The Muse

The thing about guilt: it’s so unattractive and I’m so good at it.

And I’m thinking: How can I read the poems without buying the book online because the book’s being sold by a third party and my old boyfriend will address the envelope to me, no doubt, because he’s the third party. I also don’t want to buy it at the one bookstore that will carry it (under the “local authors” section) because so many of the people who work there know my old boyfriend. And I wonder: Do I have a friend I could trust to order the book for me? Obviously, no.

I am a married woman, a married woman far removed from the habits of mind I indulged in while I was with my old boyfriend and could put up with him. For instance, I was reading a novel the other day in which the author used the word orb to refer to the sun. I wanted to kick the author to death. Orb? How dare the author be so pretentious. And then I realized that I was being unfair and provincial and shallow. Obviously the writer used the word orb because he wanted to project beauty into the world, to let us see the sun in all its dazzling splendor—he used the phrase dazzling splendor too—and who was I to want to toss his teeth down his throat? Beauty? The faculty for seeing beauty and naming beauty—hasn’t that faculty been degraded? Yet there’s so much beauty. Our desks at work, for instance. Everyone there wants to chuck them, but under the shellac is wood grain, the riverine traces of the oak, the crisp fall air filling with the spume of the oak’s fragrance, and the log itself crushing into the clover or whatever. Still, orb.

Next I was thinking about the pure physical beauty of Oskar Werner, the actor. A face like a rosebud. Hair like dry grass ruffled by breezes. That mouth—all curves. The tension in the lines of his forehead. And in Ship of Fools, the scars on his cheek and chin, that subtle puckering. That is beauty. No wonder Simone Signoret is heartbroken about leaving him. Oskar Werner’s entire face betrays devastating loss and an attempt to be brave, dignified, to give the woman he loves courage, to resist his own feelings. His eyes are like those of someone who has wept for hours. I saw that scene when I was about eleven years old, and thought: This is for adults. This is mysterious and deep and as yet unknowable to me, but someday I will look at someone the way Simone Signoret looks at Oskar Werner—and someone like Oskar Werner will look at me as if my leaving will destroy him. Romantic yearning. It was as if I’d fallen down a long flight of stairs and would never stop falling. You see that look on Oskar Werner’s face, and you’re imprinted. Maybe you’re ruined for anything less.

At Scalia’s my husband and I met for dinner with some friends—former colleagues of my husband: Olivia and Tack, who are married to each other and inseparable, and Dwight, who was along for the weekend while his wife, Beverly, went to a workshop for orthodontists in Miami. She’d taken their teenage daughter with her. A day earlier Dwight had emailed, “It’s hard to be stuck in town,” so we knew we had to invite him. We were all stuck in town. We’re always stuck in town.

We live in a town that used to be a prostitution hub—when there was a train. Back then the town was referred to as The Little Apple. New Yorkers piled in for the speakeasies and the brothels. At one time there were as many as forty-eight houses of ill repute in town and the surrounding community. One of the madams used to babysit our now elderly neighbor—according to her vivid account. Our friend Broder claims that this element of local history accounts for the widespread lack of patience here. If you haven’t been given the finger for obeying traffic laws, you haven’t lived long enough in our town.

By the time the waiter brought our orders it became clear that my friends had already read the book. I didn’t want to ask to borrow a copy. I kept studying the shrimp on my plate, nestled upon the linguine. It occurred to me that the shrimp looked like the cut-off legs of very tiny bowlegged elves wearing striped stockings.

Olivia said, “You’re going to pretend you’re not interested in the book, aren’t you?”

“It’s really not any of my business,” I said.

“We recognized that it was about you right away. You could sue.” Everyone was laughing. Even my husband.

“It’s that bad?” I asked. “Maybe I should read it.”

“No, don’t,” Olivia said, spearing into rubber bands of calamari. “Really. You have enough to handle. I mean you’re fully employed, unlike some of us. You have responsibilities. It’s not embarrassing—the book isn’t. It’s not shame producing.”

I was grateful when Dwight started talking about finding his daughter’s hamster in the refrigerator. “I don’t know how the little shit got in there. Pinya, she always holds that door open for a long time because it takes her forever to make up her mind about what to eat—but still, to not notice the hamster. It must’ve had to struggle to get up onto even the first shelf. And then I found it.”

“Was it alive?” I asked.

“You are burdened with hope,” Dwight said. “No. It was dead. Nuzzled up against a jam jar. What kind of jam you’ll ask? Apricot. The funny thing: I never noticed how many jars of jam we had in there until then. Luciana keeps buying jam. There were already no less than eight jars of jam in there. That poor hamster. It must have gotten really lost in there. The lids were on all the jam too, and so it couldn’t eat.”

