Likes

by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

  I like that too, Eva said.

  The waiter took their plates away, untouched.

  Her friend dropped her head into her hands. I’m tired, she said. How did this happen to me? I’m tired all the time.

  Eva didn’t know what to say. She reached across the table and rested her hand on the woman’s arm.

  Her friend glanced up, brightened, and then began to scold. You didn’t eat anything. That’s unforgivable. You’re going to disappear before our eyes. Don’t you dare do that when I’m blowing up like a balloon.

  After they had finished wrapping themselves in their coats and their scarves, her friend kissed her on both cheeks. One is for you, she said, and the other is for him.

  As her friend had asked, Eva bestowed a kiss upon her husband. He was already asleep when she came home. She lit a candle and studied him as he lay sleeping in their bed. He too possessed his own share of beauty, or so she had thought in the beginning, and so she was repeatedly still told. Many people, men and women both, found his looks worth noting. But she could no longer see it. She saw only the face most familiar to her, most dear. Over time, her tender stare had drifted over his face and settled there—on his forehead, his eyelids, his cheekbones, his mouth—hiding from her what was beautiful in him.

  She had thought, like Psyche, like all the other curious young wives, that she might creep up on her husband while he lay unconscious, a small circle of light hovering in her hand, and spy the secret face that had for so long remained invisible to her. Psyche had believed she would find a serpent. Another wife, a troll. And what did they find but Beauty. Their fair husbands had vanished like smoke. But why should Eva think of those old stories? The magnificent castles, the unseen servants. Imagine those wives in an apartment! Could enchantment take hold among the milk crates, the sickly houseplants, the student-loan statements? When the match sparked and the wick flared, all Eva saw was her husband’s face, neither stunning nor monstrous. The face that she loved. Wax did not drip from her candle; the spell went unbroken. He stayed right where he was, fast asleep.

  For the first time, the king appeared alone in Eva’s dream, standing atop a dry and windy hill. His cloak flapped roughly about his legs, and above him the sky glowed with a strange luminosity. Heavy gray clouds moved low and swift over a scrim of sheer, pearly, roseate light. The clouds were edged in gold and vermilion, and seemed to portend that some stirring, unknowable change was on its way. But the king did not gaze at the mysterious sky, the dark gilded clouds sweeping overhead. He kept his eyes fixed on the barren ground. He ran his open hand over a brittle tuft of grass, he turned a small stone over with his boot. Suddenly he fell to his knees, his cloak gusting up behind him, and brought his face close to the turf. What he found excited him. Hurrying on in an urgent, uneven gait, half scrambling, half running, trying to stay low to the ground, the king followed a path of signs discernible only to him. Eva could not guess what he was seeking. Her perspective was puzzling: in one blink she saw the king as a distant figure, stark against the roiling sky, and in another she could see the tiny flecks of brightness in the stone he overturned. Where am I? she wondered, and at the very moment the question arose, she felt beneath her palms the cool, papery surface of a birch. She was lost in a stand of ravishingly white, naked trees. And at the very moment she knew she was lost, she also understood she would be found. It was she the king was searching for. Stepping through the pale trees, their white arms touching her, she drew closer and closer until at last she appeared on the edge of the wood, the wind filling her nightgown like a sail. The king looked up from the ground and saw her.

  Then Eva awoke, in the darkness of the bedroom. Her heart had slowed to a languorous throb. She felt as if she was surfacing from a sleep that resembled, or perhaps preceded, death. She wanted to reach for the hand of her husband, but found herself too entranced, too abandoned, to do so. Though she could not lift her head, she became dimly aware of a reddish gleam at the foot of the bed, and wondered if, having dreamed this dream, she was destined to go up in flames, the bed a pyre, a shimmering blanket of fire enfolding her. But she was not. Through the lowered veil of her lashes, she made out embers burning in a grate; through the remnants of her dream, she smelled the ancient scent of woodsmoke, she heard the ticking of cinders falling into ash. Opening her eyes, she saw above her a low ceiling, black beams of wood, a small window hanging bright and faceted as a jewel. The room was not her own. Her husband was not beside her.

