Lithium for Medea

14

The hospital doors snapped open for me, a kind of glass mouth. An older man sat hunched and weeping on the grass near the emergency ambulance driveway. No one looked at him. He was still there as I drove out of the parking lot, a small mound lost beneath the shadows the building cast.

I walked the three steps up to my porch. My cousin Rachel had written. I sat on the porch and read her letter twice. Then I telephoned Jason.

“I miss you.” I paused. Did I miss him? “I missed you last night.”

“I’m here now. Do you want me now?”

Now, now. I said yes.

Despite everything, when Jason offers me a piece of a day or a night, I feel six years old again. I am driving with Daddy in the old gray Hudson. He’s going to buy me an ice cream cone. Daddy is taking me to the circus, the aquarium, the zoo. When Jason offers me anything I feel whole. I feel loved.

I studied my house. The last vestiges of Gerald Campbell had been thrown away. Jason’s canvases were stacked neatly near the front door. The house was thinning. I could strip it down further.

There were the gifts from Francine that I no longer needed, had never needed. All the hard hooks and little anchors she gave me. They were attempts to weigh me down to the thing she called the real world. When Francine talked about the real world she made it sound as if she held the patent.

I assembled hand-painted vases Francine had bought on business trips to Rome and Jerusalem, Buenos Aires, Paris. If I could just cut back the unnecessary shape and mass, the sense of past inhabitation, perhaps I would be able to understand. Perhaps with the walls and floors free from the weight of furniture and tourist artifacts, the truth would snap loose, dusted off, perfectly clear.

“You can’t do this to me,” Jason said. He was stunned. It was a year ago or two years ago, after our reconciliation.

“Do what?” I asked softly.

I knew precisely what. I had been gone that night. I had been gone the better part of a week with another man.

The other man meant nothing. He was irrelevant, a kind of driftwood. He didn’t stop the pain that was Jason. Beneath the surface weren’t men the same, encased in their separate sets of idiosyncrasies? I no longer had the ability to memorize a new set of boundaries. Jason had burned me out.

“Where have you been?” Jason demanded.

“You don’t want to know,” I said softly, evenly, enjoying the tension in his voice.

Jason hung up. He opened the front door of my house without knocking. He grabbed me by my shoulders and pushed me against the wall.

“Bitch,” he hissed. “I want to know.”

“I was with someone.”

“I know that, bitch. I can smell it.”

Once I had smelled it on him, too. It was like an invisible stain, the small tendrils of someone else, a faint impression left on the skin, a kind of resin.

“Does he fuck you like this?” Jason demanded. He was tearing off my jeans. He was pushing me farther against the wall. “Does he, bitch? Fuck you like this? Fuck you like I do?”

“Nobody fucks me like you do,” I whispered, my forehead pressed against the cool plaster walls.

“Why spoil it?” Jason asked. He was finished.

I was sitting on the floor. I lit a cigarette and looked at him. “I don’t trust you, obviously.”

Jason’s face was tight with a slow white spreading anger. There would be retribution. It didn’t matter. His new weapons could only be variations and refinements on the old. And I had already been singed past bone. I was almost pure, beyond ash.

Later there would be escalations. Later I would come to Jason’s studio when night was already thinning and going gray.

“Get laid?” he asked, opening his front door for me. I brushed his naked body as I walked in.

“Yes,” I said into the darkness. I felt Jason walking behind me, a special dark heat at my back.

I lay down on his bed. I was a prop being taken down from a shelf. I would be dusted and polished, briefly admired. Then Jason would put me away again.

“Did he make you feel this much alive?” Jason asked. He was breathing in uneven short angry puffs like smoke.

“Actually, it was soft and gentle.”

“Gentle? Since when is that your bag?” Jason sounded mildly surprised.

I didn’t say anything. I had gone to a party. I found myself talking to a young woman. She was nineteen. She played a harpsichord in a small orchestra. The woman needed a ride home. I had driven her.

I watched the woman move through her rooms. She was graceful and deft, strangely confident. I had never been nineteen in that way. I had doubts. I leaned over toilets and vomited. I stood in the steamy shadows of Giovanni’s Italian Restaurant with the pasta in big fat black pots and dragged myself half asleep, half dead, through the rooms, the streets.

