Your company, your touch, your voice, your face?
Or, worse, my trust, my smug protected grace?
The peace that came upon the end of chase?
For when I had you I thought I was done
with girlish wishing-fors inside my mind.
No longer wanting “someone,” some grand “he,”
I had, in you, completed that sad grind
of hoping, longing, yearning from afar
for one to be my match, my prize, my star.
And being done I could, I’d hoped, do more…
I’d been happy to get that done, and then be free to do more. Sex was work: with whom, how far, what it means. Marriage would just be marriage. Marriage would just be.
When Nick discovered that my mother, or aunt, had saved a poem by the same author, I’d caught my breath. That is the synchronicity that drives me, that linkage with my mother, as if I’d been built out of real flesh torn off of her.
Everything had been fine with Dan, until four years in, when he found my birth control pills. He’d wanted children. I didn’t. He’d been assuming we were just unlucky.
I started at Magdalene a year after they started to let women in. I received a research fellowship. I’d not been to Cambridge before. The divorce was final.
Harry, a Cambridge native, had given up his law practice, and spent his savings on a trip to South America, where he’d fallen in love with birds. Then he’d returned and fallen in love with me. Then… Well, here we are.
He went straight out of the house after his shower, despite his wet hair and the cold. He’d duck inside the first chance he’d get. The pub on the corner. They don’t serve food until evening. He hadn’t even had breakfast. He’d be drunk before long.
I let my study door hang open behind me. I walked into a chair that Miranda must have moved to sit in. Harry hadn’t moved it back. He used to be careful about keeping things predictably arranged for me.
I went upstairs. Past the guest room; I didn’t open the door. Past the computer room. I carried on to the attic stairs. Up to the bird room. The noise was stifling: bird shrieks and whistles from all sides. Cold pushed in through the one screened, open window. Mountain songbirds don’t need heat. The room smelled biologicaclass="underline" dry, thick, doughy, dirty. I felt caught by it.
I felt for the back of his chair. It’s a straight chair, no cushion. I hefted it up over my shoulder and brought it down against the top of the central aviary, by my hip. The chair bounced against the cage, and sprang back up over my head. Its next time down it bent bars. I pulled it up again, and brought it down again. The metal made a piggish sound, squealing as the bars ruptured. The birds squealed too, suddenly fat, shrieking pigs instead of light, insubstantial twitterers. A sound came out of me too. I was a pig. I groaned from my stomach, groaned like I had a baby coming out of me. My mouth stretched open even as I squeezed the rest of myself together in a crouch on the floor. I was still for so long that two of the creatures alit on me. I’d broken the aviary door. They were free.
I opened the window. Why not? It was windy out. The birds would be swept away as if with a broom.
The still-caged birds on the right-hand wall chattered with increasing volume and their jumping rattled their cages, right next to my head. These weren’t the canaries. These were the fosters.
I felt myself trembling. My fingers wriggled easily between wire bars, grabbing two cages at once. I pulled them down, tumbling the ones above them as well. I was all limbs: kicking in the cages below, waving the two in my fists. The shrieking inside them increased in fear and then died away, one by one.
There’s a pattern in S. M. Madison’s books. She starts with contentment: a heroine in an exotic location, in communion with the place itself. Conflict follows, shoving the heroine up against other people. There’s friendship and sex, but always as action, never as the goal. The end brings equilibrium again; her triumph leads back to the pleasures of her original solitude, enhanced by comfort, or confidence, or money, or safety. But still, alone, and happy. Enchanted by place, not people.
The House of the Dead begins at the Mena House Hotel overlooking the Giza pyramids:
The walls huddled together. We were all tired, the walls and I. Only the shutters were awake, begging to be opened, energised by the hot daylight on the other side. I hadn’t slept on the plane. It had been impossible, with knees and elbows on both sides, and actors racing across the soundless screen at the front of the cabin. So I slept here: cool sheets, hard mattress, small room. The edges of the fluffed pillow made a high, soft wall around my heavy head. This sleep was delicious, and decadent like an evening feast after Ramadan’s daily fasting. I was fat with this sleep. Outside, camel hoof stomps pounded sand. Outside, the pyramids faded in the strong sun. Outside, flies landed on moist, open eyes. The shutters kept all of them out. The shutters kept me in. I’m grateful to shutters. The door should take lessons. It quivered from pounding fists. Someone was getting in. The shutters held out the whole waking world, but the door couldn’t keep out one man.
It ends in the southern city of Aswan, on the famous terrace of the Old Cataract Hoteclass="underline"
Yellow and blue make green; it’s true everywhere. The blue Nile and yellow desert make green life between them, a fresh, narrow swath along each side of the river. Servants make coffee. Tourists make crowds. Rolling blinds, thick and patterned like carpets from the marketplace, make the terrace cool in the hot day. The natural shape of a huge stone elephant makes visitors photograph the island across from the hotel. Wind makes dozens of white sails pull feluccas across the water. All of these are true every day.
She follows this pattern over and over. In Out of the Sea, her heroine begins in an aisle seat on an airplane, desperate for the window view of the Aegean below. Her fellow passengers, like the one blocking her view, are impediments to her experience. Over and over, this S. M. Madison prizes place over people. Over and over, she finds peace in hotels, not a home.
Her fictional beginnings and endings became a comfort to me. Her abandonment of me hadn’t been personal. Her affair with solitude was the most consuming in her life; that was clear.
There are moments for me too, where the primacy of place, and relationship with the inanimate, is suddenly overwhelmingly satisfying.
I may be like her. I may be meant to be alone.
Harry sometimes asked me for help with crosswords. He’d read the clue and describe how many spaces and any letters he already had. I threw answers at him, but I hated it. I hate crosswords. They seem such a waste of time. I pelted him with words of the correct length, and suggested anagrams and interpretations of the clue fragments. I reasoned that if I could give him the answer it would end. Maybe he couldn’t tell I hated it; he kept asking. He kept talking to me, until I was sick from words, mentally batting them away from my head. The words were like birds flying at me, his birds, always birds. Their noise was constant.
The two in the cages in my hands were dead. I’d beaten the cages against the wall.
I put them down and descended the ladderlike steps. In the den I pulled up the website with taxi numbers and called one. I must always explain that I’m blind, or they won’t bother to push the horn on arrival, no matter that I’ve asked.
I printed directions to Rose Cottage to give the driver.
I brushed my hair in the bathroom. I changed my clothes.
The taxi’s horn was louder than I thought it would be. I jumped, I dropped my bag. It blasted again, twice, hard. My head throbbed. I opened the door.
I knew it was nothing personal. I could see that. She got rid of me because of who she is, because she doesn’t share life with anyone. It wasn’t me, it had nothing to do with me. I comforted myself with that truth, pulled it around me like a smooth sheet, a coarse blanket, and a soft cotton sleeve.