Thirty-three Swoons

by Martha Cooley

Genres: Literary Fiction; Psychological Thrillers

Synopsis

- "The Archivist, Martha Cooley's first novel, was a national bestseller and a "New York Times Notable Book.- With the assurance, complexity, and depth of a work by Bulgakov, DeLillo, or Poe, Martha Cooley's extraordinary second novel is further evidence that she is one of the most gifted writers at work today.

Release date: September 3, 2007

Publisher: Back Bay Books

Print pages: 320

Sample

PROLOGUE (December 1999)

THINK OF me as real. Whether or not I am is unimportant, an idle theoretical question.

Same goes for truth. Consider it irrelevant! There’s no such thing as a true story, only credible or questionable ones: those we believe, and those we don’t. As to this story, think of it as not just one but several, nested inside each other. Like a Russian matryoshka, one of those rotund wooden dolls with a horizontal seam around its middle. You pop open the doll and inside is a slightly smaller version, which you also open, which contains another, smaller one—and so on, till you reach the tiniest, most enwombed of all.

Russians use matryoshkas to teach their children the mathematical concepts of volume and proportion. But these nested dolls are also useful for communicating a fact about history and, more broadly, about time: any event, human or natural, is simultaneously prefiguration and echo, forerunner and follow-up. Knowing this, people may find it easier to conduct the business of living with some appreciation for absurdity, some tolerance for paradox; even, from time to time—though this is less common—with some glee.

Seva was capable of that: of gleefulness. Which is why I so enjoyed our collaboration.

IN MOSCOW, a while back—during the early decades of the twentieth century (which in a few weeks we’ll be calling “the last century,” the one we just fled, whose teeth marks are still visible)—in Moscow lived a theater director and set designer named Vsevolod Meyerhold.

Seva had luminous dark-brown eyes, a pronouncedly curved nose, and mobile, almost twitchy features. His hair was perpetually tousled, as if it had never occurred to him to comb it. A true maverick, Seva believed that all the usual, tired rules of stage performance existed merely to be broken. Curtainless stages and exposed wings, revolves and ramps and multilevel sets, montages and freezes and action amidst the audience—all these were Meyerholdian innovations. He knew what he wanted: an overthrow of expectations, a revolution! Russia’s theater had never seen anyone remotely like him before. And neither Russia nor the rest of the world would see anyone quite like him again.

Seva was thick-skinned. He loved it when spectators were outraged by his productions—the more jeers, the better. Mostly, though, his audiences were exhilarated, like children in a fun house full of distorting mirrors. “Mystery and the desire to solve it,” he wrote, “are what draw so many people to the theater.” In the theater, if not in life, people thrill to bewilderment.

SEVA LOVED Paris almost as much as he loved plays. Though he visited it only a few times, the French capital was a site to which he returned frequently in his reveries.

He could readily summon to memory the city’s views and sounds, and when he was feeling low, the smell of French tobacco renewed him—as did a certain fragrance his wife liked to wear, which she’d obtained in Paris. For Seva, whose nose was nearly as sensitive as a perfume maker’s, simply remembering the odors of Paris was profoundly comforting. Not unlike daydreaming, to which he often had recourse, especially while in prison . . .

I’ll get to all that. But before I go any further, I ought to explain what I’m doing here, why this story’s being told by me and not by somebody else. In theory anyone could tell it (anyone, that is, willing to lay claim to a certain kind of omniscience, as storytellers must), but in practice I’m it—there’s no one better suited.

I’M HERE for the simple reason that I was Seva Meyerhold’s doppelganger, his double. Everybody has one, of course. You can’t go through a lifetime without one, acknowledged or not. A doppelganger is simply an alternate self, invoked as needed, active as required: the ego’s private retainer. Loyal, yes, but also reliably independent. When necessary, an agent provocateur.

Perhaps as a child you played with a friend termed imaginary by your parents? When you recount a personal experience, are you tempted to pretend it happened to somebody else? Ever worn a costume and felt that powerful elation which results from having become, for a few intensely satisfying hours, an utterly different I? Then I’m sure you know what I mean. There’s nothing at all unusual in this: having an incorporeal double is one of life’s inevitabilities. It’s of a piece with having a shadow for your body, an echo for your voice, a reflection for your face as you peer in the mirror and wonder (aloud or silently, unnerved or excited), Just who am I now?

