The Unfinished World Page 3

  Please pull your car up closer, she shouts to the driver. I can’t push the crate that far.

  The driver just stares, leans out the window, spits. Resumes staring. Smiles. He has a dark unibrow and broken-off brown teeth.

  Animal, she says. Tony laughs, long, loud.

  We are all animals. You too, no? He comes closer, stands in her sunlight, makes a dark shadow over her. She starts to back up but he grabs her wrist, pulls hard, touches a finger to her lips. You, for instance. You are bat. You are batshit, yes? He laughs and releases her, and she is suddenly glad Clarence isn’t here.

  Don’t touch me again, she says coldly.

  Tony smiles. He is not unattractive, maybe too tanned and leathery but she supposes given his age that’s not such a bad thing. Better to be preserved, to be pickled, rather than melt down as slow and soft as candle wax. Better to smile than leer. Her stomach goes rather wrong at the thought of what’s behind that smile. Follow me, she says, and she honestly doesn’t know whether she’d like him to turn around and go, quickly, or to follow her and then . . . and then. Then what?

  I can help you with the crate, he says, suddenly contrite. The Big Man will be so happy to see his friend again.

  She is glad to have the help getting the crate onto the dolly. The dog was huge, nearly as tall as she was, not to mention the elaborate scene she’d placed him in. Hunting, perfect butterfly balanced on a flower, stump ringed with tiny ants. The perfect companion for a wealthy gangster. The thing he can’t kill.

  When the car pulls out of the drive, Louise sighs. Whether in relief or frustration, she doesn’t know. Her hands are full of money.

  When they were small, Louise and Clarence would put their sleds in the back of the car and drive with their father to a hilly place where the mountains started to rise. Louise watched the earth dash by under her sled, arms around her father, trusting that the ground would eventually come up to meet them. She loved that feeling of flying. She loved how everything seemed to sharpen in that moment; how the sled’s shadow seemed inked onto the snow. How the soft edges of the pine trees could cut their cheeks like razors as they flew by. There was something about that moment that seemed to stamp the hardness of nature into everything—not in a cruel way—only in the cleanest, most Darwinian sense. It was the nature of avalanches, of hard, icy snow and buried footpaths. The nature of the wild dream before man.

  Louise remembered how Clarence was always frightened of the initial jump. When they shared a sled he would hold her waist so tightly she felt her lungs close a little, her arms tingle, and her vision blacken at the edges. She would often return to this memory after her parents’ death. She wondered if there was that same strange sense of euphoria, if the world seemed so perfectly black-and-white in those last several seconds. She wondered if the last thing her father saw was his own shadow, flying impossibly over the snow.

  Louise as a child eventually learned all she could from Thumbelina. She then took to the parlor, sketched the stilled bobcat, the snowy owl, the dancing mice with their little legs akimbo. She would sit there for hours with her drawing pad and her pencils, sketching the fine lines of whiskers, the wet-looking noses, the curved claws, the tufts of hair in the ears.

  Other children would have been terrified, alone in that great dark room with its heavy wall hangings and wine-colored carpets, surrounded by once-living shapes caught in endless predation. Not Louise. Her mother said she didn’t suppose Louise could be frightened by anything, that Louise was the only child she’d seen born without fear. Her mother crossed herself as she said it—it seemed unnatural.

  But Louise’s father used to smile and nod sagely toward his daughter. I’ve taught her never to be afraid, he would say, and she isn’t.

  He needed a child who would remain impartial in the face of accurate observation, for without it, what did we have but the terrors of the imagination? It wasn’t that her father had no use for imagination—indeed it was essential to his work, to creating the final spark of life. But he also knew what a terrible dictator imagination could be, given unbridled freedom. He had seen it destroy the outer life of his wife, her whole being focused now on what she could dream in her head and keep for her own, the self a prison: just the woman, her pottery wheel, and her stilled and silent tongue.

  Shortly after the funeral, her father’s uncle asked Louise for a portrait of her parents. Instead Louise sent a violent, angry sketch, the paper almost torn through in places from her heavy crosshatching. It suggested a car, a vast mechanical wreck. Two shapes were crumpled in a heap of what looked like twisted metal, gears, wheels. Clarence was very unhappy when she folded it crudely and stuffed it in an envelope addressed to the uncle.

