by Lia Purpura
Perhaps we are too fixed in our bodies.
This might help:
Once I saw in a new, slick hotel a very mod bathtub with high sides like a big teacup. Anyone would look fragile in it, unformed and diminished by its size. I imagined at rest there many wet bodies, each as tender as the underside of a wrist, that patch where life could be so easily let. In the low light, it suggested the soft milks of Vermeer, cream in the unspiraling peel of the lemon, the lilac and sulfur hanging in air, gem-bright wine in cut roemers blackening, mossy greens pocking the cut wheels of cheese, puckering apples, freshly killed pheasant rainbowing dark corners—in decline, such brimming; in quietude, torsion.
My Friend, in order to contain the event you’re discussing—the tending-after, and after, not-wanting—we would have to be different. Wider and broader. And our language would, too. Need and its overtones—desire, ownership, envy—would not be discordant. We’d carry “aftermath” easily with us, lilacs and sulphur shading the scene, the knowledge of clabbering coming on, the turning and souring under our noses, but not yet, not just yet.
If people are happiest when they’re useful, then why can’t the body be used for good, or lent out as needed, given over, since we’re here for such a very short while? Hard question.
Dear,
I know others have questions, practical ones, about love and taxes and families and work. Just one more then. I’m sure it’s related. Why is it so hard to believe that, as seen from a plane, clouds really can’t hold us? I know, because they look thick and solid, they constitute a way of thinking, perpetuate childish thoughts about heaven. Still, it’s hard to imagine they won’t soften a fall. Such backlit white curves, such pearled, gray-bright heft . . . until your plane cuts right through, and they resist not at all. They just allow passage.
Dear, why are they so unmoved by our passing?
On Luxury
No one’s ready.
To sit here on a wooden bench and not have to think of a gunman shattering the train station’s bustle, early light, scent of coffee—that’s a luxury. I forget sometimes. Like I forget having legs. Which is “just a given,” we say. But it is given. I’m not arguing by God, Luck, or Science, just that it could be otherwise. And “luxury” is its best measure, that unit, lux, of illumination, diurnal, in slices, across a pine floor. Ferocious midday, translucing my boy’s ear. Jeweling a wineberry. Breaking in surf, and in outgoing ripples recomposing its silvery veil. Here K-9 patrols are making their rounds, sniffing our bags, moving along. People take mild note and return to their business.
Why aren’t we ready to think of our peace?
How amazing I’ve never planned my escape. Quick, let me think: I’d run down to the tracks, jump off the end and hide under the platform. But I needn’t do that. Luxury, to read in the Baltimore Sun “murder rate,” and not have to see the facts of my life recounted therein. Luxury, to read and not follow the phrase down to a bloody, wet stash of drugs, clothes torn and scattered, the whole torrent of shit, junk, paraphernalia jumping the curb, sluicing a front stoop, my stoop, the one I’d climb daily returning from work, couldn’t scrub clean, with deep cracks where the necklace they shot him for landed. Luxury, to turn back to roll, coffee, paper. To pair shooting with elsewhere. To let elsewhere be faceless and stoopless, miasmic, panegyric, and broken from mainland. Unmapped. Unsketched. Or sketched very badly and broadly—with stylized “alley” and “pile of garbage,” “shattered glass,” “prostitutes.” I can skim fast, skip the rock of my gaze over the headlines, let it grip nothing, be seized by nothing, just skitter across and sink.
Dear stage. Dear props. Dear National Geographic-toned urban blight shots: dusk coming on and through one framing link of the sagging chain fence, a slick, backlit rat. A (wide-scope) child-with-soda toddling close to rat /garbage /needle. Parentless on the glittering asphalt. A deepening red-purple centerfold sky, generously layering rooftops with color, forcing that beauty-in-decay wobble, ruin-threshed, redemptive, as night comes on, lavish-yet-stark, in this, the last photo, so we might turn the page and still breathe.
