When I was a little girl, my parents had kept a layer of their wedding cake in the chest freezer downstairs. It was the top tier of a white cake with silver icing, the bride and groom wrapped in wax paper and tucked down beside it. All throughout my childhood, I’d go downstairs and scoop out some of the frozen cake from the underside with a teaspoon and eat it in perfect secrecy in the dark of the coldroom. It was furred with ice, but if I warmed the little hunks of cake in my mouth, the slightly sour taste of marzipan thawed out of it, and it was delicious. When I went down there, I’d have to fight the contradictory feelings of curiosity and shame. I was taking something from my mother that she obviously cared so much about. But there are certain feelings that you can’t fight, and the urge to be connected to certain people is one of them. When I sat in the coldroom, dissolving the cake in my mouth, I would become my mother. I’d absorb her into my body, and I believed I knew what it felt like to be her. To be pregnant with my brother, to sleep beside my father, to hold me to her chest. I could not resist these small tastes.
The plastic bride and groom that she’d saved accurately showed the height difference between my parents, my mother being the taller. My father had always claimed he was tall for a Greek, that at five foot nine (he’d rounded up from seven and a half inches) he towered over his contemporaries. One of his few recurring jokes — he wasn’t known for his sense of humour — was that he was the starting forward of the best basketball team in Greece, the Lesbos Rockets. My mother would revert to a stone face whenever this joke was told, and then look from him to us, as if such a thing could corrupt us.
The bride on the cake resembled my mother in more than height. It had her long, graceful features, her slender piano-playing hands (a regret of hers, that her piano remained in Albany in her mother’s house), her Modigliani neck, her long black hair. Of course, in all of this she was much like Molly, who had the same New England roots, that British rose beauty sustained through generations of tennis-playing, book-reading, buttermilk-biscuit-baking decendants of the pilgrim ships. My father always said that he’d married the American Constitution, my mother that she was the bride of Orpheus (my father had a beautiful singing voice, and my mother obviously didn’t know that much about Greek myth, although she got the ending right). My brother, Dale, won the genetic lottery and got my mother’s delicate features. I got a mix — mermaid on top, milkmaid on the bottom. Surf’n’ turf, as Molly used to call me. But by college, I’d come to like my odd dimensions and never took offence at Molly’s nicknames. I grew into them. I had a reputation for being sensual, which suited me. My body is the only constant in my life.
Meanwhile, the plastic groom looked nothing like my father. When Dale and I recently returned to the house in Ovid and I emptied the freezer, I unwrapped the bride and groom to look at them one more time. My mother was still sharply white, her features clear and colourful. But my father, who I realized had been taken from a different bride-and-groom set (where, certainly, the bride had been the standard diminutive), was made from lesser material. His features had faded, and the freezer had strangely melted the plastic a little. He seemed an unhappy homunculus with a vague face and a ruined tuxedo.
The dark cast itself over the rooftops, that Midwest darkness with its starblown sky, and at the edge of it all, in our own bed, I slept with Martin. He smelled of bathsalts, his skin radiating heat. We’d sat and washed the day off in the claw-footed tub, drifting in conversation, pulling ourselves back into a twosome alone in our house.
He fell asleep almost right away, but I lay awake, parsing the day. Its warp and weft, a day of long moments. Finally, I slept and the moon crossed the sky. Feeling the bed move, I woke and saw Martin sitting by the edge, his hands braced against the side.
You all right?
Gotta go, he said.
Don’t leave the seat up. I drifted back off. I slept. The bed moved and I opened my eyes on his back again. He was motionless.
Listen, he said.
What? I blinked and then I realized that even though he was silhouetted in the window, I could also see the windowframe and even the trees outside, as if he were translucent. Then pinholes of light began to burn through him, like he was a piece of film melting in a projector, and my heart began pounding in my throat. I lurched up, shouting his name and pushing myself back against the headboard. And then he was not there.
I climbed down from the bed and went out into the house where the lights were still off. I had the feeling in my body of an overlong afternoon nap, the chemical fuzz, the sense of wrongness.
