“See. There are 8 triangles in every block, but every triangle is a different color. 6 or 7 dark ones, 1 or 2 light ones. Pink. Pale green. From over here you can see how shattered it all looks. Smashed, to quote you. That's why it's a Broken Dishes, not a Pinwheel. I'm giving it to my husband.”
“You throw things at him?”
“Just this.” I point between my legs.
We never fight. We never argue. I get angry but not with him. And whatever I'm angry with I don't make into him. There's so much peace there. It was never like this before. I fought with men. I disdained them. I wouldn't fuck them. I don't know what came first, the anger or the distance. I wasn't saving myself for marriage. I was just saving myself.
John was different. He was so fragile. That was his
strength. He'd been worn down almost to transparency. I used to worry that he'd burn through. People are like quiltsâtheir passions are what eat them.
We've lasted almost a year. A year is so long. It's nothing to my customers. They buy my quilts to slow down time.
But Johnny makes time stand almost still. It's so quiet around him. So peaceful.
He leads the perfect life.
We just got back from a trip and I'm very tired. It gets harder and harder to find good quilts. But when I do find one I feel like I've entered time. Otherwise I don't feel like I'm living in time at all. The future doesn't interest me. Why should it. It doesn't exist and it never will. But a quilt is full of blood and passion and pain and art and time. It's like going for a ride on a magic carpet. You don't know what we can see, why don't you tell your dreams to me. I can read the dreams in quilts. I can touch the life.
I got Johnny interested in the history when I read to him from The Minister's Wooing by Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin. She had all these women sitting around in a bee. This was supposed to be 200 years ago. They talked and talked. About everything. Johnny is very interested in what people say. I read to him: “The conversation never flagged, ranging from theology to recipes of corn fritters, sly allusions to the future lady of the parish to the doctrine of free will and predestination.” “They talked about free will!” said Johnny. “Just like Nietzsche!”
I always try to visit the graveyards in the places quilts were made. I look for the headstones of the makers. In Lebanon Ohio I found Emma Ann Covert. That was before I met Johnny but he likes me to tell him about it because of her name. “I
should have been a Covert,” he says. I tried to get the Hall family to sell me her Bouquet of Garden Flowers. I wouldn't have sold it to me either.
After I saw Celestine Bacheller's incredible embroidered scene-paintings in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts I tried to find her grave in Wyoma. If she'd put a cemetery in a quilt maybe I would have found her. When I told Johnny she'd worked on this one quilt from 1850 until 1900, he said, “That's the year Nietzsche died.”
This time Johnny was with me. We ended up in Blackstrap Maine. We found Henry Thompson Leighton's grave. He was buried with his wife, Maria Josephine Bateman Leighton. But they weren't surrounded by the graves of the 44 young women who'd made Henry his bridegroom's quilt. One appliqued square each. “Were they all his lovers?” Johnny asked. “Of course,” I told him. “That must have been quite a bee,” said Johnny.
He wandered off among the graves. Then he called for me. Screamed for me is more like it. I ran to him. I don't know if I've ever heard him raise his voice before. I thought he might have stepped in a hole and broken his ankle. When I got to him he wasn't hurt but there were tears in his eyes. He was pointing at the grave before him. I looked down. The stone was lying flat. There was nothing on it. I knew exactly what was making him so sad. “Let's turn it over,” I said. But when we did, the other side was empty also. “It doesn't matter,” I said. “Yours won't look like this.” “What will it say? What have I ever done in my life?” “It will say Beloved Husband.”
He hardly spoke on the long drive home. He didn't listen to music. The blankness of the stone was like the silence he fears. How do you save someone from nothingness. He fills
my life. I wish I could fill his.
“Promise me I'll die before you,” he said.
I couldn't help laughing. “Just to get Beloved Husband on your tombstone.”
“That's not it at all.” He didn't say another word the whole way home.
He waits for me in bed. I can feel him watching me. Listening to my pencil move.
He has never been so quiet for so long since the moment we met. And I've never been so tired in my life.
“I'll be right there,” I just said.
Please answer me.
“That must have been quite a bee.”
He was laughing when he said it.
He still is.
Beloved Husband.
