Siri Hustvedt - The Summer Without Men

I didn’t answer her. I remembered Boris’s hollow voice on the phone saying he had found Stefan dead. I remembered the yellow note stuck to the kitchen wall that said, “Call plumber” and that each letter of that reminder had an alien quality as if it weren’t English. It had made no sense, but the voice in my head had been crisp, matter-of-fact: You must call the police and go to him now . No confusion, no panic, but an awareness that the terrible thing had come and that I felt hard. This has happened; it is true. You must act now. There were drops of rain on the cab window, then sudden thin slides of water, behind which I could see the fogged buildings downtown and then the street sign for N. Moore, so ordinary, so familiar. The elevator with its cold gray panels, the low ringing sound at the third floor. Stefan hanging. The word No . Then again. No. Boris throwing up in the bathroom. My hand stroking his head, gripping his shoulders firmly. He didn’t weep; he grunted in my arms like a hurt animal.

“It was terrible,” I said in a flat voice.

“Yes.”

“I took care of him. I held him up. What would he have done if I hadn’t been there? How can he not remember? He turned into a stone. I fed him. I talked to him. I tolerated his silence. He refused to get help. He went to the lab, ran the experiments, came home, and turned back into a rock. Sometimes I worry that I’ll incinerate myself with my anger. I’ll just blow up. I’ll break down again.”

“Blowing up is not the same as breaking down and, as we’ve said before, even breaking down can have its purpose, its meanings. You held yourself together for a long time, but tolerating cracks is part of being well and alive. I think you’re doing that. You don’t seem so afraid of yourself.”

“I love you, Dr. S.”

“I’m glad to hear that.”

* * *

I heard the child before I saw her: a small voice that came from behind a bush. “I’m putting you in the garden, that’s it, and you mustn’t be sillies or willies or dillies … Absolutely not! Plop, here, here. Yes, look, a hill for you. Dandelion trees. Teeny wind blowing. Okay, peoples, a house.”

From my reclining position in the lawn chair where I was reading, I saw a pair of short, naked legs come into view, take two steps, and then drop to a kneeling position on the ground. The partly visible child had a green plastic bucket, which she dumped out on the grass. I saw a pink dollhouse and a host of figures, hard and stuffed, of various sizes, and then the girl’s head, which startled me before I understood that she was wearing a fright wig of se kind, a gnarled platinum concoction that made me think of an electrocuted Harpo Marx. The commentary resumed. “You can get in, Ratty, and you too, Beary. Look, you talk to each others. Some dishes.” Running exit, swift return, spillage of small cups and plates onto the grass. Busy arrangements and then chewing noises, lip smacking, and simulated burps. “It’s not polite to burp at the table. See, he’s coming, it’s Giraffey. Can you fit in? Squeeze in there.” Giraffey did not fit well, so his manipulator settled for the entrance of the fellow’s head and neck in-house, body beyond.

I returned to my book, but the child’s voice pulled me away now and again by small exclamations and loud humming. A brief silence was followed by a sudden lament: “Too bad I’m real so I can’t go in my little house and live!”

I remembered, remembered that threshold world of Almost, where wishes are nearly real. Could it be that my dolls stirred at night? Had the spoon moved of its own accord a fraction of an inch? Had my hope enchanted it? The real and unreal like mirror twins, so close to each other they both breathed living breaths. Some fear, too. You had to brush against the uneasy sense that dreams had broken out of their confinement in sleep and pushed into daylight. Don’t you wish, Bea said, the ceiling was the floor? Don’t you wish we could …

The girl was standing about five feet away, staring gravely in my direction, a round and sturdy person of three or four with a moon face and big eyes under the ludicrous wig. In one hand, she gripped Giraffey by the neck, a battle-scarred creature who looked as if he needed hospitalization.

“Hi,” I said. “What’s your name?”

She shook her head vigorously, puffed out her cheeks, turned suddenly, and ran.

Too bad I’m real, I thought.

* * *

My bout of nerves before meeting my poetry class of seven pubescent girls struck me as ridiculous, and yet I could feel the constriction in my lungs, hear my shallow breaths, the small puffs of my anxiety. I spoke sternly to myself. You have taught graduate school students writing for years, and these are only children. Also, you should have known that no self-respecting boy of Bonden would sign up for a poetry workshop, that out here in the provinces, poetry signifies frails, dolls, and dowagers. Why would you expect to attract more than a few girls with vague and probably sentimental fantasies about writing verse? Who was I anyway? I had my Doris prize and I had my PhD in comparative literature and my job at Columbia, crusts of respectability to offer as evidence that my failure wasn’t complete. The trouble with me was that the inside had touched the outside. After crumbling to bits, I had lost that brisk confidence in the wheels of my own mind, the realization that had come to me sometime in my late forties that I might be ignored, but I could out-think just about anybody, that massive reading had turned my brain into a synthetic machine that could summon philosophy and science and literature in the same breath. I rousemyself with a list of mad poets (some more and some less): Torquato Tasso, John Clare, Christopher Smart, Friedrich Hölderlin, Antonin Artaud, Paul Celan, Randall Jarrell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Ezra Pound, Robert Fergusson, Velimir Khlebnikov, Georg Trakl, Gustaf Fröding, Hugh MacDiarmid, Gérard de Nerval, Edgar Allan Poe, Burns Singer, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke, Laura Riding, Sara Teasdale, Vachel Lindsay, John Berryman, James Schuyler, Sylvia Plath, Delmore Schwartz … Buoyed by the reputations of my fellow maniacs, depressives, and voice hearers, I hopped on my bicycle to meet the seven poetic flowers of Bonden.

* * *

As I looked around the table at my pupils, I grew calmer. They were indeed children. The preposterous but poignant realities of girls on the cusp asserted themselves immediately, and my sympathy for them almost choked me. Peyton Berg, several inches taller than I, very thin, with no breasts, constantly adjusted her arms and legs as if they were alien limbs. Jessica Lorquat was tiny, but she had the body of a woman. A false atmosphere of femininity hung about her that made itself known chiefly in an affectation — a cooing baby voice. Ashley Larsen, sleek brown hair, slightly protruding eyes, walked and sat with the self-conscious air that comes with a newly acquired erogenous zone — holding herself chest-out to display growing buds. Emma Hartley withdrew behind a veil of blond hair, smiling shyly. Nikki Borud and Joan Kavacek, both plump and loud, appeared to function in tandem, as one giggling, mincing persona. Alice Wright, pretty, large teeth covered by braces, was reading when I came in and continued to read quietly until the class started. When she closed the book, I saw that it was Jane Eyre, and I felt a moment of envy, the envy of first discovery.

At least one of them was wearing perfume, which on the warm June day mingled with the room’s dust and made me sneeze twice. Jessica, Ashley, Nikki, and Joan were dressed for something other than a poetry workshop. Adorned with trailing earrings, lip gloss, eye shadow, T-shirts with messages that exposed their bare bellies of various sizes and shapes, they had strutted rather than walked into the room. The Gang of Four, I thought. The comfort, the safety, the group.