The Name of the World

  “She looked good on a poster in a head shop. She looked quite beautiful and blue and they didn’t know what she was the goddess of, with all her extra arms. They were new and hip, and they’d renounced all concepts. They were too hip to know anything at all.”

  “Your parents were flower children, maybe.”

  “No maybe! We all went to the Rainbow gatherings every summer. Every July Fourth until ’93, for an orgy of pantheism and anarchy. After Goddess left home they moved to The Land—that huge commune down in Tennessee. My dad met Mom in ’68 when he was a fisherman in Alaska. She worked every summer in Anchorage.”

  “Anchorage? Doing what?”

  “Well. As a matter of fact she was a whore.”

  “Fantastic,” was about all I could say.

  “She made enough in ten weeks to live all year. I mean—back then. Before they met.”

  “Ten weeks…” She had a way of making anything I could say sound stupid far in advance of my saying it.

  “After they met, no, she quit the seasonal whoring, and then all she had was her memories.”

  “Of course, you could be kidding me.”

  That seemed to hurt her. “Why do you say that?”

  Now we had one of those pauses, but it wasn’t hers, it was mine, because I hadn’t thought she could be wounded.

  “…I guess because I don’t want to seem gullible.”

  “Okay. Nobody does. Should I tell you what I like about you?”

  “That depends.”

  “I know. But I like you because you’re small. Everything about you is the right size. Your spirit, too. Everything’s portable. You’re very self-contained. What do you like about me?”

  Though I’d already said it once, it happened to be true, and so I said, “I admire you because you’re wild.”

  She laughed at me for that.

  I said, “Oh, you’re wild. You’re light. Even when you’re perfectly still you’re ready to be blown all around by the elements.”

  Now she looked shocked. “You did a pretty good job of stammering up till now. But that sounds rehearsed. Either that’s a line of yours, or you’ve been thinking about me. Thinking actual words about me in your head.”

  “I dreamed about you last night.”

  “Tell me.”

  “No.”

  “Have you had fantasies about me?”

  To get back something of myself, I crossed my arms over my chest. Ten feet away the radio still played jazz. She was still standing. I was still sitting in a chair. I felt like a pupil, a slow one. “You’re a force on the planet, that’s for sure. Where did you get that far-out name?”

  “Have you imagined me? Am I your fantasy?”

  “All right, yeah. You certainly are.”

  “And what have you fantasized, Michael Reed?”

  “I don’t know. This conversation is getting pretty close to it.”

  “Let me guess what you’re thinking…Okay…And the answer is no.”

  “No?”

  “No, they’re not redheads.”

  “Who?”

  “My sisters. They’re brunettes.”

  “That’s not what I was thinking.”

  “But Goddess bleaches hers out platinum. She’s very L.A. All right—what were you really thinking?”

  “I couldn’t possibly remember now.”

  “I knew I could make you stop!”

  “Okay, okay. I was thinking about your Fourth of July striptease competition. It’s only five days away.”

  “Would you like to help me shave?”

  “Shave?” That stopped my mouth for two long seconds. “Isn’t it a little early for that?” Although inside I said only, Sweet gah-dam Jesus.

  “Come and sit outside.”

  And I rose and followed her down the brief corridor, out the back door into the Midwest. She brought with her a small box of light wood—redwood, or cedar—built like a cigar box but naked of any design. When she saw me puzzling over it she opened the lid to show me it held a variety of envelopes, used envelopes, of many different sizes and colors, but generally of the sort for letters or greeting cards. We sat beside each other on the new grass, she with the box in her lap; and she fingered through the envelopes as if searching for one in particular. Her knee lay lightly against my hip. All this was fine, but it wasn’t enough. I wanted something more than mere physical touch. Something unexpected. Something impossible to foresee. I looked at my watch: just past seven, the sun hanging and swelling, the shadows long and cool, though the heat still clung to the land. A banana moon stood above the horizon. Some clouds way to the north; they might disappear or they might bring hail and tornadoes. After these four years in the Midwest I’d learned to expect any kind of weather at any moment. I had rejected the weather, in a way, had walled myself off from any approach of the elements, had made them my enemy after the weather had become, in effect, the murderer of my wife and daughter.

