A Simple Story

A Simple Story

by A. Diao Lavina

The day was unlike any other but it was like any other: clear sky, sun, slow like Southern honey when it pours. The cliff would crumble, I thought, crumble and crack and fall crashing to the blue; it would storm suddenly, heavy black rolling in from the Atlantic, a torrent to soak our skins, soak our hearts so heavy they would drown and then float, float in the wake of the violence and anguish, melt into the sea and become one in their nothingness. I would swirl into you and see you as a transparent mirror, I would dance your curve of a ripple and cap you with seafroth, I would roll into you and sweep into rockpools with you to startle small crabs and limpets.

But the day was unlike any other but it was like any other. The earth stood still, the sea lulled and glinted, the heat rose to make eyes squint and threaten tears. Turn around, I thought. Turn around.

You stood on the deck of the ferry, leaning lightly on the rail, you were motionless in the hurry of activity around you. Othr passsengers passed you like blurs of color, but you stood apart, looking out to the water. You had your back turned to shore, turned to me. Your shoulders were still. You did not turn around, not until the ferry had cast off from the island and you were a small figure, the glare of the sun pulling shadows over your face like some senseless veil, only then did you turn and stare towards shore and I could not see your eyes.

It astonishes me when I come upon it. The day is one of those unbelievable ones in the South, honey-dripping-bees-buzzing-pavement-sizzling, and everything smells enticing like honeysuckle in some secret garden unmapped or pancakes at Grandma's when we were children. There is something anticipatory in the way the sunlight weaves its way down through the foliage, the way it winks through gaps in the leaves. I can't wait to see the ocean; Julia has given me Cottage Four again this year. I hurry down the trail lugging my Notebook and backpack.

It astonishes me when I come upon it.

It is dry already, on a piece of cloth on someone's worktable dragged onto the clearing northwest of Cottage Four. A clay face. It has been made to look like woven wicker. Around it are tools for scraping and carving, several odd things (the soft part of a Scotch Brite synthetic sponge? fishing nylon? a ball of brown string, beads). An uneaten portion of that day's lunch, tuna salad, I think, Wow this person got here early, I just checked in today. I peer at the name on the lunch box: S. Mensch, Cottage Nine. S. Mensch has the other cottage fronting the Ocean, the one at the bottom of the cliff.

My eyes are drawn to the face. The maker has molded the contours of the face with strips of wicker, to the last telltale curve of each woof upon warp. I can see where the maker's hands touched with the tools, slowly, intentionally. A face with intention. Each line is an intention. The wicker-looking strips break in some places, and there are uneven gaps between them, as if tension of woof upon warp had tautened the strips into separation, but they possess a fluidity that make the lines seem somehow endless. S. Mensch doesn't waste lines.

"Who are you," I ask, unaware I have spoken aloud until my voice has faded and I feel shy and foolish.

An impulse hits me: Touch it. The thought is vaguely shocking, makes me shudder inwardly. I look around. Nobody else is here, yet I feel like a violator of the artist's workspace, I am trespassing on hours spent in a trance.

I do not touch the mask; to do so without permission seems wrong.

Richard the playwright pours us both Camparis with soda and shakes his head at my question. "Mensch? No, darling, never heard of him." He turns to hand me the drink. "Why?"

I sip the drink. "Curiousity. I thought there was a Mensch checked in."

Richard flips a wrist to dismiss the matter. "I saw the guest list when I got in yesterday. No one by that name."

I nod and turn to the young man who has been making his way to us and smile as he smiles. He extends a hand to me and says, "Hi. Paul Astin."

"Hello, I'm--"

"Oh. I'm sorry, darlings," gushes Richard, "Paul Astin, Ellen Brink. She does words."

We smile and nod to each other, then Paul offers, "I thought I recognized you from the poster print in Julia's library."

I hate being recognized. But I smile and ask, "You write?"

"No. Watercolors."

"Welcome to the Colony."

