The Magic Slate

                                                     A Fiction in Seven Movements

           

What would happen... if somebody sitting at the extremity of the world pushed his sword through the limiting wall? On the one hand, indeed, this seems easy, as there is nothing to limit it; on the other hand, impossible, as there would be no place where it could be pushed.

 

                                                A. Koyré: From Closed World to the Infinite Universe:

                                                Henry More, Letter to Rene Descartes

 

 

                                                                                   

Jacob Russell

The Magic Slate

      Through the courtyard of City Hall this winter night where pigeons brood in hidden watches, where beasts of the New World and naked river nymphs keep their stony vigils, beneath the feet of Penn gazing over his city with bronzed eyes, passes George, in love (poor soul) with Alexandra--through this gate of transformations (so the legend goes), to Gershon Fische.  Ah, Fische, on Eagles wings, to what can he be likened? A turtle stuck backwards in his shell! The ruminations of a compulsive orb spider! The heart of the Valkyries's charger in the breast of an ass! O love! O lovely ruin! Take warning! Take heart!

      He is in there, while I am out here. He is warm, while I am cold. I stomp my feet; I slap my hands against my knees, blow across my finger tips. I know what you are thinking. That I must be jealous, that I envy her--and you, that I would do anything to bring them down: but you are wrong. I am not your enemy; I wish you only the highest, as I wish all men only the highest. Gershon would understand, if any man would‑‑we are, after all, old friends... who could wish for a greater? What I shall send, is what you most desire... 

The Magic Slate

Jacob Russell

 

                                             Processional in Three Scenes: Winter 1990

                                                                The Candy Bowl

 

            Her single purpose tonight is to see Gershon Fische, though she would deny it. But facts are facts, and Gershon is indeed waiting. There he is, listening to the frozen rain pelting the window, the same rain that falls on George, on Alexandra and her mate, that chills the stalker in the night, that blows about the feet of Calder's Penn, but Gershon doesn't bother to look out. If he appears preoccupied, it is because he has begun his ritual rounds of exit. Alexandra knows them well. There will be, of course, that trip to the stove to make sure the gas is off under the tea kettle. Once (as he tells the tale) he went for a walk, absent mindedly left a burner on in the apartment. When he returned, the kettle was charred black and badly warped, the Bakelite handle had melted, dripped down the sides of the kettle and fused to the burner grates. The smell lingered for days, penetrated everything in the apartment, defied expurgation through a half dozen brands of air freshener. (This from a man who claims to have no imagination!). Exasperated beyond good judgment, he tried incense purchased from the table of a dashiki clad vender at the foot of the steps to the el at 15th Street. Alas, a fatal combination. The incense absorbed the lingering fumes of burnt plastic, which, married to the chemical bouquet of the air fresheners, infused the air, clung to the furniture--to the very walls, he claimed--like cat piss on a hot wood stove. It took days to clear, windows open, midwinter, while he took refuge with an acquaintance who owed him several favors, long overdue.

            When at last he was able to return, he had to replace the water pipes, which had frozen and burst, and the toilet‑‑fatally cracked by the solid block of ice that filled it.

You see, there are reasons for his cautions (he will not fail to remind you); like Gershon himself, they are well grounded in reality.

            Afternoons for Gershon are reserved for reading the newspaper. If she is there, she is to be quiet and to leave him alone, so she will sit on the floor beside him, ner­vously chewing a strand of hair‑‑until he catches her out of the corner of his eye and makes her stop.

            You will notice today's Wall Street Journal folded and tucked into the black wicker basket by the reading desk. Gershon doesn't like to throw them out right away. Tomorrow, he might remember‑‑with renewed interest‑‑some article, and wish to read it again, or to clip and save it. Each day's issue spends a week in the basket. Seven days. On the seventh day, he will take it to the landing outside the kitchen and rest it on the stack of old papers, ready to be bundled for pickup.

            Now the desk top is inspected--pauses for a moment, eyes with displeasure a woman's sweater draped casually over the back of the desk chair, reaches to move it, checks himself; touches it with one finger, pauses... continues on his rounds. Picks up the black and gold Waterman fountain pen, returns it to its place in the center drawer, slips the gold rimmed glasses into his jacket pocket, gazes for a moment at a lacquered wood, chinoiserie candy bowl, and is not pleased.

            Alexandra knows. The mound of hard candies must be rebuilt, missing pieces replaced. He will select little marbles of candy from a box in the right hand drawer, and one at a time, set them in place according to color. They are in two flavors, lime and black raspberry; jade green and deep purple. (Notice how carefully he chooses: for every green candy, a purple companion, like a three dimensional mosaic.)  He works until the little dome of candies is repaired and resolved once more into a smooth and harmonious line, continuous with the curve of the bowl that supports it.

            The desk itself is solid oak, stained dark with age and use. It looks like it could have been rescued from an old library, and probably was. This is where he sits when he writes, his back to her, ringed by light from the brass desk lamp, framed in the glow of the computer screen (its immaculate, molded polystyrene perfection an incongruous contrast to the antique desk with its ancient scars).

            The room is otherwise sparsely furnished. There is a chair for reading, upholstered in leather‑‑once deep red, but now almost as dark and brown as the desk‑‑a small, threadbare gray sofa. By the front window, in the center of a card table, peeling gray vinyl top, an Apulian vase, c. 300 BCE, black glaze with red clay figures: three muses attending to the burial of Dionysus. A lyre rests at the feet of the central figure, her arm across her eyes in a gesture of mourning.

            The bookcase hanging on the west wall holds only a few dozen volumes; Gershon, though an avid reader, is no collector. He prefers to use the library‑‑or to bring a book upstairs from the store‑‑return­ing it as virginally stiff and clean as he found it.

            But time is running out! Gershon must cut short his tour (a private indulgence he is able, if pressed, to deny himself). Quickly now!  Open the lower right-hand drawer, draw out the small, plush velveteen bag‑‑yes!  Tied with a drawstring of twisted cord, it holds, it would appear from the tightly stretched folds of the fabric, an object of some weight. He places it with care beside the candy bowl, allowing his hand to rest for a moment on the bag before giving in to one last distraction‑‑straightening the Salomes: seven enigmatic drawings by an enigmatic hand; they are a recent acquisition, Alexandra would not know (no more than she would know of the velveteen bag) though she is as intimately acquainted with the contents of Gershon's apartment as a lover with the body of his beloved. He pulls on the usual crumpled gray wool jacket, finds his tweed cap, and heads for the door.

            Gershon is as casual in personal attire as he is fastidious about his rooms. With his stiff, graying shock of straw blond hair, center parted, those gold rimmed glasses, he looks out of place in time‑‑like an Edwardian professor gone to seed.

Come, let us watch him lock the door behind him, begin the descent down the narrow stairway‑‑to an evening, which, at this moment, we have every reason to believe he fervently wishes he could avoid.

The Magic Slate                                                                                                                Promenade

Jacob Russell

 

                                                            The Egyptologist's Son

            There, on the tower of City Hall, high, high above these streets both broad and narrow, William Penn keeps watch over a city spawned by his own dreams, keeps watch with bronzed eyes and scroll erected heavenward, stands on this winter's night, imprisoned still, enmeshed in scaffolding of steel, not likely to escape to trample out the vintage with his great buckled boots, his hose, his many buttoned coat (sword of spirit, not of flesh), stands waiting... waiting for the spirit to move him? Far below on Centre Square, in the shadows of Oldenburg's clothespin, a bearded man with battered satchel emerges from the stairway of the Frankford el and steps into a company of Scottish pipers with families in tow: George, inebriate hunter, stalking and stalked, the haunted huntsman on his foggy prowl.

            At the corner of Broad and Market, a tall man in a London Fog climbs out of a taxi. A boy watches his father draw a shining ceremonial sword from its scabbard--holding it aloft, as though to pierce the clouds with light.

            Scattered shoppers hugging packages cling to buildings or huddle in doorways for shelter; George hurries past, south on 15th Street, west on Sansom, where he stops before a door emblazoned with the Happy Rooster. He checks his watch: hours early. Sets the valise he has been carrying at his feet, feels in his pocket for the key. Will he show? Too much for him to carry alone. So little time.

            Stands there at the door, light rain flecked with sleet pelting his glasses, stares through fogged lenses. Nicht eis, nicht schnee. Catchword on his mind--from where? Behind him, the shadow of the tall man hovers for a moment, then passes on. For hours he will stare at that door from the other side, from the table where they first sat and talked away an afternoon. Waiting, like tall Willie, with glazed eyes.

            As if that weren't bad enough, sitting here alone, cash slowing leaking from his pockets, Tanqueray with twists of fate to drain him dry. As if it weren't bad enough: her husband. Not even Tanquerays‑‑-mortified (the word he thought), could mollify: amor d'mort, the end, finis. No, not bad enough that Gershon with his bland mesmeric glare--her husband too...

            --We have a call, the barman says. For the gentleman with the book.

            Hands the receiver over the bar.

            No, she won't be able to meet him, must go to the Golden Mean to find her Salomes. No, not after... Husband is with her, no choice. She could not shake him. First it rains and now it snows, no use to stay. Soon he will press the journal against his body and, embraced by the cold, cross the street then down the block to huddle out of reach of wind, pull his black watch cap down over his ears to await the appointed hour, the guests arrival. Pressed against a leeward wall, windows of the AIA bookstore at his back: Talisman West and Robie House: dream shelters from the storm, the wind driven sleet, and no mother's skirt to shelter him. Not here. Pictures in a book, no more.

            He will watch in wonder pass him by a dozen ornamented men in Celtic regalia of Scottish Rite with wives and bairns on hand to man umbrellas--the youngest of them will stretch his on high to cover towering papa. Bearing arms against the sea of sputter and splat. Why here?

            --The gentleman would like another drink?

            --Why not?  A-mused, he thought, negating prefix--to be without her. Alexandra, Alexandra, reeling through inebriate fog. What music, this? They are never to be trusted, by Fische's word, who cites in turn the poet's words in hell laced with lectures from the Faerie Queen, else sublimely, Longinus the pseudonymous--his life-long project of translation and commentary, always in progress, never done... Fustian fool! Who is he to tell me how or when or why?

            Was it always so? No golden age? No time when it was different? Once happy companions they‑‑the poet and his proctor, one by one bereft, their specters bound in servitude, Amazonian vixens vivisected, the purple scars of prophylactic mastectomies, sex sliced and sewn, Urania a black hole. Una meany miney moe‑‑truth be told, she stood by hers‑‑forced smiles for the frogs of Error reverberating from suburban bowers, from Wallmart walls, from lips of insurance men everywhere; Polyhymnia turned graverobber, the hieroglyphics in his mother's Book of Tombs, Calliope's blank slate. Erasure: sudden.  No, she will not meet him here tonight.

            The phone!

            (How many has he had?) as though his head had begun to ring. The key. George fingers it in his pocket fishing for change. Enough quarters dimes and nickels added to the odd bill or two remaining, that's one more drink, but how will he get home? Flinders Petrie George, head flung back against the seat, face flushed, his fingers fumbling for a pen in his shirt pocket, finds one, feels in the bag beside him for his journal... remembers. Looks at the suitcase at his feet. Unfolds a napkin, spreads it open on the table, foil to paper, writes:

      Stood up. Like tall Willy in the rain. My eyes too are glazed... No going on from here. The hell with it--seize the day! Let's give 'em hell!

            Crumples the napkin, lifts his glass and wipes the table.

            --Enough, he whispers to the uncomprehending air. Enough and more than enough! The phone call, that one last drink, his last words, follow now the script to its last unfolding, cold rain in his face, half shelter sought along the wall exactly as imagined, follow the shadows down the narrow street from the precipice at the world's edge to the Golden Mean, and down the stairs, unaware till the last minute that he, too, was being followed, or someone was. A moment's hesitation before entering, great gusts of wind and shafts of sleet and rain. On the sidewalk above, thruuump--a little cry of distress! A maiden's cry! His cue? No sooner has he turned to see than the party passes on his heels.

      I smile...          ... it has begun. In the Old Towne the crier cries‑‑announced upon a winter's knell. High time, I say, High time!

The Magic Slate                                                                                                                Promenade

Jacob Russell

                                                                The Persian Lamb

            All day the threat has been in the air: the heavy gray clouds pressing on the roof tops, the bitter fog‑‑now it is beginning. Spiraling down, the mist, half frozen rain‑‑nicht Eis, nicht Schnee‑‑and Alexandra, too, begins to keep her promise. She draws her coat around her, her black Persian lamb, and turtles her still pretty neck into that leather trimmed collar. A man stands in the stairwell that leads to the entrance of the bookstore; he watches intently the efforts of a young woman on the sidewalk above to unjamb her collapsible umbrella. The store is about five feet below street level and the stairs are narrow. They shoulder past this foul weather voyeur, open the door and step into the Golden Mean to the sound of bells. Gershon hears the door chime as he enters from the rear.

            A tall gaunt man in a dark suit, whom Alexandra recognizes but can't seem to place is reaching for a volume on an upper shelf. Now George, too, passed outside without acknowledgment, blows in on the same icy wind that whips the hem of her coat hard against her calves before the door can swing shut again. Someone with him in the entrance. Pulls something from his pocket... hands it too him. The recipient of this gift turns and promptly disappears.

            --Why did you have to follow me here? she is saying to Husband, her legal mate, who looks George square in the face as he nudges past--without hint of recogni­tion.

            --Because I'm worried, Alex. Believe it or not--I care!                      --My dear Bread Winner--you exceed your duties...

            The tall man hovers over them for a moment, and with distracted air, returns to his book.

            The soft leather brim of her matching hat is streaming now with rivulets of cold rain. Alexandra holds the hat away from her while it drips on the floor. Husband watches, scowling. What possessed her to come out on a night like this? Not three weeks ago she was flat on her back with a case of flu that threatened pneumonia!

            --Alex, he pleads, listen to reason!

            --O Husband, will you please! (with a little cough). Alex has reasons Husband knows not of.

            --Why are you so stubborn! he asks.

            --I am not stubborn! she tells him, and then because she knows it will shut him up--What do you expect from an artist?        

      Now don't laugh! This is Alexandra, who tosses out this sort of line with high drama, positively aglitter with irony! But don't think she doesn't mean it. He knows. She holds it over him. She flaunts it! But he won't cross her. He knows better. In the end, he goes along with her.

      He worries about her; he lectures, hangs dire warnings over her head, explains endlessly‑‑like talking to a child, he will tell you, she never listens! And she'll fasten those black eyes on him so the dread creeps into his gut, that little gnawing fear he doesn't dare confess. I am not a child! she says, in her Clytemnestra voice, her goddess voice, and most certainly not your child! No glittering irony now. Only steel! The dagger's gleam! The glacial stare! And when she knows she has him, when he feels her powers, she will, utterly without malice and in all innocence (only because she cannot resist the invitation of the moment‑‑any invitation, of any moment), give her hair a toss and arch her hand over her head like a flamenco dancer, or burst out singing, or cross her eyes and twist a strand of hair under her nose like a mustache... or collapse on the floor in uncontrollable laughter‑‑like a child!

            George is trying to catch Alexandra's eye, a task made difficult by a recurrent doubling of images, the refusal of the room to stay in focus, and a disproportionate expenditure of will required to stay upright without noticeable sway. On her part, she is intent on making her way to the back of the store where Gershon Fische is standing beside another desk‑‑a perfect replica of the one upstairs. Alexandra hangs her coat on the back of one of several chairs set up to face the desk‑‑but look, Gershon appears distracted, nervous. The signs are subtle‑‑Gershon is not one to hang his emotions on his sleeve‑‑but if you know the man, there's no way you can miss it. Certainly Alexandra won't. Has she done something to anger him? Whatever her thoughts, they remain hidden, and she turns and moves to the cashier's island at the center of the store‑‑as though she had not yet noticed his presence, though she certainly has.

