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It has not happened yet. This most
exquisite moment of equipoise, equilibrium.
The moment between heartbeats. The moment between
breaths. The moment of
quick sharp terror before the plunge into orgasm, the body’s
helpless convulsing as the soul is extinguished like a
flame.
Sometime before dawn of March 31. Though
Serena has no sense of the date as she has but the vaguest sense of
the season: this teasing New England stasis between late winter and early
spring. She is
certain she hasn’t been sleeping—not since Andre has left her and
the child—yet her eyes spring open alert and dilated. Someone—it must be Andre—has
unlocked a rear door, has entered the house quietly and is
approaching in the hall.
Serena’s heart pounds like a terrified bird beating wings in
her chest, she clutches the fifteen-month little Andre in her arms
hearing his father’s footsteps in the corridor—
“Andre? We’re in
here.”
He will know where to
find us. I have left
messages—so many messages!
His assistant knows.
His friends know.
He
knows that I am waiting, and that I am not going to go away.
This raging insomnia!
The sixth night of Serena Dayinka’s vigil in the borrowed
house—the Nickelsons’ “big-open house” the child calls it, so many
skylights, floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows, sliding glass doors
overlooking a hilly late-winter terrain of drained and etiolated and
curiously depthless pine woods—on rural-suburban Edgehill Lane three
miles north of the village of Tarkington, Massachusetts. Serena has had phases of
insomnia in the past—since the age of thirteen, when her father went away—but none has been
so virulent as this, raging like wild fire, dry brush, furious
crackling flames rushing over the glassy walls, the high white
ceilings and the hardwood floors whose high gloss has been dulled by
boot prints (she, the grateful occupant of the borrowed house, de facto homeless until her
June first residency begins at Breadloaf) has been careless about
tracking damp, mud, gravel in and out, indifferent to stains from
the child’s spilled food and leaky sodden underpants where in one of
his more robust moods he has played at pushing himself across the
floor like a little monkey) as other parts of the beautifully
furnished house will be discovered to have been defiled by the
recent occupants, some more willfully than others. How could this horror have
happened! We welcomed
her into our house to help her out, she was in such a
predicament. We did it
to help out Andre. We
had no idea the poor woman was so-- Wiping the child’s
runny nose on a paper cocktail napkin she then crumples and tosses
aside—much of the house is strewn with wadded stiffened
tissues—mother and little Andre are lying in a patch of sunshine on the
high-gloss living room floor, the several bedrooms in the
Nickelsons’ house have become too smelly.
Serena laughs to think how such superior individuals as
Gerald and Danielle Nichelson—he, Andre Gatteau’s poet-critic pal who
publishes so frequently in The New York Review of
Books, she, a “celebrated”
Renaissance art historian--will be obliged to stammer the
inevitable clichés, how scripted their reactions will be, like those
of TV performers. All of Andre Gatteau’s
friends, acquaintances, admirers—everyone who has known both Andre
and Serena—and those who knew Andre’s son—will be forced to stammer
in the days, weeks, months to follow will say But where was Andre, how could
Andre have allowed such a horror to
happen!
She laughs, to think.
Well, where is
Andre Gatteau? In
the early-morning of March 31?
Andre is in retreat. Andre has gone away for an
indeterminate period of time—it might be a few days, a week, two
weeks. Very likely, it will not be longer, nor has he traveled
abroad, for, as his assistant knows, he has not taken his passport;
she has reason to suspect, since she’d made hurried arrangements for
him just the previous week, that Andre Gatteau is at the Lost
Lake Mountain Zen Retreat in the Adirondack Mountains, eleven miles west of Scroon Lake.
Several times in the past twenty-three years, Andre Gatteau
has retreated to Lost
Lake
Mountain. In the exigency of personal
crises, Lost
Lake
Mountain has become his
solace, his spiritual home.
That place where, when
you come there, they have to take you in.
Here, in the mist-shrouded Adirondack dawn, so cold in the
barely heated sesshin room overlooking leaden-glass Lost Lake that
his breath is steaming, Andre Gatteau, fifty-three years old and
feeling his age, is sitting zazen with a dozen other
seekers of enlightenment under the tutelage of a revered Zen
monk. They were wakened
in the dark at 5:45 A.M. ,
it is not yet 7:30 A.M.
and already Andre Gatteau is feeling the strain of the intense Zen
meditation. Though
Andre has been sitting zazen-- in the classic lotus
position, buttocks on the bare pine floorboards, ankles tucked
beneath (sinewy-muscled) legs, knees raised and hands in loosely
gripped fists on his knees—for little more than an hour, already his
bladder is pinching with a need to urinate; there have come mocking
little jabs of arthritic pain not only in his legs but in his
wrists, and in that tenderly vulnerable spot at the base of his
spine; he is assailed by distracting thoughts, hornet-thoughts,
obsessive thoughts—all that Zen meditation forbids. Observe your thoughts. Observe your thoughts as
they emerge, as they arise, as they fill your consciousness, as they
clamor and howl and fade and vanish, observe your thoughts knowing
always that your thoughts are not you: your thoughts are not your
Zen-mind.
This is true!
He knows this is the one true fact.
And so he is determined, this time at
Lost
Lake
Mountain he will not
fail. As he did not
fail in the several heroic endeavors of his life, the first of these
being a re-invention of his life, a scouring and a cleansing and a
re-making of his soul, as an African-American boy of fourteen, in
Lakeland, Florida.
The eastern sky above
Mt.
Hood is veined and
mottled like a tumorous growth, curious streaks of shadow, crevices
of sunshine and rain-swollen cumulous clouds. Here is the beauty of the world,
without humankind to name it.
With the exception of a flush-faced porcine white man in his
sixties and an older, emaciated white woman with a starved-hawk of
sheer desperation—Help me!
help me!—the other Zen-seekers embarked upon this twelve-day
sesshin retreat appear to be considerably younger than Andre
Gatteau. At the silent
breakfast Andre had taken care not to look at anyone very
closely—Andre Gatteau isn’t a man who wishes to exchange smiles,
greetings, handshakes with strangers—certainly Andre doesn’t want
anyone to look closely at him. Known for his shyness,
or his willful passivity, Andre is one to speak only when directly
addressed and then often in a near-audible murmur. (Though he reads his poetry
on stage, as a performer, in a voice of astonishing emotional
nuance, power, and beauty.)
Andre is a stocky dark-skinned man with a wrestler’s build:
muscled shoulders, large hands and feet, slightly foreshortened
legs. His face looks as
if it has been battered, as in a car wreck; he is ugly-handsome,
with unusually large alert almond-shaped eyes aslant in his stolid
face; on his forehead just beneath his hairline is a sickle-shaped
scar that catches the light like a winking third eye. His graying nubby hair is
trimmed short. Not a
tall man, at five-foot-nine, Andre carries himself with an almost
military bearing, he has a dread of stooped shoulders, a drooping
head; he has a dread of aging, as he cannot imagine a future in
which, by an effort of will, he will not be able to control the
circumstances of his life utterly.
At Lost
Lake, Andre Gatteau is incognito. In any case no incoming calls
are accepted here, and no uninvited visitors. The effort of sesshin is intense
meditation: sitting zazen
seven to ten hours daily, in the late afternoon walking zazen on the trails circling
the retreat. There are
interludes of work zazen,
Zen instruction, brief breaks for meals, bedtime promptly after
sunset.
