Nine Island (16 page)

So there you are, you've constructed the scene, you've put
together a hopeful conflation of men, you're picturing it all and
trying to imagine that your cold dry hands belong to somebody else.

But then it's like a spout of water that is just too weak. The mind wanders, tries to focus, but wanders again, the hands lose interest, they fall still, the whole thing dies away. Nothing is stirred, nothing moves, nothing comes of this, nothing.

W
ELL, THE TRANSFORMATIONS are logical. Ovid made that very clear. The transformations are fair. You become what you were bound to be; you become what you actually are. Wasn't it stone you wanted to be? Or glass, chrome? Something like that?

V
IRGIL WAS RIGHT, too. After the floods in the steam room and those lines of apartments, after the blood on the men's spa wall, there came a final, invisible spasm. We knew what had happened by a notice in the mail room, with its bright hive of tiny brass doors.

Now that a Contracting Firm has been selected for the Pool Project, the pool and garden deck will be closed as of August 15. Until further notice.

How long do you think? I asked the Frenchman.

He laughed. They say two years, which means at least three. And the whole jungle garden will be cut down—he sliced with his hand and laughed—and the koi fish will die. The contractors will say not, but we know how they are. He shook his head. And for this we get to pay nine million dollars. Nine. Which means each of us must now find at least twenty thousand.

Lino walked by with a grin just then, tipping his blue-banded hat.

Yes, said the Frenchman once Lino had passed. Nine million dollars, all going to that little man and his friends.

Well, okay, said N. It's not the end of the world. Just a stupid swimming pool.

But oh, like everyone, a liar, that N who transforms in the water, where for a time she does not have that body and does not feel that pain, pain you can see lance her.

I swam in the hourglass this evening, the last time for a long while. Just glided through the cool with eyes shut. Bare arms and legs wide, floating, depth belling below.

I opened my eyes and looked up at the dusky sky: Venus hung bright by the moon. Then looked over to the building. Up on the twenty-second floor, out on N's balcony, stood P. He was leaning on his elbows, gazing down at the pool, and me.

I lifted a hand to wave. But he turned quickly away.

I
WONDER. WAS IT
ever anything other than two people running side by side, never getting closer?

For instance:

The Devil inside me the last time. Fucking and fucking, it wouldn't end, as if the point of fucking were maintaining a state of perpetual need whose satisfaction was its own continuation, pushing into me again and again until I'd gone from near pleasure to pain to numbness to rage, thinking, You are alone, all you want is the ongoing fucking. I pretended to sleep, to be dead, so he'd know I knew his fucking had nothing to do with me, and when he came out of his trance every now and then and said, Are you here? Are you here? Are you with me? I lay in a furious torpor, which didn't stop him, he kept right on fucking, his sick state of not-having and having at once.

Or:

Two people, husband and wife, on a bed. The light from the
windows on the north is cool blue; from the south, through the wis
teria, green. The parquet floor is laid on concrete, so all the sounds are hard. A new place where no one had yet lived when they carried their boxes up ten years before. Now, wisteria grows up to their fifth-floor wall of glass. A delicate spider dwells in the cold bathroom corner; the wife likes to observe its progress as she bathes. The black cat with long white whiskers and brows and a white spot on the nose is draped on an Ikea chair, glaucousness glazing one eye, for he is getting old, this once prancing boy-cat, fifteen years old. It's late on a Sunday, because again they have been avoiding this all weekend until now, when it is too late.

Can't speak of it any more than has already been spoken for four or five years. Spoken of by her, anyway; he can't bring himself to speak.

They have failed again, the two of them. They just can't love each other right. He weeps dry into his elbow, again; again, she stares at the ceiling. A feeling of hot bones in skin on a bed. Of something in your skin that
must
burst but can't: you are trapped inside. Four or five or six years of these Sundays, but who would count such a thing. This is after the years of careful calendars, the five years of animal, vegetable, mineral calendars, which kept track of temperatures, injections, and blood, until this pair was told on the phone that
es löhnt sich nicht
, was not worth their trying.