            George is hanging back, still to the front of the store. He takes a stand behind a rack of books, pulls one unsteadily from the shelf, hand restraining their companions, sees them in his mind's eye tumbling like cards from a shuffled deck. Holds the book in his hand without opening it; his eye, you will notice, is on Alexandra, who's talking to the cashier‑‑a younger woman, hair streaked blue and black, elbows resting on the counter. Of all those present, the only child native born to this fair city. At home among strangers. The legs of her black denim pants are tucked into heavy army boots; sleeveless mauve dance tights serve as a top, pressing her breasts flat against her chest; two, soft shadowy rings insinuate the presence of her nipples. Winding from her throat to the wide, studded leather belt around her waist hang catenary loops of silver chain. She has been here since early afternoon when she replaced the elusive Yudit, Gershon's mysterious friend and part-time help--who at this moment is nowhere to be seen.

            Alexandra has what you might call the habit of beauty, without being, to the careful eye, beautiful; that is, not beautiful in any regular sense, by any normal standard, or should we say, by any definition not her own. Look closely, and you can't miss the shadows that have begun to fall across her face. She has one foot already upon that threshold where a woman becomes invisible in the eyes of men: any man, that is, not already securely won: invisible, that is, as a sexual being. In Alexandra, the inevitable crossing has been delayed, forestalled, only by this habit, by the strength of her unaltered, and largely unconscious conviction of her own physical beauty. It is this habit that overshadows the youthful cashier, as Alexandra habitually overshadows the women around her, gaining their enmity and resentment, leaving her, till now, and virtually from childhood, almost wholly dependent on men for company and friendship. It is this habit that holds George's eye, where he sees her look over her shoulder at Gershon, still at his desk in the back of the store, and then at him, acknowledging, at last, his presence with a sly smile before returning to the seat where she left her coat.

            The bell over the door sounds again; a quick blast of cold air reaches all the way to the back‑‑and the militant, nasal whine of bagpipes. Through the street-level window in front, between stacks of books propped up on display: plaid stockinged legs, bare knees raised high flinging highland kilts before them, sporrans a-bounding, ceremonial swords aswaying at the marcher's sides. The door clicks shut muting the pipers, who fade gradually into the distance. Husband looks up from the paper he's been reading and Alexandra turns, clutching the lapels of the Persian lamb. Three more visitors have entered the store to the sound of the bagpipes, three women in black, their shoulders white with snow, cases for their instruments in tow: viola, flute and violin. In the window, George sees a reflection of his face--but then it moves! As though to get a better view! The window is streaked with rain and melting sleet; no reflection, but a man? A woman? Impossible to tell. An apparition with eyes as pail as snow, gaunt cheeks and missing teeth. The specter grins a jack-o-lantern grin, bobbing its head from side to side, and pointing‑‑finger pressed to glass, (who will be the one, it seems to ask, pointing one by one to each of the occupants of the Golden Mean, as though begging for an answer: to Alexandra and her mate, to the tall silent one, the musical mourners three: points now to the cashier and shrugs--but not to George, though it's George who's closest to the window. Once again the ghost points--points and counts; holds up both hands‑‑seven fingers stretched forth, two mid air, five against the glass, which will not give (neither gate nor door), and disappears into the winter night.

            Light falls through the falling snow like a banner tied to an invisible comet. Shaking like a hairless dog, I pull my visage after me, following the holiday pipers down the cold streets. Like ancient warriors, the adenoidal whine of victory mocks the fallen.

Whose children these, lost along the way?

Because the poor are despoiled, because the needy groan

            The homeless, as far as the eye can see, are still as death. The pipers step over their blanket shrouded bodies wailing tunes that would make the banshees howl, but they do not move, the fallen, the homeless‑‑their blankets soaked and frozen, softly glazed with snow, and the pipers wend their way among them growing smaller and the bagpipes growing fainter, marching in step to the edge of the visible world and beyond, enshrouded one by one in snow and silence.

The Magic Slate

Jacob Russell

                                                                       SMOKE

                                                      First Movement: Seven Scenes

 

                                                          At the Feet of Dr. Pepper

                                                                    Spring, 1990

                                                         Philadelphia Free Library 

 

            It was the first time in four years that she had seen him--one of her weekly visits to Gershon; there he was coming out of the Golden Mean, walking toward her coming east as she went west, and stopping, face to the glass at the House of Genji two doors down as though deciphering the mysteries of sushi from the menu taped to the window--but all the while he was following her: her reflection as she sashayed past, his eyes askance as she descended the stairs and into the Golden Mean. Was it true, that she didn't recognize him? But of course, there were other things on Alexandra's mind. A coincidence, perhaps? Yet another case of mistaken identity? After a while you almost stop noticing--the familiar face that turns out to be another stranger in the crowd. If she took note at all I'm sure she would have forgotten if, (purely by chance, of course) she hadn't run into him again in the library that very afternoon, sent (if you can believe it) by Gershon Fische on a quest for information, saw him as she passed the stairs from north to south on her way to the Nonprofits Collection, saw him again and remembered... everything.

      On the wide landing below, where the stairs divide, there stands, on a block pedestal about four feet high, seated on a straight backed chair, a life size bronze statue of a man donning an academic robe over a business suit (not unlike, I think, a younger, more distinguished version of my old friend, Herr Fische!). On the top stair of the east flight (which would be to the right, as the main entrance faces south) a young art student with orange hair and silver rings‑‑one for each finger of her left hand, like her two companions on the lobby floor below, sat cross legged, making quick charcoal sketches, and there he was! Alexandra's stranger at the feet of the bronze scholar, kneeling, elbows on his knees, the better to decipher the inscription on its base, and though his face was hidden, she knew the moment she saw him that this was the man from the Golden Mean, and she knew, when she saw him glance her way--the way his left eyebrow shot up, parting at the familiar scar--that he recognized her as well.   Alex, did you wonder if he had followed you? Admit it‑‑the thought did not displease you!

            He... was what you call middle aged: generic white man in medias res, medieval, pendulum at horizontal racing from the mean: early fifties. Younger? Older? Short cropped salt and pepper beard. At his side, a large, white canvas bag filled with books. Maybe twenty minutes later, when she'd gotten the information Gershon had sent her to retrieve, he was still there, now sitting on the stairs, a notebook open on his lap, several books stacked at his feet and a defiant scowl on his face. A black man in dark slacks and white short sleeve shirt with circular insignia patches on the sleeves had been trying, politely, to get him to move; so far, with no success.

            --Excuse me, sir...

            --What's that? Says George, noticing Alexandra at the railing above him.

            --Sir, could I help you carry your things to a table?

            --It's all right, I'm fine.

            --I'm sorry, sir, but you can't sit here.

  George twists around to point his cocked finger like a pistol at two young art students in the lobby below, shoots pointed glances at the girl on the stairs above him‑‑who continues to record in quick action sketches the disputation at Dr. Pepper's feet.

            --Oh, but I can, you see--I am quite able (pats the floor next to him with his hand). Bet you can too brother mine! If one can Toucan! Give it a try long legs, great view! I'll be Able you be Cain! Call your bluff and raise you one!

            The guard bends at waist in stately bow the better to address sir George: sir, saith he...

            George, suddenly offended, all belligerent bravado. What's the difference? he wants to know, pointing again to the art students. And don't sir me, surrah! This is America, emolument prohibited my man, you hear? Leave me be!

      all the while, Alexandra's not unsympathetic eye upon him.

            --I'm sorry, sir, but you can't sit here.

   George, voice rising both in volume and in pitch--No your not! You're not sorry at all! Not one bit. I'm the sorry one around here don't you forget it! And what you ask, am I sorry for? For minding my own damn business in a public institution and suddenly the library Gestapo comes knock knock knocking telling me where I can't sit is what I'm sorry for.

      Alexandra, like Athena over Telemachus, continues from above, her watch--gracing her favored one with benign goddess smile.

            --No no, it's me who's sorry! So quickly he forgets... (gesturing to the balcony). Let me be, you understand? Get off my back and let me be!

            The guard calmly kneels, tries to pick up some of George's books.

            George, (louder still) Hands off, man! Who do you

think you are? Look! (points) Look down there! You don't bother them!. They draw, I read‑‑why me, not them?

      Why, indeed? I thought, amused. If they can do it, why not him? Was he blocking anyone's way? Was he posing any danger? Stand by your prerogatives, I sighed, and signed the gleam in Alexandra's eye.

            By now, people are beginning to notice. I see the woman at the central check-in desk by the door signal toward the Music Room to the north and soon two more uniformed guards appear. As they walk toward the great stairway, he quickly gathers his books, stands up and slings the bag over his shoulder. Shorter, slighter than Alexandra remembered, a little awkward‑‑like an adolescent unsure of his body. The guard reaches for his arm as though to escort him out of the building, but Alexandra's shade leaps back out of his reach, face gone white as a sheet. The guard, unflustered and undeterred, quickly moves after him; again he grabs for his arm and again the man swirls away and out of reach, dancing down the stairs with sudden grace, nor do the other two guards moving at him from below escape his glance. Feinting a dash to the west, luring both of them after, he quickly spins to the other side of the lobby and toward the door, book bag flying at arm's length. He no longer looks frightened; back in command of himself, he seems to be enjoying this game. Now that he has all three guards in front of him, no need to protect his flank‑‑he turns to face them, holding up his free hand, gesturing like a traffic cop to STOP!

            --Alright! he shouts. All right, I'm gone. I'm on my way. Out a here! Ariva-cio, babycakes! Are we cool now? Are we? The guards slow down, but continue to close in; he continues to back away, heads for the door, defending all the while the justice of his cause, no longer shouting, but loud enough for everyone in the library to hear him, voice playful, mocking.

            --Come now, don't let appearances deceive you! he taunts them. You've no power over me! No way! You don't even know where I am! (all the while he's making for the door, and at a good, smart clip)  No Sirs and Mams, Ladies and Lambs! I'm not what you think I am! See over there? he says, pointing back at the base of the good bronze doc.

            --No, not here! Not this! grabbing a fistful of his own shirt. A mere figment, this! It's not me you're looking at, I'm not what you see here! Not me! Know what this is? ‑‑Your wish to have me gone! Your wish to be rid of me! You want to erase me, so whoosh! I'm erased! But only in your minds, mon chairs! In reality, I'm still back there, doing what I came to do; doing what I was sent to do. That's right! That's right‑‑sent! My mission, friends, from the bitch within, the voice at the gates, the window of the world.

            --A figment! A ruddy bloody figment! his arm waving over his head in a theatrical flourish as he enters the vestibule, his voice still echoing behind him as he pushes through the last set of doors and out under the open sky.

            --A figment! ...while all along, reality goes begging at your feet unseen!

The Magic Slate                                                                                                                  Smoke I:2

Jacob Russell

                                                               The Swan Fountain

                                                                    Logan Circle

            George has no wish to set his thoughts in order. It's better this way. To let them flow. Pack up and leave, his footsteps echo on the marble floor, down wide shadowy steps to sunlight and the Swan Fountain where the flags of the world unfurl before him clap clap clap in the bright wind. Out from the dim marble twilight of the library--squints in the tremendous blue. Her again. That room on Rittenhouse Square. A torrent of memories from the fountain's spray take wing with the flurry of pigeons at his feet. It is painful. Too much, this overflowing absurd nameless trembling senseless rushing, this uncontrollable wonder, this wish for love, this unbearable joy without reckoning or cause. Turmoil without rime or reason. The animals spooked. Too old for this. Enough! he shouts at the wheeling pigeons overhead. Enough! What point, the mind's insistence on purpose and order, the idealizing will lobbying heaven for cosmic sanction for the animal will. Happier to give in, accept the chaos. It's always like this, isn't it? Balance, so hard won, slapped athwart by a mere coincidence of pheromones.

            Why fight it? Amor fati: this too must be chosen. Only a woman after all. A woman... and only yesterday, swore to the life of a monk! The Poetics of Renunciation from here to the

pit. No, it is unnatural to man to live alone. He stands now on the edge of the wide boulevard, motionless, utterly alone. As broad and wide and deep as the city itself, emptied out, a vaulted sepulcher. Alone. Its only inhabitant. The raucous applause of the flags the only sound, and then, a faint murmur, a flicker of light from the mirror of a passing car; self consciousness, like a twinge of nausea, returns; the shadow-ape sidles up, beside himself.

            --Beside myself, he smirks, speaking his thoughts, does not care who overhears. What if she comes out and sees me like this? Give up youthful passions, make friends with death... when out of nowhere? Do I? Quickly, find the mask! He must hide and quickly hide all signs‑‑the tears, (yes, they come easy to George these days, of joy, of pain... ) wipe them--quickly, as though adjusting his cap. Rising to the occasion he calls it, feeling his arousal, what does she want of me this time?

            Not out of shame he hides, and not alone for her, but because of the second eye, this false self-consciousness that makes all things unholy in its mirror, does not even know to lie, but wears instead the masks of truth, defiles all innocence, the inner voyeur, the pretender, the dancing monkeyact who sees reflective counterfeit in every face. Pride, he tells himself, with double voice, and in the echo murmuring the fountain's hissss, a singular reply... enough?

            Purely of the body, yes? No? Such fierce wanting! This sudden waking! To have again--to try once more, one last chance? Not only her, but everything and all at once! What she woke in him. To be something more, his own story in his own hand.

      Had enough? I whisper in the water's voice, wink in fountain light.

      You never know, he whispers back at me... you never know...

The Magic Slate                                                                                                                  Smoke I:3

Jacob Russell

 

                                                         Under Dr. Pepper's Robes

                                                        Free Library, Logan Circle

            She is vaguely annoyed, but more perplexed than troubled, and to the degree that she is troubled, it's the fact of her curiosity that perplexes her and not the crazyman in the lobby who has kindled it‑‑who she suspects... knows... is not crazy at all but only an enigma‑‑like Gershon, an enigma: which one the lesser, which the greater?  One would be more than enough, but two to enter her life since she left her seclusion and opened her doors to the world? Search for that missing piece, the part of the puzzle unfound. Distraction. Knots to be untangled, for Alexandra cannot keep her fingers from a knot; it's a compulsion.

      You are your father's daughter, after all. Not that her father was given to untanglings, more the other way around...

            Her eyes follow where his steps had taken him across the floor of the great lobby. There was a day when the water around them was smooth as marble. Only the ripples from their fishing boat disturbed the calm. She could see the water clear as day and the reflected clouds and the oars hanging from the oar locks, each blade surrounded by its own expanding set of rings, but she could not see her father, only his shadow as he sat behind her and the whirrr of the casting reel and the black line arching out over the surface of the lake, the sudden silence, the line rippling against the sky, a sudden snag, a knotted line, the red and white lure recoiling toward the boat, hitting the water with a splash, ring upon ring upon ring; but nowhere could she see his face. Cloud of unknowing. Presence of what is not there.

            Alexandra, curious now about the inscription, turns and walks across the landing to the bronze statue of Dr. Pepper; it's not three steps before she sees, propped against the pedestal, a marble cover composition book. It had to be his. Her first impulse is to look to the entrance; perhaps she could still see him from the steps, and if she runs she might catch him to return the book. But she doesn't move.

            No book... a volume of his journal. What is this, a set-up? Left on purpose for her to find?

