by Amy Hempel
She said she never sang the songs that people knew because to do so would be to hold the dying when the point is to help the dying let go. Chances are they have not heard “Rosa Mystica,” or “Custodes Hominum,” or “Dans Nos Obscurites,” she said.
I asked her privately, when she had finished speaking, how the medical profession had first greeted her approach to the dying. She said she was invited to keep it to herself. She smiled and said, “Containment is also holy,” a woman who could bide her time.
I had always thought women’s clinics should replace their posters of “The Desiderata” and Erté’s Nouveau nymphs with reproductions of Hans Holbein’s An Allegory of Passion, with its caption from Petrarch’s Canzoniere: “E cosi desio me mena”—“And so desire carries me along.”
It is not always a matter of being careless, you know.
It is not always desire, either. Except as the desire to save oneself by doing what one is told to do by the person who has the knife.
* * *
An old friend from high school phoned on the ninth day I was late. She was in my town for the day. A tiny blond girl, she had left school for Japan where she put on ceremonial robes and apprenticed herself to elderly Japanese masters of the bamboo flute called shakuhachi. She was a quick study, and was soon quite the thing in performances throughout Japan. Back in this country, she told me she was recording “telepathic duets” with a partner on recorder two thousand miles away. She said that at an agreed-upon time, they would sit in meditation for an hour, then record an improvisation in their separate studios. Later, they would combine the two recordings into one piece.
Successful collaborations inspire envy in me. But “collaborate,” someone once told me, also means “to betray.”
I drove my crazy old friend to the train station that evening, and on the way home stopped at the all-night drugstore to buy the test.
When Stella first visits Windward House for dinner, a malevolent spirit causes her to faint. Pamela Fitzgerald calls for the doctor, who proves to be handsome, kind, and available. But will Pamela Fitzgerald be excluded from the happiness her brother and Stella share?
* * *
Crime around here has taken a new turn. People who live on the horse farms on the road to the beach report that the rails are disappearing from their split-rail fences. Charred rails are found in the sand. Imagine the kind of person who takes down someone’s fence in order to make a bonfire on a beach.
Even when it was not my fault, I was lectured on the imperative of responsibility, a sitting dog being told to sit.
In the bathroom, I lifted the test strip out of the crystal tumbler. Without looking at it, I laid it on a saucer and left the room.
The next day, I took the train to the South to resume my house-sitting job. With time to kill in Union Station, I visited stores I would not otherwise have entered and underwent a kind of awakening, asking myself for the first time, Why don’t I have shoe trees? Though I hadn’t asked for help, a salesgirl at a cosmetics counter told me to comb my hair out wet. She said brushing stretched the hair, snapped it off. She sold me a comb, and I acted as though I had always known to use one.
You can do anything with ease if you act as though you do it all the time—dance, sunbathe nude, talk someone out of hurting you. What had prepared me to be good at that? I read in a psi journal that a superficially injured person often becomes hysterical, while someone hurt seriously may be more likely to conserve energy and get herself help.
The evening the man in the auditorium came to my place, I became steadily calmer until I was in a trance of self-preservation. I had missed a lecture just before we were to have an exam. The man to my right, always to my right, told me he had taken thorough notes; he said he was willing to share them with me if I wanted. He made a show of looking in his book bag. He looked again and said he must have left his notebook at home. He said he could drop it off for me that evening. He said it would be no trouble. I gave him my address, which he wrote on his hand with a felt-tipped marker.
Well, he had the book bag with him when he showed up at my place that night. I saw that he had changed from a T-shirt to something long-sleeved. He came in after standing out there for so long I felt I had to let him. He said he just wanted to drop off the notes. He sat in the armchair in the small living room furnished by the professor and his wife. There were no photographs of them, but there were, I remember, a lot of wood carvings from various foreign places. He dropped his book bag on the carpet beside him, but did not open it. I went to get him some soda or something. Was it just water?
In the crisis training I received in the women’s group, we were told that our instincts were good, that if we sensed we were being followed, we were probably right.
I said, “How about the notes?”
He looked startled, then said, with exaggerated deference, “Of course. Don’t let me keep the lady waiting.”
He unbuckled the book bag.
I went to switch on a lamp.
When I turned around, he had the knife.
On the hotline one night, I took a call from a woman who had been raped by three men in a Turkish bath. “Why me?” she kept asking me. I told her it happens to anyone. I told her the stats for our city. I told her it was not her fault. Then it was revealed that she weighed nearly three hundred pounds, and that what she meant by “Why me?” was why they would want to rape her.
“What are you doing?” I said.
He had a close-trimmed black beard, I noticed. I have never understood how a man trims a beard. Is it the lawnmower principle, where you raise the blade away from what you are going to mow?
He said, “You have a great mouth.”
I said thank you.
He said he liked it that I was cordial. He said he didn’t like it when a woman tried to run away, or push him away, and he had to use the knife.
Just when you begin to think you’ve dreamt it …
He tried and tried.
Said it was my fault.
