The Body Artist

CHAPTER 4

There were five birds on the feeder and they all faced outward, away from the food and identically still. She watched them. They weren't looking or listening so much as feeling something, intent and sensing.

All these words are wrong, she thought.

This was the feeder that hung outside the sunporch and she stood in the mostly white room, by the broad window, waiting for Mr. Tuttle.

She'd been putting up feeders since her return. This was the basic range of her worldly surround, the breadth of nature that bordered the house. But it feels like she's feeding the birds of Earth, a different seed for each receptacle, sometimes two seeds layered light and dark in a single feeder, and they come and peck, or don't, and the feeders are different as well, cages, ringed cylinders, hanging saucers, mounted trays, and maybe it's a hawk, she doesn't know, that keeps the birds away sometimes, or a jay that mimics a hawk, or they read a message in some event outside the visible spectrum.

When he walked in he didn't look at her but went straight to the glass-top table with the curlicued legs.

Rey's tape recorder lay blinking in the middle of the table.

She sat and began to speak, describing his appearance. Face and hair and so forth. Wakeful or not. Fairly neat or mostly unkempt. What else? Good, bad or indifferent night.

Not that she knew what his nights were like. One night only. She hadn't been able to sleep and had stood for a while at his door past midnight, listening to the raspy nasal intake and finding herself moved in an unusual way. In sleep he was no more unknowable than anyone else. Look. The shrouded body feebly beating. This is what you feel, looking at the hushed and vulnerable body, almost anyone's, or you lie next to your husband after you've made love and breathe the heat of his merciless dreams and wonder who he is, tenderly ponder the truth you'll never know, because this is the secret that sleep protects in its neural depths, in its stages, layers and folds.

This morning she talked about his name, or tried to. They did it together, start and stop. But the more they talked – they talked a while and changed the subject and he turned off the recorder and she turned it back on and maybe he'd had one, yes, a name, but he'd forgotten it or lost it and could not get it back. She said, "I am Lauren."

She said this a number of times, pointing at herself, because she thought it would be helpful to both of them if he called her by her name.

She said, "If you had a name. Just suppose now. Is there anyone who would know what it is? Where is your mother? When I say mother, the woman who gives birth to a child, the parent, the female parent, does this word? Tell me. What?"

He knew what a chair is called and a window and a wall but not the tape recorder, although he knew how to turn it off, and not, it seemed, who his mother was or where she might be found.

"If there is another language you speak," she told him, "say some words."

"Say some words."

"Say some words. Doesn't matter if I can't understand."

"Say some words to say some words."

"All right. Be a Zen master, you little creep. How do you know what I said to my husband? Where were you? Were you here, somewhere, listening? My voice. It sounded word for word. Tell me about this."

When there was a pause in the conversation, the recorder stopped hissing. She watched him. She tried to press him on the matter but got nowhere arid changed the subject again.

"What did you mean earlier yesterday when you said, when you seemed to say what? I don't recall the words exactly. It was yesterday. The day before today. You said I'd still be here, I think, when the lease. Do you remember this? When I'm supposed to leave. You said I do not."

"I said this what I said."

"You said this. That you somehow."

"Somehow. What is somehow?"

"Shut up. That you somehow but never mind. When the lease ends. Or something else completely."

He turned off the recorder. She turned it on, he turned it off. Just curious, she thought, or aimlessly playing. But she felt like hitting him. No, she didn't. She didn't know what she felt. It was time to call the hospitals and other institutions. That's what she felt. It was way past the time and she was making a mistake not to inquire, not to take him to someone in a position of authority, a doctor or administrator, the nun who runs an assisted-living shelter, gracious and able, but she knew she would not do it. '

She spent an hour in a makeshift office on the second floor, transcribing selected remarks from the tape she'd made with him.

She heard herself say, "I am Lauren," like a character in black spandex in a science-fiction film.

It occurred to her finally. She began to understand that he'd heard her voice on the tape recorder. At some point before she'd inserted a blank tape, he'd hit the play button and heard her talking to Rey, who was up on the second floor with the tape machine in his hand, communicating script ideas.