“Did the hamster have a name?” my husband asked. I looked over at him and felt a wave of affection. My husband, always ready to sympathize with the powerless.

“Spike.”

I kept picturing the brave little hamster struggling up past the vegetable bin and shivering on the shelf. I didn’t feel like eating my shrimp after that. And then my mind superimposed Oskar Werner’s beautiful face over the hamster’s.

Olivia plunged into her calamari again and said, “You know no matter what his poems say, he’s revealing how humiliated he was by the relationship. It’s like he was stuck and the poems were a way to dig out an obstruction.”

“Oh, that’s so disgusting sounding,” Tack offered.

“You want disgusting?” Olivia said, scanning all our faces. “My mother has this story. She says that her great-uncle drank so much beer that a doctor had to cut a rind out of his liver. And the rind was green.”

“Did you read in the newspaper about that woman whose body was a brewery . . . I bet she was all rind,” Dwight said.

Olivia sipped her wine, wiped her mouth, and said, “I guess my family specializes in terrible stories. My grandmother has this terrible story about a woman she knew whose mind ‘turned.’ That’s how she said it. The woman’s mind ‘turned’ and she believed she was a pig. It’s true. It’s true. You’re laughing but it’s true—supposedly. This poor woman wandered around on all fours under the dinner table, and the family fed her scraps. She made pig sounds too.”

“I’m not going to laugh,” my husband said. “I believe that story.”

I was beginning to feel itchy and uncomfortable. Like a dog in a Halloween costume. I thought about my former boyfriend. He used to say that he bored easily, and I told him that he sounded like a serial killer.

Olivia lifted her fork and leaned toward me. “Your old boyfriend sure has a good memory. For your life. There’s a poem in the book about that body of water you used to frequent when you were a kid.”

“You mean the creek.”

“Oh yeah, that’s what the poem was called. ‘The Creek.’ Right? I should have brought the book with me tonight.”

“I’m glad you didn’t.”

It occurred to me that what my ex-boyfriend had done by writing me into his poems was violent, that taking another person’s life for his own purposes was a way to do harm and get away with it. To embalm a person in a book . . .

“Well, the poem’s about how you were obsessed with that creek and didn’t even know what it was called.”

“That’s true,” I said. “We never called that creek anything other than ‘the creek.’”

I found out the name only by Googling the location. And then I found out more than I wanted to know: A murder-suicide occurred there, the husband murdering the wife and then himself. It happened right in the house near the part of the creek where I used to wade. A detail in the newspaper account especially bothered me. The woman’s mother was with her. They’d just come from the courthouse where the daughter’s divorce was finalized. The daughter went into the house first. The mother stayed outside to pick up a piece of trash blowing across the lawn. She was picking up the trash when she heard the first shot. Something about the mother picking up trash—that bothered me.

The house where that horror took place was small with gray siding, and in the front yard, almost obscuring the porch, grew lilac bushes. In spring the blossoms were wildly fragrant and heavy, as down-drooping as bunches of grapes.

My husband said, “Let’s not talk about that putrid book. Emilia doesn’t need to read it.”

It occurred to me then that he’d already read it.

Did he hide the book in the house, like it was pornography? Or did he read it while standing in the bookstore, not caring if anyone saw him?

Maybe I’d left my ex-boyfriend, but I was the loyal one. I wouldn’t tell his secrets.

“Does it rhyme?” I asked.

“What? The book of poetry about . . .”

“Does it?”

“I didn’t notice.”

Tack said, “It kind of rhymes.”

“What else is everyone reading these days?” asked Olivia, who must have registered my tension. “I’m not reading much, but I saw this great documentary last night. About squid. Did you know that sperm whales consume something like six hundred or seven hundred or eight hundred squid in a day? Do any of you know much about, you know, giant squid? Giant squid—no one knows anything much about them. They’re one of the only living beings who still retain their privacy!” She nudged me. “Sorry . . . I know that you’d like your private life not to be exposed in poems. Even if they’re poems no one will read except us, the people who love you. Anyway, giant squid lurk so deep in the ocean that no one knows how they communicate, like, do they whistle or anything.”

“Or grunt.”

“Yes, Dwight, or grunt. We don’t even know where they give birth or where they travel, how they even figure out how to meet each other in the darkness. Very few of their bodies have ever been seen. They look horrendous. They have enormous eyes, but their heads—they look so, so uncircumcised.” She pulled up photos on her phone.

“Those tentacles,” my husband said. He was speechless. As were we all.

I imagined giant squid in the deepest sea, tentacles waving, mammoth eyes on their uncircumcised-looking heads, and I imagined more—that each was alone, unmarked, untagged, mysterious in a monstrous way.

My husband was peppering his chicken when Dwight said, “As you age you start losing your sense of taste. You start overpeppering your food.” He winked at my husband. “Feeling your age a bit, buddy?”

