Without Trace

 

My story "Without Trace" has a long, convoluted pedigree.  Much of it comes from the novel set in Crete which I researched there as well as in many Continuing Studies classes about Minoan culture and archaeology.  Kanti Deschene, half Navajo in this story, was in the novel Abel, full Navajo.  Zak—my Afro-Greek cultural anthropologist—is new, though his Romantic outlook has been stolen from the main character of the novel, Mar.

 

I revised this part of the novel to submit as a "border crossing narrative" in late 2021.  Its main preoccupation, as I see it, is extinctions—that huge temporal border.  The main character, Kanti, is an archaeologist whose specialization in ancient pollens has taken her to Crete over the years to study the abrupt end of the Bronze Age, of Minoan civilization.  Her final trip to Crete occurs during another looming extinction—our own, due to the worsening climate crisis and growing devastation by Covid-19 (in the Navajo homelands especially).  Another important border, this one theoretical, lies between knowing and not knowing, knowledge gained and lost.  Kanti is preoccupied with finding out what happened to end the Minoan world; that's been almost more important to her than intimate human relationships.

 

But those, in this liminal state we're in, our "inbetweeness," are in flux.  All our identities, social relations, and established customs, routines, and spaces have suddenly changed, become foreign, uncertain.

For those fortunate enough not to be refugees, I believe, foreign countries had stopped seeming particularly drastic borders anymore—but all that changed in early 2020.  Even other people, even those closest to us, in the same house or room or public space, were suddenly forbidden to us, on the other side of crucial lines.

 

Crete and its prehistory is something that has always fascinated me, as a lifelong student of archaeology and philosophical reflection, and having been born in New Mexico I feel kindred to the Navajos and other Native peoples, and write frequently about their customs and beliefs.

 

Here's a brief excerpt:

         "So they set out together in the blue Fiat for one of the last fastnesses of the small remnant of the once-great civilization which had survived beyond the general fall—soon to be gone as well.

She felt the urgency especially there, in that liminal place so near the end.  The end of the Minoans, the end of the Bronze Age.  She felt in her own bones the aching traces of the dying culture she'd followed with curious concern.  At Vronda (and still higher up, at Karphi, the highest of all the peak sanctuaries) the very last hold-outs had defied the forces of natural destruction, the unidentified invaders, fate writ large.  They’d been cut off from everything, hung on precariously in the haunts of gods who'd chosen not to save them.  They died unmarked on mountains they had held sacred.  In the end the shrines that they had tended had become their graves."

 

"Without Trace" was published online on March 1 in the Frontiers issue of Halfway Down the Stairs—frontiers and borders being more or less the same.

 

 

image:  The site of Vronda, InstapStudyCenter.net

Green Flash

Another novel excerpt has been published, this "Green Flash"—in Hawai'i rather than Crete.

"All day she thought of the dark skin of the Polynesian dancer, Gabriel, knifing into the turquoise sunshot water with its black heart (son of Pele), the bright-sailed catamaran like a Hawaiian Icarus flying into the sun, saying “it’s better at dusk.”  The green flash that her father yearned for as the sun went, swallowed into night, the yearning color of salvationout in the region where mirages live."

The publisher is Silver Stork, in their "Solais" issue—"of sunlight."

image:  Green Flash, Pekka Parvianen, NASA

Studio with Mimosa

Another post in The Ekphrastic Review, this a small bit on Bonnard's luminous conflagration Studio with Mimosa, from my still unpublished novel Nude Against the Light.

We got to see this painting again in London in March, at the Tate exhibition of Bonnard's work, and I had the awful impression that it has faded since I saw it first in France in 2000.  I hope I'm wrong, that it was a trick of the light.


image:  Pierre Bonnard, 1935

Blue Monkeys, and an Octopus

Many of my favorite novels were serialized—

The Count of Monte Cristo, The Woman in White, The Portrait of a Lady, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Tender is the Night, and (by my namesake, that other Christie) And Then There Were None.

So it amuses me that my own endlessly long novel, set mostly in Crete, has been appearing in pieces, if out of order, in various publications.

"Blue Monkeys" was published by UK-based Belle Ombre in March (one Sunday morning as we sat on Hampstead Heath looking out at the distant London skyline and, closer, at fine dogs and their dogwalkers).  "Octopus" was published by New York-based Lowestoft Chronicle earlier in March. 

Both these feature Anna Oliver, a feisty 80, who all her life has done her damnedest to forget her Greek lover killed shortly after the German invasion in 1941, and to ignore the house he left her on the northern coast of Crete.

