“I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” Zhivago said. “I’m sorry—”
“What? What?”
“Um, Cynthia, could you—” Dr. Zhivago moved Ben’s wrists to my girlfriend, offering them. “Could you take your father—”
“Ben,” she said, and then, glancing at me, changed it. “Dad,” she said. “Come on.” Ben was rumbling like a volcano; the timpanist, by now, is getting blisters, and the golem hasn’t even shown up.
“What?” he screamed again, and Cyn burst into tears. Zhivago dropped Ben’s arms, and Ben dropped his own arms, and Cyn let go of her father and I stepped toward Cyn to put my arms around her. This, I thought: this I could offer her, shelter from tears, me and nobody else. But Ben hugged her, too, awkwardly covering my arms as well until we must have looked like an orgy, with Zhivago standing sternly over us. I let go, and stepped back, and the two Glasses walked, entangled and crying, down the hallway leaving me alone with the chaperone.
Zhivago coughed. I leaned down and picked up the clipboard from where it fell, and when I glanced at it I saw it was a prop. For the audience, this will not be such a surprise, but we in the hospital expect the real thing from doctors. On the top page—and on the other pages, as I flipped through them—there was nothing but squiggles, semblances of writing that when viewed from a distance, could look like notes. Up close I could tell he hadn’t written anything down, never, the whole time he was taking notes. On each page were little wavy lines, just a little sketch of the surface of the sea. It was a prop. It was fake. “What is—” I said. I was the child unable to inquire. “This is nothing. What’s—”
Zhivago put an arm of clear threat around me, a thug hug: How’s the family? “Joseph,” he said to me, “I think you should go home.”
“I—”
“I mean home, Joseph. You don’t belong here. This is a family time. The Glass family.”
“These notes,” I said, handing them to him, “are blank.”
“Look around you, Joseph,” he continued smoothly. “A woman is dying. Another woman is dead. Just go home, Joseph. This isn’t your family.”
I tried again. “Why aren’t you taking any notes?”
He looked at me sharply and snatched the clipboard from my hands. He glanced at it and took his arm from around me. “You shouldn’t be concerning yourself with Mimi,” he said.
“Those aren’t notes!” I said, and Mimi’s door opened and Stephen, flushed and rumpled, stepped out of the room.
“My handwriting,” Zhivago said stiffly, smiling at Stephen, “is illegible. Like all doctors’. We’re doing all we can, let me assure you.”
“Is she going to be O.K.?” Stephen asked Zhivago hoarsely.
“We’re doing all we can,” he said again.
“I can’t live without her,” Stephen said simply, and leaned up against the wall. Half his shirt was untucked. “I’m not—I can’t sleep. I can’t eat. I’m not eating without her.” This, at least, was true; with Mimi in the hospital all of us were just heating stuff up and then retiring immediately to our bedrooms. Cyn didn’t even come up to the attic any more, though she didn’t go to sleep; I lay awake all night listening to all the bedroom doors open and close like chattering teeth. “Is she—”
“We’re doing,” Zhivago said, “all we can.”
“Where’s Gramma?” he said.
“Your father has arrived,” he said, gesturing down the hallway. “Find your father, Stephen.” Stephen put a finger in his mouth like he’d cut it, and walked down the hallway, the noise of his sandals bouncing off the walls. “Frank,” I heard Mimi call weakly from her room. “Frank.” After lurking behind the door during this whole scene we finally hear from the dying woman. “Frank.”
“Just a minute,” Zhivago—Frank, I guess—called to her. He put a hand on the doorjamb and looked at me. “You see?” he said, gesturing to Stephen, still wandering down the hall like a freezing orphan. “You shouldn’t be here. This doesn’t really concern you, Joseph. This woman—this mother—is very sick. She’s in horrible pain. She can’t even bend her knees, Joseph.” Mimi called him again. “This—this isn’t about you.”
“I love her,” I said, trying one more time.
He almost rolled his eyes. “Everybody loves her,” he said, gesturing into the room.
“Cynthia,” I said. “I love Cynthia.” I hadn’t said that for so long I felt like it wasn’t much of an explanation, like it wasn’t enough, or wasn’t true. Something slipped into my hand like a secret note was passed me; when I looked down Cyn was standing next to me, her little palm inside mine. Zhivago opened his mouth, closed it, walked through Mimi’s door, and closed it.
