Cartesian Sonata: And Other Novellas (5 page)

The past came back that way, over a bridge of pain, and she
wept for her childhood when she lived it again as she wept for all immortal things. Condemned, eternally, to be. Her eyes were full of tears and she felt herself trying to move. She wanted to roll to the water and drown. This time I know what to do, she thought. But the oat stem remained against her cheek and she heard her answer to her mother’s calls and found that her voice and her answer were sweet.

At first there were only a few, the shoulder especially, but later they came in crowds, the whole lot finally, and she tracked them down, the burns and sprains and cuts and broken bones, her fingers following lines on her skin and jubilantly jabbing at scars: there—there—there it is. October 9th, 1935, I was scrubbing, and a splinter from that wideboard floor—there was fir everywhere like a forest in that April Street house—ran under the nail of my left forefinger, piercing the skin; there’s the nick of it yet, right up to the cuticle where the thing sank in—and then that doctor with the fraternity pin I went to, he drowned in the war, the fylfots got him, bless their hearts, and he was added to the sea—well, his hands were white and wrinkled as though they’d been underwater a long time already, he should have worn gloves, they would have prevented the skin from sliding off his bones, but he was so personal and there was a gap in his mouth where his death was—no, there’s no pleasure in knowing—and he took my shudders for spasms of pain, saying there, there, in a filthy whisper, prodding with the dirty end of it … pleasure in the past? no, not for me, there’s no sweetness in it, not for me, just the glistening black well in the cup, turning about the spoon, steam leaping the edge … the aches, the bruises, and the blows, the lacerations, pinches, pimples, sores, and my hot dung water, before I was trained, which seared my bottom raw, and I remember, in my bed, how I would whimper when I finally peed and the urine seeped around through the flannel and burned the flesh, and how sometimes Mother
would come to hush me—there, there, she always said—bumping about in the room as though it weren’t brightly lit, and having shampooed her hair so it hung like a fall of water from her head … the punctures, scrapes, smarts, scratches, tears, every sort of choking, fit of sneezing, coughing and spitting up of clots of air: they come together sometimes, strike me everywhere so I curl like burning paper, perhaps right in front of Edgar, who thought the first time—thank god, she’s got epilepsy, that explains everything—but who now thinks I throw tantrums to shame him, and blood fills his face, his nose in erection, while he blocks his eyes with his palms or runs shouting to another room, except once when yelling he took me up fiercely in his arms, shouting what what what as loudly down my ear as an engine, and I managed to say, please look out I don’t burn you, words which stung him like a lash—I can still see the weal on humid days—so that he jerked away, letting me go, and I fell softly like an armload of smoldering rags.

In Madame’s bowl. The land lay like a magic lake. Pleasure? Those ladies came from the sugar crock, discussing my death. Mrs. Maggies, a nice old lady, is one of my Fates. That’s all that’s sweet, the future sometimes, but no, you only take on another role. Corpses, she knew, were eloquent, she’d hear them speak, they were never quiet, they ran on and on, even with the casket closed she could hear their steady murmuring. They ran on and on until their voices mingled with the wash and groan of burial dirt. Poor Edgar would come home angry today—drawers stuck, pencils broken, carbons smudged, and papers torn, no money made—to find her at the cards again. They’re worse than alcohol, he’ll bellow, sweeping them to the floor, where the eight of swords will fall face up on her foot. Why don’t you drink, eh? then I’d know what to do; have a little pity, why not? do something ordinary—drink, gossip, screw—something human, goddamn it—steal, lie, nag—something ordinary—get fat, live dirty!
It would be a worn-out plea. And the speech of February 3rd was due again. They all come round like comets, soon or late. He’ll have one of his terrible throwing rages, the kind Ella will find pieces of in all her bins and storage boxes later. When was the last time she’d been through this particular storm? It began before he got his coat off. He threw his hat first. It skims the table, scattering cards—the eight of swords. She listened to the slicker of their sailing. Yes, September 10th in ’50 was the last time. Ella rubbed her shoulder where he’d shaken her. Everything leaves a wake. It’s mostly refuse, what we’ve got, she thought, looking about. But it was ominous—that eight.

