The Beginners

by Rebecca Wolff

  I looked up from my lap just in time to see one large, pure, crystalline teardrop fall into Cherry’s lap, onto the hand in her own lap, where it lay still and quiet. I looked up farther, to her face, where in her eyes more tears gathered, silently, waiting to follow their leader. I looked up further, above her dark hair, to the stony face of the mill, whose dark windows had once contained and reflected our shared majesty, our secret royal ancestry, our unlimited power and freedom. I looked above the mill’s peaked roofline into the deep blue October sky and saw my real freedom moving, like an alternate sky, or like a veil dropped over the sky, over and above any of these realms I had known before. My real, true freedom was a mystery—was, itself, mystery: I didn’t need to know anything more about Cherry, or about myself, or about the Motherwells, for the moment. When all was revealed to me, when the veil was dropped from my one, true face, then I would truly be a prisoner.

  CHERRY LEFT ME THERE at the mill. She did not say goodbye, just stared at me as I sat silent, and then rose up clumsily, stiffly, like a doll with no hinge at the waist, and walked away. I watched her figure moving down the road, then climbing the hill toward the big white house on the green.

  29.

  Mid-October

  You’re never going to understand the profound sense of alienation that I experience when in nature. Are you.” Raquel spoke somewhat rhetorically to Theo. I was listening, crestfallen and relieved in equal measure to find myself back in my usual role, a lucky bystander to their extended collision. My own run-in with Theo did not seem to have altered this relationship, and I do not know what I would have done with the transfer of Theo’s full weight onto me—the attempt to visualize such a development left me with yet another blank spot in my cortex, a blot of unthinking—though I allowed myself to glance at him often in the simple, unpredicated hope that I might find him glancing at me.

  We were out in the woods behind the high school, on a sunny late afternoon, following one of the many paths forged by kids in their desperate search for a quiet place to smoke pot at recess. This path, if followed for three-quarters of a mile, took one all the way to the muddy, overgrown edge of the reservoir. The fallen leaves on the ground seemed to hiss.

  “Well, yes, I do understand it, I believe.” He stopped on the path. “Probably not in the way that you would want me to. Talk and think, that’s all you ever do. When you have only to act.” He retreated from this typically abbreviated outburst, his back to us, hands clasped at his ass, looking at the ground, or at a stunted tree trunk growing diagonally out of the ground. He turned around quietly and we resumed our walk.

  “I hate it when you say things like that. Things that ring so true. When it seems to me that you could just as easily say ‘I love an orange when it’s in segments’ as you could say ‘Niggers are filthy,’ or ‘Your mother sucks cocks in hell.’ You are just as much of a monster as I am, Theo.”

  She watched his face very closely as she said that. Then she turned on her heel and ran off the path, into the forest. She ran a little clumsily but with great force, like a bear, or a stone that has turned to flesh. Soon she was out of sight.

  We walked in the direction of her flight for a bit, then Theo suggested—and my heartbeat quickened at the suggestion—that we’d better wait for her at home. “That way she’ll know where to find us,” he said. We turned around and walked in silence.

  IN THE HOUSE Theo went to make hot cocoa in the kitchen and I wandered up to his study. The bed was pushed against the wall in the corner and all the bedding folded into a narrow pallet in the middle of the floor. He’d been meditating. I wanted to look at his books.

  And I wanted to ask him what had happened to Raquel to make her like this, to rip her off from the surface of the world like a decal. There must have been, I was convinced, some traumatic, some decisive occurrence: a schism of some sort. Someone must have done something to her. The fact that she never spoke of any such event almost seemed to me to be proof. There were so many things, in those days, that I took for granted. For instance, that none of the more ominous eventualities would pan out. That’s how we go on living our lives, after all: hoping for, if not the best, at least not the worst.

  THE BOOKS on his shelf looked as though he had made good use of them, traveled with them, slept with them under his pillow, stuck them in backpacks and pockets. I picked out one and flipped open its stained, dog-eared cover. Theo’s footsteps were on the carpeted staircase and he came in with two cups steaming in his hands. I turned to him with the book like a giant clamshell I had wrestled open.

  “What are you looking at?” He stepped close, setting down the mugs on top of the bookcase, and took the book from me, and it all started to feel as though it had already happened. “Ahh. The downfall of Western civilization. Cogito ergo fuckface. This man has destroyed more young lives than crack cocaine, broken condoms, and plastic surgery all rolled up into one secret weapon.

  “Here’s another one of my favorites. The tragically flawed Marquis de Sade.” He pulled a thick paperback from the shelf, allowing it to fall open where the spine of the book was cracked from frequent use.

  “This man had a notion, a precursor to the modern regulatory axiom about your right to smoke that cigar extending only as far as the tip of my nose. De Sade believed that his right to smoke a cigar extended as far as using the nearest eyeball for an ashtray. He sewed up a woman’s vagina, once. I mean he wrote a philosophical tract in which this act exemplified his beliefs. He had great sex, with virgins and old women and young men alike. Every orifice was available to him.” Theo’s cool gray eyes were steadily trained on my hot face, as though he was waiting for me to signal understanding before he moved forward. I tried a smile, but it felt as though I might cry. I was waiting again, inside that space inside, which he had made for me, in which I waited for him. In which I waited in fear for him to fuck me again. In which I could not wait for him to fuck me again.

