Glass Grapes (13 page)

Surrealism's philosophy relative to, concern with, the “object”—a kind of happy marriage with my life-long preoccupation with things. Especially with regard to the past, a futile reminiscence of the Mill notion that everything old is good & valuable—mystical sense of the past—empathy for antiques—nostalgia for old books.

—Joseph Cornell

He floats, she thought, as she thought about him and she couldn't help thinking about him, out to flea markets, and returns, not with a small glass bottle, but with giant chests of drawers, bent calipers for measuring skulls, an oversized set of scales, a hodgepodge of stuff, most too large to be placed on a table, and so, like everything piled here and there, in the way of legs and feet. Coming here was, she thought, like bumping into a material version of what she wanted, meeting up with things that she couldn't have imagined or couldn't have summoned up the energy to go find, haul into place, pay
for, but which once there seemed as familiar as rooms one lay in as a feverish child, the roses on the wallpaper melded in feverish heat. Visiting was like reaching out in the dark to encounter her dead mother on the way to the kitchen to get a glass of water, the hallway between dreaming and waking that as a child she'd taken for granted as another realm in and of itself.

In this one house in Quincy, something of this returned, at least around the edges. There was the pleasure of revisiting the familiar, odd things he'd collected: the 19th-century wooden mantelpiece, the photograph with the smeared emulsion of brooms, the etching of ships coming into harbor. And there was always the pleasure of seeing and touching new objects recently carried in, the anticipation of a future in which there would be more. Her hands opened and shut as if she were being touched instead of touching. It was the house she'd always thought she'd live in and although now she knew she wouldn't, she wanted to visit it as if it would help some transition not only into a past which she didn't want to lose sight of, but also into a future that seemed recently more obscure than ever. Lately the constriction in her lungs seemed to be tightening around more than her lungs. She once came close to moving in when for a moment both of them were off balance—he divorced and she alone. She had taken time off work to spend the summer with him and help paint the shutters. But for some reason hidden now in the past and in all that had happened since, she hadn't.

She said this to the man on the plane. “There must have been more to it,” she confessed as people confess high in the air, but somehow her memory had locked onto one scene. She saw herself sitting in the kitchen with him and his now dead mother, anxious about a plane ride back to the west coast and to whatever was going to happen to her. There didn't seem to be a discussion at the center of whatever decision had been made, or whatever decision had occurred, since she couldn't call up a single conversation about it, just those green and pink fringes of anxiety that erupt from a missing center like steamers of confetti falling from the sky.

Her help with the shutters wasn't all. The move into the house was an excavation into someone else's past, their own being too familiar, too ill-defined. If the idea of self-examination ever came up, it was set off to the side, cordoned off. In the dreams she had upon arriving, she found herself trespassing, trying to extricate herself from entangling fences, coming upon flat sheets of cardboard that required intricate fitting together, tabs and slits, but she fumbled—all hands—and woke up. In the decaying house they came upon ruins that drew and transfixed them: bits of melted fiberglass like sculpted embryos, cast ceramic coverings for the wiring, one layer of Victorian wallpaper on top of another: yellow roses, then stripes, then a delicate patterning of small bouquets tied with ribbons, layered like kimono robes one on top of the other as they were unevenly stripped away. The whole room unfolded in a paper fan
of green wavy stripes, the wallpaper just put on, 1910: music playing, sun slanting through the tall windows, children waiting to be told.

On some days after a rush of work, they simply stood there, caught in a past life that was more their own than the one before them, as if they could fall asleep and awake, posed formally before the photographer who disappeared beneath a black cloth and ordered them to stand still. The faded photograph of a couple hung in the hallway; the woman's eyes were half closed. In their fatigue, words seemed to take flight, leaving them behind with what felt like hands enlarged and hot from having been slept on too long.

