Ancestor terrain watercolor/gouache 1991 Tia Ballantine
Selected story, essay
What follows are several stories and a link to my essay about Beckett's NOT I, included here simply because chips of Beckett's bones are embedded in my skin. Too much stumbling about in the dark, I guess. "Shark Bait" and "Miss Liberty has an Orgasm" are excerpted from a larger work -- Spring Loaded -- tentatively completed in 1999 but begun decades earlier, somewhere in the shadow of rainstorm with the radio blasting the blues against the background noise of gunfire and police sirens. [Bill Ballantine 1948]
Living during the 1980s deep in America's worst ghetto, now a chic zone filled with dozens of corporate orphans happily slumming it, was bone chilling. Winters brought ice and despair -- Crack Annie huddled in any doorway she could find, muttering epithets at any who passed -- and summer made the walls sweat. Late at night, I sat, knees to chest, in the window, hoping for a breeze while watching the crack addicts below dancing slow motion circles in the street, stripping off clothing as they danced. Shirts waved overhead like flags, skirts twirled like fans.
I kept my family fed doing construction work, schlepping sheetrock and plastering walls. I kept my spirit satisfied painting and writing small stories in blue-lined notebooks. Out back, I planted roses in a narrow strip of ground revealed when the concrete was sledge-hammered loose.
And then, someone shot out our car windows.
And then, we moved first to the mountains and then to the sea.
And then, my father died. That's my dad in the picture -- the mermaid; the sailor, except for his legs, is papier mache.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
STORIES:
Miss Liberty has an Orgasm
Shark Bait
The Departed
ESSAY:
To and Fro in Shadow: NOT I
joy watercolor on paper 1986 Tia Ballantine
Miss Liberty has an Orgasm
---This is what I use for ammo.
Joe reaches into his pocket and pulls out a tampon. Holding the black powder pistol in one hand and the tampon in the other, he uses his teeth to strip the paper from the cardboard tube, his tongue to pull the paper into his mouth and his thumb to release the tampon into the palm of his hand. It lies there--a motionless tadpole bleached white. Kicked from water, dead on demand. Night sky burns with exploding rockets. Fountains of red, white and blue sparks dripping to roof tops. Tonight all New York celebrates Lady Liberty’s release from bondage. No longer dingy, cracked or broken, she stands revealed in magnificent splendor.
I can’t tell the difference, although from a rooftop miles away, I don’t expect to see polished brass.
---So, now what? You going to pack that baby in the barrel and blow it into the bleeding sky?
---We’ll know we’re successful if we get a thunderstorm.
---Maybe it will come back to earth transformed to emerald green.
---Fuck you, Clare, this isn’t painting. This is orgasm.
---We’ve done this one, Joe. You think I don’t know about orgasm? What, it’s only a male gun thing? Shit, Joe, give it up. I have orgasms when I paint, orgasms when I look into eyes. I know orgasm in my flesh, Joe. I’m a fucking Reichian. Orgasm can sit in front of thinking--and sinks to bone. Life depends on it. And not only do I know orgasm, Joe, but I know orgasm and menstruation. You know when I have multiple orgasms? When I’m menstruating. There’s a little piece of info I bet you didn’t have. So, fuck you, too.
---You want to try?
---I’m not menstruating.
Clare sits on the edge of the roof. A huge rocket explodes overhead, a canopy of intensely white shivering sparks answered by green smaller rockets hissing in rapid succession two blocks away.
---So, shoot your load, Joe. The sky’s in multiple orgasm tonight, and she’ll need a few tampons at the end.
No one has paid any attention to earlier broadcast warnings about the illegality of shooting rockets from rooftops. No part of the sky blinks free. Everywhere spark waterfalls appear, collapse and reappear as color echoes and drains. Dying smoke puffs brilliant pink and green. She likes this. Noise, anarchy, exuberance. No way out. Nothing protects anything. It’s a stew easily swallowed, heat running down her throat.
Packed shoulder to shoulder across the roof, friends fall laughing against one another. With shiploads of monster rockets arriving on the Brooklyn docks from China, the city promised a massive display of fireworks. No one wants to miss this one, but I wonder if the main event can top the preliminaries. This light painted sky is enough for me.
Clare looks up and sees a young woman with uncanny balance, walking the ledge of the elevator shaft.
---Barry, who the hell is that up there? Tell her to come down. The last thing I want tonight is for someone to catapult off the roof.
