Kyra Read online

  “I would like to think we can arrive at consensus,” Doug said, his voice earnest. “Can you say, Kyra, what you see as the problem?”

  I had just said it. To do what Nancy was asking us to do would mean to reexamine our assumptions about what is a city, and recognize how culturally driven our approach has been to what we call “basic design.”

  If I got angry, they would say I was angry. And nothing I said would have any effect. If I did not get angry, nothing would happen. I could see how they wanted to leave it. We now have a course on the Akha, we have a woman in our department. What more do you want?

  “It’s not as if we’ve never talked about this before,” I said, my voice rising, there was nothing to lose. “If we’re serious about integrating culture into our teaching of design, the implications are radical. We would need to bring in an anthropologist, someone who has thought seriously about the problem of holding different ways not only of designing a city or constructing a building but of seeing the world. What we’re proposing now is indistinguishable from what everyone has been doing. It’s like holding a bazaar. If we go on this way, we’ll lose…”

  Erik looked up.

  Loss, that gets them. My friend David had been delighted by a paper that opened with the sentence “Loss has been found.” I looked at my watch. I would go to my office and call David. He and Sarah had gone to Cape Town for the week to be with her father, who was undergoing surgery.

  Nancy looked discouraged. She reminded people about the donor. “She’s serious about this.”

  Erik said we could not let ourselves be led by a donor’s agenda. It violated the spirit of academic freedom. A peroration followed.

  “The best predictor of the future is the past,” he concluded. It was his stock comment at search committee meetings when a candidate who showed promise had not yet published. Condemned to repeat. “We know of similar efforts to satisfy donors that have been well intended but have ended up as disasters”—a stab at Nancy. She didn’t flinch. “I’m afraid our funder may be disappointed, but our students need jobs.”

  I saw it. The closing. Craig looked at his watch, Erik stared out the window, Doug picked up the signal, Ian cleared his throat.

  I looked at Nancy. She met my gaze. She shrugged her shoulders. It was useless.

  Outside it was snowing again. Footprints led in both directions, some toward Kirkland Street, where the clock on the Busch-Reisinger Museum said twenty to twelve. The meeting had ended early. The snow swirled around me. Across the street, Memorial Hall, monument to the Civil War. Snow landed on the ledges of red brick, veiling the building like a shroud. I remembered that I had intended to call David, but it would be dinnertime in Cape Town now and probably he and Sarah were out. The footprints on the sidewalk were like the inlaid brass feet on subway platforms, showing the way. One pair veered off the curb. I followed them into the street, crossing the wet black asphalt, picking up the trail on the other side. It led up the steps into Memorial Hall.

  I stood in the cave of the entrance. I didn’t know anymore why I had come to Cambridge. To wrench myself into the familiar? A lecturer’s voice droned through the closed doors of Sanders Theater. Muffled, words indistinct. Only the tone of authority came through. Sentences coming to a dead stop. The voice then picking up again, rising into the sentence and then falling into conclusion.

  I was here. It was Monday, halfway through the day. He was there, in Budapest, behind the iron curtain. This building was a monument to war, to the aftermath of war. After math, there is…what? Science. I reached for logic, the blade that sliced. To cut through this universe, this university, to see into the core. I looked up into the dark spaces above me. The Victorian building had no ribs, no outward manifestations of inner structure. The lecture ended. Sporadic applause. Bravo. I thought of Tosca hurling herself from the battlements of the Castel Sant Angelo once she realized that her Mario was dead. Scarpia had fooled her into trusting him. The execution was not mock, a mocking of trust. She should have known.

  The doors of the lecture hall opened. Students poured out, pulling on coats, shifting their books, righting themselves, and heading outside.

  I went to my office and called Felicia. She was home, making a little lunch. “I’d love some company,” she said.

