CHAPTER 3
IT WAS THAT SUMMER, THAT REFULGENT SUMMER LONG ago when breathing was its own luxury, that I last read Moby-Dick—that summer Lydia and I were in love. We read it together, each separately, but at night reading aloud favorite passages to each other, passages that occasionally would be the same. Ishmael on the masthead, Lydia and I beneath the white sheets. Let me make a clean breast of it here, and frankly admit that I kept but sorry guard. With the problem of the universe revolving in me, how could I—being left completely to myself at such a thought-engendering altitude—how could I but lightly hold my obligation to observe all whale-ship’s standing orders, “Keep your weather eye open, and sing out every time.”
“It’s lucky I’m not alone in the heights,” I’d say, “what with the problem of the universe sitting here beside me as it whirls around within me.”
“It is a problem, isn’t it?” And then grabbing the edge of the sheet, and giving it a quick tug upward so that the cloth billowed above our bodies, revealing us to ourselves, she would sing out, “Thar she blows!”
I remember her body then, her white body beneath the sheet’s gauzy light—her living body impossible to speak of or define. It was a woman’s body, breasts and hips, a pale body, and it was Lydia’s. A body with a name. To say her name the tongue presses against the backside of the front teeth, draws back to the top of the palate, liquid to plosive, and then the tongue drops, the mouth opens as the hard e lowers into the long a, the tongue just edging over the bottom teeth, and the name is said, it is spoken, expelled with the breath as the sheet falls back down, as she turns toward me, having heard her name . . .
“But you know what the danger is?”
“Of hunting whales? I’d guess it is the whales.”
“No, of thinking alone on the masthead.”
“Yes? That you fall down.”
“Right. But it’s what you fall into.”
“The ocean.”
“Yourself.”
She looked at me, the sheet fully settled back over us, under the waves again. “That’s why it’s good not to be alone.”
I hold now in my hand that same book I read that summer with her, carrying it from the study, in between the hallway’s white walls that somehow seem to press toward me, glass picture frames only a brilliant white sheen showing nothing of the faces they covered. I walked to the hook where my book bag hangs, opened its flap, and put the novel in. I’d long ago thrown out the notes I kept diligently for many years—my attempt at thinking intricately enough to trace the intricacy of the book, those yellowed pages bound together by a rubber band, my mind outside my mind, words to remember what otherwise I might forget. I put the novel in, spine first so the thumb-dirty pages faced upward, and snapped the bag shut. Taking it from the hook, I walked out the door to school. It felt empty. But in my head the book was heavy, an anchor-weight plunging my mind again to airless depths. The summer day today eerily calm, no wind, no breeze. The waters were still. Or would be still, if I were on the water. The trees looked to my eye burdened by the weight of their leaves, as if the very thing that sustained them, that took in the light that fed them, was their most intimate threat. Invisible within one tree a house finch sang. I walked underneath the song. The broken shell of a robin’s egg on the path, smear of yolk, but no tree above it from which it could have fallen.
That refulgent summer long ago, that summer, when Lydia and I were in love, we went to the art museum downtown to see the new exhibition. We walked up the granite stairs and through the revolving door in the opaque glass wall that was the museum’s front, only to see ourselves approaching ourselves in the mirrored surface of a faceless rabbit standing attentively in the foyer. Actually, we appeared twice. First in the belly, our images growing less distended as we neared the polished curve; then in the rabbit’s featureless face, our heads’ dark upside-down circles where the rabbit’s eyes should have been, as if he was using us in order to see us.
“Reason and Appetite,” I said, reading the title on the placard on the wall.
