Still Life
Phong
Peter picked through the mail on the sofa. The mail oozed with credit card advertisements and life insurance pitches, magazine offers, clothes catalogs, free CD offers and coupons. “The last guy who lived here must’ve had money to burn, or else he was totally bored.” he said to his sister on the phone.
The phone cord, whose coils were stretched to capacity, ran from the mounted unit on the kitchen wall to the living room couch. The mid-day sun streaked through the windows and shone on the bare, dusty floor of his apartment. As he read the contents, Peter would let the discarded envelopes fall on the ground, to populate the empty room.
“I bet they were bored.” She said.
“They? How do you know it’s more than one guy?” He asked.
“Why are you so sure it was a guy?”
“You should see the magazines he gets.” He pulled out a bottle of heart medication from his pocket and popped a few pills down his gullet.
Suddenly the taut cord pulled the telephone receiver from his ear, disjoining it from its snug shoulder and firing it across the room. It raised such a clamor when it smacked the refrigerator that the whole room recoiled. “Shit. Now I need a phone.” Peter said.
A block down from his new apartment, Peter found an antique store with some old yellow chairs and a big sturdy desk in the window display. Inside, the walls of the store were covered with shelves on which rested equal portions of popular Americana and real antiques. Peter let his eyes scan across the rows of blank-eyed dolls, unlit lamps, silent radios, and stalled clocks. A full-sized statue of Elvis, bellowing into a microphone, governed one corner, facing off with a stark painting of Jesus surrounded by innumerable crucifixions.
Behind a locked display, odd stones and jewels, small metal bicycles and comic book superheroes in glorified poses mingled happily. Peter inspected a coffee table with detached legs. He held up the four posts and measured their length against each other. It might be a wobbly table, he thought. Peter didn’t really want a wobbly table, no matter what its kitsch value. He glanced at the pricetag. Fifty dollars! He put the legs of the table down on the floor gently.
He shuffled past the furniture, in the direction of the dishware. At the end of the aisle, he spotted a skull from behind, its cranium sharply contoured and its sutures seamlessly interwoven. Curious, he walked toward the skull. As he neared the shelf where the skull stood watch, he noticed it wore a blanket of dust, as if it were a fashion. He looked intensely at the skull for a time, now from the side, until he became self-conscious and turned away suddenly. She had certainly noticed him staring.
“Can I help you with anything?” The skull asked. “Or are you just browsing?”
“No.” Peter felt compelled to explain himself, “I’m not interested in antiques. I’m looking for a new phone for my apartment... and some furniture.”
The skull laughed through her full-toothed smile. “Well,” she said, “an old antique store isn’t really the right place to be looking for a new phone, I’m afraid. But we do have furniture.”
Peter laughed too, feeling slightly ridiculous. “I’m sorry. It’s just, I’ve never even been in an antique store before. I think the oldest store we have in Atlanta is Woolworths, and that just closed.”
“So you’re from Atlanta?” She asked, surprised. Peter figured she got mostly local shoppers in an old haunt like this.
“Well, originally. I moved here this weekend.” He said. “So, you work here?”
“Yes. I’m sorry, my name is Cyril.” She said, grinning.
“Peter.”
“Pleased to meet you, Peter.” Cyril did look pleased. Peter too was pleased, but he had found it hard to smile ever since the whole ordeal with Melissa. He had thought that they would be always friends, at least. What was with this list all of a sudden? “So what are you looking for in the way of furniture. You’ll need a bed first.”
“Actually, I have a sofabed. It came with the apartment. Everything else I need, though.” Peter felt awkward sharing the gritty details of his spartan life with this sweet antique-seller.
Cyril directed Peter to a display of ornate chairs, a blond wood table, and a vanity table. Without stopping to look at the pricetag, Peter moved past the display to pick up some foldable plastic chairs. “I think I’ve found my home furnishings, Ms. Cyril.” They exchanged a friendly smile.
“I can see that you are a man of refined taste.” Cyril commented.
“I do have refined tastes.” Peter insisted, “I just don’t express it materially.”