Another piece of Anna's story, "Naxos," will be published by Sweden-based Mediterranean Poetry.  For a taste of that, while waiting— 

"Anna laid a tart green against an impish red against a blue to knock the socks off you.  Saturated colors, wet on her fattest camelhair brush.  Painting caïques in the cove, on Naxos, sitting on a borrowed stool under a giddy great golf umbrella Marcella had also wheedled out of the hotel owner for her, with Metaxa written all across it, using the handy beechwood folding easel she had ordered specially for her Greek Adventure."

In the end I shall perhaps gather up all the pieces and tape them back together in whatever configuration they've landed, something fresh and surprising. 

image:  Blue Monkey Fresco, Palace of Knossos

The Theft of Faith

The assignment was to write a short-short fiction piece imitating Ron Hansen's Nebraska.  This morphed into a very (very) rough sketch for the novel I've been wanting to write—a drastic reworking of my first attempt at a novel many years ago, based on the real-life theft that devastated Santa Fe.  It's stalled because there are several versions I'm equally taken with.  I don't yet know which might be most compelling.

Sometime during the night of Sunday, March 18, 1973, the willow-wood Madonna which was Santa Fe, New Mexico’s beloved patron saint was stolen from her altar in the locked cathedral, no clue but a set of footprints left behind. 

The town was stunned, bereft.  Grown men and women, said the front-page news reports, wept when they heard.  It was a crime particularly terrible in that Catholic town, an act of sagrilege, a sign of the incalculable times.  And far more personal, besides—a loss somehow much closer to the bone than any ordinary theft.  As if appealing for the safe return of an abducted child, Santa Fe mayor Joseph E. Valdes vowed to "do anything in my power to be sure that La Conquistadora is found."

Lucy was only sixteen at the time, busy with boys and theatre and chess, and not especially interested in religion.  She didn’t see that it had much of anything to do with her.  But she sensed even then, in all her inward-focused innocence, that the theft of the little holy figurine was pivotal for Santa Fe—and for them all.  That nothing from then on would ever be the same.  And before the whole thing was over (entwined as it was with her weeks of playing Juliet in the school play, and feeling as she did woven-about with marriage, loss, and death), she had begun to understand that she'd been led up to that empty altar curious and hesitant as a young bride, and been transfixed there.  She would, forever after and however many thousand miles away, keep coming back to the silenced cathedral, finding it her touchstone.

The theft of faith, she’d write one day.  Having worn herself senseless writing about selling one's soul for knowledge, the black arts, treating Faust in Marlowe's play and Prospero in Shakespeare's for her dissertation in religious studies at Columbia, she'd found herself in the small hours, senses fumy from a pot of Lapsang Souchong tea, scribbling down a counter-argument to blessed ignorance—a story with a heroine almost as innocent as she herself had been, doomed by the damnation that comes of not knowing, no longer being sure of anything.  (The keystone of her first collection of stories, that The New Yorker would call "elegiac and exquisite.")  One way or another, that would always be her theme.

The cathedral, St. Francis de Assisi, was downtown in what seemed in that high desert country a vast, deeply shady park of elms and box elders, though if looked back at later while walking dogs in Central Park or waiting for your married lover every afternoon beside the aviary in the Borghese Gardens, planted with trees that could be found in ancient sacred woods, you'd realize wasn't much more than a smallish city block, really.  Behind the park was St. Vincent’s Hospital, where Lucy had been born—and where, almost exactly twenty years after the theft, the night after she moved into a rustic in-law cottage on a sprawling property in the foothills above the Stanford campus, the famous writer who had lived just up the road would die, after a car crash there in Santa Fe during a trip to give a lecture.

Catty-corner from the cathedral on the east, the side closest to the Santa Fe River (dry most always, except in early May when carrying snow melt, and up above the reservoir on Upper Canyon Road, where on the campus of the prep school that had taken over a compound of low-roofed science labs you could find watercress growing in it as Lucy would discover during her three blissful school-years there from seventh to ninth grades), was La Fonda, the inn at the end of the Santa Fe Trail.  You could stop on snowy days to warm yourself at the huge open fireplace in the lobby with the polished flagstones and the worn leather settees, breathing the fragrance of the piñon wood crackling with sap and then left smoldering all day; and check the newsstand for your favorite books by local writers Oliver La Farge or N. Scott Momaday, Tony Hillerman or Donald Hamilton (whose children went to Lucy’s school and, she discovered one morning, stricken with awe, kept homing pigeons in palacial cages in their patio with high adobe walls).  Where, Ernie Pyle the journalist from World War II wrote, “You could go … any time of day and see a few artists in the bar … a goateed gentleman from Austria or a maharajah from India or a New York broker … You never met anyone anywhere except at La Fonda.”  Where you could write bad, heartsick poems in a spiral notebook while consoling yourself with crèpes of sweet apricot jam or cinnamon-dusted café au lait in the French Pastry Shop around the side, across from Packard’s Trading Post, with its green-hearted copper kettles and cozily steamed windows, pretending that you were (as you would some years after that day be, remembering) in Paris, writing your bad poems in French instead.

