Ghost Dance (25 page)

I loved them for the way they made my mother feel. All these years they had made her feel safe. What they told her was this: “Take refuge.” “Step into your talent.” “Apologize to no one.” “Life is perplexing. Your imagination is your gift.” “Do what you must.” They were islands of comfort. She had swum out to them and rested on their wonderful shores.

The associate professor of English, carrying an armful of books, smiles. I pass her on the library steps. “Take refuge,” she says.

“Come now, Christine,” she says softly, offering her hand. “You’re going to be all right. I promise.”

My mother stands up and allows herself to be helped out of the ditch by the woman who is so kind. She has a long, gray braid down her back. “I promise,” she says again, speaking softly to her grown daughter. They turn from the ditch. It is Grandma Alice. She hugs my mother. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

Marta, walking through the library, no interest in books, recognized me against the high, pine window where I still sat gazing at the many faces of my mother. She looked from the photos to me but made no connection as far as I could tell. I collected the books and put them in a pile as if I might protect my mother from Marta in this way. Though it seemed to me that Marta lived a dangerous life, something my mother had once recommended, I was doubtful that this was what she had had in mind.

I did not expect Marta to recognize me. She had barely seen me the previous night in Jennifer’s room, I thought. She had barely known that I was there at all. And though she had at one point actually described my face, lingered over my features, it had not seemed to me an accurate portrait.

“Forget a face like that?” Marta laughed, tipping my head up and putting her thumb and forefinger on my chin. “No chance.” I caught a glimmer of what might have been the old Marta, the Marta before Natalie, the one who laughed and wanted, without hesitation, faces like mine.

“Have you seen Jennifer?” she asked, as if we had known each other a long time, as if the face she could not forget exhausted her, bored her.

“I don’t know who Jennifer is.”

She looked at me as if she wondered what it would be like to be able to say that.

“You haven’t met her yet?”

“No.”

Marta had lost track of the days. How many had passed, she wondered, since I had arrived holding that little note?

“Well, won’t that be something?” she smiled. She looked like a mischievous child: the grin, the sneakers, the mass of dark curls, the papers she held in her hand, crumpled, tear-stained.

She put her hand on my shoulder. Her touch was like no other, firm but gentle, hard but yielding, and it brought me immediately back to the night before. She was drawing me at a tremendous speed into intimacy. There was no time to waste.

“I’ve got a dog,” she said. She was still a child to me.

“Oh?” I said.

“She’s really only a puppy. I live in Gushing. She’s in my room. Do you want to see her?”

“Sure,” I said.

I put the books back on the shelf. On another day I would be able to find them easily, I said to myself.

“Come on,” she said.

I knew what Marta wanted. It was easy to see. We left the library. I turned to look at the librarian and watched her grow small as we walked toward Marta ‘s dormitory.

“This is it,” she said as we stood in front of a large house made completely, it seemed, of gingerbread.

“This is it?” I said.

She nodded. “This way,” she smiled. And I followed her up the winding stairs to the tiny room where the dead girl lived.

Each night was the same. She wore the same clothes, the black pants she had gotten in Mykonos and the cotton T-shirt of Natalie’s. Every night she rubbed her cheek against her shoulder, closed her eyes, and sniffed the shirt as if fabric, like the heart, could hold a person long after they were gone, in its weave.

Two eight-by-ten black-and-white photographs of Natalie were propped on the bureau and illuminated by candles. Every night we toasted those photos of her and listened to the records of Billie Holiday. Wherever we were, if we sat in her room or if we went to classes or to the dining hall, Billie Holiday seemed to follow us. She sang as I studied those pictures of Natalie. The straight blonde hair, the long, elegant nose, the lips—too thin, I thought, cruel, somehow.

“She was a complete mystery to me, Vanessa,” Marta said.

I nodded, engrossed in the photographs. Natalie seemed terrified to me, alone in that frame against a black background, lost. She carefully held the poses of a self-conscious child, though the poses, a hand on a hip, a cigarette poised between beautiful fingers, were meant to convey the opposite impression: sophistication, worldliness, maturity—Natalie in her leather pants, Natalie clutching an Italian
Vogue
. What did she see, as she looked into the glassy eye of the camera, that frightened her so?

