Bittersweet

I

We’ve crept closer to her since he died, to the chair in which she sits by day, sleeps by night. She doesn’t yet grasp the purpose of our embrace, box elders, with our summer entourage of orange and black bugs. Brave sumacs, waving our flame wands in fall. Hickories of the shagbark variety, our nuts pinging on her metal roof before the snows come. We know she can hear them sliding the cold gradient. 

She was married and lived here with a fiddler, a man who wielded wood to live, to survive. But his was cut from the Amazon, pillaged from the best Pernambuco years ago. 

Legs themselves reduced to sticks, he died three years back. His fiddle and bow now reside deep in the house’s interior, in an upstairs closet. 

She cannot bear the thought of donating them, but doesn’t want anyone to think her stingy when they’re discovered, as she will be, the red berries of bittersweet replacing her eyes. She doesn’t want money, unless it’s to leave it to her son, so estranged she wouldn’t know where to begin looking for him. There were dogs at one time. No barking now to announce the distant clatter of the dozer that might, on any day, round the turn on to the dead-end, barely-traveled road and lumber toward the small crumbling house. Her husband now gone, she pays someone to do what little shopping she needs. 

II

After you died, all the firsts … Entering the room where the two of us spent most of our time. Sitting in my chair and staring at yours. Not moving. My life shrinking to the size of a seat cushion.

You were a redhead. Red lashes like tassels edging a stage curtain. You talked little, a trait I misunderstood. One you defended with more silence, and, so I thought, with music. But you did teach me about fiddle bows and horse hair, the first time we made love. White tail hair from white horses, stallions in Siberia. 

You rubbed the cake of rosin on the white horsehair of the bow so it gripped the string, spoke. Back and forth, you explained, abrading, every stroke an entreaty to the perfect sound. Rosining, a kind of lovemaking. Flecks of rosin, telltale signs I shyly wiped from your lapels. I had always dreamed of a grand love like that.

III

Sixty-odd years ago. In a barn, doors are thrown open to a summer breeze. Me, sitting in a pew, a young lover of music, never suspecting it was you I was looking for. You, first fiddler in a string quartet, never suspecting it was me you were looking for. Me, entranced by Haydn, Bartok, Beethoven, and for an encore, Turina, La Oración del Torero. You, casting a spell: a chapel snaked with incense smoke. A matador about to face his bull, bowed in final prayer.

From some distant valley, a dog barked right after the last note. Applause, the clapping together of palms with their collision of lifelines … Across rows of heads, us, looking up, recognizing each other, two strangers who’d been waiting our whole lives for that smile.

IV

From her chair, she attends our seasons: our bare limbs cracking in winter, new leaves gossiping in spring, luxuriating in their summer stories until the fall husks them and sends them haunting.

It’s taken years for the bittersweet vine to get to where it is now. At first it only murmured at her window, putting out feelers she thought charming. Now, more gnarled, it’s so thick it no longer scrapes individual stems against the glass, but reaches as one body. Deep yellow capsules burst to reveal crimson berries, the house a canvas on which to display its jewels. When the winter wind shakes its mop of dried casings, it sends them scattering like yellow petals on the snow. The vine’s constant chafing at her window is an importuning. One morning she wakes to find the window broken. Soon a waiting stem squeezes through. 

V

I wonder if it was because we married too quickly. We emerged from the registry office festooned with flowers, bits of confetti on my lashes. We danced all night to your humming of mysterious tunes. 

I didn’t understand, that day in the barn, why, although transported by your music, I sat at the back, as close to the open doors as I could get, one restless foot edging into the aisle without my permission. The sudden agitation was strange to me then. I didn’t yet know what was happening to me or why it was happening now. 

Down the steps of the registry office I ran on our wedding day, the soles of my feet gulping ground. It grieves me to this day that you must have mistaken for joy the confetti that streamed behind me in the wind. 

