Game of Secrets Read online

  It was just after one o’clock when I got home, the house quiet, even my mother asleep. She’d left the porch light on, but only that, and when the knob turned and the door swung open and I stepped into that thick dark stillness, it was like walking into a shopworn palace of the dead.

  I made a bowl of cornflakes, found a spoon in the drying rack, and took the bowl into the den and popped in the film. It wasn’t one of Nykvist’s. It was the only great one Bergman did without him. But it was during that scene when Max von Sydow challenges Death to a game of chess that those words Nykvist said once slipped out of me all of a piece like words can do.

  Light

  can be gentle, dangerous, dreamlike, bare …

  Only words. But I remembered them, and thought about my mother lying upstairs in the bedroom above my head, I wondered if in her sleep she could hear the sound of the television drifting up through the floor. Then I knew, in that gut way you know certain things, that she was not asleep, but awake, lying there beside my father. She had been awake all this time, waiting up to know that I was home.

  It should be a comfort, shouldn’t it? Knowing she’s been waiting up—not this other thing spiking through me—that she’s rifling with my solitude.

  Death has accepted von Sydow’s challenge. They have just sat down to play when I decide I don’t need to watch anymore. I know how it all falls out.

  I flick the power button on the clicker—trees, plain, knight, hooded figure, chessboard—all of it into the vanishing, down to the bit of blue horizontal light, the echo of light, in the center of the TV screen. Zip. The snap of cornflakes in the bowl, hitting milk. I let it soak in.

  To my right, against the wall on the small table, the dark skeletal shape of that orchid I bought for her, that thing she keeps, God knows why when it’s so far gone. And it occurs to me that one conceivable redeeming aspect of the man in the green sports coat, one nudge of common ground between us, is that he would, more than likely, know the difference between a Bergman film and Casablanca. Above me, a floorboard creaks. Listen. Steps. The soft creak, creak. Listen. Silence. Nothing.

  I am imagining things.

  I was six when I found her in the room upstairs. I had come up the narrow steps from the kitchen, climbing carefully—I remember this—carefully, those steps are old and steep and I was small, my hands feeling for the cool whitewash damp of the walls—it’s odd, isn’t it? these inconsequent details you will remember—and when I reached the top, saw the light only, at the far end of the hall, pale lemon-colored light streaming from the open door of that room that was unused. I walked toward it, drawn, until its warmth striped my bare legs. I noticed then my mother sitting there, on the floor near the old wash-stand, the basin and pitcher with their blue-and-white designs.

  She did not see me. She sat with her back to the door. Light on the rush through the window touched her shoulder like a hand. Her head was slightly bent, her shoulders curved toward something in her lap, and I stepped into the room to see, stepped closer, and then I did see. An old bureau drawer she had pulled out, and in her lap a child’s clothes I had never seen, I did not know, but knew something was not right, by the way she was touching them, folding those small clothes, lining up sleeves, hems, smoothing edges with her hands, refolding each piece, piece by piece, again into that drawer, unfolding and refolding—the intention—you sweet little one—she was so calm and unaware—what I must have felt—how could I ever fix it, save her, undo, knowing already in that instant there was nothing.

  It’s where the hardness starts. In the knowing there is nothing you can do.

  I remember. Standing in the doorway—she never did look up—and I stood there, feeling that small hardness form inside me. Less than the size of a fist, but with an edge that, like a quick blade, cut my breath.

  Years later, I went back to that drawer, yanked it open, found towels, blankets, cedar blocks. On occasion, though, still, I consider it. Hold the thought at arm’s length. Distilled. Sanitized even by the glare of the rational mind. In the silence of the house where I was alone with her. That room ablaze.

  Is it real? How you remember it now? Is it more than real?

  They come at night—thoughts of this ilk—they shoulder in when my body’s exhausted, my mind wired—and a butterfly angst beating up against my ribs, trying not to feel, not to think about the fact that in roughly sixteen hours I’ve got a date with Ray Varick. Wanting, trying not to want, too much.

