Your Clothes a Sepulcher, Your Body a Grave
WE SHOULD HAVE LIVED THAT SUMMER IN reverse. If not that summer, at least that afternoon. The carousel’s glistening brass, all the wooden horses open-mouthed with their blood-colored tongues showing. The boardwalk sun-bleached. And us, standing underneath, eating our spun sugar ankle-deep in seawater, listening to the many feet pass above. “There will never be another day like this one,” you said. “I know, I know,” I was saying; I hated the sound of those words from your mouth. The spun sugar cobwebbing in my throat, drying me out. You threw your stick into the shallows and I said, “Some seagull is going to eat that,” and you said, “I don’t care, let it die, I don’t care.” And I knew you didn’t. The sun was setting too early. In the brasseries, the singers were mounting the patios to sing about heartbreak. The clink of wineglasses reached us, the hum of guitars being tuned, and I knew night was close, and I knew that in every way that mattered, you were already gone for me.
You were the niece of my mother’s first love’s spinster sister, and we met at a party thrown in your garden. The hyacinth was so choking thick that no one could smell the tea cakes, no one could smell the tea. The cypress trees, the wild lavender, they made their overtures, but what we remember is that more sensuous odor. I was a little boy in a sailor suit, afraid to dirty my clothes, pale as the white brim of my sailor’s cap. I had never set sail. Probably I would have gotten seasick. But we were in Italy; isn’t that sufficient for a love story to begin? You were not eating the tea cakes on the saucer that had been allotted you. I looked across the table and thought: We are nearly the same age. I wanted, at once, to be your friend. You wouldn’t look at me. You were a fragile-looking girl whose skin had bluish undertones that seemed at the time perfectly natural to me. I could see all your veins spiderwebbing across your body, carrying your blood from your delicately curled pinkie to the hollow of your throat. You had been dressed like a nun: You even wore a miniature wimple fitted securely to your head. They were always costuming us children then. I suppose I thought they were just dressing you for company. To be an amusement. Years later, we would kneel in the raspberry thicket; you would whisper: “Do you—know—the bleeding nun?” But for now, you would say nothing. The veins would leap and twitch in your fingers as you grasped your teacup. Early days, those. You were almost entirely here. You could have been entirely mine. Let time untangle and maybe there in the center someone would find us: you in your dark cloak and me in my pale linens, old enough but not too old, straddling after and before, seeing through a haze of hyacinth, barely breathing.
Perhaps that was the first indication that you had power: that you could make me yours, that you could make yourself mine. A stack of respectable men and women had to die, not least of all my own mother, so my sailor-suited young self could pass into the hands of a family friend who spent his summers scouring the Orient for antiquities. “No place for a young boy,” he said, “all that dust in his lungs, all those tombs being opened. Nothing lies still where you leave it.” Instead he brought me to you. Instead I was haunted. In the two years since the garden party, I had grown taller, less towheaded; I had learned a handful of swear words at boarding school that I deployed in vicious whispers. But otherwise I had not changed. Only you were different. You wore white crinoline, diaphanous but high collared. A violet ribbon tied around your neck. A veil of crocheted lace let the light into your hair in gridwork fragments. I loved you then, or thought I did. You were kneeling in the garden near the old stone wall, digging for something. Your knuckles were bloody. I withdrew a handkerchief from the pocket of my suit and cleaned the wound, and felt quite the gentleman until your aunt called you to her side like a dog that had misbehaved.
Your look was violent then. Your veins darkened; your blue-toned skin made me think of ancient marbled stone, a mountainside, a jagged peak cutting into the clouds somewhere in the Pyrenees. I was not afraid of you. I wanted to climb.
I wanted to feel the mist on my skin and look down and not fall. I was an orphan. My guardian was in Tunisia, battering the locals with a shovel and an advanced degree. How else do you occupy yourself? You stand on a mountaintop. You feel the mist on your skin. You fall in love. I grasped your hand. I felt the veins in each of your fingers pulse. Nausea rocked me and I wanted to put a world between us, but instead I felt my grip tighten. You made a little strangled sound of pain and still I could not release. That’s when I first understood. Later, a patch of hyacinth grew from the soil where you bloodied your knuckles.