VI

Scales: connected notes. Arpeggios: broken lines … Before a concert, you warmed up in the spare bedroom, your practice room. I would wait till the last note died away, then meet you at the foot of the stairs, wipe flecks of rosin from your lapels. I longed for you—the passion you lavished on your music. At first I came to hear you every time you played, but my strange new fear accompanied me, my thumping heartbeats notes the composers never wrote. 

But that soon changed. I missed one concert. Then another. Soon a whole season of music went by. We didn’t talk of my retreat, and before I knew it, I was scarcely going out at all. Grocery aisles, post offices, small talk, the handling of coins and greasy dollar bills—of all this you relieved me. In the beginning I was grateful for your protection. Returning home, you’d lock the front door behind us without my having to ask. I came to dread intrusion from the outside—mail carriers, snow plows, the occasional lost traveler who’d taken a wrong turn. Locked inside our house, we played out our strange intimacy, you, me, the notes it had become too painful to hear, the music itself with which you sealed yourself away in the practice room.

VII

We trees saw her, hidden behind our leaves like ladies behind fans. 

Though remote, their house was sometimes gay. Musicians gathered here. Her husband and his friends engaged in the persiflage for which such artists are infamous. Light banter, raillery, frivolous talk. Even she could sometimes be counted on for a passing witticism while in their presence. The gatherings filtered out onto the grounds, to lawns shimmering citron under the sun, to swooping paths just broad enough for two through the field behind the old barn. They sipped wine as they walked, unaware that we were watching.

There, from the twiggy shelters we provided them, grouse and groundhog looked on too. They heard, even the insect eggs on the stems of the goldenrod heard the humoresque of their talk.

It was during one such nattering around the field that, seeing but unseen, she trailed behind her husband and a friend, a cellist. Her husband had just bought his new bow. Under the sun he glowed like a new mother. Excitement birthed words. From the way his hands flew about, she knew he was extolling to his friend the virtues of old growth Pernambuco. 

We listened with a nervous rubbing of our twigs, an agitated whisper of our leaves. Such bow talk, based as it was on pillage, contracted us, sent an impulse alarm racing along the mycelium beneath our feet. Amidst the agitated whisper of leaves stood the eggs in their glue, more hesitant to hatch, or the caterpillars noticing the new and slight bitterness transmitted to their leafy meals. 

VIII

Why was it you had so much to say to them and so little to me? Careful not to disturb the bees, I hovered fingertips above the burgeoning sprays of the goldenrod which was just beginning to bloom. I wondered too, though only idly, whether these bees were wild or from Jarvis’s beloved hives, from which he extracted the honey I used to sweeten the tea we two shared every evening. There was a wind that day which wafted us up and down the slopes. Occasionally it carried with it snippets of conversation—who’d bought what bow at what hoity toity instrument shop out east, who’d gotten swindled by a fake instrument certificate and who he or she might swindle in return, who was playing what, who teaching whom, sometimes code for who was sleeping with whom.

As the wind shifted, suddenly your words carried back to me, and I overheard you and your friend speaking. At first, I assumed you were still talking about your bow.

“So,” said your friend. “Are things any better?” 

I saw you shake your head.

And then, “She’s not doing well.” You said it in that worried voice you used when you feared a crack was opening up in your fiddle or an unexplained rattle threatened perfection of sound. 

It took me a moment to grasp that you were discussing me—and apparently not for the first time. I felt exposed, embarrassed, sorry for you all at once. 

Your friend’s hand hovered above the goldenrods, careful not to disturb the bees. I watched him push his sleeves up to the elbows. I was close enough that I couldn’t help noticing the hairs on his forearms, not ginger and fleecy like yours but dark and tangled as briars.

“Have you tried what I suggested?” 

His hand accidentally brushed a bloom, to a confetti-scatter of pollen. 

“Talking to her?” You sighed deeply. “You know how I am with her—words escape me.” 

