The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf Read online

  Which was why he’d left that place blank. He didn’t know how it had happened, he confessed, but somewhere along the line he’d lost control of the tattoo. He and Helle were alone in the shop, celebrating the completion of the project with a bottle of Indonesian rum. Ten sessions in all, stretching out over almost three months. I couldn’t begin to imagine how painful it had been, Helle said; excruciatingly painful—blood-stained bandages, infections, fevers, needles pricking through tender scar tissue. According to Mandrill, it was probably during the seventh session that he’d first realized the tattoo was staring at him, and that its stare wasn’t the one he’d drawn. No, this was the stare of a completely unfamiliar intelligence—lay off the rum, Mandrill, he thought, get some sleep. During the eighth session the eye seemed to throw a quick glance in the direction of the door; during the ninth session it actually winked at him. How many fingers, how many fingers? he asked Helle, wildly holding his hand up behind her neck. Nothing like this had ever happened before, and he was frightened.

  “I hadn’t figured out how it worked yet,” Helle said, flatly, “so I couldn’t tell him.” A sharp, cold rain was beginning to fall, threatening to turn at any minute to sleet or snow. With the exception of the quarry water, which remained an eerie yellow-green, and the headlights of the passing cars, most of which were now lit, everything in the world around us was a deep, spiritless shade of gray. “We should be getting back,” I said, adding that it must be close to suppertime, and while Maren had been kind enough to agree to watch the twins for the afternoon, I didn’t want to presume on her good nature. “I bet you don’t,” Helle replied. She raised the hood of her parka, shoved her hands down into its pockets, and started walking in the direction of town. “Go on,” she said when she was several paces ahead of me. “Give it a try. You’re dying to, I can tell. Besides, you might as well see what you’re up against.”

  So she stood there, a small damp woman on the shoulder of a wet gray road suddenly filled with rush-hour traffic, waiting for me to demonstrate once more that she could get me to believe anything. “Forget it,” I said. Maybe she was the kind of person who bought those stories in the National Enquirer—the cowboy in Utah who’d carved the Nativity scene, complete with angels and sheep and tiny coffers containing gold, frankincense, and myrrh, onto a poker chip; the grandmother in Maine who’d embroidered the entire text of the United States Constitution onto a shoelace—but I wasn’t. The tattoo was a nice piece of work, and I’d admit that Mandrill must have been an unusually talented craftsman. I said as much, loudly, trying to get her to turn around, even though she’d once again started walking, quicker than ever, back toward town. “Haven’t you ever wondered,” she called brightly over her shoulder, “why he does that thing with his glasses?”

  Eventually, hard little pellets, part snow and part ice, began to fall from a sky you could no longer see; Helle and I walked along in an uncompanionable silence, maintaining a distance between us of about one car length. Indeed, neither one of us said a single word until we were both standing together in the weak light cast by an overhead bulb on the Blackburns’ front porch, protected from the wind and the sleet, if not from each other. “Who?” I asked. “Who does what thing?”

  Helle laughed. “Can’t you do any better than that, Frances?” And when I told her spies got shot, she laughed even harder. “Shot?” she said. “Well, that’s not so bad. Do you know what they do to adulterers? Cut off their cocks.”

  IV

  ALTHOUGH THE TRUTH IS, Helle’s anger didn’t have anything to do with an offended morality. What made her angry, at least in part, was the fact that I would permit Sam a form of intimacy she would never be allowed; that, to be blunt, I’d let him fuck me, whereas all Helle enjoyed was the occasional sisterly kiss on the cheek. Nor do I mean to imply that she was merely jealous. She might well have been, but ultimately both this and her morality would prove beside the point. Clearly some deeper sense of outrage was at the heart of Helle’s anger, some sense of a primary flaw in the universe.

