The Apple Trees at Olema (3 page)

Driving up 80 in the haze, they talked and talked.

(Smoke in the air simmering from wildfires.)

His story was sad and hers was roiled, troubled.

Alternatively:

A man and a woman, old friends, are in a theater

watching a movie in which a man and a woman,

old friends, are driving through summer on a mountain road.

The woman is describing the end of her marriage

and sobbing, shaking her head and laughing

and sobbing. The man is watching the road, listening,

his own more diffuse unhappiness in abeyance,

and because, in the restaurant before the film

the woman had been describing the end of her marriage

and cried, they are not sure whether they are in the theater

or on the mountain road, and when the timber truck

comes suddenly around the bend, they both flinch.

He found that it was no good trying to tell

what happened that day. Everything he said

seemed fictional the moment that he said it,

the rain, the scent of her hair, what she said

as she was leaving, and why it was important

for him to explain that the car had been parked

under eucalyptus on a hillside, and how velvety

and blurred the trees looked through the windshield;

not, he said, that making fictions might not be

the best way of getting at it, but that nothing he said

had the brute, abject, unassimilated quality

of a wounding experience: the ego in any telling

was already seeing itself as a character, and a character,

he said, was exactly what he was not at that moment,

even as he kept wanting to explain to someone,

to whomever would listen, that she had closed the door

so quietly and so firmly that the beads of rain

on the side window didn't even quiver.

Names for involuntary movements of the body—

squirm, wince, flinch, and shudder—

sound like a law firm in Dickens:

“Mr. Flinch took off his black gloves

as if he were skinning his hands.”

“Quiver dipped the nib of his pen

into the throat of the inkwell.”

The receptionist at the hospital morgue told him

to call the city medical examiner's office,

but you only got a recorded voice on weekends.

Setup without the punchline:

three greenhorns are being measured for suits

by a very large tailor in a very small room on Hester Street.

Once there were two sisters called Knock Me and Sock Me;

their best friend was a bear named Always Arguing.

What kind of animals were the sisters? one child asked.

Maybe they could be raccoons, said the other.

or pandas, said the first. They could be pandas.

“Why?” he asked. “Because she was lonely,

and angry,” said the friend

who knew her better,

“and she 'd run out of stories.

or come to the one story.”

It is good to sit down to birthday cake

with children, who think it is the entire point

of life and who, therefore, respect each detail

of the ceremony. There ought to be a rule,

he thought, for who gets to lick the knife

that cuts the cake and the rule should have

its pattern somewhere in the winter stars.

Which do you add to the tea first, he 'd asked,

the sugar or the milk? And the child had said,

instantly: “The milk.” (Laws as cool

and angular as words:
angular, sidereal
.)

Stories about the distribution of wealth:

once upon a time there was an old man

and an old woman who were very, very poor.

How Eldie Got Her Name

The neighborhood had been so dangerous,

she said, there was one summer when the mailmen

refused to deliver the mail. Her mother

never appeared and her grandmother,

who had bought a handgun for protection

and had also taught her how to use it,

would walk her to the post office for the sweet,

singsong, half-rhymed letters that smelled,

or that she imagined smelled, of Florida.

She had, when she was ten, shot at an intruder

climbing in the window. The roar,

she said, was tremendous and she doesn't know

to this day whether she hit the man or not.

(A big-boned young woman, skin the color

of the inside of some light-colored hazelnut

confection, auburn eyes, some plucked string

of melancholy radiating from her whole body

when she spoke.) Did her mama come back?

They had asked. She never came back.

The mail started up again but the letters stopped.

Turned out she was good in school, and that

was what saved her. She loved the labor

of schoolwork. Loved finishing a project

and contemplating the neatness of her script.

Her grandmother shook her head, sometimes,

amused and proud, and called her “Little Diligence.”

Punchline without the setup:

and the three nuns from Immaculate Conception

nodded and smiled as they passed,

because they thought he was addressing them in Latin.

He had known, as long as he 'd known anything,

that he had a father somewhere. When he was twelve,

his mother told him why he had no shadow.

Because she, not her sister, answered the door,

she was the first to hear the news.

A Ballad:

He loved to watch that woman sew.

She let her hair grow long for show.

Riddle's a needle (a refrain might go)

and plainly said is thread.

She looked beautiful, and looked her age, too.

She'd had a go at putting herself together;

she had always had the confidence that,

with a face like hers, a few touches

to represent the idea of a put-together look

would do, like some set designer's genius

minimalism. It had a slightly harridan effect

and he remembered that it wasn't what was

headlong or slapdash about her, but the way

they gestured, like a quotation, at an understanding

of elegance it would have been boring to spell out,

that had at first dazzled him about her.

He felt himself stirring at this recognition,

and at a certain memory that attended it,

and then laughed at the thought that he had

actually stimulated himself with an analysis

of her style, and she said, as if she were remembering

the way he could make her insecure, “What?

What are you smiling about?” and he said, “Nothing.”

