Читать книгу Physics of Sunset - Jane Vandenburgh - Страница 10

6

The Parts of Speech

WASN’T LIFE ITS own grand and spacious miracle? That she who needed nearly perfect silence in order to work had somehow married a musician? This had honestly never before occurred to her. Being weak-minded, Anna was as bullied by music as she was by being in the room with an attractive person. Music approached her, tried to get inside her just after she’d gone numb. Music wanted her, wanting her to become lost to its fluency.

Fluency was what Anna always lacked. She had, in speech, not so much a real stutter as the need to halt, wait, pause at the blockades put up by any kind of disjunction. In high school this evolved from a slight stumbling to a need to fully stop at any kind of punctuation so she could peer out cautiously over the line to see what lay ahead of her. The speech pathologist taught her how to slow down, press her lips together, focus, breathe, go on.

The whole course of her life now seemed to come down to these matters of hesitation. It wasn’t that Anna hadn’t been able to finish a dissertation as much as she hesitated to even really start one. She always felt the need to eliminate as silly or wrong or clichéd or probably more untrue than true more words and phrases than she could bring herself to produce and so ended up, year after year, with fewer and fewer pages to show to her advisor.

This man came to her wedding, held Anna’s hand for a long time at the reception, staring down into her palm as if reading her future. He was more than a little drunk, became too effusive in praising her interesting mind. He wanted to ask something of her, he said. He wanted to ask Anna to not go into the house and never come back out again.

But what did she have to say about Dickinson that hadn’t already been better said? And why should anyone whisper another syllable about this poet, surely our most silent and importantly vanished one? Could Anna’s thesis be only two lines long, say just that? Could she submit one holograph page of her own loopy handwriting marked by her own wavering and infinite dashes?

She became perversely proud of it, the Ph.D. dissertation that went backward year by year toward its own inevitable nonexistence. She fell out of touch with her department, then with her advisor, finally deciding she was incapable of inflicting any part of her critical stammerings on an unwaiting world. The universe would be a better place, she knew, if less of this was written. The world also required fewer books of poetry. It wasn’t that poetry shouldn’t be made but that no one else should ever be made to actually look at it.

At forty Anna still dreamed guilty dreams of what she’d left unfinished. She dreamed of her advisor, that she saw him in the library and tried to hide within the stacks that were not stacks because they changed into the showers in the women’s gym. Through the warped optics of the glass bricks, Anna became poisonously objective. She watched her own naked body go cubist, breaking apart in a shower stall.

Why had Anna married Charlie? Was it that she once imagined Charlie’s happiness was like a language that he would be able to teach to her and that it turned out instead to be an aptitude? Like perfect pitch in music, some people had it, while most did not.

They married, made accommodations to one another, grew older, had a baby who then became a toddler. Then they went to Europe late one summer.

This was the third or fourth of the recent honeymoons given them by his parents as anniversary gifts. The two of them were sitting in a café in Prague eating dinner when Charlie decided it was time to say he’d been having an affair with one of his graduate students.

Anna licked her lips, steadied herself. It wouldn’t have been entirely honest to say she was completely shocked by this revelation. Because her sense of smell had become hyperacute when she was pregnant with Maggie, she had on occasion detected a kind of perfume on the tweed of Charlie’s jackets that smelled quite a bit like Play-Doh.

She studied the laced fingers of her hands that lay in her lap, palms upward, then looked over Charlie’s shoulder in order to catch the eye of the waiter. If this was to be another of those everlastingly introspective evenings, they were going to need another bottle of wine in order to get through it.

This was exactly what he had always loved about Anna, he said, this great calm of hers, her maturity, her self-possession. He didn’t actually say “Old Girl,” but that did undoubtedly occur to him. This was a crisis surely, but it need not be the end of them. Their baby was two and a half years old—they needed to consider, he supposed, a separation if that’s what Anna wanted; they would do whatever Anna wanted, but he wanted really to think long and hard about Maggie. There was the new study on the children of divorce, its long-term consequence. As for the student? Charlie was embarrassed to say he hadn’t been in love with her, nor she with him.

Anna was too astonished by all this to know exactly how to respond. She was suffering from a kind of aural reverberation, a bounce, then delay, then echo, that came with extreme self-consciousness in which she had to hear everything she thought of two or three times in an outwardly transmitted ripple.

