You see things differently when you’re in love.
– Anna Wiener, “Falling Hard”
They were in love and then they weren’t. It felt like standing on a wild quotation. Like a balcony happening to someone else in a selfie that included a city. Hell: they went after it. They kindled midnights with warm monosyllables and bought a Turkish coffee pot.
*
She read Renata Adler and wondered how much it would cost to visit New Orleans or score invitations to cocktail parties hosted by art-aspiring patrons. He read Balzac and wondered if Peggy Guggenheim was a metaphor for the girl with golden eyes.
He said it goes both ways, you know, the metaphor. It’s a two-way street. She disagreed with the implications. She said so. She said no — two streets head towards different destinations. They go in opposite directions. This divergence was essential to the meaning of two-way. This motion was critical to the indication. And she resented him for overlooking it.
*
She was in love and then she wasn’t. A person. A being recognizable to itself as distinct. A human who drove. The traffic light turned red but she kept moving forward. Red was irrelevant. Red threw its head back when it laughed, and she didn’t even recognize the habit until she quit doing it. Quit being the bold impasto. Quit performing the self she loved most. No longer losing the thread of her thoughts in the crimson of Antoine Watteau’s little red crayon, the red of Leonardo’s drafts, the swirling lines, those etudes of living and experimenting with possibility. Above all, there was the thrill of unfinishing. And then there wasn’t.
*
The world buzzed on schedule. The large white sign on the brownstone condo read foreclosed. Only that word was red-letter. No one was safe from landlords in the city. But solidarity with the evicted didn’t slow her pace. She carried an umbrella just in case; the weather had a mind of its own. The weather often decided otherwise. Weather was pure idiom.
She walked briskly to punish her own tendency to stroll. A sack of dead bagels poked up from a trash can. What had her parents expected of the world? What did they fear most?
Glenn Gould swerved into her head, his eyes twitching to the left as he insisted no one should be allowed to paint this house red. It should be outlawed, Gould said. The color red would provoke an epidemic of manic activity which would then lead to violence, inevitably. Red is too competitive, he concluded. She listened to birds and brought love along as she kept moving, pushing her legs towards the vegetable market. Three purple tomatoes, one cucumber, a bouquet of squash. Not manic but methodical. There was a point to this motion. A finale. She watched an exhausted bus slump on the curb and then stop to let the commuters off. The tips of their shoes reached for the black step that led down to the sidewalk.
*
He was in love and then he wasn’t. That day when they ran into each other at the bookstore, she was wearing a white shirt. White, he murmured, you look like an angel-orgy in it. She stopped wearing red: she said it clashed with her skin tone.
You can tell a star’s age by its temperature. His father had said this, whiskey in hand, the hollow winds of the Midwest rippling across his face, shaping it like clay as the sun bled into sunset. The red stars are the oldest ones, the weakest, but white stars are young.
This seemed sensible and yet impossible. But he was there all the time now. In her room. In her head. He helped repaint the walls of her crimson bedroom into an off-white hue that caught the light. I feel so much lighter, she had said, her eyes darting back and forth between his lips and the coffee. The space between them expanded to include the way she imagined him looking at her: what he relished. What he remembered. What he despised.
*
A rosy-fingered dawn ripped straight from Homer’s infernals spread across the apartment. The day clattered forward. They were and they weren’t. Was it all of the sudden?
Dusk buttered their bread with omens and almonds. He recalled Dante’s Purgatorio, the red-orange of Mars breaking through the dense mists above the horizon. As if some god poured burning paint onto the ocean below.
They spent three days on the coast with old friends. A cat convalesced on the fake leather sofa of the rental. Nothing could be seen of the edge where colors set.
*
She was. She had been. So desperate to see him at the wedding of a mutual friend. A shared way of looking at the world, the woman marrying their friend was saying. Red carnations that resembled small elephants from a distance. So much elegance, she said to her friend’s mother. Eager to catch a moment alone with him. Infatuated by the lights on the golf course, looking quite lonely at night, and no one to share this image with. She kept it for him in a notebook.
*
He was. He had been. Mystified by the eloquence of her embroidery on the pillowcase. Pacing the lobby and looking for words. Trying to describe the allure of her contestations, major and minor, intelligent and ignorant. He recognized her in everything, including his readings. Her dissonance in Martin Amis’ phrase “the sexuality of the road accident”; her laughter in a leaf at the foot of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s unrealized pantisocracy; the scent of her perfume like a mysterious Proustian secretion in a book by Walter Abish; her tempestuousness in a “world made richer by a wreath” in a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke; her eyes in the “fire-fainting sea” of Wallace Stevens.
*
He was thinking of reversals of fortune in Greek tragedy. Nothing was permanent. Except maybe the weird shoe ads in the classifieds section of Harper’s; those shoe ads had been running forever. Peripateia. Orthodontics. Protofascists.
*
She was thinking of hands and what we do with them. In Camille Claudel’s Waltz, the man and the woman dance, their bodies intersecting and then merging into a vortex. The sculpture’s lower half resembles a star spinning itself out, dispersing its energy into the witless cosmos. And Camille’s hand goes to meet the curved palm of her lover and mentor, Auguste Rodin.
