Her Body and Other Parties
“I need you to fall out of the chair,” she said. “However you land, stay that way. Keep your eyes open and your body still.”
“I—”
“The faster we do this, the less likely we are to get rained on,” she said, her voice firm and friendly. She smiled widely and then disappeared beneath the camera’s hood.
I hesitated. I looked down at the earth. The grasses were glowing with the light from the sunset, but I could see dirt and rocks. I did not want to injure myself. Truth be told, I didn’t even want to dirty myself.
Anele came out from under the hood. “Is everything okay?” she asked.
I looked at her face, and then back at the earth. I tipped over.
The surprises came all at once: First, the earth was not as hard as I had imagined it; it yielded as if it were loam. The sun, which had been hidden behind Anele’s body, was now uncovered and glowed between her legs like some mythical entreaty. I heard the dry click of the shutter, the sound of some insect biting down. There was lightning then, distinct, forking across the sky and over the distant hotel. So many omens. I felt strangely content there, on the ground, as if I could stay there for hours, listening to the cicadas and watching the light change and then vanish.
And then Anele was kneeling down in front of me, helping me sit back up. “We have to run, we have to run!” she said, and if I felt any anger or strangeness, it was crushed beneath this girlish appeal. She tossed my clothes to me and folded down the camera. At that moment, the last of the day’s heat vanished, as if sucked down a drain, replaced with the chill of oncoming rain. Anele began to run, and I followed her, my clothes clutched to my bosom, the sheet flapping behind me. I felt light, airy. I laughed. I did not turn around to look at the sky but I could visualize it as clearly as if I had: clouds roiling upon us like men at a bar, suffocating, and us laughing, together, away. I heard the rain then, the sound of something tearing, and we were up on the porch in seconds. When I turned back, the distant trees and sky and even our cars were visually obliterated by the downfall. I was soaked through. The sheet was filthy, now, dirty and half-translucent and clinging to me like a condom. I felt elated, happier than I’d been in months. Perhaps even years.
Was this friendship? Was this how things were supposed to be? It felt that way, that I had ecstatically stumbled into happiness, and everything seemed right and correct. Anele looked beautiful, barely winded. She smiled at me. “Thank you for your help,” she said, and disappeared into the hotel.
I made progress on my novel. I found that the index cards hindered my process, so I simply buckled down over my keyboard and wrote until I emerged from my trance. Sometimes, I sat on the porch and gave imaginary interviews to NPR personalities.
“When I write, I feel like I’m being hypnotized,” I told Terry Gross.
“It was at that moment I knew everything was going to change,” I told Ira Glass.
“Pickled things, and shrimp,” I told Lynne Rossetto Kasper.
I crossed paths with the others at breakfast, sometimes. One morning, Diego told me about the previous day’s social engagements—which I had ignored in favor of Lucille’s social engagements near my novel’s climax—and in doing so he said a curious word: colonist.
“Colonist?” I said.
“We’re at an artist colony,” he said. “So we’re colonists, right? Like Columbus.” He drained his orange juice and stood up from the table.
I suppose he meant it to be funny, but I was horrified. Resident had seemed such a rich and appropriate term, an umbrella I would have been content to carry all of my days. But now the word colonist settled down next to me, with teeth. What were we colonizing? Each other’s space? The wilderness? Our own minds? This last thought was a troubling one, even though it was not very different from my conception of being allowed to be a resident in your own mind. Resident suggests a door hatch in the front of your brain, propped open to allow for introspection, and when you enter, you are faced with objects that you’d previously forgotten about. “I remember this!” you might say, holding up a small wooden frog, or a floppy rag doll with no face, or a picture book whose sensory impressions flood back to you as you turn the pages—a toadstool with a wedge missing from its cap; a flurry of luminous autumn leaves; a summer breeze dancing with milkweed. In contrast, colonist sounds monstrous, as if you have kicked down the door hatch of your mind and inside you find a strange family eating supper.
