A City Made of Words

by Paul Park

  Relieved, he shrugged. “You’re the therapist,” he said, avoiding the word ‘shrink,’ which she hated. Her profession was a point of fact, though old men were not her specialty. Most of her patients were teenagers. She had a private practice in Ridgefield Park.

  It was too hard to explain, but inside he was wondering if Scheherazade had also employed the jazzband method of storytelling, the cornet whispering in the king’s ear, the trombone shuddering underneath them all the way back down, and the clarinet twining them in ivied filigree, now and for all future time and future readers. He had to remember thinking about this, so that he could tell Jane about it in two months if he managed to get away. He would write it down when he got home. “Please say ‘Scheherazade’ when we get back inside,” he said, a request he regretted when it still was in his mouth.

  “Anything to oblige.”

  “Unless you forget.” He was joking, of course.

  “I won’t forget.” Her lips settled into a line.

  There had been a time when he hadn’t needed these reminders. He would think about a piece of writing in the middle of the night and in the morning his head would still be full. He remembered the feeling. But now, ideas drifted away. “They flee from me that sometime did me seek,” which was a poem he had once thought to be about romantic love. “With naked foot …”

  On the island, naked or almost naked, sitting cross-legged on the bed, Jane would untie a rayon Indian scarf from around her tarot deck. At least she called it a tarot deck, but the images were not ones Mark had seen before—no fool, no hanged man, no chariot, no tower. She seemed puzzled when he mentioned this. The cards were not mass-produced, she said, but made for her, which was how everything should be. Her girlfriend had painted them. Mark got the impression the girlfriend was a good deal older and held some kind of ceremonial position at the farm.

  There were no male figures in this tarot deck. Jane consulted the cards several times a day, shuffling them and then laying them out in various patterns. They influenced her decisions. For example, that was why she and Mark had become lovers in the first place, because of a potential meaning or result. Mark guessed that in Jane’s mind at least, she was receiving directions from the maker of the cards. Humbly, he accepted those directions and the limits they imposed, no vaginal intercourse, for example. Sure. Fine. Whatever. In other ways and with other parts of herself she was generous and inventive, and he hoped he was as well.

  Actually, it was more as if she had never heard of vaginal intercourse. She looked pensive and doubtful as he tried to explain. Instead, when she brought him to orgasm, often she would pinch the tip of his penis between her finger and thumb so that she could point it away from them when the time came. “Eew,” she’d say. Then in a moment she would pat him dry with a washcloth. “Feel better?”

  “Much.” It was as if his sperm contained some toxic or acidic substance. Her job, as the competent local authority, was to remove the excess and dispose of it responsibly.

  “So … two sisters in harem pants. Are you thinking about sex?” asked Barbara, now, holding on to his arm amid the blowing snowflakes.

  “Poof. You’re the one who’s obsessed.”

  The odd thing was: the cards were easy to remember. Even after thirty years he could still picture them, big in her small hands, painted on rough pasteboard perhaps four inches by six. The Cartomancer. The Road. The Golem. The Wind. The Cage. The Prisoner. The Rabbi. The Temple. The Intruders. The Fire Ritual. The Silver Fruit-Tree. The Gift of Happiness. The Cranial Explosion. The House of Healing. The Girl among the Palms. The Musicians. “Take the image,” Jane had said once, “and make it three-dimensional. Walk through it or else suspend it in the middle of your mind.” At moments over these thirty years he had taken her advice and now he took it again, stumping down Washington Street as if it were The Road, the little shop fronts with the gray-faced women, sinister and haggard under the lowering sky. Up ahead, a bonfire in the middle of the street and a circle of black figures around it, the closest ones rendered in silhouette.

  He stepped over the gutter onto the cobblestones. Barbara followed him. But by the time he turned to her, something had happened that had coarsened her face, made her cheeks seem brown and tough as fired clay, her teeth square and yellow in her mouth. He, by contrast, as they stepped forward in the swirling wind, imagined himself losing substance, losing mass until he drifted up into the cold middle air, less a person than a point of view. Down below, clumsy and relentless, Barbara labored up the road past the little shops where the women sold chamomile and verbena and sausages tied up with string. He was down there too, an ambulatory object rather than a man, at least as seen from above, an object with a crest of whitish hair.

