by Susan Hahn
The feelings of that terror, the physical pain, and the seizure that overtook her when he was nearly done all returned as she stared at the porch swing—its bench becoming his penis and her arms the rusted chains—yes, these past two years, the rusted chains just trying to hold herself up by writing—writing about what had happened that night, so she would not go crashing to the floor, completely broken and useless. Then, the image changed—consolidated itself—and she became both the chains and the bench in all their wreckage, an object on the brink of becoming a complete heap of junk. Something to be tossed to the curb or thrown into an alley, then picked up by a foul smelling truck, and carried off to the dump.
For well over a year, most of it in silence, except for her pen, she had tried to keep her grip, but the chains had become too worn and were about to snap from the ceiling of herself and no God-hope could hold it up. The rhythms she created in her writing room could no longer swing her high enough to reconcile what had occurred in that dungeon apartment.
How she went filled with the anticipation of having the attention of such an important, attractive man. How she went with a rise in her step and a girlish flirtation, which she was now sure had emanated from her face and body and from her velvet slacks and soft angora sweater that she had carefully chosen for the occasion. Everything about her that evening was so soft.
“Yes, a soft target,” she thought and with this, once again, the full grief-rage welled up inside her, like a river overrunning its banks, for her own unbearable naiveté, for her own vast stupidity, for the wasteland that night had made into her future, and she started shaking.
The lemon Life-Saver had already dissolved on her tongue and she reached down into her pocket for another. When she saw it was green, this brought a smirk to her face, because of how green she had been as she had so cautiously climbed those outside, slippery steel steps to the place he inhabited that evening in January—the month which holds the hope of new beginnings and positive resolutions, but, like any other, can explode into unimaginable endings.
She thought of Michael to even herself further.
And with this, I prayed that the power of Michael in her mind would make her turn back. But it did not.
She thought about the phone message she had left him saying that if she were not home, she would be back soon and to bring milkshakes topped with hot fudge, adding, if possible, to please rent the movie Wuthering Heights. She imagined his familiar sigh at this suggestion and him saying to himself with tired amusement, “Again!” She did all of this so he would not think anything was out of the ordinary with her not being there when he arrived. That she was just out, running a common errand. That she was okay. In her mind she was always worried that Michael would show up here—show up to kill him. And with this thought she looked around.
It was important to her that he have at least a little more time thinking that everything was getting better. That she was improving. She tried to give him that impression and could tell he was beginning to feel optimistic about this from his words the other evening when he said, “Perhaps we could eventually put all of this behind us and build a new future.” She stayed quiet, giving him an enigmatic smile and a slight positive nod, which he was used to and to which he lightly responded, “So what exactly are you really thinking?” She only continued to smile. Something he also found familiar.
It had been a mistake to tell him anything about what had happened. She saw this as soon as she had begun opening up to him. Of course, once she started, he would not let her stop. Afterward, she had tried her best to reassure him, saying that being able to talk to him had been cathartic. But she had heard what he said all too clearly and had seen the way his face and neck had reddened as she spoke and how afterward he stood too still for too long a time, his skin looking as if it were about to burn off.
She did not want this gentle man to take on any more of her problems than he already had. She did not want him to be the one to take action. She wanted to free him. To free him of her. She wanted him to be finally free of her so he would be able to release himself into life again.
She closed her eyes and pictured him putting the large shakes in the refrigerator, placing the movie on the kitchen table, taking off his warm, black overcoat, black leather gloves, and unwrapping his long Burberry scarf from his neck. She had bought it for him as a gift and he wore it religiously. How he would then put a glove into each pocket and neatly wrap the scarf around a hanger, place the coat on it and fit it carefully into the hall closet. He then would quietly check to see if perhaps she had arrived early—if the door to her writing room was closed. Since it would not be, he would sit down on the couch and turn on the TV—watch something he knew would not interest her, and how he would be pleased to have some time to himself for his own indulgence, and this calmed her.
She also thought about some of the titles of the poems she had written these past two years and the poems themselves—her small, frightened, yet daring little poems, her little selves—her pathetic, struggling, little persons—“Melancholia,” “Claustrophobia,” “Paranoia,” “Schizophrenia,” and on and on. How they had taken over her mind, populated her life and yoked her in, centered her some—kept her from becoming a splatter a little longer and she thought about what anyone might make of them after this night, after the act that was about to happen.
By now, her mouth curved into a large grin. Touching it with her ungloved hand, it felt stuck there and she wondered if she looked like a madwoman at this moment—if she looked like the terror-stricken image she had of Grandmother Slaughter; if she looked like the Insane Idyth Slaughter. If, in fact, her own history had finally imploded within her—not just from Grandmother Idyth, but from the not-so sealed pit of reptiles her mother carried with her from Auschwitz, which forever crawled inside her mother and had slowly entered her the more she found out another detail of her mother’s story. Then, she stared at her smooth, high, black boots, and it was the first time she realized how much they looked like the ones the Nazis wore when they goose-stepped their way along so many pavements toward their vision.
