Louisa Meets Bear (13 page)

I lowered the tray onto the coffee table and went over to the fireplace to look at the photographs displayed on the mantelpiece on either side of a Chinese urn: to the left, a squat woman and gaunt man in wedding garb—Mr. Pryzwawa's wedding picture, I assumed; to the right, a picture of the squat woman with a little girl standing beside her; on both sides, many pictures of what appeared to be the same girl growing older. In one of the photos, the girl held a kitten close to her face. In another, she sat on the floor hugging a German shepherd.

Set off a bit from the others was a large photo: three rows of young women, all dressed in khaki pants and long-sleeved white shirts, in front of a jeep. I picked out the girl. She was in the front row, thinner than in the other photos. Without the puffiness in her cheeks, her features looked more intelligent. She appeared slightly worried. To the right of the jeep there was a black man who looked like a guide, to the left a huge crate with the slats covered with wire mesh and some kind of animal inside.

Leaning closer, I made out the face of the beast, the eyes dark globules, as though the pupil had overtaken the iris and then all of the white. They reminded me of a painting my mother had shown me during one of our visits to the Pushkin: two animals in a field of lush grasses and red day lilies with black dots for eyes. “It's a Rousseau,” she'd explained. “The speckled animal is a jaguar. The white one is a horse.” The animals had appeared to be in some kind of embrace. The horse's eyes, though, had made me uneasy. Although only dots, they seemed anguished. When I pulled on my mother's sleeve to ask what the animals were doing, she bent down to brush her lips over my forehead. “The jaguar is kissing the horse,” she'd whispered into my ear.

Next to the safari photo was a small crucifix: the Jesus with tilted head and blood dripping down his forearms and calves. Given Mr. Pryzwawa's age, the girl should have now been middle-aged, with nearly grown children of her own, but there were no later pictures, no new cycle of mother and child.

Mr. Pryzwawa came in with mugs of tea while I was still looking at the photographs. It occurred to me that maybe the girl had died.

Mr. Pryzwawa put the mugs on the tray next to the sardines. He lowered himself onto a hard-backed chair and I sat across from him on the couch. From years of people avoiding asking me about my mother, I knew that I had to inquire—the added pain when someone senses your grief and treats it like leprosy.

“Is this your daughter?”

“Our Judy.” Mr. Pryzwawa's eyes had a burnt dry look, years beyond tears. My mother's death had taught me that
time heals all
is a stupid platitude. Wounds change: a crushed bone turns into a limp. An arsoned building becomes a home for rats.

Once, when Bear asked me to tell him something more about my mother, I told him about the trip to the Soviet Union: how my mother had taken me to see the Impressionist paintings at the Pushkin and the Hermitage. “I remember standing in front of her, little enough to lean against her knees. There was a picture of a jaguar kissing a horse. The horse's eyes looked like the button ones on some of my stuffed animals.”

“A jaguar kissing a horse?”

“Yes,” I said, bristling and then recoiling as it dawned on me how strange that would be.

For my birthday a few weeks later, Bear bought me a book about modern art in the Soviet museums. Not until I had leafed through it several times did I see the Rousseau—the white horse and the jaguar drawn as though for a children's story, the day lilies a brilliant red backdrop. Goose bumps broke out on my arms as I read the title:
Jaguar Attacking a Horse.
I've never asked my father if my mother had known the title and not wanted to tell me, but I can imagine his response:
For your mother, kisses and bites were the same.

Mr. Pryzwawa shifted his gaze from the mantel of pictures. “Last summer made twenty-three years since our Judy died.” He studied my face. “She was about your age.” I held myself very still, hoping he wouldn't ask how old I was. I didn't want to find out that I had been born the year his daughter died. “She died in Africa.”

Mr. Pryzwawa took off his glasses. With one hand on his forehead, shielding his eyes, he inhaled sharply. “She'd just graduated from nursing school. A group of them went to work for the summer in a village in Tanzania. At the end of their trip, they went on a weekend safari.”

My head was nodding up and down like a bobbing doll.

