Banana Rose (34 page)

I wanted to be out in that rain, to let it refresh me. I got up, put on a pair of worn sneakers and my old yellow slicker, and went out the door. I walked across the overpass to I-94 and onto Seward Avenue. The rain beat furiously on the asphalt and filled the gutter. I was completely alone for the first time in my life.

Let’s see, I said to myself. Rip’s dead, Alice is dead, Gauguin no longer lives with you. Come on, Nell, here’s your chance to become a tragic painter. As I walked, I picked out colors and planned paintings in my head with them. Green, a meadow; blue, a sky; lavender, an iris. Oh, Nell, how conventional. Try again. Pink, a rabbit; lime, an avocado; white, a dead rat. As I stood on the corner, a woman walked by carrying a red umbrella. A whole world rippled through me: The red rose that unfolded before me on that first acid trip so many years ago, the red marble I stole for my sister, Rita, because her favorite color was red. My favorite color had been red, too, but I couldn’t be the same as Rita. I’d told her my favorite was green.

As my legs carried me automatically, I developed a plan. I’d walk all the way up to Hennepin Avenue to Schlamp’s Department Store. Only a town in the Midwest would have a store called Schlamp’s. No one ever seemed to go in it to shop, and no one ever came out. I decided to go in it and see what they sold.

As I passed Portland Avenue, I began to feel an aching in my heart. It was the same old dilemma—Gauguin versus Taos—but now I didn’t have either one. That thought stopped me dead in the middle of the street. Nell, go home, go paint, I told myself. There’s really nothing else to do.

When I arrived home, I stood in front of the canvas for almost five minutes as my breathing became thick. Suddenly, a huge scream came out of me, and I grabbed the big wide paintbrush Gauguin had used to paint houses with in Boulder. I stuck it in black paint and smushed it in the middle of the white. I screamed and grunted as I flew at the black with red, then orange, and then a deep purple. Sight left me. I traveled on waves of grief and longing.

When I was finished, I fell to the floor, my face in my arms, and cried. I didn’t care what the painting looked like. My marriage was over.

O
NE
W
EDNESDAY IN EARLY
October I was sitting alone in one of the high wooden booths in the Meat Cleaver Café on Seward Avenue, eating a fat hamburger and sipping a Coke. I wasn’t sure if I was alive or dead. Teaching had been hard that day. Maurice was in my class for a third year. His mother had gone crazy the night before and attacked her husband’s girlfriend with an ice pick.

Maurice shook his head and out of the blue said out loud to himself, “But Mama promised me potato chips. A whole bag of my own. And I didn’t get them.”

Maurice bit his nails so badly that day, his fingers were bleeding. When the bell rang for lunch, he looked up hopefully.

I shook my head. “No potato chips today, Maurice, and I noticed you didn’t finish your vocabulary test.”

I was tough, because underneath I was crumbling. I couldn’t stand sleeping alone at night while Maurice’s father had two women.

I asked the waitress for a small bag of potato chips to go with my hamburger. I put the bag in my purse. I’d give it to Maurice tomorrow if he finished his vocabulary test. Heck, I’d give it to him anyway.

I overheard a couple in the next booth talking about musicians: Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Hank Williams. The man then said, “I sometimes think alcoholics are just more intense people that don’t know how to cool out.

That was a theory Gauguin had. I stopped chewing the hunk of hamburger meat and white bread bun that was mashed in my mouth. Was that Gauguin in the next booth? Naa, Gauguin wouldn’t come to the Meat Cleaver. The sandwiches were too expensive.

The next booth was silent for a moment. Then I heard two beer bottles clink. A female voice said, “Here’s to you.”

I lifted my body just enough so my eyes saw the tops of the two heads in the next booth. Two redheads. My brain revolved like a slot machine in a casino. It stopped at the jackpot. It was Gauguin!

The mass of food in my mouth fell out. My nose began to bleed and my eyes watered. I stood up. I hadn’t taken off my navy wool coat, just unbuttoned it. I turned and walked straight for the door as though I were in a trance. There was a crowd of people near the entrance. The expression on my face, the tears, the blood, must have caused immediate compassion, if not horror. They parted for me like the Red Sea.

