|
|
|
|
|||
|
|
|||||
|
Joan Connor And I, Isolde |
|||||
|
|
|
||||
|
|
|
||||
|
We met on the
carnie bus. We both were midway people doing the “You are
thirty-six,” I said. “Seven,” you
corrected. “And you weigh
one-sixty-five.” “Six,” you
corrected. “I am only off by
one,” I said, little anticipating how much damage an error of one could
cause. “Two,” you
corrected. “One twice.” “I don’t do
names,” I said. “Tristan,” you
introduced yourself. “Triste? A man of sorrow?” I thought of Jupiter’s wise but
sad face above his forked beard. But you laughed. A
robust, startled laugh that seemed to take even you by surprise. “I’m Isolde,” I introduced myself, “a diviner.” “Divine Isolde,” you said and slumped back in your seat. Is Old Jones, the
head of the summer carnie craft bus, jounced onto the bus in his polyester
plaid pants that, from long wear, suspended a second pair of buttocks from Izzy’s own. And Izzy explained the rules. “Booth rent paid up front. No
drugs or whores on the bus. If you can’t be discreet, don’t cheat. Ten
percent of all earnings funnel into my pockets.” He jiggled the change in his
front pocket causing the long salami, pepperoni, and string cheese he
suspended from a key ring on his belt loop to sway. Izzy
flipped up the pepperoni, bias-cut a slab with a Buck knife against the dash,
and flipped the piece into the air, catching it in his mouth. “Any
questions?” he asked, champing. “No? Then we’re off.” Yelling back and
forth over the tinny din of the rattle-trap bus, I learned that you had no
blood family you could recall. You’d come north from the mountains of I told you I’d
been doing the “Oh about 242,500,” I’d guess. And Izzy would buy it and stay up all night on the bus unbuilding the castle and laying out the straws like some
ornate I Ching pattern. And the count might be
242,499 or 501. After testing my estimates several times, Izzy
came to me and said, “You cannot deny your gift, Isolde.”
And he sewed me the tent and painted it with moons and dragons and christened
me Isolde the Diviner. Business picked up. After we
exchanged histories, you fell asleep and snored softly. When we arrived at Tannerville fairground, I set off with my gear for the
midway. I read some cards, some palms, some tea leaves, guessed a weight, an
age. By He smirked. “You’re
the gypsy; you tell me.” I elbowed my way
in, and then I understood who you really were. Your face wore a smeary mask
of oil. Your bare back gleamed with sweat. In a spray of wood chips and
blizzard of sawdust, you buzzed a huge trunk of wood. Around you clustered a
herd of moose, a den of black bears, giant hawks
with wingspans the length of the food booth boardwalk. The crowd clapped
and chanted. You wiped the sweat and grease on your crumpled flannel shirt. You
smiled straight into my diviner’s eyes, then revved the saw, hefted it, and
attacked a massive block of wood. You carved a fury. Through the screen of
wood dust, a bow shape emerged. Then your chain saw whirred, strung it with
slender wooden strings. Dazed, you dropped the saw. It buzzed, kicking up
sawdust, squirming like a live thing in the wood chips, spluttered out of gas
and died. The crowd hushed. Although onlookers would later claim it was only
a passing jet, the calliope on the carousel, the sound summer makes with its
distant children’s voices, tree toads, and humming bees, they, if pressed to
truth upon their deathbeds, would testify to what we all witnessed: the harp
began to play alone. The song thrummed, high and delicate, liquid like
strings but with the mellow resonance of wood. An arboreal sound, windy but
rooted, nourished by air, earth, water and the fire of the sun. Elemental. When
the song, the trance snapped, the crowd began to shuffle and cough and wander
off. And you, Tristan, stumbled from your stupor and squatted on the ground, your back pressed against a stump. I returned to my
tent. The heat inside oppressed me. I dragged my table and chair outside to
work on my spearmint gum wrapper chains and pop top ropes for the teenage
girls. Near supper, you strolled along the midway, your hands in your jeans’
pockets, and I called you over. I slipped a Wrigley gum wrapper necklace
around your neck where it hung like the garland ringing Le Monde, the highest
card. I did not know what I really wanted to ask. “Can you teach me that?” I
whispered. You shook your
head. “Chain saws are too dangerous for girls.” “No, the secret,”
