Welcome to English 101: The Harper Perennial Classics Book Club! Today’s book is A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.As I think I may have said in the introductory post, I resisted reading ATGIB for a long time, scowling in the face of anyone who suggested it to me by saying, “but it’s about a young girl growing up in Brooklyn who loves reading! And you’re a young girl growing up in Brooklyn who loves reading!” But when I eventually read it, somewhere around age 13 or 14 (oh, how I wish GoodReads had been around to keep track of my reading back then!), I fell in love. I knew just how Francie felt, wanting to lose myself in the world of books because it was so much better than what was going on in the real world, though I was young enough that I don’ think I articulated it to myself that way. ATGIB was beautiful and sad (the scene where Katie lays her head on the table and sobs after the funeral stayed with me all these years), and I remembered it fondly.

I’m so glad I first read it when I did, because the most prominent thing about it this time for me was the all-consuming, unending poverty. Collecting junk to sell for pennies. Mixing old bread with water and other kitchen scraps to make meals. Feeling the concrete through the holes in your shoes. The Nolans are always cold; always hungry. They are barely surviving…

Click over to The Olive Reader to read the rest of their ATGIB post.

For now, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn has rocketed up my TBR pile for February. Anyone else want to join me? We might be a little behind as The Olive Reader has already started their discussion but literature’s timeless, right?

1. Email me if you’d like one of the two copies I have to give away.

2. Browse Inside to start reading the book.

3. Take some time to look at the Reading Group Guide.

4. Learn more about Betty Smith.

Order the Fish

My book Fast Food Nation describes, among other things, how the centralization and industrialization of our food system has accelerated the rise of foodborne illnesses, how the growing power of fast food chains and agribusinesses has thwarted effective government regulation, and how federal agencies created to oversee these food companies have fallen under their control. During the three years since Fast Food Nation was published, all of these problems have gotten worse. It isn’t difficult to explain why. Since 2000, America’s agribusiness firms have donated more than $140 million to candidates running for Congress and the presidency. Almost three-quarters of that money has gone to Republicans. So far this year, the McDonald’s Corporation has given 77 percent of its donations to Republicans; the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, 81 percent; and the National Restaurant Association, 90 percent. In return, the Bush administration and the Republican majority in Congress have worked hard to serve these private interests at the expense of public health.

The leading fast-food chains and meatpacking companies don’t want any of their customers to get sick. But these companies also don’t want to be held accountable when their food does make people sick. For almost a century the meatpacking industry has vehemently opposed federal efforts to prevent the sale of contaminated meat. Today the U.S.D.A. offers a fine example of a government agency that has been thoroughly captured and corrupted. At a time when newly emerged pathogens such as E. coli O157:H7 and mad-cow disease threaten the nation’s food supply, the U.S.D.A. has failed to adopt effective measures to test for contaminated meat, trace it, and recall it. As a result, ordinary Americans, both Republican and Democrat, are paying the price with their health and, sometimes, their lives.

The ConAgra slaughterhouse in Greeley, Colorado, features prominently in Fast Food Nation. Now owned by Swift & Company, it is one of the largest slaughterhouses in the United States. I wrote about Greeley because it seemed an apt symbol of how the transformation of cattle into industrial commodities has created labor, environmental, food-safety, and animal-welfare problems. Not long afterward, in the summer of 2002, the Greeley slaughterhouse was responsible for the third-largest meat recall in American history.

The first hint of contamination at the ConAgra plant occurred in January 2002, when Montana Quality Foods says a random internal sample of its ground beef tested positive for E. coli O157:H7. The small family-owned company in Miles City, Montana, bought coarse ground beef from ConAgra and another source and ground it into a finished product for local customers. The company’s owner, John Munsell, was convinced that the tainted sample had originally come from the ConAgra slaughterhouse in Greeley. Three more samples of his meat tested positive for E. coli O157:H7, all of it, he claimed, ground from the same ConAgra shipment. According to a report later issued by the U.S.D.A.’s Office of Inspector General (O.I.G.), Munsell asked U.S.D.A. inspectors to test the ConAgra meat. Their district superiors refused to allow this. (The U.S.D.A. counters that it tried to test Munsell’s meat and that of his suppliers, including ConAgra, but that all of the suspect product had already been used.)

Munsell says he warned the U.S.D.A. that ConAgra was shipping tainted meat and that people all over the country might get sick. According to the Government Accountability Project, a non-profit whistle-blower organization, a number of U.S.D.A. inspectors agreed. “The chances are pretty good that ConAgra is the source [of contamination],” an inspector wrote, “and there’s probably more of this ‘suspect’ product out in distribution circulating like a ticking time bomb.” Instead of testing ConAgra’s meat, however, the U.S.D.A. ordered intensive E. coli testing at Montana Quality Foods, labeled the company an “imminent threat to the public,” and briefly shut it down. (In a statement, the U.S.D.A. says it “took Mr. Munsell’s claims seriously and made every attempt to investigate them,” and points out that the O.I.G. report found flaws in Munsell’s food-safety processes. ConAgra disputes Munsell’s claims and says that none of its meat was responsible for the contamination.)

A few months later, in June 2002, samples began testing positive for E. coli O157:H7 at Galligan Wholesale Meat Company, in Denver. Galligan was another small firm. It processed a lot less beef in a year than the Greeley slaughterhouse shipped on a typical day. On June 17 the company told the U.S.D.A. that its contaminated meat had been shipped from ConAgra’s Greeley slaughterhouse. A week later the U.S.D.A. shut down the Galligan plant while refusing to test any of the beef at the ConAgra facility. A U.S.D.A. food-safety expert accused Galligan of trying “to point fingers at other companies.” On June 24, an agency official in Washington, D.C., finally granted permission for a test of ConAgra’s meat. The sample tested positive for E. coli O157:H7, and on June 30 ConAgra voluntarily recalled 354,000 pounds of potentially contaminated beef–less than a single day’s worth of production.

Ten days after ConAgra announced its recall, Colorado health officials reported a statewide outbreak of E. coli O157:H7 poisoning. DNA testing conclusively linked the rash of illnesses to beef from the ConAgra slaughterhouse in Greeley. A few weeks earlier, while Galligan Wholesale Meat had been urging the U.S.D.A. to test ConAgra’s meat, Safeway supermarkets in Colorado were unwittingly offering a buy-one-get-one-free sale of the tainted ground beef.

One death and at least 46 illnesses were caused by ConAgra’s meat — and perhaps twenty times that number were sickened by it without realizing the cause. Few cases of E. coli food poisoning are ever traced back to their source. Of the almost 19 million pounds of beef that ConAgra eventually decided to recall, only 3 million were returned. Secretary of Agriculture Ann M. Veneman said the company had been “very cooperative” with the recall, even though ConAgra refused for weeks to tell state public-health authorities where the contaminated beef had been shipped. A ConAgra spokesperson contends that “the federal government didn’t want us to share certain information with the states at first, and there existed in the beef industry at the time a practice of not sharing information about customers.”

The recalled meat was a small portion of what ConAgra had shipped from Greeley between April and July of 2002. The O.I.G. report found that the Greeley slaughterhouse had been producing meat tainted with E. coli O157:H7 for nearly two years.

ConAgra conducted its own testing on the product destined to become ground beef–but the company was never required to disclose its results. According to the O.I.G., from April to October 2002, ConAgra’s samples were testing positive for E. coli O157:H7, on average, between four and five times a week. “Throughout the course of that summer,” a ConAgra spokesperson responds, “nearly all of the processes were dismantled and revamped, retested, and made better, from the beginning of the process when the animal comes into the plant, all the way through and including the end production of product.”

Although U.S.D.A. inspectors repeatedly cited the Greeley plant for visible fecal contamination of the meat, they imposed no punishments and demanded no corrective action. As a result, questionable meat was routinely sold to the general public. ConAgra performed a variety of pathogen tests, however, for its largest customers, such as the two major fast food chains that bought meat from the plant. During the publicly announced recall, large customers had secretly returned at least 118,000 pounds of beef to the Greeley slaughterhouse after the meat tested positive for E. coli O157:H7. ConAgra accepted the meat, and then rerouted it to someone else. (ConAgra claims that meat which tested positive never got to its end destination.) Neither ConAgra nor its customers warned the U.S.D.A. about all this tainted meat. The customers later claimed they were under no legal obligation to do so.

Last year I attended a meeting with Elsa Murano, the U.S.D.A.’s undersecretary for food safety. Before joining the Bush administration she was a professor at Texas A & M University. She seems like a sincere person. But her views are much more consistent with those of a top meatpacking executive than with what you’d expect from the government’s foremost advocate of safe meat. Murano thinks the U.S.D.A. doesn’t need the authority to order mandatory recalls, or to fine meat companies that deliberately break the rules. She thinks most outbreaks of foodborne illness could be avoided if people just cooked their food properly.

