twenty-four
Teresa kept to herself much of the time. She took walks out into the soybean fields and went horseback riding at a neighboring farm. Every Friday she listened to people with illnesses via long-distance. Some spring afternoons she swam in the creek at the back of the property. Afterward she sat wrapped in a towel, her hair still wet, and smoked a Marlboro under a stand of sycamores. I watched her from the lawn, the history of the world splayed on my lap.
One day I followed her partway down to the creek and she spoke to me on her way back to the main house. I knew the weather was going to turn and that rain would ruin her swims, so I’d watched her without my usual reserve. She breezed by, barefoot, arms folded, then turned back to face me.
“Are you following me?” she asked.
“Define following,” I said.
“If you’re stalking me I’ll tell Dr. Gillman.”
“No. Not stalking. Watching, maybe.”
She adjusted the towel around her waist. A drop of creek water fell from her hair onto her forearm.
“You need to start smoking,” she said. “You’re always fidgeting with your hands.”
“Oh.”
“I smoke in the barn after dinner if you want to learn.” She walked back to the house through the formation of Cal, Dick, Owen, and Arlen playing Frisbee. They ignored her. I wondered if their gifts blinded them to beauty. Did they look at a Rembrandt, a Monet, and fail to see the wan light, the Tuscan hills blued by distance? Outside of Toby’s imaginings, nobody else at Gillman’s seemed to suspect that Teresa was gorgeous. Perhaps they saw the skinny arms and legs but didn’t notice the way her eyes held flecks of brown and green, the way she tucked her coal-black hair behind her ears to reveal her long, pale neck, or the fact that her mouth was brimming and red, as if she had just come in from a snowy walk.
Later that day, at dusk, I had my first smoking lesson in the split-level barn. It was a hundred years old with enormous rough-hewn timbers spliced together with dovetail joints. A resident cat kept watch from the hayloft. It was dark inside except for Teresa’s flashlight. She waited for me in the entrance, a pack of Marlboros stashed in her back pocket. As we entered, it smelled of alfalfa and drying corn. She led me to an enclosure she’d made out of straw bales, igloo-like, where she sat and smoked each evening while the rest of us ate peach cobbler in the dining room, while Dick and Cal challenged each other with equations and kept score with Roman numerals. She sat Indian-style and gestured for me to squeeze into her bale-house cubby.
“No one would ever look for me here,” she said. She took out her cigarettes as I climbed inside. The walls were three bales high and the roof was half open. I heard the cat rustling above us.
“You could burn this whole barn down,” I said.
She removed a disheveled cigarette and lit it. She took off her shoes. I stared for a moment at her thin-boned feet.
the skeleton of the foot consists of three parts the tarsus metatarsus and phalanges the bones of the tarsus are seven in number—
“There are worse things than burning to death,” she said, inhaling.
“Like what?”
“Drowning. Bowel cancer. Strangulation…”
She ashed her cigarette onto a patch of dirt floor, then handed it to me. I put the cigarette to the edge of my mouth and drew breath. The smoke didn’t burn as much as I’d feared. I felt it in my stomach, then let out a single, truncated cough.
Teresa said, “Picture your lungs as balloons. Let the smoke fill them slowly. You might get a head spin the first few times. First time, I threw up.”
“I’ll look forward to it.”
“Do you want a drink?” she asked.
“Sure.”
“My older brother smuggles it to me when he comes to visit with the folks.”
She produced a small metallic flask from inside her shirt. It was chrome-colored and resembled a TV gambler’s hip flask. She unscrewed the cap, took a swig, and then passed it to me. We exchanged the cigarette for the flask. I took a sip. It was bitter-tasting, colorless—gin. She leaned back with the cigarette in her mouth, her chin pointing at the hayloft.
“You like me, don’t you?” she said.
some notable shipwrecks since 1850 | 1854 march city of glasgow | british steamer missing in north atlantic lives lost 480 | 1854 september arctic us steamer sunk—
I couldn’t speak. The cigarette glowed and smoldered from the hill of her chin and mouth. Someone had sucked all the air from the barn—everything was smoke. My lungs felt constricted, asthmatic.
“It’s okay,” she said. “Boys like me. I don’t care.”
The word boys was oxide red. She handed me the cigarette. I attempted a gesture of composure, held the cigarette between my thumb and first finger like a drifter from a Depression-era movie. I let the smoke rise up into my face. My eyes watered. She laughed suddenly, touched the toes of her bare feet together.
“Why do boys like you?” I asked.
“You tell me,” she said.
“I don’t know.”
“Is it my tits?” she asked, locking on my eyes. “Because they’re sore and tender right now from my period and I wish I didn’t have any.”
hurricanes typhoons blizzards other storms | 1888 march 11 to 14 blizzard eastern us lives lost 400 | 1900 aug to sept hurricane galveston tx lives lost 6000…
An impossible heat spread up my back, neck, and face. I was thankful for the descending darkness. I thought about Toby’s nanny, the woman who allowed him to fondle her breasts, a woman more of kindness and charity, I now realized, than lust. I had pictured her with bright red hair and lipstick, but now in my mind she wore a hairnet or a bonnet, a woman waiting to be a grandmother. She didn’t have tits; she had a bosom. Only women without mystery offered themselves so openly.
