The Red Tree

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Sort of,” she replied. “I don’t know about you, but I’ve been working too much. It’s never good for me, when I get that far into my work. Anyway, I won’t be insulted if you say no. I’m a lot better at taking rejection than I am at finding four-leaf clovers.”

  And I noticed then that the big moth from the front porch was circling about the light hanging above the table, and I let my eyes stray to the kitchen window, and sat there staring into the night decently hiding the red tree from my sight.

  “You feel it, too?” she asked, and before I could reply, she said, “I try not to think about it, but I never stop feeling it, squatting out there, watching me.”

  “It’s only a tree,” I said, unconvincingly, and Mothra beat her fragile wings against the thin shell of glass standing between her and the deadly heat of the 60-watt incandescent bulb.

  “No strings attached,” Constance said again.

  “Oh, there are always strings,” I replied. “Whether we put them there or not.”

  “Yes or no?” she asked, and there was only a hint of impatience in her voice. Of course I said yes. She nodded and took my hand, and led me out of the kitchen, our twin mugs of chamomile tea abandoned on the table. I followed her down the narrow hall and up the narrower stairs to her garret. There, surrounded by her canvases, all of them hidden beneath drop cloths, she undressed me, and then I sat naked on the mattress and watched while she undressed herself. She’s thinner than I’d thought, almost bony, and there’s a tattoo perfectly centered in the small of her back. Two symbols placed side by side, somewhat reminiscent of a child’s stick figures, only there were no circles to indicate the heads, and the vertical lines that would form the torsos and necks extended downwards between the “legs,” like a tail. They also looked a bit like a pair of stylized arrows pointing upwards, the tips of each crossed by a horizontal stroke. The tattoo had been inked in shades of gray, and was no more than five or six inches across. It, or perhaps they, looked like this (drawing these in with a pen):

  “What is that?” I asked, as she tugged her T-shirt off over her head, revealing breasts just beginning to lose the enviable firmness of their youth. Her nipples were darker than I expected, my expectations based on her generally pale complexion. They were, I saw, almost the same terra cotta as her irises, and for a moment I actually considered the possibility that she rouged them to match her eyes. “The symbol tattooed over your ass, what does it mean?”

  She dropped the T-shirt to the floor at her feet and stood staring down at me, her forehead creased very slightly, as though the answer to my question escaped her.

  “The tattoo,” I prompted. “I don’t know that symbol.”

  “Oh,” she said. “That. I had that done at a parlor in Silver Lake. I was pretty drunk at the time. It wasn’t even my idea.”

  I lay down, admiring her breasts, her flat belly, her hips, and trying not to be ashamed of my own body, which bears all the scars and blemishes and imperfections earned by the chronic inactivity that generally accompanies the life of a professional writer.

  “It’s a kanji, a Chinese character.”

  “I know what a kanji is,” I said, probably sounding more defensive than I’d meant to. “What does it mean?”

  “What difference does it make what it means?” she asked, slipping out of her panties, letting them fall to the floor on top of her T-shirt. Her pubic hair was the same jet-black as the hair on her head. “Maybe I was so drunk I don’t even remember what it means.”

  “You really don’t remember?”

  “Are you trying to spoil the mood?” she countered. “Do you want to discuss my tattoos or do you want to fuck me?”

  “I wasn’t aware the one necessarily precluded the possibility of the other,” and then she frowned and told me to shut the hell up, and shut up I did. She climbed on top, and pretty much stayed there the whole time, which was just fine by me. She’s the first person I’d been with since Amanda. I didn’t tell her that, but I’m going to assume she knows it. I didn’t sit down here to write some silly erotic confessional, and it’s all a blur anyway—her fingers and her tongue, her attentive lips and those odd clay-colored eyes of hers. I’m not sure how many times I came, and I have no idea how many times she came. Afterwards, she switched off the lamp by the futon, and we lay together in the darkness, hardly talking, listening to the night outside the farmhouse.

