The Skin Above My Knee

by Marcia Butler

  After the concert, in casual conversation, he mentioned that he and my mother would be hosting a large Thanksgiving dinner in New Hampshire, where they had recently retired.

  “Oh, great,” I said instinctively. “I’ll come up, too. I’d love to come.”

  “No—don’t come. The house will be too crowded.”

  “Okay. But I can stay in a motel close by. I don’t need to stay in the house.”

  “No. It’s too many people.”

  “But I’ll only come for the main meal, then. Would that help?”

  “I said no. It’s just better if you stay home.”

  The cruelty of the moment kicked me down, and I became rigid, imagining myself sitting on his lap, not wanting to move a fraction of an inch for fear of what I would surely feel; in front of the TV on a Sunday night, while listening to Andy Williams sing “Moon River” on The Ed Sullivan Show.

  My father turned around and walked the length of the large reception room—my eyes now on his broad back. I placed a small chunk of cheddar cheese from the banquet table in my mouth, chewed slowly, washed it down with a swig of white wine, and thought of Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr rolling around in the surf in the movie From Here to Eternity. This was a 1950s version of a sex scene—their affair is spoken about, though we never see them do more than kiss. But the sexual nature of them, entangled in the water as it ebbed and flowed like an orgasm, is clear. I watched that movie many times over the years, and Burt’s back, as he lolled in the surf with Deborah, was particularly intriguing to me. I waited for that scene every time.

  One night when I was perhaps nine or ten, I walked out of my room to go to the bathroom and saw my father standing at the end of the hall with his back to me, naked. His back had the exact same cut as Burt Lancaster’s—broad up top and tapering through the torso down to the waist. He heard me and turned, revealing his full nakedness. I was startled, but he remained calm and made no effort to cover up, which at the time was particularly scary and horrifying. My eyes dropped down for just a second, to take in what I saw as three penises—or three long droopy things. Then my eyes quickly shot back up to his. Holding my gaze, he walked toward me and placed his hands on my shoulders (in exactly the way he’d put his hands on my shoulders when he’d asked if I was “comfortable”). Swiveling me around and with his hand at the small of my back, he nudged me forward. I went into the bathroom, alone, and closed the door.

  Once inside, I sat on the toilet, hyperventilating. My father as a sexual being, a man who was not embarrassed to show his special daughter of nine years his naked body, felt wrong and violating. Why didn’t he make an effort to cover up? His casual manner was evidence of his perceived and actual power over me. He had absolutely nothing to be sorry about or, in fact, hide, and further, I was not important enough to make him exhibit even a pretense of modesty. I hadn’t thought about that event, or the connection to my interest in Burt Lancaster’s body, until I saw my father’s back after the concert.

  As audience members milled about, I began to crumble in slow motion. André stood just a few feet away, speaking with friends. A few concertgoers approached to compliment my playing. I thanked them in what must have been a monotone. Time moved forward as if all were normal, but the blood beat hard from my heart directly to my head. Childlike and flummoxed, I sought my father’s eyes, my eyes asking what on earth I had done wrong. He’d left the room.

  Repeats

  For the American premiere of the Philip Glass opera White Raven at Lincoln Center in 2001, you receive the call and agree to play the run. You love Glass’s music specifically for how it reminds you, strangely, personally, of Wagner. The harmonic changes are extremely slow, and you can wallow in E minor, for instance, for thirty minutes or even longer. Wagner is like that. You love that languorous, ocean liner–like movement in music. As you stare at the boat, it appears to be anchored, but after a while, you notice that your eyes are at a different point on the horizon. You love to feel stable within music’s velvety language.

