memory tapes
At the edge of a green-gold, placid lake sprawls an achingly lovely rustic villa, the full summer sun spilling velveteen shadows into the secrets of its blond wood, its lacy carved accents. The long, nodding grasses dotted with wildflowers paint longer shadows along its walls, its porches and gatehouses; the water licks the pier, and the air smells gently of brine, but mostly of heat, sonorous with the tick-buzz of insects. Heavy pollens give the air a dreamlike quality, as if the entire scene were unreal, existing in a living photograph, seen through the lens of memory.
Down the pier is a Roman specimen of male, naked to the waist, some supplanted artifact of an era when Caesars and conquistadors reigned, his long, long hair rustled gently in the wind like a black flag. He's accompanied by others, as if the entire assemblage might have been a handful of teen ne'er-do-wells in another day. Not today, though; they're too grown, too fierce, too angled, something flat in their eyes unmistakably the residues of all the deaths they've embraced with candor.
But the black-haired man is smashing empties against the pier lazily, skipping stones restlessly, watching the horizon as if he were expecting his woman to arise out of the sea. Occasionally, he looks over his shoulder at the great house, as if wary of the ghosts it breathes.
One pale little ghost drifts soundlessly through drawing rooms with arched beam ceilings, her hands in black-lace gloves occupied endlessly with the dust, the dust of ages that falls on mantelpieces and portraits, the parchment wilt of dry flowers in forgotten vases. With her white face, blue lips and maid's frock, she might be just a spectre after all.
Sometimes in the kitchen, there is an artist to whom the sun is kind; sometimes the spectre-girl hovers in the kitchen doorway as if attending on her, and there is the rattle of pills, precise as the rattling of bones.
There is a guest room in the far wing; its French doors lead out onto an untended, long-neglected patio, where the wildgrasses have split the brick as if to devour it. Something about the scenery is arrestingly familiar, as if it belonged in a painting somewhere, as if there ought to be someone in the empty chair by the veranda doors, as if there surely, surely were spirits asleep in that bed.
Some intangible thing must, must have once lain in those sheets, laid itself to rest there like the echo of a song, forever. Here, there is the scent of dogwood and chrysanthemum, summer flowers in latebloom, although there are no white petals in sight.
This summer, though, the long-unused room has been given to a new patient. Did the alchemist introduce her as girlfriend simply to enforce the irony of his sudden absence? Upstairs, unbeknownst to her, an attic is filling with mirrors -- these ones are perfect, since there could be no other place for such a chamber but the attic of this house, no more perfect sand for glass than the shores of this lake.
In the master bedroom a woman is lying as if in state, perpetually half-undressed, a screen siren wilting like a summer flower, just as white, just as spilt, as if she swelled with seeds, her hair as long as her son's and just as black, her pale face showing so little sign of the passage of time. As if she were born of this place, this lake house, as if she'd mothered it all. Here and there are her portraits in the house, in places of reverence; pictures of her and of a woman quite like her, and of a girl quite like the two of them, and all of them resemble the new mother who's yet to arrive.
From time to time she reaches a long white arm from inside her sheets; when accompanied by her son, she strokes his strong jaw just a little too long, and when alone she calls the names of the dead. Sometimes her voice can be heard, calling names like Marshall but never the name of the moon nor the month, August-Augustus as unspoken as sin, and she paces back and forth at night so that the floorboards creak, so that one might wonder if this woman exists at all, if instead she might not just be haunting this place like so many other spirits, like the ghost of a frail child in a white dress that sometimes stares from photographs in the house as if she were still alive somewhere, somehow.
And where is the brat prince of this estate, a timeless creature burnished dangerously human by the sun, with great and swollen golden eyes as if to rival that flaming sphere, that endless water? Sometimes he stands alone at the shore, a long, lean whip of obscenity waist-deep in wildflowers, a plume of smoke drifting from a lax, crooked mouth. Sometimes he smokes in the drawing room as if he were the house's rightful master, as if he were inheriting that armchair.
Sometimes he stands outside the guest room in the dark where the patient is sleeping, as if night could turn him to some kind of feral, stalking creature drawn by scent. He can be seen from high windows sometimes on the empty pier, stripped for swimming, some strange stamp covering the almondine skin of his back like the kiss of the sea, blue and green, green and gold, and sometimes it's like his thoughts are so noisy that they thicken the air, that they drown out the whispers of the past's spectres.
He swims as if he were born from the water, but to watch him doing that feels like observing a ritual too sacred for human eyes. He violates the lake, and neither it nor the great house, nor its ill matriarch nor her poor son, nor his absent wife and baby, nor the devoted artist of his portrait, nor his nubile patient, know for what purpose he has arranged this scene, this chamber of fate, this dust-hung portrait throbbing with the energy of the long-lost.
