Seven O'Clock at the Quad

In the morning the quiet is a hotel kind, hinting at the breathing of others, at the shuffling of their limbs on borrowed beds, and at their wanderlusting dreams.

from "The Phoenix Tree"

The Phoenix Tree grew from a rock that slanted precariously out to sea. Children loved to climb it. Their parents loved to scream. No one had ever fallen from The Phoenix Tree, but it was a cautionary tale waiting to happen. Someday someone would. And then that someone would die with their lungs full of green water and their skin starry with salt. Everyone would cry and shake their heads together, bitterly saying I told you so, and, no, I told you.

Then a man would come with an axe.

But for now the Phoenix Tree stood, tall and strong and calm. Each night it cut its silhouette out of the sunset. Tourists took pictures that always professional postcards, because The Phoenix Tree was particularly photogenic, even for a palm. 

In the Dessert (Take Two)

In the dessert, if you go too long with only sand to eat and drink and breath and see, you can go no farther with only sand. So there is water, shimmering with the same erotic, untouchable sheen as the golden circles dangling from the costume of a belly dancer. You can only get just so close-- never closer. Never there. Are we there yet, are we there yet, are we there yet? Now?
Never.
It's like a dance, or a chase scene. (You can't decide.) You take a step forward; the water laps a wave back. In your throat and your gut and your limbs is a feeling that falls somewhere between thirst and lust, and you think that maybe they are always, in the end, the same thing.
You want to cry, but there is not enough water in your body to wet your eyes.
In the dessert, you inevitably lose your mind.

from "Elsa On the Subway"

Sometimes in the subway Elsa did not mind the iron maiden press of strangers against her sides, and this was how she knew she must leave the city. A pale man shifted to make room for a woman carrying a baby with balled fists and closed eyes. In doing so, he moved so close to Elsa that she could feel the contours of his body beneath his clothes. It occurred to her that this was how they would stand if they were lovers. Suddenly, she wanted very badly to cry. The only thought that stopped her was this: if she did, she knew, no one would turn to ask her what was wrong. They would instead continue to stare dully out the windows at the muddy blur of the tunnel flashing by. 

Midway between San Fransisco and Berkely, the subway goes underwater. Elsa had taken this route many times and knew by heart the moment when the land dropped away and the ocean gripped the train tightly with both hands. She closed her eyes exactly when. 

Her ears popped like popcorn.

She leaned back.

The man standing behind her smelled like rain and old paper. He was wearing a dark pink jacket made of cordoroy. It was soft and fragile to the touch. His name, Elsa decided at random, was Jackson.

She wanted him to ask her if she knew where they were.

She wanted to be the one to say, "The sea."

In the Dessert (Take One)

1.

In the dessert, there are more stars than there are freckles on a red haired girl in the summer time.

I am going to step out of character, so to speak, for  just a moment. This feels something like cheating, and also scarily like actually blogging, but I promise not to make a habit of it. I just thought I might add some pictures to break up the visual monotony of this blog. First off, here is a postcard I picked up at a Simon Van Booy reading. (Eloquence and elegance. I'm certain that was the best reading I've ever been to.) It's part of a contest that harpercollins is doing right now. I'm not going to go to detail right now but I might later. The photograph is of date palm trees, which I now know much more about than I ever expected or planned to. All date palms, for example, belong to the phoenix genus. The fruit ripens at varying rates and so must be picked one by one, by hand. There is also a variety of date palms, Phoenix theophrasti, that is found only on Crete. There are very few palm forests on Crete, but one of the few is located at Vai. I might be deluding myself, but this still seems very auspicious as Vai was one of the first places in Europe I ever visited. I think about it often. My trip to Vai involved, among other things, a shady chaffeur named Spyro who dressed like a Nascar racer, an exhilerating but also, frankly, terrifying high-speed trip through the mountains on gravel roads that seemed to be only a few inches wider than the car, a myriad mountain goats, and a mysterious pile of brightly colored cubes abandoned at the side of the road miles from any other sign of human life. All somewhat off-putting at the time, but excellent to have to recall. And Vai itself was very beautiful. I never knew that "seagreen" was a real color-- I thought it was just more cutsy Crayola nonsense-- but it is. At Vai the water is green and so perfect that it makes you wonder why water is ever blue. But I digress.

