Log of the S.S. The Mrs Unguentine (8 page)

When, two weeks later, my solitude having placed me in a state of resignation in which I thought I could bear anything, Unguentine strode through the bedroom door with bright eyes and a smile that seemed to indicate nothing had ever happened—I burst into tears and fiercely wished nothing ever had. We embraced. I apologized for having stripped the bedroom, chattered on about this and that, old conversations, ancient words that uncontrollably came across the years and back to me. He didn’t seem to mind. Soon I was following him upstairs towards the gardens. I hadn’t wanted to go, not so quickly. I wondered whether it was really my Unguentine I was behind, or some arrogant, hirsute creature whose biped tramping set the whole staircase to clattering. I dreaded the first look. Desert? Dustbowl? Bomb crater? Unaccustomed to the flood of bright light beneath the dome, I was to wander around uncomprehending a half hour until his gestures and demonstrations made clear what he had done. A few trees he had spared; why I didn’t know, no more than I knew why he had cut the others down, why he had begun replacing them with ones of his own creation, dry and brittle mimics which yet caught the contour of trunk and branch framework, the traceries of twig, needle, bud—why this fake forestry? I was stunned. Upon armatures of steel rod he had woven coils of rope fifty and sixty feet into the air, padded them with kapok and foam rubber, glued and stitched them up with simulated barks of dried and shredded kelp, bound and applied in the manner of papier-mâché. The leaves, plastic, of a two-ply lamination enclosing a liquid solution that gave them a flickering motion in breezes and winds and an uncanny translucence, almost too leaf-like. The tools and materials of his handiwork littered the remains of the living garden; I saw petunias gasping for air from beneath piles of iron rod, grapes bleeding under heaps of half-rotted rope; upended tree stumps, sacks of cement, gaping holes in the lawn where were to be sunk the steel roots of the next crop of artificial trees. I leaned on him repeatedly, his warm flesh, and sobbed; to be with him again, but also at these, his monstrosities.

Yet there was nothing to do but go on, wherever it all might lead. After a day of rest in the sticky sun, I began to help him. Something to do. He showed me how to paint the leaves. Gave me a little box of paints. Brushes. A pot of glue. A hamper of unpainted leaves the colour of skimmed milk, and slowly they began to pass through my fingers for their spatterings of green, then to be fastened to twigs of molybdenum wire and into drooping sprays along the lines indicated by his rough sketches, only a few dozen leaves a day at first, then with practice over two hundred, from one basket to another through my increasingly deft fingers, leaving small callouses and arid memories. Thence into branches and boughs to be stacked around a naked trunk, to be hoisted up and bolted on with the insidious clicking of a ratchet wrench, until a calm morning just before sunrise when the light was soft and easy to work under, a high tree ready to be inaugurated, Unguentine would climb the ladder and shift the leaves of a bough here and there to my hand signals down below, tilting them, bending them, giving a branch a vigorous shake to see how it would hang after a wind. Then he would come down to hook up the paint sprayer, re-ascend with a long red rubber tube dangling behind him and vanish into the depths of the leaves to straddle a branch while I would wait below on the lawn holding the large mirror by which he could see how his spraying appeared at a distance. The whole tree would tremble and creak as he positioned himself; then, up there somewhere, leaves would part and I might glimpse his face, eyes rolling as he struggled to unkink the hose, unclog the spray gun. A hand would droop out, point left. I’d hold up the mirror in the direction indicated. His arm reaching way out through the foliage with the nozzle pointed at a cluster of leaves whose greens were perhaps still too poisonous, he would pull the trigger,
psst-psst,
and suddenly the spot would harmonize. On to the next he would go, branches springing up and down, until gradually the whole tree would be muted with a subtle haze, like dew, like dust, and until the sun would swell up over the horizon and the dome creak to the influx of light and heat, elements for which the new trees had no use. When finished, he would climb down and walk around the trunk once or twice, his head thrown back, frowning, squinting up at it. I might go, Eh-ah, feign enthusiasm. I hated the stench of fresh paint. Some days this would be the most I saw of him. We rarely spoke. The communications I received from him were orders mainly. Do this, do that. Shear the goat, weave a rug. Air the hold. Dig up the onions, potatoes. There was no rest.

