Glass Grapes (10 page)

He sat at the edge of things trimming words out of paragraphs in his mind. His wife on the other hand laid a table for six with purple candles and lit them and straightened them and stood back to look at them and straightened them again. He paid no attention to the candles or anything else. She glared at him without animosity. He trimmed off “releasing the double meaning on principle.” I watched. I wanted to put my hands on the top of his bald head the way I always do. Why is it that men fear going bald, when it is exactly this trait which makes them erotic, so available and irresistibly blank. One can't touch men in any way really—they have such good defenses—but when they are bald, it is as if one had a head on a platter without the fuss of dancing or veils.

When the other guests arrived we sat down for conversation and wine and we all started in, I with some usual enthusiasm, this time a fixation on a poem
I'd just read, the others about a conference on semiotics. Somewhere in the city, papers were still being read, speeches given. He tried to join in, but his paragraph, the one he had been working on, held him tight in her arms; you could almost see him struggle to get loose, but it was of no avail. One loopy sentence drifted like tendrils around him. The rhapsody of thought held him in thrall, La Belle Dame etc., and no matter that he made himself look straight at us, he couldn't see us, and we remained that lumpy and indistinguishable blur called “dinner guests.”

        
O what can ail thee, knight at arms

           
Alone and palely loitering?

        
The sedge has wither'd from the Lake

           
And no birds sing.

One can't help being sympathetic with one so lost in his own thoughts, removed, so unable to join in. I tried to throw looks of sympathy his way as I thumbed through photographs of the family and family dog being passed around. One can't help one's fondness for the specific: the sleek head of the Doberman, the missing teeth of the small boy. But for the most part, and this remained throughout the evening, I couldn't get over the prominence of his head and the glorious abstraction of his mind. I couldn't stop thinking about what it meant to live inside one's head, to have vast capacities of thought, to be able to follow one's roving ideas through
potential paragraphs and pages, despite dinner guests. I think that if it had been in his control, he would have joined in and would in fact have enjoyed the company his wife had gathered together to eat pasta on shiny blue plates. She too was Italian and a great cook, everybody said so, and the guests were witty enough, charming and eager, leaning forward over their blue plates, semiotic quips, ties and beads. But as it was, he was lost on the edges of who could ever imagine what brilliant ideas, what perfectly orchestrated arguments.

One has to, one friend says to me, one just has to, if only from time to time, use one's best china. The watery blue that linked us over the years of our friendship expanded and flowed around us as the evening progressed: the purple candles, the blue plates, the mood of sentimental intelligence, the fact of our having had so many dinners together over so many years. What we knew or thought we knew about each other. So the wash of the evening was as the watery wash of the brush over colors too saturated, too refined. We all blended and purred.

After a while he couldn't even pretend. His mouth stopped its silent opening and shutting as if he might possibly join in, his eyes stopped trying to focus, his hands began a silent dance of gestures meant, I am sure, to illustrate the points he was making in the paragraph he was writing or had written or thought to write when a break finally came and he could escape from the swaying of the crowd.

Once as a child I took a dance class, not the usual ballet I was used to, but a special session offered on Saturday by a special guest teacher from Albany. We stood in our black leotards, all ungainly girls, all unformed and shy, and were asked to become a forest of trees, to sway to the music with our arms outspread, to bend and blend together as if our branches were being swept by incessant wind. There was no way, despite our embarrassment, not to do what we were told to do (we were obedient and trained, after all, good girls with identical topknots and feeble aspirations), swaying and bending in a way that we knew already by the age of nine was out of date and stupid. Does it mean not being stupid, this life of the mind, this fervor to stand alone, to pursue a thought to its finish, to finish a line of argument or recall a poem while everyone else is finishing dessert or clearing the table or swaying to the music. He was like a rock in the middle of the stream. We all moved around him as if he were insensate matter, as if his head were the boulder, as if he were only a sign pointing elsewhere, not to us, not to any of us. His wife poked teasingly, familiarly at his ribs at about the middle of the dinner, but finally gave up, acquiesced, and his silence became the most obvious part of the conversation, not that we stopped or faltered, intent as we were on discussing the roast beef, the rosemary potatoes, and the lemon pie—its glaze reflecting back the watery light of the candles—but that it was incorporated as part of the whole piece we were constructing, until by the
end of the evening I was exhausted beyond all manner of thinking by the sheer effort of stepping around him, not including him, not hearing his voice, not expecting a response.

I felt myself sweaty and wet with the effort of ignoring the head that was so prominent and fine. I too, I too, I wanted to say. I know what you're like. I too am alone. I too embrace abstract thought; I too can quote Keats. I knew what he was thinking, could feel the difficulty of transition, of how to capture the range of meanings, the sinister proliferation of possible comments about one word. What was the word. I concentrated, but it slipped away:
mutatis mutandis.
And I wanted this head, more than anything else, I wanted to hold it and cradle it and make it my own. To me it had become a valued object, a thing to be possessed and clung to, the only thing worth having—not the thoughts themselves exactly, but their locus, the bald head towering above us as we went about exchanging dates and plans and ideas for the next party, the next grouping of dinner plates.

