Onion Songs (14 page)

He picked up one of the books she had left behind:
Beloved
, by Toni Morrison. He found the ornate metal bookmark she had inserted a third of the way through the book, a bookmark he had never seen before, but one so special he felt it must have been his wife’s way of honoring this particular volume. He remembered that she had talked about this novel, how much she had loved it, how anxious she had been to get to the next page. But he was sorry that he did not remember anything more specific than that about the book itself.

He
’d never read much fiction—fiction made him feel uncomfortable. He assumed the main characters were more or less masks of the author. Otherwise, how could the author make the story seem real? Fiction, he thought, must be a very strange sort of autobiography, portraying what the author wanted to happen, dreaded might happen, would happen if the author were of another sex, lived in a different country, had different personality traits, took a different path, job, spouse, etc. How did authors feel when their books were misread? What if people liked the character in your book better than who you were on such and such a particular day? He found such layering disturbing, and all too close to the way most people viewed their own lives.

But she
’d loved the book and had wanted to finish it, and so, over the next few days, he finished it for her, reading it aloud despite the weaknesses in his speaking voice. He didn’t think he needed to read it aloud so that she might hear it. He’d never believed in such things. Wherever she was he didn’t think she was in any position to physically hear anything. He read it aloud so that the words might live in this home they’d shared all their married life.

Across the street from the art museum there was a park where people came to preach, to give speeches, to perform, or to express themselves in any way desired
, as long as they didn’t ask for money or offend common decency. The city government prided itself on its openness and the privilege was well used. Every day there were crowds.

One afternoon he brought a folding table and a battered old suitcase into the park, and out of the suitcase he retrieved a variety of records
, which he laid out on the table for display. All of these records had to do with his wife’s life, her long illness, and her death. At one end of the table there were photo albums from her childhood, letters to her parents from camp, a lock of hair from her first haircut. Next to these were laid out their wedding pictures and a variety of snapshots from their marriage: a trip out west, a day at the beach, a picnic in their own front yard when the car wouldn’t start. He and his wife appeared together in all of the shots, and when he examined them he became obsessed with trying to remember what friend, neighbor, or stranger had been pressed into service as photographer. For most of the photographs a clear identification of the person taking the picture was impossible, as any normal person might expect. He understood this. But still it troubled him. Had these record makers been purely accidental, or was it possible that some had hung around hoping to be recruited for just such a purpose? Certainly, if these people hadn’t been there, there might be no record that his long marriage to this wonderful woman had occurred at all.

At the other end of the table he stacked medical records and some pictures from her final years.
He had been the photographer for these, and had taken so many portraits of her during this time that choosing a few representative photos had been a difficult task.

Specific facts having to do with her height and weight, the amount of space she occupied, her exact age to the minute at time of death, were prominently displayed.
“This is the space and time she occupied,” he repeated again and again when reciting these figures.

There were relatively few visitors to his table that first day, but for those that did come he provided a lengthy narrative concerning his wife, their time together, and her relatively recent death.
He was undeterred by the lack of questions—he enjoyed talking about her so much, and it had been such a long time since he’d had the opportunity to talk about her, that the public’s lack of interest wasn’t about to dissuade him. He returned to the park every day that week and delivered essentially the same presentation.

The following week he decided to add a new element to the performance, not only to make it more interesting for himself, but to draw some of the larger crowds available during warmer weather.
Despite his lack of formal dance training, despite his singular ineptitude with anything involving coordinated movement, he positioned himself behind the table and began a series of sweeping, yet precise, gestures, which might have been untrained yoga, untrained martial arts, untrained dance, or the unintentional movements of someone afflicted with a nervous disease. During these movements he delivered the same talk he had the week before, except this time there were more questions from the audience.

He grasped, he moved, he took a large inhalation of air.
He faltered, he limped, he ached, he winced. He tried to exemplify how it was to be in the world for the number of years he had walked upon this planet. He tried to show the truth of his body and the solitary nature of his existence, and, without using the exact words, just how much he missed her.

He meditated on his hands as they moved through the air.
He tried to make the movements of his performance as natural as possible. He attempted to imitate the everyday movements he made as he went through a normal day: cooking, washing hands, taking medications, holding his face as he wept. He imagined his movements as invisible brush strokes. He imagined himself as Clifford Stills, as Jackson Pollock. He imagined himself as some anonymous figure struggling through the wind and driving rain of his very worst day.

He rarely looked at the figures of his audience as he made his performances.
It required too much focus just to imitate everyday natural movements for him to give his audience much more than a passing glance. But every so often he became aware of a slight blurring of the edges of the crowd. Now and then he became aware of the forgotten figures coming out of hiding, their vague outlines filling with heat and color to become targets for his eyes.