*
They were. Where were they? Walking along the river at night, she felt his hand harboring her own and the world could no longer harm her. The world in his hand could no longer do the small things involved in harming. All middle terms had vanished. The world in his hand could only astonish, create, electrify, or destroy her. Take it easy, but take it, Mingus had written.
*
Where were they going? She sat on his lap while he typed and rubbed her cheek against his chin. Her eyes closed, her mind cleared itself completely. Prickliness: him. Against her skin. What is it? he wondered. She wanted to say something. He could feel it, like a cat moving between his calves. What do you think about this? she said, as she lifted her iphone and located the photo of Claudel’s sculpture. He took the iphone from her and expanded the image with his fingertip, staring closely, looking for something. Or just looking. He wasn’t sure what she was saying. She hadn’t said anything. Her eyes sparkled. Well then, he asked— and grinned — do you like waltzing? She didn’t know. Teach me, she said. And so they rose from the kitchenette table. And the room was embarrassing, gorgeous, like sunset. And they did.
*
He was thinking about the scene at the film’s beginning, a simple phone conversation. The wife smokes a cigarette as her husband says he won’t be able to make it home that evening. The camera alternates between the same two frames: the wife holding the phone v. the husband holding the phone. A conversation happens. And it makes him uncomfortable: the wife’s loneliness, already fringed by madness. And then the wife walks through the rain like a piano solo in an abandoned mall. Like a song in a suburban ruin, she sits on a stool at a bar and looks for a pair of eyes to erase her. What on earth had John Cassavetes been thinking?
*
Her throat itched for sour candy. She slipped away from the film during a slow scene to smoke a cigarette. Fascinated by the sensation of nausea. How could John bear to direct Gena Rowlands in this role? I mean she was his wife. She was and she wasn’t that slice of pie in his life.
Still, she thought, it would be thrilling to be directed by him. She couldn’t stop imagining it, and so she went in and sat closer to him on the sofa. He watched the screen as she said: Part of me dreams of being the body that brings your vision to life. As soon as the words cartwheeled out of her mouth, she wanted to eat them. Her hand on his knee, mid-thigh. His face slightly blue from the screen. His profile wavering like the shadow of an upright bass in the unlit parts of a truck stop. He was watching the movie, he said. He was and then he wasn’t.
She interrupted him. She had and then hadn’t. He said this was one of the best parts and pointed his finger towards the screen. Her eyes followed his finger into the replay. The blocked-out part, the overwritten. The woman under the influence cohered to the husband. If she cohered to the husband, she was decoherent to everyone else. When the man on the screen said, Make yourself at home, all the men listened. The wife sat at the head of the table, mumbling babytalk. Can I get you anything? she kept asking. Some wives lose the map of language. She does and she doesn’t want to continue watching this movie with him.
She puts Mingus on the turntable so she can imagine being in his imagination as something other than herself.
Something about the upright bass and man.
She had put Mingus on the turntable before.
She never wanted to listen to Mingus anymore.
He watches her for a minute and then it’s too much. He goes to the balcony and leaves her alone with the extant self-portrait.
*
They did and they didn’t disagree about the film’s meaning. They do but they don’t. He wanted her to see what the director had intended. And she tried to, kept trying, dilating her brain as she washed strawberries. The director is like the husband who wants to control everything, he told her. The knife made small dents on the cutting board. The strawberries looked tame without their spiky green hats. She cut off their hats quietly. It was true that the husband had a temper. The husband gets angry a lot, she told him. The wife loses her mind. The kids watch. Their parents.
He didn’t get why they couldn’t discuss the movie without losing the train of thought. You mean the train track? she replied. She acted serious. He scowled; chewed a strawberry.
Did you count how many times the husband slapped her? He said this aloud, berry in mouth, and then wrapped his arms around her waist, pulling her into his chest. She couldn’t see his face in the pathos. It was horrible, he murmured. It was horrid to watch. They agreed it was unbearable – like watching a new blister being mixed with oil paints in order to create a color. And dreading the development of a draft without destination. And John Corigliano’s red violin caprices.
*
He didn’t. Imagine an ending. She did. Begin writing an essay about Delmore Schwartz that turned into a series on the poetics of loneliness. The people on screens can never reject us. They liked to think this. Make-believe was never as mean as family. That’s why kids played pretend. It was a form of protection.
She wanted to belong to him completely, which was only possible in fantasy. She walked along a pier alone like some fantastic creature, existing only for him.
He wanted to watch her imitate the voices of women on screens — and keep laughing – and then die by her side when they were in their early nineties. They incompleted each other.
He couldn’t see her on that pier she imagined for him. He couldn’t see what she wanted to be or why she believed in trying to talk about things like nonexistent piers and Coney Island.
She couldn’t see the point of walking. And where was Glenn Gould? All those people talking over each other in his cold idea of north. Their teeth chattering. Her hands empty. His hands hidden in mittens. Her hair falling out in clumps like the unloved women from her mother’s family who had never been good enough.