Amber Sparks - The Unfinished World - And Other Stories

I’m fine, says Louise. I eat meat.

That’s so interesting, says Noel’s mother. Her name is Mrs. Ralph Mattson. That’s how she introduces herself, without herself included. She’s always there at dinner but never seems to eat anything; Louise watches in fascination as she breaks her meal down into component parts and packs it away in her sleeves, her wallet, her pockets. Once Louise watched her tuck a slice of ham into her bra. She doesn’t know if the old lady is crazy or just repulsed by Teesa’s terrible food. That’s so interesting, she repeats, uncertainty flitting over her features. She spears a lamb chop with her fork and opens her pocketbook.

Long silence, broken only by the staccato bursts of forks and knives scraping ceramic. Finally Clarence puts his fork down, says, That gallery that you recommended said no.

Noel swigs wine, shakes his head. Sorry, Clarence. We tried, but he wasn’t sure he was interested in pottery. Guess he wasn’t.

Not my pottery, anyway, says Clarence mildly.

Noel protests, but Louise is not surprised. Clarence has been working on a new series, modeled after the urns the ancient Egyptians used to store the vital organs of their dead after embalmment. Except that Clarence’s urns are made of the vital organs themselves. Louise’s favorite is an urn sculpted to look like a bloody, hollowed-out heart, aorta and superior vena cava sitting atop the lid like gloves for alien hands. They have not been popular with Clarence’s usual gallerists, who want something pretty they can sell to the tourists. The tourists don’t want to drink tea from a teapot that looks like a lung.

We’ll keep asking around, says Noel. Those pieces are so brilliant. We know a friend who’s working on some project involving ritual — maybe you two could do something together? Clarence shrugs. He’s never made art for anyone else. He just does things to see if he can do them. And when he finds he can, he stops and does something else.

Teesa pours out coffee, burnt as the lamb chops. She knows that Noel and Louise are having an affair, but claims not to mind. She prides herself on being unconventional, so she mentions it frequently, with an air of studied boredom. Teesa is one of those people who substitute scarves for personality. Now she dances back to her chair, and watches Louise put down her knife and fork. Oh, she says, I’m always so impressed with your table manners, you and Clarence.

She is forever saying things like this to Louise and Clarence, as if they were feral cats skulking about a farmhouse. As if they were not quite civilized. Louise wants to bite Teesa’s thin freckled arms in revenge. Instead she says, quite politely, Oh, we’re not exactly Grey Gardens up at the estate, you know. We have running water. We even bathe sometimes.

Noel yelps, his way of laughing. Mrs. Ralph Mattson finishes putting away the last of her food and taps Louise’s arm. My dear, the old woman says, gumming the words through thick red lipstick caked over her lips, a bloody cave of bad dentures. That nightmare mouth tells Louise she’d like her little dog to be preserved when he goes. I do think it will be any day now, she says, clicking her tongue.

I can do that, says Louise. Would you like him to be playing? Hunting? Sleeping?

I think mounting a nice-looking bitch, Mrs. Ralph Mattson says cheerfully, and Clarence starts coughing. He looks at Louise, who shrugs, so he continues to drink his coffee with the sort of ferocious delicacy he uses whenever he encounters anything carnal. Louise has never known, of course, if that extends to his affairs, and she does not care to ask.

Louise has been loyal only — almost only — to her brother and father in love. This is not to say she has been a virgin; she has always been open and in fact almost generous in matters of the skin. But in matters of the heart she has been lured but once, long ago. She fell in love with a complexion, pale and soft as ivory silk, lips ripe and rosy, too pretty, almost, to be a man’s face at all. And yet there was nothing at all soft about him. His mind had strong legs and his eyes were hard and gray. The beautiful lips shaped determined phrases, anger often braided into the words.

His name was Morris, and he was a pianist, yet another man who relied on his own two hands. She met him during her tour of Europe, the only traveling outside of the States she’d ever done. He was seated next to her at the Vienna Opera House during a performance of Der Rosenkavalier . When Octavian gave Sophie the silver rose, Morris reached over, a total stranger, and draped his long, long fingers casually over her upper thigh. She saw him again in front of Mozart’s house, and he took her to his hotel and had her on the floor of the tiny tiled bathroom. His fingers played her as expertly as a piano and she responded with fervor to each staccato note, each long sustain.

She failed to finish her tour and instead followed him home to Indiana, where he taught at a university. It lasted for six months but in the end he was too sure of himself and too angry to feel sure of anyone else. He accused her of unspeakable and untrue things. And then on a dark night, flat as the surrounding fields, he took a bottle of pills and died on the living room rug. His wrecked, ghostly face in death was the ugliest thing she’d ever seen. She fled that night, got on a bus and went back home to Clarence. Clarence, who after no word from her for months met her at the door with silence and a glass of bourbon. Clarence, who never asked where she had been.

Clarence has a lover’s soul. That’s what their father always said, but he understood it to be a weakness.

Clarence disagreed. It’s the one thing that makes me really brave: love. It’s the poetry of it, I suppose. The nobility. The inevitable tragedy.

Louise had laughed at the time. Tragedy? Clarence’s idea of love consisted of one-night stands with the pretty farm girls who worked at Denny’s during the winter. What was so noble about that? Human urges, that was all.

Clarence would laugh, too. As close as they were, he never told Louise his most terrible secret: he desperately wanted a love like Mother and Father. Even if, especially if, it meant the destruction that followed. He knew that Louise’s forgiveness would never extend that far.

When the car pulls up and Tony gets out, Louise is watching from the upstairs bedroom. Her fingertips itch. She thinks of her father, of how he would tease her about these strange urges, how when she was little her fingers and toes would ache and she would long to fly. Use those restless limbs, he’d tell her, laughing. Shake the energy out of those fingers into this little squirrel. Make it dance like you want to.

She watches Clarence and Tony discussing payment. Ducks, embarrassed, as Tony looks up and sees her dark head aimed toward him. She pulls her hair over her face like a curtain and picks up a paintbrush. She can start working on some pigeon eyes. But her fingers are shaking, unsteady, and after a moment she puts down the paintbrush in disgust. She peeks up through her hair, sees Clarence getting into a heated discussion with the man in the truck with the gun. With Jackson.

This is new. She doesn’t like this. She throws on a pair of pants, tucks her slip into them like an awkward, billowing shirt, and gallops down the stairs and through the door. Clarence and Jackson are howling at one another, no, rather, Clarence is howling and the man with the gun is pointing the gun at Clarence.