Almost Famous Women (18 page)

She did not respond, but took a breath and settled further into her bed. When Allegra fell into a deep rest—one where she breathed slowly and seemed only to inhabit a portion of her body—I was relieved that her suffering had ended, but I knew mine would begin again in earnest.

It was the twentieth of April and not quite warm when she gave up. She was pronounced dead at 10:00 p.m. The last amaretti remained at her bedside, untouched.

You should rest, the nurse told me, as they began to prepare Allegra's body, washing it, filing her small nails.

I shook my head, wanting to prolong the moment. I understood the finality of the situation and wanted to dwell, soak up the last of Allegra's spirit. I could see a crushing wave of sadness in front of me.

The abbess came to remove me, but, defiant with grief, I turned away. For hours I sat on a small chair next to Allegra until they took her. I touched her hair and imagined the trajectory of her life, willing her past the obstacle of death.

Lord Byron made a show of his grief and sent for her body as if it were a rare volume, the thing that had been missing from his library all along.

A month later I moved to Murano, a small island outside of Venice, and became a washwoman for a glassmaker. I could not remain at Bagnacavallo; I was too angry, too tired, cynical.

You're making a mistake, the abbess said, when I told her my intentions.

I have made many, I said.

I lived away from the palazzos, where the gardens were beginning to bloom, and the scent of sea salt and pine filled the air.

I worked harder than I had worked before, trying to forget the children that had been taken from me. I requested extra shifts, thankful for the sleep that came after I'd exhausted myself.

During lunch I could not sit still. I ate baguettes and drank strong coffee. In the afternoons I made a habit of looking in the shop windows, the glass figurines inside garish and dappled, some green like the convent nursery's walls.

I slept with the slim volume of Allegra's letters underneath my mattress, though I did not read them, could not look at the name she'd learned to write herself, the cumbersome capital
A
.

I never lay down unless I was sure I was too tired to think, too worn down to remember. When I didn't sleep, she came to me, young and alive, olives in her mouth, the child I knew better than my own. Their eyes and fingers became the same in my dreams.

Lucia Joyce dancing in Paris at the Bullier Ball, May 1929.

Photo reprinted with permission of the Stuart Gilbert Collection at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin.

L
drinks from a broken teacup and splits her lip. She doesn't wipe the blood with a napkin but sucks it away, glaring up at her mother with crooked eyes.

I don't take pleasure in summer eggs, L says.

Why do you speak in irregular sentences? her mother asks.

I have no native tongue, L says. What do you expect?

There's a chamber pot on the couch and the house smells terrible in the heat. A boiled egg sits on the plate in front of her; L cuts it open but doesn't eat. This offends her mother, she can tell. She knows what her mother is thinking: These eggs cost money.

L is choreographing in her head again, making mental diagrams: the arch of a back, a lunge, a flexed foot. Her own bare feet tap the floor of the rented flat. She wants to stumble upon an invisible idea and render it with her body, amplify it. She feels something savage and raw inside and wants to show it on the stage, or in a patron's garden. She wants to begin a discussion underneath the orange trees.

Lucia, her mother says, leaning on the counter in her outdated, coffee-stained couture. You need to empty the pot.

I'm working.

Nonsense.

L's imagination is back in Antibes. She bathes in the Baie des Anges and dances in the woods with unshowered, muscular girls in tunics, loose hair tumbling down their backs. They give nighttime shows, the flicker of oil lamps on their damp skin. Her muscles were firmer then. She spoke three languages. She was on the verge of something. Her thoughts were the color of moss and her head was teeming with them. The ideas were crawling all over her body like the fat worms she used to feed the rooster after a rain, the lonely one who crowed in the city streets at dawn, the one who sought shelter behind a fetid wastebin.

L, the pot. Remember the pot.

But L remembers the olive grove and the moon. Those are doorways in her imagination. If you have dreamed of something taboo, she thinks, say your brother's tongue, you must not let the image go. You must let it unlock something for you artistically, because it's part of the rhythm. You must let the native tongue torture you slowly, make you ask what in the pit of humanity makes you want to turn away. What does the moral filter look like? What might the arm do? The leg?

She taps her foot.

L, the pot is stinking up the room! Stop tapping.

If you have fingered a rose blossom, she thinks, you know the shape of a clitoris. You picture it between your teeth. You squeeze it with your fingers. How can I make the shape of that feeling? What color is a lunge? What does an arabesque sound like?