  You remember seeing Einstein on the Beach at Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1984. It was Glass’s breakout opera. You remember thinking that it was like seeing Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time. You didn’t understand it, but you couldn’t rip your eyes away. While watching Einstein, you were mesmerized by the slow-moving “action” on the stage, juxtaposed with the rapid repeating patterns in the orchestra, laid over huge swaths of static, harmonic landscapes. A few other composers had written “minimal” music like this, but no one had merged it with a dramatic, staged concept. You could say that Robert Wilson, who staged the opera, was a perfect fit for Glass’s musical vocabulary. Fast repeating chords and arpeggios set against the giant man on stilts lumbering across the stage for ten minutes. Each man’s art becomes stronger when linked together.

  With this new score on your stand, you see immediately that Glass’s music will be particularly challenging because of its repeating patterns for many dozens of bars. The notes themselves are not that hard to play. It’s the repetition that’s mind-numbingly tricky, because you can get mixed up easily. You have to be very alert and on your game. In addition to the repeated patterns of notes to play, the small sections are also repeated and then large sections, too. Then there could be a huge repeat, when you go back and do the whole thing over again. Without ever stopping. These sections can last for ten to fifteen minutes. That is a very long time when you are playing repeated patterns. The whole thing keeps folding over onto itself, and because the harmony is so static, you don’t know where you are sometimes. And because the chords are basically simple and don’t change much, if you make a mistake with the repeat, it is very obvious. There is nowhere to hide in Mr. Glass’s music. It is extremely exposed, even though many musicians are playing the same exact notes.

  So you realize that this opera is one of the hardest things you have ever played. But you are in luck, because the man with the eyes and ears and nose and arms is your conductor for the run. Not only does he have the phenomenally gifted physicality to get the job done, he also has the genius ability to keep track of all the repeats and all the stuff on the stage. God. What a brain! And when people do mess up their repeats, he just smiles. You want to play perfectly for him, because he is such a gentleman about the mistakes!

  Gradually, through the rehearsals, everyone pulls his or her act and mind together, and it’s super tight for the run of the performances. But the Glass opera makes you start to think about how the whole world is one enormous repeat; that there is nothing new at all. And you begin to develop a fascination with fractals and perfect proportions and certain colors like red and the golden mean and even the universal elements of the solar system that seem to hold the whole earth up and simultaneously keep it spinning. And repeating feels fundamental and natural and a God-given right. You have done your own fair share of repeating.

  Florida

  AFTER THE TOUR of my lifetime, André receded quickly back into his own life, shy an oboe player. That made sense. My parents retreated to New Hampshire and resumed their retired life, hosting all manner of people for Thanksgiving, minus an oboe player. For that, I had been well prepared.

  The memory of my father’s broad back turning on me sent me skirting the rim of a 23rd Street sewer. At that exact moment I needed a yes-man: one who would shepherd me to the sidewalk, away from the open manhole, and reverse the very direction of the drain’s orbit-driven vortex. I would now repeat myself; nab a tried-and-true yes-man whose worst habits were already well known to me. The devil himself would do.

  My broken-in Mephisto was now living in a warm climate—halfway to hell: the west coast of Florida, on a barrier island called Anna Maria Island. Gone were the horns. His spear, chucked aside. His blood-red devil skin had been nicely neutralized by a tropical tan.

  As I approached Bruce’s lean, lanky figure from the arrivals gate at the airport, I saw a bronzed Clint with the whitest set of choppers imaginable. Those teeth glared and
blared! Well, you’ve got to be unnaturally tanned and have teeth bonded with pure white enamel that God didn’t invent if you mean to do right by the state of Florida.

  Our reunion had been conceived of and arranged with expeditious fluidity a month prior. It was simple: I’d called and left a message on his answering machine. Within four days, I received a note in the post, with a poem.

  Bruce was a literary man of deep talents and accomplishments. In addition to writing copy for big advertising agencies, he was a published poet, with two mildly bestselling books in the 1970s Rod McKuen style of romantic poetry. He drew very well and had sold a few cartoons in his day. Photography was the most brilliant aspect of his oeuvre, with a special nod toward the female face, shot through gauze and tightly focused through the aperture of his beloved Hasselblad camera.

