Cynthia Huntington

“So, why don’t you sleep with girls?” “I’m not really attracted to girls.” “Are you telling me you were really attracted to every man you slept with?” Conversation with a friend 1. After twenty I stopped counting, not like my friend Beverly, who sewed an embroidered satin star on her bell-bottoms for every new guy she fucked. She had them running down both legs and around the billowing hem, and was starting up the inseam when the jeans gave out in the wash. It was a boys’ game anyway, those years of our extended homage to the penis: the guitar playing the penis, drums saluting it, cock rock, Molotov cocktail, the motorcycle gripped between the thighs, and I went down, we all went down, in the old cultural disaster of idol worship—a thousand-year bender. Only this time it was the adolescent member, oiled and laved, thrust forward arcing, thin with ache, all tight flesh poked upward, claiming its own. How it came and went, penetrating but never settling down, and how often we were caused to admire it: hairless sweet warrior, raider against the State. But I have this sweet pink flower here between my legs—I put my hand down and touch it, still soft and wet, and many-folded, endlessly opening, hiding, seeking, hidden and sought, but never very much admired or even smiled on in those years, never served much less sung to. Not a garden then but a citadel, a wall to be breached, a new land claimed, but linger there? No, I would say there was an overall lack of appreciation, though breasts were well respected, slopping loose under T-shirts like little animals, and I would feel my nipples brush the cotton with pleasure, see them regarded also with pleasure. Still, sex then was a taking, like spoils of war, a victory over all those straight fucks back home, marooned in the dismal suburbs that birthed us squalling and red and watched us flee in ungrateful cars down night highways. And God knows it felt good those nights. I was ready, it was ready, to open and answer the call. And take me down and roll me over, yes, and give it to me—but why all this riding away afterward? Where was everyone going and why didn’t I get to ride along? Who knew at first nothing had changed, just wanting the thrust and tug and slam up against the headboard, I should say so, but left still wanting more, wanting to leap out of centuries’ shame and be something new, not this old consolation of women for the powerless, some kind of cosmic door prize awarded just for showing up with a dick, some proof to themselves these boys were men. “You’re good,” he said. Hell, I wasn’t taking a typing test, I was fighting to live in a dying world. I was throwing myself away, an offering to wildest space, surrender to the mind’s dissolve, the body’s electric light, nerve endings firing like exploding stars. “You’re good,” they all said: you’d think somebody was doing a survey. Girls say yes to boys who say no, and then your professor asks if you’re wearing underwear, when you meet for your conference on the poetry of Yeats. Crossing the border after midnight in a borrowed car after a visit to the after-hours doctor’s office in Sarnia. Nodding out in the back seat, pills wearing off. He was a legend among undergraduates: cheap and reliable, always on call, until a month later the headlines screamed “Abortion Doc!” when a girl died in his office and he dragged her down to the river and dumped her body in the underbrush.

For ten years I would not say the name. I said: episode. Said: setback, incident, exacerbation—anything but be specific in the way this is specific, not a theory or description, but a diagnosis. I said: muscle, weakness, numbness, fatigue. I said vertigo, neuritis, lesion, spasm. Remission. Progression. Recurrence. Deficit. But the name, the ugly sound of it, I refused. There are two words. The last one means: scarring. It means what grows hard, and cannot be repaired. The first one means: repeating, or myriad, consisting of many parts, increasing in number, happening over and over, without end.

