On the Way to the Funeral
Mallory Owen
1.
- Gavril is in the hospital, says Toller.
Toller, then Gavril two years below, then little me, Annabel. The baby girl.
- I have an art show, I said, but I’ll come as soon as I can.
And then, not two hours later.
- Gavril is dead.
2.
Where you going, Saul asks. Downtown, I say. Remember? Starts at ten, need to be there by nine, then out by noon. Need to catch the train to New Paltz at one. Funeral starts at three.
You had a turtle, once, before you were dead. Its shell was hard cracked green-knubbled. Maybe it was a terrapin. I pull up my white underwear and fasten a black dress around my waist. Am I allowed to wear white underwear? I think about your terrapin, how it bobbed its head up and down – agreeing with the world. You never agreed with the world.
One white-jacketed calla lily sprouts from a mug on Saul’s desk. Were those from me? Must’ve been somebody else – it points, like a painting, to something other. Its head hangs. Think it’s still living until you peep over the rim and see the stalk is brown dry dead. What remains of art? Perhaps only a vestige [Nancy].
What remains of this lily – only a vestige indeed. You always thought their ductile white pelts were so elegant.
Once for Mom you went out to the fields to pick flowers, but all you came back with were stinking dandelions. You wrapped them in a purple ribbon and they dropped little lion’s teeth all down the hall. By the time you presented them, they were just bloodless wilted heads. From my body, flowers shall grow and I am in them, and that is eternity [Munch]. What did those dandelions point to? What did they mean?
I still can’t figure out why you stayed in town. There was never anything beautiful up there.
3.
And it is summer! The morning mist—the geese—the patter of feet like cracking eggs—the bees creeping into my ears—and that smell that is of nothing but fresh crisp air heralding the coming of apples and the dying bluebells. I wish I wish I wish I could spend this hot heavy golden day here in the heart of the park and not get on the train and not see any of those empty dark faces gathered to pass their grief around like a children’s ring-round-the-rosy game. It is summer - nobody should grieve in the summer. We should stamp it forgotten until the cold.
The painting faces my knees. I hope it will not melt and smear my thighs with oils. I remember, once, we walked the halls of a looping white gallery – black and white paintings—crows feathers and milkteeth adhered to the canvas—it was cold, near Christmas—you were wearing a pale lavender scarf. I thought we will never be as worldly again. You thought, slightly older, this is all nonsense. We stood, facing a canvas, and it was wild, excessive, frightening, although I could not have said what was so frightening about it.
Nobody else’s paintings were good enough for you. They were mundane—banal—boring—sad. They were unoriginal, and there was nothing worse for art. They were visually compelling, but rested on pedestrian ideas, and therefore empty. You always had something else in mind. You had dreams. You saw something different. Later, I always came to you first. Who else would I show them to?
At one I will catch the train. Grand Central on the half hour. If you stand in one part of the station and whisper, people far off can hear you as if you were standing next to them. Doesn’t that smack of immortality? The show will be over by then and I will be exhausted – I slept last night on the orange threaded couch in Saul’s backyard.
The desolate heat rises in the evenings to Saul’s room at the top of the house. The breath from your mouth leaves as steam. The couch is in the junk pile at the bottom of the fire escape. It has been there for years. He did not move when I left. It was cooler outside, like the heat had finally said enough, but sleep was fitful.
Once there was a man standing over me in a mink coat. I do not know if I was asleep or awake. His face looked like yours. He was wearing a strange fur hat and he bent over me, looking into my face. There is not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings [Nietzsche]. I don’t know whether he was imaginary or not, but I felt like I loved him. When you die, do you become imaginary?
I wondered in the night. I wondered if we can hear ourselves die. It might sound like the creak of trees when their trunks shift in the wind. I wondered, do we all feel it coming with the same sense? Might I smell it, like wet soil, while you taste it fresh on your tongue like the tang of a young leek. Will a blind man hear death more distinctly, and a deaf man see it stalking him with the clearest of eyes?
4.
You would have asked how I met Saul. You were always curious. I remember a winter afternoon. We had been confined indoors. Rain fell heavy like an exhausted body dipping to rest on the earth. You remember how Mom hated the rain. I was discovering myself, under the covers. The deliciousness of the cold tickled at my face. You came in the door without knocking, and I turned red with shame. You never told anyone, not even Toller.
I know Toller put you up to it. He suspected, but never knew. We were taught against it, in school, but what young girl listened? You kept it for me, with a wink at the dinner table.