--It’s Kapuahilihili. Leave her alone, Clare. She’s a dancer. She thinks with her body. She knows what she’s doing, and she needs to be on the edge of sky right now.
---Thanatos, Barry. She’s flirting with death.
---Look around you, baby. That’s the nature of the night.
He touches her arm, reminds her of necessary distance.
Not everybody lives in the same place.
Last year, on a quieter day with heat and sun, Kapuahilihili’s father had sat with them on the roof. No one said much. Keaokapu wanted sun on his arms, the wind to shed across his back. The days that passed had made him thinner. The blue between his ribs was a deeper shade, Clare thought, but that may have been because his skin had veered to yellow.
Look, man, he said, can I borrow your Kamakau? I can’t believe I never read him, but I have to now. I need to know more. I can’t believe they never taught us any of that. It was our land, our history, our place, Barry, and no one even told us these books existed.
When Keaokapu stares, his eyes take out distance.
Sure, man, sure. Borrow the Kamakau. Take the Kumulipo, my Malo, too. You gotta read Malo. He packs a lot into his book. You have to work hard to sort it out.
Sitting there quietly, spilling words onto each other, they looked past the harbor until Jasmine arrived. Jasmine changed the pace of any room, even one without walls. He knew how to expand sky, walked on his toes, and refused to stay still. When his body wasn’t moving, his mouth was. He was ceaseless.
Jasmine came bounding onto the roof, and Keaokapu lifted his chin in the direction of Jasmine’s shout, his face catching the sun in flat planes suspended across bone. Keaokapu’s skin was stretched so tight that every bone shone blue through the parchment cover--an x-ray penciled black. Chemotherapy had removed most of his hair, and what was left he had let grow long. Black hair lay on wind, thin banners pointing out to sea, eels escaping from his brain.
Headless snakes snapped to an electric sky.
Keaokapu was the only person Clare had ever known who stopped Jasmine in his tracks. No one said anything for quite some time. Finally Keaokapu stood, put his arms on Jasmine’s shoulders, and leaned his face into his, cheeks pressed and noses catching each other’s breath.
Welcome, brother, he said. I hear you are the man responsible for training the midwives who made certain our Kailani made it to this side. Mahalo. Mahalo a nui.
---I don’t know if this is going to help, but we can try.
Jasmine opens a leather pouch and removes a hard-shelled plastic box. When the top is lifted, acupuncture needles spark the sun.
---We’re going to try to open the energy paths of your body. Sort of create a secondary system, an assistant if you will, to help with the process of chemotherapy. Placing the needles doesn’t hurt, but you should be as relaxed as possible. Try to find the most comfortable position you can.
Beginning at the wrist and moving upward to the neck, Jasmine inserts the needles. Finding places near each ear, he continues down the other arm.
---Good.
By the time Jasmine is finished, Keaokapu is a strange prickly creature with antennae to another world. He closes his eyes, stops talking and puts both hands flat on his knees. Jasmine continues his nervous chatter, but Keaokapu doesn’t answer. He is removed. As his breathing slows, his muscles, perfectly visible under paper-thin skin, melt. Thinking he’s asleep, Clare wonders if she should go downstairs and get an umbrella, or a tarp. Something to block the sun.
She looks across the harbor at sailboats circling Miss Liberty, flies to rotten meat. (I don’t think of the light flashing on the water as reflection, but as someone slicing waves from below.) Clare feels it on her back.
One after another, the needles in Keaokapu’s arm start to bend, lying down in the same direction as if a flood had left a field of meadow grass lying on the dirt, waiting for sun to raise it full again. Jasmine holds his head. Barry keeps his hands in front of him, and Clare looks past.
When the last needle collapses against Keaokapu’s skin, Jasmine pulls the first one out and lays it on the roof’s edge. He places the second one next to the first, until they all lie there, exact replicas one of another, perfect ninety degree angles, precisely and sharply bent. He picks up one and holds it into sun, tries to bend the angle back to straight. Each attempt is resisted by the angle. The needle is permanently bent.
Keaokapu looks at Jasmine and smiles.
Sorry, man, he says, sorry about the needles. I guess I am already on it.
Kapuahilihili has one hand flat against the narrow edge wall of the elevator shaft and one leg stretched to the back. With her white leotards, she is a fragile flower thread, the pistil of a blond crocus. Clare knows she means to turn a cartwheel on the ledge above the street. She hears Kapuahilihili’s voice spring loud, talking to her dead father on the west bound wind. Because she ran in circles around his legs when she was small, Keaokapu used to tease her, calling her Kapuahiohio. A whirlwind he could not stop. Now, she wants her legs in wind. He is too early gone.
