The Mare

Paul

I don’t know why I felt glad they were coming. This whole thing — Ginger’s “project,” as Becca called it — had ruined my marriage, or allowed me to ruin it, and the ruin had just begun. What would happen to Ginger if we divorced? I imagined her in the city, living in a grimy studio in Queens or Brooklyn, maybe Crown Heights, trying to find a job (as what?) and attempting to maintain a relationship with a family who’d most likely have no use for her — and I sped to Poughkeepsie as if to forestall that future, Polly hurling away from me like a rapidly cooling planet wrenched off its axis.

I got there early but couldn’t find a spot in the near lot, had to spiral up the parking structure for a space, thinking weirdly of Ginger’s sister, whom I had once compared, after her death, to the Nabokovian character Hazel Shade, an ugly girl who kills herself on being rejected by a cloddish boy. I did not make a direct comparison between live Melinda and the fictional dead girl for Ginger; I just repeated one critic’s somewhat quixotically made case that poor scorned Hazel is transformed by death into a Vanessa butterfly, a kind angel who gently guides her father into the spirit world and even comforts the egotistical lunatic (and great rejecter of women) who inadvertently drew her dad to his death.

I heard a train pulling in as I hurried down the concrete steps, feeling that strange gladness in anticipation of the lumpen, frowning woman and her odd boy whom I could deliver to my even more odd wife. Who had liked the connection between her sister and Hazel Shade because she felt that Melinda had guided her to Velvet and Velvet to the horse. And because she believed in transformation, she did not accept that anything just “is what it is”; she always thought it could be something else, something secretly beautiful and glorious.

I made myself visible at the foot of a main stairway, smiling expectantly as the last passengers left the train. My smile stiffened slightly; they did not seem to be there. I went to the other end of the platform, thinking they might be waiting for the elevator. But the conveyance was taking someone up, and I dropped the smile as I headed back up the stairs. “Pippa Passes”; Nabokov had used that poem wittily in connection with Hazel, Pippa being an insignificant girl who somehow transforms everyone around her into something better than they are. They weren’t upstairs either or in the lobby. Exasperated — this was so typical — I reached for my phone, calling as I walked outside, where insignificant people passed and passed.