Bluebeard's Egg (27 page)

Yvonne can think of no reason for these episodes. There’s no trigger for them, no early warning. They’re just something that happens to her, like a sneeze. She thinks of them as chemical.

Today Yvonne is having lunch with a man whose collar-bone she admires, or did admire when it was available to her. Right now it isn’t, because Yvonne is no longer sleeping with this man. She stopped because of the impossibility of the situation. For Yvonne, situations become impossible quickly. She doesn’t like situations.

This is a man with whom Yvonne was once in love. There are several such men in Yvonne’s life; she makes a distinction between them and the men she draws. She never draws men she’s in love with; she thinks it’s because she lacks the necessary distance from them. She sees them, not as form or line or colour or even expression, but as concentrations of the light. (That’s her version of it when she’s in love; when she isn’t, she remembers them as rarefied blurs, like something you’ve spilled on a tablecloth and are trying to wash out. She has occasionally made the mistake of trying to explain all this to the men concerned.) She’s no stranger to addiction, having once passed far too many chemical travelogues through her body, and she knows its dangers. As far as she’s concerned love is just another form of it.

She can’t stand too much of this sort of thing, so her affairs with such men don’t last long. She doesn’t begin them with any illusions about permanence, or even about temporary domestic arrangements; the days are gone when she could believe that if only she could climb into bed with a man and pull the covers over both their heads, they would be safe.

However, she often likes these men and thinks that something is due them, and so she continues to see them afterwards, which is easy because, her separations from them are never unpleasant, not any more. Life is too short.

Yvonne sits across from the man, at a table in a small restaurant, holding onto the tablecloth with one hand, below the table where he can’t see it. She’s listening to him with her customary interest, head tilted. She misses him intensely; or rather, she misses, not him, but the sensations he used to be able to arouse in her. The light has gone out of him and now she can see him clearly. She finds this objectivity of hers, this clarity, almost more depressing than she can bear, not because there is anything hideous or repellant about this man but because he has now returned to the ordinary level, the level of things she can see, in all their amazing and complex particularity, but cannot touch.

He’s come to the end of what he’s been saying, which had to do with politics. Now it’s time for Yvonne to tell him a joke.

“Why is pubic hair curly?” she says.

“Why?” he says; as usual, he attempts to conceal the shock he feels at hearing her say words like
pubic
. Nice men are more difficult for Yvonne than pigs. If a man is piggish enough, she’s glad to see him go.

“So you won’t poke your eyes out,” says Yvonne, clutching the tablecloth.

Instead of laughing he smiles at her, a little sadly. “I don’t know how you do it,” he says. “Nothing ever bothers you.”

Yvonne pauses. Maybe he’s referring to the fact that, in their withdrawal from each other, there were no frantic phone calls from her, no broken dishes, no accusations, no tears. She’s tried all these in the past and found them lacking. But maybe he wanted those things, as proof of something, of love perhaps; maybe he’s disappointed by her failure to provide them.

“Things bother me,” says Yvonne,

“You have so much energy,” he goes on, as if he hasn’t heard her. “Where do you get it from? What’s your secret?”

Yvonne looks down at her plate, on which there is half an apple and walnut and watercress salad and a crust of bread. To touch his hand, which is there in plain view, on the tablecloth a mere six inches away from her wine glass, would be to put herself at risk again, and she is already at risk. Once she delighted in being at risk; but once she did everything too much.

She looks up at him and smiles. “My secret is that I get up every morning to watch the sunrise,” she says. This
is
her secret, though it’s not the only one; it’s only the one that’s on offer today. She watches him to see if he’s bought it, and he has. This is enough in character for him, it’s what he thinks she’s really like. He’s satisfied that she’s all right, that there will be no trouble, which is what he wanted to know. He orders another cup of coffee and asks for the bill. When it comes, Yvonne pays half.

They walk out into the March air, warmer than usual this year, a fact on which they both comment. Yvonne avoids shaking hands with him. It occurs to her that he is the last man she will ever have the energy to love. It’s so much work. He waves good-bye to her and gets onto a streetcar and is borne away, towards a set of distant stoplights, along tracks that converge as they recede.

Near the streetcar stop there’s a small flower shop where you can buy one flower at a time, if one flower is all you want. It’s all Yvonne ever wants. Today they have tulips, for the first time this year, and Yvonne chooses a red one, the inside of the cup an acrylic orange. She will take this tulip back to her room and set it in a white bud vase in the sunlight and drink its blood until it dies.

