Authors: Natalie Goldberg
A month later, Gauguin and I visited Alice’s grave. We could walk on top of the frozen snow. The headstone was buried in the drifts, but we stood near where we thought it was. Gauguin carried a bouquet of early daffodils that were already freezing. He placed them on the ground in an empty mayonnaise jar he had brought with him. Through the thin branches I watched the sun leave the city and sink behind the lake. The jar fell over and the yellow flowers lay in a field of white. Gauguin’s lower lip trembled the whole time we were there, but he didn’t cry. I noticed that he hadn’t shaved in several days: Red stubble sprouted from his chin and cheeks, and he looked a lot older than when I had first met him in Taos.
That night at midnight I woke up, stone cold, and felt a deep crack from throat to groin opening inside me. In that instant I knew simply and clearly that I was experiencing the moment Alice had left her body. She wanted someone on earth to know how she felt, and she had chosen me because I was the other woman in the immediate family, and, I think, because she did not want to burden her son even further. It did not matter that it had been a month since she died. Time does not matter to the dead. It was just important that someone felt it, and I was chosen, not out of logic but out of connection. Though Gauguin was sleeping next to me, he did not wake up and I didn’t ever tell him about it. I was afraid Gauguin would think I was crazy—or even worse, he might have regretted missing one last chance to be with her or been jealous that it had been me who was chosen.
R
IP DIED TWO MONTHS
after Alice did, on a yacht near the Madeira Islands off the coast of Portugal. Crushing a Marlboro into a clear glass ashtray in the lower cabin, he turned to his new girlfriend, Sarah, who was lying next to him with her blond hair spread out on the white pillow. “This is the last damn cigarette I’m ever going to smoke,” he said. He reached for the silver cord to turn out the light and pulled it a little too hard. As the light extinguished, he let out a loud scream. That was it. A massive heart attack. He was already dead when he vomited. Sarah caught the scream and kept it in her mouth. She held its sound for a long time afterward. I bet some part of her is still tasting it.
The police packed Rip into a big black plastic bag and sat him upright in the window seat next to Sarah in the small prop plane that flew them to Lisbon.
We were at home when the phone rang. “Sarah! Aren’t you on a boat?” Gauguin asked.
“Your father is dead.” The words smacked Gauguin into another world from where he stood by our couch in the plain Midwest. His face twisted the way his father’s had when he’d chewed at a cigar. I turned to watch a crow fly by the living room window.
“Rip’s dead?” Gauguin said. The room exploded with the silence of gladioli. I walked across that silence to touch him, but he was breathing so hard that I knew nothing could touch his sorrow, and I stepped back.
The phone connection had a lot of static, so Sarah yelled into the receiver. I could hear her from halfway across the room.
“The Madeiras are Portuguese, so they won’t let the body go right away unless we cremate it,” she informed Gauguin.
“Bring my father home!” Gauguin screamed.
“He’s dead. He’s not coming home.” I’d never heard Sarah be so honest.
Then Gauguin said quietly, “Do what you have to,” and I saw in that moment he was thinking of Alice—that Rip had died in someone else’s arms.
Two days later, we waited for Sarah’s plane to land. Gauguin and I stood by gate seven and passed a can of Coke back and forth between us. The sky was overcast and even at midnight it felt gray. Through the window we watched Sarah’s small body walk across the runway to the waiting room. In her arms she lovingly held a small square box. She bent four times to kiss it before she entered the brightly lit airport and handed the box to Gauguin.
“Here’s your father,” she said.
We drove Sarah home and sat at her kitchen table while she recalled every detail. “One of the last things your father said to me was, ‘Honey, we’re going to be together a long time.’ ” Gauguin threw his eyes down at the carpet. Sarah continued, “The day before he died, he navigated the boat.” Sarah cocked her head to one side to see Rip better in her mind’s eye. “Yes, he looked very nautical that day.”
“Gauguin, it’s getting late. We should go,” I said to interrupt her. We kissed her good-bye, thanked her, and rode down the elevator with the box between us.
At home we put the box on the kitchen table and lit incense. It was wrapped in paper that looked like imitation wood. Gauguin just stared at it. “This is my father?”
“Do you want something to eat?” It felt like a dumb response, but I knew Gauguin hadn’t eaten since lunch.
