The Beginners (28 page)
Authors: Rebecca Wolff
We were past the Social Club, then the old barn on our right, coming around the hairpin turn, going uphill. We drove back through the center of town. Raquel turned the car toward the Old Road, heading, I guessed, toward the loop.
“I still believe that the difference humanity makes is incalculable, because it is a question of self-consciousness. In humans, self-consciousness varies only by degree, although it varies hugely. The day that a chipmunk sits up on a rock and tells me, or even just looks like it
wants
to tell me, that it’s having trouble deciding what to eat, is the day that I will give up my title and join the ranks of those who see their place on the food chain. . . . You know, this all reminds me of one of my favorite stories, the allegory to end all allegories.
wants
to tell me, that it’s having trouble deciding what to eat, is the day that I will give up my title and join the ranks of those who see their place on the food chain. . . . You know, this all reminds me of one of my favorite stories, the allegory to end all allegories.
“I don’t even remember where I first heard this. I can’t tell stories. All I really recall is a servant, in some bushes beneath the window of the king, bearing a covered dish. Under the cover is a pure white snake, cooked, prepared simply for the king’s consumption. It seems the king had overheard one day that in order to understand the language of the animals, the residents of that other kingdom just outside his window, one must eat of the rare white snake. At this point in the story, you, the listener, should be wondering just who it was he overheard say this. A sorcerer? A practical joker? Or was it a jackrabbit, speaking in human tongue.
“So he catches the fever of wanting. Now that he possesses this knowledge he must put it into action: he commands his servant to go out into the forest, return with the sublimely exoticized white snake, and bring it to him for his supper. This is where the story begins, in my memory, with that fabulous image of the weary, triumphant servant of the king, having spent all the long day in the forest entrapping the luminous, exquisite snake. Who knows what trials he underwent in its procurement? We can only imagine. See, this is the trouble I have with stories. It’s the fleshing out part that bothers me.
“But ever onward with the engrossing narrative! The king, alone in his grandly appointed chamber, sits down and devours the white snake. It probably tastes a lot like frogs’ legs, which supposedly taste like chicken. But a bit oilier, and stringier, I would bet. He cuts it up into little sections, small rings of snake, like calamari, and eats the whole thing. And then immediately goes out the window and into the forest, where, just as he had hoped, he converses freely with badgers and crows and wild boars and the occasional gazelle.
“He is gone for several months. The effects of the snake on the language centers are long lasting. And of course he is in a kind of ecstatic state of communion. The natural world! Opened up to him! He runs about in the forest and listens in on the unexpectedly fascinating dialogue of chipmunks, who chatter, their jaws stuffed with roughage. He understands wildcats when they address themselves to their god. He has interspecies communication skills! He serves as interpreter in the forest, settling disputes between hawks and voles, foxes and hounds. He is at one with what he believes to be the natural order, for the first time in his benighted, bejeweled, hierarchical life. In all his days of glory in the forest, however, he never sees another white snake.
“And this is because he has eaten the last one. An otter tells him so. And when the power of the previously ingested one begins to wear off, there is nothing for the devastated king to do but return home, to the castle, where he lives out the rest of his days in torpor and misery. It is the far greater ill, after all, to have a memory of a tongue stuck in your head with no capacity for speaking it, than to have had no tongue at all. The great king! The poor king. To remember the flavor but not the texture, to know that there was something so free, so wild, so necessary, that he could say, something being said all around him, but to have no recall of its content, its meat. Just like a dream. Not like riding a bicycle; that, they say, you never forget. But just like the way some people speak of the experience of having an emotion. Love, for instance. Or is love a metaphysical condition? Anyway, they say ’tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. But this was not so for the king. ’Twas misery to have understood so much! And then to fall back to not understanding.
“What fresh hell. What constantly fresh hell.” Raquel sighed and leaned forward against the steering wheel.
We were stopped now at the end of the long access road, the road to nowhere, literally, or at least to nowhere that we could go and survive the going. In front of us was a footpath that led straight down to the edge of the water, to the submerged valley of lost ancestors, lost histories, lost names and truths and reasons.
I WONDERED, THEN, as Raquel turned the car toward home, and her multiplicity of stories faded from the air around us, if she and I were now best friends, as Cherry and I had been. But just as quickly as it entered my mind to wonder, I found the answer: if we were, I wouldn’t have to ask myself the question in the first place. It’s like magic that you don’t ask it. About once a year, Cherry and I would pause for a moment in the middle of some day we were spending together, some formless, endless activity in which we participated, thoughtlessly, like two skinny monkeys, to survey our long, long history, and to conclude, inevitably, that it was good. We might laugh, then, that accomplished, and resume. Even the brevity of our exchange was a signature of our mutual perfection with relation to each other. We could be succinct together.