I said. You squinted at
me. “You can’t teach magic, divine Isolde. It
abides.” We shared a corn
dog and a pitcher of yeasty draft in the beer tent. The midway lights were
winking off the day. The freaks from the outlying towns were arriving, ogling
and munching and competing for the prize of empty pockets at the ring toss. The
Himalayan whirled in its sequined, snowy lights. The rockets twirled. Fireworks
rained from the skies. The Ferris wheel glittered
its graceful circle. “Will you walk me to my tent?” I asked. “I’m married,”
you said and blended your shadow into the night. Izzy knew before either of us. It was Izzy’s
business to know things. He approached you with his knowledge. “Isolde loves you.” “Then we must
find her a man, an other,” you said. “My wife is a
jealous woman, white hands and green eyes.” Izzy shook his head, knocked on his forehead. Later he
told me, “The man is wooden, Isolde. He feels how a
tree feels, sentient but not conscious.” “But his saw
sings. His harp sings. And they sang for me. I heard them,” I said, weaving a
straw bird cage around a stringless harp. “Illusion. Sleight-of-hand.”
Izzy chopped off a slab of pepperoni and offered it
to me. I shook my head
and rose and looked into my hand mirror. I wondered how the diviner had
neither seen nor foreseen the moment which, only with hindsight, I isolated
as the moment I started loving you. The clock’s face wears blinkers. My
features, the straw yellow hair, the moss green of my eyes, the spray of
freckles on my cheekbones dissolved into the silver backing of the handglass. You returned to The next summer,
my twenty-eighth, Izzy woke up in his hammock on
the bus from a prescient dream—choking on a mouthful of soil and the
determination that I should marry that summer. He circulated word among the
carnies that the man who could make me forget you could claim me as wife. Some
new crafts people boarded the bus that June. One, a whittler named
Switchblade, bragged that he would be the man to claim me, but I did not
trace that fate in his loveline as I read his palm
in my tent. And the Tarot cards insisted on Le Pendu—a
destiny dangling in uncertain transition. “I will win you with my art,”
Switchblade insisted against the counter-evidence of the cards. His voice drawled, southern-sweet and gooey, “I will win you, sugar.”
I examined the art at his stand—the tiny balsa wood toads, the miniature lady
bugs and dragon flies. Soft wood. Lower life forms. “I can carve angels on
the head of a pin,” he boasted, “invisible to the naked or microscopically
aided eye.” “Difficult to
prove,” I said and sauntered off. “A charlatan,” Izzy said, beaming with approval. Switchblade
posted handbills announcing the advent of the day when he would steal my
heart with his art. Thinking of his insects and reptiles, I scoffed. But when
Switchblade finally peeled back his tent flaps, he revealed no miniature to
steal my heart, but a man, a perfect man, massive in scale, but short-statured, with triangular muscles like scales plating his
back and corded legs and a chest, staved like a barrel. His skin gleamed with
the nutty sheen of golden oak. And the statue’s brown eyes kept me awake at
night. I tossed, kicked back the covers of my cot in the tent, steamy with
the smells of paraffin and fryer grease and sweat and oil and, more faintly,
the soft sweetness of summer. Every day I
scrutinized the statue, but it became only the lovelier on re-inspection,
yielding only one flaw—a nick, a gouge, really, the
size of a quarter in the right calf. Circular, accidentally geometrically
perfect. La Roue de Fortune. Switchblade began
bowing prematurely, accepting the carnies’ congratulations on the impending
banns. And, as the circles under my eyes scalloped like the unlit crescents
of half moons, Izzy gradually conceded Switchblade
had whittled himself a wife. Then, in July,
you reappeared. You drove up in your pickup, the bed hammering at the shocks
with the weight of your carved wooden menagerie. You limped over to my tent,
grinning. Your skin gleamed, sallow, like the moon through a fog. My fingers
trembled as I wove the delicate straws into a love knot. A gust of wind
puffed the straws from my table. “And did you
divine my arrival, Miss I.?” you asked with a facetious tip of your plaid
cap. “The wind heard
you coming,” I said and ducked, flustered, into my tent to find the broom. Before