Outside, now, through the wisteria, down past the tram wires, on the gray street, the posters at the tram stop have shifted through their yearly cycle. Always the same poster each May; May is the time for the deodorant ad.
Unwiderstehlichen Achselhöhle!
Irresistible armpits. October would be the time for the bank poster. And no, she can't buy mesh bags of seed for the tiny bandit birds now, because it is May. In May you are not allowed to feed the birds. You may go to the drugstore, to DM or Schlecker, and ask
bitte
for the small mesh bags, but the ladies will shake their heads.

Nein
. It is time for those birds to eat elsewhere.

F
AR OUT IN the bay, a man swims from one boat to another. All you can see is a small splash of arms in the rippling green, near where that hammerhead swam. The distance between boats is maybe two blocks.

I will watch until he has reached the next boat.

A boy once tumbled from his father, out of blue sky, and splashed into green sea just like this.

Feathers, wax, sun.

Have I mentioned that O had a daughter? Or maybe she was a stepdaughter: it didn't matter to him. He was teaching her to write stories, just before being exiled from Rome.

And when he was ordered to live and die alone on the Black Sea, she's one of the few he sent letters.

My dear darling girl.

I
FORGOT TO
mention what's in N and P's apartment that surprised me: among polished fossils and vases of plumes and ferns were candies. Chocolates, truffles, drops wrapped in scarlet or green or golden foil, as well as the brass molds to make them: stars and crescents, eggs and hearts, snowflakes, butterflies, fleur-de-lis.

What is this? I asked N.

It's P, she said. Haven't I said? His business. Making candy.

Making candy but not in Miami. Canada, in fact: he flies there each week.

Why? I asked him, in the garage. Why are you in Miami?

He shrugged, smiled weakly, and said, Oh, for N. I thought it might help.

B
OUGHT A WEEK'S worth of diapers, pills, litter, and cat food, gave N instructions, held Buster for a time on my lap, his paws slowly pedaling, then took a cab to the airport, and flew.

Rental car from BWI down 97 to 50 past Annapolis to Woods
Landing. When I parked, my mother was dressed up and ready
to go.

Let's go to the Severn Inn, she said. You know the Severn?

Yep, I said, as it's where we always go.

She was dying to be out among people, young people, any people,
men
. When we got to the restaurant I helped her clump with her candy-bright cane across the deck to a table looking over the river to the Naval Academy, and the sun hung low and red, and we agreed it was grand to be out on the water on a warm summer eve, two single ladies on the town. When the wine came we toasted her birthday and talked about some birthdays past, and after a while I told her the rationales and ramifications of my decision to retire from love.

Well, well, she said. You know, darling, this might be how it
is
with our line of women. There's nothing my mother liked more than being alone in her house in Adelaide, tending her garden, making pavlova. And there's nothing I like more than being alone in
my
house, with the deck and tulip trees and paper. That might just be how our line is: contented, solitary women.

I nodded, and we gazed at the melting sun, the water tin-bright, not the green-blue of paradise, and I didn't have the heart to mention the difference between my mother and her mother, and me.

But oh well, it did feel grand to be out with her as in old days, and sitting with her cane hooked behind the chair she looked like herself. She glanced around gaily in her chartreuse top with her imbalanced seawater eyes, and she smiled widely at a pair of cadets and waved to a little girl in a puff of pink dress trotting up and down the deck, and even though we hadn't eaten, her wineglass was already empty. The waitress appeared and said, Another? and that mother of mine is always so fast that before I could say anything she nodded passionately and said, I should
think
so. Do you know I'm eighty today?

Well, happy birthday! sang the waitress, and the small girl by the rail spun to see.

The new glass came, was gulped down at once, too little of her crab cake was eaten and almost none of her green tomatoes, and I thought dammit, she takes lots of pills, but okay, it's her birthday, let her be jolly. Then as we were leaving, after I'd helped her clump down the ramp and across the asphalt to the car, as I was propping open the door with one hand and holding her elbow with the other, she began, slowly, to fall.

I have seen and seen this moment. It is slower every time.