      Who is he to guess how she would act? Who is he to know her mind?  Could he be angry still? If he were dangerous as well as odd--would it be worse... or better? Why so nervous? Was it a premonition--that she left him? The weapon on the bed that last day. Nursing unconsummated desires. She entertains the thought, but doesn't believe it for a moment‑‑nonetheless‑‑the space on the stairs where he sat ...can almost feel him watching.

            She stoops down as though to read the inscription and with her right hand, feels for the book, picks it up and draws it surreptitiously to her body like a shoplifter, pressing it against her breasts with folded arms.

Oh, Alexandra, yow much have you denied ...and now again?

            She'd left her car a few blocks north of the library: a bridge suspended over an abandoned rail right-of-way past Callowhill, a sunken road to nowhere vanishing into a tunnel beset with ragweed and ailanthus. Too obvious an image. With the notebook tucked safely into her purse, she squints in the early spring sunlight, her eyes not yet adjusted to the glare after the temple gloom of the old library. Like coming out of a tunnel. What if he followed her? What if, right now, he were to come strolling out of that narrow cobbled alleyway, grinning and talking to himself?  The way he looked at her by the Golden Mean... yes, she noticed. How could she have missed him? Nothing to fear... a chance encounter, nothing more, still, Alexandra quickens her pace, but it does no good‑‑he easily keeps step with her fantasy.

            --It's the notebook, she says outloud.

            About to protest that she has no intention of stealing it, she turns to face him, but of course there's no one there. To her right the white tower of the Inquirer Building pokes its gold cupola into the mild blue; wide white contrails run parallel across the heavens, converging in the west: vanishing point. Skymaps for the sun to follow on its course. Only when she is seated behind the wheel, the car doors safely locked, does she take the notebook from her purse. The binding is worn and reinforced with amber tape, the pages swell between the covers. Clearly visible--the division between the leaves that have been written on and the few still virgin pages that remain. She can feel it when she strokes them with her fingers. The edges of the clean pages are even and cool, while those with entries have a soft burr; rippling with animal warmth, they pulse under her finger tips when she presses them together.

            Alexandra slides from under the wheel over to the passenger seat so there will be room to lay the book on her lap. From her pocket book, a worn sheet of paper has fallen to the seat, folded, deeply creased, brown, brittle edges, crumbling edges. My titles... she whispers, slowly wadding the paper in her hand, then smoothing it again, returning it carefully folded once more to her pocket book. She looks up and down the street and sidewalk, assures herself that there is no one near, opens the notebook and reads the entry inside the cover:

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                            IF

                                                                         LOST

                                                                   RETURN TO

                                                                   (F. P.) George

                                                               General Contractor

                                        Electrical Painting Chimney Cleaning Carpentry

                                                             and Decorative Glass

                                                       Reliquary of a 1000 Nullities

                                                       The 23rd Book of Forgetting

The Magic Slate                                                                                                                  Smoke I:4

Jacob Russell

 

 

                                                                   The Invitation

                                                                    Winter, 1984

                                                Overbrook Farms, Alexandra's Home

 

            My dear Alexandra,

                        I chanced by the Orison Gallery on Friday last, reluctantly, I confess (it was an obligation‑‑Marianna is an old acquaintance, and I had promised). It would be an understatement to say that I was pleasantly surprised (this has become all too rare) to find on those walls work of some merit and no little promise. I am speaking, Dear Lady, of your two large drawings. They are by no means realized, but reveal a masterful hand, and, as I said, no little promise.

                        I am certain I can be of much help to you, that is, if you are serious about your work‑‑and from these drawings, every indication tells me that you are. There are grave problems to be addressed (the godawful, pretentious and woefully misleading titles are, while incidental, symptomatic!...

 

            It had been three weeks since she received the note, handwritten on a sheet of memo paper: phone number, return address at The Golden Mean. Alexandra had been to the bookstore on occasion; their stock included a small, but fine selection of art books; it was a good place to browse, quiet, a place apart.

            Dear Lady?

            Who was this man?

            Such presumption would be certain to rouse curiosity‑‑and this was Alexandra. Still, as she read the note again, she could not help but wonder at herself--what had gotten into her? She walked upstairs, into her studio. Away from Husband. Flopped down on the sofa, unfolded the note.

                                                ... I look forward to meeting you‑‑at your convenience, of course. Phone to make arrangements.

 

                                    You need a firm hand to guide you. You owe it to your gift.

                        I am,

                        Grateful to be of Service,

                        GF

 

            --If I'm serious? A firm hand? And what does he know about my titles! With her fingertip, she traced the lines the pen had left, the expansion of fibers from the ink of the fountain pen, a subtle roughening from the edge of the nib. Presses harder than he needs to. A firm hand  Crumbled the paper, felt the sharp folded edges bite into her palm.

            Across the room, two of her latest drawings leaned against the wall, unfinished. She began to see in the curve of a branch, a woman's shoulder‑‑a face encircled in a wreath of leaves. She took the note, opened it, spread and smoothed it against her thigh, sat listening to the birds, lost in thought, she scratched out a few words on the back of the note, folded it once more, neatly.

            It wouldn't do to call Marianna. And she wasn't about to call 'G.F.' without knowing who he was. She would have to find out on her own.

Blue Pages.

            EASY REFERENCE LIST  GOVERNMENT & OTHER PUBLIC    SERVICES.

                        Government Offices - City & County.

            ASSOCIATED CITY AGENCIES.

                                                Possible...

            CITY COUNCIL?   

                                                Not likely.

            COMMERCE DEPARTMENT!

                                                Here we go!

Business Assistance Hotline ..686-9620  Alexandra, directory on her lap, picks up the phone from floor, gives the cord a kick to free her leg from the cord, dials the number... dials: the phone in her studio--the same black retro model they found in the house when they moved in.

            --If I wanted to find the name of the proprietor of a retail store in Center City, what agency would I go to for the information?

                        Interesting question, the reply, male voice, soft spoken. Reassuring... she wonders, gay? Easier to deal with. No pressures from...

                        Hold on just a sec--see if I can find that out for you. No Muzak, thank God. A real voice, live. Maybe it's the dial phone? No list of numbers...no logic tree, branching options...always zero if your question leaves you out on a limb. The null set.

            --He had a nice voice. From City Hall? I wouldn't have thought it...

      Hello?

            --Yes?

      Tell you what, dear--try the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce. The number there is 545-1234. Another possibility: Center City District: 440-5500. They do a lot of services in the area.

            --Thank you very much!

      Your quite welcome, dear--good luck, now!

            --What a nice man... a surprise,  Makes you think, doesn't it? What had I expected?

            Several phone calls later, she had her name: Gershon Fische. It rang a bell. She'd heard of him before, somewhere... couldn't forget a name like that‑‑Fische... Gershon.

            Next: call Marianna. Or not? This had to be the name... same initials. Just call him... if she asked for him by name, he'd assume she'd heard of him. Or should she play innocent? Better to get the dope from Marianna. Still, don't want Marianna in on this, not till I know the whole story. She must already know... he must have said something. But then, maybe not. Something about this man tells me it's better not to assume. Better to know everything I can. To go well armed. Dear lady ...

            --Hello, Marianna? Alex! Fine, you? (The usual lies). I don't know, I just wanted ... checking the status ... I know you would have called ... right... if there was anything serious. My new drawings‑‑has there been any interest?

            --Oh, Really! A gentleman from New York, you say? A gentleman, like in quotes? Used to be from New York. Well that's nice. He said that? No, of course not... not say anything? But... but you haven't told me anything, what could I possibly have to tell?

            --What else? ...That's all? Nothing else? Does this guy have a gallery or something?

            --So who is he? Connections--right. What does that mean, connections? Do I know him? ...I thought you said you knew him? (Have I said too much? Given myself away? This is getting seriously weird... ) 

            --You can't give me his name? Why not? ... God, Marianna, you make it sound...

            --Secret? What secret? Okay, secretive--what's the difference? ... a very private man.

            --I am taking you seriously... no, well, I'm gratified to know this Very-Private-Man thinks my work deserves to be shown someplace where it will be seen.

            --Did he really say that? He has his nerve, doesn't he? What does he think you are? Yes, I know‑‑Philadelphia backwash. My God, these people! All right‑‑I'll let you go, and thanks! Well now really, Mare... don't get yourself in trouble or anything ... What do you mean, it's not funny? I think it's a riot! Mysterious stranger... oh for God's sake, laugh, Mare, it's a joke! Okay... okay... okay... let you go. Thanks, really, really. Bye.

            When she had replaced the receiver after her third phone call of the afternoon she sat on the floor at the foot of the sofa trying to remember what he had said, her mind a blank. She stared at the window, the dark leaves against the sky like countless little hands, light flickering through their wind-touched trembling palms. Alexandra rested her arm on the back of the sofa, her hand dangling over the edge; the note, between her fingers slipped, and gently fluttered to the floor.

The Magic Slate                                                                                                                  Smoke I:5

Jacob Russell

 

 

                                                                     The Screen

                                                              Winter/Spring, 1989

 

            --Alex? The voice at the door!

            She wheels around, abruptly wakened from her work, a little arc of ink startled from her brush alights like a loop of hair flung in a whirling dance about the head of the figure on the easel. The last Salome, a perfect crown. In an instant, furious, and then she sees, grasps what has happened. The culmination of three year's labor--the perfect accident.

                                                                      *     *     *

            Just visible from her second story studio window, the topmost branches of the young pear tree would form a moving shadow--light‑pierced, interlocking lines of silverpoint to dissect and fragment burnished shards of January sky, or green in mid-summer leaf. Caught in the violent wind-shaken pas de deux of early March, the branches dance on air; in autumn, yellow leaves will flutter on their stems like little fans‑‑one by one to leap and fall or fly away in droves with every gust.

            Alexandra sees through the seasons; a frame of mind perceives the possibilities of light descending as a screen, a veil floating on the shills of time. Before she saw its purpose she began to plan, to see her way, to build. A winter's tale, a project to pursue while waiting for the sun's return, a thing translucent as that memory that will not be erased, a foliate shroud to commemorate and mask the truth.

                                                        ALEXANDRA'S PLANS

            Eight lengths of 2x3 cut to bevel at right angles

            joined by flat corner irons, 6x8' frame, 8x3' base  

            mounted on four casters to carry the frame

                        TO MOVE, TO FOLLOW EASILY THE LIGHT

                                    (that moves left to right across the south facing window)

                                    Struts, angled from the dolly to the uprights

                                    mount and secure it to its base

                        THE FRAME SHALL BE UNBENDING

                                    (its size and weight‑‑too much for corner fasteners, the hardware will not hold, when rolled across the floor it leans, threatens to tear loose the screws and fold to a collapsing parallelogram)

                        IT MUST BE FREE OF SHADOWS  

                                                            how?

                                    Clear of reinforcing struts across the bias‑‑fishing line, (clear monofilament, to make invisible the lines behind the screen)  the lines, stretched taught, criss-crossed to triangulate the square and make it rigid.

 

            This was not the work of an hour. She had her other projects to complete. There was a series of water colors, life size figures emerging from vague, floral patterns, like reflections on the surface of a wind touched pool; these, she was at first, through impatience, inclined to abandon, but as they progressed, she began to see them as groundwork and preparation for her larger designs. Through the course of that fall and winter, when her other work was done, often late at night or in the early morning hours, Alexandra would apply herself to her plan. Sometimes she would do nothing more than hold one of the braces in her lap, stroke it with a block wrapped in sandpaper: slowly, deliberately, letting her fingers play over the surface, searching for the slightest burr or irregularity. More than means to an end, it had to feel right in her hands; when she touched it, she had to know it was her own. Sometimes she came only to sit and intently dream her idea into being‑‑to slide the unfinished, transparent image in her mind across the unfinished work, to compare, correct for misalignment, to wash away in light unwanted shadows.

            The studio is almost empty. There is an old sideboard on the east wall striped to bare wood which she uses to store brushes, paint and equipment. Around the ceiling, track lighting; the walls are off-white and bare, the floor‑‑narrow strips of unfinished, gray teak. Against the back wall, opposite the window, Alexandra has thrown over an old chesterfield sofa, a single piece of Waverly upholstery fabric, loosely draped like a painter's drop cloth: a print of large stylized peonies, sienna and cream on a ground of rose-tinted gray. At the foot of the sofa, a braided rag throw rug‑‑shades of brown, rust, tan and ocher‑‑and on the rug, Alexandra‑‑cross legged and barefoot, denim shirt and jeans, hair pinned up, carelessly, so a few dark strands fall over her ears and brow. The cup of tea beside her sits, cold and untouched.

            The frame is ready. She is sewing by hand, finishing the hems along the edge of a white cotton, double bed sheet: three-quarter inch fold on one side, two inches on the opposite. When they are complete, she slides a heavy solid brass curtain rod into the fold of the narrower hem. Into the wider, for strength, a large, hollow drapery rod. Grommets have been fastened along the top, six of them, fifteen inches apart. Screwed into the top brace of the frame are six brass hooks to match.

            As early as November, next year's leaf buds will begin to line the bare twigs and at their tips, flower buds  They begin to swell in December and January, almost imperceptibly‑‑more visibly by mid February, more yet in March. First to open are the flowers: white umbrella clusters in early April. Their petals begin to drop almost as soon as they open‑‑a week of blooming and the last of them lies scattered, like torn bits of paper over the grass.

            When in May, the tree is fully in leaf, the sweet perfume of the mock orange along the house begins to drift into the studio. Robins nest in the tree; they carry string, bits of plastic bag, shreds of paper to weave into the thatch of grass and twigs.

            Alexandra, too has begun to gather small bundles of branches and twigs. She lays them on the floor beside the braided rug. From these, she selects several sprays of flowers, three branches in full leaf, and one bare and dead. One at a time, she places them on the sheet, moves them this way and that, alters the arrangement until she is satisfied with the pattern; a few long looping stitches with needle and thread secures them to the sheet.

            Her work complete, she picks the sheet up by its top support, walks over to the frame, steps onto a low stool and carefully matches the eyes of the grommets to the hooks. The castor wheels rumble as she rolls the frame and dolly over the wood floor to the south window. Downstairs, her husband looks up from the front page of the Sunday Inquirer.

            Leaf and branch in clear photographic light, in silhouette and shadow, hang suspended in time, as though the wind itself had frozen in place. With fingertips, she strokes the frame, feels the smooth, soft, well sanded wood. A needle of sunlight stitches the edge of the screen, glints in Alexandra's eye, illuminates one strand of hair over her left ear. The rolling lumber of the wheels, now stopped, punctuates and frames the room in silence. The space between herself and the work of her hands summons her, embraces her and what she sees; her mind becomes quiescent, at home in the body.

                                                                      *     *     *

            --Alex? The voice in the door!

            --Husband! She turns from her place, emotions contained‑‑shoulders flex back and‑‑without thought, one hand tucks a loose shirt tail into her jeans (and there casually remains) while the other hand in the same motion, moves to the back of her head and pulls three pins from her hair, which falls over her shoulders and ears and hides in darkness the needle point of light that had crossed the room to touch her.

            She couldn't actually feel it, the scar, but her finger tips searched as she let down her hair, turned to face him, surrounding herself with her aura‑‑knowing what he saw because it was she who had made it.

            --How's it coming? he asked, voice resonant with concern, blue eyes sincere, taking in the room, her screen, quickly back to her, waiting for the explanations she never gave. Husband, turns from Alexandra to the lightscreen, he sees the twining branches and the blooms, the leaves in sun and shadow. Invisible, the lines beyond the screen.