On the opposite corner, across Cathedral Place, was the old post-office, which would in the early 1990s become a museum of contemporary American Indian arts, where the young Hopi, Cliff Nequatewa, would (Lucy would decide in a story) hang his first juried painting, of a ceremonial mask, the colors of the sacred Landers Blue turquoise his father set in heavy silver pendants, and of the earth in the canyon behind the dance plaza at home.

Across Palace Avenue was Sena Plaza, named for the Palace of the Governors and for the Sena family, respectively—the museum that had the old carriages and the letterpress, and the stern goateed forefathers and black-lace-mantillaed grandmothers of José Sena, who Lucy’s father worked for at the Abstract and Title company.  Uncle Joe, who had a cat named Saturday, who ate a fried egg on his enchilada, who gave her the garnet-red enameled jewelry box with the tutued ballerina twirling on one toe among velvet and mirrors, and dozens of Portuguese stamps with old sailing ships and Arabian stallions in cool dusty colors for her stamp collection; and who, among the musty ledgers of Spanish land grant records, taught her to use chopsticks—though the only place in town you could use them, in those days, was at the New Canton Café, whose waitress was Mabel, come from St. Louis and widowed young; whose egg foo young with crispy bean sprouts Lucy loved, if not as well if she was truthful as the glossy cherry pie.

Sena Plaza had been the family’s hacienda, dating back to 1692—seventy years after the arrival of La Conquistadora.  The compound was made up of a series of uneven brick-paved patios and rickety dark wooden staircases climbing up out of the twining summertime embrace of honeysuckle to long narrow wooden balconies, worthy of Spanish Juliets, where there were appraisers and a dentist, a used-book shop, a soap merchant, the shop that wove the striped ponchos that Lucy and the other volunteer ushers would wear at the Santa Fe Opera that coming summer, her last summer before going away.  And in the middle was The Shed, everyone’s favorite restaurant.  The Shed had opened first in Burro Alley—where the donkeys of the firewood vendors used to be tethered—the year before Lucy’s parents moved to Santa Fe.  In 1973 (and still now, more than thirty years later), you could buy your firewood from Jesus, as her father loved to say.  At the wood yard of Jesus Rios, up where Camino del Monte Sol comes into Canyon Road, around the corner from the low-roofed studio where Lucy took ballet with Jacques Cartier, who did the fire dance each year for thirty years at the burning of Zozobra—he was the figure in red moving inexorably up the steps at Fort Marcy to set fire, at last, after an agonizing long approach, to the enormous groaning paper effigy, lighting the fuse that would eventually set off a fit of fireworks from its massive frowning thrashing head. 

Old Man Gloom burned, and as the legend had it, with him all the town’s cares burnt too, for another year.  But maybe not that year, and maybe never since, for some.  The repercussions of the theft were maybe more than even Old Man Gloom could take away.

At night, especially in the winter months, downtown Santa Fe is pretty well deserted.  Despite the many businesses around, no one saw anything at all that might lead the police to the thief or thieves of La Conquistadora.  The cathedral sacristan, Della Garcia, had at 9:15 carefully locked the heavy outer doors with their sixteen carved panels (the arthritis in her hands, worsened by the icy March wind, making it an act of love, you have to imagine), and they had remained locked until just before 6:00 a.m. the following morning, when they were opened again for mass.  When Father Miguel Baca, in whose care the souls of tens of thousands were, surely sank groaning to his knees on the cold stones before the uncommunicative altar, sending a prayer of desperation heavenward.  Wondering how he could tell them, his trusting flock.  Her confraternity.  The women who dressed her.  Those who knew well and others who would learn, in the papers, about the one hundred and thirty dresses in the Madonna’s wardrobe, and the valuable jewels that adorned her.  The accounts that would in retrospect amaze Lucy.  “One dress, made by Cochití Pueblo artist Dorothy Trujillo, is of Native American design and includes small silver bracelets and a miniature squash blossom necklace.”  Her accessories, including "Castilian mantillas, lavish damask and gold lamé gowns and mantles, and even tiny Parisian lace handkerchiefs and ruby earrings."

