The Beginners (25 page)

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Authors: Rebecca Wolff

BOOK: The Beginners
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We quickly sat up and dressed. I realized that I had shut my eyes at the start, as soon as I was laid down, and only opened them after he had stopped moving and rested his cheek on my breast. I wished that I had thought to watch his face, as it went through its motions.
We sat side by side on the floor, just as we had been, and drank our cocoa, still warm. My throat was sore from breathing with my mouth open. I combed my hair out with my fingers.
“I don’t know what Raquel’s been telling you, Ginger.” He began in this way, the timbre of his usually light, reedy voice richer than before, as though orgasm had caused his blood to be drained from his veins, heated, then reintroduced. I simply waited.
“She can be very convincing, and so can I. But you need to be careful. We all need to be careful.” Another cryptic warning, now seeming almost comically misplaced. “It is dangerous to believe one person’s side of any story; there is always another. And in the end, none of it may be true.
“I want to tell you this now, because I see that you mean a lot to Raquel—” This hurt: to Raquel? Had I not met him halfway each time? Was it not important to him that I was ready for him? “And when something is important to her she will do anything she can to hold on to it.” I wondered why she would think that she had to do anything special to hold on to me, when I was pinned, like a butterfly to a mounting board.
But it seemed he was intent on telling me a story. “Raquel and I have not known each other for very long,” he began. This I already knew, though it was difficult to understand how two could come to rely on one another so quickly, or at least how they could become so enmeshed, or could know each other so deeply. As I cast my mind through these configurations, I found myself rejecting each one in turn. I knew nothing, I decided, about the relationship between any two people, least of all these two.
Theo continued, and I found that I knew even less than I thought. “I met Raquel about a year ago in a treatment program at a psychiatric clinic in the city. I had just been released from jail, two years early for good behavior, on condition that I participate in an extended group therapy. She was one of eight others in the group. She’d been institutionalized for several years, and had also just been reintroduced to society. Over the course of a year, the other seven all dropped out, and that left Raquel and me and two therapists. It turned into a kind of mock couples counseling, with Raquel and I as a default couple.
“At first she couldn’t even look at me when she spoke. She was incapable of meeting my eyes for more than a few seconds. The therapists worked on that a lot with her, actually keeping track of her gaze, its duration. In that room it was as though I stood for every other person in the world, to her. If she could hold my eyes as she talked to me—believe in my existence, really—then she was healing, the therapists said. And I suppose her belief in me healed me, too.
“I’ll never know if it was this relationship that was set up for us, or if I simply took an opportunity to do good for once in my life”—he shook his head quickly, as though to reset his brain—“but I found, after a while, that I wanted to take care of her. I wanted to protect her, in the therapeutic environment and then later, when we started to spend time together outside of the clinic, which was of course forbidden by the rules of the treatment program. We met two or three times, before and after the group session, and then decided that we didn’t need the therapists anymore.”
 
 
THEY DROVE IN through the churchyard gates, under the curious gaze of the houses all around the green, over the rutty one-lane road that winds past the church itself and on into the graveyard proper. Theo parked and put the emergency brake on, as they were on a hill, and then they walked down toward the oldest part of the graveyard, where the trees were tallest and the graves showed the most wear. Only the slate stones were legible. Slate is odd: smooth as a sheet of paper; always cool to the touch, no matter how hot the day; austere yet quite contemporary in dove-gray or mauve.
They trailed amongst the stones in a light drizzle, fanning out and calling to each other funny old names like Thankful and Hepzibah. They walked around, looking at graves. This is Theo’s version. They were looking for no grave in particular. They felt a common delight in burial sites: a place of unquestionable significance. There is no way to avoid addressing in some manner their connotations. When you walk in a graveyard and it is sunny and bright out you may feel illuminated in your mortal form. The soil, the ground, the grass that grows, your feet, your legs, your torso, neck, and brain. All living, and what is beneath completely dead, at the cellular level. Or you may feel the pressure of the nonlife itself, historically speaking.
All these lives, once just like mine, self-important, full-hearted. Every last one of these dead people must have had a dream of becoming famous at one time or another.
Or you may feel, on a gray and chilly spring day like the one on which they first came to Wick, the full impact of the dead. Certain people on a certain day will get the dead inside them, filling every niche that has been prepared by all the living that they have done. First there is a heightened awareness of the potential gravity of your situation. Here you are, laughing and talking and walking on all the places where people’s bodies have actually been put into the earth. It is possible, after all, that they really don’t like it, that they resent this show of disrespect: your feet on their final resting place. And then you catch yourself on this train of thought and think again: “Who is ‘they,’ for God’s sake? Do I really believe that there is a particular spirit attached to a particular dead body, actually lurking around in the near vicinity, ‘haunting’ as it were, waiting for some poor, live person to come around and transgress?”
And by repeating to yourself over and over these words, like “dead body,” and “waiting,” and “alive,” as you continue to walk in and amongst the gravestones, careful not to be too careful about where you walk, you begin to see things. A white flash in the corner of your left eye: a rabbit on the path? Another on the top of that hill over there: just a particularly tall gravestone, rising above the horizon line. You can try to shake it off but you are over the threshold, now. The words used to describe the dead and their surroundings are weighty and endlessly variable: they are like the shadows of words.
Apparition, decomposition, materialization, haunt, return, still, peace, rest, eternal
. And that is the truth of it. For whether the dead are at rest or returning, peaceful or haunting, that condition is eternal. The body is dead, the spirit is present. Or the spirit is dead forever; the body is always somewhere.
And now you are absolutely saturated with the language of the dead, of death. The tongue of death is in your mouth, and if you are anything like anyone, like everyone, you are spooked. It’s time to go, to get out of the realm of all the significant names, the real place where bodies are kept. It’s time to get back to somewhere that does not have such a specific purpose: a house.
 
