Dressing Up for the Carnival (11 page)

A seven-year-old boy taken along with his class to the museum in Buffalo stares into a display case. His gaze settles on a long, oddly shaped wooden key (Babylonian), and his hand flies instantly to the key he wears around his neck, the key that will let him into his house on North Lilac Avenue after school, one hour before his mother returns from her job at the bottling plant. When first tying the key in place, she had delivered certain warnings: the key must not be lost, lent, or even shown to others, but must be kept buried under his sweater all day long, accompanying him everywhere, protecting him from danger.

He doesn’t need protection, not that he could ever explain this to his mother, he knows how to jump and hustle and keep himself watchful. The key leads him home and into a warm hallway, the light switch waiting, a note on the refrigerator, the television set sending him a wide, waxy smile of welcome. There is no danger, none at all; his mother has been misled, her notion of the world somehow damaged. Still, he loves this key (so icy against his skin when he slips it on, but warming quickly to body temperature) and has to restrain himself, whenever he feels restless, from reaching inside his clothes and fingering its edges.

He is a solemn child whose thoughts are full of perforations (how it would feel to bite into a red crayon or put his tongue to the rain-soaked bushes behind the schoolyard fence), or else opening onto a lively boil of fantasy that tends to be dotted with bravery and tribute. And yet, for all his imaginative powers, he cannot—at his age—begin to picture the unscrolling of a future in which he will one day possess a key ring (in the shape of the Eiffel Tower) which will hold a pair of streamlined rubber-tipped car keys, as well as a rainbow of pale tinted others—house, office, club, cottage—and a time when he will have a curly-headed wife with her own set of keys (on a thong of red leather stamped with her initials) and a fourteen-year-old daughter whose miniature brass key will open a diary in which she will write out her secret thoughts, beneath which lie a secondary drift of thought too tentative, too sacred, too rare to trust to the inexactitude of print and to the guardianship of a mere key.

ABSENCE

She woke up early, drank a cup of strong unsugared coffee, then sat down at her word processor. She knew more or less what she wanted to do, and that was to create a story that possessed a granddaughter, a Boston fern, a golden apple, and a small blue cradle. But after she had typed half a dozen words, she found that one of the letters of the keyboard was broken, and, to make matters worse, a vowel, the very letter that attaches to the hungry self.

Of course she had no money and no house-handy mate to prod the key free. Many a woman would have shrugged good naturedly, conceded defeat, and left the small stones of thought unclothed, but not our woman; our woman rolled up her sleeves, to use that thready old metaphor, and began afresh. She would work
around
the faulty letter. She would force her story, however awkwardly, toward a detour. She would be resourceful, look for other ways, and make an artefact out of absence. She would, to put the matter bluntly, make do.

She started—slowly, ponderously—to tap out words. “Several thousand years ago there—”

But where her hands had once danced, they now trudged. She stopped and scratched her head, her busy, normally useful head, that had begun, suddenly, to thrum and echo; where could she go from here? she asked herself sharply. Because the flabby but dependable gerund had dropped through language’s trapdoor, gone. Whole parcels of grammar, for that matter, seemed all at once out of reach, and so were those bulky doorstop words that connect and announce and allow a sentence to pause for a moment and take on fresh loads of oxygen. Vocabulary, her well-loved garden, as broad and taken-for-granted as an acre of goldenrod, had shrunk to a square yard, and she was, as never before, forced to choose her words, much as her adored great-aunt, seated at a tea table, had selected sugar lumps by means of a carefully executed set of tongs.

She was tempted, of course, to seek out synonyms, and who could blame her? But words, she knew, held formal levels of sense and shades of deference that were untransferable one to the other, though thousands of deluded souls hunch each day over crossword puzzles and try. The glue of resonance makes austere demands. Memory barks, and context, that absolute old cow, glowers and chews up what’s less than acceptable.

The woman grew, as the day wore on, more and more frustrated. Always the word she sought, the only word, teased and taunted from the top row of the broken keyboard, a word that spun around the center of a slender, one-legged vowel, erect but humble, whose dot of amazement had never before mattered.