Speculations flew.  Leads were pursued.  The police wondered if the crime were related to thefts over the past two years of other religious objects from churches and Penitente moradas around the state.  On July 5 the year before, a valuable statue of San Miguel had been stolen from Santa Fe’s San Miguel Mission, the oldest church in the United States, along with other statues and paintings.  A handwritten note received by the Archdiocese office the week after the empty altar was discovered suggested that La Conquistadora had gone off in search of the lost San Miguel, because he’d been gone so long and clearly needed help finding his way back home.

Lucy went on blithely untouched—or so she imagined.  That Sunday she was written up in The New Mexican herself.  An oddity, a girl who played chess (to the death, she’d say), and most often won.  She travelled with the others on the chess team to Santa Fe High, Las Vegas, Los Alamos.  Took boys unaware, beating them easily.  (A kind of mating game, she’d write ironically one day, when she'd learned irony.)  She checked the mail for answers to her applications to far colleges—Wellesley, the University of Victoria, UC Santa Barbara; it didn’t matter where, really, just someplace far away.  She felt the end coming.  Despaired, feeling nostalgic for her past before it was even over.  Could see herself an old, old lady, looking back, her executor (in lieu of children or grandchildren) finding a bit of brittle chamisa—what was called rabbitbrush—among her effects.  A few Portuguese stamps.  Her wistful poems which had that spring begun winning student awards, though she would give up poetry and chess both after her first year away from Santa Fe.

She would have sworn later that the search for the missing statue went on for the better part of a year.  She would be surprised to learn it had been just a month.  The time it took for the grape hyacinths to bloom.  For tumbleweeds to collect on chain link fences around town, in the fitful early spring winds.  For the crowded kitchen at The Shed to go through seven thousand gallons of red chili sauce.  For her heart to be broken in three places, just when she'd learned she had one.  For the boy she'd trusted with it to prove faithless, to leave what was between them, turn away and go places she couldn’t imagine let alone follow, talking as he sometimes did of slipping into strangers' houses, standing scarcely breathing in a track of moonlight on the threshhold of a sleeper's bedroom like a strange new skin; and (worse, maybe, confiding this as well), falling under the strong spell of a Swedish exchange student who would stay on after graduation and sing in the opera chorus, all but dropping out of school the last couple of weeks to take her to (and in) the ghost town south of town with the name of a Spanish city where there once were silver mines and now just lonesome godforsaken houses they could choose among and claim with his summer camp sleeping bag for an hour or two, a day.

On Saturday, April 7, things started moving, fast.  Father Baca received a ransom note enclosing as proof of possession a cross from La Conquistadora's crown.  The note stated in poor Italian that the Madonna would be returned unharmed in exchange for $150,000 and a promise from the Governor that those involved would not face criminal prosecution.  If church leaders agreed to these terms, Father Baca was instructed to ring the cathedral's bells exactly 10 times at 4:45 p.m. on Wednesday, April 11.  If the bells were rung at the designated time, the kidnappers would deliver additional instructions by phone the following day.

And then on Saturday, the 14^th, giant headlines.  La Conquistadora had been found!

   Montoya, Baca, Santa Fe police chief Felix Lujan and police captain

   Alfred Lucero accompanied the 17-year-old to La Conquistadora's

   location in the cold early morning hours of Saturday, April 14.

      The minor, whose name was withheld because of his age, led police

   to the foothills of the Manzano Mountains, east of Los Lunas. The small

   group hiked about three miles, and, after crossing a stream, approached

   a remote, abandoned mine.

      Using only two flashlights, the men followed the youth about 200

   yards into the mine. There the police finally found La Conquistadora,

   safely wrapped in foam padding and secured in a large plastic bag.

      Other stolen works of art were also discovered, including valuable

   missing artifacts from the San Miguel mission church.

Word got around town like summer lightning, despite the disclaimer.  The minor was the son of the Lieutenant Governor.  The other boy involved had been in Lucy’s class the year before.  A newcomer from out of town or state, a loner, someone who kept to himself, she’d thought—though later she wasn't sure about that, either.