Joe holds his pistol above his head and pulls the trigger. The flaming tampon shoots an arc above the roof; it’s black before it hits the ground. The harbor statue shudders red, lit by sparking chrysanthemums larger than Manhattan’s tip and wider than the harbor width. One fades, another blooms.
Winding out, Kapuahilihili turns and turns again, flips backwards on the roof, hands straight arrows to the sky.
compassion watercolor on paper 1985 Tia Ballantine
The Departed
Cuba’s mother gives us a tear-drop trailer with UFW painted inside a green circle next to the door; the red enamel of the letters flaking off. We tow the trailer out to Colorado and leave it some feet back from the river’s edge. In the spring the river swells and overflows its banks, but we have no desire to float away.
__________
After making a wrong turn somewhere in Ohio, we end up in Kentucky, and at twilight when the head-lights refuse to switch on, we have no choice but to pull into a graveled driveway next to a warehouse with corrugated steel sides and a bright royal blue door. Everyone has gone home for the night, and it is quiet, away from the highway, close to the river. As soon as we switch the engine off, the night turns on. Crickets compete with bullfrogs for space, and the milky way begins to hum some unrecognizable tune. Of course, instantly a high-pitched mosquito whine kills all that romance of river edges and crickets. We will sleep in the car, wait until first light, and then find an electrician in town who might locate the problem; we have no choice, but we need to close the windows to keep from being devoured by bugs. And it is hot. Already my lower back, my inner thighs, the backs of my knees are dripping wet.
Then, headlights, and a car door slams. Someone is walking towards the car in the dark—someone large. I can feel the distance between each footfall, hear the gravel crunch underfoot, almost painfully. The crickets pause.
---What you folks doing here?
He leans his palm into the windshield and aims his voice for the still open window. The moon disappears abruptly behind the wide curve of his left shoulder. He is saying something low and gutteral about this being his warehouse, and something else—something I can’t hear. The crickets are still silent, but I can hear him breathing and can see his hand curled fingers to palm, resting on the doorframe. He shifts his weight heavily onto one foot and uses his other hand to fish something from the pocket of his overalls. When he brings his hand back to the open window, there is a small click. Metal to metal.
---Listen.
I close my eyes and wait.
---Listen. There are beds in there, beer in the fridge, a coffee pot. Make yourselves at home. Towels in the cabinet under the drawing table and the air conditioner controls to the left of the fridge. Just slip the key under the door in the morning when you leave.
He clicks the key once more against the door panel and then passes it easily through the open window. The crickets sing again, but then, they probably had never left off in the first place. There are clean sheets and two apricot Danish for breakfast. The coffee is French Roast.
___________
I open the letter to a watercolor of columbines. Inside three typed lines:
Dear Tia, Happy New Year; I miss your letters. I put you in for a Pushcart: did they write. I gather you’re thriving? God bless.
He signs his name as he always signs it—three fast letters.
The sun is a siren on my arm. I want to peel it back with my teeth.
There is one other piece of mail—a postcard from Madrid. Antonio Saura, Cocktail Party 1960.
___________
Before she leaves the islands, she gives me two things—a hand-woven jacket embroidered in cross-stitch with hard round buttons and button holes made of bound satin threads, and her phone number. When she leaves Texas, she gives me two phone numbers, one for the program director and one for the cottage where she will sleep and write. When I call she says: It’s cold here, but this place has high ceilings, and you are my first call. I just walked through the door this very instant. I just set my suitcases on the floor. You are my welcoming committee.
_________
The sepia photograph arrives in a green vellum envelope. She has her hands spread across her breasts, her belly round and large, and she is radiating. I put the photo on my board next to the snapshot of my father looking surprised, reading to a stuffed rabbit balanced on his knee. I attach the first photo carefully, not wanting to disturb its silvered surface. Now I want to know if the baby is born. I am glad she has De Koonings and Stellas on her wall and a rose garden large enough for a glass-topped table and four wrought iron chairs. I am glad she lives with early morning fog and blue lupine.
_________
Last night, someone left a box of macadamia nut chocolates on my chair outside the front door. There was no note. I don’t think it was the same person who occasionally leaves old unread copies of the NYTimes, but the same concrete pot with the aloe plant was used to keep the wind from blowing the box-top away. Whoever it was must have waited for some time. When I opened the box, two chocolates were missing.