On Running For Your Life in the Dim Before Dawn

We ran until stars went through our lungs.

Until our legs had the motion stuck inside of them like seasick

A burn both sharp and blurry in our calves.

The feeling of drinking gin too fast.

And we knew, as we had known for years--since ninth grade science class, to be exact-- that the first law of kinetics is this: objects in motion stay in motion.

And all along the diving hills there was no use holding back.

Lady

(a little something from the archives. this is pretty old...)

It is easy not to trust Felix.
Easy when we see him off by himself, his shadow the only thing that deigns to be near us. It stretches across the cold ground, blue and thin like a sliver of darkest ocean. Easier still when he tells those...stories. His tongue so fast but his eyes so slow.
"I knew a lady once," he'll say, "Little and firm with mischief in her stride. And black, black eyes. For weeks, I'd longed to take her home with me. Then one night she put her hand on my arm and said, Felix. Just that. When we got to my apartment I flipped on the light and the fuse burst in a little shower of sparks, so I'll understand if you think I just saw what I did because of the dark. But let me tell you. Under that lady's fine red coat was a fine red gown, and under that lady's fine red gown was a fine red fox tail, lush and sweeping and curled towards her bare white hip."
We don't believe him, but of course we have to ask,
"What happened then, Felix?"
"Lady turned tail and fled."

from "The Good Gimmick"

"The metaphor may be a tired one, but damn it--" Frank said, one hand moving along the waist of his guitar as if it were a breathing thing and might stir beneath his touch, "It's nearly impossible for a man not to compare the things he loves to the women he wants to undress."

Frank Gray. All ruddy cheeks and florescent white hair. Heineken foam and tobacco smoke. Worn plaid shirts sloppily cuffed over hands whose fingers, despite their swollen, purplish appearance, could dance like no others. All up and down the frets in a way that was so fast but so smooth that it started to look slow.

Sometimes in the evening it got so that we could hear the music in the floorboards. Pelvic, guttural crashes of purr and static that should have blasted from the speakers of some brow-beaten brown car with the bass turned up too high. If I hadn't known him myself, I never would have believed it was just Frank, alone in his room with his second-hand amp and tenth-hand electric.

Medic, Medic

Jamie was citrus on a split lip, but you, my dear, were a purr in a hurting throat.
                  

French Trip Nostalgia

  One day we went to the sea. It was a Thursday, I believe, but walking down the narrow, shadowed street to the Lycée we could feel the sun trying to find us, like an offer and a dare. The sky that day was a blue so proud, so tender (as if, ripe) that it looked like a show put on to attract a lover. And not just any lover, of course, but a lover fit for the longings of the sky.

Bruna had a test; we parted ways on the school steps that morning. She told me to meet her back at 17:00, and wrote her phone number in perfect palmer method handwriting on a blank page in my notebook. I said O.K.. On after thought, bonne chance. She smiled; she dimpled; she disappeared through the doors. 
The students ebbed around me, pressing cigarettes feverishly to their mouths, laughing nasaly laughs, kissing (in greeting or otherwise), clapping one another and even their teachers on the backs. For a moment they seemed a crowd purely of strangers.  I saw Dan first; his hieght, the blonde streaks in his hair, and the brightness of his shirt all gave him away. Then I spotted Sarah, Molly, Theresa, Céline. Dan and Sarah waved, Céline winked, Molly pretended not to have seen me, and Theresa smiled uncertainly. I went to them, kissed where kissing was appropriate (where one of us was french). We said simple things back and forth in one language or another. Céline lit a cigarette off of Sarah's; they smoked with their spare hands on their hips, blowing truncated gray plumes towards the sky, speaking hurridly in between drags. Dan asked where Bruna was. I said class, a test, then asked why Theresa was with us instead of with her host brother Ludavic. Dan said Ludavic had a test too, same as Bruna. I nodded. Sarah ground the useless part of cigarette into the concrete. Around us even the stragglers were straggling off one by one. Finally, Céline shoved his hands into the depths of his unnecessary coat, something apolagetic in his posture. "I go," he said simply. Sarah nodded, told him not to be late. Then she was alone with the four of us, the Americans. For a moment she was silent, surveying us with a look of cryptic amusement. Behind her, in the ramshackle apartment across the way, the old drunkard we had been told to ignore on the very first day leaned out of his window to shout a slurred profanity at an irritated passerby. Sarah rolled her eyes in his direction, then said, "So."
"So," I said back.
Dan laughed (good natured, compulsivley; Dan was always laughing.) "What are we doing?" he asked.
"What do you want to do?" Sarah retorted, her dark eyes gleaming with mischeif and promise and a million other less definable things. (She was like that. Like this: sturdy, agreeable, impulsive, what one might call a force.)
At first nothing creative came to mind. There were the stores, and there was the café -bar where, it seemed, Bruna and her friends passed more time during school hours than they did at school.
And then, there was the sea.