I'll do green,
I promised,
all green.
One New Year's we'd had an all black affair; we'd announced as if in chorus our sophisticated disdain for celebrations of the New Year, our love of the old, our hatred of joy and hats and whistles. Instead, we proposed, we'd go into mourning for the lovely past, wear black for the old year and eat only black food: blackened fish, black pasta with squid ink sauce, blackberries, wine so dark as to seem black. Black olives. I could do all green easily enough, but my
heart wasn't in it. I didn't want to plan ahead, didn't want to discuss what salads I'd concoct, where to buy the best arugula. I wanted to watch the bald man quote and trim, add and subtract, think his weighty thoughts and recite poetry. Now he was mouthing an entirely new paragraph, a new projection, had pulled in philosophical ideas to undergird his point, and then had begun, I could see it, to quote the lines themselves:

        
And there she lulled me asleep,

           
And there I dream'd, Ah! woe betide!

        
The latest dream I ever dreamt

           
On the cold hill's side.

I wanted this removed being, this standoffish husband, this owl of a man. What was he doing so all alone on the shores of his thoughts, pacing up and down in the narrow room, furrowing his extensive brow. I wanted to watch him as he slept, watch the head in noble repose. We were, I wanted to tell him, exactly alike. I could read him, I knew it. We were meant for each other. He was alone; I was alone. I meandered up and down
the cold hill's side.

In such a state, I lost, as one might have expected, my usual ability to concentrate on several things at once, keeping the one tune going while overlaying grace notes, keeping the color clear while adding water, whole brushfuls of clear water. I was no longer able to talk about next Thursday and get the word I was looking for,
looking
at,
one might say, as my eyes just grazed the top of his head again and again, knowing the word would appear if I just brushed past it enough times, like rubbing a lead pencil over a paper laid on a tombstone and watching the knight's shield with its hidden meanings come clear. I must have been clearing the table, trying in the ordinary course of things to maneuver just a bit closer to the thoughts I could almost hear
(“our literature is thus characterized by the pitiless divorce between the producer of the text and its user, between its owner and its customer, between its author and its reader”),
almost. Dear reader, I broke the platter, it slipped out of my hands on the way to the kitchen and was smashed into a million bits. I almost had hold of the word but the platter got away.
Olive oil,
Sharia said.
It's edges are covered in olive oil. Not to worry,
she said and scrambled and mopped and collected the pieces.

Then, as if the smashed platter had done it, broken the spell and all connection between us, the man laughed and turned to his wife in congratulations for a fine affair, for all her splendid efforts in the kitchen (he congratulated her on the perfection of the roast), and put his arms around her and laughed as if the union of one with another were as easy as anything. The
pale loitering
I had seen so clearly that it seemed etched on the walls of the dining room, vanished. The dog came into the room and hung, sloppy and wet, about the backs of our legs. The boy woke and stood in yellow pajamas at the top of the stairs. The spell was broken, as if one
had waked cold and alone on a hill and I, embarrassed and foolish, wrapped myself in my thick winter coat, December in New York, and went home alone by taxi in the dark.

Marybeth said vaguely,
They are nice, silvery sort of,
and preened by turning her head and thinking she had hair enough. She saw the words
Veronica Lake
as if written in loopy scroll on her inner eyelids, thought of
Sullivan's Travels,
and came back feeling better from her brief reverie of someone else's blond beauty. Puffy off-the-shoulder blouses were in again. Hers was worn a shade defensively, but in the smoky noise of the gallery opening no one would notice.

Someone compared the work on the wall to Lissitzky but someone said no it was not so ironic, and there was an exchange about what did irony mean anyhow in these post-everything days. Marybeth had always had a suspicion that often it was meanness. From his leather chair, out of the past, her father said something she couldn't quite hear as if the sound on the TV had been turned off. She remembered opening colored pencils in a flip-top box and she remembered laughing with her
father at whatever he had said in that long-ago afternoon when afternoons seemed to grow longer and quieter as she made drawing after drawing.

Tom thought she should talk more. He said he liked her way of
getting into the visual component of cooking,
the way she stared at the color of tomatoes as she stirred the spoon around and around. But sometimes he was just irked. Her book covers were elegant and people ordered them and with the job at the café it was enough. She knew what celadon green would do and she mostly took life, except for the occasional pain in her stomach, in a dazed sort of way.

Although she wasn't as sure of herself as most took her to be, she delivered well in a voice high and darty, and used the pain, the small but sharp one, to make a kind of arching stance. It was what, so he said, had drawn Tom to her in the first place. He'd seen her in what he'd called
a delicious mope
one night, but it was the sort of mope edged off by wit. At least it seemed that way to Tom who was hooked he said. Tom's way of putting things seemed to Marybeth as if the shade of color were slightly off. She looked away from the strident fluorescent bouncing off the gallery walls.

I could be wrong,
someone said and went for wine.
If anything goes, what sort of standards . . . it's all a realm of play. It's true in fashion, music, I mean I know all that about the failure of institutions but isn't this, I mean, we're not in the nineteenth century.

