Glass Grapes (5 page)

It was as light as wind skimming over the surface of the earth, as light as footprints making no mark, a rain that made nothing wet, as if nothing had ever been there, nothing had happened or if it had, had disappeared without a trace, everything erased but for the giant shadow of a cone superimposed on the landscape of a drawing someone had made in soft pencil.

This is the way she was thinking as she was driving the car. And then she thought she wanted to shake him, to wake him up as if he'd gone off to sleep, not that he actually slept more hours, in fact fewer than she did, but that he was of a weight, a sleepiness, possessed it in his being, in his genes as some might say, turned that ring around on his finger in slow motion, and wouldn't tell where it came from or why—given his addiction to the minimal and the strict rules he followed—he consented to wearing jewelry at all. It stood out against his olive skin.

Her mother used to shake her by the shoulders, though not to wake her up, more to bring her down, to calm her, to get her to stop from running in circles, though why she thought shaking would do the trick, she never knew. Afterwards, when she was especially agitated, she thought about it, wished for it, though of course—she pleaded with her memory to yield up its secrets—she never could have been thrown against a wall, too big of course, and no one does such things, and she couldn't remember even being pushed against a wall or against anything else for that matter, though she did remember being shaken, and she would like to shake him to get him to attend, although since he was excruciatingly attentive to certain things, she wasn't sure what she wanted him to attend to.

It was an affair of storms and calms, one that was longer than either had expected and over before anyone would have, if asked, predicted. Which isn't to say that she didn't make extravagant gestures which unnerved him, and which they both knew unnerved him. You must have
Don Giovanni,
she exclaimed. No one exclaims any longer, but she did, rushed out and bought it, forced it upon him and turned it up loud. It filled the room with clashing and passion. He was suspicious, wary of extravagance and made her take it away. She rushed at him. He backed away and she rushed.

She rushed through the market when what he wanted, though not as an articulated desire, but more as a neutral fact, was to touch the world lightly, to disturb
things less than anyone could imagine possible. He sliced his bread thinner each day and it had to be carefully handled not to tear at the center as he moved it to the toaster; if the butter was too hard, it broke the toast. But he was careful. He had fewer clothes than anyone she'd ever known. It wasn't just that he made do or that he couldn't have bought some few more, although he did have to “watch his pennies” as her father had used to say, but that his pleasures came from having a drawer with four t-shirts, washed out, folded and set one on top of the other. He was especially pleased if they were all the same, all white or all gray or that color they became after many washings, and she thought he ironed them, they were so perfectly flat, or perhaps it was a way of folding she never had time for.

When they went to the market together, she watched him walk the aisles as if he had all the time in the world, had no place to get to, wasn't hungry, didn't much care what he bought. Her trips were always “catch-as-catch-can” between work and home, one thing and another, always some gathering of items in a rush, unbalanced in her arms, the same over and over, but his walking—and it was walking in a way she'd never thought of before—as if what one did in a supermarket wasn't wheel or race, but walk in a desultory and appreciative way. He never bought more than four or five things, whatever he needed for a day or two, but he took so long at it and spent so much extra time at the magazine rack looking over all the new magazines, especially the ones on architecture
and houses, that it made her jumpy, unable to stand the neon, the deliberations, the sense that there was all the time in the world. He never bought a magazine, or when he did it was only after having thought about it for several days, returning to get it, not buying it on the spot, but thinking it over. You never think anything over, he said to her; you just grab at things.

She wondered if he thought she grabbed at him. Did he feel she put her hands on him too often and she began to watch herself do it, and watch his movements towards, or, she thought more often, away. She tried to stop, but it was something she simply did as she came through the room and she had a hard time remembering to stop until it was so hard she did. She remembered to sit across from him and keep her arms at her sides. She remembered not to force her cold hands under his arm where she knew it would be warm and not to lop her leg over his just because she felt like it. And in bed she did what she realized belatedly pleased him most; she chose one posture and moved as little as possible. It was not easy or natural, indeed it was as unnatural as she could have imagined, but she thought with great effort of being like a sheet, flat and folded in a drawer; she thought of how he was aroused at her stillness and she managed because it was so arousing itself to find him in her power in this unexpected way.

It was an affair based on the weather. They settled on it and agreed. He liked talking about the weather.
It came to be for her a gesture like lying still. It was an announcement of how long they had to hold off and of what was to come. For him it was the repetition of a lost childhood, lost porches and Midwestern storms, a past that was most vivid because it had faded like old photographs. He imitated the voice of his grandfather who spoke of what the wind would do or the rain. Since they now lived in Los Angeles, these discussions, like their affair, were attenuated. There wasn't much in the way of weather, or rather, there wasn't much weather for them, for they had come out of the Midwest, and so what happened in the city, small increments of change, had to be sought out, obsessed over, admired and repeated. It wasn't like the snowstorm that overtook her window when she was eleven and it wasn't like the pelting of rain that for months hammered the tin roof and made her think she would go mad if someone didn't come and rescue her from the rain, her parents, her fretful desires.

