Stories From the Plague Years (24 page)

In a twilight I have made, I walk, with a monster from my childhood shuffling beside me, until Civic Center, the rotten heart of this city to which I am shackled, looms ahead. The knotted trees before City Hall take afternoon shadows, and the row of portable toilets for the city’s human detritus are packed close like a sea-wall containing the destitute who mill in the park nearby. The man beside me, who has spoken to me, his quarry, is too winded from walking to say anything. I step from my twilight. I see his goal ahead, the bus stop that is my destination, and the collision of fury and dread that has no name in any language I know cracks frost along my spine. At the bus stop is what looks like the mass of grey necrotic tissue I once pressed out of my wrist into a basin of scalding salt water when, uninsured, I had been bitten by a brown recluse spider. The mass waves as did the tendrils of dead flesh that had been part of me.

The mass is many of
them
, expectant and hungry as they await me at the stop. Their ghost-fleshed, younger selves that had first hunted me when I was a child mill within their softer, older bodies. In their translucency, their younger selves overlap. It is as if the film that infection coats on the lenses of my eyes has been given the form of living people.

They await me. Knowing this is the way I have chosen to go to the Waterfront. Knowing that this is the way I have chosen to honour my friend whom they knew, from the diluted sight they have stolen from me, would die. They wish to ambush me in a group . . . the way they used to while I still drank to the excess to which they’d driven me.

I turn and cross against the light, ducking SUVs and mini-vans. The faces of children in one vehicle look away from the DVD they watch in the back seat to gaze at the man inches away from their careening window.

Once across, I look back to the crowd of stalkers. Their ghost-bodies seem agitated, like river grass whipped in a current.

I walk quickly along alleys, ways impassable to cars and cabs in which they may try to follow. I take steep hills, knowing that they would not follow or keep up.

Alone, at the top of a hill, I let out my rage that they would so trespass on my pilgrimage to Marie’s wake. She stirs again within me; the part of her that loiters in my heart and brushes against my thoughts has been soiled by
their
proximity. I lean against a wall of cinder block and, swearing, strike it with my palm as would one frenzied by angel dust.

The gallery had been many things. All it had been over the years puts pressure on my forehead, the weight of its past packs around me like the underneath of snow. The buzzing energy of the shouts of children, though not the sounds, echoes from when the place had been an unlicensed play-school. I bow my head from the pressure as I enter and lift my gaze slowly. . . .

And I drink what had been Marie. The taste is like the scent of a stem of rosemary drying. The feel is as soft on my skin as lake water in the summer. Few of those here mourn Marie, and I’m thankful for their hypocrisy—I could not have withstood a room full of people wounded by the loss of Marie while I was touched by her art, and while they were so touched. I said I lifted my gaze to her art; that is only partly true. For to lift your gaze to her art is to be lifted
by
your gaze; it is for your vision to be drawn in the same way her deep brown eyes trapped your gaze, welcomely, whenever she spoke to you. The angels summoned to the sky above Marie’s light seemed to grace what she had crafted with her sight and her hands. To walk into the space where her art is hung is like walking into her arms, the very arms into which she pressed the numbness and death that she had first melted in a spoon, the very arms which, holding you, would let you know the grief and love she wore as a raiment upon her soul.

A few patrons look my way, as if they know me. None is one of
them
. It is as if I am expected, though why, I cannot guess. Yet a few among the few who look at me do so the way that
they
do—as if I am their property that has rudely not acknowledged their ownership of me. I look away from them, and suddenly feel as if the earth rises to meet me. As if I have been taken by a swoon and fall to the floor of a red-sanded desert.

“I’m glad you came,” says a soft voice as a hand is placed on my shoulder, as I remember such a touch from all the times Marie had so greeted me. I turn and see a mask of Marie, fleeting, as if I have stared at a black and white photo of her and suddenly looked to an expanse of pure white. The mask fades and a face like Marie’s lingers in flesh where the mask had been.