  In the first days of the king’s return, there was a girl who wandered far into the forest. At dusk she would come home, with scratched face and torn skirts and brambles stuck like pins in her hair, to find her husband sitting before a hearth gone cold, a pot caked with old gruel. But how his eyes would shine when she appeared! He draws out her seat, he brings in water, he makes her a broth, which she plays with, with her spoon. She smiles at him shyly, saying, I think I lost my sense of time.

  One evening, the dusk turns into darkness and still the girl has not come home. Her husband runs to the edge of the forest, a torch in his hand. All night he searches for her, the legions of trees looming around him, and by morning he stumbles out from the woods, bewildered and afraid, having found no sign of her. The other wives are washing clothes in the stream. They bend down farther over their work, as if by doing so they might make themselves invisible. The young husband approaches them, his face a wound, his voice hoarse when he asks them, Have you seen her? The women, up to their elbows in cold water, shake their heads. They are silent.

  Eva imagined the silence into which her husband would awake. She imagined his voice in the empty room, saying her name. She heard, clearly, the variations he would use—Evita? Evuncular?—time’s elaborations, the joyful, thoughtless ornamenting of the word he most liked to say. The names would chime and shiver in the air. Evel Knievel? he would ask, and there would be no answer. She had been taken too far away.

  In a strange bed, in a strange room, she felt the anguish of her husband as her own. It felt like knives, like rats gnawing, like broken glass, like poison bubbling—no, it felt like something else. Exactly. All it took was two slippery pills, swallowed at the clinic, and then a bus ride home and straight into bed. The pain began as a little pang in her gut, and then—whoosh!—she was possessed by it. Her husband (not yet her husband) knelt beside the bed with a cool washcloth in his hand as she writhed around like a snake, sweating through the sheets. And just as swiftly it was over. The pain disappeared and the bleeding began. The whole thing lasted only an afternoon. In the evening the two of them walked around the neighborhood, eating ice cream. To say they had made a decision would suggest that they had needed to have a conversation. Neither one had said, Given the smallness of our apartment, and the narrowness of the stairs. Considering where we are in our lives … She didn’t even have to mention her wedding dress, which was already paid for, already fitted, sitting hugely and steadfastly on her credit card. It was made of silk organza and floated up behind her when she moved. It was the color of champagne.

  In this strange bed, in this close room, beneath the tiny jewel of a window, she thought of her husband and felt again the ache of that dreamlike afternoon. Or at least she did for a little while. A shockingly, shamefully little while. For how could she stay sad when the king himself was watching her, sitting alert by the fire? As she saw his dark eyes gleaming in the light, her sorrow for her husband dwindled into a low, melancholy note above which her false heart trilled. The king! The brave and ravaged and beautiful king. What might he say to her? What might he see? There was always the possibility he could love her, wasn’t there? There was always the possibility. If her young marriage had taught her anything, it was that. The surprise, the stark miracle of love, bent in her direction. So why not the king, watching silently from his chair?

  She felt his eyes move over her, touching each part of her deliberately, like a hand.

  The next time Eva awoke, in the darkness of the bedroom, her heart was brimming, beating
lightly as a bird’s. The heaviness that had pulled on her was lifted. She yawned enormously, stretching her limbs to the far corners of the bed. At the end of the room a ruddy light glowed, but rising up onto her elbows, she saw that it belonged to the unsteady streetlamp outside her apartment window. And above her was her ceiling, still haunted by the water stain. The crooked blinds. The seething radiator. Did the sound of its spitting mean she was back? The dream over? More likely, more tormenting, the dream continued, and she had simply been ejected from it. For there sat her umbrella, her shoes. There lay the novel she was reading, prostrate on the floor. Her crumpled socks. His swaybacked boots. His corduroy pants, upright and perfectly accordioned. They spoke of the lovely, unflustered motion with which he had loosened them, allowed them to drop down the length of his legs, neatly stepped clear of them, and then plunged into the bed. Her husband. His watch resting on the bureau. His stack of National Geographics. The photograph of his mother and father and sisters on the wall. His harmonica glinting. His collection of fortune-cookie fortunes in a jar. All the things about him she adored, infinite and ordinary as the stars.

