The great lost work.
When I was a reporter at the New York Times, I did
a story about a couple who moved to an island off the coast of Maine, and lived there together - and alone - for most of their married lives. No one's gotten to the bottom of it, but I believe, despite issues that might one day bedevil it, that it is one of the great love stories of its time. It came to my attention through a photographer, David Graham, who had photographed the island after its inhabitants, the Kellams, had died. (The article was used as a preface to a book of those photographs,
"Alone Together.")
One of the local residents - a long-standing summer lady named Kippy Stroud - invited me to participate in an arts colony in that neck of the (Maine) woods that she sponsored, and so I did for two summers. Mostly an art crowd, that showed art for the colony to discuss after community dinners, I produced a fragment of a novel, as I was one of the lone writers there. I wrote every morning in my spare bedroom in the house I was lent, looking out over Northeast Harbor.
The crowd enjoyed the serialization, I think. I read two long bits, on two evenings, and read aloud, I imagine it was a bit of a page turner.
Back in New York, the novel did two things for me quickly: it failed to get me into the MacDowell Colony, the oldest arts colony in the U.S., and it failed to interest my literary agent, David McCormick (an excellent and otherwise efficient fellow), who was reluctant to discuss it with me. Out of the wild, well-moneyed woods of Maine, the thought, 'deep end,' as in, 'went off the,' occurred to me. But, guys, when I reread it, I still think it's kind of good.
The novel, which was to be based on the interior life of Teri Schiavo, the young woman in a coma that the forces of contemporary Western civilization tried - and succeeded - in making a working definition of quality of life, and life as we know it, and life as we refuse to imagine it, is/was called "If I Woke Up Tomorrow, Would You Love Me?"
Curtain up. And thank you for listening, ma'am.
A fucking asshole, is what he was. She grabbed the wheel of the car hard, twisting it to the left until it whinnied, then she spun out the back wheels, shooting gravel out behind her like she is under attack and defending herself, against what. The car ding ding ding ding dings quickly, recognizing a small domestic crisis – she hasn’t strapped on the seat belt harness, but she is already barreling through the night, drilling a hole through the driveway’s brush like a bullet.
I want the top down, but she fumbles the switch, but, it’s here, it’s just above my head and I want air. I want sky. Big and black and beautiful, that lets you sail up into it when you look. It doesn’t give a shit if you’re drunk, because you swim in it, it swims with you as you stare, not wanting to be here, below, where things are stuck in place, and fucked.
The convertible’s top starts to lift, her finger has touched the button and pushed and the canvas roof arcs into the sky ceremoniously, like a portal being opened, but she is out on the highway now, doing great speed, and the ribbed top catches the wind shooting off the front of the car, streaming up the hood like a rocket, as though the wind is fire, and bursts the roof, inflating it like an emergency device. The car swerves hard to the right, leaving the black road and hitting rocks again, spraying them in a wild shower to the side of the car, by the empty passenger’s seat, as though she is cutting through water, or she’s hit steel and is scrapping it, smashed, in a shower of sparks.
But the sparks are stars in the sky, above the black trees, and she hangs on the wheel to regain the road. She loses the trees in the white sights of the headlights and the blacktop is speeding beneath her again, rushing away like something leaving a wake behind the car on an uncharted part of the ocean, where there are no lights and no markers and nothing is familiar but the sky.
The seat beside her is empty, as she stops looking right, and focuses on going forward. Fuck him. Fuck him forever, and into the past, deep as a grave. He can stay there. Who else does she need but her foot in the sandal, jams on the lever beneath it like she can leave the moment, leave the thought, leave him, by pushing down, grinding her bare toes like teeth, making it happen and getting the fuck out.
The car’s speed grabs her throat as she lurches backward, and her hair sails high. Nice ride, someone said today at the docks, and it is. The car is new, metallic and green, like a bird you’d see on t.v. because it was about to become extinct, or green and alive like chemical waste they can’t kill.
Or a dragonfly, with its spherical eyes and luminous wings, hovering now over the road, and then darting ahead into a curve of black. It is a beautiful ride, chilled, with no pain, none, the asshole, and it is a ride to hell without him, as fast as she can make it. Her foot jams forward. What a terrific car, a fucking flying insect, you look and you’re there, quicker than sight. The faster you go, the colder it gets, cool then cold then ice on her face, hot and red and flushed from drinking, and fighting, and drinking, then fighting with her hands and legs, trying to kill the asshole, I will fucking hurt you, I will hurt you like you’ve never been hurt. With the nails on my hand. They are metallic and green, like the ride, dragonflies swarming the wheel against the whipping streamer that the black road has become, flying between the trees and sailing up and diving down as the hills try to toss her like a lurching boat.
