But suddenly the air changed. I sensed danger, flood or fire.
“What is it?” I said. “What?”
He looked at me like an ancient man, wild, needing food. With an enormous strength he ripped apart the zipper of my pants as if he did not know what a zipper was or how it worked. He was going back in time. He had forgotten all this. I squirmed under him. Having gotten my pants off, he pinned my shoulders down to stop my movement, bracing me, holding me tight, not knowing where we were going though we had gone there so many times before together. He was hard and large on top of me. He was something primitive, made of stone or bone, something blunt like a club. He put his hand in my mouth. I felt I might choke on it. He forced his salty fingers down my throat and pressed his way into me. I pushed my head away and sat up, feeling him in this position deep inside me where another more mysterious mouth opened and opened and howled, and he, too, began to howl, and his howls grew louder and louder, changing from the sounds we recognize as human into other sounds—sounds that had been lost at the beginning of language. I followed him backwards to the time before words, before memory, where I let go of everything, and we lay there at the start for a moment, two bodies of water, of air, breathing in the dark—for a moment.
Slowly the darkness began to give wav and the land bathed in the light of dawn. He let his eve linger for a long time over the mesa, the sunlit cliffs, the loping hills. He stood facing east, watching that great red disk on the horizon flare, rise up, and slowly climb the enormous sky.
“It’s even more beautiful than a swan,” my mother whispers.
“That precious, precious bird,” I say. She nods her head.
“You must not be afraid.”
They must have looked lovely together as they swirled around the center of the dance floor for all to see.
My father was becoming even more lost as they hugged and listened to the silence outside, alone during the band’s break, standing precariously on the verge of their adult lives.
The band returned—one final song. And, yes, my parents indeed looked lovely together—like figures of marzipan poised on the top of a wedding cake…
Sabine opens the large window s of the house in Maine. Strangely, at the same time the air of the sea seems warm and cool. She looks out at the breast of the beach, the lovely white belly of the beach. She watches the fishermen lift their nets, come in with their catch. The air of the room is heavy, drenched with the sea, a persistent humidity. My mother’s empty pages stacked in a white pile are filled up already with so much water. She, too, is filled up. She bends down. Her eyes slip slowly to Sabine’s ankles. She helps Sabine pull back the heavy sheets in the languid air.
She is not so far away on that day I fall off my bicycle, my knee shredded, bits of the driveway embedded in the wound. She appears from around the corner when she hears me crying. She is wearing her gardening clothes.
She helps me up, looks at my knee, kisses me on the ear, and whispers, “Your dress is magnificent.”
“The ballroom is gigantic!” I say.
“I have
never
in my life seen a chandelier like this one before,” she gasps, pointing to the sun. “Oh, have you ever in your life seen anything like it?”
“Never,” I say. “Where are we?” I ask. “Where are we, Mom?”
On the book jacket of
To Vanessa
is my favorite picture of my mother. She is in profile and she looks as serene as I have ever seen her—content, happy. The light is beautiful and she is smiling.
“You’ll miss your train. Don’t miss it,” she urges. “Go now. Go.”
I try to enter the sky, to force myself to become that bird. But there is no forcing it, I know.
“Do not be afraid,” she whispers to me.
I watch that bobbing branch where the Topaz Bird once was. But it’s so tiny, so hard to see.
“Continue the story,” she prods me. “Go on.”
The note asked that I come to Main Building, Room
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, as soon as possible. It was written on an index card in an impossibly small handwriting and signed by someone named Jennifer Stafford. There was nothing unusual about this note, it was just one among many instructions I found in my mailbox upon arrival at college, and yet I kept going back to it, going over the same few words, even as I read other papers, other notes, I visualized that handwriting and that name. There was something familiar there, something that called me to it; the other papers fell to the floor.
