The Yellow Braid (18 page)

In the short space of a summer, she’d
turned into the Magdalene of her poem:
fallen woman, fallen to a higher
crown
. She saw her
existence as a farce and yet, unable—no, unwilling—to disrupt the
bliss her desire brought.

Later, after Livia was in her own bed,
asleep, Caro entered her room. Livia was on her back with the
sheets kicked off and her arms flung over her head.

All she knew and desired was Livia. Because
if not with Livia, then with no one else. And so she knelt in
Christ-like abjection, tears and sweat mingling.

Livia came awake. Her face registered only
mild surprise at Caro’s nearness. Even so, Caro’s hand came up to
her chest, and she clutched her shirt, and began wrenching it, a
physical indication of an inner conflict.

“It’s okay,” Livia said. The soft, ambiguous
words that dissolved the night space between them.

Livia had given her permission, and Caro
felt herself slipping into euphoria. Her movements were slow,
almost dreamlike, she felt, as she lay alongside the sweet-scented
body. She stroked the dampness from Livia’s forehead, the hairs
along her cheekbone, then her chin, until her fingers settled on
her lips.

Caro’s mind no longer dictated her actions.
Her heart and her desire gave her the courage to take Livia into
her arms. She cradled her, and when Livia showed no resistance, she
kissed her, a long and gentle kiss on the mouth that for weeks she
had longed to touch.

When Caro finally drew back, she wept openly
in the knowledge that for the duration of a single kiss she had
found perfection. For that one long moment, she’d felt the heat of
Livia’s youth. She’d lost herself in the possibility of their being
together and her life a yet-to-be written story instead of one
already finished and critiqued.

But in the moment before, and after, she
knew she had to let her go.

As if instinctively, Livia grabbed her,
begging her to stay. “Please, don’t leave me,” she whispered, her
cheek flush against Caro’s. “I feel safe with you. I’ll do anything
you want.”

“I believe you would,” Caro whispered back.
She began kissing Livia’s head, and her face, and then caressed her
body one last time before easing out of Livia’s grip. A steady
withdrawal was made possible only by an image Caro maintained in
her mind’s eye, like a rendering in one of Nina’s photographs: the
shoe-polish hair and liver-spotted skin, harsh reminders of her
age.

“I love you, Caro.” Livia’s face plumped up
with tears that drowned her eyes and turned her skin the color of
pale ash. “Just tell me what I did wrong and I’ll fix it.”

“Livia, you did nothing wrong. It’s me,”
Caro said.

“I’ll write a poem for you. You like my
poems …” Livia’s words seemed to fall into a deep canyon; Caro
seemed implacable. Her eyes grew large with sudden passion and she
lashed out in turn: “I hate you! I hate you!”

There was a brief, startling silence between
them until Livia ran out of the room. Caro heard the glass door
rattle in its frame when it hit the wall. She went to the window,
and in the starlight, saw Livia dash down to the beach.

She waited, calculating the time for Livia
to reach home, and then dialed Nina’s number.

Tommy answered. “What happened? She’s a
mess, but she won’t say anything except that she hates you. What
the hell is going on?”

“Goodbye, Tommy.”

The armored cars of dreams,
contrived to let u
s do so many a dangerous thing. ~
Elizabeth Bishop

Caro shivered in the night air despite the
heavy humidity that smudged the horizon like a dowdy gray banner, a
density so powerful it hid the ocean. She trudged toward the
shoreline, passing through the smoky vapors like a ghost through
walls.

As she approached the water’s edge, the
ocean seemed to reappear, and she gazed into its boundlessness. A
wave broke, steeping her feet in foam. The flood tide collected,
pushing itself up the beach. In a couple of hours its level would
reach high tide.

Caro lowered herself onto the sand and made
figures with her fingertips in the packed wetness. She was trying
to figure how she got to where she was that night: a middle-aged
woman star-crossed by a child whose beauty—and very existence—could
make her weep.

Except for the brief words she’d had with
Tommy the night Livia ran out of her house, she hadn’t spoken to
anyone. Nina had come knocking at her door several times and then
given up. Caro only knew the details of Livia’s departure from a
voicemail that Tommy left.

Caro didn’t regret her actions—not the
kiss, not any part of her life with Livia that summer. She’d gone
in search of ideal love, and she’d found it. Not the Platonic kind
that was measured only by degrees of beauty or knowledge, but
rather one that acknowledged and allowed its carnal counterpart—the
heat beneath the cool skin of intellect. She’d discovered that
transcendent love sparkled and shone precisely because of the touch
and the kiss that preceded it.

Such a complex word,
desire
. With Livia, desire was a blunt blow to Caro’s
being.

Caro regretted not completing her poem to
Livia. Whenever she sat with it, she felt trapped in her own
tongue, felt the impenetrability of language when language doesn’t
suffice. She’d written how many poems throughout the years? And
this one … this, the most treasured of all … she’d been unable to
resolve.
A
posy from a sea of verse, a weave of harvest dust, the sonnet dark
its lyrics terse
...
Those were the last lines she’d composed.

The night sea roiled against the
stiffening wind. A gasp escaped Caro’s lips as a rush of cold foam
hit hard against her, and she scampered to higher ground. A star
dipped from the high reaches of the sky and with it a vision of
Livia, the tip of her braid brushing Caro’s cheek. Caro closed her
eyes from the sheer joy of imagining her so near. She wanted to
speak, to say Livia’s name aloud one last time. Instead, the last
line of the poem fell from her lips in graceful brevity.
And go she says, I
must
.

Caro contemplated the simple perfection of
the words for only a moment before she felt her heart open to an
unexpected clarity. She’d taken emotionally from Livia, but not
without giving. Throughout the weeks, she’d helped Livia through
the pain of mother loss and her aunt’s artistic demands. She’d
shored up the girl’s sense of self as a young adult and a
blossoming poet. Finally, in spite of, and because of her deep love
for the girl, she’d turned her away.

And go she says, I
must
. Caro recited the
verse again and again until the words seemed to spin circles of
seaweed, green and blue, wreathing their heads and linking them as
one. For a time, Caro had been everything to Livia—a mother to a
daughter. A mentor to a student. A lover to her beloved.

After a long while Caro rose, her limbs
shaking and stiff. She paused to get her balance. As she did, she
gazed backward upon the sea that she was leaving, and then forward
up the beach to the house. The distance and journey of love lost
with Livia seemed interminable. But in the end, she had to believe,
not impossible.

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