  I stomped the snow off my boots and walked into her embrace. “Here, take off these wet things.” She brushed the snow from the front of her dress. “Are your feet dry?” I felt like sobbing. I handed her my jacket and scarf. The house held the stillness of snow. She had set two places at the dining room table. “It isn’t much,” she said, bringing a salad and a plate of cold meats. “Paula’s away, but I warmed up the soup that she left. It’s one of her specialties, beans and barley.” Paula had been with Felicia for years.

  Two delicate white cups, porcelain ringed with gold, rattled on their saucers as she set them down. Steam rose into my face. “She puts meat in it and carrots—everything good.” She was watching me carefully. “I hope you like it.” I dipped the round silver spoon into the milky broth.

  When we first came to America and stayed with Felicia, her spacious house had welcomed us with quiet dignity. It was like walking into the Europe my parents had fled. Felicia wore stockings every day, even when she was not going out. She and Leo had left Berlin at the last possible moment, in 1939. He was in the diamond business, had contacts in New York. Her diamond ring refracted the light from the chandelier.

  “How is your project going?” she asked.

  I told her about the fishing community moving in. The artists as well. “I was very sorry that I couldn’t get there to see Tosca,” she said. She went to the Dolomites every summer, even after Leo died. Together they had helped set up the Window Shop in Cambridge, run by refugees who had brought with them the secret of Viennese pastry. The Mozart torte was Leo’s favorite. Felicia served it each year on New Year’s Day.

  Suddenly I knew I had to go back to Nashawena. It had been a bad idea to come to Cambridge. She watched me carefully as I finished my soup and helped myself to meat and salad. “Take a little more,” she said, indicating the roast beef with her fork. “The iron will be good for you. You look pale.”

  I had thought I wanted to talk with Felicia, but the house felt oppressive. Where was the ground that he had not stood on? The earth was falling away at my feet.

  I drove back along the Southeast Expressway, trying not to see, trying not to recognize what was happening. In one sense, nothing was happening, it had all happened, or nothing had happened. I was losing the tenses. I watched the gulls, like birds in a penitentiary, soaring over razor wire.

  When I got back to the island, it was almost dark. Anna and Tony were sitting in the living room, leafing through seed catalogues. They had made a fire. I sat next to it, grateful for the warmth. Anna looked at me sharply.

  “It’s okay,” I said. And I thought at that moment that it was. The house wrapped itself around me, and I sank into its comfort. The light of the fire intensified as the windows turned black.

  “Would you like a glass of wine?” Anna asked. I could see she was concerned.

  “No, I’m really okay now. I mean, yes,” I said, meaning the wine.

  Tony stayed into the evening, his presence reassuring. There were people around me. I was not alone. We talked about whether to grow bok choy.

  When Tony left, Anna pressed me. Why had I come back so soon? Had something happened in Cambridge? I couldn’t tell her, couldn’t put it into words. I fished the mail out of my purse to distract her. There wasn’t much. I didn’t say I had gone half-looking for a letter from Andreas. I couldn’t talk about it. Not even with her.

  The spring term did not start until February. That left two more months. I thought I would concentrate on finishing the island project. Now that people were living there, there was lots of activity. I would watch the community as it formed, see how they adjusted to the spaces, how the spaces affected their way of living and working. But my heart wasn’t in it.
I can see now that it had been a mistake to involve Andreas in this project. Everywhere I turned, I came upon him.

  Anna saw that, but I think I distracted her with my anger. She may have seen through that too. She would join me in berating him. The general point intrigued her: just when you thought someone was going to do something new, you discovered that in fact they were doing the same old thing. She said this happened all the time in therapy. But it was important not to give up.

  Tony was hanging around, and I could see Anna hesitating. I thought it was in part because of me. She had dropped her theory about sex versus intimacy. Now she said it didn’t have to be a choice.

  When I said I was going to stay at the shack on the ocean side for a while, that I wanted to work there because of the view of the sea and because I really needed to be alone—it was partly because of her. She had turned forty. The possibility of children would soon be foreclosed. She and Tony would be great parents. They raised oysters and vegetables. Why not children?