Today I got married. But now it was yesterday. It's 4 in the morning and I'm sitting here on the floor in my old nightgown in the moonlight while my husband sleeps in our huge bed and I watch him while I write. This is our first night in the loft. It was ready for us last week. But we didn't move in because we weren't married yet.
Such a traditional couple.
I usually turn my back to him when I write. Now he's sleeping. So I sit here with what's left of the champagne writing and watching him with my diary on my crossed legs and his semen seeping out of me like little baby fingers.
I always wondered what happened to it when the man pulled out.
It was a great wedding. We didn't know a soul. That's how
people should get married. Alone. Nothing to distract you from one another.
Johnny carried my boombox there and got permission to play some music. Bach. He says he wants to have 20 children just like Bach.
“Me too,” I told him. “Each one by a different man.”
He also gave a little speech. We're surrounded by strangers and he says that the minute he laid eyes on me he wanted me. The flesh said she's for me. The spirit said she's for me.
People didn't know what to make of him. Men closed their eyes. Maybe they thought they could make him disappear.
Women shook their heads.
I stood there next to him with tears in my eyes.
When we got home, he opened a bottle of champagne. It's already like an artifact. It's green and thick with flowers etched into it. Or do I mean a talisman.
We sat at one of the Seymour tables. I wondered why he wasn't carrying me to the bed. He must have known it wasn't time. How does he know? All he's had is the so-called Cosima. More than I've had. He knows more too.
At first he talked about this new place of ours. Look at this, he said. Look over there at that. The furniture looks great. Are the lights too bright? Don't forget you can lock your closet. What a fine kitchen. Granite counters. Imagine that. But we can't cut on them or we'll ruin our knives.
Then, as if he were a new home himself, some new space that I am moving into, he said, “I want you to know me. Nobody has ever known me. I have never really known myself. But if you know me, then I will find myself in you.”
“No pun intended?” I couldn't help it.
He laughed. He said, “But I meant it! More champagne?”
“Fuck me, Johnny.”
He undressed me. No one has ever undressed me before. That's been my job. Let alone fucked me. I love undressing for men. I love to watch them watching me. I love peeling off my layers of clothes and the more naked I get the more hidden I am.
But I figured, you're a married girl now, Clarabell, let someone else do the work.
He worships me. I sit on the edge of the bed and he kneels before me and he buries his head in my lap before he so much as takes off one of my half-boots. I put my fingers in his inviting hair and weigh his head and think how much he's got in there, all those words, all those sounds, all those questions.
He lifts his head to look at me and his glasses come off in my skirt. It's like I've got 2 men now, one looking into my eyes, one into my lap.
“Can you see without your glasses?”
“I have no idea.”
I slide them back onto his face. “There's something I want you to see.”
I went to my closet. The key was in the lock.
“This is from me to you. For us.”
I never gave anyone a quilt before. It violates all my principles.
We spread it out over the bed. It was huge.
“Wedding rings,” he said.
“Double.”
“It's very beautiful. And now I understand.” He held up his left hand to me.
We were ringless. I'd told him the Amish wore no jewelry including wedding rings.
Now he undresses me as I stand beside him. I fold back the quilt before we lie down.
“I thought bed quilts were for fucking on,” he says.
I lie on the bed and open myself up for him.
Ike just left. It was the third time this week. Plus once at the gallery. “Watch me,” he says, “watch me.” “I thought I was the director of this film,” I told him. He laughed. “You are. But I'm the star.”
Johnny just asked me a question. That's something he almost never does when I'm writing in here. I know he watches me from the bed while I do this, which I don't mind at all. In fact I love to feel his eyes on my back. I sometimes wish he would just rip this thing out of my hands and expose me for what I am. Look at this handwriting. Sometimes I can't read it myself. But what if he can't. From the day I met him I thought he could. But what if he can't. Or what if he can but he doesn't. Or what if he does but he doesn't understand. What if he does understand. Will he ever know me.
“Do you think of me as someone to whom nothing has happened?” he asked.
“I think of you as someone everything has happened to. Everything.”
“Thank you, Clara.”
That was it. I never thought of it before. How deep you sink in life when you're careful not to move.
