Bereavements (9 page)

Besides . . .

She couldn’t traffic in hearts, his or any other; not while Jamie’s still beat within her. Dead? Even his body, when she dared to look, remained exquisite, as perfect, untouched by time—she’d seen to that!—as the day, the hour, he’d been placed in the tomb, while his spirit, his quintessential self was as much alive in her as ever. Just as she had given him
out
to life with a cry of agony at birth, so too, she had taken him back
in,
in death, and in agony different, but no less severe. The womb that carried him now, nurtured him, the new gestation that would make his “death”-in-life a “life”-in-death, was of spirit, and mind, not body, his food passion, not blood: the kind of faith and madness that moved mountains into seas.

I’ll find a way!

Mrs. Evans jolted into consciousness with a small breathless cry, disoriented, not knowing what had happened.

She glanced down.

Dear Bruno . . .

But she had begun the letter at eleven-thirty and it was now well past midnight!

She felt depleted, drained; her forehead and the corners of her mouth were wet. This was the third time in the past month “it” had happened. Troubled, she dried herself, again remembering the interview, fake or genuine, with Mrs. Luz: the contorted face, the trace of foam upon the pale lips, a shattered voice evoking the “dead” with an impressive prelude of barking gibberish and garish “evidence.”

Had she been doing that too?—fake or genuine—imagining or discovering a capacity, a growing talent—whatever its name—to do the same? And would she soon be hearing voices, moving objects with her eyes, hanging misty cords of ectoplasm in the air like wash upon a line? Either way, wasn’t it a shocking joke, a warp of mind, another symptom (as Robert would say) of her indulgent Jamie-madness?

“Carma! Bury him; be done with it!”

Done with what?—the foolish man! She hadn’t buried Jamie, and never would. She had glorified him. But was she now hopelessly, helplessly beginning to drown in her own poetry of death?

If she didn’t get help, or couldn’t, or manage someway to help herself, if she could not
be
where she was, and
do, for the living,
what needed to be done—through these absurd letters, if need be: through “Bruno,” “Angel,” whomever and whatever, then she knew she’d continue her increasing blackouts, and her dazed night-long wandering through the Village streets, or—more likely—be waking Dori at one, two, three in the morning, begging for the car and that wild drive to Long Island to fling herself, senseless, raving on the steps of Jamie’s tomb, calling to him, coaxing, demanding he “rise,” sometimes with magical gestures, as if she, too, had a finger to wither fig trees and feet blessed or cursed enough to walk on water . . . calling, calling her son with no means to stop herself, her shame and embarrassment acute, because Dori was always standing by, frozen, unable to help, only to watch, to wait for all her raging passion to spend itself until he could finally kneel, cradle her head, feed her sips of brandy; whereupon she would rise, composed, like shaken royalty, an epileptic queen before her serfs, murmuring with absurd hauteur, “I’m all right, all right now, Dori.”

Then he’d guide her gently away from the bronze door, down the marble steps, around the pools splattered with their waxen-white of water lilies, along the pebbled paths, across wet grass to the house where servants watching from afar, shadowed ghosts in their robes and nightgowns, were gathered upon the steps like a tableau upon a stage, light from the open door flooding from behind them, their nervous hands having wrung themselves wet and still.

Book II

D
EAR BRUNO
David Carlson-Wade . . .

There. That seemed exactly right; his full name, quite as he had written it, neither formal, nor informal, but with just that touch of jest, of playfulness that was needed.

I received your charming letter . . . No, no. I was
pleased?
—yes,
I was pleased to receive your very nice letter . . .

“Nice” seemed an excellent choice since no other word in the English language was as universal, innocuous, and meant absolutely nothing and everything simultaneously.

. . .your very nice letter, and am in your debt for so informative an account of yourself and your. . .
No, that was much too stilted.

. . .your very nice letter,but rather than reply with details of my own . . .
That was not what she wanted, either.

. . . your very nice letter.
Period.