 
RAQUEL AND THEO WALKED between the gravestones and Theo read out loud the ones he could make out: “Charity Putnam, beloved wife of Samuel, 1740–1762. Not very old. People died younger back then. Often in childbirth, women died. And here’s Samuel. 1720–1784. He was a lot older than her. That was common, too. Look at this one; Maribelle Lawson. That’s a fancy name for those plain times. She was three years old. Can’t you just see her? Curls and a starchy frock.
“Wow, Lavonia Threadgill. And her husband Deodat. Those are the kinds of names that completely determine a personality. No chance that they would be the town pump and the town drunk. They must have been upstanding. Entirely beyond suspicion.”
“As are we,” Raquel responded airily, moving on to a tall slate stone with a long inscription. “My God, Theo. Listen to this.
Look on me as you pass by / As you are now, so once was I / As I am now, so must you be / Prepare for death, to follow me.
Keziah Snow. Seventeen-something. This man was thinking ahead. He chose to speak directly to the living, for all eternity. He sussed it out and knew that we would be open to some words of wisdom, from beyond.”
Theo stood beside her, in front of the stone. It was particularly shady, where they stood, beneath a tremendous, ancient elm newly leafed out. “Or maybe he was just a bitter man, a man who had no clue what the afterlife held, nor, for that matter, what his life preceding it had held. It sounds like he thought of little besides his own demise, in his last days. When he sat and wrote, in his cramped and spidery hand, this last message to the world.”
“Yes, he must have spent a lot of time presupposing his exact position in the box, underground, under the stone, under the tree, under the sky. I wouldn’t mind staying here for a little while.”
“Under this tree?”
“No.”
“Here, in this graveyard?”
“No.”
“In this town?”
“Right.”
“Well, we can stay for dinner, if you like? I think I saw a little place . . .”
“Why don’t we see if there’s an apartment available?”
“What, for the summer?”
“For whenever. For forever. Why not here? Here seems as good as anywhere else, if not better. I bet it’s cheap.
“And,” Raquel continued, “this is just exactly the kind of town I’ve always wondered about. I drive through, on my way somewhere else, and I see a ‘For Rent’ sign in an apartment above a doughnut shop or a florist and I just want to stop the car and alter my path entirely, irretrievably, irreparably. The path is arbitrary anyway, why not acknowledge that truth by making truly arbitrary choices? If I lived in an apartment above a doughnut shop in a town like this, that would be the solution to the whole problem of identity, right there. In this context, who could name me? I would be void-of-course, like a moon, and like a moon I would orbit my new planet. And anyone who observed me would be changed. They would reflect a new me back at me and I would be, therefore, new.”
“Only one objection, my dear. Or rather an amendment.”
“What, my dear?” The endearments were spoken without irony, but knowingly.
“You won’t be alone.”
“You and I in an apartment in a strange, small town. Don’t you see that I will be alone just the same?”
“Better yet,” Theo said, with typically sudden and full enthusiasm. “How about a real house? I bet we could get one of those big old houses. I have always imagined that in a big old house I could spread myself thinly throughout, really inhabit it.” His certain eyes.
“Become one with it, as it were,” she said.
Theo glanced sideways at her sharply to see if she was making fun of him. It was often difficult to read her tone of voice. A single eyebrow was gently raised. When entirely in earnest, as she so often was, both eyebrows shot up.
“Why, yes. Do you have a problem with that?”
“No,” she said. “My darling.” These words like a sound check for another, more persuasive endearment.
One month later they drove back into town with their few belongings and moved into the house they’d purchased from Mr. Grose, the selectman, who also ran Grose Realty.
 
 
RAQUEL MATERIALIZED in the doorway, a lit cigarette in her hand. I had not heard her shut the door downstairs, nor come up the staircase, nor smelled the smoke. I was engrossed. I was remembering the bubble of light she had evoked so genuinely, on that rainy day when Cherry and I stayed upstairs in her room for hours. The bubble of mutuality that had held the two of them together, outside the office of the academic, in her story, in which at the moment of contact it had been difficult to hold his eyes, but not out of fear, or disability, or disbelief; rather it was an excess of illumination, as though the moment of being seen, a shared experience, or a shared feeling within that experience, caused something like pain, expressed as blindness. In Theo’s story, he had misrepresented her pain, just as she had in her story misrepresented his desire to look at her. Everyone wants to look at someone when they are speaking. How disappointing.
“I do like to have a postcoital cigarette,” Raquel remarked, deliberately casual. “Smoking is just one of the many things I can’t seem to become addicted to.” She crossed the room and sat down on the bare mattress. Theo held out his cup. I took it and passed it. She reached out and dropped her half-smoked cigarette in the cup, but left it in my hand. She slid off the bed and down to the floor, to our level. I sloshed the ashy dregs of cocoa around in the bottom, and the cigarette drowned in them.
“Since you’re telling stories, Theo, why don’t you tell Ginger all about how you ended up in prison?” She slid her eyes around to regard me. “It’s probably the most interesting thing about him, in the end—though you’ve found out by now that he can be very entertaining, given the chance. I do hope you’re all right, dear. He can be entertaining, and more than a little self-serving.” I was as humiliated by the note of motherly concern in her voice as I was at the realization of her knowledge. She knew what was happening between Theo and me: nothing. Nothing was happening that did not include her.
“Again, Raquel,” Theo said, speaking from out of his silence like a singer who has waited for just the right stillness to break, “just look. Once more you’ve provided us with what could only be described as ‘atmosphere.’” He got up and walked over to the window, waving at the air in front of him, in which shafts of low-slung sunlight coming in through the panes had materialized, lent body and volume, a medium, as it were, by the curls of smoke she had blown through her nose and mouth as she spoke.

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