Sometimes all he touches is my head. I get so used to his hands everywhere. On my shoulders with his thumbs on my
nipples. The back of his hands brushing the insides of my thighs. Reaching back to grab one of my ankles when I've got my legs spread high to fit him in completely. Or under me with his hands spread on my ass and his fingers moving in my crack so my hole back there's a little mouth opening and closing saying stick your finger in, which he sometimes does and I go wild. But there are times when he almost keeps his hands to himself. He has me wondering where he's going to put them. He had to learn to do this. He was not a great lover from the get-go. He was beautiful. His flesh was golden hard just like that radiant man who's got his muscly legs spread in El Greco's Resurrection and Christ is rising up hardonically, as John would say, from in between them. His face was speechless. I mean I could look at it and not be able to say anything. Not want to. But he had no idea. He was like someone whose body and mind have never met. They lived in different countries. I don't think he would have been able to recognize himself in a photograph. So he had to learn how to touch. First himself. Then me. It was like having a baby. The idea of it fills your mind, your house, the world, but you have to bear the body. Johnny's was like that. It had to be born. He'd lie between my legs and enter me. But while he was inside me he was learning how to love. Where to hide his face. When to look at mine. How to use his tongue, his teeth. What to say. What to do with his feet. How to bounce his balls against my butt. Where to put his hands. His hands would scare me if he weren't my husband. But he's learned to play me like an instrument. And sometimes all he touches is my head. His fingers on my scalp. His thumbs rubbing behind my ears. His eyelids fluttering in my hair. I wait for his hands to move down my body. To massage my breasts or hold my waist. But he keeps them on my head. He holds my head in his hands and rubs my scalp and my mind floods with pleasure.
Literally. It stops thinking. It isn't a mind any more. It's a piece of my body. And he holds it in his hands. And when I come, I come together. There is no difference between thinking and feeling. There is, for goddamn once, peace.
This is my first day in New York. I bought this blank book at Barnes and Noble. It was filled with students. Barnes and Noble I mean. They were standing in line to sell their books. Suckers! I never have to go to school again in my life! I had to go to the other store across the street to find this book. It was so ugly that I almost didn't buy it. But then I got the idea to put a little piece of my quilt on it. It was only from the corners. They were a mess anyway because I used to suck on this quilt when I was a baby. And on the bus ride here I really messed it up. I slept under it. I ate on it. I used it to hide from creeps who would stare at me. Grandma Belzidas made it for me when I was little. It just fit my bed. Now it's kind of falling apart. But just the stitching. And the filling's coming out at the seams. But the fabric's still strong. It's worn down so much I can see through it when I hold it up to my eyes. It's as smooth as my skin. It got that way from me. Sometimes I didn't know where this quilt ended and I began. I used to wrap myself up in it like a mummy. Now I make myself come with it. Am I allowed to say that? Well I pity anyone who tries to read this. They used to call me The Alien at school. Because of my writing. Not because of my looks. I never had any problem with my looks. I'm beautiful. Even my father thought so. I had lots of boyfriends. I photograph very well. My name is Carla Belzidas. I'm l6 years old. I'm from the Valley of the Moon in California. I ran away from home. And nobody's ever going to find me.
I was on my way to pick up Zach at the Jewish Theological Seminary for lunch when I bumped into the Professor in front of the Columbia library. “My wife's not home,” he said. We walked out through the gate and across Broadway and cut through Barnard and I thought about how I was getting my education for free. He lives on Claremont Avenue which I couldn't remember the last time I wrote about going home with him because that was the first time and the first time with a man I sometimes miss the details because I'm picturing what's to come. His wife also teaches American literature he told me today while we were walking and he actually said “Hello Dear” up toward a window as we passed the building where he said she was holding her class. “Different centuries,” he said to me and I thought he was joking so I said, “You aren't
that
much older than me.” He laughed and said, “I mean she teaches the 19th and I teach the 20th.” Before I had sex with him I made him give me some books. “A prostitute for learning” he called me. Well the sex is over but I've got slightly used paperbacks of Wallace Stegner, Walker Percy, and Wright Morris. Just the way he did last time he asked me to describe what was happening. “Pretend you're in one of my classes.” So I went for it this time. “I see little drops of come. Wet yourself with it. Pretend you're