  “Forest,” she said to me. “It’s the kanji for ‘forest.’ At least, that’s what the tattoo guy told me.”

  “And why did you have the kanji for forest tattooed on your back?” I asked. “Unless it’s a secret, I mean.”

  “I swear to fuck,” she sighed, “I honestly can’t remember that. I wasn’t kidding about being drunk. We’d been doing shots of Jägermeister with Bud all night.”

  “We?”

  “Nobody important,” she said, and I didn’t press the matter. She laid her head on my left shoulder, and told me that she could hear my heart beating.

  “That’s usually a good sign,” I said. She laughed very softly, and sometime after that, I drifted off to sleep. If there were dreams, I can’t remember them.

  I woke to the angry caw of a crow, which seemed loud even over the chug of the AC unit.

  I made coffee while Constance made breakfast, and while we were eating, she mentioned the short story again. I’d forgotten all about it, and would have been very happy to let things stay that way.

  “I’m not sure about the title, but it’s actually pretty good,” she said, and, deciding maybe it was easiest not to argue, I asked if the manuscript was still upstairs.

  “Yeah,” she replied. “But I’ll bring it back down right after I finish my coffee,” which she did.

  Seventeen onionskin pages, held together with a plastic paper clip, and most of them bearing corrections and proofreader’s marks in red pencil. My handwriting. And so now I’ve come full circle, and if there’s anything I’m forgetting, anything that matters, it’s going to have to wait until later, because I think I hear the car.

  PONY

  FOR AMANDA

  I. The Window (April)

  Helen opens a window, props it open with a brick, and in a moment I can smell the Chinese wisteria out in the garden. The first genuinely warm breezes of spring spilling across the sill, filled with the smell of drooping white blossoms and a hundred other growing things.The sun is so warm on my face, and I lie on the floor and watch the only cloud I can see floating alone in a sky so blue it might still be winter out there. She was reading her poetry to me. I’ve been drinking cheap red wine from a chipped coffee cup with an Edward Gorey drawing printed on one side, and she’s been reading me her poetry and pausing to talk about the field. At that moment, I still think that neither of us has been back to the field in years, and it’s surprisingly easy to fool myself into believing that my memories are only some silly ghost story Helen’s been slipping in between the stanzas. Not the vulgar sort of spook story that people write these days. More like something an Arthur Machen might have written, or an Algernon Blackwood, something more mood and suggestion than anything else, and I congratulate myself on feeling so removed from that night in the field and take another sip of the bitter wine. Helen’s been drinking water, only bottled water from a ruby-stemmed wineglass, because she says wine makes her slur.

  I open my bathrobe, and the sun feels clean and good across my breasts and belly. I’m very proud of my belly, that it’s still flat and hard this far past thirty. Helen stops reading her poem again and squeezes my left nipple until I tell her to quit it. She pretends to pout until I tell her to stop that, too.

  “I went back,” she says, and I keep my eyes on that one cloud, way up there where words and bad memories can’t ever reach it. Helen’s quiet for almost a full minute, and then she says, “Nothing happened. I just walked around for a little while, that’s all. I just wanted to see.”

  “That last line seemed a bit forced,” I say. “Maybe you should read it to me again,
” and I shut my eyes, but I don’t have to see her face to know the sudden change in her expression or to feel the chill hiding just underneath the warm breeze getting in through the window. It must have been there all along, the chill, but I was too busy with the sun and my one cloud and the smell of Chinese wisteria to notice. I watch a scatter of orange afterimages floating in the darkness behind my eyelids and wait for Helen to bite back.

  “I need a cigarette,” she says, and I start to apologize, but it would be a lie, and I figure I’ve probably done enough damage for one afternoon. I listen to her bare feet on the hardwood as she crosses the room to the little table near her side of the bed.The table with her typewriter. I hear her strike a match and smell the sulfur.

  “Nothing happened,” she says again. “You don’t have to be such a cunt about it.”

