02.13.2023

Wassaic

Martha was twelve. She remembers it well, when days were long and tangible. Somehow, though, Martha is forty-seven now, and days feel more like molecules of air in a stream of panting.

Martha is successful now. She works a job for which she wears pressed slate suits with starchy pastel button downs. People work for her. She doesn’t read before bed, or watch movies. She has thoughts about the way things are, or how things used to be, or how things might be beyond where she is in any precise moment, but Martha never has these thoughts twice. Nor does she let them linger. And she certainly never acts on them. Martha lets them pass like cars driven by sleep-deprived drivers through the George Washington Bridge toll booth — out of town. When she gets together with friends, she never brings these thoughts up. She and her friends discuss pressing topics, and when Martha pauses to sip her drink, a Tanqueray and tonic, her mind focuses only on the prick of carbonate and toxic bite of fermented wheat.

This morning, though, for whatever reason, a thought entered Martha’s toll booth but didn’t pass through. Martha recalled being twelve but nothing of the thirty-five years in between. She remembered the ways days used to be, and feeling how days are now, Martha fell to the floor. She dug her nails into the wood paneling, which gathered under her acrylics and cut her skin. She felt as though she’d been sliding down ice with such speed that she could see no discernible grooves or gradient hues in the ice itself, only a smooth abyss of gray with the whir of wind blaring past her ears. The floor was cold, and Martha realized, she’d never seen the natural rings of each floorboard until now.

Martha didn’t drive to work today. Still in her slate suit and starchy button down on, Martha drove out of the city. When she crossed the George Washington Bridge toll booth, she paid the toll and didn’t drive on immediately. She held her breath and stared at the old man behind the glass until her waterlines burned.

For two hours on indiscernible freeways, Martha thought solely of a pond — not any particular pond she knew, just the vague perfection of ponds used to illustrate the letter P to children in alphabet books. Martha got off an exit and passed through a small town. A street sign read: “Welcome to Wassaic.” There was an abandoned train station and a busser with bleeding mosquito bites

sweeping in front of an empty bar. Martha pulled off on a gravel road just north of the town. She wanted to find a pond. Past a ridge lined in grazing cows, Martha found one.  She got out of the car without shutting the door, or even turning off the engine.

As Martha walked toward the pond, goosebumps flared up her arms. The surface was half glazed in ice and melting in the light. There was no wind, and Martha could hear the faint crackle of the thawing pond as what had long been still began to move again.

At the bank, Martha parted the wheat, which was as tall as herself in heels, and squatted. She could see each breath as it left her. It was about 9:30 in the morning.

Martha didn’t move all day. She observed how the sun arced over her, and for the first time since she was about twelve, felt the passage of time. By noon, all the ice had melted. By five PM, the cows had migrated from the ridge behind her to the hills before her. By seven, the sun sunk behind a thin stream of clouds rising from the horizon and turned the sky red.

Another thought entered Martha’s mind. She thought of Of Mice and Men, which she read in sixth grade, around the time she was twelve. Specifically, she thought of the scene in the end where George sits by a lake with Lenny. The thought didn’t pass. Martha went so far as to imagine a man — and if fact, pictured the sweeping busser with bleeding mosquito bites — step quietly behind her and hold a gun to the back of her head. Martha held onto this thought, the nape of her neck growing warm. Martha thought very hard about it, as if she were willing it to be true.

When the last section of sun was lost behind the hills, and the pond went black with night, Martha turned around. She saw her car, still on and door still open. She got in and drove back home.

.

The following Saturday, Martha met her friends at a dim bar downtown. She mentioned a new policy at work. She sipped her drink.

02.11.2023

Boys and Men and Books

Boys and men have been giving me books. They’re not giving me any sort of proper love — they’re too old, or young, or the best friends of boys I used to go out with, or too paternal, anyway — but I guess, in a way, giving me books is another sort of proper love. When I read their books — and I read a little bit of each one each day — I do feel loved by the boys and men. I even feel like I’m loving them back. And loving something is a pleasant way to pass the time in between loving somebody.

Since two Saturdays ago, I’ve been given five books. I never asked for a single one of them, either. This is an entirely new phenomenon. With a glint in their eyes like they’re exceptional gentlemen from previous centuries, the boys and men slide them off their book shelves or out of their bags and say something like, “I want you to read this,” or, “this made me think of you.” One said, “read this.” Just that.

They’re all different, the books. Even if they’re not good, which most of them are, I’ve learned a lot. One is big and hard covered and came wrapped in plastic. One has a jagged groove through the binding from his old cat’s fangs. One is yellowed and delicate and falls apart as I turn the pages, no matter how careful I am. I’ve tried sewing this one back together, but it’s no use. One has a note in the sleeve that’s been scribbled out, but when I tip the book in the light, I can see the inscription. “Happy Birthday, my Love.” The fifth is heavily annotated in pen. Lines here and there are underlined, and certain pages are dog-eared. I un-dog-ear the pages I don’t find interesting, but the creases remain. And I make my own annotations, but there isn’t much room left in the margins.

