Still Life with Plums (11 page)

Beth opens welcoming arms as she approaches. “Oprah?” she shouts still from several feet away, the words echoing off distant walls. “You’re a fucking Oprah classic pick now?”

Natalie’s head flops forward. “I confess.”

“Greedy bitch,” Beth adds, gripping Natalie in her sturdy arms. “You lucky, greedy bitch.”

Natalie doesn’t feel lucky though she knows she should. Still so much money coming in from her first novel,
Mixed Metaphors
, written in a six-month frenzy as an undergrad when she was pregnant and all she could stomach was tomato soup and Cheetos. How her little book catapulted skyward until she was absurdly lauded The Voice of Her Age. VoHA, Beth jabs. Frequently.
The Divine Ms. VoHA
.

In the parking lot, Natalie draws hot air into her lungs, imagines her blood thickening as she peels off her jacket, her sweater, marveling that just hours before she was shivering on an icy tarmac miles to the east. As Beth drives away from the airport she chatters wildly—another verbose woman—about her recent move to Arizona, her
new teaching post to escape her old life.
Such a brave leap
, Natalie thinks as they aim for distant mountains, the folds and peaks looking like loads of rumpled towels dumped still warm from the dryer. Natalie relaxes into the gentle ascension, the unexpected dashes of yellow and magenta against the burnt earth, the bramble and brush, the saguaro hailing her like old friends. Or perhaps offering a thorny warning:
Turn back!

After several minutes she realizes that Beth has stopped talking. “I loved
The Temple of Tikal,”
Natalie confesses about Beth’s latest book, the sixth in a series of international murder mysteries.

“If only the snotty-literati would take notice,” Beth says, “but then it’s no
Mixed Metaphors,”
their standing joke.

“Well, what is?” Natalie says, wishing the snotty-literati could forget about her, that cluster of old white men who have rented a smoky room in the dark part of her brain where they drink scotch and sharpen their knives. They all look and sound exactly like George Plimpton, though occasionally her dead father pulls up a chair, too.

A jackrabbit skitters across the road and Beth doesn’t even slow down.

“Seriously,” Natalie says. “You’re disgustingly prolific.”

“I just plant my ass in the chair two hours a day,” Beth says. “It’s not magic.”

Isn’t it magic?
Natalie wants to ask, but she knows better. Beth is not a romantic, nor has she apparently rented out any critical parts of her brain.

Beth pauses at a stop light and looks over at Natalie.

Don’t ask. Don’t ask. Don’t ask
, Natalie’s well-practiced incantation when she’s afraid someone’s going to probe about her new book.

“Don’t worry. I was just going to ask how James likes country living.”

“We’re an hour from D.C. It’s not exactly remote.”

“Still, why did you buy a five-bedroom farmhouse now? And what in the world do you need twenty acres for?”

Natalie doesn’t know the answer to that. She really does not. “I had to do something with all that Oprah money.”

Beth throws her head back and guffaws. “Well at least you can put some distance between yourself and your mother.”

Natalie presses her chin to her chest. “I wish,” she says, but even now she can hear her mother’s nasally voice that penetrates every room, every closet, the listing barn out back, the rickety fort built in the mulberry tree at the farthest corner of the property. She wonders if her mother magically packed her voice in Natalie’s satchel so it would assail her even here:
Natalie, did I tell you about the time
…

It is exactly the kind of resort Natalie expected: a cluster of flat-topped adobe structures in earthen tones, all looking as if they had been carved out of desert rock by indigenous people. Natalie makes a note to find out exactly which tribe that might have been. Another possible metaphor: a whole clan scattered like sand, leaving only the remnants of past villages now just calcified bones being overrun by camera-wielding ants. Could the original builders ever have imagined such a thing when they chiseled doorways and rooms out of solid rock? Piled stone upon stone. Lashed together precious timber. Hewed out troughs for their animals. A sudden fantasy rumble of stampeding bison, an archaic echo still whirling across the earth for hundreds, maybe thousands of years.

Natalie is assigned half of a duplex bungalow across the gravel road from the lodge. Beth lugs in the suitcase and plops it on the bed, the coiled springs complaining. On the bedside table sits a cellophane-wrapped gift basket filled with cans of tomato soup and Cheetos.

“Just trying to jumpstart the juices,” Beth says.

Natalie laughs, but that particular ritual lost its power years ago. And she has tried.

