From

The Eyries

a novel, 2018

XXXX

When the days in the city were hot, and skin instantly slicked with sweat, reinforced by so much blinding, inert concrete, so much steel, Cassandra did not work. She considered employment with the vague notion of someone in half-paralysis, or bed-ridden: her ideas of movement were shot with the contours of her dreams, and her actual steps were small and self-serving. She read obsessively, fed herself on little things, and took walks, sometimes ending up at a gallery or a museum. Galleries did not suit her as she had no interest in the work of her contemporaries: it was like scalding her skin with boiling water to walk among these pieces hung to bright white, forbidding walls. When she saw that what was hung could not match the emotional weight she burdened her pieces with, she felt injured. And after a few minutes she would silently, blithely walk out.

But museums—through vast museum halls, especially the Metropolitan on 83rd street, she felt no envy, she drew no fatalities. She walked slowly and with absorbed interest through the Nineteenth and early Twentieth century rooms. She bored her eyes upon Manet’s Funeral picture, Picasso’s circus boy, and his blind man sat down to bread and wine—upon Van Gogh’s cypress trees, and the long vertical or horizontal canvases of flattened Byzantine-like rooms, somber, windowless interiors in which women were sewing, and their faces wore the oily light of the lamps of their time, perhaps her favorite—the Vuillards. She thought to herself in those times she would have married, and her husband come home when he said he would, and a baby be born to her, and a thousand needs and requests be made of her from some greater family, and her life have more inherited proportion, less individual vacuity. In such a closed in drawing room she would not have been an artist, but the women seemed part of a coven, and her heart beat hard before the pictures. She could not reconcile this quandary in herself.

She made her rounds depending on where she would not have to pay to enter. She could not have lived with it otherwise, her idle art walks. A paltry amount of loan run-off from the school year was all that was attached to her name, and anyway, Angél paid for most things. Yet she had to keep a gnawing anxiety at bay—it seemed more and more likely that Angél would not have to find normal work, and then how could she, his other, go fold up sandwiches behind a cafécounter or leave off waiting at home for him to bend down cocktails to foot-stools in a dark club? The fluid motions of the day, which for him ticked by automatic, like swallowing, were neurotic in her. She made only false efforts, jilted, half-awake efforts. Like the humid, turgid gathering and circling of a storm, doom descended upon her about three pm. The day was just too agonizingly long, and she had little purpose in it. Yet assigned, extraneous purpose would not do. More than one tentative suggestion by her mother on the phone was screamed down, the phone flung across the room. Around three she had to smoke a joint. But even after that, anxious, biting, rampant thoughts would clog her young body, and arrest a naturally agile mind.

She could navigate the mornings, yes, the softer condition of the city, when the early morning birds outside the scraggly tree were crying, and light was clear and palpable to her. Then she had her morning rituals after Angél left. She went out for coffee at a lonely café, and read by a window seat, usually Hemingway, then went outside to smoke a cigarette. In the café she also wrote and drew and sometimes painted with watercolors in a little book. Yet the ache, the swirl of dark moisture that foretold the heavy precipitation of three pm was never far, and invaded her consciousness even at the early hours. Everything she tried to do seemed at random, peripheral, aching with uselessness. The central thing, a central uniting raison d’être, so that her movements were the varying manifestations of a whole person was missing. It was missing.

She had a tunnel by which she could access the deeper, more centrally-located arches of herself, and this was by making a mantra of Angél and her own love. Though he must be a false idol to masquerade as the key to herself, yet the feelings that the imagining of his face called to mind were real and had roots. Thinking of him, her drawings were not vague or disinterested, but focused, and her words on paper could not be dashed off fast enough. Then there was the illumination that sometimes occurs in dark places, like the glow of stalagmites in a deep cave.

            After three pm came the black hours when the storm raged, and unknown destruction lay in wait. Seven, eight pm passes and he would not come, she would eat alone, and in thin desperation, her voice muddled in the bile of tears, call him at last. He would answer in cheeriness, but with a belying weariness that made the cheeriness of arbitrary construct, and tell her where he was. With renunciation she would take off after him. Sometimes these journeys were long—she traveled on foot, on bike, by train, thoughtlessly, and experienced peace only here, when his gravitational weight was pulling her, the only absolute reprieve from hours clenched, and yet without parameter. She even, taking pity on him, drew these periods out—she might ride longer than needed, take walking detours, as if to make apparent to him that her life had its own mystery.

            "Why do you want to come out with me kido?" Angél asked her. They were walking through an emptied Soho at two in the morning.

            Cassandra was leading her bike by the handlebars. "To be with you."

            "But I don’t get it. I’m out with other people and you don't try to talk to anyone but me."

