Study in Perfect (8 page)

Not long after, I married and had a baby—a colicky no-sleeper whose very existence squashed my conceit like an egg carton. Pretend to be a man, when your entire body is in service to a famished child, a female at her functional peak? After three years of this, I hardly recognized the person who had written my poems. It was absurd, even impossible to lie, to play the cowboy again and pick up where I left off. I began a slow crawl back to some semblance of honesty in my work, and then to publish these poems at the level I had before. Now I partition
off my identity, using my maiden or “professional” name for poems and essays, my married name for church newsletters and legal documents, and a little bit of both for my work in publishing. This fits right in with shifting notions of the self. We are made of
many
selves, not just one. Over a lifetime, we float between honesty and fabrication, between conformity—our dependence on others—and the urge to be separate from them. Maybe the natural truth
is
dependence and the denial of it necessary for us to accomplish anything beyond basic survival.

In Harrison's poem the speaker lies to his sister, his incentive a whim or cruelty or the need to appear larger than life, like the magnificent frigate bird. But what of the poem itself? Is the writer telling the truth? Was there a sister at all, trusting and loyal? If not, what are the writer's motives in deceiving us? What can we make of this enchantment inside an enchantment, writing that casts a spell on the reader too?

The con man may employ wit and cleverness in his scam, but his lie remains a poor man's lie, with close ties to evolutionary pressure. His enchantment is basic and blunt. Freud would place the artist only slightly above the criminal. In his assessment, the artist “desires to win honor, power, wealth, fame, and the love of women.”

But art is not solely a form of greed and self-aggrandizement. Harrison's poem, by the nature of its medium, will never bring him more than a few dollars. At best, a successful poem will garner a thousand extra readers, hardly the legions of adoring fans that flock to rock concerts. Doesn't the artist also:
Compose a suite of songs to remember, or reactivate some past music in herself? Paint to safeguard the view from a farmhouse window, visualize a betrayal, pleasure, loss? Write to understand, clarify, generalize, move from the micro to the macro, the personal to the public, like a set of Russian nesting dolls opened in reverse?

Artists play with reality, whether they manipulate language, paint, or a digital camera. Call it poetic license, embellishment, or outright lying, they are loose in their allegiance to facts. How interesting that the word
fact
comes from the Latin
factum
, “to do or make.” It's the same root for
artifice, counterfeit, facade, facsimile
. Icarus's wings did not melt when he defied the warning and flew close to the sun. A princess cannot really feel a pea under dozens of mattresses. Artists prevaricate in order to tell the truth.

Here's another poem (mine), rife with deception:

HOMESICKNESS

On another continent, mother circles the farmhouse.
She steams gnocchi, tosses them in butter.

Mother and daughter have matching teeth, like a zipper.

If daughter flies home she'll lose eight hours. If her car were
     amphibious,
the loss would be hardly perceptible.

There's always the mail. And the cell phone, like a human
     cowbell.
Especially if you are loved.

Mother rings her from the bus stop, train station, grocery
     store.
When it's time to pay, she says hang on. The bus pulls up,
     gotta go, so long!

Emotion: from the Latin
emovere
—to move away, “in
     transport.”

How would a jet land in the country, gravel roads
and all those electric fences?

She opens her mail, a blue mountain of
Mit Luftpost, Par
     Avion
.

Genes are a kind of blue letter from a mother
to her daughter: Good news, bad news.

What is a mother but a tooth's way of producing another
     tooth?

My mother never lived in a farmhouse; she was raised in suburban Milwaukee. My mother and I do not have matching teeth. The zipper came first as an image of connection/disconnection; our teeth match only in the sense that all teeth match, although I had braces and she did not. It is not true my mother rings me on the fly, in fact, cell phones did not exist during her lifetime. “What is a mother,” I conclude, “but a tooth's way of producing another tooth?” This is a rather cold statement stumbled on by fusing genetic “blue letters” and those matching teeth—a drastic reduction of a mother's role, true to the poem, true perhaps of some mothers, but definitely not true of mine.

Asked about the origins of poetry, Nabokov responded, “When a cave boy came running back to the cave, through the tall grass, shouting as he ran, ‘Wolf, wolf,' and there
was
no wolf, his baboonlike parents, great sticklers for the truth, gave him a hiding, no doubt, but poetry had been born—the tall story had been born in the tall grass.” Tall tales, yarns, fish stories—there are many names for this sort of lie. But in most cases, the motives are similar: to entertain, yes, but also to get at a truth the facts won't allow. Perhaps lying has, by its narrow definition, been given a bad name. Maybe Ulysses is an elaborate lie, originating on the same ground as the Mafia don denying the assassination of an entire family. The difference is complexity and, of course, motivation. The Mafioso's lie is simple survival. The lying artist hints at a deeper definition of self and a greater organization of the world. My lie to the nun was pure greed and selfish desire.

Sister Paulette wore an indigo habit of the modern style, skirt just below the knee, sensible shoes. She was sturdy and moved nimbly for someone her age. I couldn't help but notice she'd sprung for the more expensive graduated lenses for her wire-rimmed glasses. After years spent absorbing and dodging various crises, demands, and fibs, she was a solid combination of common sense, spiritual discipline, and perhaps the slightest hint of vanity.

