“I want to take it back—the idea of my tongue in your mouth, the idea that I could ever love you,” she said to someone whose name we cannot get—the third call.
Some time after the third call the drug was injected, we now believe. As close as we can tell, it was somewhere between nine and eleven o’clock. She then began preparing to go out, combing her hair, putting it up, loosening it, taking it down, putting it up again. She applied and reapplied makeup to her ghost face, painting on cheeks and eyes, composing a mouth. But no matter how much color she added, she remained white as the heroin climbed her arms and reached up for her. Giving up, she put a few lipsticks into her purse—an incomplete work, untitled vet.
When she gets to the bar she buys a new pack of cigarettes, which she smokes to the rhythm of Frene h pop music, and then she fumbles across the dance floor. Two women stop her to talk. She lies clearly and without hesitation to one lover about another, loses interest in the lie midway, forgets the ending, walks away. Slowly she finds her way to the bathroom, refusing help every few steps, her divorce with the body almost final now. She blacks out several times but somehow manages to get herself home. Her dazzling eyes light the way. She moves forward, quicker than she had previously, open-armed, toward light, toward a large, white American car. She nearly runs into it, like a cat giving away its last life.
Back in the apartment she falls to the bed, farther away with each breath now from her intentions, her fingertips freed from the history of art. Who can remember now, she wonders? longer skirts? Shorter hair? Longer hair? The color white?
Soon the police arrive—two young men. “This happens,” they say, covering the body, steady as surgeons. “This happens.” For them it is the only way to see such things. “This happens,” they mutter to each other, looking at her long, beautiful legs, her flawless face. “It was very pure—the heroin. She probably did not know,” they tell anyone who will listen. “It happens, that’s all. C’est tout. C’est ça.”
Later, there will be police photographers.
Later, in the mind, we will try over and over to see this—her body sculpting itself into its final position—but w e cannot.
“On Natalie’s behalf I quote from a Richard Brautigan poem for you,” Marta said quietly.
I don’t want to see you end up that way
with your body being poured like wounded
marble into the architecture of those who make
bridges out of crippled birds.
“If you feel compelled to remember, try to imagine her hunched over pin-ball.”
“Imagine it differently, Marta,” I told her. “Help yourself out of this.” But Marta could not imagine her way through grief and past it. She sank into it and she took me, too. She had never followed the flight of the Topaz Bird. She had never even heard of it.
Natalie is lying in her apartment on the floor with her head propped against a blank wall, drawing conclusions, summing things up. “Do you think it was right,” she asks herself now, “to come here to France, so far from Marta and everyone else?” She reaches across the floor for a pen but finds only pencils and with them carves a few short lines, last words, as the dresser disappears, the kitchen light dims. Her meditation is long and involved; it does not fit on the page and cannot be captured completely by the slowing pace of her hand. The complex thoughts of an abstracting mind flood her whole system.
“Do not picture it that way,” Marta says, “Natalie apologizing, Natalie thanking those she’d always meant to, Natalie saying good-bye, making the ordinary, the simple gestures of love. Do not think of it that way. For some, the most simple things are not possible.
“She probably welcomed sleep, because she was so restless always and had gone without sleep for so long. She probably was thinking about the color red or a new way to cut her hair.”
She probably never once thought of the growing space in front of her eyes. A song from the bar that would not leave her head was probably the last thing on her mind, locked forever inside her skull after the brain closed down. Surely, she could not have known that she was about to die.
“And if someone had told her,” Marta says, “she probably would have laughed and shrugged her shoulders. She probably would not have been listening.”
“My palms once said unjust criticism would follow my death. My palms are gone, their lines incorporated into the world you now see, along with all the dead.”
She looked just as she looked in Martas photographs. As in the photos, empty space enveloped her. She looked lonely out there, in need of company.
“Give me a chance,” she said. “Imagine me,” she pleaded, and she stepped closer, “please.”
“Maybe Natalie isn’t dead,” I said, jumping awake. “Maybe she’s still alive. What if she wanted to trick everybody? Escape her parents? Change her life? Start over? Become French or Italian? Change her name? Maybe she arranged it all w ith the man in the phone booth in Nice. Maybe the whole thing was set up somehow.”