"Johan is sick today," Sarah said, as if somehow this decided things. "We will go visit him." Then, off our looks of mild confusion, she added, "He lives by the beach. It will be fun. And he's not really sick, he's...what do you say?"
"Playing hooky," I offered.
"Hickey?"
"Haha. No. Hooky."
"Hooky. O.k. On y va."
And we did just that. On the bus Sarah told us that Johan hadn't come to school all week. The way she said it it sounded like pride, like boasting. Molly asked if his parents knew. Sarah, in lieu of answering, laughed. "Johan is my best friend," she said affectionately. For a moment no one spoke. Then, with a startling, appealing lack of elegance, Sarah scrambled onto her knees, and pointed out the bus's faintly tinted, not-so-faintly dirty windows. "Look at the lavender," she said, and we did, at the shimmering, stretching ripple of silver-purple blurring past. When the beautiful fields faded from view, Sarah settled back into her seat with an air of absolute satisfaction. "We're close," she said. 

Johan lived in a town filled with kitschy stores selling lanyards and pornographic postcards, keychains and umbrellas and novelty martini glasses, bikinis and shark tooth necklaces. Presumably it was sometimes filled also with tourists, but it wasn't the right season for that. On the contrary,  the only people we saw seemed more than content to pretend that they were alone, an illusion we likewise maintained. From where the bus let us off, it was a five minute walk through the naked streets to the beach. Everything felt wide and silent and empty--until we reached the sea, which, though wide (infinite, in fact), was loud and alive. And blue. So blue. Not the same blue as the sky, but a different blue, a blue worthy of the sky's efforts and affections.
We took off our shoes, our socks, our tights, our jackets. We piled them on a log close to the sidewalk. We dug our toes down deep into the sand. We wiggled them. The wind took our voices and ran off with them. It brought us the taste of the sea. We walked along the beach, slanting towards the water. Beneath us, the sand grew darker and cooler. Eventually the waves reached for our ankles. We cringed from the cold but refused to shy away. We cuffed our jeans. We bunched up our skirts in our hands. We waded.
There were shells everywhere.  It was easy not to notice them at first, but if you wanted to find them, they were there. Pink shells and purple shells and strange, cylindrical shells that looked more like magical flutes than like any other shells I had ever seen. Sarah and Molly and Theresa went to lie in the sun, but Dan and I wandered, following one shell to the next, lifting them gingerly, fighting over some of them, hardly talking,hardly even breathing, maybe letting the sea breathe for us... until finally we heard Sarah shouting for us and realized that we were almost too far to hear her at all. We turned back.