Nell looks much like her sister, and what is more wounding to me, she smells like Marie, if such a family likeness is possible. She is the ground— the earth that supports—beneath the radiant sky that had been Marie. Nell’s eyes are blue, the near opposite of the warm brown of Marie’s eyes, yet just as deep and arresting. I place the hand I abraded on cinder block over the hand she has placed on my shoulder, and see under the sleeve of her blouse the raised, worm-coloured scars along her forearm that are there, or that will be there one day. Where Marie has used a needle, Nell has used, or will use, the teeth of a broken bottle.

“Marie said she wanted you here. For this.” She swallows after speaking the last two words, as if to take them back.

“I had to come, and I wanted to.”

“Could you . . . could I ask you to come with me?” She takes my chafed hand and leads me past the deep forests Marie had painted half from the banks of brush and trees in Golden Gate Park and half from her imagination, past the seascapes Marie had done of an ocean she had never seen but had read about, past the small cottage in Berkeley she had painted that she had transplanted to a hillock like one in a work by Cezanne. Nell walks ahead of me with near-unreal gracefulness that shames me in a way that I cannot name. There is a memory that stirs warmly inside me, and I realize that Nell leads me the way Marie led me to the corner of that freezing bar in January.

Nell stops us before the far wall of the space, near windows that look out on the Bay.

“Can you tell me who they are?” she asks, gesturing to Marie’s portraits.

Empathy
is what scholars say is the investment of oneself into a painting. It is an incomplete notion, for a painting can intrude upon
you
and your perceptions. Looking at the canvas that Marie painted, looking at how Marie had forced her own compassionate and loving sight to
stay
within the textures and strokes she crafted, I
felt
all that is, that was, that had been, Janet intrude upon me. Marie had painted Janet reading a book in the Park. The curling flames of Janet’s rich, thick hair were draped over one hand. So perfect were the textures, one could see the motion of Janet’s fingers twisting a lock as she read.

“Do you know her?” asks Nell.

“It’s . . . she’s . . . Janet. Marie and I knew her years ago. She disappeared.” I stumble for the words. “Could you ask the curator, or whoever is handling the sales, to not put this one in the catalogue? Or online? And maybe leave the work untitled?”

“Marie arranged for all that weeks ago,” says Nell. Her words are clipped, not out of anger at my request, but out of discomfort for speaking of Marie in the so recent past.

“
Of course she did, of course she would
,” I say. Or think I say.

So frightened, so sleep-deprived had Janet been before she fled town and her stalking ex-husband, Marie and I had heard her scream when a lock of her hair, flowing around her like red-brown smoke, had been caught in a low-hanging branch one windy day.

“Marie said that she . . .
Janet
, you said? That she probably wanted to stay disappeared.”

Nell next walks me to a portrait of Tom, whom Marie had painted in warm earth-tones. In his portrait, Tom smokes while hunched over his coffee. Marie had caught the happy semi-grin that Tom wore whenever he lit up, knowing that he had successfully displaced his need for coke to the less lethal need for cigarettes and caffeine. Tom had disappeared as well, either to leave the city and its temptations or to be consumed by those temptations elsewhere, with no witnesses to his defeat by that which steady smoking and coffee had held at bay.

“‘Tom,’” says Nell after I have named him. “I met him, I think. I just couldn’t remember his name.”

We next stand before a portrait of Paul, whom Marie and I had met while he wore a cast, as he was recovering from the spite of a girlfriend who had smashed a jar of pennies onto his hand. Marie had painted Paul with his guitar on his lap—his face set as he worked the hand-exerciser that might one day give him back his music. The play of light on Paul’s face is like that of a Hopper; the look in his eyes is one of pain and hope.

I tell Nell Paul’s name and his story, though I do not know if he has ever learned to play again.

I feel my pulse throb in my neck as I speak to Nell, as I realize that Marie’s art has become more beautiful with her death. While she lived, it was timid of her light, even though what makes it beautiful is the investment of her light.