            An ocean of silence was her answer. She was locked, chained to behavior she did not know how to break, that he could predict to the minute of an hour. How long precisely she would wait before she must call him, the maximum length of time between the call and her silent, pale-cheeked appearance upon which the gravity of her thoughts was too plain and mortifying to him. And no amount of laughter or airy conversation with others could alleviate it. They came up to their little stoop and Angél loped up the stairs two at a time and opened the door. So another night saw them disappear behind the thin walls of the apartment on Charlton Street.

            But monotony is only a ruse. August. To the North Fork where James' parents have a beach house. Angél had arranged that his god-brother would meet them there. They were to stay two days at the North Fork and then drive to Pennsylvania, and from there, finally, fly to Japan.

            They drove up into the long shadow of a house in late afternoon, perched on a little hill, which tumbled down to a rocky beach. It was the bayside of the ocean here, conch-like blue, gentle, pretending stillness. A whole party was assembled on the back lawn. Down at the beach the young men began to dig holes, James, Angél, and his godbrother Matthew. The people of the party gravitated between the sand-hole lobster laying ceremony, and a long white-clothed table on the grass where tiers of oysters, dishes of lemon, and many loaves of bread were set, as well as countless bottles of wine. In a big pit the boys laid down rocks, driftwood. Angél bent to light the fire, and blew tenderly on it. It soon was blazing low and energetic, with red sparks now and then tossed up from the wind that caressed the bay. The sun was half-sunk, lolling pale yellow upon the gentle rippling water. People were wandering around the grounds or down the beach talking and drinking, and there were a few children who splashed in their bathing suits. Annabelle walked up the narrow stretch of beach in a long white dress, with her wavy chestnut hair tied back, holding the arm of a friend, laughing and talking. The fire was raked over and a few older men brought down the deep red, sea-flecked lobsters in big bins, their claws tied, their lives clenched, and some whole potatoes and corn wrapped in tinfoil, all carried down in a procession, and carefully arranged over the steaming seaweed Angél himself was laying.

Cassandra watched from a rock thrust out on the bay. She saw the flaring and taming of the fire and the futile thrashing of the blood red lobsters. She watched the children ushered away by their mothers, women in their thirties, cooly dressed, as the tide gently rose higher. She sat with her knees drawn up in a wrap dress, with a bathing suit underneath, tying up her hair, proud and straight-backed in her isolation, with the keen, serious, cold-gleaming eyes she could not help but wear. Though a mask merely, for her heart writhes in despair like one of the children dragged from the water’s edge and hanging on his mother’s arm while she talks and drinks and has little to do with him. Tall tiki torches were lit all around the yard and she turned her head to see their catching, wind-blown flames. The sky bared its last slashes of light. She saw Annabelle and her friend crouch down by the young men around the lobster bake. Then her heart leaped. At a small thing. A sign, a miniscule validation, which she needed now at least once a day, creeping on every hour—like the junkie and his heroin. Angél was turning his head, looking for her. She slid off her rock and came silently up to him. She was taken under his open arm, to the damp, warm, sea-clinging smell of his underarm, being so near to the waves, that was tainted with the faint musk of cigarette smoke.

            The lobsters had to cook for an hour. The seaweed blackened and crisped; grey smoke cut a tower through the clean blue night. Lights could be seen around the bay in the houses up against the shore, but there were not many. The bay stretched out, fathomless, joining the ocean somewhere out there, nebulous. Close at hand little red, floating flares of someone or other’s cigarette. Angél rolled up a joint and passed it around. Cassandra sat to Angél’s right, and to his left at a space was James with Annabelle sitting straight backed before him. Angél passed the joint to Annabelle’s outstretching, thin, mobile hand, and she raised it to a wide, laughing mouth. Features had become hard to distinguish; all the true, gathered light was up at the long table on the lawn. Yet Cassandra, hard at thought and with deep focus, discerned the no longer truly young face, the long, thin, laughing mouth, and hair smooth and gossamer as silk that clung to the neck of Annabelle. She let herself be nourished on the thin sustenance of a physical comparison with this woman. Annabelle already had a line between her brow, and faintly about her mouth; she had a mature, thin terseness to her, an angularity that had hardened in the wake of the full flush of bloom which suffused Cassandra’s body now. This was soured, bitter comfort. Angél was drawn to her. Cassandra was too intuitive not to notice. And James, who it seemed he most admired, had chosen this woman against all womankind his own age, with their clumsiness and inexperience and fresh faces. Her reedy voice like a low G chord kept the young men’s ears respondent, their boyish voices clamoring to respond. Each time Annabelle spoke, which was frequently, Cassandra swallowed what felt like raw salt down her throat. She knew Angél didn’t care for superficialities. This woman had self-command and a sole trajectory she had not—an art career, a business, a sound bank account, clothes tailored to her. All she could levy in response when jealousy hammered at her heart was—youth, youth! Followed by in a meek tone, tenderness, devotion.

