Poetry helped:
the glass shards,
the razor blades, are full of eyes.
My life crammed with eyes, surfeited
with calibrating eyes, every tic
of thought watched and charted; yet blind
every one of them unseeing
when the bleeding starts
The nurses — Philistines — ignored her poetry and the spits of blood. On such days there was nothing for it but to escape from air altogether, to flow into her other medium of water. And today was a swimming day.
She trod water, breathing by her other system, her secret gills. The water was green and murky and restful. No one could be seen too clearly, an added benefit. There were other days when the water was too clear for privacy and she would have to hide behind seaweed, but today was satisfactorily opaque. She relaxed within the greenness, buoyant and at peace.
Aqueous eyes peered at her like floating moons and she let herself ride motionless on the swell, curious. It was Dr Blackburn’s face, a kind one. She saw his gills working, his mouth opening and closing. He did not realise that the waves distorted all sound, that it was futile to speak.
She circled him, rubbing scales, to show that only touch communicated — or certain vibratory patterns set up by fin rhythms and telegraphed direct to receptive minds. He understood. Together they swam through caverns to a large concourse of waters where the waves were crystal clear and full of bodies and she wanted to dart back to murkier rock crevices when she saw suddenly someone she had lost a lifetime ago — her little brother, ludicrously magnified by the crazy lens of ocean.
She surfaced gasping and the air was soft and clean as childhood. She ran and stumbled up the beach, laughing, and gathered him into her arms.
“Oh Jason,” she sobbed. “Oh Jason,Jason! How you’ve grown!”
Dr Blackburn said, “Your brother has come to take you home for a few days.”
“Don’t you remember?” Jason asked. “We’re going to see Mother and Emily.”
He was never prepared for Tory. Never. Every time the shock was greater. There did not seem to be any way to protect himself from it.
Submitting to the soft swallowing pillows of flesh, he felt the past shambling over him like a drunken elephant, ponderous, random.
IX Elizabeth
The nice thing about a power mower, she thinks, is the illusion of strength it gives to these old arms and legs.
Also she loves the tang of the cut grass and the knowledge that it is still growing even as she is cutting it. In three days it will have to be mown all over again. And again. And again. Such pleasing confirmation that living things need never be daunted, that hope is instinctual. She always feels like saying: Good for you, grass!
She has to be careful not to let Edward see her from the window. For the swath of lawn in his view she has to pay the neighbour’s son — if she remembers to stop mowing in time, and if she remembers to ask the boy. As far as Edward knows, the neighbour’s son mows it all. And it is, really, wickedly self-indulgent of her to sin in secret like this, but she cannot bear to give it up.
Edward is enraged by evidence of the agility of others. How he hates aging, she sighs. And wonders: if my heart wavers, if my sight (which is deteriorating) blinks out, if my body is shackled to a chair, will I be as splenetic as he is?
She truly does not think so. She thinks she will continue to shake the marrow from each day, that she will say to her body: Try to defeat me, old bag-of-bones. She thinks the thrill of outwitting the daily diminishments will continue to absorb her. She expects she will do what she does now, on impossibly arthritic mornings. First the testing and flexing of wrists, shoulder blades, ankles. Can she get out of bed? Will her ankles hold up on the steps? On a day when the answer is no, she starts with rubbing and moves on to her own brand of isometric exercises. Just enough to coax rudimentary life into the joints. And then the experimentation: how many ways to get a bathrobe on, to get to the bathroom, when the limbs are as uncooperative as chair legs?
It’s a serious game, demanding more concentration than chess or bridge. So far she holds a trump (playable after the first skirmishes of pain and gritted teeth). Her body cannot resist the pummelling of a hot shower. It softens. It yields.
She rewards it by mowing the lawn, a sensuous business. Now she is roiling like a skiff between delphiniums and poppies, grass flying like spume, settling on her hair and arms and legs. (She never uses the grass-catcher, she likes raking too much.)