  Well, she said. He asked for a portrait of the two of them.

  Louise, he said gently. She was her father’s daughter but she’d inherited her mother’s black anger. It burned through her sometimes like a chemical fire, brief and devastating and utterly unstoppable. Clarence had no choice but to watch and wait until his sister had cooled into some new shape, until she emerged from the fire patient and calm and even harder than before.

  Their mother was always a beauty, tall and fair and well-made. But the lovely brow concealed a deep hurt, a void where pain replaced love, replaced joy, replaced even sadness. Their mother had been a locked box for years.

  But every now and then when even she felt the pull toward other people, it was Clarence whom she sought out, Clarence to whom she gave her love and her talent and her self-sufficient steadiness. Louise belonged to their father; she had the same scientific curiosity, the same dancing-but-dogged mind. She had her father’s merry eyes and dark hair. So naturally her mother gravitated toward her own mirror, the pale, delicate Clarence, with his bright hair and great gawky height. He was the only one allowed to use her pottery wheel. He was the only one allowed to kiss her good night. He was the only one allowed to love her.

  To create life, one must be a keen observer of faces. A raised eyebrow, a crooked laugh, the width of irises. The lines that snake away from the eyes like tributaries, the shadows of cheekbones slicing backward. The way the mouth holds itself just so.

  Louise sleeps, dreams of feathers and wings and wild flight through darkened skies. Someone is singing. She sees a flock of pigeons overheard and she remembers something about a town square and December 2nd. Then she wakes, head on the pillow buried in down and feeling wrecked and confused.

  Oh. Noel’s pigeons. Noel’s exhibit is opening in a few months and he needs pigeons. He needs a hundred of them, some installation in a public square. He’s hoping he’ll be arrested. She needs to get the eyes right, those terrible pink eyes, slick and toxic as rainbows in an oil spill. She’s been putting these off because she hates pigeons. She hates to work with something she hates. But Noel does pay her. So she must become again the impartial scientist, immune to any human notion of what is beautiful. She must make a dream of the homeliest birds.

  The adults at the funeral watched the young teenagers holding on to one another’s hands and were glad to be anything but them, despite their youth and beauty and brilliance. There was something waiting to go rotten in them, everyone could see it in the tableau they made. Everyone could see the future would be difficult to find.

  But brother and sister found the past instead. They’ve kept the memory of their parents alive. In the sightless visages of animal corpses, in the slick wet surface of clay, they create memories of their parents. Gargoyles with their father’s grin and their mother’s long gaze. Monkeys and cats and turtles with their father’s broad nose and their mother’s way of tilting her head back just a little, as if to take in more of the world. Clarence works his clay on the wheel, digs his thumbs into the earth, while Louise preserves skin, stretches it over new bones, molds the clay eye sockets and paints the details of claw, of tooth, of pupil and iris. Everywhere the faces of their own creators. Every day they are burying their parents; they have created a forever cemetery for those lost and broken f
aces.

  At Noel’s for dinner. Teesa, his wife, parks a pair of lamb chops in front of Louise and Clarence, and Louise finds she can’t quite get her teeth through the blackened meat. Teesa is a horrible cook.

  Oh, is it hard for you to eat animals, then? asks Teesa. I suppose it must be. I didn’t think to ask.

  I’m fine, says Louise. I eat meat.

  That’s so interesting, says Noel’s mother. Her name is Mrs. Ralph Mattson. That’s how she introduces herself, without herself included. She’s always there at dinner but never seems to eat anything; Louise watches in fascination as she breaks her meal down into component parts and packs it away in her sleeves, her wallet, her pockets. Once Louise watched her tuck a slice of ham into her bra. She doesn’t know if the old lady is crazy or just repulsed by Teesa’s terrible food. That’s so interesting, she repeats, uncertainty flitting over her features. She spears a lamb chop with her fork and opens her pocketbook.

  Long silence, broken only by the staccato bursts of forks and knives scraping ceramic. Finally Clarence puts his fork down, says, That gallery that you recommended said no.