Nell thanks me by offering me a plastic cup of jug wine from the crumb-ridden caterer’s table. I decline, and she seems to nod, as if remembering. By the table, on a small podium, is a photo album of Marie’s unfinished works. The cityscape view out of Marie’s living room window floats like some half-realized dream in the album behind a clear plastic sheet protector. The album feels as if something close to me might sleep among Marie’s other half-finished dreams and visions. If it is the face of another dead or lost friend, I can’t bear to look at it.

Nell’s glance falls to the album, to the cityscape that had filled the window beneath which Marie had died.

“Do you still have a key to Marie’s place?” she asks.

“No,” I say, giving Nell insight into my relationship with Marie of which she may not have been aware.

Nell looks down to the scavenged table, as if embarrassed by the question and my answer. She reaches for her purse and opens it.

They
are coming. I feel them. Their approach is like the spread of wasp venom under newly stung skin. They have known my destination. They approach
en masse
, to reattempt the ambush they had intended for the bus stop. Because of their numbers, they feel close. Closer even than does Nell standing before me. I should flee to the anonymity of my apartment, to the safety of its smallness and the invisibility of its single window that faces a brick wall.

Yet there is a safety in this moment that I feel, as Nell reaches into her purse and pulls forth a key ring. They will not come, I know, until this safe moment is over. Nell removes a key from where it dangles next to a shiny, newly-cut one just like it and hands it to me. I feel the residue on it of the grief and the anger she felt when the clerk at the coroner’s office handed it to her. The key scalds my hand, and I feel as if my palm might blister where she has placed it.

“I don’t know how long I’ll be here,” says Nell. “Can you meet me at Marie’s sometime after ten? There are things . . .” her throat constricts, as does mine while I meet her eyes. “There are things Marie said she wanted you to have if anything happened to her.”

Nell is furious; there is terrible beauty to rage on the face of one as graceful as she, even when such rage is hidden. Loss masks itself beneath her skin. She wishes to make her rage known, rage born of the sight of Marie’s face, haloed by the glow of a metal slab, the face I had seen moving with the simulacra of life when Marie and I had spoken our maimed farewell.

“I can meet you there. After ten,” I say, putting the key in my pocket.

“I have to play hostess. Please excuse me.”

She gives me her hand, now slick with cold sweat. I have upset her, or she has upset herself. This moment and its safety dissolve around us. “Thank you for coming,” she says.

I leave the showing. I walk past the colors and the palettes I recognize from the flecks on Marie’s nails, from the smears on the overalls she wore while working, from the reeking drop-cloths that she piled in the corner of her kitchen. I take the back stairwell where the caterers loiter, feeling
them
come closer. At street level, I see
them
coming—a few cluster near rusted cars and vans parked in the Waterfront lot.

They will position themselves throughout the neighbourhood. They will hunt me in bars and coffee shops, and coordinate themselves through their cell phones and voicemails and text messages. I do not fathom this breaking of their theatre of stealth, and though I know going to Marie’s home will savage my heart, I am thankful to have a place to go besides my home, which will be watched closely tonight.

Nell waits in the hallway outside Marie’s apartment, tapping cigarette ash into a beer can. The sleeves of her blouse are rolled up, revealing smooth skin etched with as-yet-unbroken blue veins.

She smiles as I walk up the hallway, as I smile politely and smother down my horror at what she will do.

She drops her cigarette hissing into the can. She stands and again fixes me with her blue eyes. I hide what I see of her future, what I see of her choices and how they will write themselves deeply in her flesh. For the second time tonight, she says, “I’m glad you came.”

There is no graceful reply to what she has said, so I say next to nothing: “Have you been here long?”

“About an hour. I couldn’t stand being at the showing after a while. A lot of the so-called patrons were just vultures.”

I smell
them
on her as she says “
vultures
.” They have been close to her, soiling the space of Marie’s art, her empathy, and her mourning.

“Is there anything I can do? To help settle . . . things?”

“No. Not now. I just want you to have what Marie wanted you to have. I need to see something
done
. I want to have some closure, tonight.”

She opens the door and the residual smells of Marie—the lingering scent of the expensive lotion she always used out of vanity for her skin, and also the scent of the sandalwood conditioner she said always made her feel calm—choke me with memory.