Yes, luxury (in Latin, also: a vicious indulgence) looks like bagged pastries, coffee, briefcases. Neat rolling suitcases (I still think they’re marvels), redcaps with trolleys helping the oldsters. Benches—a rich, worn mahogany. Walls—of marble and quarried in Sicily. Wall sconces—bronze, and the whole of the interior lined with creamy Rookwood-of-Cincinnati tiles. I’m balancing on the very edge of the Beaux-Arts here, as the well-intentioned music policy promotes this morning’s calming selection, the New World Symphony. And here comes the English horn’s rise-and-stretch moment, all the tender, new, foresty ferns unfurling, slow rambles in meadows, encounters with moss, swallows, silvery waterfall—everything fresh, alighting, awaking. And here I am, among those in the station, arriving/departing. Here and alive. Alive, and recalling how tense that passage when I played it myself, the exposed intervals not terribly complicated, but treacherous still. As every English horn player knows, careless phrasing at the modulation, or a tempo too slow (opening quarters, especially) tanks the primordial, tips the whole thing into crassness. Even today, I’m nervous hearing it, having been trained to anticipate ruin and adjust.
Here, now, in the station I’m listening hard. As he is, to the music, in a moment of stillness awaiting his train, this beautiful, scruffy conservatory student, en route to New York with his violin. I see his distraction (“Not this again, not The New World”) then a softening, as he busies himself (It’s Dvořák at least, not Pachelbel’s god-awful Canon) as he takes out his book, travel cup, iPod. Plugs himself in: Mahler, I bet. He’s a serious sort. The board flips to “Departures” and he gathers his stuff. There he goes, toward his train. There he goes with the crowd, finding the gate. He’s distracted—his girlfriend, audition, apartment. He’s not thinking this lightness, this early-bird ramble could be the very last thing he hears.
There he goes—off to Gate E, with that luxury.
Remembering
How do I remember it? I come to the patch of garden first, in the back. Then the little mud room I guess it’s called around here, just off the kitchen. I enter the kitchen. To the right there’s the living room, a cool, open expanse. Wingback chairs. A fireplace? I’ll ask him, was there a fireplace. If we sat in the chairs. If we sat on the floor. Was there a rocker. Was there a mantle. If above an upright piano, hung photos of great-greats in gilt frames with thick wavy glass—his pince-nez, her coiled white hair, and were they really there at all. Back in the kitchen, I remember high counters and that he hopped up and sat there, beside the deep porcelain sink. I was always thirsty. The glasses were tall. There must have been chairs and a past era’s table, gold-flecked, silver-rimmed or with space-agey darts. How bright and clean it all was. And he was. His neat hair. The curls cropped and tight—or that was the tension’s effect. He had a round laugh but his body was hard, there was nothing excess in gesture or feature. All the lines, pushed against, held.
And now here’s the strange gift—sixteen years’ distance is about to close up. How easy to say time-and-space, to know so little of the science behind it, and know still, to employ it. This long stretch of not having seen, this uninterrupted and very pure distance is a measure of—what? Here, soon, at my door with his curious children, will be one who can tell me something of who I was then—who, like me, could not have said at the time, bound as we were by the present, though we still called it “knowing each other.” Once we had only moment-to-moment unfolding days. I was not, then, a still point to reflect on. Over the years, time gave me a form. By now I’ve long been a contemplation.
I remember he was forthright but kind. I don’t think he ever said one hurtful thing. The house he took care of, in his father’s family for generations, was a respite. A calm place. It called up the phrase “well-appointed,” but all that means, or would have meant to me then, was that one could find pins, twine, glue, sandpaper, tacks—small useful things, notions contained in Sucret
tins and Savarin cans under the sink. Lining the mud room. There were chores and they seemed to take up his day. He hauled brush and prepared the garden for winter; there were boots for that purpose, and boots for other purposes. And the house had a place for each thing. That he was apart from my life as a student enlarged my understanding of a day. He wore pullovers with many hidden zippers, each sealing a pocket he made precise use of. Much dark blue, against which he appeared even brighter. The house was warm. The rug was braided. Or a braided rug might be imagined into that space. It’s that my grandmother’s house had these rugs, and my past (with toy cars vrooming over and catching the fibers) now meets up with the space I’m opening again, in his house—and I, as the site of, the host of that meeting, step back and watch, eye to wool hillocks and pluckable, heavy black stitches.