1. Living from pill to pill, from bed to couch, what doesn’t kill me only makes me dizzy. Pain dissolves like chalk in water, grit on the bottom of the glass. Waiting takes forever, throbs to the soles of my feet,Bella noche . . . Hives as large as mice hump up under my skin (“no more barbiturates for you, Cynthia!”) —itch, stretch, I don’t fit my flesh— sting, tingle, prick, the sorcerer’s threat. There’s a knife stabbed through my left eye. My right foot is made of elephant hide and weighs in at roughly one cartload of potatoes. Oxygen twenty-four hours; I’m swelled with steroids, prednisone buzz in the brain; a motel room with sixteen foreign workers sleeping in shifts, playing reggae at three a.m. 2. Oh I love my white pill that makes the black fist of pain unclench, unspasming the nerves. I float, released to darkness visible, worlds dissolving. And the yellow pill, bitter on my tongue, that wakes me at 2 a.m. writing out plans in Arabic to organize an expedition to the Pole. Drug of hubris searing my eyes, my scrawl unreadable in daylight: foil my enemies. Bitter taste of fugue, my hand shakes: some foreign being in my brain giving orders. You must You must You will. Later, the pungent brown liquor shoots the dark with threads of gold behind my eyes. One flash as the mind goes out. 3. I must elude pain float past clarity pain in the brain slammed down like a housefly. It’s a big dodge. Fly on a stovetop sizzle and ash pop. This is illusion, mental confusion born in the synapse. What can be undone down to the last gasp. It’s a hodgepodge. If you kill pain you will become pain; pain does not feel pain, no nerves in the brain. It’s a mind-fuck. It’s just your bad luck. A torpor sealed my brain I felt no humans near it seemed to me I could not feel or touch or see or hear. I don’t know who I am without my medicine. My skin will crawl with bugs if I don’t get my drugs. My brain’s a maelstrom, singing a sad song. Reality is so cruel. Prednisone oh prednisone so fast my mind racing, never tasting rest. Razzle-dazzle razz Fist bitch piss stitch witch . . . (only wait, the fit will pass.) fast, gash, lash, splash—QUIT! (I saw a werewolf in a white suit, walking past the tables at the Full Moon Café. Floppy bow tie, big furry hands.) Percodan, Percocet, let you go, let you rest. When the grip lets you go and you float like a note on the flow, there’s your life, there’s no worry— (yeah, it’s funky how the night moves.) Barbiturate babykins, narcotic slut, black oil of opiate. Chatty Cathy, dirty brat, bed-wetter, nasty pants. Painkiller, painkiller, I have a new friend, better than my old friend, plugging holes in the brain: Sigmund Freud, Sigmund Freud, Sigmund Freud, Cocaine! I want a soft landing; let me float. Once the seizure lifted me and threw me down. I did not like it. I did not like lying there on the floor looking up through air like green water. 4. And there is one so dark, a ghost, it passes through the mesh of thought without tearing a strand, whispering destinies perceived true, pronouncing sentences of death. 5. A cloud, the absence of a noun, no name, roaring far away in the summer dark like a train, or a giant fan, or a highway that never stops. The mind explodes in the dark of space, unnursed by atmospheres, as air raid sirens scream for blood and I am only nerves, strung on constellations, meridians and vectors quivering. A red and yellow capsule invades the chemistry of thought; cathode rays blast from the television screen and signals pass deep into space until the stars are singing “Rosalita.” You will not remember this night.

New houses relax on the fields. Garage doors open soundlessly to admit the monster. Tires stretched over forty pounds of air pressure float across gravel. The boy closes the last storm door on the last evening paper and runs to the car where his mother waits. She does not answer him; the door slam freezes her dreams. It is January. A dog chained to a barn door keeps barking. Somebody’s angry, scared to let him go. On the other side of a forest past these fields, wolves sniff the hard snow of the tundra. I lay beside the only tree for warmth, there where the pack might find me. The house takes care of us now. Look at the meat browning under the light. The refrigerator switches on; ice crashes into the tray. Here are locks in case someone wants to do us harm. Remember how the police had to pound and pound to wake us that night a white Cadillac leapt from the icy road into the arms of our maple! It hung there, empty, doors flung wide— it was a great white petal of a car, breathing under the gas-lights, opening and opening.

