Her Body and Other Parties
“No,” I said. “Just a coincidence.” I set my glass down and almost missed the table.
Then there was Lydia’s hideous barking laugh. Diego’s face was buried in her long hair, dropping some secret observation into her ear. She looked at me and laughed again. I blushed and busied myself with my meal.
Anele finished her wine and placed a hand over the glass when Diego lifted the bottle. She turned to me. “While I’m here I’m working on a project that I’m calling ‘The Artists,’” she said. “Would you be willing to spend an afternoon doing a portrait session with me? No pressure, of course.”
The pressure felt real, but I was drowsy and also I already liked Anele in the way that I liked some people—she seemed overwhelmingly well intentioned and was, it could not be denied, strikingly beautiful. I saw she was watching me expectantly, and I realized I was smiling for no apparent reason. I rubbed my numb face with my palms.
“Happily,” I said, biting the inside of my cheek. My mouth went to metal.
By the next morning, a chill had descended upon the P—— Mountains, and the grounds outside the window of the kitchen were shrouded in mist.
“Do you drink coffee?” Anele said behind me. I had barely nodded when she placed into my hand a warm and heavy mug, which I sipped from without examining it.
“I can walk you down to the studios,” she said. “I’d be happy to. It’s hard to get there if you don’t know the way, even when everything isn’t obscured in fog. Did you sleep well?”
I nodded again. A small animal in my brain stirred with intent—to vocalize and thank Anele for her many kindnesses—but I could not remove my eyes from the whiteness beyond the window, how easily it obliterated everything.
When the front doors shut behind us, I jumped. From the steps, I could just see the outline of trees, which we had to pass through to reach the lakeside. Anele set off through them, finding the path. She hopped effortlessly over a fallen log and swerved around a patch of fat, glistening mushrooms. At some point, we passed a narrow white bench, whose design and dimensions suggested it was not meant for resting. Without turning, she gestured toward it. “The bench is about halfway between the lake and the hotel, just for reference.”
When the trees were behind us, I saw the faintest impressions of buildings. One loomed directly in front of me. For the first time, I broke from Anele’s wake and stepped toward it, hoping for clarity with proximity.
“Jesus!” Anele grabbed the strap of my bag and pulled me back. “Be careful. You almost just walked into the lake.” In front of me, the air was like milk—no building in sight.
She gestured to her right, where a series of steps ascended toward shadow. “This is you. Mourning Dove, right?”
“Yes,” I said forcefully. “Thank you for showing me the way.”
“Be careful,” she said. “And if you need to get back—” She pointed to where we’d come from. A ball of light glinted, even through the mist. “That’s the hotel. That light is illuminated at night and during bad weather. So you can always find your way home. Happy writing!”
Anele vanished into the mist, though I heard her feet displacing pebbles long after she had gone.
My cabin was a generously sized building with an office that overlooked the rim of the lake—or would, when the fog abated. There was even a small deck, for work on the days without too much sun or rain, or for relaxation or observation. Despite its age, the building was reassuringly sturdy. I walked around, taking hold of various joints and railings, shaking them to see if anything was rotting or came off in my hand like a leprous limb. All seemed solid.
Inside, a series of wooden boards sat on a shelf above my desk. At first glance they resembled Moses’s tablets, but when I stood on a chair and examined them I saw they were lists and lists of names—some clear, some illegible—of previous residents. The names and dates and jokes ran together like a Dadaist poem.
Solomon Sayer—Fiction Writer. Undine Le Forge, Painter, June 19—. Ella Smythe “Summer of Love!” C——
I frowned. Someone with my name—another resident—had occupied this cabin, many years ago. I ran my finger over my name—over her name—and then rubbed it on my jeans.
A curious term, resident. It seemed at first glance incidental, like a stone, but then if you turned it over, it teemed with life. A resident lived somewhere. You were a resident of a town or a house. Here, you were a resident of this space, yes—not really, of course; you were a visitor, but whereas visitor suggests leaving at the end of the night and driving out in the darkness, resident means that you set up your electric kettle, and will be staying for a while—but also that you are a resident of your own thoughts. You had to find them, be aware of them, but once you located your thoughts you never had to drive away.
