Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart (17 page)

In my dreams, we go down to the still waters together, though, of course, this is not how it happened. Not in this waking world. But in dreams, we walk hand-in-hand across the wide plowed fields. Some years there is tall corn, and other years there are fat orange pumpkins on snaking vines. In the autumn moonlight, the rich soil beneath our hare feet is dark as chocolate, and you lead the way, and I listen while you talk. Always was I the student, always the one who followed and never the leader, my eager Anactoria to your patient Sappho. You have shown me all your secret places, the mysteries and confidences of both your body and the land. You lead me on and on across those fields, and also along the hidden trails through the woods that lie to the north of the Old Bulgarmarsh Road. In my dreams, you speak frequently of the Eleionomae, or Heleionomae, those nymphs who held to the fens and boggy places of the world. Or, in other moods, on nights when there are clouds to dim the moon, you offer me tales of Peg Powler or the grindylows, grimmer spirits luring naughty children to their rightful drownings. You are a deep well, and have no end of stories. No matter how many times I’ve heard them before, the glamour of your voice always weaves them into something new, making, by arts unknown to me, unfamiliar lays of threadbare ballads.

With that cocoa earth soft and alive beneath our feet, and the Full Hunter’s Moon watching over all, you tell me, for example, of the suicide who, by the death of her choosing, becomes a
rusalka.
In the waning hours of some Ukrainian night, her eyes flash iridescent green with fairy fire, and she sits upon the shore of the river that she haunts and sings her pretty songs to lure foolish, lustful men into her arms. If she wants them, they go to her, even as I am helpless to do other than follow you. There is great wisdom, you say, in recognizing the piper, and peace in the dance, and I laugh and look up to see the outline of an owl against the star-specked sky You tell me not to look, to cover my eyes, but the warning comes too late, and I have already seen the silhouette of that huge funerary bird.

That grim harbinger of Lilith, searching our field for mice and voles and careless rabbits, for dreamers who do not avert their eves. I know those sickle talons, how they tear the evening apart, how they tear my skin and pull me from one dream to another. Also, I have a scrap of paper on which you copied a few lines from
Walden
—“I rejoice that there are owls... They represent the stark twilight and unsatisfied thoughts which all have. All day the sun has shone on the surface of some savage swamp, where the single spruce stands hung with usnea lichens, and small hawks circulate above, and the chicadee lisps amid the evergreens, and the partridge and rabbit skulk beneath; but now a more dismal and fitting day dawns, and a different race of creatures awakes to express the meaning of Nature there.”

The room where I sleep is littered with such quotations, the confetti of your thoughts.
You
would not keep a proper notebook or diary, though you never told me why. I never asked. I sleep here amid the thoughts you found and stole from others.

The dream will change, most nights, as dreams are wont to do (even without the intrusion of owls). The fields vanish, and take the moon with them. Now there is the harsher light of the bulb above our bathroom sink, and you lying naked in a tub of warm and steaming water. I am sitting on the cast-iron rim, and I lean down and kiss your lips. You taste like life, I think, and your breath is sweet. Your tongue flicks across your teeth, over my lips, and I pull away.

“It would be a very simple thing,” you say again. “You’re certainly strong enough to hold me under.”

“But I would miss you,” I protest. “I would be alone.”

“Always thinking of yourself,” you laugh.

But then I
am
pushing you down, and it
is
easy, one hand on your head and another laid firmly between your breasts. In the first few moments, you are surprised and begin to struggle. But then you grow calm, a calm I read as resignation and curiosity, and your hazel-green eyes open wide to watch me from beneath the water.

“It’s a game,” you whisper in my right ear. “It’s only a game.”

I turn my head, hoping for even the briefest glimpse of you. But, for a very long time, there’s only the open bathroom window, and beyond the sash, a full moon shines down on fields of ripe pumpkins.

“Six Indians,” you say, as we pick our way between the neat rows. “They felled the unfortunate Zoeth Howland on a March night in 1676. He was on his way to a Quaker meeting, because, you see, he was a Quaker.”

