I blush. I can feel his enormous body lowering onto mine, crushing me. His body could block out the sun. With his voice alone he could break apart people’s thoughts, stop the flow of memory. He could turn the whole world dark.
“This mildness will kill us,” he says. “November,” he says, shaking his head. He lights a cigarette. The smoke does not rise. “Someone has broken your heart.”
“It’s a long story,” I sigh.
“No,” he says. The word is meant to punctuate, to put a full stop to my story. “I don’t mean for you to tell me.” He puts one finger to my lips. “Never tell me,” he says, pressing his finger harder to my mouth.
With his first touch I begin my descent into a deep, deep valley I half hope I w ill not be able to rise from.
“You are one of the saddest people I have ever seen.” His voice seems to waver. It has been so long since I have talked to another human being.
He speaks slowly, gently, knowing to be careful. “You are blurry with sadness,” he whispers, “so passive. This face.” He touches my cheek, moves slowly to my mouth where he lingers, then my chin. Softly: “Your features are lost in sorrow. You have given in and it has gladly taken you to its drowsy side.”
I want him to touch me everywhere. I want his tongue to speak inside me.
His words begin to slow. His tongue grows thicker. His hands are sweating. He steps closer. He too has begun to fall. He feels this falling and allows it, following me downward into some deep sexual pit at the center of our living where there is only breathing, only blood, only sighs.
“I could love you right—”
“Please,” I say.
“I’ve been waiting a long time for you,” he says. “Come with me.”
The sounds of the station have subsided. The lights seem to have dimmed. We bump into things.
“Come with me,” he says.
I wait in the lobby of a hotel for him. I sit in something soft and feel the softness against my body.
“OK,” he says, holding a shiny key.
Slowly we rise. In the small mirrored elevator I can feel him everywhere. The ride is seconds, hours. We step off. The hall is long and dark. The key goes into the lock. “We will make ourselves over,” he says. The door opens.
The hotel room was warm. I felt dizzy, a little giddy.
“I’m going to faint,” I said.
“No, no, you’re not,” he said, and I felt somewhat revived with his words. “Just sit down.”
I sat on the bed and took off my coat and he sat in the one chair of the room, several feet away, and looked at me.
“You’re trembling,” I said.
“Am I? I’ve been waiting for you a long time,” he said. He spoke very softly. “And now here you are, right within arm’s reach. It’s like a miracle.”
I unbuttoned my shirt slowly. My breasts bloomed in front of him in the hot room. “I’m so hot,” I whispered.
He closed his eyes and put his face in his hands. Finally, after what seemed a long time, he looked up slowly, careful not to move too quickly or say anything too loudly, as if I was on the verge of disappearing and this, his first look, would also be his last. If I was an apparition, then he must do nothing to dispel it from his psyche. If I was some wild animal, caught in this room, any sudden movement might frighten me. He spoke very cautiously, as if he might bruise me with his words if he were not careful. He spoke gently so that the image might hold.
“You are the anonymous woman I have seen for years.” He did not take his eyes from me.
“Don’t move,” he said slowly. “Please don’t move.” He looked at my breasts as if he had not imagined that this woman would have a physical shape at all when he finally saw her—and a voice—words. “I never expected to see you,” he said.
My face was flushed. The long, slow burning that had started deep within had now begun spreading from the inside out. The tips of my fingers were bright red. My eyes I knew were turning dark, dark blue.
“Please don’t move,” he said as he took off his shirt and his pants. He never stopped looking at me.
I shuddered to see this enormous man naked in front of me. Undressed, he seemed even larger, as if he had been in some way contained by his clothing.
“Don’t be afraid,” I whispered. “Don’t be afraid of me.”
He laughed softly.
I reached for his hand and pulled him slowly toward me.
“I’ve never seen a woman like you before,” he said, his voice barely controlled. “I never thought—”
I guided his huge hand onto my breasts. A moan that had been stored for centuries in the darkest part of my body finally came into my throat. He looked more animal now than man as he scratched at my pants, trying to tear them from my body as if they were some second skin. “Let me—” I could not talk. He was sucking softly on my neck.