From Fast Food Nation. Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. copyright (c) 2009 by Eric Schlosser. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

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“Our bookclub met in September (sorry it’s been so long before I replied, but it’s budget time and some staff have been out with flu and I’ve been a bit swamped). We quite enjoyed The Letter Opener by Kyo Maclear.

Here are some comments:

“Engaging”
“The writing really made you feel for the characters”
“Characters were intriguing and very well written”
“The writing gave great visualizations — you could easily imagine the places described”
“The characters were interesting and did interesting things. It made you want to keep reading to find out what happened to them”
“Skillful knitting together of main characters”
“Smooth bridging of diverse stories”
This story was like her “second coming of age”

All really enjoyed the “P.S.” section at the back and found it very interesting and informative. Many were inspired to seek more information and during our book club meeting many of us recalled stories of items lost in the mail, or miraculously turning up… This book enabled us to have some really great discussions!

The one criticism we all had with the book was that the cover was not very alluring. All of us were surprised by how much we’d enjoyed the book because none of us were very excited by the cover. I know this is a small thing, and different editions have different covers, but I thought I’d give you the whole tale. None of us thought we would have picked this title based on seeing this cover. We’re glad we did read it for book club, but it likely would have been missed if we’d seen this on the shelf.

Thank you again for the copies of the book[s] — we really did enjoy the story”.

And our thanks go out to Shannan and the Sylvan Lake Book Club for their honest, interesting and engaging response to Kyo Maclear’s novel.

“Home to stay, Glory! Yes!” her father said, and her heart sank. He attempted a twinkle of joy at this thought, but his eyes were damp with commiseration. “To stay for a while this time!” he amended, and took her bag from her, first shifting his cane to his weaker hand. Dear God, she thought, dear God in heaven. So began and ended all of her prayers these days, which were really cries of amazement.

While, this new novel takes place concurrently with Gilead, you don’t have to have read the first book to enjoy this one, as the stories, while they have similar plot points and some of the same characters, are extremely different.

The assured nature of Robinson’s voice, her ability to tell a story, and the emotional depth of the relationships between the elder Boughton and his children, bring you right into this novel from the very first page and just don’t let you go. As both Glory and her father await the return of Jack (brother and favourite son), who has been away from Gilead for twenty years, it’s apparent that his presence will change their lives irrevocably as only family members can. In many ways, Jack’s visit is a blessing and a curse, as it brings both Glory and her father closer together, but also forces them to reflect on the past, an exercise that truly brings out the richness in Robinson’s writing.

When I finished the book, I actually hugged it to my chest. I may have uttered an, “Oh, Glory!” or two, as well. The novel picks you up and drops you so wholly into these characters so much so that you can’t help but want to reach into the book and hold them, befriend them, debate with them, and simply enjoy the pleasures in their lives.

Of course, my adoration of Home sent me reeling, again, for more of Marilynne Robinson, which led me to read her first book, Housekeeping. I’ve only just begun, but I am already enthralled by Ruthie’s story. Here’s a passage I read this morning in transit:

It is, as she said, difficult to describe someone, since memories are by their nature fragmented, isolated, and arbitrary as glimpses one has at night through lighted windows.

What do your lighted windows display? Right now mine would be filled to the brim of thoughts about Marilynne Robinson’s books.

When I began to write, I was a woman with dark hair and young kids, and short stories seemed at least possible. I am indebted to Coteau Books, a small publishing house run by writers and book lovers, for my first collection, Women of Influence. Soon after its publication, I was in the hands of an agent, Jan Whitford, who placed my second collection, Casino & Other Stories, with Phyllis Bruce at HarperCollins. Because the beloved Jack Rabinovich wanted to bring readers to Canadian fiction, he had just launched the Giller Prize, and to my amazement, Casino was shortlisted. When my novel A Good House won the Giller, I accepted the award with uncharacteristic emotion (but perhaps characteristic rambling) because, in a split second, I had become the luckiest writer alive. Luckiest because I have never written to please anyone but myself, and also because I know more than a few Canadian writers whose work has not received the exposure it plainly deserves.

A writer like me cannot consciously predetermine the moral compass of her work because that would be a distraction, and the cost could be high, but looking back from here and now, I see that most of my fiction has tended to concentrate on my characters’ ability, or inability, to evolve. To adapt either to external circumstance, or to each other, or to their own changed selves.

In the story “Crush,” a young girl’s perfectly healthy, emerging sexuality prompts a grieving evolution in her mother and a quick, survival-based heads-up for the oblivious but decent bread man who is the object of her surprising lust. In the story “Casino,” a fire in a dance hall at the lake causes commonplace men to call up their instinct and strength, to put their commonplace love into action, as men can.

In A Good House, which is told over several generations, a family evolves from rural life through town and on to city life, facing in each decade birth and death and accidents and handicaps, good marriages and bad, and behaviour that is both beneath and beyond what they might have expected. What matters, of course, is, If a character can adapt, how exactly is it done? Is the change natural or clumsy, harmful or selfless? Is the failure cowardly or brave?

Suddenly is meant to be a study of both lifelong friendship among women and of the demands of sexual devotion in marriage. As Sandra approaches her own imminent death — and with it the loss of her grown children — Jack, her husband, and Colleen and Jude, her good friends of thirty years, take up their responsibility to help her. As she prepares herself, Sandra comes to love memory as much as I do, and all of them, with all of their skill and failure and stupidity and strength, are changed.

An intimate partnership, a marriage, is always interesting. But so is friendship among women, with its own loyalties and limitations. Like marriage, friendship among women is work, and it’s risky. It is sometimes less than we need but just as often more than we deserve. Maybe it’s the ease that interests me, with most of the elemental stories — about parents, about childhood about careers, about kids, even sometimes about men — long since told. Maybe women can walk into a room together or sit having lunch with that strange, relaxed confidence because so much is known, because so many stories have already been heard. Stories that will include, if the friendship is lucky and profound, some truth.

There are no evil twins in my work, nothing explodes. There is no perversion or greed or war, no endless, plotted death. And it has occurred to me that I have ducked the larger question, the question of evil. But some time in twenty years of publishing fiction, I must have decided to stay close to, to keep watch over, the thing that perversion and greed and war destroy, which is our small evolutionary need to simply live with — and if we can, to adapt with — our partners and children and friends. Because, as much as monstrous weakness, this too seems to be securely in our nature. I think believing it makes me a realist.

Bonnie Burnard, March 2009.

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But I contact them anyway. Although my initial correspondence is by e-mail or letter, my goal is to ask the actual questions via phone, because a telephone conversation allows the fanatic to free-associate and bring up esoterica I’d be incapable of putting in a question. My initial call is often an act of groveling debasement. Invariably, I am assured that a layman can never understand the intricacies of the Shay train engine or the differences between the 1927 Acousticon Model 28 hearing aid and the 1928 Acousticon Model 56. Who am I to be brash enough to presume I could understand, their tone makes clear.

I assure my interviewees that I agree totally, that I know I’m just a dim-witted novelist capable of only the most rudimentary understanding of their area of expertise. Such an admission usually makes a big difference. Although the tone of condescension may l linger, as well as the belief that, as countless movies and novels have shown them, I’ll still get it wrong, they answer my questions and offer additional details they believe may be helpful. A very few eventually accept me as a kindred spirit.

Such was the case in 2006 while I was researching Serena, which led me to these temples of obscure and strange information, and to others as well.

I wanted something in the novel’s middle that would ratchet up the loggers’ awe of Serena and make her almost otherworldly to both the loggers and the reader. Because I knew men cutting timber in western North Carolina were sometimes bitten by rattlesnakes, and that eagles hunted rattlesnakes in the wild, I came up with the idea of Serena killing the snakes with an eagle she’d trained. I contacted the North American Falconers Association. After speaking to a half-dozen people, I was informed that “Scott would know.” Scott turned out to be Scott Simpson, one of a dozen or so people in the United States who hunted with an eagle. Yes, Scott said to my question, an eagle trained to hunt rattlesnakes would be unusual but plausible. In that initial conversation, which lasted half an hour, Scott went into great detail about how such training would be done. After a few minutes I began to hear a chirping sound over the line. Thinking one of our phones was on the blink, I asked Scott if he heard the sound as well. “That’s my eagle,” he said matter-of-factly. “It lives in the house with me.”

