The Body Artist Read online

  She walked on the grounds, feeling what was here, all sky and light, the sound of hammering somewhere in one of the hutments off the dirt road, nearly half a mile off, tactful on the wind, and how the clarity of things can deepen your step, give you something to catch at and grip, and then the hammer stopped. She walked and thought. It was one of the birdless mornings. A stillness hung about the feeders, such emptiness, arresting in its depth.

  Inside she noticed first thing that he was wearing the shoes she'd bought him, snug, laced, with cushioned soles, and she was pleased about this.

  They sat in the panelled room with the tape device on a coffee table between them.

  Who had taught him to tie his shoes?

  He was staring at her. He seemed to be staring but probably wasn't. She didn't think his eye was able to search out and shape things. Not like normal anyway. The eye is supposed to shape and process and paint. It tells us a story we want to believe.

  "Then when it comes to me."

  "What?"

  'A thing of the most. Days yes years."

  "Do you know what that means? A day. A year. Or did you hear me use these words?"

  "Say some words."

  "Say some words."

  "In when it comes."

  "In when it comes. What?" she said.

  "Leave into leaving."

  "Who is leaving?"

  "This is when you, yes, you said."

  "What did I say?"

  She realized she'd never called him by his name. She spoke his name only when she was alone, talking into the tape recorder. Because, of course, admit it – the name is cute and condescending.

  He said, "Don't touch it," in a voice that wasn't quite his. "I'll clean it up later."

  He fell into a silence after this. Yes, fell. Showing a downcast glance, a lowering of spirits if she read it right. She recited a nursery rhyme, in French. She tried to get him to repeat a line and he made an effort, touching and hopeless, and she found herself describing the scene, mentally, to someone who may have been Mariella, or not, as if he were a piece of found art and they needed, between them, to settle the question of his usability.

  Afternoons, ever so fast, last light drained into the hills across the bay, into everything around her, trees and earth and the pressed leaves beneath her feet, umbered rust and gold, and once a skein of geese passed silently over her shoulder, flying down the world into their secret night.

  She began to understand that she could not miss Rey, could not consider his absence, the loss of Rey, without thinking along the margins of Mr. Tuttle.

  When she picked up the ringing phone, she waited for the caller to speak first and felt a small cruel satisfaction in the lull of puzzled molecules.

  She took him outside on a clear night and traced a constellation with her finger. It was a while since she'd looked at the night sky and their breath showed smoky in the chill air. She drew him frontally near and put his hands in her jacket pockets and blew words in his face that she made him repeat.

  He said, "The word for moonlight is moonlight."

  This made her happy. It was logically complex and oddly moving and circularly beautiful and true – or maybe not so circular but straight as straight can be.

  She had to find a name that she could call him to his face.

  She found it interesting to think that he lived in overlapping realities.

  Many things are interesting, fool, but nowhere near true.

  She reminded herself she needed batteries for the tape recorder.

  She liked to think. What did she like to think? She was having a dumb day and wanted to blame the fog.

  Maybe he falls, he slides, if that is a useful word, from his experience of an objective world, the deepest description of space-time, where he does not feel a sense of future direction – he slides into her experience, everyone's, the standard sun-kissed chronology of events.

  Am I the first human to abduct an alien?

  The fog was somber and bronzed low-rolling toward the coast but then lost form on landfall, taking everything with it in amoebic murk.

  If there is no sequential order except for what we engender to make us safe in the world, then maybe it is possible, what, to cross from one nameless state to another, except that it clearly isn't.

  She reminded herself she needed batteries. She told herself remember.

  It was the kind of day in which you forget words and drop things and wonder what it is you came into the room to get because you are standing here for a reason and you have to tell yourself it is just a question of sooner or later before you remember because you always remember once you are here.

  The thing is communicated somehow.

  She wax-stripped hair from her armpits and legs. It came ripping off in cold sizzles. She had an acid exfoliating cream, hard-core, prescribed, and after she stripped the hair she rubbed in the cream to remove wastepapery skin in flakes and scales and little rolling boluses that she liked to hold between her fingers and imagine, unmorbidly, as the cell death of something inside her.

  She used a monkey-hair brush on her elbows and knees. She wanted it to hurt.

  She didn't have to go to Tangier to buy loofahs and orange sticks. It was all in the malls, in the high aisles, and so were the facial brushes, razors and oatmeal scrubs. This was her work, to disappear from all her former venues of aspect and bearing and to become a blankness, a body slate erased of even' past resemblance.

  She had a fade cream she applied just about everywhere, to depigment herself. She cut off some, then more of the hair on her head. It was crude work that became nearly brutal when she bleached out the color. In the mirror she wanted to see someone who is classically unseen, the person you are trained to look through, bled of familiar effect, a spook in the night static of every public toilet.

  She used astringents to remove soap residues, greases and chronic lurking dirt. There were plastic strips that she stuck on and peeled off, grubbing up numerous pluglike impurities from her follicles and pores.

  A hidden system, interesting, these tallowy secretions, glandular events of the body cosmos, small festers and eruptions, impacted fats, oils, salt and sweat, and how nearly scholarly the pleasures of extraction.