“Yeah.” He looked up. “I’d love something.”
I took some leftover chicken out of the fridge.
“Where should I put it?” I asked, holding a red plate of roasted wings and breasts.
“I guess over there.” He nodded at the table where the box was.
“You sure?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “I guess.”
We sat at the table in front of Rip’s box and a huge hunger overtook us. We tore at the chicken with our hands.
“This can’t be real,” Gauguin said as he yanked a piece of meat off a drumstick.
The box was a strange dinner guest, a silent shadow of his father. We both were in a frenzy. No amount of food could fill us.
“This sounds nuts, Nell, but let’s go to bed.” Gauguin licked his greasy fingers. “What better way to make tribute to Rip?”
I laughed, a little hysterically. “Okay. What should we do with the box?”
“Bring it in?”
“You’re kidding.” My stomach turned. “I can’t do that. That’s sick.”
“I can’t either. It was a bad joke.” Gauguin got up and blew out the candle. “Good night, Rip.” His lips trembled.
He took my hand. We turned, leaving the box and the plate of chicken bones on the table.
I stopped. “Wait. We should clear the table. It doesn’t seem right.”
We carried the plates to the sink and then went into the bedroom. We crawled between the cold sheets and clung to each other. Gauguin was trembling. We made love desperately, urgently, as if it were the only thing that would keep us alive.
When Gauguin poured himself into me, I pictured beaver swimming upstream. I knew if I didn’t get pregnant that night, in spite of the diaphragm, I never would.
Three days later, we buried the box at the veterans’ cemetery near a 7-Eleven in Bloomington off Interstate 35. Camille rode a train all night from Indiana to come to the funeral. A thin rain fell and made the edges of the grave soft.
Camille kept asking, “Why isn’t there a preacher?” We didn’t have the heart to tell her Rip had been an atheist, though in her heart she knew, so we all clasped hands and sang the Lord’s Prayer. We filled the hole with red carnations and each of us took a turn throwing in a shovelful of dirt.
Gauguin was first. Through the ceremony he had been dry-eyed, but when the dirt fell to the bottom of the hole, he started to sob. “Rip,” he called down into the hole, “I love you.”
Someone handed him a Kleenex, and an old friend of the family took the shovel from him and passed it to Camille, helping her scoop up some dirt.
I stepped forward. “Gauguin,” I said.
He threw his arms around me and wept on my shoulder.
After the funeral, Rip’s employees threw a champagne party at his architecture studio. Near his large white desk flicked slides of Rip at the Louvre in Paris, which he had visited two years earlier. There was Rip, standing by the Mona Lisa; there he was, by the Venus de Milo; and then in a flash he was contemplating Picasso’s two-breasted, two-eyed twisted woman.
I sat by the window and looked across Washington Avenue at the Northwest Bank. Then I got up and walked into the other room, where platters of rolled slices of roast beef, ham, and turkey were spread out. I spied Camille at the center of a small group. Everyone wanted to meet her. Rip had talked about her all the time. She had never visited Minneapolis while he was alive. She cocked her head to one side and listened to whatever people said about her son, as if their memories could bring him back to life.
Suddenly, Gauguin approached me from behind. Breathing heavily, he firmly grasped my elbow and led me to the elevator. He pressed the tenth floor button, and when we got in, he shoved me against the wall. We rode up and down the shaft with his body pressed against mine and his tongue deep inside my mouth. He was sweating so hard his white shirt became transparent. There was a yearning in him that could have walked through walls. Tears ran down his face and his nose was running.
“Nell,” he said finally, “everything’s over. My whole life. First Alice, now Rip. I can’t work here—I don’t belong in this state. Both my parents are gone. I’m all washed out.” He leaned against the mirrored back wall and waited for the elevator to open. We’d already ridden up and down three times.
Gauguin had asked the authorities at the veterans’ cemetery if his dad could have “artist” written on the gravestone—Rip had hated the army and during World War II had suffered a depression so strong, he’d been discharged at Camp Douglas. They said yes but they must have made a mistake, because when the stone was erected it read, “Raymond ‘Rip’ Howard II, Third Infantry, First Legion. 1915–1980.”
When Gauguin saw the stone, he said, “Now it’s up to me.” His hand opened and closed in a fist.