  On Jane’s pasteboard card, the wind consisted of a loose gesture of lines that nevertheless had taken on a human shape whose vagueness made it gender neutral, as Jane herself had grudgingly pointed out. Sketched in ink over a watercolor wash, it had more of an expression than a shape. It knew what Mark did not: where he was going. It saw his peculiar, splay-footed hobble, the way he leaned on Barbara’s hand.

  Fed with icy boughs, the bonfire smoked and sparked. But the way was blocked with angry women, rich and poor, old and young, gray-haired vagabonds dressed in rags, and schoolgirls in gabardine overcoats and flat brown hats with ribbons at the back. The central gutter was full of frozen refuse. Mark stepped slowly along its rim while Barbara prowled around him in a moving circle, protecting him as she had all their life together. Her yellow eyes gleamed. Her arms and legs pumped rotated and pumped. Hissing and muttering, the women parted to let them through until they reached the bonfire, arranged on a pallet in the icy mud. Beyond it, a cage built of rough saplings, the bark and occasional leaves still affixed, and a middle-aged woman inside, her hair lank and yellow, her homespun shirt ripped down the front. Barbara reached out with her able hands, tightened her grip on two bars of the sapling cage, pulled them apart. The headless, four-sided nails pulled away from the green wood, and the fire hissed and popped, and the circle of women closed in around them, clicking their tongues. When she looked up, Jane’s eyes were bleary and red-rimmed, her face smudged with ash. Mark did not recognize her, not yet. At that moment (he saw from above) each one of them had a double nature: Barbara and the golem, Jane young and old, and Mark’s body surrounded by its current of air. And the moment itself split and replicated also, containing Mark and Jane on the airplane with the light behind her, and on the island at the instant when, sitting cross-legged, she first looked up at him from the tarot deck, and right now in the cage as she lifted her face, and in the future also, as if he had actually gone back as she’d requested, found a way to disentangle himself in six weeks’ time, buy a ticket, get Barbara to drive him to Newark Airport, fly to Sydney and then onward, days of traveling that would culminate at La Reine Hortense, waddling with his suitcase down the road to the paillote and beyond it the white cabin and Jane waiting.

  He could see her now, or “now,” a middle-aged woman with a round face lined with happiness, which carried inside of it the Jane that she had been. In each of these incarnations he recognized her, something in her, some moment of congress not simultaneously but in a sequence, each cascading into the next like shuffling cards, and resolving here when Jane raised her face to him, her cheeks smudged, her hands raw and bruised as she gripped the sapling bars. The golem had pulled one of them loose, opening a gap. Now, yellow-eyed and fierce, she turned to confront the gathered women, outraged to see a man in their village and outraged also at this interruption of whatever they were doing with their bonfire and their cage and their rabbi—Mark saw her now, erect on the stone steps, dressed in antique ceremonial robes of silk brocade, her arms and hands and face decorated with hierophantic marking. A young woman with her hair bound up, holding in her hands the wands of chaos, the rabbi stood at the temple’s brazen door, a seam of light behind her.

  “Mark,” Jane said, as she had in so many of these moments, as she
had when he kissed her that first time after Madame Hortense had blessed their wedding and he had led his bride away from the Christmas fire and the assembled guests, up through the sudden darkness to their cabin above the beach—she had been skeptical at first, uncertain and amused. “Mark, Mark, Mark, Mark,” she said, her voice a little breathless in all the gathered moments, the words themselves like cards laid down one after the other.

  The water, he knew, would be higher now because of climate change. Perhaps all the white sand beach would be swallowed up. Perhaps even the paillote.

  He imagined this would become a ritual every year, now that they had found each other once again. They would return to the island every year until he was very old. Madame Hortense would be glad, her big face split with her red smile. She also, one night after the supper she had made for them—langoustines, some kind of reddish fish—had predicted this, predicted a yearly celebration there—“Oh, but you will see us again. Every Christmas, no?”