            “You want more kido?” Angél dangled the half joint before her.

            “All right,” she said, and took a drag of her perpetual, becalming medicine.

            Finally the lobsters were cooked and the entire party sat down to the long table draped over with plain cloth, brushed in the changeable light of flames from the tiki torches.

            "We're doing well but it's a bitch of a job," Annabelle was saying, her not terribly white teeth showing through her wide mouth. Her narrow shoulders rose and fell. "Scuze me. Growing up in New York City, not so good for niceties."

            James was next to her, a tall figure, not eating but looking at his father with one arm casually thrown over Annabelle's chair.

            "And do you make art yourself, Annabelle?" Mr. Thornfield asked.

            "I'm afraid not. I do take photographs for my own amusement. My father really usurped that one. I have a sister though who's making a meager attempt. His are big shoes to fill and she's trying painting. I don't envy her."

            "Annabelle is amazing as a gallerist, father, though she's modest about it," James said.

            "Can be a good business," was Mr. Thornfield's answer.

            "When am I needed next Annabelle?" Angél asked in a resounding voice.

            Annabelle gently picked at the collapsed flesh of her lobster with a fork. "Oh as soon as we ladies need a young man's hands, sweetheart, but right now we're showing miniatures. A wonderful artist from the Czech Republic," she said effusively, the last part as if aside to Mr. Thornfield.

            Angél lowered his head and bit into his corn. Lobster lay untouched on his plate. Cassandra was slowly eating hers. It was moist, almost as if smoked meat, brightened by the cut lemons to the side of every plate. The blunt side of Angél’s arm was against hers, his legs swung in the opposite direction towards James and Annabelle. To Cassandra’s immediate right sat Matthew, a dark-haired, bearded young man akin to a somber, acutely staring portrait of the writer Vsevolod Mikhailovich hanging in the Met. Matthew was eating his lobster voraciously, snapping the legs with his fingers. Angél’s head was turned away, gazing at the couple, at the gallerist, and Cassandra, so botheringly over-aware, was beginning to feel in the clutches of a burning tropical disease. Her breath was quickened, her skin felt clammy, too tight, and the food became gray and at the same time too extravagantly salted. But she was cold, too. Perhaps in a dark winter’s briar, oh, desperately attending to this futile passion, her throat dry and parched for water, for fresh greens, spring, and feeling only these automatic caresses in the night, these timed, expected caresses. Constantly renewed everything must be—almost like her oil derricks, a century old and madly penetrating the same spot. Was this all for pleasure? The dear sweet taste of life’s potentialities was gone from her—Pleasure! She raised her eyes. The sky was total blackness, and the stars as if to say nothing could be done looked to be wanly retreating. Annabelle cried another long laugh from her long, wry mouth.

            "Well," Matthew said, chewing lobster audibly, "Cassandra, what are you up to these days? Angél hasn't told me much."

            She could not answer. Her stomach was submerged in the warm saltiness of self-pity, and all her faculties were failing her. Her cheeks lost their blood. Her awareness had gone down, out of the present, out of the tumult and swing of the world and all its seductive absorption, for the world did not make her—the world was not helping her. Down she flung herself, deep into the very primal waters of herself. Searching, searching for what she was. Meanwhile all normal processes were arrested; she could barely swallow, or lift her eyes.

            "Good food, huh?" Matthew managed.

            "I’m not up to that much right now,” she answered softly.

            "You go to school Angél said?"

            "Yes.”

            “He said you paint, too. Is that what you’re studying?”

“Yes and no,” was the quiet reply.

“Hm. Annabelle!" Matthew cried out, and the gallerist leaned forward in her chair, her wide hazel eyes glittering in the torch light.

            "What, Matty?"

            "Have you seen Cassandra's paintings?"

            Annabelle glanced at the younger woman whose gaze was averted.

            "No I'm afraid not. I will take a look sometime."

            Angél now turned to Cassandra himself. "She is a good painter," he said roughly from the back of his throat.

            “How do you and Annabelle know each other, Matthew? Angél tells me you live out in Los Angeles,” Mr. Thornfield rejoined, “and that you two are godbrothers.”

            "Oh yeah, our mothers have been friends for like thirty-five years. But LA and New York, you know, they’re really connected. I met Annabelle years ago in the city. I take pictures for different editorial and fashion projects, so she was around then doing some fashion stuff. I've known her about ten years.”

"It's a small world even in New York City, isn't it?" Mr. Thornfield said.

