“I was half dead worrying about being dead,” she told Nina after the accident, “and punishing myself for not living up to my own ideas of a good life.”
“You’ve had a good life,” Nina said.
“Yes, but not the life I had in mind. Not the textured, brocaded, embroidered, embossed, baroque, burgundy, silk, opal, extraordinary, ruby life I had in mind …..”
“Oh, please!” Nina said. “I’m just happy to stick around for Daylight Savings Time,”
ii.
What does it mean to feel alive everyday? She knew she appreciated hot water. And was glad to live in the age of toilet paper.
Closer to the terror, Regina had craved simply that her dread would stop, that her life would have a sweet uneventfulness. She had longed for the pleasure of going through a day where things could be counted on to remain the same and even boredom could be cherished. But now, further along to that place where she realized she was no longer afraid to die, she wondered whether a peaceful vacuum would be enough.
She was sure there could be much more happiness. There had been a time, early on, when she took happiness and all the bright moments that came with it for granted. There had been a time when she carried sunshine in her head. All things were hers; she expected it. Good fortune was always there to be had. It was her right:
“I soar with the joy of my life,
the freedom,
delicious, liquid,
torrential
freedom
to come and go
and always
find everything
everywhere.”
But her recent life with its sour information changed all that. She had become afraid to feel happy, or safe, or hopeful, and now she had to figure out how to get it back again, if not in the same way, at least in ways that felt the same.
She knew this would be harder to do than knowing it should be done.
iii
Nina was happy.
When Nina fell forward for the first time from the low platform at the edge of the boat that took beginners out to the coral reef, it became all she ever wanted to do.
Pulling the goggles that rested on her forehead down over her eyes, placing the mouthpiece between her teeth, and checking to see if the breathing tube was upright, she took the plunge into the warm, emerald green Caribbean sea.
It was the quiet, the primitive quiet, the immediate silence that first captured her.
While everyone else chased colorful fish, Nina just wanted to cavort. In the absence of the gravity that kept her immobile on land, she would spin and romp along the seabed floor. Out here the reef was deep enough for the full force of the ocean to hold her almost standing upright, but shallow enough to let the current move, as she ordinarily could not, one foot in front of the other, the soles of her finless feet sinking into the sandy soil, and for the first time in her adult life, allowing her to take a short, bouncy underwater stroll.
No one had to explain joy to her.
iv.
Regina had always worried that she would get the meaning of life wrong, but now she made up her mind about a couple of things.
One was to admit that it would not be possible for her to remain constantly aware of life’s balance sheet, that she would become exhausted from continually not taking anything for granted—and that, if as Nina said, every part of life is extraordinary--- she would disappoint all the gods she was supposed to regularly thank for all the extraordinariness behind each ordinary thing.
She could not even remain aware of the extraordinariness of her own ordinary body, of the rich liquid gushing around inside the balloon of her skin. One would think it would tickle, at least. Instead, it flowed on as much outside of her consciousness as a river in a different city.
The second thing Regina decided…..determined, yet still muddled…. was she would have to get rid of everything in her life that didn’t work, and that---- if she were to be alive at all---she would have to paint again.
CHAPTER FIFTY SEVEN
i.
Sometimes a good day is just a couple of new ideas.
The work didn’t have to be perfect; the universe was not perfect.
It didn’t even have to be a success.
A famous composer of Broadway musicals Regina knew had been a huge success, a household word. He had startled and shocked the world. The walls of his apartment were covered with the familiar posters and awards recognizable to everyone as icons for the last half century. His Broadway shows had been seen and loved for their accurately catching life as it was about to explode into something different. Yet, he was broke. No one would back him in any new venture or even hire him for an old one. The time for his work seemed to have come and gone. He was facing jail in a squabble over copyrights. His children refused to answer his phone calls. He was slump-shouldered, miserable, and desperate. But his walls remained covered with the frozen proof of how the world had loved him. It was too easy to please the world.
Her paintings would never please, because they were not easy work, done easily. And it had become too ludicrous for Regina to keep up her old obsession for immortality. As much as she had once hoped she would live forever through her art, she understood that the most she could expect was to be misunderstood now.
CHAPTER FIFTY EIGHT
He was finished with “R”
After all this time he imagined the impact of his empty threats on “Regina” surely would be less than he wanted.
He wanted gasps. Like a bad silent movie.
Clearly it was time to find E: Ellie, Evelyn, Esther, Eve, Esmerelda, Ellen, Edith, Evan, Elena, Elizabeth, Eustace, Edwidge, Elaine, Erin, Estelle, Evangeline, Edye, Enid, Emma, Ennis, Eleanor, Erica, Edna, Edwina, Eartha………
How would he start this time?
But there was no starting.
It was inevitable that his caged violence and entrenched sadism would eventually fall back on him. His life sentence lulled him into indifference toward whatever trouble he could get into for whatever reason. But this time he picked the wrong fight.
