460
ROBIN MAGOWAN
just her favorite rain and emptiness, a light gray-green fog enclosing
all the Berkeley hills so that only outline remained, the brick of a stair,
the burnt black wood of a shingle house, a pair of window panes all
fretted and saintly. Discomposite things, but then so is a church's rose
window. Only this window lay on the ground, fragments anyone might
come to, pick up, throwaway. That casual and erasible. Her aim was
the sorceress who would find value in what for everyone else had been
waste. She was fine, and her eyes that melted you also formed you, made
me whole again. She was blacksmith and privy, and when she locked
me in her heart it was not without making herself bereft, doomed. Like
a Spanish saint she was her own best wound.
One can see the strength she furnished in advice and example, and
the immense cost it bore her in the necessary self-immolation that each
gesture and generous thought entailed. Still she kept on, and here I
may have helped. With my six-gun and my writer's knives that I'd be
constantly licking, polishing, keeping my inward self serviceable, cat–
clean:
any day, any time, sir,
and the hand flashing out to seal the
bargain. In the process our lives began to take on a see-saw regularity
where the one up could lend a hand to the other.
At first, I was too stupid, or too overcome by admiration, to see
she needed my help. And she was too proud, and too much a woman,
to ask for it. So our troubles always came down to my not talking, just
as our best love-making followed on some heart-to-heart talk I felt
squeamish before. They seemed banal, adolescent pretention, I'd tell
myself. In reality, I was plumb afraid. For the only way she knew of
to make me talk seriously was by threatening to leave me. Finally, she
realized things weren't all that black-and-white.
If
I couldn't talk, it
might be that I didn't know how. So, she set out duly to teach me,
hauling out dictionaries to sprinkle the night air with words, telling me
stories that were her dreams and memories, or just things she had read.
One part of the instruction was to teach me to use my own
I
when
talking. I was afraid of this American pronoun. As I construed it, it
meant a dead self, since its "I" was a person I no longer was. Thus,
for any continuity it would be untrue, and this continuity - my life
all one spontaneous garden-flow - I wanted very much to assert. I did
not see that without it I had no way of confronting time, and who I
had been. The mere notion of such a quest was anathema. My bath–
room eyes wanted all the inhuman glint they could get, and confounded
that with the strength of the cloak Perseus puts on, before setting out
for the Medusas of an always more fetching modernity.