She never did find out if the other stories she heard were true.  If there was someone else involved.  Someone she’d loved first for a mortal hour over a chessboard.  Whose hand lingered on hers one spring day in the sun-silvered library in the school on Upper Canyon Road when they hadn’t yet left it, trying with a mute protest to stop her taking his queen.  Quicksilver on her palm, again that final spring as the mercurial Mercutio (thinking only of him while Romeo breathed to her lips at their meeting "palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss," and choosing him instead, Romeo's moody friend, rewriting Shakespeare absolutely, if she'd just been given the chance).  Who one day after algebra put the stem of lilac she’d used as a bookmark behind his ear, a flame of hope and possibility against his tawny hair; and then for thirteen magic days came home with her to study, write equations on the insides of her wrists.  

“Tell her to call me when she comes to town again,” he'd told a friend of hers a year or two later, when he was back in town after Sweden, said to be studying medieval French and ancient Greek at St. John’s College, where an old friend of Lucy's family lived as housemaster and filled a hummingbird feeder of ruby glass and played mah jong, and once had taken her to see a film of Japanese ghost stories that haunted her strangely still. 

But gone too far beyond those days in Santa Fe, beyond recall, to New York City and a brownstone on Columbus Avenue and then to St. Andrews and Rome and Paris for a month or two and back again, looking for nothing she could name, she thought about it sometimes with an ache of loss for what might have kept her home, but never got around to calling.  Like the chance that he'd been there in the dark that night in the cathedral, the chance that something might have sparked between them turned to ash quietly in her roommate's hand-thrown ashtray with the phone number he'd pencilled on the inside back page of a Greek New Testament. 

She didn’t want to know for sure, one way or the other.  She’d learned too much and lost too much already by it.  There was a world best left in the dim realm of possibility, breathy and fine as the cathedrals of green dappled light along East Alameda in the long-stilled time of love and lilacs, the high vaulted cottonwoods planted by the French archbishop along the on-again, off-again river, running with snowmelt.

—Christie  

The Years

This was inspired by an exercise, based on Virginia Woolf's book of the same name, and the various vignettes I've included here have been worked subsequently into my long Cretan novel, Reading the Stones.

1978

In the circle of light in the microscope’s lens, the scales of a moth wing have become fantastic—an ordinary miller caught in Abel’s bedroom with his cupped hand, against the wall.  Like owl feathers, they are, in one of the ceremonies, like seeds transparent, quick with life—light strokes of owl brown except for three which are mysteriously grape blue.  Who could have guessed all that was in there?

Abel, a junior at Gallup High School, small for his age and next to others of his family, as usual doesn’t leave the science lab until the janitor has to lock up for the day, and then he drags his worn-out denim jacket off the wooden stool reluctantly and shuffles out into the mild spring evening made to go farther by Daylight Savings Time—like his father’s stews, which he stretches with a can of chopped tomatoes or of Campbell’s beef and barley soup, sometimes a couple of handfuls of hard posole or pinto beans, or a cup of vodka if he wants to make it fancy, Stroganoff.  “Stew for the Czars,” his father says, pronouncing the c.   (They kid him he’s a Sioux chef, with all his experiments with food, except that he’s a Ramah Navajo.)  What use, though, the extra watered-down time, when they lock the microscopes up at the old time anyway, and then there’s nothing to do with it but homework, television, chores.  Running—he likes to run best in the dark.

The microscope shows Abel the world he has never been able to see, what others of his family must see, what his cousin Billy tells him—every chance he gets—he saw during his vision quest out on Black Oak Mesa last year.  Now that the spirits have revealed themselves to Billy he is Red Hawk and wears his ear pierced with silver, but Abel can still beat him easily at the 5,000-meter run, and any relay you like.  Even now that he has discovered the worlds that live inside the microscope, playing possum in the nondescript surfaces of all things, what Abel wants most is to be one of the runners who gets to carry the Olympic torch, someday.  His own ceremonial name is Running Boy—or if you ask his Grandfather Joseph, Sees What’s Here.  Which is okay with him, except when Billy gets going.  Which is every time he sees him, you can count on that.  To Billy he is Hey Dumbshit.

                                    __________

The bark is rough under Marcella’s bare legs, the cottonwood leaves rustling around her (always whispering among themselves about something, telling tree secrets).  Between the black silhouettes of two branches crossing above her the moon calmly observes the town of Chimayo, New Mexico settling down for the night.  Marcella can hear the faint distinctive chinks of plates and silverware being washed, through the open kitchen window.  Cassie’s turn to do the dishes.  Miss Future Housewife of America.  The Queen of Clean.