“Vanessa,” Marta said slow ly, looking at me with her flickering brown eyes, “you’re so stupid sometimes.” She took my hand. “These are the facts. I loved a strange and beautiful woman. I never understood her. Our time together was short. I was a season’s diversion for her, a plaything—an exotic object from South America for her impressive collection. When she tired of me, she packed up and left. Do not idealize her. She was thoughtless, selfish, and vain. But I loved her anyway. She never really cared about me. She died that cold night in France. She’s dead. I love her still.”
“But, Marta…”
“There are things that can never be explained, Vanessa, things that will never make sense. I’m unlucky, I guess. I can’t get around the facts; they keep coming back. Natalie is dead. She died for nothing. I can never bring her back.”
Mourning clothes weigh far more than regular clothing. They are not only heavier, but they cling close to the body and they do not come off at night. I was not at all surprised by Marta ‘s stooped posture, her rounded shoulders, her slow motion. I was impressed that she could move at all under such a tremendous weight. It must have taken great effort. She barely picked up her feet anymore; they were covered by mourning shoes.
How did we get up to the catwalk of Main those late afternoons where we stood and watched the sun sink like a heart? She could barely walk most days, but we climbed up there somehow. Where was Jennifer, I wondered, as we stared into the pink light and Marta told stories?
“Oh, off on some project, no doubt,” Marta said, with disdain and affection. She laughed, picturing her friend talking in feminist to the Ladies’ Auxiliary Club in Poughkeepsie or negotiating some treaty with the women at Bard College.
“You’ve got to give Jennifer credit,” she said, exhausted just thinking of the piles of leaflets and petitions that covered the floor of her room.
I miss her, this Marta, only because I have seen her shed for a moment her mourning clothes and join some unencumbered present where she comments on a task of Jennifer’s or a particular professor’s eccentricities or reads aloud some ridiculous article from the student newspaper. I wish for this Marta to be with me all the time. But as quickly as she’s surfaced, it seems she sinks again, so heavy in her clothes of death.
I too had grown fonder and fonder of escape. “Where is the needle, Marta?” I asked.
The Chinese are right to make white the mourning color. It is the color of the eyes rolled back in the head, the color of the blank page that is always before my mother. It is the color of cocaine—the color of heroin.
She is baklava sweet in the stale ground.
“She slipped out of the wreckage of our lives casually,” Marta said, falling into sleep, “as if out of a pair of stockings.”
There was no sign of turmoil on Natalie’s face that day as she discussed with her adviser taking the year in France, then wrote to her parents, on vacation in Africa, for money, then made the plane reservations. She felt calm, relieved even, as if some weight had been lifted.
Not even she knew how much damage had been done. The mind can continue for days or months or years sometimes before allowing chaos in. Not everyone falls apart immediately during a crisis. Some grow stronger at first, more beautiful. The men on the plane could not keep their eyes off Natalie. She knew this, and it brought her some small pleasure as she lit a cigarette and unfastened her safety belt. They had no power over her and she enjoyed that, for she could never love a man and their lecherous and forlorn looks made her quite suddenly giddy. She was in control of her life. How easily she had made all the necessary arrangements.
What waited for her in France she was too tired even to conceive. She took from her large leather bag an Italian
Vogue
, a French dictionary, and some light-blue writing paper, which she quickly put away. She would not look back again. Gray Poughkeepsie was gone. She had made it disappear. She could do anything. Marta, too, was gone. Her French, of course, would need brushing up, she thought. Marta ‘s had always been so pathetic, so horribly Spanish. Natalie loathed imperfection, weakness of any kind. She hated the way Marta groveled. Natalie practiced her cold, hard look on the man across the aisle. He fidgeted in his seat. Marta had become so weak. At the end Natalie could not stand the sight of her. She smiled. She had made her disappear.
I stumbled into the white room. The weather was getting colder and colder now, the mercury falling way below freezing. I hugged my black coat to me. White envelopes fell from my pockets and the package of needles. Jack looked into my eyes, rolled up my sleeves.
