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Kilban , Evergreen N0.53, April.'68 |
He stares at the gunmetal gray clouds in the white marbleized floor, unconsciously seeking reflections in the dull surface. It’s an old habit he thinks he’s broken. Self-regard, the obsession with one’s own image, he had concluded, was part of what was wrong with her, and with everything. He’d decided he would simply stop looking at himself, and had sunk his graduation money into a one-way ticket to Nepal.
At the monastery, it was easy to avoid reflections. There wasn’t much glass or electric light to strike it. The only polished objects were the copper pitchers and bowls, the burnished horns blown at prayer, the Mohawked helmets and bald pates of the monks. The bathrooms contained no faucets or mirrors; just pots, low wooden tables, and copper buckets of icy mountain water in which to dunk hands before leaving. The water was the biggest temptation; at first he’d had to resist the urge to examine himself before his hands broke the meniscus. Gradually, though, he had subdued this impulse, along with the others. He had stopped remembering his own face, and had almost succeeded in forgetting Lily’s, in forgetting her disquisitions on Degas, in forgetting the noises she made in her sleep, the laughter and little grunts he found almost unbearably erotic. It had become habit, after awhile, to close his eyes and lie on the hard cold bed and simply be still.
* * *
His body remembers how we tear the paper, how we wipe and pull the handle. How we prepare ourselves to sally forth from the stall without meeting the eyes of our neighbors - fly zipped, bag shouldered. He moves toward the vanity almost automatically. Before he has time to think about it, his body remembers what we do when we face a mirror.
After half a year of not looking, he barely recognizes what he sees. The hair that covers his skull is no longer than the stubble on his chin. Around his mouth and eyes, tiny creases make him look older than twenty-two. Subsisting largely on rice and tea, he’s lost maybe fifteen pounds, and his cheekbones and jawbone are now visible just beneath the skin. There is a tiny scar in the shape of Idaho high on his left temple. From beneath it, his eyes stare back at him.
In the time of flirtatious pub conversations, part of what had attracted him about Lily was the way she looked him straight in the eye, as if challenging him to look away, while her hands ranged over the bar, punctuating her points with a stab of her cigarette. She’d seemed to see something there that intrigued her: if not the arrogant glint he saw in her own eyes, perhaps a sympathetic lonesomeness.
One night after a couple of months in London, their talk had spilled over past closing time. Through rain-slicked streets they’d walked back toward the international dorm. She had continued to talk as they passed the blank building faces. He had tried to keep his wet hands warm in his pockets. Though neither mentioned it, both knew they would end up back in her room; a fog of inevitability surrounded them. They went through the motions of sitting on the edge of her bed, of passing back and forth a bottle of bourbon and talking about her dissatisfaction with her classes and her sense that things with Aaron were breaking up over the Atlantic.
“Sometimes I think you’re the only good thing to come out of this whole experience,” she said. Her hand had come somehow to rest on his thigh.
He didn’t feel good about it, morally, at the time. He still doesn’t; a glimmer of accusation lights the eyes in the mirror. But, he reminds himself, they were drunk, it was London, rain was on the windows - what else could have happened?
For two months, hardly anything else did. By the end of the semester, when they decided to travel to France and Spain and Morocco together, he had worked out a rationale, a system of beliefs necessary to explain why he was doing what he was doing; this was how Western religions worked, he would write later, in his thesis. He took it as an article of faith that Lily and Aaron hadn’t been destined for one another. And here she was, giggling in a photo booth at the train station as, behind its blind eye, the camera whirred, documenting the high spirits in which they left London. He looked relatively happy, smiling at a point somewhere to the left of the lens, and she, resting her head on his shoulder, seemed to have forgotten what she had described to him the night they first slept together as the awkward silences on the telephone. She never talked about Aaron anymore, and he never asked.
He let Lily keep the black and white photo strip of the two of them cheek to cheek.
* * *
He can remember when the faucets in public restrooms had knobs you were reluctant to touch. You’d turn them with your sleeve or elbows and submit your hands to the cloying pink soap and the gush of the sink. Now, you wave your hands underneath a motion sensor, hoping to activate a sprinkle of water. You can activate the hot-air blower the same way. You can exit the lavatory leaving nothing of yourself behind.