His smile has become a permanent fixture of the subtlely-lit room. In the six years I have returned to the Colony, I have never met anyone, rookie or no, who was as visibly excited and turned on by other artists as this guy. Fortunately, Richard rescues me from any more questions and pasted-on, eerie cheerfulness. They exchange impressions and I am left to let my eyes wander, muttering, "I wonder where Julia is."

I have kicked myself for this habit of mumbling things, and I kick myself again as Paul the Smiling Man turns to me and asks, "This is your sixth year, eh? How do you like Julia?"

Richard winks at me and says to Paul, "Julia is secretly in love with Ellen, Paul. She always gets the cottage with the best view in the whole Colony."

I elbow Richard and say to the flustered Paul, poor kid, "Don't believe everything Richard tells you, Paul--"

There is a sudden hush in the room, and I know the lady of the Colony has arrived. Elegant as ever, Julia glides across the room, greeting each guest as she passes, pausing to exchange words of welcome and encouragement. When she reaches the center of the room, the attentive silence is complete and she addresses us in that soft, graceful voice, "Ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Edward Perry Artists Colony. Your work has been noted by the Colony's patrons, and consequently you have been invited here, free from the distractions of ordinary days--"

"Yummy men," Richard hisses in my ear.

"--so you may give your work all the attention it deserves for an entire season. Now before we move to the dining room, let me introduce the guests." She introduces each one: a composer, a couple of novelists, a painter, Richard and myself, and the rookies, Paul and a screenwriter. Eight of us. No Mensch. I don't know why this should disappoint me, but it does. For some reason I really want to meet this Mensch who makes faces.

After dinner Richard and I sprawl on the verandah chairs to sip espressos and smoke cigarettes.

"Paul is sort of cute," chuckles Richard.

I groan. "Richard, you know the rules. He's a rookie. You're going to scare the shit out of him."

"Well. At least I want to talk, you know, make a connection."

"You know Rule Numero Uno--" I start.

"--Yeah, yeah, don't bug the other guests," he sighs, "but Ellen darling, I need some intellectual intercourse with someone who won't throw illegitimate verbs at me."

"You're impossible. The only times you may have this much-needed intercourse is evenings at dinner."

Richard turns to me with a smirk on his face, extinguishes his cigarette in the ashtray, says resolutely, "Very well, darling. I am leaving you at this gauche activity and going in for much-needed intercourse with the watercolorist."

The moon hangs low and lights the small paths to the beach. Past the silent cottages with darkened windows, I make my way down, peering at the moon, thinking a quiet walk is so much better than getting drunk at the main house, talking shop.

I get to the crest of the last sand dune, stand there inhaling. Salt air. Wind whips in from the Atlantic, seeps through the linen jacket I'm wearing, and although warm, makes me shiver.

To my left: a splash. Someone is swimming with strong, efficient strokes. I watch the limbs lift from the dark water, plunge, lift, plunge. The flash of arms stop as the swimmer reaches shallow water.

The body emerges.

Her hair clings closely to her head, she sweeps it back with both hands, and as she bends her arms her muscles tauten. She walks to a pile of clothing, pulls a long white dress over her head after shaking loose the sand. Picks up a pair of sandals. Starts walking away. In the moonlight her shape grows dim as she leaves the beach and disappears into trees.

I stand looking after her, wondering whether I have just had some kind of hallucination. The moon rises over the sea.

That night I fall asleep thinking of things I should not perhaps have witnessed, and it makes me as a thief breaking and entering another's rooms.

By seven-thirty the next morning I have been up writing for hours. I hear the breakfast pail softly clang against the door to Cottage Four and seconds later the barely imperceptible crack of a twig as Louise the kitchen maid shuffles away. As I am retrieving the pail with bagels, cream cheese, oranges and fresh thermos of espresso, the light hits me. Morning light on Tupelo Island, Georgia, is full and sensuous, its yellow of the quality that beckons and teases and winks. One must cease. One must desist. One must take a walk.

Barefooted and barely caring, swinging the breakfast pail, I head out northward on the dunes. The water laps at the sand and there's hardly a breeze, but once in a while a gentle wind attempts its way inland. The sand squeaks under my toes.