Lydia took me by the hand and guided me through a milling crowd of students to a side room in which the museum displayed objects from its permanent collection, curators selecting objects according to a theme. The word REFLECTION was written in bright metal above the door. Against a sheet hanging in the middle of the room a film loop showed a cupped hand filled with water, and on the water’s surface, the face of the man holding it; every second or two small ripples would disrupt the portrait of himself he was holding—his heartbeat—and then his face would appear in his own hand again. A broken mirror on the floor. A pair of mirrored shoes on a pedestal, each on a separate motorized cylinder that, at regular intervals, clicked the heels together. A string dripped water onto a mirror flat beneath it: its surface, perfect elsewhere, is slightly marred by the water dropping onto it; the eye works out the process in reverse, imperfection in the perfect surface, noticing the water drop that out of its own destruction builds an instantaneous crown, to the string from which the water dropped; and looking at the string, seeing a mirror on the wall directly behind it, a mirror that had been through the same process, which had on its surface a dark crater that, when standing before it, water dripping off the string in front of your gaze, put a hole in the middle of your face. A painting of a man looking in a mirror and seeing the back of his own head. And set against an entire wall, a series of different-sized mirrors each in a different frame, some ornate, some austere, one with no frame at all, an oval mirror hanging by a string tied around a nail in the wall.
“It’s called Family Portrait,” Lydia said, reading from the pamphlet accompanying the show. “The artist asked each member of his family, parents, wife, children, to choose a mirror of his or her liking. He placed the mirror on the wall and asked each person to look at herself. He borrowed a machine from the psychology lab at the University that recorded the motion of each person’s eye as she looked at herself—the ‘saccadic motion’ it says here. Then for parents and wife and children he etched those lines—the eye’s motion when one looks at one-self—on the mirror each had chosen.”
I walked over to a mirror in golden baroque frame, clusters of grapes in gold, sparrows and finches in gold, ivy twining in gold that on closer inspection was a golden paint chipping off from the wood in many places; I could see the grain of the wood on the finch’s beak whose wing tip was broken. On the mirror’s surface were a bunch of lines, hundreds of lines, a chaos at first that began, on looking closer, to take order if not shape. There was no outline of head or of face. Only lines clustered together, hinting at what was being seen: thick crosshatches marking what must be the mouth, and linking the mouth, in a series of jagged diagonal lines, the right eye, marked by the overarching brow, and with a set of compact circular lines that marked what looked like two pupils in a single eye. And then the eye was my eye, and I was seeing my face through the face of another. I felt suddenly awful. I had put on the mask of another person’s eyes. Then Lydia’s face was next to my own. She said, “Look,” pointing at the small placard next to the mirror, a placard I hadn’t noticed, “this is a self-portrait.”
“It is?”
“Yes. It’s titled Me.”
I looked back in the mirror, my face inside his face, my eyes in his eyes.
“So, that’s ‘Me,’” I said, and walked out of the room by myself, turning around at the door to see Lydia absorbed by the same portrait, and a slight step back of shock when she saw her eye caught in the artist’s.
We walked down the hall of old arms and armor, reliquaries and goblets. A shield with a gun’s muzzle pointing out its center. Saint’s tooth in a glass box.
“There was something awful about that, wasn’t there?” Lydia said.
“About those mirrors?”
“Yes.” She looked to her side at a rifle whose butt inlaid with ivory depicted a unicorn fleeing hunting dogs and the hunters behind them. “To see yourself as someone else. To be a stranger like that
. But more: It’s intimate.” She said the word as if in awe and disgust. “You stand in front of a mirror every day, and every day it shows you exactly whom you’ll know you’ll see—just yourself. It’s good to know, somehow, isn’t it, that you’re yourself and no one else?”
“I’m kind of taken by the thought of being someone else,” I said, trying to recover my humor, to find a way to remove us from the strangeness of the hour.
But Lydia kept along the lines of her thought, tucking a strand of hair back behind her ear. “We think we’re checking our hair, checking to see if anything is stuck in our teeth, if we look presentable—but it’s a different question, one we’re always asking but never say.” She stopped talking, but she wasn’t quiet. There was an inward noise in her face. We walked past a gallery in which I saw a woman in a painter’s smock, easel in front of her, exactly reproducing on her canvas the painting she was looking at, a lioness with a blood-red mouth drinking from a pool. “The eye doesn’t know it, but sight is anonymous.” She said this with finality, as if she had reached a scientific certainty.
