The Almanac Branch

by Bradford Morrow

  A white door with no bell and no nameplate. Just inside, an alcove, and beyond the white plaster archway she had placed a double bed—wrought-iron from the turn of the century, whose head and foot reached up as if to touch the ceiling in clusters of curled strands that Grace thought resembled fiddlehead ferns in the spring, before they had fully opened, and accordingly she’d painted them green. Next to the bed she put an oak side table, and on it a dark wine-glazed Van Briggle lamp molded with dragonflies whose wings spread around its body. In the windowsills some of the starfish collection was laid, and around it she set out a few of her favorite Geiger novelties, including the talking seashell. The closet remained empty, aside from extra linens and a few presents they had given each other, some scarves and unused slippers. This barrenness she’d intended from the beginning to change, since it suggested, to her, a hollowness at the heart of the aerie that was loathsome.

  Wasn’t it, moreover, false? she might have asked herself—a false emptiness against the fullness of what she and Cutts had worked so hard to get and keep for themselves? By the same token, what else could they have needed, given that they had each other? There was the argument that those who needed to crowd their world with objects and decorations weren’t able to be intimate with themselves or anyone else. For any thesis, an antithesis, and what did it matter? To Grace’s world that the aerie existed at all meant that she had finally come to a synthesis with someone.

  The green bed didn’t stand at the center of the aerie although she knew it to be at the center of their arrangement, for she had no difficulty in admitting to herself that sex was not just vital to them, but that she and Cutts were drawn together above all in the cause of their own sexuality, and that the filaments that laced them were made offlesh over and above any spiritual or intellectual material. Grace liked to let the sheets go unlaundered for as long as possible so that the heavy salt-sour smell of them would persist—it was something she’d always wished she could have done when they made love at Cutts and Bea’s place—and would be there to greet them along with the whirling-dervish pigeons that cooed on the concrete sill. Not only did that scent remind them of why they kept coming back to the aerie, to that bed, but it played through them a kind of invocation to begin, each time they entered.

  Grace always arrived first. She would put on the kettle for coffee, knowing that the coffee, too, she made as much for the smell of it as to sip, because it helped to create an atmosphere of home, where there was the same licorice red teakettle, remaking the morning, which was of course by then a lost thing. She’d already been through this ritual, of the coffee, the kettle, the not-quite-thereness back with Charles, but then so much had to be done twice in order to make the arrangement work. Double life, so this is what that really meant, she thought, yes because so much has to be accomplished twice just to create a place or state of mind where the one thing she did want to make happen actuallycould. How did people get themselves into these messes? And how many mornings did Cutts have to linger in bed with her, with Bea—his real wife, his acknowledged wife—to keep his own domestic balances in place? Grace would never ask. It would upset him, she was sure. He would refuse to answer, and besides she didn’t even want to know, in the last analysis. Anything in twos meant conspiracy, meant duplicity, didn’t it? The very word double had duplicity as its etymological cousin and given that Grace didn’t care to feel duplicitous she’d learned that it was better not to press too deeply into areas of Cutts’s life. Some knowledge was best not gained. That is, they were friends, the three of them; she, him, and her. Grace already knew the range of not-so-private matters that friends discuss with one another. Sometimes she’d even had to hear Bea’sgirl talk about intimacies between Cutts and herself, how Bea had noticed that sometime during the last year a really subtle but you could still feel it, every day, kind of distance had grown between her and Cutts. It was nothing that really threatened the marriage, she gave Grace to understand, but since Grace had been married once, well had this sort of thing happened to Grace? Bea wanted to know, should she be taking it more, what, not seriously since she didn’t take it seriously, she told herself, or … more as a threat, should she worry? The clock chimed its throaty mahogany tone when she asked, and it conjured the cuckoo clock, which always conjured, in turn, the traditional cuckold; did Grace wince? She studied the wallpaper in Bea’s kitchen instead. It comprised blotches of dusty-pink blossoms or silly swine-faces, she couldn’t tell which. But also, she tried to consider this, what her friend was asking. She thought hard, then, before answering, the clock having had its say, because she knew that she could give Bea an honest and valuable, if not forthright, response if she could only concentrate on her own past and on her love for Bea. And when she said, “I wouldn’t worry about it,” she felt sure that there was nothing in her advice that derived from the deep need in her to protect her own relationship with Bea’s husband. Grace knew she didn’t mean to threaten Bea, and therefore Bea was not in fact threatened by what Grace was doing. She felt, Grace did, satisfied with her answer. Whether it was good advice she couldn’t know any more than if she didn’t know a thing beyond the surface of her friendship with Cutts. She was so integrally bound to Cutts that when she hugged Bea and kissed her good-bye that time, not the slightest tint of irony or regret or remorse arose from her own knowledge that these lips and hands of hers had a few hours before, up in the aerie, spread over the lips and hands of their mutual husband. If Cutts’s lips were turning cold toward Bea, they would have turned so because of someone besides Grace, wouldn’t they? Grace left Bea behind even sensing that she could somehow enableCutts to move closer to Bea physically, and still not relinquish him herself. Wasn’t there some way all this love could be deepened, even, for them all? she thought. Some mornings, when she woke up into the dry linen of her bedclothes, regretful at their aridity, Grace even allowed herself to wonder if Bea were made aware of the truth whether she wouldn’t find her way clear to appreciating the profound goodness in it, in what there was between Grace and Cutts—she wondered whether even, after the first shock of betrayal, Bea might not come to accept it, even welcome it.