  She reached for his hand. She slid her foot across the sheets, seeking his leg. She rolled over voluptuously, in anticipation of the warm obstacle that would stop her. But she rolled, unhindered, all the way to the edge. Nothing prevented her, nothing held. She had the cool expanse entirely to herself. Her husband was no longer there.

  He’s coming right back, she thought. He’ll be here in a heartbeat.

  Because maybe he wanted a glass of water, or else drank too many before he went to bed. Maybe he heard footsteps on the stairs, and was waiting, dictionary raised, behind the door. Maybe he was saving them. Maybe he was thirsty. Or maybe, like her, he had fallen in love—with the gypsy queen and her raven hair. The tiny girl tucked inside a tulip. The mermaid, the shield maiden, the daughter crying from the tower. Maybe it was the siren who had called to him. And maybe he had answered, and was gone.

  THE BEARS

  Once, when I was convalescing, I was sent to a farmhouse in the country. No one there knew I had been sick. A woman came to cook in the evenings, and her daughter would appear at odd hours with a mop and bucket, keeping the place clean. There were many kinds of tea to be found in the kitchen, and a woven tray on which you could arrange the tea things. Also there were deep old wooden chairs lined up along the front porch, so you could sit as long as you liked, looking out over the fields, the trees, and sometimes even the mountains if the sky was truly clear. Because of the porch and the tray and the slow way the day ended, I felt, in this place, though no one knew of my miscarriage, as if I were being gently attended to, as if all the demands of the world had been softly lifted away, and that I should rest.

  I had been invited there to finish a chapter on William James. I was to do so in the company of eight other people working on interesting, improbable projects. The invitation had come as a great surprise to me and had a magical effect on my confidence. As soon as I set foot in the farmhouse, however, every thought and hope I had about William James flew out of my head, like bits of charred paper up a chimney. He had been my companion for several months, and now he turned into a man I barely knew. His sudden disappearance made the days seem long. Soon I discovered that the pastimes I had always imagined I’d enjoy—such as dipping into newly published novels, and drifting off to sleep in the middle of the afternoon—left me with a stiff neck, as well as a feeling of dread.

  My only relief was in walking along the sides of the highway and the roads. Though they were country roads, they were not laid out in a haphazard way, and I decided that if I was to set out, and turn left, and then left again, turning and turning until I found my way back again, I would be all right. I walked slowly, but for distances that surprised me. I walked without my wallet or my glasses, and my life felt far away. The city I lived in, the appointments I made, the students I taught, my dog, my friend—it seemed as if what held me to them had loosened and let go. When I thought of home, all I remembered was a route I would sometimes follow as I walked to the bus stop, a route that took me past an empty parking lot, where long grasses and weeds had been allowed to grow in profusion. Even though it wasn’t strictly on my way, I liked walking past this empty lot because of the wild, sweet smell it sent out into the world. No other lot or overgrown yard I knew of had managed to achieve the right alchemy of grass and clover and tall spindly wildflowers, and no other place could secrete this same smell. But here, along the side of the highway, the smell was everywhere.

  Reading the signs that appeared on the road, I learned I was walking through a part of the countryside that had yet to be discovered and made over in a sentimental way. This area remained practical and suspicious. At frequent intervals, sometimes only two or three trees apart, the signs were posted: PRIVATE PROPERTY, they said. Then came a list of numerous activities, followed by the words STRICTLY FORBIDDEN, and for final emphasis, the phrase SHALL BE PROSECUTED. As if these yellow signs left room for doubt and interpretation, some residents had gone to the trouble of making their own: NO VISITORS, said one. NO TRESPASSING, said another. And even the cornfields were wrapped around with barbed wire. But not once did I see another person walking along the road. It was hard to imagine who the trespassers might be. Other than me, of course.