When I reach the foot of the slope that ascends the cliff, I feel perfect. (Is perfect a feeling?) The gulls are calling, fighting over bits of stray herring, swooping and demonstrating freedom. Beauty loves some drama, I think, giddy and drunk with the light. Damn that I don't have shoes on; I traipse up the slope.

It is when I reach the rim of woods, just before the cliff leveled onto its plateau, when I see you. You stand near the edge, you stand looking out over the water. You wear the white dress, and you are still. The sun plays with your dark hair, changes its color to a lighter shade, and creates a silhouette of your body under the dress with soft purple shadows. Momentarily you begin to move, and when you stoop I can see that you hold gull feathers in one hand. You pick one up, examine it, discard, pick up another, examine, keep. I observe you do this for a few minutes. Abruptly you stiffen and I know you have sensed me. Slowly you straighten up and turn. My breath seizes upon itself like a clenched fist in my throat.

You wait as I approach. Strangely, everything has stopped moving; even the gulls' cries have grown muffled.

The clearest thing at the moment is how you hold my gaze. Our eyes lock.

"Hello."

"Hello," I echo, "you make masks."

I dream of taking you in front of the long mirror in my studio apartment in Boston. You wear a white, man's shirt tucked haphazardly into loose jeans with frayed cuffs. Under your bare feet the wooden floor stretches infinitely, and around you the light fills the room, almost liquid, thick and languid. We swim in it. We speak and I nod although there is no sound save the rush of blood in my head. It takes years of seconds for my hands to reach your face. Your skin crumbles underneath my fingers and becomes ash, bits of you clinging to my palms and fingertips, and in a mad flash of motion I pull your face close to my face. When I kiss you I catch fire.

I dream of taking you, ashen and crumbling, in both hands, of pounding you into fine powder, of smearing you onto my face, arms, every part, to wear you like war paint, bridal gray, Greek actor clad in white clay, chanting a tragedy.

Dancing a whirling dervish scattering shadows and ash over the world whitened and blank. Spinning recklessly, falling into places, corners I had not previously known.

The world burned away and I danced covered with your ashes.

In the dawn I make a list of words:

alluring

purposeful

intentional/accidental

message

conceptual

perceptive

mysterious

:but I know the list is you.

I work until 7.30 and then take the breakfast pail, lope toward the cliff, shambling with shoes on the sand. Slower, slowing down at the sight of your windows. Curtains open. Clear glass. My steps trickle. You are asleep or out or silently working on a mask.

The cliff is empty (what did I expect?). Gulls feathers flutter, stuck in the yellowing grass.

I stake a patch of precarious cliff overlooking the drop. Start peeling an orange. Alluring: curve, pith, silence, color. Eating an orange is some determined meditation. The plush breaking of thin skin with the teeth, the spray of flavor taking over the mouth.

Purposeful: deliberate lifting away of inch upon inch of peel, trailing unbroken string of it. Intentional/accidental: removing the clinging fibers from the slices, separating the slices, all pristine until a fingernail pierces the odd one, juice on fingers.

Conceptual: sipping espresso, warmth down the chest. Sun.

Perceptive message: peeling oranges atop a cliff entertaining lone guest for breakfast, thinking of mystery: you.

In the late afternoon I string words together.

S. Mensch

We met on the cliff the other day. I was the

Wandering Aengus with the breakfast pail.

Would you spare some time to talk,

sometime? 'Til time and times are done,

so I may know where you've been

since dinner at the main house has missed

you or you it.

If this is an intrusion,

please discard and forgive.

E. Brink, Cottage Four.

It is possible, even marginally, that moments pass inside of us rich with meaning, crammed with circumstantial evidence of some pivotal significance, yet remain unperceived because we are not paying attention. It is possible that sometimes we may be blind to the inner workings of our own hearts. And apparently the matter of beginnings is arbitrary as the fall of rain or of footsteps.

Four days of silence from you is only four silent days if I perceive it that way. I was not paying attention.