Unguentine was either busy cutting down the last of the living trees of any size, with the shambles of tangled branches, broken windows, with wandering furrows all over the yard where heavy logs had been dragged to the bow to be dropped overboard, or was wiring up their mechanical replacements, each one more ambitious, more intricate than the last. In the place of the Chestnut Anna, the most splendid of his trees when alive, there came to stand a silent and gracefully swaying thing with specially articulated boughs that needed a daily lubrication in windy weather or high seas. The leaves of the Beech Cynthia turned bright yellow after a month as the top coat of green paint flaked off in invisible specks, revealing the autumnal undercoat; and I thought we would be seeing her like that forever, paralyzed in splendour, until one morning, a morning that promised to be quiet and eventless, for there were no more large trees to be cut and the garden was now overcrowded with mechanical trees and no space left, thank God: I knew I would suffocate with any more lifelessness about. We were crossing the lawn together, just having had breakfast, in a silence that was not morose but over which seemed to hang the understanding that if only time might pass a little faster, then all might be well; and it was then that Unguentine stepped away from my side and reached over to the artificial Beech Cynthia, pulled something, a lever perhaps, and all of a sudden from up high the air resounded with a flurry of clicking noises followed by a rushing shower. I flung my arms over my head. I screamed perhaps—while every one of her thousands of leaves dropped to the ground at once with the sound of wet noodles. Then it was all over. Perhaps he said something about their needing changing, repainting. But I wasn’t listening, or was listening only to the sad popping noises the laminated leaves made as crushed beneath my aimless feet, their yellow solution spurting out to stain the lawn. So this was how it would be. Year after year. Grinding them all up. Bleaching the plastic powder. Mixing up a new solution. Rolling them out like dough, cutting the leaf forms anew. The lamination. Injecting the liquid solution. Painting one side, then the other. So on, so forth, through artificial springs and painted autumns, tree by tree, the mindless work waxing and varnishing our bodies into ages too old to bear, the hideous leaves burying us and everything we had ever known under matted, impermeable mounds.

It couldn’t end like this: I wouldn’t have it, would kill myself first. The olden days of our youth had promised more and I still remembered the times from which we had sprung, before everything changed, when people looked so much better, the young looked younger, the old looked older as if having lived in the heat of the fields, knowing dust. Perhaps none of it had ever been living, but I would remember it so, had to. Little enough of it, true. Scraps. Flashes. I remembered something about having first fallen in love with Unguentine by image, say the fleeting reflection of a newspaper photograph in a pond, in some park, as perhaps carried by a passer-by who must have folded the paper away into his coat pocket just as I might have been hastening to catch up and have a closer look. I would have been young and pubescent then, without the courage to tug at the man’s sleeve. But the image left some mark, would not vanish, stayed with me through those long years until one summer on a crowded beach I first heard Unguentine’s voice while I lay buried in hot sand with my eyes shielded by sunglasses, neither awake nor asleep. The cry, that hoarse cry torn from the fast-running figure of a man who, perceiving me only the last instant before his bare feet would have trampled me, leaped into the air, over me, and ran on. It was him, I think, a thrashing shape receding so fast towards a horizon blinding with luminous sand, surf, foam; and who, I knew, would some day return. He must have. Things must have happened one after the other, to this, the barge, the mechanical forest, to the moment not long after that he disappeared once and for all in some confidential manner I never learned of; but at the right time, I suppose, somewhat late even, for he must have been just as emptied by it all as I was. He heard me, no doubt. Go. Leave now, before it is too late.

I reproached him only for leaving me after forty years together without word, without note, without explanation, scene, quarrel, bloody drama. How dare he? He knew my tastes. He knew that I should have preferred some rich terminal event such as a foot placed with seeming carelessness on a weakened pane of glass high up on the dome, the tinkle, the shout, the long fall through plastic leaves to the lawn, at my feet, where I might be weeding: the crumpled form, my dead husband fallen from the sky. Or how much I would have mulled over and enjoyed and finally treasured up in memory a scene on the stern deck as he might have lowered himself into the skiff or diving bell or simply jumped into the water with stones tied to his ankles, my shrill abuse about the marriage vows and what was to become of me now, an emptied woman upon a rudderless, leaking barge with worn-out lawns and exhausted livestock? What was I to do? Where go? Did it not use to be that a gentleman of a man would have at least repaired the machinery before leaving so I could possibly get somewhere? Your duty, Unguentine? He failed me. If in fact I would have had the strength to rise to such an occasion; as likely not. And just as likely there might have been some little parting scene so quiet and muted I was the one who failed to note its import at the time, as at breakfast that day when he stood up from the table and brushed a tea-leaf from his lip while through the open dome doors there came the sound of the twin sycamores’ leaves slapping and grinding together like jeering applause, and when he bent down and kissed me once on the forehead before walking away down the deck, jauntily, in the manner of one who has ten miles to cover on foot before noon. Thus he vanished from sight around the dome. I sat in my chair, finished my tea secure in the knowledge that there was no place to go. This was it. For months I remained convinced he would return somehow, come back, hear me tell of what had happened in his absence. He never did.

