Creature (6 page)

Time opens up and something is wrong. The wind blows in the opposite direction. The sky is a strange color. Even my voice sounds like someone who hasn’t spoken in a long time.

When I rehearse, I don’t have to memorize my lines. The auditorium holds my thoughts and all I have to do is step into them. I am getting closer and closer to something, but I don’t know what it is. Only that it is here. On my dress. In the air. When it is not my turn to be on stage I sit in the wings, and think, and sew.

Tonight I’ll eat bugs. I won’t complain because it’s all I have. The days are getting longer. Someone said hello to me on my walk. Soon, I’ll only feel pleasure.

When people look at me they sometimes think of the word “decadence,” but I only have the face and body of a decadent person, not the experience. I am someone who enjoys getting rid of things, even if it seems like I should be sitting down in a jewelry store surrounded by gold.

Something has brought me here. Violent paintings. Almost all of them are religious. Here, in the middle of the gallery, is that famous one of St. John the Baptist’s head on a platter. See the shadows on Salome’s face and neck? When I see too many paintings like this, I emerge into something softer, allowed the pleasure of arriving from a museum into a warm winter night. This is why I look. Snow blankets the ground, but not coldly. I could take off my coat if I wanted to. I don’t have to wear gloves.

Usually I gravitate toward paintings of village scenes. Look at this one with its bright dabs of light in the windows of the houses. I would like to go inside the houses. I would like to go inside those rooms above the pastry shop. In one of the windows sits a simple striped chair and a side table with books on top. I could read in that room, and entertain guests.

Even though I am not a decadent person, I have had decadent friendships. I have been able to love many people. Today I miss everyone and I look at the paintings feeling near to something.

I have been trying to figure out my relationship to the person I live with, who I also love, though I don’t know him very well. We have only lived together for a few weeks and in that time there have been many nights of sitting bundled up on the porch, and now that it’s even colder, in the living room or the kitchen, or one of us reads in bed. It is me who usually lies in bed, sometimes with my laptop. I look at things on the Internet, but I am still aware of the mountains around us. They have become part of everything and the Internet doesn’t stop this.

Here is a winter scene in which a shrub covered in snow looks like a tarantula. And a painting of a frost fair on the river Thames in 1684. A full marketplace set up for the freezing, the doors of the tents flapping, and people riding over the ice on their horses to get to them, or walking in groups of three or four, with a dog running on ahead. In this painting the light comes from a small fire on the edge of the frozen river.

Here I am returning home. My figure crosses the landscape; a mountainside with dark houses perched here and there. Now I am on the porch, stamping the snow from my boots. The person I live with is heating something on the stovetop.

We embrace. The room is warm from the stove.

“You look like you want something,” he says.

“It’s just the way my face is shaped.” The living room is sparse and perfect. Two comfortable chairs with an oval rug between them. A clear glass bowl sits on the windowsill. All the boxes are gone.

“It looks great in here,” I say. “Actually, it might be the best place I’ve ever lived in.”

“Me too.”

“I’ll go organize the bedroom.”

All of our bedroom things are taken out of boxes, cleaned, and put away; when your belongings are few, unpacking doesn’t take long. The bed is next to the window, and now there’s a fine dresser across from it that used to belong to my grandmother. Our clothes are inside. I place pink and blue cloth flowers in my hair and see my reflection. I’m startled by how spoiled I look.

Before I left the last city I lived in, all my friends had already moved. I went to a party and in the bathroom I thought to myself, when you walk back out none of the people you love will be there.

One friend is too much in her body, and was one of the people I missed most in that bathroom, feeling how far away she was, that I wouldn’t go with her to parties in that city anymore. Another friend and I used to remind each other that someday this moment would be over, a continuous recognition, grateful to still be immersed in it.

For a long time after that I thought I had already met all the people worth meeting, but it wasn’t true. Something in me has always been naïve, though I’m not sure my face has registered that.