A letter on my desk welcomed me to Mourning Dove Cabin, and encouraged me to add my name to the newest tablet. From my desk I could see half of my porch, and then the opacity of the fog consumed the railing and all beyond it.
I unpacked my bag, and then placed my notebook next to the computer, where it fairly hummed with portent. The novel. My novel.
I began to work. I decided to outline my novel on index cards, so that they would be easy to move around. The entire wall was made of corkboard, and so I thumbtacked the cards in a grid, pinning up Lucille’s trials and triumphs in a way that could be easily manipulated.
A centipede crawled along the wall, and I killed it with the card that said Lucille realizes her entire childhood has been a terrible lie, from the first sentence to the last. Its legs still twitched after I painted the plaster with its innards. I made a new card and threw that one away. The one that said Lucille discovers her sexuality at the edge of an autumn lake was pinned in the middle, which is where my plot abruptly stopped. My eyes scanned the cards. Baxter escapes and is struck by a car. Lucille’s girlfriend breaks up with her because she is “difficult at parties.” Lucille enters the art festival. I felt pleased with my progress, though a little concerned that I wasn’t entirely positive how I was going to maximize Lucille’s suffering. Losing the art festival’s grand prize wasn’t enough, probably. I made a cup of tea and sat down, where I remained staring at the cards until dinnertime.
Just before dawn, I woke up with a soapy taste gathering around my molars. My body lurched from the bed. I fell to my knees before the toilet, still shoving away wisps of dreams as a hot burp signaled what was to come.
I had been sick before, but never like this. I vomited so hard that I wrenched the toilet seat from its hinges with a terrible crack, and rested my head on the cool tile until it seemed clean, and the best of things. I sat up again, and still more, impossibly more, emerged from my body. To cool down, I crawled into the bathtub. When I looked up at the showerhead in the seconds before it belched icy relief, it was dark and ringed with calcified lime, like the parasitic mouth of a lamprey. I vomited again. When I was certain that nothing remained inside me, I crawled back to the bed, where I pulled the heavy duvet over my body and receded inside myself.
My illness persisted for some time. My fever spiked and the air around me shimmered like heat over blacktop. I thought to myself that I should get to a hospital, that my mind was, like the rest of my body, baking, but the thought was a twig bobbing along through Noah’s deluge. I was freezing and buried myself in my blankets; I was roasting alive and stripped naked, the sweat crystallizing on my skin. At the very worst of it, I reached to the other side of the bed to feel for the contours of my own face. I believe that I cried out for my wife many times, though how loudly (or if I did so at all) is something I will never know. I believe it rained, because outside the window something wet smacked the glass in waves. In the height of my fever, I believed that this was the sound of the tide, and I was sinking beneath the ocean’s surface, dropping out of sight of heat and light and air. I was thirsty, but when I tried to sip water from my trembling palm, I vomited again, my muscles aching from the heaving. I am dying, I thought to myself, and that i
s that.
I woke up in the thin strains of morning, with a person gently rapping on my door, calling my name. Anele.
“Are you all right?” she asked through the wood. “We’re all really worried about you. You’ve missed dinner for two nights.”
I could not move. “Come in,” I said.
The door swung open, and I heard Anele suck in a sharp breath. I appreciated later what caused this: the room was hot and sour. It smelled of fever and stale sweat, of vomit and weeping.
“I have,” I said, “been ill.”
She came over to the bed, which I thought was kind considering the nuances of contagion. “Do you—should I call Edna?” she said.
“If you could bring me a glass of water,” I said, “it would be much appreciated.”
It felt as if she had dissolved, but then she was back with a glass. I took a sip, but for the first time in days my stomach did not move, except to growl with hunger. I downed the entire glass, and though it did not slake my thirst, I felt my humanity climb back into me.