He looks down at the hands washing each other. Bluewhite suds roll off his palms, collecting like momentary seafoam in the tiny hairs on his wrists before dropping to the shallow porcelain and disappearing down the drain. Even with his conscientious ablutions, tiny veins of dirt remain beneath the nails. Unlike his face, his hands look young: deft and soft and long-fingered, like a violinist’s or surgeon’s. They have only recently been asked to do real work. Between two longer lines - health? fortune? - a truncated wrinkle predicts either a barren love life or an early demise, he can’t remember which. Their backs are small-pored and unblemished and unlike Lily’s.
Eight months after the fact, when he bumped into her in the campus coffeeshop, his wounds from Marrakech had long since healed, leaving only the mark on his forehead. Lily’s hands were still covered in scars. He knew better than to look, but couldn’t keep from glancing down as they stood talking in the entryway. There was something conspicuous about the way she now kept them below her waist.
People moved around them, coming, going. He was glad for the company - he and Lily could only be comfortable in crowds now - but the motion, like the noise of the espresso machine, distracted him from what she was saying. His mind was already running on several paths simultaneously - listening to her, trying to make small gestures toward ending the conversation, remembering Morocco, wondering if the cuts that crisscrossed her hands and wrists like roads on a map still hurt.
They hadn’t seen each other since the beginning of fall semester, six months earlier, when they had sat on a bench in the dappled sunshine and talked warmly. She had worn long sleeves despite the weather. She had told him that she and Aaron were back together. “He’ll never forgive you,” she said. “It’s not the most attractive aspect of his personality.” He said he understood, and wished them both the best, as though she had asked how he felt. After that, he took care to avoid places they might run into each other. He immersed himself in his thesis. He stopped going to his usual bar.
The lavatory tile that grids the wall behind him is colorless, industrial, the blue equivalent of beige. It acts as a backdrop for the travelers who pass into the toilets, then return, stopping off at the vanity to splash their hands through the water. Reflexively, they look in the wall-length mirror, to straighten ties or examine teeth for debris from lunch, or to brush errant hairs back against the sides of their sleek heads. They seem not to see him, and his body remembers how to seem not to see them.
This was the posture he’d been prepared to adopt, when he’d spotted Lily entering the coffeeshop. He noticed that she pretended not to see him either. So his surprise was genuine, hers feigned, when they passed each other and she said, “Oh my God, how are you?”
In the five minutes they stood there, chatting like old friends, she didn’t ask him anything about himself. Nor did she a week later, the night she appeared in his room. He and his roommates had scheduled a St. Patrick’s Day party, and though the weather was damp and cold and he wasn’t in the mood, he felt obliged to go through with it. No quantity of foamy keg beer seemed to enliven him, and sometime after one o’ clock, when the time ceased to matter, he dragged himself upstairs and lay down without closing the door or turning on the light. The sounds of the still-lively party mingled with the hiss of cars on the rain-slicked street below his bedroom window. The trees in the wind threw shadows on the ceiling. He didn’t look up when the doorway darkened.
“Are you in here?” she said.
He didn’t answer. She came in and sat down beside him.
“I didn’t see you downstairs, so I came up.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I was going to ask you the same thing.”
“I never liked St. Patrick’s Day,” he said. “I forgot to wear green.”
“You poor Protestants,” she said, and rested her hand on his cheek.
They stayed like that for a while. Then she leaned down and kissed him. He did nothing to encourage or discourage her. “You quit smoking,” he said, when it was over.
“I want to stay here tonight,” she said.
“Where’s Aaron?” he said.
“Does it matter?”
“I’m tired, Lily.”
“We could just sleep.”
“I don’t think think we could.”
Her features had grown distinct in the darkness. Behind her, leafshadows swam on the ceiling like a school of small fish. She was immobile, studying his face for awhile. Then she picked up her purse off the floor and left without saying goodbye.
* * *