I move closer to the window, and hear across the alley, the tink of glass against glass. Paco's singing slows and moves farther away. I try to imagine what would happen if we simply knocked on the door, confronted him. But it won't happen.
I watch my father filling in Megumi's left eye. I know that eye, its smallness, its Asian teardrop, its engaging brown. He will not confront Paco. He will not confront his wife. They must decide for themselves. I understand. If I discover Megumi watching a man in the Indian restaurant where we often eat lunch, or the little playhouse on a warm night, it hurts. A little knife stabs me in the side. But I will not speak. She must love me in the face of other men.
The singing is louder, comes close. My father cracks the pencil against the floor, then stands and paces. He pushes his fingers through his hair and shakes his head. I grab the stool before it falls, and look at my fiancee.
"We should go," Megumi whispers.
"No, I can't leave him now." I go to the window where he kneels, and peer over the sill with him. I see nothing. The song has stopped. I wonder if we are the only ones who hear it.
"I think she's there," he whispers.
"Impossible," I say and kneel too.
"Help me push this," he says and unlatches the window.
The windows of the studio have not been opened in years. I pry my fingers into the paint and dirt between window and wood and push as the seal cracks, the window slowly opens and warm, wet air flows in and settles against our faces.
"You watch. I'll be right back," he says and rises.
I watch the alley and the darkness of Paco's windows. A white curtain floats up and settles, floats up again. I imagine an entire life beyond the alley and that apartment. A life my father makes in his paintings. I could have chosen to be a painter. Maybe I am. He taught me to draw. He encouraged me. I drew sneakers and the toaster oven and her, even her, when she dressed in long skirts and shawl, the chopsticks in her hair, to teach at the studio or to dance. I didn't know. I fixed her. He was proud. He taught me to draw without looking at the paper. I remember the first time. The old shoes tangled together, the laces, the perspective of one shoe atop another.
No singing. No sound at all. Not even cars on the roads outside, doors, children, music. Nothing. My knees start to ache, but do not move. This is important. Not to see Paco or my mother, but to carry this through for him.
He returns, and between his legs, pointing straight up, a rifle. It has a thin barrel and a metal sight at the tip. "I didn't know you had that," I say.
"Pellet gun. She's gone, Son."
"Gone," I repeat. Not my mother, I realize. The chair where Megumi sat is empty. The light brightens and burns the empty chair. The canvas where he started to paint her looks like it's smoldering in the intense light.
My father pumps the pellet gun angrily. He claps the stock shut, then pumps it again.
"It needs ten pumps to get through that window," he says between breaths.
He sticks the rusty barrel through the window and rests it against the windowsill. He snuggles the stock against his shoulder and cheek, cocks his head, watches. "Tell me if you see them," he says.
"You won't shoot her?" I ask.
He looks at me like he can't believe I would ask the question. He will not shoot her. He is sane. He will shoot Paco.
"I can't see anything," I say.
My father takes deep, heavy breaths, then blows air slowly from his pursed lips. Some practiced routine for shooting, I guess. But the alley is silent. The windows are empty of movement. I'm not sure if anyone is there anymore.
"I'll check around back," he says. Before I can ask him what this means, he's gone, slipping from the room like a young man, agile, on a grave mission.
I watch the alley for a few seconds and wonder if my father will appear wearing fatigues and a mask of black and green. I hear the screen door slam, but no one appears. I stand and try a few numb steps, but my legs are chunks of wood. I walk like Frankenstein, grab the stool, and lean on it. I stretch my legs and feel the size of the canvas in front of me. My legs run beneath it when I'm this close. I see all the grains and imperfections of the undercoating. I see the spaces in the charcoal lines where he's drawn Megumi's faint outline. It's only a human shape. I don't see her yet.
I take a pencil and press the tip into the line of her left eye. i imagine her face close to mine. We are in bed and she's laughing. I smell her; feel her breath on my chin. Her soft eyes widen, and she looks at me; I count three freckles.
When I finally look, I'm surprised to see I've ruined what little there was to start. It looks nothing like her. It seems ridiculous to realize I don't know her well. Maybe I never will. I drop the pencil into the tray. I look toward the front windows of the studio to see if the car is still there. Maybe she waited. I realize that one day she will know some furtive craving I will be unable to satisfy. I open the front door, smell turpentine baking in the heat, the vegetable smell of hot vines, dirt, and grass. The car is not there.
ROB: I want to say this about these pieces — all are remarkably well written. You've got the tools, folks. Good writing, very good writing. Why don't you give yourself a moment and refresh your memory about Erich's story. Remember the guidelines in here: if you feel you have something useful to say, great. Keep it focused on the text and let's work from basics first, but you're under no compulsion to speak. On the other hand, I don't want you to take anything I've said to mean "Keep your mouth shut," either. You will often have wonderful, useful things to say. It won't affect your grade either way. So it's up to you.
No one? OK, I'll start.
The story sets up quite beautifully — line to line, it's nicely written. "His hair is fine and light gray, tossed up from thinking with his fingers." That's a fabulous line; And you set the tone of New Orleans beautifully. You must have responded to Tom Piazza — remember the Brownsville story? You catch New Orleans — not derivatively, but in a way reminiscent of that milieu. Your narrator talks about coming into this place in the Quarter where artists live, and you evoke it vividly.
The father is an artist, and when you have a father artist and an accountant son, there's at once a discrepancy that suggests the possibility not only for traditional conflict but also for the prime mover of conflict, yearning. And there's an interesting kind of undercutting of polarity, in that the son met Megumi along the Bayou at the New Orleans Museum of Art.
But that undercutting, in fact, is just the foreshadowing of the actual dissipation of any sense of difference in the story. The son readily understands his father's art — seeks it out, in fact, with regard to Megumi — and the father in turn seems quite comfortable with his son and totally accepting of Megumi as a future daughter-in-law. The only problem is beyond the wall. And it's a shared problem, of sorts, but it remains a problem.
So I've got the yearning deficit here. There is no dynamic of desire. It's not until pretty late in the story that anybody thinks to take any action. Once taken, it gets sort of extreme. As a result, it feels dragged in. When we get to scenes that might contain heat — that is to say, scenes that involve the mother from the past, or even in the present — we never see her. To make anything of the story, you have to believe that the mother and even his mother being with his father are somehow important to him. But there's no evidence of that, and this is where the emotional logic of the story breaks down. Before there's even a serious reference to the mother's flamenco career — the background of her stage presence, the relationship of the mother and father, the mother dancing next door with this Paco guy — all of this is done in summary, abstraction, generalization. There isn't a single memory, not a single scene, not even a peeking through the window. Here these double shotgun houses sit. The son comes and goes always to the father, and yet the mother's right there. We have no real sense of why there's this absence, this division, this gap between son and mother. The past offense seems to be, even from his point of view, between the mother and the father. It's not as if he's sided with the father in some drastic way against the mother. Then when we hear about the mother learning flamenco in Tulane — and this was some time ago, wasn't it— there's not even a moment of flashback of his seeing her. If your mother suddenly turns into a flamenco dancer — there's a lot of potential here, Erich, but there needs to be a moment when he sees her dance for the first time, at whatever age, im-pressionably. And a moment when he is compelled to see her dance now, in the present of the story. When, for example, he is somehow compelled to carry those flowers from this doorstep to the other and put them where they're supposed to be, and then look, peek, spy. We want to see his mother dancing the flamenco, especially with a strange man.