An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky (14 page)

“Why?”

“That's a long story. I'm not sure I really understand
why
myself. Orpheus, he was a singer, a singer whose song was so beautiful not only people would be helpless to listen, but stones, trees, flowers. This meant something to my dad. Eurydice was the woman he loved and she died, bit by a snake on their wedding day, and Orpheus sang his way into the underworld to rescue her from death. And this meant something to him, too. It meant everything to him. Eurydice would follow him as long as he didn't look back—his song had to do his looking for him. But he did look back, and she fell back into the shadows, back into death.” Then, looking at the second painting, “And the god-crazed women, years later, the maenads, they struck off his head, which sang as it fell through the air. Like your violin. Singing as it died.”

I felt, I should say, very sad. I thought about my father; I imagined him in my head, but where his face should be I saw a mirror; I saw myself looking at him, my face on his body looking back at me, my eye etching an eye on the glass.

“Let's go, Lydia. I've had enough art for the day. And there's something I'd like to show you, something at the house, an old book that meant much to me.”

“What's the book?”

“A book of wonders.”

We retraced our steps through the museum. We walked by a gallery full of commotion. An elderly man had fallen down; his glass-topped cane lay in the middle of the room. A group of people gathered behind him, a
sort of semicircle, almost as if he were a docent pointing out the details of a masterpiece; one woman let him rest back against her. He was pointing up at a painting, a view of a city by a river or lake—I could only see it for a moment, just out the corner of my eye—and saying in a feeble voice, nonetheless quite loud, “little patch of yellow wall, little patch of yellow wall.” And then the man was gone, the scene erased, and we stepped out into the late summer's yellow light. How is it that dusk begins gathering in the trees before the sky? But so it is. Lydia walked down the steps and didn't look back; I kept turning around to see who might be following.

“Y
OUR MOTHER WAS SO PRETTY. IT'S A SHAME SHE'S NOT
looking up at the camera,” Lydia said, looking at the photo in the hall.

“I spent a lot of time as a boy looking at that picture, trying to remember her face. Sometimes I still try, but her face seems to be behind a veil, a veil the wind sometimes pushes against her face's shape. A cloth floating in the air, the shape always changing. I think as a boy I could remember it better, that she was more present to me. Still almost alive. My father took the photo down one day. I suppose it was painful for him to see it. The wall had a whiter square where the frame had been. I stared at it and cried, as if her face were still there, until he put it back.”

“It sounds like such a lonely childhood.”

“Maybe. I don't know. Maybe it was. I read a lot. My father encouraged me to do so, of course. It gave him time to work. I would sit under his desk, leaning back against his legs, reading.” We walked down the hall to the study. “And when he wasn't working on the scroll, when he was out in the yard, or teaching, or cooking dinner, I'd sneak into the study and read a book on the shelf I was not allowed to read, a book of old fairy tales, dark tales and strange wonders. It would give me nightmares.
It frightened me. But I loved it. It made me feel closer to something I felt
in
me but could find no words for—it explained something about the world no one would talk about to me—”

“Your mother's dying?”

“Probably, yes.” Lydia's saying that phrase, saying it so simply, so directly, affected me. My mother had not ceased to die. I felt like the little boy I had not ceased to be—that continuous child inside the adult who wanders through the labyrinth of his grown-up self, lost, afraid of monsters, afraid to speak too loudly lest his own words reveal him, and put him in greater danger, put him in the hands of the monster he asks for help to avoid.

“And the book? How did you find it?”

“Once upon a time,” I thought a joke would change my mood, “I walked into the study and found my father leaning against the wall by the window reading a book with a green cover. When I came in he quickly closed it; I remember still the sound of his clapping it shut. He put the book in an open space on the lowest shelf and told me that it was a book I wasn't allowed to read. It was the only green book on the shelf, surrounded by drab black and brown leather spines of uninteresting others. It looked like a fresh sprig in blasted ground. I couldn't stop staring at it, noticing it every time I walked into his office. It had a sort of gravitational pull on me.”

“It sounds like he wanted you to read it.”

“What do you mean?”

“That he made such a show of it so that you'd feel tempted to read it, put it on the lowest shelf so you could reach it; he made it obvious which book you were forbidden to open.”

We walked into the study. There on the desk the novel thickly sat—thought it was not so thick, then. One hundred pages, maybe less. There on the desk sat the novel's thick promise. I opened a drawer and pulled from it the sheaf of letters my father wrote me from his trip. I put them on the desk and pulled out the chair for Lydia to sit down.

“I thought you might want to read these. You don't have to—”

“What are they?”

“These are the letters my father wrote me from a long trip he took.”

Lydia untied the ribbon holding them together and opened the first envelope.