“Joseph,” she said. Her voice was sad, and unaccompanied. I haven’t talked of it enough, but this is a love story, you know. A love opera. It just has a sad ending. Maybe because it was a hospital, I looked at Cyn and for one clear moment, didn’t see an inch of her body. I bent towards her and felt in that instant something patient and vulnerable, some internal rhythm behind all this orchestration, and the rushing of my blood.
“I love you,” I said again, but here the orchestra kicks back in: T.U.D.
“Joseph, I—”
“Look,” I said. “Let’s leave. Let’s get out of here. Both of us. Together or something.”
“I can’t,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “You know? We could go back to Mather. Or drive off somewhere, like a movie.”
“I can’t,” she said. It wasn’t a movie.
“You can,” I said.
“I don’t want to,” she said simply, and let my hand go. I looked at her fingers; everything was stained. I saw Cyn’s spidery hand and remembered what it had clutched, what she had done. I took a step backwards and closed my eyes.
“This family,” I said. “This family has done terrible things to you, Cyn. This isn’t right.”
“They aren’t happening to me,” she said. She pointed at the hospital wall like I hadn’t seen something that was plastered there. “They’re just happening.”
“No,” I said.
“I have to stay here,” she said. “This is my mother.”
“I know,” I hissed, stunned at the fury in my throat. Everything was hot. “I know what you’ve done, Cyn.”
She just looked at me: that’s all she did. Just looked at me, blank and wrong. An eyebrow went up like a periscope. “You know—”
“That little—that little table,” I said. I blinked, burned. “That little table, Cyn. The window over it makes the wind blow. It opened the door of Stephen’s room.”
“What are you talking about?” she screamed. She put her hands to her ears. “What are you talking about?”
“I saw! I know!”
“No!” she screamed. Her face was red, or maybe everything was: my eyes, looking at everything and turning it all red. Cyn was crying. “I don’t—I can’t hear this. I don’t know what you’re talking about, but you can’t go crazy! This isn’t—this isn’t you! This isn’t about you!”
“I saw it!”
“What are you talking about?” she screamed. “Get out of here! My mother—”
“Your mother knows,” I spat, and shuddered. The room rumbled around me with the brass, and the percussion and all this drama. “She’s—your mother knows, Cyn. She was listening! She’s—”
“She’s dying!” Cyn screamed, and Dr. Zhivago opened the door. Behind his sharp-angled body I could see Mimi, sitting up on the complicated metallic bed. I saw her pale hospital face, framed with her unwashed hospital hair and plastered with that hospital grimace of pain. And something else. I stalked past Zhivago and right up to Mimi to make sure I hadn’t missed it. She followed my eyes and then, dropping the grimace for a smile, leaned up to me to speak. I heard Zhivago stomping toward me, and Cyn crying in the hallway; she didn’t have much time.
“They won’t—” she croaked, and frowned.
“What—What are you talking about?” Cyn screamed
at me, and I felt Zhivago’s hand on my arm. Mimi looked at me and shrugged.
“They won’t what?” I asked. “What?”
“What are you talking about?” Cyn screamed again, and I realized maybe she wasn’t screaming at me.
“I want you out of here,” Zhivago said, pulling at me.
“They won’t what?” I asked, and Zhivago stopped. The orchestra waits.
“They won’t,” she said finally, and smiled like a skull, “believe you.”
“Out,” Zhivago said, reanimated. He dragged me toward the door. I looked right at Mimi. I wouldn’t forget what I saw.
“It’s unbelievable!” she shouted, and from her throat she spat a loud cackle. “It’s unbelievable!”
I couldn’t look at Cyn as Zhivago pushed me into the hallway. I didn’t want to see where she had gone as the door slammed: into the room, or after me, or into the arms of somebody else. Mimi was right: unbelievable, all this sordid incest, the monster in the basement, all the lies and bedroom sneaking and significant looks over meals, all this illness and looming death, all blossoming like horrid tulips from a filthy mind. Mine. I stumbled out of the Osteopathy Ward and vomited into a little thicket of greying plants somebody had stuck in the middle of the parking lot, some vague and fruitless decoration. It didn’t belong there. I heaved again, and put my face into my hands like I was removing stage makeup. How can you see this? The curtain has fallen, that’s how, and the three men finish the scene at the edge of the stage.
