Ghost Dance (24 page)

“Mangoes,” she sighed, “papaya.” She was covering a mirror with long lines of cocaine. “Guava,” she said. “There’s nothing like it.

“But I was never really happy there,” she said, snorting up the white powder. “Come on, don’t be shy.” She waited for me to inhale it. “Only my mother is Venezuelan. My father is American. He went down there at your age, just a boy dreaming of making a fortune in pearls, and sitting in the sun. But he never stopped talking about America. And it sounded so good when he talked about it.” She inhaled again.

“I used to dream about coming to the States, where I could buy the Beatles albums as soon as they came out.” She laughed. “You know, I thought I’d get to see the baseball players on the street. What a jerk I was.

“Please excuse all this,” she said, disgusted with herself. She knocked over the glass of Scotch and we watched it soak into the mattress. “But w hen I finally did get here and met Natalie, all I wanted to do was to go to Europe. Natalie had lived in Lurope. Her father was a diplomat. She was very jet set. She said it was the only place to live.”

Marta sighed. The cocaine had made her energetic, but thinking about her life made her weary. She snorted more off the floor.

“To make a short story shorter, the gringo left us for diamonds in Africa. He always promised to send for me. I learned everything there was to know about the place. Fauna, flowers, exports, climate, gross national product. What would you like to know?”

“Did you ever get there?”

She laughed. “What do you think?”

“Where is he now?”

She shrugged, “Who knows? I’ve spent my whole life wanting to be somewhere I wasn’t. It’s really quite a pathetic story. Now all I want to do is die and, look, still I am alive. Though,” she added, “there are some rather uncharitable people at this school who would like to dispute it. I swear I’m not high anymore,” Marta said. “Let’s do just a little more, OK?”

She dumped the whole bag out on the floor and then got up and went into the closet where I could hear her dialing the phone and ordering another bottle of Scotch.

“They deliver,” she said from inside the closet. “They’re very accommodating.”

When she returned she held something wrapped in a white cloth. Slowly she unwrapped it. It was a hypodermic needle. “Cocaine,” she whispered, “was not meant to be snorted. Believe me. I know.”

Who had once lain in the cavity under Marta’s arm? Her body draped in black looked so strong. Her dark arms were smooth, muscular. They looked like the arms of an athlete, a bearer of torches, a person no one could hurt. Who could reduce her to this? She had tried her hardest, she had done her best, only now to have Natalie—that was the word she was saying softly to herself over and over: Natalie, Natalie, Natalie.…

In her voice I could hear the bones of their embrace being broken apart and strewn about the room. They were everywhere—bones in the closet, bones piled up against the door.

“Make a fist,” she said. She tied my arm with a rubber tube.

I shivered. Marta put the needle in my arm. The room turned blue.

“Once it goes in,” she said quietly, “it never really comes out.”

I imagined Jennifer who, having closed her eyes for a moment, now opened them and added more hot water to the tub.

Blood stained the window shades. Long strands of hair slept in the bed. The bones piled higher and higher.

“Marta,” I said, shaking her, “I’m scared.”

“Don’t cry.”

“I’m afraid.”

“Don’t be afraid.”

“I think I should go now,” I said, moving to the door. My legs swayed under me.

“You’re my thrill,” Billie Holiday sang, “you do something to me. You send chills right through me.” My hand slipped from the doorknob. I turned to Marta.

“Come here,” she said.

“Don’t cry. Please don’t cry. I can’t stand to see girls cry,” she said. If she had looked in her own mirror, it would have broken her heart.

“I’m scared,” I said, collapsing to the floor. “I’m afraid.”

“What do you have to be afraid of?” she said, but then looked away, caught in the sorrow that would not let her go. “Why? Why did she have to die? Why?” she said over and over, but the more she said the word, the more senseless it became—just a sound and no way in.

She surrendered to the question and it drove her to the ground. “Why?” she asked, bringing me down with her, shaking me, staring into the wideness of my eyes as if the body when challenged would reveal its ancient, mortal secret. “Why?” she said, pressing hard for an answer.

I was afraid of her but I extended my arm anyway and touched her lightly on the shoulder. She shuddered.

I did not know why.

