The Body Artist

CHAPTER 7

The dead squirrel you see in the driveway, dead and decapitated, turns out to be a strip of curled burlap, but you look at it, you walk past it, even so, with a mixed tinge of terror and pity.

Because it was lonely. Because smoke rolled out of the hollows in the wooded hills and the ferns were burnt brown by time. There was a sternness of judgment in the barrens, shades of flamed earth under darkish skies, and in the boulders sea-strewn at the edge of the pine woods, an old stony temper, a rigor of oath-taking and obduracy. And because he'd said what he'd said, that she would be here in the end.

She had a grubby sweater, a pullover, that she put on, accidentally, backward, and then she stood there deciding whether to take it off and put it on again or to feel the slight discomfort of the neck of the sweater riding too high on her own neck. It was a crewneck, a pullover.

She felt the label scratchy at her throat. Not scratchy but something else and she slipped her index and middle fingers inside the neck, elbows thrust up and out, thinking into the blankness of her decision.

They said grim winter grim.

But she is here again, in the house, as he'd said she would be, beyond the limits of the lease agreement. Not that she recalls his exact words. But this is what she'd understood him to say, or his inexact words, or his clear or hazy meaning. She has extended the lease, in whatever words he'd used, and she knows she has taken this action to fulfill the truth of his remark, which probably invalidates whatever truth there may have been. It is not circumstance that has kept her here, or startled chance, but only the remark itself, which she barely recalls him making.

She threw off the sweater and hit her hand on the hanging lamp, which she always forgot was there, and then pulled the sweater down over her head, front side front, as they'd intended in Taiwan.

She knew it was five-thirty and looked at her watch. That's what it was.

When she could not remember what he looked like, she leaned into a mirror and there he was, not really, only hintingly, barely at all. but there in a way, in a manner of thinking, in some mirrors more than others, more than rueful reproduction, depending on the hour and the light and the quality of the glass, the strategies of the glass, with its reversal of left and right, this room or that, because every image in every mirror is only virtual, even when you expect to see yourself.

She climbed the stairs, touching the top of the newel when she reached the landing. This was something she always did because she had to, feeling the oak grain, the carved spurs and ruts in the wood. The post was tapered to an acanthus pattern and was the best thing in the house, just about, along with the plank floor in the kitchen.

She looked at Kotka, after dinner, in Finland.

For five straight days she drove out to the point, the headland, because the standing gulls that look a little dumpy on stilt legs become in their flight the slant carriers of all this rockbound time, taking it out of geology, out of science and mind, and giving it soar and loft and body, bringing it into their flight muscles and blood-flow, into their sturdy hammering hearts, their metronomic hearts, and because she knew this was the day it would happen.

She listened to the sound the wax paper made, advancing along the notched edge of the box when she tore the paper from the roll.

The radiators began to clang, a common occurrence now.

She sat down to eat the food on the plate and thought I'm not hungry. The phone was ringing. She thought in words sometimes, outright and fully formed. She wasn't sure when this began to happen, a day or a month ago, because it seemed to have been the case forever.

Maybe she believed she could deliver herself into his reality, working out the logistics of word and thought, which is how he'd seemed to make his way through a statement or a room.

Maybe there are times when we slide into another reality but can't remember it, can't concede the truth of it because this would be too devastating to absorb.

This is what would happen. She played it through to a certain point, mentally, in the rooms and halls, and then it stopped.

She walked down the fire road past the ramshackle house with the freshly painted white cross rising from the point of the A-frame and the SAVED sign out front.

She cleaned the bathroom, using the spray-gun bottle of disinfectant. Then she held the nozzle of the spray gun to her head, seeing herself as doing what anyone might do, alone, without special reference to the person's circumstances. It was the pine-scent bottle, the pistol-grip bottle of tile-and-grout cleaner, killer of mildew, and she held the nozzle, the muzzle to her head, finger pressed to the plastic trigger, with her tongue hanging out for effect.

This is what people do, she thought, alone in their lives.

She was happy in a way; in many ways, folded in hope, having the house to come back to after long mornings rambling in stands of jack pine and spruce, where she named bog plants for him, spelling out the words, or whole afternoons when she crouched on the massive granite slabs out at the point, the promontory, and watched the weather build and the plumes of booming surf shoot higher, because this is what would happen when she returned, running her hand over shags of sea moss and knowing she would mount the stairs, touching the top of the newel at the landing, and walk down the hall into his time.

The stories she told herself did not seem hers exactly. She was in them so heedlessly they seemed to come from a deeper source, whatever that might mean, a thing that was overtaking her. Where did they come from? They did not come from the newspaper. She hadn't read a paper in some time. She looked at a paper in town, at the general store, front page only, and it seemed to be another framework altogether, a slick hysteria of picture and ink, the world so fleetingly easy to love and hate, so reliable and forgettable in its recipes and wars and typographical errors.