In the dream she had during the second week, he took her to the edge of the sea to a tent. Inside they played volleyball in miniature since the tent was barely large enough for two army cots. She stood on one side of the pushed-together cots and he on the other and they hit the ball back and forth. When she lay down next to him, she felt the hair on his chest like the fur of animals. On the beach were striped umbrellas, children, colored balls and flying Frisbees. This dream, she thought, was somehow an offering of a kind of life they could have or had had as children, but it was very damp and the quarters were so close she felt herself unable to breathe. She remembered her mother telling her that as she had aged her dreams had become unbearably real.

They put on overalls and gloves and face masks and she tied a bandana around her hair to keep out the dust. Their hand tools became extensions of the hands that ached at the end of the day and refused to uncurl easily around a glass of water, a cup of tea, but once in place, latched on, as the cup became a hand, the hand a cup. They had become one entity working on the house, sanding and painting and waiting. She couldn't recognize him in his wrappings, and he couldn't recognize her. Or rather, it wasn't a question of recognition, but of having agreed as they couldn't agree on anything else, to work on this house, to put off, perhaps, a time that would eventually come. They were side by side during the day and into the evening; they were lifting their arms; they were crouching by the molding; they were looking at paint samples, fanning out blues and green-blues and narrowing themselves into corners. When they turned into one another by accident, it was like running into something overly familiar but out of place.

They stripped away broken plaster to the wooden slats beneath. Dust stuck to her. Her hair seemed made of filaments. Her nails tore. Something was caught between her teeth. She couldn't find her socks, her feet, where her feet ended in shoes, the shoes on the carpet, the carpet, dusty and moldy on the wooden floor. They ripped up the carpet, rolled it, took it out to the edge of the street. The window in the bedroom was shifted to the left to give a view to the garden; this shift took days and took it out of her as if parts of her own body had
had to be shifted as well. She was sometimes so tired that she simply lay down on the floor and felt the wood beneath her hands anchor her in place.

At the end of the day they sat across from one another over takeout at the one clean space, the kitchen table, and stared into space. She didn't sleep with him, not only because they were both too tired, but also because they found the intense intimacy of the day, working beside one another for hours, and what turned out to be the unrelenting intimacy of silence over the table, as much as they could take. The Victorian ceilings were high and hard to reach. The inside top shelves of the closet had to be cleaned. The books smelled of foxing. She felt for him in her sleep. Her hands groped the air.

In her dream of the third week he put a yellow dog and her large litter of pups in the bed. They scrambled around on her covers, one paw slipping into a crevice, one ear brushing her face. Everything was lumpy and wet and she felt the bed rock on the waves of the ocean beneath her. The pups dissolved into transparent embryos pulsing their blue veins beneath watery skin. They pushed against her, nudging her, kneading her, licking her.

Crates arrived with the heads of Italian angels, old stone jars, elephants holding up platforms, intricately carved wooden eagles, one with a fish in its mouth. A wooden gazebo from Indonesia filled what used to be the garden lawn. All these objects turned the house into something foreign and exotic, as if a house once
landlocked had begun to float, as if the center of the house were no longer just inside, but inside out along the periphery—the porches and patios and gazebos in the yard. The afternoon light was slanted and the air was humid. Horseflies and mosquitoes edged around her hairline. The meadow grasses and Queen Anne's lace invaded the side yard.

It felt like summer, a summer that had disappeared from her vocabulary until now. She took off her overalls and sat in the sun that flickered in the manner of an old film, the faces of the young parents disintegrating in grainy memory. Each segment of the past hour was so etched and shimmering that she felt it would take her years, given the inevitable passage of time, to remember every small detail, the rigging on the painted ship, the warriors and lances in the carpet, the blank marble eyes of angels, the faces in the film. She must, she thought, remember it all. She tilted her face into the bluish haloes of too much sun.