Andre relieves some of the stress of the zazen meditation by going
for a run of two to three miles before the evening meal and already
by mid-morning his body yearns ahead to that interlude of release,
and freedom: always
Andre has gone on solitary runs, often in the early morning, or in
the early evening after a day of highly concentrated work. Take me with you, I’m a runner
too, I promise I won’t talk to you Andre please take me with you
she’d pleaded before pregnancy distended her small supple body and
there was no possibility of Serena joining
him.
It was nothing personal: Andre had never wanted anyone to
accompany him, running.
Since he’d begun seriously writing poetry in his mid-twenties
running—solitary running—has been sacred to him, a time of intense meditation: his
model is the blind John Milton who’d purposefully spent much of his
time alone, developing his remarkable memory as one might develop
muscles through sheer exercise and repetition; Milton could retain
as many as fifty hendecasyllables of blank verse in his memory at a
single time and then dictate these to whoever was available. In this way the entirety of
the magnificent Paradise
Lost was composed.
No living poet can be said to be “famous” in America—nor even
“known”—yet in some quarters, predominantly east-coast, urban, and
academic, Andre Gatteau has become a famous name in the past fifteen
years: his photograph has appeared in the New York Times (National
Book Award, Pulitzer Prize, McArthur award, et al.), he has been the
subject of lengthy profiles in the New Yorker and Harper’s. Such attention has
made Andre even more self-conscious in public. Serena teased Poor Andre! He resents being recognized
when he doesn’t want to be recognized and he resents not being
recognized when he isn’t recognized.
Serena!
His heart contracts in pain, he will not think of
her.
Nor of the child: his child.
Hers, and his.
He cannot think Ours.
Andre? Please call me.
I am so sorry, I
did not mean to be so emotional.
Did not mean to
accuse you, it’s just I am so exhausted.
Andre, forgive me,
you know I didn’t mean the ridiculous things I
said.
Little Andre is
missing you, darling. Here, I will put him on the
line, say hello to Daddy, honey, c’mon sweetie Daddy is
listening—
Call my cell phone,
Andre. It’s never
turned off. I am
staying at Gerald’s and Danielle’s as you know, I am expecting to
see you here maybe this weekend, please call and confirm will you, I
will leave their number another time in case you’ve misplaced
it.
As the Heart Sutra is being chanted by Zen devotees, young
Caucasians in coarse-woven monk-robes like a PBS documentary: this
continuous lulling chant like slabs of water cascading down a rocky
mountain stream.
The Heart Sutra of which it is claimed that somewhere in the
world at all times without ceasing the Heart Sutra which is the
oldest and most beautiful of all the sutras is being
chanted.
No color
sound
smell
taste
Touch
object of mind
No realm of eyes
no realm of mind
No ignorance no
extinction of ignorance
No old age
death
no extinction of old age and
death
The great bright mantra the
utmost mantra
Gone
gone beyond
Gone all the way
beyond
Bodhi Svaha!
Serena surprised him stealing up behind him barefoot and
naked except for wispy black panties sliding her small hot hands
inside his shirt, kneaded and stroked his fleshy chest, tickled the
taut little nipples, kiss-sucked that special spot just below his
ear that never failed to arouse him sexually whispering All that Zen can tell you,
darling, is what you already know: you are perfect. And—I am perfect! So—come to
bed!
Mum-my!
Mum-my.
The child stirs and frets in her arms, his skin is
flushed with fever.
Premature by nearly five weeks the child is prone to
respiratory ailments, for several days he’s been sneezing, nose
running and that tight barking little cough that tears at her heart
like a reproach. Mum-my! Mum-my! Why doesn’t Dad-dy love us
anymore! As the
Tarkington pediatrician has recommended Serena has been giving
little Andre children’s aspirin dissolved in fruit juice, she’s been
urging him to eat the hot oatmeal with raisins that has been his
favorite, but the child hasn’t much appetite, spits and chokes up
what he manages to swallow, pushing the spoon irritably away whining
Mum-my no! Don’t
want.
Even whining like a sick puppy, hair stuck to his
forehead like seaweed and a powerful stench of baby-filth eking from
him, little Andre is a beautiful child. No Caucasian child so
beautiful as Andre Dayinka Gatteau. Exquisite thick-lashed
dark-brown eyes, silky cocoa-colored skin distinctly lighter than
his father’s burnished-dark skin but darker than his mother’s
creamy-tawny skin, and those perfect little sculpted lips Mummy
likes to kiss, suck-suck-kiss, as playfully Mummy suck-suck-kisses
little Andre’s wriggling monkey-toes. It has been a while since
Serena has bathed little Andre, she intends to bathe him this
morning while there is still time, no later than 11:30 A.M. she must
bathe him, he must be prepared.
In the bath, the tiny penis. Flesh-knob penis, miniature
penis, so unlike the penis of an adult man she stoops to kiss it
lightly, not a suck-suck-kiss in the tub (for that would be wicked,
perverse)—such a Mummy-kiss is forbidden. God help us. God O God help us. Help me not to do this God
help me send me this child’s father O God.
It is a fact, a legal fact: the child’s name is Andre
Dayinka Gatteau.
On the birth certificate this is so. There is
no questioning the paternity of the child, Serena Dayinka and Andre
Gatteau had been sharing a residence for more than a year in
Amherst, Massachusetts.
You can laugh at such legal formalities, such bourgeois
convention, of course flamboyant young poets like Serena Dayinka
laugh at such things but there is a time (Serena knows,
recalling the distraught example of her mother after her father died
without leaving a legally executed will) when these may be the only
words that matter.
And they are to be married, Serena had begun to tell a few
friends.
Impulsively she’d called her mother with whom she had not
spoken in months and had not seen in more than a year. Her
mother’s voice had been eager, thrilled. You could not predict
Phyllis Ferguson’s behavior: though she and her youngest and most
mutinous daughter had not spoken in a long time it was as if, in
this matter of marrying the great man they’d been conspiring like girls
on the phone every day. Will it be a public sort of
wedding, Phyllis asked shamelessly, reporters, the press? Andre
Gatteau was very famous, Phyllis said, she’d looked him up on the
Internet and people had heard of him where she lived. (In
Bethesda, Maryland.
With Serena’s elderly grandmother. In the
stolid-brick house in which Phyllis had grown up in the long-ago
1950s that held very little interest for Serena since it fell beyond
the scope of her poetry.) When was the wedding
scheduled, Phyllis asked and Serena said, Late October.
Almost shyly Phyllis asked where. Serena
said Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Chapel Hill! North
Carolina! But why, Phyllis asked,
confused.
Because
she and Andre had a joint appointment at the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill, Serena
explained patiently. Because they were moving to
Chapel Hill at the end of
the summer after they returned from the Prague literary
festival.
Prague! Phyllis did not even ask
about Prague.
Phyllis had not yet seen her beautiful cocoa-colored grandson
in person.
Phyllis had not yet held her fifteen-month grandson in her
arms.
So strange Serena thought it, a stab of pain between her
eyes, a quick jolt of her old furious hatred for this woman, Phyllis
seemed scarcely to respond when Serena spoke of her son. She’d
inquired after his skin color, initially. She had
not asked after him since.
Mum-my?
Little Andre has heard the sound, too—a man’s footsteps
in the rear of the house—his eyes spring open, glassy yet
alert.
Is it Dad-dy? It seems to be a
promise—Mummy has promised?—that the child’s father will be coming
to see them very soon. There has been the wonderful
tiptoe-Daddy game, Daddy returning late at night and tiptoeing into
the child’s room to lean over his bed and kiss him solemnly on the
forehead
Don’t wake up, little-Andre. Bless you, in sleep.
