The Sunken Cathedral (19 page)

Abe’s smile is the smile he wears for certain voices—his son’s voice and his wife’s voice at times. He was a happy man, Marie thinks, watching her son and her husband lie in the bed, side by side, her son straight with not touching, with carefulness, her son the height and length of his father, as handsome, all Abe except for his eyes: her eyes.

He will not stay for dinner or for wine. He has a class tomorrow and he has promised his roommate something. He will be back in the morning, or maybe the day after tomorrow—his filthy sneakers on the bed and after all that, Abe, after we’ve told him so many times—but Abe will already be gone and so this is it: “because God said only pairs.” A punch line; a joke—last words overrated, Jules said first to his roommate, then his boyfriend, testing how it sounds, how it might sound, though it sounds like shit, Jules said afterward. It sounds like total shit.

I
. Not until Remembrance Day, when Jules had the school assignment, did she ever say a word: why speak of such things? Remembrance Day not to her liking, Marie said. This, now, who we are, she said. Onward, she said, Jules baffled by his mother’s sudden anger. It was the neighbors I most despised, she told him: St. Claire’s idiot boys; the widow with the pony and the milk cart. They took my mother’s loom. Jules listened and then drew a picture of a pony pulling a milk cart, a loom, or how his mother described to him a loom, in the milk cart, the perspective skewed, the loom misshapen, curved as an angel’s wing and too large—he had been very young. He had never seen a loom or a milk cart.

XXXIV

T
here were still books. Elizabeth would read them for hours, forgetting the time. Dinner came and went like in children’s stories, plates gone cold as the blue dusk fell or the sun rose. Beggar girls—Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese—sought answers from the Man in the Moon. They followed their golden dragons, believing in golden stairways that led straight up. The girls were driven by desperation: their parents starving in the Forgotten Village, existing on two or three grains of rice after their days’ labor. The girls would speak to the golden dragons, who would go along, protecting them from the various obstacles they encountered along the way, ferocious animals or unscrupulous merchants. They were innocent girls who believed in the dreams of the night before or week, sleeping on pine needles in the Forgotten Forest. All they had to do was get out of the Forest. They believed in that, though their parents, convinced of their deaths, had gone gray as sheets as they poked holes in the muddy swamps, planting another meager rice crop. Sometimes one had a lucky copper bowl. Sometimes one had a premonition, or an encounter with a magical goldfish.

The bird in its tiny cage, hopping on one scrawny claw as the other reached to pluck the scroll: the fortune.

Tell us what it means, the destitute parent asked of the copper bowl, the magical goldfish. Tell us when it will end, or begin.

She yawned and rose, hungry or not at all. She read and read and the years passed as if nothing had ever happened, as if no one had been lost to the world, taken into the water. Her sixteenth birthday at the summer place in that great, high-ceilinged room in the White Mountains, a fire in the fireplace, alone. She had lied to be here, where she worked in the dining room clearing tables and washing dishes: seventeen years of age, minimum. Yes, yes, she had said to the employer, a Mrs. Something who wasn’t born yesterday, who knew which end was up. And now, day off and raining, Elizabeth read the book she had brought from home, from the box marked
FREE.
She yawned: Happy Birthday to me, she said under her breath.

Out the window the lake stretched and steamed toward forever, its borders edged with cattails, clogged with the felled, waterlogged stumps of beaver dams. There were loon and warm-blooded mammals, nocturnal, hiding. On the long graceful roots of the water lilies egg sacs that would hatch in days: tadpoles. Just last night she had heard an owl and the boy in her bed had said, Is that an owl?

She thought how that sounded,
the boy in her bed.
She thought how that would feel to say it: more than wanting to
do
it, she had wanted to
say
it, to name it, to say she had. But the doing: she could still feel his hands in certain places and she wished them back, wished him back though this was not his day off. Tomorrow’s my birthday, she had told him, and he, the coolest in the pack, the long-banged boy, had said, Let’s celebrate, and someone had something from home, illegal and sweet. It made her feel old and reckless and she had let the boy unbutton her jeans and put his hand there, and she had twisted around so he would put his hand into her, and she had felt as if all of her might puddle into butter like Sambo, one of the stories she remembers though mostly the look of its cover and illustrations, the black boy and the ferocious tiger.