The Magic Slate                                                                                                                  Smoke I:6

Jacob Russell

 

 

                                                           What Her Husband Saw

                                                              Early Summer, 1988

 

      Husband sees what he wants to see (but don't we all?)‑‑Alexandra and her whims, her wiles, her shills, her shalls. Why should he be upset with her? ... like growing angry at the rain, like cursing the wind for stealing your hat. It's her nature to do these things‑‑and his to watch, watch over her. Isn't that what she wants, what she needs from him? He's told himself a thousand times, so simple when you understand. But come! You must see for yourself. Down this little corridor of time, one turn forward, three turns back, and here we are! A moment regained. But hush! Listen! We shall be witness...

            He does not argue. No, this time he waits. Silent for a change, but not as if he doesn't know. Not as if he doesn't see, see Alexandra move about the room in one of her silent frenzies. Silent. Closed up like a box. As though he wasn't there--her wish. But he is there, and he sees, he sees the way she folds her clothes, like she's packing to make an escape.

            This time, she wouldn't  speak to me. It's always something. Refused  Refused to answer. Pretending, as usual. Pretending she didn't hear my questions. Why?

            Every fold perfect, the clash of hangers in the closet, the way she closes the blinds with a single pull so the weights on the draw cords knock against the wall.

            Sure, I brought the subject up. But not to accuse or scold. Why should I do that? I was in the right. No need for me to raise my voice. She would know. She would. She would.

            Clunk, clunk, clunk, like pendulums. I see, I see what she's doing.

            ... how she pulls off her shirt and jeans and throws them on the wicker chair, stuffs her arms into her robe: bam! How she pulls the bathroom door after her, hard like she's going to slam it‑‑stops inches short‑‑lets it click softly at the latch.

      Yes, he sees. He is not blind. He watches the door, hears the water come on in the shower. I have this urge, you know?

            ... to reach out from the bed where he is sitting there in the dark.

            ... in my mind, I mean.

            Sees himself pushing open the door with his foot. Something you might do in a dream, where space and time are measured by your wants, your fears, and not by quadrant, line and plumb. He stares at the closed door, wants to give it a little nudge--would conjure it so, but this is no dream. Beyond his reach.

            No. Here, in the real world, he will have to stand up, walk across the room. It's the law. He will have to act. Do you hear me, Husband? Do you?. Do you hear me, Alex? Do you?

            Confident she doesn't, he crosses the room and stealthily opens it. His voice low so she won't hear, but loud enough that he can't be sure.

            --Do you?

            What he hears is the water running, the way it changes, the sound of it as she moves: now it's falling on her body, now on the tile walls, now spraying on the door panel. Soon, she'll be stepping out of the shower, soon, it will be too late.

            So, here, in the real world, I get up and walk over to the door and put my hand on the knob, and turn it, and the door opens...

            A band of light spills out across the bedroom carpet. He follows it back to where it fades into the darkness under the bed, sits down to watch.

            Rivulets of condensation trace erotic paths down the steam fogged shower door, like tree branches outside a window on a rainy night, and on the other side, her shadow, and through the clear little trails of water--narrow revelations of her body. She left two large bath towels neatly folded on the toilet lid, but the bathrobe

            ... her blue robe--the one I got her

            ... is in a heap on the floor where she let it fall. The sound of the water stops. The shower door opens. She reaches out, takes the first towel, lightly pats her dripping body before stepping out, then, bending at the waist to let her hair hang loose in front of her, takes the second towel, vigorously rubs herself dry, then wraps her hair and folds the towel on her head like a turban. With the first towel, she finishes drying: her back, her breasts and belly, her legs, her feet. She knows the door is open, but she didn't let on.

            Like I'm not here. Like I couldn't see.

            But when she bends to pick up the robe from the floor, their eyes meet, there is no surprise in hers. She knows.

            The blue bathrobe I bought her the year we were married‑‑because it was cold that winter. Before we put in the new windows, how drafty it was‑‑a robe to hold her warm, a gift.

      Did you know that there are places where a man can kill his wife and walk away--scott free? Of course, he has to find her in the act. He has to kill her in the act, the moment of discovery‑‑in her lover's arms. It's true. In such place not a judge or jury will convict--if he's even brought to trial. It's the act of passion that counts, the act of passion that undoes her, absolves his guilt, brings her down and raises him above the law. Makes you think, n'est-ce pas?

            But what about the lover?

            What--you think the lover should get off scott free? Kill them both in the same bed, by the same reasoning, the same defense.

            What if he only kills the lover and not his wife? Say, he wants to forgive her, to take her back? 

            You think you can have it all? Not in the real world, my friend. Don't be a fool.

            You're right. It would make him look weak, wouldn't it.         Unmanly.

            Setting curbs to passion turns passion to reason.

            Reason deprives passion of its innocence.

            Yes, the greater passion is the victor. She'd like that, wouldn't she? Makes you think. For sure. For sure.

            On the other hand, if the wronged lover plots revenge ... would mean he'd been thinking about it.

            Passion drawn out, nurtured, passion for the long haul, passion under reason's thumb... is proof of guilt. Remember, it's passion contained that is answerable to the law. In chaos--freedom!

            Has to be spontaneous. There's the trick. Thinking makes you guilty. Is that my trouble, Alex? Is it?

            He could see the tension in her neck‑‑those tendons that run from behind the ear to the shoulder, the veins on her temple. She leans over the sink, bares her teeth at the mirror, examines them, takes the toothbrush and begins to scrub. The cloth tie hung from a loop at the waist of her robe dances a little hangman's dance as she pumps her arm, brushing, quivers in a fine tremor at the end. She leaves the water running. Me, I turn it on to rinse my toothbrush, turn it off between. An annoying sound when you're trying to think.

            --So when are you going to talk to me, Alex? Alex answers, still brushing, toothbrush in mouth.

            --You know I can't hear you with the water going. Why are you doing this?  The least you could do is turn off the damned water.

            Alex turns to Husband, angry, toothpaste foaming at the corners of her mouth. The water is still running. Like a flood in the room, a waterfall, a static roar in the mind. He points to the bathroom door, the running water. Light spills out over the bedroom carpet, stops just short of his shoes, seeps into the dark at the base of the bed; it plays over her shoulders, her hair, her bare feet.

            I used to love her feet. She had such pretty feet. Now there's calluses on the sides, on her heels. Her toenails are getting thick. She keeps them colored so you can't tell, but I can see. I don't look at her feet anymore. But I remember. I remember how it used to be. Before we lost ... Maybe... if ... it could be different. Maybe...

            --Will you let me get dressed in peace! Toothpaste dripping down her chin: he reaches out, takes the collar of her robe, tries to wipe her mouth.

            --Cassandra, he says...

            She flinches, pulls away as though ducking a blow.

            --Why are doing this, he shouts, enraged. Do you think I'm going to hit you! All I want ...

            --Don't touch me!

            --What the fuck is the matter with you? He clutches the robe, pulls her toward him. You're crazy! You're crazy. Have I ever hit you? Ever? She pushes him, hard. Shoves her hand in his face, the hand with the toothbrush, wet with toothpaste and spittle and he pulls harder on her robe, pushing her back at the same time to get the toothbrush out of his face, a spontaneous reflex, but because he is still holding the robe, the sudden backward movement pulls her off balance and she falls against the shower door, snapping the plastic panel free from the door frame, falling through--into the shower stall on top of the door, which bends under her weight, softens her fall but not enough to keep her from hitting her head on the tile wall as she goes down.

            O Husband! An accident! An accidental fall.

            And there was Alexandra, who saw for a moment, stars, black stars on a field of white, microbic circles accelerating outward to the edge of the eye's universe.

            The shower is a dangerous place, the aide who shaved the circle of scalp around the wound, reminds her: a scalp wound to be sutured after the long wait in the emergency room.

            Later, when they get home, she will pour herself a small tumbler of dry vermouth with a twist. She will look at him, as though she were sizing up a stranger, take a wedge of lemon and squeeze a few drops into the glass; as they fall into the pale liquid, the lemon drops react with the vermouth, expand in undulating, ghostly waves.

            He stands behind her, gently lays his hand on her shoulder. She doesn't move. He understands, but lets his hand hover for a moment, close, but not touching.

            She can hear the water running in the shower as she lies in bed. A few brief spurts, enough to wash the blood from the tiles. He comes out carrying the damaged plastic panel. She can hear it scrape against the dresser, against the door frame, a descending arpeggio against the banister posts on the way downstairs.

            When he crawls into bed beside Alexandra, she appears to be sound asleep. In the dark, the patch of white bandage on the back of her head shows through the tangle of black hair. His eyes follow the lines of her body, the rise of her shoulders, the smooth downward curve to her waist, the mound of her hips beneath the sheets.

      Careful not to disturb; carefully, he settles down beside her, carefully, watching in the dark her shadowed form ascend.

The Magic Slate                                                                                                                  Smoke I:7

Jacob Russell

 

                                                                         Smoke

                                                               Rittenhouse Square

      The trees that day, were not in leaf‑‑which leads him to think that it must have been in early spring‑‑spring rather than autumn because he has no recollection of fallen leaves. He's sure he would have noticed‑‑the way they rattle over the walkways and lawns when the wind blows‑‑for it was windy that day; he had to hold the pages of his book with his thumbs to keep the wind from riffling them as he read, and he can see the segmented folds of flesh of fingers and palm illuminated by the flair of the match, how it flickered in the sheltering cup of his hand as he lit his cigarette, and when he looked up‑‑her face before him watching his own. The last vision of a sailor drowning in the sea.

            Gershon Fische walked on summer afternoons, if the weather was not too warm (for he was no lover of heat) to Rittenhouse Square where he would, invariably, seek out a bench in the southwest corner by the sculpture of the bronze goat‑‑off to the side in the shade of the horse chestnuts if it was still early and the sun high. There is another bench, one that curves like an amphitheater around the goat on its little stage, and later, when the apartment buildings across the street cast their shadows over the park, he would move there. Preferring cephalic to caudal view, and because he disliked to have anyone sit to his right, he claimed the northwest serif of the ‘C’, aligned and even with the goat's head‑‑its horns gleaming (as are the tail, the curve of the back and the right rear hoof), polished by the admiring hands of generations of children. Here, where nannies with their charges, mothers with infants in strollers and toddlers in hand, come to gather round the little circle--he would come to sit and read on afternoons, undisturbed by intrusive phones or unexpected (and unwanted) callers‑‑oblivious as a statue to the throng of children at his feet.

      It was established habit, a thing suitable (as we know) for Gershon, who would drive chance out of his life altogether, if only life would let him.

            --Can I have one? she asked, the end of that white scarf fluttering on an erratic breeze.

            He hadn't seen her approach. There she was, out of nowhere, it seemed, standing in front of him. He said nothing, thinking at first that she was one of the homeless (bundled in that shabby coat)‑‑that if he ignored her she would cease to exist.

            --May I. He said. May I have one--picking up the book and beginning to read again.

            --Yes, she said. May I. You are correct. This is what I have asked. Would it be possible for you to give me one?

            Gershon peeked over his book: a pair of boy's shoes, brown oxfords with no socks. She did not move, nor could he block her from his mind. Quick glances--merely to assuage his curiosity, careful to avoid eye contact. A blue cotton skirt, badly worn, jutted from below the hem of a cloth coat, flapped rhythmically against bare legs. She was humming, softly, barely audible, a melody of vaguely Eastern cast. He lowered his book, looked her full in the eye.

            --Well? She asked. Would it?

            --Leave! he said, and back to his book.

            She neither moved nor spoke. Gershon's eyes were on the page but he wasn't reading.

            --Go! he commanded, more harshly this time. Feed the pigeons! Scat! (waving her away with his hand, as though she were a bothersome squirrel)

            Still, she did not move. Again, he lowered his book. He started to scold--but suddenly regretted his tone. This was no street lady as he'd first supposed. Perhaps it was the coat that had misled him‑‑overdressed for the weather‑‑the faded, cloth coat, too large for her, buttoned on the right like a man's. A broad face, no make up‑‑a little chafed over the cheekbones, but otherwise pleasant complexion; dark eyes, her hair hidden under a white silk scarf with some kind of figurative design in red and purple needlework. A pleasant mouth, a slight smile, ironic yet innocent‑‑and her voice‑‑the singing--a musical cadence even when she spoke.

            --Excuse me? You wanted to ask me something?

            --Yes. I wanted...

            --You've got the wrong person. He's not here.

            --He? Who is not here?

            --Whoever you're looking for. He's not here.

            --Oh, but I am only looking for you! And I think I have found you!

            --I said, get lost.

            --This would not be necessary.

            --Pardon?

            --To become lost. How does one become what one already is? Lost? True of all of us, I think. Isn't that so? Lost? Maybe you can help me? And maybe I am only asking for a cigarette. No?

            There was an accent he couldn't identify. A foreign look about her. Her face? Her eyes?

            --May I? she asked, indicating that she wanted to sit--then doing just that, to his right‑‑close, very close, close enough to touch because he had, by intention, left so little room on the end of the bench.

            He waited for her response... offering no encouragement.     --Why, the cigarette, if you please? You are all alone. It will be good to keep you company don't you think? While I smoke?

            --Company? he said. Did I ask for company? (Squeezing a folded newspaper between himself and the intruder, misinterpreting her intentions, too aware of her body warmth)  I'm not interested.

            --Oh but I think you are very much so.

            --Pardon?

            --You are very much interested. I can tell these things. She looks about as she speaks--seeming to explore the park, eying in wonder the trees, the passing traffic, the buildings across the street. And you interest me very much as well or I would not ask of you a cigarette, is this not so?

            --I said... if you don't leave (eye fixed on his book)... I'll signal the cops is what I'll do.

            --But why? Do you imagine I am about to pick your pocket? No, she said, without changing expression. You are definitely mistaken. You are perhaps thinking I am someone else? Her voice rising in pitch, itself a question mark?

            --I don't smoke.

            --But just this minute...

            --I said, I don't smoke.

            --No--you are smoking, you see? She pointed to the discarded butt at his feet, still smoldering. Gershon took a quick glance at the smoking stub out of the corner of his eye, crushes it with his foot.

            --The last one. I'm out. Now--leave me in peace.

            --No, this is not true. I saw you put the pack in this pocket (tapping his jacket). Right here... you see. There it is. May I have one now, please? This will not hurt you, I promise. You see how politely I am asking you? To give me a cigarette. She looked at Gershon, smiled expectantly, holding out her hand.

            Gershon scowled. Undismayed, she raised her two fingers to her lips--the smoker's victory sign.

            --Were you born, in a barn?

            --Why do you want to know this? A bit surprised, a hint of uncertainty‑‑a little catch in her voice. But no, not in a barn I don't think this was where I began  And you?

            --Don't be cute with me!

            --You don't understand. I am not being cute at all. It is true, there are many things which I do not remember. I am not even sure, she said, puzzling over the question, where I was born. Not even the city of my birth do I remember. Oh, who can believe what you have not lived? What you have not learned for yourself? I have been told many things, many stories, and it is the city where I lived until the day of her birth. But how does this matter--I mean to you?

            --One does not go around demanding cigarettes from strangers. Do you understand? To ask is more than enough, but to demand! Compounding your insolence! Refusing to take no for an answer! One can't do this, not if one wishes to be accepted in civil company, behave like a gypsy--is that what you are? A hive of them across from the hospital on 11th street. You want to tell my fortune? If you don't get out of here I'll tell you yours. Now get lost!

            --I am not a gypsy. They told me all the things I was not and nothing at all that I am and there were never any gypsies, ever, in their stories. So not in mine. Now, I have one for you, a question; why are you asking me this--where I was born, and making me wait so long for the cigarette... since I know that you will in the end.

