The Red Tree

PONY

Helen opens a window, props it open with a brick, and in a moment I can smell the Chinese wisteria out in the garden. The first genuinely warm breezes of spring spilling across the sill, filled with the smell of drooping white blossoms and a hundred other growing things.The sun is so warm on my face, and I lie on the floor and watch the only cloud I can see floating alone in a sky so blue it might still be winter out there. She was reading her poetry to me. I’ve been drinking cheap red wine from a chipped coffee cup with an Edward Gorey drawing printed on one side, and she’s been reading me her poetry and pausing to talk about the field. At that moment, I still think that neither of us has been back to the field in years, and it’s surprisingly easy to fool myself into believing that my memories are only some silly ghost story Helen’s been slipping in between the stanzas. Not the vulgar sort of spook story that people write these days. More like something an Arthur Machen might have written, or an Algernon Blackwood, something more mood and suggestion than anything else, and I congratulate myself on feeling so removed from that night in the field and take another sip of the bitter wine. Helen’s been drinking water, only bottled water from a ruby-stemmed wineglass, because she says wine makes her slur.

I open my bathrobe, and the sun feels clean and good across my breasts and belly. I’m very proud of my belly, that it’s still flat and hard this far past thirty. Helen stops reading her poem again and squeezes my left nipple until I tell her to quit it. She pretends to pout until I tell her to stop that, too.

“I went back,” she says, and I keep my eyes on that one cloud, way up there where words and bad memories can’t ever reach it. Helen’s quiet for almost a full minute, and then she says, “Nothing happened. I just walked around for a little while, that’s all. I just wanted to see.”

“That last line seemed a bit forced,” I say. “Maybe you should read it to me again,” and I shut my eyes, but I don’t have to see her face to know the sudden change in her expression or to feel the chill hiding just underneath the warm breeze getting in through the window. It must have been there all along, the chill, but I was too busy with the sun and my one cloud and the smell of Chinese wisteria to notice. I watch a scatter of orange afterimages floating in the darkness behind my eyelids and wait for Helen to bite back.

“I need a cigarette,” she says, and I start to apologize, but it would be a lie, and I figure I’ve probably done enough damage for one afternoon. I listen to her bare feet on the hardwood as she crosses the room to the little table near her side of the bed.The table with her typewriter. I hear her strike a match and smell the sulfur.

“Nothing happened,” she says again. “You don’t have to be such a cunt about it.”

“If nothing happened,” I reply, “then there’s no need for this conversation, is there?” And I open my eyes again. My cloud has moved along an inch or so towards the right side of the window frame, which would be east, and I can hear a mockingbird singing.

“Someone fixed the lock on the gate,” she says.“I had to climb over.They put up a sign, too. No trespassing.”

“But you climbed over anyway?”

“No one saw me.”

“I don’t care. It was still illegal.”

“I went all the way up the hill,” she tells me. “I went all the way to the stone wall.”

“How many times do I have to tell you I don’t want to talk about this,” I say and roll over on my left side, rolling towards her, rolling away from the window and the cloud, the wisteria smell and the chattering mockingbird, and my elbow hits the Edward Gorey cup and it tips over.The wine almost looks like blood as it flows across the floor and the handwritten pages Helen’s left lying there.The burgundy undoes her words, her delicate fountain-pen cursive, and the ink runs and mixes with the wine.

“Fuck you,” she says and leaves me alone in the room, only a ragged, fading smoke ghost to mark the space she occupied a few seconds before. I pick up the empty cup, cursing myself, my carelessness and the things I’ve said because I’m scared and too drunk not to show it, and somewhere in the house a door slams. Later on, I think, Helen will believe it was only an accident, and I’m not so drunk or scared or stupid to know I’m better off not going after her. Outside, the mockingbird’s stopped singing, and when I look back at the window, I can’t find the white cloud anywhere.

This is not the night.This is only a dream of the night, only my incomplete, unreliable memories of a dream, which is as close as I can come on paper.The dream I’ve had more times now than I can recall, and it’s never precisely the truth of things, and it’s never the same twice. I have even tried putting it down on canvas, again and again, but I can hardly stand the sight of them, those damned absurd paintings. I used to keep them hidden behind the old chifforobe where I store my paints and brushes and jars of pigment, kept them there until Helen finally found them. Sometimes, I still think about burning them.

The gate with the broken padlock, the gate halfway between Exeter and Nooseneck, and I follow you down the dirt road that winds steeply up the hill through the old apple orchard, past trees planted and grown before our parents were born, trees planted when our grandparents were still young. And the moon’s so full and bright I can see everything — the ground-fall fruit rotting in the grass, your eyes, a fat spider hanging in her web. I can see the place ahead of us where the road turns sharply away from the orchard towards a field no one’s bothered to plow in half a century or more, and you stop and hold a hand cupped to your right ear.