  The poem hit the right notes. It seemed that I made someone weak; I caused someone to dream; I inspired someone to need me. I was likened to the wonders of nature. I booked a flight for All Points South.

  The vestiges of our brutal marriage still lived close to the surface of my skin, and, careful and restrained, I maintained a hesitantly optimistic skepticism during our first weekend together. We talked, and Bruce was a great talker. But the bulk of his bluster had been punched out of him. With the severance package from his European days assiduously blown through, he was subsisting on freelance copywriting jobs and the occasional photography shoot. The freshly humbled devil now lived a very spare life.

  Professing his remorse repeatedly for messing up my life, Bruce now allowed me to assume what was for me, certainly in light of our previous relationship, an unusual position of power. I enjoyed being apologized to, so I sat back on the sofa and let it all flow from him like a roaring, whitecapped river. His mea culpas were stated, rethought, and rephrased on the fly. Bruce more than proved his competence as a clever copywriter. He pressed his point, and his love, well.

  Once home, I received a letter each and every day. As a scribe, Bruce was the sweetest, most understanding of lovers. Self-deprecation seemed a newfound trait, and to highlight his new lowly status all the more, he steadily raised my pedestal higher, draping it with garlands of adulation concerning my accomplished career as an oboist. On paper: our love was big and pure and tremulous. In hell: paper disappears with the flick of a match.

  The poem he wrote to me, which propelled me to Florida, eventually found its way into my wallet. While in rehearsal, or even on the subway, I often pulled it out for a cursory read-through, as if to emboss the beauty of his words more deeply into my doubtful mind. Like a blind person, I’d run my fingers over the type-punched indentations of the B side. His words sprang into a three-dimensional reality, and I rubbed my cheek up close to the paper and his idea of who I was.

  This poem. Its words reminded me that someone saw me in a way I couldn’t possibly see myself; that someone thought I was beautiful and worth aching over. Those words made me ache. Even in years past, when he was addled by drugs and alcohol, Bruce’s most desperate compulsion was a need for passion, and I’d always found that attractive. Now this poem was proof that a fevered passion could still bubble up, with me as his muse. It had been summoned up as a response to—no, as a tribute to—a single voice message left on his answering machine.

  By the time I went down for the second trip, all my worries went up in smoke—gone. I believed this poem to be pure and purely inspired:

  I am lost,

  As I surrender myself to you

  In this silent pursuit

  Of shared pleasures.

  Your naked perfection has

  Swept me away, away

  To the absolute center

  Of my tiny universe,

  That invisible focus of

  All my most gentle fantasies.

  Modernism called to this newly bronzed wordsmith—his small condo was all glass, mirrors, and white laminate. During our second weekend together, I noticed lovely touches like purple irises on the marble Saarinen table in the dining area. Bed linens were freshly laundered, ironed, and pulled down as they would be in a luxury hotel. The white-and-black bathroom was pristine and smelled faintly of lavender. How nice that he’d thought to impress me. Bruce, now clean and sober, was truly a romantic.

  It was evening on the second night; we were preparing to step out for dinner. Having come in from a day at the beach, we’d lazed off to sleep for an hour. Now Bruce was in the bathroom, showering. A long, low bookshelf was mounted on the wall opposite his bed, floating about twenty inches off the floor. Lying on my side, waiting for my turn under the sand-blasting shower, I lazily perused his books with mild curiosity. Bruce read a lot, mostly the classics. I saw Moby-Dick, a few Jane Austens, some Elmore Leonard—Philip Roth, of course.

  My eyes stopped short at several copies of both volumes of his poetry. I couldn’t help but muse back to the day I had moved out on him. His mouth foaming with spittle, he had charged me several times, and my boys from the bar literally stood in between us and faced him down.

  The last thing Bruce and I had fought about was his poetry.

  “Aren’t you going to take the books?” was one of his parting shots.