  “If nothing happened,” I reply, “then there’s no need for this conversation, is there?” And I open my eyes again. My cloud has moved along an inch or so towards the right side of the window frame, which would be east, and I can hear a mockingbird singing.

  “Someone fixed the lock on the gate,” she says.“I had to climb over.They put up a sign, too. No trespassing.”

  “But you climbed over anyway?”

  “No one saw me.”

  “I don’t care. It was still illegal.”

  “I went all the way up the hill,” she tells me. “I went all the way to the stone wall.”

  “How many times do I have to tell you I don’t want to talk about this,” I say and roll over on my left side, rolling towards her, rolling away from the window and the cloud, the wisteria smell and the chattering mockingbird, and my elbow hits the Edward Gorey cup and it tips over.The wine almost looks like blood as it flows across the floor and the handwritten pages Helen’s left lying there.The burgundy undoes her words, her delicate fountain-pen cursive, and the ink runs and mixes with the wine.

  “Fuck you,” she says and leaves me alone in the room, only a ragged, fading smoke ghost to mark the space she occupied a few seconds before. I pick up the empty cup, cursing myself, my carelessness and the things I’ve said because I’m scared and too drunk not to show it, and somewhere in the house a door slams. Later on, I think, Helen will believe it was only an accident, and I’m not so drunk or scared or stupid to know I’m better off not going after her. Outside, the mockingbird’s stopped singing, and when I look back at the window, I can’t find the white cloud anywhere.

  2.The Field (October)

  This is not the night.This is only a dream of the night, only my incomplete, unreliable memories of a dream, which is as close as I can come on paper.The dream I’ve had more times now than I can recall, and it’s never precisely the truth of things, and it’s never the same twice. I have even tried putting it down on canvas, again and again, but I can hardly stand the sight of them, those damned absurd paintings. I used to keep them hidden behind the old chifforobe where I store my paints and brushes and jars of pigment, kept them there until Helen finally found them. Sometimes, I still think about burning them.

  The gate with the broken padlock, the gate halfway between Exeter and Nooseneck, and I follow you down the dirt road that winds steeply up the hill through the old apple orchard, past trees planted and grown before our parents were born, trees planted when our grandparents were still young. And the moon’s so full and bright I can see everything—the ground-fall fruit rotting in the grass, your eyes, a fat spider hanging in her web. I can see the place ahead of us where the road turns sharply away from the orchard towards a field no one’s bothered to plow in half a century or more, and you stop and hold a hand cupped to your right ear.

  “No,” I reply, when you tell me that you can hear music and ask if I can hear it, too. I’m not lying. I can’t hear much of anything but the wind in the limbs of the apple trees and a dog barking somewhere far away.

  “Well, I can. I can hear it clear as anything,” you say, and then you leave the dirt road and head off through the trees.

  Sometimes I yell for you to wait, because I don’t want to be left there on the road by myself, and sometimes I follow you, and sometimes I just stand there in the moonlight and branch shadows listening to the night, trying to hear whatever it is you think you’ve heard.The air smells sweet and faintly vinegary, and I wonder if it’s the apples going soft and brown all around me. Sometimes you stop and call for me to hurry.

  A thousand variations on a single moment. It doesn’t matter which one’s for real, or at least it doesn’t matter to me. I’m not even sure that I can remember any more, not for certain. They’ve all bled together through days and nights and repetition, like sepia ink and cheap wine, and by the time I’ve finally caught up with you (because I always catch up with you, sooner or later), you’re standing at the low stone wall dividing the orchard from the field.You’re leaning forward against the wall, one leg up and your knee pressed to the granite and slate as if you were about to climb over it but then forgot what you were doing.The field is wide, and I think it might go on forever, that the wall might be here to keep apart more than an old orchard and a fallow plot of land.