She might say this or she might say that. If she heard herself speak, she might be able to determine what she actually felt. She thought of saying this: Well, that’s good, or she might say, Oh well, too bad, then, for each of you—Anna’s tone might be either blithe or sarcastic. What she really wanted to know, of course, was had there been God in it, but this question seemed much more personal than any she might ask about their specific sexual customs and/or practices.

There were gas lamps on the corner and there was hokey Czech folk music tumbling from a staticky speaker and an old Michael Jackson song blasting from the open door of the disco across the cobbled street. This was the New Czech Republic, Anna struggled to remember. All the old names of the same old countries had gone away into the Dark Zone behind the Iron Curtain but now were coming back, just as heroin was back and crack cocaine was back—she’d just read this news in one of her several trashy magazines. Whole countries were rematerializing with the New Nationalism—some had been submerged for generations—yet a blanding was happening in Europe so the countries now seemed to her to have been transported from the different parts of Disneyland.

Anna was having trouble listening. She was thinking of swimming in Sand Pond during summers when she was little and how she had always known beneath knowing that her mother took Anna and her brother Davis up there sometimes to punish their father for things he’d done. She also knew without knowing that it had to do with sex.

Sex was the Dark Zone, was buried in the layers of what was known and what was not known and what was spoken and was not spoken and in this was like the distinct layers of temperature of the water in the pond. The water was meant to remain cold, the dark and secret place. The warm layer was clear; through it the shallows displayed their golden pebbles, and that was where the reeds grew and the babies sat.

The warm layer of water was never more than a foot deep even in August at the peak of summer. The X-shaped insects skated, balanced their infinitesimal weight, the bubbled X’s haloed, echoed, on the sand below, held aloft by pods of surface tension—because of waterbugs, X was still one of Anna’s favorite letters. Through the clear water the exaggerated shadows of the water-skaters bumped and abruptly moved. It was easy knowledge that lay in the shallows, and this easiness lay atop the deeper water of the quarry. The deeper things were cold, were dangerous. Sex was dangerous, was singular, was why you learned to swim, why you were frightened, why you jumped off the raft and why you disappeared into blackness as you went off and into it.

She was thinking how very much she now wanted to take her own baby daughter and go home to East Eden, except that Anna was ashamed to have made so little evolutionary progress and to do so would mark her forever as her own mother’s girl.

She was ashamed of herself, also ashamed of Charlie for being unable to keep his word. He’d promised to change when Maggie was born—she more than half believed him. She forgot the most basic truth of what it meant to grow older: one does not change except to become more intensely what one has always been.

“You’re not angry then?” someone asked. It was Charlie. He was here. She’d forgotten all about him.

Angry? Anna wondered. She turned the word over and over, counted its various letters, rubbed it until it became as polished as a river rock. What was he talking about again? She was remembering something else. This was a huge man, both tall and fat, who once danced with her at a roadhouse. This man was maybe forty or even fifty—Anna was not yet seventeen. It was upstate near the border of Canada. She and her mother driving north in her Grandmother Rutherford’s big old-fashioned boat of an American car, having left Rhinebeck abruptly. Neither Davis nor Anna’s father was with them. They’d been driving aimlessly, heading toward the border, flying northward as if it was as “up” as the way it lay on the flat of the map, having lost all sense of internal gyroscope and with it the natural horizon.

The big man spoke to Anna in French as they danced, spoke suggestively of the things he’d like to do to her. He could not have known how completely she understood him. They danced and Anna was beautiful to him, no longer the tall shy girl with the frizzy hair, no longer awkward in speech or tripping on her size-ten feet. Dancing with that elegant man was like being danced with by the ocean.

Had he simply led her away with him, she would have gone. She would have gone anywhere that night to escape getting back into the car again with her mother’s desolation.

“Well, good,” Anna told Charlie. She heard the word recede in reverb, going good! good! good! This might be a kind of echolocation, she guessed, like the system of sonar used by bats.

She reached over to borrow his reading glasses to look again at dessert—the waiter had taken her plate and she was suddenly starving. “Good,” she said again. “That’s settled then.”

She squinted, looking for a list of pastries—she wanted something gross, something that came served mit Schlag. Some unspoken cue caused her to look up. She peered over the readers to look at her husband. Was there something wrong with him? There in the Weinstube in Prague was the first time Anna could remember ever seeing Charlie look actually frightened.

