by Susan Hahn
He erupted into a laugh that seemed sinister, making her feel terribly uncomfortable, and then he glared at her—his eyes suddenly so absolutely empty. At that indelible moment she was not sure she was seeing things as they truly were. Instinctively, she looked the bracelet, and it occurred to her that it was an out-of-the-ordinary gesture for their relationship as it existed in the present and she became nervous. She thought of a starfish out of its element, flopping on the dry sand, fighting for its life, and she held tight to the charm on her necklace. He saw this and suggested they eat.
He had made a chicken dish. It did not smell quite right, because it was not fully cooked. She could see blood spots on the meat, and as she delicately tried to separate it from the bone—the cooked parts from the raw—with the dog quietly sitting next to her, it happened. The dog was as startled as she when he sprang from his chair and yanked her from hers. His hands were already on her breasts. Then she felt the dog’s paws at her waist. She could feel the dog shudder. “Is the dog trying to protect me or is the dog wanting me to protect her?” she wondered in a thought-panic. At that moment the dog seemed half-human, half-animal and she, Cecilia, seemed half-animal, half-human. Her mind was whirling as she wondered, “Are we one and the same being?” She even thought of Nijinsky as the Faun and his becoming half-animal, half-human—her associations all a dervish dance.
He screamed at the dog and she ran under the table—hid there. Cecilia saw the dog under it as he pulled her to the futon. And yes, she could smell the urine from when his daughter had napped there earlier.
The more she cried for him to stop, the more he ripped at her clothes. Her hair went flying all over her face, her now bare skin, her breasts, while the dog stayed huddled, almost frozen in her own mountain of fur, except for the chewing, that unrelenting chewing, her unrelenting chewing on herself, her eyes crazed from the chaos. She and the dog stared at each other after it was over as Cecilia cowered on the soiled, hardwood floor. Now, the dog is dead—dead in the unrelenting heat of that August. The tarred roof burning her dog feet.
Driving herself home that night so badly bruised and mind-broken all she could think to do was to make up lines for a poem. A poem to distract her, to help her get home. Doing this did keep the headlights from the cars coming toward her and the taillights from the cars speeding past her from completely smearing into each other, as she kept wiping away the tears that would not stop arriving. Over and over the lines repeating in her head:
He bought me
a bracelet
of silver and obsidian
and after he broke the bread,
devoured it
he could not stop
saying
“Sorry, Sorry”
over and over again
“Sorry, Sorry”
circling like a vulture
over me over
a bracelet of silver and obsidian.
After the “dog poem” was published he called at least twice a week, his number popping up on her Caller ID, but he only spoke the first time, saying, “Now I am going ruin your career. I have the power.” After that he would just bash the phone down, as if to make sure she would hear the crash—to frighten her further, which it did. Still does, although the calls stopped a couple of months ago.
So she sits in her chair, worrying as to what he might do next and now also with her own, fully shaped, knife-sharp rage, thinking about all of it, thinking he was the last person inside her, which makes her sick—makes her feel polluted and that she will go to her death with this fact.
Everywhere she goes she imagines, “Someone is going to come along and throw me to the ground, drag me deeper into that dark forest where the archdemons await—Lucifer, Mammon, Asmodeus, Satan, Beelzebub, Leviathan. The German.”
She checks her body for marks every day, as if he had left something in her which she can never get rid of, something that will rise up. Some stain that eventually will make itself visible—that the cells in the deep layers of her body are mutating into some hideous blossom. Which they are. The heart’s melanoma—a fury spreading with its pronged-in, black, ragged edges and its forever festering red center.
She keeps all men, except Michael—who spends much of his time with her as if they were the closest brother and sister—at a friendly, but measured distance. When she does go out it is usually with someone she knows well, mostly a relative, or to a place she regards as “safe”—like the dress shop. If she does go somewhere alone, she disguises herself with layers of clothes, plus scarves or hats—tucking her distinctive hair inside them. She stays at home a lot in her chair writing such lines as “in my corner shrinking from any vibration that could allow the delicate poised snow to be shaken to avalanche.” Then, she signs her name, “Cecilia Slaughter—still poet,” and thinks, “Funny, those words—their double meaning.”
She thinks about her mother, gone, the dog, gone, even her father with a quick, clean heart attack six months after her mother’s death—“Each with their leap, or fall, it doesn’t matter, out of here.” She remembers how well over a year ago she buried her mother’s diary—with the stem of the bald flower pressed between its pages—next to the bracelet of silver and obsidian and how they now lie beside each other with their separate, wild, silent screams.
And she does wonder if Cecily has written a play using what she has heard, however much it might be in error. Half of her now cowers in the corner of her own room, thinking about this and the further trouble it could cause, while the other half continuously lifts off this planet into that hot noonday sun—her mind ablaze—into the clear, blister of that August air.
Then, in her chair, she contemplates: “Perhaps it’s time. Time to tell someone. Time to tell everyone. Time to tell at least some of it. To find out how the telling feels so as to possibly save myself from my own considered leap into the atmosphere.”