One whose hair radiated around a bored but pale face opened her mouth. Her girlfriend stuck a cigarette in and began to croon
Stormy Weather. Are you singing these days?
The person speaking felt embarrassed and obliged to ask and she was, at the Club A.V. She'd made it, at least as back-up, so she was stuck where she was.
I just stick to oldies,
she said to no one in particular and passed a hand over the radiant fluff of hair. Both of the women wore black like most in the room but had moved beyond producer-leather. They hummed.

I adore it,
the gallery owner said, coming from the back room, expansive and high.

Marybeth was glad she'd gone blank for a moment and glad Tom's work sold but not in this sort of blow-out way. She looked at the gallery owner's French wife and wondered if that was why she didn't seem to mind—pretty enough but no knockout and still she carried it off no matter what he did. Tom was good at what he did and people were always after him, his jeans tight on his thin frame. She wished it reminded her of how fake the world was, but it didn't. Her stomach ached. Rubbing her cheek on the faded cloth as she extended her legs on the couch when they watched TV, she saw the warm color of bits of cloth she'd kept in a box in the closet when she was nine.

Once in a therapy group she said to a man who had a wife, three children, and affairs in his head:
Thinking is the same as doing it.
They said she had to
learn to express her anger. She hated his descriptions of free-floating limbs in net stockings over the head of his wife underneath him on the bed, so she recited lessons about the gravity of mortal sin from Catholic school and then felt guilty for having lied, for not saying the man's loose flesh made her ill and that she'd never been a Catholic.

A dark-haired woman was talking to Tom who was twisting his cuff the way he did. Marybeth had thought the affair was over. A man in a narrow suit interrupted her with a drink. His bluish skin was shiny and he was good at talking and slicking back his slicked back hair. Next to him Marybeth felt mute, but her eyes lit up anyhow on cue as he began on the soul-force of
Das Lied von der Erde.
She tried not to watch Tom and Carol as their sentences twinned one another, broke off, and reattached. She tried hard to attend, although she felt herself drowning in the man's enthusiasm and he was in any case speaking to some audience somewhere she was a mere stand-in for. She tried to remember the last classical music she had heard. He said something she missed. She shut her eyes and saw a watercolor of a dark-haired woman turning into a hare. Across the room she recognized a painter she knew who was staggering and who wouldn't come with them later but would go back to his room, liquor his particular form of discipline.

Her own life was tidy enough. She hunted plastic from the 50's, Bakelite spoons, green glass plates. She could see teacups and saucers on the sill above the sink.
The last book she'd done had been turned, flyleaf out, the speckle across the outside, admired, a talk at a local college, a mild sort of fame. She wished she were sitting down when she saw Tom's wrists fold.

Too brightly she came up to where Tom was standing.
Carol's coming with us,
he said, putting an arm around her shoulder in a gesture that might have been reassuring.
We might do an installation together. Want any more?
Marybeth shook her head. Carol said yes and Tom left them standing together.

Oh, it's nothing,
Carol said to someone passing by, turning her head to sweep the room and fixing the corner where Tom stood with empty glasses and a man in a ponytail whose arms filled what space there was. Carol smiled as the owner slid by to set her glass earring swinging and to say something about her last video.
I want to show you something,
he said and slid some more, pulling her with him towards the back room pulling his tweed jacket off in the heat, leaving Marybeth standing alone.

Marybeth knew she was pretty enough but at the moment it didn't help. The cupboards she had painted appeared somewhere. A woman in white bumped her out of it and she wondered if it was being older. She kept losing her sense of how funny it was in spite of losing weight.

At the restaurant she ordered a dish from the vegetable column that wouldn't stay with her too long. She wouldn't have chosen to come here but this year
Korean was in again. Others ordered portions of raw meat with garlic, transparent noodles, a stir-fried squid, potstickers, a whole barbecued fish. Everyone wanted something. A women told a story about a screenwriter who had churned out a screenplay for a joke and made pots of money.
Did you like the work,
someone tried again. They looked around to see if the artist had arrived. A friend of Tom's Marybeth couldn't remember drank in the corner. He looked out of an old movie, perhaps on purpose. She thought about the purposeful and love and then tried not to.

The waiters set dishes down in front of each person who flipped aside purses, hair, scarves, jackets, in order to get at the food and reordered beer and pushed chairs to sit by the right person in the confusion of who had ordered what. Carol began a story about her last show and everyone's eyes turned on her. She could get anyone to do anything and anyone to listen. You just had to watch her mouth form words. Marybeth tried to see the color of the end piece she wanted to use on the book she was designing. She brushed her hand as if by accident on Tom's jeans as he moved to help with bottles of beer and remembered something. She tried to pull it into herself and gather herself as if it were not elsewhere but here. The food was pungent and loud, chopped and steaming. Marybeth looked down at what was set in front of her and into the gaping mouth of a toothy fish.

I think that's mine,
Carol laughed, reaching. Marybeth felt her voice tuning itself high and darty.
She remembered something else and her father.
No,
she said, putting a large piece of garlic and fish in her mouth and biting down hard. She knew her stomach would hurt but not until tomorrow.