Mary Jo Salter

My husband has a crush on Myrna Loy, and likes to rent her movies, for a treat. It makes some evenings harder to enjoy. The list of actresses who might employ him as their slave is too long to repeat. (My husband has a crush on Myrna Loy, Carole Lombard, Paulette Goddard, coy Jean Arthur with that voice as dry as wheat ...) It makes some evenings harder to enjoy. Does he confess all this just to annoy a loyal spouse? I know I can’t compete. My husband has a crush on Myrna Loy. And can’t a woman have her dreamboats? Boy, I wouldn’t say my life is incomplete, but some evening I could certainly enjoy two hours with Cary Grant as my own toy. I guess, though, we were destined not to meet. My husband has a crush on Myrna Loy, which makes some evenings harder to enjoy.

They’ve perched for hours on that window-ledge, scarcely moving. Beak to beak, a matched set, they differ almost imperceptibly— like salt and pepper shakers. It’s an event when they tuck (simultaneously) their pinpoint heads into lavender vests of fat. But reminiscent of clock hands blandly turning because they must have turned—somehow, they’ve taken on the grave, small-eyed aspect of monks hooded in conferences so intimate nothing need be said. If some are chuckling in the park, earning their bread, these are content to let the dark engulf them— it’s all the human imagination can fathom, how single-mindedly mindless two silhouettes stand in a window thick as milk glass. They appear never to have fed on anything else when they stir all of a sudden to peck savagely, for love or hygiene, at the grimy feathers of the other; but when they resume their places, the shift is one only a painter or a barber (prodding a chin back into position) would be likely to notice.

From now on they always are, for years now they always have been, but from now on you know they are, they always will be, from now on when they cry and you say wryly to their mother,better you than me, you’d better mean it, you’d better hand over what you can’t have, and gracefully.

The music was already turning sad, those fresh-faced voices singing in a round the lie that time could set its needle back and play from the beginning. Had you lived to eighty, as you’d wished, who knows?—you might have broken from the circle of that past more ours than yours. Never even sure which was the truest color for your hair (it changed with each photographer), we claimed you for ourselves; called you John and named the day you left us (spun out like a reel— the last broadcast to prove you’d lived at all) an end to hope itself. It isn’t true, and worse, does you no justice if we call your death the death of anything but you. II It put you in the headlines once again: years after you’d left the band, you joined another—of those whose lives, in breaking, link all memory with their end. The studio of history can tamper with you now, as if there’d always been a single track chance traveled on, and your discordant voice had led us to the final violence. Yet like the times when I, a star-crossed fan, had catalogued your favorite foods, your views on monarchy and war, and gaily clipped your quips and daily antics from the news, I keep a loving record of your death. All the evidence is in—of what, and to what end, it’s hard to figure out, riddles you might have beat into a song. A younger face of yours, a cover shot, peered from all the newsstands as if proof of some noteworthy thing you’d newly done.

6:48 a.m., and leaden little jokes about what heroes we are for getting up at this hour. Quiet. The surf and sandpipers running. T minus ten and counting, the sun mounting over Canaveral a swollen coral, a color bright as camera lights. We’re blind- sided by a flash: shot from the unseen launching pad, and so from nowhere, a flame-tipped arrow—no, an airborne pen on fire, its ink a plume of smoke which, even while zooming upward, stays as oddly solid as the braided tail of a tornado, and lingers there as lightning would if it could steal its own thunder. —Which, when it rumbles in, leaves under or within it a million firecrackers going off, a thrill of distant pops and rips in delayed reaction, hitting the beach in fading waves as the last glint of shuttle receives our hands’ eye-shade salute: the giant point of all the fuss soon smaller than a star. Only now does a steady, low sputter above us, a lawn mower cutting a corner of the sky, grow audible. Look, it’s a biplane!— some pilot’s long-planned, funny tribute to wonder’s always-dated orbit and the itch of afterthought. I swat my ankle, bitten by a sand gnat: what the locals call no-see-’ums.

Wind whistling, as it does in winter, and I think nothing of it until it snaps a shutter off her bedroom window, spins it over the roof and down to crash on the deck in back, like something out of Oz. We look up, stunned—then glad to be safe and have a story, characters in a fable we only half-believe. Look, in my surprise I somehow split a wall, the last one in the house we’re making of gingerbread. We’ll have to improvise: prop the two halves forward like an open double door and with a tube of icing cement them to the floor. Five days until Christmas, and the house cannot be closed. When she peers into the cold interior we’ve exposed, she half-expects to find three magi in the manger, a mother and her child. She half-expects to read on tablets of gingerbread a line or two of Scripture, as she has every morning inside a dated shutter on her Advent calendar. She takes it from the mantel and coaxes one fingertip under the perforation, as if her future hinges on not tearing off the flap under which a thumbnail picture by Raphael or Giorgione, Hans Memling or David of apses, niches, archways, cradles a smaller scene of a mother and her child, of the lidded jewel-box of Mary’s downcast eyes. Flee into Egypt, cries the angel of the Lord to Joseph in a dream, for Herod will seek the young child to destroy him. While she works to tile the roof with shingled peppermints, I wash my sugared hands and step out to the deck to lug the shutter in, a page torn from a book still blank for the two of us, a mother and her child.