“Well, there must be something you can do. I’m no expert on marriage, but they do say, what doesn’t happen in the bedroom …”

I bristled, suppressing a fleeting fantasy about what kind of lover this man might be. As to you, what need did you have of the bedroom? You already had a love of your own. 

IX

Perhaps her husband read her thoughts, for we watched his shoulders hunch in defeat.  We had seen his anguish, how he stashed it in the barn, where, careful not to injure his hands, he sometimes kicked around corroded gas cans or three-legged tables that spiraled dust like cruel confetti.

The cellist put his arm around him.

“I know you love her. Anyone can see that.”

X

From my chair I hear him squeezing by the bittersweet and in through the door. I hear the tips of his loose laces clicking the floor, the scrunch of a grocery bag. He appears in the doorway to the living room, grizzled now, of indeterminate age.

“They didn’t have sweet,” Jarvis says. “I got plain potatoes instead.”

In what’s left of my affairs, he’s grown as entangled as the vine.

I wonder if you’d mind, after all these years, the things he still does for me. The little repairs: the spacklings, tappings, oilings of hinges. 

It was only a few days after that walk around the field. I could hear your music see-sawing from your practice room and I fled to pick mint leaves near the barn. I remember the dress I had chosen that morning, pale with blue cornflowers, of some weightless weave I’d soon retire for the season. It was one of my last chances to wear it.

“Pretty frock,” Jarvis had said when he came upon me, gathering. “Suits you.”

He was grizzled even then, raw, sweet, unrefined. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a compliment. What were you playing? Bartok? 

Before I knew it, our two shadows became one, swaying in the grass. It only took a few measures and then it was over. When we came out from behind the barn, Jarvis and I, your music stopped. Jarvis looked alarmed.

“He’s rosining his bow,” I said, but clearly, Jarvis didn’t know what I was talking about.

“Rosin is a solid form of resin.” I used the very words you’d enshrined in me after the first time we’d made love and you were preparing to play for me. 

“See that white pine over there?” I turned and pointed to the field. It was actually a cluster, growing so close and in such breathing intimacy their arms clasped above ground, their roots below. 

But when I looked back at Jarvis, he was looking at me, not at the tree. 

“So beautiful …” he whispered.

My dress wrinkled from the grass behind the barn, I looked up at your window. I remembered kissing you, remembered making our son together from some substance that was as if from a strange star. My voice caught as I went on. “One heats the fresh liquid resin from trees like that. It sometimes looks like amber.”

 To you, I knew, it was more precious than amber. 

XI

That night, she tore the mint leaves into the pot, set the cups and strainers, honey, on the tray and fetched it into the living room while the moon and the stars assembling in the night sky proceeded in a persiflage all their own. Her sorrow and shame swirled in that hot liquid sweetened with the labor of Jarvis’s bees. 

They both needed it sweeter that night. The honey took so long to melt, their spoons circled around and around their teacups, tinkling the china curves. His eyes pondered the steaming beverage. 

In silence they sat in their chairs. He with his new bow, she with her book of medicinal plants. Out of the blue, he offered to play for her, a rare invitation. He hadn’t done so in years, not since their son came home—solo Bach, which he hadn’t played with such aching since the early days of their marriage, or perhaps on the day their son was conceived. She listened then as she did now, elbows to knees, holding her face in her palms, tears trickling into her lifelines.

XII

After that day, Jarvis found reasons to scuff up the road to do things for me in all seasons, usually to the accompaniment of your music from upstairs. I always listened more closely when he was around. The doleful spackling of a crack in the plaster would inspire a particularly mournful movement of solo Bach. The anointing with oil of a rusty hinge would taunt in time with the sneers of Shostakovich. 

One day Jarvis had been there, tinkering with his hives. On the lookout for colony collapse, he’d lately been unusually solicitous of them. I was in the kitchen making jelly when I saw him stooping beneath my open window, pretending to mend a sash that wasn’t broken. I noticed it before he did, a bee landing on his arm, lugging its large pollen grains through his bristly hairs. He must have felt a tickle, for suddenly, he brought the bee up to eye level.

