Return Trips (3 page)

At another time when she was manic, my mother sent me a lot of clothes, and they are what I wear, worn-out C. Klein shirts and jeans, old sweaters and skirts (A. Klein, B. Blass). My yellow hair tight in a bun. Skinny and tense, with huge, needful eyes. A group of artists lives in a big old shabby
house down the block. Artists are what I believe they are. Mrs. Nelson says, sniffingly, “Gays,” but to her that might mean the same. “Gay artists” surely has an attractive sound to me. In any case, they all wear beautiful bright loose clothes. I am in love, in a way, with all of them; I would like to move over there and be friends. I want to say to them, “Look, these clothes aren’t really me. I ruined my only Levis in too much Clorox. I will loosen my hair and become plump and peaceful. You’ll see, if you let me move in.”

When Carl is at home he is often asleep; he falls asleep anywhere, easily and deeply asleep. His mouth goes slack; sometimes saliva seeps out, slowly, down his blond stubbled chin. Once I watched a tiny ant march heroically across Carl’s face, over the wide pale planes, the thick bridge of his nose, and Carl never blinked. We have a lot of ants, especially when I leave the dishes in the sink for a couple of days, which I have recently begun to do. (Why? Am I fond of ants?) Ants crawl all over the greasy, encrusted Haviland and Spode, and the milk-fogged glasses that Mrs. Nelson refers to as my “crystal.” At least that stuff sometimes breaks, whereas the furniture will surely outlast me.

I could break it?

Awake, Carl talks a lot, in his high, tight voice. And he does not say the things that you would expect of a sleepy fat blond man. He sounds like one of the other things that he is: a graduate student in psychology, with a strong side-interest in computers. He believes that he is parodying the person that he is. When I give too many clothes (all my old Norells) to the Goodwill, he says, “If only you were an anal retentive like me,” thinking he is making a joke.

Carl complains, as I do, about the bulkiness of our furniture, the space it takes up, but I notice that he always mentions
it, somehow, to friends who have failed to remark on it. “A ridiculous piece of ostentation, isn’t it?” he will say, not hearing the pride in his own voice. “Helen’s mother shipped it out from St. Louis, in one of her manic phases. She’s quite immune to Lithium, poor lady.”

But one Saturday he spent the whole day waxing and polishing all the surfaces of wood. He is incredibly thorough: for hours his fingers probed and massaged the planes and high ornamental carvings.

How could I have married a man who looks like my mother? How not have noticed? Although my mother’s family was all of English stock, as she puts it (thank God for my Welsh father, although he died so young that I barely knew him), and Carl’s people are all German. Farmers, from the Sacramento Valley. I thought my mother would be mad (a German peasant, from a farm), but she likes Carl. “He doesn’t seem in the least Germanic, not that they aren’t a marvellous people. He’s a brilliant boy. I’m sure he’ll be a distinguished professor someday, or perhaps some fantastic computer career.” And Carl asks her about the hallmarks on old silver, and I wonder if I am alive.

I devise stratagems to keep Carl from touching me, which sometimes he still wants to do. Unoriginally, I pretend to be asleep, or at dinner I will begin to describe a headache or a cramp. Or sometimes I just let him. God knows it doesn’t take long.

Carl ordered some silver polish from Macy’s ($14!), silver polish that an ad in the Chronicle said was wonderful. It came: a whitish liquid with a ghastly sick smell. Carl spent a perfect Saturday (for him), polishing all the silver and feeling sick.

When and why did I stop doing all the things that once absorbed my days? The washing polishing waxing of our things. When Carl said I was obsessional? No, not then. When I couldn’t stand his tours of inspection? Perhaps. When I noticed that he often repolished what I had done—so unnecessary; I was an expert silver-polisher in my time. Is this my sneaky way of becoming “liberated”? (I know that I am still a long way off.)

