Much Later
Haven’t written for months. Astrid very pregnant. The fetus expands persistently. The invader draws near. My own private population explosion: spinal injury of my independence. Do I care if it dies?
The only good I can imagine from having a child: what I can learn from him, not from nauseatingly cute attempts at walking talking shitting which thrill every parent so they repeat their discoveries to you ad nauseam until you despise not only all children everywhere but even find you’re struck by sudden & irrational distaste for kittens & puppies. But it occurs to me I could learn from this child something about the nature of humanity- and if I accept Harry’s pronouncement that I am a born philosopher then this baby could be an ambitious philosophical project! What if I reared it in a cupboard without light? Or in room full of mirrors? Or Dali paintings? Apparently babies have to
Yuck
If a girl Astrid wants to name the child Wilma for some reason- if a boy, Jasper. God knows where she got these names- all the same to me. If raised properly at a certain age he’ll/she’ll choose his/her own name to reflect who he/she thinks he/she is to feel entirely comfortable in his/her own skin- nothing worse than hearing your name called & feeling a dispassionate shudder or being left cold when you see your own name in print which is why most signatures are barely legible scrawls: the unconscious rebeling against the name, trying to smash it.
Worried about money. Astrid is too. She says she has been broke before in more countries than I can name in such poverty I cannot imagine but she’s never done it with a baby & she’s worried my inherent laziness will ensure our mutual starvation. Clearly criticism is the new fire that will not die. To have a child is to be impaled daily on the spike of responsibility.
Christ!
Idiocy (or is it insanity?) redefined in what I saw when I came home today: Astrid fixing the fuses in the kitchen while standing in a small puddle of water. I threw her over my shoulder and tossed her on the bed.
– You trying to kill yourself? I screamed.
She looked at me as if I had put my face on inside out & said in small bored voice If I could think of a really clever way to commit suicide, I would.
Suicide?
– How can you even think about suicide when you’re pregnant? I said surprising myself w/ pro-life thoughts.
– Don’t worry. Suicides often fail, anyway. When I was a girl my uncle jumped off a cliff and then waved from the bottom, his back broken. And my cousin took an overdose of pills and just wound up vomiting for a week. My grandfather put a gun in his mouth, pulled the trigger, and somehow managed to miss his brain.
– This is the first thing you’ve told me about your family!
– Is it?
– Did every member of your family attempt suicide at one point?
– My father never did.
– Who was your father? What was his name? What did he do? Is he still alive? What country did he come from? What country do you come from? What is your first language? Where did you grow up?
Why don’t you talk about anything? Why won’t you tell me anything?
Did something terrible happen to you? What…
A cold glaze came over her- she was receding fast. Her soul on an express train, back to nowhere.
Strange Days Indeed
Things w/ Astrid worse than ever. Icy wall dividing us. She does nothing all day, just stares out window or at own puffiness. On rare occasions she says anything her opinions are as bleak & sterile as mine were before I got sick of them. (I haven’t grown optimistic merely bored with pessimism so now I think light pretty thoughts for variety- sadly this is starting to get dull too- where next?)
I say We should get out a bit.
She says To do what?
I say We could go sit in a café & look at people.
She says I can’t look at people anymore. I’ve seen too many.
Life’s lost its appeal. Nothing I can suggest to break her from catatonic spell. Museums? She’s been to every one. Walks in the park? Already strolled under every color of the leaf. Movies? Books? No new stories only different character names. Sex? She’s done every position untold times.
I ask her Are you sad?
– No, unhappy.
– Depressed?
– No, miserable.
– Is it the baby?
– I’m sorry. I can’t explain it, but you’re being so lovely, Martin. Thank you she says squeezing my hand & staring at me w/ her wide glassy eyes.
One night she cleaned the whole apartment & went out & returned w/ wine & cheese & chocolates & a fedora hat for me which I wore w/ no clothes on & it made her laugh hysterically & I realized just how much I missed her laugh.
But by morning she was miserable again.
Remembering how on the morning after our relationship began she’d drawn my face in pencil I went out & bought paints & a canvas spending all the money I had in vain hope that she might take out burning misery on blank canvas instead of on me.
When I unveiled the gift she cried & smiled in spite of herself then moved the canvas by the window & began painting.
That set off something new.
Each painting a rendition of hell, she has many hells & she paints them all. But hell is just a face, and it is just the face she paints. One face. One terrible face. Painted many times.
– Whose face is it? I asked today.
– It’s nobody. I don’t know. It’s just a face.
– I can see it’s a face. I said it was a face. I didn’t say Whose hand is that?
– I’m not a good painter, she said.
– I don’t know much about painting but I think it’s very good. But that’s not what I’m talking about. I want to know who the face belongs to.
– I painted it, she said. It belongs to me.
You can see there was no talking to her like you talk to a normal person. You had to be tricky.
– I’ve seen that face before, I said. I know him.
– He is not a man. He is not in the world, she said & my suspicions hardened into conclusions: that this woman is insane.
Always small canvases, always the same painting, only the colors differ browns & blacks & muted reds. I can see her frenzy in that face.
Later I study the painted faces hoping that in the hallucinatory state in which she paints slips of her subconscious have dropped clues onto the canvas. The paintings perhaps elegantly symbolic maps that can lead me to epicenter of her morbid condition. My eyes train on them, dissecting them furtively under the weak lamplight. But I can’t see anything in that face other than her horror of it that fast has become my own. It really is a horrible face.
Yesterday
Whatever religious sentiments she has banked up in her interior stirred up in all this painting. Sometimes she’ll be lost in painting & she’ll call out Forgive me Lord! then go about chatting to him in half whispers leaving lengthy pauses presumably where he responds. When today she said Forgive me Lord! I did his part & said OK. You’re forgiven. Now shut up.