  She found the muscle rub she'd bought for Rey just before he left and she used it just to use it.

  She stood looking at him, two bodies in a room. He seemed to recede under observation, inwardly withdraw, not in discomfort, she thought, but spontaneously, autonomically, guided by some law of his body's own devising. She put her hands on his shoulders and looked into his eyes. She thought, When did people start looking into each other's eyes? This is what she did, searchingly, standing in the kitchen with Mr. Tuttle.

  Don't touch it. I'll clean it up later.

  His eyes were gray but what did it matter. His eyes were off-gray, they were mild and still and unanxious. She looked. She was always looking. She could not get enough. His eyes were gray gone sallow in this harsh light, slightly yellowish, and there were no stirrings of tremulous self.

  She framed his face in her hands, looking into him straight-on. What did it mean, the first time a thinking creature looked deeply into another's eyes? Did it take a hundred thousand years before this happened or was it the first thing they did, transcendingly, the thing that made them higher, made them modern, the gaze that demonstrates we are lonely in our souls?

  She said, "Why do I think I'm standing closer to you than you are to me?"

  She wasn't trying to be funny. It was true, a paradox of the spectral sort. Then she tried to be funny, using sweet talk and pet names, but soon felt foolish and stopped.

  He ate breakfast, or didn't, leaving most of it. Then he stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the long hall that led to the foyer. She sat at the table, waiting. He looked past her or through her and she almost knew what was coming.

  He said, "But where are you going?"

  He said, "Just a little while into town."

  He said, "
But there's nothing we need. And I'll get it if we need it. I know what to get. We need some what's-it-called. Scouring powder."

  He said, "What?"

  She knew almost at once, even before he spoke. She didn't know specifically but sensed and felt the change in him. The tea was smoking in her mug. She sat at the table and watched him and then she knew completely in the first electric exchange because the voice, the voices were not his.

  "But we don't need it now this minute. I'll get it when I go. Ajax. That's the stuff. There's nothing to scour right now."

  She listened and it was her. Who the hell else. These things she'd said.

  "Ajax, son of Telamon, I think, if my Trojan War is still intact, and maybe we need a newspaper because the old one's pretty stale, and great brave warrior, and spear-thrower of mighty distances, and toilet cleanser too."

  Do you recognize what you said weeks earlier, and yes, if it is recited back to you, and yes, if it is the last thing you said, among the last things, to someone you loved and would never see again. This is what she'd said to him before he got in the car and drove, if only she d known, all the way to New York.

  "Just for a drive. This is all. I'll take the Toyota," he said, he said, "if I ever find my keys."

  This is what the man was saying in the doorway; looking small and weak, beat down by something. It did not seem an act of memory. It was Rey's voice all right, it was her husband's tonal soul, but she didn't think the man was remembering. It is happening now. This is what she thought. She watched him struggle in his utterance and thought it was happening, somehow, now, in his frame, in his fracted time, and he is only reporting, helplessly, what they say.

  He said, "Take a walk why don't you. Great day. Leave the car, leave the keys."

  He said, "They're in the car. Of course. The keys. Where else? This is it. How can I tell you? This is always it."

  He stood in the doorway, blinking. Rey is alive now in this man's mind, in his mouth and body and cock. Her skin was electric. She saw herself, she sees herself crawling toward him. The image is there in front of her. She is crawling across the floor and it is nearly real to her. She feels something has separated, softly come unfixed, and she tries to pull him down to the floor with her, stop him, keep him here, or crawls up onto him or into him, dissolving, or only lies prone and sobs unstoppably, being watched by herself from above.

  She could smell his liniment on her body, his muscle rub, and then he was all through talking.

  CHAPTER 6

  You stand at the table shuffling papers and you drop something. Only you don't know it. It takes a second or two before you know it and even then you know it only as a formless distortion of the teeming space around your body. But once you know you've dropped something, you hear it hit the floor, belatedly. The sound makes its way through an immense web of distances. You hear the thing fall and know what it is at the same time, more or less, and it's a paperclip. You know this from the sound it makes when it hits the floor and from the retrieved memory of the drop itself, the thing falling from your hand or slipping off the edge of the page to which it was clipped. It slipped off the edge of the page. Now that you know you dropped it, you remember how it happened, or half remember, or sort of see it maybe, or something else. The paperclip hits the floor with an end-to-end bounce, faint and weightless, a sound for which there is no imitative word, the sound of a paperclip falling, but when you bend to pick it up, it isn't there.

  That night she stood outside his room and listened to him whimper. The sound was a series of weak cries, half cries, dull and uniform, and it had a faint echo, a feedback, and carried a desolation that swept aside words, hers or anyone's.

  She didn't know what it meant. Of course she knew. He had no protective surface. He was alone and unable to improvise, make himself up. She went to the bed and sat there, offering touches and calming sounds, softenings of the night.

  He was scared. How simple and true. She tried to tend him, numb him to his fear. He was here in the howl of the world. This was the howling face, the stark, the not-as-if of things.