At first you didn’t know me. I was a shape moving rapidly, nervous at the edge of your vision. A flat, high voice, dark slash of hair across my cheekbone. I made myself present, though never distinct. Things I said that he repeated, a tone you could hear, but never trace, in his voice. Silence—followed by talk of other things. When you would sit at your desk, I would creep near you like a question. A thought would scurry across the front of your mind. I’d be there, ducking out of sight. You must have felt me watching you, my small eyes fixed on your face, the smile you wondered at, on the lips only. The voice on the phone, quick and full of business. All that you saw and heard and could not find the center of, those days growing into years, growing inside of you, out of reach, now with you forever, in your house, in your garden, in corridors of dream where I finally tell you my name.

I’ll take a bath when it snows, when I can look out the window up high and see the sky all pale and blank like a fish’s eye. And I know the boats won’t go out tonight, the fishermen drinking whiskey, locked in a bar-dream, the music rocking them deeper. It doesn’t snow enough here, though some would say otherwise, fearing accidents. But the paper boy, skidding uphill on his bike in light snow, knows better, making S-tracks when his wheels slide sideways. We really needed this snow, the old men will say, putting to bed the surface roots of trees, putting to bed the too-travelled streets. When everything is covered the earth has a light of its own; the snow falls down from the moon as everyone knows, and brings that light back to us. I needed this light. All day I kept by the window, watching the sky, a prisoner in my clothes, the wind felt dry and mean. Starlings stalked the yard with evil eyes —I hated them, and hated, too, my neighbor’s house where sparks from the chimney fell back in a stinking cloud—black ashes bringing no blessing. When the roads are covered, when the water is black and snow falls into the waves, the birds’ hunger swirls the air, dark lovely shapes. All hungers are equal now. I'll give them bread and seeds. I have no money; the whiskey is gone, and I must bathe in water. Fishermen, please do not go out in your flimsy boats tonight to chase after the cod and mackerel, to hook the giant eels. Go safe, go free. Let your feet leave trails through streets and yards, wandering home, your crooked voyages to bed.

Heart, oh heart, I sit here writing your name on pieces of paper, folded, hidden, misplaced . . . found again. There is the element of saying and there is the element of making: one needn’t choose. I am singing the dream out from the ice, asking it to carry me like a horse or a river, down and away. This day, here in paned-glass sun: the young waitress shaking out her apron and retying it flat across her stomach— a bit of vanity—her hair swept off her neck, crash of a milk bottle on the granite counter, cream spread in a mild pool toward the rim, and the roots of habit and longing briefly seized by the mind. So noisy here! The sound echoes out of years, brought to this showing forth, unrehearsed. It seems we wake and find ourselves repeating, embodying the ancient gestures by which we recognize ourselves completed. Not one of us could be born and invent life—it must show through us— the arm flung in the air, the coffee poured out, and down the street, someone hurrying by, head down against the wind. And a man and a woman come to an old grief, carved in them, carved into them —the old way of water wearing rock— by law, and the hatred between them is equal to the hope neither will release. Each wants to be whole, to embody all of time, when nothing in this world is whole, and this is by law. When my father said bitterly to my mother:you have changed, he meant, without meaning to say, how she had changed him. A man holds his head down against the wind. Yet the wind fills him with the dust of temples, the breath of the dead. The dream of the light inside the branches— a gleam of wet, glimmer that is a bud, the leaf within the bud. The photographer comes inside and closes the lens of his camera. Then he is the lens. Then my eye is the light. This is the element of saying. The young waitress flings a paper cup behind her, into the trash can. That is a saying. The cream swirled into the coffee, the sugar dissolving, disembodied, and the body of the manager disappears, swallowed into a doorway. The element of making is slow, uncertain as a temple, a falling forward, stitching back, like a stone wall, like the panes in an arched window, like a repetition chosen beyond necessity. Yet somehow we have seen all this before— the girl in the fur hat speaking syrup into a phone; the falseness of her charm is an ancient imposter, familiar and therefore true. A door is opened and falls closed. Suddenly at every table someone looks down and is reading— books, newspapers, calendars, reading tea leaves, reading bones. A woman in a periwinkle jacket: I am reading her shoulders as the day introspects. In dream the passive construction and the past perfect tense prevail: she was being pushed on a swing. The woman with many television credits gazes out the window, heavy with years, forgetting herself, forgetting sorrow, the false husband, the crippled child, the old plots forgetting, and it is suddenly lovely, as free as something read or dreamed; the young waitress with sun on her face—her unblemished face—looks up, from the middle of eternity, her desire immaculate in the moment. When a word is beautiful above all others—your name— when a woman appears as a bird of prey and we turn away, hoping not to be recognized—oh heart!— when the light on the branches flares in a window with no sky, this is old story reading us, these are springs from words laid down before and ahead of us, and in the moment we are making an answer.