  On the bed was a crazy quilt (the pattern was Wonder of the World) and more often than not, for all her lapses into this sort of peaceable dreaminess about Bea’s being understanding, and welcoming her passionate, lying friend into her life (for she knew Bea would never understand, and would either leave Cutts or more likely do everything in her power to exile Grace), it seemed as if a quilt whose pattern was called crazy made a lot of sense. All this was a wonder of the world. For whatever moments she and Cutts were able to share in the aerie there were as many moments like the present one, where she stood sipping at the coffee she’d just made, staring out over the patinaed roof of the church with its spires rising at the corners of its dull bulk, daydreaming, thinking that it wouldn’t take much to bring it all to an end. He’d argue. He might even weep—they both would. It would take weeks, maybe a few months to answer finally to every question he might raise in the hope of going on with it, but it could be brought to an end. Conceivably, though perhaps it was an exalted hope silly in its lack of practicality, their friendship, hers and Cutts’s, could be salvaged if they moved to end it, and soon. Bea would never know what had happened and because of just that—that it had happened, was in the past—it wouldn’t really matter that she didn’t know. It would be over is all, presumably to become a personal, invisible legend, to be pulled out once in a while and fondled, smiledat, quietly celebrated or scoffed at depending upon the future mood. Grace and Cutts would have had this romance, which like anything else in the world would go dim in time and under the weight of experience. It’s common, it happens; let go, let go.

  She then felt lazy, as if there were a stream of warm lead pouring down through her veins.

  Holidays never failed to quicken if not a worm of jealousy in my gut, some sense of crawling defeat. Like a captured animal, I endured them, from New Year’s to Easter, from Independence
Day on through to Christmas (always the worst of all holidays, for the false light of celebration it shines into corners occupied by the most resistant, agnostic, even atheist of us all) with Charles—this was expected of me, was a given. And I was dutiful in this regard, in part because I knew that Faw endured them himself, not just because he thought that it wasn’t worth fighting them, but because he was caught up in an idea that we, who were for better or worse a family, had best stay somehow in step with the holidays, if only because without them we wouldn’t stay in step at all.