Often it has happened, for Daddy travels frequently. It is
Daddy’s complaint that he hates to travel, yet there is a pleasure
in Daddy returning home, sometimes surprising Mummy; or sometimes in
the night there is a call, and the child is wakened to hear his
mother’s girlish voice catch in surprise. Oh
darling!
It’s you, where are you?
This raging insomnia! Its advantage is, Serena sees so
very clearly.
One of the Zen poems she’d copied into her journal, that
Andre had shown her
Nothing in the cry
of cicadas suggests they
are about to die
Nine glittering knives on display in the Nickelsons’
kitchen!
Nine Japanese-made stainless steel knives with carved black
handles, magnetized against a metal bar above the blond wood butcher
block table. Why so many knives? Several
appear to be nearly the same size, and similarly shaped; the
differences are near-imperceptible. One, the longest, at a wicked ten
inches, must be a carving knife; there is a chef’s knife, with a
specially weighted handle; there is a knife for the left hand; there
is a deceptively ordinary-looking paring knife. But
razor-sharp. A serious cook keeps his knives
razor-sharp.
Serena felt a touch of vertigo. These
instruments of savage beauty taunting Serena Dayanik to look, to
see.
Lurid as pornographic images, obscene in display as chattery
Danielle Nickelson insisted upon showing Serena through the dazzling
Mexican-tile-floored kitchen as if she, Serena, were a prospect
buyer, and not a desperate homeless squatter clutching at her
whimpering cast-off son.
Gently Danielle kept touching Serena’s thin bare arm in a way
meant to give comfort that felt like mockery.
You and little Andre will be very
comfortable here, I think! There’s plenty of food and
the village is only five minutes away and friends at the college
will be looking out for you. Say yes, Serena! Gerald
and I would be so happy if you stay here until—things are sorted out
with Andre.
Quickly Serena looked away from the knives. Not a
second glance, that Danielle Nickelson would recall.
Winter sunshine! There is something stark and
cleansing about it.
She wonders if, driving to Tarkington this morning,
early-morning on the Interstate, Andre has been wearing the Gucci
sunglasses she’d given him.
These were very chic, very expensive steel-rimmed glasses
with a dark amber tint, of which Andre had been disapproving of
course.
But how handsome he looked wearing these glasses, Serena
understood that he was secretly pleased.
Lying with little Andre in her arms in a patch of wintry
sunshine on the floor of the glass walled living room—opening her
legs to the sunshine—naked legs, beneath her soiled flannel
nightgown—this raging insomnia has gutted the inside of her skull,
it is what is called rebound insomnia for she’d been taking an
anti-anxiety medication called lorazapam which a Tarkington doctor
had prescribed for her with but a single refill for he’d wanted her
to come back within a week to see him but this Serena will not
do.
As Dr. Bender wanted her to bring little Andre back within a
few days for fear the child might develop bronchitis or pneumonia
but Serena has no time for such things, Serena’s mind is
blazing.
Like the Heart Sutra which is a continuous chant Serena’s
mind is a continuous chant. Strange how she is lying here on
the floor gazing up at floor-to-ceiling bookshelves crammed with
books—so many books—too many books!—Serena who has published just
three books of poetry of which the first has already gone out of
print looks away wincing. After her father went
away—such terms as death, self-inflicted were never
uttered—Serena’s grief-stricken and furious mother summoned a
second-hand bookstore proprietor to haul away her father’s books;
when Serena and her sisters returned from school that afternoon
every shelf in their father’s study had been cleared, no sign of the
man they’d called Papa remained.
Never has Serena told Andre Gatteau such shameful details of
her childhood in College Park, Maryland. It has
been Serena’s strategy to present herself as utterly
bourgeois, suburban despite the fact—the novelty-fact!—that her
parents were mixed-race: her father Indian, born in Delhi; her mother
Caucasian, from Bethesda
. Rarely
does Serena tell anyone the fullest truth about herself except in
her poetry in which, in meticulously crafted stanzas, she tells the
truth slant as Emily Dickinson has prescribed. Never reveal
what can be flung back into your face Serena’s mother warned her
daughters.
Serena hasn’t been telling the Tarkington pediatrician that
she has been keeping little Andre with her at all times, night, day,
even using the bathroom she is determined not to let the high-strung
child out of her sight for a moment, in terror that the child will
suddenly begin to vomit and choke to death on his
vomit, in terror that on his skinny wobbly legs he will fall and
strike his head on one of the sharp-edged chrome-and-glass tables in
the borrowed house; he will begin to convulse, he will lapse into a
fever-coma, he will simply cease breathing. Andre had
seemed to blame her, the child’s mother, for little Andre’s
perpetual sniveling and runny nose. For the way in which, in Andre’s
words, the beautiful cocoa-skinned child did not seem
right—his fussiness with food, his frequent temper tantrums, his
fits of screeching and babbling at a deafening volume. (Often,
Andre simply fled the premises. Nor could Andre abide what he
called a “messy” household.) Had
not Serena’s own mother reacted with disbelief when Serena called
her to inform her of the pregnancy You?
Pregnant? Having a child? Oh Serena
I don’t think that is a good idea and will this man-- the
father--marry you?
At 9:13
A.M. the phone rings but it is not Daddy and yet it is
early enough, there is plenty of time.
Noon, Serena has decided. She will
bathe the child at 11:30 A.M. for lately there
has been a struggle getting the child into the tub, Mummy must not
lose patience with little Andre, but Mummy must be firm. A line
from Nietzsche that has always struck her It comes, it
is nigh, the great noontide!
The call was from one of the mutual
friends. Checking up on Serena and the child, expressing concern
for Serena and the child, asking if Serena and the child would like
to come for supper that night, gladly he—Hugh--would come over and
pick them up, bring them back to the house, Serena politely
murmurs
No
thank you making no effort to recall who the hell Hugh is, one
of Andre’s professor-friends from Tarkington College, or could be
from Amherst—Amherst is just fifteen miles away—maybe this is the
pushy man, with his wife, who’d approached Serena in the Tarkington
Market the last time she’d ventured out a few days ago alarming
and upsetting Serena in her state of nerves and at an embarrassing
moment when the child was behaving badly, kicking, whining,
precarious in a child-seat attached to Serena’s shopping cart No please
thank you leave me alone I am busy I can’t talk now thank you so
much goodbye.
How Serena has come to hate these people! Pitying
her, condescending to her, Andre Gatteau’s rejected woman and her
brattish child, Serena Dayinka has become a figure of scorn,
ridicule, contempt and her child an unwanted bastard as in the most
brutal and horrific of Grimm’s fairy tales Serena had
appropriated for her use as an ambitious young poet.
Powerful poetry. I like this voice. This is
good poetry, Serena.
Softly he’d spoken, and sincerely. It was
not Andre Gatteau’s way to speak other than softly and sincerely and
when Serena’s poetry did not please him, or when Serena herself did
not please him, it was silence with which he responded, from the
very first it has been silence with which he has responded, there
can be no reply to silence, there can be no defense against silence,
what power have the most persuasive, heartrending, carefully chosen
words against silence and so it came to Serena months ago, as long
as a year ago the terrible thought If I can’t
make this man love me I will make this man hate me, I will pierce
his stony heart.