Toller was a cruel child, and he is an indifferent adult. I wish it had been you who moved to Manhattan with me. I never see Toller anyway.
I met Saul at a show. He told me he thought my paintings were beautiful and mature. I thought he was trite, but I liked his body. You would shake your head at me for that. He was wearing a red sweater and brown leather shoes. I invited him home with me. You would be jealous of my forwardness, but you’d hide it in your soft disapproval, and shake your head some more. Now he looks at me like he owns me. It has become a private joke with myself, although sometimes I look at him and think, this is the saddest man in the world. I don’t know why I think that. But I do. What he thinks I feel is an illusion. Perhaps it is art. Can a relationship be art? Can you make art with your feelings? There is certainly enough artifice in mine. It makes me feel warm to think of what he’ll do without me.
The show is a success. My work is complimented. Does what goes on inside show on the outside? Someone has a great fire in his soul and nobody ever comes to warm themselves at it, and passers-by see nothing but a little smoke at the top of the chimney and then go on their way [Van Gogh]. You always warmed yourself at it. I wonder now if I am happy with my work. Is any artist ever happy with their work or, upon reconsideration, do they always want to throw it out? It has occurred to me that I might paint the fields where you died.
We cannot live in trite worlds. We cannot stay somewhere where the air on our tongues tastes ridiculous.
5.
I asked you once how the world would end. You thought I was kidding around. What kind of a question is that? You asked me. I said I was serious. You must have thought it was the kind of thing asked to provoke.
Nuclear war. I said. I have always thought we would be the end of ourselves. There’s no way around it, now. You were sitting on the swing and I was leaned up against one of the oaks. Toller had already left. Those were golden days. With the path we’re on, nothing to do but blow ourselves up.
It won’t. That was your answer. I thought you were messing with me, because you thought it was a stupid question, but you weren’t. I don’t think it will ever end. We are here to stay now. There’s no chance we end ourselves in nuclear war. Someone will be left at the end. You launched yourself into the air. We hadn’t been to the swing in years. You were lanky and long, as if you’d been stretched too thin, and I could see the bones in the hollows of your throat and at your dirty elbows.
We will evolve, you told me. We will evolve into something better, eventually. I asked what you meant. How could we evolve, when there were so many of us? What collective force could possibly work? Founder effect, you said, after the nuclear war. A few will be left, and we will evolve from them. I’m counting on them being the smart ones. You winked at me as you swung, and I laughed at that. It’d be sad to have come all this way only for them to be the idiots, you said.
Is it going to be you? I asked. You shook your head and kicked your legs out in front of you, as if you were trying to jump straight into the sky.
6.
The slow rock of the train. As if it is trying to settle into the tracks. I think of the man in the fur hat. His face was like yours. The nose was delicate. The eyes were black and straining, two black beetles caught scrambling in a red thread net. You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below [Exodus]. Did I imagine him?
I have no interest in the funeral. I will not represent you as death and death as you. I will not look at your face. You have gone on a long trip, and you’ll be back someday. Your face lies at the far reaches of the world.
7.
I longed for dark spirits. I was sixteen, you had just come of age. The old crooked bottles standing dusthusked and years untouched at the back of Calhoun’s. Looked like they could taste of nothing but honey-syrup. You of age? How many times did I try, though Calhoun knew our parents and Dad did his divorce? Even the names were like someone had poured butter in my ear: bourbon, scotch, black rum.
This was my dream for Rosie’s that Friday: to be the late girl at the party who comes in the wake of all eyes, stares down the throng and makes her high-stepping way to the couch, hips knocking on each side an aged flask of drink made only for old men and poets, white wrists exposed by their fluked necks and grinning at her own sharp-edged presence.
You owed me one because I found weed in your room before your birthday but didn’t say anything to our parents. We giggled that Toller, ever the eldest, might disown us both, but I held you to it, having so little leverage as the youngest sister.
In the end, you bought two bottles of his cheapest Malbec and said they’re still dark, maybe even darker. I always liked your laugh, but I hated it then. Malbec smacked both of mustiness and pretension, and people already whispered that I thought I was better because Mom let me wear lipstick. I couldn’t bring Malbec. I thought I’d read somewhere that red wine gives you rosacea.
Rosie’s would be a bust.
The alley behind Jan’s house. Telephone wires string up the sky. Heaps of silvered trash – scent of the hot still sea. A thousand times: I don’t want you hanging around with that Jan. Both summer babies, both like gangly chickens in a run. There was no way I was leaving her behind. We drank the Malbec back there, and Jan didn’t say a thing about it. It made me feel like I was about to give birth, like sticksweet wine would flow from between my legs when it was least expected.