I heard a dog bark outside. I didn’t know the neighbors, but I knew their dog. He sometimes followed me into the house where I kept a box of biscuits for him.
“Stay,” I said to the man from the auditorium.
He stopped slamming himself against me.
“It’s enough that you’re here,” I said.
I saw his shoulders drop. He put the knife down. He put his arms around me. He said we would be lovers. He began to cry. I felt him begin to get hard.
The moment when Stella is saved from death on the cliffs is the moment the ghost stops sobbing, the moment Stella finds out who her real mother is, and what happened to her real mother when Stella was too young to know.
* * *
In spring, daffodils line the miles of the National Trust coastline of Cornwall. They flourish in my sorry northern yard, as well, passed over by deer as are the garish forsythia I failed to prune. It is the opposite of ikebana, the harmonious placement of a single bloom, and that is as close as I have ever come to making friends with disorder.
Given the number of times I have seen The Uninvited, you would think I would know to whom the title refers—to the ghosts or to the guests.
One of the assistants let me in when I arrived. Several handlers were already present, one for each of the dogs that would participate in the experiment.
The assistant signaled for a black Lab to be brought forward. The dog stood calmly. The assistant took a metal choke chain from her pocket. She moved to the dog’s rear end. She stood above the dog and held the chain collar from one end so that it hung a few inches above the dog’s hips.
“Keep her still?” the assistant said.
In a few moments, the chain began to move slowly from side to side, about an inch in each direction over the dog’s hips.
“It’s not scientific,” said the assistant, “but it’s about a hundred percent accurate in determining pregnancy.
She’ll have her sonogram to be sure, but if she wasn’t pregn
ant, the chain would have swung north-south. Something to do with the magnetic field.”
The assistant handed me the chain and said, “Would you like to try it?”
I said I would.
I gave her back the chain.
I got down on all fours.
REFERENCE #388475848-5
To: Parking Violations Bureau, New York City
I am writing in reference to the ticket I was issued today for “covering ‘The Empire State’” on my license plate. I include two photographs I took this afternoon that show, front and back, that the words “The Empire State” are clearly visible. I noticed several cars on the same block featuring license plates on which these words were entirely covered by the frame provided by the car dealer, and I noticed that none of these cars had been ticketed, as mine had. I don’t mean to appear insolent, but I am wondering if the ticket might have been issued by the young Hispanic guy I sometimes see patrolling the double-parked cars during the week? I ask because the other day my dog yanked the leash from my hand and ran to him and jumped up looking for a treat. He did not appear to be comfortable around dogs, and though mine is a friendly one, she’s big, and maybe the guy was frightened for a moment? It happened as I was getting out of my car, so he would have known it was my car, is what I’m saying.
“The Empire State”—it occurred to me that this is a nickname. I mean, police officers do not put out an all-points bulletin in The Empire State, they put out an all-points bulletin in New York, which words are also clearly visible on my license plates. In fact, there is no information the government might require that is not visible on these plates. You could even say that the words “The Empire State” are advertising. They fit a standard definition: a paid announcement, a public notice in print to induce people to use something, the action of making that thing generally known, providing information of general interest. Close enough.
I have parked my car with the plates as they appear in the accompanying photos on New York City streets for five years, since I drove the car out of the dealership on the Island five years ago; it has never been a problem until now. (I bought the car without ever reading Consumer Reports. I checked with a friend who said the price I was quoted was a reasonable one, but that I should refuse the extended warranty the dealer was pushing. “I’m trying to do you a favor,” the dealer said, pissed off.)
At the time I bought the car, I didn’t know I would soon be back living in the city, and hardly ever needing it. I had thought I would stay the two-hour drive east. What is the saying?—“If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.”
I haven’t kept track of everything I’m supposed to do with the car, but your records will show that I paid the ticket for my expired registration the same week it was issued. I did better with the safety inspection, and FYI, I’m good through November.
It’s not really about the money, the $75 the ticket would cost me. I wouldn’t mind writing a check for that amount as a donation to a Police Athletic League, or a fund to help rebuild the city. I’m not like the guy at the film festival yesterday who asked the French director in the Q and A after his film was shown, “Are we going to get our money back?” I hadn’t even wanted to see the film; before we went, I told my date what I did want to see, and he said, “They stole the idea from that other one, the one where they ate each other.” And I said, “No, that was the plane crash; this is the two guys who had the mountain-climbing accident. It’s a documentary.” And he said, “What isn’t?”
Then, after the French film, after the audience applauded for this major piece of crap, the date and I cut out and went to a place he had heard about in the East Village for tea. It turned out to be someone’s exotic version of high tea, so instead of scones and clotted cream and cucumber sandwiches, we were each served a teaspoon of clear, rosemary-scented jelly with a single pomegranate seed inside! What came after that were these teensy cubes of polenta covered in grapefruit puree, all floating in a “bubble bath” of champagne. Then came a chocolate truffle the size of a tooth. The fellow and I were giddy. It was pouring outside, and when we left, after the tea ceremony, we didn’t want to leave each other, so we walked another couple of blocks to see a second movie, one he wanted to see, and I didn’t tell him I had already seen it because by that time I just wanted to sit next to him in the dark. “I wonder who that is singing,” I whispered at one point in the sound track. He didn’t know, but I did, from having read the credits the first time I saw the movie. “Kind of sounds like Dave Matthews,” I said, knowing I was right. “Let’s be sure to check at the end,” I said. “I’d like to get it for you.”