_________
She sent the black jet pendulum from Yelapa, packed it in shredded yucca fiber stuffed into an empty Tampax box with a note scrawled on thin blue paper saying that she found this "magic" stone (her word not mine) on the beach, tangled up in seaweed—without the ribbon, of course. And no, she didn’t drill the hole through the narrow end. It was already there, but clogged with sand. Holding it under the bathroom faucet flushed out most of the sand, but she had to push the tiny green shell out with a sewing needle. The red velvet ribbon she found coiled in the back of the kitchen drawer backed into the beeswax candles. The pendulum was too heavy to wear around my neck, but I liked rubbing my smallest finger across the flat polished facets. The tiny green shell was crushed to dust, even though it was wrapped in layers of bathroom tissue.
__________
She writes: Shades of moss on wonderful world of walls, hedges, labyrinthine lanes. A few cherished Autumn moments before back to that other Emerald Isle. On the other side of the card—a picture of Oscar Wilde, Jonathan Swift, Bram Stoker, Samuel Beckett, and a stamp—two wolves, one with an open mouth, on a yellowing moor.
__________
After she dies, I look in her bathroom drawer for the rosewood box with Kokoshka’s cigarette wrapped in pink tissue, but after thirty years in salt air the cigarette has melted to brown stain.
__________
When she calls, I don’t want to tell her that I have been crying for three days and have kept all the doors and windows shut. Maybe she knows anyway. She reads me her poem about the red snake crossing the road in slow curves, its tail snapping at one edge of the road, its narrow head pushing against the ridged sand on the other edge. I ask her if the snake is red because of the setting sun (she always walks in the desert at nightfall.) No, she says, it stays red, even in the moonlight; the man in the gas station told her the snake is a red racer.
__________
He writes me a letter that takes apart my world.
ten watercolor/gouache 1990 Tia Ballantine
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Shark Bait
Nightfall didn't come creeping in this dark alley. It just happened, unannounced. It was not an event. The sky turned from one shade of yellow grey to a deeper shade of apricot, and the shadows emptied, becoming thinner, graceless. Maybe the traffic on the street slowed, maybe it increased. It didn't matter. One thing changed, and Clare could see that. At night, after the sun set, after the sky shifted in shade, she could sit on the step outside the storefront and drink a beer, and no one ever noticed. After sunset, she fell to shadow.
"We might have a violet sky tonight." She drained the last of the beer from the can and crumpled it. She set it carefully, next to the open door and leaned back, peering into the hollow dark of the storefront. "Barry, damn it, come out here. You missed the fucking sunset."
She could hear him, moving about inside.
"Come on, Clare, you act as if this is some sort of god-damned beach or something. What do you think? That you are sitting on some sort of rock, dabbling your tippy toes in the god-damned waves? There is no sunset. There's no sunrise, and I'm not coming out."
Clare sighed the kind of sigh that she hoped might fill the air at the very same moment that Marilyn Monroe's face filled the screen and then leaned back until she was lying in the doorway, trailing her fingers on the tile floor. If she turned her head just slightly to the right, her long red hair fell over one eye and she could see Barry. He was sitting on the floor, leaning against the brick wall, erasing the drawing that he had been working on all day. He erased slowly and methodically. The oil lamps were lit, and she could barely make out the stack of bare canvases in the corner, barricaded by a stack of unpacked boxes and a mattress, tossed on the floor without commitment, close to the window and nearest to the door.
They hadn't been living here for very long, if they were living here at all. They stayed occasionally, some nights, when things got too crowded in the loft downtown, or Joe got too crazy. Sometimes he was hard to take, all that talk about the Mekong Delta and the whites of their eyes. The night Joe shot the glass out of the skylight, they came up here to sleep, bringing only their sleeping bags and a change of underwear. It wasn't such a big thing really. No one was hurt. The glass in the skylight was safety glass, and it came raining down in hard little crystals. It was sudden and complete, as short-lived as a hailstorm. When she shook out the sleeping bags, the pieces of glass dropped harmlessly to the floor. There were no shards or splinters, only the light from Joe's flashlight, landing on the empty space, catching the square crystals in quick flashes before they fell. Joe was laughing and Barry wanted to go back to sleep. Ghosts of the Mekong, he kept mumbling, pulling her back to the floor, but she was too nervous. So they left and came here to sleep.