Peter picked up his things and moved toward the register. He glanced back at the skull resting atop the high shelf. She had no hair, and to the traditionalist within him this was a defect of sorts, but the smooth curve of her brow, and the subtle indentation at her temple, had an appeal to him that he could not deny. He had an impulse to pick her up and take her with him too, but he reminded himself that she worked there at the antique store, and his hands were full besides.
“Listen,” Cyril said, “if you’re new to Savannah, you’ll need someone to give you the tour around town.”
“Yeah, I could use the company too.” Peter said, trying to withhold his excitement. “When do you get off work?”
Peter and Cyril stepped out into the spring light, a light that made the inside of an antique store feel cavernous. Together the couple walked over cobblestone streets, and under iron footbridges, settling into a lover’s lingering pace at a park uptown, where myriad mansions competed in the scale of their gothic morbidity.
Cyril named all of the parks, monuments, and buildings that they passed, adding bits of history when she thought it appropriate. Both of them sensed that the topic would quickly lose its novelty. Names of places meant less and less to Peter as the places themselves grew more familiar, so that his experience of them began to be more essential than their role in such and such a movie, or in the scheme of naval history.
“To be honest, Cyril, I am much more interested in the people around here.” Peter announced in the middle of their tour. “Who lives there, for example?” He pointed out a great stone-walled building with elaborately sculpted reliefs in its walls.
“Oh, this is where the old Southern aristocrats have come to spend the last of their fortunes.” Cyril responded with a tinge of sarcasm in her voice. “Every one of these little hamlets is its own little Xanadu.”
“You seem kind of bitter over some harmless old folks.” Peter said.
“Not at all. The rotting rich are what keeps antique stores like ours in business.” Cyril said.
Rows of weeping willow trees lined every street, forming a kind of ceiling to the city that made everything going on within feel intimate and comfortable. The vines that descended from the weeping willows brushed the tops of park fences and dodged one another in the breeze. Peter thought how the proximity of the trees must make their roots intercede, and what an intricate network their branches must make underground, where they are hidden from human eyes beneath that blanket of earth.
That the two could walk along in mutual quiet was assuring to Peter, and he began to measure their moments together against those he and Melissa had spent, strolling the sidewalks of outer Atlanta. But the two couldn’t be compared. He had been in love with Melissa, and he and Cyril had just met. But Peter recognized the warm coil unwinding in his chest, the cords of love that wanted pulling, and which would not be satisfied until they were entwined with some other’s grappling wires.
Along the waterfront, Peter and Cyril paused under the restaurant marquees, surveying the menus first for good seafood dishes, then, as they became less discriminating, scanning the menus for decent dishes under four dollars. They settled on an outdoor café where the waiters were not so attentive, and the food cheaper.
“Well, this was a nice find.” said Cyril, but Peter waved his hand at her.
“Shhht,” he said, pointing out toward the dock, to where his eyes were fixed, “Look at that.”
Nearby, a painter had set up an easel where he looked out onto the watery horizon. He stood there slowly priming his canvas with a wash of white, then added a wash of yellow, waiting for something. Cyril sat facing Peter, Peter facing the artist, he facing the water, all of them quiet and expectant. Then, just when the sun crowned on the water’s edge, the artist attacked his canvas with a meticulous ferocity, now slashing in broad strokes, now moving the brush in fine, controlled dashes. Peter watched the performance in silent rapture, and when the spectacle was over the sun had set. The artist packed up his things and moved toward the lights of downtown.
Peter would have liked to paint that sunset himself, though he hadn’t even the money to buy a canvas. Yet the blissful coincidence of that moment made him feel exalted by fate. “We are lucky to be here now, eating this lousy bread, down by the waterside, in the dark. I don’t even have enough cash to buy a grilled cheese sandwich, but it feels right being here with you right now.”
Cyril had been staring at Peter for a long time. “You paint, don’t you?” She said, almost nastily.
Peter nodded. “Still want to have dinner with me?”
