Martin Sloane (8 page)

They’re just a few things I want to keep. He was in silhouette now, the moon against his back.

What’s this one? Molly asked. She was kneeling by a low shelf where she’d pulled a box made of glass on all sides out of its place. The front and back panels held an object encrusted with dirt. Through one side, you could see a rusted latch. Through the other, a page from an old Bible, lit up with illuminations. I’d seen it once or twice before. Martin had described it as unfinished — he hadn’t even given it a title. But now he took it from Molly and told her it was called The Good Book of Mysteries.

You’ll like this story, he said to her. It’s based on something my father told me when I was little.

Is it? I said.

Yes, said Martin. This story is for
Molly
though.

Alright.

It was called the Clonmacnoise Bible, he continued, the one my father told me about. It was supposed to be the most beautiful illuminated manuscript ever discovered. It was named for the ancient monastery on the shores of the Shannon where they discovered it. When they found the Bible, buried in the foundation of a nine-hundred-year-old church, it was in a rotted box, and its pages were open to two ancient illuminations, the most beautiful things ever seen. But the rest of the pages in both halves had partially decomposed from water leaking into the box through the ground, not to mention the discharges of all the bodies buried at varying depths in the church floor and in the yards, and then the pages had also petrified from centuries of pressure on the collapsed box. So what they decided to do was, they kept the second half at Clonmacnoise and sent the first half to Trinity in Dublin to be studied. And so began a succession of terrible luck. A curse, in fact.

Really, I said.

Martin shot me a look. The first man who tried to pry the pages apart was the most renowned archaeologist of the time, and after a week of trying to separate one page from another with nearly microscopic wires, he gave up in despair and hanged himself from the corner of a bookcase in the library. The second man, a chemist, tried to find a solvent that would separate the pages without destroying the illuminations, and although he was able to get the very edges of the pages to come apart, he could not see any of the illuminations, and gave up as well. He didn’t despair about his failure, but his wife took their three children back to their grandmother’s in Belfast, appalled that he would tamper with a religious artifact, and so come in for the wrath of God. This man spent the rest of his days alone and bereft.

Bereft, Molly said.

Finally, said Martin, a group of scientists decided that the best way to separate the pages of the first half of the Clonmacnoise Bible would be to immerse it in oil — since the pages were on an animal skin of some sort and wouldn’t be damaged — and allow the oil to soak in, and then subject the book to a long, slow drying process that would likely separate the newly supple pages.

Uh-huh, I said suspiciously. And?

Well, they had the Bible in a kiln with a glass door, and they had it on a low burn. After a number of days, they could see that the Bible’s pages were easing apart. When they could almost see the surfaces of the pages, with those bright colours and the long-lost illustrations, they turned the kiln off and let everything cool, and then they opened the door after another day and got ready with the bottles of champagne.

Molly’s face was pale. What happened?

It fell to ash the instant they touched it.

Jesus Christ, I said.

So now the other half at Clonmacnoise is in a glass case and if anyone tries to discover the rest of its treasures, they’ll lose that little bit they do have.

Molly stood bolt upright. And why is that story for me? she said. Why for me? It means don’t try to figure things out?

I looked back and forth between them, lost in the sudden updraft of emotion.

No, said Martin quietly. My father told it to me because something bad had happened to me, and I said that there was no reason for anything, that the world made no sense. My father was a religious man and this upset him.

So what, you were just a kid.

He said to me, just because you can’t understand why this is happening to you doesn’t mean there isn’t a reason. It’s just hidden from you, and you have to be able to appreciate life knowing you aren’t entitled to know all the answers.

He advised you not to think about your life? Molly said.

No. He was telling me to show some respect for both the beautiful as well as the darker mysteries, that’s all. He wanted me to understand that if something refuses to reveal itself to you, prying it apart could ruin something that was precious the way it was.

Including this bad thing that happened to you?

Well, it made me who I am, so I guess there was something good in it. If I think I’m leading a life worth leading.

And are you? Molly said.