I called to him quietly without answer.
I flicked the outside light on and saw the shed beyond, tinny grey. There were no tell-tale cracks of light along its edges. I opened the sliding door and, hunched over in the cold air, called for him, then called a little louder, trying not to wake our neighbours, and the sound of my hoarse voice moving out into the utterly still night startled me. I heard movement down in the ravine and then two dogs flashed black in front of the glowing water. After that, nothing. I stared out at the sickly dark of near-morning, that greyish light that I’d always thought of as the light of the back of the moon, the light hidden from us on Earth, the beaded sweat on my arms meeting the cold wet air. I went back into the bedroom and sat up against the wall, staring at the empty spot in the bed, and I began to drift off again, picturing him in a coat over his pyjamas, walking to the all-night store for something sweet.
III.
CROSSING, 1987. 14" X 8" X 6" BOX CONSTRUCTION. WOOD AND GLASS WITH FOUND OBJECTS, PHOTOGRAPHS, ORGANIC MATERIAL. LOOKING DOWN ON A SHIP AS IT CROSSES A ROUGH SEA. THE TOPDECKS FAINTLY REVEAL THE FACE OF A WOMAN ON THEM. SMOKE COMING OUT OF THE FUNNELS SPREADS AGAINST THE TOP GLASS OF THE BOX AND RESOLVES INTO THE FACE OF A MAN.
WHEN I WAS TWENTY-FIVE, THE MAN I LOVED WALKED out of my home late one night and vanished. No one ever saw him again. There are no other words for this.
Impressions of that night are burnt into memory. Something I had said? A look on Molly’s face. Embracing her, holding his hand walking into the house, the moon through willows. Always this order of memory, returning to it, looking for the crack in it where light can push through, the one cell bursting gold with revelation. Later, twined in bed, music drifting past outside on a car radio. A door opening, feet on gravel. History urging itself into being. At dawn, calling his name from the doorway. Motionless in the reading chair. Standing at the window. Later, roaring in the dark, on my knees under the stars. Wet grass against my cheek, eyes staved open, the river audible through trees.
The roads that framed the university were busy thoroughfares, full of used-textbook stores, pizza outlets, and, farther out, the bars and other specialized establishments. Such were the laws of the state that if you had a restaurant with so much as a shelf of booze behind a counter, that shelf had to be draped with a sheet at all times so the alcohol was not visible to minors. The bars themselves, with their Fort Knoxes of alcohol doubled in mirrors, were considered true dens of sin, and held an outcast status in the town, hunched on the periphery of things. Here also were the windowless porno stores and the places you could go to sell your plasma. I was uncomfortable at first going into these places, a sheaf of photos in hand, as my inquiries made Martin guilty after the fact of certain tastes. But how I wanted to hear that he had been through those doors. That he had come to commune with the awesome democracy of pornography, or had thinned his blood in preparation for a journey. Travelling light at the cellular level.
But no one had seen him.
At home, I made an attempt to go about my life. I bought groceries, I bathed, I took the newspaper as usual. I have no doubt that outwardly I seemed fine, and to myself — but for some weight loss and a tendency to get lost in conversations — I seemed as I’d always been. Although I also admit that I was having an unusual effect on time. I found I had the ability to stare the second hand on a clock to stillness. I’d look away and when I looked back, it’d be moving again. Some mornings
, after gathering my things for class (my pen, a sheet of foolscap folded in half), I would stand at the window and look out on the yard toward the shed and try to piece together what had happened in my life to bring me to this moment. It would take almost an hour to make my way through this warren of thoughts, and I’d startle to realize I was now late for class, but then I’d look at the clock and see that only four minutes had passed.
In November, a month after Martin’s disappearance, a student of mine left the class in the middle of a lecture and returned with another faculty member. This man, whose name and face I can’t bring to mind, accompanied me from the class. After that, if I ran into my students, they pretended not to know me. I wandered the campus, flicking my eyes over the scenery … it was not something even the most callous of my students could bring themselves to find funny. I was given a wide berth.