Furthermore, to have to pause and pry an obscure phrase from the dusty pages of her old thesaurus threw her off balance and altered the melody of her prose. Between stutters and starts, the sheen was somehow lost; the small watery pleasures of accent and stress were roughed up as though translated from some coarse sub-Balkan folk tale and rammed through the nozzle of a too-clever-by-half, space-larky computer.

Her head-bone ached; her arm-bones froze; she wanted only to make, as she had done before, sentences that melted at the center and branched at the ends, that threatened to grow unruly and run away, but that clause for clause adhered to one another as though stuck down by Velcro tabs.

She suffered too over the
sounds
that evaded her and was forced to settle for those other, less seemly vowels whose open mouths and unsubtle throats yawned and groaned and showed altogether too much teeth. She preferred small slanted breakable tones that scarcely made themselves known unless you pressed an ear closely to the curled end of the tongue or the spout of a kettle. The thump of heartbeat was what she wanted, but also the small urgent jumps lodged between the beats. (She was thankful, though, for the sly
y
that now and then leapt forward and pulled a sentence taut as a cord.)

“Several thousand years ago a woman sat down at a table and began to—”

Hours passed, but the work went badly. She thought to herself: to make a pot of bean soup would produce more pleasure. To vacuum the hall rug would be of more use.

Both sense and grace eluded her, but hardest to bear was the fact that the broken key seemed to demand of her a parallel surrender, a correspondence of economy subtracted from the alphabet of her very self. But how? A story had to come from somewhere. Some hand must move the pen along or press the keys and steer, somehow, the granddaughter toward the Boston fern or place the golden apple at the foot of the blue cradle. “A woman sat down at a table and—”

She felt her arm fall heavy on the table and she wondered, oddly, whether or not the table objected. And was the lamp, clamped there to the table’s edge, exhausted after so long a day? Were the floorboards reasonably cheerful or the door numb with lack of movement, and was the broken letter on her keyboard appeased at last by her cast-off self?

Because now her thoughts flowed through every object and every corner of the room, and a moment later she
became
the walls and also the clean roof overhead and the powerful black sky. Why, she wondered aloud, had she stayed so long enclosed by the tough, lonely pronoun of her body when the whole world beckoned?

But the words she actually set down came from the dark eye of her eye, the stubborn self that refused at the last moment to let go. “A woman sat down—”

Everyone knew who the woman was. Even when she put a red hat on her head or changed her name or turned the clock back a thousand years or resorted to wobbly fables about granddaughters and Boston ferns, everyone knew the woman had been there from the start, seated at a table, object and subject sternly fused. No one, not even the very young, pretends that the person who brought forth words was any other than the arabesque of the unfolded self. There was no escape and scarcely any sorrow.

“A woman sat down and wrote,” she wrote.

WINDOWS

In the days when the Window Tax was first introduced M. J. used to say to me: “Stop complaining. Accept. Render unto Caesar. Et cetera.”

I remember feeling at the time of the legislation that the two of us would continue to live moderately well as long as we had electricity to illuminate our days and nights, and failing that, kerosene or candles. But I knew that our work would suffer in the long run.

“Furthermore,” M. J. continued, “the choice is ours. We can block off as many or as few windows as we choose.”

This was true enough; the government, fearing rebellion, I suppose, has left the options open. Theoretically, citizens are free to choose their own level of taxation, shutting off, if they like, just one or two windows or perhaps half to two-thirds of their overall glazed area. In our own case, we immediately decided to brick up the large pane at the back of the house which overlooks the ravine. A picture window, is how my parents would have described this wide, costly expanse of glass; M. J. prefers the trademark term “panorama vista,” but at the same time squints ironically when it’s mentioned. We loved the view, both of us, and felt our work was nourished by it, those immense swaying poplars and the sunlight breaking across the top of their twinkling leaves, but once we sat down and calculated the tax dollars per square inch of window, we decided we would have to make the sacrifice.

