My Education (29 page)

Now, as I pretended to share his absorption with browsing fish tanks—“I can't picture the fish that goes with Country Joe, but I know we'll know it when we see it,” he said frowningly—I was aware of how lonely Dutra must be. He hadn't had a lover since me. He hadn't had an actual, publicly at-his-side girlfriend since the unnamed, foresworn girlfriend of his drug-dealing days. I knew Dutra got laid—among other ephemeral ties he had slept with Lucinda—but as for nourishing intimacy with a person who knew what he truly was like; a person who knew he was stupid with hubris and unstintingly, joyfully kind; a person who knew that if given his bong,
Donahue
,
London Calling
, an everything bagel with scallion cream cheese, and a coffee-iced coffee, sitting on his sofa he could master any subject and retain it indefinitely—in other words, as for being known, which is the best part of love—by whom was he known, even chastely, apart from myself?

Meanwhile the shape of my future with Martha had finally begun to emerge, like the earth's familiar face from those maps of the old blobby continents bumping around. It was a miracle yet inevitable, the only outcome I'd been willing to foresee. If attending the party for Ernie O'Rourke as a couple was going to shock, it would shock all the more for how clear it would be that we weren't just a transient fling.
They've been together in secret for months
all the gossips would murmur, with grudging respect. I knew Dutra must feel the tectonic plates shifting him off to one side, the more keenly the more Martha and I kept him part of our life. Urging someone to make himself feel at home only serves to remind him the house isn't his; nor the saltwater tank, for that matter, though I practically let him think so, from the kindly remorse I was feeling toward him, that Martha and I in the end would be forced to—indeed were already beginning to—leave him behind.

“The blue chromis,” Dutra announced, directing me to a wafer-thin, silvery-pale little fish with no blotches or stripes or dorsal banners or quill-like extrusions at all.

“Why?” I objected. I'd been pondering a choice between the bristling lionfish and the Picasso triggerfish, as gorgeous and weird as an African mask. “The blue chromis is totally plain.”

“And you're a total amateur who needs an amateur fish. The triggerfish is high-needs and high-risk and it costs twenty bucks. It'll die, guarantee you. Blue chromis is the friend that Joe needs.”

“I'm not an amateur. And it isn't Joe's tank or even your tank, believe it or not.” But of course I would let Dutra win.

Abstracted from the dazzling bazaar of the tropical fish store, the simple blue chromis did ignite with its own luminosity, so that the penny-candy brightness of Joe's orange and white stripes was offset by a cool lunar glow. But the glitter that far more entranced me, once Dutra had taken a set of tank readings and reluctantly left me alone, was that of the dangly new earrings I'd bought; with careful hands I juxtaposed them to a fragrant new lip gloss, and a new pair of high-heeled Mary Jane shoes. The clothes I would wear to the party had begun to consume me with equal parts pleasure and anguish. I longed to remake myself into an image I could scarcely intuit, let alone put in words; my mind groped toward sinuous forms and aloof, careless gestures. I suppose I wanted Martha's effortless perfection by the opposite means. If she could sweep her face distractedly with rouge while yelling over her shoulder to Anya to take Joachim out of the bath—then I could pore over department-store displays of rouge brushes, of the broom-flared and the fat as a pom-pom, the cheap bristly and the shockingly pricey like the cut tail-stump of some silk-pelted beast, for the one that would touch me with feverish magic and make me like her. If she could retrieve a silk shift off the back of a chair it had limply embellished for months, and in pulling this sweat-fragrant, never-once-dry-cleaned tube over her head emerge creamy and cool as the young Princess Grace—then I could spend secret days muscling through packed racks of clothes at Filene's of the Glacial Lakes Mall, and straining my neck as I stared at my ass in all sorts of encasements, from all possible angles, and then plying my cheap Woolworth's iron on an ironing board made by shrouding my desk with a towel. If Martha could, the afternoon of the party itself, call to tell me she and Dutra were going to get in a few games of pool at The Pines before she swung by her place to get dressed and then picked me up around six—I could spend the whole day, almost since waking up, in unsystematic, fastidious preparation. I styled my hair before showering, showered, and ruined, and redid my hair. I made up my face before donning my dress, put the dress on, dredged the neck on foundation and rouge and had to take off, spot-wash, and re-iron the dress and re-make-up my face. I brushed my teeth and in jittery dizziness ate a banana and brushed them again. I poured myself a double scotch for courage, and brushed my teeth again, and then poured scotch again and then brushed a third time. I threw over my whole painstaking ensemble for a completely different outfit and different hairstyle and wondered if it was too late to buy different shoes, but it was now five
P.M
.; in agitation and despair I drew the blinds and lay flat on my back on the sofa and tried to freshen myself with a nap, without moving a muscle, all my weight on two thumbprint-size spots on the back of my skull and the top of my rump, so as not to wrinkle my dress or disorder my hair.