  Flower said, “Will you give me a sample of your handwriting?”

  I didn’t know how to respond to this. “I’m not sure.”

  “Write down a few words for me. A sentence, a phrase, a name, anything.” She closed the box and set it in my lap. “Do you have a business card?”

  Here I felt our movement toward the unforeseen, in the direction of something that couldn’t have been predicted. I don’t think I’ll try to explain what I mean by that. Instead I’ll hope it comes clear on its own. I put one of my business cards flat on the lid of the box and pushed the ball point from the pen with my thumb. A phrase? A name? I wrote: the name of the world—across the back of my card and set the box in Flower’s lap.

  She looked at my writing and read the phrase aloud. She opened the lid and put the card in one of the envelopes and closed it up with all the others inside their box and held it in her lap again. Her smock was buttoned high, came up just below the cleft of her neck and breastbone. There in her pale skin were one or two unbearably thin blue veins.

  Why she wanted to spend this time with me I could only guess, because I was afraid to ask. I sat beside her looking at the daylit moon, wanting to kiss her, but afraid to. Also I had a powerful urge to leave, to get away from her, or from myself in this situation, but that idea scared me, too, because I saw myself five minutes down the road, braking and considering, accelerating and stopping, maybe even turning the car around in the big fields, the only person in the only car from horizon to horizon, and then turning the car around yet once again and heading home, wanting to go back to her, but afraid to.

  Now I’m going to interrupt myself, and I don’t know how to signal that except by saying it.

  Looking over the pages of this reminiscence, I see I’ve misled. I’ve created the impression that what I’ve been aiming at is the account of a one-night stand, and that the item pending most crucially between Flower and me was my loss of a kind of late-life virginity. I’ve implied I’d had nothing to do with women since I’d lost my wife. That’s not true.

  The worst of my disequilibrium had passed in a couple of years. I wouldn’t bore even a highly paid psychiatrist with the details of my love life, my sex life, during this period, except to say that it was quite a lot less than nothing—that is, I couldn’t bear to have so much as a single sexual thought, let a single desire so much as flicker in my mind, during the two years after I was widowed. Not only because my grief made me loyal to my wife, but also because I was grieving for someone who was dead, and death is such a physical thing. I didn’t want physical things. I didn’t even like facts about things, and in a secret way I came to hate the truth itself.

  This extra dimension of loneliness, this revulsion for the world and even, at first, for the stuff of which it was composed, seemed unique at the time. But I think I see now that it was completely typical, and that what revolted me above all was the understanding that everything passes away.

  So this sad insight didn’t first visit me while I waited with Flower for something to happen between us. And she w
asn’t the woman who broke me out of the ice. A month or so after the second anniversary of my widowhood, I went to a prostitute. Or rather, she came to me, came to my hotel room in Washington where I was staying at the expense of the Senate Committee on Ethics, who were conducting hearings. (I was called to Washington, but never called to testify.) A tall woman in her thirties, the only prostitute I’ve ever met as such. I explained my situation to her, and she was very understanding, and she even refused payment, and we made love. At first she refused payment, that is, but afterward she suddenly wondered if I hadn’t been conning her with a sad story, and she wanted her money on general principles. Ultimately she decided I couldn’t have been so false about a part of life so real, and wouldn’t take the money. But I insisted. So she took it. And that is how that went.

  I didn’t feel villainous, or soiled, either. I felt like I’d been with a woman, we’d meant something to each other, maybe not very much, and she’d passed along.

  So this isn’t about that at all.