She was clutching my wrist with one hand, her purse with the other, and one foot had veered into the passenger well, but the horizon must have tilted or her thin leg suddenly failed, because then her fingers were digging into my skin, she was falling slowly back, she had suddenly turned so heavy I could not hold her, I could not hold her, and she tilted backward and slid out of my hands and fell, her head hard on the asphalt.

Mom, I said, Mom!

She murmured something, and I was on my knees trying to lift her shoulders, her head, her hair slick with blood.

Help! We need help.

Then as people ran and called, as she lay on the ground and I pressed my scarf to her head to stop the blood, but it would not stop because of the Plavix, and I said, Mom, Mom, Mom, she began to make a noise. A deep grunting, something that could come from a bear or the ground. She muttered and grunted, her arms and legs stiffened like branches, and when she opened her eyes and stared at me, there was nothing I knew in that face.

In the ambulance they wouldn't let me in the back with her so I sat in the front, clasped her purse, and tried to follow the roads we took so I could find our way home. Route 50 to 97 to 695 and into Baltimore but then what? At the hospital—which hospital? Shock-Trauma something—they raced to wheel her in one door and shouted for me to go in another and find her inside. Find her inside. Find her inside. I ran through sliding doors, down halls, through more sliding doors, up steps, down more halls. When I found her she was in a sheeted place with people moaning on either side, blanket to her shoulders, face pointing above, pointing because her eyes and cheeks had suddenly sunk and she was nothing but nose.

I took her cold hand. She opened an eye and held my hand tight.

Something happened, she muttered.

Yes. But you'll be fine.

Mm, she said, and shut the eye.

I rubbed her knuckles. After a moment she squinted.

Am thinking, she said, of alphabet. Got to hyena.

(Her animal game.)

Hyena, I said. Okay: iguana.

A pale smile appeared. Iguana. Was that . . . in Ecuador? Did we live there?

Yes, we did. Your turn.

She shut her eyes, then said, What?

Next animal. Starting with J.

Oh. J. Jaguar.

Kangaroo.

She was silent again, her hand chill in mine.

Your turn, I said.

Where?

What?

Are we in hospital? she said.

I'm afraid we are.

In . . . Maryland?

Yes!

Thought I lived there.

You do! Still your turn.

What?

Next animal.

Oh. Rather sleep a bit.

But right now we really don't want you to sleep.

She looked at me, and I stroked the hair from her brow, where skin is so shockingly thin.

And we moved on to L, and she said lynx, and I thought it might be good to change the game and asked how much
lynx
was worth, and she tried and gave up but I made her do it, count up the letters, and so it went for two hours, three, after we'd gone through animals we went through plants and then cities, her hands colder and drier, feet paddling quietly under the blanket, while near us a man screamed and another man tried to calm him, as we waited for someone to scan her brain, to tell us she was herself. When it was quiet but still wasn't morning, she looked up and whispered, Don't leave.

Of course not, I said. Where would I go?

• • •

The yolky next day, I walked through white halls and swinging doors and down stairs and through more doors until I found one to the world: morning sun, men laughing and smoking by a taxi stand. I called N.

Of course, she said. Don't worry about anything
here
. You take care of your mother, and I'll take care of little Buster, because that's how it ought to work in the world. Right? I'll send you pictures so you'll know he's fine.

At last it was confirmed: seizure but no stroke, no marks on her brain. We sat side by side and studied the images on the screen as the neurologist clicked through them, beautiful, grainy gray images shifting slightly at each click like paint-on-glass, islands and bayous and eddies moving behind the bone of her nose. How lovely, my mother murmured, and, looking at the swirls and pools, I wondered which held the traces of her dancing the cancan in Indonesia, striding down a Delaware beach, riding the Metro at dawn to teach at Federal Triangle and riding it home again at dusk, twirling over the brown-and-gold rug, spilling her wine or martini, licking the tongue of one of those men at the kitchen table, being hit by another and driving in rage over a Los Angeles freeway, all the traces of the husbands and men and other husbands and men, and tending her plants, willfully killing her plants, finding a dead hummingbird and keeping it in the freezer to look at now and then, all the traces somewhere in the beautiful myriad whorls and labyrinths of this brain we watched shift on the screen.