Radiant Days

A NOVEL BY

E
lizabeth
H
and

VIKING

An Imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

VIKING

Published by Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India

Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand
(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published in 2012 by Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

1  3  5  7  9  10  8  6  4  2

Copyright © Elizabeth Hand, 2012

All translation of Arthur Rimbaud’s poems and letters by Elizabeth Hand

My thanks to Patti Smith for the permission to quote from her song “Land.”

All rights reserved

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA IS AVAILABLE

ISBN: 978-1-101-56704-3

Printed in U.S.A.

Set in Granjon

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

For my daughter, Callie,
Poetry in motion

CONTENTS

PART ONE:  Alchemy of the Word

PART TWO:  Strange Couple

PART THREE:  Exiles

PART FOUR:  State of Siege

PART FIVE:  Farewell

PART SIX:  Radiant Days

Author’s Note

Select Bibliography

Washington, D.C.

SEPTEMBER 1977

CLEA WAS TWENTY-THREE
, five years older than me. She was my graduate instructor for life drawing at the Corcoran School of Art.

“You’re a girl,” she said on the first day of the fall semester. She glanced, frowning, at the list of names on her clipboard. “Merle—I thought that was a guy’s name.”

“My father wanted Merle for Merle Haggard. My mother said Merle Oberon.” It was typical that my parents couldn’t agree on something, even when they seemed to want the same thing. “So I’m Merle.”

“Merle.” Clea didn’t smile. She continued to stare at me as she read the rest of the class list. Three hours later, when the class was done, she asked me if I wanted to have lunch.

“Yeah, sure.” I shrugged. The other students hurried past, paying no attention to us. I grabbed my bag, an old canvas mailman’s satchel filled with my sketchbooks and charcoal pencils,
notebooks, Magic Markers and spent Bic lighters and empty packs of cigarettes, and followed her outside.

She took me to a place called the Blue Mirror. I’d never been there—I’d never been anywhere. I was a scholarship student from rural Virginia, hours away in the Shenandoah Valley, living in a group house in Northeast where I had to pay only fifty bucks a month for a mattress on the floor and a single bathroom shared with ten other people, most of them students at other schools. My father had given me four hundred dollars to last the entire year, but I’d paid my rent several months in advance, which didn’t leave much. I was broke, living on apples and whatever my roommates didn’t finish of their own scraped-together meals. Spanish rice, mostly, which I hated, burned toast, hard-boiled eggs.

It felt strange, now, to be in a restaurant—a big diner, really, booths and, yeah, blue mirrors reflecting the narrow space, so it seemed like we were sitting in a railway car to infinity.

“So where you from?” Clea asked.

“Norville, Virginia.”

Clea laughed. “Where the hell is Norville, Virginia?”

“Nowhere.” I grabbed the sugar and started pouring it into my coffee. “That’s why I left.”

I ordered a Reuben—I’d never had one but I liked the name. When it came, I stared at it, an oozing mass of neon orange and creamy yellow on grilled rye bread, and finally took a bite.

“It’s good.” I pointed at the lacy pink fringe of meat. “What’s that?”

“Corned beef. Or no, maybe pastrami.”

“What’s pastrami?”

“Corned beef with a fancy name.”

The waitress set Clea’s lunch in front of her: apple pie and vanilla ice cream. I said, “That’s your lunch?”

“Apples are good for you. So’s pastrami. Eat.”

It was hard to focus on eating with Clea sitting across from me. She was impossibly exotic, not just older than me but married. The only married people I knew were even older, like my parents, though it was only my father, since my mother had left years ago.

But Clea hardly mentioned her husband. Her mother was black, a former dancer with Katherine Dunham’s company; her father was a Swedish businessman. Clea had grown up in Manhattan and Stockholm, gone to boarding school in Geneva, then studied art in Paris before ending up here in D.C., teaching at the Corcoran while her husband attended Georgetown Law School. She was tall and lanky; her skin looked as though it had been dusted with gold. When I touched it, I half expected to see my fingertips yellow with pollen. Her dark hair was thick and curling, pinned back from her face with two combs that had black feathers in them; her eyes narrow, the pupils a gleaming liquid amber flecked with green. Later, when she came back to my place and kissed me, it was like pressing my mouth against an overripe fruit that split beneath my lips.

“Have you done this before?” She took a black cigarette from an alligator-skin case, tapped it against the floor, lit up, and exhaled. “With a woman?”

I shook my head. “Just guys. Well, my friend Lorna, we kissed once.”

“Did you like it?”

I scrounged through my bag until I found a bent Marlboro. “Yeah.”

I lit my cigarette from hers, then dug in my bag for a charcoal pencil. On the floor beside my mattress was a crumpled paper plate smeared with ketchup, like a lipstick kiss. I worked around this and drew Clea as she sat, eyes shut, smoke coiling around her unsprung hair like a nest of baby snakes.

“Let me see.” Her eyes opened. Before I could stop her, she grabbed the sketch.

She stared at it for a long time, the way she’d stared at me in class that morning. I wanted to curse her out but didn’t, and waited for what I knew would come next, what always came when a teacher saw my work: disdain or anger or, at best, impatience that I hadn’t followed directions, hadn’t drawn what was in front of me.

“This is amazing,” she said at last, and stared at the paper plate. “I was on the selection committee—I saw your portfolio when you submitted it.”

“You thought I was a guy.”

She nodded. “It’s good.”

She looked at me, and I saw something flicker across her face. A sort of hunger; a terrible, helpless longing that I did not yet recognize as envy.

“No one ever likes it,” I said. I didn’t tell her that I’d been rejected by all the better-known schools I’d applied to—Pratt and
RISD, the Parsons School of Design. “My teacher in high school, she said I didn’t show the real world. She just wanted us to copy stuff, bowls of fruit and shit like that.”

“‘Art is not a mirror to reflect the world, but a hammer with which to shape it.’ That’s Mayakovsky.” Clea took the paper plate, touched the ketchup to see if it was still wet, then carefully slid the sketch into her leather bag. “I need to go meet Marc. See you Wednesday.” She stood and dressed, and left.

W
HEN I WAS THREE YEARS OLD, MY MOTHER WOULD GIVE ME A
bucket of water and an old paintbrush, and tell me to go outside and paint the driveway. I’d carefully paint the cracked concrete, watch bewitched as the dark gray chunks turned white again. I didn’t know the water was evaporating: I thought it was magic, something only I could do. I’d mix dirt with the water, or crushed dandelions, to see if the water would turn yellow. I’d take spoonfuls of grape jelly and Tang to make purple and orange. Once I poured one of my father’s beers onto the drive, to watch it foam. My father spanked me when he got home from the hardware store where he worked and found the empty can.