Dressing Up for the Carnival (6 page)

Now she sat in a small room counting off days. A series of pictures tripped through her head, joining the pink flowers on the wall and receding finally into a continuous blur of grief. She has told Mrs. Hanna who keeps the lodging house that her husband will pay the rent as soon as he returns from a brief journey to Der byshire, a journey necessitated by a sudden illness in her mother’s family. Poor creature, said Mrs. Hanna with her munching gums, poor creature, and Lizzie has turned these words over in her mind at least a hundred times.

Late one spring night, in the tender darkness, she flung a cloak across her shoulders, swiftly pinned a hat to her head, and strode toward the site of the New Bridge.

The New Bridge is a wonder. Great iron spans swing between tapering stone piles in a manner so harmonious that mountains are brought to mind, and feudal strongholds and brave deeds. The graceful railings are decorated with iron Tritons and plunging sea creatures, thrusting their green painted heads boldly forward and interlacing their scaly tails. Far below the flooded river roars and sings.

A yellowish light now forms on the bridge railing, a spumy brightness as clear as paint, but cut over and across by shapes of heavy leaves and whip-like branches, and above them a watery aisle outlined and tinted by a three-quarters-full moon.
Now,
Lizzie whispers. And hoists herself up among the molded mermaids. Now!

But two thoughts quickly intervene. First, that she is a remarkably able swimmer. Her father, who drank, who told lies, who pocketed money he had no right to, who blasphemed, who could scarcely read, who was prideful and superstitious—this same man had taught each of his seven children, daughters as well as sons, to swim. He stood waist high in pond water and supported their bodies with the shelf of his broad arms, encouraging them to kick for their lives and thrash and keep their heads above the treacherous surface; over and over until they had it right, until it became second nature—which is why Lizzie knows that the moment she breaks through the white foam, a phantom courage will drive her smoothly and swiftly in the direction of the river bank.

Her second thought is for her hat, which is yellow straw with a band of cut-felt violets around its crown, given her by the Oxford sister on her last birthday. She holds the hat in little regard, but senses at the same time the absurdity, the impossibility, of drowning in such a hat. Nor will she leave it on the bridge railing to be picked up by the first passerby.

Suddenly, like a wave riding well above its fellows, her sorrow collapses. She smiles, licks her lips, and turns her back on the tide of river water with its glints and crescents and riding knots of gold. Down there in the swirling currents her dear Neddie’s behavior is suspended. Not only that, but she imagines possibilities of rescue. Mrs. Hanna. Her Oxford sister. Some few remaining coins in the bottom of a purse. Who can tell.

It is to my advantage that I can discard the possibilities Lizzie can’t even imagine. All she understands is that both love and the lack of love can be supported. Loneliness might even be useful, she thinks—and clinging to this slender handrail of hope she readjusts her hat and strikes off down the road.

 

 

Elsewhere, much nearer home, a woman named Elizabeth is lying on her bed in the middle of the afternoon with a plastic dry cleaner’s bag drawn up over her face, like a blanket in freezing weather. She is no longer young. A week ago she apprehended herself, not directly in a mirror, but by catching hold of her image, almost by chance, in the presence of its encircling flesh, and realized that this disintegrating quilted envelope would accompany her to the end, and that she had lost forever the power to stir ardor.

Nevertheless she is surprisingly calm, breathing almost indifferently against the thin plastic covering. She inhales and exhales experimentally, playfully, observing the way the membrane puckers and clings, then withdraws at her pleasure. She has been married for twenty-five years, and is still married, to a man who no longer loves her; it’s gone, it’s used up, it’s worn away, and there’s nothing to bring it back; half her despair derives from knowing that this thing that’s collapsed so suddenly in her, has been dead to him for years, and she thinks how much more bearable an abrupt abandonment of love would have been.

How much more acceptable, like a cleanly applied knife, if he were to leave her for someone else, one of the secretaries in his office, for instance, some girl with a swaying, gliding pelvis, with carelessly bundled dark massy hair and bright coral mouth and fingernails—perhaps her name would be Coral as well, Coral of the swervy body and rhythmic hands who would bring about an honest spasm of betrayal and not this slow airless unassuageable absence.