I left her alone to read them. I didn't want to see her face as she read the letters; I didn't want to hover ghostlike over the ghosts those letters were to me. I walked to the kitchen to open a bottle of wine, poured myself a glass, the bouquet sudden and diffuse in the room when I took my first sip, sat in a chair, and stared at the wall while I waited. A blank wall gives the mind more fully over to its distraction, a movie with no plot cast through the eyes onto the screen, edited by images that repeat, as the glass of wine in my hand became another evening, a
moment forgotten from last spring, when at Olin's house, slightly drunk, I knocked an empty wineglass off the table and it shattered against the floor and Lydia, looking down at the shards of glass on the wood, tipsily said, “That's how it begins.”

When the glass was empty, I filled it again. I filled one for Lydia, and took it to her. She put down the last letter, placed it neatly on top of the others, and left them face down on the desk. “Your father thought he was Orpheus.”

“I think he thought everyone was Orpheus. Or that Orpheus was some unrealized potential in us all. To be a singer. To sing a song that opened a door into another world. He thought of words as passages, not meanings; doorways, not definitions. He thought words kept open the wall between the living and the dead. I think he thought one could escape through a word. And enter. If he could sing the right words in the right order, sing them in the right way, some kind of multiplying melody, then he could sing his way into death and bring home my mother and sister. He was convinced, you know. He was absolutely convinced. He thought Orpheus wasn't a man but a symbol, a type of us all. Orpheus was who one could be—” I stopped, aghast to sound so much like him.

“It's hard to believe
he
could believe such a thing. A professor, a rational man. Your mother's death must have broken something in him.”

“Reason's plank.”

Lydia looked at me. “You had a hard childhood, not just a lonely one.”

“A child doesn't know it's hard; I didn't. It was dark, that's all. Filled with shadows, mysteries. I loved my father very much. I loved him more the crazier he became. I thought he was magical. And wise. I'd listen to him practice the myth, practice his singing, his chanting, an awful music that hardly sounded like music, dark and rhythmic, guttural, almost violent—but it didn't scare me, or it scared me in a way that made sense, and so it didn't scare me. I didn't know to be afraid of the way he was crazy.”

“And then he left?”

“And then one day he was gone.”

“Weren't you angry?”

“I knew it would happen. He never told me he would leave, but I knew it. I knew he was practicing, preparing for a journey. The words he studied, I knew they meant he'd leave. I wasn't angry, I wasn't even surprised. Sad, I guess—I was already sad.”

Something quiet in Lydia's face grew quieter; her whole face silence. “Fathers are an awful fate.” Her face looked ashen.

“Fathers are just an introduction to fate; it becomes awful afterward, when fate is what you try to escape.”

“What is your fate?”

I ignored the question. “My father came home a different man. He never spoke of what happened on that island. He would look at me in a way that I felt I could
not ask him. It was secret.” I thought about fate, how one doesn't know what it is, but only that it must be run away from, fled, and that fleeing it is always running directly toward it. “Father came home with a limp. His skin seemed more taut against him, as if he had been partially embalmed. He had a slightly jaundiced look. He kept teaching, but it didn't go well. He seemed as feeble as he actually was. He . . . dwindled. And then he died.”

“I'm sorry.”

Those three syllables rebounded through my head, a drumbeat repeating itself, growing louder as the words disappeared. The white poplar scratched against the window, pen on glass. I wanted to be able to say
don't be sorry
but I couldn't. I couldn't lie to her. “What I wanted to show you,” trying to gather myself, trying to still the quaver in my words, “was the book, the green book, filled with tales. My childhood friend.” I went over to the bookshelf. My hand by old habit reached to the middle of the lowest shelf, but the book was missing. It was gone. “It's vanished,” I said, a desperate helplessness uncontrollable in my voice.
Vanished
is how the moment felt to me—not that I had lost the book, not that I had been reading it in the armchair and left it on a table in the living room, not that I had lent it to a friend or student and simply forgotten the fact. Orpheus had peeled himself off the canvas and stolen the book to keep his lonely head company in the afterlife—he had carried it away in his mouth. No natural explanations came to me;
I felt riddled, not as by a child's riddle book, but riddled as in filled with holes. “It's vanished, it's vanished—” I kept saying it to myself over and over again, and the empty space on the shelf opened the empty space in me, that absent space, as shocking as reading a novel and finding, hundreds of pages deep, a signature of blank pages, a missing chapter, after which the novel continues, missing characters one had come to like, to rely on, even to love. My hand was shaking, still held out toward the shelf. Lydia came behind me. She put her hand on my shaking hand, but the tremor didn't stop, it just descended deeper in me—more pressure in the fault of my earthquake life. She leaned her forehead against the back of my neck and said, “I won't vanish.” She said these words but I could not see her say them; I could not see her eyes; I could not see her lips form the words. She spoke them behind me, as if the words existed in the air by themselves, spoken by anyone, anonymous. I wanted to say it, but I could not say it. I could not say it, but I knew it was true. Everyone vanishes.