“He looks like a catcher for the Boston Red Sox.” Rudy smiled. Would she smile? He grew mock-serious: “The faculties of discernment and generosity are always at war. You must decide whether you will be muse or artist. A woman cannot be both.”
“I can’t believe you,” she said, staring accusingly around their apartment. “This is not life. This is something else,” and the whole ill-lit place stared back at her, hurt, a ditzy old beauty parlor flunking someone else’s math.
“Forget this Squanto thing,” he said, looking compassionate. “I’ve got an idea for you. I’ve thought about it all day: a children’s book called Too Many Lesbians.” He began motioning with his arms. “Lesbians in bushes, lesbians in trees … Find the lesbians …”
“I’m going out for some air,” she said, and she grabbed her coat and flew out the door. It was evening already, zinc gray and chill, the puddles freezing on the walks in a thin glaze. She hurried past the shivering Rosies at the corner, hurried six blocks in a zigzag to look at the bird feeder again. Visit a place at night, she knew, and it was yours.
When she reached it, the house was dark, holding its breath, soundless so as not to be discovered. She pressed her face against the gate, the hard cilia of its ironwork, and sighed, longing for another existence, one that belonged to a woman who lived in a house like this, the lovely brow of its mansard roof, thoughtful with rooms. She felt a distrust of her own life, like those aerospace engineers reluctant to fly in planes of their own design, fearing death by their own claptrappery.
The bird feeder stood tall as a constable. There were no birds.
“YOU SHOULD never leave. You just always come back,” whispered Rudy. A tourist in your own despair, he had once said. It was the title of one of his paintings. One of a snarling dog leaping over a sofa.
She stared through the small window by their bed, a strip of sky and one dim star, an asterisk to take her away briefly to an explanation — the night bragging a footnote. He held her, kissed her. Here in bed was when he seemed to her not to be doing imitations of other people. After fifteen years, she had seen all the imitations — friends, parents, movie actors — until it was a little scary, as if he were many different people at once, people to turn to, not in distress, but like a channel on television, a mind gone crazy with cable. He was Jimmy Stewart. He was Elvis Presley. “When you were growing up, were your parents funny?” she asked him once.
“My parents? You’ve got to be kidding,” he said. “I mean, once in a while they memorized something.” He was Dylan on the harmonica. Lifelike; absolutely lifelike. He was James Cagney. He was some musical blend he called Smokey Robinson Caruso.
“Don’t you think we’d have beautiful children?” Rudy now pleaded, sleepily, his hand smoothing the bangs off her brow. “They’d be nervous and insane,” she murmured.
“You’re strung out about your health.”
“But maybe they’d also be able to do imitations.”
Rudy kissed her throat, her ears, her throat again. She had to spit daily into a jar she kept in the bathroom, and to visit the clinic regularly, bringing the jar.
“You think we don’t love each other anymore,” he said. He was capable of tenderness. Though sometimes he was rough, pressing himself upon her with a force that startled her, wanting to make love and kissing her meanly against the walclass="underline" come on, come on; though his paintings had grown more violent, feverish swirls of men in business suits sodomizing animals: this is my statement about yuppies, OK?; though in coffee shops he often lorded over her spells of sorrowful boredom by looking disgusted while she blinked soggily into her lunch — here without his clothes on, with her face open to him, he could be a tender husband. “You think that, but it’s not true.” Years ago she had come to know his little lies, harmless for the most part and born of vanity and doubts, and sometimes fueled merely by a desire to hide from things whose truth took too much effort to figure out. She knew the way he would tell the same anecdotes from his life, over and over again, each time a little differently, the exaggerations and contradictions sometimes having a particular purpose — his self-portrait as Undiscovered Genius — and sometimes not seeming to have one at all. “Six inches from the door was an empty shopping cart jammed up against the door,” he told her once, and she said, “Rudy, how can it be six inches from the door but also jammed up against it?”
“It was full of newspapers and tin cans, stuff like that. I don’t know.”
She couldn’t even say when the love between them had begun to sicken, how long it had been gasping drearily over its own grave of rage and obligation. They had spent over a third of their lives together — a third, like sleep. He was the only man who had ever, even once, claimed to find her beautiful. And he had stuck with her, loved her, even when she was twenty and in terrified thrall to sex, not daring to move, out of politeness or was it timidity. He had helped her. Later she learned to crave the drugged heart of sex, the drugs at the core of it: All the necessary kissing and fussing seemed only that — necessary — to get to the drugs. But it had all been with Rudy, always with him. “Now we are truly in cahoots,” she exulted, the day they were married at the county clerk’s.
“I don’t look good in cahoots,” he said, his arm swung loosely around. “Let’s go get tattoos.”
What kisses there were in disappointment; sorrow fueled them, pushed them to a place. The city writhed, and the world shut down all around. Rudy gave pouting mouths to his Virgin Marys, popped open cans of beer, watched old movies on TV. “You are happy until you say you are happy. Then you are no longer happy. Bonnard. The great painter of happiness articulating itself to death.”
Maybe she’d thought life would provide her with something more lasting, more flattering than sexual love, but it never had, not really. For a while, she’d felt like one of the girls on the street corner: a world of leotards and drugs — drugs you hungered for and got to fast.
“Don’t you think we have a very special love?” asked Rudy. But she wasn’t believing in special love. Even when everyone was being practical, she believed — like a yearning for wind in winter — in only one kind of love, the kind in art: where you die for it. She had read too many books, said Rudy, Victorian novels where the children spoke in the subjunctive. You take too much to heart, he wrote her once, when she was away, living in Boston with an aging aunt and a sketch pad.
“I would never die for you,” she said softly.
“Sure you would,” said Rudy. He sighed, lay back. “Do you want a glass of water? I’ll get down and get it.”
At times her marriage seemed like a saint, guillotined and still walking for miles through the city, carrying its head. She often thought of the whole apartment going up in flames. What would she take with her? What few things would she grab for her new life? The thought exhilarated her. You take too much to heart.
IN THE HOUSE DREAM, she walks in past the gate and the bird feeder and knocks on the door. It opens slowly and she steps in, in and around, until it is she herself who is opening it, from the other side, wondering who has knocked.