Mrs. Nelson is obsessed with the “gay artists” down the street. (So am I, but in a different way.) There are two girls and three boys in that house, and Mrs. Nelson knows for a fact that there are only two bedrooms. So? The only time she got her face in the front door, collecting for the Red Cross (they all hooted, “We gave at the office”; not very funny, she thought), she distinctly did not see a couch where a person could sleep. So? I tell her that I don’t know. I find the conversation embarrassing, and I do not mention the possibility of a rolled-up sleeping bag somewhere. Nor do I mention the nature of my own obsession with them: how do they get by with no jobs, and where (and how) did they leave whatever they used to own?

This insane climate has finally made me sick—physically, that is. In the midst of a February heat wave some dark cold wrapping rains came down upon us, rattling the window-panes of our box-house and the palm leaves outside, and I caught a terrible cold with pleurisy and a cough, so that it seemed silly to get out of bed. Carl said he thought it was an extension of my depression (I am depressed? I thought my mother was). He told me to stay in bed, and went whistling into the kitchen to clear up dinner dishes and make breakfast.

• • •

Carl is delighted that I am sick; he is in love with all my symptoms. What does this mean? He wants me to die? No. He wants to be free to do everything that he thinks that I should do, and that he should not want to do, but he does. Yes.

I think I married Carl because he said that I should. I have always been quite docile, until I stopped washing dishes on time and polishing things—but perhaps that was further compliance. It was what Carl wanted me to do all alone?

He brings in a tray. “Now, how’s that for a pretty little omelet?”

Then, as suddenly as I became sick, I am well, and the rain is over and it is spring and I am in love with everyone I see: the beautiful garbage collectors and the butcher and especially the extra boy in the house down the street, who must sleep in his sleeping bag on the living room floor. He has long, pale-red hair—he is beautiful! One Saturday while Carl is polishing the silver I brush down my hair and go for a walk and there he is, the red-haired boy, saying Hi, so warmly! I walk on, after saying Hi also, but I feel that now we are friends. I give him a name—John—and from then on we have long conversations in my mind.

On another day I see a girl coming out of their yard, a dark-haired girl. We, too, say Hi to each other, and I think of her, too, as a friend, from then on. Her name is Meg, in my mind, and we, too, talk.

Looming Mrs. Nelson caught me napping. “My, your things look so
nice
, since you took to working on them,” and her pale eyes glitter as though they, too, were polished. I do not tell her that it is Carl who does all that; it seems a shameful secret.

• • •

I point out to Carl that we would have more money if I got a job. He tells me that there are almost no jobs for anyone these days.

That is true, but it is also true that he does not want me to work.

For his computer course Carl is working on a paper. The title seems most ominous to me; it is called “The Manipulation of Data.” Manipulation?
Really
? He reads paragraphs to me aloud, usually when I am reading something else. I think that Carl would like us to be more nearly interchangeable with each other, but he is becoming more and more unreal to me. I regard him from my distance, and it seems odd that we know each other, unspeakably odd that we have married.

In a charitable way I try to think of a girl who would be good for Carl, and I imagine a young girl, probably a junior in college, who is also studying psychology and computers. They could do everything together, read and cook and eat and polish everything in the house, all day long, on Saturdays.

My mother is right: Carl will be a distinguished professor. But I am surely undistinguished, as a wife.

The spring is real, though, wild and insistent: yards full of flowing acacia, fields of blossoms, and wild mustard as bright as sunshine, and light soft winds.

Mrs. Nelson sighs because there are only three stem wine glasses left, and it occurs to me how little I know about her life. Who and what was Mr. Nelson, and was she sad when he died? But it seems too late to ask.

• • •

I tell John and Meg (in my mind) that I think perhaps Carl and I bring out each other’s worst qualities, and they agree (such wise gay artists!). I try to tell Carl that, but he says I am simply depressed. I am not depressed, really.

Watching the flowers grow, I go for many walks, smelling, breathing air. One day when I come home and find Carl asleep on the sofa, quite suddenly I am mortally stricken with pity for him, so fat and unhappy and unloved, and in that illuminated instant of real pain, I understand that he is boring because I cannot listen to him. And if I can’t love him and listen, at least I could leave? I rush into the bathroom, crying, but he doesn’t wake.