“Another, please,” I said, and she refilled the glass.
I finished it, and felt renewed.
“There’s no need to call Edna,” I said.
“If you’re sure,” she said. “Let me know if you need anything?”
“Has any mail come for me?” I asked. A letter from my wife would be comforting.
“No, nothing,” she said.
I began to write that afternoon. My legs felt shaky and there was a strange rasping sensation in my chest, but I wrote in short bursts and felt mostly fine. The Painter came by my cabin and knocked on my door. I started at the intrusion, but she said something and offered me a small box of medicine. I did not reach for it. What was it that my mind kept from me, when forgetting her words?
She said something else, and shook the box at me, again. I took it. Then she reached up and touched my face; I flinched, but her fingers were cool and dry. She walked down the stairs and went to the lake’s edge, where she reached down, picked up something from the grass, and flung it into the water.
I pushed one of the pills through the blister pack’s foil and examined it. It was oblong, with no numbers or letters, and it was a reddish-orange, except also a little purple and blue, and greenish if you turned it, and if I held it in the light it went white as an aspirin. I tossed the box into the trash and the pills into the toilet; they drifted around the bowl like tadpoles before zooming out of sight when I flushed.
As I felt stronger, I began to take walks around the lake. It was bigger than it appeared, and even when I walked for an hour I covered only a fraction of its perimeter. On the third day of these journeys, I walked for two hours and discovered a beach with a partially submerged canoe lounging in the tide. The gentle motion of the water caused the canoe to rock ever so slightly and reminded me of the way the canopies of the trees had undulated in the wind during camp. Thum-thum-thum-thum.
The Girl Scout camp of my youth had been on a lake as well. Could it be on the other side of this same lake? If I hiked long and far enough, would I come upon that dock where my own predilections were solidified and mocked on that crisp autumn evening? Would I locate that romantic, terrible idyll? The idea had not occurred to me before—I’d always assumed it was some other lake, up here in the mountains—but the rhythm of the water and the memory of the trees seemed to confirm that I had returned to a place from my past.
It was then I remembered that I had once been sick at camp. How had I forgotten? This was the unspoken pleasure of the residency: the sudden permission of memory to come upon you. I remembered one of the leaders taking my temperature and clucking her tongue at the number. I remembered a sense of despair. Here on the beach, the despair felt clear, as if I’d been seeking its signal for decades and had just now come in range of a cell tower.
I walked a little farther, and noticed something red in the beach’s stones. I knelt and picked up a small glass bead. It looked like it had come from a camper’s bracelet. Perhaps it had been in the water for quite a long time, and had washed up on this shore just for me.
I put it in my pocket and walked back to my cabin.
That evening, when I undressed for bed, I noticed a small, raised bump on the inside of my thigh. I pressed it. A shock of pain bisected my leg, and when it passed I observed that the bump was soft, as though filled with liquid or jelly. I felt my fingers twitch with the desire to squeeze it, but I resisted. The next day, however, there was another, and then another. They clustered on my thighs, erupted underneath my breasts. I was alarmed. Perhaps there was some kind of insect here that I hadn’t known about—not ticks or mosquitos. Some kind of poisonous spider? But I thought about how I slept and in which kind of garment, and could not fathom how I’d been bitten. They did not itch, but they felt full, and I felt full, as if I needed release.
I sat on the edge of the bathtub, burning a safety pin over a lighter. The metal blackened slightly, and I blew on the shaft and tested it for heat with the pad of my finger. Satisfied that it was cool and sterile, I inserted the pin into the original abjection. It resisted only briefly—a split second of thrashing fists before yielding—and then discharged. A limb of pus and blood climbed the stalk of the needle before collapsing under its own weight and trailing down my leg like an untended menstrual cycle. I soaked half a roll of toilet paper—cheap toilet paper, but still—with my own blood, taking out one after another. I felt pleasantly sore afterward, but cleansed. I covered each one with a blob of ointment and a slick bandage.
