by Nisi Shawl
◊
A Schematic Diagram
Linda began her affair with Gene in high school. Sometimes Linda wanted to marry Gene. Sometimes Gene wanted to marry Linda. Gregory married Lois. Ben married Nancy. Doug married Sue. Linda and Gene took a flat with Paul. Gene married Marion and moved to Montreal.
Bereft, Linda sailed to London on the France. At the university she met Ahmet.
Jerry had an affair with Lois. Gregory was almost killed in a motorcycle accident. Jerry went to Europe. When he returned, a year later, to New York, he subleased Paul’s apartment. Paul went away and wrote a novel. He returned and collaborated on a second novel with Jerry. They went to London.
Linda wanted to marry Paul. She had an affair with Jerry. The three of them lived together in Ahmet’s flat. After an unhappy and brief affair with Bob, Paul went away and wrote about it. Jerry moved out of the flat and had a brief and unhappy affair with Nancy.
Doug and Sue went to London. She hated London and returned to the States. Doug had an affair with Linda. Jerry had an affair with a different, younger Linda. Mr. Nolde had an affair with the first Linda. Linda was very unhappy. She wanted to marry Jerry. She wanted to marry Doug.
Paul returned to the States. He decided to sublease the Williamses’ house with Sue. Doug grew worried and returned to the States. Ben was very upset. He refused to give Linda Doug’s phone number.
Gene and Marion went to London.
POETS: Gregory. Gene. Doug.
Paul. Jerry. Bob.
NOVELISTS,
SHORT STORY WRITERS: Gene. Doug. Paul. Jerry.
Lois. Nancy. Ben. Linda.
Sue. The Williamses.
PAINTERS: Marion. Linda. Sue.
EDITORS, ANTHOLOGISTS: Doug. Jerry. Bob.
Ben. Mr. Williams.
ARCHITECT: Ahmed.
ART COLLECTOR: Mr. Nolde.
III.
The artist, when he makes his art, shares a common fate with Rousseauistic man: he begins free and ends in chains.
And other metaphors (for instance, the furnishing of a room) to express the fact that at this point I know pretty well the nature of everything that must follow to the end of “Reredos” (which was the title it preserved through the entire first draft).
Both Jim and Jane are doubtful about the merits of this story. They seemed to enjoy the preceding sections at the première in Jane’s studio (she had just finished a handsome gray nude; we were all feeling mellow), but they questioned whether that wider audience who will read my story to themselves, who have never met me and, likely, never will, would find it relevant or interesting.
What a wider audience ought to know (bear in mind, reader, that this is the frame, not the story):
Four years ago, when I was in advertising, I wrote a story called “The Baron, Danielle, and Paul,” which portrayed, behind several thick veils of circumspection, my situation during the previous year, when I had been living with John and Pamela on Riverside Drive. That story appeared, revised, as “Slaves” in the Transatlantic Review. Before it had come out, I was living with Pamela again, this time in London and with a different John, a recombination that Jim (before he had ever met Pamela) used as the basis for an amusing piece of frou-frou called “Front and Centaur.” After he had met her he wrote “Récits,” which is a kind of love story and in no way frivolous. (It, too, was taken by the Transatlantic Review.) Then Jim came here, to Milford, and almost immediately Jane wrote a story about the three of us: “Naje, Ijm, and Mot.” Two days ago Jim sent this off, immaculately typed, to McCrindle, who edits TR.
In these successive stories there is a closer and closer approximation to the “real” situation. Thence: this. (Which will almost necessarily go to McCrindle too. If he rejects it? New Worlds? Jim is co-editor there.)
A bedroom farce with all the doors opening onto the same library. Stage center, a row of typewriters. On the walls, posters advertising the Transatlantic Review.
But beyond the fleeting amusement of our prototypical incests, the story does (should) raise a serious question. Concerning? Art’s relationship to other purposes, let us say. Or alternatively, the Artist’s role in Society.
Why do I write stories? Why do you read them?
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The Semaphore
The maples, whose leaves he would so much have preferred to rake, grew far up the hill, beyond even the most reckless gerrymandering of the boundaries of the backyard. The leaves that he was in fact raking were dingy brown scraps, mere litter, the droppings of poplars.
Jane came out onto the porch. She had just made herself blond. “You shouldn’t do it that way,” she said.
“How should I do it?” he said.
“You should rake them into piles, and then put the piles in boxes, and then empty the boxes into the incinerator, and then incinerate them.”
“Do you want to rake the leaves?”
“I hate to rake leaves—it reminds me of poems in The New Yorker. I wanted you to come in the kitchen and look at what Dylan’s found.”
Dylan had found a slug.
“It’s a snail,” she said, “without its shell.”
“It’s a slug,” he said.
“Oh, you’re always so disagreeable.”
“Snail!” Dylan crowed proudly. “Snail!”
“No, not a snail,” he explained, in the slow expository tone he reserved for his son. “A slug. Say ‘slug.’”
Dylan looked at his father with bewilderment.
“Slug,” he coaxed. “Slug. Slug.”
“Fuck,” Dylan said.