His wife had used a dressmaker to make alterations in her careful purchases, so it wasn
’t too much trouble to ask the woman to make several colored bodysuits fitted to his measurements. The only difficult part of the process was standing before her in T-shirt and shorts so that she could take these exacting measurements. Like a small boy he kept his eyes tightly shut until it was over.

The next week he appeared in the park in a variegated green and brown bodysuit.
He thought he looked like a hole in the fabric of the world. He noticed that if he moved his body in certain ways, and at certain speeds, it was difficult for him to find the edge of himself. His sense of a personal outline faded in and out with his every movement, as if made from radio signals from an unreliable transmitter.

He attempted to harness unconscious habits into his performance: nose pickings, butt scratching, spitting.
He was aware that some people were repulsed, and left at the first appearance of some unpleasant bit of personal business. Although it meant the loss of some verisimilitude, he quickly returned to a semblance of politeness.

The following week he added photo manipulation to his performance.
He had taken some of those precious photographs of him and his wife together, copied them, and made crude alterations in the copies. In some of the images he had altered her, or scratched her out, leaving a shapeless white defect in her place. In others he had simply folded over the photo in order to essentially erase her from the image entirely. He discovered that the altered photographs made him look ridiculous. He became a mad eccentric holding hands with nothing, speaking to nothing, kissing the nothing that is not there. The outlines in the crowd wavered as their faces began to drain of all color.

As he moved inside his empty body suit he thought he was beginning to resemble them: the figures that were not there.
Some days his arms moved so quickly he lost track and could not find them. If he closed his eyes even once he forgot he was even there.

Sometimes people would try to touch him and that was when a museum guard posted near the edge of the crowd warned them away.
He had seen the guard there for days but had thought that the man was merely a part of the audience, perhaps out there on his lunch break and wondering why everyone was watching the man who was not there dancing behind a table full of garbage: water-stained photographs and papers so dirty and damaged no one could read them anymore. Of course this put additional weight on his verbal performance to convey exactly who his wife had been. But his voice was failing. Some days he could barely whisper. The crowd sometimes had to edge quite close in order to hear him. “Please do not touch the exhibit,” the guard would warn.

Sometimes he would notice the hands of certain audience members: opening and closing as if desperate to hold something. It occurred to him then that perhaps he should add things his wife had held to the table display: knitting needles, books, cooking implements.
For didn’t the objects she had handled tell an important part of her story? He thought then of adding his own hands to the table display, or at least a casting or a photograph.

On some days if he kept at his performance long enough he became unaware of anything else.
His figure became a tangle of moments, lines of force, electrical energy, exhalations, and perspirations. His very presence appeared to fracture the air.

Some days his body became a tired whisper in his ear
, which he attempted to ignore. Some days he stood in the audience surrounded by vague figures and shadows of figures, an echo of imitated movements through time, and watched his own performance.

One day he arrived to find the exhibit closed.
His table was there, but all his carefully collected documentation was missing. But then he couldn’t remember the last time he had seen those documents, and wondered if they might have vanished months ago.

“
I’m afraid the exhibit is closed,” the guard said.

When he started to reply he realized the guard wasn
’t talking to him, but to all the figures gathered behind him. They began to shuffle away, the outlines of their forms distorting and flowing across the landscape.

“
What am I supposed to do now?” he asked. The guard did not answer. He began to dance, and could not find his arms, his legs, or his next wandering thought. But even then, his movement did not stop.

THE GLARE AND THE GLOW

James Thurber once said there are two kinds of light: the glow that illuminates and the glare that obscures.
I’ve always liked quotations. Whatever their content, they always seem apropos. If your audience doesn’t immediately grasp the connection, they’re inclined to think they just aren’t learned enough. I suppose they assume that if you’ve read enough to offer them some quotation, you must be smart enough to use it correctly.

I read a great deal.
Unfortunately I’ve come to the conclusion that I understand very little of what I read. I can be thoroughly involved in a novel and still not know what it’s all about. One of the differences between novels and real life is supposedly that the novel has a theme. I believe that’s another quotation, but for the life of me I can’t remember the source, or enough of the original context to quote it more precisely. Some people say there are no original ideas. I sometimes wonder if I don’t remember the source, does that make it an original thought?
Following that line of reasoning,
the people with the poorest memories must be geniuses.

Perhaps you
’ve had the experience of just starting to say something, but at the last second you become convinced it’s a quotation, and maybe you’re afraid you’ll make some embarrassing misquote, or maybe you’re afraid people will think you’re trying to pass off someone else’s thoughts as your own. So you say nothing. I think this may account for many awkward conversational silences. At least it does in my case. Some days I hardly say anything, so convinced I am that I understand nothing, and that every thought I have is stolen from someone else possessed of far better understanding than I.