Anele came to my cabin one early evening to collect her promised portrait session. She looked sweaty and triumphant, and straps of large camera bags crisscrossed her torso. I glanced behind her and saw dark clouds in the distance. A storm?
“It’s a while off,” she said, as if reading my mind. “A few hours at least. This won’t take very long, I promise.” We walked back toward the hotel, and then veered off into a meadow about a half mile away. The grasses became taller and taller and eventually came up to our waists, and more than once I leaned over to assure myself that my pants were tucked into my socks, to discourage tick bites. The third time I did this, I stood and noticed Anele had stopped and was watching me. She smiled, then kept walking.
“Did you enjoy scouting?” she asked. “How long did you do it?” “From Brownies until Seniors. Almost my whole girlhood.” The word Brownies broke off into my mouth like something cloying, stale, and I spit onto the ground.
“You don’t seem like a Girl Scout,” she said.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“You just seem very—ethereal. I guess I think of Girl Scouts as hearty and outdoorsy.”
“It is possible to be both.” I stopped and looked down at my legs, where the thumb of a Band-Aid poked out from beneath my shorts. Anele had not stopped walking, and I rushed to catch up. The grass ended suddenly and we were at a large elm. In front of the trunk was a wrought iron chair, painted white.
“Oh, perfect timing,” said Anele. “The light.” I was not a photographer—I had never professionalized my visual observations, only my theories and perspective problems and narrative impulses—but she didn’t need to explain further. The sun was low and everything was awash in honey light, including my skin. Behind the tree, the impending storm darkened the sky. Were we driving toward the storm, a photograph of the side mirror would reveal light in the past, and darkness in the future.
Anele handed me a white sheet.
“Can you wear this?” she asked. “Only this. Just wrap it around your body, however you feel comfortable.” She turned around and began setting up her camera. “Tell me about the Brownies,” she said.
“Oh,” I said. “Brownies were little girls. Kindergarten age. The name came from these little house elves who supposedly lived in people’s homes and did work in exchange for gifts. There’s this whole story about a naughty brother and sister who always wanted to play and never wanted to help their father clean the house.” I unbut
toned my blouse and unhooked my bra. “Then the grandmother tells them to consult this old owl nearby about these little imps. And while she technically tells both of the children, the little girl goes to find the owl—”
I wrapped the sheet tightly around my chest, like a modest lover in a television show aired before late night. “I’m ready,” I said.
Anele turned. She came over and began to fiddle with my hair. “Does she find the owl?”
I tried to frown slightly, but Anele was brushing some lipstick over my mouth, blunt as a thumb. “Yes,” I said. “She does. It gives her a riddle, to find the Brownie.”
“Goddamnit,” she muttered. She pushed around the outline of my mouth, her finger slipping against the cosmetic wax. “Sorry, I overshot the edge of your lip.” She began to apply it again. “What’s the Brownie riddle?”
The bottom went out beneath me, and for a very brief second I was certain that the distant lightning had reached out and flicked me, like the finger of a god.
“I don’t remember,” I whispered. Anele’s eyes left my mouth and she looked at me for a long, hard second before twirling the tube shut.
“You’re very beautiful,” she said, though whether her voice was admiring or merely reassuring was difficult to tell. She pushed me down into the chair and returned to her camera. My skin was glazed with heat, and a mosquito screamed past my ear and bit me before I could flick it away. For the first time, I noticed the camera, which she must have set up while I was changing. It looked like an old-fashioned thing; it seemed that Anele would lean over and cover her head with a heavy cloth, and take the photo by depressing a button at the end of a cord. I did not know such cameras still existed.
She saw me looking. “It’s called a large-format camera. The negative is about the size of your hand.” She tilted my chin upward.
“Now,” she said, “what I need you to do is to fall over.”
“Pardon?” I asked. I felt a ripple of thunder through the bones of the chair. This detail had not been in her original request, I was certain.