I went outside to sweep up my scattered straw, I plucked a straw from the
broom. It stretched long and glossy but splintered toward the end. Hopes
twinned or split? When I returned, the wind had swept all my loose straws
away and you had hobbled off. Within two days
the word on the boardwalk gossiped that you suffered from a chain saw wound
in your calf and, infected, you trembled, delirious with fever. I stayed away
as long as I could restrain myself from going to you. Then, capitulating, I
came to you with sno-cones. I supported you and
held the cones to your lips. I pressed shaved ice onto your forehead and, staring
at your brow, I recognized Switchblade’s beardless sculpture. You. Your
likeness. Your artwork. Switchblade’s sculpture was yours and you. I dug your
chain saw out of the toolbox in the flatbed. Its gap-toothed chain matched
the site of the gouge in the wooden statue’s calf exactly where the downward
stroke of your saw would have been timed to place it. And you suffered,
feverish with your sympathetic wound, enthralled by your own magic. I loved you with
the love that lurched onto the carnie bus the first day I beheld you, both of
us blind to the destiny of love that bound us. We met in a fulfillment of the
meaning of our names: Tristan and Isolde, becoming
the mythic lovers our names knew us to be. Our names refused to be denied. Once
I knew I loved you, I knew I always had, that my life to that point was a pen
waiting to write your name. That once your name was written, the ink would
never dry. I carried the
chain saw to Izzy, who smiled the merest smile. “So
now it’s done,” he said. “Then we must cure Tristan.” Together, Izzy and I returned to the truck. We propped you up in
the seat of the cab. Izzy whacked off two slices of
pepperoni and, like a priest, placed the circles on our tongues. First,
yours; then mine. When you awoke, you kissed me, and
I did not know if the peppery taste burned from your mouth or my own. That night,
Switchblade, no longer able to sheath his impatience, stalked my tent and
ended his hunt on my cot. When he awoke in the filtered green light of the tent,
he found Carmen the cotton candy girl’s black hair corkscrewing into his
chest hairs. You and I were gone. When your fever
subsided, we drove up into mountains. A new fever infected us. We parked at
the base of the mountain in the deserted parking lot of the ski area. You
sharpened your straightedge on a whetstone and shaved in the rearview mirror,
leaving your cheeks rubbed raw and clean. I bathed in the brook. We climbed
the deserted ski trail of Inside, on the
mossy grass, under the blue moon, in the thin, pale, rare air of the
mountains, we lay down together breathing in evergreen. Then you rose, raised
me up in your arms, drank from my mouth as if I were
a cup. I no longer knew if I were the drinker or the drink. The world below
us receded beneath a ring of clouds. Our hands married; our lips wed. You
woke between my thighs, ate berries from the hollow between my breasts. We
lived naked. I cannot remember night and day, waking or sleeping, only the
hardness in you softening, growing wet, growing firm again as our spire
rained down its slowly browning needles and we lay together in its soft mulchy bed. The sketchy
skeleton of our shelter aspired to the sky in that summer of no rain, no
weather at all until the day—I do not know if it was morning or afternoon or
night—we heard their voices barking over the granite outcrops, the voices
from that other fallen-away world come to call us back. As Izzy, Carmen, and Switchblade approached, you rose and pulled
on your pitch-encrusted, mildewed clothes. You found your chain saw, rusty
from the dew, and placed it between us on our bed of pine needles. Your sin
stabbed me. I knew you then
as the adulterer you’d chosen to be—not the betrayer of La Jalouse, your wife with the white hands who’d boiled
potatoes for you and laundered your plaid shirts, and neatened your bed
sheets with tight hospital corners, but as the betrayer of love, our love,
this love that was us but not us, too, that had compelled us up a mountain to
the earthly point nearest the sky, torn us from time, and tossed us up out of
ourselves. Putting the saw between us, you snapped the magic chain encircling
us as if it were forged from the flimsy, folded links of gum wrappers. As Izzy, Carmen, and Switchblade confronted us, you sat up