A dog barks persistently somewhere across the valley, just one urgent note over and over and over.  Cerberus, Marcella thinks, the dog that guards the River Styx—or the Acequia Styx, rather, being a lesser, New Mexican Cerberus and chasing cows on its days off—trying to keep some restless shade from escaping the underworld to go out to the Cadillac Bar for the night like anybody else.  In the darkness, washed out by the moon which silvers too the edges of the riverlike cottonwood leaves, she can smell the lilacs, lush and rich, a dusky purple smell that catches in her throat and makes her yearn for things not yet articulated.  She is fourteen, and it is all beginning.  Somehow she knows that, sitting in the tree on this spring night, almost the end of the school year.  It’s part of what the leaves have been saying, though they tell themselves she hasn’t understood.

                                    __________

Chorus makes a warning hum.

The horse-actors enter, and ceremonially put on their masks—first raising

them high above their heads.  Nugget stands in the central tunnel.

They’re getting to the end of the first dress rehearsal for Equus, and Anna, sitting next to some of the young students who help her with Props, in the second row of the makeshift theatre the Players have been using this year, has been enchanted by the effect of the spooky ceremonial masks, transforming the simple set she took almost straight from Peter Shaffer’s stage directions.  It’s a play of strange and profound power.  The fey Will Bryant, playing Alan, is doing an amazing job, after the migraine he had earlier, waiting to go on.

In the light from the stage Anna looks at the wristwatch she has just bought herself, defiant purple against the saggy skin of advancing age—and too many years of gardening.  Damnation.  She’s got to leave already if she’s going to get to the hospital to visit Gerald before visiting hours are over; and if she doesn’t their younger son Howard will have hissy fits.  So unbecoming in a Statistician.  (Especially if she decides to needle him.  “Sorry, darling, I was with that gorgeous young man….”)  She thinks how much better she likes the fey boy than her own tedious progeny.  She can’t bear what’s coming, though, when he blinds the horses.  She’s almost glad they have run late tonight, so she can leave pretending it doesn’t end badly, just once.  She touches the hand of the girl next to her—Tracy, is it?—in goodbye, and slips down the side aisle of the theatre to the door.

Outside, the mild normality of the Philadelphia spring night takes her aback; but a huge sulphurous moon, primordial, comes out toward her from behind the Tastee Freeze, and follows silently along beside her as she drives just a smidgen over the speed limit to the hospital, to make her nightly peace with husband and son.

1996

Abel is running in the city twilight, Charles River on his left, and somewhere off to his right the Public Gardens, with a white patch of swans not gone yet for the winter.  He can see his breath, faintly, ahead of him, a small ghost—the spirit his people would see, visible to him now too.  He laughs at that.  A group of three businessmen passing on their way home look back at him, smile.  The trees are almost bare now, lights instead of leaves hung on the dark skeletal branches.  What a difference running here.  He thinks of how he used to run at morning in the high desert, startling up the smell of rabbit brush and sage as he swept through it, along the sandy bottom of a river-cut canyon, instead of in these canyons of glass and steel and lights and the eyes always on you from the hundreds of offices above.  So hard for a Navajo accustomed to privacy.

Privacy.  That will be gone everywhere, anyway, in a week; he will be married and forever in the company of another.  But she is myself, Abel thinks; maybe it won’t be any different.  Only a kind of fuller, richer privacy.  She doesn’t take up all the air you needed to breathe, the way other people—someone like Marcella—would do.  A person like that takes up a lot of air, somehow.  I wonder if she feels it, like a kind of constant thirst?  Above him on the Longfellow Bridge, a lighted train passes on its way to Cambridge.  Even in the foreignness of this place that is now his home, he feels undeservedly lucky, the cold air off the river igniting in his lungs as he runs.

                                    __________

The rush of warm air stirs the small hairs on the nape of her bare neck with an uneasy frisson.  Marcella stares into the mirror while the stylist works around her weightless head with the hand dryer.  Who is that in there?  She has just had her hair cut mostly off, and now she thinks she wants it back, but it’s lying on the floor behind her, not moving.  Things she wants back, she thinks, throat tight.  Oh Abel.  She was only ever right with him, and now she’ll never be that way again.  The perfumey smell of mousse the stylist has worked, ice cold, through her stubble of hair, with both hands, is not something she recognizes either.  Though it’s on her, it is not her smell.  So what is it that makes a person, anyway? Marcella wonders.  The hair, the hurt, what?  Where does it all start and end, what defines us?  Daphne, girl turning tree— did roots come easily?