  Yesterday lunchtime, my brother stopped in for coffee and a ham sandwich and, as he was leaving, threw a cool look at me, and said, “I hear you got plans for Thursday night.” Like we were still teenagers, me horning in on his crowd.

  I retorted something to that effect.

  He just kind of glared. “Do me one great favor, and don’t fuck everything up.”

  Light, Nykvist wrote …

  … hot, dark, violet, springlike, falling

  It can all come down on you like this. Can’t it?

  Zip.

  DISCOVERY

  MARNE

  June 10, 2004, 3:30 AM

  I still can’t sleep. I’m more than halfway through this little library book, the one I found a week ago in the shelf on the landing at the top of the stairs, slipped in between Millay and my mother’s Dylan Thomas collection. Selected Writings. The World I Breathe. Adventures in the Skin Trade.

  My mother is, has always been, a Dylan Thomas freak.

  It’s by some unknown polymath, this book, The Secret of Light. Even under the library plastic, the cloth has frayed, a thready fringe with the board coming through and a water stain shading the top edge. I’ve tried to decipher her handwritten notes in the margins. There are sections of it I can make out, stanzas, fragments of poems—lifted, not hers. An Auden bit I recognized, lines about the crack in the teacup that opens a lane to the land of the dead. That one caught me up. Understandably so. And I read the other marginalia near it to see if, taken together, there would be a larger vision I could make sense of. But it was like trying to fill a sudoku grid without enough numbers to start, and I gave up. It’s all too disparate. Some mental shorthand that must have had a cogent logic to her once. Just fragments now—jotted like cramped answers in very light pencil. Smoke.

  The weird thing, though, is it’s just this book. In all the years I’ve been tossing around, I have never seen my mother write in a book, never seen her underline a passage or dog-ear a page. I thought perhaps I might have missed something, but I searched the shelf and found only this one marked. And a library book. She must have known she’d never return it.

  Four pages in, I have to admit, I almost ditched it. Not my mom’s kind of book either. New Age before the term was coined, hock cosmogony masquerading as physics.

  But there is this one idea. It drew me in and won’t quite let me go—about how the world we see, what we think we see, is only one side of the hemisphere.

  Light cannot be seen. It can only be known. That which the eyes “feel” and believe to be light is but wave motion simulating, the echo of light.

  The first time I took a passage from a book, I was nine: The Wizard of Oz. I didn’t cut it for the debate about choosing a heart or a brain. I cut it for Dorothy. Her puzzlement. Her caught in between. I did it crouched on the floor of the downstairs coat closet where my father kept his guns. I used a pair of sewing scissors. My mother winced when she saw the excised page, but said nothing. She didn’t tell me it upset her, but I could read it in her face so when I did it again a few months later, another passage from a picture book about the life of Michelangelo, I made sure I did that cutting in front of her. I took my time. Left a slight, purposeful, perfect margin of white space around the paragraph, neat corners at the indents.

  Looking back now, I know. I wanted to see what she would do. I wanted to wake her out of that distance I kept losing her to. I wanted her to stop me—her hand swift, ruthless, firm—to catch my fingers on the scissors, her grip tightening until mine released. I wanted to f
eel that strength in her, that line drawn, that edge, that ending point. I wanted to know there was a line. I wanted to know that if I fell into her, I would not just go on falling.

  The cutting continued. Occasional, peripatetic takings. Even after my mother’s reaction ceased to have bearing, or perhaps because I found other, less oblique ways of being unkind, still I did it. I kept the cuttings in a shoe box from the Star Store under my dresser.

  Surprisingly enough, I never took from her. Never touched her “Do Not Go Gentle,” her “Boys in Their Summer Ruin,” her “Vision and Prayer.” Never touched those precious ordered volumes, their swamp-colored spines tucked together in the little shelf on the landing at the top of the stairs.