  Noel swigs wine, shakes his head. Sorry, Clarence. We tried, but he wasn’t sure he was interested in pottery. Guess he wasn’t.

  Not my pottery, anyway, says Clarence mildly.

  Noel protests, but Louise is not surprised. Clarence has been working on a new series, modeled after the urns the ancient Egyptians used to store the vital organs of their dead after embalmment. Except that Clarence’s urns are made of the vital organs themselves. Louise’s favorite is an urn sculpted to look like a bloody, hollowed-out heart, aorta and superior vena cava sitting atop the lid like gloves for alien hands. They have not been popular with Clarence’s usual gallerists, who want something pretty they can sell to the tourists. The tourists don’t want to drink tea from a teapot that looks like a lung.

  We’ll keep asking around, says Noel. Those pieces are so brilliant. We know a friend who’s working on some project involving ritual—maybe you two could do something together? Clarence shrugs. He’s never made art for anyone else. He just does things to see if he can do them. And when he finds he can, he stops and does something else.

  Teesa pours out coffee, burnt as the lamb chops. She knows that Noel and Louise are having an affair, but claims not to mind. She prides herself on being unconventional, so she mentions it frequently, with an air of studied boredom. Teesa is one of those people who substitute scarves for personality. Now she dances back to her chair, and watches Louise put down her knife and fork. Oh, she says, I’m always so impressed with your table manners, you and Clarence.

  She is forever saying things like this to Louise and Clarence, as if they were feral cats skulking about a farmhouse. As if they were not quite civilized. Louise wants to bite Teesa’s thin freckled arms in revenge. Instead she says, quite politely, Oh, we’re not exactly Grey Gardens up at the estate, you know. We have running water. We even bathe sometimes.

  Noel yelps, his way of laughing. Mrs. Ralph Mattson finishes putting away the last of her food and taps Louise’s arm. My dear, the old woman says, gumming the words through thick red lipstick caked over her lips, a bloody cave of bad dentures. That nightmare mouth tells Louise she’d like her little dog to be preserved when he goes. I do think it will be any day now, she says, clicking her tongue.

  I can do that, says Louise. Would you like him to be playing? Hunting? Sleeping?

  I think mounting a nice-looking bitch, Mrs. Ralph Mattson says cheerfully, and Clarence starts coughing. He looks at Louise, who shrugs, so he continues to drink his coffee with the sort of ferocious delicacy he uses whenever he encounters anything carnal. Louise has never known, of course, if that extends to his affairs, and she does not care to ask.

  Louise has been loyal only—almost only—to her brother and father in love. This is not to say she has been a virgin; she has always been open and in fact almost generous in matters of the skin. But in matters of the heart she has been lured but once, long ago. She fell in love with a complexion, pale and soft as ivory silk, lips ripe and rosy, too pretty, almost, to be a man’s face at all. And yet there was nothing at all soft about him. His mind had strong legs and his eyes were hard and gray. The beautiful lips shaped determined phrases, anger often braided into the words.

  His name was Morris, and he was a pianist, yet another man who relied on his own two hands. She met him during her tour of Europe, the only traveling outside of the States she’d ever done. He was seated next to her at the Vienna Opera House during a performance of Der Rosenkavalier. When Octavian gave Sophie the silver rose, Morris reached over, a total stranger, and draped his long, long fingers casually over her upper thigh. She saw him again in front of Mozart’s house, and he took her to his hotel and had her on the floor of the tiny tiled bathroom. His fingers played her as expertly as a piano and she responded with fervor to each staccato note, each long sustain.

  She failed to finish her tour and instead followed him home to Indiana, where he taught at a university. It lasted for six months but in the end he was too sure of himself and too angry to feel sure of anyone else. He accused her of unspeakable and untrue things. And then on a dark night, flat as the surrounding fields, he took a bottle of pills and died on the living room rug. His wrecked, ghostly face in death was the ugliest thing she’d ever seen. She fled that night, got on a bus and went back home to Clarence. Clarence, who after no word from her for months met her at the door with silence and a glass of bourbon. Clarence, who never asked where she had been.