“No,” I reply, when you tell me that you can hear music and ask if I can hear it, too. I’m not lying. I can’t hear much of anything but the wind in the limbs of the apple trees and a dog barking somewhere far away.

“Well, I can. I can hear it clear as anything,” you say, and then you leave the dirt road and head off through the trees.

Sometimes I yell for you to wait, because I don’t want to be left there on the road by myself, and sometimes I follow you, and sometimes I just stand there in the moonlight and branch shadows listening to the night, trying to hear whatever it is you think you’ve heard.The air smells sweet and faintly vinegary, and I wonder if it’s the apples going soft and brown all around me. Sometimes you stop and call for me to hurry.

A thousand variations on a single moment. It doesn’t matter which one’s for real, or at least it doesn’t matter to me. I’m not even sure that I can remember any more, not for certain. They’ve all bled together through days and nights and repetition, like sepia ink and cheap wine, and by the time I’ve finally caught up with you (because I always catch up with you, sooner or later), you’re standing at the low stone wall dividing the orchard from the field.You’re leaning forward against the wall, one leg up and your knee pressed to the granite and slate as if you were about to climb over it but then forgot what you were doing.The field is wide, and I think it might go on forever, that the wall might be here to keep apart more than an old orchard and a fallow plot of land.

“Tell me that you can see her,” you say, and I start to say that I don’t see anything at all, that I don’t know what you’re talking about and we really ought to go back to the car. Sometimes, I try to remember why I let you talk me into pulling off the road and parking in the weeds and wandering off into the trees.

It’s easier to steal your thoughts than make my own.

“Please, tell me you can see her.”

And I can, but I don’t tell you that. I have never yet told you that. Not in so many words. But I can see her standing there in the wide field, the tall, tall girl and the moon washing white across her wide shoulders and full breasts and Palomino hips, and then she sees us and turns quickly away. There are no clouds, and the moon’s so bright that there’s no mistaking the way her black hair continues straight down the center of her back like a horse’s mane or the long tail that swats nervously from one side of her ass to the other as she begins to run. Sometimes, I take your arm and hold you tight and stop you from going over the stone wall after her. Sometimes you stand very still and only watch. Sometimes you call out for her to please come back to you, that there’s nothing to be afraid of because we’d never hurt her. Sometimes there are tears in your eyes, and you call me names and beg me to please, please let you run with her.

And we stand there a very long time, until there’s nothing more to see or say that we haven’t seen.You’re the first to head back down the hill towards the car, and sometimes we get lost and seem to wander for hours and hours through the orchard, through tangles of creeper vines and wild grapes that weren’t there before. And other times, it seems to take no time at all.

And this last part, this is only a week ago.

I wake up from a dream of that night, a dream of wild things running on two legs, wild things in moonlit pastures that seem to stretch away forever. I wake up sweating and breathless and alone.She’s gone to take a piss, that’s all,I think, blinking at the clock on the dresser. It’s almost three in the morning, and for a while I lie there, listening to the secret, settling noises the house makes at three a.m., the noises no one’s supposed to hear. I’m lying there listening and trying too hard not to remember the dream when I hear Helen crying, and I get up and follow the sound down the hall to the spare bedroom that I’ve taken for my studio.

Helen’s found the canvases I hid behind the old chifforobe and pulled them all out into the light. She’s lined them up, indecently, these things no one else was ever meant to see, lined them up along two of the walls, pushing other things aside to make space for them. I stand there in the doorway, knowing I should be angry and knowing, too, that I have no right to be angry. Knowing that somehow all my lies to her about that night at the edge of the field have forfeited my right to feel violated. Some lies are that profound, that cruel, and I understand this. I do, and so I stand there, silently wondering what she’s going to say when she realizes I’m watching her

Helen glances at me over her shoulder, her eyes red and swollen and her face streaked with snot and tears. “You saw what I saw,” she says, the same way she might have said she was leaving me. And then she looks back at the paintings, each one only slightly different from the others, and shakes her head.

“You asshole,” she says.“You fucking cunt. I thought I was losing my mind. Did you even know that? Did you know I thought that I was going crazy?”

“No,” I lie. “I didn’t know.”

“How long have you been painting these?” she asks me, and I tell her the truth, that I painted the first one only a week after the night we walked through the orchard.

“I ought to have them framed and put them on the walls,” she says and wipes at her eyes. “I ought to hang them all through the fucking house, so you have to see them wherever you go. That’s what I ought to do. Would you like that?”

I tell her that I wouldn’t, and she laughs and sits down on the floor with her back to me.

“Go to bed,” she says.

“I wasn’t trying to hurt you,” I tell her. “I wasn’t ever trying to hurt you.”

“No. Don’t you dare fucking say anything else to me. Go back to bed and leave me alone.”