This is the part where I have to count backward, or else I’ll lose myself. That’s what you do to me. I was eight when I first met you, I was ten when your aunt became my summer guardian. I was sixteen on the day of the boardwalk and the sunset, when we fled to Marseille for a perfect day that was never supposed to end. But what between? Sometime, someone had to tell me the truth. Your aunt must have felt sorry for me, the little boy clumsily pursuing the black-eyed girl who melted, seamlessly, into everything: into the mud on the banks, into the tar of the fens, into the snow glistening on the distant ridges. The birds and fish were afraid of you. We must have been fourteen or so. I say we because your age is mine, you understand, and mine is yours, and we must not try to separate one from the other anymore.
We found a garden with crumbling walls, our own antiquity. You slipped through, and I climbed over, fitting my bare feet into the crevices in the stone. I was not, by then, surprised at how you collapsed boundaries. I was only surprised at how desperately I wanted you to collapse into me. Inside was all a mess of hyacinths. You remember now. The open-mouthed white and pale-purple buds, stacked generously on their stout cerulean stems. Thunder cracked and the air was full, suddenly, of rain. You were still trying to gather flowers. Your veil came loose when you bent your head and some impulse commanded me to pull it back until you were entirely bareheaded. The feeling that overcame me then, I cannot define, besides to say that I never wanted to feel like that again. I could see nothing; the sun was eclipsed, my self was lost, and you were the only thing, standing luminous.
You couldn’t love me like that, Isabella, not if you tried. You are lying in that hospital bed now with your arms limp at your sides, and you still can’t fathom it. That love, I am sorry to say, is the reserve of the powerless; that love is only mine. We ran back
through the downpour. Your arms were full of hyacinths, your cheeks were streaked with rain and tears. Your aunt separated us that night. She crushed your flowers beneath her shoes. She told me the story of what you are, her mother before her; her daughter after. Looking sternly at me, in a fierce whisper: “Don’t you dare fall in love with her.” I was fourteen years old. I was weak-kneed and nauseated. I only knew what I wanted after she said that. They call those desires nascent. Pronounce that word in English, hold it on the edge of your tongue, really hearing it. You can, if you listen closely, hear the word be born.
You already know how the boardwalk ended. Let’s remember the rest of the day. Let them not say that there were no good times. Already you were collapsing by then. You would say such dark, cruel things. But you held my hand and wore a scarf wrapped around your head, dark curls spilling out the sides in botanic abundance. Your dress was plain and light and billowed at your ankles. We boarded the first train to Marseille, ascending the lonely platform of our rural station in the cool hours before your aunt was awake. From my guardian, we were still getting postcards with watercolor sketches of relics on one side and scribbled notes on the other; last night, in a fit of defiance, we had torn the latest one to pieces. Now we came as true orphans into the world, born to each other. We rode the Ferris wheel. We ate ham-and-butter sandwiches. Marseille looked inconsequential on a map of France, only a red dot nodding to the jagged coastline. But it was famous, you had promised me, for the cathedral outside of town. The cathedral belonged to the bleeding nun and her sisters. The cathedral was haunted with their grim berobed figures, who walked at twilight, singing endless posthumous vespers. You said you belonged to them, as if you were dead already.
I didn’t understand, then, how your clothes were a sepulcher and your body a grave. I thought if I only loved you enough, I could make the story come untrue. At sunset we approached the heavy Gothic spires and you prostrated yourself on the still-cooling marble. I stood motionless until at last I found the courage to pull you back. I said we should go home. You tore loose. You looked at me and I saw, suddenly, how far down you could tumble me.