in our bed, turned to me, where I naked lay, and said, “Isolde,
it is time to go. It is my duty to return to my wife.” Why didn’t you
struggle against duty, Tristan? Did you hear your children’s voices in Izzy’s, in Carmen’s? You who had been ageless aged. Before
my eyes, your still clean-scraped cheeks bristled,
sprouted hairs, matted a full beard. And although your
ears are moldy now and no longer hear, I ask you this, Tristan. Is love
responsibility? Is it the increment of daily habit reeling us into its
ceaseless round of dirty pans, half-hearted promises, the unimpassioned
connubial stains washed weekly from the bed sheets—only to remember that the
round ceases? It all ceases. Or is it something else? The snap of a string in
the balloon man’s hand when a balloon tugs free and floats, rising to its
element, lighter than air and farther than the field of vision? A holy,
inexorable passion. Which has the greater claim? Answer me from your grave
with your lipless socket of a jaw. Tristan, you
denied us. I laughed, I
crowed as Switchblade pointed at me, because he would never have me. You
inhabited me, leaving no empty space for anyone else to claim. Carmen sobbed
noisily. Switchblade had had his fill of her sticky sweetness. As we exited
from our makeshift home, it collapsed into a pile of brush. Card XVI, La Maison De Dieu, ruination where
the nineteenth card had foretold the sun would rise on us. We were pulling
against the cards. Izzy shrugged an apology at me. “Switchblade said he
would hunt you down with me or without,” he said. You marched down
the mountain, a jointed wooden soldier, commissioning himself
to return to La Jalouse, surrendering your duty to
her long, white hands. Only Izzy’s tearless eyes
reflected the sorrow of our descent. “Tramp,”
Switchblade accused me. “Slut.” “I have lain with
no man but my husband and the man of wood posed in your own tent who won me,”
I said and pushed him from my path. I spat on the ground and a spring bubbled
up between us, cascaded down the rocky escarpment of the mountain. After that
magic, Switchblade would risk no more. You returned to
your loveless, dutiful bed. I returned to the carnival. Switchblade hacked
your self-portrait in oak into shredded mulch. Then he disappeared. Carmen
forgave him, forgave me. Women are born to forgiveness; that is their cruelty.
But I do not forgive. I sent you
letters in white envelopes, letters written in invisible ink, letters stuffed
with photographs, letters with love knots woven of my graying hair. La Jalouse ordered you to burn them all, and you obeyed. Their
smoke curled like incense into the sky, offering your defiance to the skies
for judgment. In You wore yourself
out with duty. La Jalouse’s white hands turned
black, scrubbing it into you. When at last you were dying and your will like
a willow osier bent to its true nature, you sent for me. “If she will come,
have her send me a note in a white envelope. If she will not, have her send a
black envelope.” La Jalouse would not interfere
with your dying request, but she would interfere with my response. I knew she would
intercept the note, so I sent two, identical, believing that she would
destroy the first and therefore not expect the second. But I miscalculated by
one day. My error of one, twice, as you once said. The second note arrived a
day too late. I sent the note, Tristan, in a white envelope, and your wife
with her black hands rubbed her ink into it and lay down between you and me
like a chain saw. She killed you with a marriage when love would have saved
you. My white note in
her black envelope read: I will not forgive you, Tristan. That is my love. You seeped into
the night, gathering like black fog into the hollows of the earth, not
knowing. An unopened envelope. I hope mold has a noble taste. I wait for my
black envelope to arrive. Izzy’s came. I live alone
now. And I, Isolde, live out my name, growing toothless, blind and
old in the half-moon shadows of a hawk’s wood wings, telling myself over and
over the story of my life until death emends it. The bony hands of the thirteenth
card, reputedly, have a delicate but firm touch. Death is a painstaking
editor. |
|||||
|
|
|
||||
|
|
|
||||
|
Arts & Letters is supported by |
Arts & Letters Journal of Contemporary Culture Campus Box 89 Georgia College & State University Milledgeville, GA
31061 Phone: (478) 445-1289 E-mail: al@gcsu.edu
|
GC&SU is a member of |
|||
|
|
|
|
|||
|
|||||