There was something that hurt him. That was hurting and he was putting away, or falling more fully into, I didn’t know which. He didn’t know. There was distance between him and the weltering thing. To either side of the wedge was a violence. I sensed there were ropes, the kind in a seafaring cartoon, with a figure plumb in the middle of coils uncoiling fast. And if, as the anchor kept falling, he stayed put as my grandmother would say, he’d have been dragged overboard and down. But he wasn’t still. He was working fast away from the rope. I thought the untangling would be a long effort. I thought there were things, meanwhile, he shouldn’t put up with. A girl he liked who was careless, not worthy, not at all, in my estimation, since he asked my opinion on such things. She dismissed the chores, oil lamp, canning jars. Footstool’s crewel work. Antimacassar. Such was the protectiveness I felt for the house, for the house’s old things, and for him. Impossible almost for his body to relax. He moved very quickly across tasks, rooms, yards, thought. The brown garden mended things up. As did the clearing and hauling of brush. All my key scenes are of late fall and winter, variations on and responses to cold. Tea maybe. Maybe hot chocolate. He made something for us. What was it? What, in return, did I make?
There were uncertainties, fretted, impacted. A mother was missing. The alarms were far off, but I heard them ringing. Sometimes they clanged. I remember thinking it would likely be rage, that it couldn’t be otherwise, but its name was unknown. I wondered how he lived without her. I couldn’t have lived without my mother, not then, my mother who held things for me, past things, and returned them to me when I asked. His mother’s missing was a form of damage that kept being done. He called it a decision. That he decided distance was best frightened me. Late afternoons, the blank thing was there, in the quiet, ratcheting, winching.
If I press I can find more: a bike, and a helmet—before laws about helmets, so it hung in a specialized air. There was a patch of yellow at the side of the house. Wasn’t there a door—to a basement or a pantry? Was this my first pantry? Did we draw the living-room drapes? No. There were no drapes. And why would we draw them, it was always so gray, or snowing, or verging on snow. It’s that memory sidles up to a phrase, and a gesture comes along, too—“draw the drapes.” It’s that the phrase fit, that the room in its spareness and decency would have put it that way. There were curtains instead. They were sheer and when you brushed by, they noticed. Wasn’t he beautiful. Didn’t he run ahead with a thought, ask, then fill in an answer before I had one. And wasn’t there also a counter-impulse, a quick way of rerouting the statement, refining it, offering it again, like a road widened. The thought bettered. Wasn’t he intent on bettering himself. (Surely I admired that drive, and as surely turned away from the phrase, thinking it too conventional.) And after retracting the interruption, didn’t he slow down, chide himself—and chide, that little slicing motion, didn’t he pare back his impatience. Wasn’t he hard on himself. To that reflex, habituated. Merciless, even. Excoriating comes. The core and scrape in that word. And the overtones cuore and striate. Consecrate too, fit to the very ground of that house where he slept, read, cooked, breathed—as I breathed, in my grandmother’s house, deeply, the smell of mornings in winter when the heat kicked on and the wood of the stairs and floors expanded, releasing the scent of years when I wasn’t. Didn’t I want to quiet him. Soften things. Offer some softness. I keep putting a dog there, then taking it back. Dog isn’t right, but would have been good, with a bed in his room, its sighs companionable at night.
I never saw the whole house. Parts were closed off to keep the heat in—and that fits. He required very little space and the things he needed were close at hand. He reused and used down to the last. Studying at night, we must have opened the fridge and found not much at all. What did I bring? There must have been beer. I think there was oatmeal—in a tin, if a pantry—but not those single rip-open packets. Too wasteful. Too modern. There were stories I followed, harrowing ones, and much I refrained from asking, which, too, was part of the conversation. It must have been—knowing nothing of his life, then a lot all at once—that I listened for patterns, and to manage the unstable characters/sequences/motives, and mostly, my own disbelief.