  That’s what I told myself.

  A writer had occupied the shack the previous winter and brought in a Jotul stove. In the beginning, the shack was a good place for me to work and offered a kind of sanctuary. I was reaching the end of my design work on the project, I thought I would start something new. The gray weathered boards, the door that secured with a clasp, the pulsating warmth of the stove. There was a ritual to living there, feeding logs into the stove, securing the door each time you walked in or out. I put my drawing table under the windows so I could watch the sea, and the days fell into a rhythm. The good light for working ended mid-afternoon. Anna would come around and we would walk the beach while the light turned gold and the sun sank into the sea, leaving a trail of pinks and reds. Usually I ate with Anna and Tony and listened to James Taylor with them. We didn’t talk much. Then I would walk back and fall asleep.

  I decided it was a good time to paint my room in the house—change the color while I was away. Tony offered to do it for me; there wasn’t much going on in the hatchery and nothing in the garden, so he had time. I moved my things out, carting a box of books and papers to the shack and leaving the rest packed up in the hall closet, where I also put my clothes.

  Do you want to know how it happened? I mean how it actually happened? Obviously I had thought about it. When he left. As a way of punishing him. In lieu of killing him perhaps. A kind of dumb show in a way. But then I was also thinking that I might be pregnant, that maybe I would have his child, because my period was late, and that occupied my mind for a time. I was involved with the end of the building season and the people moving in. Also, I was numb. And maybe it was the quiet of the shack, the sense of paring life down to the core, that led me to reflect on what had happened, like someone coming out of shock. Which is why I think it was so hard that day when I went to Cambridge. Because it was as if I had no skin. I had lost my shield.

  And then it was really one day. I was finishing the last of the drawings, sketching the landscape, putting in the wall to mark the eastern end of the site, filling in the stones one by one. And then I heard the word stone and thought of the day when we had skipped stones and talked about the saying “A rolling stone gathers no moss.” He said that in his experience, if you kept moving, you would not sink. It was the story of his life. But I didn’t hear it then. Like I didn’t see that Anton was consumed by jealousy, that it was a competition and he had to prove he was more of a man than Simon. Like Scarpia with Cavaradossi. The ending of Tosca was familiar, I had seen it happen: Simon, a man, taken out and shot.

  I suddenly saw what I had resisted seeing. He had said it right at the beginning, that he would keep moving. And I didn’t hear it. I thought he would stay.

  The world spun, the angles shifted. Suddenly it was clear. He knew from the beginning that he would leave me. He had said it. I had fooled myself.

  I got up from the table. I had to see. I had to see now what was the truth.

  In Greece, there are women who can read the bones of the dead, tell from the shape of the bones how they lived, where they stood in the community. I took my red jacket from the peg by the door and headed out into the wind. The ocean was opaque, slate gray, revealing nothing. I turned and let the wind carry me away from the sea.

  Anna was sitting at the kitchen counter when I came in. She looked up, surprised.

  “I’ve finished,” I said. “Done. Completed the drawings. Now it’s a question of waiting for the weather.” I didn’t want her to come too close. I regret now that I had to involve her, but it turned out she had moved my box with Andreas’s letters and the postcards and the Tosca things out of the hall closet and I didn’t know where she had put it. Tony was painting. I checked the color. Lemony in the graying light. “It looks great. Thank you so much for doing this.”

  “Why do you want those things?” Anna asked. She was standing beside me in the doorway. I moved away.

  “Because now that it’s over, I want to get rid of them, burn everything. I’m taking the old drawings for the site to the dump, and I thought I would take them too.”

  “Great,” she said, unconvinced.

  But I had drawn a cordon around me. There was no opening for her to enter.

  She told me where she had put the box. I retrieved it and headed out. I hadn’t taken off my coat.

