Braided Lives (43 page)

and man in full armor, clanking.

When he presses me tight to his

bosom, mine is impaled

on a protective spike. If

you love me you’ll kiss me

he says and knocks out my teeth.

If you love me you’ll save

me from this imprisonment he

says as he fits a new point

to his lance and climbs

on his horse and charges. You

didn’t really love me

he mutters to my corpse;

that’s why I’m still locked

in here. Oh, the love

of women is weak. It sure

is my blood sings like gnats

in the evening as he

goes clanking off.

I feel like calling it “Man in a Can,” but I know better than to be flip. I can’t bring it to class anyhow. It isn’t in stanzas or regular meter and has no neat literary references and no ambiguity at all.

My inky palm. Wind scuds the rain over the lake in waves over breaking waves. Peter as abstraction and Peter tinkering with his equipment. Work is a room where every object has a significant place, a room where I can have what I want or at least name what I have and name what I want. Without work I am too small. My writing justifies me: what am I doing here? Writing two poems. All is not waste. I am the alchemist, turning leaden failure into golden work. Even as I wrote that of him in a moment of recoil, I believe that trapped in him is a man struggling to reach the air. If I didn’t expect from moment to moment that man to break through, I would not be here beside this northern lake.

How can these people, his uncle, leave such a pretty house to itself? Unlike the summer cottages my parents used to rent from ads in the papers for my father’s two-week vacations, this house is not furnished with battered mismatched pieces. Even the dishes are good china. How can they just leave good things here in the woods? How come they don’t bother being here?

“They don’t use this place much anymore,” Peter explains as we curl up on the leather sofa by the stove. “It used to be nice, but it’s a bit spoiled.” He gestures at the lake where the sun is setting behind the far woods.

Spoiled. I think of the treat it was for us if we got to rent a cabin in a row of cabins, three rooms and an extra cot on the porch. A rowboat was a big deal. Now his uncle has a house in St. Thomas. That’s in the Virgin Islands, Peter explains. They go there in the winter. In the summer they prefer Maine. I could stay here, I fantasize. Just stay here, with this house around me alone in all this space and I’d write and write. Would I be scared alone in the woods? I have no idea; I’ve never been allowed to find out. Imagine, to have places you can go off by yourself and be alone in a pleasant comfortable space. I catch a glimpse of the fact that Peter has brought me here because nobody in the family cares about this place; they are holding on to it as an investment when the land will be developed. Yet what is rustic to him is one of my first glimpses of what I would call luxury. All my life I have been crowded for space. Wedged in, jammed together, smelling and hearing each other. The silence of this place enters me through my ears and gives me enormous mental space to fill with words. What a privilege to enter this green world full of other creatures whom people have given names I do not know, neither the labels nor the furred, feathered or needled the labels call to mind, making precise what I see as quick blurs.

Sun tints the morning to a painted egg. Rippled straw-colored sand. Filmy jade weeds. Silver in the weathered boards of the dock where I sit on a pier. On the rim of my vision he squints through his camera. “Look to the left and up. A little more.” I stare at a boathouse, a low uninteresting building. I try to look interested. He says, “I see things you don’t see yourself. Things others can’t see. I’m going to prove they exist.” Touching me through the lens.

Now he has me wade into the water with my jeans rolled up, water so cold my bones wail. He poses me against the same pier with my hands behind me. “I used to be interested in textures,” he mutters. “The way a fly would see a book or an apple. But now I’m photographing dreams.” He uses the word a lot. This morning at breakfast he cradled his hot mug against his cheek, telling me, “I’ve got to get my dreams straight.”

Standing up to my knees in ice water assuming a posture of bondage and feeling like a fool—parody of a fashion model, with my sweater pulled tight against my breasts and my back all goose pimples —I say, “What did you mean about getting your dreams straight?” Conversation turns me from object into agent again.

“It’s time. It’s that or die inside, like my sister, like my brother. Are you going to help?”

At first I think he means his nightmares. In sleep he grinds his teeth, mutters curses, rolls from side to side struggling.

His hands move on his forehead soothing. The camera hangs like an outsized necklace. “I talk crooked and expect you to hear straight. But I make sense, if you’d listen!” He turns abruptly and stalks away, leaving me to scramble out, my teeth chattering. “Know what the old man said when I told him I wasn’t going to the traditional clan picnic? If you take another of your joyrides, don’t expect me to bail you out. You’d think I was a playboy! That’s how he talks to me. I racked up a car once when I was seventeen, and he’s still counting the pennies.”

“You have to leave home. You never really have. Even going to Michigan, you’re within striking distance. Don’t take the job in Detroit, if you don’t get the one in Brookhaven. Go to California.”

“You’re right—you see it! Yeah, my brother thinks he’s such a big man because he does a bad imitation of what my father turns out. My sister lives a mile away. We’re an old Michigan family, they say. Here long before the Fords—the salt Fords, they’re older than the Henry Fords. Yeah, I say, we were here a long time, a bunch of drunken French trappers cheating the Indians out of their furs and drinking bad rum and knocking up squaws. That bugs them…. You want to live on Long Island?”

“What’s it like? I’ve never even been to New York City.”

“We ought to go together. We will!”

“Will we?” I hardly dare believe but wish he means it.

“Scarface never lies, baby. My word is good as a bond. A tax-free municipal bond.” He is pleased with me. Gradually he has been loosening. We are making it a lot, for us; he is talking a lot. Sometimes he even embraces me when we are not in bed. “We’ll go this summer. If I get the job, you can come see me for long weekends.”