As for what doppelgangers actually do, the possibilities are limitless! We’re prompters; we get balls rolling. In some circumstances we furnish the so-called voice of reason; at other times, a sublime hint of eros, a refreshing shower of humor, a jolt of fear, a flash of fury: whatever’s useful at the moment. There are no straightforward guidelines, only improvisation.

SEVA SIGNED me on because he was starting to encounter impediments. He sensed what was coming: his government was locking up its artists, and colleagues were turning one another in. Seva understood that in life as onstage, a double is good protection, a safety net for the self. The only question in his mind was what exactly to do with our partnership.

Here I let him take the lead, and eventually things got dicey. Just as transactions between people are sometimes botched, so too a person’s relationship with his or her double can founder. Under extreme circumstances, it can even be sundered altogether. Though I should’ve been more insistent, Seva had me lulled into a false feeling of security . . .

In the early days of 1940, he died in prison, and I sidelined myself.

What can I say? My stint in Butyrka, waiting with Seva in his dank cell, nearly did me in. My sense of failure was profound. And although I hoped for a new partner to show up quickly (someone beguiling, to help me get over Seva), the right candidate simply didn’t appear.

I WAS not, however, entirely unemployed. For reasons and in ways I’ll explain before long, I infiltrated various individuals’ dreams.

I did this under Seva’s auspices, in the guise of the director himself. And each person on whose nocturnal stage I performed was connected in some way with theater—hence amenable to my appearances, however unexpected they may have been.

All dreams, I think, are essentially rehearsals. The dreamer tries out speeches and gestures, not for an audience but to see where improvisation might lead. To “mysterious allusions, deception and transformation,” as Seva once said, and thence, if the dreamer is lucky, into the clear.

My most recent oneiric intervention involved a woman named Camilla Archer, a fifty-year-old American residing in New York City. I was drawn to her partly because she loved theater, which meant she knew a fair bit about Seva’s career and accomplishments. Plus, someone else linked us: her father, Jordan Archer. Seva had met him many years earlier, in Paris. About Jordan, more anon—but first a few words on his daughter, before I let her speak for herself.

CAMILLA WAS in considerable distress when I first encountered her.

In a nutshell: her cousin, Eve Pell, had just died unexpectedly, and the deceased’s sole offspring—a young woman—had begun asking questions about Eve’s past. These inquiries made Camilla quite uneasy, which I found curious. Wouldn’t a daughter naturally want to learn as much as possible about her dead mother? Camilla’s resistance to her young relation’s inquiries reminded me of a bear doing its best to prolong hibernation, even though in some recess of its mind, it knows the season for sleep is over.

What’s causing this woman to stonewall? I wondered. My question soon gave rise to an idea. I could mastermind a series of nocturnal vignettes for Camilla that would have the effect of rousing her, not swiftly (as if the bedsheets, so to speak, were being yanked off) but ineluctably—as though a feather were tickling her mind while she slept and the only way to get the tickling to stop would be to wake up . . .

Yet why, one may ask, would I bother to intercede in such a situation? What, in short, did it have to do with me?

Remorse, for starters. I was swimming in it.

As Seva’s partner I’d urged denial upon him (Just look the other way!), and history had pounced, tearing him to bits. After his passing, I had but one aim: to perpetuate the remarkable mental energies that had been generated by our collaboration. Like two sticks rubbing together, a human being and his or her double always give off mental heat. Sometimes it’s mild, sometimes strong, sometimes—as with Seva—nearly incandescent. This was, after all, a man of rare talent. And when such a human being dies, the heat that’s been created is dispersed, like flying sparks, in other minds. Which it then warms. Or ignites!

Ergo my draw to Camilla, who struck me as fine tinder for Seva’s sparks.

IN THE first of Camilla’s dreams, I took a recent event, a shooting spree at an American high school, and mingled it with one from the distant past: an outdoor theatrical spectacle. I had in mind the sort of thing that used to take place on Russian streets during the Revolution—lively, ribald, didactic. Into these entwined events I introduced Vsevolod Meyerhold.

