“I brought a postcard you sent me from Fiji 16 years ago.” She produces it from her backpack. She reads it out loud. “On the beach under green cliffs, I feel God’s breath. I make my daughter smile. She laughs like an orchestra of bells and sea birds fed on fresh fruits. Her hair is moss against my lips. How pink the infant fingernails are. I wish you such sea pearls.” She offers the postcard to Clarissa.
“I forgot that completely.” Clarissa doesn’t take the postcard. “That was Anna. A guy with the name of a reptile, Snake or Scorpion, took her away on a Harley to Arizona. I sent you newspaper clippings.”
“She testified against you,” she tries to remember. “In that divorce.”
“I was accused of witness tampering. I almost lost my license,” Clarissa says, and stands up.
She returns the postcard to her backpack. Their reunions are conceptually well intentioned. But leaches and bloodletting were once considered purifying and curative.
There is a long pause during which she considers radium poisoning, Madam Curie and the extent of her fatigue. Then she asks, “You still doing the venture capital thing? Private jets? Yachts to beaches too chic to be on a map? Everybody loses but you?”
“When the Israeli money dried up, I thought I was through. Then the Persians. No sensibility and billions, all liquid. An entire race with an innate passion for schlock. Payday.” Clarissa is more alert. “Then détente. Russian mafia money poured in. Cossacks with unlimited cash. Who would have thought?” Clarissa places the strip of photographs in her Chanel purse. And, as an afterthought asks, “What about you?”
“I’m getting married,” she says. “I’m moving to Wood’s End, Pennsylvania.”
“Jesus. The grand finale. OD in a barn with a woodstove? Twenty below without the wind chill? Your halfway house skirts in a broom closet? What now? Another alcoholic painter fighting his way back to the Whitney? Or a seething genius with a great novel and a small narcotics problem?” Clarissa extracts her cell phone.
“Fuck you.” She is outraged.
“I apologize. That was completely inappropriate,” Clarissa says immediately. “Forgive me, please. It’s separation anxiety. We have difficulty individuating. Partings are turbulent. The overlay and resonances are unspeakable. But Brillstein says we’re improving.”
“You’re still with Brillstein? Jerry’s psychiatrist? The Freudian with the high colonics and weekend mud baths?” She stares at Clarissa. She’s so startled, she’s almost sober.
“He’s eclectic, I know. But it’s like a family plan. I’m grandfathered in at the original price,” Clarissa says.
The stylish phone opens; the keyboard glows like the panels on an airplane. It’s the millennium and we have cockpits on our wrists. Clarissa’s phone is voice activated. She says, “Driver.” Then, “Pier 39. Now.”
“Does your arm hurt?” she wonders.
“No pain, no gain. My dear cousin,” Clarissa smiles. “Keep your finger on the trigger. We must soldier on. Our cause is just.”
She realizes Clarissa has already moved on. The conference is over. The documents will be studied. Further discussions to be scheduled. My people will calendar with yours. We’ll synchronize by palm pilot.
Suddenly she feels she’s on a borderless layover. It’s last Christmas in India again. She began in a broken taxi 5 hours from Goa. Then a 6-hour delay in the airport and the run across the tarmac for the last and totally unscheduled miraculous flight to Bombay. A day room for 7 hours. The flight to Frankfurt and another day room and delay. Finally, the 14-hour flight to New York. 70 hours of continual travel and she was just finding her rhythm. She could continue for weeks or months, in a perpetual montage of stalled entrances and exits, corridors and steps, tunnels and lobbies all in vertigo, in free fall, where no time zones apply.
They are no longer holding hands. A distance of texture and intention forms between them. The geometry is calculated. Not even their shadows collide.
“Another bittersweet reunion barely survived,” Clarissa says. “My beloved almost cousin.”
“And you, my first and greatest love,” she replies. “Another high risk foray we deserve purple hearts for.”
“We’ll get red hearts next time. Our next tattoo.” Clarissa produces a small false smile. Her lips are stiff beneath the lurid lacquer coating.
They kiss on both cheeks. The glitter has departed from their eyes. They’ve slid into an interminable foreign film they have neither interest nor affection for. But she knows the name of Clarissa’s lipstick now. It’s called Khmer Rouge.
There’s a certain pause just before sunset when the bay is veiled in azure. It’s the moment for redemption or drowning. Inland, cyclone fenced freeways carve cement scars beside bungalows with miniature balconies where parched Geraniums decay in air soiled from the fumes of manufacturing and human wounds. The bay is a muted defeated blue, subjugated and contained. At night, they pump the antidepressants in. Or maybe there’s enough Prozac and beer already in the sewage. Pollution turns the setting sun into strata of brandy and lurid claret, smears of curry and iodine. It looks like a massacre.
“Listen. My car can take you where you’re going,” Clarissa offers.
Clarissa’s driver has short hair, a thick neck, aviator sunglasses and an ear attachment like a Secret Service agent. Clarissa indicates the car door. It is open like a dark mouth with the teeth knocked out. And she’s waving the purple scarf like a banner. She refuses to admit that she doesn’t know where she’s going. She turns away and starts walking.
“Look. The Prada coat that doesn’t fit right,” Clarissa calls, waving a patch of blue silk with both her hands.
She turns away and starts walking. If those are words issuing from Clarissa’s mouth, which needs immediate surgical attention, she can’t hear them. There are shadows along the boardwalk and alleys bordering residential streets with ridiculous insipid seaside names. Bay Street. Marine Drive. North Peninsula View. Who do they think they’re kidding?
Keep walking and shadows find you. They’re the distilled essence of all harbors and bays. They taste like a wounded sherry you can drink or pour on your cuts. Shadows are graceful and do not require explanations. They know you’re more dangerous than they dare imagine. They cannot fill in your blanks. Simply surrender and they do everything.
There are no neutral zones. They’re an illusion, a delusionary construct, like movie and real estate contracts. Satellites map each zip code and tap every telephone. Cities are enclaves between combat arenas. We are born with weapons of mass destruction. They’re within us from inception and we pass them down the generations like poisonous heirlooms. It’s ground zero now and forever. She senses the car moving behind and away from her, and she’s grateful. She hopes Clarissa loses her license and becomes destitute. She should have her hands amputated like any other thief. Then she should get a slow growing undetectable ovarian cancer that metastesizes in her stomach and brain. The Russian Mafia should gang rape her while the Iranians eat caviar and watch. In any event, she never wants to see Clarissa again.
THE PROFESSOR’S WIFE
It’s a brisk, wind-thrashed morning in early April and Professor Malcolm McCarty is riding his bicycle along Maple Ridge Road toward campus. His bike is winter gray and weathered, with a wire basket attached in the back and front. It’s ideal for transporting books. He purchased it from a Sorbonne classicist during his first graduate school sojourn in Europe, and despite the shipping expense, he knew he would cherish it.