* * *
The presence behind the door came and went. It was there, and then it wasn’t there. I talked my way inside whenever I felt it, using my reason to trump the potent sensation. I continued to think of the presence as a speechless version of Mr. Nobody, a nut who sent regular messages but had shifted his tone from harassing mean guy to borderline philosopher, which again made me suspect Leonard. “Reality is immaterial, made from events, actions, potentialities. Regard these mysterious subjectivities that alter the mind-world, the Zeno effect! Relay this to Izcovich, your faithless spouse. Yours, Nobody.”
Annoyed and upset by the reference to Boris, I quickly typed a response and sent it, regretting it instantly: Who are you and what do you want from me?
* * *
“I knew he had a temper when I married him,” Lola said late in the afternoon while Simon dozed on her knees and Flora jumped in and out of a small turquoise blow-up pool. “But I didn’t have kids then. Flora gets so scared.” These three sentences seemed to float in the hot air between us, and I felt sad. I wanted to say, But he doesn’t hit anyone, right? He’s not violent? The questions that rose up sank back inside me, and I never pronounced the words. Lola was wearing a green bathing suit, sunglasses, and a baseball cap. Her body hadn’t entirely lost the swollen proportions of pregnancy, and her breasts were large with milk. She was a hefty girl, but looking at her I found her attractive. I guessed it was her youth—her smooth skin, her curves, her unlined face, with its gray eyes, slightly flat nose, and full lips—no part of her had succumbed to age, no brown spots or protruding veins or wrinkles or drooping skin.
“I wonder if she’ll ever take off that wig. Pete hates it. I keep telling him, who cares? She doesn’t wear it to church. I think he wanted a sweet little thing…” Lola didn’t finish. “He worries there’s something wrong with her, hyperactivity or something.”
Flora was engrossed in giving Giraffeyather violent bath. She was kneeling in the pool, bouncing him up and down as she sang, “Da, da, little Giraffey-boo. Bumba, bumba! Baby, you!” Giraffey was left floating, face down, and Flora began a new game—she lay back on her elbows and kicked vigorously enough to spray water onto my legs. “Watch, Mom! Look, Mom. Look, Mia!”
My feelings about Pete grew darker. What an idiot.
Pete’s son squirmed into wakefulness. He waved his small fists in front of his face, began stretching his knees and spine, and by the time I held him only minutes later he was fully conscious, his dark eyes like seeds locked into mine. I stroked the down on his head, examined his mouth pursing and grimacing. I spoke to him and he answered me with small sounds. After a time, he turned and began to root for food, and I felt the shadow of a familiar sensation in my breasts, a bodily memory. I handed him to Lola. Once her son was comfortably nursing, she looked over at me and said, “He didn’t want her at first. I got pregnant. We were already going to get married, it wasn’t that. It was too soon for him.” Lola leaned back in her chair. “Pete’s an anxious guy. I knew that, too. He had an older sister who was born with lots of things wrong with her and really retarded. They had to put her in a home. She never learned to walk or talk or anything. She died when she was seven. Pete doesn’t like to talk about it.” Lola examined her nail polish. “His dad never went to see her, not once. The whole thing was really awful for his mom. You can imagine.”
I could imagine. I looked up at the clouds, a dense cirrus configuration, and, as I watched a head dangling long streams of hair break away very slowly from a long attenuated neck, I realized that I had been more comfortable with the angry cipher Pete than with this new person, the young man with the dead sister.
It may have been the general emptiness of the view—corn and sky. It may have been the heat or my own quiet desperation or simply a need to fill the irremediably dull present with bluster and blabber, but when Lola asked me about life in New York, I regaled her with one story after another and listened to her laugh. I emphasized the crass, the prurient, and the outlandish. I turned the city into a nonstop carnival of poseurs, hucksters, and clowns whose pratfalls and escapades made for high entertainment. I told her about Charlie and Wayne, two poets who nearly came to blows over Ezra Pound one long-day’s-journey-into-a-drunken-night but ended up in a literal pissing contest on the roof of a building in SoHo. I told her about Miriam Hunt, the aging heiress with the big bucks, little boobs, surgical face, and Hermès bags, who true to her name stalked young male scientists eager for her money by sidling up to them and breathing sweet somethings into their ears: “How much did you say the research project you’re proposing would cost?” I told her about my friend Rupert, who, halfway through a sex-change operation, stopped, deciding that two-in-one was the way to go. I told her about the octogenarian billionaire I sat next to at a fund-raising dinner who farted and sighed, farted and sighed, farted some more and sighed some more throughout the entire meal, as if he were home alone on the toilet. I told her about my homeless pal, Frankie, whose children, brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, and uncles died at a rate of about two a week after contracting colorful or rare diseases, including scurvy, leprosy, dengue fever, Klinefelter’s syndrome, tospirosis, fatal familial insomnia, and Chagas disease. Indeed, Frankie’s supply of relatives was so great, he forgot the names of the recent dead between our meetings on Seventh Avenue.