  Am I making sense in this account? Am I intelligible? Or am I muttering? I think it stands a chance of being useful. That’s the point of writing it all down. It’s not just an aid to private introspection. But am I being too meditative? Too introspective?

  The joint of Flower’s collarbones showed in the neck of her smock, and just below it the moles and imperfections in the flesh on her breastbone. To let my wife and child be dead. I didn’t think I was cruel enough for that. Because that is what the imperfections in Flower’s skin invited me to do. There was a sense in which Anne and Elsie had to be killed, and killing them was up to me.

  I had to break the tension, the mixed desire and shame, I had to say anything at all. “I’d like to read the phrases inside your envelopes. Let me see what other people wrote.”

  “I can’t let you do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because then when these words are all closed up inside this box they won’t be in a dark place anymore. Light will leak in and they’ll slowly get eaten up. A dim light. A deteriorating light. The light that comes from your mind.”

  “What do you mean? My mind in particular, or anybody who happens to read them?”

  “Anybody’s mind. If anybody finds out what they say, their perfection will slowly deteriorate.”

  “But you know, don’t you? You’ve read them.”

  “Yes. But if anybody else ever does, then what they’re doing inside me will be destroyed.”

  She looked at me now with a very vivid, communicative expression on her lovely face. It said she was quite willing to view all this as absurd and humorous, but her eyes emanated a deep curiosity to see if I might somehow understand. I think I did understand. But I don’t think she believed I did.

  And I did kiss her. Touched her sleeve with my fingers. She didn’t draw away. I plucked at her sleeve and she came close and I put my lips to hers.

  “Okay,” she said. “Come back inside, please.”

  She took me by the hand, carrying her box in the crook of her arm. On the way in she toed the rubber-tipped stopper with her pointed boot, and the heavy door swung to behind us. She set the box of phrases beside her pallet in the classroom and we descended onto the folds of nylon—it was a sleeping bag, not much of a cushion against the concrete floor. For a few minutes we kissed wildly, but I felt like a man in the wrong neighborhood, expecting at any moment to turn onto the right street, wondering where the hell it is and growing more and more panicked and disoriented. She was sweet, nothing about her felt held back, no slight deflection, no place reserved for herself, no irony or mischief, no studious objectivity, none of the stratagems that might have kept part of her out of this dalliance with an old man.

  “Tell me your dream. The one you wouldn’t tell me.”

  “I saw you in a room full of strangers. On a stage. They were studying you. It was just a dream.”

  Kissing me, she unbuckled my belt and I helped with the rest. In my white boxer shorts I gave back her kisses and we both worked at the top buttons of her smock.

  “This isn’t it,” I said. I felt no desire for her now. With a distinct and physical sensation I was slipping back into that hole where I felt no desire at all. I gripped her hands tight but it didn’t help. “I’m leaving.” I clutched at my clothing, snatched up whatever looked like mine from the floor and covered myself.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  My shirt open, barefoot, I got out to my car and tossed my shoes and socks into the back seat and hung on desperately to the steering wheel. She stood on the steps, just a shape. A shape containing…

  This—now—was the point I’d wanted to reach with her. All the expected moments had been stepped through. One step more would take us into moments that could never have been foretold. I opened the door and put my feet out and pulled on my shoes. I buttoned my shirt, I watched her shape. I turned off the motor and went back.

  She wasn’t there. The shape of her may not have been there in the first place. I went up the front steps and down the steps inside.

  She stood still at the end of the hallway, having hesitated, I guessed, at the sound of my footfalls coming. She’d opened the back door again. From outside a warm green breath filled the hallway and began moving through it softly and audibly.

  She came toward me carrying her message from a vanished god. “Would you like to hear the story of my name?”

  I had a sense of her studio, just to my right, filled with ghostly items and skeletal things.

  Again: “Would you like me to tell you the story of my name?”

  I followed her back into her studio and sat on the spangled chair.

  “First I think I have to tell you another story before I can tell you the story of my name.”