Workmen came and went. She walked about touching the furniture, rubbing shins against the plush of the sofa, the drip of the palm branches, the doorjambs. She took Polaroids of each stage of progress. The odd color of the prints, the muted green wash, seemed to match her sense of the air inside the house that fell on them, and each day they edged closer to retreat from the world outside the walls they worked in, lived in, slept in. The morbidity of the future had, she thought, been finally resolved: it no longer pulsed as before, but had
been edged out by the house itself, by its antique trappings, by summers of childhood, and by an agreement that had come into being without their having had to speak of it. There were but two of them. They curled up together suddenly. They slipped glances in between stacks of drawers that fit no bureaus. Their hands met over newspapers that had been left behind and hauled into the kitchen. He read from a scrap of paper, “Sweet hours have perished here; This is a mighty room; Within its precincts hopes have played—Now shadows in the tomb.”
Do you remember,
she said,
we first were together when my mother was dying. We sat on the bed in my old room, waiting.

In the heat of the sun, the air wobbled. Behind her the wallpaper was warm, beating like a heart when she put her hand to it. She reached out to take his hand and licked it as she once remembered doing as a child marking up her room with wet kisses and feeling the toys painted on the slippery wallpaper now imprinted on her tongue.

If in a letter to you I quote a section from a book I am reading, is the section I am quoting different because it is now filtered through my voice? How is this passage changed, if it is, by being inserted in the context of my letter to you? Does it come to have a significance, even an intimacy, which it would not have if you had bought the book yourself and marked the identical passage? And what if my inclusion of the quotation was meant to imply that it had some bearing on something I had not been able to mention to you for reasons of reticence, but which now I was trying to make known?

Simply by its taking up space on the page, does it impress itself on you despite the fact that you don't read it with care? Or if you skip it altogether, glancing at the page in a cursory fashion as you are apt to do given the constraints on your time, my effort to say something intimate to you in elegant, borrowed language is thereby foiled. I would have chosen a passage I had thought might convey to you how I
think I would write to you if I had the skills of this particular author, and yet this would have meant nothing to you.

So that after a week or so when I haven't heard from you, I'll conclude that the passage was offensive to you, and that I had broken all bonds between us, inserting language and imagery not my own into so deeply personal a letter, and that it was not the specific nature of the material, but rather, the stealing of another's perceptions in order to convey some semblance of my own that had ruined everything.

1. If after a time she became wary of her own tendencies to alter the truth in small and insignificant ways, but ways which nevertheless she saw as a type of wickedness, then she felt she had no other recourse but to quote from others, not that she thought the quoted material more reliable, but only that it came from other mouths, not less tainted perhaps, but at least not her own. And it had been in print: the quoted material had already been published and had been, therefore, subject to various reviews and had been corrected by various editors who were more knowledgeable than she and capable therefore of saying more about the truth of things.

So she stitched together letters which for her mattered more than the so-called obvious signs of love, and sent them to him whether he was nearby and accessible by phone or had traveled to another city. Wherever he went there was always a letter waiting for him in which
he looked in vain for a fragment of her natural way of talking, for some expression he recognized, some habit of speech, a private aside.

But there was nothing. Although the letters had begun innocently enough with a few quoted passages, to indicate what she was reading or to reiterate a point, they proceeded to those in which only the introductory salutations were her own, and these were as neutral and official sounding as she was able to make them, as if she were even then, in so momentary a lapse into “her own voice,” dependent on a text, polite but distant. Of late, even the introductory statements such as “from an article on optical illusions” or “from the recent essay on portraiture” were excised and only the quotations in all their naked glory were left, and often without punctuation or quotation marks so that the paragraphs from all the articles and newspapers and books ran together like bodily fluids and it was impossible for him to find anything idiosyncratic, anything addressed specifically to him from her in the whole of the letter and yet she insisted she had never so thoroughly poured her heart out to anyone before.

2. Her sense was that only the oblique could convey what she wanted to convey. If one of her photographic subjects stared out directly into the lens, she knew she had failed to capture the true image, that all she would have would be an imitation snapshot like those which filled family albums in which wooden figures
stand squarely before the camera, look into the lens and smile the smile everyone recognizes as “the smile for the camera.” Her motto, “never look at the camera,” was therefore carried as well into her letters. Her model for this capturing of the truth was the photograph of Dauthendey with his wife:
She is seen beside him in the photograph; he holds her; her glance, however, goes past him, directly into an unhealthy distance.
So, she thought, the wife was captured revealing the future which at the time of the photograph was unrealized by any in the room but for the oblique glance into “an unhealthy distance.” The future was caught in the emulsion, not by human insight, but by a random mechanical process.

