Everything Carries Me to You

But she could not forget the charming prince, “he on whom my wishes depend, and in whose hands I should like to place the happiness of my life. I will venture all for him.”
The little mermaid’s heart beat with fear, but she thought of the prince
and her courage returned.

“I know what you want,” said the sea witch; “it is very stupid of you, but you shall have your way, and it will bring you to sorrow, my pretty princess.You will feel great pain, as if a sword were passing through you. You will still have the same floating gracefulness of movement, and no dancer will ever tread so lightly; but every step you take on your human feet
will feel as if you were treading upon one thousand of the sharpest knives,
and from every step the blood must flow.

Well now; have you lost your courage?”

~Hans Christian Andersen, The Little Mermaid

*

1990

[Below. The falls. Night.]

And at last she has reached the falls.

She does not even remember the last hundred— or was it a thousand?— yards of her journey to this place.

It doesn’t matter, now. She makes her way, heart-in-throat, straight to the spot;

It’s still here.

Of course it is. Right where we— she corrects herself— where I left it, she thinks, then quickly stops herself before the memories can threaten and instead fastens her gaze on the little cleft in the rock just a few precarious feet down the cliff’s more gently sloping eastern edge. It’s a tidal pool of sorts; a narrow ledge above it forms a natural seat just big enough for two.

For two.

No. Lisa gives herself a little shake. She is not here to reminisce but to seek relief from a different lingering ache: the one in her foot, which hurts all the time now as she counts the days, the hours now really, between sessions of cortisone shots, nerve blockers, white wine, prescription painkillers, biofeedback, acupuncture… everything but voodoo; would Narcissa make a house call with her herbs and incantations? What about an exorcism?

For in truth the pain has taken on the dimensions of a demon entity, so watchfully and untiringly does it haunt her every step.

Adrenaline, fury, and sheer force of will had allowed her to dance a few more years after the final surgery; now, it is only her discipline, pride, and implacable physical control that allow her to move with her old liquid grace while in the public eye as she always has, hiding the pain as she always has— I learned early to hide it, all of it, as required of me didn’t I Father?— but now the price must be paid, as it always must, as it always has been; I will be paying til I die and it will never be enough.

Stop. Focus. She is not here for forgiveness; not to offer it, and not to plead for any.

Settling herself with care on the rim of the shallow pool, she gingerly removes the furry boot from the injured foot, gritting her teeth against the stabbing pain. She peels off the long woolen stocking that reaches halfway up her thigh, and retrieving a small curved blade from the leather pouch at her waist, quickly cuts away the tape she must use daily now to stabilize the ankle so it does not give out, causing her to fall. She has become deft with the little blade, so accustomed to this ritual by now that she is able to free herself quickly without slicing her skin, unlike the early days when she’d once left an unfortunate trail of bloody footprints that nearly gave her away. Now, though, she wields the knife without a thought and leaves no hint of her passage.

Returning the knife to its pouch she runs her fingers over the roll of tape to reassure herself it’s still there; without it the journey back to her chamber would be an unthinkable ordeal; the prima ballerina honorific is not employed as a compliment down here and I’ll be damned if I wouldn’t crawl the entire distance back over broken bottles and rusty nails rather than tap out a humiliating request for assistance they’d never let me live down.

The image of herself on hands and knees resonates more than it should. In fact it was a mistake to come back, a terrible mistake, especially now. Her timing seems to have abandoned her when she needs it most, but now, thankfully, as the past hisses at her in the roar of the falls and reaches for her in the mist of droplets that glitter all around her, once again the pain in her foot proves her salvation, something to hang onto, traction that will keep her here, in the present. Grounded. Focus. Breathe.

Bracing herself against the surrounding rock with her other foot, she lowers the ruined one into the icy pool that is just wide enough and just deep enough as if designed by the Creator with an injured dancer in mind, and begins her mental countdown until the vicious throbbing will give way to blessed numbness. Good. Bring the heart rate down too. In her mind’s eye she visualizes the cold seeping into metatarsals filigreed with the overlapping fractures that have been the price of her art.

Her old childhood habit of gathering up her heavy wool skirt under her left arm so it won’t get wet comes naturally even after so long away, as does her reflex to tuck the thick fabric under herself to provide some cushion; the rock seems harder and her bones less forgiving than last time she was here, so long ago, soaking bruised feet and toes not yet deformed by years en pointe, dreaming aloud with him of the career he was so certain awaited her and of the life they would somehow, together, carve out of a cruel reality as hard and unyielding as this rock—

No. Don’t go there. Don’t. Just keep breathing into the pain, she tells herself, but now a sudden movement off to her right catches her eye; it seems someone else has sought out this place where the rush of ancient waters offers both memory and forgetting.

