Paper Lantern: Love Stories (22 page)

At the tower, he began to climb the peeling ladder. It was even higher than it had looked from the beach, high enough that one might peer over the horizon to determine if those far-off electric throbs were a brewing storm. The beach stretched below, unmarked now except for fresh hoofprints. And then he spotted the horse again, running along the surf with a woman riding bareback, naked, her pendulous breasts jouncing, her silvery hair streaming in the wind as they vanished into the distance. He continued his ascent. When he reached the top, he would sit and watch and wait for Mariel to return.

6

“And where you off to so fast?” asked the balloon man. He held a bouquet of colored balloons that threatened to lift him into the sky.

She’d been running lost through the bazaar that lined the puddled, cobbled streets along the pier where the sea whumped the seawall and pitched up spray.

“It’s these lead boots keeps me feet on the ground,” the balloon man said. “Got them from a deep-sea diver with the bends won’t be needing them no more.”

He held out a translucent white balloon as if offering a flower, but as she reached to take it, she noticed that all the other balloons were imprinted with the distorted faces of girls trapped inside and looking out.

“It’s free for you, little doll face. Come back!”

His boots hammered the cobblestones as he chased her, seemingly unaware that as he labored to run the balloons were slipping from his hand and floating off.

She outdistanced him easily, her bare feet splashing through puddles, her hair flying. She passed a fire-eater who blew a flaming kiss in her direction, and a contortionist bent in a diving helmet that trailed cut lines, his voice echoing from inside: “You looks like a girlie needs a good hosing!”

The sea whumped the seawall with the reverberation of kettledrums.

She heard a tarantella before she saw the hurdy-gurdy man. His mascot—part monkey, part spider—danced, straining, at the end of a golden chain.

“Give a coin for Jocko’s cup, jailbait, or else a kiss you must give up,” the hurdy-gurdy man said. When she didn’t stop, he released the golden chain. And though Jocko on his eight muscular legs accelerated as the balloon man could not, she was older now, and faster, and he couldn’t run her down.

Waves whumped in from a horizon the gray of blue jays. A mica haze of atomized ocean hung above slick cobblestones. Rolling thunder roiled the whitecaps, the periscopes and shark fins and sounding flukes. When she came to a brimming horse trough, she stopped as if to drink, and doubled over, a stitch in her side.

A man with hound eyes, a hawk nose, a military mustache, tarnished hair, and a drooping gut smiled at her from the entrance to a shop whose doorposts were white plaster goddesses. He held a riding crop as one might a fly swatter. The goddesses were crisscrossed with bloody welts that presumably had been horseflies. Each time his hand rose to smooth his mustache, a goddess flinched.

“Do you train horses, sir?” she asked.

“Something better, young lady,” he said. “I’ve a unicorn prances on your palm. A ballerina balances on his horn. Wind him and a tune makes her spin. Come inside before the storm and hear my whimsical collection from olden times the wide world over—ballerinas, gypsies, odalisques, nymphs. One has
your
name on it, perhaps.”

“I’m afraid, sir, I don’t have so much as a coin.”

“Oh, it will be my gift to you.”

“Don’t go in,” an old man in dark glasses and a crushed green hat whispered, as he pushed his piled dray past.

“But a storm is near and this kind sir has offered to show me his collection of music boxes.”

“Years will pass and you won’t come back out of his shop still yourself.”

She glanced at the man in the doorway of his shop. He smiled and beckoned with his riding crop.

“Where did you get all those umbrellas?” she asked the man with the dray.

“I find them discarded, or maybe they find me—blown inside out, twisted, mildewed, lost, forgotten in pubs, left behind on beaches. Gamps, brollys, bumbershoots, parasols—some for rain, others for sun. I mend them.”

The weight of the first
plip
of rain on the surface of the trough made it brim into a waterfall that rilled along the gutters. Rats chirped from the swirling sewers and scurried toward the white wooden belfry that overlooked the docks. Its carillon pealed helter-skelter in gusts off the sea.

“I’m afraid,” she said, “a downpour is coming.”

“Each is beautiful in its own way,” the umbrella mender said. “Some are silk and some are canvas, but all are made of shadow. Don’t be afraid. Sit and I’ll push us along.”

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“Why, on a day like this to the beach, of course.”

Lightning unspooled along the ocean, the gutters, the lenses of the umbrella mender’s glasses. A jagged bolt blistered the belfry. Bats sailed out, burning like heretics.