She tries hard to picture the two of them together, her husband and this woman Coral, and for an instant a color photo flickers on her eyelids. But she has trouble keeping it in focus. Instead she is imagining the legions of other women who have almost died for love, how they are all fetched from the same province of illusion, the same fraying story, and how they employ the same shadeless metaphors. A tragic narrative, unbearable, except that the recurrent episodes—of ecstasy, shock, loss, and lament—are similarly, cunningly, hinged to a saving capacity for digression and recovery, for the ability to be called back by clamorous objects and appointments. A woman at the end of love, after all, is not the same as a woman at the end of her tether. She has the power to create parallel stories that offer her a measure of comfort.

Already the plastic bag has loosened its hold and slipped down below her face, a bag that only yesterday enclosed a heavy gray overcoat, her husband’s, and was carried home by Elizabeth herself from the dry cleaner’s in a nearby shopping mall and put away in a cedar closet until next winter.

Close to the dry cleaner’s establishment—her brain drifts and skitters as it refills with oxygen—is a florist’s where she sometimes buys cut flowers, and next to the florist’s is a delicatessen where rare honeys and olives can be found. She is a woman whose life is crowded with not-unpleasant errands and with the entrapment of fragrant, familiar, and sometimes enchanting items, all of which possess a reassuring, measurable weight and volume.

Not that this is much of a handrail to hang on to—she knows that, and so do I—but it is at least continuous, solid, reliable as a narrative in its turnings and better than no handrail at all.

ILK

By now everyone’s seen the spring issue of
Ficto-Factions,
page 146, in which G.T.A., whoever he/she may be, summarizes the various papers that were presented at the recent NWUS Conference on Narrativity and Notation. Put your finger on the third paragraph of the summary, move it halfway down, and you’ll see that the astute and androgynous G.T.A. refers to me by name. The bit about “the new theory of narrative put forward at NWUS and how it illustrates the atemporal paradigms of L. Porter and his ilk.”

It happens that I am L. Porter—but you already know that. It’s printed right here on my name tag.

I prefer to be direct in my responses, so I’ll admit straightaway that an inexplicable gust of sadness passed through me when I came across G.T.A.’s pointed but oblique mention, and I realized too after some reflection that I was subtly injured to see myself accompanied by a faithful, though imaginary, pool of “ilk.” By the way, that should be
her
ilk, not
his,
the
L
in my name standing for Lucy, after my no longer living and breathing Aunt Lucy. (Traditionally, of course, Lucy has been a female name, and one that comes embedded with complementary echoes of
lacy,
and also the lazy-daisy womb of its final
y.
) Nevertheless, my good friends, as distinct from my “ilk,” have persuaded me that if I’m really serious about getting tenure I’d better sign my published articles with my initial only. In these days of affirmative action, Lucy Porter gets interviews, plenty of them, but L. Porter gets people to read her “ilkish” ideas about narrative.

So where exactly do I stand, then, on narrative enclosures? Or, to put it another way, how small can ficto-fragments get without actually disappearing? First, forget all that spongy Wentworthian whuss about narrative as movement. A narrative isn’t something you pull along like a toy train, a perpetually thrusting indicative. It’s this little subjunctive cottage by the side of the road. All you have to do is open the door and walk in. Sometimes you might arrive and find the door ajar. That’s always nice. Other times you crawl in through a window. You look around, pick yourself a chair, sit down, relax. You’re there. Chrysalis collapses into cognition. You apprehend the controlling weights and counterweights of separate acts and objects. No need to ask for another thing.

All right, most of us know this instinctively. Where Dick Wentworth (R. S. Wentworth, teacher/scholar/critic) goes wrong is in confusing narrative containment with sequentiality and its engagé/degagé assumptions concerning directedness, the old shell game, only with new flags attached. “Look,” I explain to him at the ANRAA Symposium in January—we collide while checking our coats at the opening night wine-and-cheese reception—“a fictive module doesn’t need a fully rigged sailing vessel. A footstool is all it needs. Or a longing for a footstool.”