When we reached them Sarah called Johan and told him that we were on our way. It seemed criminal to put the rest of our clothing back on, so we carried everything in awkward bundles. It was O.K; it wasn't far. It seemed we had barely lost sight of the waves when we came to a white, two story house with a balcony and a blue roof. Its stucco-esque walls reminded me of an adobe, and a fenced-in patio was fiiled with small palm trees, potted cactuses, and exuberant flowers that stuck out their long, pink tongues at us as Sarah keyed in a number she knew by heart and the gates clicked open. 
Stepping through, Sarah tilted her head back,and thundered, "Johan? JOOOHAAN?" 
A moment later Johan appeared on the balcony. He was tall and bony with a long forehead, deep-set gray eyes, and gelled light brown hair. He was also more sloppily dressed than I'd come to expect of the french students; although it was hard to say whether this was habitual or simply because he hadn't been planning on leaving the house. As I watched, he tapped ash carelessly over the rail into the garden below, bit back a smile and regarded us silently.
"We came to visit you," Sarah said. "Because you are sick."
Johan laughed.
"Playing hooky," she added.
"Comment? Hocky, comme sur la glace?"
"Hooky. Comme quand on ne va pas a l'école."
"Ah. Hooky. I am playing hooky."
"Yes. But you said you are sick so we came to visit you, to make you better."
"Actually," said Theresa, "We would really just say skipping school."
Everyone looked at her. Everyone blinked. Up until that point, Theresa had hardly spoken at all.
"O.k," said Johan. He tossed his cigarette butt over the fence to the neighbors yard, and promptly vanished from the balcony. A moment later, he reappeared at the front door.
"Drinks?" he asked. "Alchohol? Jus?"
"Je vais mourir de soif," Sarah whined. "I'm thirsty. Lemonade."
Dan and I exchanged glances, raised brows. There was something fundamentally unnerving about Sarah picking fruit juice over alchohol. It seemed strange, too, (though not unpleasent), when we were, some minutes later, seated on wire chairs around a wire table, drinking limonade from stout, colorful plastic cups. In the last few days we'd grown used to the artistry and rituals of eating and drinking, and to the omniprescence of wine. I sipped slowly, at once enchanted and apalled by how much sweeter the soda tasted by contrast. How quickly we adapt.
And yes, right then it felt so easy to be there, so natural. The sun, the sea, the smoke, the bread, the wine, kiss hello, kiss good bye. Playing hicky, hocky, hooky, whatever. Everyone speaking one language, then everyone speaking another, botching both, sometimes the feeling of understanding neither, but even then...
Laughter. Lavender. Love.


The bus came and went without us, humming down the street just close enough that we turned our heads.
"Fuck," said Sarah, grinning. Theresa squirmed. "I said I'd meet Ludavic..." she trailed off. Sarah shrugged. The next bus came in an hour and there was nothing we could do.  Theresa looked annoyed, but it seemed impossible not to smile.  In that moment, the feeling of freedom was absolute. The wind was soft and balmy and sweet, like a breeze borrowed from a shampoo commercial in which topless girls lounged luxuriously in the tropics. The limonade was going to our heads like wine. Time was different here; time was on our side. Twenty-four hour time was slow and meaningless and kind. We doddled on our way to the bus stop, stopped at one of the homogenous stores to fill a white paper bag with licorice, happy cola, and creme brulee gummies. We tossed the bag back and forth, licked sour sugar from our thumbs. When we reached the bus stop, we  lay on the benches on our backs and stared up at the sky. We taught each other to be vulgar or charming in english or french. Sarah made it a rule that for the rest of the day no one could speak in their own language; for the most part the rule was followed. Dan and I sang the repetitive pop songs we'd learned from the radio on the drive to Mont Pellier the day before; Sarah filled in the blanks we couldn't remember. Eventually the bus came, not quite on schedule, but close enough. It was our last night in Bézier, and even paying for the bus ticket felt sacred and sad.


Dinner that night was strange, wineless and crowded. Since it was the last night, it had been decided that all of the exchange and host students from the Lycée Henry VI would eat together at a traditional restaurant. As our trip the sea had somewhat delayed us, we arrived last, and Dan and I got seperated from our host sisters and their friends. We were seated at the end of the table by the door. It felt cold and sequestered. Around us were other American students, mostly from West High. Sometimes they tried to speak to us, but for the most part, we refused. I was struck by the realization that Dan had somehow become my friend, and then immediately after by the realization that he would not remain so for long. I sulked, folded my napkin into a crane, then a flower. Dan fidgeted, skated a knife down his arm, laughed when I told him to stop. Aaron Heise asked if we liked France. We said yes. Aaron said something else and I'm sure at that point my irritation was plain across my face; I wasn't in the mood to humor anyone. I felt like time was running out, like it had turned against us. 

It was and it had. 