“Blow me,” Billy said, when he got tired of fighting. “On second thought, blow somebody else,” and he walked away. The words keep rushing at her face, blinding her like headlights.
Where is the music coming from? The night is full of music, coming at her from both sides, from beneath her, from behind her. The CD player leapt on with the car, when she drove away from the party, the house on the harbor, the lights and the voices and the yelling receeding like the last swinging buoys as she sailed out onto the road, cutting up the road like water.
Love songs. It’s a love song. She can hear it now.Why is the world so fucking full of love songs. She used to love this song. Now she can’t believe what an incredible offense it is. Who’s fucking great idea was it to write love songs. What the fuck was there to shout shout shout about. She’s listening hard, letting the music make her loose, like the drinking and the speed on the road, and the sky swimming above, the stars like the notes of the song flying away, trembling strings and guitars and big rumbling bass wheeling out into space and revolving like a great sightful chorus, of what. No fucking way, no fucking way this will ever end well, one loud note, all shouting, then an echo, a little gasp of infinity that they do in the studio, like you’re supposed to start living the song the minute it stops playing.
It’s making her cry. She feels tears at her eyes, pulled hard across the tops of her cheeks by the speed of the wind circling the car. But she’s crying harder now, and the car can’t dry the tears. Her eyes are wet, then they blur, the headlights coming at her blur like they’ve been dropped in water, she’s underwater, when a minute, a minute before, the water was before her, bright like the sky, the same sky glittering up from black water reflecting, flat and endless as a mirror.
She’s lost the road again. But who wants a road, who needs a fucking road, what good is a road, where does it go that you’ve never been before. If somebody put it there, there’s nothing at the end that hasn’t been seen. She’s seen every road on this island, she’s driven it to work, she’s driven it to parties, she’s driven it to his house, when he calls her up and says he wants to see her, or tells her to go home, when he wants to get back together, and when she goes looking for him, because she doesn’t know where he is, and she is lost like a dog until she finds him, frightened and hysterical enough to kill. She wants to go someplace, for once in her life, that somebody else hasn’t gotten to, and that’s not a place you get to on a road.
The car leaves the ground, as though it is headed towards the stars, where she watches the music and lets herself cry, her tears as full of notes as the sky, black and sparkling and heavenly. And deep. So deep, you could leap up and never land. You would twirl, like a big diamond ring on an astronaut’s hand, without weight, no up or down, or good or bad, you would lose the weight of decision, the gravity that pulls you back into your name, into your job, into your body, into your lousy, lousy life, into his arms, with the zodiac tattoos, his birth sign on the right, a bull, her birth sign on the left, a scorpion with a sleeping tail.
She takes her hands off the wheel, green nails disarmed, the dragonflies disperse, as they do, in an instant, because she knows, her tears pulling at an odd part of her face because the car is heeling over as it sails, that nothing is in her hands anymore. Not since she met him, and let herself die. She is hanging by her legs above water, the view as tilted and thrilling as a ride. Her eyes are wide and clear, and dry. And her hair is whipping the sky, like the road that lashed the car off the bridge. She loses a sandal.
Then something explodes above her, white like pictures of God, punching the side of her head in a kind of fierce blossom as she slams her nose on the console between the seats and the gear shift rips her blouse open below her neck and cuts into her breast. The car explodes like parachutes, white and taut in a huge billow, and she thinks, with quick joy, a reprieve - a cloud of grace, white like a bride, and she feels a happiness as sharp as pain, but the parachutes are inverted and inflating the wrong way. They are not cupping her fall, but pushing at her like a pillow that would stop her breathing. She hears herself start to scream, it is the pillow waking her up, then her back slams the water, a wet hard slap like getting a new baby to breath and her eyes fill again with salt and water, like tears, floating away from her, that have no bottom.