Over the course of the next two years, Scott answered questions ranging from whether an eagle could kill a Komodo dragon (yes, at least a small one five to six feet in length) to how someone could ride a horse and carry an eagle at the same time. I also found out about how Kazakhs traditionally trained eagles, how to calm a nervous bird, and how to “cast off” a bird from the fist into flight. It was a fascinating education, given with generosity and patience, and I found myself asking more and more questions irrelevant to my novel. Scott sensed a potential convert and told me that he’d given up a well-paying job and a beautiful home in North Carolina to relocate to Wyoming so he could hunt with his bird. “Be careful,” Scott warned, “or you’ll end up doing the same thing.”

My time with Phil, the train engine historian, was of a shorter duration, but nevertheless memorable. One twenty-minute phone call, to be exact. I wasn’t sure I would get that. When I told Phil what I wanted, he told me he was a busy man “with responsibilities.” “Go ahead,” he said, “but make it quick.” I asked my questions about the Shay engine, and he responded thoroughly but tersely. I thanked him for the ten minutes I’d taken of his time, ready to hang up so he could get back to his more pressing matters, but Phil stopped me and proceeded to go on a ten-minute rant about anachronistic train engines in movies. It turned out that one of Phil’s “responsibilities” was watching movies (primarily Westerns) with fellow train engine enthusiasts, the purpose being to point out engines that wouldn’t fit the period. Phil then gave me a long list of particular movies that had outraged him and his cohorts. I thanked him again and hung up.

* * *

Sometimes, however, instead of my contacting the fanatics, the fanatics contact me. When this role reversal occurs, the already tenuous line between enthusiasm and insanity can be breached. Just after publishing a novel that dealt, in part, with a Civil War–era massacre, I received a phone call from a woman who informed me that my novels weren’t products of my imagination but instead true stories transmitted from the dead to the living, giving contemporary literary criticism a new take on Roland Barthes’ “Death of the Author” argument.

At about the same time, I received an e-mail from a self-proclaimed paranormal investigator. His team had visited the massacre site and obtained “compelling evidence” from one of the murdered men that a detail in my novel was wrong. “We have real jobs,” the paranormal investigator assured me, though what off-duty ghostbusters do to pay the bills went unstated.

Bizarre episodes indeed, but I suppose no more bizarre than being contacted without warning by a total stranger who demands meticulous information about something he knows nothing about, a stranger who spends much of his waking life creating imaginary people and imaginary worlds, yet who’s also obsessive about placing the correct factual details within a three-hundred-page “lie” that he’s spent three years making up. And so it is that whether I contact them or they contact me, I know that I am, perhaps more than I might care to admit, among my own kind.

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Ninety-three Million Miles Away

At least part of the reason why Ali married Claude, a cosmetic surgeon with a growing practice, was so that she could quit her boring government job. Claude was all for it. “You only have one life to live,” he said. “You only have one kick at the can.” He gave her a generous allowance and told her to do what she wanted.

She wasn’t sure what that was, aside from trying on clothes in expensive stores. Claude suggested something musical — she loved music — so she took dance classes and piano lessons and discovered that she had a tin ear and no sense of rhythm. She fell into a mild depression during which she peevishly questioned Claude about the ethics of cosmetic surgery.

“It all depends on what light you’re looking at it in,” Claude said. He was not easily riled. What Ali needed to do, he said, was take the wider view.

She agreed. She decided to devote herself to learning, and she began a regimen of reading and studying, five days a week, five to six hours a day. She read novels, plays, biographies, essays, magazine articles, almanacs, the New Testament, The Concise Oxford Dictionary, The Harper Anthology of Poetry. But after a year of this, although she became known as the person at dinner parties who could supply the name or date that somebody was snapping around for, she wasn’t particularly happy, and she didn’t even feel smart. Far from it, she felt stupid, a machine, an idiot savant whose one talent was memorization. If she had any creative talent, which was the only kind she really admired, she wasn’t going to find it by armouring herself with facts. She grew slightly paranoid that Claude wanted her to settle down and have a baby.

On their second wedding anniversary they bought a condominium apartment with floor-to-ceiling windows, and Ali decided to abandon her reading regimen and to take up painting. Since she didn’t know the first thing about painting or even drawing, she studied pictures from art books. She did know what her first subject was going to be — herself in the nude. A few months ago she’d had a dream about spotting her signature in the corner of a painting, and realizing from the conversation of the men who were admiring it (and blocking her view) that it was an extraordinary rendition of her naked self. She took the dream to be a sign. For two weeks she studied the proportions, skin tones and muscle definitions of the nudes in her books, then she went out and bought art supplies and a self-standing, full-length mirror.

She set up her work area halfway down the living room. Here she had light without being directly in front of the window. When she was all ready to begin, she stood before the mirror and slipped off her white terry-cloth housecoat and her pink flannelette pyjamas, letting them fall to the floor. It aroused her a little to witness her careless shedding of clothes. She tried a pose: hands folded and resting loosely under her stomach, feet buried in the drift of her housecoat.

For some reason, however, she couldn’t get a fix on what she looked like. Her face and body seemed indistinct, secretive in a way, as if they were actually well defined, but not to her, or not from where she was looking.

She decided that she should simply start, and see what happened. She did a pencil drawing of herself sitting in a chair and stretching. It struck her as being very good, not that she could really judge, but the out-of-kilter proportions seemed slyly deliberate, and there was a pleasing simplicity to the reaching arms and the elongated curve of the neck. Because flattery hadn’t been her intention, Ali felt that at last she may have wrenched a vision out of her soul.

The next morning she got out of bed unusually early, not long after Claude had left the apartment, and discovered sunlight streaming obliquely into the living room through a gap between their building and the apartment house next door. As far as she knew, and in spite of the plate-glass windows, this was the only direct light they got. Deciding to make use of it while it lasted, she moved her easel, chair and mirror closer to the window. Then she took off her housecoat and pyjamas.

For a few moments she stood there looking at herself, wondering what it was that had inspired the sketch. Today she was disposed to seeing herself as not bad, overall. As far as certain specifics went, though, as to whether her breasts were small, for instance, or her eyes close together, she remained in the dark.

Did other people find her looks ambiguous? Claude was always calling her beautiful, except that the way he put it — “You’re beautiful to me” or “I think you’re beautiful” — made it sound as if she should understand that his taste in women was unconventional. Her only boyfriend before Claude, a guy called Roger, told her she was great but never said how exactly. When they had sex, Roger liked to hold the base of his penis and watch it going in and out of her. Once, he said that there were days he got so horny at the office, his pencil turned him on. (She felt it should have been his pencil sharpener.)

Maybe she was one of those people who are more attractive when they’re animated, she thought. She gave it a try. She smiled and tossed her head, she tucked her hair behind her ears. She covered her breasts with her hands. Down her cleavage a drop of sweat slid haltingly, a sensation like the tip of a tongue. She circled her palms until her nipples hardened. She imagined a man’s hands . . . not Claude’s — a man’s hands not attached to any particular man. She looked out the window.

In the apartment across from her she saw a man.

She leapt to one side, behind the drapes. Her heart pounded violently, as if something had thundered by. She stood there hugging herself. The drapes smelled bitter, cabbagey. Her right hand cupped her left breast, which felt like her heart because her pulse was in it.

After a moment she realized that she had started circling both of her palms on her nipples again. She stopped, astonished, then went on doing it but with the same skeptical thrill she used to get when she knew it wasn’t her moving the Ouija board. And then it was her feet that were moving involuntarily, taking her from behind the drapes into a preternatural brightness.

She went to the easel, picked up a brush and the palette and began to mix a skin colour. She didn’t look at the window or at the mirror. She had the tranced sensation of being at the edge of a cliff. Her first strokes dripped, so she switched to dabbing at the canvas, producing what started to resemble feathers. Paint splashed on her own skin but she ignored it and went on dabbing, layer on layer until she lost the direct sun. Then she wet a rag in the turpentine and wiped her hands and her breasts and stomach.

She thought about the sun. That it is ninety-three million miles away and that its fuel supply will last another five billion years. Instead of thinking about the man who was watching her, she tried to recall a solar chart she had memorized a couple of years ago.

The surface temperature is six thousand degrees Fahrenheit, she told herself. Double that number and you have how many times bigger the surface of the sun is compared to the surface of the earth. Except that because the sun is a ball of hot gas, it actually has no surface.

When she had rubbed the paint off, she went into the kitchen to wash away the turpentine with soap and water. The man’s eyes tracked her. She didn’t have to glance at the window for confirmation. She switched on the light above the sink, soaped the dishcloth and began to wipe her skin. There was no reason to clean her arms, but she lifted each one and wiped the cloth over it. She wiped her breasts. She seemed to share in his scrutiny, as if she were looking at herself through his eyes. From his perspective she was able to see her physical self very clearly — her shiny, red-highlighted hair, her small waist and heart-shaped bottom, the dreamy tilt to her head.