The constable who seized upon us did not know who we were. He had not seen our photographs, three years old and sepia-bleary, although already your aunt had a poster circulating. We must have worn our story on our faces. When they separated us at the station and you screamed, I thought you were crying for me. Sometimes now I shut my eyes and
dream of the world where that was true. If you could feel for me as you felt for those cathedral doors, we would surely be married now. We would have three children, and a sprawling garden with a pit of unutterable horror looking for all the world like a patch of blue flowers. I comprehend now, as I couldn’t then, that you were never mine to lose.
Your aunt extricated me from the entire misguided episode—her phrasing, not mine, primly enclosing an unceasing passion within the confines of a day. We were reduced, all at once, to our ham-and-butter sandwiches. Arrangements were to be made, she told me. The university, traveling, perhaps even a sojourn in the Orient to cultivate a sense of worldliness. For a young man, doors are always opening. A bystander who witnessed our parting would have thought he was seeing the bittersweet conclusion to a forbidden adolescent romance. But I knew. And you did too. I shut my eyes and saw the veins snaking across your forehead, the veil slipping loose. Something cleaved within me. Afterward, the sound of your wailing was always going to be there, deeper than anything, deeper than the part of me that was me. We aged together like ivy wrapping a slow four-generation stranglehold around a tree trunk.
Do you suppose I was anything more than a phantom to my university classmates? And less, to all the sweet-faced and cultivated girls who brushed past me nearly soundlessly at parties, opening their mouths only to utter appropriate remarks at modest intervals. I will admit now, in the privacy of our hospital room, that sometimes I would find these suitable girls in the shadow of the stairwell and disprove their innocence—nothing ruinous, only kisses, trying to locate on their necks or foreheads a lifted vein, trying to reopen the wound that festered within me. My advances were clumsy, and I always said your name either by mistake or on purpose, the syllables slipping loose. I told you, Isabella, always you are there. I met a girl with what they term a good head on her shoulders. She was a Jesuit, she was pale and dark-haired. I suppose I must have been thinking then that I could possess some part of you. I asked if she was convent-bound and she said, “I thought you were going to propose marriage to me,” and then, without trying, without meaning it in the least, I did.
The first of your letters came shortly afterward. I have them all, bound in black ribbon, the soft chalky odor of myrrh clinging to the paper. Do you remember the poetry you would write me? Desperate words, the tails of the letters coiled like sea
serpents, but the particulars don’t matter. You meant, I am assured, what you said. They tell me you were caged in the depths of the house by then, a dark corridor directly beneath an airy white-floored room where hothouse lilies bloomed year-round. Rats scurried with repulsive liberty from the latticed door to the subterranean tunnels in which they conducted their inglorious rodent lives, and only you dwelled in the between shade-colored world where neither rats nor humans wished to linger.
At first they sent you meals on porcelain dishes, delicate spoons and silk napkins and full tea service. But you had to earn those things, and the conduct books, too, and the abridged copy of Clarissa, and the nightgown in good sturdy material so you wouldn’t be too cold. The more privileges they revoked, the more passionately you adored me. Tear me loose you wrote with the o’s curled ribbonlike into one another, the s pressed fetally against the e. I would hold them and then I was in Marseille again, beneath the boardwalk. “A seagull will choke,” I was saying. “I don’t care, I don’t care, you were telling me.” You were beautiful and bleak and terrifying. I shut my eyes and could see you, unveiled, hyacinths sprouting through the stone floor at your feet. It was that image which brought me to the house at Christmas. I was engaged to be married. I WAS five years past Marseille. I reread your letters on the train: not the words, but the handwriting. You looped your l’s like I did. I had a broad-tipped black pen, and I crossed out, one by one, all your troublesome mentions of the word nunnery, until there were no more.
I reached the house at night and thought at first that the taxi must have gotten it wrong: This collapsing pile of wreckage was not the house of my childhood summers. I wore dove gray and white, costumed as my frail boyhood. My fist shook when I went to knock on the front door.
A Christmas tree had been stuffed into one corner of the great room, ornaments and garland hung dutifully, but your aunt was alone and age-stooped and something had caved within her. I could see on her face what she and you had done to each other. ...
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