Robert Butler - From Where You Dream - The Process of Writing Fiction

I look "into the eyes" of this flat white metal bird, and there tumbles out of the hot void where the dream has fled a moment from Liege. I was — what? — no more than eight or nine because the market was still there, and yet there was some fear attached to food, the possibility of want. Nine, then. 1939. My mother's hip warm against my shoulder in a coat of loden green. A bird was pecking at the edge of a puddle, at a piece of cake or petit four. Yes. My mother was buying bread and I was waiting to see if there would be a marzipan, a biscuit, a mille-feuille for me. I was — why? — terrified that I would be ignored, denied, expected to go home without a treat. I wanted to bend and snatch the cake away from the bird, who seemed impossibly bold at my feet. Like the German boys who would not hesitate to say anything— scum! kike! gypsy! This bird had my sweet, unless (her voice murmured above me, the inconsequential murmur of the housewife and the merchant, his deeper, dulcet, reasoning plaints mixed in with hers) — unless she would remember me. Why did I both suppose that they could feed me and fear that they would not? The bird cocked a beady eye at me. Taunting. An ordinary small brown bird, fat with feathers, who might yet pluck out my eyes.

My mother said, "Simone. M. Partenier is speaking to you."

Partenier. The name comes back unbidden, the patissier of the open market. His banner ran along his stall at the level of my knees in red scrolling script that I could read: Partenier Patisserie. In front of that the malevolent bird sat pecking at the petit four, shaking it like a dog with a sock (like Dogzilla my only darling, my only offspring, whom I have abandoned).

"Say thank you to M. Partenier." Who handed down a plain crust of day-old roll. Betrayed, I couldn't speak.

I grasp the metal pole and feel its contour on my palm, turn my palm on its painted surface, feel the white sides of the hospital bed before they wheeled me in. It was a tube of just such stuff. They raised the sides and suddenly my pallet had become a cage. I looked up through the bars and reached up on both sides to hoist myself but my muscles were straw. The beak-nosed nurse told me not to be "irritable now," and someone — someone else — there were how many in charge of me? — stuck a needle in my arm. My weakness became lightness, I could have floated from my cage, but all the while I knew that this was because they had stolen away my will. They were taking her, I had been tricked. They told me that a broken child was worse than no child at all, but they were tricking me. I rose against the needle, against the bars, against the hand of the nurse who now — thieving bird, big keeper of sweets, hot hip of my mother, abandoned dog — I rose and struck her full in the face.

I think what I said was not intelligible. To myself I said, "I've changed my mind. I'll have the broken one."

"No!" I said to M. Partenier. "I don't want your old crust!" And my mother marched me home and washed my mouth. Soap bittered on my tongue where I had wanted marzipan.

And later, when there was no food, how I would have welcomed a crust of bread. As, now, I would have a deaf child, welcome a heart with a hole in it, see for blind eyes, instead of this none, this nothing, this no one. I have a metal bird and a snapshot of an Irish setter I abandoned. I have a metal pole in my hand, a cement porch, a TV set. The music swells inside, full of unlikely sugar.

My knuckles ache. I have been gripping the two poles with my two hands. The pain across my back has sharpened with the tensing of my torso. Under my fingers the brushstrokes in the paint — how many coats has somebody applied? — some young couple proud of their clapboard dream and then the landlord hoping to salt away a little nest egg, wanting to be a man of property. The bird does not regard me with its flat eye. There is no malevolence in things. Not even in a hypodermic needle. M. Partenier gave me a crust because the sugar had run out. The bird had probably got a bit of dirty discard and my longing painted it into something precious. I wish I had Dogzilla. But I could not have raised a baby on my own, faulty or whole.

I use the poles to stretch, hanging in an arc against the pain, which pulls my spine, releases, and relaxes. The moon has risen across Oak Alley and tangles in the cottonwood leaves. The dust has dropped with night and left spiced balmi-ness. I turn and go back in, latching the screen behind me.

Flamenco

It is impossible to escape the heat of the French Quarter. It is searing and ubiquitous, cruel from early June until late September. The few full-time residents of Toulouse and Decatur and St. Peter near City Park stay indoors living lives surrounded by plaster walls and chugging window air conditioners. The insides of things stare back at you. It is hot. This part of the Quarter sits in the soggy apex of an old geographical spoon. It is where artists live. The rent is cheap.

I had come to my father's studio that afternoon to tell him good news, and to ask of him a favor he would not want to fulfill. My girlfriend, Megumi Kido, of one year, had just agreed to marry me. An American would say, M ey-gumi. Two syllables and a half-silent g. But this is not her name. Her name is Me-gu-mi. Three syllables, each one rising softly in your mouth until the last e flutters out like a small bird. It is her secret name. Her real name; her bedroom name.

Since I met her along the bayou at the New Orleans Museum of Art (she sat alone on a plaid blanket to watch mullet jump) she has been the center of my every thought.

For her, I exercise an uncontainable desire to improve, to read prospectuses late at night, to depreciate the adjusted basis of gifts and fair market values ranging as far back as 1946. She understands my craving for things to remain unchanged in our briar, Covington home — the furniture and books, the Kabuki mask and ceramic vase above the fireplace, the silk throw rugs beyond the sofa. She also understands my need to pace, and then to sit quietly and think, sometimes for hours, about the puzzle of numbers a financial accountant must learn the shape of. I am the youngest to make junior partner at Connick, Castelano, Warwick & O'Connor since the Great War. It is a firm with history.

The double shotgun where my parents live needs more than paint. The neighborhood turns pretty around it. It's an old plan to keep thieves away. Vines of bougainvillea breed in the wrought-iron porch rails, and pose against the darkened windows. The old planks, not wide, but delicate and old-fashioned gingerbread, look powdered with white dust and dry. I parallel park behind the Volkswagen van, once my mother's shuttle for doctor's appointments, late-to-school rides, dance recitals, and classes, now with its guts hanging loose below it, reminds the three of us of the chaos of motherhood. Promises have been made to repair it. I step over the stacks of yellow coffee cans, mostly from the Cafe Du Monde, filled with muddy, mineral spirits and colors, and knock on the studio door before I enter.

It is alleged that Van Gogh's insanity was more than biological. The invisible vapors of mineral spirits inhaled, even swallowed from wet brushes, over time caused his intellect to fail. Inside the studio, these same vapors radiate from the wood floors, the high ceilings where the heat rests, the wet canvas, and the dry stacked arm deep against the walls. All of us have inhaled it over the years.