There was more, evidently , that needed to be said: Charlie hadn’t brought this up in order to hurt Anna or cause her distress but because she was going to find out anyway. The girl told her parents, who had threatened Mills with a lawsuit. Mills was arranging her admission at another school, one that was, Charlie said, really firstrate, one she probably wouldn’t otherwise have been admitted to.

Anna positioned her tongue and lips. She breathed. She was experiencing a moment of hesitation. She needed to spend a couple of moments organizing herself, her internal pacing, commas, periods, and the question marks, how they might pose what kinds of expectations. She was also deconstructing this last part: this current girl’s various chances and hopes for advancement and future happiness. And the strange twist of her good fortune. The bend this girl’s life road took there when it came to Charlie, that there was this small thing back then that her parents made into this big legalistic deal—though not serious in that it barely mattered since no one’s heart was broken, the one small irony being that what wrecked her professor’s marriage turned out to be her trampoline.

Charlie was going on. The lawyers for Mills were talking to the parents’ lawyers and both were talking to those of Charlie’s parents. It was Charlie’s parents who came up with the idea of the cash settlement for the girl and endowing Mills with the practice rooms.

Anna’s mother was a handsome woman, an accomplished pianist and a sophisticated milliner. Margaret wasn’t beautiful but was tall and thin and she carried herself well. She had a kind of wry solemnity, Anna thought, as if she had secret value.

Anna was thinking of her mother, how each seemed somehow fated to stand in the rising damp of a cabin in a logged-off hardwood forest picking men who turned out to be as useless as this one. Men like this were nothing special, men like this were a dime a dozen. Anna felt very close to her mother then.

Anna quietly gathered herself, as her mother might have, and stood up from the table. The night was warm. She remembered to take along the cardigan she’d hung on the back of her chair. This sweater had been crocheted by her mother. It was a creamy white and had tiny buttons made of pearls.

Charlie began hurriedly throwing money down on the table. He threw down great bunches of large bills printed in blue on pale pink, and green on pale blue. The paper was as crinkly and thin as the tissue used to wrap Italian almond cookies. These were made of egg white and air and sugar, weighed next to nothing; these, with Jordan almonds, were Anna’s mother’s favorite sweets. The look and feel of money was simply better in Europe, Anna thought. There were so many kinds of currencies, so many shapes and weights, bills printed so beautifully on so many kinds of paper, yet the global commerce was soon to convert it all to MouskaDollars.

Anna—tall, proud, chin up, back straight—stumbled slightly on the uneven cobblestones. She had gone a ways down the block when he caught up to her. Charlie reached to take her elbow, leaned in, needing to confide something. He needed to tell her this: if Anna was set on walking back to their pension, she was going in the wrong direction.

She steadied herself, licked the dryness of her wine-tart lips. Anna too had something she needed to confide. She leaned over to whisper it: “Fuck you,” she said.

They were a handsome couple, or so they were always told, and they did mirror one another in a certain way. She saw the two in her mind’s eye: blond, large-faced, freckles scattered across their good cheekbones. The clinical name for what was happening to her, Anna remembered, was disassociation. Anna and her husband turned, she thought. Anna and her husband began to walk the cobbled streets of this ancient capital back toward their room, which lay in the Dark Zone beyond the thumping disco.

“Excuse me, Charlie?” she asked after another moment. “But do you know what?” His head was down to listen carefully—he was clearly penitential. “You?” He nodded. “Your parents—her parents—that whole sad story?” He nodded. “It’s completely sordid.” She listened, heard her words veer off, going clipped and strange.

This old and dignified capital had been so carefully rendered in this phony theme park of this jigsaw Europe that the phony flickering gas lamps were turning out to be real. She watched these lamps as they begin to halo. There was a shine on the street and on the sidewalk and on slick wet roofs, which were made of what? Some kind of slate or tile? The shine began to blur, certain places in her vision began to bounce and magnify. She put one hand out, long fingers facing up, to feel if anything was falling. Had it been raining? Anna couldn’t remember. The water shortage was so extreme that year in California that half the counties ended the summer in emergency rationing.

“Charlie?” Anna asked after another moment. “You know what else?” He nodded a little too eagerly. “My mother has never liked you.” Then she leaned over and, as if to make a physical point of this, she threw up onto his shoes.