On the train the next day I would stare out the window, speak to no one, and dream. I would wander behind my wavering eyelids to the place where sea met land, absently turning a little pink shell over and over and over again in my hands. In three days time I would be home, and we-- these people whom I felt so deceptively close to--would be no one to each other. The inevitability of this was thick in my throat. I thought about trying say something about not wanting to leave, but knew that whatever I said would come across somehow as both understatement and exaggeration. Dan turned to me and muttered that roquefort is better with wine and that it was a shame that we couldn't order any as tu sais qui was sitting with us. Aaron glanced up angrily and asked what we were talking about. Dan rolled his eyes at me and said, "Nothing."
Then Sarah came by, as if to save us. Dan said something that neither of us heard. "Comment?" Sarah asked, kneeling between our chairs.

And I thought: but for now, we lean in close when we speak.  ~

from "Bone Setting Basics"

Zach moved to her city, and thought it would be good to catch up. He called Lissa, hung up on her, called her back. They agreed to meet at the park, by the magnolia they used to talk philosophy and Saturday Night Live under. It had been so long that neither could remember what the quarrel that kept them apart had been. Besides, they weren’t only friends; they were cousins. Third or twice-removed or something; Zach wasn’t entirely clear, but anyway, it didn’t matter. They say blood is thicker than water and Zach, being not only a doctor but a supersitious one, was particularly prone to believing metaphors about blood. 

When Zach got to the park he found the magnolia immediately. But something was wrong. It was bigger, to start with. It had thicker limbs. It cast a deeper, gloomier shadow than Zach remembered. It used to be such a delicate thing, just taking hold. Zach had always found that charming; he had felt a sense of solidarity with the tree and its youth and its insistance on beauty. Now it was it was so firmly established. Suddenly Zach felt old. 

Lissa wasn’t there yet, so he thought he might take some flowers from the tree and give them to her. He broke off a branch but all of the blossoms were battered and most were bruised, covered in brown smudges the color a half-eaten apple goes when left too long unattended. He was going to drop the branch on the ground, but Lissa walked up just then, and, at a loss, he handed the flowers to her anyway. 

“Zach!” she said. She raised the flowers to her nose but, as far as Zach could tell, did not bother to inhale their fragrance. “It’s been too long.”

This was not the right thing to say, but in all fairness Zach did not know what the right thing to say was, or if there even was  a right thing to say at all. So he said, “Yes,” which was also not the right thing to say. He looked at the flowers in her hands and thought that that had not been the right thing to do, and also that even if it had been, those would not have been the right flowers to give.

“Why don’t we sit down?” Lissa asked, and that, Zach thought, was perfect.

So they sat and they talked and slowly the sun went down behind them. It was all very nice, but hopelessly stiff, and at times quite boring. After an hour or so Zach began to feel as if he were trying to discuss in detail how much he loved the finger sandwiches at party with the President. This was, obviously enough, not an experience Zach had ever had, but the image was so clear it felt real. He considered telling Lissa about it, then discarded that idea but toyed with the new idea of asking if she wanted to go somewhere with finger sandwiches, then as a joke asking if she wanted to go somewhere with the president. Finally he wound up staring blankly into the space behind her head.

“I do prattle on, though, don’t I?” Lissa asked. 

Zach was supposed to say ‘No, not at all,’ and he knew it, but he didn’t. He gritted his teeth instead and waited for her to look offended but move on, which she did with admirable speed.

“You never told me what you’re doing back here, Zach,” she said.

Which was when Zach told her about the job, which really was the only thing he’d meant to tell her in the first place.

When Lissa first learned that Zach was teaching at the other school, she made an inventive noise somewhere between a laugh and a sigh and asked, in all apparent sincerity, “Well that’s nice, Zachary. Are you sleeping with any of your students yet?”

Flabbergasted, Zach ran a hand through his thinning hair and said, “Of course not Lissa. Why would you even ask a horrible thing like that?” 

Lissa shrugged. “I do know about those places, Zach. They’re like that there.”

“Like what, exactly? I don’t even know what you mean. But at any rate, they aren’t like that. And they certainly aren’t like that.”

“Maybe not all of them. But everyone heard about--”

“Manny? Manny was a snake. They fired him.”