The interloper is a woman— no, a girl; and so intent is she, so inwardly focused, she does not notice Lisa some yards away, in these clothes I probably blend right into the cliff as if I were carved from it, thinks Lisa. She doesn’t recognize the girl; hasn’t yet encountered her in the short time since her own unheralded arrival back in the tunnels;

for in fact Lisa has done her best to remain invisible as she quietly navigates the margins of a community now hushed, sleepwalking, nearly unrecognizable with grief, a collective grief that binds them all the more tightly to one another but in which she is not included, which only reconfirms her status as the eternal outsider looking in. She had intended to go out of her way to avoid Vincent, to give him all due space and privacy at such a time but it has turned out to be unnecessary; though his presence amongst them dominates and defines the community every bit as much as it ever did, he himself has become nearly a ghost, as if the still-fresh earth over the grave of his murdered lover has reached up and swallowed him too.

Or did he jump? she wonders. To join her.

Catherine. His lover.

Lover. Her eyes still on the waif just yards from her, Lisa turns the word over in her mind, skimming, for now, over the implications, directing her attention instead to remembering the doomed young attorney as she had appeared to Lisa the last time they crossed paths. Curiously unmarred by the frightening scars still visible high on one cheek, Catherine’s sultry beauty and privileged poise somehow only amplified her vulnerability, her air of restlessness and deep searching unhappiness that have remained Lisa’s strongest impression of her: another beautiful, wounded child-woman in this constellation of the wounded in which Vincent must daily re-imagine his life, wresting it from a pitiless world the way a sculptor must envision and then liberate the very embodiment of power and movement from a giant block of stone.

Lisa tries to visualize where he could be right now, at this moment, though she knows he will not— he cannot— accept comfort from her or from anyone. She knows his grief will have drawn him down to the bowels of this world, down to places even Narcissa avoids, down to depths the Devil himself dares not attempt.

For that is where Vincent is right now: in Hell.

Because like everyone in Vincent’s orbit Catherine had not only witnessed but personally suffered the very worst that human beings do to one another; like too many, she had not survived it. Had her spirit found, in death, a peace Vincent certainly will never find again without her, not as long as he draws breath?
Catherine. Lisa closes her eyes. Vincent is looking for you. Are you looking for him?

She opens her eyes again. The pale young woman has stopped moving now, leaning motionless against the rock face, and Lisa’s thoughts return to the doomed Catherine. Deep in the earth she lies, as do we all in some fashion down here, the living and the dead entombed together in uneasy proximity; she has crossed that invisible divide before her time, this modern-day princess, never to return to her castle high in the air above us.

But who is to say that Death has left her silent? Who is to say Catherine cannot speak— is not speaking, still— to Vincent, through this rock, through these waters, as her body has returned to the elements from which it came? He is a creature gone to earth himself now, thinks Lisa, deep into the source of his elemental powers; perhaps the better to hear her calling to him, should Death grant her one last wish. Is she calling out to him?

I would try, in her place.

Lisa catches herself; this is the witch in her talking, the feral daughter of the Old Ones; the siren succubus whom Father so feared that he cast her out— disowned her— at the first opportunity. Careful. Remember where you are. You do not enjoy Narcissa’s protected status here. Down here time has stopped, at least where she and the mythology around her departure from the tunnels are concerned; down here she will always be the heartless, faithless, soulless one, the ungrateful foundling, the gifted but vapid narcissist who seduced and destroyed Vincent and crushed the boyish spirit out of him forever; and who had fled from the consequences and never looked back.

Of all the roles she has played in her life and in her career this is the one that has come to define her, both to herself and to the members of the tunnel community; this is the one that matters most: a cruelly unjust role not of her own choosing and from which there is no escape; she will never be allowed to emerge, like a butterfly from a chrysalis, to start fresh and new in the way of all artists breathing life into the eternal stories of what it is to be human. In tunnel legend she will be, always and only, the villainess— the monster— who had left the tunnel community’s golden young lion-prince, their champion and hero, broken and scarred almost beyond his capacity to love again, and the woman who had, as a girl barely into her teens, very nearly cost him his life.

