“Now, what I want to know is this: When I turned them into phantoms of my thinking, and in so doing endowed them with loveliness, did I do good by them or bad?
“You had lost the race and had dunked your head and they had carried your brother away on their shoulders when I said, ‘Here,’ handing you the cards, ‘these are for the loser.’ After that I saw you two more times. And there was always the dark screen down between us, although at moments it seemed so close to lifting, I thought my heart would burst. Then I did not see you for three years. I slept every night with your lovely ghost. And when I saw you again I was still so young, and I didn’t know yet that you were not going to be my idea of you. And when I say that you are still a disappointment to me — oh, yes, I am very, very cruel, as you have said I am, but wait — I mean to say: My darling darling, you have killed the past. You have broken my heart. You have given me the present moment.
“Look at me. Open your eyes and look at my face.
“I still remember the first joke in English you made. We were walking up Maumee Avenue downtown to a musical club. We had been married a long time, and Alessio was dead. And you were pestering me, you wanted to kiss me on my ear on the street with people passing. I smacked you and was petulant, but you persisted. You called me a witch, but I was unmoved. The excrement of the horses was everywhere in the gutter. And you said, ‘You wear your heart up your sleeve.’ In a cage in the window above us, a monkey was screaming in a way that was so like a human child screaming that I wanted to go up there and hold it. You moved again to kiss me as we walked, and I pushed you away, and you whispered, almost touching my ear with your mouth, something as vulgar as I have ever heard you say — you remember, what you said you were going to do, the thing you said you were going to do to me, right there on the street, standing. And I said in my thoughts, wishing you could know without having to hear me say it, If you would only refuse me, I would give myself away to you.
“Or have something to drink, won’t you? Won’t you?
“What I wanted most to feel in those days was the exquisite suffering of you going away from me. We were unlike, you and I. You felt what you felt; whereas I, like a scientist, was always trying to know what I felt. I made experiments in my brain like a fooclass="underline" If this, then how would I feel? If that, then how? My heart was hidden from me, and I believed I had to abuse it to make it give up its secrets. I wanted you, from your own disinclination, to refuse me so that I could comprehend my feelings by suffering them. But you would not withdraw from me and make a space in which I could put my thoughts between us. So I have never known, and do not know now, my own feelings; I only feel them.
“But if ever. If you should ever. Should you ever. If you were to. Were you ever to. . then the screen would clap down forever on which ideas are painted.
“But you would not refuse me. You took my arm firmly in your brown hand. I was so skinny then and your hand so big that you could wrap your hand all the way around the thickest part of my arm and touch your thumb to your finger. And I said to myself, There is no hope. And I succumbed, was dragged by you into the club and was sat down by you, was thrown into a chair behind a low table with no cloth on it that was strewn with peanut shells and loose threads of tobacco. There were a dozen young men behind the lights on the stage playing violins and banjos; one had a mouth organ, another — a boy, seated — had a saw (a saw!) that he was bending into the shape of an S, and bending further, and unbending, and striking with a hammer, and making it make this human noise, plaintive, while an old man, older than you are now, with a white, patchy beard sang, and I did not know the words he was singing (it was English, only it wasn’t English at all), and all of them were standing but the boy while the man sang and beat out the time by stomping his boot resoundingly on the floor, and a Negro asked you what we would drink. And you told him to bring us two bottles of beer, if he pleased. I asked myself, Where was I? I was thirty-one. We had been married ten years. Alessio was dead. I asked myself, Where was I? The boy was smashing and smashing at the saw, making it cry out under the violins, and there were the banjos and the mouth organ and the old man’s yawning foreign voice and his stomping and the stout clapping of his hands. You would not let go my arm. My family were dead. I had killed them. The Negro came with the beers and poured them into glasses. I had no hope of any hope at all. The footlights threw the long shadows of the men up on the green wall behind them. I had no past or home country to return to, and no hope, only this man gripping my arm so tightly, my own hand had gone numb. The men on the stage were leaping, and the old man gave a whoop, and leapt, bringing his boots down solidly on the stage, and the others stopped playing. I saw the boy with the saw slip the hammer beneath his chair as one of the violinists passed him a bow. Then the boy bent the saw deep against the toe of his shoe and drew the bow along the blunt edge of the saw. Everything was quiet but for this. Nobody moved but this boy with his bow and the saw and the Negro carrying a bottle to a table in the front of the club.
“And the sound broke on my mind — you remember the sound, a sound of exquisite suffering with something else in it. Something I could not. . refuse, a sound of what suffering is on its backside; it was the hopeless sound of a child’s laughter.
“A minute later the old man gave a terrific stomp and they all started in again with the banjos and the singing. I could not catch my breath. And you let go my arm and touched your lips to my ear and said, ‘Stop this crying.’ But I did not know I was crying until you told me. I thought I was laughing. I believed I was laughing, like the boy’s saw, like a child laughing. I believed I had no hope at all. I had no hope at all. I could not stop myself from laughing. The clock over the stage read seven thirty. There was the smell of tobacco spit and popcorn.
“And if ever. Should you ever — so you must open your mouth and drink something warm. If you were to. Then — you know this, so you must help me, you must open your mouth and drink — then you would plunge me irretrievably to the bottom of the dead and irretrievable past.
“You remember, don’t you? How there was a boy with fierce eyes and wispy yellow hair on his cheeks, and how you put your mouth on my ear as though we were alone, and how the old man whooped? We drank our supper. The old man, at length, climbed down from the stage, took a seat by the stove in the middle of the room, and fell asleep.
“And we stayed till eleven and listened to the lads play.”
Acknowledgments
This book was written with the aid of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the Michener/Coperni cus Society, the U.S.-Italy Fulbright Commission, the MacDowell Colony, and the Corporation of Yaddo; and with the indispensable advice of Rick Barot, Sara Becker, Sarah Braunstein, Bill Clegg, Michael Dumanis, Tim Earley, Jaimy Gordon, Vanessa Hwang Lui, John Michael MacDonald, Fiona McCrae, ZZ Packer, Roger Skillings, Jennifer Sprague, Justin Tussing, and Emily Shelton.