That's how he reproduced her voice.

What about the hand gesture? She rejected the hand gesture. The gesture was coincidental, circumstantial, partly her own fabrication.

She felt better now.

Over the days she worked her body hard. There were always states to reach that surpassed previous extremes. She could take a thing to an unendurable extreme as measured by breath or strength or length of time or force of will and then resolve to extend the limit.

I think you are making your own little totalitarian society, Rey told her once, where you are the dictator, absolutely, and also the oppressed people, he said, perhaps admiringly, one artist to another.

Her bodywork made everything transparent. She saw and thought clearly, which might only mean there was little that needed seeing and not a lot to think about. But maybe it went deeper, the poses she assumed and held for prolonged periods, the gyrate exaggerations, the snake shapes and flower bends, the prayerful spans of systematic breathing, life lived irreducibly as sheer respiration. First breathe, then pant, then gasp. It made her go taut and saucer-eyed, arteries flaring in her neck, these hours of breathing so urgent and absurd that she came out the other end in a kind of pristine light, feeling what it means to be alive.

She began to work naked in a cold room. She did her crossovers on the bare floor, and her pelvic stretches, which were mockingly erotic and erotic both, and her slow-motion repetitions of everyday gestures, checking the time on your wrist or turning to hail a cab, actions quoted by rote in another conceptual frame, many times over and now slower and over, with your mouth open in astonishment and your eyes shut tight against the intensity of passing awareness.

Isabel called, Rey's first wife.

"At the funeral we barely talked. So you avoided me a little, which I understand it, believe me, and can sympathize. I also accept what he did because I know him forever. But for you it's different. I feel bad we didn't talk. I could see it coming for years. This is a thing that was going to happen. We all knew this about him. For years he was going to do this thing. It was a thing he carried with him. It was his way out. He wasn't a man in despair. This thing was a plan in his mind. It was his trick that he knew he could do when he needed it. He even made me see him in the chair." "But don't you understand?"

"Please. Who understands but me? He was an impossible man. From Paris already he was very difficult. Nearly eleven years we were married. I went through things with him I could not begin to tell you. Don't think I am not sparing you. I am sparing you everything. This man, it was not a question of chemicals in his brain. It was him who he was. Frankly you didn't have time to find out. Because I will tell you something. We were two people with one life and it was his life. I stayed with him until it ruined my health, which I am still paying the price. I had to leave in the middle of the night. Because why do you think? He threatened he would kill me. And in this room where I'm standing I look at the empty space where the chair used to be. For one whole day it was here until they removed it out of my sight and took it to the medical examiner, with his blood and what else, I won't even describe, okay, for evidence. So I buy another chair. No problem. In the meantime there is the empty space. Of course he wanted to spare you the actual moment. So he comes to New York and sits in my chair."

"It was your chair. Was it your gun? Whose gun did he use?"

"Are you crazy my gun? This is another thing you didn't know. He always owned a gun. Wherever he lived he had a gun. This gun or that gun. I didn't keep count."

"No. Don't you understand? I don't want to hear this."

"But I want to say it. I insist to say it. This man hated who he was. Because how long do I know this man and how long do you know him? I never left. Did I ever leave? Were we ever really separated? I knew him in my sleep. And I know exactly how his mind was working. He said to himself two things. This is a woman I know forever. And maybe she will not mind the mess."

She went looking for Mr. Tuttle. She had no idea where he went or what he did when he was out of her sight. He made more sense to her sleeping than he did across the table, eyes slightly bulging, or in her imagination for that matter. It was hard for her to think him into being, even momentarily, in the shallowest sort of conjecture, a figure by a window in the dusty light.

She stood in the front hall and called, "Where are you?"

That night they sat in the panelled room and she read to him from a book about the human body. There were photographs of blood cells magnified many thousands of times and there was a section of text on the biology of childbirth and this is what she was reading to him, slowly, inserting comments of her own, and asking questions, and drinking tea, and about forty minutes into the session, reading a passage about the embryo, half an inch long, afloat in body fluid, she realized he was talking to her.