  “Oui—chaque année—bien sûr. Notre anniversaire.”

  The rabbi also was dark-skinned, the lines on her face and hands rendered in ochre pigment. Standing above them on the temple steps beyond the cage, she also made prophetic gestures, though of a different sort, minatory, accusing. Mark reached through the gap and took Jane’s hand, which was chafed and rough and bleeding from the knuckles. “Mark,” she said—it was so good to see her, after thirty years! And yes, he could still perceive the young woman in her body interacting with the younger man inside himself, while at the same time he imagined himself old, older even than now, closing his eyes finally after taking his leave of her. Maybe then also her eyes would be red from crying. Now he pulled her from the cage, and as the rabbi or hierophant took her first step down, and as the golem, eyes brimming with artificial malice, held the crowd at bay, he brought Jane, young and old, into his embrace and kissed her gash of a red mouth.

  The doors to the temple slid open, revealing its red interior lit with cauldrons of fire. Raising his head, Mark saw something new in the face of the hierophant, something he did not expect, a tilt of her head, a gesture with her nine-pronged iron staves. The affect of her painted lips was hard to read. With failing strength, he pulled Jane over the wet stones and up the steps. From up above, rising through the cloudy air, he saw a white-haired man, unsteady on his feet, helping or pretending to help a younger woman as the rabbi stood aside to let them pass, and he imagined he heard some shreds of words: “She broke our only law. But there is an extenuating circumstance …” The doors opened to admit them while the golem prowled around the bonfire. The temple, or ziggurat, a four-sided pyramid of stepped stone, culminated in a square terrace and a smoking altar, but soon the smoke and mist resolved, and from above he could see the green and silver landscape open up, the wide fields separated by lines of trees. Farther still and he could catch a glimpse of the lozenge shape of Nottinghamshire as if printed in a map, and then more clouds, and he was suffering as the air grew thin. In a moment, as he rose, he knew simultaneously that he was crashing to earth.

  “They flee from me that sometime did me seek, with naked foot stalking in my chamber. I have seen them …” In the white cabin above the beach, among the palm trees, he had told Jane about the things that scared him, the holes in his memory even at forty, the things he already couldn’t do anymore.

  Late at night, by candlelight, she was laying out his future in the cards. “I think we read that at school.” Later: “You know this is … unusual, for me.” Later: “I’ll go up to the temple at the farm when I get back.”

  “What temple?”

  “Of the female divine. That’s what we call it. Some of us, anyway.”

  “Ummm. What’s that like?”

  “Never you mind. Wouldn’t you just like to get your foot inside? I’ll tell you, though—it’s lovely warm. There’s a workshop on the lower level. Everyone as busy as beavers. I could make a figure out of clay, if you’d like, and bake it in the kiln. It will be my gift.”

  She put her hand on the golem card, which showed a dark figure, back bent, peering at the world through yellow eyes. “But we should know what would be good for you. Straight, probably. Why not? Change is always good.”

  With her thumbnail, she scratched at the rough pasteboard surface of the card. “Someone with big hands. A healer. You like them dark, don’t you? And a bit older than me, I should think, thank you very much indeed. Filthy old man.”

  Twenty minutes later: “Eew.” Ten minutes after that, wind through the mosquito net and the open door. A flicker in the light. Jane sitting against the headboard dressed in underpants and an old T-shirt, the sleeves ripped away. She was working harder now, more methodically, her face almost a parody of concentration. Tongue in the corner of her mouth, at moments, even, as he looked at her. With her thumbnail she had scuffed away a layer in the pigment of the card as if re-inscribing it. She had scraped at some of the background lines, changing the contours of the face and head. “There. You think you might fancy something like that? Take it. My gift to you.”

  Those words were in his head when he woke up in the hospital out of a light doze. His hand was between Barbara’s hands and she was picking at his plastic bracelet. He had slipped and fallen in the street, hit his head, suffered some kind of partial seizure. The doctor would come in to talk about it soon. Bathed in golden light, now Mark lay with the IV in his arm. His skin itched. “Have you told the kids?”