There were pictures everywhere, propped on trunks and tables, taped to the walls, lying on top of books. In each photo she looked just as lonely, just as scared—her face always the same. There could be no touching her. She just stared. When you thought you were safe, there was always another photo; when you thought you were out of the range of her gave, you would turn suddenly and she would be watching.

“Isn’t she beautiful?” Marta said. And it was true; she was.

After many nights spent in that room with Marta I would finally dare to touch those photos, putting them together in different ways, in an attempt to animate her, to watch her move, watch her light her cigarette, watch her walk in her spiked heels, her Stetson hat, her fur coat. I wanted to see her look at Marta, then look away, watch her leave for France, try to understand what made her this way.

“To Natalie,” Marta said, barely able to lift her glass at all by midnight, a toast, I imagined, that Natalie, lit by candles, being worshipped, would appreciate.

“Tell me more and more and then some,” Billie Holiday sang.

“It didn’t happen the wav they said,” Marta whispered. “Natalie did not want to die. I’m going to go there. I’m going to find out w hat really happened. People don’t disappear like that. I never spoke with her parents. I couldn’t find them anyway here. People don’t just disappear like that.”

Every night I listened to the stories, drank Scotch, and watched Marta toast the photos of the dead girl until they dissolved and disappeared.

“Natalie would never have killed herself,” she said. Her brown eves were black. “It couldn’t have happened the way they said.”

“Tell me more,” I murmured. “Tell me more and more,” I sang, until the candles burned out.

She had lived everywhere here. She hail done everything. Her father was a diplomat and she had grown up a golden girl, gleaning beauty from all the great cities of the world.

People didn’t disappear like that: off the edge of some foreign country, at the phone number just beyond the reach of the voice, some operator insisting in French over and over that she has dialed correctly.

People didn’t disappear that way—the final message left on the mouth of a man in a phone booth in Nice, a man with a voice easy not to believe’.

Her parents are sitting suspended in air, somewhere here between New York and Paris, eating the darkness, swallowing it vv hole, counting the miles to the man, the phone booth, rewinding the years, never once sensing something in their daughter having gone a long way off.

People didn’t die that wav—nothing left behind: no Calvin Klein shirts, no Kenzo dresses; no Dior, no Estée Lauder, no Mary Quant; no Shiseido, no Nina Simone, no Gato Barbieri, no Yves St. Laurent.

They tell us she has already forgotten her entire life. We are chewing on the sharp edges of empty space. We are calling home our truant feelings.

People didn’t disappear like that—no bulge in the ground, no stone to throw roses at. People that disappeared that way always came back.

My mother winds the black phone cord around her hand. She clears her throat and puts on her phone voice, the one she feels is decipherable to the real world, the world of numbers and phones, the one operators can hear. As soon as she gets Sabine on the other end her phone voice melts. “Sabine,” she sighs, and her language changes.

I have heard this conversation many times. Again tonight, my mother worries. I translate the French as best I can. “I am exceptional only in appearance, only in charm,” is what I think she says. I can’t hear what Sabine says but whatever it is it calms my mother slightly.

“I am a coward,” my mother says as she steps into her pumps, and she believes it. “I will never be good enough.” She kisses the receiver twice and hangs up. I sit at her feet. “My beauty,” she whispers, hugging me to her, and she begins to cry.

How she hesitated those nights she was to be at one party or another.

My mother could not understand why she caused such a commotion in people. The mere suggestion that she might attend a certain party would turn it into an event. She hated this; it baffled her, for she distrusted those who would so readily attach themselves to her.

“Clearly no one in this room understands or has even read one line of my work,” she’d say after three or four drinks.

Beauty is a trap; it is its own art form. To be beautiful, it is said, is enough.

On her worst days she thought people admired her work because of her beauty, because of the person she was at cocktail parties: witty, charming, seductive, caustic, dangerous—beautiful. But it is not enough.

The centerpiece—let them have what they wanted, she thought. Let them take what was least important to her. She didn’t mind. It meant nothing to her—the shape of her face, her blue eyes, her bare shoulders.

