by Rebecca Lee
“Oh, those,” Groovy said. “Those are my signature.”
“She puts marshmallows in everything,” Sands said. And then Indira returned to the room, apologizing as she sat down. “I’m supposed to be getting married in two months.”
“What?” we all said.
“Yes. But I don’t want to.”
Reuben looked stricken. “It’s an arranged marriage?” he said.
“Well, sort of.”
“Who arranged it?”
“I did, actually. But it was four years ago, before I went to Princeton and my fiancé to Penn. We planned to return to Bombay and get married, but I fell out of touch with him. Meanwhile, our fathers have joined businesses, and everybody awaits my arrival.”
We talked about this for a while and tried to strategize ways out. By the time midnight rolled around, Sands caught up to me in the kitchen and suggested we peel away, go to the river.
AND WHAT IS A love affair if not a little boat, pushing off from shore, its tilting, untethered bob, its sensitivity to one’s quietest gestures?
“I would love an arranged marriage,” Sands said. I was pushing us away from the edge with my oar, breaking apart the thin skein of ice forming there.
“No you wouldn’t.”
“Yes. I’d like to have a family so involved that they were planning the wedding and I just had to show up, the treasured bride.” And then she rose in the boat, and as she stood it was as if the world shifted off course and was just careening back and forth, drunkenly. The trees shook with interest. She stretched and yawned, lifting her arms. Her sweater lifted, so that a narrow strip of her stomach showed. It was like burnished wood, pierced with a ruby. She looked almost psychedelically pretty there, in the tunnel created by the trees over the river.
I would have kissed her then, struggled up through the ranks of myself to do this one true thing, except I made the mistake of glancing up first, through the ragged arms of trees. And there was Stadbakken’s room alight. A cold wind reared suddenly, and I could feel minuscule shards of ice embedded in it. By the time the river froze, we would no longer be together, and I could feel in the air already the terrible possibility.
THE NEXT AFTERNOON, HOW could I help but think he had seen us, through his telescope, since when I entered for my tutorial, the first thing he did was lift my sketches to the light and say, “I don’t think you and Sands are working well together at all anymore.”
“Why?”
“I used to see Sands all over the page, and now I don’t see her here at all.”
I didn’t think this was fair, nor particularly true. “Maybe our work is starting to become similar.”
“Oh.” He looked at me sarcastically. “The two become one then, is that it?” He actually leaned up against the telescope then. If either of us had looked through it, probably we would have seen the river shrinking, crackling, crystallizing itself into ice.
WE HAD ONE REHEARSAL, a run-through in the commons. Reuben was the director. Stadbakken was going to be given the most expansive part in the play, the part of the dying Prior. And Indira was the angel, of course. Sands had made wings. If I hadn’t loved Sands before the wings, I would have now, for they were made of the feathers and down of creatures that had to be imaginary—white and brown and long. Picture her in the dewy morning coming off the hill to wrestle down a figment, tear off its feathers, later affixing them with glue to bent clothes hangers and panty hose straps, and there you have Sands and everything about her.
Sands and Groovy played the parts of Louie and Joe, respectively, two gay men. Their interpretations of men were hilarious—strangely deep throated and spliced through with their ideas of gayness, which were like streams of joy running through.
I played a luminous, heartbroken, and uptight woman whom Joe had abandoned. I took her husband’s rejection of her quite seriously, tried to imagine exactly how it would feel as I swished in my housecoat along the floor of the commons.
After the rehearsal, I was sitting in the sheepskin chair, minding my own business, when Sands and Groovy came along to deliver their verdict on my performance. “You don’t really have being a woman quite right,” Sands said.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you need to feel it inside.”
“I can feel it inside,” I said.
“You looked kinda stiff.”
“No, I didn’t. That was my interpretation.”
“You gotta loosen up.” Sands reached down to shake my shoulders a little.
“You do,” I said, and I reached for her, and I brought her to me. Her body was such a mysterious rolling landscape in those moments, it turned and turned and turned, and I could feel her falling into my lap. I don’t know what I would have done then, some minor consummation of my feelings for her, but Stadbakken stepped into the room. It was very odd to see him in daylight. Sands stood up, not too quickly, but definitely a little shaken.