In addition, I gave Camilla’s father a key part in that first dream. Jordan Archer’s presence on her nighttime stage got his daughter’s attention immediately. Thereafter it was easy to proceed with additional episodes and keep the pressure mounting. By the time her final dream rolled around, in a few months, my collaborator would feel deeply rattled, and just as deeply invigorated.

I CONFESS that by urging this woman to dream in a certain direction, I was also satisfying my own desire to revisit days past. If only Seva and I could have teamed up in a different era!

Silly longing; I should know better. The Russian poet Aleksandr Kushner said it straight out: “Nothing on this earth is cruder than to beg for time or blame the hour.” Seva’s mise-en-scène wasn’t a pretty one. The utopia he (and so many others!) tried to conjure was nothing but a catastrophe in the making. All that midcentury savagery—see what’s come of it? First that series of outlandish spy games between Russia and America; and now, as the century draws to its close, the entire house of cards is collapsing. Russia’s old thugs have been reanointed as its new oligarchs.

As for the West, it’s in a nasty muddle of its own. Warring in the Balkans yet again! And peeking anxiously eastward toward the next outbreak, another likely bloodbath, this time in a hot, sandy place . . . One needn’t, however, look to the latest battlefield to see what’s wrong. One has merely to visit any shopping mall, wander its halls, finger its goods, play the video games, watch the rapt faces of the children as the fireballs descend and the villains cackle maniacally till the good guys arrive to blow their faces off.

Ah, I long for a new kind of drama to spook us, embolden us! As Chekhov put it, in The Seagull: “One must portray life not as it is, and not as it ought to be, but as it appears in our dreams.” Well, we can only wish. I can safely assert, though, that my American’s nighttime dream-labor was worth the disruption it entailed. To her came a peek behind appearances, the best thing a dream can offer.

TIME TO take off! I could make a few additional remarks, but I don’t wish to prejudice you. Seva felt strongly about this. The audience, he insisted, should always be defamiliarized.

ON THAT note, the curtain. New York City, May 1999. Enter CAMILLA.

ONE

A BITTER medicinal smell, something like iodine. Then a sudden clearing, blankness in my nostrils. And then jasmine, gorgeously subtle at first but soon heavy, pungent, fetid: as if jasmine blossoms were rotting, as if rottenness itself underlay the fragrance, lending a brown tinge to the blossoms.

And now a murky iron odor, reminding me of something. I can’t find the name for it. Images flicker across my closed eyelids. A city, not American, someplace in Eastern Europe. Sarajevo? No, this city is grander, imperial, with massive buildings—St. Petersburg, it must be St. Petersburg. Yes, the Winter Palace. I smell wet wool and sweat and excitement. There’s a crowd in the palace square, I’m in the midst of thousands of people. We’re participants in one of those vast spectacles Russians used to stage on the streets during the Revolution: reenactments of battles, with ordinary citizens playing the roles of Bolsheviks and Czarists, and soldiers playing themselves.

I hear the roar of artillery, rifles, handguns. People are shouting all around me; a great rocket soars upward, its noise deafening. Then a hush. Everyone begins fervently singing the “Internationale” while five-pointed red stars light up above the palace. A red banner appears behind it, fierce yet jolly.

The lights begin to dim. Now I see a man, tall and slender, taking a bow on a platform erected at one end of the square. Captured by a spotlight, he’s wearing a black cape; although his eyes are masked, the rest of his face is very pale. A large placard, suspended by ropes, drops down behind him. It appears to be an advertisement for a play. The man in the cape points at it enthusiastically, then calls out to the spectators.

AnnouncingColumbine’s Scarf,he proclaims. Ladies and gentlemen, my theater troupe performs this marvelous drama so strangely, you won’t recognize the original! We’ve got a real band with a conductor, and action right in the audience—involving you, dear spectator! Come see it!

A clown emerges from beneath the platform. Clambering onto the stage, his movements jerky and awkward, he joins the caped man. Together they make vulgar gestures and goofy faces, to widespread laughter. Then a vast, all-white curtain falls, concealing the entire platform and square.