  The pickup trucks wouldn’t slow down when they passed me on the road. They hadn’t slowed down for other things either. Along the highway’s edge I saw a rabbit, its remains vanishing, its bits of fur lifting up from the pavement as dreamily as thistledown; I saw a small black songbird, throbbing with larvae, and a freshly dead chipmunk, curled up on its side as if in sleep. There were also many beautiful horses, heraldic and fully alive. I wanted to watch them gallop across the fields with their ravishing black manes streaming behind them, but it seemed when left alone they had little reason to do so. They chose to stand still, in mysterious silence. The cows, in contrast, were full of spirit, but maybe only when being pushed into a trailer. I happened to be walking by while this process was underway. The cows already inside the trailer made an alarming sound, a truly unhappy and outraged sound, the sort of hoarse trumpeting you might hear from an elephant. It could not be described as either mooing or lowing. I wondered where the cows were being taken, whether their misery was mindless and fleeting, as they were simply being driven to another pasture; or whether the truth was darker and the animals sensed the sure approach of death. So I studied the cows, and I noted that these were black, and large, with heavy brows and small eyes, and that their boulder-like bodies hung low to the ground. But what did this mean? I had no idea. I had no way of knowing just where they were off to.

  The list of things I did not know was getting longer. I could name only two of the plants that grew in abundance on the side of the road. If there had been a child walking alongside me, its hand in my own, and if this child had shown any curiosity about the world, I would have been able only to say, That is goldenrod. And that, Queen Anne’s lace. It would have been a poor display of knowledge. Pale starry blue flowers and velvety purses of orange and gold, whole swamps of tawdry purple tapers and creeping vines that spread their fingers out into the road—all of it as common as day, and all of it inscrutable to me. I had also been forced to admit, while trying to write a postcard, that I wasn’t completely sure which mountains I was looking at. The cows, the flowers, the mountain range; why William James had seen fit to abandon me; whether I would ever get well; how to relieve the sorrow of my friend.

  That I continued to call him my friend probably added to his unhappiness. But the other names sounded antiseptic to me. Sometimes he would identify himself lightheartedly on phone messages as the father of your unborn child. After a certain point, though, this no longer applied. I believed friend to be a true honorific, but he said he felt differently, and so what to call him was among the many unknown things that troubled me as I made my slow way around the fields.

  But there was always the white house of Jerry Roth
, which I did come to know. And, in fact, the house seemed such a reflection of him, I sometimes felt as if I knew him, the man. His house was set back slightly from the road, sitting upon a soft rise in the land; it looked out over the acres of a horse farm, and nearer than that a fishing pond, edged with cattails, shadowed by willow trees, a rowboat resting on its grassy bank. Perfect as in a painting or a dream; as if all the charm and sentiment the countryside had been coolly withholding could now, at last, express itself, could gloriously unfurl in one long exhalation of white clapboard and dappled shade and undulating lawn. A colonial house, but without stiffness or symmetry: a wing rambled off to the right, toward a glassed-in porch, and on the left stood a new addition, a sort of studio or guest quarters, its face yawning open in a wide cathedral window, and its entrance marked by a great glass lantern that echoed, in wittily enormous proportions, the quaint, black-leaded lights that hung beside the front door of the original house.

  I did not apprehend all of this graciousness at once. It revealed itself to me in a slow unfolding of surprises. One afternoon, the wind stirred the leaves of Jerry Roth’s old maple, and only then did I see how beautifully it spread its canopy across the front lawn, and how thickly the plantings grew beneath it, their dark green leaves polished and aglow, the white flowers floating above their long stems like candle flames. Another day, hearing a window shut, I turned and saw the kaleidoscopic horse standing calmly in the garden. The same size, the same stillness, as the creatures across the road, but its coat glistened with blue sky and yellow stars, with tempera paint and varnish, with winding streams and hills of violet and umber and red. And in this backward glance I also found the apple tree, crooked with age, its lowest branch dipping only a few feet from the ground, extended as if in invitation for a child to take a seat.

  What else. There was a plaque attached to the mailbox post, its delicate roman capitals spelling out JEROME ROTH, and beneath that a picture of a pheasant, wings spread, like something you might find on a piece of porcelain. And opposite the mailbox, a square of white-and-blue tin announcing that this little stretch of road should be known as RUE JERRY ROTH (MARIN ÉMÉRITE). The street sign was displayed on a faded red barn, now turned into a garage for three wonderful cars: a wood-paneled station wagon, a Volkswagen van, and a sleek silver two-seater, Japanese and new. One evening, while walking along the highway, I was passed from behind by the wood-paneled station wagon, and my heart quickened involuntarily, as though I’d seen a star.