She began to shiver. She wrung out the cloth and folded it over the faucet, then patted herself dry with a dish towel. Then, pretending to be examining her fingernails, she turned and walked over to the window. She looked up.

There he was, in the window straight across but one floor higher. Her glance of a quarter of an hour ago had registered dark hair and a white shirt. Now she saw a long, older face, a man in his fifties maybe. A green tie. She had seen him before this morning — quick, disinterested (or so she had thought) sightings of a man in his kitchen, watching television, going from room to room. A bachelor living next door. She pressed the palms of her hands on the window, and he stepped back into shadow.

The pane clouded from her breath. She leaned her body into it, flattening her breasts against the cool glass. Right at the window she was visible to his apartment and the one below, which had closed vertical blinds. “Each window like a pill’ry appears,” she thought. Vaguely appropriate lines from the poems she had read last year were always occurring to her. She felt that he was still watching, but she yearned for proof.

When it became evident that he wasn’t going to show himself, she went into the bedroom. The bedroom windows didn’t face the apartment house, but she closed them anyway, then got into bed under the covers. Between her legs there was such a tender throbbing that she had to push a pillow into her crotch. Sex addicts must feel like this, she thought. Rapists, child molesters.

She said to herself, “You are a certifiable exhibitionist.” She let out an amazed, almost exultant laugh, but instantly fell into a darker amazement as it dawned on her that she really was, she really was an exhibitionist. And what’s more, she had been one for years, or at least she had been working up to being one for years.

Why, for instance, did she and Claude live here, in this vulgar low-rise? Wasn’t it because of the floor-to-ceiling windows that faced the windows of the house next door?

And what about when she was twelve and became so obsessed with the idea of urinating on people’s lawns that one night she crept out of the house after everyone was asleep and did it? Peed on the lawn of the townhouses next door, right under a streetlight, in fact.

What about two years ago, when she didn’t wear underpants the entire summer? She’d had a minor yeast infection and had read that it was a good idea not to wear underpants at home, if you could help it, but she had stopped wearing them in public as well, beneath skirts and dresses, at parties, on buses, and she must have known that this was taking it a bit far, because she had kept it from Claude.

“Oh, my God,” she said wretchedly.

She went still, alerted by how theatrical that had sounded. Her heart was beating in her throat. She touched a finger to it. So fragile, a throat. She imagined the man being excited by one of her hands circling her throat.

What was going on? What was the matter with her? Maybe she was too aroused to be shocked at herself. She moved her hips, rubbing her crotch against the pillow. No, she didn’t want to masturbate. That would ruin it.

Ruin what?

She closed her eyes, and the man appeared to her. She experienced a rush of wild longing. It was as if, all her life, she had been waiting for a long-faced, middle-aged man in a white shirt and green tie. He was probably still standing in his living room, watching her window.

She sat up, threw off the covers.

Dropped back down on the bed.

This was crazy. This really was crazy. What if he was a rapist? What if, right this minute, he was downstairs, finding out her name from the mailbox? Or what if he was just some lonely, normal man who took her display as an invitation to phone her up and ask her for a date? It’s not as if she wanted to go out with him. She wasn’t looking for an affair.

For an hour or so she fretted, and then she drifted off to sleep. When she woke up, shortly after noon, she was quite calm. The state she had worked herself into earlier struck her as overwrought. So, she gave some guy a thrill, so what? She was a bit of an exhibitionist. Most women were, she bet. It was instinctive, a side effect of being the receptor in the sex act.

She decided to have lunch and go for a walk. While she was making herself a sandwich she avoided glancing at the window, but as soon as she sat at the table she couldn’t resist looking over.

He wasn’t there, and yet she felt that he was watching her, standing out of the light. She ran a hand through her hair. “For Christ’s sake,” she reproached herself, but she was already with him. Again it was as if her eyes were in his head, although not replacing his eyes. She knew that he wanted her to slip her hand down her sweat pants. She did this. Watching his window, she removed her hand and licked her wet fingers. At that instant she would have paid money for some sign that he was watching.

After a few minutes she began to chew on her fingernails. She was suddenly depressed. She reached over and pulled the curtain across the window and ate her sandwich. Her mouth, biting into the bread, trembled like an old lady’s. “Tremble like a guilty thing surprised,” she quoted to herself. It wasn’t guilt, though. It wasn’t frustration, either, not sexual frustration. She was acquainted with this bleached sadness — it came upon her at the height of sensation. After orgasms, after a day of trying on clothes in stores.

She finished her sandwich and went for a long walk in her new toreador pants and her tight black turtleneck. By the time she returned, Claude was home. He asked her if she had worked in the nude again.

“Of course,” she said absently. “I have to.” She was looking past him at the man’s closed drapes. “Claude,” she said suddenly, “am I beautiful? I mean not just to you. Am I empirically beautiful?”

Claude looked surprised. “Well, yeah,” he said. “Sure you are. Hell, I married you, didn’t I? Hey!” He stepped back. “Whoa!”

She was removing her clothes. When she was naked, she said, “Don’t think of me as your wife. Just as a woman. One of your patients. Am I beautiful or not?”

He made a show of eyeing her up and down. “Not bad,” he said. “Of course, it depends what you mean by beautiful.” He laughed. “What’s going on?”

“I’m serious. You don’t think I’m kind of . . . normal? You know, plain?”

“Of course not,” he said lovingly. He reached for her and drew her into his arms. “You want hard evidence?” he said.

They went into the bedroom. It was dark because the curtains were still drawn. She switched on the bedside lamp, but once he was undressed he switched it off.

“No,” she said from the bed, “leave it on.”

“What? You want it on?”

“For a change.”

The next morning she got up before he did. She had hardly slept. During breakfast she kept looking over at the apartment house, but there was no sign of the man. Which didn’t necessarily mean that he wasn’t there. She couldn’t wait for Claude to leave so that she could stop pretending she wasn’t keyed-up. It was gnawing at her that she had overestimated or somehow misread the man’s interest. How did she know? He might be gay. He might be so devoted to a certain woman that all other women repelled him. He might be puritanical, a priest, a Born-Again. He might be out of his mind.

The minute Claude left the apartment, she undressed and began work on the painting. She stood in the sunlight mixing colours, then sat on the chair in her stretching pose, looking at herself in the mirror, then stood up and, without paying much attention, glancing every few seconds at his window, painted ribs and uplifted breasts.

An hour went by before she thought, He’s not going to show up. She dropped into the chair, weak with disappointment, even though she knew that, very likely, he had simply been obliged to go to work, that his being home yesterday was a fluke. Forlornly she gazed at her painting. To her surprise she had accomplished something rather interesting: breasts like Picasso eyes. It is possible, she thought dully, that I am a natural talent.

She put her brush in the turpentine, and her face in her hands. She felt the sun on her hair. In a few minutes the sun would disappear behind his house, and after that, if she wanted him to get a good look at her, she would have to stand right at the window. She envisioned herself stationed there all day. You are ridiculous, she told herself. You are unhinged.

She glanced up at the window again.

He was there.

She sat up straight. Slowly she came to her feet. Stay, she prayed. He did. She walked to the window, her fingertips brushing her thighs. She held her breath. When she was at the window, she stood perfectly still. He stood perfectly still. He had on a white shirt again, but no tie. He was close enough that she could make out the darkness around his eyes, although she couldn’t tell exactly where he was looking. But his eyes seemed to enter her head like a drug, and she felt herself aligned with his perspective. She saw herself — surprisingly slender, composed but apprehensive—through the glass and against the backdrop of the room’s white walls.

After a minute or two she walked to the chair, picked it up and carried it to the window. She sat facing him, her knees apart. He was as still as a picture. So was she, because she had suddenly remembered that he might be gay, or crazy. She tried to give him a hard look. She observed his age and his sad, respectable appearance. And the fact that he remained at the window, revealing his interest.

No, he was the man she had imagined. I am a gift to him, she thought, opening her legs wider. I am his dream come true. She began to rotate her hips. With the fingers of both hands she spread her labia.

One small part of her mind, clinging to the person she had been until yesterday morning, tried to pull her back. She felt it as a presence behind the chair, a tableau of sensational, irrelevant warnings that she was obviously not about to turn around for. She kept her eyes on the man. Moving her left hand up to her breasts, she began to rub and squeeze and to circle her fingers on the nipples. The middle finger of her right hand slipped into her vagina, as the palm massaged her clitoris.

He was motionless.