“You are a tiger,” the boy had said, as if he were reading her mind. He has taken off all her clothes and his, and he pushes into her in the place his hand kneaded and warmed though now it feels too small for him and he is no longer here anyway. He’s somewhere else, jerking on top of her.

The boy smells delicious and feels soft as she feels. A summer night though cool. The lights are out and they are in her bed and the room is the maid’s room, chamber pot on the bureau as if for flowers but there are no flowers here, only stiff green pine and dried brown needles and stones to stub your toe if you skinny-dip and they will, they do—she wants to wash the boy out of her, there had been so much of him—but it is cold, cold in the shadows of the overhanging spruce, her feet sunk in the mud, a mire of decomposing leaves that had once composed the autumn and the spring, that had once composed Molly; now only the green of summer, these woods, the children, the teenagers—a beautiful boy and a beautiful girl asleep in the narrow bed meant for one, their hair still wet with lake, a fishy smell, the dusty, mothballed blanket pulled to their chins, their eyes sweet with sleep.

The beautiful boy has been here before but she has never been and doesn’t want to wake up, doesn’t want to stir in case the boy decides to leave too early. He has work to do. He must deliver the ice to the iceboxes and new guests want sailing lessons. There will be another pretty girl in their company and he will flirt, forgetting her for the afternoon or at least until dinner, when the other staff wink as he sets down his tray beside hers.

What’s up, he’ll say, and she’ll know, just by that, which way the wind blows. (East-west, he told the family, smiling at the new pretty girl, a blonde in a string bikini, pancake flat but amazing turquoise eyes. She loved him immediately, the coolest boy, long-banged, dull.)

I read a great book today, she’ll say.

Yeah? he says, forgetting her birthday, but then the bell rings as the guest who caught the big fish steps from the kitchen holding it high above his head and the other guests in the dining room and the staff and even the cook come out from the kitchen to applaud.

The boy’s name Teddy, she remembers. She wrote him letters and he wrote her one.
^I

It’s usually smooth as glass! Elizabeth shouts to her father, there to see her, a surprise, the two now in the motorboat, a whaler, thirty-horsepower, a putt-putt to take him to Grizzly Cove, where he might catch a big fish everyone will applaud at dinner. The lake whips around them as he drives the boat, as the boat smacks the rough, the whitecaps, then slams down hard again on the black water, slams down again and again, the waves rising up to take her under, she knows, to take her down.

I
. Last year she looked him up online and found photographs: the boy all grown with his family. They stood six in a row near a lake and she wondered if it were the same lake, if Teddy had returned to the camp as a guest, caught a fish or two, sailed with his daughters, hiked the mountain that rose up to shadow the whole or to pierce the storm clouds that always came in so quickly, roughing the lake water that usually, in the early evening, was smooth as glass.

XXXV

T
he keys, if she’s ever wondered, are to storage bins in the basement, Sid Morris tells Marie. You cannot believe the junk people leave behind—all their masterpieces! Years of work! Pouf! They’re gone and I’m left with the crap of their labor.

She hasn’t asked, she does not say.

They stand in Sid Morris’s office in the empty School of Inspired Arts, the Yoga Center on the third floor holding some kind of meditation retreat. Scores of scruffy men and women shuffle up and down the stairs. They must have just let them out for a cigarette, Sid Morris says.

Imagine sitting all day saying nothing, Marie says.

Death would be more interesting, Sid Morris says. Tried it once. Meditation, not death, but what’s the difference? You should hear the idiotic questions: “If I’m breathing out my left nostril and I accidentally breathe out my right, is that a problem?”

Marie laughs. She does not know what she expected showing up on a vacant Saturday; she had come to tell him that she is leaving her house after all, that she does not want Sid Morris to embark on the journey west and find her gone.

It happens to the best of us, Sid Morris says, looking down.

He checks a book of some kind, a ledger filled in pale ink. She watches as he draws a line through what she sees is her name in a long list of others and now x-ed like his calendar days—before noon?—the month almost passed, late May. Outside, the weather has turned glorious, lilac and rose.

“It’s a beautiful day,” she says. “You should get out.”

