Glass Grapes (6 page)

She looked at the corner where the cabinet had been and saw the splatter paintings over screens she had done in grade school, with a toothbrush, a bit of
screen in a frame, and a maple leaf. Once the leaf was lifted up, the white left on the page, the image of the leaf itself which was now damp and blue and curled, was pure white and somehow more than the limp thing she held between her fingers. The teacher sent them out to gather leaves in the fall so that on darkening afternoons they could do projects. She shook herself, she gathered what she could of her sense of purpose, she said she'd see him later and he smiled at her blankly. She thought he wanted her to stay or go, either, but not to disturb the air as she moved.

He gave away his old tape player.
Where is it,
she began and then stopped.
Why did you give it away? It was broken,
he said, though she knew that a week ago it hadn't been broken, that they had sat in the fading light for two hours and listened to the Bach unaccompanied cello, and he told her he'd never had that tape, she was welcome to look, but when she did, it wasn't there.

And then he left the apartment and walked towards the bus stop and she was standing by her car wondering where he was going. He had a box of books under his arm. The books had begun to disappear as well and she wondered as she drove home if he were moving, and where was he moving and why she couldn't ask. Most of his books came from the library; he was one of the few she knew who used the library, but he had some few paperbacks, many smelling of foxing and paper dust. She liked going through the box he had under the bed.

He liked, she thought, to have her for an audience, going through the same photographs again and again of his young mother, his grandmother, and the picture of the porch with the snowball bush to the side. He could pass his thumb and fingers over these for hours and talk about the way he'd seen the storms coming, the exact weather in August, the ways people talked in those days. His stories varied little. She liked the sameness, the return to the same descriptions, the shaping of the shadow against the wall, the planks of the floorboards, the eyes of the knots in the wood.

Why then did she feel like shaking him, as if he were in a state of sleep? Why then did she feel she'd entered a realm in which photographs lied? He hadn't ever been on that porch, he'd bought them with his old cups and his old books at a flea market, the family was someone else's altogether. Perhaps the photographs had been picked at random from some junk store, perhaps that woman in the flowered dress on the porch had no connection to him whatsoever and perhaps he's never been on the porch at all.
Would you like more tea,
he asked politely.

She could feel the trance coming on. It was a cloud of dew, faded and in faded color. He was telling her about a place he wanted to visit. It was Kyoto he said, and he began to show her photographs of gardens, gardens with raked stone, one garden with a giant white cone in the center.
The world is coming to an end,
he said.
I have to visit Japan before it happens.
Was he joking, she
wondered? He had barely enough money for rent and food and yet he was as serious as she'd ever seen him. In the corner of the room he had put three stones, a start of something perhaps. He said gardeners pull up every weed, every bit of green, creating a calm ocean of stillness, a replica of ripples just barely indented across the graveled surface. He turned the pages slowly and forced her to focus on the photograph. The book itself was tiny, a small edition meant to be carried in a pocket, so small that it was impossible to flatten the pages and almost impossible for more than one person to look at unless they moved awkwardly close together. His hand looked outsized; it was large in any case and always looked larger, she thought, because his arms were thin and long. She stared at the veins on his left hand, at the veins in the maple leaf, at the tiny book. It had never occurred to her to want to go anywhere, much less to a place as foreign and far off as Japan; it was so at odds with what she thought of as their history and she thought he had thought this too. Wasn't he the one who was nostalgic, the one who talked on and on about that quite ordinary porch and the patch that produced summer squash and corn. What had these cold white arrangements to do with that, she thought, and found herself sunken and irritated.

One day he burned the last book on the grate. She saw the cone of ashes, fragile and insistent and unswept. Next time the bed was gone. He was sleeping, he said, on a sort of bedroll, like being in the army. When were
you ever in the army, she asked. He made them tea, but this time it was green and bitter and she couldn't drink it, and he presented it to her as if he were moving in slow motion. And there was only one cup. He wanted to share it with her, insisted on his taking a sip followed by her taking a sip, but she didn't want this tea he offered and the handle had been snapped off and she could only stare at the jagged spot.