All at once the girl turned her face toward me. She looked younger than nineteen. She played a harpsichord. She didn’t want to marry, ever. She looked younger than I had ever been. She leaned over and kissed me. Her mouth startled.

I surprised myself. Something sparked electric, risky, raw. I stayed with her. I took off my clothing. I felt determined. She left a light on in the hallway. I sat down on the edge of her bed. I watched her light a candle and hoped it would be simple, painless, something I could wash down the drain, change clothing, stand in supermarket lines and no one would know. And I offered my face to the other. My lips were kissed, my chest pressed. I was a good grape, breaking and scattering juice.

“Come from your gentle lover?” Jason asked.

It was the next night. It was late. Still, he had kept his lights on. Still, he had waited for me.

I nodded. Jason glanced at the kitchen clock. “Only midnight,” he observed. “What happened? The guy’s wife show up?”

“As a matter of fact, it was a she,” I said. “And her husband came back.”

I liked the way my words sounded. They filled the air between us with something white and sharp. I felt surrounded by spikes, little marble columns where I could hide. A safe place in the ruins, almost definable. I wanted to smile.

Jason grabbed my wrist. “You were with a chick? Is that what you’re telling me?” The veins in his forehead leaped out. His eyes went black. “A woman?” Jason paused. He looked at the kitchen wall as if searching for something, a common household object that might explain everything. Finally he said, “That really disgusts me.” He dropped his fingers from my wrist. He glanced at his fingers as if expecting to find a glossy dark stain. My wrist fell to my side, a white fist hitting my hip, a kind of gong.

Was I imagining it? Was his face slowly collapsing in slabs of grayish clay? But yes. His eyes were dark. They darted. They raced. I could feel them spark. They seemed to be tearing at themselves, growing claws. Inside Jason’s eyes there was turbulence, as if suddenly he had a vision of a thousand possible futures and in each one he was dying, falling hacked, trapped, boiled.

I felt light, airy. I could drift like smoke. I smiled sweetly, my lips perfect, my mouth half opened, silky in darkness, a flower, flawless. I stretched myself on his bed. I had stumbled on gold, nuggets and chips, gold by the pound, the ton. I waited in the darkness for Jason. I didn’t have to wait long.

Later there would be escalations.

“Who was it?” he asked, talking into my body. “A man?” Jason bit my breast. I could feel his tongue, eyelids, fingernails, warm breath, lime breath. “A woman?” His voice seemed to flutter and tremble.

I was a kind of mirror. Dark formless things snaked and jerked in the smoky rippling glass. His fear brushed against me, a pulse running through the darkness, a current, electric.

“Was it a man?” Jason seemed to plead. He held my face hard with his hands and looked down through the shadows, looked down for something. I knew he would find nothing.

“No,” I lied easily, looking straight at him. My face was solid. Nothing leaked or shook. “It was a woman.”

“Jesus,” he said. He slid away from me. He coiled himself into the darkness, stung and withdrawn. His face was a sail suddenly deprived of wind. The canvas flapped in useless white sheets. Jason pressed his face into the pillow. He began to cry.

“There, there,” I said, stroking his back lightly. “There, there,” I said softly, gently, running my fingernails across his flesh, skating my fingers across his small back. I was smiling in the darkness, smiling where he couldn’t see me. The smile felt odd and heavy on my mouth.

All at once I didn’t care any more if he was painting naked blond teenagers crouching over a pile of oranges in a sandbox like strange young hens. It didn’t matter if he was painting women humping beer cans on a tapestry of floral print beach towel, their pink and yellow and orange legs disappearing into the gold and red and blue threads. I didn’t care what young woman with what flat girl’s stomach knelt on a yellow plastic beach raft with her hips jutting forward in the universal and cross-culturally validated position of absolute invitation. It had taken years not to care anymore.

“Where are you going?” Jason sat up in bed.

“Out,” I said. It was another night, another battle.

Jason pushed the covers back, angry. He followed me into his bathroom. I combed my hair slowly, carefully arranging the long red strands around my neck. In the half-light they were a kind of coral. Why, I could be a mermaid draped in sea shells.

“It’s one A.M.”