THE LOVERS
Each night before sleep, while in
their bedtime clothes, he takes her
eyebrow brush with the tiny comb
on one side and he parts her
hair, rubbing the dark blue
plastic teeth over the crown of her
bowed head. First, he uncovers
the bald spot, tells her it’s not
so bad, so big, and then
he tries—how he tries—
to hide it with the long strands,
and always in the gentlest of voices he says
now, no one can notice. For years
this is the only way they’ve come together,
at midnight, with the one stooped lamp on—
or sometimes a flashlight—so he can see more
clearly and describe for her the stubs
(thick or thin? she whispers) that are pushing through
her center. She loves the pull and scratch
he creates on her tender excited
skin. It eases her mind, erases
thought. Though these ecstasies are not
what he imagined some twenty years ago,
with her tongue deep in his mouth—
his in hers—in each other everywhere, in
the car, on the couch, even in bed.
They made love according to the manual,
moved in ways understandable,
unlike now, their shadows
on the shade—two bent bodies
barely touching, strangely loving.
c. slaughter
EACH TIME BEFORE Michael leaves, he combs Cecilia’s hair. She sits in front of the computer and surfs the internet for life’s lighter side, which usually means going to several online celebrity gossip sites. Often she will mention some of what she is reading, if it is inconsequential enough.
All the while Michael stands behind her, combing her long hair and he can feel her whole body calm as he untangles the knots she has made in it during the day. He likes to think it is at these moments that he is unsnarling her entire life, not just smoothing out her hair unde
r the dim lamplight.
Sometimes Cecilia will look for a small, five-star hotel anywhere in the world—she travels well on the computer—and talk about the two of them maybe going there. “Someday?” she questions herself out loud. Michael’s excitement for the moment is authentic as he puts down the comb, grabs a small pad of paper on her desk, and writes down the name of the one she has clicked on to, although he knows they will never go. He has come to realize Cecilia will never again wander too far from here. Her writing room is an anchor to this world—as Michael has convinced himself he is, especially when he combs her hair.
When she is finally relaxed, Cecilia asks him to check the bald spot atop her head. Sometimes she even asks him to draw it. To make a tracing of it. She has many of these tracings, which she keeps in her desk drawer. He makes the best approximation of it that he can—trying to be as exact as possible—but his talent for drawing is minimal. He counts the number of hairs trying to sprout from the spot and adds them to the picture, because he knows she will then ask, “How many?” as she will about its size. “A quarter, a nickel, a dime?” Then, with a hint of humor, she will add, “Valium—five milligrams?” Her voice is sweet and childlike and this makes it harder for him to show his frustration upon her request to do this. He knows she wants the spot to be smaller than the last time he drew it, but it has taken him years to understand that she does not want it to entirely disappear. It has become too much a part of her. She calls it “my flawless flaw,” continuing, “I look at it with awe”—laughs, then puts this line, or a version of it, into a poem.
Sometimes, resting here, inside my casket locked in my vault and my old thoughts, I long not just for Wyatt’s quick, strong, forceful hands, but also ones like Michael’s—so gentle. But I also wonder if I—or any of my cousins for that matter—were raised to appreciate such masculine kindness, at least for any length of time.
Cecilia has taken Michael into a world he did not know existed and he has gone agreeably. She has taken him with no force. It does not matter that they are divorced. He came back after only a few months under the pretext that she probably needed her checkbook balanced—which she did—and to make sure there was enough food in the cupboards and refrigerator—which there was not.
Some nights he lies next to her and reads from the biographies of the Russian poets—Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Tsvetayeva, and Pasternak, and as she is about to fall to sleep she will quietly sigh and say some variation of “How could they stand such oppression and still be so brilliant, Michael? Do you think perhaps they were made more so, because their words were the only things they had to hold on to—like others do their jewels?” He likes it when she says his name.
I know she believes she would not have been able to survive what they had to endure—the censorship, their unending exiles. I cannot decide. Growing up and especially after my death, I had seen Cecilia jump many hurdles, but, then again, I had seen her tumble down into a pit within her mind, filled with demons calling to her. “Mandelstam jumped out of a window in exile, and survived,” she says to Michael. “But Tsvetayeva hanged herself.” She repeats this in a tone that teeters between sadness and marvel.
Cecilia does not seem interested in what the Americans did to themselves—Plath, Sexton, Berryman, Lowell. It is a large outward force, an outward oppression—history’s dictators trying to suffocate words, that absorbs her attention. Of course, I know so much of this comes from Aunt Lettie’s history.
