by Susan Hahn
He told Cecily as carefully as he could, “No, I’m not really interested in speaking about the past. Reformulating it.” But she continued to push, telling him she had “information,” as if she believed he was some stupid fish that she could bait and hook and drag him into God-knows-what. He had had enough of these kinds of women. These types. Their manipulations. He had moved on.
Cecily was shaken by his turning her down and tried her hardest to keep him on the phone. She babbled on and, of course, the quieter he became the more she tried to fill the silence with fast-paced talk. Something about a play she had written about a poet and a critic. “Would you like to read it? Would you?” she repeated, and then too nervously laughed. He did not like her manner—her clumsy attempt at being coy, the sheer desperation she thought she kept so well hidden, and her heavy, nasal Midwestern twang. Also, her voice had an unappealing huskiness, unlike with some women where sexiness comes through such low tones. To him, she was the flip side of sultry, with no awareness of how ridiculous she sounded and how inept she was as she pleaded her case.
It became clear—almost from the start—that he was dealing with yet another Slaughter woman filled with deep disturbances that he no longer wanted anything to do with. He could sense her own anger toward Cecilia, which she clearly thought she contained so well, expanding inside her. When he hung up the phone he prayed to a higher power that he would never hear the Slaughter name again.
Yet afterward he sat down in his chair and could not stop himself from returning to his times with Cecilia. The tease of her. Her impeccable presentation of perfection and his giving in to his increasing impulse to undo it. He had never felt anything like that before, nor did he want to again. He knew he more than frightened her. He knew what he did was wrong and that he had terrified both her and himself.
Then, he hit the flat, wooden arm of his chair with his fist and thought, with great anger, “I am not the Nazi she has created in her latest poems, just as she is not her mother with her own devastating history.” It was obvious to him that Cecilia tended to continuously create situations, consciously or unconsciously, which attempted to provoke scenarios that paralleled those of her mother.
More and more as time has passed, he feels he is the victim given all the poems she has written since then, which, no matter how much they are disguised, are clearly about him. He continues to believe the paranoia of her reaction afterward was too dramatic, too theatrical. She wanted something to happen. He also knows this is a hard sell and some will never be convinced of this.
The color of her porcelain breasts tipped with the virgin shade of a young girl’s untouched nipples and how he wanted to suck them, suck them to a woman’s lifeblood is something he can never forget. It lays there in the back of his brain like a large animal, sometimes dormant, sometimes not. As does how he could not let her up, once he had her.
However, he feels he is inhabiting a different space now, and can only hope she is too; but he worries that the unrelenting obsessiveness in her poetry spills over into her real life (or vice versa) and the fantasies she has created from what happened will continue to cause him trouble.
He thinks, “She could have been considered a major talent if she had been able to rein in her words, thoughts, and actions to just the page, but she will never be able to do this and it will ultimately destroy her not only professionally, but personally. It would have been best if she had written just a couple of gorgeous, angry books and died young, like Plath.”
The first thing that flashed through his mind when he saw her at that packed reading was whether the color of the hair on her head—autumn leaves at their thick, blazing peak—matched the thatch between her legs. How urgent his impulse was to undress her. How quick he was to ask someone, “Who is that woman?” Easily, he found a colleague who knew of her and her poetry.
Of course, all those coffee-shop conversations they had were for him just a prelude to having her—having her underneath him, nude, his body an enormous weight holding her down and possessing her. He was sure she could tell this by the way he stared at her during their get-togethers—and especially by what he had said at that proper, public conversation, about pleasure. How she ultimately handled it all has become a completely different matter.
He will never stop believing that Cecilia, unconsciously, was readying herself for what happened—as if her whole life, her whole history was preparing for it. He was just the man who hooked into the scenario—a brute force uncontrollably charging into her, a character in the personal history play of her own creation. A play like the one that absurd woman Cecily referred to and with which she had tried to impress him in that nerve-wracking conversation.
He remembers that she said she knew the perfect way to get back at Cecilia. She mumbled this at the end—as if by then she was no longer talking to him, only to herself and the chorus of craziness that was her mind. Her voice had become a swirl of agitated disappointment after he turned down all her suggested possibilities of an in-person encounter. His final words to her were a polite, firm, measured, “No, I just do not want to revisit this subject.”
Now, he worries, “Am I the critic in her damn play and if so, how have I been characterized? What has this one done to me?” Then he thinks, “Female artists. Fuck them. Yes, at your own risk,” allowing himself to laugh out loud at his own bad joke. He is a little less concerned when he remembers how disagreeable her voice became when she mentioned Cecilia. Her growing rage toward Cecilia, which she could not conceal—that strange muttering at the end of the conversation about getting back at her—makes him feel that he is not the target of her wrath, that she actually wanted him to actively collude with her in some plot against Cecilia. Or entice him in some way to be part of one of her own imagination.