When she walked out of the store, she saw the Japanese woman coming toward her, the white-haired woman, and she wore a padded jacket and had her hands concealed. Her hands were fisted up inside the sleeves of her jacket, for warmth, and she watched the woman, sleeves seemingly empty, and cursed herself for not having thought of this for the piece, because it was fantastic, no hands, it was everything she needed to know about the woman and would have been perfect for the piece, inexplicably missing hands, and she tortured herself with the mystery of a gesturing figure, half lit, no hands, and smiled falsely at the woman when she passed.

Why not sink into it? Let death bring you down. Give death its sway.

Why shouldn't the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin? You don't know how to love the ones you love until they disappear abruptly. Then you understand how thinly distanced from their suffering, how sparing of self you often were, only rarely unguarded of heart, working your networks of give-and-take.

She held these ideas every way she was. Eyes, mind and body. She moved about the town's sloping streets unnoticed, holding these ideas, buying groceries and hardware and playing through these thoughts to a certain point, in the long hall, among the locks, tools and glassware.

Why shouldn't his death bring you into some total scandal of garment-rending grief? Why should you accommodate his death? Or surrender to it in thin-lipped tasteful bereavement? Why give him up if you can walk along the hall and find a way to place him within reach?

Sink lower, she thought. Let it bring you down. Go where it takes you.

Sometimes she thought in these motive forms, addressing someone who wasn't quite her, and other times in other ways. She thought in faces, there in the air, the little missing man's when she could recall it, just outside the bony sockets of her eyes. I am Lauren. But less and less.

When she got out of the car, someone was there. She wasn't out of the car, she was still half in, beginning to unbend, and a figure loomed above her in the driveway.

She nearly fell back into the seat. It was a jolting moment. She looked up at him, a large man, middle-aged, talking to her.

When she rose to full height, she was able to glimpse his car, parked at the side of the house. She listened to him. She tried to listen to what he was saying and to read the situation, fix its limits accurately.

"Assure you I don't mean to intrude. Tried calling several times. No answer. I understand completely. You're here to get away from that."

"And you're here?"

She was angry now. The looming effect, the menace began to fade. The fear began to melt back into her body, into the bloodstream and nerve fibers, the ridges of her fingertips, and she shut the car door hard, she swung the door shut.

"To talk about the house." he sad in a tone of some detachment. "It seems this is my house, still. My wife's and mine."

He stepped back and eased аround to look at the house, bringing it materially into the dialogue – his house. Now that he'd looked, there could be no doubt.

"And there is something you want to discuss."

"Yes exactly," he said and seemed to burst into a kind of pinkness, pleased by her grasp of the moment.

There was a pause. The man had a slightly edgeworn air, a malaise perhaps shaped over many years.

She said, "Who invites who in?"

He put up his hands.

"Not necessary. Wouldn't think. No, no, absolutely."

Then he laughed at her remark. It hit him finally and he laughed, showing sepia teeth. She waited. She was getting interested in this. She began to feel she was fitting into something, becoming comfortable out here, in the driveway, with the owner of the house.

"Has it been satisfactory then?"

"Mostly, I think, yes."

"Because if there's anything."

"No, it's fine, I think. Rooms."

"Yes."

"Rooms and rooms."

It was cold. She wondered if it was supposed to be so cold.

"Yes," he said. "Been in the family. Let's see, forever. But the upkeep."

"I would imagine."

"The work, the attention. We have a history of large families, I'm afraid. The endless sort of, you know, repairing, repainting. Something always needs attending to."

She waited for him to mention Alma in this regard, his wife, and the fact that the children were grown and living elsewhere now.

"And what we were hoping in fact."

His body stretched, it strained upward and askant in a little epiphany of bright expectation. She saw him in this gesture as a man trying to unsnarl himself from a lifetime's shyness and constriction.

"Is that you wouldn't mind."

She listened, practically seeing the words, and liked him a bit more, and felt an easy alertness, a sense of being inside the moment.

"Yes."

"You see there's a chest of drawers. It's stored in a room somewhere upstairs. Wrapped, I think. Probably wrapped in that padded fabric they use. Maybe you've come across it. Because it was about to be moved, shipped, and then somehow, well, you know how these things don't always happen when they're supposed to. It's a delicate piece, in two parts, and fairly old."

This is not what he was supposed to say.

"One of the unused rooms on the top floor, wrapped in quilts. And what we'd like to do," he said.

She noted the tracery of blood vessels in his face, a large man, yes, and getting on, getting old, his skin beginning to stretch, eyelines deepening, and he was supposed to say something about Mr. Tuttle, why he'd left and where he'd gone and whatever else there was to say about the man, to clear up, to explain and analyze.

"Is, if we sent someone to get it, perhaps you wouldn't mind the inconvenience. We've tried calling and the woman has called, the real estate person. It's an old family piece. We thought we'd like to have it refinished and placed in our bedroom, at home. We've talked about it for some time. Current home, of course. But what with one thing and another."

