The Gnome Stories, page 3
The question was whether I had done something unforgivable to Katie, to break her heart and send her away from me, to her many adulteries. Were they a punishment for something I had done? I asked. She said that was stupid, that her affairs were stupid and didn’t mean anything, and she was sorry. What did she mean she was sorry? I remember asking. What could anybody mean by that? She had done things. She had done a lot of things. She was not asking for forgiveness, she said. She just felt bad about it and wanted me to know it. I was very angry as I sat on Lewis’s cream-colored sheets contemplating his mass of stuff piled on the floor. What a useless set of possessions. It looked like mostly underwear, a couple dozen books, some video game paraphernalia, and, most impressively, a collection of maybe two or three hundred model rocket ships organized in boxes as the base of the heap, all the disposable engines lined up in a long line on the floor. Was that it? I wondered. Was that all he had amounted to?
I had said some things to Katie. I had told her stories about what I might have said or done to Mary in her last moments. Tell that to your gossip columnists, I said. Tell that to the CNN reporters. Are you happy, having wrung that out of me? Her face could not have been whiter. All my blood had drained, too, as this story came out of me. For the first time I can remember she looked utterly surprised. We had crossed a line. I had carried her over the transom into another house, her in another wedding dress and me already naked. And we were held aloft in that moment, suspended somewhere above our marriage and the neighborhood and the rules that the world had set out for us, that we had agreed to. And that lasted for about a minute. And then her expression turned, and she had turned, and she had gone, and that was it, and was it possible that that was really it at last? I had been drunk just as I was drunk with my sister, receiving her drunken forgiveness as she sobbed. They both were sobbing. I was not sobbing. I didn’t sob when I shot the intruder down. I did not believe in this catharsis. I would finger all my wounds and allow that pain to penetrate. I would bathe in it, fortify myself with it.
I paused. I kept waiting for something to happen.
If this scene turned out as I hoped, I would hear the shrieks of the stairs, the clicks of weapons being armed. The door would open suddenly and the room would fill with the sound of angry voices. I would feel nothing as I lay back on the decedent’s bed, pants around my ankles, headphones on, as I pleased myself furiously, thinking of all of you, your naked bodies, your open mouths. I would barely be aware of any force as gunshots bloomed across my chest like a spring field on fast-forward. Time would slow and somebody would understand something, and I would at last be carried away by consequence.
Believing in the Future with the Torturer’s Apprentice
I left but then returned in the after of after, when the world was mostly smoke and the air was completely ruined, without telling my husband or his other wife, those other girls with his eyes and her hair that I found under the stairs. We had agreed to leave it all behind. The silver vessels. The 132 Couroc trays I had collected. Our wedding rings. The cat’s ashes. My mother’s. The stinky sinks that you could never fully clean, not with help, not ever. The hair clustered in the drains. The geologic rings of calcium around the pool. The still-boxed Christmas lights. The speculum. The college syllabi. Love letters. Computers. The photographs of pain that were his life’s work, women’s mouths, mostly, frozen, opening into the acrid air. They were saying untold things, only my husband knows just what, and now they weren’t saying anything. They were burning. They had probably already burned.
It took almost a decade to feel that I could believe in him fully. He did, after all, have another spouse. Another house. Two kids in the photographs he hid away from me in the cubby below the stairs. We had none. He hadn’t wanted another one. It didn’t bother me. I said it didn’t bother me. It was easier this way. I had my portion of the space. I didn’t need him every day. I got my way enough. I had my work enough, my friends enough. I was coughing less and less, the lifetime of whatever it was in my lungs finally clearing up.
The press called him “the torturer’s apprentice.” The phrase was apt, though he disliked it. You know his mentor better: the more famous artist, the one who goes without a name. He used just a pompous little glyph. Which drove people crazy. But my husband, the lesser known, he has a name. He’s the one who’s into mouths. He prepared the girls. He did the contracts up. The glyph wouldn’t do the contracts or the casting. Like a wizard, he wouldn’t appear until the girls were prepped and ready, until they’d been emptied out. All the materials had to be there before he showed. And he wouldn’t stay after. My husband the apprentice took his photos while they were still in prep. Then the glyph did his famous thing. Then the girls went home. Sometimes they came to the gallery shows, signed autographs, editions. When they did they seemed oddly blank. They said they didn’t remember anything. They looked like they were haloed in light, like they were levitating.
My husband showed me the studio. An operating room, totally clean and bare and chemical and steel. Restraints. One-way mirrors. It’s fucked up. I’m the first one to tell you it’s fucked up. I’ve always known it is. But it is honest. Deep down all of us are fucked. It takes a special something to bring that out so far, so fast from us. The two of them may be reviled, but no one looks away. In our world no one ever looks away.
The secret with my husband’s photographs is that you can’t fully tell what they’re about, orgasm or agony, groan or moan or first speech or hum, if there is a difference, either way it’s something emerging, not yet fully formed, a breath between breaths, an aperture opening, and a way to punctuate a day, a night, a life. The close-up of the mouth is where it’s at for him. The folded vee of tongue. The lemniscate of lips closed then opening. A mouth is like a flower, he said. A mouth is like a bird. A mouth is like a tease. A feet with toes unfurling. A mouth is like a fountain.