At the edge of the parking lot to the market there was a man wrapped in a dirty blanket. She saw how brown his skin was from sleeping in the sun. She got some groceries and parked at the far end of the parking lot before going home. The ice cream melted through the brown paper bag and left a triangular stain on the seat. She couldn't stop thinking about the roll of a man and about what she should do.

After a few weeks passed in which she had stayed away on purpose, she found herself thinking of black and white cones, of sand and stone and shapes, and it was all she could think of. Had he learned, she wondered, to fire a gun, and had he really been in the army? Why would the world come to an end just now and why would he think so? She thought about how easily things passed away. If she didn't see him, perhaps these thoughts would go away; she thought maybe if she just didn't see him or if she stopped putting her thumb into the slight indentation on the way up the stairs. I've stopped, she told herself. I'll never do it again. It's the same thing, however, she knew, it was the same always to do something or always
not to do it. She didn't go back. Sometimes she'd ask a casual question of someone, but no one ever responded in a way particular enough to let her know.

She decided to paint her living room and moved all the furniture into the middle and covered it all with old sheets so that the room was transformed into a figure of sorts, one draped chair positioned against another. She bought paint and looked at everything rearranged. In the corner the original paint was still bright, and from the wall emerged a shape she was startled to recognize.

First he had faces done in the crook of his elbow, small elegant faces with hooked noses and flat cheekbones. Then, overlaid across the top of the faces, came zigzag designs as if the faces were peering out from behind ornate screens or trying to escape the foliage of interlocking vines, the loopy arrangement of what looked to be organic, intestinal. Each time he went back the faces were more obscured, and yet perhaps because they were so hard to make out, they took on a kind of salience so that although at first it had been possible to take them, if not for granted, but just to take them, afterwards they seemed to announce something. Why didn't he take on some other area of his body she wondered, why did he keep returning to the same right arm, fingers even, like a person who knows it's time to move, but keeps on in the same apartment piling up books and knowing it is time to move someplace bigger where the neighbors don't scream that they'll pull their
kids' arms out of their sockets. She counted the layers of tattoos across his right arm, like a filmy layer that could be lifted off like Chinese paper cutouts in a shop she'd found, flimsy, delicate, concise. He wore only long-sleeved button-down shirts, blue, the left sleeve rolled down and buttoned at the wrist, always a bit short on his long arm, the other rolled up high exposing the tattoos, the whole thing extremely and properly contrived.

He wrote letters in longhand, precise cursive script, the sort practiced in elementary school. He left notes around, each one done in that perfect hard pressed ballpoint script that went through to layers beneath, leaving a message pressed into the yellow pad after the top layer had been torn off and crumpled. He left a note on the box of coffee filters:
Use two.
And on the coffee cup:
Soak in bleach.
And on the front table:
I've gone for a few days.
She studied the curves of the letters for clues, but was unable to detect anything definitive and when he returned she didn't ask. She didn't know why; it simply seemed intrusive and against some set of rules she thought might be in place, so she opted for the elegance of silence. He asked if she had soaked the cups.

You go on for such a long time when nothing happens, nothing out of the ordinary, so you assume it will go on for quite a long time, not forever, no one thinks forever, but for quite a long time. And then things clump together freakishly: your dog dies, you have an accident
coming out of the car wash and your wrist doesn't heal, your friend turns spidery thin, thinner than you could have imagined and her hair falls out like your mother's before she died, and you're caught in a pocket of turbulence you can't seem to get out of. You know it won't go on forever, but you can't get it out of your voice on the phone, that edge is there even when you try to relax and breathe and everyone has long since stopped noting it. It becomes a usual hitch, a usual way people think of you.

You are startled that ordinary ventures that once seemed so ordinary even in the days when you were trying to be hypersensitive, turn out to be trials for you. Now you have to be pushed onto the road to go where you'd planned to go in the first place and talk to your heart to keep it from pounding in your mouth. You breathe into a paper bag. Someone tells you to try acupuncture—it made her want to rush right out and eat a steak she says—and so you try it and drive to the corner afterwards and can't remember whether to turn right or left, and although you have the directions written out, you can't seem to reverse left and right in order to get back on track and you feel limp, unable to get a breath, and you can't imagine, although she had insisted it was true, that she'd been positively ravenous.