It was bitter. Her lips were bitter too when she kissed me. She knew it wasn’t my first, she’d been waiting, to make sure I wasn’t disappointed, if it wasn’t what I wanted. They tasted just as I thought my own lips would. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry. I did not know what she was apologizing for. I took her hand and we laughed.
8.
Across the carriage. There he is. The fur hatted man. Is he you?
He sits with his hands folded in his lap. He watches me. His face is so like yours. The broad lips to seal a thoughtful and quiet mouth. Smooth cheeks the color of a fish belly. His hair is sandy, darkened with the grit of his years, perhaps as golden as your own when you were young and we used to play in the backyard, down by the oak copse. His hands are huge. He has thick fingers. It is this that distinguishes him. You had the delicate hands of a young woman, always white like a stripped lily.
The fur-hatted man is staring at me. I stare back, and think he is not you, but he could have been. I wonder why he is wearing a fur hat in the heat of July, and I wonder if perhaps he is ill. He’s going the wrong way for that. His eyes do not betray the diabolical weight of sickness in him, but then, they are not always reliable. You can’t always count on the whites to go yellow like cream turning in the sun. At times, it is invisible.
You always told me, never talk to strangers. For awhile, whenever I saw you, I’d shriek and yell stranger stranger stranger, and you’d catch me up around my middle and growl. The squeak and squeal of laughter. Those days we had to ourselves.
Seated facing me he has the bulk of a bear. He rises. You remember Dad used to tell us that everything in the world is an echo of something else. We are reverberations of long-stale reverberations. You’d laugh at him swirling his whiskey, clocks in the hall like the drum of fingerbones going at all hours and say thanks for the tips, Dad.
The fur hatted man rises and sits next to me, an echo of an echo.
-Sorry to bother you, he says.
-Then don’t.
-You look just like someone I know.
-What?
-My ex-wife. You look just like my ex-wife. Just really like her. Even down to that mole on your lip.
The fur hatted man twists a piece of loose hair around his fingertip.
-Not nice to comment on the moles of others.
-Sorry, didn’t mean to offend.
-You did.
-But it’s just, you do, you look exactly like my ex-wife, just like her.
-Bit of a cradle-robber are you?
-Haven’t seen her in years.
-Then how do you know what she looks like.
-You look like just like she used to.
-Well, doppelgangerism isn’t really an interest of mine.
I turned away. You would have gotten a kick out of him, though. I’d been right, about the crazy. Off his fucking rocker. You would have had more fun with him, but I couldn’t find the energy.
9.
It started in earnest with the notes. Jan always wrote the same thing. It is my intention: to love her so long, till she’ll love me in the end. They’d be in the knotholes of maples, wrapped in silver twine, or stuck to a branch on the riverbank; they’d be pinned to my locker, or slid subtle between the pages of a notebook, one I’d never known was missing. I never wrote back. I was spoiled. It was natural that she would love me, and that I would be ambivalent. I didn’t understand things, then. This was the way my life was going to go. Toller always said, we get what we can bear. I think, we bear the things we get, and must take the things we desire.
Rosie’s was packed to the beams. Rockers and skives, creeps and nobodies, jerks and jades and ingénues, all the smoke and mirror tricks of adolescence. Each one thinks he’s the only one who doesn’t know who he is yet.
Jan is the Armida in the middle, jiving her way through, pockets of pop rocks and jellybeans, to settle the score between herself and the world. Her face is burnished like someone has rubbed it with gold. She plucks a joint like a flower from the sea-green fingers of a reclining stoner and puts it to her red lips. The look on her face as she inhales is both terrible and terrific, as if she is presiding over some solemn séance. What do we yearn for at the sight of beauty? To be beautiful: we imagine that there must be much happiness bound up in this [Nietzsche]. Is Jan beautiful in this moment? Inhaling again she runs her hands down the sides of her ribs and they wave as if tracing the sloping back of a lover, and her teeth are still strong and crimsoned with wine so she looks carnivorous and gilded.
She has long pale hair, hair fine enough it could have been spun sugar, and translucent skin that freckles with such vivacious ferocity that through the summer she looks perpetually as if she’s been spattered with mud. It always sounds like she’s announcing something. Her hands are bigger than they should be. Once, she grasped my wrist to keep me from falling in the river, and it bruised up plum. I was always afraid of the bellows of her spirit.