You are kissing me, she thought. She seemed to feel his lips, cool, soft, sliding and sucking down her stomach. You are kissing me. She imagined his hands under her, lifting her like a bowl to his lips.

She was coming.

Her body jolted. Her legs shook. She had never experienced anything like it. Seeing what he saw, she witnessed an act of shocking vulnerability. It went on and on. She saw the charity of her display, her lavish recklessness and submission. It inspired her to the tenderest self-love. The man did not move, not until she had finally stopped moving, and then he reached up one hand — to signal, she thought, but it was to close the drapes.

She stayed sprawled in the chair. She was astonished. She couldn’t believe herself. She couldn’t believe him. How did he know to stay so still, to simply watch her? She avoided the thought that right at this moment he was probably masturbating. She absorbed herself only with what she had seen, which was a dead-still man whose eyes she had sensed roving over her body the way that eyes in certain portraits seem to follow you around a room.

The next three mornings everything was the same. He had on his white shirt, she masturbated in the chair, he watched without moving, she came spectacularly, he closed the drapes.

Afterwards she went out clothes shopping or visiting people. Everyone told her how great she looked. At night she was passionate in bed, prompting Claude to ask several times, “What the hell’s come over you?” but he asked it happily, he didn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. She felt very loving toward Claude, not out of guilt but out of high spirits. She knew better than to confess, of course, and yet she didn’t believe that she was betraying him with the man next door. A man who hadn’t touched her or spoken to her, who, as far as she was concerned, existed only from the waist up and who never moved except to pull his drapes, how could that man be counted as a lover?

The fourth day, Friday, the man didn’t appear. For two hours she waited in the chair. Finally she moved to the couch and watched television, keeping one eye on his window. She told herself that he must have had an urgent appointment, or that he had to go to work early. She was worried, though. At some point, late in the afternoon when she wasn’t looking, he closed his drapes.

Saturday and Sunday he didn’t seem to be home — the drapes were drawn and the lights off. Not that she could have done anything anyway, not with Claude there. On Monday morning she was in her chair, naked, as soon as Claude left the house. She waited until ten-thirty, then put on her toreador pants and white push-up halter-top and went for a walk. A consoling line from Romeo and Juliet played in her head: “He that is stricken blind cannot forget the precious treasure of his eyesight lost.” She was angry with the man for not being as keen as she was. If he was at his window tomorrow, she vowed she would shut her drapes on him.

But how would she replace him, what would she do? Become a table dancer? She had to laugh. Aside from the fact that she was a respectably married woman and could not dance to save her life and was probably ten years too old, the last thing she wanted was a bunch of slack-jawed, flat-eyed drunks grabbing at her breasts. She wanted one man, and she wanted him to have a sad, intelligent demeanour and the control to watch her without moving a muscle. She wanted him to wear a white shirt.

On the way home, passing his place, she stopped. The building was a mansion turned into luxury apartments. He must have money, she realized. An obvious conclusion, but until now she’d had no interest whatsoever in who he was.

She climbed the stairs and tried the door. Found it open. Walked in.

The mailboxes were numbered one to four. His would be four. She read the name in the little window: Dr. Andrew Halsey.

Back at her apartment she looked him up under “Physicians” in the phone book and found that, like Claude, he was a surgeon. A general surgeon, though, a remover of tumours and diseased organs.

Presumably on call. Presumably dedicated, as a general surgeon had to be.

She guessed she would forgive his absences.

The next morning and the next, Andrew (as she now thought of him) was at the window. Thursday he wasn’t. She tried not to be disappointed. She imagined him saving people’s lives, drawing his scalpel along skin in beautifully precise cuts. For something to do she worked on her painting. She painted fishlike eyes, a hooked nose, a mouth full of teeth. She worked fast.

Andrew was there Friday morning. When Ali saw him she rose to her feet and pressed her body against the window, as she had done the first morning. Then she walked to the chair, turned it around and leaned over it, her back to him. She masturbated stroking herself from behind.

That afternoon she bought him a pair of binoculars, an expensive, powerful pair, which she wrapped in brown paper, addressed and left on the floor in front of his mailbox. All weekend she was preoccupied with wondering whether he would understand that she had given them to him and whether he would use them. She had considered including a message — “For our mornings” or something like that — but such direct communication seemed like a violation of a pact between them. The binoculars alone were a risk.

Monday, before she even had her housecoat off, he walked from the rear of the room to the window, the binoculars at his eyes. Because most of his face was covered by the binoculars and his hands, she had the impression that he was masked.
Her legs shook. When she opened her legs and spread her labia, his eyes crawled up her. She masturbated but didn’t come and didn’t try to, although she put on a show of coming. She was so devoted to his appreciation that her pleasure seemed like a siphoning of his, an early, childish indulgence that she would never return to.

It was later, with Claude, that she came. After supper she pulled him onto the bed. She pretended that he was Andrew, or rather she imagined a dark, long-faced, silent man who made love with his eyes open but who smelled and felt like Claude and whom she loved and trusted as she did Claude. With this hybrid partner she was able to relax enough to encourage the kind of kissing and movement she needed but had never had the confidence to insist upon. The next morning, masturbating for Andrew, she reached the height of ecstasy, as if her orgasms with him had been the fantasy, and her pretences of orgasm were the real thing. Not coming released her completely into his dream of her. The whole show was for him — cunt, ass, mouth, throat offered to his magnified vision.

For several weeks Andrew turned up regularly, five mornings a week, and she lived in a state of elation. In the afternoons she worked on her painting, without much concentration though, since finishing it didn’t seem to matter any more in spite of how well it was turning out. Claude insisted that it was still very much a self-portrait, a statement Ali was insulted by, given the woman’s obvious primitivism and her flat, distant eyes.

There was no reason for her to continue working in the nude, not in the afternoon, but she did, out of habit and comfort and on the outside chance that Andrew might be home and peeking through his drapes. While she painted she wondered about her exhibitionism, what it was about her that craved to have a strange man look at her. Of course, everyone and everything liked to be looked at to a certain degree, she thought. Flowers, cats, anything that preened or shone, children crying, “Look at me!” Some mornings her episodes with Andrew seemed to have nothing at all to do with lust. They were completely display, wholehearted surrender to what felt like the most inaugural and genuine of all desires, which was not sex but which happened to be expressed through a sexual act.

One night she dreamed that Andrew was operating on her. Above the surgical mask his eyes were expressionless. He had very long arms. She was also able to see, as if through his eyes, the vertical incision that went from between her breasts to her navel, and the skin on either side of the incision folded back like a scroll. Her heart was brilliant red and perfectly heartshaped. All of her other organs were glistening yellows and oranges. Somebody should take a picture of this, she thought. Andrew’s gloved hands barely appeared to move as they wielded long, silver instruments. There was no blood on his hands. Very carefully, so that she hardly felt it, he prodded her organs and plucked at her veins and tendons, occasionally drawing a tendon out and dropping it into a petri dish. It was as if he were weeding a garden. Her heart throbbed. A tendon encirled her heart, and when he pulled on it she could feel that its other end encircled her vagina, and the uncoiling there was the most exquisite sensation she had ever experienced. She worried that she would come and that her trembling and spasms would cause him to accidentally stab her. She woke up coming.

All day the dream obsessed her. It could happen, she reasoned. She could have a gall bladder or an appendicitis attack and be rushed to the hospital and, just as she was going under, see that the surgeon was Andrew. It could happen.

When she woke up the next morning, the dream was her first thought. She looked down at the gentle swell of her stomach and felt sentimental and excited. She found it impossible to shake the dream, even while she was masturbating for Andrew, so that instead of entering his dream of her, instead of seeing a naked woman sitting in a pool of morning sun, she saw her sliced-open chest in the shaft of his surgeon’s light. Her heart was what she focused on, its fragile pulsing, but she also saw the slower rise and fall of her lungs, and the quivering of her other organs. Between her organs were tantalizing crevices and entwined swirls of blue and red — her veins and arteries. Her tendons were seashell pink, threaded tight as guitar strings.

Of course she realized that she had the physiology all wrong and that in a real operation there would be blood and pain and she would be anaesthetized. It was an impossible, mad fantasy. She didn’t expect it to last. But every day it became more enticing as she authenticated it with hard data, such as the name of the hospital he operated out of (she called his number in the phone book and asked his nurse) and the name of the surgical instruments he would use (she consulted one of Claude’s medical texts), and as she smoothed out the rough edges by imagining, for instance, minuscule suction tubes planted here and there in the incision to remove every last drop of blood.

In the mornings, during her real encounters with Andrew, she became increasingly frustrated until it was all she could do not to quit in the middle, close the drapes or walk out of the room. And yet if he failed to show up she was desperate. She started to drink gin and tonics before lunch and to sunbathe at the edge of the driveway between her building and his, knowing he wasn’t home from ten o’clock on, but lying there for hours, just in case.