“Where is Indira?” he said. “Her father has called me.”
“I’ll find her,” I said. I thought she might be back in the room with Reuben, and I knew he would be mortified if Stadbakken knew this.
And I did find them there, sitting across from each other at Reuben’s folding table, two beautiful solitudes greeting each other across a little distance, playing cards.
I THINK IT WOULD have been possible to maintain this little world, always on the edge of fruition, if we hadn’t spent Thanksgiving together, hours on hours together, if we hadn’t consumed so much sugar gin, if we hadn’t put on such a beautiful play. It was a snowy day. Dinner was planned for nightfall, which was five p.m. in these parts. Stadbakken would be arriving at four-thirty, at the dimming of the day. So we all met to cook in Utopia at one, after a morning of working alone on our sketches of the theater.
For the first hour we mostly drank. Sands enforced a game of Monopoly, and then we began to cook. Groovy made little pancake hors d’oeuvres, studded with cloves and cinnamon. Reuben and I were in charge of the turkey and the ham and the smaller game hens. Indira was in and out, miraculously cooking gorgeous yams and some exotic bean dish at the same time she was dissolving a multimillion-dollar marriage deal in Bombay on her cell without even breaking a sweat. She just kept rearranging things with her long, bronze hands, which I guess is what cooking is.
Sands relaxed in the commons, reading a book. She had been to town early in the morning to get the drinks and seemed to believe this exempted her from any further participation in the meal, except for leaning against the doorjamb every now and then to read us a passage from her novel, which today was Justine, by Lawrence Durrell: “Certainly she was bad in many ways, but they were all small ways. Nor can I say she harmed nobody. But those she harmed most she made fruitful. She expelled people from their old selves.”
“That’s you, all right,” I said.
“It’s me, too,” Groovy said.
“It’s totally you,” Sands said, complimenting her.
I was trying to break open the plastic surrounding the turkey, surprised and humbled by all the blood that poured out as it opened. “How does anybody eat after they’ve cooked a meal?” I said.
“Welcome to being a woman,” Sands said.
“Well,” I said, “we have to kill them. That’s hard work.”
“Nobody killed that,” she said. “It wasn’t ever really alive.”
“It was,” I said, newly in touch with animals from my months in the barn. I held out the turkey a little. “It had its days in the sun.”
Sands smiled at me for a few long moments in which I arranged our whole future. We would live out our long chain of days at Fialta, secretly but not so secretly in love, and then we would move together to Chicago, or New York City, and live in our own private warren of rooms together. And our life would be made up of the gentle separations and communion of marriage. A line from a book Indira had given to Reuben ran through my mind, a sad line, I realize now, but it didn’t even occur to me then that it was. “It was good
to be alive when you were alive.” My dream, as I stared at Sands, was crosshatched by our friends—Groovy, Indira, Reuben—moving back and forth between us, carrying on.
So, finally, the table was set, and the beloved guest had arrived, exuberant and windswept. He lifted his cup to us, and we drank, our bodies growing warmer as the day grew colder outside, whiter and whiter. The table was laid with the creatures, all burnished a coppery gold. And in the fireplace the log, like another little beast at work on itself, turned and turned as the air filled with the smell of fire. We lifted our cups back to Stadbakken. If you have ever felt that the table at which you sit contains everything and everybody that matters to you, like a little boat, then you know how I felt. It doesn’t feel secure at all, but rather a little tipsy. It is unnerving to love a single place so much. There are no anchors to the world outside, the cities in the distance, the country around you. There is just this: the six of you afloat so happily in the temporary day.
AFTER DINNER, WE CLEARED away the dishes and then set about the scene from the play. “Okay,” Sands said to Stadbakken, “you have a part.” She handed him a Xeroxed copy of the play. “This chair you’re sitting in? It’s your bed. You’re dying.” She touched his shoulder when she told him this. My eyes settled on her hand, on his shoulder. And his eyes settled on my eyes.