“I promise I’ll get rid of them,” I tell her, and Helen laughs again.

“No, you won’t,” she says, almost whispering. “These are mine now. I need them, and you’re not ever going to get rid of any of them. Not tonight and not ever.”

“I was scared, Helen.”

“I told you to go back to bed,” she says again, and I ask her to come with me.

“I’ll come when I’m ready. I’ll come when I’m done here.”

“There’s nothing else to see,” I say, but then she looks at me again, her eyes filled with resentment and fury and bitterness, and I don’t say anything else. I leave her alone with the paintings and walk back to the bedroom. Maybe, I think, she’ll change her mind and destroy them. Maybe she’ll take a knife to the paintings or burn them, the way I should have done months ago. I sit down on the edge of the bed, wishing I had a drink, thinking about going downstairs for a glass of whiskey or a brandy, or maybe going to the medicine cabinet for a couple of Helen’s Valium. And that’s when I see the owl skull, sitting atop the stack of books beside her typewriter. Bone bleached white by sun and weather, rain and snow and frost, those great empty, unseeing eye sockets, the yellow-brown sheath still covering that hooked beak. I looked for it after that night in February, three months ago, the night Helen brought the blonde woman home, but I never found it. So maybe, I told myself, maybe that was just some other part of the dreams. I lie down and do my best not to think about Helen, all alone in my studio with those terrible paintings of the thing from the field. And I try not to think about the owl skull; too, too many pieces to a puzzle I never want to solve. And before Helen comes back to bed, as the sky outside the window begins to go dusky shades of gray and purple with the deceits of false dawn, I drift back down to the orchard and the stone wall and someone has turned the ponies out again.

I am so sick of this typewriter, and right now, sitting here pecking at these fucking black keys is the very last thing I want to be doing. And yet, I will not even try to deny that I need this, the outlet of writing, the words, the pages, the goddamn typewriter. As surely as I need the Tegretol and Klonopin and sleep, as surely as I need to stop drinking again and stop smoking so much and write another book, and while I’m making this little wish list, as surely as I need to take an ax to that goddamn wicked tree out there. As surely as I need all those things, so, too, do I need to reduce the day to mere nouns and verbs and adjectives. It has been entirely too strange and frustrating, this day, and that’s after fucking Constance and after the inexplicable fact of “Pony.” I mean, it seems now, somehow, that the worst of it began after Constance returned from Foster, though, truthfully, very little has happened since she got back to the farmhouse.

Whether I’m actually talking in circles or not, I feel as though I’m talking in circles. Reading back over that last paragraph, it seems like nothing so much to me as the Ouroboros of my consciousness struggling futilely to consume itself in toto. Maybe in the hope that the act of consumption, of self-annihilation, would lead, finally, to peace and an end to this fear and confusion. I’ve never really thought much of (or on) the whole writing-as-therapy line of reasoning — James Pennebaker and the curative virtues of self-disclosure. I say that,and yet I need this. Right now, I think my ability to “write it out” might be the only thing holding me together. Well, that and the pills and the beer I shouldn’t be drinking.

I’m not sure what I expected from Constance this afternoon, only that I expected something. I know that last night she said, “No strings attached.” In fact, I’m pretty sure that she said it twice. And when she said it, it was no doubt exactly what I wanted to hear, the little push necessary if I was to follow her up those stairs, the promise that we could share this thing without commitment or emotional baggage or whatever. Just sex. Just the physical release and the comfort of having another woman’s body against mine for the first time since Amanda’s death. Looking back, I know that was all she offered and all I agreed to, all I thought I wanted or needed. But. she’s acting like it never happened.

And what? What the fuck am I whining about? I’m upset because she meant what she said? Did some desperate recess of my mind allow itself to believe that, regardless of what we said and what we thought we meant, last night would be the beginning of something more? That Constance Hopkins would be the end of my mourning for Amanda, and the floodgates would open wide, and I’d be free to shit out the book that Dorry and my editor are waiting for, and we’d all live happily ever after? Is that what this is all about?

She came back from Foster and, almost immediately, retreated to the sanctuary of her attic, and I’ve hardly seen her since. She’s come down a couple of times to use the toilet, once to get something from the fridge. She’s been perfectly pleasant with me, and I’d be lying to say that she’s behaving differently towards me (and isn’t that the problem, Sarah, that she isn’t?). There was the usual small talk, but no suggestion that tonight would see an encore of last night’s tryst. I’m forty-four years old, and I’ve had more one-night stands than I can even recollect. I’m not supposed to act like this. I am ashamed that I feel so rejected or betrayed or ignored simply because Constance meant “no strings” when she said “no strings.” I am more than ashamed that I can’t stop thinking maybe I just didn’t do it for her last night, that I was invited into her bed and found wanting.