One afternoon, light-headed from gin and sun, restless with worry because he hadn’t turned up the last three mornings, she changed out of her bikini and into a strapless cotton dress and went for a walk. She walked past the park she had been heading for, past the stores she had thought she might browse in. The sun bore down. Strutting by men who eyed her bare shoulders, she felt voluptuous, sweetly rounded. But at the pit of her stomach was a filament of anxiety, evidence that despite telling herself otherwise, she knew where she was going.

She entered the hospital by the Emergency doors and wandered the corridors for what seemed like half an hour before discovering Andrew’s office. By this time she was holding her stomach and half believing that the feeling of anxiety might actually be a symptom of something very serious.

“Dr. Halsey isn’t seeing patients,” his nurse said. She slit open a manila envelope with a lion’s head letter opener. “They’ll take care of you at Emergency.”

“I have to see Dr. Halsey,” Ali said, her voice cracking. “I’m a friend.”

The nurse sighed. “Just a minute.” She stood and went down a hall, opening a door at the end after a quick knock.

Ali pressed her fists into her stomach. For some reason she no longer felt a thing. She pressed harder. What a miracle if she burst her appendix! She should stab herself with the letter opener. She should at least break her fingers, slam them in a drawer like a draft dodger.

“Would you like to come in?” a high, nasal voice said. Ali spun around. It was Andrew, standing at the door.

“The doctor will see you,” the nurse said impatiently, sitting back behind her desk.

Ali’s heart began to pound. She felt as if a pair of hands were cupping and uncupping her ears. His shirt was blue. She went down the hall, squeezing past him without looking up, and sat in the chair beside his desk. He shut the door and walked to the window. It was a big room. There was a long expanse of old green and yellow floor tiles between them. Leaning his hip against a filing cabinet, he just stood there, hands in his trouser pockets, regarding her with such a polite, impersonal expression that she asked him if he recognized her.

“Of course I do,” he said quietly.

“Well –” Suddenly she was mortified. She felt like a woman about to sob that she couldn’t afford the abortion. She touched her fingers to her hot face. “I don’t know your name,” he said.

“Oh. Ali. Ali Perrin.”

“What do you want, Ali?”

Her eyes fluttered down to his shoes — black, shabby loafers. She hated his adenoidal voice. What did she want? What she wanted was to bolt from the room like the mad woman she suspected she was. She glanced up at him again. Because he was standing with his back to the window, he was outlined in light. It made him seem unreal, like a film image superimposed against a screen. She tried to look away, but his eyes held her. Out in the waiting room the telephone was ringing. What do you want, she thought, capitulating to the pull of her perspective over to his, seeing now, from across the room, a charming woman with tanned, bare shoulders and blushing cheeks.

The light blinked on his phone. Both of them glanced at it, but he stayed standing where he was. After a moment she murmured, “I have no idea what I’m doing here.”

He was silent. She kept her eyes on the phone, waiting for him to speak. When he didn’t, she said, “I had a dream . . .” She let out a disbelieving laugh. “God.” She shook her head.

“You are very lovely,” he said in a speculative tone. She glanced up at him, and he turned away. Pressing his hands together, he took a few steps along the window. “I have very much enjoyed our . . . our encounters.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” she said. “I’m not here to –”

“However,” he cut in, “I should tell you that I am moving into another building.”

She looked straight at him.

“This weekend, as a matter of fact.” He frowned at his wall of framed diplomas.

“This weekend?” she said.

“Yes.”

“So,” she murmured. “It’s over, then.”

“Regrettably.”

She stared at his profile. In profile he was a stranger — beaknosed, round-shouldered. She hated his shoes, his floor, his formal way of speaking, his voice, his profile, and yet her eyes filled and she longed for him to look at her again.

Abruptly he turned his back to her and said that his apartment was in the east end, near the beach. He gestured out the window. Did she know where the yacht club was? “No,” she whispered.

“Not that I am a member,” he said with a mild laugh.

“Listen,” she said, wiping her eyes. “I’m sorry.” She came to her feet. “I guess I just wanted to see you.”

He strode like an obliging host over to the door.

“Well, goodbye,” she said, looking up into his face.

He had garlic breath and five-o’clock shadow. His eyes grazed hers. “I wouldn’t feel too badly about anything,” he said affably.

When she got back to the apartment the first thing she did was take her clothes off and go over to the full-length mirror, which was still standing next to the easel. Her eyes filled again because without Andrew’s appreciation or the hope of it (and despite how repellent she had found him), what she saw was a pathetic little woman with pasty skin and short legs.

She looked at the painting. If that was her, as Claude claimed, then she also had flat eyes and crude, wild proportions.

What on earth did Claude see in her?

What had Andrew seen? “You are very lovely,” Andrew had said, but maybe he’d been reminding himself. Maybe he’d meant “lovely when I’m in the next building.”

After supper that evening she asked Claude to lie with her on the couch, and the two of them watched tv. She held his hand against her breast. “Let this be enough,” she prayed.

But she didn’t believe it ever would be. The world was too full of surprises, it frightened her. As Claude was always saying, things looked different from different angles and in different lights. What this meant to her was that everything hinged on where you happened to be standing at a given moment, or even on who you imagined you were. It meant that in certain lights, desire sprang up out of nowhere.

Five Small Rooms (A Murder Mystery) by Diane Schoemperlen

I have learned not to underestimate the power of rooms, especially a small room with unequivocal corners, exemplary walls, and well-mannered windows divided into many rectangular panes. I like a small room without curtains, carpets, misgivings, or ghosts.

I. SMALL ROOM WITH PEARS

I like a room painted in a confident full-bodied color. I steer clear of pastels because they are, generally speaking, capricious, irresolute, and frequently coy. Blue is a good color for a small room, especially if it is of a shade called Tidal Pool, Tropical Sea, Azure, Atoll, or Night Swim.

I once painted a room a shade of blue called Rainy Day. I find a rainy day to be a fine thing on occasion, particularly after an unmitigated stretch of gratuitous sunshine. In that blue room, I kept a stock of umbrellas ready at hand just in case. This was the first room I had ever painted all by myself. For years I had believed that painting a room was a task I could never master, a task better left to professionals or men. After I finished painting this room, I was as proud of myself as if I had discovered the Northwest Passage.

This room had many outstanding features including lots of large cupboards and a counter ample enough to perform surgery on if necessary. In the cupboards I kept all kinds of things: dresses that no longer fit or flattered me, a bird’s nest I’d found in the park when I was six, a red and white lace negligee, the program from a musical version of Macbeth, several single socks and earrings, instruction manuals for a radio, a blow-dryer, and a lawn mower that I no longer owned, a package of love letters tied up with a black satin ribbon. No matter how many secrets I stowed in these cupboards, they never filled up.

Often I found myself wandering into the blue room in the middle of the night. I would stand naked staring into the refrigerator at three in the morning, until the cold air gave me goose bumps and my nipples got hard. It was a very old refrigerator which sometimes chirped like a distant melancholy cricket. I was searching not for food so much as for memories, motives, an alibi: how it looked, how it happened, when.

I would reach into the refrigerator and pull out a chunk of ham, a chicken leg, a slice of cheese, or some fruit. Pears were my favorite. Imagine the feel of the sweet gritty flesh on your tongue, the voluptuous juice on your chin. Pears are so delicate. My fingertips made bruises on their thin mottled skin.

This was nothing like “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? / I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. / I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. Peaches I am not fond of. Their fuzz gives me shivers like fingernails on a chalkboard. The color of their flesh close to the pit is too much like that of meat close to the bone. My consumption of pears had nothing to do with daring or indecision. It was strictly a matter of pure pleasure, which always comes as a great relief. At that point in my life I’d had no dealings with mermaids and did not expect to. I am tone deaf and, much as I admire a good body of water, I have never learned to swim.

As for the women who come and go, they are not likely to be talking of Michelangelo.

II. SMALL ROOM WITH SEASHELLS

Later there was another small blue room, this one painted in a shade called Atlantis because it was situated on the very edge of the ocean. In this room I enjoyed the omnipresent odor of salt water and the ubiquitous sound of the surf. These struck me as two things I would never grow tired of.

This room was very sturdy, with support beams as substantial and steadfast as tree trunks. The windows were recessed deep into the thick outer walls. These walls were solid straight through, not hollow in the middle like most. They put me in mind of chocolate Easter bunnies, how the best bunnies are the solid ones, how cheated you feel when biting into a hollow one only to discover it is just a thin shell of chocolate around a rabbit-shaped pocket of sweet empty air.

