I Cannot Get You Close Enough (40 page)

“Here they are,” I said. “My notes and the letters. Are you going to let Helen see them?”

“I might. I thought about it. No one has any secrets anymore, it seems. But I think I will go on and keep mine, just to be mean.” She laughed and came alive at the thought.

“The thought of you being mean is past me. Imagine you being mean.”

“I used to play evil roles. I did Medea to the cheers of thousands.”

“I love you, Noel.” I walked across the room and threw myself down upon the bed. “I loved your house,” I added. “Daniel wants me to paint his girls. Wait till you see the one I did of Crystal. It's fabulous, if I do say so myself.”

“Darling girl.” She patted me like a child. “Have a cookie.” She pointed to the glass jars of Oreos and Peanut Butter Cremes. I opened one and took out a cookie and began to eat. I giggled. I took out another one and came back to the bed. She poured coffee from a Thermos into small white cups and handed one to me. I snuggled down into a sea of pillows. The oak and golden raintree and crepe myrtle trees outside the window made a mosaic of light upon the bed.

“Did you read them all?”

“Yes. I told you that I did.” She was waiting for me to tell her that they were the most wonderful letters in the world but I wasn't going to do it. I was tired of thrall. I loved Noel, but I wasn't going to play the games. I loved the room and the oak trees outside the windows and my paintings hanging everywhere and the Oreos and Peanut Butter Cremes but I wasn't going to play Secret Letters anymore.

“Let me see,” she said. She opened the envelopes and began to read parts of the letters out loud. Her voice is amazing. What a spell she casts. Her voice is so melodic she can make anything sound mysterious and fraught with meaning. “The mystery of children,” she began. “Helen gives her life to her children and they pay her back by making her a slave. The Oedipus Complex, the Electra. In our family power is handed down in a strange and complex way. The most powerful older person keeps it all. To access love you must give your power to that figure. To get love you must steal power from your children. This is achieved by giving and receiving money. The Greeks knew everything. A king sacrifices his daughter to fill the sails of the ships bound for Troy. A boy kills his father and marries his mother. A plague comes.”

“Every moment is charged with meaning, each encounter, every act. So the slightest gesture of his hand, his face above me in the shared fantasy of love. Never to be forgotten, never lost. Any moment, these clouds, this dawn, this unending mystery.”

“I dreamed I wandered down a sunny hall and found a beautiful Chinese print. It was the cover of a book. Inside were wonderful old photographs of my mother. Before she was married to my father.”

“The sunsets are fabulous in your house in Maine. The sunset spreads out across a thousand acres of sky, it encompasses the sea and sky, makes a sunset taco, a sunset shell.”

“What a feast we live in. Nationalities, cars, trees, oceans, love affairs, electromagnetic fields. How to write in the face of so much wonder. What to praise.”

She looked up. The letters were spread out across her knees. “Pour more coffee, precious,” she said. “Wouldn't you like some more?” She began to gather up the letters and fold them back into the envelopes. She wasn't mad at me. She didn't have to have me to play her game. She had Anna and her own imagination. “Where's your painting, my darling?” she added. “You didn't bring it to show to me?”

“It's at Crystal's house. We had a terrible time getting it shipped. Manny wanted it shipped in the frame. Well, Federal Express finally did it. It beat us here. You want to see it?”

“Of course I do.”

“I could take you over there. You could go in the wheelchair.”

“No. I can't do that, Lydia. I can't leave.”

“Why not? We'll carry you downstairs.”

“Oh, no. Oh, please.” Her beautiful old face fell. The face I loved so much. Won't go, won't get in the chair, won't let people look at her, won't leave her domain.

“Okay,” I said. “I'll bring it in Crystal's station wagon.” I took the Thermos, poured more coffee, got another Peanut Butter Creme, sat on the bed, helped her put the letters back in the box. She had kept one page of a letter. She picked it up and read it while I stirred cream into my coffee. She was giving me one more chance. “‘But if I break the spell, what will there be left? Now, in spring, with flowering plum and apple trees and redbirds mad with sun.' Of course, Millay wrote the best about such things. How much she knew, staying in one place and watching.