  “Basically, his concept was that he could do what he wanted to when he wanted to, to whomever he wished. Not because it felt right in the moment, or because he suffered from delusions of mutuality. But because he felt free to partake in the illimitability of his actions. He loved asses. His sister’s ass, for example. I don’t know if he even had a sister. He just loved a nice hot asshole.” Theo paused for a moment, as if in contemplation. A certain tension built up in the room.

  “But the thing that makes him so lovable, in the end, is his fallibility. After all, what about the day when someone decides to hit you over the head with a frying pan? Whether your name is de Sade or Motherwell or Kissinger, your head gets opened. Your head, my frying pan; my frying pan, your head.” His restive gaze sifted through my hair, fastened on my earlobe. His last words rang in the room like some kind of anti-clarion call. The silence that hung behind them was enforced as if by a curfew.

  He moved past me to the bookshelf and put the book back. We sat down on the floor with our mugs, as there were no chairs. An uneventful episode. Nothing would happen, after all, between us, ever again, and I noted the voluminous relief I felt, and an equally gushing disappointment. I had just lifted my cup to drink when he put out his hand toward me and touched my breast through my T-shirt, on the top part, where it slopes positively toward the nipple. I held my cup in midair: it was the only thing I could look at in the room. I briefly considered whether we would be able to hear the door opening, closing, over whatever sounds we might make.

  He said, “Are you finished with that?” I wasn’t, but he took the cup out of my hand, set it down, and pulled my shirt over my head, all one motion, like a raptor plucking a field mouse. He put his hands on my bare shoulders and pushed with a constant pressure; I moved backward and down, supporting myself on my hands and then my elbows until I was flat on the folded blanket. I thought he might now kiss me—my mouth was open—but he didn’t. I opened my legs. He took his hand away from my breast and rubbed the crotch of my jeans, hard, then unbuttoned them. I lifted my hips off the blanket and h
e pulled the jeans roughly down around my ankles, along with my underwear. I was exposed to the air.

  This time was very different from the first. There was no sense in which I was attended to. I supposed that was appropriate: I was no longer a beginner. Now it was all for him. When he found his release, within five minutes, the hair on the back of my head was matted from his shoving and I felt like a piece of old wood, beaten against the shore by waves. Cold and porous.

  We quickly sat up and dressed. I realized that I had shut my eyes at the start, as soon as I was laid down, and only opened them after he had stopped moving and rested his cheek on my breast. I wished that I had thought to watch his face, as it went through its motions.

  We sat side by side on the floor, just as we had been, and drank our cocoa, still warm. My throat was sore from breathing with my mouth open. I combed my hair out with my fingers.

  “I don’t know what Raquel’s been telling you, Ginger.” He began in this way, the timbre of his usually light, reedy voice richer than before, as though orgasm had caused his blood to be drained from his veins, heated, then reintroduced. I simply waited.

  “She can be very convincing, and so can I. But you need to be careful. We all need to be careful.” Another cryptic warning, now seeming almost comically misplaced. “It is dangerous to believe one person’s side of any story; there is always another. And in the end, none of it may be true.

  “I want to tell you this now, because I see that you mean a lot to Raquel—” This hurt: to Raquel? Had I not met him halfway each time? Was it not important to him that I was ready for him? “And when something is important to her she will do anything she can to hold on to it.” I wondered why she would think that she had to do anything special to hold on to me, when I was pinned, like a butterfly to a mounting board.

  But it seemed he was intent on telling me a story. “Raquel and I have not known each other for very long,” he began. This I already knew, though it was difficult to understand how two could come to rely on one another so quickly, or at least how they could become so enmeshed, or could know each other so deeply. As I cast my mind through these configurations, I found myself rejecting each one in turn. I knew nothing, I decided, about the relationship between any two people, least of all these two.

  Theo continued, and I found that I knew even less than I thought. “I met Raquel about a year ago in a treatment program at a psychiatric clinic in the city. I had just been released from jail, two years early for good behavior, on condition that I participate in an extended group therapy. She was one of eight others in the group. She’d been institutionalized for several years, and had also just been reintroduced to society. Over the course of a year, the other seven all dropped out, and that left Raquel and me and two therapists. It turned into a kind of mock couples counseling, with Raquel and I as a default couple.

  “At first she couldn’t even look at me when she spoke. She was incapable of meeting my eyes for more than a few seconds. The therapists worked on that a lot with her, actually keeping track of her gaze, its duration. In that room it was as though I stood for every other person in the world, to her. If she could hold my eyes as she talked to me—believe in my existence, really—then she was healing, the therapists said. And I suppose her belief in me healed me, too.

  “I’ll never know if it was this relationship that was set up for us, or if I simply took an opportunity to do good for once in my life”—he shook his head quickly, as though to reset his brain—“but I found, after a while, that I wanted to take care of her. I wanted to protect her, in the therapeutic environment and then later, when we started to spend time together outside of the clinic, which was of course forbidden by the rules of the treatment program. We met two or three times, before and after the group session, and then decided that we didn’t need the therapists anymore.”