“I think it’s your hair,” I said.
“Spare me.”
“What?”
“You’ve watched way too many movies. Guys only care about one thing.”
“Two things: hair and eyes.”
“No one’s that naive,” she said.
“And what do you care about?” The nicotine and the gin filtered into my speech. I felt a burst of chemical happiness. I wanted to kiss the long, pale path of her neck.
“Nothing.”
“You must care about something. What about your patients?” I said.
“They’re not patients until they’re diagnosed. I make them patients because of what I see. Gillman says I have the eyes of God.”
“Gillman says a lot of things,” I said.
“He’s jealous,” she said.
“Of what?”
“All of us. That’s why we’re here. He wants to surround himself with talent.”
“He’s a smart man,” I said. Suddenly I heard my father in that inflection, heard the lifeless rejoinder for which he was renowned. I looked at her, through the gossamer Marlboro air, and said, “He’s going to make us all famous.” I was drunk.
“Yeah, I’m going to join the circus. Men with gallstones and saggy balls will pay me five bucks to tell them what’s wrong with them. That’ll make me famous.”
“You have an impressive gift,” I said. I sounded like National Public Radio.
She took a long sip from the flask, followed it up with several drags on the cigarette. We passed the flask and cigarette back and forth. I understood now why people did this, why a perfectly somber man at one of my mother’s Levart gatherings would dance a jig after three glasses of wine.
As we walked back to the main building, the fall of night felt heavy and liquid. A final sunburst ignited the western sky—an arsonist’s dream above the cornfields. I stopped for a moment to watch. I heard a sigh and thought it was Teresa’s. I leaned in to make a comment but the sigh turned out to be my own; Teresa had disappeared into the house.
I went back to my room and got under the covers.
Toby called out from his bed, “Where have you been, honey?”
“As soon as you make contact with her nipples I want to know about it.”
“I think I’m drunk,” I said.
Toby thought about this for a moment, turned on his side, and said, “What’s it like?”
I put my hands behind my head. “Like you’re not afraid to say what you’re thinking.”
“Could be dangerous,” he said.
FOR A MONTH TERESA AND I smoked cigarettes and drank gin in the barn. Sometimes we sat in the hayloft and coaxed the cat down from the rafters. Teresa took to bringing milk in an old Coke bottle from the dining room and letting the gray cat drink from her hand. I named the cat Albert, after Einstein. I made jokes my father would have laughed at: how Albert could catch any mouse in the universe, how he saw his rodent prey as collections of energy and information. Drunk, I had my father’s sensibilities; I was prone to introspection and weak humor. Teresa occasionally laughed, but mostly she watched me learn how to smoke without coughing, drink without slurring.
We spoke about our parents and our gifts. She grew up in Chicago, the daughter of a cop and a housewife who practiced daredevil charity—a woman who sponsored cake drives out in the ganglands and once walked through a city riot without realizing what was happening.
“She was the first person whose body I could see inside.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“I saw my younger sister in her womb. She was making pancakes. My mother was. And I just saw my sister—this little walnut curled up inside of her.”
“Did you tell her?”
“Yeah.”
“And?” I said.
“I said, Mom, what’s that thing inside your stomach? I was five. She didn’t even know herself.”
“When I was five my parents expected me to be a prodigy,” I said.
“But you weren’t?”
“No. I was slightly smarter than average.”
“And what about now?”
“I’m here because my brain changed after a car accident.”
“So now Gillman plugs you into a light socket and you can remember stuff?”
“You’re not very nice sometimes. I suppose you know that,” I said.
“You try seeing the body’s dirty laundry all day and stay chipper.”
“Point taken.”
She made three perfect smoke rings that eddied around us for a moment.
I said, “What do you see when you talk to people? Do you see their organs?”
“It’s not like X-ray vision. But every now and then I get a glimpse. The stomach looks like an old football. I see the part of the body that’s giving them trouble.”
“Can you see my stomach? Is there anything wrong with it?” I asked.
She nodded. “Indigestion. You probably need to fart but I appreciate that you’re not.”
Through the gin I could feel my embarrassment—a telegram from the world of sobriety. Every time I thought about kissing her she said something mildly disgusting or referred to my sweaty hands or my developing smoker’s cough. Each night I returned to my room and answered no to Toby’s hopeful inquiries.
twenty-five
One night Teresa and I walked out toward the fields behind the main house. I carried the Marlboros in my rolled shirtsleeve, like a small-town hoodlum. I shone a flashlight on the ground between us. Teresa took my hand and led me to the workshop where Roger kept his models. The building had been the original farmhouse and despite some recent paint it looked neglected: the window frames were warped and bloated with a century of rain and snow, the weather-boards had separated here and there, spiders were suspended from the eaves, mildew blotted one wall. We stood on the front stoop, wiped our feet on the welcome mat. Teresa opened the door and took the flashlight from my hand.
“If we turn on the lights they’ll see us,” she said.