“Is that so?” he says. He leans against his battered metal desk, Henry’s canvas behind him somehow mounted to the cinder-block wall. A heater clicks on and off in the corner though it is too warm and the windows are open, the air sweet or perhaps the Chinese are cooking. Chopin again on the radio, she thinks, remembering aloud the day with Simone, the snowflakes melting on the wooden floor.

Debussy, Sid Morris says. Compliments Helen. She thought I might be interested. Cézanne’s musical counterpart, she says. An Impressionist, she says.

I see, Marie says.

Our resident intellectual, Sid Morris says.

Debussy?

Helen, he says.

Oh, she says. She listens to the music awhile, they both do. A lost sound retrieved from an archive of lost sounds. Debussy himself on the piano—restored, polished—so that suddenly the great composer sits in the room at his instrument, the two of them politely listening like guests. The rest of the building has gone quiet as well, the weekend meditation retreat back to its group sit. From time to time, a bell chimes, the only other sound besides Claude at his piano, concentrating. Above Sid Morris, behind his desk, the completed Brooklyn Bridge spans the wall; Marie thinks of how Sid Morris guided the brush in Simone’s hand, shading this, foreshortening that, and how afterward Simone had said that even though his breath smelled rank it had felt good to be held. It had felt very good.

Katherine hardly hugs back, she said. And you remember how Henry was in so much pain.

Eventually, the music stops.

“The bridge looks beautiful,” Marie says to fill the gap, because it does: anchored to the mighty river, the steel of it against a darkening sky that showed, in certain places, the possibility of blue, a color, Sid Morris once told them, most primal, not of the soil but of something more—the rock at the center of the earth. Cézanne knew this, he had said. Cézanne understood blue, he said.

“A work in progress,” he says, smiling.

He steps out from his battered desk and he is very close, as close as he sometimes stood behind her before, watching. What she painted she never fully understood, nor did she care. It was the paint is all; the smell of the paint and the color of the paint and the paint on the brush; she was trying to make something of the way life
felt
. This is what she could never say. The way life felt, or that particular moment of life—if it could be cleared of everything else, if it could be seen and heard and
felt
: the light through the filthy windows, the sighs of the tattooed model, Sid Morris behind her, watching.

“I’m very sorry to see you go,” Sid Morris says. “I have enjoyed your company.”

“Well,” she says.

“I would have snuck back but the last time your son gave me the evil eye.”

“Did he?”

“Someone did. Handsome chap. Well dressed.”

“That was his friend, Larry,” Marie says.

“He didn’t tell you?”

“No,” Marie says. “But he doesn’t say much to me. I think he and Jules have had a falling-out.”

“Jules?” Sid Morris says.

“My son,” Marie says, understanding how little Sid Morris knows at all, or remembers.

He guides her toward the broken-down divan; she suddenly shaky—it comes on, from time to time, out of nowhere.

“Mrs. Shivers,” he says.

“Mrs. Shiver-Me-Timbers,” she says, sitting. He’ll find the fringed Renaissance scarf the model wears for the draft, thrown out from the prop shop across the street in late autumn about the time you and your sidekick showed up, Sid Morris says. I say silk she says polyester mix and it itches but she uses it anyway, he says. What a complaintnik! It’s too hot! It’s too cold! I need coffee! I need air! I can’t breathe! This is giving me a leg cramp! My God! Sid Morris says, wrapping Marie in the fringed scarf, tucking it around her frail shoulders—she looks to have shrunk since he last saw her.

The fringed scarf smells of the model’s smell, she tells him, or what she remembers of the model’s smell: a little moldy.

“Hah!” Sid Morris says, but he knows what she really means is those were happy days; happy, happy days.

*  *  *

Sid Morris lumps sugar into his tea and stirs too loudly; she can see from here white whiskers in his ear and a tiny plastic ball tucked there for hearing. He tells her what he hasn’t wanted to say to anyone. He is in the same straits. They are clearing the whole building out. They have offered more than he can turn down for his lease and so. He shrugs.
“Va bene,”
he says, dunking a crumbling cookie into his cup. “I’d be a fool not to take it. Besides,” he says, gesturing to the suitcase. “I’m already packed.” He slurps his tea. “Veritas offered the apartment over her garage in Baltimore, God forbid. Maybe there and Vero Beach for winter. Seasonal rental. Rauschenberg’s light or used to be. I don’t know what’s happened to the light.