He got up and stood high over me and stared. I kicked off my pants and in one moment, as I closed my eyes to avoid his brutal stare, he plunged deep, far, hard into my body. He had fallen on me as if into a fire, howling and in terror. If he rose again he would not be the same, as one is not who has been badly burned or hurt. He would be changed forever. And I, who was the fire, grew larger and larger as he fed himself to me. I was enveloping him, his fingers, his mouth, his whole body. There was fire in his mouth, fire in his hair, the flames licking him everywhere—blue flames, orange, white—everywhere. It grew and grew. It burned all night.
The fire did not die in sleep, which came finally to us around five that morning. Now that it had been started there would be no stopping it. No long night, no water, no dream could extinguish it. There are fires like that, I am told, in California or Africa, that never end, that burn year after year, destroying everything. They burn for tens of years, every day; they never go out.
He was asleep. His glowing red hand rested on my small flame of hair. I began to move. Having throw n himself into the furnace of my body, he too was fire now. I pressed his fingers of fire into me.
“I’m burning up,” he said, sweat running down his face.
I had begun to bleed during the night. He pushed his way through the thick flames of red, growing larger and larger by our union. I felt his tongue in m\ mouth, his lips against my lips in an exploding red kiss. We grew larger. I sighed. There was no controlling this. I le reached for me through flames, feeding himself once again into the open center of the excruciating heat, and the fire spread.
“Next Friday,” he said. “Meet me here—in this room,” and he looked at me as if he were looking at me for the first time.
I was sweating in my black coat out in the street. “Don’t leave me here alone,” I said.
“Next Friday,” he said. “Don’t forget.” He stepped away, afraid to catch onto me again and begin all over out there on the street. “Next Friday, here,” I said. As he walked away, the fire continued, burning on, slower but steadily, in this ungodly, unseasonable November.
“For
this
is wrong,” Rilke writes, “if anything is wrong:
not to enlarge the freedom of a love
with all the inner freedom one can summon.
We need, in love, to practice only this:
letting each other go. For holding on
comes easily; we do not need to learn it.”
My mother never listened to the weather report and consequently was almost always dressed unsuitably for the ever-changing whims of the Connecticut climate. I can see her shivering in a thin navy-blue cloth jacket in November or sweating in April in her lined raincoat, her whole face flushed.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she’d ask, shedding layers of sweaters, or, hunched over in another season, her arms clutching a manuscript against her chest in an attempt to ward off wind and cold, “Why?”
“But, Christine, I did,” my father would say, nearly inaudibly. It seemed to me that he suffered from my mother’s discomfort more than she did. To my father, I think, m\ mother’s problem of dressing was a symbol of all her suffering, and because of this he could hardly bear to witness these lapses in judgment.
“Why must she suffer so much?” he wondered day after endless day, night after sleepless night, as she typed. It moved him terribly to see my mother in the middle of January in a thin cotton blouse and cardigan sweater. He seemed wounded by it.
But I thought it was a good sign, a reassuring sign when mother knew she was dressed improperly. What I feared more than anything in the world was when she felt no weather at all—no cold, no heat, no rain—when she would walk through a rainstorm, come back drenched, and sit down to work at her typewriter, without changing her clothes or even wiping her brow; when she came in from a walk in the snow in her sandals, her feet bright red and numb, and she, completely unaware of them When she felt no weather, when weather did not matter, I knew it would not be long before the doctors would come and she would not be allowed out of bed. And so these days of complaining, of discomfort, of my mother questioning my father and Hetcher and me eased me in a strange way.
“Why didn’t you tell me about this terrible heat?” she would ask again and again, taking off a sweater, cocking her head and squinting slightly as if to say, “If you told me, then why can’t I remember?”
Her mind could not be trusted completely. It stopped, it skipped, it added, it forgot. It changed things.
“I did tell you, sweetheart,” my father whispered into her ear. He held her in his strong arms. She would not go mad, he said to himself. She would not.