  Still, there was something tangibly upsetting to me in the thought of Cutts at home, his home, with his own family, his other family, his Graceless family. In the heat of early July, with fireworks bellying rosy and slapping silver-yellow in the night’s face out over the water, I knew that Cutts was somewhere on a pier, or in the prodigious trembling streets, or on a roof garden, with Bea, watching the filigrees of color fall and fade, and that he was with his real wife then, while missing me maybe, a moment here or there, when he was reading a menu, trying to decipher Dal Gosht (whose anagram was Ghost Lad) or some biryany at one of the Indian dives that Bea loved so much, she with her stomach of iron, or when there was a delay in thefireworks display and the sky over the East River went ash-black and the booming roar ceased until someone solved the fireworks problem.

  On these holidays, whenever I could, I got away from Faw and his Christmas hearth hung in raiment of holly and pine boughs, or his table spread with Thanksgiving dinner, to visit the aerie. Here my jealousy, which I admit to harboring, best assumed the form of melancholy. Here I could accord myself the idiotic extravagance of absolute unhappiness, let it come, let it take over, and slip into the bed with my clothes on and drink some of Cutts’s retsina and curse him to the Mahler that I would play as loud as the speakers could handle. Here I would find myself running my hands over my all-too-familiar ribs, feeling my body like stale bread in the custodial of the one Catholic church I visited just for the heck of it once out in the island, grappling my flesh through the cotton of the sheets and the wool of my skirt, bringing myself with the orchestra to you know what. Then I could make Cutts as nonexistent as that last symphony of Mahler’s, the one he always spoke of, the great one he, Gustav Mahler, was never able to finish.

  Mahler would click off, and I, half-dreamy, was reminded of Abu Shakur of Balkh’s attitude toward suffering—To this point doth my learning go, I only know I nothing know; and just as music and wine annihilated suffering, the thought of dark-eyed Abu’s agnostic couplet here could bring a silly smile to my face, and on his advice I might sigh, and fall asleep, and forget again how angry I was with Cutts for choosing to stay with Bea, even though I had no desire for him to leave Bea, either. When I woke up and the stars were lying against the glass, reminding me of the sea stars at Scrub Farm, fat with dust or water, my headache failed to chasten me while my confusions would remain as unsorted as ever. Back home I’d walk, my sadness perishing with my anger, and by the time I went to bed in my own bed, my other bed, my home bed, doing something twice yet once again, the holiday—whatever it might have meant or been—was over, and I was as anxious as ever to see him, this sort-of husband, again. Ah, the fucking tedium unto death!

  They met the one morning at Grand Central, and in the great, anonymous stream of faces moving through its passages they kissed, and he had some time so they went down into the Oyster Bar, and locked knees under the small table, and ordered a plate of malpeque and chincoteague and chokomish and kent islands, and never mentioned a thing one to the other about what had happened the day before. Grace had got it in her mind to cut off with him, and Cutts had it in mind to tell her something that he had learned about Charles Brush, just a grapevine sort of bit of information, but something that nevertheless worried him. And they started talking, and Grace moved around and around the possibility of broaching her subject, and she found it was difficult to do. It seemed unusual, because she had experienced not the least hesitation when the time had come to tell Warne that she couldn’t go on with him. On the other hand, as Cutts took the oyster shell to his lips to drink the meat and salt water down, he began to question both the validity of the rumor he had heard, and what purpose there might be in bringing it up with Grace. She was, after all, uninvolved with the Geiger Sprawl, at least in any administrative capacity; and what if the rumor he’d heard—which was already deemed by some of his colleagues as pure rubbish, just the kind of smear tactics that he detested—was false, then what? Grace would have to go to her father, tell him about these crazinesses that were circulating about some church somewhere, some mariner’s cathedral, and how money was being diverted into its sham coffers in the name of God and country, but was in fact going into the production of—man, had he really thought he’d have the chutzpah to explain this business to her?—blue boy movies and the like, and that there was a whole fistful of funny stuff going on with the non-profit status of this church (on a fancy island in the Caribbean, too, of all places) and profits from various arms and legs and extremities of Geiger being fed into this Gulf Stream whatever-it-was Trust—and he laughed, laughed aloud, and looked across the small round table at Grace.

