“I never knew it for sure. You never explained anything. You were always so difficult. You were always saying good-bye.”
“Come with me now.”
Tears fell from Marta ‘s eyes and dripped into her mouth. She tasted the salt. In Venezuela the natives made salt at the edge of the sea. The air was white some days with it. She breathed in: the smell of fish and salt and sweat, and the wonderful beach. She pictured three white pillars of salt.
“It was so lonely to love you.”
“In death you will finally understand everything. Things fall together. Believe me. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“Hush now.” Marta began to sing the Billie Holiday song, softly at first. “Don’t explain. Just say you’ll remain. I’m glad you’re back. Don’t explain.”
“Please don’t sing that,” Natalie cried. “I’ll miss you too much.” Already Natalie must have known the ending as the dead must know endings, far in advance.
Marta nodded.
Natalie moved closer to Marta. “Come with me,” she begged. “If you ever loved me at all, come to me now.”
Marta closed her eyes. “I never thought it would be this hard to die,” she said. “Natalie,” she cried, “it means giving up everything.”
“Marta,” Natalie whispered, but it did not sound like Natalie really. “Marta,” the voice said. It was Natalie but her voice was smaller, softer. “It’s so lonely here,” she said. “There’s no music or bells. There’s no one we know here, Marta. Most everyone is old. There’s no brilliant light like we thought — nothing.”
In the darkness, her eyes closed tightly, Marta saw for the first time since she had fallen into the coma, not a black void but the Vassar campus, the chapel, the library, her small room in Cushing. And she remembered the story of a woman in a dress made of twilight fluttering across the lawn with another woman, some time ago. Then she saw Venezuela again: a house, a shell, a smooth, white stone, the ocean lapping in her ears, and the lovely clean coastline of an island in Greece, beautiful, blue and white.
And France, too, not Natalie’s France but a different one — a France filled with earnest faces, loaves of bread, bottles of wine; a cat on a fence and someone singing with a big voice in the street; an alley. And yes, Natalie, too, Natalie was there, too, but she seemed further away and she did not have the pull somehow, and Marta thought, I have her still but it’s different. It feels different. And with this recognition, that it feels different, with this letting go came not a release or a feeling of freedom but an unaccountable pain. She could never have imagined the pain that she now felt. It was a sharp pain, a shrill, horrendous scream of pain as if she were giving birth; it was a birth pain — one body pulling out and separating from the other. She was alive and she could feel everything, even her own death, her own mortality, and she shrieked again over her own inevitable death, not now, but some other time, far in the future.
She could still hear Natalie’s voice, but it was getting softer and she could no longer see her. “Natalie,” she cried, “Natalie,” and she felt the pain of what it means to be alive and, as she surfaced, she gave out a long, loud howl — a horrible, bloodcurdling scream that Natalie disappeared into.
She was alone. As she pulled herself up through oceans and oceans of pain into the air, she managed to say a few words.
“I love you still,” she whispered. Her body ached. “I will always love you, Natalie.” She was breathing light; she would live.
“Natalie,” she said. “Don’t look for me. Please don’t look. I’m not coming.”
In a blink the whole world had turned white, in a nod: the sky white; the church, the steeple, completely white, the cobblestones covered like a thousand graves; the butcher-shop window filled with the white heads of sheep, the frail bones of rabbits, white, all white; the cars buried in white like animals in the snow — winter’s fleece.
I barely heard the door open or recognized Jack when he came in. He looked different. I touched the snow that bearded his face. He smiled, looking past me out into the white.
“Isn’t it lovely?” he asked.
His voice seemed to pulsate against the snow. As I looked out the window I felt myself to be disappearing.
“Jack,” I said slowly. I looked at our hands, our faces, our clothes; we, too, were white.
I felt myself giving in. There are days like this in every season, days of such sensual intensity that they threaten to erase all else. They invite us to surrender to a single moment, they invite us to die. And what choice do we have? Trapped in the blood colors of autumn, caught in impossible snowdrifts or drifts of heat that melt men into the pavement and weaken hearts until they collapse, what choice do we have? Ask for courage then, for it is best not to look away, not to close our eyes. It is best to let our temperatures rise with the sun, to lose ourselves completely in the rhythm of rain, to let it in, to push the limits of what it means to be human, to force our boundaries, to change shape. This was such an evening for forcing things — an evening of excess.
Tonight I thought, looking out the window, Jack murmuring something in my ear, that we would never see color again, never smell flowers, never feel warmth or rain.
He was telling me that the cold front had originated somewhere in Canada and was heading north when it suddenly changed direction and now whipped down the east coast. He spoke softly and it sounded to me like a children’s story. With the storm came sharp winds and heavy snow. Around Boston it picked up sleet and hail and by New York it had fully matured. Like a cartoon it raced around the skyscrapers, breaking the glass in the doomed Hancock Insurance Building and nearly blowing into the sky like kites the dogs that were out for walks. The storm was so bad, in fact, that it kept prostitutes from the street, moonlighters from the night shift, insomniacs from the coffee shops. “Imagine,” he whispered. Couples from the suburbs forfeited their tickets to Broadway plays. Underground the subway groaned to a halt between stations and a Puerto Rican woman with two children began to cry. Men on the Bowery without homes swore at the sky and futilely attempted to make fires. A young secretary took out her bunny fur jacket and laid it on the bed. Old women switched from one radio station to another for weather reports. Children jumped on their beds gleeful at the prospect of no school. Bachelors smiled, poured more wine, and dimmed the lights, knowing their dates would not be able to get home. Jack smiled, too.
Until now it had been a fairly mild winter — sluggish like the South. I thought Jack had begun secretly to prepare for a time when all the seasons would melt together, blurring into one another, impossible to tell apart. A coolish summer would turn into a muddy, green autumn. A snowless Christmas would begin a warm winter, and when spring came he would hardly even notice it. The mind would sleep forever in a homogeneous stupor, unchallenged.
But with this storm some hope for the diversity of the future was renewed in him. He seemed alive now with the possibilities. What had rested so long in him was now awakened. He paced around the room as if I were keeping him on this violent evening from some urgent, private calling.
Early on there had been signs that this would be an evening of supreme winter, irresistible winter, winter the Québécois know, winter the blind man sees. “Prepare,” the wind had whispered into my drowsy ear in the morning light as Sabine turned a corner and boarded her plane. “Prepare,” its freezing breath had said, but there was no preparing for what was to come. Those who assumed such a stance did so to reassure themselves and to calm those around them. I was reluctant even to feign a pose of readiness. Sabine had felt it, too, I thought. She had come just in time.
“Put on your coat,” jack said finally, going to the closet. He was clumsy in his boots and heavy clothing. Though he knew this place by heart, he bumped into things, as if he’d never been here before. Together we had explored every inch of my small studio. We’d been up against every wall, under every table; wedged between the police lock and the door we continued to reach new heights of ecstasy.