            --Know I will what? (lays his book on his lap, face down). Okay, what's your scam? Out with it!

            --Scam? How is it a scam to give me a cigarette! Since I know that you will, know you will give me the cigarette? Why do you not give me from the first time I ask?

            --You know? What do you mean, you know? Reading the future--or my mind? A gypsy after all! I'll tell you, young lady, I'm going to read your fortune if you...

            --You did not say to me that you won't, is this not true?

            --What's that?

            --That you would not do it.

            --Do what?

            --There, you see. No fortune telling. I am good at watching. I watch and I learn. A simple inference, that is all. You see, if you told me no, I would have gone away and left you alone. But you did not do so. You take me for someone else--as though you were waiting for someone who has not come. You tell me you do not smoke. You ask me where was I born. But you do not tell me, no. You do not, in so many words, refuse. What then am I to think? Because you can not, do not, will not tell me no, but rather, you ask of me these intimate questions--where was I born... this man wants company, I tell myself. He is too proud to admit it--but it is the truth, so he asks me questions to hold me here, so I will not take from him a cigarette and disappear as I came, leaving him all alone. It is not nice to be alone in the world. Maybe this is why I am here, do you think?

Samantha! A mother's voice. Max! Samantha‑‑little tipsy Max, banana in hand, one foot up, one foot down‑‑oops! Plunk! Up again... offers banana to Samantha who cannot be bribed. Offers banana indiscriminately to everyone he passes. Holds banana out to Gershon, who firmly, but politely declines.

            --Look! she said, pulling a plastic bag from her purse. Look what I have!

Yudit watches Gershon as she opens the bag, closes her eyes, draws forth a blue foam alphabet block, one of three. Others remain hidden. Holds it out for Gershon to see‑‑one side only. Places the block on her lap and covers it with her hand.

 Gershon feigns disinterest, withdraws into his book.

            --What is this? She pats the covered block and waits. Okay? Pats Gershon's leg to get his attention. Gershon glares, lowers his eyes to the book.

            --No? she says. Please?  He peers over his reading glasses. Please?

            --Now what? The gypsy tricks?

            --No. No tricks. You must learn to believe me. Come now‑‑is it really so hard?

            --You want me to... what? Let me guess. You want me to tell you what's in your hand. I have no time for such nonsense.

            --Nonsense? Oh, but how can you know before you have seen?

            --I don't want to play your game. What is it you don't understand?

            --But I know you do. Look! You are not reading this book. You are thinking--what is she going to do? What does she have in her hand? What does this woman want? This woman is strange‑‑she is full of secrets--whatever might they be? I must know. So you will tell me, please? Try?

            --Shifts uncomfortably on the bench. You are persistent ... turns his book over and, she, with less room than ever, pivots her hips neatly against Gershon's own to regain her space--I'll hand you that, he says

            --No tricks, she says to Gershon, whose irritation is beginning to ease. This is not a game. Here, you see (revealing a blue foam alphabet block): it is a letter from the alphabet.

Max stops. Totters, as though the banana had unbalanced him. Reclaims his equilibrium. Eye fast on the block. Samantha, holding a Magic Slate, tablet in one hand, plastic stylus in the other, peeks into the woman's bag, which rests, open, at her feet.

            --Okay--in my mind I have an idea. No trick. No game. It is because I wish to know you--as I am sure you wish to know me. This is how we shall do it. You tell me now.

            --Tell you what?

            --Why, tell me the letter! A simple thing. You see (she holds one hand over her eyes) I am not looking. So you must tell me--what is this letter I am holding?

            --The letter Tee, he says, almost under his breath, glancing nervously about to see who might be close enough to overhear--going along with her, if only to put her off.

            --Ah, you are right. Of course. The letter Tee. Now the real question is--what does it mean?

            --Mean? says Gershon. Don't push it, lady. I'm really quite tired of this. All quite absurd--gathering himself to leave once more.

            --Wait, wait! I will show you! What if we say--what if the Tee were for time? Now, guess what--tell me. Tell me what is on the other side.

            He slips his book in his briefcase. How am I supposed to know?

            --First, look at the block, okay? She opens her hand. The block rests on her lap, the letter Tee faces heavenward. Now, she says, turning the letter over, but covered with her hand. What do you see?

            --You have your bloody hand over it!

            --Now, now, be patient. In the eye of your mind, tell me‑‑ what do you see?

            --The only eyes I have are in my head. They see exactly what is before them. I have no imagination. Show the block and I'll tell you what's there!

            --No imagination? Oh Mister...? Mister? ... I still do not know your name...

            --Fische! Mr. Fische to you.

            --Well, she cocked her head--almost haughtily, almost mocking, well, Mr. Fische... I think you are fooling me. We are talking about the alphabet, so it is very simple. If you say one letter, another letter will be in your mind. No mystery, you see. No Gypsy tricks. The question is--what is it? What is the letter in your mind? Here, I will show you...

She leans over, face to face with Samantha

            --Can I? Sweetie? Borrow this ... just for a minute?

Catches Samantha's mother with a glance, smiles reassuringly, points to the Magic Slate.

            --For writing down one little word, okay? I will give it right back I promise.

Samantha, silent, holds out the slate, holds out the stylus.

            --You have already thought of your letter? Now, we will think of a word for it--like tee for time, and I will write it for you.

Takes the tablet, steadies it on her left knee. Presses stylus to plastic... pronounces each letter as she writes.

                                                              M . E . M . O . R . Y

Holds it out for him to see--then to Samantha, whose eyes are upon him--offers it back to her. She reaches out, lifts the plastic cover sheet, erases memory, takes the tablet, returns to mother, holds tight to mother's legs, watching, holding, watching.

            --I was right, wasn't I? But we aren't done. The letter on the other side...

Removes her hand from the block, turns it over.

            --The letter Em! You see? But too easy, don't you think? No? So! We can't stop here, can we? With MEMORY and TIME? her voice inflected upward, questing.

            Gershon looked inquisitively at his interrogator. Leaned back, raised an eyebrow and almost, almost ... smiled.

            --But I know you are having to go, so! She put the block in her bag. You see‑‑now you are interested in me; now I have your curiosity right here. She took his hand and closed it around her clenched fist. Right here, she said, patting his hand. Gershon, in spite of himself, began to smile. He settled back on the bench, let himself fall into her hands.

            --Right in here. I have your curiosity. You see! I told you, no? And I have something for you as well. Do you like secrets? Of course you do! Everyone likes secrets, even the very very serious Mr. Fische. Ah ha! You smile at me! You want to laugh even--well? Go ahead. You think I will scold you if you laugh? shhhhh! I promise I will not tell (looks left and right, conspiratorially)  shhhh! It is our secret, Mr. Fische laughing in the park with this funny lady. I have lots of them, you know.

            --Funny ladies?

            --No--silly man! Secrets! Good secrets. Bad secrets... oh, I can not lie. This is true. Some secrets are not so nice. Secrets we do not want to know. But not for today, the sad secrets! Another time okay? So! Tell me if you want to see them‑‑the little good secrets I have hiding in my bag? (Speaking to him now as though he were a child, teaching him a child's game, pats his arm, encouragingly.) 

            --Gershon takes a deep breath... reaches for the cigarettes in his pocket--catches her watching, checks himself. Coughs a little cough, tucks his hands in his side pockets but she grasps his one hand, pulls it to her, places the block in his palm, the block of time, and folds his fingers around it. He turns it in his hand, squeezes, releases--glancing round to see who might be looking.

Max, who has lost interest in the block, chases a pigeon. Chases a sparrow. Loud squeals when the birds fly. A man with a beagle on a leash‑‑dog on all fours surrounded by children on all fours. The dog barks. Max barks. A boy mines a plastic bag (all seriousness) for a last pretzel. A girl in a denim jumper, curly hair pinned up, blows bubbles from a red plastic ring. Max shoos another pigeon‑‑Samantha cries‑‑wants yuce, but yuce is all gone. Very sad, Samantha.

            --Go on, he said, conceding to his growing curiosity. What is it I'm supposed to do next here...

            She took out two small dolls, Trolls, one with blue hair, one with orange. It was this sight--this strange little woman, a doll in each hand, their brightly colored hair standing out in all directions--her beaming, expectant smile. That, and a glimpse of a woman entering the park, one of those ever so serious and proper Rittenhouse ladies, staring at them in wondrous disapproval. He could not help it--burst out laughing, and once he'd started, couldn't stop. Laughed till tears ran freely down his face, laughed till his chest began to pain him and he couldn't catch his breath.

            --Are you okay? she asked, sitting the dolls aside. Rubbed and patted him on his back.

            --My dear lady, he said at last, gasping... my dear lady. Thank you! Yes. I'm fine. I've seldom been better. Thank you!

            --Then you want... is it all right if I go on?

            --Oh my, yes! Indeed yes! I'm at your mercy. Proceed! By all means. Whatever you have up your sleeve, I'm ready for you.

            --Yes? You are ready?

            --Yes! Yes indeed!

            --Okay, she says, and picked the dolls up from the ground where they have fallen from her lap. Okay then--holding them before her--Tell me, which one is young and which one is old?

            --You want the truth?

            --Always, Mr. Fische. Always the truth.

            --The truth is, I can't tell the one from the other. Look exactly the same to me, my dear.

            --You mean you cannot tell?

            --That's what I said. No difference! How could I?

            --She turned the dolls in her hand. You think so? Held them cheek to cheek, held them to her own cheeks, tenderly, inspected them, compared. You think so? Gershon nodded assent.

            --But look. This one (holding out the doll with blue hair), this one is very old. Very very old, don't you think? She held the doll over her head, like an offering. Inspected her, turning it this way and that.

            --She is so old she can no longer remember when she was a little girl, and so she always has this other doll for company. Yes... it is a girl for sure. Now... (looking first at one, and then the other) when the old one wants to know what has happened to her, she asks this doll, who is very young, and has no idea what life is going to bring her. So the doll who is a child and has no memories, remembers for the old one what has happened long ago. Do you understand? Now here is a question for you--what does the doll who is an old woman want to tell the girl with no memories? Do you understand?

Little David sits on the bench holding tight to a bottle of seltzer. Alexandra!

            Gershon looks up.

Alexandra sucks a plastic penguin.

            --But it's so clear, isn't it? Why is it one is old and one is young, and still they look alike?

            --Gershon hesitates, starts again to reach into his jacket pocket for a cigarette, again, catches himself in time. All right, he says (adopting a more clinical tone). All right, tell me, where did you learn the rules for this game?

            --Rules? Why I just make them up. No tricks. No rules ...This makes you laugh again and shake your head? I am glad to see you laugh. You would worry me how you looked before. This is much better, no?

            --Yes! Yes indeed. A memorable occasion--fast becoming so, my dear. Please go on.

            --Okay! She held up her hand, palm forward--Gershon puzzled for a second, catches on--breaks out once more in a booming laugh as they slap a fine high-five!

Max turns to look. Alexandra drops her penguin.

            --All right, he beamed‑‑fishing for composure, for words. I do give up! You're all right, my dear, you are indeed! I swear I never! My hat's off to you. Dear lady, I confess, you had me fooled. You see, there it is?

            --There is what? She asks.

            --Come, give me another chance. Oh, and here, let me give you some room, he says, sliding to his left.

            --I will show you more all right (sliding after him), what is up the sleeves, and secrets too if we can find‑‑but first you have to give to me... the cigarette!

            --...why are you laughing this time? Am I making a joke?

            --Unbelievable! Absolute perfection. The perfect act, but no act at all! The real thing... absolutely.

            --What is real, Mr. Fische?

            --Why you, my dear, you. More real than... an artist‑‑that's what you are‑‑a born artist... if I'm not being redundant.

            --Artist? An artist for getting a cigarette?

            --Art, my dear lady, is whatever an artist does. And you are most certainly the real thing. Look at you, trusting as a child. I'm no fool.

            He reached into his pocket, pulled out the pack of cigarettes, offered her one. A bastard spell.

            --What did you say?

            --Something I was--something I'm working on. Phrases come to mind... a translation. It's nothing. Words in my head.

The marvelous counterfeit of persuasion.

            She hasn't taken a cigarette... He holds the pack out to her again, but she only looks at him--expectantly, quizzically, a little smile, a gust of wind whipped the end of her scarf across her mouth, flipped the pages of the book lying beside him on the bench, skittered the expired cigarette at his feet across the bricks. He looked at the cigarettes, at his strange supplicant.

            --All right, he says, expectantly. It's your game. You are the puzzle maker... took a cigarette from the pack, to his own lips (the match flared for a moment in his two cupped hands) and he handed it to her, lit. This time she took it. ... but I'm the detective, and I think I got this one right. Tell me if I'm wrong.

            --I am thanking you very much, she says... pulling deeply on the cigarette. Not wrong at all.

            --I don't know to make them up, he says--puzzles, but I'm good at solving them.

            --You do not think I would come up to just anyone? You see, I have two eyes also. I saw you and I thought, maybe you are one to help me, no?

            --Help you--how so?

            --I saw how you did this ... (she cupped her hands as though lighting a cigarette) ... like a sailor. With a match. If it was a lighter I am walking away just like that. But you were doing it with a match. Like a sailor.

            She drew deeply on the cigarette again, let the smoke out slowly, watched the wind spin it away. I do this pretty well, no?           --Do what, well?

            --Smoke! I have never had cigarette before  This is my first! Yes! This is true! You don't believe me?

            --You mean you don't smoke? ... and you stood here insisting I give you a cigarette? My dear lady, I begin to like you more and more, god help me! But why and how?

            --It's the way you light yours, like a sailor. I thought, maybe you are a sailor, and if you are a sailor, then it must be that it's time for me to learn to smoke. You see, it is easy!

            --Doesn't look like it's your first smoke. Looks like you've done it all your life. Like someone with a long habit.

            --You are right, she said, looking up into the trees, blowing smoke from her nose, I do it well, no? And it makes me to feel good. Yes, I think maybe you are right. Maybe this isn't the first time. When I saw you, I wanted one. Was it the sailors in my mind? I don't know? Do you? I wanted the cigarette. Maybe I have always smoked. Who knows, maybe I am a sailor one day before this. What is the matter? Why do you look at me that way?

            --My dear, you are charming. Charmed me, truly you have. Here‑‑my name (holding out his hand), Gershon! May I ask you yours?

            --Mine? My what?

            --Your name! What is your name‑‑if you want to tell me, I mean.

            --Oh, she said. My name. You asked me where was I born, do you remember? It is a question like that. A secret--but not like you might think. Too me also it is a secret.

            --Whatever your story, my dear, I would love to hear it. And your secrets too. If not now, we must make a time. Yes, do tell me your mysteries and secrets. I will invite you home. Please, let me give you my number and address. You must call on me. Promise? But your name... ? Surely you do have a name?

            --My name, Mr. Fische, the one I have been given, is Yudit.

            --Youd-it, he repeats, stress on the first syllable. It, like sit.

            --You-deet, Mr. Fische, Yu-deet. That is my name. And maybe it is really so? But you can call me Deedee. If that will be easier. Deedee.

            --Yu-deet! Yudit it is!

            --No no, Mr. Fische--Deedee. This will be how you can call me, and hey, I think this Deedee, she was maybe a smoker from the crib‑‑inhaling deeply, blowing smoke into the air. Who knows? Who knows?

            Gershon was silent for a moment. He let his eyes follow a squirrel up a tree and into a hollow between two branches that spread from the trunk like the letter Y.