A teenaged boy slouches onto the forestage. He is wearing a black trench coat and a mask, and he’s joined by another boy, another, another; they run in circles, a blur of trench coats and masks. Above them flaps a large black banner lettered in white. WELCOME TO COLUMBINE, it reads.

The caped man reappears, pushing his way through a slit in the white curtain. He’s waving frantically, trying to get the boys’ attention. Please, don’t do it! he cries. No more death!

Then I see my father, directly behind the caped man. Apparently unconcerned with what is happening around him, he produces a large bottle of perfume, opens it, and sprinkles its contents on the curtain. Once again I smell the sharp odor of decaying jasmine.

The caped man inhales deeply, then begins to smile—knowingly, it seems. Something in his expression suggests he’s been waiting for this very moment. Moving to one side of the forestage, he turns to face the opposite side, tosses off his cape, raises his arms above his head, and initiates a graceful, swift cartwheel, then another, another, unhesitatingly.

Sorrow! he exclaims as he travels head over heels across the stage. Sorrow, sorrow, sorrow! His rhythms are perfectly synchronized, yet his speech and movements are entirely at odds, which makes the overall effect indefinably compelling—light and urgent at once. Watching, I know I’ve never witnessed anything like it.

The man cartwheels off into the wings. Alone now, Jordan pulls a book of matches from his pocket. He strikes one and holds it to the curtain, which bursts into a dense, silvery mist that evaporates—poof!—and is instantly gone, along with everything else. My eyes open.

THE PALM of my left hand was brick red and sticky. I sat up in bed, peering at it.

It seemed I’d reopened the cut bisecting the pad of my thumb, and it had bled during the night. There were spots on my sheets, a delicate trail of them.

I got out of bed, rinsed my hand, put ointment on the cut, and bandaged it tightly. Then I regarded my eyes in the mirror. The taupe-colored skin below them was just a little puffy. Not bad, given how fitfully I’d slept.

I blinked, remembering the iron odor. Yes, the smell of blood: my thumb.

And gunfire, something called Columbine—I must’ve been dreaming about the shootings at that high school in Colorado. But wasn’t this dream taking place somewhere else? A public square, a massive open-air stage. A scent, too. And Jordan, yes—what the hell was he doing there?

I’ve always been a lively dreamer. Normally my dreams are strung-together nonsense, each episode like a crazy quilt or a spilled set of puzzle pieces. None of the edges fit together right; the composition is semi-coherent at best. But this particular dream was different. It had the feel of a real-life event, and Jordan was in it—a most abnormal occurrence. I hadn’t dreamed of my father before. Ever.

AS I was fixing breakfast, the dream temporarily forgotten, my phone rang. I was surprised to hear Danny’s voice.

“You up?” she asked.

“Sure,” I replied. It wasn’t Danny’s habit to phone me first thing on a Sunday morning, though that didn’t mean she had something important to tell me. She might simply feel like chatting. Or hearing me chat. Talk as blotting paper, something to soak up spills of feeling.

Her mother—my cousin, Eve Pell—had died two months earlier, without warning, after contracting bacterial meningitis. Since then Danny’s moods had become difficult to gauge. Some days she’d call me repeatedly, gabbling about trivia, as if she were the most empty-headed twenty-five-year-old alive and her mother’s death hadn’t affected her in the least. Other days I’d hear nothing from her, leave messages at her office, and get no callback. I’d start worrying, wondering if she was holed up in her apartment in Brooklyn, not eating, refusing all contact. One day she’d shown up at my shop and begun to heave things around. She didn’t break anything, and I managed to calm her down, but the episode revealed how shaky her hold was. I wondered how she was able to get through a day on the job without coming unstuck.

“You by any chance going to your shop today?” she asked.

“I am, actually,” I said. Normally I don’t work on Sundays. But I had things to catch up on, and the weather forecast was dour.

“Leaving soon?”

“I’m having my coffee now. What’s up?”

“Just wondering if I might stop by later for a little visit.”

“Like when?” Something in Danny’s tone was putting me on alert.