My husband put down the pepper shaker, picked up his wine, and pushed his chair back a few inches from the table. He yawned in what must have been an attempt to loosen his jaw muscles. Then he was fine. I knew that he’d told himself something so that he could keep his temper under control.

Olivia pulled up a YouTube video.

“My god, the fucker’s red,” Dwight said.

“That’s quite a load to haul.

Like rubber lumber.”

“Like shredded flags,” I said.

“The flag of its own weird country,” Olivia said.

The squid’s upper half rippled as if ocean waves were moving inside the creature’s sheath of a head.

“It’s like a sausage that got sliced,” Olivia said. “That’s what the tentacles look like. Oh my god, those little suckers. There’s Japanese porn that features octopuses and squid. It’s quite something.”

“Isn’t it octopi?” Dwight said.

“No. It’s octopuses,” my husband said. “That’s a common misconception.” He was scrolling through his phone. “Octopuses have three hearts. And their tentacles should be called arms. That’s what it says. And their arms have brains or something like brains.”

“I wish my arms had brains,” Olivia said. “You know what? I think I’m losing my memory.”

My husband said, “Everyone is. Too much to remember. Stress, the usual. Don’t worry about it—that’s what I read—until you do something like . . . the site I read gave an example about when you should start worrying about your memory: when you put your watch in the refrigerator.”

“That’s where I put my hamster,” Dwight said.

“I don’t remember much of anything,” Tack said. We turned to look at him, startled to hear his voice so loud. “Who does? Who remembers all the names of the kids they went to elementary school with? Those kids used to rule your life, and now what do you remember? I remember only the names of the bullies.”

We were silent until Olivia said, “You know, maybe that woman was just pretending to be a pig? That’s my hope. She was just pretending. So she wouldn’t have to do the dishes or the laundry or pretend to listen to her family.”

Everyone laughed, and I felt a stab of recognition. Yes, I could imagine doing certain things to get out of any trap I was in. Maybe not pretending to be another species but . . .

My husband and I walked home—everyone else drove. We always enjoyed the walk, especially because the jasmine that lined parts of Winslow Street gave off a sweet, nostalgic scent as if already regretting the past.

“I wonder where all the prostitutes went,” my husband said. “Eighty-four houses of ill repute. Or was it forty-eight? That’s a lot of personnel. I guess after a while they disappeared into the local population. Raised families. Went to church.”

“Turned into pigs.”

“That’s harsh.”

“No, I mean they might have been like that woman in that story Olivia told. You know, desperate? Like the world was Circe and they became pigs. Like in mythology.”

“I hate mythology. Honey, I read the book.”

“I know you did. You’re very readable. Your face gave it away.”

“It’s not so bad—the book. It’s poetry. No one will read it. At some level you have to be flattered, right? You inspired the poor dope. But the woman in the poems—that’s not you, not who you are. Even if he does use your name.”

“Does he use my full name?”

“Sometimes.”

“Oh, my god, you don’t mean it?”

“It’s in two titles—your full name. You have doppelgängers online, right? So maybe people can think it’s about those other women. Or they’ll think the name is an invented name. But it doesn’t matter. You want me to beat him up? Would that help?”

My old boyfriend’s body was so warm that lying next to him was like reclining with a space heater. When his brother died, he sobbed for days and said he felt as if he’d lost an arm. He once suggested we crawl into a roped-off area so we could watch the county fireworks. We were about to do that when the cannon went off. We would have been blasted by the cannon there, between the ropes. The only poetry he used to read before I met him was by Yaime Ochno—his college roommate. Then he subscribed to poetry journals and declared that poetry was “contagious.” He told me he was “contaminated” and that I’d better follow decontamination procedures and take my dress off. He told me that when we were drunk at a party.

“I’ve changed a lot,” I said to my husband.

We were quiet, and then I said, “When Dwight mentioned that thing about losing your sense of taste while you were peppering your chicken, you wanted to say something. What was it?”

“I didn’t need to say anything. I was thinking that I bet he didn’t clean out the refrigerator. I bet that hamster—”

“Spike.”

“I bet his wife took Spike out. I bet he said, ‘You’re so good at extractions, Beverly. You do it.’ And I bet Spike got into the refrigerator under Dwight’s watch, but that he blamed his own kid.”

That night I had one of those common dreams of falling that everyone has. There’s an old superstition: if you fall and hit the bottom in your dream, you’ll die. I hadn’t slept well. I knew I needed one of those deeply restorative sleeps when you travel far down and away from your daylit life. In the morning I almost picked a fight with my husband. “Don’t make fun of me,” I kept wanting to say. Although he never had.

Read more from Issue 16.2.