Nel remembers. She guards the memory with terror and longing – as a prisoner of war relives his tenure. She has never been a prisoner, but she can imagine the horror of surrender, the hopelessness of imprisonment, the aching beyond all else, for a return to what had been.
The memory plays like a movie in her head, fixed, without the smallest variation. The process of remembering reminds her of a visit to an historic home where nothing ever changes, in which interplay with even the smallest detail is forbidden, the past there before you, but sacrosanct. The dark entrance hall with its gilt-framed mirror, hat-rack, bare floorboards worn from a million passages – not a place to linger. The parlor – a rose, overstuffed couch and chair beside glass-fronted bookshelves stocked with ancient matching sets of clothbound volumes by Tolstoy and Dumas, locked forever behind a looped velvet cordon. The bedroom…
They had made love that morning in a cheap motel room, his strong hands gentle and sure. Cy, she murmurs his name. Onomatopoeia, that name, now that he is gone. She can never say his name without the wonderfulness of that thought invading her awareness. She had never thought of him as a sigh when he was with her, when he was alive.
But she remembers his hands, the delicious slowness, the maddening slowness when she ached for completion. Cy had had an unerring timeliness. He was always just on time, even when he was hours late. He wore time like a cape, lived in its folds, completely at home, like it was his country. When they traveled, he never hurried, was never on the road at dawn, unlike her more recent companion who forever has destination in mind. Cy would have them sleep in, savor their closeness, the subtle excitement of a strange bed, then they would shower, find a breakfast place, return to the room, maybe make love again, maybe not. Traveling was a thing in itself to Cy.
What Nel can’t remember was where they were that day. Someplace in the southwest, she is sure of that, but whether it was Arizona or New Mexico, she will never know. She has settled on New Mexico, someplace east of Albuquerque, just because she likes it better. And when? another question mark. Either spring or fall, she has decided on October because she remembers tall yellow grass. And the year? perhaps it was 1969, but it could have been earlier or later. She has decided the hour was two-forty-five in the afternoon because of the brightness of the day – the flat, garish light, hard, yet somehow comforting, warm through the car window. A slight breeze had rippled the grass.
In those days they had always traveled with a wicker picnic basket with a wooden handle and lid. It had divisions inside it that held two upright wine glasses, a wine bottle on its side, and there remained a space for sandwiches or something else. For Nel and Cy the something else was always cheese and salami, crackers and olives, maybe cherry tomatoes, finger-food – a mobile picnic in the country. She was sitting with her back to the passenger door, no seatbelts back then, cross-legged on the seat. It had been an ample car. It seems strange to her now that she could have sat cross-legged sideways on the front seat, but that is how she remembers it. She had always been small. Cy, by comparison, was huge. He used to call her his doll, and she hadn’t minded. He used to say he could stow her in his coat pocket, and she had loved to imagine the security of it, the love he had meant by it, not possession, just love.
She had opened the bottle of wine. It would have been a good red, perhaps a Burgundy. Although they had little money, Cy had always insisted on good wine. Life was too short, he’d said, for cheap wine. She remembered him there at the wheel with the glass in one hand held to his nose, savoring the bouquet. He had smiled at her. Hmmm… She had raised her glass to him and he’d saluted with his, their form of silent toast – it was understood – a toast to themselves, to their life, love, happiness.
Next she was slicing cheese on the wooden cutting board that rested on the seat between her knees. She hated that jump, from wine to cheese. It was moving from the bedroom back to the hallway – the cheese scene was the height and therefore the initiator of the descent. She longed to linger with the wine, but the sniff and salute were over, the first sip. She must have put her glass back into its place in the basket because she was using both hands to cut the cheese, thin slices the way they liked them. She was pleasantly warm, cocooned and sure in the ritual of wine and cheese, in Cy and the road, in distances traversed together, carrying her contentment lightly, unquestioned. He had turned to her, taken his eyes from the empty road, just as she’d glanced up. Their eyes had met and in his eyes she’d seen, from his eyes she’d felt, an overwhelming surge of happiness. Cy had been inexpressibly happy at that moment, and it had flooded over her like warm honey, settled around her, filling every nook and cranny with gratitude and peace. She had held his eyes and felt tears well from somewhere deep inside and roll down her cheeks – and it felt like a gift she was giving him, an acknowledgement of… of their mutual… It trails off there. She doesn’t want to think ‘love’ or ‘happiness’, such pedestrian words.
Just then the car shimmied and he’d glanced back at the road. An enormous wind had appeared out of nowhere, buffeting the car, and Cy had quickly handed her his wine glass so he could get both hands on the wheel. Out of nowhere. That is how she always thinks of it, but of course the wind had come from somewhere, was caused by some imbalance in air pressure, the rising of sun-warmed air creating a vacuum… And how could the wind ‘appear’ when one cannot see the wind? Rather, it had burst from somewhere. Nel ponders the words then shakes her head. The wind had appeared from nowhere.
Nel had shivered, she feels the shiver still. She had turned and placed her bare feet on the floor, then shuffled them into her shoes. From the back seat she had fished her wrap and leaned forward to pull it around her back, tight over her shoulders. She had pushed the board of cheese into the center of the seat to keep the tassels of the wrap out of it. Wow, Cy had said, as the car was hammered again and suddenly they were blinded by snow. A freak snowstorm, people would say later. The sky went immediately black, and stark, malevolent white enveloped them.
Nel leaned her head against the window feeling the cold on her cheek, her eyes fixed in the nothingness before them. She felt the breath go out of her, breath that would never be regained. Now she cries to remember it, but then there were no tears. Now she shudders at the terror, but then there was only a wide-eyed awareness. The snow swirled about the car, tight and vicious, and somehow it carried her away. She felt herself borne into its arms, swept up in its cold embrace, out of the car, away from Cy and his comfort, away, ripped suddenly, from her complacent contentment, from her certainty and security. In the turmoil of the storm she felt herself lifted up into darkness, into a void of loneliness beyond describing, an abyss, empty, fearful, endless, hopeless, and completely real. She discovered her utter solitude, the emptiness of everything she held dear. She didn’t welcome it, but there was no denying it. The clarity of the vision stunned her, left her unhinged, gripped her with a tenacity she was powerless to shake. How long did it last? she asks herself, because that is what people asked. Two years, she answers, because that is what she answered, but she knows it is a lie. It lasts still. It has ebbed, but so has she.
Cy stuck with her, his gentle hands, his mantle of time. She feels still the cradle of his arms, his cooing breath in her ear. She sees the furrows of his perplexity, the sudden storm of anger, anger born of frustration and helplessness. But his patience was her savior, if you want to put that spin on it, eventually patching over the abyss, re-knitting the rent scrim. His certainty of time and love – they drew her slowly back, returned her from the dreadful clarity of indifference to the pleasant illusion, she has never escaped the certainty of this, the pleasant illusion of her happiness.
Truchas August, 2004