The Unfinished World (6 page)

His name was Morris, and he was a pianist, yet another man who relied on his own two hands. She met him during her tour of Europe, the only traveling outside of the States she'd ever done. He was seated next to her at the Vienna Opera House during a performance of
Der Rosenkavalier
. When Octavian gave Sophie the silver rose, Morris reached over, a total stranger, and draped his long, long fingers casually over her upper thigh. She saw him again in front of Mozart's house, and he took her to his hotel and had her
on the floor of the tiny tiled bathroom. His fingers played her as expertly as a piano and she responded with fervor to each staccato note, each long sustain.

She failed to finish her tour and instead followed him home to Indiana, where he taught at a university. It lasted for six months but in the end he was too sure of himself and too angry to feel sure of anyone else. He accused her of unspeakable and untrue things. And then on a dark night, flat as the surrounding fields, he took a bottle of pills and died on the living room rug. His wrecked, ghostly face in death was the ugliest thing she'd ever seen. She fled that night, got on a bus and went back home to Clarence. Clarence, who after no word from her for months met her at the door with silence and a glass of bourbon. Clarence, who never asked where she had been.

Clarence has a lover's soul. That's what their father always said, but he understood it to be a weakness.

Clarence disagreed. It's the one thing that makes me really brave: love. It's the poetry of it, I suppose. The nobility. The inevitable tragedy.

Louise had laughed at the time. Tragedy? Clarence's idea of love consisted of one-night stands with the pretty farm girls who worked at Denny's during the winter. What was so noble about that? Human urges, that was all.

Clarence would laugh, too. As close as they were, he never told Louise his most terrible secret: he desperately wanted a love like Mother and Father. Even if, especially if, it meant the destruction that followed. He knew that Louise's forgiveness would never extend that far.

When the car pulls up and Tony gets out, Louise is watching from the upstairs bedroom. Her fingertips itch. She thinks of her father, of how he would tease her about these strange urges, how when she was little her fingers and toes would ache and she would long to fly. Use those restless limbs, he'd tell her, laughing. Shake the energy out of those fingers into this little squirrel. Make it dance like you want to.

She watches Clarence and Tony discussing payment. Ducks, embarrassed, as Tony looks up and sees her dark head aimed toward him. She pulls her hair over her face like a curtain and picks up a paintbrush. She can start working on some pigeon eyes. But her fingers are shaking, unsteady, and after a moment she puts down the paintbrush in disgust. She peeks up through her hair, sees Clarence getting into a heated discussion with the man in the truck with the gun. With Jackson.

This is new. She doesn't like this. She throws on a pair of pants, tucks her slip into them like an awkward, billowing shirt, and gallops down the stairs and through the door. Clarence and Jackson are howling at one another, no, rather, Clarence is howling and the man with the gun is pointing the gun at Clarence.

She throws her body uselessly in front of Clarence's, short enough to protect nothing but his least vital parts. Well, least vital for staying alive. Tony is standing to the side, leaning on the hood of the truck and laughing. Beautiful, Louise, he says. Very touching.

Fuck you, she says. What's going on here? She can feel Clarence shaking behind her, just a little. Jackson smiles, deadly calm. He clicks on the safety, puts the gun back down on his lap.

Nothing so much, he says. You just better tell your brother to be careful who he's fucking, so. He shrugs.

Louise turns to Clarence, looks the wide expanse upward at his face. What's this? Fucking who?

Clarence grabs her arm in a way that is most unlike him. Let's go inside. Let's just go inside.

She shakes his arm off, angry and hurt. Clarence has a secret? From her? He starts to stalk inside, tall and faster than she is, and she loses him in the hallway. What is going ON? she shouts, but he is gone inside his workroom and shutting the door in her face.
In her face.
This is new, too. She bangs on the door for a minute before giving up and heading back outside. She is not afraid of the man with the gun. She wants her money. But the truck is gone, and Jackson is gone, and Tony is gone.

This last is unexpectedly hard. She has no idea why it should be. Tony is a leather goon with a grin, that's all. Why should she want him here? Why should she want him at all? But she knows, with the ache in her fingers and toes, that she does. She wants him like she wanted to fly from the rooftop when she was ten, wants to throw her whole body into that catastrophe until she is utterly exhausted and dried up. She hasn't wanted anyone like this since Morris, and just like Clarence's rejection, she doesn't know what to make of it. The shape of her world is changing, off-kilter and blurred, astigmatic.

Mrs. Ralph Mattson arrives in the morning, her Little Boy Blue wrapped in a blanket and reeking already.

We had to observe the customary period of mourning, she explains. Louise nods and marches off to the freezer with the poor little dog. She calls for Clarence, then remembers about their almost-fight. She thinks she heard the car drive off last night. She wonders if he is having his love affair somewhere.

When she gets back, the old lady is wandering down the hall, examining the ships-in-bottles and sea battle dioramas. She murmurs in awe, suddenly child-eyed. This is always the way it is, here in this house, magical since Louise and Clarence were small. They preserve a world long gone in these long rooms, crowded now with dead objects and memories, long devoid of the softening gaze of cheerful people and their love for one another.

Once, when she was ten, Louise hated Clarence. Just for a day. She mixed her mother's underglazes in a bucket, hoping for something pretty, and was disappointed when the mixture turned a flat brown. When her mother found out, she locked the door of her studio and wouldn't speak to Louise for a week.

After a few days, Louise complained to Clarence. You deserve the silence, he said. You broke her special paints. I won't speak to you, either.

Louise's heart was a white-tipped, furious squall. She told Clarence this was what had happened to Mother and Father. Mother was full of silence and Father was full of guilt, and the air was so heavy with accusations between them it could never be cleared again. She spilled over with rage, spending it on lamps and tables and chairs, until Doctor Lloyd had to drive out and give her a shot to calm her down. Clarence came to see her that night, shamed and sorrowful.

I'm sorry, he said. I don't want to fight ever again. She held her drug-heavy hand over his golden head like a benediction. She was all too ready to forgive, and she told him she always would be. I will never hurt you with my silence, he said. I will never be like Mother.
He curled into her chest like a comma and let her sleepy strength wash over him, let it give him brave dreams.

The dark is heavy tonight; the stars have disappeared behind a wall of clouds. The air feels thick, like something is waiting to happen. Louise is up late because she is starting to be concerned. She is waiting with her heart hinged open for her brother to come home.

Noel calls, speaking in riddles at midnight. We'd like to create a chimera, he says. Can we do that?

Any impossible life is a chimera, Louise says.

Homer's chimera, says Noel. Part lion, part goat, part snake. Is that impossible life, then? Impossible for you?

Louise considers. She doesn't like the idea. It seems a mangling of nature, red in tooth and claw and refusing to be a sideshow. You know, she says, when explorers brought the first platypus back, scientists cut it apart looking for the stitches. They were sure someone had sewn a duck's bill on.

But couldn't you? asks Noel. Couldn't you make something new if you wanted to? Like being god, yeah?

Like being god, agrees Louise. She doesn't believe in god, but Noel already knows that. That isn't what he really means at all.

She imagines the chimera breathing fire behind the wall of clouds tonight, just beyond her vision. Just beyond what she can understand. She shivers and watches the driveway for any signs of life.