When she was a little girl, waking up in the morning and there was fog on the harbor, she would walk down through the house while her parents and her brother slept, and walk out across the wet grass to the dock, walk out on the damp wood to the very end, where the square dock floated, and stand on the square dock in the middle of the fog, hidden and lost and alone, removed. The fog was white, bright as light, blind but you could see too, far into the fog, where there was everything and nothing at the same time. A white boat, moored close by, but it was the ghost of a boat, and a voice trailing by beyond the edge of the fog, but it was the ghost of a voice. White breakers breaking in a ghost on a shore that was a ghost.
“She’s dead,” she thinks she hears someone say, and it sounds like her mother, and she sees her mother in the fog, a short woman with a tough looking haircut and a sweatshirt nicely laundered and her hand crooked to her face with a cigarette, her unhappy face dissolved in smoke, but she doesn’t see her from the dock.
The sea swells in tall ribbons rolling towards her, and the platform beneath her rocks up and then down, like a balancing game you would play as a child.
“No, she’s not,” she hears another voice say, and it is her father’s, firm and flattened like a board by the local accent. She only knows this from going away to school, where people spoke with a different polish from the gray wood of her father’s voice, like the planks of the dock, the polish of the summer people her father worked for. Her father’s voice could be beautiful because it was plain, when he said “Franny,” or “Franky,” or “Francesca,” to her, and the honesty of it, with no tricks, told her he loved her to the heart.
And she hears crying, crying in pain, out over the water, wheeling low, that sounds like a gull, the painful cry that gulls make, and it sounds like a voice she knows, not speaking. It sounds like Billy McCabe, a boy she fights with, but the fighting helps her get to know him, and she decides, now that she sees boys become men, as she loses the security of being her father’s girl, that she wants to know Billy McCabe. His gull’s cry passes the dock, shrouded in fog, but she can’t be sure it’s Billy, because she has never heard him cry before.
The swells come and go, and she feels like the water beneath her is her body now, rising and falling, rolling in and back out, with a weight that isn’t a weight because it never rests, and it is only really fog distilled. Her body feels like it condenses and evaporates.
The dock begins to dry, and she is clearing too like a fog, where the mist nests in the far harbor, but the trees that form a silhouette before it are crisp and distinct, like the masts of the big sailing boats that rock like birds in the water. She hears a scatter of noise close at hand, like someone working quietly with equipment, the patient and routine sounds a nurse might make with a variety of small tasks for a patient, a knock and a chunk and a clop, shy steady industry, unobserved.
But when she looks back through what remains of the fog by the water, it is only a deer on the rocky beach, its hooves striking rock as it walks, picking its way tenuously, like its legs are healing from a break.
The sun breaks out, and it is a voice too.
“Holy mother of God Frank, how long are you going to wait for a miracle; you’ve been waiting your whole goddamn life and it hasn’t happened yet. Why do you think it’s going to happen for Franky? Don’t ask me to wait again. Don’t make her do this. Don’t let your love make excuses, Frank, that hurt, Frank, that hurt. She doesn’t want to be here, I don’t want to be here, let it go, she’s dead. Maybe she drew a lucky card. Let her leave the table.”
Now, two gulls circle and cry, then fly off, and the sky blues. A voice from out of the sky says, “and in other news,” and later in the day, “for five thousand dollars” and once in the afternoon, “Melissa had the baby, John,” and in the evening, as the blue of the sky becomes the blue of the sea before the dock, and the tone of the light seems to soothe the skin, so gentle and soft, and tender a blue, a breeze that seems to sweep down from heaven, and touch her cheek like a loving hand, a rough hand made smooth by her own sleeping skin.
“I’m sorry baby,” it says, close to her ear, curling around the voice like a shell curling around the sound of the sea, a wet and salty whisper. “I’m so so sorry.”
“I want you.”
“Shut up,” she says, then “Why?” She wears gold for him that night, her dark hair pulled back, and gold at her ears, gold on her fingers and gold at her neck. The jersey of her top pulls across her breasts and cups them, and across the bib of brown skin above, brown from the sun on her father’s boat, is a gold chain with a shower of gold hanging from it, like a sky rocket exploding at her throat and falling across her dark skin towards her breasts. When she pulls her hair back tightly, and exposes her face, her face looks like the prow of something, unafraid to explore, afraid of no water.