I am frantic with words. They stream in and clamor for order and shape. They beg direction and tear headlong smashing into each other, they lunge and maneuver and skate. I take all my meals in the cottage, heedless to Georgia sun and the call of bare skin in seawater, pausing only to bathe or nibble or fix tea.

It must be like this, an internal symposium where meaning and making meaning are the only things which matter, where joy is abstract yet pure like the color and taste of spring water. In secret it stalks us whether in sleep or waking, and the moment it captures us we face it and return its embrace, it is the dangerous and lifelong lover whose attentions and demands we cannot and will not refuse, for whose hours of calling we wait patiently and welcome completely with no regard nor concern should we abandon the rest of the world.

I did not know I missed the sun until it was done, the dance gone, and emerging from Cottage Four smelled the salt spray and heard the breakwater, craving suddenly a walk or a swim, something to celebrate a journey and a return.

Stooping to unlace my shoes I saw your note days old perhaps, under twigs, stained from moist soil.

E Brink

As a rule I keep to myself

but should you be willing

to trudge to Nine 'when the

white moths are on the wing'

then etc etc

S Mensch

Your cottage is full of color. It is green and red and blue and yellow and smudges and pieces of objects unnamed. And stray faces, past faces. By the window, a bird of passion, red eyes and a compassionate countenance, playful shockful of hair/crown. On a shelf, one half of a vase wearing the stems of roses for eyes and other facial features, a bouquet for hair. On a wall, a metal face mischievous, punk era fuzz of scrub scourer, gleaming fork tines for its smirk, padlock earring. On a worktable, a clay charmer's face, assymetrical and debonair, like the face of a boy who would be a man too soon, who knows how to skin rabbits in his father's overalls and once, donned a red blazer to take the local Italian girl to lunch in a ritzy cafe, risking ridicule from macho pals by bringing her roses the color of her blush.

"Can I touch them."

You laugh. "Well, you can come in, too, but seeing as you've already done that, go ahead."

"I've never been to anyone else's cottage before."

"Oh? Why's that?"

My turn to chuckle. "A rule Julia insists on: don't bug the other guests. We're all here to work, not distract each other."

You look at me pointedly. "Are you bugging me?"

"According to the rules."

"It's not my rule."

"Am I distracting you?"

"If you were, I'd throw you out."

"Oh good."

"That you don't distract me?"

"That you haven't thrown me out." I've reached the debonair boy, and as I touch the curves of his charm and the whirl of his personality, I think of your hands, moving over this piece of clay, in perfect synchronicity with the steady measure of your heart and the private intentions of your mind. A sense of you seeps into me like a crucial insight into an esoteric code, but I push the feelings aside; if what I see in your work is a part of you, you will have to be the one to teach me the ways of seeing.

"Would you like something? Tea, water, coffee?"

"Oh," I run to grab the grocery bag I left on the porch and run back in, "Actually, I brought dinner," holding it up. I head for the kitchen and set the bag on the counter.

You follow, bemused smile. "But you would like a drink, maybe?"

"Tah dah," I lift the bottle of red from the bag with a flourish.

I love the sound of you laughing. "You're not very subtle, are you. Does this mean that you're staying for dinner."

"Only if you like pasta."

You uncork the wine and pour for us both, handing me my glass, "Here's to 'golden apples of the sun.'"

I return the toast, "And 'silver apples of the moon.'"

We sip. An easy warmth eddies around the room, permeates, lingers. I notice the crinkles beside your eyes when you smile, your skin glows, the delicate strength with which you hold the glass. When you move your hand to tuck a stray lock of hair behind an ear I notice how the air rearranges itself around you, how the light perches on your skin and stays, possessively, precisely as it should.

"So should I call you Miss Brink."

"Ellen."

"Sian. We've met."

"Fortunately."

"This is actually good," you say as you finish your pasta. "Thank you." You reach over to pour wine for us both.

"I have to confess, I am intrigued by your masks."

You sip and swallow, and smile, suddenly shy, "That's a helluva strong verb."

"You're a helluva artist."