  There was no organizing theme or qualifying principle to the passages I chose. I cut what I revered, what struck me in a moment. It was an impulse, a habit, at times a need—food, breath, sleep—I was Ezekiel eating the scrolls—without understanding exactly what I did, or why. Until “Burnt Norton.” Tenth-grade English. Mr. Mendelsohn’s class. He was there for two years and then left, too good for us.

  It was winter, that day, I remember, blue fists of snow kicked up and on the swirl outside the classroom window, as Mendelsohn read “Burnt Norton” aloud in class, he read the whole of it, and from the first line on, I was gone.

  I skipped next period, Advanced American History, and went instead to the high school library, found “Four Quartets” in a collection, and read “Burnt Norton” through again, knowing I had to have it. Not all of it, but some piece, I needed those words against the skin, needed to feel that slight, secret rectangular fold of paper through the inside pocket of my jeans.

  I was going to take that bit early on about the little bird:

  go, go go … human kind cannot bear very much reality—

  but instead, I opted for the seven lines at the close. I couldn’t take both. At that time in my life, for reasons real and imaginary, I needed to be strict, to ration what I craved. But it was then, on that late morning in the second cubicle of the hushed school library, with a collection of T. S. Eliot’s finest splayed open on a desk where someone had driven hard in black ink, JOSIE P. SUCKS GOOD COCK, as I set the blade point of my brother’s pocketknife in tight against the binding, I realized: Grafting someone else’s thoughts might just be the fastest way to cut yourself free of your own.

  That’s not worth nothing.

  My best friend in middle school was Elise Daignault. We turned fifteen, and Elise turned suddenly beautiful, blond-trellised hair, the nubs of her breasts grown full. It came like a front—overnight—that shadow in her smile, in her eyes, the promise of sex that made men look at her in ways they never looked at me.

  After we graduated, Elise started flying for American Airlines. I used to meet her for drinks in New York, when I lived there, then later, after I’d fled west, at the Four Seasons on Market Street when she was laid over in San Fran. News from home often caught up with me through her.

  She would laugh. “You think you can burrow into some far-off scuddy pocket of the country. You think it won’t nose you out.”

  “I don’t necessarily think that.”

  “I know you, Marne—I’ve known you for twenty years.” Then her exquisite face would grow serious, strained, I would smell the sweet stain of wine on her breath as she leaned toward me. “I know why you left,” she would say, her voice a whispery rush.

  “You don’t,” I countered. “Not if I can’t nail it myself.”

  She shook her head, though, by then convinced. “I know, Marne. I’d be tripping on acid right now if I hadn’t flown away.”

  These are the laws of the sunlit world: Elise needed to be right. And she was so beautiful, every sumptuous pulsing curve of her so beautiful, she deserved to be, I decided, not just partially right, but thoroughly, or at least in that moment to have the last word.

  I let Elise wrap it up for me that night. It can be a kind of comfort, letting someone else draw out a plan for who you are. Besides, what would I have said? Some dry, mousy comment about small clothes in a drawer, my mother’s distance, or worst of all the brutal little person I’d become in response. By age thirteen, it was conscious, tangible—the screwed-tight walls of the box I was twisting myself to fit into—a small town, my family’s fraught history, the ghosts of all that bequeathed to me. I realized it one awful day as I sat by a patch of daisies, mindlessly plucking out petals, one by one: Is she crazy? Is she not? Is she loco? Is she not? When it was done, I looked and saw the whole patch worked through: torn petals, desecrated stems, no conclusive answer.

  The distance, of course, doesn’t hurt as much when you are actually gone.

  Go, go, go, little bird.

  Go.

  CRUSH

  MARNE

  June 10, 2004, 6 PM

  Waiting for him and he’s late. Four minutes, five, eight past six, still waiting. I can’t seem to sit still. The thought strikes me that he’s forgotten, or is blowing me off. The thought itself—groundless and high school—never would have occurred to me waiting for a date to show up in San Francisco. I was a certified grown-up there. Now, though, being home, I’ve regressed.