And now I found myself in the middle of a perfect fall day, a day for exploring, for recounting, for dreaming, all on my own, with only this dismal, long-winded creature beside me as a reference point.
I don’t think Raquel could have ever had one, a best friend, unless you count Theo, and I’m not sure that you can be best friends with someone who would kill you, given the chance, or who would fuck you and not kiss you. Someone who would eat you, or who would allow you to eat yourself. And watch you while you did eat yourself. But I’m confusing things: I was the one he fucks without a kiss. She was the one he watches while she eats.
As we drove past the Motherwells’ driveway and then the high school, and then past the Qwik-Go, and then past the Lamplighter, and turned around at the Wick town line, it occurred to me that all of Raquel’s talk was simply elaboration on one theme. She really was just killing silence, which could never be, for her, anything other than uncomfortable. Mr. Endicott had a phrase, about talking just to hear the sound of your own voice, which he used to use when Cherry and I had been on the phone for too long. Of course he was wrong: we talked just to hear the sound of each other’s voice. But with Raquel it was more than that. For her, every silence, every break in conversation, was more than just a break, it was a breach. One was constantly called upon, in her presence, to literally
make
conversation, to pull it out of thin air, to conscientiously fill gaps which, with anyone else, might be stuffed by the accretion of a mutual history, of shared observation, of simple understanding. That’s it, I suddenly realized, and almost felt moved to say
aha,
softly but aloud nevertheless, like a scientist too shy to shriek
Eureka
. With Raquel there was no possibility of an understanding—not of coming to one, not of reaching one, certainly not the actuality of having one. It was as though time did not pass, in her company, as though each encounter with her was entirely new, as though there was no such thing as history, as continuity. One began with her afresh each time.
make
conversation, to pull it out of thin air, to conscientiously fill gaps which, with anyone else, might be stuffed by the accretion of a mutual history, of shared observation, of simple understanding. That’s it, I suddenly realized, and almost felt moved to say
aha,
softly but aloud nevertheless, like a scientist too shy to shriek
Eureka
. With Raquel there was no possibility of an understanding—not of coming to one, not of reaching one, certainly not the actuality of having one. It was as though time did not pass, in her company, as though each encounter with her was entirely new, as though there was no such thing as history, as continuity. One began with her afresh each time.
We pulled into the driveway but neither of us got out of the car. It suddenly felt to me just like that moment in movies when a couple is at the end of a date, when all that remains is for them to part ways, but a decision must be made about the tenor of that parting. Raquel made no motion to open the door, to get out. We turned slightly in our seats toward each other, repositioning knees and elbows.
“You do understand, now, what this is all about, don’t you?” she asked me, not looking into my eyes but instead into the rearview mirror. I turned to look out the back: there was nothing behind us but the other side of the road. Then a car drove by, on its way out of town, probably, or to the Lamplighter for a quick flash of breasts, before dinner. I turned back and caught her eyes, which still held her question. I nodded my head yes, then no, then just as quickly yes again. I thought that I might literally nod my own head off.
I swiveled my torso to face her. “Love?” I croaked. Answering her, a large frog leapt out of my throat. She was startled—I suppose by the sound of my voice—and when her eyes darted into mine I saw something in them that made me look away, but not before she had done so first. Whatever it was was unbelievably difficult to observe, something like a hybrid of a dog who has just been hit by a truck but has not been killed, only had its rib cage crushed, its heart bleeding into its mouth, and a rock that has just been thrown through a plate-glass window. Or maybe the window itself.
Ten minutes had passed. I’m actually not sure at all how long we had been sitting there in the driveway, only that the sun had begun to set for real, and that it had grown chilly in the car. We reached simultaneously for our door handles, then stood for a moment looking at the sky, which was wreathed in long, striated clouds tinted morning-glory blue and rose, pale orange and violet. Faint stars showed through here and there.
“Now that’s what I call ‘firmament.’ Nothing like a sunset to bring two people together, is there? Someone wrote about the fantastic properties of the setting sun, its position in the pantheon of natural phenomena. It does provide, really, the prime example of a sharable experience of aesthetic bliss, minus the critical distance, equaling ‘beauty’: the simulacra of objective reality.