  Going back, I was walking into the wind, feeling the brace of its resistance. It stiffened my resolve. Now I would see. Now I would know how it had been.

  The shack felt too warm, as if the stove were engulfing the room. I opened one of the windows behind the table, but everything started to blow, so I quickly shut it again and took off my sweater. The box was full to overflowing: when I removed the cover, papers spilled on the floor. I didn’t realize there was so much. Good, I told myself. Evidence. Now I will see.

  Do you know how sharp anger can be, how cutting, like a knife? When it is dulled, everything blurs, like paints running together turn a dispirited brown. I started in anger. I was going to burn his letters. I started reading them, one by one. The postcard from the aquarium with the lion fish on it that said, “Beware of lion fish!” The note he had left on my windshield one day. “Only a beautiful woman would park here.” And suddenly I was back in that time, as it was at that time. And it seemed real again.

  So then I lost my ballast. I had started burning the letters in the stove, and then I was fishing them out, half-burned. One was still on fire and it caught the ends of my hair, making a horrible smell. I dropped the burning paper onto the floor and put out the fire in my hair with my hands. It was getting toward evening, and the room took on an eerie glow. I watched the flame eat away at the edges of the paper, leaving a gaping hole surrounded by black char. Good. For a moment, everything righted.

  And then I came to a folder with the things from Tosca—the program, the notes that went back and forth, and then among the papers, the knife. It was a steak knife, not a stage knife. He had brought it to rehearsal one day when he felt that the stabbing had become mechanical. He wanted Tosca to feel the weight of a knife, its sharpness. She had seen it as a means of liberation—to kill Scarpia. What she hadn’t seen was the trick. When Scarpia gave the order for what he said would be a simulated execution, telling his agent to do it as they did with Palmieri, she didn’t know that Palmieri had been, in fact, shot. The execution would not be fake. The free-conduct passes were useless.

  I hadn’t seen it either. I thought it was real—the possibility of love and freedom. And then it was not. I had been tricked. Was it clear from the beginning, and I just didn’t see it, didn’t listen, didn’t take the story seriously, didn’t think I could be in that story? Voices from childhood came back: “You don’t listen, you will see.”

  All the signs pointed in one direction, like cormorants on a rock. Without thinking what I was doing, I began to move the blade back and forth across the skin of my wrist. It made a little slice, at the surface of the skin. It was like watching the gills of a fish, blood pulsating just at the
surface.

  I became transfixed. As in a dream when you are in the dream and also watching yourself in the dream. I threw the Tosca program into the fire and watched it burn. The one he had signed “love, A.”

  The sketches of the sets were more complicated. I was so angry that I had ever agreed to do those sets. I cut the drawings with the knife, slicing them into strips, and then the knife slipped and I cut myself more deeply. And then I was in another place.

  I watched the blood flowing and found it oddly comforting. The steady flow of red blood. A visible testament to my heart. That I had feelings, that I could bleed. That my heart was pouring itself onto this uneven floor. I took the knife and began cutting deeper along the line I had made in my wrist. I looked into the wound, trying to see the structure of the cells. I leaned forward. The ends of my hair dipped in the blood. I will write in blood, I thought wildly, with my hair. So people will know. The strands of my hair stuck together. And then another image crossed that one, of hair over my face, over my eyes, a screen of hair and blood, sticky, red in the sunlight, because it was noon and we were making love and I had my period and my blood was all over him. His eyes gentle, falling into mine like stars. We had fallen into each other precipitously, without thinking.

  I took the knife. I had to cut through the surface. I had to see inside, to see, to feel what was real.

  When I woke up, the light was ancient, yellow like parchment. I thought I had left this world. The white walls of the room were silent, cool in their silence, giving no clue. I didn’t know where I was. My mind began flipping through rooms I had slept in, houses we had lived in, summer places. It was too bare to be a hotel. And then I remembered.

  The shack hot and steamy. The fire. And I saw my wrist, bandaged.

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