Jane laughed. (The night before Jim had tried to explain to Dylan the difference between a nail and a screw. Dylan could not pronounce the word “screw,” so Jim had taught him to say “fuck” instead.)
“No, slug.” But wholly without conviction.
“Snail?”
“Okay, it’s a snail.”
Jane found a grape jelly bottle and punctured the top with a nail. (Nails don’t have threads; screws do.) She put the shell-less snail in the bottle and gave the bottle to Dylan. The snail’s extended cornua explored its meaningless and tragic new world.
“Do you want to give your snail a name?” Jim asked. “What do you want to call him?”
After a moment’s deliberation Dylan said, “Four eight.”
Neither Jim nor Jane thought this a very satisfactory name. At last Jane suggested Fluff.
Even Dylan was happy with this.
Jim went outside to finish raking the brown leaves, while Jane went up to her studio to work. Her new painting represented a single gray body that embraced its thick torso with confused arms. The three heads (which might have been the same head seen from three different angles) bore a problematic relationship to the single torso. It was based on one of Blake’s illustrations to the Inferno.
Dylan stayed in the kitchen. He uncapped the grape jelly bottle and filled it with water. Snails live in water. The aquarium in the dining room was full of snails and guppies.
Fluff floated in the middle of the water, curled into a tight ball. Dylan, as he watched the snail drown, pronounced its name, its name, pronounced it.
◊
From the letter he wrote to his wife shortly before he came to Milford:
Pardon the typing. My arms are a bit sore from yesterday’s struggle with the harmonium, and I’m a little groggy, still, from being up late last night writing the first of this letter (which, looking back to, I feel should be torn up and disposed of). And I’m all emotional and everything. (I cried when I got your letter, and the effects have not yet worn off. I miss you so much. I love you so much. I want to be with Dylan so badly. You really have no idea what importance you two are in my life, how central you are to everything I do. Just after the death of his wife, Chandler wrote to a friend something like, “Everything I did, for twenty years, every moment, was just a fire for her to warm her hands by.” Which is rather how I feel. You’d do best, by the way, to disregard Tom’s proclamation
on the subject of earthly love. Tom’s ideas of love, as you must surely know, are rather peculiar ones. Never listen to a renegade Catholic’s opinions on love; only listen to what his work tells you. I do love you. I love you very much and I love you more, this moment, this month, this year, than ever I have before. I do, Jane. There’s desperation in it, yes—I need that love, to hold up against the world—I need it to give all the rest of what I do some small meaning, a degree, a single degree, of relevance—I need it as defense, and as reason. But that doesn’t make the love any less real. With Creeley, I’m afraid I finally believe that “It’s only in the relationships men manage, that they exist at all.” You ask me to write of love. But how can one write of love, particularly our love?—it is absolute, and words are approximations. I have done the best I can do, here, in this letter. I have tried, in the poems, to do better. But I do not, finally, believe in the power of words to do other than distort, fictionalize, and obfuscate. I love you. Which is the simplest and best way, because every word there, and there are few of them, is an absolute concept. I love you.)
◊
A Lasting Happiness
“How strange life is,” Jim remarked, after a pause during which he had taken in the stark details of my cramped cell. “Who would have thought, only a few years ago, that you…that I….”
“Those years have been kind to you, Jim,” I insisted earnestly. “Your books have enjoyed both popular and critical success. Though you cannot be said to be rich, your life has been filled with pleasures that wealth could never buy. The youth of the nation acclaim you and have no other wish than to pattern their lives on yours. And you, Jane Rose, you are lovelier now than when we first met. Do you remember?—it was July, in Milford.”
She turned aside a face that might have come from the pencil of Greuze, but I had seen that tear, and—dare I confess it?—that tear was dearer to me than her smile!
“And you, Tom?” Jim asked in a low voice.
“Oh, don’t think of me! I’ve been happy too in my own small way. Perhaps life did not bring altogether everything that I once expected, but it has given me…your friendship.”
He broke into tears and threw his arms about me in a last heart-rending embrace. “Tom!” he cried in agony. “Oh, Tom!”
I smiled, removing his hands gently from my shoulder to place it in Jane’s. “You’ll soon have all of us in tears,” I chided, “and that would be silly. Because I expect to be very happy, you know, where I am going.”
“Dear, dear Tom,” Jane said. “We will always remember you.”
“Ah, we ought never to trust that word ‘always.’ I would be quite satisfied with ‘sometimes.’ And young Dylan, how is he?”
“He is married, you know. We have a grandchild, a darling little girl.”
“How wonderful! How dearly I should like to be able to—but, hush! Can you hear them in the corridor? It’s time you left. It was so good of you to come. I feel quite…transfigured.”
Jane rose on tiptoe to kiss my cheek. “God bless you!” she whispered in my ear.
Jim pressed my hand silently. There were no words to express what we felt at that moment.
They left without a backward glance.
The warden entered to inquire if I wished to see a priest. I refused as politely as possible. My hands were bound, and I was led along the corridor—the guards seemed much more reluctant than I—and out through the gate to the little pony cart.