About a month ago my wife and I brought a bad bunch of light bulbs into the house.
I don’t mean that we acquired the bulbs as part of some joint purchasing decision—we just haven’t been able to pinpoint who bought this particular carton. Not that it matters that much—sometimes married couples just like to keep score. I’m sure that’s a quote; I’m sure I don’t remember who said it first.

We go through a lot of light bulbs in our house.
It’s an old house utilizing
a hodgepodge of wiring techniques, a regular electrical museum, which means surges and shorts, which seriously affect the lifespan of a bulb. What was it Dave Barry said about electricity? Something about how we believe it exists because the electric company sends us bills for it? We’ve tried the usual conservational measures—turning some of those light bulbs off, using fluorescent replacements—but we haven’t been all that successful at maintaining the changes. That’s probably more my fault than hers. I don’t think I have particularly lavish needs, but I do feel I deserve to walk around in as much light as possible, and not sit in the shadows worrying over what I might not see.
“Let your light shine.” Oprah said that. And I love to read—we both do—a good reading light or two are essential in our house. Frankly, I don’t know how anyone can stand fluorescents. Is that real light? I hardly think so—it’s like moon glow bouncing off a snow bank. Kind of pretty, but strange and useless.

So we tend to buy cheaper bulbs, and lots of them.
I know that’s probably not the most economical thing to do. But the more expensive bulbs seem to burn out almost as quickly in our house as the cheap ones, so what’s the difference? We’ve developed this pattern of buying large quantities, burning through them fiercely, buying more to feed that bright, illuminating fire that both comforts and exhausts us. Shakespeare said “We burn daylight.” I don’t know exactly what that means, but it still manages to chill me.

I knew there was something different about these bulbs the second I opened the box.
Something about their color, when they’re cold, no electricity applied. Now, I’m used to the cheaper bulbs looking a little different. Maybe it’s illusory and they’re all pretty much the same, but to my eye they do look cheaper, just lying there, their insides less frosty, and a kind of shadow already inside, resting, as if their
potential
for light must be less. I actually wondered if perhaps we’d been tricked into buying previously used, burnt-out bulbs.

Then when I pulled one out I was surprised, shocked I suppose, by its heaviness.
The sensation made me somewhat sick to my stomach. My wife and I have a peaceful life—we do not expect such things. “Expect nothing, live frugally on surprise,” to quote Alice Walker.

As I turned the bulb the heaviness shifted inside it.
I didn’t think it contained liquid—no sensation of sloshing. But perhaps something solid, yet fluid. Sand maybe, but it felt too heavy for that. Moving it gently side to side, as if I were rocking it, brought eggs and their hidden embryos to mind, which made me feel both rude and foolish. That would not be a perception I’d share with my wife, who has
long thought me a bit too much on the crude side.

Of course, Thomas Jefferson called politeness
“artificial good humor,” and that’s not exactly positive, is it? Nothing artificial about my humor. The world is a funny old place. If you don’t laugh about it, you cry.

We never had children, but it wasn
’t for lack of trying. I don’t know why we didn’t try the cures, or the alternatives. We never really talked about it. We left all that back in the shadows and just went on with our lives.

I put that first bulb down on the table and stared at it.
Careful not to break it, but definitely wanting it out of my hands. With the metal base turned away from me, and no brand name or insignia visible, it did so look like an egg.

I went back to the carton of eight.
I should have noticed before—the entire carton was heavy, remarkably so. But for the time being I left the rest of the bulbs where they were. I put the carton back down and pulled up a chair, examining the packaging. “Bulbs” was the only word on the carton, in big black letters. No brand, no manufacturer’s name or address, no instructions, no copyright, no trademark, no guarantee, not even a price. You couldn’t get much more generic than that.

Iris Murdoch said truth was like brown.
“Truth is so generic,” she said. But did she mean that was a good thing or a bad thing? That’s the trouble with quotes. It sounds like she thought truth was really no big deal. But what else is there?

And I didn
’t want to use those bulbs, but again, what else was there? Sometimes, to quote Eleanor Roosevelt, “You must do the thing you think you cannot do.” I had to use them, unless I wanted to walk around in darkness, which I’d had enough of in my lifetime already. I didn’t want to make a return trip to the store. I just don’t like the lighting. All those fluorescents. They make you rush your shopping. You’ll grab anything, buy anything, just to get out of there. They illuminate people’s irrationality more than anything else.

So I screwed one of these odd bulbs into an out-of-the-way, little
-used lamp we keep in the front hall. Mostly its purpose is to illuminate the coat rack if one of us needs to go out at night. But neither of us goes out much. So what if one of us looked like we’d gotten dressed in the dark? Who would care?