“Let me have you. Come back with me.” Her hands, dark like her throat, and ringed in gold, hold his arm, the wire of brown hair on his forearm, that she holds like the bar on a car of a roller coaster, a risk, a ride, two hands ready to tighten, like a cat willing to be close by the stretch of its legs and the light touch of its paws. Billy’s arm rests on the yellow varnish of the tavern booth’s table, a beer coaster with a bottle of beer on it to the side, and her handbag, that looks like a child’s knapsack, next to a beaded g and t. The noise of the tavern roars above them, over the booth where they huddle into the center of the scarred tables, like a storm shrieking overhead. Find safe harbor by mooring deep.
“No,” she says, thinking about what yes would mean. He is new, in ways she hasn’t figured out yet, in ways she has never seen, in ways she doesn’t expect, even though she knows, she wants, things to be there.
“So when did you become a virgin?” he says, half joking, half throat-husky frustration, his voice telling her that he has to come, and he wants to come with her, but she isn’t necessary yet. If she takes the joke, she might take him. “Tell me about the last time,” he says, in a “tell me about the first time” kind of tone, mocking the idea that they might be in love, when all bets are on, and all bets are off, though she holds his arm, and even that stiffens him.
On the television at the end of the bar, above the roaring heads, like a silent film, fourteen soldiers die in a helicopter in the sand. The black rusk smokes like a toaster with toast stuck in it. A boy scout who was missing for a week is found dead, picked clean in a fourth of July feast by animals in a national park, and a girl scout is found at the bottom of a well in an exurban county, raped and beaten with none of an animal’s fastidiousness – why do we call them animals? - equal time for crimes against nature.
A car shoots across the screen with quick commercial speed, a metallic green that looks like a dragonfly, and she thinks about all that cash in the bank, two jobs and stacking up like gold coins.
“I’ll tell you about the next time instead,” she says, matching his bet, and looking him in the eye, letting his arm go and putting one hand on her bag to check her keys and the other hand tipping her drink up to her mouth. A drop of sweat from the glass, sharp as ice, slides off the glass and plunges to her throat, stabbing it in a prick, then warms like blood as it slides towards her breasts.
“Billy, you fuck load,” a man calls from the bar, the storm above their heads diving down into their booth and blowing it apart like a shack. “Don’t you fucking try to dock your sick cock in my sister,” he says, with big boozy glee, his face burning like a sailor’s red sky.
That’s when she tells Billy she will go with him, and she finds his hand and locks it in her fingers, the gold rings on her hand, threading his rough knuckles, like keys to the lock.
“She’s the one who left us,” says Grace Utani, Francesca’s mother, to the doctor in the patients’ sitting room, a room they call a solarium. There is a photographic mural of a thick garden on the four walls. One wall has a photograph of a pair of French doors, that you are meant to think you can walk through to get to the garden that you are seeing in the mural. There are pots of plastic palms in the corners of the room, and plastic wicker garden furniture painted a durable green, so much paint applied to make it withstand the years of sorrowful use that the plastic rattan of the wicker is clogged until the surfaces are solid and not woven. The allusion is gone out of it. The mural depicts the garden in bright sun, which catches the glow from the one window in the room, which boosts the artificial effect enough to make the room habitable to the half-aware, the half-dead, the recovering.
“Children leave,” the doctor says, trying to be sympathetic and also unexpectedly wise, and yet wary, in the way that doctors have, to not say anything that would weigh the balance or stick. The doctor, a woman in her fifties, the same age as Grace, wears her hair short, to the ears, dyed a glamorous white blond that would have been fashionable with young women of her mother’s era – the society blonds and Hollywood blonds of the 1930s and 40s, and perhaps this glamorous gesture, improbable on a professional woman of her age, is a gesture towards her mother, a conciliation that has followed her through life. She wears a tight strand of pearls on her neck too, good ones, with the yellowed nacre that suggests they are real, and implicates her as a woman from a priviledged background.
Grace notices all this, but she doesn’t, for once, resent it. She needs all the understanding she can cadge, and would force it from a stranger, even this doctor. Her daughter is dead, but she is still alive somehow, they explain, and now they are asking her to kill her, but not really, just let the living part go, because it is not really life.
But how could that be true, and if she says no, what does that mean? Wasn’t Franky asleep? Doesn’t her body rise and fall, a small puff in and puff out, like when she was a baby, here in the same off-island hospital, and you had to look very closely to see her breathing, a look of peace so complete on her face that it was the safest, most secure sight possible, something you could reassure your own life with, that things would be okay, despite Frank, despite the women, despite the money, despite the drinking. Franky was a small piece of dough, elastic with life.