Between the red-top and the rye,

Between the buckwheat and the corn,

The ploughman sees with sullen eye

The hawkweed licking at the sky:

Southward and northward, west and east,

The sulphate and the lime are spread;

Harrowed and sweetened, urged, increased,

The furrow sprouts for man and beast:

Triumphant up the taken field

The tractor and the plough advance;

Blest be the healthy germ concealed

In the rich earth, and blest the yield:

“I have to be getting back,” I said. “I'll bring the painting by this afternoon.”

“Will you do me a favor before you leave?” Her head was sinking back into the pillows now. “Hand me those pills in the drawer. All the bottles, please.” I took the bottles from the drawer of the little antique bedside table. I handed them to her and picked up a glass to take to the bathroom to get water.

“Use that,” she said. “It's water.” She pointed to the table. There was a white Thermos nestled among the plants by the Mason jar. I opened it and poured a glass of water for her. “Leave it on the table with the pills,” she said. “I'll take them later.”

“I'm sorry I have to leave. I have to get back to Crystal's.”

“Don't be sorry. There is never any reason to be sorry. We do what we have to do.”

“If you say so. I love you, Noel. I hope you know that. I really love you.”

“I know you do, darling girl.” She held out her hands and I kissed her and let her go.

When I got back to Crystal's there were complications and we couldn't go over to Noel's with the painting until later in the day. “We can't come until tonight,” I told Noel on the phone.

“I'll be waiting,” she said. “I'll find something to do.”

“What did she say?” Crystal asked, when I hung up. “Was she disappointed?”

“I don't think so. She sounded happy. Maybe she's making something. Did you see that thing she did with those monkeys? My God, it should be in the Museum of Modern Art.”

“She's amazing. We are lucky to know her, Lydia. No one would believe the things that go on in that room.”

“I know. I try to tell people about it but they don't understand. You have to see it to believe it.”

What went on that afternoon was really pretty simple. Marissa, the Spanish maid, was outside in the garage apartment with a medical student she had met at the K&B. Noel didn't take the Valium and lithium. Instead she got out of bed and went in the bathroom and burned up all of Anna's letters. With a package of matches and a can of lighter fluid she sat by the tub and burned the letters one by one. She was on the last letter when the cotton shower curtain caught on fire. It caught the peeling wallpaper and the bamboo window shades and made the smoke that brought Marissa and the medical student running out half-dressed to call the fire department. We heard the sirens and got there by the time they had the hoses out.

One result of the afternoon was that the upstairs of the house is being redecorated at the insurance company's expense, including having the hardwood floors bleached, something Noel has always wanted to do. Tell me it doesn't pay to mess around with art.

CRYSTAL ANNE If Jessie has a girl they're going to name it for me. Crystal Three. No, I'm just kidding. They will name it Anne. Anne Mallison. Isn't that great? There are enough Crystals already and besides it's a tacky name. I used to like it but now I don't. Well, I shouldn't talk like that. It doesn't do any good to hate things. That's what Dad and Traceleen say and they're the nicest people I know.

We came back through New York and saw two plays. We saw
Les Miśerables
and
The Tempest. The Tempest
was the best. Dad says it is his favorite play in the world. He says he might have named me Ariel. They could name the baby Ariel. They are too young to have a baby but we're going to help them take care of it. I'm the exact right age for babysitting. I can't wait. I'm so sick of being the baby in this family.

I grew two inches this summer. I think I'm going to be pretty tall. Not that it makes much difference. Dad isn't tall and he's perfect. Jessie is tall and Andria is as tall as a queen but look at Olivia, she's only five three and she's the one who is going to be famous. I am going to correspond with Andria and Olivia this year and cheer them up while they are in college. Olivia was going to have Jessie to go to school with but now she will be all alone in Charlotte and Jessie will be here with us. I guess that will be something. Olivia and her dad all alone in Charlotte with plenty to argue about. Jessie says they will fight it out.