And great tears fell from her eyes. All was silent, dark. Finally, after many hours, she stood up.

“Would you like to dance?” she whispers.

“What?” I say.

“Would you like to dance?” she asks again politely, lowering her eyes, bowing slightly, and offering me her hand.

“The orchestra,” she says, “is so lovely. Listen.” She strains to hear the opening notes—the oboe, the French horn. “And your dress is exquisite.”

“Yes, oh, yes,” I say. “The ballroom is gigantic!”

“And the chandelier,” she says, pointing to the ceiling.

“Where are we, Marta?” I gasp.

“It’s Vienna. It’s Bavaria. It’s Port-au-Prince, Haiti,” she says. I had not heard such tenderness in a human voice before.

And for a minute I almost believe it: Somewhere we are dressed in linens and silks. Somewhere our hair is piled ludicrously on the tops of our heads and the dance steps have all been planned hundreds of years in advance for us. Somewhere we are safe in a box step, in the reliable timing of the waltz. Somewhere we are out of danger.

“It’s Mvkonos,” she whispers. “It’s Nice.” Her eves are closed; when she opens them, she is far away.

“Natalie?” she sighs. “Is that you?” She leans heavily on me. It is a terrible weight; it is the weight of the whole world. “It‘s Mvkonos. It’s Nice.”

We could barely pick up our feet. “Marta,” I say.

“It’s Nice,” she answers.

“I’m losing my balance.”

“Natalie,” she says, “Natalie.”

“What is it? What is it, Marta?” She touches my hair. It grows long and straight in her hands. She buries her face in it.

We stumble, we bump, we collide; we trip finally on the one mattress, the one lamp, falling into the void that is everywhere.

From her upstairs window my grandmother saw the two women embrace. “I’ll let it pass,” she said to herself, but she could not get rid of the image of the two women touching each other like man and woman. That was in Italy over fifty years ago. Now, I imagine, she saw it again, on the farm shortly after my parents were married and were still living with them. There she saw it: Sabine and my mother while Michael was away. The letter to my father was addressed, stamped, sealed, but she waited to mail it, deliberately missing the postman; she didn’t know why.

The whole world lay still. Nothing moved. I felt my gaze, too, stuck on the window of the room. On the sill the lizard stood stunned. In the sky the clouds had stopped. Not one leaf moved. No branches bobbed as branches will.

The associate professor of English sat frozen at her carrel in the library with her hand on her forehead, trying to gather the strength for a new year. The alcoholic dean of freshmen held his glass two inches from his mouth. It went no further. A student’s pen slowed. She could not decide whether to take one course or another. Her mind went blank for a moment.

A red brisbee lay in the green grass. The dog did not move to chase it.

Marta slept next to me; her body was perfectly still. She did not have the even breathing of a sleeper. Her mouth was slightly open as if she had been stopped in mid sentence.

The whole world held still, it seemed, with Marta’s sorrow—but not me. I took her heavy, sleeping arm from around my neck, pulled myself up, and left the room that was still dark although it was morning.

Marta had given me no facts, I thought, as I stepped into a world much brighter, more animated than I had remembered. The campus looked beautiful. I walked to the library; it seemed to call me. A small wind had started up. My mind raced, too fast. How did it happen, Marta? Was there nothing you could have done?

I look up to the top window where she lies now in troubled sleep. She does not move one muscle. My questions remain unanswered. No one hears me. How did it happen? Was there nothing you could do?

I walk faster and faster. Why? Why? In my mind I raise the Frisbee from the grass and propel it into motion. A fellow freshman catches it and smiles. The dean takes a drink. The associate professor of English, gathering up her books, leaves her carrel on the library’s second floor.

The library was empty. Classes had not yet begun and people were still stuck in summer—on the wavy lake or the tennis court with its green hum. It was cool and dark and I felt safe there. In the context of such coolness and sense and order, the events of the night before seemed as if they could not have taken place, and, walking to the shelves, I felt strangely free of them: that odd room on the top floor, Marta and her story, and the needle I watched sink into my arm.

I loved the order of libraries. I felt at ease there among the old and new-books, lined and numbered on the shelves. I found what I was looking for easily. When I was done I would put those books back in the same place and on another day I would be able to find them again. Most people would think little of such a simple thing, but today the thought of every book having its place and of no book being lost gave me an overwhelming sense of pleasure.