I said, no, a mouth is like a hive of bees, slow cave-in, being hanged, a bomb.
You can’t deny it moves you, he said. You can tell it does something to you.
The time elapsed between the photographs is short. The time between his publication of the photographs and the girls’ release was short. Their skirts were short. It was always skirts. It was always girls. This world. It’s a little sick. That’s what makes it good, he said. They signed up for it. They confessed. They opened up. They released their secrets and were released. That’s the trick to it, that it’s not just release of voice, it’s not fake or forced. It was their choice. Everyone has them, choices, secrets, voice boxes, constraints, restraints. If pressed hard enough we will all become swans.
The torture is not the point. The point is the joint between the time before and the time after. The crux. That photograph—not representing time, but time itself. That crossing space. This used to be the world. Now this is the world. Sometimes, the worlds, they seem the same. You can barely tell the difference. Clouds before. Clouds here after. But something’s changed. You can feel it. If you look close enough, the seam. The way we work out memories, what gets stored, starred for later easy retrieval, what gets discarded, boarded up. How a moment—an accident, a gas explosion, a runaway train, spreading sudden fire, a dozing driver on the interstate, fragment of falling satellite, an affair, a series of affairs, hair loss, a decapitation from a sheet of glass like in The Omen, power surge at the wrong time, power line drooping in the pool, anaphylactic shock, lightning strike, band saw slip, not to mention rapture, heart attack, stroke, or other ways the body can up and fail us—these are abysses with no bottom. Narrative works like this. Our lives work like this. Our lives are not narrative except as synapse makes them so.
If he needed to photograph it, which he did, needing to document it—I accepted that. He had nodded off in an ether haze in the medieval-themed Best Western (formerly the Sybaris, where we used to meet in the early days of our affair: now it’s under new management, but it still takes cash and asks no questions), so I clicked on his camera. There were sixty-six shots of the fireball going up, our house bursting with gas, our stuff being converted to flame, and one close-up of a mouth. My mouth. Was I laughing? I wasn’t sure.
He didn’t need to know I would go back. We agreed there would be no going back. It made sense. We left the cars; otherwise they would know. Ditto with the clothes, the photographs. The pornographic DVDs that we hadn’t watched for years. The two irreplaceable pieces of his mentor’s work. Anything that meant anything had to stay, to burn. Needless to say there could be no note or explanation.
Since he didn’t need to know, I took the rental car back. It was dark, but I knew the route. I wore a wig. I wore a skirt. In my old life I never wore a skirt. Was I an object or a subject in the skirt? As I watched from down the block, I could see my mouth, an apparition in the daylight side of the rearview, and, surprised, I closed it. I disappeared.
Ours was not the first to burn. For the last week, town houses in the hills around had been going up like far-off Christmas lights. It was festive. I’d have a drink each time. Plumes of gas erupted through roofs, followed by the slow wind of sirens up the curling streets. I couldn’t sleep so I would watch them go. Sometimes I would take the car to get a closer look. Faulty gaslines were blamed. Weak hearts were blamed. Electrical fires were blamed. Houses not up to code. Arson, maybe, the police started to think. Just bad luck, said others. A psychic said consult your ghosts, but no one knew what to do with that. The more houses that disappeared the more I started to think about disappearing myself. I didn’t know where that feeling came from, but what I knew is that I wanted me gone, us gone, the whole record of us and who we had decided to be gone. We, too, could be swans, I said. We could come out of this something else.
It was a calculated risk. It’s not as if I wasn’t willing to share him. To be sure, I didn’t want him more than occasionally. His other wife, that family, I knew almost nothing about. He wanted it that way. I didn’t even know their names. I didn’t want to know their names. He said that way it would be pure. Prudent. Unputrefiable. He knew how women were, he said. He knew how knowing could weigh you down.
It took him ten years to give up his secrets, for us to have a future we could finally believe in together, for us to have no space between us, for us to have all-access passes. That’s why he loves me now, because I can know and hold his secrets suspended in my body and not hate him for them. Because I understood. Because I said I understood. When I knew them all, that knowing was really something. That’s why I really stayed, that sense of ownership, of openness: we were a pane of glass. I couldn’t stand the opaque house, his second house, the constant smell of gas, the unbroken winter sunlight, the flimsy walls that could barely keep the howls of the neighbors’ dogs outside, our sex lives in. The whole neighborhood, Lakewood Grove, had no lakes, no wood, no groves. The whole place was a fiction, a city without city things like a government or police force. It had no past. We had no past. We were pressed flat. We were drying paper. Without a past what were we? A moment in a photograph?
I didn’t miss the house then and I don’t miss it now. Now the house is gone and so are we, except in memory. We’re someone else, I think.
Even so when I went back without his knowledge I took just one thing: a picture of the ash.