A simple thing like dressing for the weather might have made mv mother feel more at home here, day to day, had she only somehow known how to listen to such things. She knew, though, that she only had so much energy and, considering the demanding nature of her mind, she could not afford to pay attention to everything, every conversation, every news broadcast. She knew how easily she tired. If she allowed herself to see and hear everything, she would not have survived, for everything to her was a challenge, imperfect, asking to be transformed, rearranged, made over. But she would not allow it; above all my mother was a survivor.
The simple task of just looking at the world was problematic; just going to the grocery store or meeting a new friend of mine wore her out. “Sonia,” she’d say, looking at my new dark-eyed classmate. “Sonia,” she’d say, and, if she let it, her mind could wander around that one name for an entire afternoon.
She had to learn, and she did learn, when to look away. Not to would have meant to burn up, to be dissipated—or to go crazy. She would not go crazy, she said to herself. Psychic energy had to be preserved, carefully doled out, used for her work. Emotions had to be hoarded for the work. Attention to detail, mental acuity had to be saved, then focused. Select, my mother must have told herself, select and choose. Careful—be careful. Go slowly. I think I understood. She would survive; the weather was just one of the many things she had to put aside.
“Quiet,” my father said over and over through the years I was growing up. “Your mother needs quiet to work.” It was the only thing he ever asked of us. “Quiet,” he whispered, retreating into his soundproof room where his music played.
You tell me to think of the white at the end of the day on the stock market floor.
I like the way you put me to sleep.
I think of monuments. You whisper the names I want to hear:
Rachmaninoff
Shostakovich
Rimsky-Korsakov
Rach ma ni noff
Sho sta ko vich
Rim sky—Kor sa kov.
Looking up from our tangle of cat’s cradle, I noticed that Sonia’s brown eyes had turned the pale color of tea. The yellow flowers on the wallpaper in my bedroom were beginning to disappear as if they were being eaten off in some exquisite hunger. In the next room my father’s bare feet blanched. The world was losing its color. Walking to the window, I noticed a few leaves on the backyard tree had shed their green, not for the brilliant, momentary oranges and reds of autumn but for some lesser shade, a sort of gray, the mark of a more troubled, internal season, more permanent than other seasons, colder.
This was only the beginning. In the days to come, the world would continue to empty itself slowly of color until finally, by the time my mother was handing her suitcase to my father at the top of the stairs, I would barely be able to see her at all, she would be so lost in white. This happened many times through the years of my childhood. The lake would gray and flatten into a pale square. The red-winged blackbird flying across the blue sky would lose its shock of red, its feathers would fade, and the white sky would devour it.
I began to be able to detect these changes almost immediately, no matter how subtle they were at first. I felt lucky that I could foresee my mother’s departures so far in advance. With the first signs I would follow her more closely, sit nearer to her, watch her while she napped on the couch, etch her profile in my mind, hug her disappearing body as color drained from her lips and her blonde hair whitened. On these early days, her shadowy arm would curl around me like a wisp of smoke and she would whisper, “What is it, Vanessa?” But she knew well what it was.
Had I overheard telephone conversations, seen airplane or train tickets in advance, been privy to plans I had forgotten, or was it something else, something in my mother herself, some early retreat, a pulling back, a stepping away that made me aware that soon she’d be leaving again? I think I received my cue from some extreme inwardness in her, from the distant place she had already gone in preparation for her own departure, a place even beyond that place which was her normal domain. Yes, I was extremely sensitive to the timbre of my mother’s existence. I loved her so much that days in advance I could see her departure in the face of a friend.
When everything had become white, I knew the time had come for my mother to go to the closet, drag her leather suitcase across the room, and lift it to the bed. She would call me into the room then, and we would sit there for a moment staring into the white. Then she would begin.
“I just don’t know what to bring, Vanessa,” she would say. What to pack always seemed the outward struggle of a much deeper ambivalence for both of us. We sat on the bed and looked into empty space.
“Maybe I’ll pack nothing,” she said finally “Maybe I’ll give the Henrietta T. Putnam Lecture in the nude! What do you think?”