Lola’s eyes gleamed with pleasure and interest as she listened to my tales of the cosmopolitans, all of them true but all fictions nevertheless. Shorn of intimacy and seen from a considerable distance, we are all comic characters, farcical buffoons who bumble through our lives, making fine messes as we go, but when you get close, the ridiculous quickly fades into the sordid or the tragic or the merely sad. It doesn’t matter whether you are stuck in the provincial backwater of Bonden or wandering down the Champs-Élysées. The merely sad business about me was that I wanted to be admired, wanted to see myself as a shining reflection in Lola’s eyes. I was no different from Flora. Watch me, Mommy! Look at me do a cartwheel, Dad! Watch Mia do verbal dances in Sheri and Allan Burda’s weedy backyard embellished with one swiftly sagging kiddy pool.
* * *
That night I received a message from Boris informing me that Roger Dapp was returning from London, which meant that he was losing his temporary digs and would be moving in with the Pause. For the time being, this was “practical.” He wanted me to know. It was only “fair.” I took it like a woman. I wept.
You may well wonder why I wanted Boris at all, a man who tells his still-wife that he’s shacking up with his new squeeze for “practical” reasons, as if this shocking new arrangement is simply a matter of New York real estate. I wondered why I wanted him myself. Had Boris left me after two years or even ten, the damage would have been considerably less. Thirty years is a long time, and a marriage acquires an ingrown, almost incestuous quality, with complex rhythms of feeling, dialogue, and associations. We had come to the point where listening to a story or anecdote at a dinner party would simultaneously prompt the same thought in our two heads, and it was simply a matter of which one of us would articulate it aloud. Our memories had also begun to mingle. Boris would swear up and down that he was the one who came upon the great blue heron standing on the doorstep of the house we rented in Maine, and I am just as certain that I saw the enormous bird alone and told him about it. There is no answer to the riddle, no documentation—just the flimsy, shifting tissue of remembering and imagining. One of us had listened to the other tell the story, had seen in his or her mind the encounter with the bird, and had created a memory from the mental images that accompanied the heard narrative. Inside and outside are easily confused. You and I. Boris and Mia. Mental overlap.
I didn’t tell my mother about the new status of the Pause. It would have made it real, more real than I was willing to accept at the moment. Too bad I’m real, Flora had said. She had wanted to climb into the little house and live with her toys. Too bad I’m not a character in a book or a play, not that things go so well for most
of them, but then I could be written elsewhere. I will write myself elsewhere, I thought, reinvent the story in a new light: I am better off without him. Did he ever do a domestic chore in his life besides the dishes? Did he or did he not tune you out regularly as if you were a radio? Did he not interrupt you in mid-sentence countless times as if you were an airy nothing, a Ms. Nobody, a Missing Person at the table? Are you not “still beautiful” in the words of your mother? Are you not still capable of great things?
The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Mia Fredricksen, who was Born in Bonden, and during a Life of Continu’d Variety for Threescore Years, Besides Her Childhood, Was Poetic Paramour and Mistress to Various and Sundry, Thirty Years a Wife (to Naturalist and Scoundrel), at Last Gained Riches and Renown from the Concerted Efforts of Her Pen, Liv’d Mostly Honest, and Died Impenitent.
Or: “No one knew who Fredricksen was. She rode into the village of Bonden in the summer of 2009, a quiet stranger who kept her well-oiled Colt in her saddle roll, but could use it to deadly effect when the need arose.”
Or: “I distinguished her step, restlessly measuring the floor, and she frequently broke the silence by a deep inspiration, resembling a groan. She muttered detached words; the only one I could catch was the name of Boris, coupled with some wild term of endearment or suffering, and spoken as one would speak to a person present—low and earnest, and wrung from the depth of her soul.” Mia as Heathcliff—a terrible, sneering corpse become ghost, who haunts a Manhattan apartment on East Seventieth Street, returning again and again to torment Izcovich and his Pause.
* * *
The whole story is in my head, isn’t it? I am not so philosophically naïve as to believe that one can establish some empirical reality of THE STORY. We can’t even agree on what we remember, for God’s sake. We were in a taxi when the ten-year-old Daisy announced her theatrical ambitions. No, we were in the subway. Cab. Subway. Cab! The problem was that any number of Borises were IN MY HEAD. He was running around all over the place. Even if I never saw him in the flesh again, Boris as thought machinery was inevitable. How many times had he rubbed my feet while we watched a film together, patiently kneading and stroking the soles and the toes and the once-badly-broken ankle pained by arthritis? How many times had he looked up at me after I had washed his hair in the bathtub with the expression of a happy child? How many times had he embraced and rocked me after a rejection letter arrived? That was Boris, too, you see. That was Boris, too.