“Looks healthy enough,” he said, almost to himself. But then, offering his arm for my inspection, “Did you know that in this gal’s world, hive guards sometimes don’t let sick workers back into the nest?” He looked at me, flicked his chin in the direction of his hives. “But inside the nest, now that’s something else. Some pretty nifty things can happen there. Drones sometimes groom workers if they’re sick. They can even surround them to create a kind of fever to try and heal them.”

Why did Jarvis appear all those days?

You never asked the question. You played it to me instead.

XIII

You, redheaded husband, seeded a red-haired son with a face of cutting beauty. Remember how we bled with the knowledge that he would one day leave these green loyal hills and use his face in one of those asphalted places which, to me especially, represented moral and aesthetic dissolution? There was no blowout; he just drifted from our lives to root somewhere else, an alien species of the boy we knew. 

The postcard, a few years in coming, was a publicity photo of him in front of the Hollywood sign. I turned it around, displayed the handwriting side on the kitchen sill beside the honey from Jarvis’s bees. That handwriting was the same, but the face and body of the son who’d written it wasn’t. He was modeling in LA. I imagined him sweating away in the gym the soft adolescent body he left home with, dyeing his red hair blond, spraying bronzer, his rippling muscles creating shadows. Detaching from the words, so distant and unrevealing, I gleaned comfort from the vining reach of the letters themselves, their tendrilling across the small space he had cleared between us. 

You were angry with him, turned the postcard face down. 

I propped it back up. 

You, with armored eye, laid it flat.

For weeks—a three-by-five-inch war. 

Eventually I tucked it away between the pages of my book, giving it an alphabetical home. Gingko, Hollywood, Inula …

XIV

Through the mycelium we feel everything, every gift of conservation, every tremor of loss and disappointment. We feel the breakages in connection. 

At the mill, our barks are removed. Grindstones tear our fibers apart. We are washed, bleached, our bodies pulped. 

But our cells remain. Words and music are written on them.

XV

A year or so later, with a girlfriend on his arm, the son appeared. She scarcely recognized this man who was her child.

The girlfriend seemed to them a reissue of a Hollywood type too old for their boy to know. Her body looked manufactured. Surgeon-sculpted cheeks. Augmented bosom tucked—only just—inside a leopard print tee. 

They walked in the field that day. The husband, the son, silent, in the vanguard; the girlfriend and the wife behind. Respectful, all nature gave way, putting a pause on our chatter. They wandered the mown paths with champagne flutes in their hands. The girlfriend was clumsy. She teetered on her heels, the flute sloshing forth its sticky glaze to grateful bugs below. Later, the wife took charge of the heels, lent her sneakers. Later still, the girlfriend made up the wife’s face. Now the son didn’t recognize the mother.

It was the girlfriend who invited them to LA. 

XVI

After they left, I said to you one night over tea, “Take me to the shaman. I’m ready.”

Across the aromatic veils of steam you looked at me in disbelief.

“I’m going out there, but first I have to remember how…”

I sat there thinking about what I would need to do it, to be brave enough to do the thing I needed to do in order to be brave, when I suddenly remembered the Turina, La Oración del Torero. I’d only heard it that once, in the barn the day we met when I was barely older than our son’s girlfriend and you cast its spell on me. 

I don’t know where or how you found the shaman. 

He looked at it differently than the doctors and pill-pushers we had tried. In his ecstatic trance, he traveled to invisible realms, seeking communion with helping spirits. Community disharmony, he said, often manifested in individual illness. My spirit animal had left my side. I had a hole in my soul.

The shaman lit candles, burned incense. Smoke snaked the chapel. Outside, you paced. 

Beneath the shaman’s low incantations, I heard your steps, hopeful beats you synced with my heart. 