  THEY DROVE IN through the churchyard gates, under the curious gaze of the houses all around the green, over the rutty one-lane road that winds past the church itself and on into the graveyard proper. Theo parked and put the emergency brake on, as they were on a hill, and then they walked down toward the oldest part of the graveyard, where the trees were tallest and the graves showed the most wear. Only the slate stones were legible. Slate is odd: smooth as a sheet of paper; always cool to the touch, no matter how hot the day; austere yet quite contemporary in dove-gray or mauve.

  They trailed amongst the stones in a light drizzle, fanning out and calling to each other funny old names like Thankful and Hepzibah. They walked around, looking at graves. This is Theo’s version. They were looking for no grave in particular. They felt a common delight in burial sites: a place of unquestionable significance. There is no way to avoid addressing in some manner their connotations. When you walk in a graveyard and it is sunny and bright out you may feel illuminated in your mortal form. The soil, the ground, the grass that grows, your feet, your legs, your torso, neck, and brain. All living, and what is beneath completely dead, at the cellular level. Or you may feel the pressure of the nonlife itself, historically speaking. All these lives, once just like mine, self-important, full-hearted. Every last one of these dead people must have had a dream of becoming famous at one time or another.

  Or you may feel, on a gray and chilly spring day like the one on which they first came to Wick, the full impact of the dead. Certain people on a certain day will get the dead inside them, filling every niche that has been prepared by all the living that they have done. First there is a heightened awareness of the potential gravity of your situation. Here you are, laughing and talking and walking on all the places where people’s bodies have actually been put into the earth. It is possible, after all, that they really don’t like it, that they resent this show of disrespect: your feet on their final resting place. And then you catch yourself on this train of thought and think again: “Who is ‘they,’ for God’s sake? Do I really believe that there is a particular spirit attached to a particular dead body, actually lurking around in the near vicinity, ‘haunting’ as it were, waiting for some poor, live person to come around and transgress?”

  And by repeating to yourself over and over these words, like “dead body,” and “waiting,” and “alive,” as you continue to walk in and amongst the gravestones, careful not to be too careful about where you walk, you begin to see things. A white flash in the corner of your left eye: a rabbit on the path? Another on the top of that hill over there: just a particularly tall gravestone, rising above the horizon line. You can try to shake it off but you are over the threshold, now. The words used to describe the dead and their surroundings are weighty and endlessly variable: they are like the shadows of words. Apparition, decomposition, materialization, haunt, return, still, peace, rest, eternal. And that is the truth of it. For whether the dead are at rest or returning, peaceful or haunting, that condition is eternal. The body is dead, the spirit is present. Or the spirit is dead forever; the body is always somewhere.

  And now you are absolutely saturated with the language of the dead, of death. The tongue of death is in your mouth, and if you are anything like anyone, like everyone, you are spooked. It’s time to go, to get out of the realm of all the significant names, the real place where bodies are kept. It’s time to get back to somewhere that does not have such a specific purpose: a house.

  RAQUEL AND THEO WALKED between the gravestones and Theo read out loud the ones he could make out: “Charity Putnam, beloved wife of Samuel, 1740–1762. Not very old. People died younger back then. Often in childbirth, women died. And here’s Samuel. 1720–1784. He was a lot older than her. That was common, too. Look at this one; Maribelle Lawson. That’s a fancy name for those plain times. She was three years old. Can’t you just see her? Curls and a starchy frock.

  “Wow, Lavonia Threadgill. And her husband Deodat. Those are the kinds of names that completely determine a personality. No chance that they would be the town pump and the town drunk. They must have been upstanding. Entirely beyond suspicion.”

  “As are we,” R
aquel responded airily, moving on to a tall slate stone with a long inscription. “My God, Theo. Listen to this. Look on me as you pass by / As you are now, so once was I / As I am now, so must you be / Prepare for death, to follow me. Keziah Snow. Seventeen-something. This man was thinking ahead. He chose to speak directly to the living, for all eternity. He sussed it out and knew that we would be open to some words of wisdom, from beyond.”

  Theo stood beside her, in front of the stone. It was particularly shady, where they stood, beneath a tremendous, ancient elm newly leafed out. “Or maybe he was just a bitter man, a man who had no clue what the afterlife held, nor, for that matter, what his life preceding it had held. It sounds like he thought of little besides his own demise, in his last days. When he sat and wrote, in his cramped and spidery hand, this last message to the world.”

  “Yes, he must have spent a lot of time presupposing his exact position in the box, underground, under the stone, under the tree, under the sky. I wouldn’t mind staying here for a little while.”

  “Under this tree?”

  “No.”

  “Here, in this graveyard?”

  “No.”

  “In this town?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, we can stay for dinner, if you like? I think I saw a little place . . .”

  “Why don’t we see if there’s an apartment available?”

  “What, for the summer?”

  “For whenever. For forever. Why not here? Here seems as good as anywhere else, if not better. I bet it’s cheap.