But it was Rey's voice she was hearing. The representation was close, the accent and dragged vowels, the intimate differences, the articulations produced in one vocal apparatus and not another, things she'd known in

Rey's voice, and only Rey's, and she kept her head in the book, unable to look at him.

She tried to concentrate on strict listening. She told herself to listen. Her hand was still in the air, measuring the embryo for him, thumb and index finger setting the length.

She followed what he said, word for word, but had to search for the context. The speech rambled and spun. He was talking about cigarette brands, Players and Gitanes, I'd walk a mile for a Camel, and then she heard Rey's, the bell-clap report of Rey's laughter, clear and spaced, and this did not come from a tape recorder.

He was talking to her, not to a screenwriter in Rome or Los Angeles. It was Rey in his role of charming fatalist, reciting the history of his addiction to nicotine, and she heard her name along the way, the first time Mr. Tuttle had used it.

This was not some communication with the dead. It was Rey alive in the course of a talk he'd had with her. in this room, not long after they'd come here. She was sure of this, recalling how they'd gone upstairs and dropped into a night of tossing sensation, drifts of sex, confession and pale sleep, and it was confession as belief in each other, not unburdenings of guilt but avowals of belief, mostly his and stricken by need, and then drowsy sex again, two people passing through each other, easy and airy as sea spray, and how he'd told her that she was helping him recover his soul.

All this a white shine somewhere, an iceblink of memory; and then the words themselves, Rey's words, being spoken by the man in the chair nearby.

"I regain possession of myself through you. I think like myself now, not like the man I became. I eat and sleep like myself, bad, which is bad, but it's like myself when I was myself and not the other man."

She looked at him, a cartoon head and body, chin-less, stick-figured, but he knew how to make her husband live in the air that rushed from his lungs into his vocal folds – air to sounds, sounds to words, words the man, shaped faithfully on his lips and tongue.

She whispered, "What are you doing?"

"I am doing. This yes that. Say some words."

"Did you ever? Look at me. Did you ever talk to Rey? The way we are talking now."

"We are talking now."

"Yes. Are you saying yes? Say yes. When did you know him?"

"I know him where he was."

"Then and now. Is that what you're saying? Did you stand outside the room and hear us talking? When I say Rey, do you know who I mean? Talking in a room. He and I."

He let his body shift, briefly, side to side, a mechanical wag, a tick and a tock, like the first toy ever built with moving parts.

She didn't know how to think about this. There was something raw in the moment, open-wounded. It bared her to things that were outside her experience but desperately central, somehow, at the same time.

Somehow. What is somehow?

She asked him questions and he talked in his own voice, which was reedy and thin and trapped in tenses and inflections, in singsong conjugations, and she became aware that she was describing what he said to some third person in her mind, maybe her friend Mariella, objective, dependable, able to advise, known to be frank, even as she listened possessively to every word he spoke.

She began to carry the tape recorder everywhere she went. It was small and light and slipped into her breast pocket. She wore flannel shirts with flap pockets. She wore insulated boots and walked for hours along the edge of saltgrass marshes and down the middle of lost roads and she listened to Mr. Tuttle.

She looked at her face in the bathroom mirror and tried to understand why it looked different from the same face downstairs, in the full-length mirror in the front hall, although it shouldn't be hard to understand at all, she thought, because faces look different all the time and everywhere, based on a hundred daily variables, but then again, she thought, why do I look different?

She didn't take him into town because someone might know him there and because he never left the house by choice, to her knowledge, and she didn't want to force him into an experience that might frighten him, but mostly she wanted to keep him from being seen by others.

But then she took him with her to the sprawling malls, inland, in the thickness of car smog and nudging traffic, and she did it the way you do something even stranger than all the things you judged too strange to do, on impulse, to ease a need for rash gestures and faintly and vainly perhaps to see things through his eyes, the world in geometric form, patterned and stacked, and the long aisles of products and the shoppers in soft-shoe trance and whatever else might warrant his regard that you have forgotten how to see.