In the mirror she imagines leaves beginning around her pale face.  (Art Deco, for some reason, enamelled green and gold.)  She thinks of making pictures of those hidden things that make a person; the places and encounters that have gone and will yet go into what we are.  The absences, beyond all else.  How do you catch what is no longer there?  She’s interested.  She wants to learn how to make those pictures— double-exposures or time-lapse or whatever it takes to superimpose one state of being on another.  She will take some classes, she thinks; she will find out how on film or in the printing process, out of a slow bath of developer, to turn herself into someone the god might have chased, and lost.

It would be something to get her through the winter, anyway.  How old she sounds.  Pathetic and melodramatic.  But she hates this time of year, when everything is dying.  On the East Coast (Boston), in the mountains where her mother is, even here in Tucson when things start closing earlier and the dark comes before you’re ready for it.  That will all come out in her photographs, too, once she learns how to disclose the essences.  The woman with fall in her eyes.  The eyes fatigued with distances—behind, ahead—but innocent, finally, of Abel.

                                    __________

With a circular motion Audrey runs the flat steel curry brush across the appaloosa’s withers, following the whorls of the white-flecked black hair, the rounded warm solidity of horse.  She can smell the comfortably worn saddle leather, and hear the husky oats pouring like water from Delano’s feed bucket as he empties it, ten times in all, progressing down the line of stalls in the low-roofed stables.  It’s chilly this Saturday morning; she’s wearing a turtleneck sweater and the hand-me-down sheepskin jacket from Leah, over her jeans.  They are companionable, she and Delano, not talking.

The Navajo head wrangler had turned out to be an uncle or cousin of that archaeologist Marcella knew at UNM, Abel Joseph, who she’d been surprised to meet walking around the trout pond last Fourth of July weekend, with Delano and a grave foreign woman—his fiancee, a concert violinist from Ankara, Turkey, Delano later told her.  Audrey hadn’t thought Abel would remember her from the dinner in Albuquerque Old Town, the last birthday Marcella spent there, but he stopped when he saw her, surprised too, and shook her hand warmly.  He told Delano he had been friends with her daughter at the university.  (And nicely didn’t mention how she’d followed him to Arizona shamelessly, and even on to Greece, that summer).

Later in the weekend, when she was coming back in from a walk one evening after supper, in the lingering twilight, Audrey heard the sound of the violin coming from the open upstairs windows of the staff quarters.  Some haunting gypsy music, strangely at home in the New Mexico mountains.  She sorrowed suddenly for her daughter, who didn’t stand a chance.  Never had.

2000

“No way in this lifetime will we sell 1,500 copies.”

Cam balanced the pencil flat across his knuckles, the way his piano teacher had taught him, to play scales, and ran through two octaves of C Minor on the conference table while Mark Ainsbury, senior marketing guru, and Beth Soames, the project editor, got done their lifeless bickering.

“If the Reps would make the tiniest effort to talk to the bookstores—“

He’d been pretty good at the crablike walk of hands across the keyboard, but lacking in expression, as it happened; all that had gone to his brother Peter.  Poor sod.

The interminable Monday meeting went on in its predictable course, and Cam just missed catching the pencil as it rolled off the table and out of reach.

Peter hadn’t been any good at the pencil thing, even before he lost all control of his hand movements from the trauma of slitting his wrists.  The audiences hadn’t ever seemed to mind though that he played the keys like an Italian puppeteer, drawing up and up out of them a sweetness and pain that followed his ungraceful fingers like eyes a mesmerist, silk thread a silver needle (stitching a flesh wound).  Expression was everything—up to a point.

Their father had more or less managed to balance his closet Romanticism with a remunerative life.  He was not a practical man, god knows, for all that he built watertight boats and had helped to get the Millennial Clock ticking away in good order—and good time—at Greenwich.  You really shouldn’t name your sons for rivers if you expected them to turn out to be solid citizens.  Peter Cherwell, Albert Cam—what was he thinking?  You ought more reasonably to name them for generals or commanders.  Or even pirates like Lord Elgin or that Cockerell fellow who crossed paths with Byron down off Sounion.

But favorite English waterways?  That was asking for trouble.  Cam followed the line of the Thames (not one of the family) with his eyes through the grayness of rain, the chilly wet glass of the conference room windows.  An idle journey, as far as it took him.  But he left it, and went further.  He let himself go back to the day on Skyros when he had walked with an unusually animated woman up (as he remembered it) between pots of oregano to the highest point of the island to find where Theseus had met his end.  He remembered how he’d followed her up between the dazzling white houses and the smell of herbs, followed her engaging stories and her quick smile to the stony outlook far above the sea.  Even that scene Peter had made, after, somehow hadn’t succeeded in spoiling the day, for a change.  And she had been delighted by the rivers.

