Physics of Sunset. Jane Vandenburgh

       1

       Outdoor Survival Skills

      VERONIQUE CHAKRAVARTY GREW up in a little town in the south of France—she called it my veellawwge. The sun rose there over golden hills to shine on a river crossed by a Roman bridge. The scape of land eees similar to theees one, Veronique said. She pressed her lips together, looked out from her hill above the water of San Francisco Bay, then gestured in the dismissive way that showed she, being French, was superior to either of the two perfections.

      The light, she asked. And this air? Veronique smiled at Anna, who examined the atmosphere as if it were gauze between her fingertips. The light was clean and white, the air soft to the point of feeling powdery, as if it contained particles that multiplied light’s brilliance. California was dry, Mediterranean, and shadows did fall in that sharp-edged, bluish way, but it was the molecular density of Veronique’s soul that had allowed her to be transported intact to her new land from that more ancient one, Anna knew, and allowed her to feel at home.

      Springtime, a bright morning, the air cool on Anna’s naked arms. The past winter had been rainy so the hills were lushly green. A soft breeze moved up the Chakravartys’ canyon.

      Veronique had attacked the landscape like one of her Roman ancestors scooping out irrigation ditches, adding sand to the clay soil of the deep beds she’d dug into the terraced hillside. Her kitchen garden contained the same herbs and vegetables her mother grew: tomates, aubergines, persil, asperges. Veronique came, behaved as a conqueror, the earth responded, was changed by her.

      And the local idiom was being altered by the force of Veronique’s will. Anna Bell-Shay was a poet and had a hesitation in her own speech that encouraged her habit of listening carefully. Head down over the basting of a satin blanket binding or in the active grief that had yawned open for no good reason in the middle of her life, Anna attended her friend’s various beats and breaths and emphases, unreasonably imagining Veronique Chakravarty was somehow teaching her fluency.

      English was becoming ever more complex to Anna as she grew older. In the matter of a dash, for instance: how much pause might a dash be asked to carry? The dash was modern, also seemed to contain all of history. All her favorite writers seemed to balance there and so exist in the tentative.

      Veronique didn’t worry about this kind of thing. She went crashing off through the underbrush of everyday speech, imagining, for instance, that people rushing to their therapists were going to see their shrimps. This was Berkeley in the 1990s, where everyone was, or had been, or soon would be in some variety of therapy, the latest being traveling to the far-off reaches of the world to walk the most famous labyrinths. Veronique’s husband, who was from Delhi, had an almost better than perfect English. It was elegant, carefully nuanced, slightly archaic. Because of Ravi, Veronique said cawn’t and shawn’t, she rode a lift, lifted the bonnet of the caw she’d hired.

      Ravi’s was a high old culture, his wife’s more new and raw. His eyes gleamed, were deep-set, thickly lashed, so brown his dark glance might catch, take hold. His gaze possessed a person—Anna felt it grab the muscles of her lower belly in a cramp that was frankly sexual. Ravi and Anna sometimes locked eyes at dinner as Veronique plunged on and on—he might lift a brow or move his full lips slightly at something his wife just said. Ravi very pointedly did not correct her, seemed also arrogantly to defy anyone else to do so. Anna understood this. She suffered the same attraction. Veronique’s being so noisily alive being why each was drawn to her.

      The Chakravartys lived up the hill from Anna and Charlie, whose older house lay in the flats of Berkeley in the section of Northside called the Gourmet Ghetto in the real estate ads. Anna and Veronique had had babies within weeks of one another, their friendship—Veronique called it free-end-ship—had deepened over upchuck and earaches.

      Nearly all aspects of early motherhood were without intellectual challenge, they soon discovered—even talking about children was often boring in the particularly overeducated way of the developmental psychologist, whose clinical language made Anna feel she might need to shoot someone. She might feel better, she often thought, if she killed something. She would probably need to commit one small crime some day soon. She needed to turn criminal or she needed to go book an hour in a Tokyo sleeper. These were the modular sleeping capsules she’d just read about. Japanese salarymen rented them so they could power-nap on their lunch hour in order to be rested enough to go out drinking with their bosses again.

      Anna’s own mother confirmed it: infants are no more wonderful than any other subset of humanity. God does, however, make all small mammals look cute and smell good so you’ll want to nurse them, Margaret Bell said when she telephoned. Also make you less likely to toss them out a window.

      Anna and Veronique sat together on the Chakravartys’ wide deck, their children playing nearby. The light shone on water radiant as aluminum—they seemed to sit in a bowl of noon. With pregnancy Anna, who was blond and fair, developed new sensitivities; she now had a form of sun allergy. She wore big loose dresses and a wide hat and huge, very dark dark glasses to protect her pale eyes. Charlie called this Anna’s Edith Phase—Edith was Anna’s own unlovely middle name. He sometimes said to people that if life was a costume party, his gal Edith was going to come dressed as the echt artist/mental patient. She’d arrive with her head swathed in bandages, ear gone, her face all smeared with white stuff, dressed as Mrs. Vincent van Gogh.

      It was the chemistry of pregnancy that changed her, Anna thought. Her mind turned dull as her skin became more sensitive. She was a prism now through which light fell and broke apart. If what Anna was experiencing was a natural splintering of focus, as her mother suggested, when was it that she might begin to pull herself back together? Anna had once been smarter—of this she was nearly certain. She recently called her mother to ask if this wasn’t so. Margaret Bell now lived year-round in upstate New York in what had been their summer house.

      It was natural, her mother said, that the soul of a female person should be riddled by empathy. This was a natural adaption. That mothers were porous to the wishes of those around them was what had kept humanity lurching from meal to meal all down through recorded history. She was herself now finished with that portion of her life, Margaret said, having relinquished responsibility for the heavy organs of appetite to the new generation. This new lightness was one of the surprising and very wonderful things about being a grandmother.

      Days ticked by. Anna’s daughter was one year old, now turning two. The photosensitivity began to ease. Anna often wanted nothing more than to go alone into an art museum, to stand in front of a great painting and be sliced apart by all the levels and degrees of silences. A great painting made its own quiet room. What she disliked most about poetry, she’d discovered, was that it seemed to so depend upon the noisy apparatus of language.

      Until Anna witnessed it from within—experienced in her body the nubs of what might have once been deemed a personality