Of the Japanese knives Serena has selected just three to
bring with her into the living room, to the spreading patch of
sunshine on the rug. An eight-inch steak knife, a
long-handled bread knife, and the practical little paring
knife. But it is the longest knife,
with its wicked-sharp blade, its sly-winking-steely-masculine authority, that most captivates
Serena in her mood of heightened awareness. Thinking
An
instrument like this wields its own justification.
The child knows not to play with knives—nor with forks,
either—but has been fascinated by the flash of knife
blades in the sun. Is this one of Mummy’s games? That
leave Mummy and little-Andre squealing with laughter, gasping for
breath?
Mummy says No! lightly slapping away the child’s
inquisitive fingers.
Sometimes when Mummy says No it is
really Yes. And sometimes if Mummy says Yes it
is really No.
“If
your Daddy loved you better. If your Daddy loved me.”
Serena isn’t speaking reproachfully but playfully. For she
and the child are embarked upon a game. Serena
will think of it as a game. Mummy and little-Andre in the
borrowed house on Edgehill Lane and Daddy making his way to them on
the Interstate: he is traveling at just the speed limit for this is
Andre Gatteau’s way of caution in all matters. Not even
the pressure of time—it is 10:48 A.M., by 12:08 it will have
happened in this patch of sunlight on the hardwood floor of the
Nickelson’s borrowed house—can force him to behave otherwise.
Serena wipes the perspiring child’s face, brushes his sticky
hair back from his forehead. Brightly Serena kisses the little
pug nose.
“He knows, you know. What will happen. If he
doesn’t love us. I’ve told him in my poetry, he has
read my poetry and he knows.”
When you are the lover of a famous man his friends become
your friends except when you are no longer the lover of the famous
man and he has abruptly departed from your life you discover that
these friends are no longer your friends but his.
Please tell me where he is!
Henry? Catherine?
This is Serena. Are you there—please pick up the
phone.
Anthony?
I am so sorry to be bothering you—again—but I need to speak
with Andre, I need to leave a message for him, this is urgent and I
don’t think his assistant is passing my messages on to him, please
help me, I haven’t heard from Andre for almost two weeks, he hasn’t
returned my calls and I don’t know why I swear I don’t know why
please help me don’t do this to me—Jeanne?
Steve?—don’t do this to me, you will regret it.
How humiliating for Andre Gatteau, the most private of
men!
How mortified Andre will be when he learns that the
distraught and vindictive mother of his child—his youngest
child—younger than his (estranged, scattered) adult children by more
than thirty years—will have contacted, or tried to contact, as many
as forty people in the several harried days
leading to noon of March 31: Andre’s New York editor—his
publisher—his agent—the very nice woman who arranges for Andre’s
lucrative public appearances (who has begun representing Serena
Dayinka, too, on a smaller scale); Andre’s poet-friends, Andre’s
most valued poet-friend Nobel Prize-winning Derek Walcott who “isn’t
available” to speak with her (Serena carefully spells out her name
to Walcott’s assistant identifying herself as The fiancée
of Andre Gatteau and the mother of his baby.) With
these people Serena is initially polite until she understands how
they are lying to her, protecting Andre; then she becomes angry,
sarcastic, abusive. With mounting desperation she
contacts former colleagues of Andre’s in the graduate writing
program at NYU, some of whom have not glimpsed Andre Gatteau in
years;
she swallows her pride to call one of Andre’s former lovers—a
black woman lawyer associated with the Children’s Defense League in
Washington, D.C.., who doesn’t return her call; one frantic morning
after a terrifying insomniac night she calls the Dean of Arts and
Sciences at the University of Chapel Hill where she and Andre have
joint appointments to teach poetry in the fall. Yes but you
must have a number for him, a way of getting past his assistant I
think so, you were speaking directly with him last fall, Andre was
negotiating his salary you must remember! Please
help me, this is a matter of life and death! A
wave of fury, nausea, shame sweeps over her, Serena breaks the
connection and begins to cry.
“Mum-my? No—cry.”
Serena hugs little Andre, kisses him wetly on the lips.
This child is her salvation.
Until her damned laptop developed a glitch Serena has been
sending
emails as well. Dozens—hundreds?—of frantic
messages like deranged and rabid bats flying out blindly into the
void.
Many bounce back, Serena doesn’t have the correct addresses
for these strangers.
When she was nine, Serena and her two older sisters were
informed by their mother in a furious quavering voice: “Your father
has gone away, to be sick. Your father is a sick selfish
man.
Your father is a bankrupt, d’you know what a ‘bankrupt’
is?
You will know! Soon enough, you will know!”
Their mother was a nervous woman with a fair, thin, flushed
skin, a high-pitched voice, faded-red hair falling past her
shoulders in a style too youthful for her age; she was alternately
over-protective of her daughters, or withdrawn and hostile to
them.
What Serena could remember of her father—her gentle,
melodic-voiced father!—Papa with his tawny skin, his beautiful
thick-lashed eyes so dark as to appear black, a scent of something
like cinnamon on his breath—was that he’d been a fastidious man who
dressed with care, at five foot seven inches no taller than his
Caucasian wife and smaller-boned than she, with glinting wire-rimmed
eyeglasses that were always crooked on his delicate nose; born in
Delhi, India, Serena’s father had come to the United States to earn
a Ph.D. in psychology at George Mason University; he met Serena’s
mother in a section of Psych 101, an enormous lecture course in
which she’d been enrolled. Phyllis imagined herself an
intensely spiritual person, in opposition to her secular-Protestant
parents; impulsively she married soft-spoken Shahid Dayinka who’d
been smitten with her golden-red crimped hair, her fair freckled
Caucasian skin and dazzling toothpaste smile. Each
would turn out to have made an irrevocable error. To
Phyllis’s astonishment, Shahid Dayinka suffered from myriad health
problems—he was irritable, anxious, prone to “nervous stomach
upsets” and “respiratory ailments”—an insomniac, he was addicted to
barbiturates; to get through a lengthy teaching day (now at the
University of Maryland in
Baltimore, where he’d
been hired as an assistant professor) he took amphetamines.
Preparing his classes he became increasingly anxious and
short of breath, he had difficulty communicating with
undergraduates, his powerful medications left him groggy and dazed;
his students wrote cruel evaluations speaking of his sub-literate
English—his biased grading; it was Mr. Dayinka’s failure
to amuse his undergraduates that sealed his doom, undergraduates
will not forgive you for boring them. Brazenly reading the student
newspaper, yawning, talking to one another, even sleeping, though
Professor Dayinka pleaded with them Attention
please!
Let us have quiet in here please! For
those who are trying to hear me--
He could not continue. He took a medical disability
leave.
Without tenure, Mr. Dayinka would not be kept on at the
University, his contract was voided. One day when Serena and her
sisters returned from school, a day that had not seemed so very
different from any other day after their father had ceased working
at the University, their mother told them, “Your father has gone,
your father has gone away to be sick. Your father has left us and will
not be returning.” Phyllis’s greeny-amber eyes shone
with tears of righteous anger. Her mouth was a thin bitter
line.
She never wept. She never wept that Serena
observed.
She never explained the circumstances of Serena’s father’s
departure though years later Serena would learn from her sisters the
astonishing fact that he’d had killed himself with an overdose of
barbiturates, dying alone in a motel twenty miles away. Never a
drinker, Mr. Dayinka had managed to drink a quarter-bottle of
whiskey which alone would have had the authority to stop his
heart.
Serena’s mother would never forgive such a despicable act,
she told her daughters that weakness in a man is the most shameful
thing.