You could be a ghost of the Mekong, too, she said after they locked the door on the yellow light of the street and collapsed into the dark of the storefront. She supposed the Barry shrugged, but she couldn't be sure. She could feel his body next to hers; she could hear his shallow breath even as a heartbeat, but the windowless black was too dense, too humid, for her to see his face. She spent all night lying in a tense, narrow stillness, listening to the rats moving across the empty arc of space. Once she was sure that she felt a light body race quickly across her feet, and once she felt a dampness move next to her face. A sound of chewing, small teeth gnawing on something hard, kept her awake until it seemed that it must be morning. The next day they brought the oil lamps, and two days later they moved most of the boxes and all of the canvases from the loft downtown.
"Barry." Clare reached back and tossed her empty beer can across the floor.
"Cut it out, Clare." Barry shook the paper, casting a cloud of eraser into the light of the kerosene light. "I'm almost through, two more inches. That's it."
She had given up asking him why he erased everything that he drew. She could never be satisfied with his long meandering replies about ego and the impermanence of life and couldn't understand why he considered it a monument to all those who had died in Vietnam. She argued that it was a contradiction in terms. Monuments, after all, endured; erasures evaporated. They disappeared, end of story. Something that didn't exist couldn't be a monument.
She couldn't say that Barry smiled when she said that. He just turned away and muttered something under his breath, something about existence and betrayal. She said that she thought that memory was about reconstruction, and she thought it was pretty strange to create a monument through destruction. Even if you called it deconstruction. It didn't make any sense. How could you possibly remember anything if you took it all away? He said that was the point and claimed that he was allowing his ego to die by erasing all that he created.
At the same time, he kept an accurate account of each drawing destroyed, recording each one with a number and a name in a tiny spiral notebook. He kept the notebook in the breast pocket of his coat. He said that he would stop erasing when he had one drawing for every person that he saw die, one for every body dragged through the swamps. She said, that is real ego, thinking that his drawing could equal lost life, and who was he to think that he could so easily erase memory. When she refused to stop asking questions, he stopped answering. He just kept erasing.
Sometimes he would stop speaking to her for days, days when he talked only to himself, or to Joe, about the war and the light and the smell of death, a stench of blood and piss and fear and death. He never stopped making the drawings. She would say things that she didn't mean, impatient things, trying to get him to stop erasing, he let her words drop.
"Barry, I'm saving this beer for you."
Outside the door the street was filling quickly with the stagnant heat of night. Clare could feel the sweat running in thin streams between her breasts, under her arms, everywhere clothing touched her body. Only the tile floor and the cool breeze blowing from the darkest corner of the storefront felt cool, ancient even. She was hoping Barry would come out, hoping that they could sit outside the night, hoping they could go back downtown and take a shower. Joe had been unusually calm when they went back for the oil lamps and was almost apologetic the day that they move the boxes. They had been back often since, to eat, to bathe, even to sleep. Joe always pretended that they had never left, even though they had taken everything, and when they slept there, they slept on the couch under borrowed blankets.
"A gun in every toilet. That's what America needs." Joe lifted up the back of the toilet and showed Clare where he had put the gun after emptying it into the skylight. "At least it does some good there. Saves water. Save water. Reduce the arsenal. Kill two birds with one stone."
She thought about it now, the gun, lying mixed up with plumbing parts, cold and blue, a genetically altered shark in a crystalline pool. It waited as easily as the sand sharks as the aquarium waited, pressed up against the glass, their eyes empty shadows, answering nothing. It was the fact that it was there that terrified her. After she had seen the sharks, settled in their depth at the aquarium, she never wanted to swim at Coney Island anymore. It didn't matter that the pollution was more of a threat than the sharks. She knew that they were there, waiting in the clouded waters. She wondered how long it would take to rust. It was always there, whenever she looked, and she always looked. It lay there, blue steel, a precise butterfly captured by the clarity of the water, never aging. She wondered if Joe ever oiled it. She often heard him humming in the bathroom, singing to himself with the shower running, for what seemed like hours. Afterwards the bathroom would smell like a machine shop, even with the window open.
Barry had lived in a machine shop before she met him, and before they had moved in with Joe. On one side, he stacked the blank canvases, squeezed between the heavy machinery and the open space of floor. On the other side, he built a towering barrier of empty cat food cans, arranged in alternating columns and pyramids. She never did figure out just why the men who ran the machine shop agreed to rent him that five hundred square feet of open space smack in the middle of their shop. She didn't think that it was generosity.