I was outside. The cool night air was a great relief. I’d left my purse in the booth, but my car keys were in my coat pocket. I’d call the next day, pick up the purse, and pay for the hamburger. The truth was, if my purse were stolen, I didn’t care.

A week later, Gauguin sat in our old kitchen. Daylight was already gone, but it was too early to switch on the electric lights. The white walls were blue-gray. I told him I wanted a divorce.

“What? Why?” he asked. Then he put his head on the table and cried.

I flicked on the bulb.

Gauguin lifted his head off the table. “I’m not sure yet that I want one,” he said.

I looked him straight in the eye. “I want a divorce,” I said firmly, as though each word were a nail I was drilling into his forehead. I wanted to hurt him for that redhead at the Meat Cleaver Café. I wanted to pull the kitchen cabinets down, smashing everything I once loved.

In December I went to divorce court without him—as a favor. He’d been to court so many times to clear up Rip’s and Alice’s estates after they died that he couldn’t face another judge.

Marian took the day off work and came with me. We drove in her car down Hennepin Avenue to the courthouse.

“Marian, this is really nice of you,” I said. Her kindness always amazed me.

“What are neighbors for?”

That morning it seemed all of downtown was a parking lot. “Five Dollars for All-Day Parking, Three for Half-Day.” After we parked in a dollar-an-hour lot, we cut across empty car spaces toward the ten-story courthouse. As we got closer, the building’s shadow covered us. We entered, rode the elevator up to the eighth floor, and walked down a long carpeted hall. In the courtroom, Marian and I sat in the third row on a long wooden seat. Soon it was my turn to walk up to the bench.

The judge asked me to sit down. I took a seat on his left and looked straight ahead. “Now, why exactly are George Howard and Nell Schwartz getting divorced?” he asked.

The smell of sage swam across the courtroom. I wanted to tell him that when Gauguin played his sparkling trumpet, it was like water running in an arroyo, and that he and I had split cedar logs open with an ax, and that the logs had bloodred hearts and smelled like strong wind.

The judge asked, “Do you feel comfortable with the division of property?”

I looked at the white wall at the back of the courtroom and saw two eagles circling Taos Mountain.

“Do you agree to the dissolution of this marriage?”

I wanted to tell the judge that we loved each other. That we ate peyote one night in a white tipi and became fire drowning in stone. I wanted to tell him there is another place and it is not in this place.

“Please sign your name here. Ms. Schwartz, do you hear me?”

I heard water. It was running over the rocks in the Rio Chiquita. I heard coyotes in Talpa behind Blue’s house and I saw stars climb over the Pedernal in Abiquiu.

When I got up from the chair and walked down the aisle toward the back door, I was no longer human. I had become a robot, drained of emotion. Marian followed me out.

“You did great.” She patted me on the shoulder.

I turned to her and noticed that the muscles in my face that create a smile were gone. I saw her alarmed expression, but I didn’t care.

I sat in the passenger seat of her car. “What do you want to do?” she asked.

“Take me someplace,” I said. I looked straight ahead out the window.

We drove over the Mendota Bridge to a wildlife reserve on the Minnesota River. We walked through leafless bushes and trees. The sky was its usual gray.

“Nell,” Marian called, and I turned to look behind me. Marian pulled a silver wrapper out of her pocket. “It’s chocolate from Switzerland. I bought it at Dayton’s Department Store.”

Something in me stirred. “Chocolate?”

Marian opened the silver paper. The dark chocolate shone like an ancient god. Marian extended her hand, and I took two squares and carried them the five hundred miles to my mouth. As I moved them past my teeth and lips to my tongue, I remembered what had happened three Sundays ago.

It was three in the afternoon, and I’d been sitting on the living-room couch, remembering how good lovemaking was with Gauguin. It had been a long time since we had touched. Suddenly I walked across the room, picked up the phone, and dialed his number. Before that moment, I had hardly called him. If I bumped into him on the street, I was very brusque. It hurt too much to see him.

The phone rang twice. “Hello?” It was his voice. He lived in a one-room apartment four blocks away.

“Hello?” He said it again.

“Gauguin.” I said his name.

“Nell.”

“Gauguin, I want to make love with you. I thought I’d come over right now. We could do it and then I could leave.” I couldn’t believe what I was saying.

“Are you kidding?” he asked, incredulous.