XVII

She sometimes heard him at night, slipping from their bed for the room across the hall, where he sounded his musical notes, muted for her sake. But one night she slipped out herself and went into the woods, seeking the animal spirit that had fled through the hole in her soul. A giant moth kept flying at her. Perhaps it was a moth, the shaman never said. But the hole was small, crafty. All the clunky moth could do was bump her face, powdering her cheek. 

Tiptoeing back up the stairs, she heard in the silence the clicking together of his fiddle case, top and bottom meeting in velvet embrace. She hurried into bed, and soon he came, on tiptoe himself, bringing his lullabies. He held her. Wiped her tears. Stroked her cheek.

Even then, she knew he was sick. Sickness coiled in his cells. Maybe it was him she cried for.

XVIII

Without rosin a string will not speak. 

When we first met, you taught me about all this. Most horse hair was harvested in the slaughterhouse, not from live horses. All of the beast was used, you said, the flesh for meat, the hooves for glue. The hair arrives at the luthier in hanks, cleaned and organized by length. Only the finest hair gets through. Imperfections are removed. The hank is dressed. For a player of your stature, only the best hair would do.

While you taught me that first time, you brushed my hair. It too was long, straight, without those kinks and curls that on a string produce false sounds. When you were done, you gathered it into a tail and enjoyed watching me swish it. I wore it that way from that day forward.

XIX

They shared a bed till he got sick and moved across the hall. Music seeped from his bones and settled among the coils of the twin mattress there.

He had hair that flamed red. She’d heard it said that redheads feel pain, suffering more keenly than others, but he never complained, seemed more concerned with her, how she was suffering, how she would in months to come. Countless trips up and down the stairs, caring for him, she swore she felt the flecks of rosin sticking to the soles of her bare feet.

The old persiflagers came. Led by the cellist, they gathered around the sickbed, shoulder to shoulder, till they sweated with the intention of it, a social fever generated to heal.

The husband refused her offer to contact their son. “He left us,” he said. “Doesn’t want this.” But she wrote the letter anyway. 

The next day she asked Jarvis to mail it for her. “It’s to my son,” she explained.

He might as well have said out loud, “that good-for-nothing.” He knew their boy had abandoned them. 

She told him her husband couldn’t know. That he had pride.

The letter sat in a dusty drawer not a mile down the road. 

XX

One night, not far from the end, you had me bring candles into your room. Twenty, thirty, you had me light them all. You had me sit so I could see out the window, to the old barn, to the patch of grass with the memory shadow, so much more substantial than anything Jarvis and I were or had done.

“Look out there,” you said. “What do you see?”

Betrayal. I didn’t say it out loud. 

We made it down the stairs and out into the field, which had just been cut. I’d hardly been out at all since you got very sick. Your chicken wing arm slung over my shoulder, we hobbled across the stubble. We got to the pine. I’d always called it this, even though I knew it was not one but two in embrace, as I’d heard myself explain to Jarvis years before. Under its feathered arms, I held you upright, laid your palm on the aromatic trunk. 

The great horned owls had recently stopped mating. Now a late pair struck up a call and response.

We looked at each other in recognition. 

“I’ll take you to the shaman,” I said.

 “I won’t live long enough.” Your face grew more serious. “My fiddle and bow. Sell them,” you said. “Get them out of the house. But not just for the money.”

From the fringes of the wood, something rustled. A twig snapped. 

Suddenly I was scared. Of losing you. Of the silence in the house, the loss of even your cancer moans, the low sotto voce lamentoso coming from your room, the only music you could, now, make.

You told me what to do with your fiddle and bow, how much each should fetch. Told me I’d need to go there myself, to the shop out east. Say goodbye, you said. Get the price you deserve. 

All this you said before you grew too tired to talk anymore. I lowered you down, scraped up a pile of needles for a pillow. 

XXI

A sweetness was gone when you died, leaving an outline of something, a hologram. It flitted about the rooms of our house, flitted past me or through walls. 