  “What’s so funny?” she said. She looked at Cutts’s face, and realized that she didn’t want to let him go, in fact, couldn’t let go of him, not just yet. Maybe she did love him, she thought. Maybe there were ways to keep on making this thing work.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  The first time Grace brought Li Zhang up the stairs and into the aerie, what was implicit in his mind was more or less just what was in hers. Which was very coincidental, and had something to do with the fact that at the edges of what few words they spoke was the sort of disturbance that can come from a profound expectancy, the kind of expectancy that registers not in thoughts but in the viscera, the flesh of the heart.

  It was March, winter was about to surrender to the equinox; it was warmer than it had been in recent weeks. Down in the streets crystal mounds of blackened snow stood forth by the garbage cans and wrought-iron railings, each pile of cold dappled with debris and stained by a film of soot and fumes and filth, looking like ridiculous snow-omens that Grace—later that same night—would come to think she ought to have been able to read. Wherever the sun had sent down its bald light through spaces between the buildings and scraggly ginkgo trees, which rose here and there like exhausted skeletons, the snow had melted, making those clumps of the stuff that remained all the more peculiar. She should have been looking at the bits of rubbish in themounds, because then she might have gained a little insight into what was going to happen with Li, who’d seemed so nice when they met about an hour before, walking his old mother dachshund, whose chubby back sloped and breast sagged so with age that her coat was almost completely worn away from scraping along on the pavement, her hair replaced by thick liver-colored callus. But Grace just stepped over the grimy snow, talking and walking along with Li and Can Xue (the dachshund was named in honor of the writer Can Xue—i.e., Deng Xiao-hua—whom Li, along with some other disenchanted and idealistic students, met once, having made the pilgrimage to her humble house in Changsha).

  At first, Grace and Li Zhang hadn’t been walking anywhere in particular. That is, they’d entered into a conversation much in the same way a bather enters the sea, directionless, reading the waves, just going out and out, and Can Xue tugged at her leash, for she was an insistent little beast, Li explained, and then Grace found it impossible to finish the thought, whatever it had been—it seemed drowned in an undertow of words that just swam and swam through and around it now—and she’d picked up Li’s discourse and his direction and while, no, she wasn’t laughing much at the things they were saying, because Li didn’t finally have a very good sense of humor, didn’t so much as try to entertain her or make her smile, she was caught up in it all. This man, Li Zhang, seemed to be so engaged, to be so right-there-with-her, and yet it seemed he was simultaneously indefinite about everything.

  A siren
heard, in the near distance, as a willingly drowning swimmer might hear the cries of her companions back on the beach, awakened her briefly from this word-sleep she felt she was going into, and rather than save her—if that was what the sound, within its metaphor, was supposed to have done—it only made her the more content to keep floating away from it.

  When Can Xue paused by one of the ginkgo trees andshivered as she passed her urine down her blackish legs onto the frozen quarry stones that were arranged around the bole, Grace did say, “Well, see you later.”

  That was the Grace who wasn’t interested in drowning yet, the swimmer Grace who didn’t get off on the risk of icy waves and undertows and clasping kelp. She said it of course knowing that it wasn’t likely she would ever see him again since she’d never seen him around the neighborhood before, and Li Zhang didn’t insist that she stay there and continue talking with him, but instead he continued with whatever it was they’d been talking about.

  He was mentioning the stuff about the camphor trees in Formosa and China and how his grandmother took the bark and steamed it over a fire, distilled it—had she ever smelled camphor?—and how his grandmother took it and made soap, and varnish, and perfume from it. Talk about your stream of consciousness, there wasn’t even a camphor tree in the city, but that was Li, just flowing along, letting Can Xue’s nose dictate the direction, all of which would have led Grace to believe that Li wasn’t a willful sort of person, being unconcerned with where his feet carried him; but if that was what she’d thought while they strolled along together, she had been mistaken. For instance, this was not Li’s neighborhood at all, Grace discovered, after having expressed surprise that she hadn’t seen him and Can Xue before.