His words were a kind of gong. One A.M. How dare you? I am the man. I am hard. I am metal. I am time, boundary, longitude. You can’t defy me.

I put on gold hoop earrings. I was conscious of Jason watching me, his eyes, his face splintering. I was putting on pink lipstick. My hair was the color of sea bells. I was a mermaid. I didn’t care what time it was.

“Don’t go,” Jason said.

My eyes were lined with luminescent blue. They looked like the insides of abalone shells. I rubbed rouge into my skin until my whole face glowed.

“You’re doing this to piss me off,” Jason said. He was following me through the front room. His voice seemed small and shocked.

I closed his front door. I could feel him behind me as I walked across the bridge over the Grand Canal. The air felt agitated behind me, a series of small black eruptions. Something inside me smiled.

There were truces, brief states of calm beneath stripped blue skies. I sat on my front porch. I was a shell surrendering to the currents and tides. It was late afternoon, another day in an indeterminate but warm season. I had collected my rents. I watched sunflowers nod, their faces a string of fat yellow beads repeated in the water. The canal seemed to be breathing.

Suddenly Jason appeared on the horizon. He was paddling his yellow rowboat under the Howland Canal bridge. He edged closer, yellower. He tied the boat to the stake he had driven into the side of the canal in front of my house. The Woman’s House.

“I’ve come to take you away from all this.” Jason mockbowed. He smiled. He offered me his hand. I took it.

Jason rowed. The sun was raw in the sky, a slow thick red. A dozen black-and-white ducks pushed out of the way of the boat.

“It’s just like the old days,” Jason said.

His voice had a certain sparkle. I boiled potatoes in the kitchen alcove of his studio. Jason was in the front room, painting. The old days? I plopped the potatoes into the pot. They floated like the brown bloated bodies of drowned men.

Jason stood at his easel. He was watching a news special on the labor movement in Argentina. He looked from the television screen, then back to the canvas. He stared at the announcer. He dipped his brush. He faced the canvas, taking a geometric patterned towel and darkening it, adding crevices of shadow within shadow, another, more subtle design.

“You know I need you,” Jason said, staring at the canvas. A cigarette was burning in the ashtray near his palette. He sipped a beer. The announcer was talking about agriculture, the birth rate and religion.

“You always need what you don’t have,” I said sadly.

“We could try,” Jason said with conviction. He put his paintbrush down.

I turned away. I walked back into the ktichen. At that moment I realized that I didn’t need him anymore. Jason had been a mirror. I had seen in him a reflection of who I once was. I had been empty and frightened. The image was frozen. It was all Jason saw.

In time I became a mirror. I learned to show Jason his fear and sorrow, the outlines of his failure. I showed him pieces that were a sketchy gray, the color of his pervasive unhappiness.

The mirrors were inaccurate. They only reflected back what was already past. The mirrors had half-lives like radioactive elements. The mirrors had time gaps like messages sent from distant stars that even at the speed of light take centuries to arrive.

There had been a strange filtering process, a sealing out of certain vital elements. The mirrors were limited. They were ice sheets. They contained a passed vision more inconsequential than a dream. In short, they were useless.

Now it was late afternoon. The canals were turning muddy. I was waiting for the hospital to call. There was something. Infection. Internal bleeding. An artery erupting, a red glow in the glistening dim cubicle, an ember. Something happened. Unexpected. A gasping. A sinking in.

I was waiting for the doctor in his nice white coat. I was waiting for the bad news about Daddy’s throat. This is the last white scene. He is bleeding. His neck is falling apart, collapsing under the white gauze. He is coughing in his sleep. It is his last dream. He hears an ambulance scream into the hospital parking lot. In his dream it is the wail of boys playing softball in a vacant field, Bronx farmland then.

Suddenly I wished the house were completely empty, stripped of the false unnecessary residues. Why, the walls were a kind of membrane. Didn’t they breathe and lean? Didn’t they long to feel the sea breeze sting them naked, unadorned? Didn’t they yearn to be freed?

I gathered the undeniable hard evidence of my life with Francine. I made a neat pile of Greek peasant blouses, Mexican wedding dresses and French silk scarves. I wrapped hand-painted vases carefully in newspaper. I filled up cardboard cartons and carried them to the trunk of my car.