I can see how this has made you embarassed. You keep your eyes averted. I ask, "How do you get the idea. I mean, in fiction, there's some kind of thesis before you begin--I'm wondering--"

"People's faces move with intention." You pause, think hard, trace the rim of your glass with a finger. "I take one aspect I undertand and mold it into a face. So what becomes the face is the intention." When you forget because what you say matters to you, you shed the shyness and your eyes never leave mine, they bore into my head and I feel like you can reach in and take what you see, hold it up and say, See. Look. My chest tightens.

"Will it bother you if I smoke?"

"Not really. Go ahead. Wait, let me open the windows." You get up.

I get up. "Why don't we go outside." And I don't light up until we are on the porch, standing at the railing.

"There's Cygnus." You point; I squint. You lose yourself in the sky for a moment, and a stray lock of hair pulls loose from behind your ear; I want to reach over and tuck it back. I do not want to jump at every thought of you, although that is precisely what is happening.

"Sian."

You turn to me. In the dim light I can hardly see your eyes, but I sense that your are listening, your body attentive.

"There is a place, some place inside we go, a white room. We go there to keep the things that matter. In this white room we engage in the things which matter to us. You have one, and only you can go there. No one else knows where it is. And when you're in that room, when you're in that trance--nothing touches you, not malice nore useless cynicism. It's just you and what you are, what you do."

I pause. Your eyes are open and I dive in, I swim, I see you there beside me, matching my strokes. W e swim parallel to each other. I can hardly breathe; I am falling deeper and choking, losing grasp of air. I look away.

"There's this talent that not many people possess. At least as far as I know. It's being happy and knowing it the exact moment it happens. You are. You know. I see that."

After a while you spoke. "And I thought I was supposed to tell you about me."

"Ellen, Ellen darling," Richard slips his hand under my elbow and steers us, drinks in hand, to the verandah. As we step outside, I spy Paul's puzzled, hungry glance at us. Richard hisses at me, "Where the hell have you been?"

I fumble for a cigarette, light up, exhale, the puff of smoke between us, "Busy."

"It's been two weeks, darling," he sips his Campari without taking his eyes off my face.

"I've been working a lot. On scenes. These two characters have finally met. Action, reaction." I keep my eyes leveled with his.

The moon has bled away, and I pray in the dim light that he doesn't notice the way my face burns.

The day after our dinner I wake feeling giddy and light. You are at the beach, swimming. I park my breakfast pail beside yours and join you. We swim parallel to each other, matching stroke for stroke. It feels like a conversation, strangely enough, swimming in silence, the only sound the splash of arms cleaving the water, and I feel connected.

Later, dripping, you turn to me on the blanket and say, "You made me miss my swim last night," this impish smile on your face. When you smile it is slow, it hints in your eyes and slowly spreads on your mouth, then it is full and takes over your whole face, stays for a while. You don't take it away from me for a full minute.

I feel that I'm blushing and hope it is just the morning sun. I smile back. "You made me miss my evening walk."

You throw your head back and laugh, sit up, dig in the pail beside you and toss and orange to me. "What do we do about it."

"Do about what."

"Your walk."

My mind has grown blank suddenly because two lines back you said 'we.' I finish peeling the orange. The rind coils and falls into my lap.

"What."

"What, what?"

"What are you looking at me like that for."

I look away. Because I have realized that it matters that you and I are a we. "I was thinking. Tonight. Walk."

You take the naked orange from my hand, split it, hand me back a half. "Around nine then."

"Nine?" Boy, was I stupid today.

"Good time for a walk."

"You're invited."

"Well, the way I see it, you invited yourself to my swim this morning. So: quid pro quo, I'm already invited."

You are smiling and the sun burns and we are eating its color, piece by sweeter piece.

"--aside from that," Richard's voice has a slight edge.

"I'm sorry. You were saying?"

"What have you been up to aside from the scenes."

"That's it," I heave a sigh, "you know how interesting it gets."

"Tension," he agrees.

"Exactly."

