Mimi (28 page)

Far away across the lawn, my neighbor was hanging up wet clothes on the line, with the thwacks and wallops that procedure always seems to entail. Yes, those wrinkles had to go! She arranged her wash in strict order: paired socks, pants, shirts, towels, pillowcases—how big
was
this washing machine? Finally, out came an old patchwork quilt, and this too she carefully spread out on the line to dry. Was it because it was wet that it looked so great, or because I was seeing it against the sun? The battered old thing glowed like a stained-glass window!
This
was the way museums should show off their quilts (I had to tell Mimi some time): get them
wet
and light them from
behind
.

I lay on my lounger on the porch and thought about women, all the crazy stuff they do. The painted bowls of Brittany, plaited Russian loaves, all the knitted baby jackets, flower-embroidered handkerchiefs and pillowcases, the smocking, the snacking, the puddings and baked goods and preserves. The freezing and the thawing too, the wrapping and unwrapping, the cleaning and sorting and folding and smoothing—all the pooh-poohed peaceful arts of women, of odalisques. Women
invented
coziness! They could see humanity was never going to get very far without some comfort, some sense of stability. People don’t thrive on harshness and indifference. I thought of my own lunging odalisque, who’d come to me distrustful but then miraculously blossomed. Blood and bone, blood and bone, that’s what women are. They’re REAL.

The laundress had gone inside. I was all alone out there and everything was quiet. I moved the lounger onto the grass but the sun was so blinding, I shut my eyes and just listened to the swaying, swishing trees for a while—and when I opened my eyes, everything was
aglow
. Not just the sky and the clouds: every blade of grass, every different type of leaf, every petal glowed. The white shirts on the line were dazzling, soaking up the ultraviolet. Stones were sparkling. The whole world seemed devoted to the sun,
begging
for it and basking in it. Whether absorbing light (the dirt) or reflecting it (a puddle), everything was responding to light in some way. The thinnest leaves no longer seemed flimsy and vulnerable but intentionally diaphanous, so as to be filled with light. Everything out there wanted light and needed to glow. Bubbles too! Fur, hair, and feathers glow. Water glows, collecting and transmitting, no,
playing
with light. Everything seeks and leaks light.

This is what Matisse discovered in the South of France, eyeing up those odalisques. all artists know this (Bee was always talking about light but I never knew why until now). For a long time I’d had it in for fire, I didn’t think we really needed it. Only earth, air, and water interested me. But that day I accepted that
the sun wins
. I was finally reconciled to fire.

The earth is pretty flat, just a bas-relief—you see this on Long Island. To get three-dimensional, you have to look up: at the clouds, the sky. Only the sky is really 3-D—that’s
all
it is! Air, space, and
light
. A skein of geese flew overhead, not in a
V
-shape, but in the shape of a breast, with a nipple. The shape changed and several different types of breast were offered. But all of them were good.

Bubs and I took the boat out for one last voyage on the pond that evening, and scattered Bee’s ashes there: my sage sister, goddess of rivers and springs, who loved Bach, Dickens, and Matisse, loved
me
(and hated
Ant and Bee
), and thought Ben Jonson much better than Shakespeare.

It is not growing like a tree

In bulke, doth make man better bee;

Or, standing long an Oake, three hundred yeare,

To fall a logge, at last, dry, bald, and seare:

A Lillie of a Day

Is fairer farre, in May,

Although it fall, and die that night;

It was the Plant, and flowre of light.

In small proportions, we just beauties see:

And in short measures, life may perfect bee.

With one day left, I went to the beach. I didn’t want to leave Sagaponack, I didn’t want to go to Bee’s memorial, I didn’t even want to go to the beach. In despair, I stumped along. The water wasn’t moving: it looked weird, like ice, or the desert. Everything was so quiet I could hear my shirtsleeves rustle against my ribcage as I walked, and it irritated me. I could hear my breath. And then, in quick succession, a boat, a car, a motorbike, a plane. Only one of each, but still annoying. Every bird call grated, every mild wave bubbling against the shore gave me a start.

It reminded me of summer days when you’re a kid, and you just don’t know if you’re going to make it through three months of this. When the sight of a cloud, or the Good Humor Man, is a major event—even though he came every day and handed me an ice-cream sandwich, and a popsicle for Bee. Our biggest hope was that a tornado would hit, blowing the roof of our house off, the sky suddenly darkening and your bed twirling up and up. Apocalypse fantasies.

I searched for my melancholy meadow of rounded stones, but couldn’t find it. So I sat down and made my own sculpture, a miniature barbecue, with jagged little red rocks for steaks, and yellow oval pebbles for baked potatoes. Inside some tiny open clam shells I put lentil-like orange pebbles = scallops! Must have been hungry. An ant marched by carrying a huge seed. Never eat anything bigger than your head, man.