Now when I worked, I felt strange around the entrance to my own interiority. Was I actually just an invader, bearing smallpox-ridden blankets and lies? What secrets and mysteries lay undiscovered in there?
I still felt weak. I considered that I had died in that room with its drapes and pulls, and that the me who bent over my keyboard day after day was a ghost who was tethered to her work regardless of the fiddling details of her mortal coil.
I woke up to moaning. I was standing at the base of the stairs, barefoot and in my pajamas. My loosened bun hung limply against my neck. I registered the wooden panels of the hallway, the moonlight streaming through the windows that surrounded the door. I had not sleepwalked in years, yet here I was, upright and elsewhere.
I heard it again. I’d heard sounds like this before, when I was a child and our cat had eaten an entire loaf of bread. It was a sound of gluttony regretted, of wallowing in one’s own excess. My feet made no sound as I padded across the hardwood floor.
The hallway was cast in shadow. Moonlight slanted through a window, cutting three silver bars across the paneled walls. At the end of the hall, I descended the stairs and followed the sound toward the dining room. From the doorway, I could see Diego on his back on the table. Straddling his pelvis was Lydia, in her seafoam nightgown, which was hitched up around her hips. The bottoms of her feet were facing me, dark with dirt.
As Lydia undulated, I noticed patches of moonlight appearing and disappearing beneath her, bisected by darkness. My mind sleepily turned over once, twice, like a struggling engine, and then surged to life. He gripped her hips to pull her into him and then push her away. The rhythm was organic, like wind rippling over the water.
They did not seem to notice me. Lydia was facing away, and Diego’s eyes were screwed shut, as if to open them would be to release some of his pleasure.
The moonlight was overbearing, illuminating details that seemed impossible: the slickness of him, the sheer fabric that surrounded her flesh like an aura. I knew I should move—I should go back to my bedroom, perhaps rub out this mounting wave of pleasure and horror and then sleep—but I could not. Their lovemaking seemed to go on and on, but neither appeared to climax, just rut with impossibly consistent tempo.
After some time, I left them there. Back in my own room, I touched myself—how long it had been!—and my mind was a jumble of static. I thought of my wife, the dark stain of her nipples, her mouth open and ribbons of sound coiling out.
The next day, the mist returned. When I woke it was hovering in my open window, like a solicitous spirit with something to tell me. I slammed it shut so hard the frame rattled. I felt disoriented from the previous evening. Should I say something to them? Ask them to be more discreet, perhaps? Or perhaps my inadvertent observation was only my problem, and not theirs? In the kitchen, Lydia was making coffee but I did not meet her eyes.
In my cabin, I tried hard to focus. I stood out on my balcony and strained to see the lake, but I could not. Exhausted by the weather, I lay down on the floor. From there, the room changed, utterly. I felt stuck to the ceiling by a force equivalent to, though the opposite of, gravity, and from here I could see the hidden spaces beneath the furniture: a mouse’s nest, a stranger’s index card, a lone, bone-white button tilted on an axis.
I was reminded, for the umpteenth time, of Viktor Shklovsky’s idea of defamiliarization; of zooming in so close to something, and observing it so slowly, that it begins to warp, and change, and acquire new meaning. When I’d first begun to experience this phenomenon, I’d been too young to understand what
it was; certainly too young to consult a reference book. The first time, I lay down on the floor examining the metal-and-rubber foot of our family refrigerator, wreathed in dust and human hair, and from this reference point all other objects began to change. The foot, instead of being insignificant, one of four, et cetera, suddenly became everything: a stoic little home at the base of a large mountain, from which one could see a tiny curl of smoke and glinting, illuminated windows, a home from which a hero would emerge, eventually. Every nick on the foot was a balcony or a door. The detritus beneath the fridge became a wrecked, ravaged landscape, the expanse of kitchen tile a rambling kingdom waiting for salvation. This was how my mother found me: staring at the foot of the refrigerator so intensely my eyes were slightly crossed, my body curled up, my lips moving almost imperceptibly. The second time is not worth explaining in detail, though it was the reason Mrs. Z——’s daughter transferred out of our shared high school English class, and by the third time—I was an adult, then—I’d come to understand what it was that I was doing, and began to do it more consciously. This process has been useful for my writing—in fact, I believe that what talent I have comes not from some sort of muse or creative spirit but from my ability to manipulate proportions, and time—but it has put a strain on my relationships. How I married my wife is still a mystery to me.