The Fergusons had been adamantly opposed to their
daughter
marrying a dark-skinned foreigner—Delhi-born, a Hindu!—what
had she been thinking? And now these three daughters,
unmistakably mixed-blood.
Serena’s mother took money from the Fergusons to send Serena,
the smartest of her daughters, as she was the lightest-skinned, to a
“posh” private school in Baltimore. “You
need to meet people who can help you. You will need help, from such
origins.”
In this private school, Quaker-affiliated, Serena Dayinka
thrived: like a young filly running her heart out, desperate to
excel she began a model student. Art, poetry, music, journalism,
theater.
Everyone’s favorite. Most of her friends were Caucasian
girls.
Their parents adored her. Very pretty and petite and
sharp-tongued she intimidated the Caucasian boys, though they were
drawn to her creamy-pale skin, beautiful eyes and “exotic” features
and long shimmering dark-glossy hair. Serena was influenced in her art
by the savage unabashed narcissism of the Mexican painter Frida
Kahlo, her poetry was “deeper” and “more spiritual.”
It was her poetry that had drawn Andre Gatteau to her, of
course.
And Andre Gatteau’s poetry, that had drawn Serena to him.
Andre had asked Serena only politely about her family. Andre
Gatteau was not one to invite confidences, even in circumstances of
physical intimacy. In her bright bemused voice Serena
told him that her parents had been “nice enough” but “utterly
bourgeois” with the “usual middle-class pretensions” —though her
father was from Delhi and had a Ph.D. in psychology he’d become
“hopelessly Americanized.”
He’d died—of a heart attack—when Serena was just nine, she
said.
She’d scarcely known him. And she and her mother were “not
on easy terms.” So calmly Serena spoke, so without
self-pity, Andre squeezed her hands, in sympathy. Both
Serena’s small child-hands in one of Andre’s enormous hands. How she
loved him, then! How love passed between them, in
that vulnerable moment! It was the very start of their
relationship, their first week as lovers.
“Sometimes it’s for the best, Serena,” Andre said. “Not to
be on easy terms with one’s parents.” Gently he’d cradled her in his
arms, kissed the tremulous vein at her forehead. In turn,
Serena had not asked Andre much about his background for what she
wished to know, what was essential in Andre Gatteau, was contained
in his sparely crafted elegiac poetry. All poets
secrete their deepest selves in their art. The
person you are likely to meet is but an imposter.
Because it is happening continuously without end as the Heart
Sutra is forever being chanted it has not
happened yet in the borrowed house on Edgehill
Lane.
Has to uncoil his legs! Can’t bear the posture another
moment, his body is wracked in pain. Like great benumbed snakes his
sinewy-muscled legs have been coiled together for nearly ninety
minutes.
And his bladder aches, he must stumble out of the sesshin
room quickly and get to the drafty closet-sized lavatory just
outside.
Urinating into the ancient stained toilet, what bliss! The
truest bliss of the long strained morning, Andre thinks.
He has been distracted, thinking of the woman. And of the
child.
He had not wanted Serena to have a child, he’d made it clear
to Serena from the start that his life could not include a second
family, Serena had assured him yes she understood, of course. And yet:
Serena had become pregnant. And yet: Serena had convinced him,
they must have this child.
Your last-born child, Andre. Another
son!
But this one you will love, your life is settled now.
Everything has fallen in to place now. I
promise, I will be as exemplary a mother as I am a poet!
Come here, go away poor raggedy Papa
Nothing
in my hands but crumpled old paper
A refrain from one of Serena Dayinka’s mock-elegies for her
past. mesmerizing to the audience at the Waterloo Arts Festival.
And
how captivating Serena’s presentation of herself, understated, yet
impassioned; coolly restrained, yet sensuous; she wore a crimson
silk shirt and black silk trousers, black leather lace-up shoes on
child-sized feet, her skin was creamy-caramel and her lips
plum-colored and her long glossy black hair shimmered nearly to her
waist; on her head a man’s black fedora hat tilted at a rakish
angle.
The crowd was wild for her: of the “emerging” poets on the
program that evening, Serena Dayinka was the star.
In the audience was Andre Gatteau. And
afterward at a party there was Andre Gatteau brought to meet Serena
Dayinka by friends of Andre’s, knowing he’d wanted to meet the young
woman but was reluctant to approach her. They’d
shaken hands, they’d stared and smiled at each other—how much
shorter Andre Gatteau was, than Serena had envisioned: yet how
powerfully built the man was, how luminous a presence, rich
dark-ebony skin, broad flaring nostrils, deep-set almond eyes, the
shy curve of his mouth. On his forehead, a small
sickle-shaped scar. His nubby graying hair was trimmed
short as a cap, in the earlobe of his right ear he wore a small gold
stud.
Serena had been reading Andre Gatteau for years. Since
her early twenties as a M.F.A. student at Johns Hopkins. Of the
poets a generation or two preceding hers, Andre Gatteau was the most
acclaimed.
His work appeared frequently in the New
Yorker. Linked sonnets, ingeniously
orchestrated sestinas, ballads, beautifully crafted work like iron
filigree exploring the poet’s past as a descendant of slaves coming
of age in the 1950s in Lakeland, Florida. You
could surmise from the poetry that Andre’s father had been a
construction worker who’d died young; the family had scattered, but
Andre had been singled out for a scholarship to Jesuit school where
naturally he’d thrived. Like a young eagle soaring high
over Lakeland, Florida he’d left the home of his birth on
scholarships, fellowships, residencies at distinguished
universities, his was a singular American-literary success story,
the more remarkable in that Andre Gatteau avoided outright racial
themes in his work, political stridency, overstatement; he explored
his slave-heritage, and the identity-conflict of black Americans—is
one essentially black, or American?—the question first brought to
public consciousness in the 1960s by the activist-visionary Malcolm
X.
These were powerful themes but so delicately and ironically
presented, in Andre Gatteau’s poetry, the effect was of a glass rod
tapped against crystal, not a raised voice, still less a howl of
execration. Here was a brilliant black poet
whose heritage was more clearly Wallace Stevens than Langston
Hughes; whose predecessors were Donne, Herbert, Marvel.
For such poetry, Andre Gatteau was widely acclaimed. By the
Caucasian literary establishment particularly.
Here was poetry to engage the brain, not merely the groin.
Here was poetry we will all want to read and discuss!
Here was poetry we will want to reward.
Still Andre had been insulted. Plenty of times.
Sometimes subtly, sometimes not-so. Though
he’d done all he could do to distinguish himself from black
political-activist poetry still there were those who wished to
reduce him to the color of his skin. Serena herself had witnessed an
extraordinary incident at the annual luncheon of the American Academy of Arts and
Letters when an older Caucasian poet, white-haired, drunk and
swaying on his feet, remarked to Andre, “You people win all the
prizes now. Sure, I know—it’s your turn. God
knows we can’t begrudge you. We had a good long run.”
Her refrain from “Raggedy Papa” he’d quoted to Serena, that
first night. After the party, in Serena’s hotel
room.
Poor ragged Papa like crumpled paper. He’d
said, “You’ve been reading Roethke, little Serena.”
Serena blushed. It was true! Andre
laughed, and kissed her.
The first time, so sweet. Their mouths tasted of wine. Serena
thought This is the happiness of my life. This is why I
have lived.
Three years, seven months. Serena Dayinka and Andre Gatteau
have been together.
Though, Serena must concede, they have not always lived
together.
For Andre had at all times to have a separate residence,
where Serena, and then Serena and the child, were not really
welcome.
A place to which he could withdraw, when he needed to be
alone.
