The evening is early and the Cutter begins to drink. She remembers the first time she went into his office. The unmistakable light in his eyes that told her at once she had stumbled into a brand new possibility. She saw the way he played hot and cold with her depending on his fucking schedule. When he took her on Fridays the heat was constant, the day all her own. A sweet thievery, somehow immaculate.
There was a netsuke that fascinated her. She wanted him to let her have it. She needled after it: two wasps devouring the flesh of a fig. There they were, she said, the two of them, hungry and twinned.
The first time he saw her, she made sure he got a good look. She knew she looked her best in the late afternoon light. Amazing, really, in the bronzed light. Unprecedented. That was the word he had used. Deep in her cups, the Cutter recalls this. Ours, he had said, is an unprecedented adventure. What has transpired between us has never happened in all my years of practice, and it never will again.
“Stay with me just a little longer,” she had wheedled, writhing against him.
“You …” he breathed it, “move just like a wounded snake.”
The netsuke was called: The Wasp Carvers.
When she thinks of her shrink fucking a guy in drag, she can’t stand it. The pain is so bad she’d do anything at all to rub it out. She thinks that maybe sometimes when his wife was away and he came to her in the middle of the night, he’d come directly from the Crucible. What if he’d been fucking guys all the while? How does she fit into that? And why did he bring his wife into their private place, this restaurant where they always went to be alone together when they wanted to talk? Be like real people. Suddenly the Cutter’s stolen time with him is riddled with holes. So porous her life is leaking from the skin of her body. And because she is leaking, her thirst is boundless. As she drinks, the Cutter sees what he has hidden from her, all those people like herself, hungry for absolution. And he, the bastard, her shrink, the love of her life, the High Pope of tits and ass and cock and cunt! And they, all of them, wanting to be made over, penetrated to the marrow, rubbed into oblivion, yes: rubbed out. No: made visible.
Her shrink liked to fuck on bathroom sinks, on countertops, the floor. In the Studebaker. The Studebaker! She laughs out loud. She says out loud to no one in particular: “He liked to fuck in the Studebaker!”
In this way time passes. The Cutter loses her way. Around midnight she reaches into her purse. She always has a razor with her. An old-fashioned square Gillette, very sharp, with a good, solid top. She can get a good grip. She’s in their booth, the one that is always empty and so always theirs. Once, early on in their unprecedented affair, he said: Eden is here.
If the Cutter is anything when she gets down to it, she is discreet.
She starts in.
She thinks if she cuts deep enough, he’ll rescue her. Right now she’s bleeding, she’s crying silently in the night. She’s thieving all the time she’s got on her hands. It’s a risky business.
17
WHEN DAVID AWAKENS it is three in the morning. He decides to take action. He calls his doctor’s office in order to leave a message. He is surprised when he picks up.
“David!” he says.
“Jello thinks you fucked her over.”
He is frightened by this. He attempts to sound calm. In control.
“And you, David? What do you think?”
“I think you fucked her over. I think you fuck your patients over.”
This makes him angry. Defensive. His voice rises. It seems to strangle in his throat.
“That’s what you think! You think I fuck my patients!”
“I think you’re as fucking scared as all the dickheads out there.”
“Jesus—”
“I think Jello deserved better.”
“I—”
“Don’t say another word!”
“What can I do? What can I do to—”
David looks around his squalid chamber. He thinks of his doctor’s office, its leather furniture, its gorgeous carpets and netsuke cabinet. He says:
“I think we could come to an agreement. Write me some postdated checks,” she whispers. “O.K., baby? Hey! Write me a fucking book!”
He sits alone in his office, still as a spell, a stone, dead water. Finally he opens his desk drawer and takes a new checkbook out of its box. Just as he begins the phone rings. It is the hospital. An emergency. The patient is his.
When he sees the Cutter, he is undone. He is told she will survive the damage she has inflicted upon herself; that is to say she will not die, not yet, not this time. He sees to his horror that he has made his way into her body in unexpected ways, that his betrayal can be read like a road map across her wrists and thighs; she has cut the palm of her left hand, and there is a shallow mark, thin as a hair, but pearled with purple blood, across one cheek.
18
IT IS SUNDAY. He stands in the shower until the hot water fails him. He cannot shake the feeling that he is coated in slime. He goes to the sporting club and showers there; he takes a sauna and showers again. He returns to Spells and throws himself down on the floor, where he sleeps through the day and the night and awakens only at dawn when the sun tears into his eyes. It takes him a moment to realize it is Monday and that he must return to Drear to see a client.