            --What's the story with your name, turning to her again--or is that one of those secrets you keep up your sleeve?

            --You are going to think I am crazy for sure. If I tell you.     --Crazy? Not a chance.

            --Really?

            --Delightfully eccentric, shall we say. Sound money you're saner than half the people in this city. More than a little strange, my dear. But not crazy. I'm not offending you am I?

            --No, she said, that strange smile again, looking up to the tree tops. No, Mr. Gershon Fische, and then she took his hand, shook it gently. You see, I have become like Eve in the garden, Mr. Fische. She gazes into a blue haze. And together we will send the tree of knowledge up in smoke.

            The sun appeared from behind the Rittenhouse Towers, shone the length of Locust Street, shone on the goat's polished back, his gleaming child-polished horns, cast a goatly shadow eastward‑‑a pigeon, orange ring eyes, red reptilian scaled legs, strutted at Gershon's feet. Sparrows on the bench beside him cocked their head waiting for crumbs. But it was not bread from heaven that fell, but large drops of rain, bright in the beams of the western sun.

            --Oh, look! How cloudy it is to the east!  And there is thunder‑‑it is storming soon now! Quick quick before it all comes down!

            Mothers and nannies scooped up children under arm, quickly packed up shoulder bags, strollers. The older children ran over the brick walks, branches waved and leaves took up a hiss and rush before the sudden wind.

            --Sublimity, Gershon said, arm around the waist of Yudit; crowned as one they ran, sheltered by the rattling pages of the Wall Street Journal he spread over them, umbrella wise--

scatters everything before it like a bolt of lightning

The Magic Slate

Jacob Russell

 

 

                                                                   Poena Magna

                                                     Second Movement: Six Scenes

 

                                                       Yellow Lotus, Falling Leaves

            The apartment is filled with plants, paintings of lush greenhouse interiors, framed posters of exotic tropical blooms, florid, changeless, high above the trees in the park, the street below, a world apart from the vicissitudes of seasonal mortality.

            They first met at a gallery. Three years ago--out of work, he would search the papers for cultural events, openings he could check out for free wine, hors d'oeuvres, women open to his charms. It was autumn. Leaves, copper red and yellow carpeted the walk. He distinctly remembered the sound of the leaves rattling at his feet as he stood at the window. Like a movie sound track. Portentous. Everything else gone silent. There, inside, was Alexandra, black hair, those enormous dark eyes, flowered silk blouse in coral, red, rust, forest green and white; long black skirt with red silk sash around the waste: like a bird of paradise in a flock of sparrows. Soon, glass of chardonnay in hand, he was chatting her up, dizzy, and not from wine. He felt in her presence, suddenly a stranger to himself, as though he had wondered into a new life, inherited a new history. He opened his mouth and lies blossomed floribundant on his tongue, ripened, burst to seed, germinated, sprouted mid air and erupted into bloom anew. He had gone to Penn. Majored in art history and criticism.  Wrote novels. Had toyed with the idea of making films. Had a contract to do a piece on the new galleries in Old City for Philadelphia Magazine. Wanted to give it a personal slant--he told her--profiles of the artists.

            She promised him an interview. A week later they sat over coffee; he, inebriate acolyte of the arts pretending to take notes as she took in the shadowed tracery of leaves and branches playing on the window behind him, happily inventing theories, elaborate plans for her work, explaining ideas--ideas which, in fact, had never before crossed her mind.   When their business was over he asked her out for a drink. It was the middle of the afternoon. He seemed safe. Perhaps a bit eccentric, capricious--enough to make him interesting. Nothing she couldn't handle. And besides--she was in no mood to go home. Her head was spinning with images, had not been so full of ideas in years. She let him take her to a bar where they went on talking, lost all track of time, and when the evening crowd began to fill the bar, they got up to dance. There was a moment there when they looked at one another, saw how young the others were--wondered what they were doing, where this might be leading. But the moment did not last. They laughed and passed it off. Not since before she was married could she remember laughing so freely. And for him--such a burst of hope! He'd all but given up--conceded to the wintry path, no more touch from here to the pit: Give up youthful passion, make friends with death. It was like Teresa all over again. Like being raised from the dead.

            They danced, lost in the pleasures of the body, danced till they were flushed and sweating. Once, after catching a glimpse of themselves in the mirror over the bar, they stopped... broke into laughter again and fell into each other's arms, helped each other, stumbling, laughing, breathless, back to their seats. Another drink and they were out on the floor again. At last call they were still at it. Still dancing, and then the music stopped and they were out in the early morning darkness, invisible stars spinning overhead. Doors locked behind them, they drifted arm and arm across almost silent city streets to a bench in Washington Square. To her own amazement, she offered her mouth to his and they kissed to the sounds of a mockingbird endlessly changing his tune.

            There are citrus trees with tiny, orange fruits, palms, rubber plants, banana trees, plants with leaves like huge, red veined hands, all illuminated by hidden grow lights or track beams that fall like shafts of artificial sunlight through this semblance of a forest canopy.

            She pulls aside the draperies; a Rousseau jungle of lions, tropical birds and monkeys, they peer wide eyed from leafy folds at the snowy void without. There is nothing visible of the park now but the tops of bare trees poking out of the swirling flakes, the streets below and the buildings across the square have all vanished. Beyond the dim and verdant light of the room, an infinity of gray and white. It was a winter dalliance, she told herself. A restless fancy. But it had gone on now for three years... almost four.

            The body stiffens in defiance of winter's cold, takes on weight and substance, or grows heavy with indolence, warmth, gratitude for shelter. In spring, under water color skies the flags on the Parkway beat in your ears and quicken the heart--everything insubstantial, changeable as the fountain spray in sunlight, as the restless clouds, formless, endlessly playful.     She turns from the window, closes the curtains on the season and walks to the bathroom, draws the door closed behind her with a soft click.

In the dalliance of spring there is no winter, but a memory may come like a sudden frost on the heart, a premonition heard in the sound of the fountain's spray, flags clapping. A story is not about the past, he told her. It is a premonition in disguise, a map to the future we need only unfold to follow the signs and see, and see... the means we create to free ourselves from memory. We stand at the gateway, but the gate is closed; the stories have been taken hostage, and the images we would make. They all point the wrong way. You have to know what side of the gate you are on, he said. Perhaps all you have to do is turn around. Like walking backwards into the future.

            --A Great view of the park, she calls from the other side of the bathroom door, a certain distracted edge to her voice, a forced cheeriness that makes George nervous. Don't you love all this light? Pretty classy, huh? What do you think?

            He leans over to unlace his shoes, pulls off his socks, fumbles with the buttons on his shirt, but his fingers don't want to cooperate. It is the first chance in weeks they have had to be alone in private. He stares at the bathroom door, starts to unfasten his belt, hesitates...

            When Alexandra returns he is sitting on the bed, weaving slightly from side to side, as though riding one of the great lily pads that ripple across the quilted waters. Spread out before him: notebooks, index cards. What are you doing, she asks, surprised to see him still dressed except for his shoes, his pale feet poking out from under his slacks.

            He pulls a newspaper from his battered black leather briefcase. Diffuse winter light shimmers through the blue-green draperies, ripples across the room in mottled patterns like tropical flowers. The Luger at the bottom of the case catches a beam from the track lighting and shots it back at the ceiling. Careful to conceal it with a section of newspaper, he draws the gun from the case and places it on the bed, then leans the case against the night table. He looks up at her, opens the paper and spreads it out before him on the quilt, leans over it, black, half-framed reading glasses resting on the bump on his nose--like the dancing eyebrow with the scar in the center, the mark of a childhood accident long forgotten. He cuts an obit from the paper with a single-edge razor, lifts the clipping from the page, sets it precisely in the center of a 3 x 5 index card, tries to hold it with his little finger while he fastens it down with a strip of library tape but the paper keeps slipping across the card.

            --It's nothing, he tells her. Patching stuff I find into my journal... my book of days ... tying things together, you know. 

            --I weave my fantasies into the smallest of knots (she says, in a voice so quiet I could mistake it for my own)  Have lost myself for years in their undoing.

            --Here, she says aloud, eagerly--let me help. This was my job, you know. Her robe falls open as she moves toward the bed. I was the one who untangled his snags, she says, speaking to no one in particular.

            --What's that?

            --Let me. She sits beside him and reaches for one of the cards. My father's fingers were thick as stubs, she says, reading the card, puzzling over the minuscule, crabbed hand. He had no patience with this sort of thing.

            --And? he asks, following not her words but the motion of her breasts within the robe.

            --Memories that I have. Too young to place them now. Fishing with my father. She deftly lays the tape across the clipping, fixing it to the center of the card. Something about them lately. They keep coming back to me.

            --And now you're going to untangle mine? He says, letting go the button on his shirt, letting his hand rise, sliding it under the fold of her robe.

            --No. But these pages, they remind me of those fishing lines. So many tangled knots of words!

            She kneels on the bed, kisses him on the forehead, removes his glasses, draws his head between her breasts. The smell of her body envelops him, moist hay and perfume, a ploughed field, fallen leaves on a rainy afternoon. Don't leave me, he is saying. Please. Stay with me. She pulls away, gets up, back to the window, parts the curtains again.

      Ah desire, the undoing of us all. But what good will  it do to warn you? No, don't listen to me, my friend... you're right--follow the heart. The tangled sinews of the heart.

            --Alexandra laughs (and I with her).

            --What's so funny? George props his head up on one hand, attentive.

            --I want you, she says, imitating his voice, deep, breathy, eager, and sashays back to the bed, untying the robe as she goes. The draperies sway behind her. Stay with me! Pushes him on his back again, unzips his pants, pulls them off in waggling tugs, tosses them across a chair on the other side of the room. She plops down beside him, pulls the elastic band of his shorts away from his belly, feigns a peek. What have we here? she says. The usual suspects, eh? Lets the band snap back.

            --Ouch!

            --You'd think two educated adults would have better things to do with their time, she says, shaking her head. So, tell me. Why did you come here?

            --What?

            --You heard me. Why did you come today?

            --What kind of question is that? George, sits up--pushes aside the clippings, the cards, the notebooks scattered over the bed, pushes them away and takes her hand, presses it to his face.

            --Why indeed! She pulls it free, runs a finger over the severed eyebrow...

            --How did you get this?

            --When I was a kid, he shrugs. I don't know. I think I fell against a table. I forget. I want you, he says again in a whisper, almost inaudible, taking her hand, pressing his fingers to her palm.

            --I like stories, she says. Tell me more.

            --About what?

            --This, she says, stroking the scar with her finger.

            --I told you, I don't remember.

            --Make something up.

            But George is not in a mood for stories. He fondles her nipple, studying its shape, its color--storing the memory.

            --Another little fling, she says. A moment out of time. Puff! And it's gone!

            --Such is life, he says, leaning to kiss her. It's all we have. Take what we can get.

            --Yes, she says, and offers him her throat. I like that better.

            --I want more, he says, while accepting her offering.

            More... in my most sensuous echo... always more. George, George... you never know what's enough ...

            --Stay with me.

            --But I don't want to stay with you, she says, pushing him away, pushing him back, forcing him over, his head back on the pillow--over him, on hands and knees. Where? Where would we stay? Get serious, silly boy... she leans to kiss him, softly, lightly... don't be a jerk.

            He feels her breath on his lips. Her breasts hang pendulously from her chest. He studies them with interest... curious, how altered their form... notes the faint stretch marks running from her armpits, the dark hairs growing around the nipples. Our animal self. He brushes his hands over each breast, watches, follows their motion with his eyes, slides his palm down the curve of her belly until his fingers reach her pubic hair. He worries about his nails. Hangnails. An adolescent joke. She crawls forward, straddles him, knees widespread--helps him prop a pillow under his head, adjusts until he's comfortably nested between her thighs, allows him, graciously, to give her pleasure... drifting, drifting on the waters of desire--her body a puzzle for him to unravel... her father's twisted cords. So tight the knot... little by little to work it loose. With his thick fingers he could not undo me, could not, would not touch me. It was my way to keep him close, to keep him distant. You are such a pretty thing! he would say, and take me on his lap and I would turn my cheek to receive his kisses, and his rough, whiskered chin would chaff my neck. There. And there. I feel them now, now--the stubble on your chin in the dark where I cannot see. I would run my fingers ever so lightly over the spot, not wanting it to vanish. But in the morning, it would always be gone and when he stopped, stopped taking me on his lap, and kissed me no more on the neck, I knew without words that it was forbidden, it was the power growing within me, and I felt his fear of it as though it were his own. And her desire shall be for... and with such power, surely there will be no end.

            When it was late in coming, I was pleased, for I believed it was my power that had spared me, and even then I knew the truth, even then I knew--felt drawn ever closer to the time, to the loosening of the knots, to the end that comes like lightning scattering everything before it.

            Be my friend, I said to my body. You, here, now--will you be my friend? Not ask for more than I can give? Enough... to understand, enough? Outside it is snowing. Three years I've known him? Has it been that long? When it comes this late, you know it will not last. Melt before morning. It can't go on, can't last, you know that don't you? To keep and keep distant. Oh yes, unloose the knots, but gently, gently.

            --I had a friend once, once... where is she now? We would sleep over, she with me in my bedroom, and I with her. We did not know in our innocence what it meant... and one night I was with her in her house, to spend the night in my friend's house, and I was taking a bath, I was doing as I had done when alone with myself since I was a small child, as we had done together in all innocence, untying the knots--dreamily, gently, gently, the warm water lapping about me, without thought, utterly innocent, unselfconscious, unaware--lost in my pleasure, my reverie... I had not heard her on the stairs, did not see the door open--suddenly. Like that. I looked up and there she was, like a bolt of lightning, my friend's mother towering over me--her eyes, they cleaved me in two, like lightning, silent lightning where no thunder follows and no return. Not ever. Startled me to shame, to an awareness so abrupt, so unexpected, it divided me forever.

            --The next morning it came. My power had fled from my will, like a flock of crows startled from a carrion feast. I had been told everything. I knew all the answers... it was no help. I thought I would surely die. Empty. Emptied out. That little trail of blood.

            --Later, in the yard after a summer rain, I am with her again, my friend. I see her now with my second I... what is your question? I ask her, in my too grown-up voice, holding my doll between my eyes and the spring sun, high over my head in both hands. Like an offering. The lawn was wet that morning, that first morning, the morning of my lost innocence, my childhood no more. Wet, saturated with newly melted snow, the soft earth pulled at my shoes with every step; it made me queasy, the sucking of the mud under my feet. I turned in circles, staring heavenward, and wished that I had power to climb into my doll's shadow, to rise like an eclipse in human form over the mire. Oh you, my friend, so far below--I hold you like a mirror. Tell what you see in me? In me... In me... Do you? See me now, here... over him ... like Lilith, flying, flying, oh, gently, gently, yes, oh gently take me down.

            George's face, red, strained, earnest with effort, eyes clinched shut, above her now. His turn. Rows her like a boat. Her body shifts, rides the waves on the roll of her buttocks, up and back, rocking, rocking. She turns her head aside, lets her eyes wander to the animals in the window, meets her own faces in the mirror, the ones remembered, the stranger she has become.

            She  felt its presence--the power that had fled from her, saw it with her own eyes as though it were before her, saw it in the silence, in the movement of the trees... and in my mothers eyes, her limbs, her body... her strange and holy body.

            Alexandra opens her eyes: George's face close beside her, flushed, sleepy, wrapped in a solitude of his own. She begins to feel her way, to feel the words hovering somewhere over her head, herself, how a diver suspended in self-created darkness might slowly begin to rise toward the surface, that sheet of shimmering light above, a diver in a dream who has no need of air, and yet drawn out of grave sleep, allows herself ascent toward some vague postulate of day, a promise, a thing remembered more than sought. Her own body of water, the lake within, liquid with imaginings.