This is not one of your usual tales. There will be no sirens here, and I want to tell you that I’d rather not hear it, that’s it’s not the sort of ghost story I fancy.
Tell me about the nymphs, instead
, I want to say, but I don’t. I’m not a dullard. I know better than to break the spell, once the incantation is begun.

“The Narragansetts ambushed him, and then tossed the poor man’s mutilated body into the stream. Afterwards, the waters ran crimson with his blood, and it became known as Sinning Flesh Brook. Over the years, though, that became Sin and Flesh Brook.”

“What was Howland’s sin?” I ask.

“I am afraid, dear, that you’d have to ask those Narragansetts,” you reply, and now we have come to the easternmost edge of the field. We stand together on the banks of the very brook where Zoeth Howland’s body was discovered by his horrified Christian brethren. We linger here a short while, and then, without a word to indicate your intent, you turn south. I follow, inevitably I follow. And before long we have come to the swampy place where the brook drains into a nameless pond. The chilly night is not silent, but replete with the songs of frogs, and crickets, and of whippoorwills. I can hear a rowdy chorus of dogs barking at the farmhouse a few hundred yards to our southwest, and a breeze stirs and rustles the tall grass blades and goldenrod, the ragweed and the dry stalks of cattails. These are all accustomed, welcoming noises, and the chorus puts me at ease, helping me to dwell on other things than your tale of the murdered Quaker.

My hands—certainly strong enough—holding you down in the tub, and the silvery stream of bubbles leaking from your nose and mouth.

“You are bleeding,” I say, amazed at the sight, “but you are only bleeding air.”

The fat moon gazes down on us, neither approving nor disapproving. We stand there at the edge of that wide expanse of unflowing water, looking out across the cold and glistening tract of mud, and you squeeze my hand very tightly. Almost so tightly that it hurts.

“I would lie here forever,” you say, and then tell me again of the kindly, perpetual shadows cast by floating mats of duckweed and water lilies. You talk of sacred groves of filamentous green algae, the apocrypha of turtles, the arcanum of newts, and how you would know everything forgotten and forsaken during hundreds of millions of years of terrestrial evolution. You speak of the womb, the
first
womb, and tiny silver bubbles trail from out your nostrils.

“I only want to go home,” you say. “I only want to find my way back.”

The screeching owl passes overhead again, or this is another owl entirely. It hardly matters which. I catch the lire in its terrible, glowing eyes. I catch fire. And, in its claws, the dream shreds again around me. So, now I am kneeling in the mud, and with both my hands I dig your bed. My fingers tangle in roots and disturb the affairs of worms and grubs. And you lie somewhere nearby, still and oddly silent, so I am left to do the talking. We are, neither of us, clothed, and in the moonlight your skin shimmers like mother-of-pearl, while mine seems dull and black as charcoal. It isn’t, but the dream makes it so. Neither is this the way these events transpired, not exactly, and so it is safe for me to dream this dream of laying you to rest.

“Tonight, since you’re so awfully quiet, I will tell
you
a story, my love,” I say and smile, scooping out another double handful of muck from the widening, deepening hole. Digging, I have sunk in now up to my thighs, and the intimate caress of the marsh is not entirely unpleasant. I do my best to recount the tale of Hermaphroditus and the nymph Salmacis. It has always been one of your favorites, and so long as there are no vengeful Narragansett Indians and no slain Quakers, it suits me, also. I am well enough aware that I am mangling the beautiful dactylic hexameter of Ovid, and I am well enough aware how you would scowl at my sloppy recitation, if you were awake and
could
scowl.

Now, undressed upon the bank he stood,

And clasped his sides, and leaped into the flood.

His lovely limbs the silvery waves divided’,

Appearing even more lovely through the tide;

As lilies trapped inside a crystal case

Take on the a glossy luster of the glass.

“He’s mine, he’s all my own,” the Naiad cried,

And threw off all, and after him she flew.

And she fastened onto him as he swam,

And held him close, and wrapped about his limbs.

“You’re doing better than you think,” you tell me, leaning down to inspect an especially large pumpkin. “You don’t give yourself enough credit.”

