IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN
Since all of my losses, everything had constantly shrieked, ―New! New!‖ Somewhere below that lay my past, my reality, just out of sight. I was looking for my past with total concentration. Nick was a start.
But Rhonda and I were driving to her place in Vermont. I was painting in earnest, and most of my friends now were new. But Rhonda and I had a New England ethos in common; I liked her; she was a very good painter. I hadn‘t gone anywhere outside the city with anyone in years. The reason I was doing it now was that Rhonda‘s place was so close to our place in Vermont.
In the car, under the conversation and the sound of the wind going 65 mph past the windows, I thought about Corinne. I‘d talked to her the night before, long distance, long, long distance. She‘d told me that her father had died in August. She said I was the first person she‘d been able to talk to about it. ―And you know,‖ she said, in her high, sweet, nasal voice, ―I sat shiva and nobody came.‖ I think that‘s what got me – the thought of all those nobodies (and I knew them, they‘d been my department) not coming. We talked for quite a while, but the only thing I remembered saying to her was, ―In the end you realize that even when you‘re barely functioning and you feel as though you don‘t even exist, you‘re still going on perfectly well.‖ I knew, because when Rick had killed himself, everything had changed. I knew what I was talking about.
―Oh, that‘s a very valuable realization,‖ Corinne had said in her habitual tone of sweet envy. You don‘t exist, I told her in my mind. I don‘t think I‘m you.
It was funny when we got to Rhonda‘s, funny being in that house, -- like being in our place in Vermont, or a childhood, shorn of emotions: everything was similar to things in our house, but there was no feeling attached to them: the chairs, the hills. Rhonda was too frantic, too worn out to attach anything to them. My mother was like a Vermont hill herself, warm and calm and grassy and sweet-smelling, breathing life into everything.
The crumbs in the cupboard meant something to her, and to us. But this house was bare, bare of emotion, bare of thought. It was like a childhood without my mother – without everything.
A friend of Rhonda‘s arrived in the afternoon. I walked five miles with the woman and her Welsh Corgi without being able to think of a thing to say. My past was screaming below, and there was nothing I could do. I felt like a fool. At dinner I started talking about Corinne. But they didn‘t know Corinne. They were polite. Well, I had shared my feelings. I had a feeling, unshared, that all was lost.
Charles Spence arrived at eleven o‘clock the next morning. Charles is our tenant, and he arrived in his ‘52 pickup with his wife Carly and their youngest son. We drove out of the pine needles and lakes of New Hampshire and into the rolling hills of Vermont, right up to our place. It looked exactly the same, only more beautiful. And I had a sense that a lot of cloudy emotions had been swept away in the course of time and that now it looked real. Charles Spence has a failing lawn care business, and there were a lot of old machine parts piled around the house, and the lunch we all had was a food stamp lunch, but all in all I thought that the place was flourishing without us. There were lots of new neighbors 36
on the hill, including a Jewish vegetarian silversmith couple, which in our day would have been like gypsies, or gnomes. The Spences‘ kids were bright and alert, playing with the junk and picking the apples that, Carly said, had never been so good.
I took the oldest girl on a walk up the hill with me. She knew the property as well as I did, but differently – those kids didn‘t just love it, they played on it, all over it – bicycled and sledded down the hill, which is extremely steep. Another childhood was going on there now, where mine had never ended. When we got down to the house again, I left here and walked across the field. I realized afterwards that I hadn‘t noticed when I crossed the place where Rick said, ―Go away.‖ Last year it had been harder. But back at the house Charles Spence started telling me how the porch roof was leaking and that he wanted to take off the porch. I thought, ―How can he take off the porch? It‘s where Rick and I slept.‖ I didn‘t let myself think anything else.
And driving back over the mountains in that truck, the brakes of which were going and which had to be started with a stick and had a shattered window on my side, I thought I had never been so happy in my life. It was autumn, and, as they say, the peak of foliage.
The Spences asked me to come back soon, I kissed Carly good-bye, and they rattled off.
The night could have been better, but the next morning there was only the trip back ahead. I mailed a friend a post card saying, ―Just to prove I was here.‖ Because I never go anywhere, never do anything, now that Rick has died. At least, it seems that way.
We stopped in Hanover to get something to eat. I went out to look around and found a little gallery on the second floor off the main street. The woman who ran it was French, very talkative, about my age. She took out a lot of things for me when I told her that I was a painter. She seemed as glad as I was to have someone to talk to. I felt like my father – I pretended I was my father – who can go anywhere and make himself at home, because he carried his whole world with him all the time. I don‘t. My world comes over the telephone long distance and then hangs up, and when I call back all I get is an answering machine. But for an hour I made a world, or we made one, the French woman and I, and I could tell she was as happy about it as I was. I can do it, sometimes, but I have to be reminded of someone else – I‘m not enough, by myself, to make anything, to share anything. Things have to be pre-shared, with me, then I can share them again. And I close down when I‘m not sharing things. I don‘t even share them with myself. Because I think that all is lost.
Rhonda gripped the wheel and sang hymns. I sat back and thought. I thought about Marina Tsvetaeva, and all that passion and terror. ―She‘s your poet,‖ my Russian friend Helena had said. I might reach those feelings that were now, for most purposes, locked in the past
because for the brand of the criminal
and for every known sickness
we have our healer here…
37
The night before, at dinner, Rhonda had suddenly said that she‘d like to try illustration, to illustrate children‘s books, and she had talked about how she‘d like to start with a fairy tale that was ―in the public domain.‖ I thought about how those words had struck me then
– they were so generous, so open. I could hardly believe she knew them, or that I had forgotten them. And I felt as though, if there existed a phrase like ―in the public domain‖, things might not be so bad.
Last bridge I won‘t
give up or take out my hand
this is the last bridge
the last bridging between
water and firm land:
and I am saving these
coins for death
for Charon, the price of Lethe
this shadow money
from my dark hand I press
soundlessly into
the shadowy darkness of his
shadow money it is
no gleam and tinkle in it
coins for shadows:
the dead have enough poppies
This bridge
Lovers for the most part