I looked from her to him and back, not sure at all what had set this in motion. I leaned forward and gently took the fragile artwork from Martin’s hands. A prize in every box, I said. I slipped the Good Book of Mysteries back into place and drew out another box, one whose name I knew. This one has a happy ending, I said. Grand Central.

Molly looked over at it and smiled softly. That’s pretty.

And
I know this one, I said, clearing my throat nervously. It’s about a cinema.

A little while later, Molly looked at her watch and announced she had half an hour to make her bus. She went into the house to grab her bag. My god, I said to him, as we crossed the lawn behind her, what was that about?

I’m not sure. He sounded tired.

But what did she
say
to you? Molly reappeared in the doorway. You’ll tell me after.

She put her arms around me. It did me a world of good to get away for a day, she said. Her voice contained no hint of her previous distress. Thank you.

Okay, I said, a little lost. I wondered if she had quickly checked through her bag and seen what I’d left there for her. I could see no hint of what she was feeling under what she appeared to be feeling. Calm and collected.

We’ll talk, she said. I’ll call you. She turned to Martin. Thanks, she said.

He reached forward and hugged her. She slung her little bag over her shoulder, carelessly enough that I knew she hadn’t opened it and looked inside, and kissed us both. I just stood there and watched her walk toward the road.

Wait, I said, snapping out of it, we’ll drive you.

No, I’ll walk, she said. I don’t get lost.

But your bus is going to leave.

I’ll be fine, she said, and she waved to us both and turned down toward where the main road led to the station.

Martin went back into the shed to tidy up, and I stood in the doorway, watching him, waiting. Well, are you going to tell me what the
hell
that was all about?

He shrugged. Maybe she’s unhappy, he said.

She’s unhappy? Stop the presses. She seemed miserable all day. Is that what she wanted to say to you? He continued meticulously to shelve his things. Martin?

He walked past me in the threshold and snapped the light off. I stepped back so he could close the door. Then he turned to me sharply in the doorframe. I don’t mind if you come in here when I’m gone, he said. But if you break something, tell me so I can fix it.

Oh …, I said.

We stepped out of the verge and he clicked the lock shut. I’m not angry.

Okay.

But you can’t just replace a broken thing with an unbroken thing like you’re changing a lightbulb.

I’m sorry, I said, and I linked my arm in his, but he surprised me by slipping his out.

Just have a little more respect, okay? He continued across the grass to the house, and I followed him, knowing (in the way we tend to know things that are, if fact, just the way we’ve chosen to see the world) that there was no point in trying to make it right. At least not today, a day that had gotten away from me. I went in behind him and shut the kitchen door. It seemed to me that there were two darknesses that night, the one outside and the one in the house, and there was no difference, as if the door were a plate of glass dropped into the sea at night. I pulled the lock up. I had the image of that book of holy secrets, heavy with earth and rain and dust.

When I was a little girl, my parents had kept a layer of their wedding cake in the chest freezer downstairs. It was the top tier of a white cake with silver icing, the bride and groom wrapped in wax paper and tucked down beside it. All throughout my childhood, I’d go downstairs and scoop out some of the frozen cake from the underside with a teaspoon and eat it in perfect secrecy in the dark of the coldroom. It was furred with ice, but if I warmed the little hunks of cake in my mouth, the slightly sour taste of marzipan thawed out of it, and it was delicious. When I went down there, I’d have to fight the contradictory feelings of curiosity and shame. I was taking something from my mother that she obviously cared so much about. But there are certain feelings that you can’t fight, and the urge to be connected to certain people is one of them. When I sat in the coldroom, dissolving the cake in my mouth, I would become my mother. I’d absorb her into my body, and I believed I knew what it felt like to be her. To be pregnant with my brother, to sleep beside my father, to hold
me
to her chest. I could not resist these small tastes.

The plastic bride and groom that she’d saved accurately showed the height difference between my parents, my mother being the taller. My father had always claimed he was tall for a Greek, that at five foot nine (he’d rounded up from seven and a half inches) he towered over his contemporaries. One of his few recurring jokes — he wasn’t known for his sense of humour — was that he was the starting forward of the best basketball team in Greece, the Lesbos Rockets. My mother would revert to a stone face whenever this joke was told, and then look from him to us, as if such a thing could corrupt us.