Or, there were no graduated lenses, no sensible shoes, indeed, no Paulette or Catholic school. Like Harrison, I have designed a sister-hologram with language and imagination, instead of bone and blood—all inventions to dramatize the story,
to underscore the flagrancy of a lie and its uncomfortable consequences. Perhaps Bonnie went to a huge public school with an overworked staff and a multitude of misbehaving students. Perhaps we picked her up as usual on Thursday and hit the road early the next morning. Her absence on Friday would hardly have been noticed. It doesn't really matter. I'm almost not sure myself after all these years—a lifetime of truths, lies, truths that turned out to be lies, lies that turned out to be true. It's all part of the effort to explain what I'm doing here, on earth.

A tricolored flag from west harbor to east dock. Near stripe of amber, middle aquamarine, finally black with touches of evergreen. So clear, so spotless this early in the season, too cold for human swimming. Presumably fished out, though every day a man wades out to seduce a smallmouth bass.

A dinghy named
Pesto
zigzags through the water. Zig. Zag. The rower can't see behind, where she is going. She steers toward Anderson's buoy, avoids the deep and also the shallow where stones would gouge into the boat. Her oars give warning—clank, scrape, jerk—instead of the smooth glide forward. She marks her progress against the shore, past boat docks, sagging green cabins, and the ancient Trollhaugen guesthouse.

She's not even a little wet but feels like she's taking a giant bath of peridots, a gemwater rinse from scalp to toe. Her boat leaves a meandering wake of darker emerald trimmed with foam. The oars send off tiny whirlpools on both sides. Sometimes she stops to watch their retreat, how they chase each other, then flatten, barely five feet out, and blend into the current. The sound is hushed and delicious and makes her mouth
water. It's tempting to take a drink, so she lowers her hand, holds it under till her fingers go numb.

Next year, she'll arrive later in the summer when the water's temperate, better for swimming, but laced with bits of algae that slither across her ankles.

So it goes with perfect: its anchor drifts, catches again in time, some other immaculate place.

Marking Time in Door County

 

I'm sitting on the pier, first morning of our ten-day vacation. Green Bay is in party mode. Whitecaps collide and dance from crisscrossing wakes. Pontoon boats putter along, their riders squawking like chicks in aluminum baskets. I breathe in the odor of juniper, mown grass, beer, and yes, alewives, a dozen of them, curled and bloated inside the marina. A storm's on its way, but sky-wise, there's only a distant smudge of cloud over Horseshoe Island. Inside the house the girls are waking up—Laura at the fridge, Bonnie rummaging for her hairbrush, best friend Kristin humming in the shower. A fly finds its way to the honey at the bottom of my teacup.

Ten thousand such mornings have passed since my grandparents purchased a house called Gray Logs, with a lean-to kitchen and 150 feet of waterfront in Ephraim, Wisconsin. In 1947 the village held a few rustic hotels, an ice-cream shop, and Anderson's dock with its graffiti-clogged barn. American Indians, the French, and Norwegians were among Ephraim's early visitors. We are the latest, one of fourteen third- and fourth-generation families who now share this property with its Scandinavian log buildings, its hemlocks and swamp, its flocks of mallards and gulls. We come from all over the country—Maryland, Kentucky, Idaho, California, and New York—to ground more constant and welcoming than the fourteen places we call home.

The approach from Highway 42 winds through Egg Harbor, Fish Creek, Ephraim, and finally, to Gray Logs, at the bottom of a deeply shadowed driveway. Then the sky opens out and water fills in the spaces. We can see Horseshoe Island, Eagle Bluff, and remarkably, Three Sisters Islands, several miles away over swells and sails. No streetlights or lane markers here. And the trees are not the kind I worry about in my own backyard, yellowing and sparse. They are grand, gracious ladies in evergreen dresses; they are here to soothe, to whisper reassurances. Stendhal defined beauty as “the promise of happiness.” I walk out onto the rickety pier and let the wind with its odor of grass and Green Bay hit me from all sides. It's possible when this idea occurred to him, Stendhal was standing in just such a place.

My grandparents are here too, invisible comfort, solicitous ghosts. One waving from the kitchen, the other still in bed with her tray of coffee and toast. They traveled the world but always returned, for there was no place they found lovelier than Gray Logs. My husband and I sleep in their room, shower in their once off-limits-to-kids bathroom. Though decades have passed since they died, it feels a little bit like trespassing. The girls have staked out the upstairs. We make short shrift of unpacking, and with bathing suits under our shorts and water shoes in hand, the celebration begins.

No swimming for me, not just yet. I have a ritual I must attend to on every visit. I say hello to the house by kissing the smooth gray banister, by shedding my shoes and running my toes over the flagstones, by opening the linen closet and counting the blue-and-white-striped towels.

I'm expressing my thanks for safe arrival. Not just this one in 2002, but all my arrivals. Here on the braided living room
rug, center of the house, where everything is stored, no whisper or footstep is excluded. I listen, breathe deeply, sniff for the raucous poker games on the folding card table, red and blue plastic chips careening about like unsure bicycles, Bicycle cards leaping when John or Chuck or Nan slam down a faux-furious fist. The sweep of our grandfather's terrycloth robe, his tray of perfect over-easies and sausage. And my father vexing the floor-boards with early morning back stretches and leg lifts, creaking inside the body and out. I touch the maroon slip-covered sofa. Down into the fibers I go like a medical detective, uncovering wet towels, shed bathing suits, the crumpled wrappers of great-grandfather's red anise, which he used to lure us little ones closer until we hated the candies, even as adults. He was too old and his forehead too shiny. Between the polished floor planks went 221 baby fingers picking up lost cinnamon imperials. I inhale the dander from Scotties and Westies, bassets, pointers, and mutts. Thirty-nine years of no-see-ums, yellow jackets, and dust.