She thought about the story of Celie’s grandmother Eva, sitting with her daughter, Esther, as Esther wrote to the American Red Cross looking for Eva’s parents, brothers, and sister long after the crematoria had taken them from her, with her not knowing for years that they had gone to ash, and she stared again at the sight of her now horrifying boots. She thought of Celie and how she was born into Eva’s hysteria after she found out what had happened to her family and the shrieks of all of Eva’s fears into the baby Celie’s ears and how they had infected Celie. At this moment all journeys that ended in disaster seemed to crash into each other and into her.
She thought about the critics. She could almost see the high-powered ones lined up in front of her like a firing squad, and of their possible commentaries about the body of work she had created. If she would be added to their short list of great, yet crazy female poets and if they would come to write volumes about her, too, or if she would only keep the lesser ones busy, writing with a gossipy tabloid fascination about her and her ever so miniscule mini-moment in literary history, and this only hardened her grin and created a new rush of wired energy within her at the temporality, nonsense, and vanity of all of it.
It was then I prayed as hard as I could for her to stop, as if I could reach her, even though I knew I could not.
She lifted her gloved hand to ring the bell, the same hand that would reach into the deep pocket where the gun lay quiet. Her only fear at the moment was that the bell would be broken or would be too soft and that he would not hear her. “Hear me. Here me,” she thought. Another chant from childhood and a line from a poem whose title at the moment she could not remember. She absolutely washed from her mind the possibility that Arletta would be there. It had to be he who opened the door. She said out loud, “It had to be.” As if by saying this, she could will it.
The bell had a too-loud buzz. She thought of a buzzard—a bird wai
ting for its prey. Circling. Then she heard someone coming down the many stairs, and she wondered if he had a new dog and if the new dog would accompany him. And if the dog would be female and if she would be beautiful, yet look beaten—if her fur would be unwashed and glued together from her constant gnawing on herself, and his neglect. But there were no animal sounds. Just those of someone heavy-footed. Then she heard him. She heard him say in an annoyed way, “Who’s there?” She stayed silent and, being the buzzard, she rang the bell again. And again, he said, “Who’s there?” Only louder.
Suddenly, the first floor lights flicked on. She leaned over and peeked through the dirty dining room window, incongruously trimmed with clean, white lace curtains, and she saw him coming down the stairs. He was alone. And in seeing this the adrenaline in her body reached a euphoric surge she had only sometimes experienced when writing a poem—the words arriving almost too rapidly with an overwhelmingly ecstatic, yet excruciating excitement building inside her in trying to catch all of them—as if all language at those spectacular moments was being funneled into an opening at the top of her head from a place high above—a golden place of great, unbounded splendor.
Angrier, he yelled, “Who’s there? Damn it! Who’s there?” Hearing his irritation, she rang the bell again and then again, because she never felt more the master—more the master of herself and of him. And this feeling made her giddier—made her glide higher. She liked being the tormentor. She liked finally being in charge. Then he opened the door, and there he was looking tired and sloppy. And she took the gun out of her pocket and shot him.
CLEAN
Still, against the heavy wind,
the spoon of cherry wood
no longer moves
the liquid in the pot.
Locked in the lamplight sweat
of the eternal night winter,
the disturbed quiet is quite safe—
suffocates the closed room.
Looking out, all that can be
seen is a knothole in the oak tree.
Gone is the fig, the oyster, the mango,
the red candle—its wick.
Gone is the bean, the blackberry, the carrot,
the parsnip, the horn of the rhinoceros.
The cupboard is both
emptied and latched.
The man in his blister heat
will not come back.
The kitchen is so clean,
everything’s in its nook.
c. slaughter
AFTER CECILIA KILLED Herr M, she got back in her car and drove past his old attic apartment where the rape had occurred, slowed the car to a stop for a few seconds, stared at the top floor, then made her way east, down to the lake and turned the gun on herself.
She had wanted to fill the deep pockets of her coat with heavy stones, like Virginia Woolf had done, and then walk into the water and sink down into it. However, because it had been the coldest December in forty years and such weather continued, creating a frigid January, the lake looked like it was made of concrete—secure enough that anyone might be tempted to skate on it and this made her worry that all that would happen if she walked across it was that it would just crack a bit—if that. Added to this was the chance someone might see her, for a full moon now lit the night sky, disturbing the darkness, and if someone saw her they might for the moment feel heroic, stop their car, leap out, and try to save her.
She did consider the small chance that she might be able to find a weak spot in the ice and could stomp on it with her boots and force a split. Then, she would be able to slip herself down into the frigid water and quietly drown. She liked the image of herself doing this. It seemed graceful. But with the gun still in her pocket and her energy maniacally high, without much hesitation about fifteen minutes after the death of Herr M, she decided to put the revolver in her mouth.