"Darling, it gets beautiful. When the scenes, the characters, when they mesh. Beautiful."

"Yes."

You are that night. I watch you as we smile at things we say. I watch as you speak of the summer constellations, pointing the stars out to me, and I remember wistfulness creeping in, curling its purple fingers around my bloodred heart, saying, "It's past light we look at, and the light though beautiful is millions of years past."

You look at me for a moment, a pensive look on your face as if you wonder why we are on a cliff above the ocean, the night warm and fragrant. Then you said to the sky, "Maybe we could see the trur light of the stars if we'd only bring ourselves closer to them to better appreciate the light--they would appear even brighter and be much less than a million light years away. We should try to find our way to get there."

I look at you as you say this, and I see that you are beautiful. And I turn away from the light on your face because I am afraid of burning and if I were to draw my face close to your face as I want to, I would ignite and burn you with me.

I have told myself the days with you, the nights of quietly and attentively knowing the nuances of you, were all right because I would not catch fire, because when we walked side by side I kept air between us though inside you are light and I am air and we dance a slow dance in circles around our own local star. I have not begrudged the way you push thoughts aside in my head and made a home for yourself there. My world has been silent, my white rooms secret. I watch you. I watch as we weave our thoughts together, and I have found the woven fabric color drenched and complicated in its patterns so it became difficult to distinguish where you began and where I ended. And although it would have been so simple to reach out a hand to brush your chin with a whisper, I shoved repeatedly this thought away and have strung the strings of our strange and compelling connection so in conversation my hands only gestured and fell, gestured and fell.

After dinner I take my espresso to the verandah, but before I pass through the door I glimpse the silhouettes of Richard and Paul, standing on the far side of the porch, their bodies close, heads drawn together. They pull away and the murmur of their voices speaks of tenderness. I pause. I do not want to intrude, I don't want to be the one to admonish and lecture. I take a detour.

The kitchen bustles with dessert preparations. Louise leads me to the exit with a "Miss Ellen, you goin' miss dis cake," pressing a wrapped piece of cale in my hand before she waves me off.

I find you sitting on the edge of the dunes. I sit beside you. We say nothing, just watch the sea heave and sag under the dim light of scattered stars and a fingernail moon.

I reach for the cake in my pocket and hand it to you.

"What is it."

"The highlight of the evening. Julia's chocolate cake."

"Mmm." You unfold the aluminum wrapping. "Ellen. What--no fork, no napkins?" I can hear the smile in your voice.

"Sian. You expect me to think of forks and napkins too. God. When all I can think about is you." There. It was out.

I wince at your silence, imagine your smile fade as you turn your face away. You stare at the cake in your hand, break off a piece, put it in your mouth.

I reach over and take a bite off, eat.

You break the silence. "It's really sweet."

"Yes."

We all have complex rules in our hearts, though perhaps the emotion runs simply enough. We all have ways of scratching the surface of reality to find the truth within, yet: reality is not a thought. To each heart, truth just is. Who's to say what is real to another, but who's to say what's real to one is untrue. If I do not give love a voice, it remains true in itself; no amount of thought removes its truth. But I cannot expect it to be real unless it is expressed.

"Sian."

You turn to me, attentive. Your eyes sweep over my face, then meet my gaze, locked in, waiting. As I slowly choke on the words wanting to spill, you reach a hand over and softly brush a crumb off my mouth.

"I'm in love with you."

"I know."

Though you say nothing you allow me to spend time with you. We fall into variable days following a pattern. Once night I make dinner in your cottage, on another you cook in mine. In the mornings we swim before daybreak and shared breakfast until the heat sharpened, then we worked in separate silences, separate spaces. In the evenings inevitably we would meet and walk the dunes, the cliff, the short coast before the wall of rocks southward.

I do not question the mystery of why you spend time with me. If it means anything, it means the simple fact of itself, and to question it would permit a seed of doubt to bring in fear.