“I am going to give birth to a child,” she continued, never missing a beat. “In about six months. However long it takes. Will you help me around the house, then, when I’ve grown so huge I can’t pick my own fork up off the floor where I’ve dropped it?”
I nodded, slowly, considering this scenario. Raquel at the table, big as a house, anemically pale from giving all her blood to Baby. The fork just out of her reach on the floor. Me, under the table to get it. I saw the fetus floating deep inside of her, in the dark, impossibly small for something so significant. The infant would be sickly, would require special care. Or maybe Raquel would not, as she had so often suggested, be able to sustain a life inside of her. An inner life.
But, in truth, I could only imagine that Raquel’s pregnancy would be of the bloomingly healthy, regal sort.
“I only hope we can stay around that long,” Raquel continued, after a long pause. “It may be that we’ll be gone before you know it. One ought never to overstay one’s welcome, Ginger—remember that.”
32.
T
he holidays. It was Thanksgiving. Paper turkeys and burnished ears of Indian corn strung up all over town; my parents on stools at their Formica counter, making turkey sandwiches with jiggly cranberry jelly from a can, worrying about me. I wondered how the day would pass. My town made a big deal out of Thanksgiving. There was a parade down Main Street, with all the small children dressed up as Pilgrims. Many of the townspeople dressed up, too, just to watch, and later to sit in the stands at the football game at the high school. My parents were some of the few who didn’t get the whole house trussed up like a turkey. I missed my parents terribly, suddenly. Raquel would have envied me, if she could have known what I was feeling. A tremulous concoction of pity and blood and vision: I saw them again in their sad, sturdy progress through the day, my mother rinsing dishes to put in the dishwasher, my father pausing behind her for a moment to give the tight muscles at the top of her shoulders a quick squeeze. They did not speak of me. They spoke of Jack, in the only terms in which they spoke of him: his promise, his folly, his eternal glory. They wept. And here was I, getting older. I had promised to return home by three, for dinner at four.
he holidays. It was Thanksgiving. Paper turkeys and burnished ears of Indian corn strung up all over town; my parents on stools at their Formica counter, making turkey sandwiches with jiggly cranberry jelly from a can, worrying about me. I wondered how the day would pass. My town made a big deal out of Thanksgiving. There was a parade down Main Street, with all the small children dressed up as Pilgrims. Many of the townspeople dressed up, too, just to watch, and later to sit in the stands at the football game at the high school. My parents were some of the few who didn’t get the whole house trussed up like a turkey. I missed my parents terribly, suddenly. Raquel would have envied me, if she could have known what I was feeling. A tremulous concoction of pity and blood and vision: I saw them again in their sad, sturdy progress through the day, my mother rinsing dishes to put in the dishwasher, my father pausing behind her for a moment to give the tight muscles at the top of her shoulders a quick squeeze. They did not speak of me. They spoke of Jack, in the only terms in which they spoke of him: his promise, his folly, his eternal glory. They wept. And here was I, getting older. I had promised to return home by three, for dinner at four.
WE STRETCHED OUT VARIOUSLY, like cats, on couches and in front of the fire Theo lit. The day was nippy and blue, very blue, with November’s giant clouds moving slowly. I felt a strong desire to take a walk, to be outdoors in the day, to visit familiar sites, shops, to greet the people I knew. Or to turn a corner and see Cherry. Maybe instead I should walk away from town, down the Old Road to the reservoir. At this time of year the mosquitoes were all dead, and no one would be out hunting today, when the football games on TV had reached a frenzied peak.
It was such an unusual movement on my part that I felt I must explain myself. I stuttered, wool jacket in hand. Theo and Raquel exchanged a sly glance, and Raquel patted the couch next to where she sat.
“Here, come sit here,” she said. I did not want to upset her, at any cost, and so I went and sat beside her although I felt an unprecedented urge to stay away, as far away as possible, to keep moving away.
“Don’t leave now,” she said, half-pleading. “Why, if you wait just a little while, we’ll go with you. I haven’t been down to the reservoir since that first time we went. Can you believe it?”
I looked sharply at her as she lied, or fabricated, or believed herself, but I could see not a trace of any more than the usual effort at speech on her face. I glanced at Theo and he was looking steadily at me. Oh, how I longed to be outside: to see the road, the streets, the town, the world; anything outside of the Motherwells’ house, and their faces. I longed to see my parents, and I thought that Theo and Raquel would have laughed at me if they had known.
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