  I didn’t say a word.

  “An illustrated tale. Not just a story—a picture, too.”

  Looking for something or other, she wandered among her objects, these multifarious seashells, sprays of baby’s breath, sprays of peacock feathers like abstract eyes on white necks, many-colored balls of yarn, tinfoil collected into shiny knots, miniature bottles you could fill to overflowing from a thimble, somber and translucent, purple, blue, green. She’d made her world a space for these things, for the train cars and props of model railroads, particularly the engines, small and black and heavy engines; birds’ nests cradling eggshells of turquoise and mottled amber: things whose perishing had been arrested by their power to make her love them. Objects not stored in boxes and labeled for eventual use, but left out in plain sight to be found and contemplated. Left open to encounters with strangers.

  “Before I can tell you the story of my name,” Flower said, “I believe I have to tell you the story of your face.”

  I felt better when she said that. “A sad, ugly tale.”

  “I don’t want to! But it’s necessary.”

  She’d found a sketch pad, a sheaf of newsprint in large sheets. She sat on a stool behind the nearest easel, set up the pad, took a thick pencil from the easel’s tray, and began, I guessed, to draw. She was left-handed.

  “Your lips are thin. You have a big space between your nose and upper lip, like a monkey, but you miss having a monkey face because your chin is too small and there’s not enough face beneath your mouth to make a monkey face. Your nose is small and pushed up too far. Too much of your nostrils show. That makes your eyes look sort of dull-minded and also sort of fearful.”

  She stopped momentarily and honed her pencil on a piece of emery paper.

  “Your eyes are a very beautiful blue. You have nice round cheeks, and bushy well-defined eyebrows. Very definite eyebrows. Your hair is nice, very tightly curled, kinked, really, and with lots of colors in it, brown and blond and some blue and mostly gray. And you’re small.”

  Flower stood up and held the sketch pad out before her at arm’s length a full minute, looking back and forth between her rendering and her model. She turned the pad to me. It was quick, but recognizable.

  “Yo
ur hands are small. I’ve told you you have an inner and outer smallness that’s very attractive, at least to me.”

  “Thank you. I think.”

  “The story of your face is over.”

  “Thank you even more.”

  “Now the other story. Once I was taken away by a guy to a gingerbread house.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “This is the story of my name.”

  “Okay. All right.”

  “When I was a little girl, one day a man led me away from my home and took me to a gingerbread house.

  “He was small like you, Michael, and his nose was turned up too far, like yours, and his chin was too small like yours. But his face was narrow, and his whole head, too, and his ears were big and funny. Not like yours. You have nice ears.

  “I was four years old. One morning he came to our back yard and took me away. They didn’t find me till after dark.

  “He sang a song,” she said.

  “Were you terrified?”

  “I wasn’t. And I’m not terrified when I remember. But everyone I’ve ever told it to has been.”

  (She looked at me quizzically, searching, I suppose, for my fear. I’m sure it was there and I’m sure she discovered it.

  (Yet now these words came from me—I didn’t intend them and I didn’t even know what they meant—I just remember them now—I hear them—I said, “I still can’t feel anything.” No response from Flower. Maybe she didn’t hear.)

  “I don’t remember much. Sometimes when I’m trying to recall what happened, I think I remember another little girl there. An almost sad little girl watching me. I didn’t think of sadness then, so I don’t know, but I almost think she was sad. Here’s what else I remember:

  “In the morning I was playing in the garden. I had some mischief in my mind. The back yard was bordered all around by a flower bed about six feet wide, all along the base of this cinderblock wall that enclosed the yard. It was the spring season. I looked in the earth where I sort of understood, without actually remembering doing it, that my mother and sisters and I had planted bulbs in the fall, tulip bulbs, and I sensed there were tulips growing there right now, just under the dirt. I wanted to dig there and see. It was a mischief in my mind. I didn’t care if I disturbed the tulips.