And now no one on the outside world would be S.C.A.R.E.D anymore.
CHAPTER FIFTY NINE
If only this could be an ordinary spring.
She had waited, but there had been no Christmas card. By then she knew by heart the formula the alleged bomber used, and could probably write a credible threat herself. It would have shown Three Wise Men on the front, and inside it would say “It’s a Wise Man who knows three on a match won’t bring good cheer.” And include three matches. She couldn’t make up her mind if they should be burned out or not.
But a card never arrived. Not then, nor for the New Year, when the clamorous brightness of the city challenged the dark universe with the illusion of securing us to the planet.
There were not even any threats in between or since.
Maybe it was over.
Maybe it wasn’t.
She had cautiously started—with the weary insistence of Detective Walter-- to enter the era of it “probably not” going to happen again.
She was beginning to adopt the gamblers’ syndrome: after a loss, the brain thinks it is due for a win. Regina could feel herself slowly letting down her guard, beginning to feel safe to feel safe. She had already stopped jumping at the explosive sound of thunder and returned to hearing it as the drum roll to a grand light show.
The first time she left her loft without thinking about what terrible thing might happen next, it was like suddenly getting over the flu. There seemed to be air lifting up the bones of her spine and a switch turned on behind her eyes. She felt like a whole person again.
But she was not depending solely on the absence of threats—she was beginning to give herself good things.
ii.
It was a small start.
She vowed to wear only matching underwear.
She accepted that coffee and summer were their own rewards.
She thought about changing her bank password to LIFE.
br /> She reversed her attitude towards panhandlers and worried less that they would use the money to slowly kill themselves, but instead honored their requests to let them feel some moment of success in their daily round of pain and embarrassment.
She took a certain pleasure in knowing how things are.
But more difficult and resistant to change was her promise to herself to paint again.
She knew she had to do it, but she still didn’t know why.
Just being no longer afraid to die, didn’t make living easy. She could hardly bear again the straightjacket of the painting life, the voluntary house arrest. The memory of the necessary isolation almost sent her screaming out of the dark loft into the bright sunshine of the streets. In the past it had helped if she had someone with whom she could thrash out all these conflicting emotions of not wanting to paint and being compelled to. There had always been Marius, for better or worse. Now who? Nina would listen, but try as she might to be a good sister, it wouldn’t be long before her eyes glazed over and Regina would realize she was talking to herself.
CHAPTER SIXTY
Regina needed Doris.
So what could she do?
People pray to the dead all the time.
She wasn’t up for that.
But the little flags on which Tibetan monks sent prayers out with the mountain winds to whatever heaven there was, seemed like a rather poetic and symbolically satisfying gesture.
She realized that everything she wanted to talk to Doris about was probably too long for a prayer flag, but she had become flexible and was willing to create her own version.
Instead of cloth blowing in the high clear air, she would tack up a much larger paper version on her studio bulletin board where she kept small rough sketches and swatches of color.
There, it too might welcome life changes and become part of a greater cycle.
So she began:
“My dear Doris,
I am sorry my stubbornness did not allow me tell you when you were alive how often you were right. Well, you were right again: I am going to paint, in spite of myself.
But it is not so simple as that.
I still ponder, as you and I have done in many of our past conversations, why anyone should move away from the generosity of life into the selfishness of art.
During my recent hiatus from the foolish angst of the “artistic” life, I thought I was free of all these questions without answers. But apparently not.
So maybe I have come up with a fragile understanding. At least for myself.
It is impossible for us to understand the incomprehensible interior of others, especially because ordinary expression falls so short. How can we know what others are unable to reveal?
Art may be the tool to remedy this unhappy situation, since it speaks what we want to tell, but can hardly say.
It may be the map that guides our differing souls through the strange lands of each other. Or A downloading of one person’s consciousness onto another; a way to feel the kick in someone else’s gut.
It may offer reassurance of the already known; possibly reveal the never known .It is a portrait of our mutuality. It helps us become each other.
Art is the Exchange of Mysteries.”
She paused, certain that Doris would say it was all pompous nonsense, if she could say anything at all. “Well,” Regina continued defiantly to her aunt, “It’s my definition. I can make up any one I want.”
What she wanted was for the world to understand itself.
ii.
Regina gave herself freedom. She made a choice.
Choice: the very core of joy.
She had given up her fear of being surprised by dying. Now, she would choose to give up her fear of living badly.
And just live.
One morning at 5 a.m. she awoke with a strange restlessness. “What is this?” she wondered.
She had been awakened by happiness.
It wasn’t a grand happiness, but apparently she had begun to accumulate again the small joys that could hold their own.
THE END
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[email protected] Also by this author: short stories Changes of Heart; international romance novel Skylark; essay on Living With The Brooklyn Bridge and poetry Star on Fire.
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