By the back fence, matted with blackberry runners and Virginia creeper and assorted flowering and fruit-bearing vines, she accidentally shears off a trailer of honeysuckle and the air is heavy with chopped fragrance. The vine is caught in the blades like a piece of string and she turns off the motor to pull it out.
She thinks of Victoria. The honeysuckle always reminds her of Victoria. Just a little short of breath, she sits on the grass and rests, her back against the mower. Twisting the ravaged cord of honeysuckle in figure eights around her thumb and fingers. Why should it smell of Tory?
The bruising perhaps. The damaging.
At Tory’s birth …
There is, Elizabeth supposes, nothing quite like the birth cry of a first-born. One of those moments when the meaning of life shimmers clear as a dewdrop in the mind.
She remembers Edward standing at the bedside watching Tory sucking at her breast. She remembers that she thought of tales of mythical transformation: beautiful young men turning into fauns, children into unicorns. There was about him some quality of awe that made one think of wild deer. Or of stranger creatures, fey and otherworldly.
The hush of his features: could I have set this in motion? Could I have stirred in the night and cast this life upon the waters? Tory’s black curls still sticky with birth fluid, her fingers and nails — the work of an incomparable miniaturist — the fine whorl of her ear, the little slurping animal sounds, the blind and voracious sucking, the mad energy of her lips and cheek muscles — he watched it all in a trance, his being vibrating like a drumskin. His right hand, his knotted mill-town fingers, advanced in worship. He stroked Tory’s head, her ear, the line of the cheek-bone, her lips, the pink-brown circle around Elizabeth’s nipple, her breast.
She remembers that. She can feel it still, the touch of almost fifty years ago. She had murmured to him, mother and seducer, newborn love merging with old. And his hand had clenched and taken refuge behind his coat lapels, a guilty thing. It was as though he had been caught fingering his own mother’s private parts.
Oh Edward, she sighed, she grieved. If she could have taken him in her arms and given him her other breast to suck.
Elizabeth sighs and runs her fingers over her sun-warm arms. Tissue over bone. ’ hour, is coming, she thinks. The bone hibernates from birth, biding its time, rearing its implacable form closer and closer to the surface, awaiting the last great spring of death. She buries her fingers in the cut grass, massaging earth, and rubs the tang of summer into her arms; reaches under her cotton top and anoints her breasts. There is juice in her yet.
Poor Edward, she sighs, so afraid of the flesh. His great shame: in the beginning, now, and world without end, amen. How she had mistaken the ragged energy spilling from him in her parents’ drawing room. And perhaps Tory confirmed something for him: the hugger-mugger of copulation and begetting.
They had watched her, their first-born, grow into imperfection.
But Elizabeth cherishes flawed things. It seems to her that their beauty is somehow ethereal because more vulnerable. She has given succour to cats without tails and dogs without cars. Her window ledges are cluttered with relics from antique auctions: blood-red crystal pitchers with chipped lips, milk-glass with hairline cracks, porcelain cups without handles. Anthropomorphic things. She endows them with tragic histories and grieving memories and present contentment.
She thinks: When Tory comes, we’ll sit here in the crushed grass and thread flowers and sing songs.
But the
shredded length of honeysuckle disturbs her. Her mind veers away from the act of injury itself. The moment of damage cannot be redeemed into art. There are two black holes in the past, two different nights of harm.
Elizabeth is agitated now, brushing two images from her eyes with nervous hands. Tory as a sleepy child, Tory on her seventeenth birthday. Elizabeth is on her feet now, pulling at the cord of the mower. Tory in a white nightgown, a frightened child, is sliding down the banister of the handle. Elizabeth pulls the cord sharply, the motor growls and stops. She pulls again, swearing at it softly, beseeching it for its roar of white noise. She pulls again. Perverse, the motor hunches like a sulky cat and ignores her. She looks across the lawn and the gazebo is flail of Japanese lanterns and party revelry, and in the doorway, Tory at seventeen …
Elizabeth is crying now, and digging with her bare hands in the nearest patch of garden. Tending things. Removing weeds. Binding up.
It is not enough.