In the months after the divorce, Michael tried dating other women. They were easier to find than he imagined. Once the divorce was made known, many women, in fact, found him first. He would take each to a nice restaurant, but never one he went to with Cecilia. The oddest thing he found happening on these dates was how many of these women told him that they were, or aspired to be, a poet. Also, most of them arrived dressed in black—some trying to look like young, hip students, others like pseudo-Goths, most just going for an expensive, exotic look. Yet, no matter how they presented themselves, all of them at some point in the conversation would tell him how much they loved Cecilia’s poetry. Then, annoyingly to him, they usually followed it with a “but” which meant they, of course, were different. Different in style, in content—whatever—forever the implication being if they were just discovered they could come to be regarded as well as she—if not better. It was at this point Michael would start to tune out, especially when they attached how healthy they were, implying, sometimes subtly, sometimes not, that Cecilia was not.
Some would tell him how much they exercised. A few even asked—still at dinner—would he like to feel their biceps? Their triceps? He, of course, would accommodate them, however odd it looked in a public place. He found it amusing and also discovered that any kind of physical mention about themselves was always a prelude to what they would inevitably offer later in the evening.
He did have sex with a few, but always made sure he was protected. It was not so much for him, but for her. Even at those moments he would think of Cecilia—her obsession with germs. And he would smile and the women would think he was smiling at them. Each time he would put on a condom he would think of how she always stretched the sleeve of her sweater over her hand when she touched a doorknob or used the joint—never the tip—of her finger when pushing the button on an elevator.
One day they had a terrible fight in public when he forgot and actually pushed an elevator button full force with his naked thumb. He did have to admit the best thing about these new women was that on the way up to their apartments they did not care what he touched. Yet even this, somehow, made him remember Cecilia too much in the positive, for the thought would suddenly charge into his mind that these women might be completely unclean—perhaps even pigs. He would laugh to himself when thinking this and want to tell Cecilia about what she had done to him—how much she had invaded his thought patterns. He knows this would have made her laugh and she would have replied, “I’m not that powerful,” which she would mean.
Everything Cecilia says, she means. Everything she says she is going to do, she does. This is one of my most abiding memories of her when we were children and why what she did to Deidre at that lunch truly bothers her and has helped send her whole being into a further spin away from the person she thought she knew to be herself.
For the most part she lives her life in too straightforward—too literal—a way. Certainly a mistake when it came to Herr M. It is only in her writing that she values double meanings, metaphors, and hidden texts, or when she speaks about “poetic justice” and the too many ironies within the Slaughter family.
The women Michael dated talked a lot about what they were going to do and then added a when or an if only. So no matter how toned their bodies, how full their refrigerators, how they actually could cook, how they so obviously took care to balance their checkbooks, the more Michael gravitated back to Cecilia in her chair—her hair loosened, her head bent over her long, yellow pads of paper heaped onto her lap, her room filled with books from the library, so as to keep each detail she used totally accurate, her only exercise sitting on the floor checking and rechecking facts, then getting up and returning to her chair. He loved how filled with care she was with her words.
Cecilia never asked if Michael had sex with other women—if he touched them. He wanted her to, so he could tell her “Yes,” and that the more he did, the more he came to hate it—and them. How they seemed cardboard cutouts of her. Then, he would have told her how much he loved her. How the weights she placed on her mind—its lifts and stretches—were so much better than the hardened muscles of the women with whom he had slept. But she never asked.
Within four months of the divorce Michael had given up all the other women and returned to Cecilia. Some people told him he had lost his mind—I would not have gone to this extreme, but I was filled with hard worry for him. Some offered him the names of their therapists, their friends’ therapists. They reminded him of how difficult Cecilia was to live with—of her mood swings, her deep depressions,
the isolation she insisted on when she was writing, of how her mother’s sorrowful history had infected her.
On their second date she had warned him of her complicated sadness. That her mother was an Auschwitz survivor. That her father was more obsessed with his sister than any other woman and had no interest in his own wife’s story. “How sick is all that?” she would say more than once with a twinkle in her eye, and it was then he knew he was caught by this woman who could find whimsy in the middle of just about any twisted story. Her ability to see things from every side—her mind a Rubik’s Cube of grief and polished delight—hooked him.
They keep separate places, but most nights he is at her apartment. It does not matter to her when he shows up. If the door to her writing room is closed, he quietly turns the TV on in the den, lies down on the couch, and often finds himself asleep there until morning. Sometimes Cecilia is just going to bed when he passes her in the hall in the early morning. He will ask what time she wants to get up, then go with her into her bedroom, set her alarm, and rush home to change his clothes for work. Even at these times, he is happier having slept on their old sofa than next to any of the preened, pared-down women.
Nothing is preplanned, but some days, late in the afternoon, he will call and ask if she would like to go out for dinner, or perhaps for him to just bring over two large vanilla shakes topped with hot fudge. Lately she opts for the latter. When he arrives, if the door to her writing room is open, he knows he can ask if she would like to watch TV. They go to Turner Classics first, to see if they are showing an old, romantic movie. One of Michael’s favorite times is watching Cecilia watching a movie—curled into the corner of the sofa, milkshake in hand. There, she looks so safe. It is at that moment he thinks, “This is good, no one can hurt her.” This thought of his—this hope—makes me sad for them both.
