“I’m not one for travel actually, but with Ned, I could go anywhere. I would. I did.”
*
“Oh, God!” Isabel with a lemon under a knife, tea and tarts at midnight, had cut deeply into her finger.
“Run it under cold water.”
“Oh, God!” She saw the blood run off, and she contracted her vaginal muscles as if it might help contain the wound. “Oh. .” The sting of it! The cut! She didn’t like the cold water and she swaddled the finger with paper towels. Meanwhile, Sally was after the first-aid kit under the bathroom sink. She came back with the gauze in hand and took up Isabel’s finger and wrapped it rapidly, efficiently, like a nurse. “I feel dizzy,” Isabel said, and Sally put an arm around her, and led her from the sink to the kitchen chair, sat her down, and finished bandaging.
“I’m taking you to the emergency room at the hospital. It’s not that late and there should be someone on duty. Where are your shoes?”
The gauze had begun to pink already.
“Keep your hand raised,” Sally said. “It’s a deep cut. You may need stitches. This is the kind of thing I would do,” she said.
Isabel found her slippers — only slightly surprised at being barefoot — let herself be led to the car, door opened, legs swung in. “Okay?” Sally said, and Isabel nodded yes, though the gauze had begun to leak, so Sally gave her the kitchen towel she had brought along in case and told Isabel to wrap it around her finger and then her hand. In this way she muffled the bite and tried to subdue the sharp memory of cutting herself. She thought of graver agonies — wounds, burns — incalculable affliction of the sort she read about every day, but the hurt did not abate. The finger was hot and it beat, heartlike hot and sore.
For the rest — the long drive, the parking lot, the waiting room, the frosty windows in ambulatory — Isabel let herself be led. She shut her eyes when the doctor took up the needle to numb the area and then a kind of nothing until she looked down and saw a turbaned finger puppet that grew sharper as it woke but safe. Sally knew her way around hospitals and did the paperwork — check-in, checkout — all the while smiling at Isabel, saying how much she liked being around someone more hapless than herself.
*
In the watercolor of the lily pads Dinah likes best, the lily pads are a congestion of greens with here and there a pink or yellow crown for flower. The sky is made of orange strokes; the white paper shows through. What time is it in the painting? Could be dawn or sunset. The pond is a party, present tense and happy, but he might very well have started painting it on one of his silent, unhappy mornings. The same was true for the nude paintings. What were his sensations when painting Dinah in the garden as seen from the studio with nakedness inside this summer in the shape of Isabel? Two summers ago, it was Caitlin with the red hair. Caitlin’s pubis is the same red, not quite a red, but an orange brown, burnt-brown triangle, very small, the hips broad invitations. Never on any of the nudes are their nipples largely, colorfully noted. A bright triangle, roughly brushed in, is the focal point of the nude model’s body. As far as Dinah’s concerned, that is. No, in truth, the dynamic element is really the color and the contrasts; the body, except for suggested sexual parts, is pink; the facial features are incidental; the young women — young women to her, to Dinah — the young women are shapes.
Some of what has happened, some of what has been written about her husband and his interviews have made Dinah cynical. His work has been described as “showing us voluptuous ease,” but also conveying “a respect for labor. . no doubt a residue of his own early years of physical toil.”
Toil? What toil to be the son of wealthy parents who have made it possible to be an artist, a figure destined to be reliant on a trust fund so that a trust fund has been provided?
How old were the kids conducting these interviews anyway?
Dinah was thirty when she first met Clive in an elective course on figurative painting. He seemed very young to be a visiting professor, but he told her that she seemed very old to be an undergraduate. “Just wise” was what she said. She had left college after her freshman year to marry her high school sweetheart and fuck and fuck and fuck with impunity before he deployed for Vietnam. The year was 1969. The baby, if indeed there ever was one, died; Dinah saw blood, and after that more blood, unbidden, clotted, black. The high school sweetheart came back, and they stayed married for two years. Why? She has knocked against this question before and had no answer except to remember why she married in the first place. His body! His body was the first place. Lolling in the school gym to see him and then to lean into his body. Talk was beside the point. The point was his long body, the combative hardness of his muscled body, and the smell of his body after running when his T-shirt was no more than a tissue she pressed her nose to. His inimitable smell! She has not tasted his like and never expected to even as she rubbed against him when they were no more than sweethearts; she knew this olfactory arousal would be forever particular to him, James, Jimmy, Jimbo Card. And she was right.
For a time her name was Dinah Card and she was married to Jim Card, who called her Dee.
Now she is Dinah Harris and nothing of her hometown is known; she writes under this name even as she writes of her hometown. The baby who never was is an informing sadness, an ink that blooms on the white sheet.
At age nine she broke her arm playing a stupid game with her best friend of the time, Cynthia. Cynthia tipped a hammock hooked up in a metal frame by sitting on the end and made Dinah climb to the top of what she called the mountain. “Climb the mountain!” Why not go to the park and play on the jungle gym? “Climb it!” Dinah slipped, her arm got caught somehow, and she fell — she was never able to explain the accident; even the game Cynthia had invented was hard to describe, but she was committed to it. Cynthia didn’t believe Dinah had broken her arm, but Cynthia’s mother believed it. “Dinah’s hardly a sissy” was how Cynthia’s mother defended her. First sensations of mortality then, the start of the ugly years and trembling, Dinah, five feet barely-something inches, feared most people, men especially. Her art teacher took her aside for more than one reason; Clive took her aside, too, but by then, at thirty, she knew what men could and could not do to women, and she was not afraid of Clive.
Weirdly fearless — adventuresome? — Dinah was the first in a high school class of fifty who dared to color her hair, and in Dinah’s case, blue streaks. She drew on herself as she did on other surfaces. She was on her way to mascara when she met Jim. Now her hands sometimes shake in applying eyeliner, and her eyes come out uneven and she thinks she looks tragic, like a French chanteuse — black pointy lips on a sad face informed by too much knowing.
Another version of Dee and Jim Card: a rusty S.O.S pad disintegrating in her hand. The sink is dry, and the refrigerator, emptied, stinks; elsewhere locked windows, old air. Who left the apartment first? No sequence but objects, scenes, his glove without its mate.
She doesn’t remember Jim’s voice though she sees him yelling at her on the stoop to their apartment. Henry Street, Madison, Wisconsin, around the corner from State Street, the center of power: at one end of State Street the university, at the other, the capitol. Politics, their politics were diverging when she thought, as lovers, she and Jim should be in accord.
Another time she came back to their apartment to find a pyre of old books from courses she had taken — an entire term on Shelley, books on Freud and books by Freud and books with dialectic in their titles — all stacked as for a purifying rite in the middle of the bare room where she and Jimbo had once done everything but cook and sleep. He left a pack of matches nearby.