“Can’t help you with the knocked-up part, but I made sure there are a few cute boys in your workshop.”

Natalie thumps her belly. “No uterus, remember?”

“Uterus, schmuterous.”

After Beth leaves, Natalie sinks into an overstuffed chair by the window, the sun basting her with heat. She opens her satchel and bypasses her novel and her mother’s voice to pull out the workshop manuscripts. Eight short stories that she has already read and scribbled on. All skillfully written. Lots of terse man-stories chock with gratuitous violence and cigarettes. Plenty of self-absorbed, struggling-writer vignettes that make Natalie wince. There is one, however, that she has read three times, pencil at the ready, without etching a single mark. She riffles the bundle and finds it: “The Lemons are Crying” by Hannah Pasqual, though there isn’t a lemon in it and nobody cries. It is exactly like so many stories Natalie has been reading lately by all those up-and-coming writers. Gorgeous words, sentences, whole paragraphs packed with lush metaphors ripe with meanings Natalie can’t quite piece together, but how she desperately wants to. Sentient animals with exquisite vocabularies. Houses that walk. Trees that take baths and benevolent lawns. It’s not Magical Realism exactly. Beyond Fabulist by far. She keeps looking for the story.
Where’s the story?
she often whispers as she reads, afraid she ineptly missed it. Even now, in her chair, Natalie’s heart hammers in the same way it did when she tried to chip through
Ulysses
and finally gave up after page sixty-five, a secret failure, especially for a writer who is The Voice of Her Age. Because it is as if these wordsmiths have tapped a rich stratum deep inside the earth that Natalie has been unable to mine for such a very long time, if ever at all.

A fluke
, one critic wrote years ago about
Mixed Metaphors. One hit wonder
, she has read more and more frequently. (Oh, but what a hit, Beth has often consoled.)
Fluke
. Natalie tumbles the word around in her mouth. Feels the weight of it on her tongue and then etched on the roof of her mouth like a cave drawing, an image that erupted after she researched the Paleolithic drawings of Lascaux Caves, such primal imagery, ripe for double meaning: horse, bison, fluke. She runs her tongue over the five letters forming sans-serif legs and a tail, arched neck, a raised head bleating the very word.

Natalie arrives late to eat dinner in the lodge with the rest of the faculty: two more aging fiction writers and three poets all with yard-long CVs and stacks of published books. They greet her through clenched teeth as they vigorously carve up their meat, steel cutlery click-clacking. For two solid hours they bemoan academia, such little time to write, how lucky Natalie is (words coated with thorns), the grief they suffer from their high-brow colleagues who disrespect their
creative
pursuits, an odd conundrum. But these writers have scholarly leanings as well: all that lit crit and theory, post-post this, meta-that, hyper-whatever that Natalie grew bored with years ago, preferring the much more fascinating dissection of simple people navigating through difficult lives. Still, all this pedantic lexicon makes her pleat and unpleat her napkin in her lap, a hundred done and undone paper birds, until the ball-peen thrumming on her solar plexus is too much and she excuses herself to use the restroom.

She passes two women reconnecting at the salad bar offering hugs and kisses and “Haven’t seen you since Yaddo! Or was it Breadloaf?” Such a weird subculture, Natalie thinks. A carnival circuit for writers and she wonders what sideshow freak that makes her: tattooed lady; one hit wonder; wordless woman.

That night in bed Natalie learns that bonobo and Homo sapiens DNA is 98% identical. Unlike the common chimpanzee, the bonobos’ facial features vary slightly, like humans, so they can tell each other apart. Natalie brushes her fingers over her face, feels the sharp bend in her nose, the divot in her chin, the zygomatic arch of bone that runs from her temple to her cheek. She wonders if James would be able to identify her solely by touch in a darkened cave. She could certainly identify him, and Nathan. Natalie looks at her right hand, no coarse throwback hairs, though the bulging knuckles are regrettable, the stubby fingernails she passed along to her son. But not to her daughter, her second and surprisingly last child, fully-formed, stillborn, who had James’s lovely almond-shaped nails.

Natalie slides her thumb over the callus on her middle finger where a stand-worth of cedar pencils have rested over the years—because she still writes in longhand—hoping the ritual that had worked so well that one time will once again prove fruitful, even if tomato soup and Cheetos no longer do.

