Woman, Blue
The voices that usually filled the Copper Crow had deserted it. Bartenders, waitresses, customers — they’d all gone home. The light was a smolder, not enough to show the cracks running through an ancient oil painting hung by the stairs. Logan was used to rubbing up against the emptiness, to nights drawn out like notes struck and held till early morning.
A basement bar in the West Village, the Copper Crow had probably been built when ships still needed sails. Bottles stood in neat rows before a mirror the size of a small pond, its edges trimmed by woodwork from another era. A squiggle of neon ran below the antique frame, an illegible signature the pale red of iron just before it burns white.
The stillness was as bare as the floorboards.
Logan kept a tape recorder running in case he came up with a riff or a melodic experiment worth working into a song, but he hadn’t touched a key in the last … five minutes? Ten?
Anglo on his mother’s side, he was Creek on his father’s. Dark, like his father, he’d grown up willowy, like his mother. His grandfather, a full-blooded Creek, hadn’t lived all that long but long enough to bury his oldest son. Logan’s father, himself a full-blood, had died at an intersection in Topeka, where two pickup trucks had mangled each other as if one of them had expected to win. Both drivers killed, no witnesses at that early morning hour, police never figured out who’d run the signal.
In the silence — a desert he could transform just by putting his finger to the keyboard, by switching on the house stereo system, by opening his mouth — he heard his grandfather’s voice. Dry as the chafing of cicada wings. There were other voices, blurred and indistinct. He didn’t hear them when the streets were loud with traffic, couldn’t make them out until darkness arched itself like a bridge and the city settled into a calmer rhythm.
The voices had crushed him once, with their weight and numbers, with the fears and anxieties and regrets and the losses they spoke of. He wouldn’t let that happen again. He wouldn’t go back to the hospital.
Strangely, it wasn’t his grandfather or even his father who went on murmuring in his ear, none of the long dead. It was Linda, whom he’d barely known.
They’d met in the hospital. He was alone on a bench, and when he looked up, she was standing in front of him, blue-eyed and blue-jeaned, a light breeze lifting strands of sandy hair around her head.
“Mind if I sit down?” One hand pressed a notebook against her side.
“Sure.” Watching the strands do their slow dance, he slid over on slats that had been painted over so many times chips three layers deep exposed another shade of green.
The air carried the smell of mud and dead grass, of sap oozing from winter-split pines. Shampooed hair.
She leaned toward him. “What I really need to do …” An expression of anxiety wavered on her face, a candle about to go out. “What I really need to find out is today’s date.”
He didn’t know either. One of those things he’d gradually lost track of as the days and weeks slushed together. He made a gesture of helplessness with his hands.
“It doesn’t matter.” Her voice was perky. “It’s not the real one anyway. They turned it all back.” She blinked. So hard that it wasn’t a blink but a tic.
“Turned everything back?” Who, he wondered, had turned everything back. How? Then he remembered where he was. The doctors who would eagerly write this stuff down.
“They had to. If they didn’t, then …” Her forehead crinkled. “Then I’m only 24. That can’t be right. So much has happened in my life.” She blinked again and jerked her head back as though water had splashed on her face. A kind of spasm. “No …” Incongruously, she nodded, her forehead smooth and blank. “They turned everything back.” She snatched up her notebook and handed it to him. “I’m keeping track.”
Bluebells or something wallpapering the cover, it had a little strap with a buckle and a lock.
“I have about fifty of them now, but they don’t let me keep them here. They’re in a secret place because once, once my father threw them out. He said there wasn’t any room for them. But if there are no history books, it would be just like it never happened, wouldn’t it? We’d never know.” She giggled. “Isn’t that funny?”
His weak smile felt like something tearing. The little breakdown he’d had was nothing compared to whatever rift had stranded Linda somewhere outside the calendar.
“Here …” She pulled a pen from a back pocket. “Write your name and the date. I mean, just March whatever, you know? Never mind the year — it’s not the real one anyway. Say, Today I met Linda O. Feehly — my middle name’s Olivia — and whatever else you want to write.”
On a warm February day I met Linda O. —
“How do you spell your last name?”
Feehly. She is the friendliest person I’ve met here. I hope I see her again soon.
“Make sure you sign it.” She leaned over to watch.
He gave the notebook back to her.
“Thanks.” A hand on either end of it, she lifted her arms over her head and stretched.
He looked away. Linda, with her tics and non sequiturs, with her confusion about history and her age, with those soft swellings under her shirt, made a spreading puddle of warmth in his lap. Instinct didn’t disappear in the hospital; it slept less, burrowed deeper. An arched back roused it. Body heat. The smell of shampooed hair.