How was her husband to know? How was Ella? No one can be clairvoyant about clairvoyancy. For a long time as a child she’d thought that everyone could see at night, in darkness, as well and easily as she could. She’d thought that when her mother laughed, everyone saw the needles, or the dark licorice stain that spread over her chest, sometimes, when she talked. But these were isolated perceptions. It was only later, in her teens, that the world changed utterly. Slowly her senses had grown more acute, her discriminations finer. Then there was the first time—she’d been fifteen—when she’d come on a piece of astral essence lying in a neighbor’s driveway. Lord—it had reeked! But how was she to know what it was, though she kept it, that smelly splinter of soul, six years in a shoebox before letting it go? Or throwing it away—most guiltily—that would be more accurate.

Philip Gelvin had come to see her father, his slick hair shiny as the shoes he sold. Her father’s ears began to smoke at once, and soon a thick pall of anger lay through the house as if grease had caught fire in the kitchen. Finally Philip lifted his hand in front of her father’s face, slowly forming a fist, and then he stood there—silent, declamatory, and statuesque. The next day Ella could see the dent Phil’s balled-up fist had made. It was there now, so that when Edgar took her home for a visit she saw it, a
little knuckled pocket of space suspended in the middle of the parlor as though it had been hung there by a spider, and she couldn’t help wincing when people passed through it, for she’d learned that each time they did a portion of that fierce symbolic blow was struck again. Ella, herself, could show a matching knuckly bruise beneath her chin.

It was the same here—in their present house. They were all over the place, those people. The passions of the previous owners, not to mention Edgar’s, Muffin’s, hers, messed up the even drifts of atmosphere like sloppy tracks through new snow. There was, for instance, a penis in the bathroom that certainly didn’t belong to her husband, and one day, driven by desires which, for a change, surprised her, she carefully closed her fingers on it. It was still warm, like a skillet handle, and the air it shaped was velvety. Well, it was true, there’s nothing softer than a foreskin.

Keep off that rib, you hairy bastard, I want no further Muffertrees, Ella shouted crossly, twisting in her chair, and the words were snapped up in the bills of black-eyed gulls who were soaring in Madame’s treasure glass and laughing with their feet. It was Muffertrees again, all right; she’d caught the dirty spirit this time in its soldier clothing, walking in Berlin as of a year ago. You’ll hear from him soon, Madame Betz had said, tugging her sash about her as she spoke, swollen as a red balloon; and Ella remembered it was in that moment, nearly one third in, that she became afraid of falling, of seeping through the porous rubber of that red balloon and being borne in great lofts to the arch and roll-off of the earth, where she’d be spat out in the air when it burst like the seed of a peach. Peach blossoms: how well you decorate your bones. Muffertrees! Muffertrees wore at his white belt-edge a gun in case suspended. A white helmet was a comfort to his head, and white spats were clasped to his friendly shoes. His lips were chapped from too much red wine stolen in Paris and from too much kissing of brothers. He carefully
peeled the dead skin off with his front teeth and scraped it down to the end of his tongue, where he whistled it away, for he was always a tidy body and wanted a respectable entrance. How much bitten skin does a man collect in his life? Let’s see. Suppose the lips were chapped one day in five, an estimate conservative enough, and on that day five flakes were commonly taken in, their normal size a thirty-second of an inch, paced off roughly; that would be approximately eleven and four-tenths square inches of skin annually. If an average life dragged on for sixty years, discounting babyhood, since the practice isn’t customary at that age, the amount would come to six hundred and eighty-four square inches, or four and seven-tenths square feet, enough to carpet the average entryway. Of course that didn’t count all the other kinds of skin that might have been bitten off from god knows where. Then fingernails were a covering too. The difficulty there lay in estimating the rate of chew and the amount of skin or nail swallowed on average, as opposed to the amount blown, shaken, or spat away.

Damn clattering gears and cams, dinning calculations in her ears for hours sometimes; it was worse than a buzz or a ring, and she’d felt like telling her neighbor so; that little humming her neighbor had from a defective tube was nothing compared to Ella’s columns, runs, and totalizing dings. That part of the brain was a pet, but pets were a bloody nuisance; you could cut it out, who would care, though Madame Betz had said they weren’t all as noisy as hers was, or as given to inventively useless computations.