  “Not yet. I wanted to be able to say that you’ll be fine.”

  “Am I fine?”

  “You’ll be fine.”

  Mark wasn’t as sure. Along his elbow and his forearm and his wrist, the skin seemed thin as phyllo dough. By contrast, Barbara looked as good as ever, the planes of her cheeks and nose and forehead, the dark, heavy eyebrows, her expression familiar to him after all these years: imperious, loving, exasperated. “But now they range,” he thought, “busily seeking in continual change.”

  He didn’t say it. Barbara said, “Charlie Minter called about the reading. I told him you were too sick. Don’t you think that’s right? Otherwise I could go with you.”

  He didn’t feel he had to respond. That was the benefit of being sick. “I hate to take away your trip to the South Seas,” she said gently. “The island where you met that girl. What was her name?”

  He didn’t want to tell her, but he did. “Jane,” he said. “Jane Gold.” It felt like a betrayal. When he closed his eyes, he wondered if he might ever reopen them.

  “Rest now,” she said, and so he did. But he did not sleep. After some time, he could hear the hospital settling down. From the nurse’s station came the sound of distant music on the radio.

  They had spent a long time on the beach in their bathing suits. The sand was white, the water clear. When they swam out and looked down, they saw long, striped snakes among the rocks. Later, hungry and thirsty, they came up through the fringe of palms to meet their hosts—they had heard music from the paillote, an old man, as it turned out, playing the horn. This was Georges, and he broke off to greet them and introduce them to Hortense, who was cleaning out the cabins. Other people milled about, drinking wine for Christmas Eve. And Mark could feel there was a misunderstanding right here, one that pleased him, especially since Jane made no effort to correct it—not that she could have easily, because her French was not good. Someone had booked the white cabin, a couple on their “lune de miel.” Maybe they wouldn’t come. The sun went down, and there was dancing and Christmas music and more wine. Madame Hortense toasted the happy couple. There was something reassuring about the celebration of the group, the gentle teasing about the wedding night; it was cheaper for them to stay in the same room and Jane had no money. They went up to cabin to rinse off and change into clean clothes. “But I’m a bit of a Lesbian, darling,” she said.

  “I know, I know. Merry Christmas.”

  “But I’m Jewish, darling.” Already they were both a little drunk. The first time they kissed, it was in a crowd o
f people laughing and clapping and cheering them on. Jane had put on a pale yellow dress and she gave a little curtsy. Later, when night had fallen and he had lit the candle, he looked over and saw her sitting cross-legged on the bed, her dress pulled up. She laid out her cards, placing her forefinger on The Wedding (reversed). “I don’t want you getting any ideas about tonight,” she said, prematurely. “But it would be fun to come back here when we’re old!”

  In the hospital, finally, he opened his eyes to the subdued lighting, the dark night outside. He listened as the trumpet came in, bringing with it the melody—a Christmas tune, the first of the season, layered among the other hospital noises. Barbara was on the couch asleep. He admired her for a moment, reaching out his hand. But then he rocked back and forth a bit and managed to slide out of bed, managed to stumble out into the hall, barefoot in his humiliating robe. Everywhere, all around him, people were asleep, lying back on their pillows in the rooms he passed, curled up in the hallways among stacks of towels. He was following the music. And when he reached the nurse’s station, a long, high, semicircular desk, he found himself anticipating the clarinet—just a few preliminary notes—waiting for its break. The radio was boxy and old-fashioned, the nurse asleep, her head cradled in her arms. And on the island path from the gravel road down toward the shore, he could see how much had changed, how far the sea had crept up through the palms. Many trees had died and lost their tops. There at the water’s edge he caught a glimpse of an old man, turning now to come back toward him the other way.

  “Punctuality, Basic Hygiene, Gun Safety”

  Paul Park Interviewed by Terry Bisson

  You grew up in a college town. Defend.