Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (25 page)

in a voice which I (age eleven) thought odd.

I stared at the back of her head waiting for what she would say.

Her answer would clear this up.

But she just laughed a strange laugh with ropes all over it.

Later that summer I put this laugh together with another laugh

I overheard as I was going upstairs.

She was talking on the telephone in the kitchen.

Well a woman would be just as happy with a kiss on the cheek

most of the time but YOU KNOW MEN,

she was saying. Laugh.

Not ropes, thorns.

I have arrived at the middle of the moor

where the ground goes down into a low swampy place.

The swamp water is frozen solid.

Bits of gold weed

have etched themselves

on the underside of the ice like messages.

 

I’ll come when thou art saddest,

Laid alone in the darkened room;

When the mad day’s mirth has vanished,

And the smile of joy is banished,

 

 

I’ll come when the heart’s real feeling

Has entire, unbiased sway,

And my influence o’er thee stealing

Grief deepening, joy congealing,

Shall bear thy soul away.

 

 

Listen! ’tis just the hour,

The awful time for thee:

Dost thou not feel upon thy soul

A flood of strange sensations roll,

Forerunners of a sterner power,

Heralds of me?

 

Very hard to read, the messages that pass

between Thou and Emily.

In this poem she reverses their roles,

speaking not
as
the victim but
to
the victim.

It is chilling to watch Thou move upon thou,

who lies alone in the dark waiting to be mastered.

It is a shock to realize that this low, slow collusion

of master and victim within one voice

is a rationale

for the most awful loneliness of the poet’s hour.

She has reversed the roles of thou and Thou

not as a display of power

but to force out of herself some pity

for this soul trapped in glass,

which is her true creation.

Those nights lying alone

are not discontinuous with this cold hectic dawn.

It is who I am.

Is it a vocation of anger?

Why construe silence

as the Real Presence?

Why stoop to kiss this doorstep?

Why be unstrung and pounded flat and pine away

imagining someone vast to whom I may vent the swell of my soul?

Emily was fond of Psalm 130.

“My soul waiteth on Thou more than they that watch for the

morning,

I say more than they that watch for the morning.”

I like to believe that for her the act of watching provided a shelter,

that her collusion with Thou gave ease to anger and desire:

“In Thou they are quenched as a fire of thorns,” says the psalmist.

But for myself I do not believe this, I am not quenched —

with Thou or without Thou I find no shelter.

I am my own Nude.

And Nudes have a difficult sexual destiny.

I have watched this destiny disclose itself

in its jerky passage from girl to woman to who I am now,

from love to anger to this cold marrow,

from fire to shelter to fire.

What is the opposite of believing in Thou —

merely not believing in Thou? No. That is too simple.

That is to prepare a misunderstanding.

I want to speak more clearly.

Perhaps the Nudes are the best way.

Nude #5. Deck of cards.

Each card is made of flesh.

The living cards are days of a woman’s life.

I see a great silver needle go flashing right through the deck once from end to end.

Nude #6 I cannot remember.

Nude #7. White room whose walls,

having neither planes nor curves nor angles,

are composed of a continuous satiny white membrane

like the flesh of some interior organ of the moon.

It is a living surface, almost wet.

Lucency breathes in and out.

Rainbows shudder across it.

And around the walls of the room a voice goes whispering,

Be very careful. Be very careful.

Nude #8. Black disc on which the fires of all the winds

are attached in a row.

A woman stands on the disc

amid the winds whose long yellow silk flames

flow and vibrate up through her.

Nude #9. Transparent loam.

Under the loam a woman has dug a long deep trench.

Into the trench she is placing small white forms, I don’t know what they are.

Nude #10. Green thorn of the world poking up

alive through the heart of a woman

who lies on her back on the ground.

The thorn is exploding

its green blood above her in the air.

Everything it is it has
, the voice says.

Nude #11. Ledge in outer space.

Space is bluish black and glossy as solid water

and moving very fast in all directions,

shrieking past the woman who stands pinned

to nothing by its pressure.

She peers and glances for some way to go, trying to lift her hand but cannot.

Nude #12. Old pole in the wind.

Cold currents are streaming over it

and pulling out

into ragged long horizontal black lines

some shreds of ribbon

attached to the pole.

I cannot see how they are attached —

notches? staples? nails? All of a sudden the wind changes

and all the black shreds rise straight up in the air

and tie themselves into knots,

then untie and float down.

The wind is gone.

It waits.

By this time, midway through winter,

I had become entirely fascinated with my spiritual melodrama.

Then it stopped.

Days passed, months passed and I saw nothing.

I continued to peer and glance, sitting on the rug in front of my sofa

in the curtainless morning

with my nerves open to the air like something skinned.

I saw nothing.

Outside the window spring storms came and went.

April snow folded its huge white paws over doors and porches.

I watched a chunk of it lean over the roof and break off

and fall and I thought,

How slow! as it glided soundlessly past,

but still — nothing. No nudes.

No Thou.