Does the doctor have children, Grace wonders, too confused to be combative. Would she ask her to give up her own if she did? She was asking Grace to allow them to let Franky die. Shut off all the machines, and let her go.
But where would she go? Would she leave? Would Grace see that? How would she know?
Grace put an unlit cigarette in her mouth, and let it hang there like a thermometer, something she did when she was in a place where she couldn’t smoke. Franky had already left, she was already gone, left the island to go to New York, to go to school, to study and leave her life here, be better and be different. She already was different. She was only here to deal with Billy McCabe. What to do with the other half, when you’ve stepped outside your love to let yourself live for a minute, like stepping out of the house for air, or quiet, or the smart stinging spice of a smoke, you and the solitary signal it sends up, showing you the direction of the next decision, sharing it in self-realization or anger. Who would she be if she left Frank?
Billy McCabe wanted Franky to die, said she wouldn’t want to live like this. But what would her life have been like with him, married and children when the engagement wasn’t even working. Stubborn and poor when Franky had broken away and studied to succeed. What do you share when only one of you is swimming to the surface. Or can you rise together, if you stop fighting, and let love buoy you to the top? Billy was in Franky’s room, with Frank and Tommy, the men gathered around her bed like a boat crew that had failed to save her.
Maybe letting her go was a way of letting her have her better life, though Grace had fought her move away to New York. Maybe this was giving her what she wanted, that Grace had never given her, releasing her to the light at the top of the water, where there was sun and hope.
Grace starts to cry, and the hate digs in more.
“Okay,” she says, and the doctor grabs her hands gently and squeezes them once between her own like they are two women in the same boat. But they aren’t, Grace thinks bitterly as the tears slide down her creased face until she tastes salt. Not even remotely. The doctor leads her down the hall, hung with children’s drawings of their own efforts to survive this world – cancer, chemo, congenital whatever – and into Franky’s room. Grace looks at Frank and Frank looks at the doctor, to complete the circle of decision.
Tucked under Franky’s arm is a stuffed toy, a polar bear that she has driven up from New York with, white like no bear in the Maine woods, as though its lack of color is her daughter’s way of saying, I’m not yours, I’m not from around here anymore, I’m gone, I’m part of a world you will never know.
“Alright, when we stop the respirator, she is going to continue to breath for a few minutes,” the blond lady doctor says, a male nurse at the machine by the bed nodding as thought they are demonstrating a car. “It will be about five or ten minutes, so, uh, please don’t be alarmed. If you’d like to take a minute alone, take all the time you’d like, and you can call us. We’ll be outside and someone can call us. We’ll need to stay, once we begin.”
“No,” Tommy says, standing by his sister like a dog guarding a body. “Start now.”
The male nurse makes a checklist of the faces in the room, and then turns a dial and flips a switch on the machine.
Above the bed, lines crossing screens move and rear and peak and descend in a repeating pattern like a series of waves rolling towards a shore. Over and over, the waves dip and rise, as steadily as a heart, as they move from left to right, rolling towards the beach, breaking on the rocks and starting again, at the left, rolling from the dark well of the deepest ocean to the shallow fringe, delicate with a small crest of purest white, where people tease their toes, or wash their hands after a picnic, or pull their boats up, their journeys over.
In thirty minutes, in the silence of the room, as the waves beat strongly on the screen, undiminished, and Francesca’s chest rises and falls, beneath a sheet, in a dim echo of the electronic scribble above her bed, no one speaks. Tommy leaves the room, after Frank says it is okay, and Grace holds the doctor’s hand, as though she is glued to her in a procedure she has consented to without understanding it, until the doctor releases her hand to walk to the bed and examine Franky’s face and mouth and wrist and chest, her breasts harboring a small gold crucifix that Billy has never seen before.
The doctor touchs Franky like she is dead, but she isn’t. She is pulling at the air like a boat pulling at the wind, sailing. And the water races across the screens above the bed in swells that travel smoothly, charting her motion.
The doctor smiles back at Grace with a flicker of what looks to Grace like fear, as if to say, this is wrong and the hardest part has begun, the part that will kill us all for as long as she lives.