Music keeps you youthful. Like I’m not the target audience for the Verve, but this morning I put on that song that goes, “I’m a million different people from one day to the next—I can change, I can change …” and—what’s my point? I was in a really good mood when I found the ticket on my windshield. Then how to get rid of the poison, like adrenaline, that flooded my system when I read what it was for?
There is a theory of healing based on animals in the wild. People have observed animals that barely escaped a predator, and they say these animals lie down and shake, and in so doing somehow release the trauma. Whereas human beings take it in; we don’t work it out, so it lodges in us where it produces any number of nasty effects and symptoms. If you follow a kind of guided fantasy, supposedly you can locate a calm, still place inside you and practice visiting it over and over, and that’s as far as I got with this theory. It’s supposed to make you feel better.
Maybe I should sell the car. But there is something about being able to get in a car and leave when you want to, or need to, without waiting to get to a car rental agency if you even know where one is and if it is even open when you get there.
Like last week, after a guy grabbed my arm when I was running around the reservoir, when he was suddenly in front of me, coming from the trees on the south end of the track, and no one else was around just then and I couldn’t swing around wide enough to get completely past him, and he grabbed my arm. I think it was my anger that made him finally release me, because that is what I felt, not fear, until I got back home with a sore throat from yelling at him to leave me the fuck alone. I was shaking like crazy, and it wouldn’t stop, so I walked a block to where my car was parked, and I drove for a couple of hours toward the ocean. My right leg was bouncing on the accelerator from nerves for much of the way, but I stopped for coffee and when I started up again I steered with my knees, the way real drivers steer, with a cup of coffee in one hand, playing the radio with the other. So maybe I am a wild animal, shaking off the trauma of nearcapture.
There were actually two men at the reservoir. And I thought it was odd that when the first one grabbed me, and I reflexively swung my free arm around to sock him in the chest, the other man didn’t stop me. Because he could have. He watched, and listened to me yell, so I don’t know what the deal was. But I think it was worth paying the insurance and having to park the car and get this ticket to have the car there to use that day.
You could accuse me of trying to put a human face on this. And you would be correct. But is there anything wrong with that? Unless the ticket was issued by the guy my dog startled, I know it isn’t personal. But I’m not a person who can take this ticket in stride with the kind of urbanity urbane people prize in each other. I feel I must question—and protest—this particular ticket.
I want what is fair. I don’t want a fight. But the truth is, I’m shaking—right now, writing this letter. My hand is shaking while I write. It’s saying what I can’t say—this is the way I say it.
WHAT WERE THE WHITE THINGS?
These pieces of crockery are a repertory company, playing roles in each dream. No, that’s not the way it started. He said the pieces of crockery played roles in each painting. The artist clicked through slides of still lifes he had painted over thirty years. Someone in the small, attentive audience said, “Isn’t that the cup in the painting from years ago?” Yes
, it was, the artist said, and the pitcher and mixing bowl and goblet, too. Who was the nude woman leaning against the table on which the crockery was displayed? The artist didn’t say, and no one in the small, attentive audience asked.
I was content to look at objects that had held the attention of a gifted man for so many years. I arrived at the lecture on my way to someplace else, an appointment with a doctor my doctor had arranged. Two days before, she was telling me his name and address and I have to say, I stopped listening, even though—or because—it was important. So instead of going to the radiologist’s office, I walked into a nondenominational church where the artist’s presentation was advertised on a plaque outside: “Finding the Mystery in Clarity.” Was this not the opposite of what most people sought? I thought, I will learn something!
The crockery was white, not glazed, and painted realistically. The pieces threw different lengths of shadows depending on the angle of the light in each painting. Sometimes the pieces were lined up touching one another, and other times there were gaps. Were these gaps part of the mystery the artist had in mind? Did he mean for us to be literal, to think: absence? He said the mind wants to make sense of a thing, the mind wants to know what something stands for. Okay, the artist said, here is what I painted that September. On the screen, we saw a familiar tabletop—familiar from years of his still lifes—and the two tallest pieces of crockery, the pitcher and the vase, were missing; nothing stood in their places.
Ahhhh, the small, attentive audience said.
Then someone asked the artist, What were the white things? He meant what were the white things in the other paintings. What did they represent? And the artist said that was not a question he would answer.
My mother, near the end of her life, announced that she was giving everything away. She was enraged. She told me to put a sticker on anything I wanted to keep, but every time I did, she said she had promised the thing to someone else. The house was all the houses I had grown up in. The things I wanted to keep were all white. But what were the white things?