But when they got there she left him strapped in his seatbelt and locked in the car while she went to the electronics store and supermarket and shoe outlet. She bought him a pair of shoes and some socks. She bought blank tapes for the voice recorder, unavailable in town, and came back to the car with bags of groceries in a gleaming cart and found him sitting in piss and shit.

Maybe this man experiences another kind of reality where he is here and there, before and after, and he moves from one to the other shatteringly, in a state of collapse, minus an identity, a language, a way to enjoy the savor of the honey-coated toast she watches him eat.

She thought maybe he lived in a kind of time that had no narrative quality. What else did she think? She sat in the nearly bare office on the second floor and didn't know what else she thought.

They spoke every morning at the glass-top table on the sunporch and she recorded what they said. The room was unheated but they sat comfortably in the current run of sunny days over mugs of mint tea.

He sat hunched, speaking toward the device, sometimes into it, seemingly to it, with it, just he and it, and when he stopped cold, between constructions, his mouth continued to vibrate slightly, a shadow movement that resembled an old person's tremor of reflex or agitation.

"Did you know Rey? Do you know who I mean when I say Rey?"

"It is not able."

"Try to answer. Please. You see how important it is to me. Talk like him. Say some words."

There's a code in the simplest conversation that tells the speakers what's going on outside the bare acoustics. This was missing when they talked. There was a missing beat. It was hard for her to find the tempo. All they had were unadjusted words. She lost touch with him, lost interest sometimes, couldn't locate rhythmic intervals or time cues or even the mutters and hums, the audible pauses that pace a remark. He didn't register facial responses to things she said and this threw her off. There were no grades of emphasis here and flatness there. She began to understand that their talks had no time sense and that all the references at the unspoken level, the things a man speaking Dutch might share with a man speaking Chinese – all this was missing here.

"Push the thing."

"Push the button. No, do not push the button. That's the stop button. Did you hear us in the room? He and I. Talking."

She wanted to touch him. She'd never touched him, she didn't think, or did passingly, maybe, once, strapping him into his seat in the car, when he was wearing a sweater or jacket.

"You know him where he was. You know him from before. You heard him speak to me. Did we see you? Were you hidden somewhere so we could not see you? Understand hidden? You know his voice. Make me hear it."

She knew, she told herself she was not an unstrung woman who encounters a person responsive to psychic forces, able to put her in touch with her late husband.

This was something else.

She watched him. His hair looked chalky today. He seemed barely here, four feet away from her. He didn't know how to measure himself to what we call the Now. What is that anyway? It's possible there's no such thing for those who do not take it as a matter of faith. Maybe it was a physicist she needed to talk to, someone, she wasn't sure, who might tell her what the parameters were. She hated that word. She used it but didn't know what it meant and used it anyway. The birds were going crazy on the feeder.

She called Mariella and got the machine. A synthesized voice said, Please / leave / a message / after / the / tone. The words were not spoken but generated and they were separated by brief but deep dimensions. She hung up and called back, just to hear the voice again. How strange the discontinuity. It seemed a quantum hop, one word to the next. She hung up and called back. One voice for each word. Seven different voices. Not seven different voices but one male voice in seven time cycles. But not male exactly either. And not words so much as syllables but not that either. She hung up and called back.

She walked down the long hall and up the stairs to the third floor and past the empty rooms to the bathroom near the far end. He was sitting in the tub when she opened the door. He did not move his head or in any way acknowledge. She stood there looking. He had soap in one hand and a washcloth in the other. He remained in this position, hands poised, and she watched him. He did not move. He did not look at her or acknowledge by other means. His hands were barely out of the water, the sliver of soap, the washcloth bunched. Soap is called a sliver in this figuration.

She whispered, "Look at me."