In my head John and Meg both say, “You could probably get
something
in the city. Or at least you’d be up there.”

“But what about all the furniture?” I ask them.

“That’s easy,” they say.

Some years ago I spent a hot and mostly miserable summer in an ugly yellow hotel on the steep and thickly wooded, rocky coast of northern Yugoslavia, not far from the island of Rab. I was with a man whom I entirely, wildly loved, and he, Paul, loved me, too, but together we suffered the most excruciating romantic agonies, along with the more ordinary daily discomforts of bad food, an uncomfortable, poorly ventilated room with a hard, unyielding bed, and not enough money to get away. Or enough strength: Paul’s health was bad. Morosely we stared out over the lovely clear, cool blue water, from our pine forest, to enticing islands that were purplish-gray in the distance. Or else I swam and Paul looked out after me.

Paul’s problem was a congenital heart condition, now correctable by surgery, but not so then; he hurt a lot, and the smallest walks could cause pain. Even love, I came to realize, was for Paul a form of torture, although we kept at it—for him suicidally, I guess—during those endless sultry yellow afternoons, on our awful bed, between our harsh, coarse sheets.

I wanted us to marry. I was very young, and very healthy,
and my crazy, unreal idea of marriage seemed to include a sort of transfer of strength. I was not quite so silly as to consciously think that marrying me would “cure” Paul, nor did I imagine a lifelong nurse role for myself. It was, rather, a magic belief that if we did a normal thing, something other people did all the time, like getting married, Paul’s heart would become normal, too, like other, ordinary hearts.

Paul believed that he would die young, and, nobly, he felt that our marriage would be unfair to me. He also pointed out that whereas he had enough money from a small inheritance for one person, himself, to live on very sparingly, there was really not enough for two, and I would do well to go back to America and to the years of graduate study to which my professor mother wanted to stake me. At that time, largely because of Paul, who was a poet, I thought of studying literature; instead, after he died I turned to history, contemporary American. By now I have written several books; my particular interest is in the Trotskyite movement: its rich history of lonely, occasionally brilliant, contentious voices, its legacy of schisms—an odd choice, perhaps, but the books have been surprisingly popular. You might say, and I hope Paul would, that I have done very well professionally. In any case you could say that Paul won our argument. That fall I went back to graduate school, at Georgetown, and Paul died young, as he said he would, in a hospital in Trieste.

I have said that Paul loved me, and so he did, intensely—he loved me more, it has come to seem to me, than anyone since, although I have had my share, I guess. But Paul loved me with a meticulous attention that included every aspect. Not only my person: at that time I was just a skinny tall young girl with heavy dark hair that was fated to early gray, as my mother’s had been. With an old-fashioned name—Emma. Paul loved my hair and my name and whatever I said to him, any odd old memory, or half-formed ambition;
he took all my perceptions seriously. He laughed at all my jokes, although his were much funnier. He was even interested in my dreams, which I would sometimes wake and tell him, that summer, in the breathless pre-dawn cool, in the ugly hotel.

And so it is surprising that there was one particular dream that I did not tell him, especially since this dream was so painful and troubling that I remember it still. Much later I even arranged to reënact the dream, an expurgatory ritual of sorts—but that is to get far ahead of my story.

In the dream, then, that I dreamed as I slept with Paul, all those years ago in Yugoslavia, it was very hot, and I was walking down a long, intensely familiar hill, beside a winding white concrete highway. In the valley below was the rambling white house where (long before Yugoslavia) my parents and I had lived for almost five years, in a small Southern town called Hilton. I did not get as far as the house, in the dream; it was so hot, and I was burdened with the most terrific, heavy pain in my chest, a pain that must have come from Paul’s actual pain, as the heat in the dream would have come from the actual heat of that summer.

“Oh, I had such an awful dream!” I cried out to Paul, as I burrowed against his sharp back, his fine damp skin.