  Clarence has a lover’s soul. That’s what their father always said, but he understood it to be a weakness.

  Clarence disagreed. It’s the one thing that makes me really brave: love. It’s the poetry of it, I suppose. The nobility. The inevitable tragedy.

  Louise had laughed at the time. Tragedy? Clarence’s idea of love consisted of one-night stands with the pretty farm girls who worked at Denny’s during the winter. What was so noble about that? Human urges, that was all.

  Clarence would laugh, too. As close as they were, he never told Louise his most terrible secret: he desperately wanted a love like Mother and Father. Even if, especially if, it meant the destruction that followed. He knew that Louise’s forgiveness would never extend that far.

  When the car pulls up and Tony gets out, Louise is watching from the upstairs bedroom. Her fingertips itch. She thinks of her father, of how he would tease her about these strange urges, how when she was little her fingers and toes would ache and she would long to fly. Use those restless limbs, he’d tell her, laughing. Shake the energy out of those fingers into this little squirrel. Make it dance like you want to.

  She watches Clarence and Tony discussing payment. Ducks, embarrassed, as Tony looks up and sees her dark head aimed toward him. She pulls her hair over her face like a curtain and picks up a paintbrush. She can start working on some pigeon eyes. But her fingers are shaking, unsteady, and after a moment she puts down the paintbrush in disgust. She peeks up through her hair, sees Clarence getting into a heated discussion with the man in the truck with the gun. With Jackson.

  This is new. She doesn’t like this. She throws on a pair of pants, tucks her slip into them like an awkward, billowing shirt, and gallops down the stairs and through the door. Clarence and Jackson are howling at one another, no, rather, Clarence is howling and the man with the gun is pointing the gun at Clarence.

  She throws her body uselessly in front of Clarence’s, short enough to protect nothing but his least vital parts. Well, least vital for staying alive. Tony is standing to the side, leaning on the hood of the truck and laughing. Beautiful, Louise, he says. Very touching.

  Fuck you, she says. What’s going on here? She can feel Clarence shaking behind her, just a little. Jackson smiles, deadly calm. He clicks on the safety, puts the gun back down on his lap.

  Nothing so much, he says. You just better tell your brother to be careful who he’s fucking, so. He shrugs.

  Louise tu
rns to Clarence, looks the wide expanse upward at his face. What’s this? Fucking who?

  Clarence grabs her arm in a way that is most unlike him. Let’s go inside. Let’s just go inside.

  She shakes his arm off, angry and hurt. Clarence has a secret? From her? He starts to stalk inside, tall and faster than she is, and she loses him in the hallway. What is going ON? she shouts, but he is gone inside his workroom and shutting the door in her face. In her face. This is new, too. She bangs on the door for a minute before giving up and heading back outside. She is not afraid of the man with the gun. She wants her money. But the truck is gone, and Jackson is gone, and Tony is gone.

  This last is unexpectedly hard. She has no idea why it should be. Tony is a leather goon with a grin, that’s all. Why should she want him here? Why should she want him at all? But she knows, with the ache in her fingers and toes, that she does. She wants him like she wanted to fly from the rooftop when she was ten, wants to throw her whole body into that catastrophe until she is utterly exhausted and dried up. She hasn’t wanted anyone like this since Morris, and just like Clarence’s rejection, she doesn’t know what to make of it. The shape of her world is changing, off-kilter and blurred, astigmatic.

  Mrs. Ralph Mattson arrives in the morning, her Little Boy Blue wrapped in a blanket and reeking already.

  We had to observe the customary period of mourning, she explains. Louise nods and marches off to the freezer with the poor little dog. She calls for Clarence, then remembers about their almost-fight. She thinks she heard the car drive off last night. She wonders if he is having his love affair somewhere.

  When she gets back, the old lady is wandering down the hall, examining the ships-in-bottles and sea battle dioramas. She murmurs in awe, suddenly child-eyed. This is always the way it is, here in this house, magical since Louise and Clarence were small. They preserve a world long gone in these long rooms, crowded now with dead objects and memories, long devoid of the softening gaze of cheerful people and their love for one another.