            "It is father," James answered.

            "I understand Angél you've been in an important exhibition, so James tells me," Mr. Thornfield went on.

            "Oh, yes, sir. I feel really grateful for it. In Los Angeles."

            “My friend’s gallery,” Matthew chimed in.

            "Maybe you'll be exhibiting him instead of having him move your artwork all around soon, Annabelle," Mr. Thornfield said, wiping his mouth with a cloth napkin.

            Annabelle answered with a slow, smiling glance at Angél. “Sure, I’d love it.”

            The torchlight cast little ebbing circles about the faces around the table. A waning half moon had come out, high above the ocean. Empty, cracked lobster bodies filled bowls down the center of the table and coffee was being brought and poured around from various french presses by Lupe and a couple others whose rounded arms and low faces became touched by the light of the torch flames. Any gap in the conversation brought the ocean’s lapping to Cassandra’s ears.

            When the coffee and dessert, raspberry and blackberry pie, were finished, the older adults retreated into the house, and the younger moved down to the strip of sand before the ocean to build up a fire in the lobster pit. They sat around close, growing, leaping flames. Faint smoke, a hair darker than the night sky, towered and thinned into nothingness. A blunt was rolled and passed around. Angél took deep drags when it was passed to him and Cassandra, pressed up against his arm, very faint ones.

“I think I’ve had too much wine,” she murmured to him.

He squeezed her shoulder, and was laughing. She could feel the rumbles in his chest from the laughter. The glancing hot flames, the heavy dinner, Angél's chest warmed with blood and life, the encircling smoke, and the ocean carrying cold bright beams on its waves from the moon, broken and swollen upon the waves, filled her like high tide come to an ocean cavern, fleshing her vacuity. She may be nothing more than what was eaten and lost every successive second, a tableau of presence. The thought soothed her.

            Angél in time picked Cassandra up and carried her up the hill, darkened with all the torches blown out, to the main house. He walked into a shadowy room, his feet in thin-soled canvas shoes slipping quiet over Moroccan rugs, his hips brushing past wicker chairs and heavy bookshelves, and went up a creaking stair to the upstairs. He took her to a little room halfway down the length of a hall where he had set their bags earlier, where a bed was pushed up against a big cracked open window letting in a breeze, and a moving white shell of moonlight, and laid her down over the comforter. As soon as she was down and his firm footfalls were retreating, Cassandra spoke.

            "Where are you going?"

            "Back out to the beach. You fell asleep."

            "You won't lie with me?"

            "Uh—Cassie, you fell asleep and they're all still hanging out."

            "I know, but, I haven't spent any time alone with you."

            "We are alone constantly.”

            "You're being mean to me."

            "I don't want to do this right now. I'll see you in the morning."

            "You won't sleep here?"

            "Yes," he answered, rough, "I will, but I'm not going to see James for a while, since we're going to Japan next week and we'll have plenty of time alone then, so yes I will sleep here but I'm going to go now."

            "Okay, you go, but... I don’t like that you’re upset."

            "I’m all right."

            "What’s wrong?"

            "Nothing. You're almost like a different person than when I met you. So awkward and strange."

            Cassandra craned up on her elbows, her hidden face, with the moonlight cooling her back, breaking with tears, and she covered her face with her hands.

            "I don’t know why you’re not happy."

            "I am happy,” she mouthed meekly, her shoulders like little moons. “It’s just hard for me—all these other people who get to know you, who I can’t possibly be—"

            The door was shut, not slammed, because Angél’s ingrained sense of deference to his elders checked even his strongest emotions, so the door was simply shut, and his footsteps hurried away, the stairs groaning under his weight, and the downstairs floor receiving a bound from his skipping the last two stairs.  

            “It’s not only that,” she murmured in the dark, drunk on their disparities, “I am out of place, out of sync, and I wish I were you.”

            Cassandra tried to close her eyes; she entered a place that cannot be well described, a place visited by those who must escape their present forms, and curl against Immortality. Here there is no self, no recognizable body. The hinge of despair is the door to this place, at whose threshold feelings too hot are flooded with cold calm. A numbness out of time cradled her, but would not let her sleep. It is a realm of consciousness, limbo, and the entryway demands sleep as a sacrifice for the calm. In the morning she opened her eyes, knowing she had not slept but not really been awake, to see Angél lying next to her. She beheld the back of his dark head, his naked arms, and sleeping hands above the sheet with his nails dirty from smoking, from the sand on the beach. Sunlight caressed his shoulder as the moon had caressed hers and her eyes feasted, at the tone of her impossible loving, of which she could find no cure. She would not move or touch him, but was as still, as watchful as a cat bent on hunting, or protecting the tender, weak bodies of its young.