One morning, standing at her kitchen window, waiting for the coffee to percolate, spitting the last of the scalding water into the pot, Grace realizes what she understands about Franky’s relationship to Billy McCabe. Neighbors’ voices come in through the screen, like a breeze with the sounds of bugs in it – fresh, with minor irritations – Mom, a child’s demand lost in the short woods between the houses, calls, and cocked, unseen, at a different angle, a girl’s voice commands “Red light,” then “Green light,” then “Red light.”
Grace finds, in the corner of her eye, figures out on the rocky point that divides her stone beach from the beach of the house next door, rented to vacationers. The figures, from small to medium in size like a chart of man’s progress, freeze then advance then freeze on the rocks, as a girl at the point stops and starts them, her hand held out like a wand. Slowness will catch someone out, in this idle summer amusement, something that Grace believes like a fateful fact of birth. Things with a game’s rules aren’t always games, she knows, especially when you have to fight to keep from losing, and it’s never a clean win.
Franky thinks she controls Billy McCabe, controls the situation, thinks she’s the one saying yes or no, stop or start, red or green. It wasn’t that way in the beginning, when Grace couldn’t find Franky at home, in her apartment in town, because she was with Billy, or out looking for him, the taverns, the docks, the one-stops, the long fast drives, back and forth, between harbors at night, the lights of the boats at rest out on the black water like the lights of small sleeping villages as she raced over the roads like she was back on a bicycle, tearing between Grace’s house and her father’s. Four years after the separation she had her learner’s permit. Frank taught her to drive, and Grace passed along her old Mazda to her. Dull with color, like a hard cranberry.
Then Billy fell in love with her. Grace watched it happen. He wanted her by his side, when he went out with his friends. He wanted to know where she was, when she wasn’t there. He called Grace, when Franky wasn’t with Frank, or in her apartment. He called Grace when Franky was on the phone, to find out if she was talking to her. Tommy would tell Grace about seeing them at the Tom Cat, buying cigarettes before bed, when he stopped by to work on the house the next day.
All Billy’s distrust of the world, all his lordship of his own self-center, all his impulse to be something in life, leaking steadily like something you learn to bail, the dutiful condition of being out in your own boat, was invested in Franky now. She was in the boat with him.
Grace realized, standing at the screen, children’s voices playing like gnats at her ear, children that would grow and grow until you couldn’t contain them, and one year they would be here, renting the house, with their own children, that though Franky thought she had control of Billy, Billy thought he owned her, and that was much much stronger, more powerful than direction or control. It touched every corner of the globe, stronger than a compass. It was a map you could fold into sharp quadrants and tuck away into your head and your heart, like your heart was a pocket on a shirt.
The air still and quiet now at the screen, Grace lights a cigarette, as though she can burn this realization away like a tick on the skin, but its fear has already bitten her, and she can feel herself beginning to scratch at the idea like she is scratching at her own blood.
Billy McCabe is sitting in the library in Southwest Harbor, in the big manor-like front room, looking through newspapers at the listings for work. He checks the local papers, but he checks the Boston and the Providence and the New York papers too, to see what kinds of work people do there, and who might be looking for what. Franny is gone to New York, two months ago, to study to be a lawyer, what the fuck, but Billy stops the reflex to condemn the move with a curse now, and wonders instead if Franny is meeting the people who are moving to New York to take the jobs he sees posted in the newspaper. In the papers’ advertisements, men wear driving moccasins – shoes you don’t lace, with no heels or soles – and women rub phones against their cheeks like puppies or kittens.
Kitchen help. He could do that. He worked in the kitchen of one of the big wooden hotels in Bar Harbor one summer, carrying the aluminum vats with the lunch-special chowder in them, catching a glimpse through the portholes of the swinging doors into the dining room of the young girls with their parents, wearing the brand new t-shirts over their brand new breasts, developing like small local berries as June summered into July then matured into August.
Mechanic. He could do that. He knew boats. He knew trucks. He knew his black F 250 like his cock in his hand. Two months without Franny. Trucks. He could do that.