And then the play began. Reuben narrated to Stadbakken what came before: love, disappointment, the crude beautiful drama of sex, Sands and Groovy vamping at love, Sands carrying on like a girl making fun of a boy making fun of a girl, with a painted mustache. She was so ridiculous and beautiful, I thought I might die. Beyond the play, the day darkened. The backdrop was the icy arms of trees, the lift of starlings against the falling sun, the day dying. When Indira’s part came, we had to shout for her. She was in Utopia, arguing on her cell. She hung up the phone and came in. She began to cry as she delivered her line, which gave her part a weird veracity: “Heaven is a city much like San Francisco—more beautiful because imperiled.” We carried on for a few seconds, but then realized she actually was crying, standing there.
“What’s the matter?” Sands asked.
“My father, he’s sick. They just told me. I have to leave tomorrow.”
“Oh no!” Groovy said. And we all murmured. I looked over at Reuben. What will you do now, Reuben? What display now? What will spill out of you now? He stood so still, as the heartbroken always do, and then he went to her. He touched her wing, the safest, least intrusive part.
“Let’s continue,” Indira said.
And so we did.
“Since you believe the world is perfectible you find it always unsatisfying.” This was Sands, as Louis. And then she kissed Groovy, as Joe. They kissed, as men kiss. I staggered inwardly. And the play wound through its tragedies easily until Stadbakken’s final, deathbed lines. “You are all fabulous creatures, each and every one. And I bless you: More life.” Behind his head thousands of birds took flight. He raised his arms, though dying. He loved the play, you could tell. The wind howled. And then he stood up to go hug Indira.
SINCE SANDS HADN’T COOKED, it was her duty to clean up. I helped her clear away the dishes. We made an enormous pile of dirty dishes and plates and heaps of food on the silver table at the center of Utopia. There were also the three empty carriages of bones. “I can’t believe that about Indira,” Sands said.
“I know. It’s hard to believe.”
“And now she’ll have to get married. That’s a real primal fear, you know, for women. I can remember as a girl having dreams about having to get married.”
“You’re so unromantic, I can’t even stand it.”
“Me?” she said.
“You.”
She was leaning against the silver table, looking down at the turkey drumstick that she was tearing apart in her hands, to eat, when I stepped up, finally, and against all better reason, kissed her. Tomorrow, Indira would be gone, and who could predict what would happen then, when one of us was gone? Time was ticking away, the snow was falling. Sands’s mouth tasted like ten thousand things—berries and wine and pumpkin and something too human to define. I placed my hand on her spine as it arched back over the table, and then the door swung open. I turned to see Stadbakken, my arm lifting Sands so that we stood before him, my arm around her. He was smoking a cigar, and some of its smoke was spiraling up around his head. He stood still for a moment and then said, “Oh, is that right? Well, then. Okay. That’s fine.”
He walked toward us then. “First, let’s clear away the bones,” he said. “Let’s make some room, then, for you two. Let us clear away the bones!” And with that, he swept his entire arm over the silver lake of the table, so that everything flew—all the bodies breaking up in the air, a flurry of bone and gristle, of life sailing apart.
LATER THAT NIGHT I went looking for Sands. She had kissed me, told me to wait in Utopia, and ran after Stadbakken. “I’ll try to solve it,” she said to me. But then she did not come back for over an hour. I went to the women’s wing and found Groovy there, helping Indira to pack. And then Reuben came out of Indira’s room as well, carrying an empty cardboard box. He wasn’t saying anything, so I blurted, “Indira, why are you going? Please don’t go. Please stay.”
Indira looked at me sweetly, indulgently, as if I were a small child. She hugged me.
And then I went to Stadbakken’s. The light was falling down out of the building, onto the snow, that’s how bright it was. It was too high for me to see anything, but I stood out in the snow for a long time. I must have stood there for close to an hour. It was ridiculous, I knew, and pathetic, but that light was more warm and significant than any I’d ever known in my life, and I knew that when I turned to go there would be nothing, only the cold and the never-ending drifts of snow.