It might have been curiosity, or simply an admission on their part that, as machinists, they were no longer considered to be desirable neighbors in a building that was rapidly filling up with artists who paid higher rents and demanded quieter days. Maybe by having an artist in their shop, they felt unified, justified somehow, a part of it all , so to speak. Maybe they related to Barry's piles of rubber erasures, swept neatly at the end of each week into even piles that edged the border of their space and his. Maybe they reminded them of their own piles of thin blue scrapings of hardened steel, their own removals, made them feel like artists, too, turning out the nuts and bolts of society. Maybe they liked it when those two piles touched, ashes to ashes; summer moving into fall.
Maybe they just liked the idea of having someone there, day and night, long after they had gone home to their quiet homes with wide green lawns on Long Island. It didn't seem to matter. They never complained about Barry's old tom cat; they were glad to have the mice gone. Barry never complained about the constant slamming of the machines. He was solitary and eccentric enough not to interfere with their business. They explained to their customers that he was a caretaker, and he explained to his cat that landlords were always strange, always demanding, and never perfect. It seemed like a perfect marriage, until Clare moved in.
"Barry, honey, bring me another beer out of the cooler when you come out, will you?" Clare rolled her T-shirt up to her breasts and blew softly on her naked belly. "Bring one for you, too. I drank yours."
Barry appeared suddenly in the doorway, one arm holding a large piece of paper at arms length from his body. He stepped over Clare's outstretched arm and sat on the narrow doorstep, slipping his long legs into the shadow.
"You want to see it? It's done."
He covered Clare's stomach with the paper and, in one motion, she sat up and held the drawing into the yellow of the street lights. The entire paper seemed to be virginal, excepting a pale blue line that encircled the perimeter, the original line that marked the border of the drawing. She could only detect a few dimples, and one obvious scar, where the pencil had intruded with greater vehemence than expected, where the line could not be completely erased. Aside from these deviations, it was impossible to find any clue as to what the drawing had looked like before he had erased it. The paper appeared unused, casually scarred.
"I'm giving this one to Joe. It's about him, you know."
Clare pretended to look surprised, and, in a way, she was surprised. She was amazed that he would tell her just what he had drawn, something that he had never done before, and she was amazed that he was drawing now for survivors of the war. She was glad to be surprised, genuinely surprised, as she did not want him to know that she had seen the drawing. She had peeked over his shoulder earlier in the day, when he was so intent on drawing that he had not heard her come in. She stood behind him for nearly ten minutes, watching him work. He never looked up. She wanted to reach down and touch him, to move the long hair off his neck and kiss the soft down that grew there at the base of his skull. She reached out once, but she stopped, inches from the skin of his neck, unwilling to break the spells, unwilling to stop the methodical rocking of his hands.
He moved the pencil up and down the drawing, adding line after line, until Joe's eyes flashed from the paper, staring to the farthest distance, opened to a capacity that seemed jammed by memory, looking around a corner, a corner so far behind him that he would have to walk blocks to find it. There was a tiger with its mouth open behind him and the barrel of a gun pressed against his temple, covering his ear. The lower half of his face was obscured with shadows of palm trees bent against the wind, so she couldn't see if his mouth was open or closed, but she could tell by the set of his eyes that, whatever he was doing or saying, it was in silence. She watched until the beads of sweat began to form around the edges of Joe's eyes and drip through the shadows of the trees behind. Then she turned and left the room with an even quieter step than she had come.
"I know that he'll like it. He doesn't have any of your work." Clare tilted the paper toward the blue neon lights of the bar across the street, watching the shadows shift from sour yellow to electric blue. "He'll love it."
"Oh, Clare, sweet, sweet Clare." Barry buried his face in her thick red hair and ran his fingers lightly down her back. "Sweet Clare, with the waterfall hair, where would the world be without you? Where would I be?"
"Why did you. . ."
Clare stopped.
She wanted to ask him to tell her about the drawing, about Joe, about the moment she had seen that afternoon looking over his shoulder, the moment that had passed years ago, the moment that he had erased today. She wanted to know about the shadows, the gun, the sweat that mixed somehow with tears. She wanted to know about the hand that held the gun. She wanted to know.
"Funny," she said, "I got something for Joe today, too."