This, she knows, is her legacy; and her thoughts would likely have followed an even darker path had movement not drawn her attention yet again to the girl who still had not noticed her, and was now tentatively finding her way forward again.
Grateful for the distraction, Lisa studies the girl more carefully. In this time of such darkness in the tunnels Lisa is sure she would have remembered so luminous a creature, pale as a portrait in a locket— and for a moment she forgets the pain, in her foot at least, as she watches the girl; specifically the elfin, otherworldly grace with which she carries herself. As she studies the girl, the shimmering spray from the falls overlays everything around them both in trembling rainbows, and Lisa is momentarily enchanted by a sudden sense of having been transported from her own all-too-real life into a living fairytale and she holds her breath so as not to break the spell.
Delicately, supporting herself hand over hand along the cliff wall almost as if blind, the young woman finds her way forward, unaware of Lisa’s watchful attention. From her perch Lisa sees the girl come perilously close to the cliff’s edge, and then without warning press her mouth hard into the inner crook of her elbow and double over sobbing, great body-wracking but soundless sobs.

Even above the roar of the falls Lisa is certain of it: this grief is absolutely silent. Because it must be.

From long practice, she realizes. She recognizes it, recognizes herself in the girl, when she was only a little younger than the girl is now. No one must see, no one must hear. I remember very well. The secret. The shame.

Then, before she’s even aware she’s forming the words aloud to someone else as she once whispered them to herself, Lisa hears her own voice calling out.

“Don’t jump.”

Her urgency slices through the noise and the distance between them and, startled, the girl rears back, stumbling then quickly righting herself. She has the reflexes of a dancer, thinks Lisa, but not the confidence.

“I’m sorry I frightened you.” Lisa keeps her voice calm, low, soft. The girl is even younger than she’d thought, not yet out of her teens.

“I would never,” answers the girl softly “Not now. I… I have a daughter,” she continues before Lisa can collect herself enough to say anything reassuring. She wipes her eyes and nose on the worn bottom edge of her quilted patchwork vest. “She’s everything. It’s her I’m living for now.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” says Lisa. She holds out her hand in invitation. “Come sit; keep me company.”

The girl’s eyes widen with surprise, and, Lisa realizes, gratitude. She pats the spot beside her; the young woman doesn’t need to be asked twice, and, gracefully closing the short distance between them, nimbly arranges herself on the ledge next to Lisa. Through her tears her eyes are startlingly blue, her gaze warm and direct. “I’m Lena,” she says. “Not really at my best right now I guess.”

“Neither am I,” says Lisa. “But I’m glad to have the company. I’m Lisa.”
Lena nods shyly and they sit in companionable silence for a moment, interrupted only by the teen’s sniffles; then both speak at once.

“You first,” says Lisa.

“I was going to say you must be a ballet dancer,” says the girl. She pronounces it “bally;” Lisa can’t quite place the accent.

She laughs. “Oh dear, what have you heard?”

“Nothing.” Lena points at Lisa’s half-frozen foot, its misshapen toes and disfiguring scars laid bare in the clear water. “That’s got to hurt a lot.”

“You don’t scare easy do you?” Lisa is impressed. “Most people can’t stand to look at a dancer’s feet.”

Lena is genuinely puzzled. “You use ‘em hard, how else are they going to look?”

Well, exactly, thinks Lisa. There’s more to this one than meets the eye. She decides to take the risk. “Why were you crying?”

The lighthearted mood instantly evaporates as the girl clutches at her vest; her unconscious gesture of closing its edges more tightly over the thick turtleneck sweater beneath it breaks Lisa’s heart. Shame. So young and already so filled with it. Oh Vincent what did you do?

She holds out her arms to gather up the miserable girl and rocks her gently. “Men can really mess with your head. And it’s so much harder when they’re kind, isn’t it?”

The girl’s shaking shoulders tell Lisa all she needs to know. She reaches down to smooth back some wayward strands of cornsilk that have fallen across Lena’s cheek. “It’s almost easier when they’re mean, somehow, isn’t it?” she says. “It helps you get over them.” And now he’s like a wounded animal and all you want is to touch him; all you want is to touch him, distract him, heal him, fill him up with love, curl around him like a vine around an oak and climb until you find the sun and bring it back and give it to him and then maybe he will love you.

I know. I remember.
Lena pulls away and shakes her head, tears trembling just at the edge of her lashes. “It’s not his fault. He didn’t do anything.”