In the tub, you have stopped bleeding air, and have finally stopped thrashing wildly about; the floor and walls are soaked. I am soaked, and my hair is dripping, but that was to be expected, wasn’t it; my own part in this baptism, if you will. Your hazel-green eyes are still open, and I wish I could see whatever it is that you must see so clearly now, no longer shackled by the burden of living only from one breath to the next.

“Please,” you say, and look up at me. “Go on. I’m listening. You were just getting to the good part.”

I nod, but for a moment I am too fascinated by the intricate collage of moments swirling about me, so many competing, incompatible pasts superimposed upon one another. I could very easily become lost in that spiraling maze of images and events. It would not be so bad, to linger always in so many days and nights that might have been, and all of them witnessed simultaneously.

“I’m waiting,” you say again, and go back to inspecting the pumpkin at your feet. “Salmacis held him close, and wrapped about his limbs.”

“That’s not really right,” I replied. “I know that I’m getting it wrong.”

“You’re getting it right enough.”

“I wish the owls were not listening,” I say, and you glare at me over your right shoulder.

“Don’t be so shy,” you tell me. “Come on. What happens next.” The hole in the mud is almost wide enough to contain you, and I begin to concentrate on getting the edges as even as I can. It seems to me it should be made neat, the bed where you will sleep. But every time I try to smooth out a side or make a corner conform more closely to ninety degrees, the mud shows me it has ideas of its own, surrendering to gravity and sloughing and sliding back into its natural asymmetry. The marshy place at the end of Sin and Flesh Brook couldn’t care less for right angles; it is doing me a favor simply by permitting you this sanctuary.

And then I am talking once more, and I’ve begun to wonder how I will ever get your body out of the tub.

The more the boy resisted, the more he was coy.

The tighter the Naiad clung to him.

She kissed the struggling boy.

Like the wriggling snake snatched on high

In an eaglets claws, hissing in the sky,

Around the foe his twirling tail he flings,

And twisted her legs, and writhed about her wings.

Then, lying on the floor of our bedroom, you roll over to read me another of your innumerable quotations, those slips of paper like gutted fortune cookies. I listen. I always listen. It is something from Swinburne:
Love, is it love or sleep or shadow or light / That lies between thine eyelids and thine eyes?

You were always reading me Swinburne. I have a manila envelope filled with your quotations and sealed with a glob of crimson wax. I will place it beneath you, herein the marsh at the end of the brook where Zoeth Howland was ambushed and met his untimely, messy end, three hundred and thirty two years ago.

The restless boy still obstinately strove

To free himself and still he refused her love.

Amid his limbs she kept her own entwined,

“And why, coy youth,” she cried, “why so unkind?

Oh may the Gods thus keep us ever joined!

Oh may we never, never part again!
”

And here I pause, staring a long moment into that amniotic gouge laid open before me. Womb. Cunt. Grave. All these and many, many other things besides. I am sweating despite the chilly night, even though my fingers have grown numb from the cold ooze. Already, a few inches of water have collected at the bottom, seeping up and also seeping through the sagging walls of the hole.

“Should I go on?” I ask, though I’m uncertain if I am asking you, or asking the owls, or asking the voyeur moon.

“No turning back now,” you say, scribbling another line of Swinburne on another slip of paper, staining your fingers with sepia ink.

“I mean the story,” I say, in case you’d misunderstood. “Should I continue with the tale of the rape of Hermaphroditus, or have I said too much already?”

“You truly think it was a rape?” you ask, licking at the ink oil your fingertips. “He didn’t have to enter the pool, after all, and it
was
Salmacis’ pool. In fact, if one favors symbolism over a literal interpretation, you might say the boy was the one initiated coitus.”

“I have always leaned towards the literal,” I admit, and you grin, showing teeth gone the color of old ivory set into gums the color of indigo berries.

“What happens next?” you ask.

And now I am certain that there is more than one owl, that there are, in fact, at least a dozen, battening at the sky and perched in the limbs of what few small trees grow at the edge of the marsh. Those birds are also listening, also waiting, and the words fall from my lips like stones.