“They stopped to photograph a pride of lions. Seems that Judy walked away from the jeep to take a picture of one of the cubs. The mother lion looked up and made a run for Judy. The guide shot the mother lion, but he only wounded her.”

I stared at Mr. Pryzwawa's skin, parched white as desert sand.

“The mother lion must have been in a rage from having been shot because she jumped up and dug her claws into Judy's face. Ripped out her face.”

Mr. Pryzwawa put his glasses back on. He adjusted them on his nose and focused his gaze on me. “That's what my wife was never able to stand—that our Judy lost her face. Me, I was relieved. The doctor told me the claws went through her eyes, directly into her brain. She died in an instant.”

Although I'd been countless times on the telling end of the story of my mother's death, I couldn't remember what anyone had ever said in response other than Bear, who'd asked where my mother had been going and I'd realized that I didn't know.

“What use do the dead have for a face was the way I saw it, but my wife, she didn't want her buried without a face, not even in a closed casket, so we had her cremated.”

Mr. Pryzwawa pointed to the Chinese urn on the mantel. “That's her,” he said. “She's in there.”

*   *   *

I took the apartment. There was no lease and I told Mr. Pryzwawa that it would be for only a few months—until the end of the school year, when I'd already decided I was going to move back West. He didn't ask me any questions but I could tell he knew I was in some kind of trouble because when I asked if he wanted a month's deposit, he patted my shoulder and said, “No need. I see you're a nice girl.”

I drove back to the city on a local road that ran next to the river. For a stretch, there was a wall covered with graffiti, and from a distance I caught sight of a heart with
Percy Green Forever
written in large bubble letters. When I got closer, though, I saw that I was wrong—the bubble letters spelled
Peter and Gretchen Forever
. I hadn't heard any news about Percy since B.C.: Before Cat-Sue. In the lull of the car, Percy's story distilled to a sentence: cop with gun got Green with knife got Pakistani tourist with subway map.

Though I didn't know the road, not even its name, I assumed that if I followed the river, I couldn't get lost. Wandering at dusk through an unfamiliar neighborhood in Moscow, my mother had taken my hand, declaring, “If John Speke could find the source of the Nile, we can find our way back to the hotel.” Then, with no idea of what or where the source of the Nile might be, I'd been aware only of the descending dark and that my mother's hand, a shell over my own, was cold.

Not until I was a teenager, old enough to know about Lake Victoria but not old enough to have stopped pretending that my mother was not really dead but rather away on a long trip, had I discovered that my mother, who must have imagined herself a kindred spirit to Isak Dinesen and Beryl Markham with their brave but syphilitic lovers, had had a passion for these European explorers of the wild continent. In the attic of my father's house, Corrine and I found my mother's underlined copy of the memoirs of Vivienne de Watteville, a woman who had traveled to Kenya with her father in the twenties and then continued her journeys alone to photograph the regal animals after her father, like Mr. Pryzwawa's Judy, had been killed by a lion. Corrine and I wept when we read how Vivienne's father, whom she'd called Brovie, pulled the lion's claws out of his own flesh and then walked bleeding to the camp where Vivienne had been left behind with spirillum fever, and how Vivienne, never mentioning her own febrile state, nursed him for thirty hours, cutting the pus from his wounds, spooning him broth, until he died. When we got to Vivienne's description of Brovie's death, “I cannot tell you how unbelievably heroic he was,” our cheeks had become waterfalls, each of us imagining ourselves the brave and beautiful Vivienne alone with our father in the Kenyan wild.

With the Palisades cast in a pinkish glow, the Hudson looked cold and deep. It occurred to me that there are two kinds of people: those who die of needing others, die attempting to rip open their skins so as to snuff out the emptiness with someone else, and those who, like Andrew, maneuver through life as though the purpose is to avoid being touched more deeply than the dermis. Despite the Cat-Sues and the baker's dozen of my shower predecessors, Andrew would undoubtedly die believing he never needed anyone. I'd be a dot on the time line of human traps he escaped.

