The Magician's Girl (12 page)

Read The Magician's Girl Online

Authors: Doris Grumbach

BOOK: The Magician's Girl
4.73Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

Holding the cups with dregs of coffee in them, they sat, looking inquiringly at each other. Luther was trying to decide on a strategy. Having twice before had intercourse with girls he had suspected of being virgins, he knew of only two approaches: a rough, determined strategy that had succeeded well with a handsome girl in Greenwich Village, who then turned out to be far more experienced than he; and the shy, diffident non-approach that had worked with a timid girl in the choir of St. Matthew's Episcopal Church in Lincoln, Nebraska, where they were both born and raised.

But his successful advance may have frightened the little soprano, because she would never see him again. Luther debated both modes and then, fortunately, hit upon a third. He smiled his wide, Greek boy's white-toothed engaging smile and said, ‘Maud, would you consider … ah, um, coupling with me?' ‘
Coupling?
' ‘Yes. Well, I chose the word because it seems to go well with potation. I've finished my coffee, by the way.' ‘Want some more?' ‘No. No, thank you. What I'd really like is for you to take off your clothes so we can make love—that is,' he said with self-conscious hesitation, ‘if you want to make love with me.'

Maud stood up. The cup rang in its saucer as she planted her feet heavily on the wooden floor. Luther felt her looking down at him but could not bring himself to look up. He felt overwhelmed by embarrassment and uncertainty. ‘I would like … to try it,' Maud said. Luther looked up to see her staring at him. ‘But I've never done it before—never been asked to, to be honest. My idea is to do it with someone—and I must admit, Luther, that I like you very much—in the dark where you—anyone—would not be able to see clearly what I look like with my clothes off. As I am.
I
know what I look like. Not much. Or maybe, too much. Not pretty.'

When she said in her artless, gravelly voice that she had feelings for him, Luther stood up and put his arms around her, feeling small, insufficient and tender toward her honesty, her unburdening. She stood stolidly and did not respond in any way. ‘Was she thinking of all the light in the room?' he wondered. The shade on the window was white and porous; he could see no way of darkening the room. He debated retreat, in deference to her wishes, but he found he wanted to see what there was to see under her tentlike shirt and under the starched whatever-it-was that bound her breasts. ‘I want to make love to her,' he thought, and at that moment was suddenly persuaded that he felt love for her. ‘I want you,' Luther said, trying to suggest by the simplicity of the sentence that it was the inner Maud, not the envelope of flesh that he desired. This was only partly true.

Maud locked the door and pulled down the inadequate shade. They undressed. She lay on her back on the narrow bed in the alcove. There seemed to be no room beside her so Luther lay down, gently, on top of her. Thus positioned, there was no time or room for the usual preliminaries. He felt heavy and awkward, his head resting on her chest, which, to his surprise, was bony, her breasts having fallen heavily to her sides. ‘I'll be gentle. Don't worry.' Maud said nothing. She shut her eyes as though she were patiently awaiting the arrival of a bullet. She put her hands on Luther's head, smoothing his curls. ‘Wonderful ears,' she said.

After the first, violent, athletic, pleasureless act for Maud was over, they lay on their sides looking at each other. ‘A consummation devoutly to be wished,' said Maud, grinning at Luther, who did not immediately recognize the line and thought perhaps the poet in Maud had produced it for the occasion. ‘Anyone likely to come home?' Luther asked. ‘No, it's a good time for this,' said Maud. ‘Liz and Minna have gone out to lunch, and then to a picture taking.' There was a long pause. Then Maud said suddenly, to Luther's discomfort, ‘How do I look to you?'

‘What do you mean?' he asked. Maud decided he knew what she meant. ‘You know, it's strange, but I don't see my looks anymore. I've decided that no one who looks like me can live forever within sight of her own body. I have to look away, to stay curled within myself, like a fetus. From there, I imagine myself looking out of a lovely face, like Minna's, or Hedy Lamarr's.' Luther, stunned by her candor, said nothing. ‘Myopia helps. My inward vision is sharpened by my failure to see out. No blurring. I look in, beyond my skin, to the beauty buried in me.' Luther stared at the blotched dormitory ceiling as she talked. He was unable to say something reassuring, to say, although he thought to say it, that he was able to see the poet within when he looked at her. His secret about her was his own. In the half hour they had been on the bed he had discovered the source of his attraction to her: he loved Maud's breasts. He felt pillowed and cherished by the formless flowing flesh, surrounded and bolstered when he gathered those monstrous yet hospitable structures into his hands and then put his head down into their damp, chasmal midst.