The police found two notes in one of her coat pockets—the same pocket that held the broken roll of Life Savers. One was folded over and on the outside read in a flowing, delicate, clearly feminine script, Michael. On the upper inside fold were the words of Kuo-an-shek-yu:
I have returned to the root
and the effort is over
On the lower half were the words:
I leave you
My love—
All that I own
My poems
Your freedom
c.
The second note was really just a scrap of paper with some fragments of lines from William Wilfred Campbell’s poem, The Winter Lakes:
Never a bud of spring, never a laugh of summer …
But only the silence and white,
The shores that grow chiller and dumber …
Hushed from outward strife …
In the other pocket the police found a bracelet of silver and obsidian placed inside carefully folded blue tissue. They asked everyone in the family about its significance. No one knew.
Cecilia did not understand, nor could I have expected her to, that given what she had just done, her hardest journey had now just begun. She had wanted so much a correction to ease the awful carbuncle of memory she carried with her about Herr M and also about her mother and Karl. She wanted to become more like Anne Frank writing and hiding in that attic from those trying to destroy her and her family, all the time believing in the goodness of people. But Cecilia could not come to believe in such goodness. Because she had been raised a female Slaughter, she was too filled with a devastating emptiness and anger.
Although she will not sleep in the forever growing potter’s field of the fitful, psychopathic evildoers with their ceaseless night terrors, she will be on a path of unrest unlike any other she had known in the life she just left.
She and Herr M will meet again and again in different ways—different forms of perversions based on sex and power—and torment each other over poetic license and its price. Eventually, if she has the strength to turn her back to him, her path will lead to a place of knowledge, forgiveness, and peace.
Herr M, on the other hand, will wander for all time looking unendingly for the perfect conquest. He will do this initially with great determination and zeal, then with an unbearable exhaustion, yet he will not be able to stop. A Sisyphus, of sorts.
He will continue to tell anyone here who will listen his side of the story. His emotions will be most stirred when he speaks of the dog. About how he did nothing wrong with her. How much he cared for her. Cecilia will always take a distant second place in any feelings he has of regret, repeating only, “I did apologize.”
The police notified Celie first because they found her name and number in Cecilia’s wallet on a card as to whom to contact in case of emergency. Upon hearing the news, quite expectedly, she broke apart, and at Cecilia’s funeral she collapsed, for she saw that Adele, indeed, had died and recently, for there was just a wooden grave marker—no plaque yet. However, with better medication and new doctors she recovered within the year.
Joshua and Jeremy and their wives, having fled the country after the murder (this being easy to do since neither union had produced any children and adoption out of the question) to escape the reporters, the gossip, and to find some kind of peace of mind on a tour of Japanese temples, actually learned some things about generosity of spirit. For the first time they truly became Celie’s brothers, and they finally saw her and they helped her.
Here, I cannot but think of Emerson’s words: “Every earnest glance we give to the realities around us, with intent to learn, proceeds from a holy impulse, and is really songs of praise.” And I praise them for this.
When she got better, they gave her money to open up her own shop—The Finest Linens to Dream On. Joyce and Jocelyn frequent it often as do their friends and, of course, all of Celie’s former clients.
Eventually, Celie’s heart did dance—some.
As one might have easily guessed, Michael was inconsolable and filled with self-recriminations about how impotent he had been in not acting promptly—in doing nothing. He grew phy
sically ill, as sometimes the anguished, stunned, and lovesick do. Soon he will die and find mind-peace—never to seek out Cecilia again. The good of heart do eventually come to a state of blessedness.
Everything here is rather balanced, religious, and just. Einstein spoke of a spiritual force at work in the universe and although he did not obsess on it, just went on with his work, he was right.
Once again, Cecily revised her play, about the poet and the critic, now adding how the poet kills the critic and then herself. She sends it to every theater company she can think of, but unknown to her, no one wants any part of it. Never will.
She believes it is her finest work. Maybe it is, but I, too, refuse to read it. Clearly her determination to beat out Cecilia in terms of success did not stop with Cecilia’s death. Instead it grew larger, into a singular obsession as cold as ice determined not to melt.
She even considers killing herself, thinking, “Maybe then I will become famous—after all, didn’t Cecilia become even more so in death?” She thinks and rethinks this possibility as she will when she appears here in an old age and forever waits for fame to arrive.
Deidre wrote a couple of poetry books that were published by a small press—unknown to most. At her insistence, her husband threw a lavish party on the occasion of each publication. At both of the festivities she sat at a large, expensive, intricately carved oak table with long-stemmed yellow roses in a vase next to her—sent to her from herself. Her husband reluctantly hired violinists for quiet background music as she signed the cover page of each book for all her invited friends and relatives. She used a gold trimmed Mont Blanc pen. The hors d’oeuvres served were so delicious everyone commented that there would be no need for dinner.