Neither of them went very far into what had gotten out of hand in their lives, not on that day or any other. Neither mentioned the parts of their childhood better forgotten. But they began to look for each other when they were outside. She was in Cottage Eight — that’s what staff called those brick boxes, cottages. He was in Nine.
At the back of the rec room in Nine was a smaller room the shrinks and nurses sometimes used for meetings. One afternoon when everyone else was basking in the balmy weather, he found a guitar standing in a corner. He grabbed it by the neck and dragged it outside.
“Are you going to play that?” Linda, sitting crosslegged in the grass, lifted her chin at the guitar.
“Figured I’d give it a try.” He sat down next to her. “Even found a pick.” He held up a plastic tab that might have come from a model kit (no telling what you’d find in the rec room). He started playing, stopped to tighten a string, started again, tightened again. Tensions adjusted, he moved beyond opening chords.
The pitch of her voice rose — “Oh I know this song.”
A throwback. To when gathering with a purpose and singing in a collective voice could bend the ear of Universal Mind. Harmony and understanding. Global peace could be brought on by mantras, like rain called down by dance. Mystic crystal revelation.
She tried to sing along, her voice coming on or fading depending on whether or not she knew the words, sometimes crumbling into a mumble to keep the rhythm. By the time the attendants came to herd them back inside, a semicircle had gathered, and Linda wasn’t the only one demolishing the lyrics. Yeah, they lived in cottages with barred windows, but someone had extended him a little credit between his thumb and two fingers, and he was glad he’d taken it.
The first time she reached for his hand, he pulled away with the excuse that they didn’t want staff catching on. Maybe she even believed it. But that didn’t explain why he never looked at her as though it pained him to be on one side of the hospital grounds while she was on the other. Why there had been only furtive glances and silent scheming while the hospital attendants glared at them as if to decode their faces.
She never blamed him for refusing to give the simplest outward sign that they were, if not boyfriend and girlfriend, in some way together. She never complained, and he assumed — wasn’t it easier? — it hadn’t hurt her. Once, only once, she’d looked at him and the question he knew she wanted to ask but wouldn’t was in her eyes. Then her face twitched, her eyes crimped shut, and the guilt was gone.
Sneaking out of movie night, the two of them managed what he’d been angling for for weeks — a splotch of shadow between two spruces on the blind side of a cottage. They could have been a couple of eight-graders behind an empty school dark except for a few mysterious lights, an unmanned ship adrift in soft insect buzz.
Her mouth tasted faintly of spearmint, clean as a child’s. He untucked her shirt, slid rough hands up the smooth skin of her back.
How long had it been?
She unbuttoned his shirt, the breeze cool enough to stiffen his nipples making it belly out. He worked her jeans down over hips he’d so often followed with his eyes, tried not to think about where he was or what the fallout would be. Tried not to think. When he closed his eyes, he saw rings of light — some charged spillover from her skin on his. By the time she was under him, their jackets and pants a quilt on the grass, all he could see were those bright rings.
Linda wasn’t the awkward lover he’d expected. She moved beneath him as if she knew exactly the way he wanted it to feel. Something burned away, and for the first time he thought her pretty. Her head tipped back, her cheekbones feline and her mouth open — almost beautiful. They arrived together at that strange moment when a hole seemed to have been punched through him, and something rushed in with the force of seawater. Shuddering and dizzy, he felt gauzy enough to be carried off by a breeze.
Next morning he was gone.
He’d known for a week he was scheduled to be processed out — they were giving him his diploma and a kick in the ass to make sure he went through the door — but couldn’t bring himself to tell her. He kept putting it off until there was no more future to write checks against. The morning he was standing outside the fence, green lawns behind him, he told himself he’d call when he got to New York. He’d send a letter, a postcard, something. But after he landed a gig as a piano man in the Copper Crow, he got busy soldering together routines, a kind of scaffolding to prop him up while he eased himself back into music.
He was a long way from Kansas, from home, the friends he’d grown up with. He was terrified of slipping again, of another hospital stay. He just needed to get himself sorted out, he insisted to no one, and he’d give Linda a ring.
A few months later he finally picked up the phone. He had to listen to the woman on the other end, who remembered him, explain to him three or four times — they might have been speaking the same foreign language neither knew well — that Linda had been found in the shallow brook running through the hospital grounds. The razor blade police had bagged was rusty, a careless discard that shouldn’t have been on the grounds. He hung up.
Now he sat in the bar’s artificial dusk, imagining her walking along the water, plunking pebbles as she went. Taking off her shoes and socks, wiggling her toes in the cool grass. But the water was cold, so cold it made her pull back. Another Eve, aware for the first time that pain is also allotted to the body.