The ride to the place of execution seemed all too brief. With what passionate admiration my eyes drank in the tender blueness of the sky! How eagerly I scanned the faces fleeting past on both sides! How familiar each one seemed! And the grandeur of the public buildings! The thrilling flight of a sparrow across the panorama of roofs! The whole vast spectacle of life—how dear it suddenly had become!
A sturdy young man—he might, I reflected, almost have been myself in another incarnation!—assisted me up the steps and asked if there was anything that I would like to say.
“Only this—” I replied. “It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”
He nodded resignedly. “Mm-hm.”
River, Clap Your Hands
Sheree Renée Thomas
Night
All night long, the weary sound of water dripped from the roof into the bucket below, eroding her dreams. Ava woke from a sleep which bore her like an ocean, her mind still filled with the raindrop drum. The moon had veiled its face so that the stars could not see her cry. She woke and saw the street alive. She remembered when the neighborhood was submerged. She remembered when she was ruined by waters, ruined and resurrected by waters that bore spent seeds, the corpses of trees, and times that would never come again. Neither born nor named, time swam lifeless inside her and the lifeless tides swam with her. Ava touched damp garments that clung to her skin, close as guilt.
Watching the early morning walkers with their dogs at their sides, Ava was reminded that she lived among a people who believed in seasons. She lived among those who believed in the story and the song, among people who believed in prayer. Yet she knew nothing but the language of loss in a landscape she no longer recognized.
Ava rubbed her palm across the empty bowl of her stomach. Now she longed for the days when she felt full, when the nausea filled her and all she could taste was the salt from the stale crackers she nibbled on. Longing gnawed at her brain, consumed her waking thoughts. She never had the chance to hold it.
Rain
Rain made her anxious. The river swelling outside beyond the bluff filled Ava with dread. The rain fell faster, harder than it had last night. Outside, the walkers had long since scattered. Only the hardcore remained, refused to retreat. All was a sheet of gray steel. Inside, her mind was pitch black, except the brief flashes of light that stung the sky of memory. The couple who came for her, flashlights in hand, the beams reflecting off the violent waters that careened outside her door. Paralyzed, her body was caught in between. Trapped between a birth and a transformation. The old house had become a ship, tossed along the siren’s song. Long after, terror filled her, even on the brightest days, flashbacks of all that she had lost. She was weary, tired of losing what she’d never had.
“Maybe it’s a blessing,” Grandmama said. “Maybe the Lord didn’t want you to have that child. Birthing in the middle of all that strife. The Lord spared him.” Grandmama was convinced the child was a boy.
“You carrying that baby mighty low,” she had said. But that was then, before the first gills came.
“Sometimes, I wish He had spared me.”
Grandmama sucked in air, a tone to freeze eardrums. Her eyes were cool water.
Wine
She had loved him. Most nights Ava told herself she had. She missed the way his fingers traced her flesh, the way his eyes widened, marveling at her smooth palms and their missing lifelines. She remembered him tracing the curve of throat, him lingering there until she could not breathe, the simple pleasure before his tongue found the gills. He had drawn away as if her touch had stung him. She never would forget his fear staring back at her, pupils dilated in widening circles, receding like the ripples in the river, him pulling away like the tide of the sea.
That night she drank red merlot, glass after cheap glass, and listened to Aretha, feeling like everything but a natural woman. That night her mind was all rivulets and rock pools. She spent the evening ruminating, returning to the same eye of water. Ava added three teardrops of pokeroot to her glass, and felt her throat constrict and release. Grandmama’s rootwork. She always had a recipe but nothing could fix this, heartbreak. The flesh had grown raw and itchy inside, a wound that would not heal. Suddenly a soul in the lost and found didn’t sound so unnatural to her. She had felt more than good inside, more possible with him. Now she felt undone, in flux. She was turned inside out. It was some time after the third or fourth glass, when the wine dribbled down her chin like ruby drops of blood, tha
t she realized it was not his absence she mourned. It was the willful blindness that his presence helped her hide. Now how would she hide from herself?
Bridges
When Ava was a child her mother recited poems to her. Fierce poems of fault lines, of rivers turned, of a great tortoise whose back was as wide as the river’s hips, of ancient paths lost and regained. They would emerge from beneath the Old Bridge. Together they dried themselves on the river’s shore and watched the two trains running overhead. The air stung. It would take hours for Ava to perfect the rhythm of breathing. Sometimes drifters would leave piles of driftwood, old bottles, used cans. Her mother would make a fire and with a stick she would carve old signs and symbols in the soil. On those cool, mosquito-filled nights, Ava swatted flies and was warmed by her mother’s company. Comforted by her mother’s voice, her gills receded into her flesh, disappeared with the wind.
Mama kept her secrets close. Tight as water skins. “The Old Bridge is not the first bridge. Another lies in the water below,” Mama had said, motioning with her hand. The thin membrane of webbing had finally dried and dropped away. It lay in scaly piles in the sand. “The first bridge was the river’s spine, the Great Turtle. Our people swam across it, drifting finally into these waters. The first people we met lived up there, high on the hills.” The high bluffs of the quiet river city were Ava’s first glimpse of what would later become her home. Mama kept her secrets close. Ava learned this when she woke and discovered that she was alone. Mama had left her sleeping on the river’s bank.