And I’m not just talking minimalism here. I’m saying that fiction’s clothes can be folded so small they’d fit inside a glass marble. You could arrange them on those little plastic doll hangers and hook them over the edge of Dick Wentworth’s name tag. There’s a bud of narrativity opening up right there behind the linked lettering, as there is beneath all uniquely arbitrary signs. There’s (A) the dickness of Dick, all it says and gestures toward. And (B) the sir/surname, Wentworth, with its past-tense failure rubbing up against the trope of privilege, not to mention (C) the underground wire pulling on Jane Austen’s
Persuasion.
Like it or not, Professor Wentworth’s name bursts with narrative chlorophyl. His beard, his belly, they’re separate stories. His pale face too. A wide bashful puzzled face. His wife killed herself. Someone told me that at last year’s meeting.

I watch him draw his scarf slowly into the tunnel of his coat sleeve before handing it over to the coat-check person, all the way in, with the little fringed ends hanging out at the shoulder and cuff. His scarf is a cheap tan scarf and doesn’t deserve this kind of care. He turns to me. His mouth opens. “As Barthes says—”

“Excuse me,” I say. “I’m starving. That looks like shrimp over there.”

“So, how’s the job search going?”

“And real champagne,” I say gushingly. Ilkishly.

My Aunt Lucy, already referred to, had a short life, thirty-six years, then cancer got her, grabbed her. She lived in Bedford, New Hampshire, where she worked as a secretary-receptionist in a piano factory. She couldn’t play the piano herself, not a note. She wasn’t very bright. She wasn’t eccentric either. She almost never remembered to send me birthday cards or small gifts. The alignment of her teeth was only so-so. So why do I insist that her skinny maladroit cancer-eaten body housed an epic, a drama, a romance, a macro-fiction, a ficto-universe? Because narrativity is ovarian, not ejaculatory as so many of our contemporary teachers /scholars/critics tend to assume.

I give you my poor old relation as an example only, putting my trust in the simplifying afterlight of metaphor which is all we have. The point is, as I try to explain to Professor Wentworth: “Narrative fullness thrives in the interstices of nano-seconds. Or nano-people, like my aunt. Though oddly enough, Professor Wentworth, I was crazy about her.”

“It’s Dick. Please. Don’t you remember our last conversation when we agreed—?”

“Dick, yes.”

“Ovarian? You were saying—?”

“I should have said egg. Egg’s a good word. A single cell—”

“A single cell—hmmm.” He strokes his chin at this point, stroke, stroke.

“—holds the surfaces of the real.”

“But. But, Lucy, tension absolutely cannot be created in a vacuum.”

Is this a trick? Starting a sentence with a double “but”? I call that aggressive. Or else aggression’s reverse side, which is helplessness. “Look, Professor Wentworth, Dick. There’s plenty of high-octane tension flowing between the simple states of being and non-being—”

“Which points,” he says, “to the other side of this discourse.”

“Every discourse is born of a micro-discourse,” say I, wanting to press his sad effusions into something ardent and orderly. Something useful.

“Uh-huh.”

There is only one shrimp left on the plate. It lies curled on its side, paler than a shrimp should be, and misshapen. I feel a yearning to know its story.

Also, I can’t help noticing that its ridged shrimpy curl matches almost exactly the configurative paisley splotches on Professor Wentworth’s tie. I stare at that tie, something makes me. The mixed blues and reds strike me as boyishly courageous, but it is the knot that brings a puddle of tears to my throat. Or rather, it is the way he, Dick Wentworth, keeps touching that knot as he speaks, applying pressure with his thumb, pushing against the spread stiffness of buttoned oxford cloth and into the erect column of the neck itself. A good enough neck, soapy, a forty-year-old neck, or thereabouts. I remember that his wife hanged herself. From a water pipe. In the basement of their house. In Ithaca, New York.

“I’m afraid I don’t quite see—” he begins, his thumb rising once again, preparing to push.

His whole life seems gathered in that little silky harbor. Mine too, for some reason. Probably the champagne fizzing up into my nose.

Did I make up that part about the water pipe? Me and my ilk and I, we’re given to such exiguous notation. Doublings. Triangu lations. Narrativistically speaking, our brushstrokes outreach our grasp.

“You’ve probably heard,” says Dick Wentworth, “that we, ahem, have an opening in the department for next year. It’s, hmmmm, in composition and rhetoric, but reassignment is always an option,” he continues, “once tenure is confirmed,” he goes on, “and you might, if you will excuse me for saying so,” he concludes, “be ready for—”