Kate Braverman - Lithium for Medea

It was the next night. It was late. Still, he had kept his lights on. Still, he had waited for me.

I nodded. Jason glanced at the kitchen clock. “Only midnight,” he observed. “What happened? The guy’s wife show up?”

“As a matter of fact, it was a she,” I said. “And her husband came back.”

I liked the way my words sounded. They filled the air between us with something white and sharp. I felt surrounded by spikes, little marble columns where I could hide. A safe place in the ruins, almost definable. I wanted to smile.

Jason grabbed my wrist. “You were with a chick? Is that what you’re telling me?” The veins in his forehead leaped out. His eyes went black. “A woman?” Jason paused. He looked at the kitchen wall as if searching for something, a common household object that might explain everything. Finally he said, “That really disgusts me.” He dropped his fingers from my wrist. He glanced at his fingers as if expecting to find a glossy dark stain. My wrist fell to my side, a white fist hitting my hip, a kind of gong.

Was I imagining it? Was his face slowly collapsing in slabs of grayish clay? But yes. His eyes were dark. They darted. They raced. I could feel them spark. They seemed to be tearing at themselves, growing claws. Inside Jason’s eyes there was turbulence, as if suddenly he had a vision of a thousand possible futures and in each one he was dying, falling hacked, trapped, boiled.

I felt light, airy. I could drift like smoke. I smiled sweetly, my lips perfect, my mouth half opened, silky in darkness, a flower, flawless. I stretched myself on his bed. I had stumbled on gold, nuggets and chips, gold by the pound, the ton. I waited in the darkness for Jason. I didn’t have to wait long.

Later there would be escalations.

“Who was it?” he asked, talking into my body. “A man?” Jason bit my breast. I could feel his tongue, eyelids, fingernails, warm breath, lime breath. “A woman?” His voice seemed to flutter and tremble.

I was a kind of mirror. Dark formless things snaked and jerked in the smoky rippling glass. His fear brushed against me, a pulse running through the darkness, a current, electric.

“Was it a man?” Jason seemed to plead. He held my face hard with his hands and looked down through the shadows, looked down for something. I knew he would find nothing.

“No,” I lied easily, looking straight at him. My face was solid. Nothing leaked or shook. “It was a woman.”

“Jesus,” he said. He slid away from me. He coiled himself into the darkness, stung and withdrawn. His face was a sail suddenly deprived of wind. The canvas flapped in useless white sheets. Jason pressed his face into the pillow. He began to cry.

“There, there,” I said, stroking his back lightly. “There, there,” I said softly, gently, running my fingernails across his flesh, skating my fingers across his small back. I was smiling in the darkness, smiling where he couldn’t see me. The smile felt odd and heavy on my mouth.

All at once I didn’t care any more if he was painting naked blond teenagers crouching over a pile of oranges in a sandbox like strange young hens. It didn’t matter if he was painting women humping beer cans on a tapestry of floral print beach towel, their pink and yellow and orange legs disappearing into the gold and red and blue threads. I didn’t care what young woman with what flat girl’s stomach knelt on a yellow plastic beach raft with her hips jutting forward in the universal and cross-culturally validated position of absolute invitation. It had taken years not to care anymore.

“Where are you going?” Jason sat up in bed.

“Out,” I said. It was another night, another battle.

Jason pushed the covers back, angry. He followed me into his bathroom. I combed my hair slowly, carefully arranging the long red strands around my neck. In the half-light they were a kind of coral. Why, I could be a mermaid draped in sea shells.

“It’s one A.M.”

His words were a kind of gong. One A.M. How dare you? I am the man. I am hard. I am metal. I am time, boundary, longitude. You can’t defy me.

I put on gold hoop earrings. I was conscious of Jason watching me, his eyes, his face splintering. I was putting on pink lipstick. My hair was the color of sea bells. I was a mermaid. I didn’t care what time it was.

“Don’t go,” Jason said.

My eyes were lined with luminescent blue. They looked like the insides of abalone shells. I rubbed rouge into my skin until my whole face glowed.

“You’re doing this to piss me off,” Jason said. He was following me through the front room. His voice seemed small and shocked.

I closed his front door. I could feel him behind me as I walked across the bridge over the Grand Canal. The air felt agitated behind me, a series of small black eruptions. Something inside me smiled.

There were truces, brief states of calm beneath stripped blue skies. I sat on my front porch. I was a shell surrendering to the currents and tides. It was late afternoon, another day in an indeterminate but warm season. I had collected my rents. I watched sunflowers nod, their faces a string of fat yellow beads repeated in the water. The canal seemed to be breathing.

Suddenly Jason appeared on the horizon. He was paddling his yellow rowboat under the Howland Canal bridge. He edged closer, yellower. He tied the boat to the stake he had driven into the side of the canal in front of my house. The Woman’s House.

“I’ve come to take you away from all this.” Jason mockbowed. He smiled. He offered me his hand. I took it.

Jason rowed. The sun was raw in the sky, a slow thick red. A dozen black-and-white ducks pushed out of the way of the boat.

“It’s just like the old days,” Jason said.

His voice had a certain sparkle. I boiled potatoes in the kitchen alcove of his studio. Jason was in the front room, painting. The old days? I plopped the potatoes into the pot. They floated like the brown bloated bodies of drowned men.

Jason stood at his easel. He was watching a news special on the labor movement in Argentina. He looked from the television screen, then back to the canvas. He stared at the announcer. He dipped his brush. He faced the canvas, taking a geometric patterned towel and darkening it, adding crevices of shadow within shadow, another, more subtle design.

“You know I need you,” Jason said, staring at the canvas. A cigarette was burning in the ashtray near his palette. He sipped a beer. The announcer was talking about agriculture, the birth rate and religion.

“You always need what you don’t have,” I said sadly.

“We could try,” Jason said with conviction. He put his paintbrush down.

I turned away. I walked back into the ktichen. At that moment I realized that I didn’t need him anymore. Jason had been a mirror. I had seen in him a reflection of who I once was. I had been empty and frightened. The image was frozen. It was all Jason saw.

In time I became a mirror. I learned to show Jason his fear and sorrow, the outlines of his failure. I showed him pieces that were a sketchy gray, the color of his pervasive unhappiness.

The mirrors were inaccurate. They only reflected back what was already past. The mirrors had half-lives like radioactive elements. The mirrors had time gaps like messages sent from distant stars that even at the speed of light take centuries to arrive.

There had been a strange filtering process, a sealing out of certain vital elements. The mirrors were limited. They were ice sheets. They contained a passed vision more inconsequential than a dream. In short, they were useless.

Now it was late afternoon. The canals were turning muddy. I was waiting for the hospital to call. There was something. Infection. Internal bleeding. An artery erupting, a red glow in the glistening dim cubicle, an ember. Something happened. Unexpected. A gasping. A sinking in.