“What’s the riddle?” Exasperated, but trying to hide it. “You’re speaking as if you’ve answered the riddle.”
She pointed into a glass case where a face painted on a porcelain platter had cracked in half. “Just that. I don’t know how else to say it. It’s not just seeing myself through another person’s eyes—that’s fine. I get that. Psych 101. It’s—it’s seeing myself see, seeing him see. It’s seeing sight. It’s thinking that my eye isn’t me. That it has no personality. That it’s anonymous. That my eye wonders who I am—.” We walked past a row of figureheads leaning out from the wall: an Indian chief, a mermaid, a Puritan woman holding a Bible to her chest, a griffin with glass eyes. “It’s being incomplete, asking ‘who?’ when you think you’re saying ‘me.’”
“And?”
“And I could be anyone.”
“But you’re not anyone. You’re you. Lydia, astronomer, teacher. Lydia with a freckle on her eyelid.”
We’d walked up a set of stairs hardly noticing the steps and into the hall where the special collections hang.
“I’ve seen that look before, that look of looking, blank and not blank.” Lydia paused, smiled at me—a strange, inexplicable smile, the smile someone gives you before telling you they’re ill. “My first summer home from college I had taken to practicing the violin in the attic at night. My father thought I was doing it to be dramatic, to be an artiste. But I played in the attic to be in the only place in the house that felt unfinished, unformed. I went to play among all the things that through the years had been discarded. The violin, I knew, was something I was going to discard. I was going to get rid of the life I was supposed to live, stuff it in a trunk, let the moths live on it, not me. My father—he would sit on the top of the steps and listen. One night, practicing the same piece over and over again, Vinteuil’s Sonata, the little theme, I kept missing a note—something I almost never did—missing a note in the simplest theme. The attic window was dark and the stars were coming out. I remember Venus so bright—that’s strange, isn’t it? to remember Venus so bright? My father came up. He looked at me like he was looking at his looking at me. He looked at me this way, you know, this certain way—and as he looked at me I told him I was done, done with it, the violin. That violin, I remember it. I remember the weight of it in my hand. It was an heirloom. In it, my father would say, is the music my ancestors played. My grandfather played it. My father gave it to me on my thirteenth birthday. When I told him—told him I was done, done with music—he looked at me, looked at his looking at me, walked up to me, took the violin in his hand, and smashed it against the floor, once, twice, until it shattered, junk among the junk, and he turned around, didn’t say a word, walked away and never mentioned music to me again. I looked out the window. I could see my own face in it—that same look. Looking at myself to see who I was. And then I looked through me, and there was Venus, cloudy Venus, and I heard the sound of the broken strings still humming in the air, against the rafters, slowly dying but singing still.”
“How did you feel?” I asked.
“I felt proud.”
I didn’t know what to say. I just took her hand and walked through the large doorway—so large it was as if a wall had been removed to form it—around the partition with the artist’s name reproduced in large vinyl letters, replicating his own handwriting, G. Moreau, to find before us two paintings. One painting showed a man, quite feminine in appearance, lower body wrapped in blue cloth, head bent in mourning, left hand raised over and behind him, holding on to the broken dead limb of a broken dead tree, and a cloth or veil numinous and ghostly behind his hand, hanging from the tree or from his fingers, a veil that in its semitranslucence also took shape, an owl or the spirit of an owl. The full moon—or is it the sun?—impossibly in front of the dark red trees. A mausoleum behind him. The man looked almost serpentine, holding in his other hand a flower he bent his head toward, not to smell it, but as if to press it against his forehead, to press it against the place of memory. Below him a dark patch—water, or hole, shadow from some unseen immensity, passage to the underworld.
In the other painting a woman with ivy twined in her hair, dressed in luxuriant prints, arabesque and oriental, looking down at the shield she cradled in her arms on which—eyes closed, mouth slightly open, head garlanded in laurel—a man’s severed head rests. It was the head of the man from the other canvas.