I wasn’t sure whether to call Molly or not — my recollection of our day together turned dark the longer I thought of it. Its awkward moments had bled across my memory like a stain. But I longed for the old Molly, the one who had reassured me in our college days, who seemed to be a sister to me, who could read my life and explain what it meant.
When I finally did call, I got her machine. The sound of her voice soothed me. I controlled my own and told her what had happened. He’s gone, I said. Without a word. I don’t know what I did.
A day passed and she didn’t return the message. I called again. Molly, I said, please call me.
I waited, but she never called.
The police came, they took notes, they accepted coffee. I watched them from a window in the house as they dusted for fingerprints in the shed. It came to nothing. From then on, I left the door to the shed unlocked, an invitation not to thieves but to the gods who may have forgotten, in their playfulness, where to return Martin when they were done. By the end of November, I ruled out the gods.
At the beginning of December, when the weather finally broke cold, I unplugged the phone. I rid the house of plants. It also seemed best to take down the prints and drawings, and after that it was a natural transition to packing up the books. As Christmas came and went, the house retreated to a clean and naked state, the air as clear as consommé, pure humming nothingness. I hadn’t been into the shed since the night of Molly’s visit, only the police had. I went out through a crisp crest of snow, and then found myself standing in front of the unlocked door, uncertain. What if I had misunderstood what had occurred in those two months past? What if I opened the workplace door and found Martin weeping over his workbench, his tiny room the only place where he might find some comfort in losing me?
I was frozen with the fear of finding the shed empty and suddenly I was transported back to the night of my mother’s funeral, when I stood outside my childhood house with the same feeling of being unable to enter a grief-filled place. People — friends, relatives, neighbours — had been in the house all afternoon. It amazed me that they were able to drink coffee and eat buttered buns until there were none left in the basket when it felt to me that I would never be able to eat again. I listened to people talk about my mother, and although I had always thought she was good, her goodness, filtered through the mourners, seemed unreal. I didn’t know yet how death changed the dead, but already it was beginning, and their talk paralyzed me.
I tried to find my father, but I couldn’t see him in the room, and I began to troll through the crowd of mourners until I reached the edge and found myself standing alone at the front door. I went outside and stood on the lawn. It was getting close to dusk — I could already see the dog star — and the sky was beginning to go grey over the houses across the road. A stain of pink was spreading at the bottom of the street.
I stood and looked at the house I’d been born in, where my mother had waited — there, at the door — for her new husband to carry her in. That story, along with the one in which they met when she came into his father’s restaurant in Ovid, were the two signal fables of their marriage; they told them over and over. I was so distracted by your mother’s beauty that I put too much ice cream in her milkshake and it broke the wings off the mixing arm! There was the window of the room above the garage where I had been conceived, my own bedroom where I’d spent all of my childhood, reading and drawing and dreaming. The front windows of the living room and the den were lit yellow and people were moving in that light, but they were silent and anonymous to me, and I knew they couldn’t see me out there on the grass. I felt like I was visiting my life.
I walked around the side of the house, and there I saw a dim square of light lying in the grass — my father was in his study. I made my way to that window and saw him sitting in a chair at the side of the room, his black hair laid flat against his forehead and his eyes red and still. There was a man standing in front of him, talking, gesturing with his hands, his hat in one of them, which was moving in small circles as he spoke. As my father listened, his face seemed to expand, as if air were being blown into him, and his eyes diminished in their sockets until everything about him looked like it would both explode and collapse at the same time. The man was calmer, and then he just stopped speaking, and both of them were silent. The man brought his other hand up to the brim of his hat and he held it against his belly.