Slowly I unpacked my clothes, savoring the mystery of the message, prolonging it. What could this Jennifer Stafford want from me? It began to sound like a command. “Stop by. Soon.” Hundreds of things occurred to me as I fumbled with hangers and put away books, but none of them anticipated that room on the top floor of Main Building under the catwalk. “Come as soon as you can,” I said to myself. “Jennifer Stafford.” Parents still lingered in the halls. There seemed a sea of students all folding into one another, crashing on an unfamiliar shore. There were waves of color and sound all around me, but the note that I held in my hand was silent and a certain darkness seemed to collect around it. I read it once more, then again, and, using the heads of parents and the shiny black trunks of students for stones, I crossed this glittering, shouting body of water and stepped safely onto the ascending elevator.
“Come in,” she said.
Walking into that room was like moving from one life into another, light into dark, air into water. With my first look inside I could already feel myself adapting, always the survivor. My body grew sleeker, my hands broader, best for swimming. My lungs expanded. I felt as if my eyes were becoming bluer so as to fathom the depths, my heart stronger because I sensed it needed to be.
The demands of this dark, vaguely sweet-smelling room were great. It asked even of its most casual visitors what no room, no place should have been able to ask of anyone. To enter the room was to surrender something, to give something up.
She seemed to be crying.
“Jennifer,” I said quickly. “Maybe it’s a mistake. I got this in my mailbox today. I don’t know if—”
“Please,” she said, as if she could not keep up with my speech. “Please, I’m not Jennifer, I don’t live here, and I don’t want to hear about it. Really.” She read Jennifer’s note, holding it up close to her eyes as if she found the size of the handwriting ridiculous. “But you’ve got a little note here,” she smiled sarcastically, “so please come in.
“As you can see,” she said, motioning around the bare room, “Jennifer has a rather modest conception of her own needs.” On the floor was a mattress, a desk lamp, and a record player. In the hallway the dresser, the desk, and the bedframe stood with a note like mine on an index card to the maintenance people, asking that these items be put in storage for the year.
“She’s doing her thesis now on the history of the women of her family, starting with her long-lost relative Sarah Stafford, who came over on the
Godspeed
or one of those. I think she’s trying to get a little bit of the Pilgrim ship ambiance in here.” She laughed and her laugh echoed in the empty, angular room.
“She doesn’t ask much anymore,” this strange woman said, looking directly at me, “just to be left alone.”
“Perhaps I should leave,” I said.
She shrugged, lighting a joint. “Regardless of its rather austere appearance, this is a room you will soon find you cannot leave,” she exhaled, “ever.”
I accepted the joint, but it felt like I was accepting much more. She smiled at me, knowing that already I was becoming a part of this thing.
“I think you’ll probably like it here,” she said.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I answered, but already I felt as though I was a bowl or an urn in this dark still life.
“Who are you, then?” I asked shyly.
“Oh, where are my manners?” she asked, again with great sarcasm. “Forgive me. My name is Marta Arenelle and today I commence my fourth and presumably final year at this hallowed institution where I am,” she paused, “of course,” she paused again, “a drama major.” She smiled at her own good sense of timing. “Let me redeem myself. Here, have a drink,” she said, getting me a glass from the closet and filling it with Scotch.
“Yes, but still, you say, who is this Jennifer Stafford and where is she anyway? And above all what does she want from me?” “Well, let’s see. She’s our resident feminist, Women’s Center, Women’s Studies student par excellence, and I don’t know what she wants from you but I can certainly guess. She’s in the bathtub right now.” Marta laughed and shook her head. “If you want to be near Jennifer, you must be resigned to the fact that half the time you will spend submerged underwater.” She laughed but the laughter went nowhere. It was a dense laugh, heavy with gloom. Like certain fogs, it felt as if it might never lift.
Billie Holiday’s voice slurred through the empty room—the sad, eerie, off-key voice I would come to associate forever with this day and with Marta, w ho retreated into the song with her bottle of Scotch. The voice deepened the darkness, intensified it. It was difficult to breathe such mournful air.
“Dreaming, I was only dreaming,” Billie Holiday sang, agonizing toward her final death. “I wake and I find you asleep in the deep of my heart, dear.”
She was singing to someone Marta could see standing in front of her. Marta had made the song hers, personalized it so that it was almost unbearable to listen to.
