, frozen, staring down
at us. Billie Holiday is singing, and then someone turns off the CD player and
there is silence. I sit on the floor, holding Henry. Alba is crouching over him,
whispering in his ear, shaking him. Henry's skin is warm, his eyes are open,
staring past me, he is heavy in my arms, so heavy, his pale skin torn apart, red
everywhere, ripped flesh framing a secret world of blood. I cradle Henry. There's
blood at the corner of his mouth. I wipe it off. Firecrackers explode somewhere
nearby. Gomez says, "I think we'd better call the police."
DISSOLUTION
Friday, February 2, 2007 (Clare is 35)
Clare: I sleep all day. Noises flit around the house-garbage truck in the alley,
rain, tree rapping against the bedroom window. I sleep. I inhabit sleep firmly,
willing it, wielding it, pushing away dreams, refusing, refusing. Sleep is my
lover now, my forgetting, my opiate, my oblivion. The phone rings and rings. I
have turned off the machine that answers with Henry's voice. It is afternoon, it is
night, it is morning. Everything is reduced to this bed, this endless slumber that
makes the days into one day, makes time stop, stretches and compacts time until
it is meaningless.
Sometimes sleep abandons me and I pretend, as though Etta has come to get
me up for school. I breathe slowly and deeply. I make my eyes still under
eyelids, I make my mind still, and soon, Sleep, seeing a perfect reproduction of
himself, comes to be united with his facsimile.
Sometimes I wake up and reach for Henry. Sleep erases all differences: then
and now; dead and living. I am past hunger, past vanity, past caring. This
morning I caught sight of my face in the bathroom mirror. I am paper-skinned,
gaunt, yellow, ring-eyed, hair matted. I look dead. I want nothing.
Kimy sits at the foot of the bed. She says, "Clare? Alba's home from school..
.won't you let her come in, say hi?" I pretend to sleep. Alba's little hand strokes
my face. Tears leak from my eyes. Alba sets something, her knapsack? her violin
case? on the floor and Kimy says, "Take off your shoes, Alba," and then Alba
crawls into bed with me. She wraps my arm around her, thrusts her head under
my chin. I sigh and open my eyes. Alba pretends to sleep. I stare at her thick
black eyelashes, her wide mouth, her pale skin; she is breathing carefully, she
clutches my hip with her strong hand, she smells of pencil shavings and rosin
and shampoo. I kiss the top of her head. Alba opens her eyes, and then her
resemblance to Henry is almost more than I can bear. Kimy gets up and walks
out of the room.
Later I get up, take a shower, eat dinner sitting at the table with Kimy and
Alba. I sit at Henry's desk after Alba has gone to bed, and I open the drawers, I
take out the bundles of letters and papers, and I begin to read.
A Letter to Be Opened in the Event of My Death
December 10, 2006
Dearest Clare,
As I write this, I am sitting at my desk in the back bedroom looking out at
your studio across the backyard full of blue evening snow, everything is slick
and crusty with ice, and it is very still. It's one of those winter evenings when the
coldness of every single thing seems to slow down time, like the narrow center of
an hourglass which time itself flows through, but slowly, slowly. I have the
feeling, very familiar to me when I am out of time but almost never otherwise, of
being buoyed up by time, floating effortlessly on its surface like a fat lady
swimmer. I had a sudden urge, tonight, here in the house by myself (you are at
Alicia's recital at St. Lucy's) to write you a letter. I suddenly wanted to leave
something, for after. I think that time is short, now. I feel as though all my
reserves, of energy, of pleasure, of duration, are thin, small. I don't feel capable of
continuing very much longer. I know you know.
If you are reading this, I am probably dead. (I say probably because you never
know what circumstances may arise; it seems foolish and self-important to just
declare one's own death as an out-and-out fact.) About this death of mine-I hope
it was simple and clean and unambiguous. I hope it didn't create too much fuss.
I'm sorry. (This reads like a suicide note. Strange.) But you know: you know that
if I could have stayed, if I could have gone on, that I would have clutched every
second: whatever it was, this death, you know that it came and took me, like a
child carried away by goblins.
Clare, I want to tell you, again, I love you. Our love has been the thread
through the labyrinth, the net under the high-wire walker, the only real thing in
this strange life of mine that I could ever trust. Tonight I feel that my love for you
has more density in this world than I do, myself: as though it could linger on
after me and surround you, keep you, hold you.