Here I often wandered out to the beach in the middle of the night. I did not wear white flannel trousers and I never heard the mermaids singing. I had no desire to disturb the universe. I simply stood there with my toes in the ocean and my head in the sky. The hair on my arms stood up in the moonlight. I studied the constellations and thought about words like firmament, nebula, and galactic cannibalism. I had to keep reminding myself that some of the stars I was seeing were already dead. I had trouble at first with the whole notion of light-years, with time as a function of distance, speed, and illumination, rather than as simply the conduit from then to now.

On cloudy nights, when I could not pursue the perfection of my theory of stars, I turned instead to collecting the miscellaneous offerings which the ocean so munificently deposited at my feet.

I gathered seashells by the fistful, listened for the ocean in each of them, and it was always there, like the same moon seen from every continent, the same God petitioned in every prayer. From the sand I plucked moon shells, harp shells, angel wings, helmets, goblets, butterflies, cockles, and tusks. Less plentiful and so of course more desirable were the sundial and chambered nautilus shells. I’d read somewhere once how the young cephalopod at first lives in the center of its shell but as it grows larger, it must move forward, sealing off each chamber behind itself. This would be like shutting a door and having it permanently locked behind you.

The seashells, like the stars, were long dead, the beautiful cast-off husks of the ugly mollusks that had made them. Only these pretty skeletons had survived, just as it was only the light of the stars that could still reach me. I thought long and hard about chambers, skeletons, a series of small rooms, the missing bodies of seashells and stars.

There were other things too offered up by the sea: tangled balls of fishing line, plastic bags, a bracelet, a knife. A pair of panty hose, a set of keys, a bathing suit, and several used condoms. Pieces of driftwood like bones, coils of seaweed like entrails. One night I found a water-bloated copy of a murder mystery called Dead Dead Double Dead. The last five pages were missing. This, I could not help but think, was hitting a little too close to home.

Apparently the ocean, in addition to being a weighty and ambivalent symbol of dynamic forces, transitional states, the collective unconscious, chaos, creation, and universal womanhood in all its benevolent and heinous incarnations, was also the repository of all lost things. I had long wondered what happened to those socks that went into the washing machine and never came out.

At this time I still believed that I could summon up my former self whenever I was ready, that I could gather up my innocence and step back into it like an old pair of shoes. Now I began to see this was no longer true. Eventually I realized that in this small room I was forever in danger of drowning or being swallowed by a sea monster. This epiphany marked the end of my blue period.

III. SMALL ROOM WITH CATS

Various shades of brown are good for small rooms too. Brown imparts a sense of serenity, solidity, and security. Imagine lying down on a bed of warm soil. Imagine being buried alive and liking it. I am partial to any color of brown that looks like coffee with milk in it or any shade that is named after food: Honey Nut, Bran Muffin, Caramel Chip, or Indian Corn. In a small room painted a color called Pumpkin Loaf, I always felt full. Sometimes in the morning I thought I could smell the sweet bread baking.

In this room there were tables but no chairs. Clearly the importance of chairs has been overestimated. I quickly got over my atavistic longings for them. Soon enough I could hardly imagine what I’d ever deemed to be indispensable about chairs. Like so many other things I once thought I could never live without, chairs, once I got used to their absence, proved to be just another habit, a knee-jerk reflex like flinching, apologizing, or falling in love. The only time I seriously missed them was when I wanted to sit down and tie my shoes. This was like wishing for a man when you want to clean out the eaves-trough or open a new jar of pickles.

There were also many shelves in this brown room, tidy well-spaced shelves like boxes built right into the wall. Some of them still bore items left behind by some former fugitive tenant. There was a pink lampshade which, in a happier time, I might have put on my head. There were some pale yellow bed sheets, soft from many washings, stained with the bodily fluids of long-gone strangers. No matter where you go, you are always leaving incriminating tidbits of evidence behind you.

There was a stack of old National Geographic magazines. Everyone has a pile of these stashed away somewhere. There were also several empty picture frames propped up on the shelves and hammered to the walls. I carefully cut photographs from the magazines and stuck them in these frames. I selected several panoramic views of jungles, mountains, fields of wheat. I chose skies without clouds, seas without boats, landscapes without figures. I changed these pictures often so as not to feel that I was just treading water or running in place.

Here I kept cats for company. I like the look of a small room with two cats in it. I tried to emulate the way they can settle themselves anywhere like boneless shape-shifting pillows and how, when falling from a great height, they will almost always land on their feet. I was impressed too by their apparently infinite ability to adapt, the way they can live well anywhere: in an alley, a barn, a palace, or a small brown room with tables and shelves, no chairs.

I told my cats stories of other cats, famous cats, tenacious cats, heroic cats, miraculous cats who found their way home again after traveling through endless miles of wilderness, fording rivers, scaling canyons, leaping tall buildings with a single bound. My cats curled around me and purred. It is not true that cats only purr when they’re happy. They also do it when they’re worried or in pain.

In my time I have been accused of many things: jealousy, arrogance, selfishness, viciousness, laziness, bitterness, and lust. Also infidelity, inclemency, insanity, immorality, and pride. I have been called reckless, heartless, shameless, malicious, sarcastic, demanding, domineering, cold-blooded, and cruel. The cats, of course, knew none of this and did not care to ask. They were well aware of the perils of curiosity, the trials and tribulations of being misunderstood. There is always someone who will be offended by a cat’s enthusiasm for killing. Think of the way they play with their prey and then, once it is sufficiently dead, how they always eat the head first, often swallowing it whole. Think of the way they leave the hearts behind, those slimy little lumps drawing flies in the driveway. Myself, I do not find this distasteful. There is always someone who will tell you that your instincts are wrong. Outside, the sweet yellow fog pressed against the windowpanes.

IV. SMALL ROOM WITH MOTH

Most kinds of green paint, as you would expect, are named after pastoral scenes and growing things: Meadow, Pasture, Orchard, Leaf, Broccoli, Asparagus, Spinach, and Dill. In a small room painted a shade called Forest Lane, the air was always moist, emitting an intimate odor of new growth and decay. The light was leafy and diffuse, like a green glaze on my skin. The ceiling was done in Maiden of the Mist, a humid color much like that of the sky on a hazy August afternoon. If I stared at this ceiling for too long, I found I could not catch my breath.

Where the walls met the ceiling there were curves instead of straight lines and angles. The tops of the windows and doorway were vaulted too. I enjoyed these arches the way you enjoy a symphony, your whole body thrilling at the crescendo’s inevitable approach. I like a good old-fashioned symphony, the way it stirs the blood. At this point in my life I knew I was ripe for a transformation.

In this room there were many solid wooden benches, the purpose of which was never clear. Perhaps the room had once been the meeting place of a secret cult whose members would sit on these benches in rows of black cloaks and hoods, worshiping their various devils and gods, planning their next move. Arranged upon these mysterious benches was an impressive assortment of cookware, metal pots and bowls of many sizes, some battered, some smooth. Perhaps these had been used to boil the sacrificial virgins or lambs. My desires both to cook and to eat having been dislodged by the heat and my overactive imagination, I filled these vessels with flowers instead of stew, sacrificial or otherwise. In this green room I ate only raw green things: lettuce, celery, sweet peppers, and limes.

Here I did not wander at night. I still went to bed not knowing what I had been accused of but this uncertainty no longer tormented me. I had only two bad dreams during my sojourn in this green room. The first was of having my head shriveled to the size of a small sweet pepper, then sliced in half and served upon a big green platter. The second was of having my body covered with a fine white powder and then pinned still wriggling to the wall. It was not a green wall. It was a red wall. I slept flat on my back with the windows open and a candle burning on the floor beside me.

Moths flew in through the open windows, misguided emissaries from the unbridled night. The patterns on their wings were written in a language I did not yet understand. They came from miles around, unable to resist the sweet deadly pull of the flame any more than I could ever resist a ripe pear, a good murder mystery, or a man who said he could save me. Moths, like humans, engage in complicated courtship rituals which involve elaborate dances and sudden dazzling flights. It was hard to determine whether they were courting each other or the promise of a hot dramatic death. I could have reached up from my bed and touched them. But as a child I was told you must never touch a moth because if that fine powder is rubbed off its wings, it will die. Outside, I thought I heard voices but I was mistaken.

I did not touch the moths. They died anyway. In the morning I would find their corpses littering the floor around my guttered candle. Their beautiful wings were scorched, their feathery antennae fried, that magic powder turned to ash. There was a lesson to be learned here, something about fortitude and the purification of the soul by fire. Either that or the moths were simply too stupid to survive. Some people believe that white moths are actually the souls of the dead and that if a black moth flies into a house, it means that someone who lives there will die within the year.