And maybe what’s eating at me isn’t even so much Constance’s inattention as the mystery posed by the “new story,” which, try as I may, I can’t stop suspecting is somehow her doing. And that’s not to say that I think she wrote the thing. Having been over it so many times now, there is genuinely no way left for me to attribute the authorship of “Pony” to anyone but myself. It’s my voice, my handwriting, me exploring my own very personal concerns, and, most damning of all, a set of line edits that includes several proofreader’s marks that, so far as I know, are entirely of my own invention.

Even if I were to go so far as to imagine that Constance could have mimicked my style, forged my handwriting, and had these sorts of insights into what happened between Amanda and me — and all those things are at least not beyond the realm of possibility—I still cannot account for the proofreading marks. I brought no finished or unfinished manuscripts with me from Atlanta that she might have cadged them from. All that shit’s locked up in a storage unit back in Georgia. So, when I stare at those pages and see there six or seven of the “operational signs” of my own invention, I’m left to conclude that either an elaborate conspiracy exists between Constance Hopkins and one of the handful of people familiar with my peculiar editing tics (my lit agent, my editors and copy editors past and present, and a couple of exes), or she’s clairvoyant, or I wrote the story myself and subsequently blocked having done so from my mind (purposefully or unintentionally, consciously or unconsciously). And I find that even when faced with so unsavory a proposition as my own insanity, I cannot simply abandon lex parsimoniae. That the simplest explanation here is also the most unsettling is irrelevant, if I am to at least remain honest with myself.

I wrote the story, and I must admit that I wrote it. I just don’t remember having written it. All evidence would indicate that I composed it sometime between July 8th and July 13th, the span of time during which I produced no journal entries. Four days, and the story comes to about 3,850 words, which is about (actually just under) what I would normally be able to produce in four days. I have spent a great deal of the afternoon and evening trying to distract myself from thoughts of Constance by trying to clearly recall everything I did over the course of those four days. My memory is decent, despite the drugs, and I’ve not come up with any apparent “missing time” or blackouts. I know my memory’s seen better days, but everything appears to be in order. There is one last avenue of investigation open to me that I have not yet pursued, and that is simply to ask Constance if she heard me at the typewriter on those days, or if she ever actually saw me working on the story, or if I talked about it with her while I was working on it. I just haven’t found the courage to do that yet. I’ve promised myself that I will do it tomorrow, and then I’ll call my doctor in Atlanta and see what she thinks.

About the only aspect of the story that might argue against my having written it is that I am rarely so transparently autobiographical. Especially when it comes to details. For example, the chipped Edward Gorey coffee mug. I’ve had that mug for years (but it’s also in storage, so there’s no way that Constance could have seen it), but it’s the sort of thing I almost never borrow from my own life and insert into my fiction. Doing so has just always sort of given me the creeps. But, it’s hardly legitimate grounds for dismissing myself as the story’s creator. Oh, and the ruby-stemmed wineglasses. Amanda bought those somewhere, and I got rid of them after she died.

It’s late, and I just want to go to bed. My eyes are beginning to water, and the words are starting to swim about on the page. But I did want to mention one other thing, lest, looking back on this entry, however many years from now, I allow myself the luxury of believing that I was, on this night, being haunted by nothing more than the specter of free love and a story I can’t recall having written. Lest Dr. Harvey’s typescript and the red tree begin to feel neglected. Any other day, this final item might have struck me as so strange and portentous as to have formed the matter of an entire entry. But tonight, it seems somewhat inconsequential by comparison. I went into my bedroom this evening, after dinner (alone), and found three leaves lying on the floor at the foot of my bed. They were quite fresh and not the least bit wilted, so I think they could not have been lying there very long before I discovered them. I knew, without a doubt, what they were as soon as I saw them, but, still, I carried one to my laptop and looked it up online. It (and the other two) are dead ringers for Quercus rubra, the Northern Red Oak. I could pretend to pretend to find comfort in the precise language of botany. Doesn’t science always scare away the monsters? I have these notes I made: upper surfaces of fully developed leaves are smooth and glossy dark green, contrasting with yellow green undersides, with either smooth or hairy axils. Stout, frequently reddish petioles measuring one to two inches long; stipules caducous. Mature leaves usually possess seven to nine lobes (oblong to oblong-ovate) tapering from a broad base and measure five to ten inches in length, four to six inches wide; leaf margins repandly denticulate; conspicuous midrib and primary veins; second pair of lobes from leaf apex largest. There. I copied that word for word from my handwritten notes, putting it down like a prayer or incantation. There are only a few words whose meanings escape me (“caducous,” “petioles,” axils,” etc.), and I’ll look them up later. But no, I do not feel all better now. I do not feel any different at all.

I threw two out and kept the third, pressing it between the pages of Harvey’s manuscript.