I took my hands away and looked up at the hot, wet sky, beating down at me like I was hung out to dry. My chest was beating with breath. I sounded like I was sobbing. But as I looked around the scraggly lot it wasn’t me; it was Stephen, not five feet from me, crouched against the smooth cement of the hospital wall and sobbing. He turned and faced me, but I wouldn’t speak to him. Now that they were out of sight, Mimi could get up out of bed and shake hands with Zhivago over a scene well played, but I needed to stay silent and out of sight. If I spoke, I thought I’d crumble, like a golem is supposed to if it ever opens its mouth, if you know what I mean. And you do: I know that deep down, you know what I’m talking about. Stephen walked closer and closer to me but I didn’t say anything, didn’t even nod. If I opened my mouth, I knew I’d crumble with the knowledge of what I saw there in Mimi’s hospital room, which as the audience fidgets is taken apart as Mimi and Zhivago walk out a back way, to await their curtain calls.
“What—what happened?” Stephen asked me. “Did anything—is she—what happened?” The words rattled in my mouth like a bite of something, but I didn’t answer. Stephen looked at me, and then past me and his face went dark. A shadow fell over us as Ben approached, but I barely noticed. As Ben and his son glared at one another, I sat right down in the parking lot and tried to sort it out: unbelievable. Mimi collapsing by the side of the river, having slipped from the house in the middle of the night, carrying—unbelievable—a clay man she had constructed in the basement. And then, sitting up in the complicated metallic bed, her pale hospital face framed with her unwashed hospital hair, that hospital grimace of pain and something else, something which nobody would believe. What, this summer, had I made up, pieced together like something in Arts & Crafts?
Ben sat down next to me, our legs sloping straight off the curb, downhill. We were all downhill from here. Stephen was stalking off, even further downstage. Ben sighed and turned to meet my eyes but I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t say it. I knew what I had seen, and I couldn’t say it. There, stored in my mouth, were all the words of what I had seen but I had to keep them there. The hospital room was all dismantled, the cemetery almost constructed for the final scene, and I couldn’t say anything. I knew what the words were—Mimi, sitting up on the complicated metallic bed, her pale hospital face framed with her unwashed hospital hair and plastered with that hospital grimace of pain, and her legs, bent at the knee, angled up towards her chin like she was stretching them. I looked at Ben’s legs, and my own, and felt the words clearly behind my teeth: Bent at the knee. Bent at the knee. But I didn’t say anything. The opera was ending, and like all opera endings the bodies were going to pile up. If I didn’t speak, if I sat quietly like a child unable to inquire, mine wouldn’t be one of them. If I watched my mouth maybe I’d live.
“Can I tell you something?” Ben asked me, quietly, finally, but I put my hands over my face again, like a curtain.
Act IV, scene two
Before the curtain rises, the chorus finally sings. Fans of the composer will call it an act of genius to save a chorus until the final scene, but the choristers will call it a gold mine; while-the main characters have to show up early for makeup and costumes, the chorus gets to wander in sometime around the second act and stand backstage in sweats for their big scene. None of those powdered wigs for the grand chorus-party in La Traviata, or the black dust of stage-grimy Jews in Die Juden. It’s an easy gig, a Perfect Crime: You go in, you go out, nobody gets hurt.
The text is from the prayer book that Rabbi Tsouris read at the grave—so polite! So earnest! The muted green cover, and that respectful, respectful font: In Contemplation of Death, the heading reads, but the rest is set for unaccompanied, four-part offstage chorus. The Name, Creator of the Universe and all that lives, I pray for healing and continued life yet I know that we are all mortal. If only my hands were clean and my heart pure! Alas, I have committed many wrongs and left so much undone! And yet I also know the good I did and the good I tried to do. May that goodness impart eternal meaning to my life. Blessed is The Name, Ruler of the Universe, the righteous Judge.