She walked into the dark interior, moved the flashlight beam across worktables and door frames. I closed the door behind me and followed. It was moonless outside and the windows were faintly set against the darkly painted walls. As the yellow beam traced our path, I saw how the house had been remodeled to accommodate artists like Roger. The rooms were painted black, spotlights hung from the cross-beams, a wall had been knocked down to create an open area; there were workbenches with vises mounted to the edge.
Teresa took the cigarettes from my shirtsleeve and lit one as we walked around. The place smelled of glue and sawdust, and the floorboards were splattered with paint. I lit a cigarette for myself. We no longer shared the same one. I had discovered my own smoking rhythm was incompatible with Teresa’s: she sucked the first half, barely stopping for conversation, while I took small, pensive puffs, considered the smoke in my mouth and throat.
We walked toward the back of the space. There was a narrow hallway that divided the rooms and we crossed into what had once been the farmhouse kitchen, now a studio. Teresa placed the flashlight on a counter. The cupboard doors had been taken off and the shelves held bottles of glue and small tubes of paint. On the old kitchen table were eight blocks of Roger’s scale model buildings. It was an imaginary city—a basilica catty-corner from the Empire State Building, a baseball field adjacent to a Venetian chapel. It was part Gothic, part Art Deco, part modern.
“Jesus,” I said quietly.
I pointed the flashlight at the city. The domes of the basilica were cut from copper and tin, the metals welded or glued together seamlessly. The windows had wooden frames the width of matchsticks and the cornices were crowned with mythical figurines—chimeras, griffins, and half-men. There were buildings with window glass the size of postage stamps, skylights that resembled tiny cubes of ice. There were traffic lights and stop signs and streetlamps. Wrought-iron balconies, water tanks. A city of brass and masonry. A miniature elevator could be seen inside a needle-topped skyscraper. A park bench and a bus stop, a penthouse apartment with a rooftop garden. Roger had made tiny potted plants from dried flowers and clay. A stone angel with unfurled wings sat in an alcove above the city. This could’ve been God’s square mile.
“This is what Roger sees in his head,” Teresa said.
She crouched to stare down the main street at eye-level. She set her chin on the curb that abruptly ended at the edge of the table. It was like the city had been built next to an abyss.
“Watch this,” she said. She blew smoke through the window of a New York brownstone. It disappeared for a second before streaming through the cracks and rising out through the chimney. She ran her hand through the smoke cloud, ominous and Godzilla-like, above the fragile rooflines. I walked around to stand beside her, crouched to see the street-level view. Even the street signs were exact. Names like River and Opal Street, the letters perfectly set against the wafered metal. Roger had hand-cut the miniature bricks that stacked to form a city power station. She crouched down beside me, her elbow on mine. I was about to say something smart about a burning city, about a towering inferno, people stuck on rooftops and leaping from windows, when she reached over my elbow with her face and kissed me. The warm cup of her mouth on mine. Her hand behind my head. We kneeled, facing each other, kissed again. I placed my hand in the small of her back. I wanted to kiss her cheekbones, her wrists—these were movie gestures, the stolen poise of an experienced lover—but they came to me effortlessly. I could hear a rush of blood in my ears.
the blood is an opaque rather viscid fluid of a bright red or scarlet color when it flows from the arteries
After a moment she stopped kissing me and sat on the floor. She took off her shoes and because this gesture seemed, in that moment, like an impossibly confident move, I realized she had kissed boys before. She sat cross-legged, barefoot.
“Sit here,” she said.
I was afraid to look at her, in case a stare would doom what might happen, in case I began memorizing the imperfections of her face—the constellation of freckles, the asymmetry of her mouth. I looked over at the baseball stadium with its to-scale concession stand
s and bleachers. The scoreboard read Yankees 9, Cubs 7.
the temperature of blood is typically about 100 degrees f
I sat close to her on the floor, our knees touching. She took my hand and placed it on the top of her stomach; my wrist brushed her bra support, a plastic rib that later I would tell Toby was the “edge of the known world.” For a moment I was lost, dislocated. Oddly I thought about my father and Whit, about men. Why had no one mentioned this? Surely they had experienced this one moment of confined bliss, been forced into a submissive silence—sinners now in church. Whit spinning in space, my father peering into an electron microscope the way an astronomer stares at distant planets and hydrous stars, men continuing their lives but surely living for this unbridled moment. I thought about the math twins and Toby. They couldn’t afford to let this happen. A genius or prodigy in love or lust laid himself bare, like a castle in ruins. “Nobody told me about this,” I said. Teresa told me to be quiet and switched off the flashlight.
twenty-six
The workshop became our new escape. Sometimes we had to wait for Roger to finish his model making for the night. He would come into the main house in a flannel shirt, dazed and smelling of wood glue, and we would take off across the lawn. Inside the workshop we’d stretch out on a bolt of canvas together, talking and kissing beside Roger’s holy city—the zip code where you could buy a World Series hot dog, then cross the street and kneel inside a vaulted cathedral. One night, after allowing my hand inside her shirt, Teresa said, “I’m going to die before I’m forty.”
The Beautiful Miscellaneous Page 12