When he did this, unbashfully, she got on her knees at the side of the tub and took the washcloth out of his hand. She moved it side to side over his shoulders and down his back. She washed in the hollow under the arm. This is the armpit, one and two. She took the soap out of his other hand and rubbed it on the cloth and washed his chest and arms, wordlessly naming his parts for him. She set the cloth down gently on the water, where it plumed inward and sank, and she swabbed his belly under the water with the soap, a drone of motion, her hand slowly circling his navel. Then she leaned across him to place the soap in the soap dish, the sliver of soap, watching him all the time, and she put her hand in the water and eased along the penis, here it is, and cupped and rubbed the testicles, naming and numbering his parts, one and two, and a small moist glow showed above his lips.

His hand came out of the water holding the cloth. She took it from him and held it spread across her face and pressed into the pores and she rubbed it over her mouth and gave it back to him. She touched his face, which was lightly fuzzed, and does he shave and who taught him, and ran her finger softly across his mouth, tracing the shape of his lips. She traced his nose and brows and the rim of his ear and the swirled inner surface. This followed by that. This leading to that. He was not skittish under her touch, or only routinely so, and she thought that nothing could seem unusual to him, or startling, or stirring, measured against the fact, the blur, whatever it was – the breathless shock of his being here.

She felt something wispy at the edge of her mouth, half in half out, that could only be a hair. She plucked at it and brushed with her thumb, a strand of hair from the washcloth, and she couldn't feel it on her face anymore and she looked at him and looked at her hand and maybe it was just an itch.

Then she went back down the hall and of course it did not feel to her that she'd been washing a child but then it wasn't quite a man either but then, again, this was who he was, outside the easy sway of either/or, and she was still finding things to examine, and wondering aloud about his use of a washcloth, which seemed a high refinement, and defending herself for her actions, and analyzing her own response to the motion of her hand over his body as she walked for miles through the blueberry barrens, in blowing mist, jacket fastened and tape reels turning.

"How could you be living here without my knowing?"

"But you know. I am living."

He half hit himself on the cheek, a little joke perhaps.

"But before. I hear a noise and you are in a room upstairs. For how long were you here? Talk into the thing."

"Talk into the thing." he said in a voice that may have been an unintended imitation of hers.

She was in town, driving down a hilly street of frame houses, and saw a man sitting on his porch, ahead of her, through trees and shrubs, arms spread, a broad-faced blondish man, lounging. She felt in that small point in time, a flyspeck quarter second or so, that she saw him complete. His life flew open to her passing glance. A lazy and manipulative man, in real estate, in fairview condos by a mosquito lake. She knew him. She saw into him. He was there, divorced and drink-haunted, emotionally distant from his kids, his sons, two sons, in school blazers, in the barest blink.

A voice recited the news on the radio.

When the car moved past the house, in the pull of the full second, she understood that she was not looking at a seated man but at a paint can placed on a board that was balanced between two chairs. The white and yellow can was his face, the board was his arms and the mind and heart of the man were in the air somewhere, already lost in the voice of the news reader on the radio.

She called Mariella's number and got the machine. She listened to the recording and hung up and then called again and hung up. She called several times over the next day and a half and listened to the recorded voice and did not leave a message. When she called again and Mariella answered, she put down the phone, softly, and stood completely still.

She said, "Talk like him. I want you to do this for me. I know you are able to do it. Do it for me. Talk like him. Say something he said that you remember. Or say whatever comes into your head. That is better. Say whatever comes into your head, just so it is him. I will not ask you how you are able to do it. I only want to listen. Talk like him. Do like him. Speak in his voice. Do Rey. Make me hear him. I am asking you nice. Be my friend. A trusted person, this is a friend. Do this for me."

They came flying in straight-up to the rungs, fighting for space at the feeding ports, pecking at others, wings humming and breasts burnt white in the sun. feed spilling from their beaks. They flew off and came back, semi-hovering, nine, ten, eleven birds, others fixed to the window screen, some in trees nearby, not singing exactly but what's the word, twitter or peep or squeak, and they attacked each other on the rungs or scrambling in midair, the color-changing birds, the name-saying birds, the birds that feed upside down.

At night she stood outside his room and watched him sleep. She stayed for an hour and then went on-line to look at the cars start to appear on the two-lane highway that entered and left Kotka, in Finland, watching until she was able to sleep herself, finally, with the arrival of nordic light.