You might say—in fact, this is plausible—that Andre hasn’t
left Serena even now, he has just gone away to be alone.
This is what some of her friends have suggested. Serena
knows better, she knows what has passed between them, still Serena
wishes to believe.
“Daddy will be here. Daddy is on his way.”
She has managed to feed the child a few spoonfuls of cereal.
A
small quantity of orange juice in which aspirin has been
dissolved.
The child sniffles, shivers. That hacking little cough. Gently
Serena strokes little Andre’s feverish skin—at the doctor’s he’d had
a temperature of 101F but it must be higher now, his skin
burns.
Recalling how she’d once seen Andre lifting the baby, when
little Andre had been just a few months old. With an
expression of such pained tenderness, she’d loved the man
passionately, though knowing even then that she could not trust him,
that he could not love her as she loved him nor even as he wished to
love her, there was something in him wounded, raw and unhealed; yet
love for Andre Gatteau and for his infant son came so strong, Serena
felt that she might faint. If he would
look at me that way she thought. Only
then.
She
does not want to hurt her child! She isn’t a deranged woman, still
less a vindictive woman. It is entirely up to Andre: the
choice isn’t hers.
Andre isn’t one to quarrel, Andre never raises his
voice.
On the contrary Andre lowers his voice when he is most
furious, you cannot know what Andre is saying.
Andre’s stony face, stony silence. The
absence of Andre Gatteau even when the man was present.
Even when the man lay beside Serena in their bed.
Even when the man made love to Serena in their bed.
Already it is 11:09 A.M., Serena stares at the clock. How is
it so late? Are their lives passing so
swiftly? Panicked
she gropes for her pen. A letter she’d been writing in a
desperate scrawled hand
Dear Gerald & dear Danielle please forgive
me but I know you can’t you won’t you will
hate & despise me you should not forgive me for I have defiled
your beautiful home you’d so cared for, this property with such
scenic views 39 Edgehill Lane how grateful little Andre & his mother
are to be here homeless otherwise truly I am sorry to defile
your precious house, sorry to stain the polish of this
hardwood floor
where little Andre & I are basking in the sun it’s a
chill cleansing sun I have opened my legs to the sun
& the sun has pierced me & that is the risk I
have taken, I do not regret. Do you think that I don’t know that you
have been in touch with Andre you knew where he’d gone & you
lied to me, I think that all of you have lied to me from the start
& I was naïve enough to believe you. What has happened
is
necessary, I know you won’t believe me. When the truth is
revealed. When Andre Gatteau is exposed. His cruel stony
heart.
He has fled to his Zen retreat, I think. He is hiding in
the mountains. Where I can’t follow him, I am too exhausted.
You will ask Andre why this is necessary, he will tell you. (Of
course he won’t! He will never speak of this.
Andre Gatteau is the most vicious of liars: the one who refuses to
speak.) You will beg him as I have done & he will turn from you.
You know he refused to see me since Feb. 16. Now it is March 31,
this is the end. The child & I are so very tired. The child is sick, his
breath smells sour. Andre refused to see his son unless he could see
his son “unaccompanied” by the son’s mother—brought to him by a designated
“neutral party”—nor would he answer my calls. So many
calls!
It isn’t money we want from him, it is his love. It is Daddy’s love
the child wants. Which is why the child is ill, Daddy has ceased to
love him. Daddy has ceased to love his mother. There must be some
reparation. There will be reparation. I am too exhausted now
to make the drive into the mountains & they would turn me
away, I am not one of them. Forgive me I have no choice. Andre
has cursed us. The child is flawed, & I am to blame. There
will be reparation. The justice of the sharp blade, the flashing
light that cuts through all subterfuge. Your
grieving but not vindictive friend S.D.
Young she’d learned. Soon after her father went
away.
That look of desire in a man’s eyes. The
thrill of the involuntary, the not-willed. Her
pleasure was increased by this knowledge, she was taking from the
man something he would not have freely given. For
Andre Gatteau had not wanted to love her, he had not wanted to
desire her so passionately, she was so much younger than he:
seventeen years. “People will think that you’re my
daughter.
My beautiful ‘mixed-blood’ daughter.”
Especially it troubled Andre, that his oldest daughter was
nearly Serena Dayinka’s age and would surely think of him with
contempt.
Serena was never to meet this daughter, who lived in
San
Francisco and from whom Andre was
estranged.
Serena was never to meet any of Andre Gatteau’s
relatives.
In triumph thinking I will be
his only family she thought. And when she was pregnant The child
and I, we will be Andre Gatteau’s family. Only us!
It was so, as an ambitious young poet Serena Dayinka
could not help but think of her radically elevated position in the
literary world: the lover of Andre Gatteau. In time,
the wife.
In time—for Serena’s love for Andre did not preclude such
shrewdly pragmatic thoughts—the literary executrix of Andre
Gatteau’s estate.
It was Serena who, once they were living together on a more
or less daily basis, when Andre was poet-in-residence at Amherst College and Serena
taught part-time at the University of Massachusetts,
insisted upon organizing Andre’s papers: more than a dozen boxes of
carelessly filed manuscripts, letters, documents dating to the
1970s.
“Your papers are valuable, Andre. Your
archive.
You must know this.”
He knew. He was not a vain man but he’d
acquired a sense of his own worth as a poet, the quality of his
achievement set beside most of his contemporaries. But his
sense of himself was one of struggle, embattlement. His
slave-ancestry heritage, his working-class background. His
sympathy for those of his own kind, though rarely now his life
intersected with theirs.
And it was Serena, when she was pregnant, who urged Andre to
draw up a will. “I mean a ‘real’ will, Andre. Executed
by a lawyer. Not something you’ve scribbled on
a piece of paper.”
Andre shuddered, and looked away. His eyes
were large, mournful, frequently threaded with fine broken
capillaries, with curious thick-skinned eyelids, like a
turtle’s;
strange haunted beautiful eyes, in which there was a glisten
of panic.
Serena understood that the prospect of drawing up a last will
and testament terrified this man who wrote with such elegant
stoicism of death in his finely crafted poems.
She said, laying her hand on his arm, “My father died without
leaving a real will, Andre. It was a terrible thing to have
done, my mother was devastated.”
“We can’t have that, darling. We can’t have anyone devastated by
a man dying.”
Andre spoke quietly, dryly. Serena laughed uneasily, and
kissed him.
And so, too, in the matter of Andre Gatteau’s will, drawn by
an attorney in Amherst, Massachusetts shortly
before the birth of his son, Serena triumphed.
Except—was this ominous?--Andre failed to share with her any
of the details of the will, to whom he was leaving his estate, only
just the fact that yes, he’d named Serena Dayinka literary
executrix.
Serena thought And next, we will be married.
“Baby? Daddy is in his way.”
The child is feverish, fretting. Pushing
irritably at Mummy’s hand as Mummy wipes his runny nose.
As the Heart Sutra chant continues Gone gone
beyond. Gone all the way beyond Bodhi
Svaha!
The beautiful razor-sharp Japanese knives she has laid
reverently on the hardwood floor. The steak knife, the chef ‘s
knife, the paring knife—instruments of surgical precision. The
child has ceased to be distracted by the glittering blades for the
child’s eyelids are drooping with fatigue and his scant child-breath
has a curious orangey-sharp odor. He is ill,
he will never be right. Andre is right. This is for the best. She
is not a vindictive woman but reparations must be made. There is
shame here, the flawed child, the cast-aside female, an old story
that requires retelling. In a sequence of engagingly
colloquial villanelles—for which she’d received an award from the
Poetry Society of America—Serena Dayinka had brilliantly retold the
tales of Rapunzel, Thumbelina, The Ice Maiden, The Beggar Maid, for
these are tales of female hurt, exploitation, and reparation that
require retelling. Andre Gatteau had much admired the
linked villanelles, he’d praised the young woman poet and Andre
Gatteau’s praise was not readily forthcoming.