It wasn’t far to Crete from here—even this gray river would get you there eventually.  It would be satisfying to put a chair calmly through the glass, salute his colleagues, and jump (just landing on a load of winter wheat fortuitously passing on a lorry bound for the Channel tunnel, and beyond).  Like some American movie.  He could see Harrison Ford or Ben Affleck doing it.  Hugh Grant was too British—like

Beth and Mark, himself and all the rest.  He’d love to see their faces though.  And to be out.  Drenched through by rain.  Moving, beyond his own painful control.  Living.

                                    __________

O lovely red mullet, Anna said to the fish as Vassilis in the Chania market held it up for her to inspect, cleaned and ready to wrap in paper once she agreed on its worth.  Such a fish for a February night, bringing into the house a whiff of the sea.  She would bake it in the classic Greek way, with tomatoes and olive oil, garlic and white wine, and they could drink the rest of the bottle with it—do them both good, after the depressing day.  Those miserable cans!  They’d cleared cans for hours, out of every damned cupboard, and Marcella had hauled them valiantly downstairs for Alexis to take away.  Anna imagined the former tenant, Mrs. Mary Walsington, walled up behind cans of imported English tinned foods, like some particularly awful horror story by Poe.  An impenetrable fort of Heinz baked beans, runny custard, beans in tomato sauce . . . and mushy peas.  To have a soul the color of mushy peas (if mushy peas could be said to have color)—what a way to meet your maker.  Anna shuddered inwardly and took her comely fish from Vassilis.  That, at least, wouldn’t be her fate, God wot.  Unless the spirit of Mrs. Mary Walsington got spiteful because they’d thrown her cans out, and transmigrated.

                                    __________

It was the Chinese New Year.  There were sea turtles in the bay, and a long table beside it under the palms, with a white tablecloth, set for eleven though they were twelve with the baby.  At the foot of it, Audrey watched as the Chinese dragons insinuated their way among the tables, fed red envelopes for luck.  They’d swoop and shoot up tall again, as the drum pulse moved them.

For the first time in her life she found she was not put off by the excessive movement and noise, the possibility of having to join in.  She didn’t have to make excuses and go off to the restroom behind the grass-thatched bar until it was over and the insistent drums still, the surf audible again in their lull.  The big dragon came nearer.  The dancer showed his face through the gaping red mouth, reassuring the children, letting them see that it was only a kind of play.  Audrey had met the dancer at the Zen center in the fall:  Kanoa, one of the best students from the martial arts school in Kailua.  It makes all the difference, to call the dragon by name.

Marcella would have liked this a lot, Audrey thought, memorizing the evening for the letter she would write to Crete.  I wish more than anything my daughter could be at this table among my new friends and family, children and elders and Shu all together eating grilled mahi mahi and Chinese noodles with slivers of things (black mushrooms, bamboo shoots, green onion) and fragrant sesame oil while the big rumbustious dragon and the imitating baby dragon dance the fortune of the new year in.  Maybe next year she will come, if I ask her?

—Christie

Composing the Self

In the photograph a woman entering her middle age sits crosslegged on the ground between two ancient red clay storage jars bigger than she is, her arm affectionately around the swell of one of them.  Though the midday sun is on her she looks cool in a white cotton t-shirt and loose drawstring pants the color and texture of celery seed.   The wrist that’s visible is enlaced in one of those elaborate Greek bracelets which you can buy for about a dollar in any shop on the islands and which leave an intricate dark mark along your skin like a tattoo where the fake gold coating rubs off.  She’s thirty-five, in that photo, but wears it well.  The jars, Minoan pithoi, are some four thousand, and have worn well too—remarkably so, given the number and intensity of earthquakes there on Crete.

            Mar is pleased with the composition.  It shows her just the way she wanted, she thinks.  Amused, defiant, a little ironic.  Accepting who she is, for a change; ready to face her critics head-on.  And the pithoi—the slow speed film has captured them well, grainy and flawed and wonderful.  Their history tangible in them.  She studies the photo in the borrowed London flat just before Christmas, and can’t wait to get back to Crete in January, to find out what will happen to that woman.

—Christie, excerpt from Reading the Stones (first draft)