The client asks him if he is unwell. “You are very perceptive,” he says, “I seem to be fighting the flu.” His tongue is swollen in his mouth or his teeth have grown uncannily large; it is very difficult for him to speak, his voice is not his own. His client says, you don’t sound like yourself, and peers at him from behind his thick glasses with misgiving. He asks his client: “Would you like to end the session—you won’t be charged—and come back next week? By then I should be over this.” The client, who suffers paranoia, is very relieved and takes him up on this offer. The client, when he sees his wife later in the day, will say: “He looked so strange! I’m not even sure it was him. And I didn’t like the way he smelled!” After a few hours reflection, he will decide to terminate his sessions.
That week he manages to see his clients on time, to get to both offices, Drear and the downtown Spells. He finds he has to remind himself, for some obscure reason, that he has two offices, has abandoned one; that Drear and Spells are offices, not “theaters.” Except when he sleeps and they are both theaters in Hell where people are pleading and sobbing and damning him.
One morning, after an infinite number of mornings, he calls all his remaining clients to tell them he is ill and must cancel all sessions for an undetermined period. This surprises no one, because by now he is swimming in his clothes. Yet they are all profoundly upset and ask him whom they can see instead. But he had long ago broken from the psychoanalytic community in town, and has no idea whatsoever.
19
AKIKO HAS FINISHED her triptych and begins to prepare the entire show for the photographer and framer. For weeks she has been thinking about what she needs to say to him for weeks, what she needs to know. She calls him. She says, I am wanting to talk; I am ready to talk. She proposes they meet in town for dinner. She says: Vietnamese? Yes, he says. O.K. Vietnamese. And he offers to pick her up at home. She agrees. Off they go together in the Studebaker.
The Vietnamese is on a busy intersection, just off a major highway. Tonight the traffic is even heavier than usual, resolute, rageful. Death sings within his skull like a knife of ice within a tempest. When the light turns yellow he accelerates. When it turns red he tears into the unspooling highway, smack into the thick of it. When Akiko screams, her voice is as thin as any creature’s struck down in the silence of the wood.
The author of eight novels as well as collections of short stories, essays, and poems, Rikki Ducornet has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, honored twice by the Lannan Foundation, and the recipient of an Academy Award in Literature. Widely published abroad, Ducornet is also a painter who exhibits internationally. She lives in Port Townsend, Washington.
COLOPHON
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Netsuke was designed at Coffee House Press, in the historic Grain Belt Brewery’s Bottling House near downtown Minneapolis. The text is set in Spectrum.
FUNDER ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Coffee House Press is an independent nonprofit literary publisher. Our books are made possible through the generous support of grants and gifts from many foundations, corporate giving programs, state and federal support, and through donations from individuals who believe in the transformational power of literature. Coffee House Press receives major operating support from the Bush Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, from Target, and from the Minnesota State Arts Board, through an appropriation from the Minnesota State Legislature and from the National Endowment for the Arts. Coffee House also receives support from: three anonymous donors; Elmer L. and Eleanor J. Andersen Foundation; Allan Appel; Around Town Literary Media Guides; Patricia Beithon; Bill Berkson; the James L. and Nancy J. Bildner Foundation; the Patrick and Aimee Butler Family Foundation; the Buuck Family Foundation; Dorsey & Whitney, LLP; Fredrikson & Byron, P.A.; Sally French; Jennifer Haugh; Anselm Hollo and Jane Dalrymple-Hollo; Jeffrey Hom; Stephen and Isabel Keating; the Kenneth Koch Literary Estate; the Lenfestey Family Foundation; Ethan J. Litman; Mary McDermid; Sjur Midness and Briar Andresen; the Rehael Fund of the Minneapolis Foundation; Deborah Reynolds; Schwegman, Lundberg, Woessner, P.A.; John Sjoberg; David Smith; Mary Strand and Tom Fraser; Jeffrey Sugerman; Patricia Tilton; the Archie D. & Bertha H. Walker Foundation; Stu Wilson and Mel Barker; the Woessner Freeman Family Foundation in memory of David Hilton; and many other generous individual donors.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Half Title Page
Title Page
Copyright
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Part Two
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
About the Author
Colophon
Table of Contents
Cover
Half Title Page
Title Page
Copyright
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Part Two
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
About the Author
Colophon
Netsuke Page 9