Why say return? I return to that place. Why construct, of sensation and time, a circle if all along these memories have been here? And doesn’t time also unfold, -buckle, -braid? Have I “stepped back in”? I’ve tried to say “found it again,” of the time, but the time wasn’t lost. Can the neither-created-nor-destroyed ether suspend couches with dark wooden scrollwork, framed tatting, the red—and what was so red . . . shirts? thermals? complexions? Did these wait? Are they lent? After all, he lent the very air a bright tint. And I can add in some fireplace heat, tangerine- and lemon-slice flames to warm the white rind of winter outside. He was training for an event, and then stopped. It wasn’t an injury. It was something else. He was moving toward something, and also away. The dimensions are folding. He was smart and precise about mechanical things, compasses, knives, the workings of houses and mowers and weather. About the body and some ways that it worked. Not all ways. I think pleasure surprised him.
He sent, yesterday, now that I’m back in town for a while, a picture of himself and his family, but I haven’t looked yet. I want to see, right in front of me, his face as I knew it, compose. I want to be part of the reconstitution, like a puddle stilling again after a truck rumbles by. I want (it’ll be any day now) to see, in that very first moment, how years compounded, what dailiness built, how the weather of everyday life grew into countenance and bearing—since one can go about picking up toys, shopping, walking the dog bitterly or tenderly, beset by distraction or filled with gratitude. I want to see which stances took and which slipped away, if there are lines I don’t recognize, if there are creases I cannot unknow.
Now I remember—of course, as soon as you corrected me, or rather, in your gentler way, suggested—it was I who sat up on the high kitchen counters, and you who stood near, and that was how we adjusted our heights.
And you’d just returned from a cross-country bike trip: that’s why the bike and you glowed. My sense of gear, and gears all around was right, though hazy. I had the bright bike against the white house, yellow catching a corner of sight. Orange, you said, but it took a few seconds and you had to cast back.
You had only a few classes to finish—and that fits the scene, more reasonably shows why you’d be clearing brush at two in the afternoon or dusk, whenever it was I looked up from my books, out the big window and across the two yards. And you’re right, it was only two yards, and there was a gate that only partly unhitched, and I had to slip through holding my breath. The neighbors kept buckets for seedpods, last onions, and hard green tomatoes to fry. The dried stalks crunched underfoot in the cold. The frost made things loud and marked my coming to see you with a form of intention I did not have. Or did not recognize. Or could not admit. I was no good with intentions and outcomes then. Your sensibly ordered, manageable tasks—lined up weekly and weekly checked off—made for me a more solid present. And though you couldn’t have known it then, in that way, you dispensed a dose of ease.
My father once painted and fired a series of Toby mugs just fo
r fun or to sell, no one in my family recalls—fat English gents, with flushed faces and waistcoats—which only recently I’ve learned to pronounce wescotts. My grandmother kept two of these mugs in a phone nook, in a corner of her dining room where, tethered to the heavy black phone, she’d sit in a straight chair and talk. There was a clipboard for appointments and a pen in a holder, silver-and-black, like a slim torpedo. There was a pair of sharp scissors, a letter-opener and pencils in a green cup with a worn velvet bottom. On higher shelves in the nook, a pewter pitcher, a lace doily, a squat crystal vase.
Most of all I liked the cheeks on the Toby mug gents. They were shiny and round—feminine in their invitation. You were rosy enough to have thought of me then as dark. A dark presence, you said (I was, likely, brooding), in the co-op one afternoon, which is now a well-lit and spiffy place, full of imported meats and good wine—no more dusty rice bins with big metal scoops, or vegetables clumped with fresh farm dirt. And now, while I’m back in town for a few months, the co-op’s across the street from my apartment, and again it’s where I shop. You described, just the other day, how we met: you were next to me on the checkout line and almost said nothing because, at the time, you didn’t know how to say even the simplest things to women, but you think I invited you somehow to speak—and we found we were neighbors and walked home together. I would have had in my bag dried noodle soup packets, fruit, coffee, and chocolate.