She rubs her hands jerkily in the grass to clean them and runs across the lawn into the house. She needs the piano.
She plays for a long time and when she lifts her head and looks out through the French windows, the gazebo is softly blurred like a pagoda in a Monet painting of the gardens at Giverny.
She plays a dance. In the dance Tory, today’s Tory, large and graceful, circles the gazebo with languid and delicate steps, and honeysuckle is braided through her hair.
X Edward
So.
It is possible that there was something slightly coarse about Marta. It is possible that the sort of gypsy musk she gave off aroused my earliest crudest boyhood memories — the smell of cats mating in alleyways, the pungent furtiveness of mill-hands and girls from the spinning rooms groping in the hedges at the back of factories.
It is possible. I am trying to be dispassionate. No doubt Mrs Weatherby saw Marta as … well, gauche — always having confidence I would rise above my lower instincts.
It is also possible that there was something of the hermit in me (cooped in too long by discipline and cerebration, by a fear of poverty and a fear of taking a wrong step, by a fearful memory of father coming in late smelling of whiskey and other women); and something of the temptress in Marta.
But to be honest, to be quite simply honest, I believe it was beyond explanations, beyond a need for justification. A cataclysm of nature. Of the order of Paolo and Francesca, Antony and Cleopatra, Anna Karenina and Vronsky — doomed as such passions always are. I do not think I am exaggerating. I am too old to deceive myself.
This is how it was.
After that first dinner party I became aware of her in the uncanny almost psychic way of one who loves totally and helplessly; the way of the fly, trapped but tranquillised, watching the slow ballet of the beautiful deadly spider. I knew without looking when she had entered a room by a certain displacement of breathing air, a change in blood pressure. I knew by an abrupt sensation of vacuum if she left town for a day. I knew when I was about to see her. I would be walking along a street thinking of anything or nothing and my hands would sashay into an unaccountable jitterbug routine of such flamboyance that I would have to push them deep into my pockets. Marta! I would think. And indeed she would appear, just turning the corner ahead, Just walking through the park with her little daughter, just coming out of someone’s front door.
Oh rage! rage! against the dying of the light.
To have lived like that.
To have come to this.
See how the squirrels mock me. See them chattering over a hoard of stolen tulip bulbs, desecrating the gazebo with their feverish chewing and spitting.
I will smash out the screen, I will throw myself into the lilacs, I will scream, I will go mad.
“Bessie!!”
Here she shuffles, here she blows.
In torment, one finds ease only in causing pain. When cornered, one must lash out.
“Where are the Wilsons?” I bellow, as though she has stupidly mislaid them along with my clean underwear and socks. (She does that, she does that, damned abstracted woman.) “Whatever happened to them after the war?” My eyes glare: you have wilfully withheld this information all these years. (She has, she has, to try me.)
Why am I doing this? We know what happened. We know that Joseph was killed in New Guinea, that Marta moved to New York. I repress this knowledge. I have forgotten it daily for half a lifetime. Did she remarry? Is she still in New York? It would be madness to inquire. Like a reformed alcoholic, I censor out all knowledge of her life. Otherwise, how would the tissue of duty hold me?
God. Oh god. Still when Bessie does that, still after fifty years, when she goes into that birdlike suspension, her breath trapped in her throat, her veins bleating in her neck, I still want her. What mockery when my systems go on strike more often than the teamsters, when I have this tin box stitched into my left chest, when my useless legs wilt over the chair edge, what mockery that the wanton and adolescent blood, too stupid to know it is old, goes thumping around my genitals.
God. She is white as a saint piled around with faggots, her eyes have known all along. How brutish I am. From the mud of a mill town I came, to mud I shall return. If I shout at her again, she will shatter like fine crystal.
“And the Roxtons,” I grumble. “And Feder, that young teacher who was shipped to Africa? And the Stanton girl that went into the nursing corps?” Playing it up now, the delirious old man rambling in the garbage of his past. “What happened to all those people we lost track of after the war?”