  Just as it probably goes without saying that Maren’s plight left her unmoved, that as far as Helle was concerned, all you needed to know about Maren could be summed up in her habit of putting on gloves before working in the garden, or her peculiar tendency to eat whatever was on her plate item by item—every single pea, for example, before moving on to the lamb chop, the boiled new potatoes, the mint jelly, as if in defiance of the digestive system’s inevitable squalor. In short, a nature too tritely divided to be worth plumbing for its hidden depths. Life made Maren nervous, so she found boring ways to regulate it. Indeed, the only daring thing she ever did was to marry a man she’d known only for a month, whom she met one day when she went to put flowers on her grandmother’s grave (which happened to be in the same Copenhagen cemetery as Søren Kierkegaard’s). She’d already deposited the flowers, and was hurrying back to her grandfather’s apartment in the nearby suburb of Nørrebro, when she encountered a bespectacled and serious-looking youth paging through a guidebook, straddling his rented bicycle in such a way as to block the path. Did she know, he asked, where Kierkegaard was buried? But because the Danish word for “cemetery” is kirkegård, and because Sam’s pronunciation left a lot to be desired, Maren’s response was to cock her head to one side, scowl, and inform him that he was in the cemetery, a response he found charming.

  If Maren had any brains, Helle claimed, she would have realized that any man making a pilgrimage to Kierkegaard’s grave should be avoided like the plague. What did Kierkegaard know about women? In the Diary, he actually suggests that the best thing a man might do for a woman after seducing her would be to emulate Neptune and turn her into a man. Oh, you might see signs of a latent ethic in Kierkegaard’s youthful decision to break off his engagement with Regine Olsen, whereas all he was doing, really, was honoring a system that allows men to singlemindedly pursue their dreams. Throw in your lot with a man, Helle contended, and forget about dreaming your own dreams. Although, to be fair, if the only image your dreams offer up, over and over again, is that of happiness with a man, then what’s the profit in resisting? Sam took Maren to hear American jazz in a bar near the university; as she sat listening to a black man play the trumpet, chills of Kierkegaardian dread ran up and down her spine. She shivered, and Sam put his arm around her, mistaking dread for passion. Later, after he’d walked her back to the apartment and she’d asked him in, he was surprised to find himself seated at a parlor table, playing chess with an old, bearded man. An erudite old Dane smoking a long, curved Meerschaum pipe, stuffing its head-shaped bowl full of tobacco; a slim, blond girl pouring a dark rain of imported beans into a huge iron coffee mill; a sweet-smelling summer breeze faintly disturbing the organdy curtains at the four tall front windows—it was all too much for Sam, who’d grown up in a blue-collar Connecticut town, and whose own grandfather had been given to telling jokes revolving around the twin themes of flatulence and excrement. Not unlike Mozart, Helle said, in his notorious letters to his cousin, except that Sam’s grandfather never composed an opera. If I wanted to understand Sam—which she assumed I did, for otherwise there was no reason to have sex with him, was there?—then I should remember that his character had been shaped negatively, that he’d set out not to be whatever he’d found most humiliating about his family. That’s what we have in common, I replied, and Helle snorted. Only he turned out to be a philosophy professor and you turned out to be a waitress, she said. Think about it, Frances.

  Helle customarily carried with her a breast-pocket-sized white notepad in which she’d jot down whatever useful ideas came to her, “like fish swimming into a weir,” in the course of an average day. But during the early stages of our acquaintance, I remember that she also carried with her a second notepad, this one bright red, with IDIOTIC THINGS SAID BY MEN written in black Magic Marker on its cover. Unfortunately that notepad never made its way into the waxed carton, although much of the material it contained shows up in The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf, specifically i
n the infamous Act One quartet, “A man says,” sung by the Bog Queen and her three daughters. Plato’s thoughts on gender and reproduction, for example, those passages Helle paraphrased for me the first time we had tea together, had first been consigned to the red notepad and later transposed into libretti, along with numerous quotations from the Bible (“There are three things that are never satisfied, yea, a fourth thing which says not, it is enough; that is, the mouth of the womb”; or “And I find more bitter than death the woman, whose heart is snares and nets, and her hands are as bands”); Dryden’s “Women are not comprised in our Laws of friendship; they are Ferae Naturae”; Greene’s “Uppon a banke, bordring by, grew women’s weedes, Fenell I meane for flatterers, fit generally for that sexe”; an unnamed Chinaman’s “The smaller the woman’s foot, the more wondrous become the folds of the vagina”; Cicero’s “When a woman thinks alone she thinks evil”; St. Bernard’s “Their face is a hissing wind, and their voice the hissing of serpents”; Terence’s “Women are intellectually like children” …

  Possibly worst of all, though, was Havelock Ellis’s claim that as far as music is concerned, “there is certainly no art in which women have shown themselves more helpless.” Helpless indeed! What he really meant, according to Helle, was that if women were suddenly to begin spending their time dreaming whole worlds into existence—such effort as is required by the creation of a symphony or an opera—then no one would be left to make sure that men’s floors got polished, no one left to make sure that the old skin and hairs which regularly sloughed off men’s bodies got swept up and thrown away. If women were to begin composing operas, who would feed the living and cosset the dead?