They both lay silent. They had tired themselves out with their first unrewarding coupling. Maud's disappointment had made her phlegmatic. Luther's renewed need died away and left him without resources. He decided on an academic subject. ‘You're Professor Berry's star in that Metaphysical Poets course. You must be pleased. I envy you.' ‘I don't know. He liked my second paper better than the one on Herbert. That's about the whole of it.' ‘You'll probably pull an A.' ‘Never. With all that work I'll be lucky to get a B minus or some such negative grade.' Luther had no more conversation to offer. He decided he had better get out of the girls' dorm and back across the street. As he got up he said, ‘I enjoyed it.' ‘What?' ‘The sex. The beginning. Next time …' ‘I too. You know, I suspect I care a lot for you, Luther.' He said, ‘You are a bright girl, and a good poet to wit. I care for you too.'

Maud smiled. ‘My mother always used to say, “Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever.”' ‘You're a good girl too,' Luther said. ‘And beautiful,' said Maud. Luther put on his pants and shirt, laced up his snow boots, kissed her cheek and said, ‘And beautiful too.' He pulled on his jacket, turned the key, went out the door and crept down the stairs.

Almost eleven years to the day of that consummation, on a cold morning before Christmas, 1950, Maud woke at five from a dream in which Martha Graham or Doris Humphrey, one of those two, a pliant stick of a figure, glided across an exotic landscape spotted with alligators. Shuddering from the memory, Maud got up, closed the window upon the gray New York City air, and made her way to the bathroom, where she squatted heavily on the toilet, and then neglected to wipe herself. Brushing her teeth struck her as too much of an effort. She poured two fingers of Lavoris and moved the sweet liquid around her furry teeth with her tongue. Feeling suddenly defiant she swallowed, gagged and threw up into the toilet.

In the kitchen she sat at the table, wearing her long shapeless gray sweater over her nightgown, her feet wrapped in the bed quilt. Then she summoned up the energy to stand, opened the oven door and lit the gas. Little blasts of heat warmed her outstretched hands. Across the room stood a pleated iron radiator, stone cold. She left the door of the oven open and started to boil water for coffee on the stove's one working burner.

Usually the mailman came at nine, the high point of her mornings. He could be heard dropping letters into the slotted boxes assigned to the house's four tenants. Maud waited for the sound, drinking the acrid black coffee, eating piece after piece of toast she cooked in the oven and buttered with uncolored margarine. Her lined white pad and fountain pen sat on the knife-scarred white oilcloth that covered the table's gashes. The pad was small and came equipped with a heavy sheet of ruled paper, which she always inserted between the top sheet and the next one to give her writing a formal rectitude when she was copying over a poem. The flip-up cover said the Ace pad was intended for
CORRESPONDENCE
and was made of
FINE-WEAVE LINEN
. Once she had purchased such a pad and then found she could write or copy on no other kind of paper. ‘Disorder become order,' she told herself as she entered words on the copybook line.

When nothing came through her pen to the pad, no image, no sound from her ear of a rhythm pressing to become a line, no word around which, for no reasons, a cluster of words would form, she spent her time adding to the destruction of the oilcloth, digging the blunt point of the Waterman into it. The shiny surface peeled away under pressure, leaving bare the brown, woven backing. Occupied in this way, Maud created abstract patterns, each day's excavation adding a new area of destructive decoration until, when she took a page from her pad and put it down on the oilcloth over the design and tried to write on it, she produced a dimpled text, a nonsensical palimpsest of depth and variety.