Then I headed home to find that Bubbles, who never bit or scratched or stole food, but instead licked me with love, Bubbles, who would stand outside on the porch and look at me so hopefully, waiting to be let in, Bubbles, who followed me around the house and the yard, and had come with me in the boat every time to feed the duck, Bubbles, who sat on my lap at the piano, at the kitchen table, on the lounger, in the car, Bubbles, who warmed herself so happily by the woodstove, and drank the milk I gave her and ate too much Fancy Feast (my fault, not hers), Bubbles, who knew and tolerated with true aplomb my every mood, Bubbles, who had found her way into my bedroom that first night in New York and poked her head around the door so inquiringly, so comically, Bubbles, who
definitely
had a sense of humor, Bubbles, who greeted me gently whenever I struggled downstairs all wrung out and hungover, Bubbles, who did stretches and jumps just as good as Kit Smart’s cat Jeoffry, Bubbles, who could leap vertically, six feet in one bound, Bubbles, who, when lying on her side on a chair, could twist herself backward in a complete circle so you saw both her face and her ass at the same time, Bubbles, who played exuberantly with string (whenever I remembered that’s what cats like and dangled some for her), Bubbles, with her inquisitiveness about all things, especially cupboards and boxes, Bubbles, with her great concentration powers, staring at stuff for minutes at a time, displaying greater intelligence and gifts of perception than any other cat (and some people) I’d known, Bubbles, who had spread herself out on my bed every night, wherever we were, taking up as much room as Gertrude ever had, but much more invitingly, Bubbles, who was also more fun as a movie companion, Bubbles, who
hated
Gertrude but took to Mimi instantly, Bubbles, who, when first released from her igloo death-trap on New Year’s Eve, had gratefully rubbed against my leg and settled herself on my shoulder without a moment’s hesitation, Bubbles, who loved me, yes,
loved
me, and
looked
at me with love, Bubbles, so beautiful, so warm and soft and funny, with her white, orange and black coloring like Hallowe’en candy, Bubbles, so full of beans, so appreciative of anything I did for her, Bubbles, with her supreme knack for coziness and contentment, flopping half off her cushion by the woodstove like the odalisque she was, Bubbles, who could intone, who had rhetoric. . . Bubbles got run over.

I heard miaowing coming from the shed as soon as I got near the house, and hoped, not so much selfishly as instinctively, that it was some other cat. But when I peered in, there she was, crouching in the darkest corner, among all the spiderwebs and snail shells and chipmunk shit. I couldn’t reach her very easily, so I tried to lure her out with some Fancy Feast, but she wouldn’t come. Then I knew something was up. So I slid over to her and gently pulled her poor crushed body to me, got her wrapped in a towel, and rushed her to the vet on Goodfriend Road in Easthampton. Once she was in the car, she was ominously silent.

They put her on a drip to get her temperature up before they could x-ray her—she was in shock. The x-rays confirmed that she’d been run over: the injuries couldn’t have happened any other way. Somebody had run her over and left her to die. But the prognosis was good. The great Bubbles! She’d have to stay at the animal hospital for a few weeks to have surgery on her back leg, and a paw, but they thought she would walk normally again in the end.

“And jump?” I asked.

“And jump,” the vet said.

“And no pain? She’ll be pain-free?”

“Well, it’s always hard to tell with animals. You know. They’re good at resignation. They often don’t show pain. But there’s no reason that she should be in pain once we’ve fixed her up, Dr. Hanafan. Don’t worry, she’s going to be fine.”

Bubbles, who’d been hit by some asshole of a millionaire and left to crawl away and die, crawl away and
die
, would be
fine
. She would be fine.

I went home and finished all the booze in the house. Then I went out on the porch and looked at the sage I’d saved.

Sunset in Sagaponack is when nature begins to regain some control and us homocentric humans don’t seem so such much. Things settle and dampen. The dim blue sky still glows but night is forming in the shadows. I wanted to freeze time, hold on to that sky, that color. And then the smell of the moist earth hit me, the best smell in the world! I realized this was the smell I should have been smelling all my life—I should go out at dawn and dusk to smell it.

I watched as a lone bug rose up toward the sky. Nobody has ever helped her, I thought, she has always been alone. But that wasn’t true. The
sun
had helped her. She flew toward it now.

Huge flocks of starlings molded and remolded themselves into one big undulating cloud, as if to celebrate surviving another day. We are free! they squealed. Free to live and mate and feed our young, and all is forgiven (the day’s squabbling over food, the day’s dangers). A grace of starlings, a murmuration? I once heard it’s called a wedding.

The moon hovered low in the sky, not a perfect circle yet but big and sassy, friendly-looking, reflected brokenly in puddles—doing that staring act she’s done a million times. She’s been taking a very good look at us for years, the earth’s long-suffering waif wife.

Saftly, saftly, through the mirk

The müne walks a’ hersel’:

Ayont the brae; abüne the kirk;

And owre the dunnlin bell.

I wudna be the müne at nicht

For a’ her gowd and a’ her licht.

FLAG DAY

I didn’t want to linger in my apartment any longer than necessary—without Mimi or Bubbles, the whole place
stank.
I checked my answering machine (condolences, but nothing from Mimi), put on a suit, threw some overnight stuff in my briefcase for the trip to Virtue and Chewing Gum later on, and set off for the gallery.

Feeling pretty monosyllabic after my fourteen days in the wilderness, I was hoping the memorial would be a quiet affair in a back room. But Bee’s dealer had cleared the whole joint to accommodate several Coziness Sculptures (no small matter). The walls were covered in Bee’s drawings, and (laminated) articles on Bee, not just obituaries but practically every review she’d ever received and a whole lot of letters and notes and other memorabilia I’d never seen. Hundreds of people were rushing from one wall to another in an orgy of appreciation and grief, some crying, some just nodding and smiling. I headed over to the violinist, who was playing the Bach partitas I’d asked for. Bach knew about death—half his children died. He would see me through, if anybody could, his worldliness and depth. Cleave to
that
. As Claude Rains says in
Deception
, it’s extraordinary “that music can exist in the same world as the basest treachery.”