“I know,” says Lisa gently. “It’s what he didn’t do, isn’t it.” And what he’ll never be able to do, because he was in love with someone else, someone who never loved him back, not the way he loved her, and he couldn’t bear to let himself see it and now she’s gone, and because guilt is his default mode he will carry that torch until it kills him and all you can do is watch until you can’t, anymore.

“He’s hurting so bad and there’s nothing I can do, I can’t even…” Lena sobs. “I feel like I can’t even go near him to say I’m sorry, to say I know he’s hurting and I wish I could help. I ruined everything.”

“How?”

“Because I– I threw myself at him.” Lena stops, exhausted.

Ah. There it is. “When was this?” asks Lisa.
“Right after the baby came last year. I didn’t know! I swear I didn’t. I thought… I thought Catherine was just his… friend.”

Lisa murmurs sympathetically, squeezing the weeping girl’s shoulders.

“I just. I never wanted anybody before” whispers Lena, then, her voice ragged, raw: “I feel… dirty. Like I never even felt, not even on the street. Because, when Vincent looks at me he will only ever see a whore.”

“Listen to me,” says Lisa urgently. “You know him. You have to know he is the last man in this entire world who could ever think that of you.”

“How can you know that?” Lena weeps, unaware that her own anguish is raking across wounds in the stoic woman beside her, wounds deeper and more crippling than the ones that ended a storied career and landed her here, back where it all started, back at the scene of the crime. “I… went to his chamber. At night… to his, bed. He didn’t, he wasn’t…” Her shame silences her again.
“He just didn’t know what to say or how to say it,” says Lisa, reaching for the girl’s shaking hands. “Because he’s…. a man. Men, most of the time, they just….”

…have their heads up their asses, is what she wants to say, at least when it comes to these moments life throws at them when some delicacy, some simple tact would have been all that was needed, that would have saved a young woman years of shame and self-recrimination… and all the while remaining— even Vincent, Lisa knows too well— utterly oblivious to it and to their part in it. In this way, at least, Vincent is, sadly, very much like any other man.
She starts again.

“Lena. You offered yourself to him,” she says. “Out of love. Out of…. a desire to give him something beautiful and real. Something true. You gave him yourself. That is love. There is no shame in that. Never ever be ashamed of love… of desire.”

Lena shakes her head in mute misery.

“Lena.” Lisa reaches to tilt the girl’s face back toward her own. “I don’t know what’s going to happen now with him. It’s going to be bad, likely very bad, for a long time. He’s in trouble and he will need a lot of time to… find his way. But I can tell you without a doubt that what you saw in his face last year was… likely a mixture, of things, of many feelings. It’s… it’s complicated. I mean it is for everyone, but especially for him. For starters you’re his ward; you, and your child, are under his protection, his care. But I do know, more than I know anything in this world, that he would never want you to feel shame. He… understands things. People. Love… desire.”

“But how can you know he’ll forgive me?”

“Because I know Vincent,” says Lisa, speaking his name aloud for the first time in— years?— and horrified to hear— to feel— the slight but unmistakable catch in her voice as she says it. His name. She feels something begin to give way inside her, something old and tightly coiled and unspeakable; and now her locked-down emotion, her secret, is out, and there it hangs in the space between herself and Lena, impossible to reel back in.

Oh my God

says Lena as Lisa sees the realization dawn in the girl’s expression.

you—

Deny it! But it’s too late.

you loved him,

says Lena, eyes widening as the full import hits her.

No.

With effort Lisa speaks calmly but forcefully over the screaming in her head. No. What is happening? No, say no, say no—

Lena is staring at her, and there’s nothing Lisa can do to stop the girl from connecting the dots and saying

…you still do.

Lisa averts her face just in time, just before the last word is out of the girl’s mouth, reaching desperately for the safe place in her mind, even as her body stiffens, as if the three little words have dealt a physical blow.

Lena’s intense scrutiny is excruciating but Lisa collects herself to meet the girl’s eyes with absolute calm in her own.
Lena is suddenly very focused, not sure how to ask. “How do you…”
“How do I hold my head up around here? How do I keep my pride, my dignity, my secret, until just now anyway?”

“Yeah,” says Lena. “Teach me.”

“It sounds easier than it is,” answers Lisa. “I ‘act as if.’”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means you see in your mind how you wish to be; you suss it all out in every detail until you see it all very clearly, and then you proceed to act that way, ‘as if’ that is how things are, already. And you keep acting that way until one day you don’t have to act anymore. Because now that is how things are; they have come about. And until that moment happens, you ‘act as if.’”
Lena looks thoughtful.