Jan was not a watcher. She was full and rounded, effusive, selfish – omnipotent and ashamed at once -- unable or unwilling to admit errors, aggressive, as if she desired to take the world in her jaws and shake it until it submitted to her.
We find dark rum hidden at the back of Rosie’s pantry, and we can tell Rosie doesn’t want anyone to find them. Kids on the counters, dangling their legs over the tiles and tapping their heads to the music, a dog sits soaked and shaking in the sink, barking, and there are four identical dark-headed girls in the corner nodding that ecstatic yes yes yes yes of the dance, shuffling their eight identical white sneakers across the floor. We grab the biggest bottle and scamper to the bathroom—giggling, in fits at the lump of the liquor shoved deep into Jan’s shorts.
At the center of me and Jan, there was regret, the regret of the end – a mirage that glows at the beginning. We peered forward and all we could see was ourselves, solitary, looking back. I have rarely felt anything towards love in my life but regret.
Jan takes my hand and she kisses me by the sink. Her skin murmurs against mine – a lapping brook—the sun on white flowers—she takes my hand. She takes my hand and kisses me by the sink. The water is running. It is still running, and I think, perhaps its pale rush will slink over my dress and I will feel the cool on my back, holding onto her hand, while she kisses me over the spilling sink. I am drowned. My body fills with water, I put my hand back and it rests in a pool, the stopper was in the sink, my body fills with water and I think, it is so sweet, it is almost like milk.
I will never be made to submit to anything again. The blue room – she kisses me over the sink—the blue tiles, they are glazed until they shine, and I will never submit to anyone again. She kisses me. I bend backwards and think, perhaps I will fall in, and disappear down the pipes, a naiad of iron and brass. She is my life, working on me, she is time, pressing me to things, pressing me into the blue tiles, the sheen of the blue tiles – she has entered my alone, and I put my hand back into the water, but it has warmed now and she has turned off the tap.
Why do I think of this now? I have not seen Jan in years.
10.
You knew Jan too. Is this why I think about her, now? Nobody has heard from her in years. She slipped through the slats of life. I always expected her to put her head down and assault her own aging with a finesse and an aggression that life could not match, that life would have no choice but to yield to. I yearned for her to be fine. To end up somewhere good.
We used to lie under the oleanders, with the smell of figs in the air—the fig tree each year would grow heavy with so much fruit that it would fall and stick and rot before we could get to it—and she would throw poems to me, across the grass. Her voice was deep. There was always dirt on her legs.
I could always tell how her day had been. There was her anger in the way she held her shoulder bones out from her back, in that tight pinch between them – there was her joy in the eager strut of her chin, which poked forward when she was in the mood for laughing – there in her feet pointed away from each other, as if one couldn’t stand the sight of the other, was her sadness, a melancholy I misinterpreted for sullenness or disinterest. I always wondered who else she was looking at.
-Don’t you get tired, living here?
She often asked me this.
-No. Why would I? It’s nice here.
-But nothing ever happens.
-Stuff happens.
-Nothing important.
-I don’t know how you tell the difference.
-Don’t you get angry, get wild, get restless?
-No.
I didn’t know it at the time, but she was right. Nothing ever did happen. Dissatisfaction came more easily to her, perhaps.
11.
Once, I came to the oleanders, and there you were, together. You and Jan.
You drove us home, that night of the Malbec. You asked Jan about her parents. She said they were fine. You asked her about her studies. You asked her about when she would get a car. She said she wouldn’t.
I remember, I came to the oleanders. Those things that held me together—blood and froth and yellow foam, perhaps—disintegrated. You and Jan rolled around in the oleanders together. You and Jan, Jan and you. Creamy skin and legs and freckles and that long burning hair.
I existed then as a stalk, as a stem of a woman, as though I could never be angry because there was no space in me for it. I was a conglomeration of twigs. I was a branch, not quite a trunk. I could never be angry – there was nothing about which to be angry. You didn’t know. Would I feel as generous with you now? Was I being generous then, or just humiliated? I don’t know now.
But I haven’t heard from Jan in years.
What is the meaning of all this? You are my brother. I cannot understand this in any way but to be what I was then: a twig, a stalk. When my leaves grow again, you will have to come back. You will have to come back, when the seasons change. You will have to come back and be where I am. You are my brother.
12.
And now the train pulls in. I wonder how I will get to the church. Under the watch of the sun the topsoil glows by the river. Oh god.
Mallory Owen is a physician and writer based in San Diego.