A year passed. Across that heavy, scummy sea the barge drifted, surrounded by an ossuary of logs that would not sink, as I tended the vegetables that still grew, the goats, the seven ducks, four hens. A few more shrubs went brown in the leaves, died. Daily I swept the barge stem to stern, scraped off a greenish growth that blossomed on the outside of the hull and which I thought might be responsible for the slight list to the left the barge was taking; these, my humble, helpless navigations. I wired the leaves back on to the Beech Cynthia in such a way they would never fall off. I repainted the bedroom. Every now and then I would crawl over the sacks of potatoes stored in the cargo hold and wind up the alarm clocks so as to have at least the consolation of his typical noises with me, puncuate my vigil, help me sleep. The night of the first anniversary of his disappearance, or of the date I first missed him and when I hauled a forty-year-old calendar out of hiding and made a mark at random on some day and month, I went out to the stern deck and turned on the neon lights he had once wired up all over the outside of the dome, and I stood there flashing them on and off, night sea shimmering under their traceries all the colours of the rainbow. But from the darkness, from reflections like pulsating electric lotuses, there came no response. Only the ducks, awakened by the false dawn, chortled and quacked. Could it then be? Like this?

Years passed. Eons. Eras without temples.
Through rusting twigs, through the struts of the dome gnawed annually higher by daring termites, the sun rose, fell, rose; things flaked, things peeled, things vanished into earth and mud and brackish water, into the formless cocoon to be mixed and moulded into whatever had the energy to sprout through and have another go. I had seen it all before. It was the same awake, the same asleep. I knew by heart that if in daytime the wind blew strong and flattened the blades of grass out on the marsh, then at night it would drop and the air be silent, or that a cooling breeze would always follow a hot day, dispel the haze. Yet I did what I could. A year I spent catching up with all the correspondence neglected over the decades, that my old friends might have some notion of what had finally become of me and how my life had turned out, how I came to live in seclusion among old mirrors and deep carpets, endless chambers, atop some highest building in a great and angry city into whose concert halls I was limousined once a month, to hear a gloomy symphony; how I lived in exile, in oases, behind ramparts of palms and aqueducts and spraying fountains, walls inlaid with intricate tiles, in the middle of a blazing desert inhabited only by morose brigands whose camels had the gout, how I fed them dates, taught their children French; or my life in northern mountains, the great stone house set amid trackless miles of evergreens half buried in the snow nine months of the year, the walls upstairs and down lined with books, my reading, my lives, my lies I told them all. For I could not speak of the sea. The sea was there, was all, beyond the mud and ooze of the floating marsh, too close to be chattered about. When I finally sealed up those hundred and fifty letters pasted with the bankrupt republic’s worthless postage stamps which depicted the S.S.
The Mrs Unguentine
cutting through the waves in all her ancient splendour, a tiny smear of dots and hatchmarks to the right forming two seated figures, perhaps Unguentine and I at the breakfast table granting a cheerful salute with waving arms, again and again, a hundred and fifty times, those arms, licked, pasted, cancelled away under the postmark once bestowed upon me, honorary postmistress of the high seas, and which read simply BARGE. I tied them all up into bundles and sealed them inside a sheet of plastic, then fitted them into a wooden box roped with life preservers. There were still pools of water around the barge, narrow estuaries which flowed out to sea and sometimes ran sweet, sometimes salty; I dropped the box into one of these and watched it float away. It didn’t get far. Fifty yards at the most, where it ran aground on a mudbank and stayed forever after.