I
N THE MIDDLE
of April, Gauguin and I drove up to Gull Lake, near Nisswa in northern Minnesota. The proprietor of the place where we stayed couldn’t believe that anyone would come farther north just when the cold was breaking down in the Twin Cities. We were the only ones at the resort cabins, and the canoes hadn’t been taken out of the boathouse yet.
We took photos of each other for the first time in our whole relationship. We had never had a camera before, but now we used Rip’s, which had become Gauguin’s. I took a photo of him eating breakfast the first morning. Fried eggs and potatoes, Sara Lee coffee cake, sliced oranges, English muffins, and coffee were laid out on the table, and I captured it all. He looked straight at the camera, his eyes weary and his smile twisted to one side of his face. He was pale, so his freckles stood out especially dark. I gulped, seeing him so haggard through the lens, and snapped his picture.
We hiked in a nearby birch forest, where one tree duplicated the next mile after mile. Gauguin walked in front, a slim backpack jogging to and fro on his back. We stopped in the austere April woods and toked on a joint. The monotony of trees only multiplied in my stoned eyes and none of them sprouted leaves.
We made love every night of that vacation out of an old memory of our bodies. After that driven sex we had when Rip died, our passion seemed to evaporate. We were two human beings who didn’t quite know what to do with each other anymore. We went through the motions of sex like a biology manual: Male genital organ is inserted into female organ until semen is secreted. The bed was soft in the cabin and Gauguin caved in on me.
On the last day we sat outside leaning against the wall of the cabin, gathering the pale sunlight into our faces.
“Nell,” Gauguin said, and paused. “I’ve got to change my life. I feel like I’m dying just like my parents, going under with them. And we’re dying, too—you and me. We don’t get along anymore.”
“No, we don’t,” I said, resigned.
“I’ve got to move out.” He turned to me. “I’ve got to take some kind of action with my life.” I knew it wasn’t a threat. It was quieter than that.
I looked out at Gull Lake. It was still and blue and inviting, but I knew it was as cold as a refrigerator. I got up, walked off a little, pulled down my pants, squatted, and peed. The pee steamed as it hit the ground. Gauguin snapped my picture. When I heard the camera click, I turned to him with an already faraway smile. He clicked the camera again.
On the way home, we stopped at a small café in Barrows, Minnesota. We examined the menu. Among selections of club sandwiches and casseroles was a Reuben sandwich. Gauguin pointed to it and said, “This is for those of ethnic persuasion,” and we both laughed. It was the only time we laughed on the whole trip.
Then Gauguin took a picture of me standing under the marquee of a closed movie theater that read,
“Gone With the Wind”
the last movie that had played there. Next to the movie theater was a drugstore that Gauguin said was the perfection of the Midwest.
I looked at it—square, light green storefront, a red Rexall sign, and a gray sidewalk—and agreed. I snapped a photo of it.
Then we drove straight back to Minneapolis. The plum tree in our back yard was blooming. As we unloaded the car, Gauguin peeked through the white blossoms, wearing a green leather jacket that he had inherited from Rip, and I snapped our last picture. His lips were full, the way Alice’s were when she was about to kiss, but his tender face was blown away.
A
S
G
AUGUIN CARRIED
his suitcases out the back door, I bent over the vegetable garden, dropping small round spinach seeds into the line I had made with my finger in the soil. I barely looked up. He carried the suitcases to the garage, opened the garage door, put the suitcases in the trunk of his car, and drove down the alley. I planted two more rows of spinach and one of carrots. When I went to get the hoe, I noticed he had chipped some yellow paint off the garage door frame as he pulled away. I thought of repairing it soon.
After the planting I washed my hands, and the dirt ran dark against the white porcelain sink. I turned on the living-room light, sat down on the couch, and picked at the already peeling white paint on the windowsill. Now that Gauguin was gone, the apartment seemed empty.
When the garden began to sprout a month later, it looked as if a child had planted it—there wasn’t one straight row. Carrots popped up among the spinach, spinach grew in the broccoli, and many of the seeds never came up at all. Empty patches everywhere were eventually taken over by weeds.
For six weeks I was as dry and stiff as a bone. I came home from school and flopped onto the living-room couch. I stared out the window. The sky was gray, and it began to rain. I watched the drops hit the glass and run down to the sill.