The bride on the cake resembled my mother in more than height. It had her long, graceful features, her slender piano-playing hands (a regret of hers, that her piano remained in Albany in her mother’s house), her Modigliani neck, her long black hair. Of course, in all of this she was much like Molly, who had the same New England roots, that British rose beauty sustained through generations of tennis-playing, book-reading, buttermilk-biscuit-baking decendants of the pilgrim ships. My father always said that he’d married the American Constitution, my mother that she was the bride of Orpheus (my father had a beautiful singing voice, and my mother obviously didn’t know that much about Greek myth, although she got the ending right). My brother, Dale, won the genetic lottery and got my mother’s delicate features. I got a mix — mermaid on top, milkmaid on the bottom. Surf’n’ turf, as Molly used to call me. But by college, I’d come to like my odd dimensions and never took offence at Molly’s nicknames. I grew into them. I had a reputation for being sensual, which suited me. My body is the only constant in my life.

Meanwhile, the plastic groom looked nothing like my father. When Dale and I recently returned to the house in Ovid and I emptied the freezer, I unwrapped the bride and groom to look at them one more time. My mother was still sharply white, her features clear and colourful. But my father, who I realized had been taken from a different bride-and-groom set (where, certainly, the bride had been the standard diminutive), was made from lesser material. His features had faded, and the freezer had strangely melted the plastic a little. He seemed an unhappy homunculus with a vague face and a ruined tuxedo.

The dark cast itself over the rooftops, that Midwest darkness with its starblown sky, and at the edge of it all, in our own bed, I slept with Martin. He smelled of bathsalts, his skin radiating heat. We’d sat and washed the day off in the claw-footed tub, drifting in conversation, pulling ourselves back into a twosome alone in our house.

He fell asleep almost right away, but I lay awake, parsing the day. Its warp and weft, a day of long moments. Finally, I slept and the moon crossed the sky. Feeling the bed move, I woke and saw Martin sitting by the edge, his hands braced against the side.

You all right?

Gotta go, he said.

Don’t leave the seat up. I drifted back off. I slept. The bed moved and I opened my eyes on his back again. He was motionless.

Listen, he said.

What? I blinked and then I realized that even though he was silhouetted in the window, I could also see the windowframe and even the trees outside, as if he were translucent. Then pinholes of light began to burn through him, like he was a piece of film melting in a projector, and my heart began pounding in my throat. I lurched up, shouting his name and pushing myself back against the headboard. And then he was not there.

I climbed down from the bed and went out into the house where the lights were still off. I had the feeling in my body of an overlong afternoon nap, the chemical fuzz, the sense of wrongness.

I called to him quietly without answer.

I flicked the outside light on and saw the shed beyond, tinny grey. There were no tell-tale cracks of light along its edges. I opened the sliding door and, hunched over in the cold air, called for him, then called a little louder, trying not to wake our neighbours, and the sound of my hoarse voice moving out into the utterly still night startled me. I heard movement down in the ravine and then two dogs flashed black in front of the glowing water. After that, nothing. I stared out at the sickly dark of near-morning, that greyish light that I’d always thought of as the light of the back of the moon, the light hidden from us on Earth, the beaded sweat on my arms meeting the cold wet air. I went back into the bedroom and sat up against the wall, staring at the empty spot in the bed, and I began to drift off again, picturing him in a coat over his pyjamas, walking to the all-night store for something sweet.

III.

CROSSING, 1987. 14" X 8" X 6" BOX CONSTRUCTION. WOOD AND GLASS WITH FOUND OBJECTS, PHOTOGRAPHS, ORGANIC MATERIAL. LOOKING DOWN ON A SHIP AS IT CROSSES A ROUGH SEA. THE TOPDECKS FAINTLY REVEAL THE FACE OF A WOMAN ON THEM. SMOKE COMING OUT OF THE FUNNELS SPREADS AGAINST THE TOP GLASS OF THE BOX AND RESOLVES INTO THE FACE OF A MAN.