Today I am going to the spa. It costs twenty dollars and I will spend five hours there. If only to warm up in winter, to sweat things out of me, I need the spa. In between the hot tub and the steam room I stay for a while in the cold pool just so I can get hot again.

Here is the mugwort tub, brewed like a tea. A sign above it lists its healing properties. One of them is for hysteria. Another is for tired legs. It’s so hot I can barely lower myself all the way in, but I do. The black water laps at my collarbones.

Here is the dry sauna, glowing red, wide planks of wood lining the walls. Heated rocks rest elegantly in the corner, while a woman pours a pitcher of water on top of them. When I lie down, the wooden bench burns me. I am quieting something in myself.

With some of my friends I have had a falling out. In that bathroom, I also thought of them. I see myself as a caring person, but the anger directed at me from a few of the people I’ve been close to makes me question that characteristic. One friend said she had to end her relationship with me because I wasn’t good for her. On the one hand this made sense, as I know there were ways in which I let her down. We were supposed to live with each other and I backed out of it. On the other hand it confused me, and made me feel as if I didn’t know myself as well as I thought I did, because I loved her and I believed I had shown her this, in other ways. Maybe I’m not as in touch with the harmful parts of myself as I am with the loving. With some friends, we’ve taken turns hurting each other, and have come out of it on another side.

It’s beautiful how long a friendship can last, even when it is awkward to be around each other. Even when there is nothing to say, neither person wants to let go. I think this is because the body still remembers the relationship, and most likely the bodies keep it alive in spite of the mind. The best thing would be to spend time with each other physically, but this is not always possible or appropriate.

The body remembers. The body wants to have its own relationship. The mind will have to say something about it afterward, or, sometimes the mind doesn’t have to say anything at all.

Yesterday the person I live with bought me a richly designed dress, and though I like it very much, I’m afraid when I wear it I’ll look aristocratic. It transforms me almost completely, physically that is. Paired with even a single piece of jewelry I’ll barely know who I am.

“Try it on,” he says.

In our simple, cabin-like house I put on a dress that is deeply, deeply patterned with the night sky.

I don’t actually think I can look at myself in any kind of mirror.

We watch something violent on my laptop. It will help me wear this dress.

There’s an excess. I can see it around me. My skirt seems too black, my shirt too white. It’s the same with the deep snow and the darkening sky.

I read all the time now, and the characters in the books I’m reading are clear and stark, like the one who marries because she mistakes love for study and learning, or else these things are better than love, or it is the only way she knows how to get close to the subjects she wants to know about. I know that this character is a better person than me. Though the religious scholar she marries is not as talented or charitable as she had first imagined, she remains dedicated to him regardless. I’m not religious but I want to be plain. As long as I am reading, this is true. I am austere. My husband thinks I am obsessed with myself.

“You are … I don’t know,” he says one night after dinner. It is nine o’clock.

“I must be hard to live with.”

“It’s not that, but you think about yourself too much. You’re always doing self-analysis.”

“I’m trying to figure something out.”

There’s an excess in him. He sits in front of the fireplace—very close to it—with three shirts on. Doesn’t he get hot? His energy takes up so much room. It’s almost as if he lives in the house more than I do, and yet I am the one who is always at home.

When we were traveling it rained constantly and he didn’t seem to mind that either. We would get out of a train and walk in a downpour for five or ten minutes to see a palace or a fort. We would look at the palace in the downpour. Now I hate palaces and I hate forts. But I can be outside for a long time in winter, the lit windows of houses guiding me along, snow under my feet to tell me I am here. I come close to knowing things; I am allowed to feel things anyone would be lucky to feel. Even this is excessive.

At our house, large globes light the rooms. They are pleasing, their copper stems bending gracefully away from the wall. When my sister Maryrose comes to visit she polishes them. I tell her not to, but she insists. She is always trying to clean things. We are both probably too young to be married and our husbands too old. This is what my life has in common with literature.

“I feel empty tonight.”

