Glass Grapes (7 page)

He'd bought one small rug and it too had zigzags across it, like his arm, his favorite sweater, his guinea hen, stuffed and dusty and on the shelf she wasn't supposed to notice; who'd given him such a thing and why had he carried it about, this child's toy, for so many years. When the yarn unraveled at the cuff of the sweater, it took on that same zigzag pattern, that repetition she locked on to. She saw the sweater hanging on a hook in the front hall where she'd painted the floorboards white, deck white; the salesman at the hardware warned her but she wanted to bring in light and order, to remake the dirty and scuffed floor in the image of a deck beneath a deck chair that would look out over the sea and
away. Now it was, as the salesman had said it would be, smudged and dirty, though surreptitiously and late at night she wet it down with the corner of a rag, hooked over a forefinger, the small sections in front of the coat rack, clean and slippery, pale as an egg.

The face on his arm was contorted either with pleasure or pain, something occurring somewhere deep in its anatomy, off-screen, off the arm, out of the frame. The teeth of St. Sebastian, the pearly white drops of Mantegna's Sebastian, eyes raised and arrows through the skin and into the groin, those unexpected doll-like teeth between slightly parted lips. They looked fake like bits of tile, painted and varnished and polished. This was not a smile, clearly not. Some piece of anatomy was out of range, was being pulled or stretched or pierced and she sometimes wished the entire face would disappear in a tangle of lines and bloody dots so she wouldn't have to think anymore.

She wondered when it would all end. The Thai restaurant she used to go to had been turned into a tattoo parlor; the woman who sold pliers and screws at the hardware store had butterflies all over her arm; the man at the video store pulled up his shirt to show her. She knew it would all heal soon, she'd seen it before. She'd read a story about a Japanese tattooer who fell madly in love with the ankle of a woman who passed in a flash past the door of his shop and for years he waited for her to return and when she did he drugged her and tattooed an enormous spider across her smooth white back.

She felt evaporated like a line of paper dolls, not just one body flattened and about to go up in smoke, but a whole line of them. She had made such dolls as a child and had always begged her mother to burn them at the end of the day. She'd sit in front of the fire and watch them curl up and turn brown at the edges of their skirts and then disappear. Her mother wanted her to keep them in a box or wait to show them off, but she wasn't interested in anything but the making and unmaking, the pleasure of a long line of intricate and identical dolls, gone. She began with the sorts of scissors made for children, clumsy and with rubberized handles, graduated to her mother's sewing scissors, and one Christmas was given a small pair of scissors in the shape of a bird. Finally, however, she had to use nail scissors, the tiniest of nail scissors to get the proper angles and proportions. The best cutouts had hair that stuck in peaks and looked thin and frayed; they lay there across the log tranquil and white, waiting for the match. It was and remained the most exquisite of moments, finally calm.

He began to write more notes for her than before, many more notes, but then they were mysteriously missing. He wrote and wrote late into the night, but then, for reasons she didn't understand, he took them away with him when he left in the morning, both shirt sleeves down and buttoned. On the paper pads left scattered through the apartment were, however, the pressings and indentations of his ballpoint, the short ones she could fairly easily make out—soak the coffee
cups or remember to buy coffee—but longer ones about some book he'd been reading, notes on the conquest of America or the practices of the Mayans, in which she could almost make out quotations. The impress was so strong and the pads so obviously placed for her to find, she knew she was supposed to know some version of a pleasure. If I match the markings with the books, she thought, if I find the quotation in a book, I'll be able to read it there, if I can only match the swirls and curves, which she couldn't.

The text of the altar, carved on top around the edge, is eroded. It has been impossible to restore the carved stela to its original condition, as many fragments are missing. It is suspected that Postclassic peoples tampered with the shattered stela, or may even have broken it themselves. Although it is clear that the figure turned to the frontal position, naked but for loincloth and ornate slippers, is human, and that the profile is that of a jaguar, it is impossible to know whether it is a human dressed to be the jaguar, or the jaguar taking on human guise.

Something else changed. He adopted a new and, she found, quite disconcerting habit. Instead of hiding when she stared at his arm, he made himself available. He draped his arm across the arm of a chair, unbuttoned his blue shirts, so that his chest showed, hollow, white, his arm open to full view. Instead of having to work to
see the new designs, she found them put on display: curlicues and more bands with red and black flecks, faces caught in the filigree of leaves, hair that snaked across foreheads and lines that broke and joined and broke again. She could hardly stand to walk into the room where he sat, could hardly stand the blare of his arm. Animals she couldn't recognize bared their teeth, beaks clamped, headdresses coiled and feathered into the air. You look as if you want someone to burn you up, throw you out. You look as if you want to be thrown against the wall.