“After I leave here. Say, five-thirty.” Now I realized she was calling from her workplace, a graphic-design firm on Seventh Avenue. I could hear background chatter, several early-bird colleagues conversing in the hallway.

“Sure,” I said. “But you’re at work now? Why on a Sunday?”

“Oh, everyone’s here. We all had to come in for this big project that’s way behind schedule. Total mismanagement. Welcome to the world of design.”

“You get paid extra for this?”

“Hah.”

“Everything else all right?”

“All right,” she echoed neutrally. Not for the first time, I was conscious of how much her voice resembled her mother’s. The same pitch, the same rough timbre, just this side of gravelly. Since my cousin’s death I’d had a few uncanny experiences of answering my phone and thinking Eve before registering the reality of her daughter on the other end.

“Don’t be staring at any walls, okay?” I said, aiming for a spot between jokiness and concern.

“I’ve got tons to do here,” Danny responded evenly. “Actually it’s been good to be busy with something other than Mom’s closets.” She paused, then added: “I’ve packed up the last of her stuff, by the way. All I have to do now is ask Sam if he’ll cart some boxes to the Salvation Army. Then the whole thing’s behind me.”

“Good,” I said. “So I’ll catch you at the end of the day.”

I HUNG up the phone and finished my coffee, contemplating Danny’s call.

The whole thing. She’d been referring, of course, to the process of emptying first her mother’s gardening store and then Eve’s rent-stabilized apartment. The latter task had turned into more of an ordeal than it should have, thanks to Eve’s landlord. Though I’d paid him for an extra half month to give Danny more time, he’d been hounding her relentlessly since her mother’s death. One evening he’d threatened to toss any remaining possessions out the back window and into the alley.

That focused my own pent-up anger. After staging a fight with him in the building’s dingy lobby, I’d used one of Eve’s keys to score a series of long gashes across the front door of her apartment. “Art for art’s sake,” I’d said to Danny, happy to make her laugh.

So the clearing-out job was done, yet the whole thing, as Danny called it, wasn’t behind her—couldn’t possibly be. It was still unspooling, a chain of improbabilities whose initiating event had been that most ordinary of complaints, a headache. With astonishing swiftness, Eve’s symptoms—a pounding head and stiff neck—had been followed by delirium, coma, a spreading purplish rash, and blood poisoning, which was what had ultimately killed her. Wham, one doctor at the hospital had said (not realizing I was eavesdropping) to another, a young intern. Seventy-two hours, man! Never saw anything like it.

To me Eve’s meningitis had arrived as a natural disaster might have—some unannounced tornado stem-winding down an unsuspecting street, everyone looking the other way. And something more was en route, too. I could feel it. Not another death but a shake-up of some sort, necessary and unavoidable, for which no preparation would be possible.

GATHERING MY things for work, I glanced at the Arts section of the paper before shoving it into my bag. Cirque du Soleil, the Canadian circus, would be coming to Madison Square Garden, and tickets were going on sale that week.

Unlike lots of plays, circus acts are always both funny and sad, sweet and grotesque at once. They’re an old art form, after all—old, wise, and playful. I ought to go, I thought. It’d do me good. And I should take Danny. She’d love it.

A switch flipped in my memory: clowns. A dream (had it been only last night?), involving my father in a circuslike performance, outdoors, in a strange city. Not American, perhaps Central European . . . Jordan had been doing something with perfume. And there’d been another man, wearing a cape, who’d cartwheeled across the stage. A theater director, I was sure of that. I thought I recognized him, yet couldn’t think who he might be.

And the scent in the dream—jasmine, yes, definitely jasmine. But not quite right. A bit off, somehow?

LATER THAT morning, shortly before noon, Stuart and Sam entered my shop at the same moment. Having nearly collided at the door, they were as taken aback as I; I wasn’t expecting either of them. They greeted each other cordially.

Stuart I’ve known thirty-two years. He’s short and thin, with large gray eyes and a minimal gray beard. His body’s supple and agile, a perfect mime’s body. In college in New England, which is where I met him, Stuart was something of a celebrity. He used to hire himself out as a mime for community events and frat parties, and during those four years he made enough money to cover his massive book bills. His dorm room looked like a very cramped library. Books were stacked everywhere but in one corner where Stuart stored his props: top hats, canes, feathers, face paint, and black patent-leather spats.