I haven’t seen any of the boys or men since they gave me the books, though. Still, it’s as if I’m lying in bed with them before I fall asleep, or sitting with them quietly at the breakfast table with my coffee, or leaning on them in the subway on my way to work. I wouldn’t prefer them next to me in place of the books, though, even though they’re all very fine boys and men.

The truth is, not too long ago, not too long before I started receiving the books, I made a vow to be celibate until the spring. I really swore off sex, grasping, kissing even — really anything enticingly masculine. The reason is because I slept with the one boy or man I was truly enticed by, and that, I think that, stopped our story short — which I imagine could have been a good and long one.

By the way, he never gave me a book. The morning after the last night we slept together, he brewed me a pour-over coffee in a clear pot, and I sat on his naked lap while we flipped through the introduction of a photography book. We didn’t get far until he got bored and put it back on his coffee table. Not long after, he left on Christmas Eve to Eastern Europe to shoot a movie until the spring, and we haven’t talked one bit since. He might as well be dead to me, which I guess means I might as well be dead to him. But I figured in the meantime, just this winter, I’ll swear off all boys and men.

.

In my head, I imagine I’ve become a virgin again. I’ve rid myself of my sexual character, who was normally dormant but could without warning nd emerge darkly defined — like a shadow when overcast clears all of a sudden. I think this is a good metaphor for my seductive side because, intellectually, I know I’m supposed to have a shadow. I know I’m fighting the laws of universe this winter by trying to hide her. It’s the residual Catholicism in me, from my father’s side.  The universe should be as the universe is not. Despite their gods, boys and men never seem to mind their shadows. They’re always enticed and trying to entice and at ease doing so. It was when I stopped being traditionally enticeable that the books started coming in. Boys and men are givers, I’ve learned. When unable to give themselves, they figure out a way to give something else.

Us girls and women request and receive. Now that I’m chaste, boys and men say things like, “you’re danger,” or “you’re seductive,” more often. It’s not long after they say these things that they offer me books. I guess I’m requesting books subconsciously, the way I requested sex instinctually with a mere glint in my eyes, like an exceptionally suppressed gentlewoman from past centuries. As a modern girl or woman, I suppose I’ve been literarily deprived. Now I’m begging for it.

Since I’ve been reading stories, I never — or hardly ever — think about sex.

I miss kissing, though.

And I do still wonder about the pictures I never got to see in that photography book stashed in the dark on his coffee table.

08.25.22

A Witness of Paris

Last night, I returned to Paris. I had been South for only three days, but as I again passed the Seine at dusk and watched the two headed creatures shuffle, aloof and slow, along the algae-smeared bank and between the blue and white flares of turning cars, and the rare black ghosts of single silhouettes momentarily eclipse the orange glow of bistros, which framed still lives of old friends thinking over cream-colored cups encrusted with sugary rings of espresso residue and under hovering domes of cigarette smoke, creating the effect of blinking flames licking up a fireplace, I saw Paris as one does the second coming of a merry dream—one first explored in principle slumber, missed upon awakening and then, by some slip of nature, revisited in the sweet sap of an early nap, revealing to the dreamer, who now knows to more acutely savor his surroundings this time, each corner of cloud and and stranger’s face intact, un-blurred. And so, seeing Paris just as I left it, I too knew to see the city as a blessed passenger does his second reverie. At first a skittish skeptic, I walked with caution—waited too long at lights, stared too long at waiters—searching for any element that might skid or dissolve as I made my way through the world, any hint that the cool fog of morning would soon settle and bring with it the certainty that Paris is really no match for reality. But no seagull faded mysteriously in flight; no rabbit-holding child skipped and vanished; no two-headed creature held its own hand, whispered to itself sweetly and was absorbed into the moonlight. No, I made my way through Paris as I knew it, down St. Germain as I knew it, to the unshaven teenage box office clerk at La Filmotèque, who chewed fruit- flavored gum as I knew her to do, through the red door into La Salle Marylin—which is to the right of the blue door into Salle Audrey—and saw Harrison Ford on film, just as he was in 1985 in THE WITNESS, and re-emerged into Parisian midnightness, exactly as I remember doing so when my life was as it was three days ago.

I was happy to assume this great re-staging suggested that all the distant dreamscapes we stop through along our nightly, loose-bellied treks do not cease to exist when we turn our backs and face the sun, but instead live on, crystallized in perfect form, scintillating with anticipation of our un-promised return by way of a halogen light-lined bridge, the far side hidden behind an immovable mist—if ever we might inhale and snap up our eyes to lay our life-giving sight on all its simple glory again.