I hate to think of you waiting. I know that you have been waiting for me all
your life, always uncertain of how long this patch of waiting would be. Ten
minutes, ten days. A month. What an uncertain husband I have been, Clare, like a
sailor, Odysseus alone and buffeted by tall waves, sometimes wily and
sometimes just a plaything of the gods. Please, Clare. When I am dead. Stop
waiting and be free. Of me-put me deep inside you and then go out in the world
and live. Love the world and yourself in it, move through it as though it offers no
resistance, as though the world is your natural element. I have given you a life of
suspended animation. I don't mean to say that you have done nothing. You have
created beauty, and meaning, in your art, and Alba, who is so amazing, and for
me: for me you have been everything.
After my mom died she ate my father up completely. She would have hated it.
Every minute of his life since then has been marked by her absence, every action
has lacked dimension because she is not there to measure against. And when I
was young I didn't understand, but now, I know, how absence can be present,
like a damaged nerve, like a dark bird.
If I had to live on without you I know I could not do it. But I hope, I have this
vision of you walking unencumbered, with your shining hair in the sun. I have
not seen this with my eyes, but only with my imagination, that makes pictures,
that always wanted to paint you, shining; but I hope that this vision will be true,
anyway.
Clare, there is one last thing, and I have hesitated to tell you, because I'm
superstitiously afraid that telling might cause it to not happen (I know: silly) and
also because I have just been going on about not waiting and this might cause
you to wait longer than you have ever waited before. But I will tell you in case
you need something, after.
Last summer, I was sitting in Kendrick's waiting room when I suddenly found
myself in a dark hallway in a house I don't know. I was sort of tangled up in a
bunch of galoshes, and it smelled like rain. At the end of the hall I could see a rim
of light around a door, and so I went very slowly and very quietly to the door
and looked in. The room was white, and intensely lit with morning sun. At the
window, with her back to me, sat a woman, wearing a coral-colored cardigan
sweater, with long white hair all down her back. She had a cup of tea beside her,
on a table. I must have made some little noise, or she sensed me behind her...she
turned and saw me, and I saw her, and it was you, Clare, this was you as an old
woman, in the future. It was sweet, Clare, it was sweet beyond telling, to come as
though from death to hold you, and to see the years all present in your face. I
won't tell you any more, so you can imagine it, so you can have it unrehearsed
when the time comes, as it will, as it does come. We will see each other again,
Clare. Until then, live, fully, present in the world, which is so beautiful.
It's dark, now, and I am very tired. I love you, always. Time is nothing.
Henry
DASEIN
Saturday, July 12, 2008 (Clare is 37)
CLARE: Charisse has taken Alba and Rosa and Max and Joe roller skating at the
Rainbo. I drive over to her house to pick Alba up, but I'm early and Charisse is
running late. Gomez answers the door wearing a towel.
"Come on in," he says, opening the door wide. "Want some coffee?"
"Sure." I follow him through their chaotic living room to the kitchen. I sit at
the table, which is still littered with breakfast dishes, and clear a space large
enough to rest my elbows. Gomez rambles around the kitchen, making coffee.
"Haven't seen your mug in a while."
"I've been pretty busy. Alba takes all these different lessons, and I just drive
her around."
"You making any art?" Gomez sets a cup and saucer in front of me and pours
coffee into the cup. Milk and sugar are already on the table, so I help myself.
"No."
"Oh." Gomez leans against the kitchen counter, hands wrapped around his
coffee cup. His hair is dark with water and combed back flat. I've never noticed
before that his hairline is receding. "Well, other than chauffeuring her highness,
what are you doing?"
What am I doing? I am waiting. I am thinking. I am sitting on our bed holding an old
plaid shirt that still smells of Henry, taking deep breaths of his smell I am going for walks at
two in the morning, when Alba is safe in her bed, long walks to tire myself out enough to
sleep. I am conducting conversations with Henry as though he were here with me, as
though he could see through my eyes, think with my brain.
"Not much."
"Hmm."
"How 'bout you?"
"Oh, you know. Aldermanning. Playing the stern paterfamilias. The usual."
"Oh." I sip my coffee. I glance at the clock over the sink. It is shaped like a
black cat: its tail twitches back and forth like a pendulum and its big eyes move
in time with each twitch, ticking loudly. It's 11:45,
"Do you want anything to eat?"
I shake my head. "No, thanks." Judging from the dishes on the table, Gomez
and Charisse had honeydew melon, scrambled eggs, and toast for breakfast. The
chi