“Ah Edward,” she says, her lost voice fluttering back to her from limbo. It is trembling, her hands are trembling. “Who knows where the time goes?”
(Elizabeth)
Liz, he was saying. Oh Liz, oh my god.
And then chaos …
Elizabeth puts a hand out to steady herself, clasps a chair back. She strains to remember something. How much later was it — a week? a month? — when Marta measuring her as a duellist might measure a rival, said levelly: “My baby’s due after Christmas.”
And Elizabeth, going for the main artery: “So is mine.” She had been going to say more, to throw shrapnel, but Marta had turned white and had leaned back against… her car door? a tree in the park?
“What a savage bitch you are, Elizabeth,” she said. Tlien she began to cry silently and helplessly.
“Oh Marta.”
They had almost embraced.
All that time gone, all that time. Wlto knew where it went?
“Ah Edward,” she says. “Who knows where the time goes?”
“My cushions,” I mumble, growling a little, wanting to make amends, to give her a chance to offer comfort. (I am not, after all, so very barbaric. I have gone on letting her love me.) “My back … my cushions have slipped …”
She plumps them, she rubs my back. Gruffly I stroke her forearm with my fingers and she is startled. I feel the tiny tremor, as of butterfly wings almost still on a bough. She is standing behind my chair, she bends over and kisses the nape of my neck. My blood crashes about, my eyes water, for an instant I feel: it has been a warm and comfortable marriage. But then I think of drooling Victoria, of Jason bristling with pedantry and contempt, of Emily, my freewheeling slut. My irritation rises, as constant and internal as phlegm.
“Isn’t it hot enough,” I snarl, “without having a body all over me like a blanket?” (I wish I would not talk like this. I wish she would not provoke me to this extreme.) “Cooped up in the house” — by way of extenuation — “without a breath of fresh air.”
“Shall I turn on the fan?” she asks. “Or would you like to be taken into the garden?”
Out in the garden! To sit in the gazebo! How my foolish blood jangles about again. But she knows I will not submit to that utter circus, the neighbours’ sons called in, the cheap adolescent cheeriness, the easy strength with which they hoist my weightless torso into the hammock of their hands. Never.
It is perverse of her to ask and I do not deign to answer. Sh
e ought to be able to read my mind. She has had fifty years’ practice. I wait for her to bring the fan. She continues to stand, pretending not to know what I want, pretending to listen for my answer. We will see who wins this battle of wills.
Two minutes and she has not moved. How can I hope to compete with the sanitised stillness, the perpetual abstraction of her dreamtime?
“Well?” I rage. “Will I have a fan by September, do you think?”
See her startle! She had forgotten I was here. Back with the Wilsons, exploring that pain, sliding back into that white shock. I want her gone before I see that in her again, before the ceaseless tide of guilt and brutishness returns to swamp me.
“Leave me, leave me. For gods sake, leave me be, woman!”
Gone. I won’t willingly cause her pain. She looked that way, I recall — that winded bruised way of frightening stillness — the night it ended, the night Marta and I came together in the gazebo like worlds on fire, the night we parted. It was a party, we must have been observed, must have been missed. How did it begin? Scotch. I remember the taste of Scotch. I remember Marta’s flesh cool as honey dew melon. Bessie’s face — like bones bleached on a shoreline, gaunt, motionless, deathly pale. People everywhere like shadows moving in, it; must have been a party …
There had been a party. Twenty to thirty people perhaps, the mood one of determined revelry stretched tight as a membrane over the universal anxiety. The talk in that summer of 1942 was all of the war. Would the tide be turned against Japan? They all drank a great deal and danced and talked endlessly. There were, of course, more women than men, and most of the men were in uniform.
Not Edward yet, and not Joseph Wilson, selective service priorities valuing teachers.
Standing by the French windows drinking Scotch, the fire slithering down his throat. Yes, and there were other details clear as yesterday. Clearer. He knew that Marta was watching him from across the room, could feel her gaze on the back of his neck, summer-warm. Desire rampaged through his body like a tidal wave.
The Tiger in the Tiger Pit Page 8