After she had left the room, startled by the click of the door latch, she walked to Canal Street. She wanted to walk to Chinatown and pick up some bok-choi and beansprouts to take downtown. She was thinking about making stir-fry for dinner, cooking on the roof, balancing the wok on the stack of bricks that was Joe's make-shift barbecue. She might even get a few shrimp to sweeten the pot. Before she bought the cabbage, the beansprouts and then some mushrooms, while she was still thinking about it, she was stopped by a tiny old lady with a spider's face.
The old woman waved a quick hand at Clare as she went by and yelled, you, you, you come buy. Clare might not have stopped if she hadn't turned, startled by the bird-like cry, and caught a flash of the woman's eyes and thought instantly of the drawing that she had just seen, of Joe's eyes, and the gun, lying in the crystal water behind the toilet. In that one moment of hesitation, the woman darted in front of her and stopped her cold.
"You buy. You buy." She held two huge bloody fish steaks above her head. "These good, real good. My son, he caught this morning. Real fresh. Real fresh."
The old woman waved the fish steaks about her head, shaking them like soundless rattles. Clare didn't know what to say, so she stood there and watched, trying to remember the few words of Vietnamese that Joe had taught her. She felt that she needed a talisman of some sort to break the spell.
"This big shark. Good meat. Best meat." She slapped the steaks together, and Clare stepped back to avoid the watery spray of blood and juice. "The shark, he don't forget. He don't remember. He been here so long, he can't remember. He know too much so he can't forget either. You buy. You eat and you have what he have. You can't remember. You can't forget. That good."
By then the old woman was wrapping the fish in newspaper, and Clare was digging into the bottom of her bag to find change. She never went any further. She never bought the bean sprouts or the bok-choi. Somehow it didn't seem sensible to walk along Canal Street with only three dollars and six pounds, at least, of shark under her arm. She went home, watched the sunset, drank a beer and wondered if they had any charcoal.
"You ever eat barbecued shark, Barry? I bet it tastes like tuna or swordfish or something. I was thinking we could barbecue it. Maybe pick up some tomatoes and parsley at the bodega." Clare tipped her head into Barry's shoulder and drained the last of the beer into her mouth, hiccuped once and smiled briefly. "What do you think?"
"Sweet Clare, sweet, beautiful Clare." Barry moved the drawing from her stomach and rested his fingers on the damp surface of her skin. "I think I want to kiss you."
"Come on, Barry, this is the street. You know, public place, man. What about that guy over there?"
Clare gestured briefly towards a man moving unsteadily from the open doorway of the bar, his arms held at abrupt angles, clawing the air, searching for invisible support. "I mean, would you want to lying here, making love, when the cops arrive to take away that body? That would be kind of harsh, don't you think, even with all this soft romantic streetlight."
She started to laugh but ended choking, spitting her beer in the street.
Barry turned and watched the man stumble and fall against a late model Cadillac, parked halfway down the block with its engine running. He saw him grab the door handle, hesitate for a short moment, yank the door as if falling, and then pull it again, only harder this time. The man howled two unmistakable words and pounded his fist into the top of the car. Barry sighed and ran his fingers through Clare's hair.
"Look's like he is in some pain."
The night air was thicker now with the cries of the man and the damp of the day settling, without wind, without the slightest breeze, on the still warm sidewalks. No lights turned on; no windows opened. No heads turned. there was no one to bother. A middle aged man, slightly heavy around the middle, flushed from drink and still dressed for a Wall Street day, pounded on a late model Cadillac parked in a dark alley with its motor running. Barry looked at Clare, and Clare looked at Barry. They both shrugged simultaneously and laughed at the mirror of their motion.
"OK." Clare flung her empty beer can through the open doorway and stood up. Cupping one hand to her mouth, she howled the howl of a threatened coyote in the direction of the raging man. Instantly, there was quiet, uninterrupted silence. "OK. Talk to us, Mr. Man. We live here, you know. If you want to beat up on your car, maybe you could do it on the next block. She doesn't seem to want to go with you."
The man stared at Clare and shifted his bulk onto the hood of the car before leaning back and shouting across the distance separating them. He didn't smile.
"I...locked..my...keys...in the god-damned car." He said each word with a flat precision and gestured at an odd angle into the shadow. "It's going to run out of god-damned gas and then how in the hell am I going to get to god-damned New Jersey?"