“Goddamn it,” he said. “Goddamn it, Vanessa.” He kissed me everywhere as if he might suck the drug from my system. “Goddamn it,” he whispered.
“Don’t do this,” he said. “Save yourself.”
White, too, is the color of snow.
“Crazy Horse was dead. Sitting Bull was soon to die. What Drinks Water dreamt in advance was coming true: ‘they will come and they will build small gray boxes on the land and beside those boxes we shall die.’”
We walked on the farm with Grandfather. He was getting old as he spoke the story. “Let’s sit here,” he said, and we sat in the center of a field of wheat.
“They were being crowded into camps,” Grandpa said. “Their food was being cut off and they were slowly starving to death. The land they loved was being taken away. The white men wanted to buy it. They did not understand that it was not for sale.
“It was the end. The earth was being pulled apart for coal and gold. Every promise was broken. Many, many were killed. There was no hope on earth.”
“It was the end,” Eletcher said. “They could not roam on the land. They were put into camps.”
“But then from the west,” my grandfather said, “came a dream over the plains.” He made a large gesture with his arm. “And the dream was this: Christ had come back to earth as an Indian. Indians from all over went to Nevada to hear the dreamer’s story. ‘The dead will all be alive again,’ Wovoka said. ‘The earth will be green with high grass. The buffalo and elk will return. There will be plenty of food. It will be like old times.’
“They were starving. There was no hope on earth. Crazy Horse was dead,” my grandfather said.
White Feather thought of her son and her heart swelled.
“‘We will walk and talk with our lost ones,’ Wovoka said, ‘if you do the Ghost Dance,’ and he taught them how to do it. ‘Everyone,’ he said, ‘must dance. There will be food and sweet grass. And the white man will become small fish in the rivers. Spread the word.’”
The Indians brought Wovoka’s message back to their tribes, Grandpa told us, and everywhere men and women began dancing the Ghost Dance. They wore the magic Ghost Shirts that were painted with sacred symbols and impenetrable to the bullets of the white man.
There was no hope on earth.
“After doing the dance for a long time, men and women fell into trances. Many saw what had been promised. There was happiness and peace. When they came back from the trances they told their dreams to others. They had seen the dead. In the next spring it was promised there would be no more misery. They danced on and on. The white men ordered the Ghost Dancing to be stopped. Sitting Bull was taken away. But the Indians continued. ‘We shall live again,’ they chanted.”
It was 1890 and winter was coming on.
Anne Stafford held her five-year-old son Joshua tightly in her arms as if she might squeeze the life back into him. Her heart ached so that she wished she might die with him. Cholera had broken out all along the Platte River. All day as they traveled westward in their covered wagons, they could see people burying their dead, using the side boards of the wagons to construct coffins.
“You cannot trade the lives of children for handfuls of gold,” Anne cried. “One does not make up for the other.”
After three days Anne’s husband finally pried Joshua away from his wife, took some boards and made the second small coffin of their short voyage. Her arms were now empty of both children. One could hear her piercing cry, like that of the coyote, through the dark nights. In grief she gathered her children’s toys together, glued them to a pail, and painted them blue.
Eva Hauser, sitting up in bed, moved the blue stamp from Germany from the top corner of the canvas down to the bottom. A series of pink stamps from France, cut in half, ran down the left side like a border. She sprinkled a bit of chamomile through the center. Looking at the various scraps of fabrics the women of the sewing circle had left her, she picked one and held it in her hands. She cut out a triangle from a family photograph and placed it carefully to the right. A broken teacup that her grandmother once lovingly put her lips to every day completes the piece.
“I can’t live here anymore,” she sighs over the phone, exhaling cigarette smoke as she tells her parents of her plans. “I can’t even drive.”
“Drive? What do you need to drive for?” her mother, always chauffeured, asks.
“You’ve obviously never come to visit me in Poughkeepsie,” Natalie says. “You obviously don’t know what I’m up against!”
“Your father will get you a car,” her mother says.