Katherine, Katherine, Katherine, Katherine. Black hair, small cold eyes, whom you loved. Cock-tease Katherine, chewer of souls. The door blew open and she blew in, a ghoul. Black air, small cold wind, taking everything. Fish-eater Katherine, whose nails dig blood. I’m going to call her pinch-cunt, pickle-lip, piss-dribble, shit-smear, goat’s-meat breath. I want to throw stones at her mother’s corpse, send her children to name-change foster homes. May the coat she is wearing burst into flames and boil the flesh blistering off her bones. May she be refused in both heaven and hell and wander the earth forever without rest— a hungry ghost clinging to the rocks and trees.

It’s September: I’ve moved into town, into the attic of an old barn—a big open room I reach by climbing a ladder that rises through a hole in the floor. The room is long and high, with windows at each end, a row of skylights that leak rain, and shake and chatter in the northeast winds. I sleep beneath the roof’s steep pitch, my mattress flat on the boards, looking up at the high ceiling, where morning diffuses downward in grains of bright dust. This was the old painter’s studio. The light in those famous canvases is still here —he couldn’t carry it away with him— though his paintings took away everything else, opening space with a stroke of blue or yellow. I think of his violent loves, the stories they still tell about him here. But how quiet and alive his paintings were, how they quiver with the life not yet realized. The town is quiet in September. Sometimes I hear people talking in the street. Last night someone said they were going to wait for Michael, and a voice said that Michael had gone home. I walk the narrow path down to the marsh. Wind hard in the dunes. Rain as I’m returning, cutting through twisting streets, past gardens bent low with rain, their colors a wash of gold. I feel the air surround my body, feel it move between my legs and between each finger, as I walk, not mastering space, but in it. And when the clouds open, the sky suddenly wide and high, no roof of leaves, it seems there’s nowhere to go but into wind or water. I climb the narrow stairs that keep turning, twisting inward until they meet the ceiling, which opens and I rise through the floor, released into an openness I never learn to expect. At the yellow table I sit and read an interview with Picasso’s lover, Francoise Gilot, the only one to leave him and have another life. She says she was not destroyed by him, as the others were: “Because I am of the stuff that cannot be destroyed.” I felt something blow through me then. Some devouring wind. Surely, then, I am of the stuff that can be destroyed. Haven’t I felt it? The breaking of all I was? Don’t I sit and count my losses, here in this room where all the life I knew has ended, so bare with desire I seem to be eating sky? That’s how it is here: I’m lonely, sad; the wind blows along the roof and I can’t sleep. Rain runs down the walls and streams across the floor, leaving dirty puddles on the boards. A yellow table and a cupboard painted blue, three chairs that don't match, or even balance rightly, a dented bucket, its metal reflecting darkly what is, what cannot be taken away. What’s beautiful here? The whole thing is beauty, a clarity not in things but around them, complete. And still, I seem to remain, somehow, myself, to remain at least something, at a loss to know how much can be taken from me and leave me only changed, not ruined, alert in an emptiness so alive I recognized it as my life. What would be left, the shape of it then, this life? I said some beauty, or radiance, an endless space I fall into or am taken up by, a brightness that holds me, gathers light in the center of empty space, like a vision of the life I have not lived.