            --What's that? George asks, eyes half closed, stroking her temple with his fingertips.

            --I was afraid of her, she says, closing her eyes to the image in the mirror. Do you want to hear a story?

            --Of who?

            --A little girl...

            --A little girl named Alexandra?

            --What makes you think it's about me?

            --A guess.

            --Do you want to hear?

            --I said I did.

            --You sound like you're ready to fall asleep.

            --So do you. It's all right. I can stay awake. Go on... once upon a time, he prompted.

            --I don't have to...

            --I said I would...

            --Once upon a time there was... go on. I'm waiting...

            --... a little girl

            --A little girl...

            ... who saw herself no more. Became invisible... in her own eyes, and wanted to be so for others. Invisible. Like air. Only she wasn't so little anymore. Getting older all the time. She had a funny habit.

            --Like a nun?

            --You're not helping.

            --Sorry.

            --But sort of, yeah. A little girl... a nun in her own mind? None. Aspiration to nullity.

            George turns from the wall to face her, tucks the pillow under his arm and his head. Go ahead, he tells her ... I'm all ears.

            Alexandra rolls over onto her back, stares at the ceiling. She had this thing, she says, whispering, that in her own mind, when she looked at herself in the mirror, she could see herself grow old before her eyes.

            --I know what that's like.

            --Do you?

            --Not the little girl part.

            --No? I wouldn't think so.

            --Growing old.

            --I see... I think you know as little of that as you do about being a little girl.

            --I will never be a little girl...

            --This little girl, the one in my story, didn't want to see. And she certainly didn't want... didn't think she wanted to grow old. There had been a time when she couldn't get enough of seeing.

            --Seeing? Seeing what?

            --Herself.

            --How do you mean?

            --That what she had once sought, now she fled. She washed her hands with bowed head to avoid the eyes of the stranger she had become. She thought, I am nothing more than

the space my body moves through, and it seemed to her it was a space defiled by this newcomer, this coarse stranger who had entered her. Remember the news... how it was filled with children, photographs, stick bodies with swollen bellies, their little souls lost in suffering flesh? Great with death, she said, and she would wake in terror, feel her own belly huge and round, brush flies from her lips in the dark. Are you awake? she asks? Alexandra listens to his breathing. When she closes her eyes, there are auras of light, like falling leaves. She imagines them covering her body. George's hand has come to rest on her breast. She lays her hand on his, slides it back to the bed.

            --Among the shower of leaves there are faces, ethereal bodies, weightless, full of light. This was when she had begun to draw. Whatever she imagined, she turned into pictures. There was a series of drawings she made at school. The councilor called her mother, requested a conference--drawings of the great beast, Void. Who made the world and molded men from his own waste, charged them to populate his creation that they might return the treasure of his being from their truest nature.

            --It was an allegory, she had argued, testing the word. A knot. A gate closed and bolted to their eyes. Their perplexity at her ideas both troubled and pleased her; the provocation became her power. Do you see how things become confused? she whispers. Tangled, so many the knots we can never undo?

            --This story is beginning to grow...

            --What?

            --... strange.

            --You think so?

            --It's alright... go on. I'm listening.

            --And so it came to be, that the power of her images grew like a planted forest, a refuge among the trees.

            --She went to school, she came home, and once home, seldom left her room. She began to think of God as divine darkness... of purity as ignorance...a studied ignorance of the world as it is, that in unlearning the illusion of physical reality there might open to the heart a gateway, a flight to the divine unispectral light beyond. To bodiless truth. Where all the knots fly open like flocks of birds.

            --She began to imagine the Imageless, to address Him, to speak to Him, to picture him.

She saw him... as a boy, perfect in his beauty, lean and strong, with sword in hand, who came to slay the giants of the flesh. Starved for beauty, she could not reconcile herself to less. She would tell them that I... that she... had eaten earlier, that she had had a big lunch, that she wasn't hungry. Leave me alone! she cried, running from the table to her room and her anger would burst out of her--so sudden and so total the transformation, in an instant, from passive silence to rage--that no one dared pursue her.

            --Once her mother followed her up the stairs and confronted her in the hall, blocking the door to her room. She screamed, dug her nails into her own face till they drew blood, threatened to scratch out her own eyes if they didn't leave her alone.

            They learned. They learned what they could say, and what they could not. They learned how to move through the house like ghosts when she was present. She taught them, and they learned.

            --My aunt, she said...

            --What's that? he asks, waking from half-slumber.

            Outside, the snow is forming halos around the street lights in the gathering darkness.

            --The first hospitalization was the summer of her senior year. There was a yard party at a neighbor's. When she walked up to the pool in her bathing suit, all conversation stopped. Later, the neighbor had an earnest talk with her mother. Arrangements were made. She was told we were going to visit my aunt. She had not seen them pack the suitcases in the trunk before they left.

            --It was a three month stay. The little girl, not so little now, brittle as an autumn leaf, light as a bird, noted with droll amusement how they observed her at meals. Just which of us is obsessed with food? she asked. The stay was not without benefit. It was a lesson in how to keep secrets; and when it was over, her mother believed her cured... even happy. Sometimes, you see... a cure is nothing more than the perfection of deceit...  

            --Your aunt?

            --Yes.

            --What happened to the little girl?

            --Good question.

            --So what about this aunt?

            --The girl had an aunt, too... the one they told her they were going to see. George rolls closer, kisses Alexandra on the shoulder. We had a lot in common.

            --I gather.

            --I didn't want to grow old like her. She used to say, half to herself.

            --Like the girl's aunt?

            --Yes.

            --Go on...

            --At the same time... she wanted to be her... but without growing old. I was afraid... she says, smoothing his hair... used to be... leaving a kiss on the top of his head. So afraid.

            --Of death?

            --Of her beauty, of what lay hidden in that withered flesh. Of saying yes, as she had done. I saw her way as my own. Predestined. She was what I would become. I was the child she never had, misplaced by a generation. My mother... only the surrogate. And then, when I felt... but then, I didn't... couldn't...

            --Didn't what?

            --Feel it, or rather, when I became aware... Alexandra turns away.

            --Aware of what?

            --Of sex, she says, speaking to the wall, how it enfolded me, divided me, gave me eyes to see in her what would happen to me. Twelve years old--and I was terrified of death... but not my own.

            --I still don't know who you're talking about...

            --My great aunt, I told you. My great grandmother's older sister. The one they told me we were going to visit.

            --Visit?

            --In my story.

            --Ah, that aunt... George says, aware now that he has been drifting in and out of sleep. Tell me about her.

            --They put her away... like me, I thought. I just realized... how I made them do to me what they had done to her. Just now, in telling you.

            --How so?

            --She was in a home for almost as long as I knew her. Strange... we would visit her there, but I hardly remember. What I remember--or think I do, was before. While she still

lived with us. A rest home, they called it. Funny word for death, isn't it. ... only she refused to die...or rest in peace.

            --She's still alive?

            --In a sense.

            --Like the women in One Hundred Years of Solitude....

            --Now and then we would go to see her, Alexandra says, ignoring him. Like I said, what I remember best was before they took her away, standing beside my mother as she washed her in the bath. This is what I will become, I thought. Like her. One of them...

            --Them?

            --One of those round bodies with no waist, with bony chests under shapeless blouses... my great aunt in the bathtub, her skin rippling over her bones, yellow and loose and wrinkled as a borrowed robe.

            --Later, when my own breasts began to swell, I would see her in my mind, her breasts floating out over the soapy water like empty sacks--I had only to recollect her name and my tears would declare their independence. This ethereal beauty, I thought, that had nothing to do with bodies or sex. You're right... what you said. Like nuns. Like ancient saints. A wisp of hair from her pink scalp, blue in the fluorescent light, like down from a fallen angel. She was not of this world anymore, and I wanted to follow, and was terrified at the thought.

            --They say she lived to be one-hundred and nineteen years old. I don't remember when she died. I must have been in the hospital. One of those stays...

            --Hospital?

            --She grew so old it was as though she outlived her own memory, and ours. Vanished from our lives like a story you know that you've been told, but remember almost nothing about. There were stories, yes. I get them mixed up--what really happened, what I only heard, what I imagined? Who knows...

            --What hospital?

            --She was famous, you know, my great-great aunt.

            --Wasn't it a great aunt?

            --Famous ... for the voluptuary pleasures of her youth.

            --Sounds intriguing, he mumbled sleepily.

            --... or so the stories went. In my mind, I see her at the end of her days like a bed of dry brown leaves. It's hard to reconcile that with what they told of her youth. Her

excesses, they liked to say, had weathered her before her time. Did they also preserve her to such age? That, they didn't say.

            --They?

            --Those she had scandalized. They felt vindicated, most pleased with themselves, which phased my great-great aunt not at all. As she was forced to abandon her vices, one by one--here is where the stories change...

            --How do you mean?

            --There were different versions. She had enemies, and they passed on their envy, as her friends passed on their love. You'll have to sort out the strands for yourself.

            --You were talking about her vices? Tell me about her vices?

            --I was talking about how she left them behind, how they said that, as she was forced to abandon them, she clung the more tenaciously to those that remained.

            --This would be according to her friends, or her enemies?

            --Both, I think. ... as though by winning ever greater satisfaction from such pleasures as might be left to her there would be no diminishment of the whole. Do you understand?

            --George sits up, yawns.

            --One by one her--like I said--her senses deserted her, her hearing, her sight...

            --That would be from her enemies. They would remember that.

            --Until at the end only one thing was left to her, a single pleasure.

            --Leave it to her friends to remember her pleasures...

            --Late in the afternoon--every day, at the hour of sunset, at whatever time it fell in the course of the year, they would bring her a cup of weak tea with a single teaspoon of sweet brandy. She had so perfected her gift, they said, so concentrated its power over the years, that when they brought this cup to her bedside, the nursing staff, along with the more able bodied patients, would gather around her. It became a daily ceremony. They all would watch as the nurse (drawing lots, to see which of the staff would have the privilege for that day), guided her hand to the cup, and the cup to her mouth. At that moment, as the warm tea touched her lips, they said... a stillness, almost palpable, would fall over the room. Like a slowly spreading ripple on a pond, a widening circle that touched each heart as it passed, drawing them one by one into the enchanted ring of her silence, as though for her visitors, too, their hearing had faded, their sight, and all the power of the body came to be centered on this one sense, this singular pleasure. Some would close their eyes, sinking into a private bliss; a few would softly weep while her ancient and otherwise immobile face would slowly come alive, like the surface of a woodland pool touched by a summer breeze, and those blank eyes would come to life, a light, a warmth, a sudden bloom color would touch her cheeks, smoothing, softening the parched desert of her face, an almost youthful blush--incongruous, bizarrely erotic, comic even--as though to mock them and their solemnity.

            --Invariably, at this point, someone would see this, the incongruity, and unable to hold it back, begin to titter. Repressed giggles quickly turned to laughter and the laughter would spread in a second all inclusive wave, like the silence that preceded it, and that sudden easing of tension brought such release, such relief--that no one could hold back--the laughter would swell, fill, then overflow the room, echo down the halls... late visitors returning to their cars in the parking lot outside, would stop in their tracks and wonder.

            --After a time, the laughter would subside and they would file out of the room, one by one, just as they had come... once more, silence would bear her as a fallen leaf on still water.

            --Such was her gift, such was the perfection of her art.

            George had taken the papers and cards from beside the bed, spread them out before him. A section of newspaper slid across the quilt. A silver-gray pistol drifted between them, floating on a yellow lotus. Alexandra doesn't notice.

            --Stay with me, he says. She shakes her head, closes her eyes.

            --I told you, she says. I can't.

            --But why...

            --You promised! Don't argue with me.

            --But...

            --No! A time apart. You agreed. Here we are. This was my gift, I told you. Case closed.

            --You're miserable with him. You said...

            --It's my misery! It's my life, my choice. My punishment... the unbreakable bond of loss.

            --Come again?

            --Purgation. My sins in a previous life. Look! (angry now), I can explain myself anyway that suits me! I don't have to explain at all! It's my choice. What I have with him--you could not possibly understand. I don't expect you to. I don't want you too!

            --But why?

            --Because it's my life! For the last time, enough!

            Alexandra turns her back on George, folds her legs under her, looks down at her feet--distressed at the bruise under a toenail, at the faint shadow of hair on her legs, at a thousand imperfections that rise to meet her gaze...

            --They don't take the numbers into account...George said, breaking the silence.

            --What?

            --Incarnation. Do you know there's more people alive on earth today than have lived and died before us in the whole history of the species? Figure it out. It's mathematical.

            --And?

            --So, there has to be one hell of a shortage of souls in the reincarnation bank. You need new souls to meet the demand. Blanks. Or do they split, the souls, with each recycling, into two, four, a half dozen? Makes sense when you think about it, the duplications. All those people under hypnosis claiming to be Cleopatra, Genghis Kahn... This man?

            --What's that?

            --This man who helped you with your paintings?

            --What about him?

            --You're seeing him, aren't you?

            --I told you, enough! I'm not going to talk about this! Alexandra stops short ... What is this? she says, noticing the gun at last. George shrugs.

            --Is this real?

            --Of course not, he says. Why would I carry a gun?

            --That's what I'd like to know.

            --Hey. Maybe we could bump him off, he says, pulling a red velveteen bag from his briefcase.

            --Who?

            --Husband! Collect the insurance.

            --Not funny, she says. Not funny at all. Then smiles. That's a wicked look, she says... He draws her down beside him, kisses her mouth. This time she relaxes, reciprocates, lets him pull the robe off her shoulders, stroke her body.

            --He scares me, you know. The guy is seriously weird.

            --You should talk. Who, my new agent?

            --Him too... No, your husband. Divorce him! Marry me!

            --You wanted sex? You got sex. Let it be...

            --It's not just about... fucking... it's touch. Intimate touch. To spend the rest of my life without touch? Animated death, not life. He reaches for Alexandra... I can have sex by myself (draws her toward him), but two bodies are better than one, don't you think? George caresses her between her legs, kisses her breasts, one and then the other, then her belly--parts the lips of her sex with his fingers, slides down her body, feels her relax, her legs fall gently open, her smell both sharp and sweet rises to meet him, the taste of her on his tongue... and then she stiffens. Her hands reach down, takes his temples between her palms, draws him up, away, gently, firmly pushes him aside.

            --Don't, she says.

            --Life is short, we're not getting any younger.

            --You said that before. You know what this is? This is an affair. We had an affair, alright? What you wanted. What you got.

 

            --It's not what I wanted. Why are doing this? There was more. You know there was. You said it yourself.

            --Was is the operative word here.

            --What are you afraid of?

            --Suddenly you want--what? To grow old together? A fucking romantic. Once a prole always a prole. Alexandra reaches over the edge of the bed where her robe has fallen--thrusts her arms into the sleeves...

            --So what is this--just sex? That's it? Is that all we are? Fuck and run? That's all this has meant to you? What about your painting? What about your Salomes?

            --What about your writing?

            George winces.

            --I thought we were good for each other. I need you, he pleads.

            --There's the problem, you see. I have what I need.

            --George goes cold. No you don't, he protests in a whisper, shaking his head. You need me too.

            --She kisses him, like a mother would kiss a child. Don't tell me what I need, she says--rolls aside, draws her robe around her ... and this? she says, nodding at the hand gun. It is real, isn't it?