I finished the day’s work long after dark. The fog had burned away by midday, and now everything was clear and sharp. The moon was nearing fullness and glinted off the lake’s waves, agitated by the wind. I set off through the trees, my feet crunching on rock. Everything shone with a thin, silvery light. I imagined myself a cat, night vision illuminating what was otherwise secret. The hotel glowed in the distance: a lighthouse beckoning me home.
But then, before me, liquid shadow spilled across my path, darker than the darkness. I tried to look past it. If I could reach the bench, I could reach the other side of the trees. But the flatness of the dark in the intervening woods was a horror. I pulled my bag tightly to my side.
You are a fool, I thought to myself. You have been reading too much and your mind is wound too tightly. You have been drowning in memory. Your wife, she would be embarrassed for you if she knew that you had drifted this far.
But I could not take my eyes from the bench. The whiteness seemed transformed, as if it were no longer painted wood but bone. As if a thousand years ago, some creature had climbed out of the lake and died in this exact spot in anticipation of my arrival. Around me, black bushes roiled in the wind, and I did not see thorns before touching one. It sank into my index finger, and I sucked the wound as I walked. Perhaps this blood offering kept whatever was nearby at bay. I sucked and sucked and then, at the other side of the shadows, the moonlight was restored. I did not look behind me.
Anele suggested one evening at dinner that we get together to share the work we’d been doing. I balked, but the others seemed enthusiastic. “After supper?” Lydia suggested. I pushed my chicken around my plate, hoping that someone would register my displeasure, but no one seemed to notice.
And so as we digested, we looked at Diego’s drawings, several panels of a dystopian world ruled by zombies thirsty for knowledge. Then, the Painter let us into her studio but said nothing about her work. The walls were covered from floor to ceiling in tiny square canvases with the same unsettling red design delicately painted on each one. They resembled handprints, but had an extra finger and were entirely too small to be human hands. I was too afraid to examine them closely, to see if they were as identical as they appeared.
When we got into Benjamin’s studio, he was sweeping a space for us to stand in. “Careful,” he said, “there’s a lot of glass on the floor.” I stayed near the wall. His sculptures were massive, assembled from clay and broken ceramic and windowpanes. Mostly they were mythical figures, but also there was a beautiful one of a naked man with a jagged slice of glass between his legs. “I call that one ‘William,’” Benjamin said when he saw me looking.
In Anele’s studio, there were the photographs. “This is my newest series, ‘The Artists,’” she said. Everyone moved to their respective images, drinking them in before looking at their neighbor’s. Lydia laughed, as if she were remembering some cheerful childhood dream. “I love it,” she purred. “They’re posed but not posed.”
Each print was set in a different place around the property. Benjamin was lying next to the lake, muddied and bound in filthy strips of linen, limbless as a silk-wrapped fly. His eyes were open, fixed on the sky, but glassy, reflecting a single bird. Diego was crumpled at the base of the hotel steps, body awkwardly jutting this way and that, his dark irises swollen with his dilated pupils. In Lydia’s, she stood with her neck in a noose on the top of a stump, and tipped forward, her arms outstretched, a serene smile on her face. And mine, well.
Anele stepped next to me. “What do you think?” she asked.