I hadn't slept well the previous night. Until now I had never had problems with sleeping, but since my concussion, and especially nights I was staying at Martha's, I'd often found myself awake at two or three in the morning, sleep snatched from me so abruptly that no drowsiness softened the onslaught of fretful alertness. I would wonder, made anxious by Dutra, if this was some tardy response of my body, defending me, after the danger, from succumbing to coma. I suspect that what really awoke me was surfeit—of the elation of having won Martha, and the terror of it; of satiation, my mouth webbed with sap and my tongue paralyzed with fatigue; and for some reason grief, as if I already knew I could never possess her enough. All in surfeit, beyond what I'd ever contain or endure, as I lay close to her in the dark. Her thin flank in slumber, hitched up, sometimes pinioned my hips. Her breast hung as if tucked in the fold of her arm, and subsiding from there to the curve of the other. Sometimes she looked older when she slept. Then the horror of her mortality, as if it were an unjust curse on her and me alone, would demolish my pride and restraint, and with a convulsion as unwilled as willed I would jostle her roughly so that she woke up. Sometimes, as if we'd arranged it that way, we would lavishly fuck. Sometimes, with a groan, she would tell me to get up and read, or to finish the joint on her dresser. One time we fought—“You are
so fucking selfish
!” she snarled. But the risk of that wound was offset by the prospect of love. By one side of her mouth rising up in the way that she had of attributing great wicked slyness to me, as she roughly unzipped me and spilled out my fear so that sleep could return.

Other nights, I never woke her at all but slipped silently out of her bed. Then her home would seem alien to me, its own elaborate nitrogen cycle. Those six doors on the second-floor hall: her own; the former master bedroom that now served as her study; the former study of Nicholas's that was now a guest bedroom; the former “library” which was dedicated now to the transient, to boxes being packed or unpacked; and past the stairwell at the opposite end, the corner rooms belonging to Anya and to Joachim. And an entire “stand up” attic above, and then the slovenly grandeur below, the vast kitchen and breakfast nook, the only rooms on that floor that seemed wanted and used; and then the formal dining room and living room and den and the entry foyer with their dust-pale refugee camps of side chairs and armchairs and side tables and end tables and sideboards and “consoles” and other words that would sometimes scud past that I had never yet linked to an object. At that time of my life I had no understanding at all of such houses as these, of the process by which they come mushrooming all on their own from the compost of cohabitation. I had no experience of adult sediment, no experience of that chemistry of domesticity by which
x
, which is love or its likeness, becomes
y
, which is not quite the same, becomes
z
, which is more different yet, to the point that sustains, or that smothers and kills. The twelve years she had over me, thirty-three to my wise twenty-one, meant no more to me than the one year Joachim had just recently notched on his belt. Had those twelve years separated us later in life—my thirty-seven from her forty-nine; my forty from her fifty-two—this blindness, which was really the thoughtless belief in our sameness, might have been apt. But it was treacherous now, so much so that despite my complete ignorance of how little I knew, I intuited somehow my weakness. I knew her house was strange water to me, when I bobbed there alone.

The phone startled me awake where I'd lain so conscientiously motionless that even as my heart broke out into a gallop my arms and legs blundered, benumbed. For a moment, catching sight of my glittering skirt and my hard glossy shoes throwing back the aquarium light, I did not know who I was, let alone where and why. The red numerals on my alarm clock spelled 6:23. “Are you looking outside?” said her voice. Clutching the phone I lurched to the window, somehow expecting to see her though there wasn't a telephone booth on my block. The window framed noiseless snowfall, like a rain of ashes. The redbud's bare limbs sprouted fluff as I watched.

“Where are you?” My voice strangely vibrated my ears. My apartment was so plunged in silence I might have been underwater along with my fish, except for the dense little windstorm of noise coming out of the phone. A faraway clamor of music and voices through which I could barely hear her though she seemed to be shouting.

“. . . walked outside and my car had been
buried
in snow.”

“Where are you? It doesn't look so bad—”

“It doesn't look so bad! It must have just started falling in town. Here we're getting socked in.”

“
Here?
Where are you? It's six twenty-five.”

“I told you, we came out to The Pines to shoot pool. Now the roads are fucked up—”

“Martha, it's six twenty-five!”

“Would you please stop obsessing on time? That's why I'm calling. I'm running a little bit late.”

“A little? You're still in Trumansburg!”

“That's my
point
, Regina, and the roads are fucked up, so I'm running—”

“But it's almost six-thirty.”

“We don't have to be there
at
six-thirty. That's just when the cocktail hour starts, little food things on trays, I doubt people'll start sitting down before eight—”

“We're not getting there until eight?” I exclaimed.
I stopped wearing a watch and I've never been late,
I remembered her bragging.
At least, not because I've lost track of the time . . .
My whole body came back to me now, I was thrumming with monster adrenaline as if on the legs of a giant I could cover the distance between us, crush houses and cars, the fresh powdery snow jumping up in alarm. I would rip the roof off of The Pines and seize her in my fist.