A great icicle formed on the railing of my balcony

so I drew up close to the window and tried peering through the icicle,

hoping to trick myself into some interior vision,

but all I saw

was the man and woman in the room across the street

making their bed and laughing.

I stopped watching.

I forgot about Nudes.

I lived my life,

which felt like a switched-off TV.

Something had gone through me and out and I could not own it.

“No need now to tremble for the hard frost and the keen wind.

Emily does not feel them,”

wrote Charlotte the day after burying her sister.

Emily had shaken free.

A soul can do that.

Whether it goes to join Thou and sit on the porch for all eternity

enjoying jokes and kisses and beautiful cold spring evenings,

you and I will never know. But I can tell you what I saw.

Nude #13 arrived when I was not watching for it.

It came at night.

Very much like Nude #1.

And yet utterly different.

I saw a high hill and on it a form shaped against hard air.

It could have been just a pole with some old cloth attached,

but as I came closer

I saw it was a human body

trying to stand against winds so terrible that the flesh was blowing off the bones.

And there was no pain.

The wind

was cleansing the bones.

They stood forth silver and necessary.

It was not my body, not a woman’s body, it was the body of us all.

It walked out of the light.

Bernard Cooper

 

BERNARD COOPER
is the author of five books including
Maps to Anywhere
,
Truth Serum
,
Guess Again
, and
The Bill from My Father
. Cooper is the recipient of the 1991 PEN/USA Ernest Hemingway Award, a 1995 O. Henry Prize, a 1999 Guggenheim grant, and a 2004 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in literature. His work has appeared in several anthologies, including
The Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories
and
The Best American Essays 1988, 1995, 1997,
and
2002.
His work has also appeared widely in magazines and literary reviews including
Harper’s
and
The Paris Review
.

 

I loved the restaurant’s name, a compact curve of a word. Its sign, five big letters rimmed in neon, hovered above the roof. I almost never saw the sign with its neon lit; my parents took me there for early summer dinners, and even by the time we left — Father cleaning his teeth with a toothpick, Mother carrying steak bones in a doggie bag — the sky was still bright. Heat rippled off the cars parked along Hollywood Boulevard, the asphalt gummy from hours of sun.

With its sleek architecture, chrome appliances, and arctic temperature, Burl’s offered a refuge from the street. We usually sat at one of the booths in front of the plateglass windows. During our dinner, people came to a halt before the news-vending machine on the corner and burrowed in their pockets and purses for change.

The waitresses at Burl’s wore brown uniforms edged in checked gingham. From their breast pockets frothed white lace handkerchiefs. In between reconnaissance missions to the tables, they busied themselves behind the counter and shouted “Tuna to travel” or “Scorch that patty” to a harried short-order cook who manned the grill. Miniature pitchers of cream and individual pats of butter were extracted from an industrial refrigerator. Coca-Cola shot from a glinting spigot. Waitresses dodged and bumped one another, as frantic as atoms.

My parents usually lingered after the meal, nursing cups of coffee while I played with the beads of condensation on my glass of ice water, tasted Tabasco sauce, or twisted pieces of my paper napkin into mangled animals. One evening, annoyed with my restlessness, my father gave me a dime and asked me to buy him a
Herald Examiner
from the vending machine in front of the restaurant.

Shouldering open the heavy glass door, I was seared by a sudden gust of heat. Traffic roared past me and stirred the air. Walking toward the newspaper machine, I held the dime so tightly, it seemed to melt in my palm. Duty made me feel large and important. I inserted the dime and opened the box, yanking a
Herald
from the spring contraption that held it as tight as a mousetrap. When I turned around, paper in hand, I saw two women walking toward me.

Their high heels clicked on the sun-baked pavement. They were tall, broad-shouldered women who moved with a mixture of haste and defiance. They’d teased their hair into nearly identical black beehives. Dangling earrings flashed in the sun, as brilliant as prisms. Each of them wore the kind of clinging, strapless outfit my mother referred to as a cocktail dress. The silky fabric — one dress was purple, the other pink — accentuated their breasts and hips and rippled with insolent highlights. The dresses exposed their bare arms, the slope of their shoulders, and the smooth, powdered plane of flesh where their cleavage began.

I owned at the time a book called
Things for Boys and Girls to Do
. There were pages to color, intricate mazes, and connect-the-dots. But another type of puzzle came to mind as I watched those women walking toward me: What’s Wrong with This Picture? Say the drawing of a dining room looked normal at first glance; on closer inspection, a chair was missing its leg and the man who sat atop it wore half a pair of glasses.

The women had Adam’s apples.

The closer they came, the shallower my breathing. I blocked the sidewalk, an incredulous child stalled in their path. When they saw me staring, they shifted their purses and linked their arms. There was something sisterly and conspirational about their sudden closeness. Though their mouths didn’t open, I thought they might have been communicating without moving their lips, so telepathic did they seem as they joined arms and pressed together, synchronizing their heavy steps. The pages of the
Herald
fluttered in the wind; I felt them against my arm, as light as batted lashes.