            --Not loaded, though, he says, clownishly, recovering himself. He picks it up, examines it. An historical artifact, he says. A piece of history. He cradles the gun in his hands like something alive, slips it into the velveteen bag, pulls tight the drawstring, puts it back into the brief case.

            --What? You don't like history?

            --You're the one who doesn't want to deal with history.

            --I'll ignore that. Look--I don't even have bullets. See! Don't even know how to load it. Never fired a gun in my life.

            --Then what are you doing with it? Really?

            --An impulse.

            --An impulse?

            --Research! I wanted to see how easy it was to get hold of one of these things. Something to write about--maybe an article. You know. One of the weeklies? You see--I haven't given up. There's still hope for me!

            --Was it?

            --Was it what?

            --Easy.

            --Fucking scary, it was so easy.

            --You mean you got it on the street?

            --Sort of.

            --Illegal?

            --Imagine this, George says, ignoring her. A gun that comes to life. This guy is thinking about killing himself, see, so he goes out and buys a gun, but when he gets it home it starts to talk to him. Being in pretty bad shape, he talks back to it. Doesn't think anything of it. What are you gonna do with me, the gun wants to know, and when he tells it, it gets pissed. Lectures him. Berates him. You jerk! Think of all the people out there who deserve to die! ... You said you were in the hospital?

            --Yes.

            --What happened?

            --What happened? What do you mean, what happened?

            --What was wrong?

            --I refused to eat. I wanted to die.

            --You?

            --Yes.

            --Anorexic? You? That's hard to believe.

            --I said, I wanted to die.

            --She walks to the window. You've changed, she said. A long silence.

            --I will see you again?

            --The snow has let up, she says, at last. I think the sky is clear. If it weren't for the lights, you know... I'm sure we could see the stars.

 

                                                                    Winter, 1984

The Magic Slate                                                                                                     Poena Magna II:2

Jacob Russell

 

 

                                                                Alexandra Gravid

                                                               Early Spring, 1984

                                                                Overbrook Farms

      She has been watching the trees outside her window, how they bow and sway in the wind‑‑steps  back into the room, sees her reflection on the glass, her face growing out of the branches. She had never imagined herself unfaithful--would not have thought it possible. Three years. Focuses the camera on the leaves, lets the window frame the image: branches in varying exposures, the woman in the glass. This was how they began, the Salomes.

            Combining drawings with the photo images from the window, with her collection of radiographs and CT scans, she started work on a series of large studies, some in ink and water color, some in acrylic. The branches vary in treatment, from black on white silhouettes, to washes freely rendered, to sections in photographic detail and always the suggestion‑-nebulous, embryonic, yet inescapable--of an emerging human form.

            Though she had not ruled it out, she had never planned to have children; it was a thought that occurred to her on occasion, something she might do in the future, like skiing in the Alps, learning Russian, flying across continent in a hot air balloon‑‑so when the idea began to drift about her as she worked, not exactly an idea, more a connection she began to make‑‑in the beginning, when the occasions were less frequent, she let them pass without notice.

            There were signs: her concentration began to go; she would look at the sheet of paper before her, brush in hand, and forget what it was she had intended to do; she would find herself daydreaming, staring at the screen, coming to herself curled on the sofa holding a cup of cold tea. This is what happened, she told herself, when you're having an affair, when your life is cleaved in two. Nothing that had anything to do with children, of course: pregnancy, birth‑‑and yet, over time, she began, in a vague sort of way, to associate these excursions (this is how she termed them in her more self-analytical moments), with certain quite specific memories of childhood--returning to them again and again. There was no apparent pattern to these memories, none that she would permit herself to grasp--other than the fact that they were‑‑memories of childhood: standing by the pool under the accusing eyes of her neighbors, her father's fishing lines, her own image in a thousand mirrors.

            George's urgent calls, his pleading to see her, set her into a panic, and when he persisted, she had their phone changed to an unlisted number.

            Later, the signs became more definite, more difficult to miss. A woman with an infant would pass in a crowd; days later she could recall the blanket it was wrapped in, the little cap it wore on its head, the tiny mittens on its hands. She became, without consciously investigating, knowledgeable of the designs of strollers, of prams, of car seats; had brand names at the tip of her tongue, knew luxury from economy models. One day she found herself pulling a bundle of coupons for disposable diapers from her purse and handing them to a neighbor, a new mother‑‑without remembering why she had saved them. The sound of an infant crying would send her heart racing in cold terror. She would go into her studio, prepare her ink and colors, stand at her easel and do nothing. The hours lost in these reveries began to intrude into her work time. The only mystery about what was happening to her, was of her own making, as if, to admit the obvious in so many words, even to herself, would make it irrevocable‑‑from that point on, there would be no turning back.

            It grew like an invisible seed; a flicker of light that teased at the corner of her eyes and would not stop; it spoke in the language of her body,  a feeling in her spine, a pressure low in her belly, a certain weight she bore above herself. As though it had already happened.

            She took up baking bread, kneading and kneading the soft dough, watching it swell in the bowl, rise over the top, rise again into loaves, pressing up and out, overflowing the pans. Whatever thoughts she might allow herself, she said nothing to Husband.

            She was thirty-seven years old. On the third anniversary of her mother's death, at twenty-two minutes before the hour of four after midnight‑‑which she knew to be the hour and moment of her own birth, she woke from a bad dream--that she had been with George--that she had forgotten her diaphragm...suddenly realized it was not a dream but a memory‑‑she had meant to forget--felt suddenly, simultaneously--terror, dread, anxiety, agitation and an irrational joy of such intensity, that for what seemed a very long time she could not be certain she was awake or asleep, living or dead. She went downstairs so not to wake Husband, but the more she paced the more agitated she became, the more her heart seemed to pound. Exhausted, she curled herself in the corner at the edge of the sofa and began to rock back and forth, holding to her knees, and when this did not calm her‑‑she reached up to the sofa and pulled down a little embroidered pillow her mother had made, which she held, rocked, and cradled to her breasts.

            When at last the summer dawn touched the window with rose, and she had grown calm, if not at peace--resolute, resigned to the inevitable, she climbed the stairs and returned to her husband's bed; and when he woke her, after he had showered and dressed for work, she took hold of his arm and in a voice that left no room for questions, told him that she would not, under any circumstances or for any reason, no matter how long it took, allow him to leave the shelter of her roof until he had made her a mother.

The Magic Slate                                                                                                     Poena Magna II:3

Jacob Russell

 

 

                                                                   Mock Orange

                                                                   Summer, 1984

                        --there is a moment when we understand more perfectly than we understand again until all is finished.

                                                                                    W.B. Yeats

            What was around her she subsumed. The continuation of a nine month long appetite. Green would have passed unnoticed if it weren't for the transient nausea, as though the cycle had returned to the beginning. Feeling inside out, she thought herself a bride with veiled hints: memory, a minuscule black hole, something old, something new‑‑what was that third, before the blue? With summer burned away like brush on the hill, not even a curl of smoke to mark its passing, how could she not be starved for hints? What happened?

            She only wanted to sleep but was afraid to close her eyes. When she did, the curtain floated gently into the room on the spring air and there was the smell of mock orange and it was someone's wedding and the branches snapped when her mother cut, then stripped the blossoms and twigs from the broken ends and carefully slipped them into place in the bucket of water that sat at her feet on the grass. But it wasn't spring, it was winter and she was blessedly late. The January sun that shone off the crusted snow on the rooftops seemed to billow the curtains and spray the room with light. For each branch her mother picked, another grew in its place, and the white blossoms fell to her feet till they drifted over her shoes, her ankles, her knees, sweeping up and around her in the wind like a cloud‑‑a white, lace curtain, a winding cloth, a blank spot in the eye of the sun.

The Magic Slate                                                                                                     Poena Magna II:4

Jacob Russell

 

 

                                                                Broken Branches

                                                               Early Spring, 1985

                                                     Philadelphia, Overbrook Farms

            If her desire for motherhood had taken her by surprise and the intensity of her anticipation through the term of her pregnancy had been wholly unexpected, she was even less prepared for the depth and suddenness of the depression that followed. It had come, almost at a stroke, on the afternoon of the third day, some twenty minutes or so after she had fed Cassandra. It was that precise, or so she would remember: on the day she felt her milk descend for the first time‑‑the child at her breast, more intimately bound to her at that moment than when it had yet been a part of her own body. And then, after they had taken the infant back to the nursery, on first thoughts of returning home, it struck‑‑as though the curtains in the room had been suddenly drawn, as though a cloud had moved across the sky and with its passing, the sun was drained of its power to bless the world with color. As though her deepest wish had betrayed her.

            It was that thought of home‑‑how it struck her with a kind of terror and the reality, when she entered it, did not relieve her fears. Cassandra was extraordinarily sensitive to her mother's mood. This Alexandra knew from those moments of respite which came to her now and then even in the lowest days of her depression. At those times, the easy times, she would pick up her daughter, and Cassandra would go limp, settling into her arms like water, fall blissfully asleep‑‑but the rest of the time, she had only to walk in the room and her daughter would begin to cry and thrash her limbs. If Alexandra tried to pick her up, she flailed wildly and stiffened her back, making it almost impossible to hold her. It was no use trying to nurse; and when she was switched to formula, Cassandra developed colic and terrible rashes, so the poor child could hardly sleep an hour at a time without waking in misery, and her cry! Her cry was a torture, an alarm that she could not answer and could not ignore. The child's first waking breath would rouse her. Before it could exhale, before the cry had begun, Alexandra was sitting up in bed, waiting, as though to be struck.

            Husband had taken Cassandra to their pediatrician for a checkup. It was the first time Alexandra had been alone in the house since Cassandra's birth. She felt light headed. As though walls had fallen down, walls that had been an hour before, weighty stone, hoary, mossed and ancient‑‑fallen! Tumbled down like playing cards! It was dizzying. Vertigo seized her. And not a wall to lean on! She bent over the glistening porcelain toilet bowl gazing unsteadily into the clear, unreflecting water, thinking of poor Narcissus. Oh God, what if she were pregnant again? There is too much of confinement in these waters! I need rivers, lakes, an ocean, driving rain! I know, dear Lady, yes. I know.

            Returned from the pediatrician, her husband announced Cassandra fit, placed her in her mother's arms and left for work. His voice, reassuring. For a moment, she heard it as she used to, as it used to be... because I thought he was safe, she said, I let him in.

            Alexandra placed the baby in the crib, laid her face-down on the blanket, ran her finger over embroidered figures--cradles rocking in the trees. In her studio, she arranged her brushes--noticed a wadded paper in the bottom of the jar. She took it out, unfolded it. It had been more than a year. She waited for her cry, and when it did not come, she picked up the phone, dialed. There was no answer. She settled herself onto the sofa and fell exhausted into a deep and dreamless sleep.

           

            --I thought you were going to work? She said, when she saw him standing at the door 

            --I did, he said. And now I'm home. He came and sat beside her. She let herself lean against him, stiffened--the usual instinct, but then--let herself relax, give in. He wrapped his arms around her. She felt his breath in her hair, easy and warm and the tears came, easy and warm. For a change, he did not speak. For a change, he let her drift on the seas of her own beguiling. Suddenly she woke from her daydreams with a start--a sudden dread‑‑Cassandra! All afternoon! She'd not cried out even once. How could it be?

            She knew‑‑even before she knew... she knew. Desperately, she drove the thought from her mind, imagined the child waking from its long nap, stretching out her little fingers, sleepy face, sleepy eyes‑‑saw herself lift her from the crib, Cassandra's warm face against her neck, sleepy face, sleepy eyes. Wanted to run, but forced herself calm, forced herself to walk calmly to the child's room. It was nothing. Her mother coming back to her, trying to take seed in her, planting her fears, her anxieties. Fear born of guilt... but for what?  What am I afraid of? That this is my punishment... No. It doesn't work that way.

            She is so still... unbreathing? Alexandra held her own breath... reached down to feel the child... the flesh where it rested against the sheet, unnaturally dark and warm where the blood, unflowing, had pooled... pulls back the cover, gently, slowly... too too cool, too pale the skin of her back where the blood had drained away. It cannot be, she told herself, even as she pressed her mouth to its mouth, even as she called, voice urgent, but calm, calm, called to Husband between breaths, even then she did not believe. No, she willed herself to see the child waking, to see her eyes open, it was only a matter of time--it would pass, it would be over this thing that was not happening. Even in the back of the ambulance, waiting for her to breath--only a matter of time--soon! Soon! The attendants, her rescuers, busy over her still body, but her eyes moving, questioning, asking, where? Isn't it true? Her eyes opened? She must be alive, must be. Even in the hospital, the resident before her, his not uncaring face, even then, even with that first moment of knowing, the knowledge denied, clinging like a vomitus rag over her face, choking her, gagging her... even then, disbelief and knowing vied in all disproportion to reality, the reality that would not come, would not return.

            Only, weeks later, when she ventured for the first time since that day into Cassandra's room, forcing herself to confront there the neatly folded sheets at the foot of the crib, the cradles tumbling from the trees, only then did she surrender to its bitter solace.

                                                                      *     *     *

            It was three years before she called again, and then, she could not speak. Held the receiver to her ear, listening to his voice, to his breath, to the dial tone. Another month before she tried again. Strictly business, she told herself‑‑to get back to her work, to save herself. They agreed to meet at the Orison on a Friday evening.

            --Where are you going? her husband asked as she opened the door.

            She stood for a moment in the entrance arranging the contents of her purse, searching for her keys, dropping them twice. She almost looked back, half turned, then stopped, and out the door again. She never answered, not him, not herself.

 

The Magic Slate                                                                                                     Poena Magna II:5

Jacob Russell

 

 

                                                                 His Calling Card

                                                                   January, 1989

            Dear Lady,

            I have waited for three years, and you have not disappointed me. Marianna informed me of your loss, which no doubt contributed to the absence of new work, the long interim between the second and third drawing of the series, and not unlikely, to your failure to answer my calls. I want you to know how saddened I was on your behalf‑‑the loss of a child cannot be caught in words. While I know such things cannot be forgotten, it is my hope that you will find some small measure of compensation as you take up once more the work, for which you have, without question, a profound calling. Know that my original invitation remains open. I look forward to our eventual meeting, and may there grow out of it, a mutually beneficial relationship.

                        Respectfully yours,     GF

            Three years since that first note? ... more. Almost five.  Those forbidden thoughts--still not lost. Not lost, rather‑‑fatefully displaced‑‑evident in her immediate recognition of his handwriting, the clarity with which she recalled the content of the first note, and how, remembering, she had, at least for the space of few quick breaths, forgotten its circumstances. How we imagine in what we do not know everything we want and do not have..

            For the rest of the morning, Alexandra fretted about the house in a state of increasing agitation. Presentiment hedged by anxiety. She would walk into her studio, stand before her most recent drawing, transfixed, recreating it, savoring this series unfurled from her head and hand, her eye a goddess... My voice. My eye above her seeing. How will it look to other eyes? Those first two at the Orison‑‑sent them too soon. They belong together. Tied, an umbilical rope, twisted tight, knots upon the cord. The frame withdrawn, the folded sheets. Stick figures. Twigs in the fire, flaming, smoke and ash, snow and ashes blown across the empty sky. Her mother's hand upon the page.

            Curious. This was not just any eye, she told herself. When it came to her work, she was indifferent to the approval or disregard of others... she told herself. Words could lift her for a moment, or hurt‑‑but the effect was brief, inconsequential. She told herself they didn't matter, that no one mattered. She did not work for them. And now, a note‑‑a few words, in that curious, flowing, 19th century hand. Her longing reawakened. What had he seen, she asked herself, what had he seen?

---