I am going to correspond with everyone I saw this summer. Lydia and Olivia and Andria. That way I will keep up my writing skills and not be a couch potato.

Oh, Mrs. Chatevin had a terrible fire the day after we got back from Maine. Two fire trucks came and the sirens were going like mad. Everyone in the neighborhood was there and they saved all the paintings except a watercolor that was over the sink. Mrs. Chatevin doesn't have any towel racks in her house. She took down all the towel racks and put paintings in their place. It was a watercolor by a man who lived a long time ago and she hated to see it go. Still, they saved everything else of value and Momma and Lydia said it will be good for Mrs. Chatevin to have to redecorate her house and will make her live a long time waiting for the plumbers to get through.

Well, that's all for now. If nothing happens I'll be writing some more when I get time. Yours most sincerely, Crystal Anne.

ANDRIA Let Kale Vito come on down here if he wants to. I'll be in Baton Rouge by then. So let him come on over to the judge's house and get real impressed. I'm not impressed because he goes to Harvard College. No man is going to take over my life and start getting me in the kitchen cooking and washing dishes. All I have to do is get up every morning and walk down the street to Louisiana State University and learn everything I can and I'll be on my way. I'll have a job and a condo and a good car and a new stereo. If I want to get laid, okay. If I get pregnant I'll have an abortion. If they want me to go to Hawaii or England, I pack a bag and get on an airplane and off I go. I saw Jessie Hand the other day. I went around to tell them all goodbye before I left for school. They are still staying at Crystal's house. They have a couple of rooms downstairs. She's starting to look pregnant and she has this look about her eyes like what did I do to myself. You got fucked, honey, and now you have to pay.

If Kale comes down here and brings their car he can come on over to Baton Rouge. It's okay with me. But he'd better bring a rubber. And I don't think I'd do it to him even then. That reminds me. I have to go to Planned Parenthood tomorrow and get on the pill again. I'm not catching herpes or AIDS or something from anyone and I'm not having any babies. Forget it. That's one thing I like about Olivia. She said she'd take two a day even if they caused cancer rather than turn her body over to a parasite. Excuse me, that's what she said. Excuse me for not wanting to end my life.

CRYSTAL
(CALLING
HER
MOTHER
ON
A
SUNNY
DAY)
Momma, Momma, is that you? It's so wonderful. It's a whole new world. It's so wonderful to have them here. Jessie is so lovely. I took her shopping and bought her the most divine maternity clothes. Oh, yes, he's fine. He's doing pretty good in all his classes. Well, not perfect, but okay. No, she doesn't want to go anymore. She's going to take some decorating classes at Loyola maybe. Later, after they're settled in an apartment. No, a place around the corner. In a week or two. Sure, sure we'd love it. Come on down. See your beautiful grandson and his bride. Okay, love you, angel darling, love you so much, love you too.

HELEN I woke up dreaming something so profound and visual and true. Only yesterday,
only yesterday
, a woman's body was completely at the mercy of nature. If she married or was fucked then she was impregnated until she died. A few women were able to withstand repeated pregnancies before they died. Some women lived to be forty or fifty years old. An occasional woman lived to be seventy or ninety. I guess those women were widowed or lucky or ugly.

We are vessels for the parasites we create. When the child is born the parents start dying. The parents' wishes and dreams and plans are altered forever. Changed and thwarted.

I hate my children. They have had twenty-seven years of my life. I am so sick of it. So sick of it and now Anna is dead and I might die. Do not let that child have a baby, Crystal. Stop right this minute. Stop those children from doing this to themselves. You are crazy to allow this, encourage this. Stop it, Crystal, stop it, Manny. Stop it, stop it, stop it.

I got this letter from Momma when I got back to Boston after the wedding. She had sent it to me to give to Crystal and it got here too late. Now I'm afraid to send it on. Imagine Momma writing this. Imagine her knowing this.