And how much, the idea that the (heavily abridged) rustlings of your unquiet mind might amount to a creditable profession?
You make people up, she’ll reason. Why not do that more thoroughly? You know, flesh and blood. Cellular differentiation, she’ll add, in attempt to suffuse these words with undeserved magic.
You have seen me with plants, you might argue. You have seen me with sourdough culture, and goldfish … (Here you might provide her with a litany of minor deaths, deficiencies of care. Up to and including the indoor pomegranate tree, which you forgot to take out of doors—for rain and for light—before taxiing to the airport, and whose expensive leafless corpse will be the first thing to greet you upon return: Welcome home.)
Somehow, these various failures, rather than exonerating you, only strengthen her resolve: parenthood will temper you. You will become the kind of person who habitually spritzes maidenhairs and sparrow orchids, monitoring direct lines of sun and ambient humidity.
I don’t want to be quiet of mind, you’ll say.
What the hell are you talking about? she’ll say.
Fine, you’ll tell her. But if we’re using my body, we’re using my eggs.
Well, that’s just selfish.
It’s economical. More ethical, really, if you consider medical resources—are you considering medical resources?
Then it wouldn’t be ours; it would just be yours. Biologically.
Is this a legality thing? you’ll ask. I’m not to be trusted? You have it, then.
But there is the real and legitimate concern of how many real-life people depend upon your wife being properly slept and reasonably nourished, capable of making clear and imperishable arguments, in order to ensure the equitable pursuit of their own lives, the lives of their preexisting, nonhypothetical children.
What you could say, the noncombustible truth, if you were brave enough to offer it: Lover, I am afraid.
What you say instead: I am not just going to incubate. Yes, you heard me. If you want to secure your bloodline so desperately …
The argument follows more or less the same trajectory each run-through, typically culminating in each of you affecting to want a child a little less than the other, a little less than whatever might demand sacrifice in your life, lives.
Fine, she said, this morning, in the room with no view of the lake. I’ve still got a few years to work it out.
Age. She has years left, you do not. What used to be called a trump card, and now must be called an ace.
In the meantime, it’s not like you’re using your body for anything remarkable.
The same attributes that made your wife a formidable fighter have made her a proficient lawyer. She is not a malicious person. There is no terrible force that charges through her veins, darkening her blood. Her blood simply quickens, at will, with acute direction and purpose. Her ferocity follows a higher fluency, is meticulously checked and metered.
When her nose was busted for the second time, busted legitimately, she hung up her gloves without resentment. Some score had been settled—it wasn’t for others (for you) to understand. She was twenty-seven anyway. Time to lift her gaze beyond the ropes.
When you were twenty-seven, you spent most of your time appraising the lurid vinyl wallpaper of your sister’s caravan in rural South Australia, listening to snakes nesting behind the flat tires while you waited for the benzodiazepine to kick in, because there is no version of your life (better, best, or otherwise) in which your own blood does not darken with a terrible force. That would be someone else’s life altogether.
Your wife is built of sturdier stuff. Unperturbable. She could run on fumes for miles, days. Across the micro-universe of the diner table, she’s finally holding your gaze. Enough of an olive branch. What is it that makes the eyes appear to gain or recover lucency? She would tell you it’s a misperception, merely the ambient light.
She settles the bill, paying from the envelope of U.S. twenties her mother gave the two of you as an eloping gift—Here’s to shared debt!
You leave, two hands for the coffee. All that is needed now is to put a little distance, a couple of hundred miles between yourselves and the room with no view of the lake, and the things that were said within it.
Otherwise, the river, the mist and geese traveling along it at varying elevations, varying speeds, southward. Otherwise, a townie child in a blue knit cap standing atop a Hollywood-red hydrant, demanding to be carried. Otherwise, the lozenge-colored leaves adorning the hire car. The vertiginous feeling of the cold snap in your lungs, of being out of season.
You set the coffee on the car roof and hold your hands up for the keys.
