Dry Your Smile (57 page)

Now at some point in this cleaning-up you discover the phone is off the hook, so you put it back on. At that moment, Life is probably sitting over in the corner next to It, laughing its ass off. Because sure enough, just a minute after you hang up the phone—it rings.

Well. You could always not answer it. But that doesn't make sense because then why did you bother to hang it back up in the first place? Maybe you should take it off the hook again. But you can't do that till it stops ringing, can you. Besides, tape recorder, there's something way down inside all this time terrified Jule's hurt or dead or crazy or runover somewhere. So you answer the phone. That's the kind of thing Life does to you.

And it's her and the conversation I already told about. And you even say, though you don't want to, “Would you like me to come up there and be with you?” And you hope to god she'll say yes and you hope to god she'll say no and there's silence. Then she says, “Thanks. But I'm okay.”

So you know that Iliana or some of her women friends are with her. So you tell her to let you know if there's anything you can do. She says yes she will.

That's that.

Then it's no use anymore going out to get more brandy, because nothing you can imagine or invent would stop the pain you're feeling anyway. So you walk through the loft like you were in a slow-motion film. You look at things. Her comb. The brass bowl that was a wedding present. The first head you tried to sculpt of her, profile against the wind like a ship's figurehead. Not a good piece. But she'd never let you chuck it out. You look at everything: the floorboards the two of you sanded and finished together, the ceiling bump left where the two of you tore down a wall. The wall the two of you later built together, too. You see the old mask she claimed for her own, the mirrored kid's face with the stake in the skull, still hanging on her wall. There's nothing you don't see.

Finally, you come in here, because there's no place else to come. You look around here, too. You see the cages, the prisons, the jails you and she were in, separately and together. You see It, in all that pristine marble virginity. You pull the tarp off Its nakedness. You walk around It, just looking at the grain.

Then you realize it's night again and you look at the clock but either it or time has stopped, because years have gone by but not enough hours. So you go out for another walk and the brandy, and think tomorrow's paper should be out and maybe you'll get the paper and that'll occupy your mind for a few minutes. So you do. And you know what Life pulls on you this time, tape recorder? The date of the paper. October 7. This dawn, today, is Julian's birthday.

Yeah. That's right. We were married just before she turned twenty, though she'd thought she was going to turn nineteen that year, until she met David and he neatly hacked a year off her life. Yeah. Hope is dying on Jule's birthday. Art can't get away with stuff like that, tape recorder, you know it and I know it. But Life doesn't give a shit about realism, it makes things up as it goes along.

So at last you find yourself back here. And you get out your old friend—that's you, tape recorder—to talk with again. Because something is changing inside and tells you to get it down before it gets lost or forgotten.

I want to forgive myself.

I want to forgive everybody. Hope—she's dying, after all. I'd like to have compassion for her. God, I'd like that. But then I think how Hope managed to fix things in Jule's mind so there never would be a child with Julian's and my features together all faceted, polished, liberated, in one face. So I lose it—whatever compassion I might have had for Hope Travis. Maybe eventually I can not hate her anymore. But compassion, no. Not for Hope, who refused to free Julian,
and
me, by ever once saying “This is my belovèd daughter, in whom I am well pleased.”

I'd like to not hate Iliana, too. Strange, I really liked her once. I think I half-knew even then that she was helpless in loving Julian. In some roundabout way, I understood that. Of course, understanding was easy enough when Julian was mine and hot hers. Easy to be compassionate about someone who wants what you have. If they actually take it away from you, though, that cuts a wedge into the compassion-capacity, if you know what I mean, tape recorder.

I know she's a lifelong exile. I know that must be its own kind of horror, different from feeling yourself an exile in your own fucking country—like me. So. You can't go home again, what else is new. David was an exile, too, but look at the damage he managed to do. Am I supposed to feel compassion for
him?
Hell with it. I've been his whipping-boy for too many years. Far as I'm concerned, he's one of those that got away with the characteristics of the guys he got away from. There've been moments when I've wished he hadn't got away at all.

But then there wouldn't have been Julian. I guess the time'll come when I won't hate her, either. I'd even say it's already here, but I'm afraid to do that. Afraid the hate will ooze in through some back window and possess me all over again, and all I want is to be free of it, to heal.

I'd like to not hate
me
anymore. I'd like to have compassion for
me
. Not pity. Compassion.

That's a lot of work ahead, all that forgiveness and compassion for all those people. Christ. It exhausts you just to think about it. Well, I figure I have to start somewhere. So I'll start with Laurence Millman.

That's
why I turned you on, tape recorder, but I didn't know it then. All I knew was that this time there'd be no hope of her eavesdropping on you, no hope of her finding messages I left behind. She's gone now, somewhere far off, head into the wind, hair flying, my proud warrior queen. I'm the only one who can say how it should go from here on in. That's how Life tricks you.

So I say that I'm not going to open this new bottle of brandy right now. That's what I say.

I say … I'm going to turn you up as high as you can go, tape recorder, so you can hear this. Because I'm going to get up from this table, right now … and I'm going over here, to get the chisel and mallet … and here, to get the work apron, and … I hope you're still picking me up, tape machine, but
God oh God I'm alive this feels good
, it doesn't even matter if my voice can't reach back to you, because
I
know what it is I'm doing, going over … here, to
It
, no not It, just the last
no the first
piece of marble, and I'm going to make something again with these hands. I'm going to make something beautiful, something that sings. I'm going to give birth to something. I'm going to give birth to myself.
Now
.

Now, Momma. Now that we're holding on to each other and we've rested for a little, we might be ready to do the next thing that will help. Remember it's me, Momma, Julian, talking into you, Hope and Hokhmah,
klayne libe, klayne Hokheleh
. You're not alone in there.

