Sari Wilson - Girl Through Glass

I want to know you, Kevin said.

Have I known anyone my whole life?

The past is swimming all around me. My father is not a bitter, twice-divorced teetotaler on an Exercycle in Connecticut, but a robust alcoholic in the middle of destroying one family and creating another. My mother, not a glorified secretary with a storage unit full of paintings, but instead a beautiful young woman, angry and searching.

Maurice wanted my forgiveness. Can I give it to him? No. I can’t. I am angry. The stack of letters Kevin gave me are burning a hole in my bag.

A bunhead passes me. Strange she would be so far east. She wears a leopard-skin hoodie, tight bright blue skirt, tights, espadrilles. Even through the Old Navy colors, I see her studio-pale legs, the battle between teenage softness and muscular power. Which one will win? She picks her way through the stream of people without looking at anyone. I must have looked like her, wandering through the city, devotee of a far-off god.

When I see these bunheads roaming the New York streets, I want to kneel and kiss them. I want to punch them, break them.

It’s the gloaming now. The West Side is still in sherbet colors, but here it’s night already. I reach Maurice’s old building, an inconspicuous six-story brick apartment building, similar to others around it. Still, I know it immediately. It now has an awning, but I recognize the glass doors and the tarnished gold handles. I peer into the windows closest to the ground. In one, a forest of plants, in another what looks like a piano, curtains in another. Who lives in Maurice’s sprawling (or do I just remember it as large?) second floor apartment now? Was it sold to pay for his care — all those years of care that I made necessary?

As I stand there in front of this unobtrusive Manhattan apartment building, my mind lurches. It’s strange. Like some liquid that loosens concrete, turns it back into sand, one image dislodges another. And the images at first seem disassociated — as if they belonged to someone else. But then they heat up and my body responds. This is my memory. It belongs to me. It is me.

I remember everything now.

Maurice is there again, lit strangely by the light from Pavlova’s case, which is broken. Glass all around. There is still the old meanness and mischief around his mouth, but there is something new in his eyes. He says something, peevish, victorious, and I can hear it. “You shouldn’t have looked at me like that. You shouldn’t have always been saying, Touch me, Touch me. You should never have asked that.”

I raise the fireplace poker, step closer, and then let it fall, and it lands on his back, I feel him curve beneath it. He raises his hand and sinks to the ground like something without bones. He moves in stubborn slow motion. He’s on the floor now. His mouth changes to a surprised smile.

That wild, bewildered look crosses his face. “Beautiful,” he says. Then he closes his eyes.

It all surges back into the center of my mind and explodes outward. All the pieces are fitting together, but I don’t really like the puzzle. I smashed the glass, I broke the humidor, I stole the shoe, I attacked him. But then there is the relief: I did not kill him. I am no murderer. But behind the relief there is something else, too.

My memory of that night, of what I did — and the feeling of that in my body. I remember so clearly now, the cool metal, so uncompromising in my hand, the weight as I pulled it back against the air, and the relief as I let it drop . No, I don’t believe that, I swung it at him. He was a fire I wanted to put out.

I could have killed him. I know that is true. I wanted to kill him. And — I wish — I watch this wish — that I had killed him that night.

I shiver, though the breeze is strangely warm.

I head back west. Then I’m on Park, going uptown, nodding at the doormen as I go. A new breeze, this one colder, comes up. I wrap my jacket tighter. I walk in and out, light and shadow under the awnings that stretch all the way curbside to waiting taxis.

I have never been rid of him, not really, all these years.

Flotillas of taxis move unceasingly toward, then past me. One stops to let an old man out. It takes an eternity for him to unfold his body.

I see myself at Dad and Judy’s, a bunhead sleeping on a mattress on the floor, counting her calories to help her fall asleep. I thought I owned the world. What a fool is the girl who desires to be a princess, trapped in the tower of her own making.

And now Kevin, his son. My son. Our son.

Other parts of the city forget themselves again and again. Where Felicia is, for example. Warehouses, then bars, now condos. And the new people who come to live in them.

Except Park Avenue perhaps.

I end up in front of Dad and Judy’s old building on Seventy-ninth. Through the glass doors, I watch the doorman touch his hat as an elderly woman walks out of the elevator. He looks like a younger version of Felix, who would be retired by now. The uniform hasn’t changed either, green with gold buttons, like an old-fashioned elevator operator. An anachronistic world. The doorman tips his hat to a woman walking out into the night.

Another piece of that night, a bit of memory, floats back to me. This one eases in gently, so at first I don’t even know I’m remembering. It feels just like thinking. I’m at Dad and Judy’s, I let myself in quietly; everyone asleep — down the hall to my room. There is blood on my shirt, and I take off my clothes, search my body for the wound that caused this blood — I can’t see it, but I can feel it. It’s my own wrongness, badness.

I sit on my bed and let the vertigo take me. I remember being on the floor, on his scratchy ancient carpet, his broken body on top of me. I walk — slowly — to the bathroom, wash the blood from my shirt with freezing cold water, ball up the wet fabric and put it in the hamper. I open my dance bag and find inside Pavlova’s pointe shoe and Maurice’s little black book.

I know there is never only one version of the past. We resurrect the past to suit the needs of the present. As I leave the fortresses of Park Avenue behind me and head to the boutiques of Madison, I understand something. Maurice didn’t belong to this world any more than I did. We were both pursuing something that we didn’t have a name for. We ended up calling it beauty.

And what is beauty? A whiff of smoke. But felt with the force of a cannonball. When you see it, it pierces your eyes, the heart overflows, contracts.

I have told myself that life inevitably ends in tragedy. Don’t the old ballet stories tell us so? Giselle, Swan Lake —those stories of betrayal, lost love, and untimely sacrifice.

But I don’t know if that is true anymore.

I gave up my innocence. But I went on living. Maybe this was the greatest crime — against him — and against myself.

It is, maybe, neither of our faults. Where does outgrown anger go? Will it fade away?

On a corner of Madison, here’s a photocopied LOST CAT sign on the lamppost. A fluffy white cat sitting on a brown leather couch. Have you seen her? Someone has scrawled over the sign in marker I FOUND HER! I touch the metal of lamppost on the corner and it’s still warm from the sun. I’m filled with strange good cheer. A lost cat. Found. Bravo!

What should I have said to Kevin? I should have said, “I remember when I was pregnant with you. I remember feeling full for the first time in my life, I think. Then you were gone, and I missed you. The dream was over and another started.”

I feel like I would die if I said that.