Your wife hesitates on the passenger side. But can’t we wait? she asks. Walk around a bit, spend a little more of this sun? We won’t beat the dark, anyway—it’ll be dark by the time we get on the Taconic.
For now, at least, the sky is the same blue as the plastic stretched drum-tight over the boats in the yacht club lot, over names you try to guess, wandering quietly through their ranks—Hortensia, Wilhelmina, Boondoggle—voices low, as though these vessels might stir from their wintering and unwittingly crush you. Loose lips list ships. The yacht club road veers right where it meets the river, becomes gravel, becomes grassy ruts and no trespassing, water to one side, woods to the other, ramparted by raspberry canes and poison ivy receding from the cold. She goes ahead, holding most of the branches from whipping back into your face. She is dressed too lightly for this weather, but doesn’t show it. Discomfort of any kind—fear, pain, guilt, embarrassment—is an animal she keeps separate from herself. Something she can leave outside and neglect to feed.
You watch her moving along the trail. Her rangy grace, a sighthound’s lope. In your smaller moments, you are envious of her narrow shoulders, her boyish hips. With men, had you ever appreciated such things without envy? Hard to remember. With her it has been there from the first, though from the first she has forbidden such comparisons between yourselves. Seven years ago (whose party?) she was wearing a dress like slow liquid, a dark rippling fabric that feigned sliding off her at every slight turn. You complimented the dress by saying you could never get away with it. She laughed and said of course, of course you could.
You countered with all the reasons you could not—your proportions, your skin tone …
But your future wife cut you off, her face stony. No, she said. This is not what we do. This is not how we get close to each other, by making ourselves seem defective enough to safely befriend.
You’d thought a person would have to be drunk to be so forthright. She was clear-eyed. You almost apologized, but stifled the urge.
Here, she offered, more gently. A few years ago I realized I’d stopped smiling in a way that hid my teeth. Now you go, your turn.
You told her that you had, at one point, truly hated your feet. What about them, exactly, you couldn’t recall. Only that you’d taken considerable measures to keep them hidden. But somewhere along the way, you must’ve stopped thinking about them. Here they were now, exposed, in open-toe sling-backs. Apparently innocuous.
There, that’s a start, she said, and sweetly bit your elbow. She had, you noticed with some annoyance, perfect teeth.
On the trail between woods and river you say little, and she less. But you pass through the same nets of oaky light, stumble over the same surfaced roots, muddy your city boots with the same forest-river mud. Something is lifting, being forgiven, by one or the both of you. Something is being resolved at a microbial level, being silently disassembled and carted away like a threatening foreign mass under an army of tiny diligent claws. It is enough, it is more than enough. You could go like this till dark and through it, wordlessly content. If it were warmer you might suggest a quick tumble in the poison ivy. But then the path opens into a clearing, littered with signs of use or misuse: half-buried plastic five-gallon, rusty propane tank, old ribbed-glass bottles, many beer and soda cans with ring-pulled mouths gaping in a style discontinued in the seventies or
eighties. You kick through the strata of fallen leaves for any proof of the new millennium, of more recent visitors, but no.
Time slip, your wife says knowingly. The Catskills are full of them. I’ve read about it. Service stations that appear once and never again, where a tank of fuel costs six dollars and you can still buy RC Cola and Kamel Reds.
It won’t show up on film, then? you ask, reaching for your phone.
In pixels, you mean? You can try, but I bet your Instagram crashes.
It’s then that you notice the woman, standing on a narrow flank of pebbled beach, looking out across the river. Her lichen-colored parka is modern enough, Dry-Tek or somesuch. She does nothing to acknowledge she’s heard you. How has she not heard you?
She has come here to howl, to howl unhindered; you know this before she opens her lungs and begins to do so. The sound agonied, agonizing. And though you cannot know the root of the anguish, it is familiar to you. From the town, through the trees, the sound of bells. She has timed her bawling to the church bells, meaning, perhaps, that she has done this before, done this often. For how long has she done this—months? Years? Her hood is up, but she cannot be much older than your wife, than yourself. She has smooth, slender hands that are taut now, fingers splayed as though they too are emitting sound, or light. Terrible force.