“No.” I was firm.

“Nell, I can’t do that. It’s opening a wound all over again.”

“Please.” I wasn’t begging. I said “please” like a fact. I wanted him.

“No, I’m sorry.” We hung up.

I went back and sat on the couch. My desire burned up the room. I knew he felt it four blocks down the street. The phone rang. I leaped up to answer it.

It was him. “Come over right now.” I ran down the back alley, past garages, through dried leaves, and around barbecue grills to his redbrick apartment house. I rang the bell for 4C; 4C rang back and I let myself in.

Gauguin flung the door open. We were in each other’s arms. We gulped each other up and ripped at each other’s clothes. I had half a blouse on, and he had his red shorts around his left ankle when we finally landed on the nearby couch. We came together in the ecstasy of marble cat eyes, the red irises twirling around and around.

As soon as it was over, I said, “I have to go.” I stood up and began to dress.

“C’mon, Nell. Give it some space,” Gauguin pleaded.

“I can’t.” I buttoned my blouse and left, walking briskly back down the back alleys. My hair was wild and I carried the smell of smoked melon musk on me.

I closed my mouth around the two square chocolates Marian had handed me. The memory of Gauguin and me dissolved. There was only my closed eyes and the darkness behind my lids. I had no idea what I was going to do with the rest of my life.

I
SIPPED A CUP
of Lipton’s tea. Then another cup. I didn’t even like the taste, but it had caffeine. I could have ordered coffee, but if I drank multiple cups of coffee, my blood would have buzzed like an old electric heater. Some caffeine was okay. Coffee was too much for my heavy heart. On the way to the Croissant House, I thought my heart would rip out of the casing in my chest and fall like a bowling ball at my feet. My only work in the two days since the divorce had been to lug around my heavy heart. It wanted to go nowhere. I finished my second cup of Lipton’s and took the third bite out of my second chocolate croissant.

I read the
National Enquirer.
The way I felt, the
National Enquirer
seemed true. A man in Arkansas had changed his nagging mother-in-law into a milk cow. That seemed like a good idea.

A bat in Los Angeles had flown into the bedroom of Liberace and made love to Hector, his favorite purple poodle. That was a good idea. Why couldn’t bats and dogs make love together? Maybe it would work out better than between two human beings.

A waitress in Kansas had discovered she was six months pregnant with an apple tree. After she found out, she refused to serve the apple turnovers the Grant Diner was famous for making. Her boss said, “We don’t care what you do with apples after hours, but on my time you serve those turnovers.” I liked her boss. He made a lot of sense. Business was business, after all.

I finished my croissant and eyed the muffins. It was ten in the morning. If I had been laughing as I read the N
ational Enquirer
, people might have relaxed, but because I read it dead seriously, they thought I was a pervert and circled far around my table when they passed.

I was devastated, not because of the tragedies in the
Enquirer
but because I was divorced. Everyplace I looked—at the man holding coins waiting for the public bus, at the young girl climbing onto the park bench, at the sparrow in the street—I saw death. I couldn’t believe that half of America had gone through this and the country was still surviving.

I put down the paper. Anna, I thought. Anna. I’ll call Anna. It was the first thought I had had besides death in forty-eight hours. My heart bristled a little at the edges at the echo of Anna’s name, but it was more like the wings of a heavy bird, dead on the highway, whose feathers flutter a moment from the movement of a passing Chevy. When I stood up, my heart, against its will, rose with my body. I paid for the tea and croissants, then dragged it out the door. I drove home, dialed Anna, and didn’t even care about there being cheaper long-distance rates after 5
P.M.

The phone rang loud and buzzy over the wires. It rang four times. I waited. I was going to let it ring until Anna answered, and I didn’t care if that took half a day.

She answered on the sixth ring. She didn’t like phones.

“Hello,” she said.

“Anna!” I screamed. “I divorced Gauguin two days ago.”

She didn’t hesitate. “Get a road map right now. I’ll go get mine.”

I didn’t ask any questions. I ran and got one off the bookshelf. “Now, let’s see which town is halfway between Minneapolis and Dansville.” I could feel her head bent over her atlas. She was quickly flipping pages.

“Nell, it’s Lakestone, Minnesota. Do you see it? In the southwest corner.”