  But how could she know this? She could not.

  Maybe he was just deranged, unroutinely nuts. Not that it's ever routine. A nutcase who tries to live in other voices.

  He lay curled in a thin blanket. She uncovered him and lay on top. You are supposed to offer solace. She kissed his face and neck and rubbed him warm. She put her hand in his shorts and began to breathe with him, to lead him in little breathy moans. This is what you do when they are scared.

  She thought she saw a bird. Out of the corner of her eye she saw something rise past the window, eerie and bird-like but maybe not a bird. She looked and it was a bird, its flight line perfectly vertical, its streaked brown body horizontal, wings calmly stroking, a sparrow, not wind-hovering but generating lift and then instantly gone.

  She saw it mostly in retrospect because she didn't know what she was seeing at first and had to re-create the ghostly moment, write it like a line in a piece of fiction, and maybe it wasn't a sparrow at all but a smaller bird, gray and not brown and spotted and not streaked but not as small as a hummingbird, and how would she ever know for sure unless it happened again, and even then, she thought, and even then again.

  It isn't true because it can't be true. Rey is not alive in this man's consciousness or in his palpable verb tense, his walking talking continuum.

  Nice word. What does it mean?

  She thought it meant a continuous thing, a continuous whole, and the only way to distinguish one part from another, this from that, now from then, is by making arbitrary divisions.

  This is exactly what he doesn't know how to do.

  She was working her body, crouched on the cold floor, smelling herself.

  But it can't be true that he drifts from one reality to another, independent of the logic of time. This is not possible. You are made out of time. This is the force that tells you who you are. Close your eyes and feel it. It is time that defines your existence.

  But this is the point, that he laps and seeps, somehow, into other reaches of being, other time-lives, and this is an aspect of his bewilderment and pain.

  Somehow. The weakest word in the language. And more or less. And maybe. Always maybe. She was always maybeing.

  She knelt, body upright and rigid, legs at hip-distance, head back, arms back, pelvis pushed forward.

  Let arms drop down.

  Dangle right hand over right foot and then left over left.

  Everything flows backward from the pelvis.

  Place palms on soles, matching hands to feet.

  Time is the only narrative that matters. It stretches events and makes it possible for us to suffer and come out of it and see death happen and come out of it. But not for him. He is in another structure, another culture, where time is something like itself, sheer and bare, empty of shelter.

  Hold position.

  Everything flows from the pelvis backward to the chest and shoulders and arms, to the furious flung-back head.

  Hold position, breathing normally, then abnormally.

  Repeat.

  The wind started blowing at noon and was still shaking the windows when she walked along the halls five hours later.

  The phone was ringing.

  In the kitchen he dropped a glass of water and she extended an arm, seeing the speckled wet begin to spread on the plank floor.

  The shrill wind made her uneasy, turning her inward, worse in a way than obliterating snow or deposits of ice that bring down power lines.

  She built a fire and then walked out of the room and up the stairs, listening to the walls take the wheezy strain.

  In the kitchen she said, "Don't touch it."

  The best things in this house were the plank floor in the kitchen and the oak balustrade on the staircase. Just saying the words. Thinking the words.

  She said, "Don't touch it," and extended an arm, held out a hand to forestall any effort he might make to pick up the pieces. "I'll clean it
up later."

  There's something about the wind. It strips you of assurances, working into you, continuous, making you feel the hidden thinness of everything around you, all the solid stuff of a hundred undertakings – the barest makeshift flimsy.

  She cleaned it up now. She didn't wait for later. There was something in the moment that she needed to keep.

  She picked up the ringing phone and it was Rey's lawyer at the other end. Something about debts. He was in heavy debt. There were obligations and liabilities. He had debts cascading on other debts. This made her feel good. It was Rey all right. She felt a rush of affection even as the news made her think of her own dimming finances. It was the Rey she knew and not some other. She was sure he hadn't been aware of the situation or had considered it so integral to the condition of his life that knowing about it was just another form of not knowing about it. It occupied no more consciousness than a soft cough on a summer's day. There were loans outstanding, accounts in arrears and taxes long overdue. The man recited numbers in a voice that had a government patent. He pointed out the implications, the sinister transits of spousal responsibility. She laughed gaily and wished him luck.

  Then he stopped eating. She sat him down at the table and fed him by hand. She urged and teased. He took some food, then less. She tried force-feeding him but he rejected most of it passively, head averted, or took it in and let it dribble out, let it dangle or spew.

  She began to eat less herself. She looked at him and didn't want to eat. He ate next to nothing for three days running and she ate little more. It was suitable in a way. It was what she hadn't thought of on her own.

  She looked at him. Poor bastard. She watched him with all the intensity of the first moments and hours but there was something in her look that felt different now, a deathly devotion almost.

  Sometimes she followed him through the house. She watched him sleep. Mornings on tape, the questions and answers, little lessons and memorizations, all this faded into a daze of stray talk and then more or less agreed-upon silence. She fed him soup while he sat on the toilet once. The days were toneless and droning.