“They hired you.”

“Exactly.”

Lissa raised an eyebrow, a taunting but oddly tender smile dancing briefly across her lips. “Yes,” she said softly, “Exactly.”

“That doesn’t mean I--” But now Zach was flustered. He had to stop. He put a hand on his forehead. The heat of his own blushing felt exactly like fever. Lissa was good at this. Too good. Perfect. An artist. He couldn’t decide if he hated her or loved her for it.

“Anyway,” Lissa said, “It would be easy. For you, I mean. You’re young, you’re handsome, you have good teeth, you hold doors open for women carrying babies.” She laughed a little, into her hands.

“You make that sound like a ploy.”

“I believe it is a ploy, more or less. Which isn’t a bad thing, per-say, just something to keep in mind.”

“You always were the cynic.”

“You always were the charmer.” She grinned, suddenly. Added: “You always were the cad.”

“I--”

“Well  congratulations, at any rate. It’s hard to find a job these days. I mean not for you, I’m sure. You’re a doctor for a Christ's sake. In fact I’m not very clear on what you’re doing at the Grassman School if you didn’t just decide that the students were more attractive than your patients.”

“Lissa, you’re horrible.” 

She was other things, too. Beautiful, for one. Today especially. All got up in an old-fashioned blue dress with a white apron. A few stray magnolia petals caught in her hair. She looked like some fantasy version of life on the Oregon Trail. Through most of college Zach had had to work very hard not to fall in love with her.  Yet try as he might Zach could muster up neither affection nor attraction towards the woman before him, only a cringing kind of hatred that he didn’t know what to do with. It was a flash. Red and hot and ugly, but then--thank gone-- for the most, gone. 

Without missing a beat, Lissa said, “But I see you didn’t answer the question. Anyway, what are you teaching? Biology?”

Slowly, Zach shook his head. “Not exactly.” 

“Arithmetic? No, I’m not thinking about this the right way. Basket weaving, maybe? I mean it is the Grassman--”

“Jesus, Lissa, will you stop? I’ll tell you if you’ll just play nice for a moment.”

“O.k. What, then?”

“Blood letting. Bone setting. The basics.”

Lissa looked blank. “Those are doctor things,” she said after a long time.  Then, “Do they really let you teach that there?”

“It’s required, actually. It’s a pilot curriculum. The idea is that there are basic mechanical methods of survival that every human being has a right and a responsibility to know.”

“You’re quoting something.”

“The mission statement, yes. But I think they’re right, you know. I think it’s a very good program. Besides, most schools already teach children CPR, why not how to stitch and disinfect as well? They may never have to use what they learn; in fact I very much hope that none of them ever will... but they might. It isn’t even entirely out of the realm of possibility that they’ll end up on a dessert island some day and...” he saw the way she was looking at him and stopped. Almost smiled. Said: “I’m still young, you admitted it yourself. From time to time I’m allowed to indulge in flights of fancy.”

“Oh Zachary,” Lissa sighed. (Zach did not know what to make of that.) She checked her watch, clucked her tongue. “I’m running late, actually,” she said; “Sorry.” She leaned forward and kissed his neck, very quickly and very lightly. 

When she had stood and was in the process of smoothing out her skirts, she added, “We just never know what to do with you.”

That was the last Zach saw of Lissa for many days. 

He sat alone in the park for several minutes, distractedly dissecting the sexual organs of a trampled magnolia flower with his thumbnail. It was dark, he realized. And he hadn’t eaten since breakfast. It would be  a good idea to stop at the grocery store on the way home. Tomorrow was the first day of class so he felt he was allowed to treat himself. He could buy a midrange bottle of wine with a dusty label to calm his nerves. A carton of strawberries because it was starting to be the right season. Ingredients for finger sandwiches. Maybe a box of cookies to share with the kids. Or was that too much like bribery? 

This, it turned out, was only first thing Zach did not know about teaching.

///as always, this is just a clip. if you are interested in reading the rest of this story, let me know.///

Star Vs. Star I

1.

It's just that sometimes when I look you in the eyes I get the feeling that I'm seeing a constellation of dead stars whose lights have, so deceptively, not yet faded from the sky.