The implications are clear, you see. If we lived in a world within the space of thought we shared, there exists no questions. We know each other's meanings, each other's pauses, and we continue from these places every time and always. But: we happened to be anchored in social incongruities. I happen to be older than you, some would say I am much older. When you began childhood, I was already on my way to its end; your innocence missed mine by years.

You happen to be a woman. And, so it happened, am I.

My questions, the ones I fight to keep from you, are not of what exists between us. All of it, all of you and all of you and me, it is all true. Of this I harbor no qualms. Rather, my questions are the echoes of voices not mine but of the vague and impenetrable social conscience: where did I think we could go? What sort of impertinence could I possibly possess to think I was allowed to love you in the face of the circumstances of what we were?

This is what happened. I am summoned, as I am every year at midsummer, to give the opening reading. Julia wanted me to open the series of showcases each one of the guests had to hold of their work. When I receive her request, I say yes, gladly, would Tuesday night be all right? and throw myself into a frenzy preparing the short manuscript, listening to my voice, adjusting tone and volume and rhythm in front of my bathroom mirror.

Tuesday night I take dinner alone in the library, a light salad and soup, waiting for the rest of them to finish theirs. They enter in all manner of sobriety and settle into the easy chairs scattered about the room. The composer asks very politely if I would allow him a cigar, and at my nod he retreats to the back of the room near the shelves of Proust and Dostoevsky. Richard winks at me as Julia comes and gives a short introduction.

Then the lights are dimmed, and by the reading lamp beside me, I begin.

When I am launching into the twelfth and last poem, I sense the door open, and I pause closing my eyes in a fierce hope, and when I look up again, you stand near the closed door, in the shadows.

And so it was that I lose them all, lose the people in that room, the shelves with their silent words, they vanish into a singularity in a moment free as if all the lives and wants of a society had inexplicably surrendered and all that remained was a passage of what I meant to say to you.

" Mask

Juxtaposed, line upon rhythm upon soul unfurled,

interwoven, an uninterrupted, seamless saturation, one

lingering exercise of her freedom, one

liquid idea poured fingertip by feathertouch with which

intricacy turns into uninhibited, pure

lines. Simply, the way she looks at the world

overturns the cheerless cynicism of defeat and its

variations. She becomes nothing but

extraordinary, her shapes echo

time as it is meant to be,

harmonious ghost of subtle

effortlessness. I have seen her face in

wavering daylight, staunch in belief,

affirming only that touch and heart and sight

yearn to reveal, yearn to be one.

Overwhelmed, I wait

until sight is given, the face unveiled, and

she the lesson in light unspoken yet understood,

every secret color as yet unnamed,

each line upon rhythm upon soul unfurled."

When the last sound crumbles into silence they all come back, clapping their hands, the room breaking into voices and light, a swarm of conversations. Paul beside Richard smiling and Richard clapping me on the back and handing me a fresh vodka. Then Julia is beside me, giving me a kiss on the cheek and murmuring, "Thank you, Ellen. There's someone I'd like you to meet."

She steps back, and there you are.

"Ellen, this is Sian. My niece."

For a moment I feel a horror that we hadn't met, that this is our introduction, that I have been dreaming all along, because you are extending a stranger's hand, saying, "How do you do."

Then I realize that this is my cue, and I grasp your hand and lightly squeeze, saying the script as it is written, "It's nice to meet you."

We exchange a few lines, volley parts of dialog in the age-old small talk script, back and forth, coconspirators in an ineffable secret agreement. Then Julia leads you away and I am beseiged by the harmless inquiries and conversations of the other guests.

This is what happened.

When the last of the guests have left to Julia's goodnight and I slump into a chair, Julia turns to me and says, "Ellen, do you know that my niece is an artist?"

Startled, I cannot speak. I nod.

"Our family believes she holds a tremendous future," she pauses, grabs my eyes, "should she make the appropriate choices. At the moment, she is simply too young to do so."

When we are alone, locked in the trance of a secret white room, we do not play games. When we are amidst those who have not entered our white rooms, we bend to their rules, we play their games. I say to Julia, "Yes, I understand."