Then the man began to cry. He lowered his head and wept, and my father turned his face from him and pushed his lips together, and splayed his fingers over his mouth. It was the most awful thing I had ever seen. I had no idea what the man had come to say, but I believed that it could only have been that my mother had died again, that she had not survived even the relative safety of death, and they had lost her now for good. The man took a half-step toward my father, but then he turned and briskly left the room. I remained riveted by the image of my father’s girl-like grief — his paleness, his damp shining palms, the shrinking in his body — but then I broke from it and quickly went back into the relative safety of the house. My father never came out of his study that night, and eventually, the food gone, the sainting of my mother complete, the guests milled out of the house. I didn’t dare go into the study, but it had been a mistake not to go and be with him. I was the only one who may have been able to comfort him in the terror of his betrayal. If I could go back there as I am now I might have been able to comfort him.
I went into the shed. It was cold inside; the tin floor buckled under my feet. Some of the cracks in the walls had widened, and tiny drifts of snow lay on Martin’s workbench. I felt, standing there, that I was in the cold ashes of a burnt building, and I quietly turned to leave, then leaned back inside to pick up something, anything, that could be brought into the house to keep me company. I pulled out Linwood Flats and took it out onto the lawn and polished the glass with my sleeve. The bare willows beside the creek swayed in reflection.
It was under a willow tree that my mother had died. Some three or four years after her death, my friend Beverly and I rode our bikes out to the spot where she’d crashed her truck on her way to deliver her strawberries to Cortland. I hadn’t told Beverly that was why we were there, and she stood looking out over the fields and ditches, her hands on her hips.
It’s a road, she said.
But what else?
A road and a ditch and an orchard. Some sky. A tree. She looked around, scratching the side of her arm. That’s all.
To me, any person standing in the shade of that tree should have been able to feel the emanations of death in that place. Beverly knew how my mother had died, but only vaguely, and not that it had happened here, not that my mother had struck this very tree and sat against it, staring out at the fields, already mostly dead. I made us sit under the tree facing the road, pretending I needed shade. In the years since the accident, the tree had grown over its scars. It smelled of green life. Beverly chewed on a blade of sawgrass, her legs splayed out into the yellow fronds. You know a willow means water runs nearby, I said.
Well we’re right beside Cayuga.
No, I mean a stream or something, I said. Under the ground.
The willow has its roots in it, like someone reaching their hand down through your roof at night.
I took Linwood Flats into the house. I sat with it at the kitchen table. A box of simple construction, it showed the view from a street onto the wall of a red brick house. A wooden dowel topped with a sea sponge cut and painted green stood as a tree beside the house. Martin had painted red flowers all over the sponge. Springtime. The box was a window on a window: beside the treetop, another pane of glass looked in on a child’s bedroom. The bedroom was empty, and the door to the closet opened on nothing. A valise stood in the doorway to the hall. You had to stand aslant to the box to see down the hall past the valise: a banister, a hall light (which was operational if you connected a wire from the back of the box to a battery), and then, faintly, the bare knees of a small boy, sitting at the top of the stairs. I knew, from the stories I’d been told, that the boy was listening to his parents in the kitchen below. The future unfolding in exhausted midnight exchanges. If you examined the scene long enough you eventually saw a tiny cigar box sticking out from under the pillow on the boy’s bed. It had been Martin’s keepsake box as a boy.
I rummaged in the hall drawer until I found the old nine-volt battery, twisted the wires from the back of the box into points and connected them to the terminals. The light in the childhood hallway came faintly to life and flickered. I turned the box in my hands, trying to see the child’s face at the top of the stairs. But the light was not strong enough, the battery was old; I remembered it dying once already. After a few more moments (during which I noticed for the first time that the light cast a shadow of someone standing in the hall out of view), the light faltered and then went out with a fizz. The box lay inert in my hands again. A sick child drifting back off to sleep. I lowered my head against it. I had planned on packing the shed, but in the end, I couldn’t go back in. I went and padlocked the door. Then put the key in an envelope addressed to Martin care of the On Spec Gallery in Toronto. I don’t mind if you come in here when I’m gone, he’d said. What did he know about himself at that moment? Had I listened to the right thing? Did I ever hear what people were saying? I slipped the envelope into a mailbox. I’m gone too.
Martin Sloane Page 7