* * *
I arrived a couple of minutes late to class. On the steps I heard peals of laughter, shrieks, and the familiar mocking singsong sound of “Oh my Gawd!” The instant I entered the room, the girls went silent. As I approached them, I saw that all eyes were on me and that there was something lying in the middle of the table: a spotty wad. What was it? A bloody Kleenex.
“Did someone have a bloody nose?”
Silence. I looked around at their seven closed faces and a phrase I hadn’t used since childhood came into my mind: What gives? No noses limpaired in any way. I took hold of a still pristine part of the soiled paper between my thumb and index finger and escorted it to the wastebasket. I then asked if anyone would like to enlighten me about the “the mystery of the bloody Kleenex,” while a mental image of Nancy Drew in her blue roadster zoomed by.
“We found it there,” Ashley said, “when we came in, but it was so gross no one wanted to touch it. The janitor or somebody must have put it there.”
I saw Jessie press her lips together hard.
“Disgusting,” Emma said. “How could anybody just leave it out like that?”
Alice stared rigidly at the table.
Nikki glanced at the wastebasket and made a face. “Some people just aren’t clean.”
Joan nodded in eager assent. Peyton looked embarrassed.
“There are many things worse than a Kleenex with a little blood on it. Let’s get to the real business of the day: nonsense.”
I was armed with poems: nursery rhymes, Ogden Nash, Christopher Isherwood, Lewis Carroll, Antonin Artaud, Edward Lear, Gerard Manley Hopkins. I hoped to move their attention from wastepaper to the pleasures of subverting meaning. We all wrote. The girls appeared to have fun, and I praised Peyton’s “tasty” poem.
Oohen the goohen in mouther sway
Licken and sticken and wulpen it im,
I dub the doben and dub the crim.
Luffen my muffin, foray!
Near the end of class, when Alice was reading her rather sad nonsense, “Lones in the wild ravage…,” Ashley began to cough, hard. She apologized, said she needed a drink, and left the room.
When class was over, they all rushed out, except Alice, who lingered. Although morose, she looked particularly pretty that day in a white T-shirt and shorts, and I walked over to her and was just about to speak when I heard someone behind me.
It turned out to be Jessie’s mother, a rotund woman in her thirties, her dark blond hair styled and sprayed. Her expression informed me instantly that she was on a mission of great seriousness. Neither Jessie’s mother nor Jessie herself, it seemed, had expected my kind of poetry class. It had come to her attention that I had given the girls a poem by, long breath, “D. H. Lawrence.” The writer’s name alone, it appeared, augured peril forhe goheretofore-unpollinated imaginations of the Bonden flowers. When I explained that “Snake” was a poem about a man attentively watching the animal and his guilt for frightening it, her jaw locked. “We have our beliefs,” she said. The woman did not look stupid. She looked dangerous. In Bonden, a rumor, a bit of gossip, even outright slander could spread with preternatural speed. I mollified her, asserting my great respect for beliefs of all kinds—an outright lie—and by the end of our conversation, I felt I had assuaged her worries. One sentence has stayed with me, however: “God is frowning on this, I tell you. He’s frowning.” I saw him, Mrs. Lorquat’s own God the Father filling the sky, a clean-shaven chap in a suit and tie, brow furrowed, implacably stern, an utterly humorless lover of mediocrity, God as the quintessential American reviewer.
When I looked for Alice, she had disappeared.
* * *
I confess now that I had already entered into a correspondence with Mr. Nobody. In response to my inquiry as to who he was and what he wanted, he had written, “I am any one of your voices, take your pick, an oracular voice, a plebian voice, an orator-for-the-ages voice, a girl’s voice, a boy’s voice, a woof, a howl, a tweet. Hurtful, coddling, angry, kind, I am the voice from Nowhere come to speak to you.”
I fell for it, pushed by my loneliness, a particular kind of aching mental loneliness. Boris had been my husband, but he had also been my interlocutor. We taught each other and, without him, I had no one to dance with anymore. I wrote to poet friends, but most of them were locked into the poetry world as much as most of Boris’s colleagues had been neuro shut-ins. This Nobody fellow was a leaper and a twister. He hopped from Leibniz’s Monadology to Heisenberg and Bohr in Copenhagen to Wallace Stevens almost without taking a breath and, despite his loopiness, I found myself entertained and wrote back, coming at him with counterthoughts and new spiraling arguments. He was an adamant anti-materialist, that much I gathered. He spat on physicalists, such as Daniel Dennett and Patricia Churchland, touting a post-Newtonian world that had left substance in the dust. An intellectual omnivore who seemed to have pressed himself to the limits of his own whirling brain, he wasn’t well, but he was fun. When I wrote to him, I always saw a picture of Leonard. Most of us need an image, after all, a someone to see, and that was how I gave Mr. Nobody a face.