Cyril jiggled as if there were beneath her the ghostly pair of skeletal shoulders shrugging. “I’ll give it a try.”
The screen door opened and a young, freckled woman walked in carrying Cyril in her arms. “Hi Peter. This is Moira.”
“Hi Moira. Hey Cyril, I am so sorry that I forgot to pick you up.”
“Don’t worry about it. You shouldn’t have to worry about where I am all the time and stuff. I have friends.” Cyril smiled. Moira put her down on the corner table, by the lamp. “Do you want to stay for some coffee or something, Moira?”
She shook her head gravely, and spoke in a low, quiet voice, “That’s okay. I think I’m needed back at the shop. Thanks anyway. Nice to meet you, Peter.” Moira shuffled out in her floor-length dress. She dressed darkly, even in the summer, from head to toe. Peter wondered if she was a Wiccan or Pagan or what.
After she had left and the screen door shut behind her, Peter went over to stand next to Cyril. “Are you sure you aren’t angry at me or anything?” Peter asked.
“I’m sure.” Cyril’s smile brought instant comfort and relief to Peter, who for his part had taken to worring about Cyril, her whereabouts, her safety. “Is this what you’ve been working on all morning?” She asked.
“Yeah. What do you think?” Peter squinted his eyes, and leaned back, studying the masonite as if it were his first time seeing it.
“Its gloomy.” She said. “Don’t you like painting nice things? I mean, you’re not unhappy are you? What’s wrong with painting pretty things? Isn’t art about beauty, after all?”
“You don’t think it’s pretty?” Peter asked her, genuinely surprised.
“Well... it’s just too... dark, you know. So many people think art has to be dreary and depressing all the time. But I think art can just be beautiful... even quaint, like a bowl of fruit or a vase of flowers. Still lives.”
“You don’t like it?” Peter said, disappointed but far from angry.
“Hmmm...”
“It’s you, you know.” Peter said, but before Cyril could argue, added, “I mean, it’s like the idea of you. It’s conceptual.”
Cyril was unmoved. “I don’t like it.” She said with finality.
“Hmmm.” Peter said, in response. He fished a prescription bottle out of his pocket, opened it, and gulped down a little white pill.
Peter held Cyril under his arm as he walked the stone path up to the gallery. Peter worried about Cyril falling out, and clutched her tight enough that it constricted her temples. She had joked that he handled her like a football. “Let’s wait.” Peter said, before bringing them inside. He placed Cyril on a ledge at eye level. “We should celebrate with some wine.”
“Can’t you wait until we get inside?” asked Cyril.
“Well, I suppose. But out here it’s just us. Inside there are people, there is mingling, and conversation.” Peter insisted. He popped the cork off the bottle, and poured half a glass.
“Well, I happen to like mingling and conversation, and I don’t drink wine, and you know that, Peter!” her voice was urgent, and made Peter flush with embarrassment.
“You don’t eat either, but that’s never stopped me,” he said, “but today is your day.” Peter raised his glass. “To you.”
Though he turned away and chugged the wine in one gulp, he felt Cyril’s two deep sockets fixed on him in profile, and for the first time those beautiful vacancies struck him as cold in their neutrality.
“To you.” Peter repeated, putting his glass down on the ledge. He lifted Cyril in his arms and stepped inside the gallery.
Together they strolled through the pacific landscapes and ocean views, the colorful abstractions, the geometric configurations, whispering conspiratorial likes and dislikes to each other. Peter stopped in front of a photo-realistic painting of a man and a woman standing naked in the middle of a Japanese rock garden; comfortably naked, not defiantly naked.
“What’s so special about this one?” Cyril asked him.
“Nothing.” Peter replied. Then he turned them around to face a wall-sized canvas, painted so heavily that the work was almost three-dimensional. A bowl of bread, a jar of olive oil, and a tall, thin vase with fern leaves and baby’s breath flowering from its mouth shared the table with a human skull, rendered onto the canvas with russet, white, and yellow ochre. The title, Still Life with Cyril; the artist, Peter Bond. “Surprise.” Peter said. “I painted it while you were asleep.”