He then thanks the fates that Arletta is not like those women. She is rational, poised, and self-contained—never losing her composure. A brilliant scholar, a natural public speaker, a commentator on society’s ills and how to correct them. They live an anchored, balanced life and he has become more centered. He keeps all extreme fantasies to himself and so far, in the months they have been together, this has worked well enough.
Unavoidably, the call reignited many thoughts for him about Cecilia—of her long hair and the way it fell over her breasts. He does still enjoy the memory of the hopes he once carried about the range of possibilities of their nakedness together. He thinks, “Perhaps if I were a poet, by now I would have written a hundred sonnets about Cecilia’s breasts. As a critic, it’s different. I reproach her temperament, her suppressed tempestuousness, the temptress she is and keeps not so deeply hidden inside herself—which only redoubles her appeal—and most especially her inability to take any responsibility for what happened.”
This self-awareness, felt with such certitude, puffs him up and makes him feel omnipotent as he speculates, “Some might say I damaged her soul, but that January evening when I opened that door what I found was a woman dressed in carefully chosen shades of burnt scarlet and wine-colored soft fabrics, already damaged and subtly asking for it. She was all subtext. My agenda was more direct.” For him, with Cecilia it was always about power and sex—still is.
However, to anyone who mentions the “dog poem,” or the dog, he will adamantly reply, “I loved her. I took good care with her. That day—that awful August day—a neighbor passing by told me he saw her—saw her fixate on a beautiful red bird, perhaps a cardinal. The bird flew too close to her and she leapt at it as though she thought she could capture it.” He then continues, “Isn’t that what behavior is sometimes about—unbridled, irrational acts to attempt to capture that which we cannot?”
I think about this last question a lot as I have tried, however unsuccessfully, even after all this time and some amount of gained wisdom, to free myself from my yearning for Wyatt—still so fiercely gripped.
THE CROSSES I
On my way to the Holy Land
I passed effigies of knights
spread out
on their tombs,
their legs a display of precise twists
to exhibit how many crusades they fought.
On my way, I couldn’t find
the promised dry path through the sea,
though I looked and looked.
Two boats sunk, but I was saved—
the good child who believes
what is told to me. On my way
I saw a man crucified on an X-
shaped cross, his immobile legs
on winged display. Another, hung
head down with feet stretched up—
the martyred, at once awkward
and lovely. I saw a man
in a loin cloth, his side was pierced,
his legs were crossed.
I stared, then forced myself
to look away. The good child who does
what is taught to me—
to find the fragment of wood
within the gold and jeweled
reliquary—ruby for blood,
beryl for rebirth, pearl for purity.
The good child who tries to do
what is asked of me—
when I arrived, I dug through layers
of dirt to discover
the container disappeared, the land emptied.
I couldn’t go home
with nothing to share.
The good child buries herself there.
c. slaughter
SHE DID NOT KNOW if he would be home as she began the long drive to his house. She did not even call to see if he would pick up the phone so she could just hang up and then be somewhat confident of finding him there when she would arrive over an hour later. Of course, it was possible that just Arletta would be there and she worried about that—about what she would do then. She did not wish her any particular harm, at least nothing she could focus on at the moment no matter what her ambivalence was about Arletta’s character—for all she cared she could live out her life winning prizes for her books on kindness, loving your neighbor, and the glories of her new homeland, which in fact was not that new since she had pretty much grown up here.
Her topics, however clichéd, made people hopeful and she did believe Arletta was at least somewhat sincere—as well as quite clever and driven by a mega-ambition. Yet, she did wonder if when these ingredients were mixed together they could produce a truly good person. She certainly was not a blatantly evil one like him, just a manic overachiever who plotted out the course of her life methodically and, so far, enormously successfully.
Others took notice of this, too. (As did I, given my own issues—both above and below the ground—with the all too blatant success-grabbers and attention-mongers.) Many were quite aware of how well Arletta aligned herself within the university and used the shoulders of new, important acquaintances to stand on and how this always seemed to lead to someone who stood taller and consequently to another large cash fellowship to improve her life—buy nice clothes, a house—and further her career. Whether eventually there will be a growing backlash from all of her good luck and, if there is, she will be strong enough to ride it out or canny enough to diffuse it, is yet to be decided, but I am guessing the answer will be yes. For now, the one thing that is for sure is that everywhere Arletta goes, she strategically positions herself in the most advantageous ways to take those successful, higher leaps which, given my best instincts coupled with my lessons with Lao Tzu, I find intensely unappealing.
She thought of Arletta a lot as she set out on her journey and imagined what she knew had to be the truth—that in her childhood Arletta had someone—her mother? her father? both?—who truly believed in her and told her she was wonderful and that whatever she chose to do with her life she would be successful. That she was unstoppable. She could make all of her dreams come true.
The more she thought of these words and made of them a litany in her mind, “wonderful, successful, unstoppable,” the more she craved to return to her own childhood and start over, find for herself such a figure to help her—as if a child could actually do this.