Shouldn’t we see if—
But your wife touches her fingers to your wrist. She has a certain grace with grief, the grief of others. You have seen this, received it. She presses her palm flat between your shoulder blades and you turn together, away, back the way you came, towards the bells, walking abreast when the trail allows.
Dusk seeps from the ground up, obliterating the woods. A desperate, newly hollowed feeling, a draining away. In a neighboring life, you’re the woman in the lichen-colored coat, howling towards god-knows-what across the water, elegant hands rigid with pain.
Hey, you plead silently. Look at me.
Your wife turns, as if you’ve spoken. The last of the light. This morning, in the first of it: her crooked nose, her troubled brow, the glint of her still perfect teeth between her ragged lips. Here we are, you’d thought then, a fact at once miraculous and not, a deer appearing in a frozen salvage yard at midnight, tiptoeing between the moonlit wrecks.
And now, in this riverside town at the edge of the road map, watching your wife pull her coat to her chin in the passenger seat, you’re thinking it again: Here we are. An astonishment common to any love. Your blood quiet. A day in which you made the best of what little light there was, the first and last of it on your love’s face.
With eyes still closed she says, You’re watching me, aren’t you? I can tell. Stop watching me.
You want me to stop watching you?
No.
Okay.
As you flick the headlights up, the question arrives from somewhere outside your own questioning, more scent or frequency than language: When was the last time you wished for different? And the answer will be a very long way from reach.
Sinkers
At thirty-three he goes back to the town his mother was raised in. She’d taken him there as a child every summer, for her own birthday, and they’d rowed out in a hired tinny to eat a picnic above the place she believed her house must have been. Must still be. The doorstep, at least, which had been made of concrete, and maybe the skeleton of the house itself, many years drowned, its brick chimney home to nests of eels and whorls of trout.
I was born down there, she’d tell him, again and again between mouthfuls of egg sandwich and swigs of portello. And when I was fourteen the Hydroelectric came, so we all had to leave.
He’d looked out over the side of the little boat, into the green depths, and imagined his mother being hauled up out of them. Reeled like a fish to the surface, into the dry boring world, gleaming and furious and fighting the air. He imagined his father was down there too, though likely the man had never seen the town, or even the lake that had swallowed it. Still, he was somehow there, doing father things—tending to lake weeds instead of lawn, shaving his jaw, leaning over the underwater sink to stare at his reflection in the underwater mirror, his features made bleary by the gray-green murk of the government-ordained lake. Cristian had never known his father’s face. Not even the picture of it. His mother had never tried to chase this stranger down, knew he wouldn’t have stayed in any case. It didn’t matter, she said. She had everything she needed.
Does he even know about me?
Cricket, how could he?
There was no truth she meant to protect him from.
Look, kiddo, other people are going to lie to you. And some are going to do it out of what they think is kindness. Not me, though, I’m never going to. You might as well get used to it.
At the boat hire, Cristian buys three hours from the man who has run the shed for the past two decades, and likely before. Cristian recalls seeing him there, all through the nineties—hair a little less wild then, a little less white—bringing the boats in or directing them out, otherwise leaning in the shaded doorway of the hire shed, perpetually in the act of rolling a cigarette he never seemed to get around to smoking. He’s doing so now, licking the gummed edge and letting it hang on his lip, unlit, a thin cocoon dangling from a ledge. He lumbers bearlike across the dock, looks down at Cristian’s suede oxfords, up at his stiff-collared shirt—Just get outter church?—and leads him to a silver tinny, unhitching it with an in-ya-get.
Cristian knows he’s thinking tourist, with that curdled feeling of contempt and relief. It’s mostly tourists who hire, tourists who bring in money. On the jetty two children squat to stare into the buckets of live bait while their father threads their hand reels, socking hooks with wormflesh as he explains about the bells. It’s a story Cristian has overheard many times before; that if you stick your head under at just the right hour, you’ll hear the old church bells ringing.