Why had she stopped dancing?
Stanchezza? Wahnsinn?
The string of broken engagements? A wounded ego? Last week, when she couldn't answer this question, she went walking. Her mother called it tramping but she went walking, stumbling through the streets with her dark hair unbrushed. She was hungry, almost catatonic, until she found a man she could press up against. A man who would give her bread.

The pot!

L stands up. She grabs a chair and hurls it at her mother, who shields her face. The chair lands on the floor, leg breaking. How can the body be like the chair? Who is watching? Her life is a performance.

Aggression is ugly in a woman. What color is it?

Last night the man who broke her heart walked into her father's birthday party as if it was nothing. As if her body had meant nothing to him. As if she had given him nothing. She was once a silver fish, her body swallowed in a costume of scales. He had been in the audience, watching.

What if I bastardized a grand plié, assumed the position of birth, squatted down like a woman in the Amazon? L thinks as her mother sobs. Would that look useful?

L retreats to her room. Her walls are painted black and they smell like the woods at night. Her curtains are made of punctured records and they sound like gunfire. She is a tree, and all her leaves are on the ground. She is naked, picked clean. She is a river, barren.

Butterfly McQueen.

Photo reprinted with permission of Mary Evans Picture Library.

B
efore we slice the cadavers open, a Unitarian chaplain offers a prayer. It's a hot August day in Baltimore. The breeze stirs the magnolia trees outside the lab window; the leaves scratch the glass and block the sun, leaving a mottled pool of light beneath our gurneys.

“We're grateful for these gifts,” the chaplain says. “May the bodies of these men and women provide the light of truth and help you practice better medicine.”

“Break out the bone saws!” one of my classmates calls out. We are, I think, eager to show mettle we don't yet have. The jokes are a coping mechanism; you earn your indifference to blood and guts. Each of us is anxious to unzip the body bag and see who we will disembowel in the name of science.

Our instructor is clear that we shouldn't name our cadaver, but of course we do. Our cadaver is fat, and has thick black chest hair. We call him Vegas. My lab partner, Sarah, slides a pair of cheap aviator sunglasses over his pale, waxen nose.

“As long as I can't see his eyes, I'm fine,” she says.

“We have to flip him over first anyway,” I say, slipping my fingers underneath his buttocks to get a sense of his weight.

“God,” I say. “He's big.” And full of embalming fluid.

“I thought they stopped taking the fat ones,” Sarah says. “Maybe there was a shortage?”

“Maybe,” I say, though the lab tech told me the school morgue has more bodies than it can handle; the economy is bad and the costs of burial are up.

“Old Vegas smells like toilet cleaner,” Sarah says. “Or menthol cigarettes.”

Sarah is hardly five feet tall and tenacious in the way of a terrier. Her parents are internists in Ohio, and I get the feeling that she's impatient about school. “I'm ready to marry myself to the hospital halls,” she says, “or the first anesthesiologist that looks like
Top Gun
–era Val Kilmer.”

“Goggles are a must when sawing bone,” our lab instructor tells us. “Watch out for bionic knees and hips; the metal will take out your eye.”

We come to the gurney well aware of the risks: the scent of phenol may make us salivate and become strangely hungry. We may not want meat for months.

Sarah makes a point of discussing her craving for beef carpaccio. “I like a little blood on my plate,” she says.

“Who are you?” I ask.

“It's his heart that did him in,” Sarah says, aiming her scalpel at his bare chest. “Blockage. I know it. I can't wait to get in there.”

With the help of our group members, we flip Vegas onto his stomach. Touching his body gives me chills. Surely this is not what he wanted, students making fat jokes and speculating about
his cause of death. Though I'm determined to remain exceedingly rational during med school, part of me wonders if some piece of Vegas's soul is aware of what we're doing to him. What would he say to us, if he could?

I run my scalpel down his vertebrae, not cutting, just thinking, and know I should be focused, the surgical scissors not quite a familiar weight in my hand. Grabbing on to his hip with the ferocity of a lover, I'm about to go wrist-deep, slice through subcutaneous fat, peel the skin off Vegas's back like a rug, when my thoughts turn to Butterfly McQueen.

In the winter of 1994 I carried a Bible around a historic neighborhood in Augusta, Georgia, evangelizing in the name of love. We had a new youth minister, a fresh graduate from Duke Divinity School. Lank Harris. He was blond, dimpled, and his father owned a car dealership in town.