What else he doesn’t know is this: I take my own photographs when he’s asleep. I pet his throat. Subtly pluck his eyebrows. I tease his lips apart. I pry his eyelids slowly open like a clam. I touch the eye. Roll it in its orbit. Sometimes I spit on it. Interrogate it. Put small objects in the mouth. Make him swallow and wonder later. He can’t tell. He’ll never tell or know. He takes these sleeping pills because of restlessness. I can do whatever to his mouth when he is out. The drugs make him suggestible. This is my mouth, I whisper, breathing onion on him. I exfoliate his skin. Peel his lips. Watch his muscles move involuntarily. Stroke his teeth. Depress the tongue. This has been going on a year. When will it be enough? I wonder. It’s not art, I said. It’s something else.
The Golem
And now the fallen monster was apparent, Annette thought, as Terence let himself out and her husband emerged from the kitchen, where he had been the whole time. It was him. Or maybe it was her. Or maybe Terence. Someone here was clearly the monster.
Harry was writing about it already. She could hear the keys clicking.
As she dressed again the cat clambered up into her lap with force. It started to knead her and purr. Whose dream was this? she wondered as it stared at her possessively, its eyes half-moons, inches from her face. It hurt, she admitted, as its claws worried through the fabric, but it was warm. It was possibly thinking about eating her whole. She hadn’t considered this before.
So this nightmare had been released and was out in the world. And had she enjoyed it? If so, it would serve him right, wouldn’t it? As it had been his idea. He had hoped to—what? Get some ideas for his half-birthed novel? Develop his sense of loathing further? Fine-tune his own self-laceration? The cat’s breath was in her face: not as bad as she’d thought, she guessed. She didn’t know what to say about it now. At least there hadn’t been a camera.
Harry had asked for that but she had had the sense to say no to that one request, she thought. She congratulated herself. But wouldn’t it be just as bad to have the incident recorded in his fiction, where maybe no one else would know it but she would know it, senseless and needy, hydroencephalytic. It, now IT, would sit there in all caps, dramatic, an IT generated by whatever electricity was left between the two of them and become something new: the word made flesh made word. And it would move, slowly at first. Perhaps it would start to strut. If Harry did it right, soon it would begin to sing.
The cat continued its methodology around her chest. The beast was driven by something deeper, but what that was she couldn’t say.
The cat had come to her, not him. That would begin to mean something later, she thought. Maybe it was a symbol. Maybe she would start writing something in response.
It wasn’t even the middle of the night, and already he was straying, her husband, who would worry at this like a scar. Annette had been the good wife, willing, or was that it? She couldn’t see herself that easily, not like usual, not right now. She had played this role. He had asked and she had said yes, meaning something else then, but what had it become?
“It meant nothing,” she would tell him later. That would slip out.
“Of course it did,” he said. “It was nothing. How could it mean anything?”
“Was it good for you,” she asked, suddenly cruel. “Was it for you, or was it for me?” She’d bored quickly, and now thought this conversation stupid.
“You really don’t know?” Harry asked, and then he didn’t either, the more he thought about it. It was his dream made real, he supposed. He had read about it years before, or maybe thought it up out of nothing. Or had it come from a scene he barely could remember from pornography stashed away in the closet in the house, one of his father’s many treasures. And what did it matter where it came from, since it had now arrived. The pages of the magazines were glossy and they smelled of something. Whiskey, maybe. Cologne, probably. Neglect. He had quite a collection. Harry couldn’t remember the words at all, but the images, they were pressed into him: legs, spread; eyes, were they looking at him? What did she imagine was in him then? The toenail curl. And it was powerful. Harry could see that much, what it did to her. What it did to him. Things were changing fast. The cat was on her lap, having settled in. He could see its shadow on her face by the angle of the light. It was, would be, a weight between them for years. Or at any rate, he thought, this was something they could share, which was true.
The cat could barely move. Someone had to take it in after his father died, and certainly not his brother, who was overseas and anyway would never, not even punctuating his absence with the comma of a visit for the funeral. Matters were decided by TELEX, a dying service that had the benefit of being fully legal in the eyes of the law. Like his marriage, he supposed, ha ha. And what it was or could be, what it could be remade to be in this story he was working on. It would be ugly: a new effect for him.
Could he look at her again, he wondered, without seeing Terence, who was even now an afterthought, a poltergeist, whatever kind of image is left behind after staring at something for a year compressed into an hour, like a ringing in the retina’s memory, and he hadn’t even seen it firsthand, couldn’t bring himself to do that exactly, to watch the two of them go at it like animals. That’s what they were. He had heard enough. So he had taped it, even as he had promised her on his father’s memory not to do. He wanted it mediated through the camera, as if that could burn him less.
He would watch the whole thing later if he could bear it, if he could ever bear it, which he expected he could not, but he couldn’t bear not knowing either. He watched the cat’s weight press down on Annette. It would serve her right. That pleasure would serve her right. He wasn’t sure, he thought—just maybe—it was just a germ of a thought, really, not even developed, but there, a seed in the heart, something around which the two of them could grow—he thought it a necessary wound, like it might open her. Maybe it was something bigger, though, a shadow cast by the chair, woman, and cat combined. Now he wanted to stomp its stupid heart out. And the two of them just sitting there, all linoleum and redirected light.
