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You may not remember: after two days, they caught youwandering naked in the forest, a rabbit’s hipbone stuck in your incisors. Theycarried you home, but already I was gone. I married my girl with the good headon her shoulders. I became a solicitor. We kept a cramped, pretentiousapartment in the city where I hung an appropriate hat and a rainslicker on arack by the door. Of course she had to get pregnant; before that, she was itchyand restless, pacing the insubstantial length of the place and asking how thefog felt on my shoulders, and if she could still get a job as a typist, whynot, why not only a few days every week, only a few hours. Knocking over thebowl of white roses that she had set on the coffee table, spilling water on thecarpet. I thought as we laid beside each other at night that I must dislike herbecause she was not you, and yet I think I could have hated her on her ownmerits.
We never had Marseille, she and I. But we had children,three of them, and the bowl of roses was soon forgotten; she no longer askedabout the feeling of fog on my shoulders. When you have children, you can’tthink of much else. And all the while—listen now, let me see if you shift inyour sleep, let me see if I am capable of hurting you—I was burning yourletters. If my good-headed wife had seen them, I think she would have gone madand abandoned me, stage heroine-like. I had something to lose besides myself. Itried to think only rarely of you standing half-veiled in the garden. I neverlet myself sit in silence. I had at least seven moments of epiphany where Iunderstood, finally, how to rid myself of you. Then another of your letterswould come and I would see that I had made no progress whatsoever. The firecould roar in the hearth a hundred years and I still wouldn’t succeed inburning away the feel of you.
I will admit something to you now: I read them. All of them.Your one-sided passionate correspondence, your childish inarticulate wails.Isabella, you wrote me in my own voice; you signed your missives with my name,and addressed them to yourself. What is one to think? I convinced myself,somehow, that at long last you loved me, and all my fearlessness and all myclimbing and all your invasions into the deepest reaches of me had been forsomething.
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There is something I have neglected. I hold this part back,for I cannot face it with the direct sensible stare of a man facing his mirroror I will not see myself when I look into the square glass pane above thebathroom sink anymore. I shave my face; I shut my eyes.
We were twelve years old. We stood across from one anotheron the patio with the afternoon sunlight coming in sharp fragments through thetree branches. “Hold out your hand,” you said, “close your eyes. Trust me.” Theveins across your face throbbed eagerly. I obeyed, feeling you all over me. Asecond of anticipation, then a whisper-light brush of your fingers on my palm.I could feel the slide of your nails, the hard ridges of your knuckles, thensomething softer.
“Open your eyes,” you said, and I did, and there was aspider sitting fatly in the middle of my palm. Shock stilled me and I could notdrop the creature.
When they wrapped my hand in the hospital, they said I mighthave died. They said you could surely not have known, a note of hope in theirvoices, anxiety underneath, looking at your aunt to see what she said. Shecould have said the word then, but you were what they call a skeleton in thefamily’s closet. Your mother before you and your daughter after. You saidnothing for yourself, looking funereal in the corner. Days later, perhapsweeks, we knelt in the raspberry thicket, and you whispered, without anyprompting, “I wanted to make you feel what I do when I look at a sugar dish ora blue sky or anything at all.”
“Afraid?” I said.
“No,” you said. “Not quite. Disgust and anger and sadnessand hatred and like you are seeing yourself in a mirror that doesn’t workright.” You cried then, and it was the only time I ever saw you cry for real,the broad colorless glistening tears of a child, streaking across the veins onyour cheeks, skirting the edges of your veil.
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You possess me now more than ever you did before; I have youless. You ought to be diminished with your head nodding on that hospitalpillow, your wrists manacled by those soft linen restraints. But you have whatall women, I have been told, finally long for. A daughter is a death thatreinvents you, hollowing out that space which was occupied with nothing andfilling it with blood and filth and adoration, and I see now how she will do toyou what already you have done to me. What your aunt could never bear to say tome before was that the truth of you was you were abject, a word I havesaid so many times now that it has become to me a two-syllable dance, a softblunt whisper followed by a sharp jolt: you are cursed, your entire femaleline. The daughter kills the mother in childbirth and in so doing inflicts uponherself an infected wound that will spend the rest of her life slowlydisfiguring her.
In whispers, your aunt and I spoke of the infant as if shewere an adventurer who would lug the sticker-encrusted suitcase of herchildhood all over the world. She was to be sent overseas for an Orientalupbringing. To be handed off to some sufficiently remote French convent for amore traditional sort of cloistering. Or to be enclosed in the same cage thatonce held us, learning geometry