“The Name” is undoubtedly Tsouris’s favorite little quirk, rather than “Lord” or “King” or “He” which might alienate the congregation, drive them away. But as the audience peers through the fog—now the dry ice—to the cemetery, we see that nearly everyone has been driven away. The Memorial Service was fairly packed, but due as much to the rain-threatening clouds that gnarled overhead as tradition, Mimi’s coffin is lowering, as the curtain rises, to a gravesite attended by precious few, although it reads like a crowd: her husband, her lover, her son and her daughter; her husband’s lover, her son’s lover, her daughter’s lover, her daughter’s other lover and the Rabbi, reading a prayer in gender-altered English translation.
It was clearly going to rain, as clear as a rolling cymbal and a shimmering viola vibrato. Beside us the Ohio River was swollen with muddy water, an engorged vein of dirty, dirty fluid. I knew the feeling. For the past several days since we had arrived at the hospital to find Zhivago waiting for us next to an empty, complicated metallic bed, my own bed in the attic had become complicated and metallic. It went without saying—as did nearly everything in the Glasses’ almost-mute house—that Cyn didn’t come up, so I sat up alone for most of the night, just listening. The orchestration was dense: the muted pizzicato padding of sneaky feet, the piercing glissandos of the wind, the snare-drum slams of bedroom doors. Beds creaked like xylophones while the rain hammered like brass. Over at Camp Shalom, the August rain was keeping all the kids indoors, making them sweaty and loud and horny. My head and body throbbed along with them all day, and at night, alone in the attic, I couldn’t tell if the pounding was internal or external, whether it was my own dirty mind, dreaming of unbelievable things, or the ripe house closing around me like one of those humid flowers from Act I Scene One, that garden ballet back when everyone was alive and Cyn was moist only for me.
And it was unbelievable; Mimi is right. Was right: Nobody would believe me. In the attic I’d try to sort out all the scenes: the plate breaking in Act I Scene One; Cyn’s finger inside me in the following scene that night; When You Can’t Be Friends with Your Mother in the Props Studio at the start of Act II; Stephen’s sweaty advice-seeking lunch in the Physics Lab cafeteria at the close of it and then the spidery hand stroking the moans out of his eager throat; Mimi’s hot gasp against her husband’s loosening robe as it fell from my body, Mimi’s bent knees before her death. When had thing
s just happened, as Cyn said, and when had I composed them, set them to the creaky music of this house? If “Dr. Zhivago” was unbelievable, what about the golem in the basement, or a whole season of anti-semitic operas, or Ben sampling his delicious daughter after she’d sneak down from our wet bed? Eventually, all this mulling over would make the whole summer one sticky blur of sex, and I would no longer know who I was thinking of, me with Cyn, or me with Mimi, or Mimi with Stephen or anyone with anyone. I’d part my own knees and compose an ending, as wet and final as a cloudburst at a funeral.
Nobody, only the sky, broke down as the first few shovels of dirt fell on the coffin some poor propsmistress had to sweat over for days, just for a few seconds of stage time. The sky just shattered, the water breaking over us like something was about to be born from all this water and mud and grief. The orchestra—if there had been one at the funeral, which of course there hadn’t—roars, too, the timpanist going for broke in these final moments of Act IV. Because everything, here, is ending:
The Glass family, having warped itself down to the fragile bones, would now claim one more life in its tragedy, and the sudden rain provides a perfect background, a nice and scary context for the monster’s arrival. Because all behavior, don’t you know, exists within a social and cultural context, and the Glasses all began running around the cemetery within a social and cultural context of rain. It was raining.
When the rain descended upon us, we were in a perfectly devised tableau (besides two supernumeraries, there to fill in the grave, who scurry off at the first sign of trouble): Rabbi Tsouris in the middle, the engorged river fluttering behind his dark black robe; Ben and Stephen stage left, staring at their feet, the better to see their skullcaps; and Cyn and I stage right, with her arm linked through mine formally and with such tender inappropriateness that I wanted to push her into one of the cemetery’s patches of mud. But the rain did it for me. When the sky broke, Cyn’s nails scratched into my wrist like a suicide attempt and when I turned to look at her it was as if the ground had swallowed her up; her small body was wrapped in a black dress wrapped in mud. Rain ran off my face, through my eyes; I wiped them again and saw that Cyn had almost fallen. The thunder roared like trombones, if there had been trombones there at the Old Jewish Cemetery. The thunder almost drowned out a scream.
Watch Your Mouth Page 12