“All those things can be learned,” continues Lisa, pulling her foot out of the water and drying it carefully on a section of her skirt. Soon sensation will return and with it the grinding pain, and she begins to speak more quickly. “All of it is play acting, do you see? Children do it naturally. All of it is a game. Think of it as a game. And the rules of the game are this simple, really: most people are more than happy to keep everything on the surface and believe that what they see at first glance is all there is of you. So…. it is up to you to decide what you want that first glance to say. After that they leave you alone.”

“I used to want to be alone. It was all I wanted.” Lena looks surprised at herself. “But now I have Katie, she is everything, more than I ever dreamed I could have, and I feel like, I feel like, it would be selfish to want…”

Lena stops and looks off toward the falls again, hugging herself for warmth.

“To want love,” finishes Lisa, then, “and intimacy… sex.”

Lena doesn’t look at her but Lisa can feel the girl listening intently.

“And not just love,” she adds. “And not just sex. A rip-roaring, passionate, body-and-soul sexual love that consumes and defines you, even as it sets you free.”

Lena makes a little sound that could be mistaken for a laugh but when she turns her face back to the older woman her eyes brim with tears. “I can’t even…”

“You can’t even imagine it.”

Looking down in misery Lena shakes her head and starts to wipe her eyes on her sleeve, but then her movements slow until she’s staring in wonder, in near-trance, at a spot along the cliff’s edge. “It was right there,” she murmurs.
“What was?” asks Lisa, fascinated by the change.

“Right over there the first time I ever saw him. It was just before the baby came. I looked at him. Oh how I looked at him. And he was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life.”

Lisa waits, and as she watches the shame and despair in the girl’s face slowly transform into something else, something full of light, something like joy.

“…you can imagine it,” says Lisa.

The tape is in her hand, the tape she must use to bind her ankle– quickly, while it’s still numb– but she is entranced by the transformation taking place in the girl beside her and cannot move, and when Lena raises her head Lisa sees it there in the girl’s eyes, a mirror of the vision she herself has carried in secret for so long, alone; but how piercing, how painful, how miraculous and beautiful to see that vision fully-formed and so palpably real, reborn in someone else when Lisa has only ever seen and felt it in herself, that heat, that yearning that breathes rich transfiguring color and urgency into every moment of every day even now, after so long, as if no time has passed at all, as if it were not hopeless, as if dreams could still come true. It’s all there, all of it, brand new in Lena’s young face.
Time stops, for just a moment, as Lisa is caught, for that moment, in the sweet radiant light in her companion’s eyes— the radiance of youth, of a faith that still believes in fairy tales with happy endings, and that love will win in the end— a holy light that promises everything is possible, for a moment.

“You can imagine such a love,” says Lisa again.

“Yes,” says Lena. “I can now.”

 

*  *  *

1971
[Below. Vincent’s and Devin’s Chamber. Night.]

What does survival look like now?

Without Vincent, she cannot picture it;

because Vincent is home to her, the only home she will ever have, and one to which Father has made sure, after tonight, she will hold out no hope of return.
When he discovers that she has been with Vincent in this way, every last door will be shut against her; this is something Father will not forgive. She knows now that she cannot save herself but she can leave herself, the truest part of herself, here, tonight, with Vincent, preserved, safe forever, for he is everything tender, everything good;

everything she’s always known was meant for others, not for her, and everything that happens tonight must last her for the rest of her life.

~Magellan’s Wife, Exile, pt. 2: Love and Fate (Lisa 1971)

*

everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

~Pablo Neruda, If You Forget Me

*

The little mermaid could not help thinking of her first rising out of the sea,
when she had seen similar festivities and joys; and she joined in the dance, poised herself in the air as a swallow when he pursues his prey, and all present cheered her with wonder. She had never danced so elegantly before. Her tender feet bled with every step,
and felt as if cut with a thousand daggers, but she cared not for it;
a sharper pang had pierced through her heart.
She knew this was the last evening she should ever see the prince, for whom she had forsaken her kindred and her home; she had given up her beautiful voice, and suffered unheard-of pain daily for him, while he knew nothing of it. This was the last evening that she would breathe the same air with him, or gaze on the starry sky and the deep sea at his side; for an eternal night, without a thought or a dream, awaited her…

~Hans Christian Anderson, The Little Mermaid