“No,” she said, she was not a decoration. She did not simply sparkle. “Don’t prettify me,” I heard her say once to a well-dressed man at one of those parties. “Don’t do it.”

It was the work that shaped her life, that gave her her intense radiance and beauty. She did not want them to take that.

She was too polite, she thought. Politely she had accepted compliments, politely she had bowed her head, letting those who needed get a glimpse of her neck. “No more,” she said on her thirty-fifth birthday. “Let them stare elsewhere.” It had never been flattering, she had simply endured it, for reasons even she must not have been clear about.

My mother was always angry with the way she was presented to the world. “The beautiful Christine Wing will read from her newest collection at eight,” she read aloud from the newspaper’s society column. “As if that makes the poems any better,” she’d scowl, “or any easier to write.” After an interview for
Time
she found herself on the cover of that magazine with the caption “The Beautiful Poet.” And when we opened to the article we found it began with two long, elaborate paragraphs describing her appearance.

She is dressed in royal blue taffeta. She looks at the young man, who stares at her, and her laugh is impossibly high. He blushes. He is very young. “My daughter,” she says, introducing me, never taking her eyes from his soft mouth. “You’re so handsome. What’s your name again?” She turns away. “I’ll be back,” she promises, taking me by the hand. She looks at him again, saying nothing. Even her silences are beautiful, not at all awkward. I watch him through the night. He does not venture far from his spot on the floor.

I have seen my mother paranoid. “It’s a trap, Vanessa,” she’d tell me, “all the laughter, all the handsome men and women. They want me to stop writing. All of them do. Don’t trust them,” she hissed. “Be careful.”

“There’s been too much talking tonight,” she’d say sometimes in the middle of a sentence, in the middle of a dinner party, and then excuse herself in a way no one but she could. But often she did not move when she might have, did not leave her throne, took in the praise, talked about nothing, gave all her profile. A slightly fearful look would pass over her face on those nights. I knew what she was thinking just by a glance or a sigh, w hen I was finally old enough to accompany her to those parties. Some nights she’d nod w hen I’d suggest we leave, as if she were just about to suggest the same thing, and she would get up shakily. But other nights she’d look at me as if I was crazy and say, “Oh, not ver, Vanessa,” in a giddy flirtatious voice. “Please,” she’d beg like a child, “not yet.”

What I see sometimes is my real mother peering out from behind her illness, and she is fine. She is not crazy at all. “Don’t let them put me here,” she pleads, but there is no convincing them. The doctors come with their hypodermic needles, wrapped in cloth so that she cannot see them in advance. They are taking away her belts and necklaces, and we leave her standing there, sobbing, in her underwear.

The sky puts on the darkening blue coat
held for it by a row of ancient trees;
you watch: and the land grows distant in your sight,
one journeying to heaven, one that falls;

and leave you, not at home in either one,
not quite so still and dark as the darkened houses,
not calling to eternitv with the passion
of what becomes a star each night, and rises;

and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel)
your life, with its immensity and fear,
so that now bounded, now immeasurable,
it is alternately stone in you and star.

“Evening” by Ramer Maria Rilke

The large, white hull of the oceanliner moves through ice. The other passengers have retired for the night: no stars tonight. My father stands on the deck and stares ahead at the land. He lifts his immense fist, which rises into the sky then sinks into the sea. “Why?” he asks over and over. The word is a jagged rock in the freezing sea. “Why?” he asks again. And the rock stands alone.

“Where did Mom go?” I ask Sabine from across the ocean. Silence wraps around the receiver.

“I don’t know, Vanessa,” she says finally. “Nobody knows the real answer to that.”

“Sabine,” I say, “you must know. Please don’t lie to me.” She says nothing.

My voice does not sail like my mother’s once did. And the ocean crashes in my ears.

Marta lifted the domed cover from the silver server and watched Natalie closely through the steam: her eyes, their deep blue color, each eyelash—she could count them—her beautiful, regal nose, but most of all her mouth; she concentrated on it, waiting for her next words. She hung on these words, she lived for them, anticipated them through the delicious, steamy haze.