The woman sitting across the table from him gets up and leaves. Billy sees she is pregnant, and she stands in a kind of rising squat from the table, like someone lifting a vat of chowder. She is dressed in a belly-stretching jersey with broad blue and white stripes across it that make her belly look even more expanded than it is. Her hair hangs down like the ears on a stuffed animal, loose and distracted, while her eyes are bright and antic, not lulled like her body. In her big body stripes, she looks like a cartoon in a Dr. Seuss book. Billy sees the book on Franny’s shelf in her childhood bedroom, when she sneaks him in one night before she got the apartment in Northeast Harbor. The Batch in the Snatch, Billy thinks with a cynicism that restores him like prowess, losing interest in the newspapers, as the pregnant woman departs.
The woman has left the book she was looking at behind on the table, and Billy spins it around like a bar coaster to see. The book is called “The Secret Houses of the Sky, Their Twelve Signs and What They Mean For Your Baby.”
It is a book on astrology, the science of the stars that he sees Franny reading the columns about in magazines for women – magazines that publish celebrities’ birthdays when the month is right. Julia, 36; Cameron, 34; Angelina, 29. He knows more about them, from lying next to Franny in bed, than he does about his own mother.
Billy looks up his birthday first – May 21st. He is the sign of the bull, Taurus, his element is earth, and his motto is I have, the book says.
“Taureans show a great interest in all physical matters, from sex to food to sports,” Billy reads, and he smirks, like girls are talking about him again at school. “Taureans may be accused of selfishness; fair enough, they will protect their own interests first. But ultimately they have the best interests of those around them at heart as well.” Billy thinks about the job he got Tommy Utani at the boatyard in Manset, when he quit, scrapping, painting with high powered guns, stocking sports shirts with fancy logos on them if he had to.
The book concludes of Taurus, “They live for the people they love.”
And Billy thinks of Franny, with a hot rush of blood to his face, and a swell at his eyes. The library room is empty, built high like a boathouse, and he swipes his wiry arm above his nose quickly somebody pocketing something in a store.
He looks up Franny. October 23rd. Scorpio, the scorpion. Her element is water; her motto is I control.
“Scorpios have an intimate connection with the world of the unconscious,” Billy reads, looking at the picture of a creature which seems truly otherworldly, not like a bull, but a creature created in dark space, from the gases or the rivers or the seas and deserts of another world, armored and intricate and fragile and hard at the same time. And lethal, in a self-defensive way.
“Furthermore, the themes of death and rebirth play a dynamic part in their lives,” the book says of Scorpio. “Many Scorpios undergo an ardous, agonized process of transformation and metamorphosis.”
Billy sits up in the stiff backed library chair as though he has touched something sharp in a place where he could put his hand but couldn’t see into, stung by what might be true about the science in the stars, and the woman who has slept curled at his back, her arms around his chest, playing with his nipples with her fingers, like tiny pincers teaching themselves not to hurt too hard. Just play.
Franny is this thing, like a figment from a deadly Dr. Seuss, that the book says Billy is attracted to, that he cannot escape, that Taurus lays down its gory horns for, in a garland of stars, a barbed wire of stars that herds the dark sky above his future.
Each prick in his skin is a star, a drop of white turned blue and black as space, as the tattooist works. Each prick a piece of the constellation, as a bull appears on Billy’s right forearm, shaved and pale, ending like a cuff at his wrist, and then, two beers later, a scorpion on his left, ending in deadly punctures, angry and red. When he finishes, the tattooist smears them with petroleum jelly, submerging them in a shallow sheen of grease.
Billy’s head feels warm from the beers, like he’s been bitten, or has a fever. Later, at the tavern, he runs into Tommy.
“What the fuck,” Tommy says, taken by surprise and turned on by the tattoos, the things that now live by Billy’s side, that form his sight when he rests his arms on the bar.
“You’re a marked man,” Tommy says loudly, to be clever, but he doesn’t know yet what he’s said.
She misses the Maine woods, so she goes one day to the zoo in Central Park. What a strange thought, that there would be something like a zoo, but there it is, down in a leafy glen, people strolling through an arcade of sidewalk artists, who catch them characteristically – a scratch on the surface; the most anyone dares for – with a piece of charcoal and a pad of paper. A collection of some types of creatures walking, children in hand, looking at a collection of other types of creatures, their young also trapped. You don’t live together, as you do in Maine, people and animals precariously crossing each others highways. You visit, by appointment, for a small admission fee.