Looking back on my own life, it is hard to determine which was the moth and which was the flame. In these matters, there is no such thing as black and white.

V. SMALL ROOM WITH CLOCKS

I have learned to be wary of the purples which have names like Dazzle, Delusion, Charade, Mirage, and Masquerade. When I first painted this small room a shade of purple called New Year’s Eve, it was easy to fool myself into believing that here I could make time stand still. I imagined myself poised in the middle of the countdown to midnight.
All around me expectant voices chanted: Ten nine eight seven six five. Then they stopped. Thousands of upturned faces gaped incredulously as the silver ball hung there and dropped no farther. Like the boy with his finger in the dike, I believed I could hold back time by the sheer forces of will, desire, and good intentions. I was encouraged by the knowledge that ancient sailors without clocks had navigated solely by instinct and fortuity.

This room, like the others, has large windows divided into many rectangular panes, thick walls solid straight through, built-in shelves filled with an efficient array of cookware, several sturdy tables, and no chairs. I see now that I am beginning to repeat myself.

In an old barrel with wooden slats and rusted iron bands I found two large clocks, identical in every way. Under normal circumstances, I appreciate an accurate clock but here I tried not to dwell on the fact that these two clocks kept impeccable time.

It was winter. Christmas was coming. I hung clusters of purple glass baubles from the ceiling on strands of invisible thread. This was meant to be festive. Outside, it should have been snowing. But in this part of the world at this time of the year it rains instead.

Each night as dusk fell, I liked to sit on the edge of the table closest to the windows. I would roll up my shirt sleeves, eat my toast, and sip my sweet milky tea. Sometimes it was raining, cold drops on black asphalt. On Christmas Eve, children sang carols in the street, their faces and their voices cherubic under red and green umbrellas in the rain. I was smug, thinking myself exempt from the passage of time, the wretched welter of loneliness, the annoying need to question, insist, or explain. Despite all the evidence against me, I was not afraid. It was easy enough to be brave with these purple walls wrapped like the robes of royalty around me.

On New Year’s morning I awoke to the sound of a million calendars turning their pages in the wind. I was forced to acknowledge the unbearable sweetness of being. You can run but you can’t hide.

Now I find myself watching the clocks instead of the rain-sprinkled street. Their faces are impassive but their hands are always in motion. All mechanical clocks depend on the slow controlled release of power. Like the ticking of the clocks, there is a refrain in my head all day long now: Be careful. Be careful. Be careful. Sometimes it is only background noise and I am not actually hearing it. But then, if I pay attention to it even for an instant, it drives everything else right out of my head. This is like the way mothers are always warning their rambunctious children: Be careful, don’t fall. Be careful, don’t bump your head. Be careful, it’s hot. Be careful, it’s sharp. Be careful, it’s dark.

When I need to hear a human voice instead of this carnivorous ticking of my brain and the clocks, I talk to the walls. Talking to the walls is not necessarily a bad thing, not if they are good strong walls, perfectly perpendicular, freshly painted, cool and smooth when you press your fevered lips against them. Purple walls in particular can convince you that everything you are telling them is brilliant, witty, and profound.

Time, they say, heals all wounds. Unless of course the wounds were fatal in the first place. He is not Lazarus. He will not rise from the dead. Even time has its limits. Do not expect that your life will follow the orderly unfolding of beginning, middle, and end. Once upon a time our hearts were innocent, generous, and sweet, oh so sweet, sweet hearts. It is time to make it clear that, although hell indeed hath no fury like a woman scorned, still I did not leave his heart to draw flies in the driveway. I did not eat his head first. I did not swallow it whole.

It is time to turn my back on the seduction of these small rooms. It is time to address the issues and answer the charges. It is time to go home: home, where the walls are white and the hearts are black. Oh, do not ask, “Where is it?” Let us go and make our visit.

It is time to make it clear that I did not kill him. But yes, oh yes, I wanted to.

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Sure, translating Don Quixote was a daunting task. But Edith Grossman claims it wasn’t the language that was the problem; it was the four centuries of historical baggage that came with Miguel de Cervantes’ classic picaresque novel.

“The perils and pitfalls involved in translating the book are in the 400 years of scholarship that exists,” Grossman says. “It was somewhat overwhelming to take this book on and confront the person a friend once called, ‘Professor Horrendo,’ the person who is waiting to find the mistake, the place you slipped up.”

Grossman needn’t have worried. Her fluid work with Don Quixote has earned unanimous praise, and the book is already in its third printing — an astonishing feat from a 930-page novel written in the early seventeenth-century.

Coupled with Grossman’s graceful and poetic translation of Gabriel García Márquez’s autobiographical Living to Tell the Tale, the Upper West side resident has now established herself as one of the finest and most high profile translators in publishing.

As Grossman might see it, that’s damning her with faint praise. “Translation is very solitary work,” she says, “and there is a great reluctance in the U.S. to publish translations. Very occasionally, in the case of Quixote, or when Seamus Heaney translated Beowulf, a translation makes a huge impact. But most of the time we don’t. I struggle to get my name on the cover.”

Grossman, who has also translated García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera as well as the work of Mario Vargas Llosa, Alvaro Mutis and other Spanish-language writers, is a Philadelphian who earned a doctorate in Latin American literature from New York University.

When García Márquez’s previous translator, Gregory Rabassa, was unavailable to do Cholera in the 1980s, Grossman was working as a college teacher and translating poetry and short stories for a literary magazine. She beat out several peers and was chosen to translate the work, establishing her reputation.

“A lot of translation has to do with how much English you know,” she says. “When I started on Cholera it seemed to me that the echo behind García Márquez’s writing, and the echo behind almost everyone who writes in Spanish, is Cervantes. But in English there isn’t a model in prose that operates in the way Cervantes does in Spanish. So I decided to use a kind of a nineteenth-century voice by way of William Faulkner.

“I didn’t use any contractions in the narration, and I used Latinate words, polysyllabic words, instead of German monosyllables. Any time I could, I chose a longer word rather than a shorter word, as if Hemingway had never lived.”

Grossman believes that translation is thirty percent “grunt work” and seventy percent artistic. There’s a long, involved process of drafts, revisions and editing, which means that an average 300-page book can go through ten revisions and take four months of seven-day weeks to finish. (Quixote took two years, but Grossman translated another book in between.)

But the really exciting and most creative part is what Grossman describes as “trying to get into the mind of the author through the text. You have to figure out what the author really meant.”

Sometimes this means referring to the six Spanish-language dictionaries she has in her apartment. Sometimes conferring with Latino friends, U.N. translators, native speakers familiar with regional speech or the author.

Grossman doesn’t consult with an author during the translation process, but if there are still problems at the end, she’ll ask the writer “what was meant. I never ask for a translation; I ask what the word means.”

And although she has a personal relationship with her authors — she will, for example, have coffee with García Márquez if he’s in town — not all of them are interested in seeing the translation before it goes into print.

But Spanish author Julian Rios, who is fluent in English, always vets his work, and because “he is a very complex writer,” Grossman says, “I’m glad he wants to see the manuscript before I submit it to the publisher.”

When Grossman was starting out in the 1970s, she and other translators were making what could be called slave wages: $45 for a 1,000-word story, 50 cents a line for poetry (that’s a whopping $7 for a sonnet).

But fees have slowly gone up, she says, and Grossman is not only able to make a living solely as a translator now, but her status is such that she also earns royalties.

Still, translating is more about love than money. Grossman was initially attracted to the field because it allowed her to work at home (she was a heavy smoker at the time and couldn’t work in libraries) and also because “it was a way of satisfying my desire to write. I had written intermittently, and translating is a way to get past the blank page.”

But the opportunities aren’t plentiful. “Who knows which is the egg or the chicken?” Grossman says. “Do Americans read fewer translations because the publishers publish fewer, or the publisher puts out fewer translations because the public reads fewer?”

Whatever the case, demand is limited. “Philip Roth once said there are only 4,000 readers in the U.S., and once you’ve sold a book to each one of them, you’re done, that’s the end of it. He was exaggerating, but basically that’s the situation… and translated literature doesn’t do better than English-language literature.”

But there’s a missionary aspect to what she does that surpasses sales figures.

“The more attention that’s paid to translating, the better it is for all translators,” she says. “There is so much literature in the world, so much we deprive ourselves of. Translation is so important to our experience of the world.”

“In Other Words…That’s What She Does” by Lewis Beale. Copyright © 2003, Los Angeles Times. Reprinted with permission. From Don Quixote. Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. copyright © 2003 by Edith Grossman. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.