And she said, “oh, yes. Right. I remember nothing.”

Two jokes walk into a bar.

A cage went in search of a bird.

Three rabbis walk into a penguin.

A boy walks out in the morning with a gun.

In the other world the girls were named Eleanor and Filina,

and one night it was very warm and they could not sleep

for the heat and the stillness, and they went outside,

beyond the wall of their parents' garden and into a meadow.

It was dark, moonless, and the stars were so thick

they seemed to shudder, and the sisters stood a long time

in the sweet smell of the cooling grasses, looking at the sky

and listening in the silence. After a while they heard a stirring

and saw that a pair of bright eyes was watching them

from the woods' edge. “Maybe it's their friend, the bear,”

one of the children said. “I don't like this story,” said the other.

“That first time I met her, at the party, she said,

‘I have an English father and an American mother

and I went to school in London and Providence, Rhode Island,

and at some point I had to choose,

so I moved back to London and became the sort of person

who says
puh-son instead of purr-son.
'

For the first person she had chosen an accent

halfway between the other two.

It was so elegant I fell in love on the spot. Later,

I understood that it was because I thought

that little verbal finesse meant

she had made herself up entirely.

I felt so much what I was and, you know,

that what I was was not that much,

so she just seemed breathtaking.”

“Her neck was the thing, and that tangle of copper hair.

And, in those days, her laugh, the way

she moved through a room. Like Landor's line—

she was meandering gold, pellucid gold.”

“Her father was a philosopher,

fairly eminent in that world, and the first time

I was there to dinner, they talked about California wines

in deference to me, I think, though it was a subject

about which I was still too broke to have a thing to say,

so I changed the subject and asked him

what kind of music he liked. He said, ‘I loathe music.'

And I said, ‘All music?' And he said—

he seemed very amused by himself but also

quite serious, ‘Almost all music, almost all the time.'

and I said ‘Beethoven?' And he said

‘I loathe Beethoven, and I loathe Stravinsky,

who loathed Beethoven.'”

“Later, in the night, we talked about it.

‘It's feelings,' she said, laughing. ‘He says

he doesn't want other people putting their feelings into him

any more than he wants,' and then she imitated

his silvery rich voice, ‘them putting their organs

into me at great length and without my consent.'

And she rolled onto my chest and wiggled herself

into position and whispered in my ear,

‘So I'll put my feelings in you, okay?'

humming it as if it were a little tune.”

“Anyway, I was besotted. In that stage, you know,

when everything about her amazed me.

one time I looked in her underwear drawer.

she had eight pair of orange panties

and one pair that was sort of lemon yellow, none of them

very new. So that was something

to think about. What kind of woman

basically wears only orange panties.”

“She had the most beautiful neck on earth.

A swan's neck. When we made love, in those first weeks,

in my grubby little graduate student bed-sit,

I'd weep afterward from gratitude while she smoked

and then we'd walk along the embankment to look at the lights

just coming on—it was midsummer—and then we'd eat something

at an Indian place and I'd watch her put forkfuls of curry

into that soft mouth I'd been kissing. It was still

just faintly light at midnight and I'd walk her home

and the wind would be coming up on the river.”

“In theory she was only part-time at Amnesty

but by fall she was there every night, later and later.

She just got to be obsessed. Political torture, mostly.

Abu Ghraib, the photographs. She had every one of them.

And photographs of the hands of some Iranian feminist journalist

that the police had taken pliers to. And Africa,

of course, Darfur, starvation, genital mutilation.

The whole starter kit of anguished causes.”

“I'd wake up in the night

and not hear her sleeper's breathing

and turn toward her and she 'd be looking at me,

wide-eyed, and say, as if we were in the middle of a conversation,

‘Do you know what the report said? It said

she had been raped multiple times and that she died

of one strong blow—they call it blunt trauma—

to the back of her head,

but she also had twenty-seven hairline fractures

to the skull, so they think the interrogation

went on for some time.'

“—So I said, ‘Yes, I can tell you exactly

what I want.' She had her head propped up on one elbow,

she was so beautiful, her hair

that Botticellian copper. ‘Look,' I said,

‘I know the world is an awful place, but I would like,

some night, to make love or walk along the river

without having to talk about George fucking Bush

or Tony fucking Blair.' I picked up her hand.

‘You bite your fingernails raw.

You should quit smoking. You're entitled, we 're entitled

to a little happiness.' She looked at me,

coolly, and gave me a perfunctory kiss

on the neck and said, ‘You sound like my mother.'”

“We were at a party and she introduced me

to one of her colleagues, tall girl, auburn hair,

absolutely white skin. After she walked away,

I said, ‘A wan English beauty.' I was really thinking

that she was inside all day breathing secondhand smoke

and saving the world. And she looked at me

for a long time, thoughtfully, and said,

‘Not really. She has lymphoma.'

I think that was the beginning of the end.

I wasn't being callow, I just didn't know.”