Читать книгу Physics of Sunset - Jane Vandenburgh - Страница 6

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Important Documents

EACH HAD BEGUN to do things that startled her. He had their old house tented for pests, forgetting to mention it. Then the house was elaborately rewired, then wrapped in tarpaper and completely reshingled. Anna was trying to work. The hammering seemed to happen directly in her skull, within which Charlie’s workmen had also come to take up residence.

He went to great expense to put in a security system, bought her a new computer as a present, had her files converted to its systems. Anna, who had been in the mountains teaching at a writers’ conference, came home to this upgrade, found she had been too dispersed by traveling—she’d lost her watch, also a pair of sunglasses—and now possessed too little craft or gravity to bungle her way through all the new layers of complication. And so it was out of his great enthusiasm and generosity that her husband managed to bury her work in the deepest levels of some new electronic hell.

Charlie built the studio in the backyard against the fence in the footprint of what had been their old falling-down garage. Anna happened to miss the ramshackle building held together by the twining of wisteria, its shingles so weathered that thin yellow capillaries of electric light showed through.

Charlie began to send her flirty e-mail from his soundproof studio. She wouldn’t answer him. It was the look of e-mail, the ugly way it printed out with its bulky dingbats and gizmos: its evanescent nature told her nothing lasts and nothing matters. E-mail was such an impulsive form, it caused a person to appear to be so naked, exhibited his weak spelling, also the twisted spine of his sentence structure. It made a person so easily rude.

There was always so much noise that surrounded Charlie. She hated the demanding little chime that said electronic “things” were in her “mailbox.” Charlie sat less than fifty feet away from her, she had a deck off her study, he might simply open the door and let his voice carry. Instead he’d invaded Anna’s one final secret place. At the jingle she could feel him on the other side of the monitor, Charlie’s watching, breathing, waiting.

Something might be really wrong with her. Stalled, she began to watch her own long white hands with an air of detachment: were these the hands of a murderer? They seemed to now move independently, as if they might suddenly shoplift or begin to yank the cork from a bottle of cold white wine to toss back a quick one. She seemed to be sending out weak flares of defiance in no particular direction. She and Veronique drank red wine now in the middle of the afternoon, becoming more and more entwined in their mutual cynicism. They gossiped so destructively she came home feeling as sick as if she’d eaten a pound of chocolates. Veronique liked to talk about sex. Anna couldn’t, wouldn’t. Veronique wasn’t verbally modest. Anna admired this but couldn’t match it. She had nothing much to say. She’d known a few boys, but that was so long ago. Her marriage wasn’t ardent. If her marriage, like so many others in the last few days of the American century, was guttering out, why should the cosmos care?

Anna shopped for groceries, lost interest, hated being made low, drawn down to gossip, stopped anyway to read entertainment weeklies in the magazines aisle, became filled with revulsion over the baseness of humanity, over her own shameful staring in bald fascination at the faces of all the famous people she could never get herself to fully recognize. She fixed on the unexpected deaths of famous people, how fame was intended to make one buoyant and large and therefore somehow inoculate against mortality—this was once religious faith’s responsibility. A poet could not be famous, by definition. If Dickinson walked down the streets of this town, she wouldn’t be noticed in any particular way. She would seem like any one of the legion of other neurotic women, all tight-lipped and sexually repressed, dressed in white, unfit to inhabit the physical world. Milvia had been designated Berkeley’s Slow Street to make a place for them to walk.

Anna had always imagined vanishing, disappearing one day, then to come alive again, completely reconfigured in some lost future. It may have been this that prompted her to annex Charlie’s last name, to give herself more letters. She needed consonants, she imagined—unlike the airiness of vowels, a string of louder consonants might add a little heft. What seemed to keep her in place now was her own place-keeping, that she stood in the pattern of generations—Anna bridged the moment between the two more luminous Margarets, the sun that was her mother, the moon of her own daughter’s ascendancy.

Anna, stuck in this earthly paralysis, stood fixated in the magazine aisle of the grocery store, suddenly unable to buy any of its garish items. There was so much wrong with food these days, no one knew where anything really came from. She decided most food was unappealing because it contained no particle of God. There was no God at all in the particularly American habit of eating way too much, then dieting. Anna took her purse and left the grocery store, abandoning her half-full shopping cart. Charlie complained that she had no other job but couldn’t keep milk and eggs and bread in the house. When was it that Charlie’s demands had become so childish?

The cultural moment now carried a waft of incense, a mood toward a paring down, a spiritual simplifying. Anna wanted to become a Buddhist, but her friend Serene Hoberman was already one and she didn’t want to emulate. Serene made an altar in her bedroom to remind her that every act of sex should carry God within it. Anna imagined her own Zen existence, how she and her daughter could make do on the $423 per month in income she received from an annuity her father left. She wanted a life filled with right action, so unlike the life she currently led. It was wrong, she thought, that she and Charlie bought so much and owned so much and were so dependent on his parents. They had no money of their own. They lived beyond their means because his parents were much too generous, really. Anna needed to simplify, she believed, to get back to whatever was essential. She had never felt so tight, so unloving. There was nothing she needed, nothing she could get herself to even remotely desire, yet she had begun to charge random items to the Amex card, things she could not imagine owning, merchandise she barely recognized after she brought it home.

Anna now sometimes caught herself in rooms into which she could not remember going. She stood at the window of her study, looking east, watching her fingers lying along the windowsill. These fingers trembled slightly. She had come searching for important documents.

She was staring up toward the houses that had been built back into the shadows of the hills. These hills burned completely in 1923 in the fire that raced down the canyon and took half the buildings on the campus. Now the windows of the houses up by the Chakravartys glinted, caught the sunlight, tossed it back at her somewhat knowingly.

Anna studied the hills as if they were more than a lesson in geography—an old volcanic uplift and wear-away, of granite outcroppings and of what was changed by heat and what was laid down by sediment and how over history topsoil ran off those old burns and into the gushing mocha-colored creeks that boiled out into the alluvial marshes rimmed seasonally by fire, and that on these trembling flatlands her house had been built. In an earthquake the ground her house stood on experienced liquefaction.

Anna had come to unreasonably believe there was something to be learned about happiness by studying these hills, that people with good houses somehow had a better chance at decent marriages.

She lost things, bills, money, pages of manuscript. Charlie made love to her. Was there God in it? She couldn’t force herself to pay attention. She had her thirty-ninth birthday, two months later her book was published. She held her breath, listened carefully, but no phone call from Heaven came. Anna felt oddly vindicated, as if she had run for her life through a thunderstorm and had somehow made it indoors, even if she was completely soaked.

“A poet lives nowhere, knows no one,” she said aloud. Someone—another poet—once leaned across two empty chairs at a reading at Black Oak to whisper this to her. Anna turned forty, promised herself she would never write again.

She wasn’t altogether certain she had ever loved her husband or that the man named Charlie Shay was someone she’d ever known or that she would even miss him if he left. She developed the unnerving habit, he said, of distractedly asking “Excuse me?” whenever he spoke to her.

They should have divorced that year. Instead they embarked on a complete remodeling of their kitchen, borrowing tens of thousands of dollars from Charlie’s parents. Their architect was Carlo Empy, the other partner in Alec Baxter’s firm.