Yet it was difficult to hold off from the restless, but ever-so-human effort to predict the future. Therefore, she abandoned the quotations themselves and pasted in photographs instead, not of herself gazing romantically into some unhealthy distance, but of those who might be plausible stand-ins for herself and for that which she might wish to say if she knew what that were. The “stand-ins” were most frequently, however, figures with little obvious resemblance to her own person, unless one were to focus on small and almost insignificant details and unless one were adept in ways that seemed even to her to put too fine a point on the matter. And yet, of course, in some way, it was such “putting” that she was after, some way of making him see how she was “like” the image she had substituted for herself, and more importantly, to see how she had so finely predicated
what she finally was to come to be, in essence that is, and what, although no one could have seen it coming, was to come to pass.

Of the countless movements of switching, inserting, pressing, and the like, the ‘snapping' of the photographer has had the greatest consequences. A touch of the finger now sufficed to fix an event for an unlimited period of time. The camera gave the moment a posthumous shock, as it were.

3. Her focus shifted to the future and she began sending him letters not only full of reference to books she was reading, but also designed to arrive when he would not be home, letters, that is, which he would not receive until later or which, since she often picked up his mail for him when he was out of town, she herself would get upon her return before he did. Thus in some sense these became letters or postcards not to him, although he did ultimately see them stacked up on his living room piano, but to herself, since she would read them over and stack them up for him to read after she had, after his return.

Why does one want to penetrate a time, she thought, unavailable to one at the moment, to insert oneself into the future, to be certain, for example, of one's existence at his house on August 16, although it is at the moment of the writing only August 3. It is “only” the
3
^RD
,
she thought, meaning, of course, that the place towards
which one was tending was someplace down the road, in a distance one could not see, unless it were captured in some “stroke,” some mark on paper or emulsion. To try to visualize herself sitting in his house surreptitiously reading the descriptions of weather on August 3 at a future time, August 16, was like adding days to the week, was like stolen time on a lovers' afternoon, was like the forbidden pleasure of knowing for certain that one would exist at a time not yet come into being, and that she had helped thereby to frame and predict the order of things.

To see her own words written there,
it is raining,
or
it has stopped raining,
was a pleasure that verged on a type of illicit potency, similar one might speculate to the alphabet itself, the way it could hold time as talking could not, and she imagined, the cessation of speech, the pleasure of existing only in the written word, and it was not so much that she wished to exist for him, but rather that she used him as a vehicle by which she could convey herself to herself, that she actually existed and had been wherever she had been and that the rain had been rain, not because she returned with a suitcase full of damp clothes and muddy shoes, but because it was written:
it is raining.
Also and equally satisfying perhaps, because the words in ink on the postcard of a rural landscape were smeared, running slightly down the card or because the card itself, an ordinary shot of rivers and trees, was curled as a card might be, especially a card left for the carrier in a mailbox standing
for hours in the pouring rain.

Then she would hold it, standing as she was at a later time, by the piano in the lamplight, and realize that she actually had been where it was raining, and that she had, moreover, successfully projected herself into the room in which she was standing, had (having imagined it and photographed it in her mind's eye—
figure in room with postcard in left hand
) brought it into being. And she felt a sense of prescience which nothing else, things far more momentous and significant in terms of what are called “life events,” could provide, nothing but her own words on the cardboard on the flipside of which a landscape in fake fall colors which she had never seen, shone in all its gaudy autumn glory.