The phone was ringing. I ran back into my house. The air rattled and broke off in sharp spinning narrow white spokes, like arrows. The sound scratched my face. My heart started racing. I could feel myself getting ready to run. The phone seemed to snap and growl. Afraid, I reached out for it, reached out to quiet it.

“I’m worried sick,” Francine said. “I couldn’t hit a ball to save my life today. I think he’s dying.”

“Don’t think that. Thoughts have a certain power.”

“You sound like you’re taking LSD again.”

“I’m not. Don’t dissipate your energy.”

“What energy? I feel like I’m dying. I’ll be all alone. I’m getting old. It doesn’t show, but I feel it. In my bones.” Francine began to cry. In the background there was talking and the sound of plates clattering, the special rattle of china and glass. “I don’t know what to do,” Francine admitted.

“You’re doing it. We’re on defense. We’re on the one-yard line. We hang tough.” Who was talking? Outside my window the canals were slowly browning. Autumn on the canals.

“What if the skin graft flops?” Francine blew her nose.

“It won’t. We won’t let it.”

“I wish you didn’t hate me,” Francine began. “Fred says it’s temporary, a phase. He’s been in analysis twenty-two years. He says I’m threatening to your identity. You feel competitive. Is that why you’re so ungiving, so hostile? Fred says—”

“Fuck Fred.” Outside my window two young boys climbed the bridge over Eastern Canal. They dropped small rocks into the water. I noticed they had a bag filled with rocks. They began throwing them at the ducks.

“Fred is something special,” Francine whispered. “I’m in the Polo Lounge waiting for him. He had a meeting at Warner’s this afternoon.” Francine sucked in her breath. “I think this guy is it.”

She thought each man was it. They were intelligent, vital and alive. They had whole histories packed solid with immutable hard evidence like Harvard and town houses and Panamanian bank accounts. Then they failed her. The well ran unexpectedly dry. Winds began howling again. And suddenly she was sitting alone on the stoops in front of a row of identical dark brick buildings where it was always winter and she never had a key.

“I’m worried,” Francine said. About my father? About the deal at Warner’s?

“It’ll be O.K.” I hung up.

It was beginning to get dark. The newly stripped walls sucked at the shadows. New dark nests formed.

“Spring cleaning?” Jason asked. He walked into the half-empty living room. He noted the blank walls. He looked at me.

I shrugged. I knew the cardboard boxes had to be packed. I was cutting grooves through the glue inside me. It was as if I had somehow stumbled on a new dimension. There was change, after all. Days did not simply rise and fall, open and blink shut one after another, unbroken, inexhaustible and meaningless. There were certain extraordinary events that altered the course of things. One had simply to wait for these events and in time they would shake apart the old order. Change was a river, snaking and dancing, fat with fresh melted snow, now cutting a channel through a mountain, now bending, now flooding, now rearranging the shape of the soft valley floor.

My father was going to die if the skin graft didn’t work. My father’s face was a swollen black smear in a white frame, a gauzy white casing. He was wearing a collar around his neck. The bandages sprouted feeding tubes. He was being watered like a plant.

“Can you feed a hungry man? A man with his own spoon?” Jason smiled. I watched him take the glass vial from his pocket.

I would be a collection of starsides soon. I would be a bleached moon soon. I would be swirling white hot beyond naked, beyond bone. In the beginning, white sun, white foam, a sudden unexpected churning.

“Is this premeditated? The way you don’t talk to me?” His voice was soft. It rubbed against the shadows.

“Hardly.” I was measuring water into the spoon. “One thing I’ve learned from you is never plan anything.”

Jason glanced at my arm. “You’re not cut out for this,” he said, his voice still soft. “You’ve got to slow down.”

“I’m going to quit soon.”

“Quit now.”

“Why? You never liked me as a hausfrau,” I said matter-of-factly.

“I don’t like you as a junkie, either.”

“We have no range, you and I. That’s the problem.” I was tapping the sides of the syringe. “We can bite or be bitten. There’s nothing else. In between, we yap and howl like kicked dogs. Yap and lie in the dust.”

I stood up. I pulled the kitchen curtains closed. I offered my arm to Jason. I shut my eyes. Outside, the canals were sealed and locked into the night. Then he pushed the needle in.