“Don’t be sad,” Maryrose says.

“Something is missing from here.” We sit in great wingback chairs, observing each other. Maryrose is wearing a harsh outfit, not meant for this time. Her cheekbones are visible.

“You want too much.”

“Maryrose, what do you see when you observe me?”

“Your kidneys.”

“That’s not fair.” I turn around, so that my back is facing my sister. “What about now?”

“I still see them, from the front or from the back. It’s what is visible in you right now, it’s very clear.”

When you spend your life looking at yourself in mirrors you don’t know how to stop, when your face is wet, when you wake up in the middle of the night, when you’re having a conversation with your husband.

Especially when I wash my face do I study it. When I am washing my face I listen to one song again and again, a very simple one. Everything I love is in this song. And then when I walk through the snow, Maryrose shows up beside me. She takes me to jewelry shops, and to perfumeries.

“Smell this one,” she will say. “And this one.”

Near us, other people are gathered around other scents.

The perfumer sprays a fragrance onto a small strip of paper and Maryrose bends to breathe it in. “Mmmm,” she says.

“Let me smell it,” I say. It is sweet and warm.

Then the perfumer walks behind the counter. On top of the counter burns a clean beeswax candle, its shadow on the wooden floor.

At home my husband says, “What is this? You’ve never worn perfume.”

“Now I wear it.”

“It’s Maryrose. You spend too much time together.”

“She’s my sister.”

“I know she’s your sister.”

“A sister is someone who changes you.” Maryrose, in her long-sleeved shirt puffed at the shoulders.

“What is a husband then?” he asks angrily.

“Of course,” I say. “A husband changes you too.”

I brush my hair; I wear my favorite red dress; I go to the library to look for books. The librarians are afraid of me. I don’t know why. The young ones and the old ones. When I walk next to the shelves or sit at a table with books spread around me, or even stand close to their desks, they steal glances at me constantly. I can’t understand these attentions. And when I am right in front of them they’ll hardly look at me at all. “It’s because you let them,” Maryrose says, but how could I control their eyes? It’s too much.

“When you were a child,” Maryrose says, “our mother had a hard time keeping you indoors. Every time she looked out the window there you were, playing with the dirt or a leaf. Even at night you were out in the leaves.” What happened to me? A leaf is still beautiful, but it isn’t interesting. “And where were you, Maryrose?” I ask her, because I can’t remember. “Sometimes I was inside, and sometimes I wasn’t home at all. When we were younger, we hardly spent time together.”

When my husband gets home he asks, “Why are you always in bed? Are you sick?” He touches my forehead and brings a book to my side.

I take off my blouse and study my armpit and then my stomach.

“Is this your self-analysis?”

“It’s part of it.”

After dinner I hurry to Maryrose’s. The cold air lifts off from the hills.

In my sister’s living room I collapse into a chair next to the fireplace. “There’s no vulnerability in you,” she says before I’ve even had a chance to sink in.

“Of course there’s vulnerability in me. There’s everything in me.”

“You don’t have a real relationship to animals.”

“I want to.”

Maryrose is strange. She cradles my head next to her stomach, which I’m not sure I like. Her stomach is stranger still, hard. “You’re going to have a baby.”

“Do you want me to have a baby?” she asks.

“No.”

“But I can’t change it.”

In the mirror above the fireplace, we are both flushed. We appear so alive. Maryrose in her gray dress, and me in the red dress I wear again and again. I watch myself press my face into her stomach. Leave through the top of your head.

There is a tone I want, but I don’t know how to get it. A TONE IN MUSIC. I go to concerts (there are always concerts in the summer), trying to find something I can copy down or emulate. When I was a child I avoided music, but I have a very close connection to it now. I own a farm, but it’s been a long time since I have DONE ANY WORK ON IT. I’m rich from my farm; I can do other things.

In the fields the crops grow almost too tall, their leaves reaching into the gentle air. This makes you question everything. What is air? What is gentle? Also, what is a child?