My father would claim my mother was like this too. “Your mother,” he'd once told me, “lived like an egg sliding over a Teflon pan.” This, I know, is my father's conceit—though I never would have said that to him or told him that Corrine, inflamed with the intuition of a thirteen-year-old first apprehending the full powers of the body, had folded the newspaper from the day my mother died into a pillowcase she gave me on my own thirteenth birthday, or that, studying the yellowed weather page, I read it had been a hot and humid day, the boating report for calm and placid waters. No wind.

*   *   *

It was nearly nine o'clock by the time I reached the Kappock Street bridge that crossed into the city. Looking west at the lights reflected on the water, it seemed as if I were peering into the future—into the weeks and probably months of trudging through the days, putting one foot in front of the other, while I waited for the afterimage of Andrew and Cat-Sue to fade.

The way Mr. Pryzwawa had dunked his tea bag up and down, over and over, until the water in the mug turned the color of the river, had left me feeling afloat in something terribly but also preciously human, and even though I could still taste the bile from the moment when Andrew had jumped up from the bed and Cat-Sue had dived under the sheet, for an instant in Mr. Pryzwawa's dusty living room there had been a real and almost soothing quality about it all.

The sky was speckled with a smoky white haze, the stars hidden by the city excrement. In the dark, I could see the George Washington Bridge lit up ahead. As part of our naming game, Andrew and I had called the bridge Martha. “George wouldn't have bothered with bridges,” Andrew had said. “Martha's the one who would have wanted a clean dry path.” Now, though, the bridge looked more shapely and elegant than a Martha, like an unworldly animal with an arched back and a million diamonds sewn into its pelt.

When I'd first learned that there had been no wind the day my mother died, I'd not yet known about my mother's sheep farmer—that I would learn years later from my cousin Lizzy after my aunt eventually told her—but I had understood in that moment with the yellowed newspaper in my hands that it must have been a great but unbearable passion, not unlike the passion that lifted the lioness onto her hind legs when she'd seen Mr. Pryzwawa's Judy approaching her cub, that had driven my mother's car off a cliff.

Salty tears cascaded over my cheeks, the car echoing with a cacophony of sniffles and gulps. Sniffles and gulps because in the back of my mind I had been looking for an apartment so I could pack my bags so Andrew would fall to his knees and declare that even though nothing had happened with Cat-Sue, it all served only to confirm his eternal love for me. Because with Mr. Pryzwawa probably at that very moment ripping down his ad for the apartment from the bulletin board at the A&P and planning to run the vacuum cleaner through the room of his daughter who lost her face, nothing Andrew could say would let me pretend Cat-Sue had been taking a nap.

Because no jaguar ever kissed a horse. Because no wind blew the day my mother died. Because by the weekend I would be sleeping in Judy's old bed—the bridge no longer Martha, no longer a bejeweled brontosaurus, just pilements of concrete buried deep in the silt.

 

1990

 

Misto

Richard watches his wife, Lena—at forty-four, still obsessively thin, with bones so tiny that Richard used to tease her that a cannibal would pass her by, and skin so delicate that on days like today when she is angry or overtaken by strong emotion, the blood vessels seem at risk of breaking the surface, Lena who has lobbied against smoking in places populated by children or public employees, Lena who now lights an Italian-packaged Marlboro and inhales with her chin jutted high into the damp Venetian air, her neck arched slightly backward, her lips pursed in the way that inspired her father nearly forty years ago to nickname her La Principessa.

“It's a
joke
,” Lena says. “Fourteenth-century Walt Disney that the tourists think is High Art.”

Richard looks over the café railing at the queue of people waiting for the vaporetto: children with black satchels going to school by boat, women with net bags crossing the canal for morning errands, tourists laden with suitcases headed to the train. Across the canal, the wall of palaces appears one-dimensional, the facades a pastiche of colored patches of peeling paint, water lapping over the doorsteps, like a huge movie set behind which no one expects to find bathrooms and kitchens and couches and rugs. Despite Lena's disdain, Richard feels the elation that the city has always induced in him. At times, walking through the narrow cobbled streets, he has had the sensation of stepping into a wrinkle in time, as though he might turn a corner and be lifted backward eight hundred years or outward into another reality where pigeons sing and gondolas fly through the air.