He was afraid to stop talking because she'd given no indication either way and seemed to be disengaging herself from the scene. He stepped back and executed another half turn and they stood there in the cold, the owner and the tenant in the driveway, looking vaguely at the house.

She tried to remember what he looked like and then forgot his name. But briefly. It was only brief and it wasn't his name. It was her name that she'd given him.

In the morning she heard the noise.

She knew it was seven-twenty, just about, and looked at the kitchen clock. That's what it was.

She understood at once that this was not the noise from the third floor. It was different, not so high in the structure of the house, less furtive than before.

She stepped slowly through the rooms, knowing it would happen like this, as chant, a man's chanted voice, his, and it paced her way up the stairs and measured the flex of her hand on the newel. Being here has come to me. Because it was lonely, the coast in this season, and because she had to touch the newel every time.

She moved past the landing and turned into the hall, feeling whatever she felt, exposed, open, something you could call unlayered maybe, if that means anything, and she was aware of the world in every step.

She knew how it would happen, driving the car past the NEW USED signs, with firewood stacked in every lean-to and shrouded in blue tarp outside garages and barns. She'd return to the house and mount the stairs, past U-HAUL and AUTO PARTS, and walk along the hall on the second floor, in chanted motion, fitting herself to a body in the process of becoming hers.

She could hear him in her chest and throat, speaking hypnotically, and she approached the door to her room, the bedroom, not so high in the structure of the house. The room upstairs had nothing in it but a dresser wrapped in moving men's quilts. His time was here, his measure or dimension or whatever labored phrase you thought to call it.

She was a thousand times a fool. She moved toward the door and was a fool this way and that but not in her room, driving past AUTO BODY and NEW USED, with firewood stacked in canvas and sailcloth, because that's where Rey was intact, in his real body, smoke in his hair and clothes.

She knew how it would happen, past the point of playing it through, because she refused to yield to the limits of belief.

Once she steps into the room, she will already have been there, now, at night, getting undressed. It is a question of fitting herself to the moment, throwing off a grubby sweater, her back to the bed. She stands barefoot, raising her arm out of the sweater and striking a hand on something above. She remembers the hanging lamp, totally wrong for the room, metal shade wobbling, and then turns and looks, knowing what she will see.

He sits on the edge of the bed in his underwear, lighting the last cigarette of the day.

Are you unable to imagine such a thing even when you see it?

Is the thing that's happening so far outside experience that you're forced to make excuses for it, or give it the petty credentials of some misperception?

Is reality too powerful for you?

Take the risk. Believe what you see and hear. It's the pulse of every secret intimation you've ever felt around the edges of your life.

They are two real bodies in a room. This is how she feels them, in the slivered heart of the half second it takes to edge around the doorpost, with hands that touch and rub and mouths that open slowly. His cock is rising in her slack pink fist. Their mouths are ajar for tongues, nipples, fingers, whatever projections of flesh, and for whispers of was and is, and their eyes come open into the soul of the other.

She stopped at the edge of the doorway, aware of the look on her face.

They will already have slept and wakened and gone down to breakfast, where they muddle through their separate routines, pouring the milk and shaking the juice, a blue jay watching from the feeder, and she sniffs the granules in the soya box. It is the simplest thing in the world when she goes out to his car and takes his car keys and hides them, hammers them, beats them, cats them, buries them in the bone soil on a strong bright day in late summer, after a roaring storm.

But before she stepped into the room, she could feel the look on her face. She knew this look, a frieze of false anticipation.

She stood a while, thinking into this. She stopped at room's edge, facing back into the hall, and felt the emptiness around her. That's when she rocked down to the floor, backed against the doorpost. She went twistingly down, slowly, almost thoughtfully, and opened her mouth, oh, in a moan that remained unsounded. She sat on the floor outside her room. Her face still wore a decorative band, a trace across the eyes of the prospect of wonders. It was a look that nearly floated free of her so she could puff her cheeks, childlike, and blow it away.

She thought she would not bother looking in there. It was pathetic to look. The room faced east and would be roiled in morning light, in webby sediment and streams of sunlit dust and in the word motes, which her mother liked to use.

Maybe it was all an erotic reverie. The whole thing was a city built for a dirty thought. She was a sexual hysteric, ha. Not that she believed it.

She sat there, thinking into the blankness of her decision. Then she worked herself up along the doorpost, slowly, breathing completely, her back to the fluted wood, squat-rising, drawing out the act over an extended length of time. Her mother died when she was nine. It wasn't her fault. It had nothing to do with her.

The room was empty when she looked. No one was there. The light was so vibrant she could see the true colors of the walls and floor. She'd never seen the walls before. The bed was empty. She'd known it was empty all along but was only catching up. She looked at the sheet and blanket swirled on her side of the bed, which was the only side in use.

She walked into the room and went to the window. She opened it. She threw the window open. She didn't know why she did this. Then she knew. She wanted to feel the sea tang on her face and the flow of time in her body, to tell her who she was.