His mother had had no patience for that sort of thing.
They don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. The church was shifted out along with everything else. Stick your head under the water, she used to say, and all you’re going to hear is your ears getting wet.
She’d told him other stories, better stories. What she called the true Provost stories. Of how the new town appeared to remember the old, and over the years had inched down the mountainside, trying to sneak back to it. Of weekends spent watching boys free-dive the drowned town, rowing out with rocks they’d use as sinkers, tipping over the sides with them hugged tight to their chests so they’d reach the bottom fast and easy, wouldn’t waste any time or breath getting down there.
It gave them longer to look around, she said.
Look around for what?
Oh, they just wanted to see for themselves. They wanted to get deep enough to look in the windows of the houses that got left behind. Like there were people still down there living watery ghost lives or something. Sitting down to breakfast at the table like normal, but when you pour out the cereal it just goes everywhere like fish food. That’s what they wanted to see, things like that.
Cristian unlaces his shoes and peels his damp socks from his feet, his shins white from the Sydney winter, from too many months lived under office fluorescents. He has brought no food, no water, just the old biscuit tin and its sifting contents. He stows it on one of the slat seats, rosellas and gum blossoms encircling the rim. Glinting. A bright day for August. Still the dark will come early, sun already stippled through gum branches. He pushes off from the jetty with outstretched arms, oars slipping in the locks.
The boatman peering from his shade, shaking his head and muttering something under his breath—paper pusher or yuppie poofter—though without much in the way of vitriol. Finally, turning away.
No wind in the valley, the lake doubling everything faithfully. Bathysphere. Ghost gums twinned from their roots, branching towards alternate skies. Nothing to trouble that second world but the wakes of a few wading birds, and that of himself, dipping the oar blades towards
their reflections without much rhythm or effect. He is no good with the oars. No good with his arms. The children’s voices are still clear and his palms already hot.
His mother. Out there on the water she’d looked glamorous. Even rowing, her forehead creased with the effort of sawing the oars back and forth, and the humidity pressing her fine hair flat. Her dress would be tucked up to keep from the slimy water sloshing in the bottom of the boat. The end of the eighties, the beginning of the nineties—somehow she’d escaped that era’s synthetic epidemic, dressing always in linen, pale silk, soft things that would crease and show stains if you were that kind of person. She was not.
Crimplene’s just another word for lazy, she said, as if he had any idea what crimplene was.
Sometimes she’d rowed them out over the house where a man had maybe killed his wife and child, or maybe not. It had been a talky sort of town, she said, and that talk just seemed to increase with the altitude after the relocation. The town had been flooded the year after the girl and her mother were found dead in their kitchen. No one ever said how. Too awful, was the only answer that parents would give. Too awful to talk about, perhaps because they did not really know, and the rumors were outrageous and conflicting. Something about poison, but whose fault, and maybe an accident after all?
Most people’s houses were trucked out of the valley, up the side of the mountain. But that house was either too rickety or too sad, and it stayed where it was. The roof tiles were salvaged but the rest was left to the flood. Cristian’s mother’s house got left behind as well, feasted on by white ants to which Cristian’s grandfather had been happy enough to surrender a three-year battle, knowing the termites’ mingy victory would be short-lived.
It was the other house, the roofless, too-awful-to-talk-about house that the boys were diving down to. Hugging stones to their chests all those years ago. Sometimes they’d surface with things held between their teeth or tucked into the pockets and belt loops of their cut-down denims. Things they called evidence: rusted cutlery, a brown glass bottle, medicinal or sinister. Someone said that if you pulled up the waterlogged floorboards you’d find—what? Proof. Of what? You know. How he. You know. And when they couldn’t bring back proof they’d surface with stories. Something down there. Something grabbed me. Swam past two shadows in the doorway. Swear it, then. I swear.
Here Until August Page 5