  It was laughingstock—how I futzed over what to wear. The stretchy twills felt too sexy, too tight in the thigh. And the cropped black slacks with the sheen, they were over the top—like I was trying too hard. I dug through my closet, pulled out an older pair of jeans, boot-cut, a rip coming at the knee. They were soft, though, eased in. A white buttondown shirt. Stalwart classic and saving grace for those of us who have no knack for style.

  Seventeen minutes past six now. I walk out on the porch, then come back in, but my mother is in the kitchen, and the prospect of watching the big hand tick its way around the clock face while she chops onions feels harrowing, so I grab some green origami paper, go into the living room. Wait there. I start making a hopping frog.

  On the end table by the couch, that damn orchid going downhill fast; above it on the wall, a black-and-white photograph of her, on the old Point Bridge.

  She was around seventeen, 1962, I think—the year of El Cid. It was taken quickly. A snapshot. The composition is out of whack. It might have worked if she had been more at the periphery. As it is, she is too central, which throws the whole balance off.

  As a child, naturally, I romanticized that photograph, assumed it was taken by my father—and when I learned it was the handiwork of some nameless outsider who worked for the state, I felt something inside overturn. It needled at me—who that man was, what role he had played in her life that warranted his failed shot hanging on our living room wall in its hokey frame.

  Her hair is light in this picture, lighter than it is now, very straight. Already there’s a wear to her features, that oddity about her. In her eyes. Not the color of them—a muted gray in his image—but the expression. You can see it. Something fugitive. Wind on the road.

  It hits me suddenly—pieces, dates, falling together—clickety clack—wheels turning—that look in her eyes—disjoint—it hits me: That snapshot must have been taken right around the time her father’s skull rolled out of a dump-load of fill. Neat sweet bullet hole—whose doing? (Silas Varick? Ray’s father)—Let’s not go there. No, no, no, not now.

  Last crease in the paper. Fold Froggy’s back legs down. Nice and flat. All done. I set him on the table, press his butt down. He slips out from under my finger, jerks forward, shoots up. Hop.

  My bra itches. I should have known. What was I thinking? Anything more elaborate than cotton bugs me—rub of syntheticky lace on the skin—what was I thinking? I go upstairs, pull that calamity off—replace it with one that is sensible—then, I am grateful he is late—another example of destiny’s logic in hindsight—what a waltz—the timing could not be more perfect: I am coming down the stairs, he drives in.

  As we turn onto Pine Hill Road, he asks where I want to go to eat.

  “Not where I work.”

  “That leaves a few options. You call it.�
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  He’s got that half smile on again, the smile that has begun to feel brutally unsafe. He is watching the road. Thin sheens in his hair I’ve just noticed, around his ears. Grays, I realize. It comes as a shock. My small-town icon. And it strikes me he might be nervous. He couldn’t be nervous. But I suddenly wonder how many dates he’s been on since he split with his wife, or would I be the first—a daunting thought. I try to recall the details: splinters of discontent, then some nasty indiscretion on her part, Ray is giving her the house for their daughter’s sake, a noble gesture that makes my brother balk. He calls Ray’s ex the “high priestess of cuntism,” which he’ll temper in my presence to “Hi-C.”

  Growing up, the truth is, I had such a crush on Ray, heart-thudding, and of course he barely noticed that my shadow struck earth. Except once, I remember, in winter. I must have been around eleven. I was out in the yard breaking icicles off the pine needles, sucking on them, when I saw Ray and Alex tearing up the rise toward the house. Ray was way ahead, his jacket flying. He gave a shout as he tagged the shed, then stopped to catch his breath. His skin was olive pale, cheeks flushed, his lips dark dark, his eyes shot around, then fell on me and stayed. There was a stump of icicle in my mouth, I remember the freezing wet melt, how it clicked against my teeth, the acrid taste of pine resin—and his eyes on my face filled with some kind of thing I had no language for.