  You could be sure, Helle said, that in the Copenhagen cemetery where Sam and Maren met, it was a woman who’d been hired to keep the gravel walkways raked, keeping all the rake marks perfectly symmetrical; it was a woman who followed Sam and Maren around, erasing their footprints as they looked for the place where what was left of Kierkegaard’s body was undergoing similar erasure under its closely mowed square of grass. Meanwhile, all around them, a confederacy of dark-clothed women would have been spreading out within the maze of boxwood cubicles, each busy at a separate task: one clipping away the green shoots which marred the otherwise level planes of the hedge surrounding her father’s grave; another setting bulbs, evenly spaced, around a stone angel. From time to time a man might appear, usually advanced in years, pausing to remove his hat before remonstrating with his departed wife or mother. How could she go away and leave him all alone? Come back, you could hear him whisper. Indifferent, the sun would continue shining on the carefully weeded beds of lilies and forget-me-nots: noon, Helle said, was the perfect time to visit a Danish cemetery, for who would want such a felicitous arrangement to be disturbed by the presence of shadows? Although even as you tried to avoid seeing them, the shadows were leaking out all around you, their dark seepage visible at the root of each tree, each flame-red tulip, each polished stone. The women would set down their little bunches of posies, and it was Death they were honoring, shadowy Death, without whom there could be no order, without whom the story of your life would rattle on and on, as inconclusive and irritating as those stories told, late into the night, by drunks or pedants.

  Oh, there’s no doubt about the fact that in those days I took all of what Helle told me with a grain of salt. I had to, as I think I’ve implied, in order to assert my right to an autonomous existence, to hold her vision of the world and, by extension, of me, at bay. She was such an extreme woman, so dramatic, so perverse! Thus it seemed to me that if she knew about Sam’s practice of putting his glasses back on during lovemaking, her knowledge must have had an empirical rather than supernatural basis: maybe he did the same thing with Maren; possibly he’d even told Helle about it himself. Certainly he’d been more than generous in providing her with details about his marriage—things he never shared with me, our agreement being that our lives when we weren’t together were our own business. I was wary, and because of that I didn’t pick up on any of the subtle hints Helle threw my way, such as her frequent references to mortality; her increasingly hostile remarks about men in general and Sam in particular; her strange fascination with the twins’ trailer. Why, you might ask, was she so infuriated by the space program, by the idea that disembodied eyes were circling the planet, keeping watch, and that even after we blew ourselves to bits those eyes would continue their lonely circling, would continue keeping watch over the empty space where a planet once had been?

  Then one snowy winter morning not long after Christmas, I was standing somewhere near the dimly lit heart of the ground floor of Shank & Bidwell’s hardware store—an establishment apparently infinite in its proliferation of dark narrow aisles forking between dark tiers of shelves, dark yawning bins, dark stairways leading to mysterious upper rooms where there were rumored to be even darker aisles, more towering shelves and deeper bins and, in the very back corner, a metal ladder disappearing into a trapdoor in the ceiling. As I stood there rummaging through a box of elbow-shaped plumbing fixtures, I smelled a peppery smell, heard the click of a kneebone, looked to my left, and there was Sam. “Where the hell have you been?” he asked, only his tone was tender, and his features, although shadowy and hard to see, had the faintly thickened, faintly softened look that signifies desire. “The holidays,” I said. “You know.” He bent forward and kissed me, quickly, on my neck—a little nip, really, the kind of quick kiss exchanged in the act of lovemaking that arouses you immediately no matter where you are, because implicit in it is the suggestion you’ve already been aroused. Of course he knew this. “Frannie,” he said. “Jesus.” Shadowy, so shadowy we might have been alone in a dark, infinite forest—until Mr. Shank approached wearing his usual pale blue smock, freshly washed and ironed by Mr. Bidwell, with whom he lived in a little fairy-tale cottage at the foot of Rose Hill. “Frances, Sam, nice to see,” said Mr. Shank, pointedly rearranging the elbow-shaped fixtures, as if their essential order in the box had been disturbed. He was a short round man with a very long flat face, and a long flat upper lip: a two-dimensional head stuck into the neckhole of a three-dimensional body. “Help you find or just?”