“. . . getting there as soon as we can. This fucking snow is not just happening to
you,
everyone'll be late . . .”

But it was just happening to me. Her phone call at six forty-five, to sketch the merry mayhem of trying to dig out her car. Her phone call at seven-fifteen, less a call than a broadcast, as if, after dropping her quarter and dialing, she'd dropped the receiver and wandered away, though the mufflement of sound must have been her own palm closing over the mouthpiece like closing a door in my face. Then the connection reopened and I heard Dutra's voice strike a note in the background, his words tumbled and lost, leaving only the coy, needling tone.

“. . . wait for the plow . . .” I seized on the shred of her voice as if catching a glimpse of her face through a crowd. Then the curtain of noise closed again.

“Martha!” I shouted. “Martha!”

Outside my window an orphan flake made its way down like a feather, tossed this way and that by the wind. The snowfall had ended. Perhaps a fluffy inch lay on my sill, mostly air; press a palm flat on it, as I did, and it melted away. Below me a passing car painted black stripes on the street. Certain snowfall reminds you that snow is just fancier rain. A plow out in this would be raising its blade up and heading back to the garage. The air was wetter than cold where it streamed in my part-open window and painted my guts, tarred them thickly in dread. But The Pines lay on Trumansburg Road on the opposite side of the lake; I stood mumbling this to myself like a simpleton chanting a memorized prayer. Sometimes a tornado will drill down one side of a street while the opposite side goes untouched. Surely the same thing must happen quite often with blizzards. Surely Martha would not lie to me—and not even lie plausibly, but with brazen conspicuousness, declaring herself in the grip of a blizzard that hadn't occurred. The front of my slippery dress had gone damp from the air. And my feet, crushed like fleshy dead stumps in the punishing cones of my high-heeled shoes, and the rims of my eyes gummed around with black clots of mascara, and my gnarled hands, cross-hatched with blood at the knuckles where the damp frigid draft, like an acid bath, ate them away. Stand as still as you can and the beast never finds you. Don't run. It'll just catch your scent. Stand as still as you can and your body's death slips out of hiding: you can hear its faint faraway noise like a river that runs underground. In possession of that, how can any harm ever befall you? Martha loved me. She had chosen tonight to announce to the world that she did. Martha did not make elaborate plans—plans best suited, perhaps, to please somebody else—and just chuck them. She did not invite people to dine in her home, and decide, at the hour, not to cook. She did not tell her lover to put on a beautiful dress, and decide not to show. The next instant would bring her if only the unending now could be butchered and done with. Years before, all of four years before, when I'd been seventeen, I'd taken acid with a man I had known just a little and liked just a little bit more. The horizon had constricted and constricted around us, all past time, every possible future, had withered away, reality outside his window was swallowed by void, his doors opened onto a nothing, if there had been a supermarket, a neighboring house, a police station near where he lived I would not have known “supermarket” or “neighbor” or “police officer,” I would not have known “hot dog” or “handcuff.” The man had tied me, wrists and ankles, to his bed using shirts from his closet, the ones with long sleeves, and had fucked me in a mad thrashing panic, as if he'd lost something he hoped to spade out of my guts, and then like a madman he'd lurched half-dressed out his front door and had ceased to exist. I worked first my friction-burned right hand and wrist from its noose, then my left, then left ankle and right. Once I'd accomplished this task time attacked me like furies. I was helplessly trapped on the far side of hours with a mind scorched and bare, agonized by its own emptiness. Being conscious was torture. A clock hung on the wall framing me with its motionless hands. Push them forward and live. Kill the minutes and live. I found a box, turned it on and made pictures. Found another, turned it on and made noise. I found a slippery heap, cleaved it open and words leaped at me and were lost, little motes in the great molten lake; my consciousness burned viciously, the more stuff I threw on it, the hotter it grew. I was watching
Donahue
and reading Marx and listening to Tchaikovsky and doing the crossword and memorizing the phone book and counting the yarns in the carpet all at the same time, and none of it snuffed out my stark naked dreadful awareness, I still didn't know who I was and time still didn't pass, it was still seven-twenty, seven-fifty, eight-ten, eight-sixteen, and at some point I stood up and took myself into the bathroom and scoured my face and reapplied all my makeup with a white-knuckled half-steady hand and then going back to my post by the window smashed the handset of the phone against the cradle with such force that both were destroyed, and the mute metal discs and the uprooted wires and the phone's other guts scattered over the floor. Then there was nothing but Martha, the dusty indigo thumbprints that sometimes appeared on the frail skin under her eyes, the slight shine of the bump on her nose, the hairsbreadth chink of light between her upper front teeth, the tart taste of her cunt, and the river was dry in its bed and no boat slipped its mooring and no one departed and Martha was coming to get me because she was mine.