Let's try to release the knot in your forehead, Momma. Let's relax it very slowly so it doesn't have to worry or be scared anymore. Feel my breath on it. It doesn't have to concentrate on pain. It can remember other things. It can remember us together, laughing and planning, the two of us against the world.

Remember feeding the ducks in the park pond? The momma and her ducklings in a row behind her, looking over her back to make sure they were all safe? Remember how one little duckling always would begin to wander off, paddling to the left or to the right in the water, bumping into a lily pad or a floating leaf, and you and I would laugh at it? And how the mother duck would
Creeak
out a warning and the duckling would look so surprised at having been missed, and then would paddle quickly back toward its mother?

Remember that spring you let me make a tiny garden in our favorite corner of the park, Momma? You bought me some anemone seeds and I planted them under the Japanese maple tree so we'd know where they were. Every Sunday we'd go check to see if they came up. But they never did, and you and I tried so hard to figure out why. I wouldn't believe they still might not come up, until finally the whole spring and summer had gone by. Then I believed. Then I cried and you held me, remember, Momma? You held me the way I'm holding you now, and you said “Dry your—” You said, “Don't cry, Baby. Let them go, they're growing somewhere. It's not that easy to kill a seed. Sometimes they can lie dormant for years and then, without anybody knowing why, just sprout and grow and bud and bloom.” That's what you said, Momma. “Let them go. They're growing somewhere.” And you were right.

So let the knot go, let the knot bloom out into an end of pain.

I know you can do it, Momma. I saw you do it just a day ago. You looked at me, and you knew it was me, and the knot dissolved. Your whole face lit up with glory, the way you look in the photograph taken when you were seventeen in Mexico.

So I know you can do it, especially if we try together, reaching for one another through all the mist and echo, through all the memory.

Let's remember how we'd bake cookies and go window-shopping, how we'd plan our future and our fortune. No no, don't knot it tighter, Hope, let it go, release it. Don't be afraid of that memory. Don't … don't be afraid of having told me, “Dry your smile.”

All that's forgiven, Momma. All that's finally understood.

This is Julian telling you so.

You loved me. You did whatever you knew how, to show that. You survived what David did, yes,
yes
you did
that's good release it a little more now
. You saved your baby.
Yes
, your baby is safe, sleeping, in the crib, loving you. You raised your baby, celebrated her the best you knew how, white lilacs on her birthday so she'd know how you loved her. I knew. Remember how I used to say you were the best mother in the whole world?
Yes, oh that's better, that's good
, release it a bit more now, let the knot go, let it bloom into light all over your face.

It was you I loved, you all along. In my genes, my features, my name, in the invention of me: you. In my poems, my politics, my dreams. It's you I forgive, you I'm holding now.

Forgive … forgive me, too? For what I've done to you and not done; meant and not meant, said and left silent. See? We can be anything we want. We can even forgive each other.

Because I do love you, Momma,
yes that's it
I always have and always will
yes let it go
and hear me say to you for all time that I know you loved me
yes
.

Thank you, Momma. You have such courage inside there where they claim you can't hear or feel a thing.

Now. I know you must be very tired. So much work for so long.

But reach, only once more,
up up up
through the darkness to where I'm reaching down through all your surfaces, telling you that you can do this one last thing, because you're not alone.

It's me here with you. We can do this together.
Come
.

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi: miserere nobis
.

Have mercy on her, God. Have mercy on my Juliana.

It's been twenty-seven hours now, at this death vigil. The daughter's eyes are almost as sunken in her head as the mother's. She's been at that bedside ceaselessly since we got here yesterday morning. Now it's dawn again. Santa María, it's her birthday now, and I don't think she even knows it. I don't think either remembers that one gave birth to the other on this day.

Dies irae, dies illa, Solvet saeclum in favilla …
how long can the mother go on like this? She lies there, already more dead than living. Skin a transparent yellow like the beeswax church candles I remember as a child, her face already more skull than expression, hardly a flicker of any flame left in her. Breath rasping in heaves, sometimes stopping completely for four or five seconds. Each time, I think
there
, it is done. Then comes another whistle of agony, another inhalation. With every pause, Juliana freezes, her own breath suspended. Her body, that I would wrap in my heart for warmth, goes motionless, waiting—like my childhood saints, statues at the altar and stained-glass lenses for the light, kneeling—waiting for Judgment Day, for the world to end and the new life to begin.

Kyrie eleison
, I do not believe. I left your churches and your sacraments, your priests who damned me and would damn me still for loving this small woman who hovers by her mother's dying. For loving as I do each part of her, soul, mind, and body, what gleams in her and what lies shadowed. For this they tell me I am damned. I left all that behind me, going for years now into your churches only for the art, the music, the moment's rest.
Agnus Dei
, mistake me not. This is not a return. For me there is no return to where I saw your bishops bless your generals while the festive blood martyred in my homeland flushed the gutters clean. Mistake me not.
Non credo in unum Deum
, not anymore,
Non laudemus te, Non adoramus te
.

It is her I praise, bless, adore, glorify. It is her.
Ave Maria, gratia pleni
, it is to You I turn, You who understands.

How long can she go on? How has she not collapsed? Strange sadistic miracle that keeps Julian going, driven like one possessed. No detail escapes her. She whispers into the mother's unhearing brain words she has found and studied for this moment. I have watched her these weeks, whenever I saw her, always carrying with her the books. The Kaddish. The Tibetan Book of the Dead. The Egyptian Book of the Dead. Carrying her scripts with her always for the studying. Carrying her dead with her everywhere.

She found a woman rabbi, my little atheist Juliana. She learned what Hebrew words to say, what they pray over their dying, what they do for their last confession. Yiddish words she learned, too, any words she could find in any language Hope might understand.