Except he’d chided her, for appropriating lines, images,
cadences from certain predecessors. His was a sharp unsparing
ear.
He’d recognized immediately the lines she’d owed to Roethke.
Come here go
away poor raggedy Pappa Nothing in my hands but
crumpled paper. Andre had recognized the
borrowing but chosen to ignore the meaning as in their most intimate
moments he held himself just perceptibly from her, in the most
subtle opposition, perhaps it was a fear of being engulfed by her
terrible ravenous need, or by his own.
She’d begged of him Why.
She’d begged of him Please don’t
do this.
She’d begged of him But there is
your son, you must love him even if you don’t love me.
Dreamily she has opened her legs—her legs are bare, she is
naked beneath the soiled terrycloth bathrobe she’d found in one of
the bedroom closets, must’ve belonged to the woman who lived in this
house whose name Serena has forgotten, she has opened her legs to
the sun’s sudden warmth and she is reckless, eager. There is
Andre Gatteau looming above her, his dark battered beautiful face
taut with love, his eyes fixed upon hers, how fleshy and solid the
man’s chest, how soft his berry-colored nipples, and the wiry gray
tangle of hairs covering his torso like a pelt, the small
dinning
voice of irony at the back of Serena Dayinka’s head is
silenced, the sneering nasal voice that has so exhausted her, she is
stricken now with silence, dumbness; his body is scalding, something
molten is being poured into her. It is the great happiness of
Serena’s life, for which Serena has been waiting all her life. This man
is her savior.
Yes this is true. It is a bare raw truth. It will
be the fatal truth of Serena Dayinka’s life.
Except the child wakes her, whimpering and squirming. What is
wrong with this child! From little Andre she has caught a
chest cold, a fever, her stomach swirls with nausea though she has
not eaten anything but stale cornflakes dashed with rancid-smelling
milk in recent memory. And the over-sweetened orange
juice she has been giving the child laced with aspirin. When
she’d been taking the lorazepam she’d nodded helplessly off into a
sour dreamless sleep and awakened hours later with a start, sweating
and panicked and terrified that something had happened to the child
who’d slipped away from beside her. At that time they’d slept in one
of the beds, in fresh clean sheets that quickly became soiled,
smelly from their bodies. Serena remembers a shameful scene
in the glaring-bright bathroom, Serena naked and sweating on her
knees groping for the last of the small white pills, she’d dropped
the pill and it had rolled behind or beneath the lilac-colored
ceramic toilet and she was desperate to retrieve it for otherwise a
night of insomniac hell lay before her like the Sahara vast and
uncharted and with no visible horizon. Oh God help
me.
I can’t continue like this.
She’d been wounded, and she’d been anxious, months ago seeing
one of Andre’s poems in the New Yorker which he hadn’t shown her, a Zen
poem it seemed to be, sharp and bright and aimed for the jugular, in
a terse elliptical style unlike Andre Gatteau’s characteristic
style.
(Andre had claimed that he’d shown her a draft, but Serena
was sure he had not. How could she have forgotten any
poem of Andre’s? She was avid for his poetry
as for his most secret innermost life, withheld from her.) The
speaker in the poem broods about his raging sexuality, his “poor,
blind, stunted desire”—as if it were an sickness to be overcome;
she’d been humiliated seeing such a poem in this prominent magazine
which all their friends read, knowing that everyone who knew her and
her relationship to Andre Gatteau would think of her in terms of the
poem, and feel pity for her: that Serena Dayinka’s revered lover
considered his desire for her as something to be healed.
How she hated Zen Buddhism! All pseudo-mystical Eastern
religions, Serena hated! Her father had never spoken
disparagingly of his Hindu relatives in India but he’d considered
himself a “rationalist”; her mother had but the vaguest
Protestant-Christian beliefs; Serena had come of age amid a
defiantly Americanized mixed-blood generation born in this country
of foreign-born parents, her allegiance was to secular America, her
best poems were cast in the idiom of the American colloquial,
startling at times in their use of slang, even obscenities. She
hated the solemn pieties of religion, especially the austerity,
asceticism, lunar chill of Zen. As Andre was drawn to Zen, so
Andre was turning away from her, she knew. From
her, and from the child.
Wanting to be a monk, as once he’d wanted to be a Jesuit
priest.
How ridiculous her lover was, sitting zazen.
At his age, coiling his legs into the lotus
position!
Through Andre’s study doorway late one night when he hadn’t
come to bed she’d observed him, her heart thudding with scorn, and
resentment. Andre Gatteau the most sexual of
men, the most needy of men, and the most vain, seeking Nirvana;
seeking transcendence, and escape from all desire; escape from the
merely
personal and petty and finite.
She’d wanted to laugh at him, to shame him. But she
knew better, she dared not offend him even playfully for he would
not speak to her for days to punish her; he would be cold with
little Andre, he would stay away from the house. In
silence Serena retreated to their bed.
That was the beginning, she thinks. The
first clear sign.
Which of the knives will she use?--Serena has not yet
decided.
The steak knife is unwieldy, so long. The
chef’s knife is a chopper! The paring knife is small and
practical.
When she’d first seen the knives on the magnetized band
quickly she’d turned away, suffused with a kind of excited
horror.
For as soon as the woman welcomed Serena and the child into
her beautiful house, speaking so kindly to her, touching her gently
as you might touch a convalescent, it had been a death sentence to
Serena.
This house! Fifteen-foot ceilings, walls
of glass, skylights and a redwood deck and bright-colored sofas,
pillows, rugs; original works of art on the walls, shelves of books,
here was a long-settled life, a married life, the woman and the man
equals in their relationship. Envy struck Serena with the force
of nausea, her soul was extinguished. Knowing then that she, Serena
Dayinka,
would never inhabit a house like this. She
would never inhabit a life like this. Never a marriage like
this.
The places to which Andre Gatteau brought her were always
temporary.
Rented houses, apartments and flats owned by friends,
university residences. These were furnished places, owned
by others.
She did not inhabit a house of her own with Andre Gatteau
because Andre Gatteau did not wish to inhabit a house with her and
now it seemed that Andre Gatteau did not wish to inhabit any place
with her nor did Andre Gatteau wish to acknowledge her
existence.
“Just until things get settled, Serena. I think
that you and little Andre will be very comfortable here…”
This chattering woman, kindly and condescending so that
Serena had all she could do to keep smiling, tugging at little
Andre’s hand to keep him by her side, saying Yes thank
you Mrs. Nichelson how kind you are thank you!
It was a death sentence. The jeering voice that had
persecuted Serena through adolescence spoke now so vividly it seemed
to Serena that the chattering white woman must hear. You will
never have this. No man will ever provide you with
this.
How contemptible you are, how pathetic. You are
not even a good poet. You are not even young any
longer.
He will love other women. He will have sex with other
women.
Since he’s been your lover, he has had sex with other
women.
You know this. Did you think that having his
child would make a difference? Did you think that he would love
you, and marry you? He will outlive you, he will
outlive the beautiful son.