  No thank you, I was about to reply, when Sam said, “The Coleman mantles. The last time I needed one, if I remember correctly, they were on the second floor, near the back wall.”

  Mr. Shank nodded and sighed. “Light them things and nothing but ash, no wonder, folks. Too fragile. Camping season they’d be but you’re right, bottom shelf in a fishing creel, the ornamental rabbits. Show if you want.” When Sam said that wouldn’t be necessary, Mr. Shank looked relieved. “Doing inventory, Mr. Bidwell always loses count halfway through you name it.”

  There was no light at all in the stairway, no railing, and with the steps’ risers of differing heights you couldn’t even count on a sense of pattern to help you climb them. I managed the first five steps by keeping my eye on the word COUGARS embroidered in white script on Sam’s back; at the sixth, my boot trod down on something that popped moistly beneath it, COUGARS dissolved into thin dark air, and I could hear Sam’s feet shuffling cautiously around above my head, floor joists moaning, a sifting fall of what sounded like sand onto the step I’d left behind seconds earlier. “The goddamn light switch,” Sam said. “It’s okay, there’s a window, once your eyes adjust.” A dark hand reached down, tentative, the shadowy fingers waggling, one of them encircled by a shadowy golden band, and pulled me up. “Get a load of this,” he said. “No wonder, folks,” he said, and then, as I paused blinking at the head of the stairs, he walked away, vanishing behind a teetering mountain of bagged peat moss toward the back wall. “Ornamental rabbits,” he said.

  The second floor seemed larger than the first, the walls exposed and creosoted wood so that it smelled like a smokehouse, brown and dark and bacony; yet it was freezing cold, whereas the heat on the first, I understood by its absence, had been stifling. And while on the first floor the aisles were at least recognizable, on the
second floor nothing even vaguely resembled a path, and even if it had you wouldn’t have been able to see it, since the window to which Sam referred was small, coated with a thick layer of frost on the inside, and crisscrossed with fly-studded spiderwebs. I made my way past a set of shelves where a flock of feathered shuttlecocks had come to rest around the oblate feet of a row of coal scuttles. Maybe the order was alphabetical? Seven or eight aluminum storm windows leaned up against a huge crate filled with black galoshes. Here and there something winked at me from out of the gloom—a chrome-plated faucet, a glass hurricane lamp, a tangle of brass light pulls—but for the most part the second floor appeared to have become the repository for large, ambiguous pieces of machinery, dull dark objects with wheelworks, levers, immense oak handles, black bolts oozing oil, blades and teeth of pocked iron, dusty convex disks covering arcane instrument panels.

  “Frannie—here,” Sam called, and at last I found him, holding the creel and leaning back against a broad wooden countertop, every available inch of which was taken up with slightly larger-than-life-sized plastic rabbits, some white, some pale brown, all of them crouched as if getting ready to hop. “Give me a hand, will you,” he asked, and I thought, You were wrong, Helle, this is what happens to adulterers. Adulterers have to make their bed among plastic rabbits in the frigid expanse of a dark brown smokehouse, while below them they hear the constant chirring of an adding machine, its occasional ding as their cold bodies lock together, as their wide-open eyes discover, in the wide-open eyes of the other, the wild, futureless expression of their own lust. We kept on most of our clothes; I never even removed my red ski cap, nor Sam his glasses. “Frannie,” he said, “I’ve missed you.” This was afterwards, when we were still lying there side by side on the wooden countertop, our breath pouring in plumes from our mouths, our hearts beating fast, rabbit fast, ding ding ding. I repeated what I’d said before: the holidays, the twins home from school, a busy time no matter how you looked at it.