She sat down to read the newspaper. When she couldn't look any longer at the jumble of
e
's and
o
's and
m
's in front of her, a story she thought about a recent plane crash, although she couldn't be sure, and thought, you have to have your eyes checked, yes, that's what you ought to do and she thought to write it down so she wouldn't forget, but felt herself drawn into the other room where he sat, moving his arm out along the chair, and as she watched it seemed to get longer, seemed to extend beyond the wooden knob at the end of the overstuffed chair and out into the room. It was almost black with design, almost completely filled in as if his purpose had been almost fulfilled, and he were finally content. And she too felt a sort of heavy contentment like a mantel of feathers come over her shoulders and down her back. It could have been a tangled mat of black hair coating his arm, so thick the lines had become and would feel fuzzy like hair, the skin broken and healed over, lines
turned to hair. She felt for the raw edge of her thumb, the broken and raw cuticle, moving forefinger over thumb again and again. She felt her face burn and was sure that without moving and without lifting his hand into the air which was so smoky and thick to burn her eyes and make her blink back the watering, making it more and more difficult to keep the healing lines in any semblance of focus, he would hit her flat across the left side of her face, a clear ancient profile against the white of the wall.

When I raise my arm I do not usually try to raise it (Wenn ich meinen Arm hebe, versuche ich meistens nichts, ihn zu heben).

—Wittgenstein

Her subject is people in landscapes of estrangement; his subject is the landscape.
You are never looking out the window,
he says to her.
Here you are driving through the most beautiful section of the California coast, and you are talking to me about a novel you are reading, the words on the pages, the characters' clothes. I am in the scotch broom,
he says, and yes, he seems to be as far as I can tell, and he is right I am not. It is everywhere on the side of the hill wherever the redwoods take a break and one ought to smell its sweet smell but all I can smell is eucalyptus and that's what grows by my bedroom window at home.

We drive for hours. He thinks about the fog blowing in off the ocean. It drifts over the fields and over
the road. One moment we can't see the road, the next it is clear. Sometimes he is talking about his subject and sometimes not, but it is always what's there. When we stop at a rest stop and look out over the view he knows how the gullies were formed, what the weather patterns will be, which ridges connect north and south.

To me the foggy blur over the tops of trees is a mental affair. You hold in your mind another time and live there in that other imagined time while the present time, new and raw in some way, presses for attention. But the other time is held like a fragile glass, transparent but up close in front of one's face. This is a practice from childhood. It serves no purpose except to counter the insistence of present time and to block it a bit. I can't remember when I haven't done this. Being in two places at one time. This is my definition of a person, I say, as if I were saying something definitive and true. He thinks I'm trying to be clever.

It began, no doubt, as a protective device. That seems to make sense. But when you try to think of when it was that the other time became important, you can't. It ought to have been a sharp pain that wrenched one time from another, made you opt out for good reason, but you can't think of one. You can think of a year when you fell from the rotted tree in the side yard and broke your arm but the pain is merely a word, not even as vivid as the small scar. And anyhow, what would it be to think of a sharp pain which is not something most of us can do. All I can think of is someone large leaning
over my hunched shoulders telling me to try,
try
she said,
to sit still.
The racing part of my body was still racing out the back door, into the backyard, and out into the street where it had been just moments before and I was trying. The idea of trying is what puts one in two places at once since the idea of trying also contains the idea of not trying. I want to try, I want to know how to say to her in that time so long ago, but I have no way to think about what I am thinking and so I don't.

He doesn't have to try to drive, but I do. I guess he is paying attention all right, but he isn't trying. When I drive I have to try hard to pay attention, to keep to the road, to follow directions, to fend off the fear of getting lost. Nothing seems so bad as that fear of turning the wrong way or finding oneself broken down on the country road with only a dim light from a distant farmhouse. I am surrounded by darkness. I try to keep calm. I try to remind myself way ahead of time to keep calm if anything should happen. I get tired of trying even when everything goes smoothly and I clutch the steering wheel. Here I am, I say to myself, trying to get myself to watch the view as if it were an unnatural act, even though, one would suppose, it is the most natural thing in the world. Look at all those people doing it, I say to myself; surely you too can look out the window at the view. You too can admire the scenery. His subject, the landscape. Try it.

But even the ringing in her ears takes her away and even the effort of sitting still in the car for so long,
even the book she tries to forget. Her novel is a novel in which the narrator becomes someone else momentarily. She loses herself in imagining herself a child and she imagines this so strongly that she begins to blurt things out, slurp the milk out of her cereal bowl, race in circles among the trees stomping in pools of shallow water. She makes no attempt to conform to the rules, this child, but neither does she break them; she simply moves through the world and does what comes to mind. What comes to mind is rather sing-songy and windy, hooting softly, gazing out and running far. The child stands in the side yard by the rotted tree. She takes off her red sweater and makes a cape. She fixes the buckle on her red shoe. She stares for hours at the view. Although she doesn't at that time live anywhere near what one might call a view, no vistas or California coastlines, it doesn't matter to her. She stands at the side of the road and looks down it. She doesn't move. She sees a rock and she sees it up close for a long time. Her mother calls for her but she doesn't come, not because she is trying to disobey, but because it just doesn't occur to her to come.

Years later she sees an elaborately constructed miniature garden planted into the cleft of a great stone, the tiniest rock garden she's ever seen with lichen, alpine plants of various sorts, saxifrages, gentians, pinks, penstemons and what looks to be a fold with a red dot in the center. The novel isn't a great novel, perhaps it hasn't yet been written, but it is what she is thinking about when he says again, look at the view and there are
waves crashing against the boulders and melting down into waterfalls and crashing again. It is almost larger than she can stand and she's back at the restaurant looking through her water glass. Through the crash of the waves, she thinks she hears him asking something.