Caitlín Kiernan - The Drowning Girl

Grandmother Caroline didn’t tell me the name of the story or its author, or if she did, I forgot. I found it many years later. The story was written by a poet named Jules Supervielle, who was born in 1884 and died in 1960. First published in 1929, the story is titled simply “L’Inconnue de la Seine.” I found it in a library at Brown University, in a collection of Supervielle’s work called L’Enfant de la haute mer . I brought it home, though like I said, I can’t read French. I copied the story down by hand. I still have it somewhere. And I’ve found other poems and stories about the drowned girl. Vladimir Nabokov wrote a poem about her, a poem that was also about the Slavic rusalki . Man Ray took photographs of that face.

One thing I have come to comprehend about true ghost stories is that we rarely know they’re happening to us until after the fact, when we’re haunted, but the events of the story proper are over and done with. This is a perfect example of what I mean. The first woman I ever kissed was l’Inconnue de la Seine , the likeness of an unidentified suicide who was born over a hundred years before me. That day, I pressed my lips gently to hers, again and again, breathing gently into her lifeless mouth. And I felt a peculiar tingle in my belly. I know now, in hindsight, this was one of my earliest sexual experiences, even though it would be several years yet before I fully admitted to myself that I would only ever want to make love to women. My lips brushing those silicone lips, and there was a…a what? A frisson, I think. A shudder of pleasure that came and went so fast I was hardly even consciously aware of it.

I’ve sat staring at photographs of the death mask. I have a book on sculpture with two black-and-white photographs of it. She doesn’t look dead. She hardly even looks like she’s sleeping. There’s a wry sort of a smile (which is why she’s sometimes called the “drowned Mona Lisa”). Her hair is parted in the middle. You can see her eyelashes clearly.

It’s all a perfect circle, in hindsight. A mandala of moments that are possessed of great significance, in hindsight. I only say that now, state it as a fact, but maybe it will become clearer farther along in my ghost story. Or maybe it won’t, and I’ll have failed.

Two years later, on my eleventh birthday, I would see Phillip George Saltonstall’s painting The Drowning Girl , hanging at RISD. Eleven years later, I would take a drive one night in July and find Eva Canning waiting for me near the banks of the Blackstone River. Beautiful, terrible, lost Eva. My ghost who was a mermaid. Unless she wasn’t. She would kiss me, and her lips were no different from those of the CPR dummy, or the lips of l’Inconnue de la Seine . And so I would fall in love with her, even though I was already very much in love with Abalyn. Did the morgue attendant kiss those dead lips, either before or after he made his mask?

In my head, this all makes a perfect circle, an elegant and inescapable circuit. But seeing it on paper, it comes across confusing. I’m afraid it isn’t clear at all, what I mean. What I want to take from my mind and put someplace outside of me. I don’t know the right words, and maybe that’s because there are no right words to pull a haunting out into the light and trap it in ink and paper.

In his painting, Saltonstall hid the face of The Drowning Girl from view, by having her look over her shoulder, back towards the forest. But the painting was done in 1898, right? So…he might well have seen l’Inconnue de la Seine . He was in love with his first cousin, and if Mary Farnum is the girl he painted, it could be that’s why he hid her face. But also maybe not. Eva Canning didn’t ever wear the face of l’Inconnue de la Seine , though she wore at least two faces that I know of.

I could never stand to be a writer. Not a real writer. It’s entirely too awful, having thoughts that refuse to become sentences.

The drugstore closes in half an hour, and I have to pick up a refill.

Am I repeating myself? Bah. Dah. Ba-ba.

I don’t mean, when I ask this, repeating myself in a useful sense that underscores and makes manifest the ways in which all these occurrences and lives are bound inextricably together to create the ghost story that I’ve lived and am now trying to write down. I mean, am I repeating myself (Bah. Dah. Ba-ba.), and I also mean to ask, am I doing it to avoid moving forwards towards the terrifying, sad truth of it all? Am I dragging my feet because I’m a crazy woman who knows damn well she’s crazy, but who doesn’t want to be reminded just how crazy she is by having to tell two stories that are true, when only one can be factual ? I feel as though I’m doing just exactly that. That I’m acting out Rosemary’s old joke about a man in a rowboat with only one oar, rowing in endless circles and never, ever reaching shore. But how can I do otherwise, when the story is a spiral, or spirals set within spirals? Am I panicking because I think I need or I wish to force a straight, sane line, a narrative that begins here and proceeds to there by a conventional, coherent route? Am I too busy second-guessing myself and pulling my insecurities up over my head—like the blankets when I was five and afraid of the dark, afraid of what might be in the dark, afraid of wolves —to stop procrastinating and relate these events straightforwardly?

Am I a crazy woman only transferring her delusions and disordered consciousness into the written word?

Dr. Ogilvy dislikes the word “crazy,” and she dislikes “insane,” as well. She probably approves of the way Butler Hospital changed its name. But I tell her these are honest words. Fuck the political or negative connotations, they’re honest words, and I need them. Maybe I’m frightened at the thought of being committed, of the antiseptic sterility of hospitals and the way they rob people of their dignity, but I’m not frightened by these words. Nor am I ashamed of them. But I am frightened by the thought that I’m caught in a loop and am incapable (or so unwilling I may as well be incapable) of communicating in a straightforward manner. And I would feel shame if I couldn’t muster the courage to tell the truth.

“Nothing is ever straightforward,” Imp typed, “though we lose a lot of the truth by pretending it’s so.”

Stop the questions. Just stop it. It makes me angry when I’m afraid. It makes me almost indescribably angry. I can’t possibly finish this if it makes me angry to try, and the only thing that makes me more angry than my fear is my failures. So, I have to do this, and I won’t stop me.

Abalyn and I didn’t really ever discuss her moving in. She just did. I had the space, and she needed someplace to live. Almost right from the start, I wanted her to be near me. I wanted to be in love with her, or it was the beginning of love. It never felt like a crush. I wasn’t a virgin. I’d had lots and lots of crushes, and it didn’t feel like that. It wasn’t that…what? Insistent? But I wanted her to stay, and she did stay, and I was glad of it. I do remember how she slept on the sofa the first few nights, out there with all her video game stuff, before I finally convinced her that was foolish when there was so much room in my bed. I wanted her in my bed. I wanted her close to me, and it was a relief when she accepted the invitation. The first time we made love, which was the first night she slept in my bed, that was a magnificent relief.

The Thursday after we met, I got off work early, and we walked together down Willow Street to the park, to Dexter Training Grounds, which, as I’ve said, isn’t a military training grounds anymore, though it’s still called that. On Thursdays, every week from early June until October, there’s a farmers’ market. Even if I don’t buy anything, I enjoy going and seeing all the produce heaped in colorful, fresh piles, arranged in woven wooden baskets, and in those little cardboard cartons, waiting to be purchased. Early in the summer, there are sugarsnap peas, green beans, cucumbers, many varieties of peppers (hot, mild, sweet; scarlet and yellow and green), apples, strawberries, kale, turnips, crisp lettuce, spicy radishes, heirloom tomatoes, and big jugs of cider. In June, it’s too early for good corn, and the blueberries aren’t ripe yet. But there’s bread from local bakeries. Sometimes, there’s fresh sausage and bacon sold from coolers by the same men who raised and killed the pigs. All of this is arranged on long folding tables beneath the chestnut trees.