Now she tried it. She wrote a string of words that had come to her as the pen encountered the paper: ‘alone and lonely, sole and solitary, last and lasting + + +'—the pen caught in an indentation and stopped. She smiled at the barrier. ‘It's a subtle form of censorship,' she said aloud. ‘I'm mistaken in these words. The oilcloth freezes me into silence, blocking my prosaic passage.' She dropped the pen and stared down at her fat, extended fingers, the nails bitten to a red line below their tips, white with cold. Other obstructions besides those on the oilcloth came to her. She thought of Luther, to whom other people's words came so easily. He was what, in his craft, was called ‘a quick study.' In the cold air before her she watched him toss his lovely head, hearing how the words he had learned in one reading flowed from his mouth, his charming, mobile mouth taking on, in passage, the accents of wit and intelligence not his own. Then the warm strand of air from the oven wiped him away and Maud smiled at his disappearance. ‘I can't think about him anymore this morning. It makes me feel worse,' Maud said to the air. She looked back at her sheet of paper and saw that the fountain pen had expelled a blue-black blot of ink. The oilcloth had received the excess and had promoted its spread into the shape of a nigrescent mushroom. She said aloud, ‘All this happening instead of poetry,' and pushed the inky paper into the oven. Slowly it heated, curled, turned in upon itself in a kind of dance of death and then burned away with a thin blue flame. Maud held her hands out to it. She took another sheet, found a place on the oilcloth that was unmarked and sat for some time, staring at the page.

Nothing came. Everything eluded her, something that happened often since she had been left alone, since the cold of this winter had reached into her bones and her mind. Six months ago—Was it only six months? she wondered—before Florence took the twins, Kenneth and Spencer, with her to New Baltimore, she had been able to listen to the boys when she searched for a word, to their unison babblings and chorusing, to pick out from their inchoate noises the sounds of a word she needed. Now the warm air, having obliterated Luther, produced the twins, her beautiful curly haired sons, standing before her in their short-legged sailor suits, a summer vision in the freezing kitchen. She could not remember the word she had been seeking. She gazed at her little boys as if she did not know them and they, in turn, said nothing and so were not the help they used to be. Now she could remember what it was she wanted from the airy twins. ‘Oh yes,' she said. At once the pressing need returned. Yesterday she had begun a sonnet about the inconceivability of safety. She sought a word: ‘Haven? harborage? No.' The one that hovered vaguely in her head eluded her. ‘How much of all this is the pointing of one's inner ear to catch the sound of a shifty word?' Sometimes she thought she had heard it, but it was too faint to catch, to pin it to the page in a stroke, before it escaped her into the obscurant air. ‘It begins with an
h
. No, perhaps an
s
? Asylum? No.' Then, with great luck it came, in a miraculous epiphany of perfection:
sanctuary
. ‘Let the line proceed,' she said aloud to the heat of the oven.

Often, if her luck did not hold, Maud would resort to the battered, coverless and spineless book she had bought years before for ten cents at a Ravena library sale of damaged and discarded books. She liked owning such a third-class elderly citizen of the publishing world, a book expelled from the shelves and offered for sale, like a slave, unjacketed and bare. More than the vast word-horde of its pages, she loved the preface that told how the
Thesaurus
came to be. The original compiler, Peter Mark Roget, had died before he was able to finish the revision of his 1852 work. His son took over the work, continuing the offering of suggested pools of word choice to writers. In her edition there was an introduction by John Lewis Roget, who wrote, ‘It is necessary for the compiler to steer a mean course between the dangers of being too concise on the one hand, and too diffuse on the other.'

‘A mean course. Lovely.' In Maud's quest for exactitude she would come upon absorbing contradictions: ‘To propugn,' wrote the grandson of Roget, ‘sometimes expresses to attack, at other times to defend.'

‘To propugn.' How pretty. The plucked music of the last syllable. A useful iamb with meanings so diverse it suggested within itself a world of opposites, an occasion on which the poet would be utterly puzzled yet delighted with the ambiguity.

How full. How fine to have a word that can mean its own antonym, a word to confuse the reader by its numerous possibilities, too many even to be categorized by the grandson of the first great verbal organizer, Peter Mark Roget.

‘Think of the critic,' Maud said. ‘Propugn, he writes in his knowledgeable exegesis of the poet's work. Propugn is the emblem of the poet's genius, the layers of connotation embodied in his word choice. Her? Will the critic ever have occasion,' she wondered, ‘to say “her” and mean poets in general? A cello word, a pungent, crafty word. A word singled out by John Mark from the millions of other words in his grandfather's word piles for special notice so that she, by pure chance, was able to find the dactylic ambiguity she was searching for, the word for something like protection.
Sanctuary
.'

Other books

Resolution by Ben Winston
Teach Me by Steele, Amy Lynn
041 Something to Hide by Carolyn Keene
The Erotic Dark by Nina Lane