I hold myself still until the door has closed itself after her. Then I take my books off her shelves, finger their edges and the sheen of their covers. I look at the photographs of me on the back of each book. My publisher insists on a different photograph for each book, and as I stare at my selves I think of the past summers, and of how my face seemed to have changed after each year, how the lines beside my eyes seemed etched deeper after each time.

I sit there for some t ime, waiting for the plaint of a small and piercing sadness to pass. And when it does, I realize that it is too late and that I am too old to cry.

Days stream one after another and I closet myself in an endless worday, free and unencumbered by social pressures and procedure, safe in the confines of my boundless white room. It seems as if this is all which seeks to linger: filling hours and pages with words. It is what I know to be truly safe because it is all I know to be looked upon with approval.

I do not know myself to be foolish, but this is all I have ever known not to abandon me, and I practice healing the wounds with my art with the ease of the wounded healer. I do not stop until the words run out, until the silence inside took over, sonorous and clear.

That night I go out for a walk, taking with me a jar of citron preserve, a present for you. The moon hangs low and large over the cliff, and under its imposing eye I make my way slowly to your cottage. Wind blows in from the sea. The trees obscure the moon as I find the familiar path to Cottage Nine, and with surer footsteps I follow my heart to where it lived.

You open the door without any questions, you let me in and all you say is, "I wondered when you'd find your way back."

I give you the citron preserve. "Here."

"What is it."

"Orange heaven. That's what they do to oranges with tough skins. They peel off the rind and preserve it in syrup."

"I thought all oranges have tough skins."

"Nope. These are the older ones, the ones that grew old on the branch."

"So what are we supposed to do with it."

"Boil it in water and drink it. Citron tea."

You look at me, head tilted in a gesture which I have found to be your inquisitive pose. "So how come you know so much."

Because I am old. "Um, Sian, could we sit out? I need a smoke."

We sot outside watching the cliff rise to the new moon. I bleed inside with fear and questions which are not really mine but I possess. I do not know what I could beg of you, I only know that my fear and questions need answers. Nothing makes sense any longer, the only thing clear and absolute is the simple fact that I love you. I know at that moment that nothing is a simple story, that a beginning may seem to be pure collision of serendipity and circumstance, but the plot twists and convolutes, strangling the straining passage of its theme until nothing remains but its pure, fading echoes.

My feeling rises to my throat one last time and I say your name, one last prayer.

Before the sound falls, you say, "I have to leave, Ellen."

That was it, then. "When."

"Tomorrow."

Silence grows useful when too much is left unsaid. I wrap it around me. When silence is uttered, as anything, it becomes real. All I say is, "Let me make you some tea."

In the kitchen I put on the kettle to boil. You grab the jar of citron preserve, grasp the lid, strain to loosen it. The lid stays stubborn.

"Let me," I offer.

You reach the jar over to my outstretched hand, and as I wrap my hand around it, our fingers touch. I draw back from the fire of it the same fraction of second you do; in a breath the jar crashes to the floor, smashes upon impact, breaks into shards scattering, orange rind and syrup seeping into cracks between the boards.

I hear you gasp, I hear myself saying, "Don't move."

Step over the mess, get the bucket and towels, bend on knees to pick up pieces of glass and mop up every last bit of spilled orange preserve from your kitchen floor. I clean it all up, I do not leave a trace.

When it is finished, you say, "I'm sorry."

I look up from where I am on the floor, and I say, "No, Sian--" pausing only to find in that pause the words have fled, and frightened suddenly, saying, "I'm sorry."

Then I leave, saying goodnight instead of the intended goodbye.

The moon is high over the sea. A wind has come to torment the waves. The waves tear up the moon with each passing ripple, and then fading, put the moon back together again.

The mask is waiting for me on the peg on the door to Cottage Four, the next day, hair of gull feathers and wicker smile and two strings of beads streaming down the sides of its eyes like long red tears. I lift it off its perch, cradle it in both hands, trace the lines which you had intended. Then I allow myself to cry, pressing the cold surface of the face you would have me wear against the naked need of my own face.

FIN.