Could you come to tea on Saturday afternoon at the above address at about three o’clock? Since you work, I assume a weekend hour would be most suitable for you but if this is inconvenient, please telephone and we will arrange a more agreeable time.

If I do not hear from you, I’ll look forward with interest and pleasure to meeting you on Saturday, the 8th.

Yours—

And now the signature, another problem. Well, her full name would be best, and amusing, like his in the salutation, so she signed it:
Carma de Vinaz Rojas Vincenti Harrington-Smith Evans.

Seeing the absurd length of it, she laughed. Never, in years, had it been necessary to write so many of her names.

How Graciela Felicita Ruiz managed to capture the wildly handsome Aurelio Carlos Rivera as a husband had always, from the beginning, been something of a mystery.

She was unattractive in both face and form, and the fact that she was a pure Puerto Rican Black became, even before the first week of marriage was over, a strongly-felt if never verbally-expressed source of condescension on Aurelio’s part. Of course, something else was wrong, not only the color of her skin, something that had nothing to do with her at all, but with Aurelio: an inexplicable difference from other men, a dreaded quality she sensed, but never named, though others did—in whispers.

Consequently, Graciela’s success in keeping the man at all was considered by neighbors and friends to have been wrought by her well-known knowledge of the black arts: through magic, potions and spells.

If this was true, it was a serious mistake and her ultimate tragedy. To endure her jealousy and frustration through the following years of neglect, though she quickly gave him a son, she turned to one of the great weaknesses in her blood: alcohol.

Fifteen years of suspicion, pleading, threats and occasional hysteria, along with drinking and the blackest of the black arts, failed to capture, or perhaps re-capture, her prize. So, at forty-two years of age she apparently decided to abandon the fight for her beautiful husband, and die.

On the other hand, she may have imagined that the slow act of her dying would be a kind of blackmail Aurelio would pay on demand. If she truly expected this, it didn’t work. All she succeeded in doing by her refusal to eat was to become more disgusting and hideous to look at.

At the conclusion of a nine-weeks’ fast, she had turned into a skeleton propped up against the pillows in her bed, the dark skin curiously translucent, stretched tightly and glued over bones.

She could barely move, and never spoke. She had no bowel movements at all, and if the small amount of urine (since she sipped occasional water) that managed at great intervals to squeeze out from between her legs was darkly ochre in color, it had no odor at all, and so, unobjectionable, was simply left there to sink into her mattress and dry.

Of course, doctors were called: as it turned out, a young knowledgeable pair who were quick to confirm each other’s diagnosis. They advised hospital care, but since Aurelio refused, Graciela remained at home.

The sickness, after all, wasn’t understandably physical and therefore real: it was one of the mind and the will, thoughtful, deliberate, a disease of hurt, rage and revenge, of murder turned inward to devour the self.

It had a name, of course; at least the doctors, if somewhat inaccurately, gave it one: two beautiful words, so lovely they were a poem that tripped lightly from the tongue,

Anorexia nervosa.

If Aurelio came into the room, Graciela’s lifeless, sunken eyes might light up for a moment, a brief bright fire of hope that the blackmail was finally to be paid, even if paid to a skeleton. But if her son, Angel, came in, as he did for a few minutes daily, his timid face stricken with pity and horror, she shut out the sight of him, or finding the barest bit of strength, lifted a few black bones to wave him away.

Fearing, and perhaps half-hoping, that his father would ask to see it, Angel actually wrote a composition, “a essay” as Auri had called it: a scrubbed, crossed-out, misspelled, ungrammatical, miserable two-and-a-half pages about a hunting trip in the “Addarondocks” and his brave if fatal encounter with an “annormos” bear which attacked him with its “pear of powerfull paws” and, oddly, ultimately hugged him to death.

How the essayist could die and then live to write the tale remained one of the paradoxes with which his small psyche had no trouble whatsoever.

His father didn’t ask about the composition.

In fact the man’s slightly beer-and-tv-bloodshot eyes looked up quite dumbly as Angel shyly—half-real, half-put-on—entered the room, ostensibly because something on the TV caught his eye.