Though the restaurant was busy at that hour, they had found a booth away from the commotion of a late evening dinner on the waterfront. Peter pleaded while Cyril sat quietly on the table. A candle in a cup lit the table with an orange tint, and made the silverware glint with reflected light. “Please, Cyril. Just tell me why you’re so upset, at least. Please, tell me?”
Her quiet was penetrating, and Peter found it difficult to bear. “I just want to know what upset you so much. I don’t think that is so unreasonable.” He sat there and tested her quiet, though every second pained him. He let his silence compete with hers.
“I think we’ve had enough of each other for a while.” She stated coldly.
Peter poked at the food on his plate nervously, then put his fork down. “Okay, why?” He had gotten her to speak, at least. Now he challenged her with his eyes.
“Do I have to say it?”
“Yes.” he declared.
“You’re love for me is selfish, and I don’t think I love you.”
The waiter walked by, but Peter curtly waved him away. The conversations of neighboring tables provided an alm ost melodious counter-rhythm to their grief. Peter took out a pill for his heart, and dropped it in his glass. He gulped it down quickly.
“See there you go again. It’s always medicine for your heart, or food for your stomache, or alcohol for your blood. I mean, you spend so much time on your body, your organs. Is that what love is to you?” Cyril demanded.
“Cyril,” said Peter, “I have to take care of my body. My heart, my stomache, they are parts of me that need my attention for survival.”
“Aren’t I a part of you too?” Cyril glared across the table with meaningful intensity, “Love is supposed to be a meeting of the minds... or... or a communion of souls! But what would you know about that. You spend so much time feeding yourself, replenishing yourself, that you have nothing left over but to spend making these... crass monuments to yourself.”
“Would you prefer if I were dead?” Peter asked simply, reservedly.
“Don’t be silly. But it’s not about that. You don’t think I’ve wondered if you wouldn’t love me more if I were a head of flesh and blood, or a whole body even? That isn’t it. It’s just that... our love isn’t healthy anymore. It isn’t good.”
“Love is always good. It doesn’t matter who you are, or what you are. I love you, Cyril. I’ve always loved you, and you know it.” Peter ran his finger along her jawline.
“No, your attraction for me is... morbid. It’s sick. It is like my attraction to dust.” Cyril’s voice dropped off at the end, as if she spoke these words against her will-- a deeper confession than she had wanted to make.
Peter sat stunned in his seat, thinking about their times together, when they first met, their promenades through the city. He remembered the thick coat of dust that lay so heavily on her head when he first saw her. It was so obvious, and he was so blind. All the time she would spend in the old library, the antique shop, the tunnel (her favorite hideaway). How else could she have loved his apartment so much, but that it was coated with layers of unswept dust? Her infidelity touched ten thousand motes of dust, and now she would not even welcome one of his embraces.
He stood up suddenly, jerking the table backward, and stormed out of the room, and left Cyril sitting alone in the wan flicker of the dusty candle-cup, smiling as always, with her broad white teeth gleaming.
Peter lay out on his sofabed, popping a baseball up and down in the air. All of his possessions were packed up into two suitcases by the door, and the room was empty again. When he dropped the ball, it dribbled across the room, forcing him to leap up
Peter knew where these conversations led, and he dropped it first. “Hey Pam... Can you tell me why Ma didn’t let me know about Aunt Esther’s funeral? Can you tell me that?”
Pam sighed, and left the dead air lingering. “Okay. She thought it would upset you. She said death makes you uncomfortable, and that you start getting your heart palpitations when you think about it too much. She worries about you. So she said I shouldn’t say anything. I mean, I don’t want you to have a heart attack for Chrissakes.”
“Hey,” he said, affecting his best paternal voice, “my heart’s okay, you hear? You have other things to worry about, Pamela. It feels great when I’m moving around, you know. It’s just when I slow down and stall for a while that my heart starts to bother me. All I have to do is just to keep going. I just can’t stop, that’s all.”