4. What she wanted to do was create in him a desire for herself, but herself purified and expunged, exquisitely missing. So having gotten him used to reading quotations which she included in all of her letters, eventually, she cut them out. At first, she did this by cutting sentences and inserting the requisite dots (...) to indicate that some portion of the text was missing. Rarely did this change the meaning of the quotation; more often it simply served to smooth and “get to the main point” more quickly. Later, she took to cutting out the topic sentence or the sentence which, if he had been adept, he would have picked as the one, although not central to the quoted text itself, central to her, central not in any obvious or crass sort of way, but central to
her understanding of what she might become given the ideal projections of her talents and predilections.

After more time had passed, the whole was composed of mere fragments and gaps. From a certain perspective and from a rather sophisticated one, the bits and fragments seemed to compose a sort of poetic assemblage, or at least she, assuming that he was missing her acutely, found it intriguing to imagine that he might find them so. Ultimately, she “cut” all the words out of her letters so that what was left was a piece of blank paper which hung together by threads, rather like the paper dolls which are connected by a thin strip of hands linking them across the accordion pull-out of their fates before being tossed in the fire. And since it became quite difficult to fold them neatly into an envelope, even a business envelope of more considerable size, she stuffed them into the envelope crudely and mailed them off rather unconscious of the mangled wad that would be retrieved on the other end. She imagined that he would pull out a perfect frame of paper, decipher the shape of the missing quotations, and even, in the rather hallucinated state of longing, be able to guess at her underlying intention and embrace the nature of things between them.

5. The letter itself became for her a kind of rival in love, not the means by which she wrote to him, not the link and conveyer of information which would maintain contact over the time they were necessarily apart,
enabling her to call up his image and imagine the time when they would be together at last again, but rather that which she most looked forward to. The upcoming time when they had planned to meet completely faded in her imagination and she found herself delaying her return so that she could continue to write to him. Each day she worked quickly to complete the tasks that were at hand and that fulfilled her professional obligations in order to have the leftover moments in which she could turn to writing to him. Thus in the course of her stay in the country, what were to have been moments of snatched time, the rag-ends of time in which she might, if she had time, write to him just to keep him up to date and to assure him of her affection and her certain return, became in flip-flop, a negative to a missing positive, that which she most looked forward to and treasured.

Yet there were days in which, she found, despite writing to him, that she could not remember what he looked like, could not call up the color of his eyes. She tried to remember his image and pulled out, as anyone would do in such circumstances, a photograph of him she had tucked into the back of a book she had been reading when she left, but for some reason the face in the photograph in no way matched what fragments of him she thought she could remember and even less seemed to match the image of the man to whom she had been writing. He wasn't a complete stranger, of course. She realized that the man in the photograph was someone she had once known and she remembered his name,
address, profession, quirks. But as to that memory that fills in the bare outline,
that
was completely missing. There was no feeling of animosity towards the man; it was simply that he had lost the limbs of familiarity and had become not an intimate, but someone she had once known. For a time she thought the photograph was to blame, that it was a poor likeness, taken from the wrong angle, or capturing—as photographs do from time to time—a fleeting expression that although quite uncharacteristic of the person being photographed, passed across his face and was fixed by the camera for all time, as if the person were turned into a caricature of himself, not what he was at all, but more like his opposite, not exactly an evil twin, but a shadowy figure with a hidden past.

6. Having realized this fact, she saw that somewhat like DNA is a snapshot in miniature of the whole person, so his face, or at least the top half of his face, was (if separated from the rest) dimly familiar and welcome. If she placed a piece of paper over the rest of his body, especially over his mouth, and looked only at his eyes and brow, she remembered in a vague way that she knew him and had known him well.

Therefore, once she had finished with work on one particularly overwrought day, she took this flimsy snapshot, the only one she had brought with her, to the local camera lab to have it blown up. She had in mind to select a manageable portion, a quotation, as it were,
from the larger book of life itself. With the grease pencil, she outlined the square which she wanted and said she would pay and wait. It would be auspicious, she thought. This action was the best she had thought of yet. It was a way to enlarge, down to the pores and dots, that bit which was familiar, reassuring, her own. It was better than future time; it was stop-time altogether. For, she reasoned, with some controlled but obvious excitement, the further one went inward, the more intimate all would become.