Physics of Sunset. Jane Vandenburgh
They sat out on the Chakravartys’ deck in good weather while Veronique, who had never heard of sunscreen, became tan, and their children grew and Anna basted satin binding onto the quilted baby blankets she made for charity. Maggie was getting bigger. A poem, or some lines in one, sometimes broke free, ran wildly, then came back to her in snatches, like the lyric of a song she was only now remembering.
Anna slept with a handsome man who, while mocking, was nice enough. He was reputed to be her husband. Charlie Shay was an experimental musician who taught at a women’s college in East Oakland. He was startlingly good-looking—she’d recently begun again to notice. He was even better-looking than he ever used to be. This was not a man who was going to lose his hair or thicken around the middle. Charlie got on his mountain bike nearly every morning and rode it straight uphill to Grizzly Peak, his bright cheeks there cooled by the dazzling fog.
Anna’s mother called to ask what fruits and vegetables were arriving in the market, to hear what Maggie was now up to. Margaret Bell fretted over her daughter’s lack of happiness, more noticeable since Maggie had been born. It was a nullity that came and now resided. It manifested physically, an emptiness framed by the muscles of Anna’s lower abdomen. She could never tell her mother this. She often felt a little sick, also ashamed of feeling sick. Her mother was Yankee, tough-minded, stoic. Anna had nothing real to complain about.
The Cold War had ended, the wall in Berlin came down, but Anna was still at times so panicked her hands shook, terrified she couldn’t save her daughter from an ecologically imperiled world. She awoke in the middle of the night to the indelible vision of a black sun rising over a nuclear desert, the sky a cold and quiet blue. This was the color Georgia O’Keefe discovered by looking through the white eyehole of a sun-bleached cow’s skull.
Anna still referred to her own husband by both his names, Margaret mentioned. Was it that Charlie’s first and last names were like his longitude and latitude? she asked. Was Anna, after all these years, still trying to get a fix on him?
Anna was startled by her mother’s comment. If she complained, she didn’t mean to, as complaint made her feel petty and disloyal. She did lately worry that the man she thought of as “Charlie Shay”—this went back to their days at Stanford when there were several Charlies in their circle—might lack something that seemed increasingly essential, the vacuoles of irony that bubbled up in a personality at the level of the cell.
When, for instance, Anna told him she intended to call her book of poems Outdoor Survival Skills, Charlie lifted his clean, strongly muscled face and gazed off so intently that a hot saltiness rushed to fill the back of her mouth. She looked down at the uselessness of her upturned hands, long fingers that lost feeling in the cold or rain. The two were out to dinner, were having lobster and champagne. She swallowed hard against the same ache that rose from her belly and now settled in behind the muscles of her jaw. Her throat closed, she’d never known such emptiness. Would she ever meet a man for whom she didn’t need to explicate?
Anna’s throat ached, her heart ached. She was thirty-eight years old. She’d been married for more than fourteen years, and still hadn’t found the road, she recognized, the one that would lead her home.
2
Important Documents
EACH HAD BEGUN to do things that startled her. He had their old house tented for pests, forgetting to mention it. Then the house was elaborately rewired, then wrapped in tarpaper and completely reshingled. Anna was trying to work. The hammering seemed to happen directly in her skull, within which Charlie’s workmen had also come to take up residence.
He went to great expense to put in a security system, bought her a new computer as a present, had her files converted to its systems. Anna, who had been in the mountains teaching at a writers’ conference, came home to this upgrade, found she had been too dispersed by traveling—she’d lost her watch, also a pair of sunglasses—and now possessed too little craft or gravity to bungle her way through all the new layers of complication. And so it was out of his great enthusiasm and generosity that her husband managed to bury her work in the deepest levels of some new electronic hell.
Charlie built the studio in the backyard against the fence in the footprint of what had been their old falling-down garage. Anna happened to miss the ramshackle building held together by the twining of wisteria, its shingles so weathered that thin yellow capillaries of electric light showed through.
Charlie began to send her flirty e-mail from his soundproof studio. She wouldn’t answer him. It was the look of e-mail, the ugly way it printed out with its bulky dingbats and gizmos: its evanescent nature told her nothing lasts and nothing matters. E-mail was such an impulsive form, it caused a person to appear to be so naked, exhibited his weak spelling, also the twisted spine of his sentence structure. It made a person so easily rude.
There was always so much noise that surrounded Charlie. She hated the demanding little chime that said electronic “things” were in her “mailbox.” Charlie sat less than fifty feet away from her, she had a deck off her study, he might simply open the door and let his voice carry. Instead he’d invaded Anna’s one final secret place. At the jingle she could feel him on the other side of the monitor, Charlie’s watching, breathing, waiting.
Something might be really wrong with her. Stalled, she began to watch her own long white hands with an air of detachment: were these the hands of a murderer? They seemed to now move independently, as if they might suddenly shoplift or begin to yank the cork from a bottle of cold white wine to toss back a quick one. She seemed to be sending out weak flares of defiance in no particular direction. She and Veronique drank red wine now in the middle of the afternoon, becoming more and more entwined in their mutual cynicism. They gossiped so destructively she came home feeling as sick as if she’d eaten a pound of chocolates. Veronique liked to talk about sex. Anna couldn’t, wouldn’t. Veronique wasn’t verbally modest. Anna admired this but couldn’t match it. She had nothing much to say. She’d known a few boys, but that was so long ago. Her marriage wasn’t ardent. If her marriage, like so many others in the last few days of the American century, was guttering out, why should the cosmos care?
Anna shopped for groceries, lost interest, hated being made low, drawn down to gossip, stopped anyway to read entertainment weeklies in the magazines aisle, became filled with revulsion over the baseness of humanity, over her own shameful staring in bald fascination at the faces of all the famous people she could never get herself to fully recognize. She fixed on the unexpected deaths of famous people, how fame was intended to make one buoyant and large and therefore somehow inoculate against mortality—this was once religious faith’s responsibility. A poet could not be famous, by definition. If Dickinson walked down the streets of this town, she wouldn’t be noticed in any particular way. She would seem like any one of the legion of other neurotic women, all tight-lipped and sexually repressed, dressed in white, unfit to inhabit the physical world. Milvia had been designated Berkeley’s Slow Street to make a place for them to walk.
Anna had always imagined vanishing, disappearing one day, then to come alive again, completely reconfigured in some lost future. It may have been this that prompted her to annex Charlie’s last name, to give herself more letters. She needed consonants, she imagined—unlike the airiness of vowels, a string of louder consonants might add a little heft. What seemed to keep her in place now was her own place-keeping, that she stood in the pattern of generations—Anna bridged the moment between the two more luminous Margarets, the sun that was her mother, the moon of her own daughter’s ascendancy.
Anna, stuck in this earthly paralysis, stood fixated in the magazine aisle of the grocery store, suddenly unable to buy any of its garish items. There was so much wrong with food these days, no one knew where anything really came from. She decided most food was unappealing because it contained no particle of God. There was no God at all in the particularly American habit of eating way too much, then dieting. Anna took her purse and left the grocery store, abandoning her half-full shopping cart. Charlie complained that she had no other job but couldn’t keep milk and eggs and bread in the house. When was it that Charlie’s demands had become so childish?