The auditorium was filling. The faculty sat on the right side in a reserved section roped off by a purple braid: formal, deathlike on this spring evening. My mother would not like this purple square, I thought. If she saw me sitting in it, she would run to me and hug me and take me away—it would be like her. I was not, of course, faculty but rather a guest of honor simply by birth, and a man who recognized me immediately, though I did not know him, led me to this distinguished corral. I sat on the aisle, one inch from the purple braid, and was careful not to touch it, as if touching it might include me somehow in its mournful darkness. We were superstitious, my mother and I. Anything could look like a symbol, a sign: a shelf of books, a glass half filled, the reserved section of a room.

Members of the faculty began to take their seats. They laughed with one another as they entered the hall. Many were coming from the dinner given for my mother beforehand. I had excused myself from that event; my mother’s friends Florence and Bethany would be with her and so she did not need me so near. Still I wondered how she was doing. I hoped that the cocktail hour had not gone on too long and that the dinner had not been too much of an ordeal. Few of these dinners were in fact as bad as she imagined them before she arrived; often she would find herself having, despite herself, quite a nice time. How easily she could shift into sociability. How easily sometimes she rode the wave of conversation into the night.

Still I hoped the faculty had been sensitive, that they had not asked too much of her, that they had given her some time to herself.

How many years had I been thinking in this way, keeping her free from harm by adopting a certain mental position, wishing her well? I could not keep her safe, I could not keep her by my side, though, waiting for her in the purple square, I still thought that I might be able to protect her simply by concentrating.

At the party I imagine that the handsome host, seeing my mother a little giddy, a little breathless, offers her a room upstairs where she might lie down for a moment. She accepts and he shows her the way. “Don’t go,” I picture my mother saying as he turns to leave her, hating sometimes more than anything to be alone. And so he doesn’t. “Hold me,” she whispers, and he takes her in his bearlike arms and kisses her gently. I choose that they should make love in the large bed, that it is passionate; and that afterwards he murmurs to her what she needs to hear—that the first cycle of poems works as a cycle must, or that the final leap in her newest poem makes everything stop, as she intended; and that she rests momentarily, lies peacefully next to him while the other dinner guests drink cognac, while the coffee brews, while the Italian professor plays the piano.

That May evening my mother walked down the aisle to the podium like a queen, like a bride, focused single-mindedly on the task still ahead of her. She did not even look at the reserved purple section. She did not come to me as she does in my dreams, sensing danger or darkness, and rescue me from it, whisking me to her side, hugging me tightly. She walked straight to the front and sat in the front row and waited. The introductory speaker was late. The introduction that night would make my mother cringe: all superlatives and the facts wrong.

I could only see her from the back. She looked so animated, gulping water, flushed, chatting with her host, flanked by Florence and Bethany, her college friends, now teachers at this college. I knew that I worried about her too much. I heard her stormy, wild laugh. So many times I had seen her this way, her hands flying about her like birds as she talked. I turned away.

They teetered down the aisles at the last moment, taking seats, one next to me, one in front of me. They looked fragile, breakable, but that was not the case. They are in their own ways more capable, stronger than most of us. They teach the Victorian novel or Chaucer or the Romantic poets. They wave to their bearded friends and clutch their programs and smile in anticipation. I love these women with their eccentric hairdos: the wispy blonde bangs and ponytail, the red hair swept up with tendrils at the ears, curls cascading down the neck. I love these women with their frilly bodices or little-girl pinafores or long plaid skirts or cocktail dresses from the fifties. I love these women with their box-shaped pocketbooks, their complicated shoes, their high sexual laughs, their quirky brilliance.

They had made my mother feel less fearful. She seemed happier when she was with them, not as alone in the world. Years after she left college she would still visit with them, sit in their houses, drink with them, and relish their intricate, intelligent stories. As a famous person, my mother had met many such women living in college towns all across the country, throwing parties for Byron’s birthday, dancing in spring at bacchanalias, reading Emily Dickinson by a fire. They were obsessive, unpredictable, exacting. When I got to college I recognized them immediately.