Did you love me? What was love to you? The golden symmetry of a Haydn quartet, the pagan brutality of Bartok, the serene rapture of Beethoven?

When you closed your fiddle case for the last time, I heard you.

Sometimes you dreamed that the horses were coming back for their tails. Without them, they could not swish away the biting bugs. Siberian bugs are legendary, you told me. You sometimes dreamed of them during the last of your sickness, nerve pain raging through your body like clouds of midges. In our old shared bed, I caught the dream, as if catching the tail of one of those ghost horses before it passed through a wall. 

A white horse, always white.

XXII

The giant bittersweet blocks the window, but she can tell what season lies beyond by the rattle or whisper of its leaves and berries. She’s frail. She sleeps a lot in her chair.

Another squelching season arrives. With it, rustlings in the hedgerow, slitherings and burrowings of life. Deposited in the fall on brittle stems that crackled in the winter wind, insect eggs hatch. In her sleep she hears the urgent waters racing down the slope. 

When she wakes, she finds him sitting in her husband’s old chair, flipping through her book on medicinal plants. She wonders if he’s real. Can ghosts send postcards from Hollywood? He tells her Jarvis said she needed him.

XXIII

Even for his now burly body, the old marital bed is too big for our son to manage, so he brings down your death bed instead. He moves my chair, sets your bed before the window. When I lower my cheek to it, I hear music wrapped around the coils.

“I found Father’s fiddle and bow in the closet,” he says.

You always wished he’d played. Not pretended with the toy violin you carved him out of the old ash that thundered to the ground one windy night.

“I should have come home. Seen him. What was he like—at the end?”

I don’t tell him of the lesions on your legs, nor how you wasted. I don’t tell him much. I spare him.

“Mom. Come out to LA,” he says. “The life there…”

I smile. Wonder about the girlfriend. 

We talk all night. First light fingered by darkness sends bittersweet prisms through the room. Tonight, the bittersweet watches out of its thousands of red eyes. Our griefs, top heavy, are no threat to it. Words like winds from different directions converge on it, softly rattling its jewels, inspiring it to conspiratorial whispers. 

I know you hear us.

The next day he climbs the vine like Jack in the beanstalk. Through the bittersweet stems I catch glimpses of a foot, a hand. The ladder gets lost in the tangle.

I watch sideways from my pillow as the vine goes down outside my window, passing the window panes piece by piece, each cushioned by the piece that goes before. I lift myself up to watch him while he leans in at the window of the room where you died. Your death, I know, he tastes in his mouth as he cuts, working that body he labored for in LA gyms.

The light enters my new bedroom. So blinding that it takes me moments to see. 

When he’s done, he comes in and sits beside me. He takes my hand.

“It’s a beautiful day in June,” he says. “The world remembers how to do this.”

When I look out, I see the trees. They seem to have crept closer to me.

“Take me to the shop. The one where your father bought his bow.”

From beneath his lashes, red dyed blond, he looks at me in the exact way you once did, when you first knew I needed a shaman.

“I don’t know where that is, Mom.” 

XXIV

The son takes her book into the field and woods to gather plants for her healing. She wonders what treasures he’ll find as he wanders. Gingko? Inula? Maybe even Hollywood, though only for some is that healing. When he returns, he boils the medicinals on the stove. The tonics do her good. 

One day, when he’s out foraging, she gets to her feet, takes her first steps. At the foot of the stairs, where she met her husband before every concert, the floorboards are buckled, uneven. Canyons have opened up between them over the years. When I’m stronger, she thinks, I’ll go down on my knees, scrape up all the rosin they might have caught.

We, the trees, have crept close enough to her now. 

The front door opens. We see her face in the crack. Between our trunks, she sees a white horse disappearing where soon she will follow.

Her hair is now as white as the hair with which your bow was strung. In readiness, she undoes it, the hank of it the only thing about her with any weight anymore. 

She hears music, the last notes of an unfamiliar piece. A dog barks. On her face, the merest tendril of a bittersweet smile.