“This one’s my favorite,” he said, pausing to free a beach umbrella from the pile. “Found it washed ashore just yesterday. Who knows how long it’s been at sea or from where it drifted. Its faded stripes are lovely still. And look at the lettering:
Ombra.
Italian, maybe? If it can support the golden weight of summer, don’t worry about a thunderstorm. And when it opens, don’t let the clowns surprise you.”

“Clowns?” she asked.

“Or the jugglers or the acrobats. I think you’ll like the beautiful bareback rider. That trough back there is for her horse.”

“But how can all that be?”

“Why, my sweet girl, has no one ever told you, every umbrella is a big top?”

7

O look at the moon tonight. Look at the moon, Earth’s O in the sky.

O all the spirits of love that wander by. O presences.

O silver face of night, you saw me standing alone. O soft embalmer of the still midnight, O somber soul unsleeping, without a dream in my heart, without a love of my own. O shades of night—vast, veiled, inexpressible. O orb that broods above the troubled sea of mind. O mysterious priest! O wondrous singer! O soft self-wounding pelican. O well for the fisherman’s boy who rides the dolphin. O ethereal rhetoric, O hidden heart, O dark swells that rock a helpless soul. O wave god who broke through me. O I heard someone whisper please adore me. O Attic shape! O boat of stars, O black sail, O remember that my life is wind. This is thy hour O Soul, the free flight into the wordless …

Look at the moon tonight.

O look at the moon.

If I Vanished

“What if I were to vanish?”

“Vanish? Under what circumstances?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“You mean, like—
poof!
—suddenly you’re not there?”

“I’m not there.”

“But there’s always a reason, or at least a context. You suddenly moved away in the middle of the night? But why? Were you kidnapped? Abducted by aliens? An extraordinary rendition by the CIA? Did you fall down a rabbit hole? Was it amnesia? Vanishing cream? Did you meet someone else? Was there a note—maybe in invisible ink—an impersonal e-mail, a message on my answering machine saying, ‘Goodbye’s too good a word, babe, don’t worry,
ciao
’? Should I show up at the Department of Missing Persons—is there really such a department? Or by ‘vanish’ do you mean that all trace of you would be wiped from my memory?”

“Say I met someone else.”

“Well, see, that’s a different question.”

“You don’t have to answer that one. I saw the answer in your eyes. They’re more honest than you are.”

“Where’d you come up with this?”

“I heard it in a movie.”

“What movie? Certainly not
The Vanishing
.”

“It was a western.”

“Clint Eastwood? Duke Wayne? Roy Rogers?”

“Kevin Costner.”

“Costner a cowboy? I hope it was better than
Dances with Wolves
when he went Native American. Pauline Kael said in her review that Kevin Costner had feathers not only in his hair but in his head.”

“It wasn’t Kevin Costner per se. It was Charley something, the character Kevin Costner plays, who gets asked the question—by Annette Bening.”

“No, it wasn’t Charley something. Characters in American movies are only poor excuses to watch movie stars. Can you remember the name of any of the characters Marilyn Monroe played? They’re all Marilyn Monroe. Charlton Heston isn’t Moses, Moses is Charlton Heston.”

“Answer the question.”

“First, you have to tell me if you want me to answer it as if we’re in some movie. I don’t know who’s starring as us or what cynical hack wrote our dialogue, and that would be important because if Ceil and Ned are in an Ingmar Bergman Swedish cowboy film, then Ned’s answer is going to be different than if, say, Quentin Tarantino is directing.”

“You’re stalling.”

“Because a question about vanishing is easy to answer in a movie where the good guys always win. If we’re in a western I reckon I’d say, ‘If you vanished, ma’am, I’d mount my horse and ride after you to the ends of the earth. I’d ride to the silver mountains of the moon and back, gunning down Injuns and other swarthy Third World desperadoes until I found you again and we galloped off into a Technicolor sunset.’”

“In other words, you’d make fun of me.”

“I’m making fun of cowboy kitsch, of the Big Tobacco Marlboro Man mythos, of the genocidal, racist, anti-environmental,
heil
Adolph Coors’s right-wing all-American West.”

“No, you’re making fun of me. And you’re wrong, by the way. In the movie, he doesn’t answer anything like that. He doesn’t answer at all right away. He goes off to think about it, like you could have done, and he comes back with the answer.”

“Okay, I give. Tell me the
right
answer.”

“You want to know, go see the movie.”

*   *   *

He doesn’t see the movie until two years later, after she has vanished. Clearly, by “vanish” she hadn’t meant that she’d be wiped from his memory.