"Do you like to eat shark?" Clare took three steps toward the car, dropped to her knees and fell to the cobblestones. In an instant she sprang to her feet and twirled around, facing the running car and the man, still standing alone, now with one arm raised. "Just kidding. Seriously, Mr. New Jersey, this isn't really a problem, not a problem, not at all. It just isn't. This is minor, Mr. Man, minor. All we need here is one genuine metal coat hanger."
It didn't take long to find a coat hanger, and it didn't take long to bend it into a hook. It didn't take long to spring the lock, and it didn't take long to open the door. If Barry had bothered to record the time, he would have remembered less than five minutes, but he didn't record it and he didn't remember it. He had given up breaking the day into hours and had forgotten how to isolate minutes. He did remember, weeks later, that before the man heaved himself, damp and trembling, into the car, he went back into the bar and came out with an unopened bottle of whiskey. He pressed it into Clare's hand with a sweaty wordless gratitude. Barry tasted it and spat it on the sidewalk. He declared it rot-gut and washed his mouth out with beer. Clare tasted it, licked her lips and smiled before she whispered, shark bait, sweet dear shark bait. She drank it all and forgot everything that he remembered.
She forgot that after draining the last drop, she threw the empty bottle in a high arc. She watched it slow at the top of its pass, three stories high, and hurtle downward, flashing blue and orange as the neon lights flashed, until it exploded against the cobblestones again and again in a repeated echo. She laughed then. Barry forgot that but remembered that she climbed to the top of a forty yard dumpster, abandoned in the front of the empty building across the street, scaling its flanks with the agility of a mountain goat. It was still and hard and dry, hot to the touch, with none of the cool damp of a rock face. He thought so then, but forgot it now. She forgot that she stood, teetering on the crumpled edge of the dumpster, yodeling and snorting, her arms outstretched and her hair dripping into shadow, yelling about fledgling eagles and meteorites crashing down to earth. She forgot that she jumped, without considering the distance, thinking only of the emptiness of space and the grave and sudden support that comes with absence, arms flung to one side, fingers webbed against the dark, mouth open without sound. She remembered thinking about the palisades that towered above the beach and the sound of a freight train, traveling non-stop to San Diego, mixed up with waves. She thought about the Washington Monument and her own indignation with the passing of time. She remembered the glass raining down from the skylight while the sound of the explosion was still echoing. She forgot that she was falling.
Barry remembered watching her body, turning between itself and electric blue, the shadow of flashing neon lights, disappearing into light only to reappear more distorted and distended than before. He remembered throwing his arms toward the cloud of red hair and seeing only fire and palm trees and smelling the stagnant smell of the swamps. He remembered how white the space between her fingers looked and that her eyes closed slowly as she fell. He remembered that she yelled out three words, light of dark, just before her body careened into his, and he felt his knees crumple with the impact of her body. He forgot that he could not catch her, and that when she fell against him, he could not hold her. Her body slipped away from his. He remembered that he tried to keep her head from hitting the cobblestones, but that it had bounced like a half inflated beach ball before he caught it and held her, tangled in her hair and the thinness of her arms. He could remember that the night smelled like steel, blue and hard, without a pulse. He did not remember sweating, and he was sure that he did not cry out, even once. He forgot that it was August and that there were meteor showers somewhere out beyond the apricot skies that stared back at him as he lay under her motionless body, back against the cobblestones. He remembered that he gathered her completely in his arms and kissed her sagging open mouth and then pressed her lips together between his forefinger and his thumb. He remembered holding his ear against her chest and hearing the steady beat of her heart and the ragged edge of shallow breath.
She forgot that he carried her, folded and unconscious, past the gaping shadow and the empty beer cans and laid her gently on the mattress, kissing her over and over and over again, before covering her with a single blue cotton sheet. She remembered waking once and seeing a rat run, tail whipping behind like a jungle snake. She remembered that the flame in the oil lamp was turned too high and that the globe was turning black with smoke. She felt the damp of the rag as he cleaned the yellow vomit off her face and the blood from the cut above her eye. He forgot the shark steaks, wrapped in newspaper, left them lying on the sidewalk next to the door. It was understandable. She remembered that only because she found the newspaper, ravished and empty, the next afternoon, smelling of rotting shark's blood and gasoline. It was blowing with no speed or distance in the gutter, not far from the empty lot. She felt a sharp pain in her head when she bent to pick it up.
"There goes the barbecue," she said, "up in smoke."
tomatoes ink drawing 1976 Tia Ballantine