  The volumes he’d given me early in our relationship were stacked on top of the coffee table. Of course they were signed copies, and I actually wanted to take them. But his pathetic narcissism ran roughshod over any sentiment that remained. I screamed the last laugh as I walked out the door.

  “Fuck your stupid, vapid poetry. Are you serious with that drivel anyway? It’s complete and utter shit!”

  Victorious, the door slammed shut, and I tromped down the stairs with Spot in tow.

  Now here I was in Florida, wooed by that very same vapid (now revered) shit. And quite possibly staring at my very own signed copies of said revered shit. A confusing surge of adrenaline kicked up. I didn’t want to look at them, afraid of a visceral reaction I might experience if I saw the inscriptions he wrote those years before, words fueled by artifice and evil.

  Bruce continued his shower. My hand dropped down to the spines of the books, my fingers gently brushing the jackets. They looked new, not dog-eared at all. Maybe he kept new copies on hand to woo potential Florida girlfriends. Poetry was certain to seal the deal. I felt my cynicism crank up a notch.

  Shoving all suspicious thoughts aside, I pulled out one of the volumes. It was not my signed copy. My mind temporarily eased, and, letting out a stream of air, I started to flip through the pages. My thumb happened to stop on a page where I landed on the words:

  I am lost,

  As I surrender myself to you

  In this silent pursuit

  Of shared pleasures.

  My poem.

  Bruce was a first-class, self-plagiarizing, lazy-eyed devil! That piece of paper I’d lugged around and nurtured and caressed for weeks—a fraud on a massive scale, just a bunch of words strung together years ago off the backside of another, younger woman’s body.

  The flow of the shower stopped, and Bruce was whistling as he toweled off in the bath. He did that a lot—whistling—and suddenly I found it irritating. I quickly jumped up and began stacking all the books that were in the bookcase on the bed, assembling my arsenal.

  He stepped out of the bathroom, wrapped in a towel. The light from above the sink cut him in half: deeply tanned upper torso, bright white towel below. It was hard to discern his facial expression. He may have been smiling or looking bewildered when he saw the stacked books on the bed. I’ll never know.

  The onslaught began. I aimed at his head, where that poem, written for someone else, had been birthed. I aimed to smash his brains in, with book after book, and give him black eyes and a broken nose to mar his Clint Eastwood looks. I aimed to chip his gleaming row of front teeth but good.

  “Marcia! Fuck! What’s the matter? Jesus. Stop it!”

  His arms raised in a protective stance, trying to bat off the flurry of American Pastoral and Pride and Prejudice.

  “My POEM. My fu
cking poem!”

  As he looked down at the top of the bookshelf, in two seconds his eyes clicked. My yes-man was very smart. He saw the book and knew. Only a person with malice in his original intent could discern the problem so immediately.

  Bruce collapsed on the bed and seemed to settle in for what he knew he deserved. His nose oozed blood, and with each whack of a book the blood spattered onto his pristine white bedcover. I wanted to do better: I wanted to destroy him.

  Bruce and Steve, my mother, my father. I wanted to kill every person in my life who had, openly or with secrecy, face-to-face or from a pummeling distance, killed an oboist’s soul. I wanted to destroy all the yes-people who were my unwitting partners against myself.

  But I stopped. I was not a killer of person or soul.

  “Marcia, Jesus! I think you broke one of my ribs.”

  “Good.”

  “I’m serious! I can’t breathe. I have stabbing pains in my chest.”

  “Good. Whether it’s a heart attack or a broken rib, I’m glad. Because I want you to suffer! You fucker.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Good.”

  “No, I’m really sorry.”

  “I believe ZERO of what you say. You’re spewing shit. One hundred percent.”

  “When I sent the poem, I didn’t know if we were even going to get together!”

  “I read that goddamned poem every day. And it’s a fucking fraud.”

  “That’s not true. It really does mean what I feel about you. But how would I know that you’d get all attached to it?”

  Ah, the mitigating. The buts and all the many other reasons…