These past months, especially, she had found herself if not falling, at least stumbling over the smallest of hurdles, and worse than this, becoming mind-clumsy. The more she tried to do everything right—to coordinate her walk with her talk, the more she strived for gracefulness, the more she fell short and it was clear that this was becoming obvious to others. However much she attempted to cover up her awkwardness and panic when she was with people—especially if there were more than one person to deal with—increasingly, she was becoming outwardly brittle. If there had ever been any suppleness to her actions, it had dried and the false confidence she publicly exhibited to compensate for this only added to the escalating pressure of a final break inside of her. She knew this.
As did I.
“Right now,” she thought, “Arletta is definitely the It Girl of the academic circus and with this it is inevitable she will begin to have her own cabal—however small—of enemies hovering nearby, hoping she’ll misstep—perhaps even break her neck or at least slip on some unnoticed black ice, which would force her to wobble off for at least a while.” To her mind this had already happened, with Arletta’s relationship with Ivan Durmand, a man fading in attractiveness—his face sagging a bit, his waistline thickening, his thought processes most likely slowing—yet still maintaining enough charisma and connections. She could only think Arletta must have her own insecurities about her ability to move forward alone and the all-too-familiar need of females for male help with advancement. Or perhaps, Arletta was just a realist, knowing that this path was still, unfortunately, the most propitious and rather than rail against it, to just use it.
To her it was obvious, too, that Arletta knew how to keep her story of where she had come from—her struggle up from the restrictive, heavy Cuban mud—strong. She had seen how she glowed on stage—almost ignited—when she gave the details of her early life. She behaved as if she had never told any of it before—like a brilliant actress does reciting her lines, becoming the character she plays each night, even though she has played the part a hundred times before and it, quite likely, has grown somewhat stale inside her. “Maybe Arletta’s deftness with this should also make one wonder further about her true self, or selves.” She added this to her basket of Arletta thoughts.
She believed Arletta shut herself down when it came to any rumors concerning Ivan Durmand, put metaphorical blinders on and earplugs in if someone directly approached to confront her about him or even alluded to any talk about the damage he had done.
She once, quite by accident, found herself in a room with her and it was clear from the high alert look on Arletta’s face, she wished she were not there. She could tell Arletta had made a connection with her last name when they were introduced for she took a step back from her and more than this, averted her eyes from hers and arched her spine too straight. Even Celine, who was with her, noticed this, which made her believe Arletta’s actions were filled with even more discomfort than she had realized at the moment, given Celine’s absence of sensitivity to nuance about anyone other than herself. Celine had said of the encounter, “That woman seemed almost afraid of you. How could anyone be afraid of you? You are strange it’s true, but to fear you? Right? No one should fear you?”
She just grabbed Celine’s hand in a cousinly fashion.
She continued to think about Arletta while she was stuck in the impossible city traffic. Beads of sweat were forming on her forehead and the palms of her hands felt fevered. Her mind was becoming a cold, wet rag, heavy with too many thoughts. Even with the heat in the car on full blast, she could not get warm enough. It was below zero outside and that was without factoring in the wind chill. She imagined when she stepped outside the beads of sweat would turn to frost and her face would glitter like on a clear night when all the stars are out and can be so clearly seen. Thinking this gave her some peace—that more than ever, she would at that moment merge with the outer atmosphere. She would no longer be alone with the
snarled, closed-off upset inside of her. Finally, she would be in sync, conjoined with something infinitely larger than herself. This image of her face twinkling like the stars made her feel religious in a Zen-like way and brought her a momentary calm.
Her thoughts wandered even more as she looked at the barren trees—the funereal lace of their branches on both sides of the highway. Their stripped, over-extended, broken patterns were more consistent with the way she felt inside. Then, she imagined the carefully mapped, clear-sighted plan Arletta had for herself—that soon she would leave Ivan Durmand and make a move to someone higher on her totem pole of ambition, and how she, with this trip, would cut her own notch into the wood of it and make this easier for her. She would free Arletta, just as her parents had freed themselves and her when they arrived in Miami with great secrecy and she learned to grow up shrewd enough to say to people with great earnestness in this country what she thought they wanted to hear, maybe to the point of actually believing it herself—her voice at once vulnerable and articulate. She had lost that touch, if she truly ever had it.
She envied her, hated her, and wanted to help her escape, because it was important to her that some female feel that free. In the Slaughter family it seemed no woman got out alive—deadened or dead was their destiny. “Except for Aunt Rose,” she thought, “who lives forever, with her feeding tube and crew of attendees, always demanding and receiving more than any ten persons’ shares of attention.”
Her anger and impatience with everyone had definitely grown weighted and ungainly. For months now whenever she went outside she had a terrible aversion to all strangers—strangers walking too fast, too slow, strangers driving what seemed too close to her. Strangers in stores not waiting their turns, talking too loudly on their cell phones about the mundane matters of their lives—the unending details of their comings and goings from here to there, as if every move they made was crucial to their world, to the entire world—while pushing too near her body, the foulness of their breath polluting her insides further.