At home, every night, she grips a pencil firmly for hours and hours, etching words and phrases until she depresses a shallow trench in the now-thickened flesh. She wants to tell Beth that.
I do sit my ass in the chair!
One day the trench will set for good, Natalie thinks, wondering if it will be worth it, all those words. But to be honest, she has scrawled more doodles than prose over the years. Carousels and biplanes when Nathan was small. Gibberish stories they penned together about helium-filled tadpoles and stackable turtles. Clouds that play ping-pong. Hiccupping lakes. She has years and years of elaborate mazes and spirals. M.C. Escher stairways and interlocking geese. But Nathan outgrew all that, leaving Natalie alone in her office with spiral notebooks of too bright paper. Hours of writing the same words over and over until they lost all meaning: livelylivelylivelylivelylivelywiltwiltwiltwiltwilt. She has considered
the possibility that she has spent her lifetime allotment of words.

Natalie flosses and brushes her teeth to unclog the Cheetos goo stuck in her gums—because even if they have lost their charm she still loves the taste. She washes her face with a bar of gritty natural soap beside the sink that she had to unwrap like a precious gift, reminding her of that unearthed dead woman on the History Channel whose flesh had turned into soap. She imagines the grit and speckles in her herbal bar are bone chips and fingernails. Surprisingly, she is not grossed out. Afterwards her skin feels tight so she rustles through her cosmetic bag for the fancy face cream James’s younger sister Joyce gave her for Christmas for maturing skin.
You trying to tell me something?
Natalie asked. The better gift was the jewelry box Joyce’s three girls, ten-year-old fertility-drug triplets, constructed out of tongue depressors, alphabet macaroni, and gummi bears.

Natalie slides off her wedding ring to keep the thick cream from gunking up the setting. It’s an emerald-cut diamond James picked out himself while still in engineering school and paid too much for. The intricate platinum setting, such detailed work. She holds the ring to the light and imagines a decrepit jeweler bent over his table, squinting through his loupe with rheumy eyes so he can better craft her particular ring. And then she remembers that documentary she watched on conflict diamonds in West Africa, another transient metaphor until that movie with Leonardo DiCaprio brought it to global attention and put the skids on it for her. Nothing fresh about that. But as she watched the film she twisted her diamond around and around her finger wondering if it was mined with enforced labor. If James traded his hard-earned cab driver’s salary for guns, or machetes, or whatever weapons wielded to exert power.

A sudden image of Nathan in his desert fatigues. That picture he sent of himself and his two buddies, green bullet-proof vests
strapped around their torsos, beige helmets shading most of their faces, black rifles or machine guns (Natalie doesn’t know the difference, nor does she want to know) looped over their shoulders, held in their hands as tenderly as if they were alive. Ribbons of ammo spilling out like entrails.

A peal of laughter from the lodge across the road brings such relief that Natalie clatters the ring on the counter and lunges across the room, thinly parts the curtain to peer out. Under the lodge’s yellow porch lights she spies a cluster of youthful conferees settling into a row of Adirondack chairs. One young man hoists himself onto the porch railing and stretches his arms overhead to grip the rafters. When he has a firm hold he lets his legs swing free so he can sway back and forth, back and forth, his troop mates whooping and chattering.

Hours later the occupants of the other half of Natalie’s duplex struggle to open their door. A man and woman giggling, stumbling inside, blurting out words like “Shit” and “Ow” and “Hurry the fuck up.” Natalie pulls her pillow over her head but it won’t drown out the sound of their urgent coupling, the mattress creaking, the headboard battering the wall. A cliché of all the bad sex scenes she has watched in B movies and it’s over so quickly Natalie is embarrassed for them. She hears their TV click on, a man-powered movie with car chases and explosions, helicopter blades whop-whop-whopping. She knows there will be no sleeping now.

The next morning, eyes gritty, Natalie arrives five minutes late to her first workshop, banana and canned apple juice in hand, a calculated tardiness since she hates waiting, hates the discomfort, the throat-clearing as the class assembles and tries to figure out how to behave around her.

She pauses outside the open door to take a swish of juice to loosen her tongue and catches snippets of hushed dialogue. “I heard this is her last conference,” someone says. “After this she’s going to hole up like Salinger. Is he even still alive?” “I don’t know, but I heard they’re paying her ten-thousand bucks for three days.” “I heard she and Beth were lovers back in college.” Natalie chokes on her juice, burning the back of her throat. She coughs and gasps, shutting up everyone in the room.