He still performs occasionally, for friends—never formally. Sometimes I wonder if he’s missed his real calling, but Stuart claims he’s happier watching a mime than being one. A mime’s work is terribly gloom-inducing, he says. That’s how Stuart talks. He strings together words that might seem affected coming out of someone else’s mouth, but sound entirely natural emerging from his. When he speaks, his hands talk, too. He’s got remarkably flexible wrists and broad palms, each with five long snakes attached: his fingers. I’ve never met a man with nicer nails.

Stuart and I first encountered each other in our college’s theater on a cold Saturday in December. That autumn, having worked hard and happily on two productions, I’d decided I wanted to be the theater’s props manager for the rest of the year. Normally this job was rotated between two students, but on that afternoon I cornered the director and began lobbying for a change in policy. She was not easily convinced, and we began sparring.

Stuart happened to be waiting around for an audition to begin. Hearing me press my case, he sidled up to the director and began tipping his head from side to side like a slightly manic cuckoo bird. Both the director and I fell silent, at which point Stuart launched into a spot-on pantomime of our debate. We began chuckling at him, no longer contestants but an audience. Winding up his improvisation with a bow, Stuart said: “Give this girl whatever she wants.” His voice, which I was hearing for the first time, was as attractively reedy as his body.

“Who is she, anyway?” he added, pointing a sharp forefinger at me while aiming his words at the director. “Camilla Archer?—never heard of her! But I can tell she’s good with props. Only a totally obsessive person would hunt you down and harass you right before an audition! Has this girl not heard of an opportune moment?”

Won over, the director relented. That’s Stuart: he performs a bit of magic and things change, often for the better. But he’s a jouster, and I’m an easy mark for him. “If we were in a spook house at an amusement park,” he asked me once, “and you were really scared, and we were holding hands, would you let go of my hand if I ordered you to?” When I shook my head, he jeered, “Of course you would—to prove how brave you are!” I asked him why, in that case, he’d even bother to order me. “Do you have any idea,” he retorted, “how appealing you are when you’re unnerved?”

SAM SAID something similar to me—I like it when you’re flustered—soon after we met. I took this as a good sign, proof of his ability to see behind surfaces.

That was a long time ago. Sam and I met in Eve’s gardening store. We lived together for two years, were married for seven, and have been divorced for nine—which means we’ve been co-orbital, as he puts it, for eighteen years. We both still live in the West Village, and we still co-own my shop, The Fourth Wall, which we opened at the start of our marriage. When that union ended, we saw no reason to shut down our business, which was clearing a small but reliable profit.

The Fourth Wall is an odd little place. It sells performing-arts memorabilia and curiosa of all kinds, including scripts, scores, libretti, posters, photos, small props, and costumes. Opening a specialized store was never a goal of Sam’s, but he went along with the idea, and we came up with a division of labor that’s still in place. Sam seldom accompanies me on my buying missions and never mans the shop, preferring instead to handle its bookkeeping and taxes.

He’s also a successful publishing consultant with a great eye for well-conceived quirkiness. Mostly he packages and publicizes books featuring the work of contemporary photographers, several of which have done quite well. In addition, Sam also owns a lively art gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a neighborhood he spotted long before it became trendy. The gallery was launched by Lila, his current wife, whose name, Stuart likes to point out, is a shortened version of my own. (And she’s a lot shorter than you, too, he adds, which she is. Younger and prettier, too.) A couple of artists actually run the space, which operates on a shoestring but shows interesting work. Sam’s quietly proud of it.

Then there are the kids. Three-year-old Zeke is Sam’s and Lila’s son; Abby is a seven-year-old redhead, Lila’s from a former marriage, now Sam’s adopted daughter. He adores them both. The children are what Sam’s always wanted, what he and I didn’t manage to—what’s the right verb, conjure, concoct?—while we were together.

“SO WHAT brings you two here?” I asked. “On a Sunday, no less?”

Stuart gave Sam a deferential, you-go-first nod.. . .