“Darling, I hope that my dream never haunted you. My heart is telling you how much I wanted you.” The song articulated her sorrow, validated it. She sank into its lowest registers. Tears filled her eyes; they would not fall.
“Please pardon my sentimentality,” she said, reaching for a small bag of hashish and covering my hand with hers.
“We’ve been waiting for you,” she whispered. “We’ve been waiting a long time for you.” Her hand was large and strong. I did not dare look at her.
I knew some further definition of myself lay here in this room, something I had previously only glimpsed, a suggestion lost before in a change of light or a conversation that took a different direction—lost at the last minute because I had turned away in a failure of nerve or a change of heart. What was here that promised to change everything now? I wondered.
I suppose it would be easy to be carried away by the voluptuousness of the scene—the velvety darkness, the ruined voice, the sweet smell of hashish, Jennifer’s conspicuous absence, and the lost person breathing shapes into Mar-ta’s full mouth. She looked at me through her tears, forcing my chin up so she could study my face.
“Why, you’re just a kid!” she cried. “You’re just a child!” she laughed. “What a joke!” She fell silent. It was Marta’s enormous capacity for hope that had made me seem for a moment to be someone I was not. She wanted so much to believe that I, dressed in white, knocking on the door, was her angel, her miracle, but now in a moment of clear-eyed scrutiny she saw me as I must have really looked: ridiculous, silly, eighteen.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. She raised her head slowly and looked at me with contempt.
“Don’t apologize to me,” she said. “What do you have to be sorry about?” At that time I had never seen anyone like her—paralyzed with grief, every word colored by it, every movement determined, defined, by its cruel properties.
I could still feel myself moving in and out of the scene, one moment being able to see myself and Marta objectively, like some omniscient narrator: “Two women, one dressed in black, one in white, sat in the corner like a symbol.” But the next moment I was locked inextricably in her gaze, caught in the hundreds of black curls that framed her tortured face.
“You’d never understand,” she whispered, “not in a million years,” but she reached for my hand and her body leaned forward and I could feel the brutal muscles of her heart contracting around me. “You’d never understand. How could you?”
“Try me,” I said. I felt brave suddenly. She was driving her nails into me but I did not struggle to get free. She put her head on my shoulder and in a second my shirt was soaked. “Don’t cry,” I said, and I felt my courage disappear. “Can I do something?”
“No,” she sighed, “unless of course you can bring back the dead.”
If at that moment I had told Marta that I was capable of that feat, I think she would have believed me: she wanted so badly to believe. Desire was like magic; love was a kind of magic. The hopeless love magic the most—for a person to be sawed in half and come out whole, for black mice to disappear. “Please,” she whispered.
She hardly looked up now. I think she feared what she might see in the suggestive air, though when she closed her eyes or looked out the window or glared at me, she saw the same thing, always the same thing. It was the magic of the dead: they could do anything, they could be anywhere.
“Perhaps I should leave you alone,” I said. “I feel like an intruder. I should leave you.”
“No,” she said, getting up slowly—although to her it must have seemed quickly—“please. Don’t leave.” In her voice I recognized my own, many years ago, begging my mother not to leave my darkened room. “Please, don’t go,” she said.
“Love will make you drink and gamble,” she sang, taking a large bag of cocaine from her jacket, “love will make you stay out all night long. Love will make you drink and gamble; love will make you stay out all night long.” She was struggling to hold onto the melody. “Love will make you do things that you know are wrong.” She smiled.
“From Venezuela,” she said, holding the plastic bag in front of my eyes. “I live there.”
In a minute’s time Marta was back on that South American coastline. She had slipped out of her clothes. The sun beat on her body. She began to sweat. She took a deep breath and her lungs filled with the salt of the ocean. She swayed slightly as she spoke. Small salamanders darted along the sill. “Venezuela,” she said, holding the words of home in her mouth a long time. “If it got too hot on the beach I could always move to the cool, blue ceramic tiles of the beach house. I loved that house. There was such peace there, such quiet. And eating fruit there,” she said and licked her lips, “is like tasting it for the first time.” I looked at her pink, tropical mouth.