Next we closed off our bedroom windows. Who needs light in a bedroom, we reasoned, or the bathroom either for that matter? We liked to think at the time that our choices represented a deliberate push toward optical derangement, and that this was something that might add a certain . . .
je ne sais quoi
. . . to a relationship that has never been easy.

Before the advent of the Window Tax, light had streamed into our modest-but-somehow-roomy house, and both M. J. and I rejoiced in the fact, particularly since we earn our living as artists—I work in oils; M. J.’s medium is also oils, but thinly, thinly applied so that the look is closer to tempera. Light—natural light—was crucial to us. Just think what natural light allows one to see: the thousand varying shades of a late fall morning when the sky is brittle with a blue and gold hardness, or the folded, collapsed, watery tints of a February afternoon. Still, artificial light was better than no light at all. We did go to the trouble of applying to the government for a professional dispensation, a matter of filling out half a dozen forms, but naturally we were turned down.

We were, it could be argued, partly prepared for our deprivation, since both of us had long since adjusted our work cycle to the seasonal rhythms, putting in longer hours in the summer and cutting back our painting time in the dark ends of winter days, quitting as early as three-thirty or four, brewing up a pot of green tea, and turning to other pursuits, occasionally pursuits of an amatory disposition; M. J.’s sensibility rises astonishingly in the midst of coziness and flickering shadow. Our most intimate moments, and our most intense, tend to fall into that crack of the day when the sun has been cut down to a bent sliver of itself and even that about to disappear on the horizon.

It is a fact that my work has always suffered at the approach of winter. The gradual threatened diminishment of the afternoon sun encourages a false exuberance. Slap down the thick blades of color while it is still possible. Hurry. Be bold (my brain shouts and prods), and out of boldness, while the clock drains away each thrifty second of possibility, will come that accident we call art.

It seldom does. What I imagine to be a useful recklessness is only bad painting executed with insufficient light.

M. J.’s highly representational work prospers even less well than mine during the late autumn days, not that the two of us have ever spoken of this. You will understand that two painters living together under one roof can be an invitation to discord, and its lesser cousin, irritation. Ideally artists would be better off selecting mates who are civil engineers or chiropractors or those who manufacture buttons or cutlery. It’s relatively easy to respect disparate work, but how do we salute, purely, the creative successes of those we live with, those we stand beside while brushing our teeth. How to rule out envy, or worse, disdain, and to resist those little sideways words or faked encouragement, delivered with the kind of candor that is really presumption? And so when I say, rather disingenuously, that M. J.’s work prospers less well, is overly representational, employs too much purple and lavender, and so on, you will have to take my pronouncement with a certain skepticism. And then reflect on the problems of artistic achievement and its measurement, and the knowledge that systems of temperament are immensely complicated. The salt and wound of M. J.’s vulnerability, for instance, is stalked by an old tenderness, but also by the fear of being overtaken.

It seems that most artists are frightened by any notion of subtraction, and, of course, the rationing of light falls into the category of serious deprivation. Without paint, artists can create images with their own blood or excrement if necessary, not that the two of us have ever been driven to such measures, but there is no real substitute for natural light. As the accustomed afternoon rays grow thinner, the work becomes more desperate, careless, and ineffectual. We often discussed this over our tea mugs during our midwinter days when the year seemed at its weakest point, how scarcity can stifle production or else, as in my case, clear a taunting space to encourage it. It seemed to both of us monu mentally unfair.

But then, with the new tax measures, the house was dark all day. Like everyone else we had come to see the cutting back of natural light as a civic protest against a manipulative tax,
conscience de nos jours,
you might call it, and like all but the very rich we had filled in every one of our windows—with brick or stone or sheets of ugly plywood.
Obscura maxima
was the code phrase on our politicized tongues, and we spoke it proudly—and on our bumper stickers too—at least in the beginning. (Of course we left the window in our studio as long as we were able, and only boarded it up when we were made to feel we had failed in our civic responsibility.)