I wasn
’t too pleased about having the bulb in my hand for the time necessary to secure it in the socket. Besides the uncanny weight of it, the glass conveyed a dead-cold feel against my palm, and there was a hard-to-describe sensation just this side of dampness as I gripped and turned it, as if the bulb were sweating on its inside surface. And the weight inside seemed to more than shift, to respond to the movement being forced upon it with some sort of intelligence. I might have told my wife, “This is no dim bulb!” if I were but moderately clever.

I noticed right away that it had
an almost lubricated feel as it glided into the turns of the socket. Usually you feel a kind of scraping resistance when you screw in a bulb—cheap metal against cheap metal. Usually it snags a bit—sometimes you have to back it out and start all over. But here I felt nothing at all. I come back to Eleanor Roosevelt for my wisdom: “When life is too easy for us, we must beware.” I was practically terrified.

But once I had the bulb firmly planted and flipped the switch I was
amazed
. What a light did bloom! It was almost pure white, whiter than a Halogen, but cooler. You could look directly at it without too much discomfort. And although I immediately saw the shadow inside, a shape that moved, I noticed that somewhat mysterious presence diminished the illumination not one bit. In fact, it appeared to manipulate the rays, and focus them, so that they spread at a speed you could actually perceive. You could see that light creep across the details of the room, at varying rates no doubt due to the different densities of detail encountered. So, gradually, shadows were eaten, and things were revealed, so that old scars in the woodwork suddenly became remembered, the residue of stains recalled, unevenness of tile, and dirt in areas I’d thought completely clean.

Even these flaws, once seen in such startling detail, became random incidents of beauty, and the truly beautiful things—a piece of tapestry, a strip of wallpaper,
a crystalline vase, a dead cousin’s photograph—became almost overwhelming to view. I stumbled out of the front hall, tears in my eyes. I can’t say I was at all embarrassed by this. For “There’s a sacredness in tears,” to quote Washington Irving.

I know now I should have taken my time with the bulbs.
My wife and I have never been ones to rush into things. We’re always so careful! But I couldn’t seem to stop myself. I went around to the lights in the living room, the dining room, my study, and our bedroom, switching out those old dusty bulbs with the rather odd, somewhat weighted bulbs from that new generic carton.

As I screwed in each bulb, and turned it on, and left it on, it really was as if a fire had been lit.
“Man is the only creature that dares to light a fire and live with it,” said one Henry Vandyke. The light flowed from each bulb, transforming our home, each separate stream seeking the companionship of the others, and morphing everything they touched into something beautiful and true. As these bulbs performed their magic I chased the light around our home, and I found an even braver brilliance where the edges of each separate stream met. And yes, I found myself dancing and singing to observe this, very much the idiot. “Every man plays the fool once in his life,” according to Mr. Congreve, and certainly this was my time, my time to shine, as it were. I felt as brilliant as those creatures, those embryos, inside the bulbs.

Because that
’s what they were, weren’t they? I wouldn’t know what else to call them, these little creatures with their oversized heads and dangly arms, playing with this startling light as if it were their first and only plaything. I just so wanted to see their darling little faces!

So I kept easing closer to each flaming bulb, staring as long as I dared, even longer, examining their precious silhouettes, willing myself to see their delicate faces even through frosted
glass. It actually seemed possible.

“
John, what on
earth
are you
doing?”

I stared at my wife.
I couldn’t take my eyes off her. “No,” I said. “That’s not quite all of it. The full quotation is ‘What on earth are you doing for heaven’s sake?’”

What was I seeing?
She looked unhappy, but she always looked unhappy. But now I was seeing it in such refined detail: the disappointments, the displeasures, the wear and tear, the rub, the whispers, and the dying. And around her like a halo, like a cocoon: this house, much loved, and all that we’d put in it, and taken out, and so much of it
accidental, without our choosing, just following habit, bad, lazy habit, just not thinking.

“
You and your damn quotations! Couldn’t we just have a normal conversation now and then? Couldn’t you just tell me how you feel for once without dragging it out of the lips of someone famous, or dead? So tell me, I’m so
unoriginal
, who was that said ‘what on earth,’ and ‘what are you doing,’ and ‘for heaven’s sake,’ and all that, for heaven’s sake!”

“
I don’t know,” I replied into the beautiful face of my disappointed, dying wife. “It’s anonymous. All the books call it ‘source unknown.’”

“
Then as far as you know, it could be original with me, right? I’ve never asked you before, have I? What you were doing with our life? I just let things go.” She squeezed her eyes shut. “God, it’s so
bright
in here! Where’s all this terrible light coming from?”