Space wasn’t space to Ella, it was signals. Everything was emitting: a flower its scent, a bat its ping, a file its roughness, a lemon its acidity, a girl her gorgeousness, a summer street its summer heat, each muscle its move; space has more waves than the ocean: X rays, radio and television transmissions, walkie-talkie talk, car phone messages, ultraviolets, microwaves, cosmics
of all kinds, kids communicating on oatmeal phones, radiations from high-tension lines, signal boxes, transistors and transformers, gazillion pieces of electronic gear leaking information, earth tremors, jet planes, other wakes and winds; but beyond and in addition to that, the scent says sugar, the ping cries victim, the rough rasps a warning, sourness stimulates salivation, that gorgeousness deserves engorgement, or at least interest, the heat is its own threat, and movement speaks for will; meanwhile the odor that meant sugar to the bee now lays along its side a smear of pollen, every victim the bat eats means fewer insects will bite that much admired thigh; moreover it is written that one avoids one scrape only to get into another, that the lemon draws the salad through a chewing mouth into a stomach where vitamins are released like news reports and ad campaigns, the pleasured penis, presuming such a consumation, can produce an unexpected pregnancy—perhaps an unequal balance of cause with effect in that case—hot feet seek shade where struggling grass gets trodden, and the frustrated will works wearily toward one more postponed end; so that scent, surface, acidity, sound, sight, sex, the warmth of the world, the will of men, are but a sidewalk fiddler’s paltry pluck among the messages, an itty-bitty fête amid such confetti; for every pit in a piece of pitted metal screams, and plants ease their juices through themselves to music, and the down of birds whispers in another register what the bird’s heart holds.

Ella Bend could be called clairvoyant simply because she possessed an abnormal number of sensitive receivers. She was almost totally attention and antennae.

I’ll die gladly, a girl who called herself Penny had said from the cream the other morning, when there isn’t a place on me that hasn’t the scar of a man’s mouth. The cream had splashed over Edgar’s cereal, releasing her husky voice, while the cornflakes crackled and blazed. Then Edgar’s spoon began to puddle
about and in a moment Edgar was chewing his wheaty cud. Ella wondered what had happened to Penny when her voice had broken in the bowl; perhaps her lover bit her then upon her … final skin. Where would the last spot be? That was a puzzle. Like the dipping of Achilles. Love’s ultima Thule. Well, it would be none of the filthy creases, nature’d see to that. They’d be bitten first, faster than any apple. It would be a place you’d never think of, inspiring the least amorous swallow, some section of the broad expanse of back most likely, a dull plain where a portion could be easily missed, though underneath the chin was difficult to reach, just as it was no easy trick to gnaw through that hairy lather on the head. Ella had yet to receive one; she was a tabula rasa in this sense, and on this basis would live forever. First grade: a little dark knobble-crested boy, a stranger, shouting—Christians eat feet—over and over. She had wanted to say, You are wrong, they wash them. It had been a riddle to her then, but now it was clear. What was the last bite but the love bite of the spear? That blow had starred Him over all the bluegreen polar ice for near a year. Muffermuffermuffermuffertrees! Come back to be apprentice to the Doge. Well, she was always receiving loose reports like that, pieces of astral essence maybe, torn off by some disaster, like the fellow in the garden from Memphis whose tears she had heard streaking his cheeks. How short our life is, like the dew, the Japanese who love the cuckoo say. Madame had been wrong too, they’d never heard from Muffertrees’ Berlin manifestation, not even when he’d taken up with that New York girl to anger her, and let Ella see how the girl’s belly hair climbed swirling toward her bosom like a vine. Unless that was the message she meant.

So: Madame Betz. The sharp part in your hair will part your head. The wheel of a chair-car going sixty. Those trains try to run on schedule, are you sure of the time? And Edgar driving nearly through your trailer my last visit, the headlights roving
crazily across the field and coming to rest in a ditch, blaring at the tired water, deafening mosquitos … I thought he might have got you then. Now Edgar looks at me and says: Are you planning to run out to Stocking? I’m sorry but I don’t like men in tears, laughing or crying. All right, all right, I see you too, so bravely uniformed and purely mittened—little Muffertrees. It’s hard to have a son what’s born an evil spirit. He was a wraith already in my belly. Was that decent? In lengths of slippery purple rope, the doctors pulled him out. Nevertheless I wanted to take him home. Some babies begin by being dead, I said, but they come alive later. Well, how was I treated?