I did not remember that afternoon very clearly—all the action that passed before our breathless dart across the meadow was hazy, like a watercolor painting—but here I looked completely, irrevocably dead. My body was crumpled like Diego’s, as if I’d been sitting demurely on the chair and then shot through the heart. Several of my many bandages were visible. My breast had slid out from underneath the sheet—this I did not remember—and there was nothing in my eyes. Or even worse—there was nothingness. Not the absence of a thing but the presence of a non-thing. I felt as if I was seeing a premonition of my own death, or a terrible memory I’d long forgotten.
Like the others, the composition was beautiful. The colors were perfectly saturated.
I did not know what to say to her. That she knew perfectly well that she had betrayed my trust, that our beautiful afternoon was ruined? That I had been exposed in a way I had not intended, and that she should feel guilty about this exposure even though it was clear she did not? I could not look at her. I trailed the group as they went to Lydia’s studio, where she played something for us. It was infuriatingly beautiful, a song in several movements that conjured an image of a terrified girl being chased from a manor, and then stumbling into the forest and nearly dying upon the banks of a surging river, and then transforming into a hawk. She then narrated the “poem” part, in which a young woman floated through space and meditated on the planets and her own life before the accident that had launched her from orbit.
When it was my turn, I primly read a brief passage from the scene where Lucille rejects the gift from her old piano teacher and then breaks into her house to retrieve it.
“Standing before the blazing inferno,” I concluded, “Lucille realized two terrible facts: that her childhood had been tremendously lonely, and that her old age would be, if possible, even worse.”
Everyone clapped politely and stood. We retired to the table, where we opened several bottles of wine.
Lydia filled my glass to the brim. “Do you ever worry,” she asked me, “that you’re the madwoman in the attic?”
“What?” I said.
“Do you ever worry about writing the madwoman-in-the-attic story?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.”
“You know. That old trope. Writing a story where the female protagonist is utterly batty. It’s sort of tiresome and regressive and, well, done”—here she gesticulated so forcefully that a few drops of red spattered the tablecloth—“don’t you think? And the mad lesbian, isn’t that a stereotype as well? Do you ever wonder about that? I mean, I’m not a lesbian, I’m just saying.”
There was a beat of silence. Everyone was studying his or her glass closely; Diego reached his finger into his wine and removed some invisible detritus from the surface.
“She isn’t batty or mad,” I said, finally. “She’s just—she’s just a nervous character.”
“I’ve never known anyone like that,” Lydia said.
“She’s me,” I clarified. “More or less. She’s just in her head a lot.”
Lydia shrugged. “So don’t write about yourself.”
/> “Men are permitted to write concealed autobiography, but I cannot do the same? It’s ego if I do it?”
“To be an artist,” Diego interjected, derailing the subject, “you must be willing to have an ego and stake everything on it.”
Anele shook her head. “You have to work hard. Ego only creates problems.”
“But without ego,” Diego said, “your writing is just scribbles in a journal. Your art is just doodles. Ego demands that what you do is important enough that you be given money to work on it.” He gestured to the hotel around us. “It demands that what you say is important enough that it be published or shown to the world.”
The Painter frowned and said something but I could not hear it, naturally. Everyone took deep sips of their wine.
That night, I heard Lydia walk past my room. Through my door’s crack I could see her feet shuffling along the hardwood. She discarded her nightgown in the hallway, and as she turned into Diego’s room her nudity was like a blade unsheathed.
I felt something strange move through my body. Once, when I was visiting my grandfather as a girl, I’d startled a garter snake out of the grass, and it had dived for the safety of the neatly assembled woodpile so fast that its muscular body snapped rigid before being slurped into the darkness. I felt this way now, as if I was plummeting somewhere so quickly my body was out of control. I crawled back into bed, and had a dream.
In it, I was sitting across from my wife, who was nude but wrapped in a gauzy fabric. She had a clipboard in her hand, and was moving a pencil down it as if ticking off entries on a list.
“Where are you?” she asked.
“Devil’s Throat,” I said.
“What are you doing?”
“Carrying a basket through the forest.”
“What’s in the basket?”
I looked down, and there they were: four beautiful spheres.
“Two eggs,” I counted. “Two figs.”