Watching him, she thought to say, you duck your head as if you're being cuffed, and wondered why she thought of cuffed and the kids who'd lived next door
whose father said, do that again and I'll pull your arms out of your sockets. From the top floor of the apartment she could look down into their back bit of yard by the garage. Four or five children, hair wispy and thin, were there playing with sticks, a small matchbox truck, a broom. One rode around and around on the broom shouting something she couldn't hear. One nursed a doll, its hair brushed back from its forehead again and again in meaningless repetition, hay-like stuff. It refused to lie flat. She looked across the room at him. His head jerked to the side when he was concentrating on something or when he sat to write. He wants someone to hit him, she thought.

It's the overlap that gets you, that you can't stop thinking about. You are in one place but you know that in a few days or even, and this happens quite often, a few hours, you will be standing someplace else and you can smell the airport or the pissy metallic air of the train and although you try to hang onto where you are and look at the tree outside the window, anchored there, or you fold up napkins in smaller and smaller squares, you can't help being in one of those dislocations that is so ordinary, not preposterous at all, and therefore eminently dismissible, and you find yourself queasy. You keep saying: knock against something, push over a chair, crack your knuckles on the door. But you see yourself going under the arch at the airport security where sometimes someone sets it off, and you are there
looking at their keys in the tray or at the camera. Someone keeps asking will the film be OK, and someone has always bought something at Macy's, a large red towel stuffed into a paper shopping bag that is already tearing at the edges, although he has just started his trip home, and you wonder why he bought a towel on his vacation when you can get a towel anywhere, and it gets caught against another suitcase on the ramp and he is tying it up with a small rope he has in his left pocket, and you wonder how he knew to bring a small rope for tying up a bag that hadn't ripped when he started out.

He's gone back for more tattoos. He keeps getting them on the same arm and hand and perhaps, although she can't quite see underneath the roll of his oxford cloth shirt, the designs go up and up even to his shoulder and over the crest of his shoulder and onto his back. She can't help wondering where they go and when they will stop. He has a friend who does them at cut rate so it doesn't cost him so much and he can discuss what sorts at great length and so they spend hours at it. Most are of pre-Columbian design. He wants to have a collection of precious and previously owned pottery, but he settles for making himself a sort of collectable, a piece of what he would wish to own. He's got all sorts of books to authenticate the designs and he keeps adding to his collection of books and to the lines in color across his arm that don't, as tattoos often do, announce anything, but rather keep the message hidden in abstraction. No
”mother” or “J” or even rippling snakes. His are rare, overlapped, elaborate. She keeps thinking it must be excruciating to have a needle go in and out, in and out, stitching the skin of one's own body, but he doesn't let her go with him and watch. When he catches her staring at his arm, he turns on the TV and sits against the chair at an angle to blot her out and she washes dishes more carefully then and uses bleach with an old toothbrush on the tile.

One day when she returned she found the set of steak knives someone had given her as a birthday present missing, the entire set unused and resting side by side like Egyptian mummies, missing. It was the only thing she couldn't locate; she checked around and although she didn't have much of value, there were things a thief might have taken and her jewelry, easily accessible in a wooden box on top of the dresser, was still there. Only later in the week when she happened to look down on the lot next door did she see the kids carving
x'
s and
o
's in the caked dirt with the knives, making elaborate roadways for the truck, printing out letters sometimes forwards and sometimes backwards as children do. The girl was sitting apart with the doll, sawing on an arm. They didn't seem to be after each other as one might have anticipated, but moved in a hungry slow sort of motion, focused only on that small ring of a world they lived in.

Your hands grow dry from the Clorox and cleaning. You buy rubber gloves but forget to put them on. You
were warned your skin would grow dry and scaly and you always try to remember, but you are in the middle of something before you remember, sprinting into it before you think of where you are going and by then it is too late. You are soaking the cups, you are scrubbing in between kitchen tiles, tiles too old and stained ever to come clean no matter how much time is spent scrubbing late into the night but when you can't sleep that's when it's good to get up and do something, to change things, if only the smell of things. It's like being asleep anyhow, over and over, and afterwards you sleep, if you're lucky, the sleep of the blessed, quiet, still, wrapped up tight in a summer sheet. It's only later you begin to worry at your cuticles, tearing at the dry bits of skin for the ache of relief.