The knot is hard and green …
is
too weak

I write upstairs.

The knot tucks itself there

hard and green. If you grow

impatient and slice into it

you expose an intricacy

that rots fast. But if you wait

the sun opens it slowly

one petal at a time among

its thorns, my yellow rose.

During supper he begins to close on himself a little. As I clear the dishes he takes his narrow head in his hands. “I’m getting a headache.” He slumps forward. I stand behind him massaging his temples as I have learned to do. “More … more … there.”

At last he mutters, “Better. I’m a sick man. Will you bury me with soft hands? Hey, baby, want me to tell you a story?”

“I’m listening.” We sit on cushions in front of the wood stove. Glinting dully the eyes of the decapitated watch us.

“I saw a sleazy movie on TV last time I was home. Pepe le Moko is the big cheese in the Casbah, where he’s got everything—almost—that he needs. The cops can’t touch him. He’s safe inside. But he falls for a broad from the outside. The cops send her away. To get her back, he has to leave his walls. The cops get him. End of Pepe.”

“Who are the cops? Your father?”

“No, the same as Pepe and the girl.” He rubs his forehead slowly. “Say the supplies are running out inside the Casbah and the walls are growing higher. All the time.”

“Suppose she didn’t run.”

“She has to. She can’t survive inside his walls.”

“He doesn’t need his walls with her. She won’t hurt him. She isn’t anybody’s cops.”

He laughs.

“All she wants is to pass in and out freely! All she wants is for him to come out when he wants to. All she wants is to love him!”

“We’ll see.” He smiles at my vehemence. “We’ll see. We’ll take things as they come.” His lucid gaze lifts to my face. “Go see if there’s any Scotch in the cabinet. My headache’s gone. Or if they left any cognac. That would be too much luck.”

Sunday night I return well pleased with Peter and myself. See, I have opened my frog and a prince is stepping out. The images that flood my mind when I think of Peter are moving and gentle: his face stripped of mask, showing emotion, half fearful, half tender.

Our door is shut, and when I try to open it, I find it bolted from the inside. Donna can’t be fucking somebody right in the house? But the opening door frames her in her old plaid bathrobe, hair damp from the shower clinging to her fragile skull. Her scrubbed face crinkles with excitement. She comes very close to me, crossing a boundary of physical contact that has existed since she told me she wanted to be free of me. “Shut it quick,” she whispers.

“Are you hiding?”

“If you don’t want her around, I’ll try to get someone to take her.”

I look around. “Who?”

“Shhh.” She pads barefoot to her closet.

I look over her shoulder. Curled on Donna’s blanket a young cat lies washing its matted black coat, plainly pregnant and starved to the bone. The cat raises her triangular head from her raw side. Her ears flatten. Her yellow eyes wait on me. “Hello. Where did you get her?”

“In the alley by Campus Drugs. I was walking off a depression. Wasn’t easy making friends.” She shows me her scored arm.

“Did you break up with Charlie?”

“Yes. I can’t do it. I have to be alone for a while. I have to get a sense of myself back…. Poor girl.” She kneels to stroke the bony head gingerly. “You can see she had a home till they kicked her out—how clean she tries to be.”

The cat leans to her hand but watches me warily always. I get down on my haunches and blink my eyes, averting my gaze like a cat. “Welcome, new roommate. Can we get away with it?”

“There’ll be a house meeting about it,” Donna says grimly. “You could try to line up votes, you’re good at that. I hate people! They get a cat and they don’t want to pay to have it spayed so it gets pregnant—of course—and then they punish it by throwing it out to starve to death. Female sexuality bugs people. We’re supposed to produce babies on request and not otherwise and orgasms on request and only in both cases with our proper wedded husbands.”

I advance my hand to be sniffed. I smell interesting, like the lake and the woods and the cabin. And sex. “Poor body. What’ll we name her?”

“Don’t be sentimental.” Donna reties her robe firmly. “Cats don’t have names. Or if they do, we don’t speak the language any more than you or I can pronounce Sally’s real Thai name. Doesn’t she have nice lines?”

“And so many. Dig those vertebrae. Count those ribs.”

“So we keep her?”

“Till you move out,” I say, wary myself like the cat.

She stands before me, emphasizing the awkwardness by putting her weight on one foot, holding the other ankle up behind her to grasp. “I know I’ve been dreadful. I hate how I’ve been. I want to stop. Don’t leave me just when I’m reforming.”

Our gazes push away like opposing magnets. “Am I leaving?”

“It’s just that my A’s never felt as big as your A’s. Except for Sal, and then it turned out he was just using me, my men are never as interesting as your men. As soon as something belongs to me, I begin to disrespect it. I began to disrespect you because you loved me. But I want to stop!”

I lean on my braced hands. “I want us to be close again.”

“So do I, Stu.” Her hands clasp themselves behind her back. “I want us to stay together.”

I squeeze my wrist. Pulse, a slow fountain of hope. “I’ll keep my stuff neater. And I’ll cut down on the drinking. You learn out of books and movies that’s what you’re supposed to do when you’re a writer. I think I’m over the brunt of my bang-up. Really.”

“Take me back, Stu?”

“Who said you’d gone anyplace?”

But she had. She had. We name the cat Eurydice. You bet your next rent payment I’m not going to spoil anything by taking a sharp look backward, to hell where we’ve just been.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

G
AME
C
ALLED ON
A
CCOUNT OF
P
AIN