Then she got used to the flowing iciness around her ankles. She sat on the bank, her feet soaking, and worked at her wrists with the deliberation of a painter recreating a landscape down to the blur of a dragonfly’s wings. It hurt. But the pain sharpened her concentration, and she pressed harder with the rusty blade. Sank it deeper.
She bent close to his ear while he sat at his keyboard, told him how the pain dissolved in the cold water and the red life flowed out of her. More life than she’d ever known she’d had.
Girlishly small, her sneakers lay stranded in the grass, laces undone.
She let her blood mingle with the clear water, she said. Watched it unwind in red ribbons and spread into cloudy plumes. Stream away in the running water. And she felt happy. So happy she began to float. Above the water flooding her veins, washing away the medication, the years she’d added to her age, the inky memories scribbled in hoarded diaries. It was all clean now, clean and running. Out to a blue lake.
The hospital attendant who’d found her — such a pale white, so stiff and cold — hadn’t known she’d died a peaceful death. With no anger toward life. No love of death. Water rushing over her body, around her face, she looked as if she were sinking into sleep. Her eyes half open. Glazed a milky blue now, the beginning of a dream still held in her pupils. The dream had caught her gaze as she lay in the cold water, worked its hypnotic magic on her. Dissolving the sky overhead and a cloud twisting restlessly past and the flight of a distressed bird. What is that? she’d wondered, staring more intently, and in the midst of her curiosity drifted free of her body. A gentle dip and she was off somewhere else.
The calm shores of a blue lake.
She lay with an arm behind her head as if to pillow it, the other across her stomach. Her shirt was still tucked into her jeans, a bare foot half buried in sand — something he’d never seen but would never forget.
He wiped sweat from his forehead, played. Started over. Played again. Raked his nails over his scalp. His fingers separated clumps of wet hair. He heard laughter. Smelled the grass from the night they’d covered the ground with their clothes. The breeze came through the walls of the bar, raised goose bumps on his skin.
Fingering keys, he sang to bring her back. The pallor of her skin was startling, the skin of her arms see through down to blue veins. She took on this color too readily, she said, bruised too easily. A shortcoming she’d inherited from her mother, a weakness they shared. Whatever hand had tied Linda together as a bundle of sinew and a puff of breath hadn’t done a good job of it, and she undid the knot herself.
Drained, he stabbed at a plastic button with a finger to shut off the tape recorder. On the label of Side A, he wrote Woman, Blue.
He snapped off the lights, and the snaking neon, silently echoed in the mirror behind the bar, went cold.
He closed the door behind him, turned a key and locked it.
A shiver ran through him. The warm night air was cold where he’d sweat through his shirt. West Third Street was empty. His eye held what little light there was the way ore locked away a mineral’s shine.
He walked past the Blue Note’s elegant sheet-metal silhouettes jazzing it up over a piano-shaped marquee. The brass poles holding it up doubled as legs.
Darkened shop windows reflected him, the street, a fire hydrant.
The tears that had gathered while he’d played in the Crow had dried. He looked down at his hands. The veins were swollen. He splayed his fingers expecting to see a ghostly light around them, to see beyond them an avenue of telephone pole crosses and their sagging wires aglow. In Kansas the horns of cattle sometimes burned blue at the tips just before a twister touched down. St. Elmo’s Fire. Maybe there was nothing to see because he was at the wrong end of it: the storm had come and gone.
Silently he asked Linda to forgive him. For letting her wade out into an emotion he couldn’t return. For being in love with being able to walk and listen and breathe. His steps slow and buoyant, he might have been wandering an underwater city, the now-and-again breeze a current. If a brick were to shake loose from a building, it would cut an odd jerky path, take its time coming to rest at his feet. A cracked lamp set out for trash had the bearing of an ancient urn. He could see the pitting left by rust on railing, and he understood that its iron spirals signaled there was a route the dead could take to return.
The Moon had taken on the color of a distant fire — a constellation burning to carbon cinders maybe. Or a single star, not so far away, collapsing into nuclear embers. The Moon seemed extraordinarily solid behind a sky full of silent motion — gray clouds driven by winds too high to feel. The clouds came slowly apart, shredding on invisible shoals.
Anything added to this night — one more homeless man against the curb, one more Styrofoam coffee cup, half-eaten hot dog, candy wrapper flapping past his feet — would make it trickle over.
He turned onto Carmine Street and hopped up the brick steps of his building. A minimalist angel illuminated the corner. He glanced back at the haloed aluminum pole as though it were a lover he was leaving.
Facing the locked door, he ground his palm heels into his eyes. For the second time that night, he asked Linda to forgive him. Reflexively, he looked at his watch. Light glinting off its face whited out the numerals, but it didn’t matter. He already knew how late it was.