Not the first time Serena has cut herself, she’d begun at the
Quaker school at age fourteen. Fine razor-strokes on the insides
of her slender arms, where her sleeves would hide the feathery
little wounds. Meant to sting, and to comfort.
Blood sprang forth so readily, like
a caress.
She would press her tongue to the scratch, lick the salty
secret blood.
Later, she began to cut the insides of her thighs (that
seemed to her, no matter how she fasted, thick,
heavy, flabby, ugly), inside her curly black pubic hair the pale
soft skin of the groin.
Cutting herself as a girl Serena had used a razor, never a
knife.
Now, she could not have said why, though in a poem she might
have explored the subtlety of such distinctions, the thought of
using a razor is repellent. A knife is required, but not an
ordinary knife: a knife that is a work of art, savage, gleaming in
the late-winter sunshine. “This one.
Andre?” Serena lifts the chef’s
knife, which is surprisingly heavy. A chef working with such a knife
must develop strong wrist muscles, this is a serious
instrument.
“Yes, Andre. Good! I
thought this would please you.”
Serena only now recalls, it’s a measure of her dazed-fever
state of exhaustion and exhilaration that she only now recalls,
Andre Gatteau has a brilliantly unsettling sonnet in his first
collection of poems Enchanted Voyager, about the ritual seppuku
suicide of the Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima in 1970, at the age
of forty-five. He will
understand. It has been his will all
along.
It is 11:55 A.M. And now it is 11:59 A.M. She is
no longer waiting—is she waiting?—is her heart pounding absurdly, in
childlike anticipation?---no longer waiting for the call on the cell
phone, or for the car turning into the long graveled driveway, or
for a firm knock on the door and the man’s uplifted voice Serena? Little
Andre?
No longer waiting Serena has shuttered her heart, in her
mouth there is a cold stony taste that is the taste of the poem, the
purest of poems, which the poet recognizes only when she has uttered
the final words, the final syllables, and placed in position the
final punctuation mark. For much of the morning close by
on Edgehill Lane a
chainsaw has been in use. Serena hates the high-pitched
shrieking but sees the logic that, if the child begins to scream, if
Mummy can’t control his screaming, the din of the chainsaw, and an
accompanying wood-grinder, will mask the sound, neighbors won’t
hear.
(If there are neighbors within earshot. Serena
isn’t sure but she doubts that there are neighbors within earshot of
the Nickelsons’ house, these expensive properties on Edgehill
Lane are so large.)
Meticulously Serena has planned, her fever-dream of the
previous night will guide her: she will hold little Andre down by
straddling him and with both her knees pinioning his little body, he
will protest, and squirm, begin to kick, thrash and cry, for he can
be a mutinous child, strong as a panicked cat despite his illness
and the drug she’s been feeding him, Bayer’s baby aspirin mashed in
orange juice. Without hesitation she will
cut--swiftly, she will slash—the veins and arteries in little
Andre’s left arm, soothing him Hush! Hush
baby! There is no pain just below the elbow; she will slash the
veins and arteries in the right arm, just below the elbow. So
swiftly this will be accomplished, the child will think it is some
sort of game, he is not a suspicious child and will be utterly
bewildered. And truly Serena believes, there
will not be much pain. Truly Serena believes, for Serena
loves the child more than life itself, far more than her own life,
she would never wish to hurt him.
Canny Serena has thought to have a supply of baby diapers, a
pillow from a sofa, a roll of toilet paper to absorb some of the
blood.
For she is fearful that the sight of the child’s spilling
blood will unnerve her.
“Mum-my?”
“Hush, sweetie. Mummy hasn’t gone anywhere.”
Critically Serena examines her own arms, looking for veins,
arteries. Slender pale-skinned arms, how many times he’d kissed the
insides of her arms with not the slightest
awareness of the feathery-thin faded scars from her girlhood,
wrists so small he could circle them with his thumb and index finger
gripping each of her wrists above her head as he eased himself into
her, always tentatively at first, as if fearful of hurting her, for
she was so small, she weighed at least ninety pounds less than
Andre, always he held himself back, she could not draw him deeply
enough into her, deep, deep…never deeply enough.
Always he’d murmured to her Beauty, my
beauty.
My beauty in an ecstasy of desire, possession. Always
he’d sated himself in her body though he would not penetrate her
deeply enough, he never sought her soul.
Nor did he sleep close beside her. Never in
her arms.
Often restless, waiting until Serena slept, or he believed
she slept, then slipping away to another part of the house. Or
slipping from the house altogether.
Though they’d made a baby together.
Somehow, that had happened.
In the mountains he is sitting zazen. He
is observing her, she is convinced that he can see her though his
figure is hidden from her, her eyes are not strong enough to
perceive him. He thinks I
can’t do it! I can do it, I am stronger than he
is.
It is 12:12 P.M. It is the very last day of March
but Serena has forgotten the year. Serena has forgotten where she is,
exactly. Whose (borrowed) house this
is.
Close by, the chainsaw has abruptly ceased. The
wood-grinder has ceased. But the lawn crew truck has not
departed, Serena will wait for the noise to resume.
Adjusting the shawl around the feverish child, wiping his
runny noise, his clammy-damp forehead, tenderly Serena kisses each
of his eyelids and his parched panting lips.
“Sweetie? Daddy is on his way.”
At Lost Lake the Heart Sutra
is being chanted. Another incense candle is
shrinking to a stump. It is past noon, their break will
be at 12:30 PM, others have given up and slipped away from the
sesshin room but Andre Gatteau wracked in arthritic pain and his
bladder (yet again) urging him to stumble away to urinate is
determined to continue until the Zen master releases them, it has
become a matter of pride. If anyone knows Andre’s identity,
he must protect his pride. He will push himself to the
limits of his endurance. How far he has come already
on this journey! Less than forty-eight hours, less
than five hundred miles yet how far, unfathomable. He is a
poet, he seeks purity. You cannot be a poet if your mind
is muddled, muddy. You cannot be a poet if you are
distracted. Recalling how as he’d approached
Lake Scroon the other afternoon he’d passed a dismaying literalness of manmade artifacts: taverns
and gas stations and automobile/ truck/ motorcycle dealerships
adored with fluttering banners, house trailers propped up on cinder
blocks in the pine woods, bungalows, habitations that appeared to be
no more than concrete foundations in the rocky earth, like bomb
shelters.
There were bait shops, yet more taverns, roadside
woodframe churches, bullet-ridden road signs, lakeside cabins, small
boats on trailers, junked vehicles in the ditch by the side of the
road, mattresses at the roadside, abandoned furniture as if families
had thrown off their chains in a frenzy of repudiation and
loss.
The poet finds little poetry in
such sights, only the residue of irony which leaves a bitter taste
on the tongue. The poet has come to this place to
escape irony.
In Zen there is no irony. In the mountains there is no
irony.
This fifth hour of zazen, or is it the sixth? Through
the strain of concentration the poet has glimpsed the merest glimmer
of bliss, fleeting as a flash of heat lightning in a summer sky, in
that instant his soul is flooded with hope, with something like
strength, the thought comes to him I will call
her.
At the break. I can do this. I will do this!
It is the revelation for which the seeker has come to
Lost Lake Mountain though it
is not the revelation he has expected. As the
Heart Sutra continues in the reedy chanting voices of the earnest
young No
color sound
smell taste
touch object of mind no
realm of eyes and no realm of mind No ignorance and also no
extinction of ignorance There is no path There is
no way that is not the path. On the altar the candle begins
to gutter, the pale flame quivers as from an expelled breath.
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