As a topic, weather is so noncommittal and passes the time so lightly that when they sat waiting for the waiter to arrive at their table, they returned to it regularly. It allowed them to avoid talking about anything too personal and yet to feel, deluded or not, that they were intimately connected because they could go on together about an agreed-upon subject for so long, with so many variations and embellishments, and so they continued on in a quite accomplished pattern about the shifts in humidity, conversations which worked best in May or
early June when there was some shift. It allowed them to avoid the extreme vehemence she was prone to. Also the minimal changes in the city's weather allowed them vast tunnels into the past which they both remembered with a fondness bordering on the fanatic or perhaps, since for neither had the present yielded up a life they could recognize, a substitution in some way. In Ohio neither would have fit in; neither would have been at home there now, and indeed she suspected that neither had been other than a misfit even then, but it was a place that together they created as normal, as home, as a place where they might, were things different, have made a life together.

His focus was on the condensation of that odd white light before the rain, the way in which trees came to be defined by that light, harsh almost as neon over the Laundromat, greenish and pale. He remembered a porch and sat himself there time and again, and when he was feeling especially generous, he put her there as well and gave her a tall glass of lemonade with ice cubes. After her initial extravagances, they agreed never to give one another anything other than these memories, these scenic
postcards
embroidered with memories that were more than what they actually remembered. On her birthday, however, he gave her a drawing he had made of a place he agreed they had both visited at one time or other during their childhoods.
The world's going to explode,
he said. The black cones he'd drawn, superimposed in ink across the picture, were proof.

He remembered the sounds of birds just before the storm hit. Not only that the light turned itself up a notch. The bird calls intensified and the silvery falling notes of the bird whose name neither of them remembered, only the sound, as if even that link, a name, were unimportant, less important than the thrill of remembering a sound as they both insisted that they did, staring into the space over the table.
Do you remember,
he'd say and she'd settle in.

Sometimes she wanted that porch more than anything, more than their sexual encounters, always so quiet, so without sound or movement, and always she thought, not really the point of whatever they were up to, though what it was they were up to she couldn't say anymore than she could stop. She thought the porch was screened in, everything looked out through a mesh of screen and as the conversation went on, the mesh closed up and darkened and she felt as if she were about to sleep and sleep in some easy way she hadn't slept for years. She remembered the house as well, gray-green and massive with the porch running all around three sides. In the back was a small garden with beans mostly and leaves with red veins running through. Beets buried in the ground. She had no idea where this house was. She knew she'd seen it and she remembered coming around the left side, but whose it was and in what Ohio town, she didn't know. It was a vivid memory that could more easily have belonged to someone else. She focused on his hands. They stood out as in portraits of
Civil War soldiers; they hung down and she could only watch them when he was so involved in his own story, he didn't notice she was staring.

He began.
It dampens one's spirits,
he said,
it comes long and pale, willow leaves across the plains. It's inserted behind every leaf of every tree. It's something like the shape of a hand though not exactly, and one can only watch and so one watches all afternoon. Sitting on the porch all afternoon, the light shifts from white to green to a pulsing absence of all color and I watched the coming light as if my limbs had turned into whatever waiting is. As if by waiting, I had become both absolute distrust and absolute certitude. And then the storm came, cool and breaking over the distance and then right at my feet, and I sat under cover of the porch and stared at the rain coming straight down and taking all the layers off my skin that had gathered all afternoon.

She was fixed in his description though she didn't know why she could listen to him in that way. Others she knew told stories that were cleverer. It had happened to her throughout her life, someone would be talking and a sort of trance would start to come, to move across her like a coming storm. Sometimes she shook it off, worried that someone would look at her and see how her skin pulled. It was the sound of a voice, his voice, as if the air were heavy and filled with insects, as if something were not about to happen, but just over and done with, and you could contemplate it full and on all sides as a three-dimensional object that floated in the space just in front of where you couldn't take your eyes off it if you wanted.

He began to give things away. At first she didn't notice. Busy and with a project at work, busy with some semblance of regular life, she didn't notice the small things. But then, one Saturday when she spent the afternoon there, she saw that the corner cabinet was missing. What she noticed first was that the paint on the wall was less faded and then she saw the cabinet that had belonged to his grandparents—he'd told her where it had stood in their house, how he had brought it west and refinished it—was missing. All that was left was a cone of less faded paint. She made tea.

Other things were gone. When he went to the corner for milk, she opened a cupboard with only two cups although he'd always had a collection of mismatched cups, some beautiful if chipped, of a sort of old-fashioned elegance and thinness around which he'd spun stories that she was never sure were true about relatives and long afternoons. Now they were missing. She wondered what to say to him when he returned, pouring milk into the tea, and settling in to some reminiscence or other. She began and then stopped. She was after something more urgently than she could understand, but he was staring at her with the sort of intense blandness that sometimes accompanied their afternoons after bed, so she stopped.