Yvonne carries the tulip in one hand, wrapped in its cone of paper, held stiffly out in front of her as if it’s dripping. Walking along past the store windows, into which she peers with her usual eagerness, her usual sense that maybe, today, she will discover behind them something that will truly be worth seeing, she feels as if her feet are not on cement at all but on ice. The blade of the skate floats, she knows, on a thin film of water, which it melts by pressure and which freezes behind it. This is the freedom of the present tense, this sliding edge.

Yvonne is drawing another man. As a rule, she draws only men who fall well within the norm: they dress more or less conventionally, they turn out, when asked, to have jobs recognized and respected by society, they’re within ten years of her own age, shooting either way. This one is different.

She began to follow him about three blocks past the flower shop, trotting along behind him – he has long legs – with her tulip held up in front of her like a child’s flag. He’s young, maybe twenty-three, and on the street he was carrying a black leather portfolio, which is now leaning against the wall by her door. His pants were black leather too, and his jacket, under which he was wearing a hot-pink shirt. His head is shaved up the back and sides, leaving a plume on top, dyed fake-fur orang-outang orange, and he has two gold earrings in his left ear. The leather portfolio means that he’s an artist or a designer of some sort; she suspects he’s a spray-painter, the kind that goes around at night and writes things on brick walls, things like
crunchy granola sucks
and
Save Soviet Jews! Win Big Prizes!
If he ever draws at all, it’s with pink and green fluorescent felt pens. She’d bet ten dollars he can’t draw fingers. Yvonne’s own renderings of fingers are very good.

In the past she’s avoided anything that looked like another artist, but there’s something about him, the sullenness, the stylistic belligerence, the aggressive pastiness and deliberate potato-sprouting-in-the-cellar lack of health. When she caught sight of him, Yvonne felt a shock of recognition, as if this was what she’d been looking for, though she doesn’t yet know why. She ran him to earth outside a submarine shop and said her piece. She expected a rejection, rude at that, but here he is, in her studio, wearing nothing at the moment but his pink shirt, one bloodless leg thrown over the arm of the wine velvet chair. In his hand is the tulip, which clashes violently with the shirt and the chair and his hair, which all clash with each other. He’s like a welding-shop accident, a motorcycle driven full tilt into a cement wall. The look he’s focussing on her is pure defiance, but defiance of what? She doesn’t know why he agreed to come with her. All he said was, “Sure, why not?” with a look she read as meaning that she totally failed to impress him.

Yvonne draws, her pencil moving lightly over his body. She knows she has to go quickly or he will get restless, he will escape her. She can put the tulip in later, when she paints him. Already she’s decided to paint him; he will be her first real painting for years. The tulip will become a poppy; it’s almost the right colour anyway.

She’s only down to the collar-bone, half visible under the open shirt, when he says, “That’s enough,” and pulls himself out of the chair and comes over and stands behind her. He puts his hands on her waist and presses himself against her: no preliminaries here, which would suit Yvonne fine – she likes these things to be fast – except that she’s uneasy about him. None of her usual mollifications, coffee, music, gratefulness, have worked on him: he’s maintained a consistent level of surliness. He’s beyond her. She thinks of Al and Judy’s cat, the black one, and the time it got its foot caught in the cord of her Venetian blind. It was so enraged she had to throw a towel over it to get it untangled.

“That’s
art,”
he says, looking over her shoulder.

Yvonne mistakes this for a compliment, until he says, “Art sucks.” There’s a hiss in the last word.

Yvonne gasps: there is such hatred in his voice. Maybe if she just stands there nothing will happen. He turns away from her and goes to the corner near the door: he wants to show her what he’s got in his portfolio. What he does are collages. The settings are all outdoors: woods, meadows, rocks, seashores. Onto them he has pasted women, meticulously cut from magazines, splayed open-legged torsoes with the hands and feet removed, sometimes the heads, over-painted with nail polish in various shades of purple and red, shiny and wet-looking against the paper.

Yet as a lover he is slow and meditative, abstracted, somnambulant almost, as if the motions he’s going through are only a kind of afterthought, like a dog groaning in a dream. The violence is all on the cardboard; it’s only art, after all. Maybe everything is only art, Yvonne thinks, picking her sky-blue shirt up off the floor, buttoning it. She wonders how many times in the future she will find herself doing up these particular buttons.

When he’s gone out, she locks the door behind him and sits in the red velvet chair. It’s herself she’s in danger from. She decides to go away for a week. When she comes back she will buy a canvas the size of a doorway and begin again. Though if art sucks and everything is only art, what has she done with her life?