  “Tell me that you can see her,” you say, and I start to say that I don’t see anything at all, that I don’t know what you’re talking about and we really ought to go back to the car. Sometimes, I try to remember why I let you talk me into pulling off the road and parking in the weeds and wandering off into the trees.

  We cannot comprehend even the edges of the abyss.

  So we don’t try.

  We walk together on warm silver nights

  And there is cider in the air and

  Someone has turned the ponies out again.

  It’s easier to steal your thoughts than make my own.

  “Please, tell me you can see her.”

  And I can, but I don’t tell you that. I have never yet told you that. Not in so many words. But I can see her standing there in the wide field, the tall, tall girl and the moon washing white across her wide shoulders and full breasts and Palomino hips, and then she sees us and turns quickly away. There are no clouds, and the moon’s so bright that there’s no mistaking the way her black hair continues straight down the center of her back like a horse’s mane or the long tail that swats nervously from one side of her ass to the other as she begins to run. Sometimes, I take your arm and hold you tight and stop you from going over the stone wall after her. Sometimes you stand very still and only watch. Sometimes you call out for her to please come back to you, that there’s nothing to be afraid of because we’d never hurt her. Sometimes there are tears in your eyes, and you call me names and beg me to please, please let you run with her.The cold iron flash from her hooves,

  And that’s my heart lost in the night.

  I know all the lies. I know all the lies.

  I know the ugly faces the moon makes when it thinks

  No one is watching.

  And we stand there a very long time, until there’s nothing more to see or say that we haven’t seen.You’re the first to head back down the hill towards the car, and sometimes we get lost and seem to wander for hours and hours through the orchard, through tangles of creeper vines and wild grapes that weren’t there before. And other times, it seems to take no time at all.

  3.The Pantomime (January-February)

  This is almost five months later, five months after that night at the edge of the field halfway between Exeter and Nooseneck. We never really talked about it. Helen would bring it up, and I would always, always immediately change the subject. I didn’t tell her about the dreams I’d started having, living it over and over again in my sleep. And then one night we were fucking—not having sex, not making love—fucking, hammering our bodies one against the other, fucking so hard we’d both be bruised and sore the next day, as if this were actually some argument we lacked the courage to ever have aloud, fucking instead of screaming at one another. And she began to whisper, details of what we’d seen or only thought we’d seen, what we’d seen reimagined
and embellished and become some sick fantasy of Helen’s. I pushed her away from me, disgusted, angry, and so I pushed too hard, harder than I’d meant to push her. She slipped off the side of the bed and struck her chin against the floor. She bit her tongue, and there was blood on her lips and her chin, and then she was screaming at me, telling me I was a coward, telling me I was a bitch and a coward and a liar, and I lay still and stared at the ceiling and didn’t say a single word. Most of what she said was true or very nearly true, but hearing it like that couldn’t change anything. A few minutes later she was crying and went off to the bathroom to wipe the blood off her face, and I took my pillow and a blanket from the closet and spent the night downstairs on the sofa.

  And this is another month after that, so late in February that it was almost March. I’d done nothing worth the price of the canvas it was painted on in months. Helen’s been away in the city, a writer’s workshop, and I take long walks late in the day, trying to clear my head with the cold air and the smell of woodsmoke. Sometimes I only walk as far as the garden, and sometimes I walk all the way down to the marshy place where our property ends and the woods begin. And I come back from an especially long walk one night, and Helen’s car is in the garage. I have an owl skull I found lying among the roots of a hemlock, and I’m thinking it’s the missing piece of the painting I haven’t been able to finish. In through the kitchen, and I call her name, call her name three times, but no one answers me. I hear voices, Helen’s voice and another woman’s, and I climb the stairs and stop outside the bedroom door, which has been left open just wide enough that it’s almost shut but I can still see what’s going on.And I understand that I’m meant to see this. Helen isn’t trying to hide anything. She’d have stayed an extra night or two or three in the city, and I never would have asked why.This is being done for me almost as much as it’s being done for her.