BY THE NEXT MORNING, our dinner was dissolving in the slop bucket—the little pancakes, the heads of fish, the turkey breast, the potato shavings. I poured a cup of coffee, picked up the pail, and walked down through the snow and darkness. The beasts were still asleep, and one startled when I opened the door and the cold sun fell over her. Eventually the snow began to fall—enormous lotus flakes that I watched from inside the barn. I milked the one cow for a while and as the sun rose higher I was finally getting warm. The barn was waking up around me, the building itself shifting and ticking away as the light forced itself through the million tiny chinks. As I milked I tried to think of a way to stay in love with Sands and stay at Fialta. In the moment Stadbakken flung his hand across the table, I had known he would never be reconciled to this. I don’t believe there was anything illicit particularly in his feelings; in fact, it was probably their very purity that made them so searing, so intolerant. He was her teacher, and she his student, and they met up there in a perfect illumination high above the regular world. Another cow shuddered awake beside me and looked up at me, half in sympathy, half in resignation to all my shortcomings, which is the very look cows always give, which is their whole take on the world.
And then the door opened. The cold, dim day rushed in, and, along with it, Sands. She was wearing a nightgown with a parka over the top, her hair in one long, sleepy braid. She looked like she was fulfilling and making fun of my dreams all at once. “You look like a farmer’s wife,” I said.
“And you the farmer.”
“He wants to see you,” she said. Some doves in the rafters fluttered and made a break for the open door, wheeling then around the corner. Fialta was burning away in the distance. From this distance, it looked already to be stirring—composed, as Auden said all living things were, of dust and Eros. It was clear what would happen. I would leave; Stadbakken would fall—the full, staggering weight of him—in my arms and hug me as he told me I had to leave. But there was still the morning. Her hair and skin were the only moments of darkness in the brightening barn. I kissed her again. One of the cows made a lowing sound I’d not heard before, which sounded like a foghorn in the distance. They’d seen it all before, this whole drama; their large hea
rts inside them had broken a hundred times before today. The barn smelled exactly like the very passage of time. The cows took their own fertility so practically, as the pigs did joyfully, and the doves beautifully. I already knew then that I’d be forced to leave Fialta; I could practically have predicted my leaving to the hour, but my heart was caught up in the present, whirring away and still insisting that this was the beginning, not the end. And so that’s how I felt hardly any grief at all, lying alongside Sands on the crackling, warm hay at the foot of that makeshift paradise, as the cows watched on, remembering human love.
Settlers
This old house, belonging to my friends Lesley and Andy, had been built in 1904 in a neighborhood that pretended it was on solid ground—old, Victorian homes with pillars and porticoes—but if you stepped through the screen door into the garden out back, you could feel the sand under your feet, and despite Lesley’s beautiful mazes of trees, you could tell the ocean had been here not long ago, and would be again.
Lesley and I were the same age—both thirty-five—but already she had three little girls, whom she was homeschooling. I was standing at the big kitchen window and I could see them out there in a corner of the garden, sitting in a little circle with their babysitter, one by one racing around and around, playing duck duck goose. There was a tropical storm on its way that evening, and it was already quite windy, and the girls’ hair, all curly and brown, was flying around in the shifty air. It was such an ideal little world, and it seemed a wonder that Lesley had somehow generated it all—the house, the girls, the man, the stone pathways out back that made a labyrinth through the garden, the exquisite homemade dollhouses in every room of the house, made out of scraps of fabric and old cereal boxes, the batik banner hanging above this big window that said, a family like no other.
Lesley and Andy were both originally from New York, both great conversationalists—full of curiosity and insight. They were both busily cooking tonight—Andy a kind of dark, sticky roast, and Lesley her specialty—a Vietnamese pho soup. If a person could measure these things, I’d say she had the upper hand in the relationship, but not by too much, just a little, just enough to offset what feminists used to call the “slide toward male dominance” in the culture at large and create a perfectly symmetrical, very powerful little system within a system, a neat counterbalance. I used to think of them as a “productive” couple, meaning their marriage seemed to give them energy rather than drain it away.