“They are both paintings of Orpheus,” Lydia said. “Orpheus at the Tomb of Eurydice and Young Thracian Woman Carrying the Head of Orpheus.”
“I know. I mean, I know the story. My father—for a long time—was concerned with Orpheus, his myth. ‘Concerned’ might be too light a word to describe it. He often told me about Orpheus at night before bed; he wrote me letters about Orpheus.”
“Why?”
“That’s a long story. I’m not sure I really understand why myself. Orpheus, he was a singer, a singer whose song was so beautiful not only people would be helpless to listen, but stones, trees, flowers. This meant something to my dad. Eurydice was the woman he loved and she died, bit by a snake on their wedding day, and Orpheus sang his way into the underworld to rescue her from death. And this meant something to him, too. It meant everything to him. Eurydice would follow him as long as he didn’t look back—his song had to do his looking for him. But he did look back, and she fell back into the shadows, back into death.” Then, looking at the second painting, “And the god-crazed women, years later, the maenads, they struck off his head, which sang as it fell through the air. Like your violin. Singing as it died.”
I felt, I should say, very sad. I thought about my father; I imagined him in my head, but where his face should be I saw a mirror; I saw myself looking at him, my face on his body looking back at me, my eye etching an eye on the glass.
“Let’s go, Lydia. I’ve had enough art for the day. And there’s something I’d like to show you, something at the house, an old book that meant much to me.”
“What’s the book?”
“A book of wonders.”
We retraced our steps through the museum. We walked by a gallery full of commotion. An elderly man had fallen down; his glass-topped cane lay in the middle of the room. A group of people gathered behind him, a sort of semicircle, almost as if he were a docent pointing out the details of a masterpiece; one woman let him rest back against her. He was pointing up at a painting, a view of a city by a river or lake—I could only see it for a moment, just out the corner of my eye—and saying in a feeble voice, nonetheless quite loud, “little patch of yellow wall, little patch of yellow wall.” And then the man was gone, the scene erased, and we stepped out into the late summer’s yellow light. How is it that dusk begins gathering in the trees before the sky? But so it is. Lydia walked down the steps and didn’t look back; I kept turning around to see who might be following.
CHAPTER 4
“YOUR MOTHER WAS SO PRETTY. IT’S A SHAME SHE�
��S NOT looking up at the camera,” Lydia said, looking at the photo in the hall.
“I spent a lot of time as a boy looking at that picture, trying to remember her face. Sometimes I still try, but her face seems to be behind a veil, a veil the wind sometimes pushes against her face’s shape. A cloth floating in the air, the shape always changing. I think as a boy I could remember it better, that she was more present to me. Still almost alive. My father took the photo down one day. I suppose it was painful for him to see it. The wall had a whiter square where the frame had been. I stared at it and cried, as if her face were still there, until he put it back.”
“It sounds like such a lonely childhood.”
“Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe it was. I read a lot. My father encouraged me to do so, of course. It gave him time to work. I would sit under his desk, leaning back against his legs, reading.” We walked down the hall to the study. “And when he wasn’t working on the scroll, when he was out in the yard, or teaching, or cooking dinner, I’d sneak into the study and read a book on the shelf I was not allowed to read, a book of old fairy tales, dark tales and strange wonders. It would give me nightmares. It frightened me. But I loved it. It made me feel closer to something I felt in me but could find no words for—it explained something about the world no one would talk about to me—”
“Your mother’s dying?”
“Probably, yes.” Lydia’s saying that phrase, saying it so simply, so directly, affected me. My mother had not ceased to die. I felt like the little boy I had not ceased to be—that continuous child inside the adult who wanders through the labyrinth of his grown-up self, lost, afraid of monsters, afraid to speak too loudly lest his own words reveal him, and put him in greater danger, put him in the hands of the monster he asks for help to avoid.
An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky Page 8