There are seals on a mount of rocks, in the center of a pool of water, as Francesca sees them off shore when her father heads his boat out to open sea. But here in the zoo, they are framed in heroic silhouette by paving stones and tall shade trees and the monumental buildings on Fifth Avenue with their old-money virtues, like a natural landscape frozen in a posture of grandeur by an imposing frame. Even the ranger with the plastic pail of fish and the microphone, standing to the left like a magi, looks like a predetermination of art.
Francesca wanders into a tunnel, dank with the smell of shit, and cold with wet, its rock walls chill with the natural refrigeration of the dark.
But the tunnel is lighted blue on one wall – it is a wall of glass, which is underwater on the other side, a wall with a blank, wavering view, shadows and brightnesses and blank, like a television with nothing on, or a poor signal. It throws the rock tunnel into a kind of hypnosis, as though it too is underwater, a little less firm underfoot, and echoing cavernously with stripes of light, echoing blue and water white. It is almost like sleeping, or the dreams you have about being asleep, when you are asleep, when you don’t know, again and again, whether you’ve succeeded in waking yourself or not.
Then something lunges into the water from the top, huge and white, on its broad back and twirling with weight, descending across the screen in front of Francesca like the wreck of something, balletic and heavy, in a blurring freefall, sparkling with mass.
She remembers the car hitting the water, the momentary boat, then the rushing chaos of being sucked to the bottom, her head above black water, then her ears popping and her head clearing in an instant as though she is on a plane descending, and the air funneling above her blackly into a tightening tornado of breathing, twisting into a screw that leaves her mouth and leaps back up above her to the surface, its dervish point a rotor of aerated life. Headlights are flashing wildly like teenagers lost in the woods as the car careers with soft speed towards the black hole beneath her.
She is caught like an anchor by one leg, and her hair is closing over her face like seaweed, pushed from the back of her head, seaweed alive with scurrying bivalved creatures that release a string of bright bubbles, perfect as pearls, that flutter up and away like helium balloons that an excited child forgot to hold onto.
Then something snaps in the top of her leg, and she bellows in a great roar of air, a jellyfish of light tangled in her hair, that escapes and dissolves before she can grab it. She tries to reach it, close her hand around it, as though she has spilled something precious, but she is underwater, she is dreaming, she is too slow, it is out of reach as things in dreams are. You try to scream but you can’t. You try to wake, but you never know if you have. Is she remembering this plunge into blackness, or is she there? Or is she there over and over again, or is she remembering something that is now only a memory, and years from being a fact, released like a break in the leg from whatever rests on the bottom.
In the flickering blue and white tunnel, agitated by the silent splash from the top, the huge white shape slows as the water pulls on it, and it blossoms with white fur, starting to turn onto its belly, adrift and delicate as a white hanky, its four paws spread out like parachutes, taking a stroke or two as it takes in the water.
It is a polar bear, who has taken a plunge off his rock, and Francesca is in the tunnel below his pond at the zoo, watching him play. With a stroke, he looms large and white at her face, his nose black as the nose of a submarine. Francesca’s eyes reflect his glittering realm like glass. Then, with a great rolling glide, he ascends, stately and huge, a shipwreck in reverse, sleek and self-possessed. The water is now empty and ghosted with blue and white.
Then a lunge again, like a thing exploding, showered in pearls of air, and he is there with her again, huge and white, like a sonar of consciousness, something she is seeing as though she is sensing it unseen, heading to the bottom as though it is the top, descending on his back as though he likes watching the world of men disappear above his massive head, his paws pulling at the thickness of the water. When he moves, it is an enormous movement, like a vast reach of time turning in an endless, weightless tilt, pulling the sky and the water together into an unbelievable somersault with his roll of white fur.
She feels her body being revolved on a sheet, a clean white sheet, and she feels her life being rolled by water as if it is a team of hands, as though it no longer has any weight – all the heavy parts are gone. Life was a huge thing become graceful at last, like a white bear tumbling in play. Hardship, relationships, pain, the dull daily dress of consciousness, like wet clothing she has struggled against, are a trail of bubbles from the nose, circling the universe like small silver fish that flit away in schools when you paw at them.
Francesca rests her eyes on the bear, happy and huge and weightlessly white.
“She’s crying,” someone shouts in the tunnel, a hard richochet. “Oh my fucking God.”
And slowly, with a stillness that looks like peace when you see it on the water, not a molecule moving for miles, the small silver fish, shy and curious, reappear at the corners of her eyes.
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