Ned doesn’t remember the title, if he ever knew it, but one night, unable to concentrate on any book in the house, he Googles
Western Costner Bening
, and finds fifty thousand five hundred entries for a film called
Open Range
. Kevin Costner not only stars in it; he also directed it.

According to the reviews that Ned skims, it’s a movie about the war between free grazers and landowners: “A former gunslinger is forced to take up arms again when he and his cattle crew are threatened by a corrupt lawman.” The free grazers—Costner as the gunslinger, Charley Waite, and Robert Duvall as Boss Spearman—are the good guys. The evil rancher who controls the law is played by Michael Gambon. Their economic clash is a moral contest: greedy corporate America versus the don’t-fence-me-in values of the Old West. The conflict plays out against what many reviewers agree is a beautifully photographed “iconic vista”—Montana, 1882, a big-sky landscape that makes it look as if there were enough to go around for everyone, especially since the original free-grazing tribes have been eradicated. The film was actually shot in Alberta.

Reviews compare
Open Range
to classics like
High Noon.
Amateurs at Amazon rate it a four-star masterpiece. The Cleveland
Sun News,
where dollar signs rather than stars are awarded, agrees: 4½ $. It’s a Hot Pick, “a paean to the Old West,” for Boo Allen of the
Denton Record-Chronicle
, and an A-minus for Roger Ebert, who praises its defense of the values of a vanishing lifestyle.

That mention of a “vanishing lifestyle” catches Ned’s attention. He wonders if vanishing is a motif in the movie, a theme echoed in the love story between Costner and Bening, prompting her odd question:
What if I were to vanish?

Other reviews are less enthusiastic. It’s panned in
The New York Times
, the
Chicago Tribune
, and
The New Yorker
.
Rolling Stone
despises “its insufferable nobility,” and
Newsday
complains of “the man’s-gotta-do-what-a-man’s-gotta-do excess” of the script. A couple reviewers find that it mirrors Bush’s cowboy presidency, with his bring-it-on War on Terror and Wanted Dead or Alive rhetoric. It makes a Worst Movies of the Year list: “a Harlequin Romance with a gunfight at the O.K. Corral.”

From the little that Ceil said, Ned had assumed that the movie was a love story, but the reviews mostly agree that Costner’s relationship with Bening seems superfluous. Bening plays Sue Barlow, with what is described on Yahoo! UK as “the steely resolve” of “a spinster who has nearly given up on love.” Iggy’s Film Reviews cautions: “Even by Harlequin Romance standards, the ties that bind these two lonely folks are flimsy. Unless Sue placed a personal ad seeking a SWM, age 40–50, who loves dogs, cares about friends and has killed before and will kill again, the attraction between the two doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

Undeterred, Ned decides to see for himself. Whatever the answer to the question about vanishing, Ceil must have experienced a shock of recognition at something in the film. Tonight, his missing her has assumed the guise of curiosity, and curiosity is preferable to feeling her absence. It’s late, already after eleven thirty, but he knows a Blockbuster that’s open until midnight, and should be able to just make it.

*   *   *

The street has vanished, been whited out. He’d been so absorbed in cyberspace, he hadn’t noticed. It seems to Ned that the snowfall should have a hiss of its own, something other than the swish of tires from the Dunkin’ Donuts–lit cross street at the end of the block. If the legend that Eskimos have a hundred words for snow were true, there’d be an Inuit word meaning snow-that-makes-the-familiar-unrecognizable. Ned can’t tell which of the plastered shapes lining the curb is his Volvo. He imagines having to go car by car, brushing off snow to find his, and when he realizes that he might not make Blockbuster in time, the intensity of his disappointment surprises him. Then he spots his car, dim under the only streetlight that’s burned out. Rather than take the time to scrape the windows, he scoops snow from them with his bare hands. When the engine turns over, the radio plays. He flicks on the defroster, wipers, headlights. It takes only that time for him to recognize the piano version of Mussorgsky’s
Pictures at an Exhibition,
the movement titled “Gnomus,” which is meant to evoke the picture of a nutcracker in the shape of a gnome promenading on deformed legs. Ned practiced this piece for a whole semester in college when he still studied piano. He hasn’t heard
Pictures
in years, and it occurs to him that sometimes one no longer listens to a beloved masterpiece in order to continue to love it. Even on the car radio, over the scrape of wipers, he can hear coughing from the audience. Perhaps the pianist is Sviatoslav Richter, at the legendary live recital in Bulgaria. Ned remembers reading that after Richter’s possessed performance, the Steinway he used had to be junked. He doesn’t wait for the engine to warm.