[55] Not all our strange mother lost

That summer, Paul and I pull a bubble over ourselves, so that we can see out if we have to, but I don’t want to. We have a magnetic field in place, I can feel it by holding his hand, my life heightened by his touch. I don’t go back to Emilie’s for the rest of the summer, and Paul stops painting scenery for Roller. He’s broke, and I’ve never had my own money. Grandfather would help me out, and Emilie would take me back, the same way that Paul can go back to the opera shop, and one of Gus’s friends would buy one of his drawings. We aren’t doing those things. For the first few weeks we stay in the same hut as that night. Sundays we come down to the city – grandfather by then needs to know how I am, and Paul goes to mass while I visit – but otherwise, we’re the first few weeks alone, shedding skins.

Mommy will be sending out Emil to find me, so we never go where he can be predicted to look or see people he might see. We stay in the hills. A Ninth Quarter girl like me, the forest has always been a place to spend an hour on Sunday afternoon, or travel through by train. It’s a place you read about and hear about but don’t belong. Until that summer – what are those sounds? How can trees sound like anything? That crash, what is it? I get used to it – they are only the sounds of the earth, and safe because Paul can always tell me what they were. (‘You thought you heard a noise, little one?’) Until my first few nights in it, I’d never thought of nature as a language we can hear.

The countryside isn’t something Paul loves, it’s just something he knows. He isn’t the forest. I realize now: he has a knack for grasping things that aren’t him, that are outside him, by remembering the difference between him and not-him. But he doesn’t know it’s a knack; I’m the one who knows, because I don’t have it, I can only see his.

He forages for potatoes, carrots. He sells graphite portraits to English tourists in the wine gardens, with me eye-batting them into his sights, and that’s our day’s coin, but mostly he fills sheets, both sides, with one drawing, another. Tiny ones, to save paper. He wakes up drawing and goes while the light works. He draws me over and over again.

We expect to stay up there until the cold drives us down. Most days start with me rolling off him to see what’s in my pockets for breakfast. I always keep a coin back for two salt rolls from the baker’s. There’s always a village baker somewhere within a walk. (I’m already holding the money.) He knows places in the hills west of the city where no one can ever find us. We wash in a stream, clean our teeth with a finger. I open my dress and we take each other behind a wall, or deep in a valley, far from any path – it’s a deep forest out there, and him the one not lost in it. He lets me see his solitude – the only time he ever will, because he isn’t a solitary man. Wrong – he is, self-contained, but it’s in a crowd that he remembers best who he is and in a crowd that he’s best at showing it. Then afterwards he takes out his drawing paper and fixes me on it. He can draw a cartoon in a few seconds, a house or a face in a few more. Those graphite portraits he sells back then, twenty minutes. But the real thing, no, he doesn’t dash off. You need to see his face when he’s really working – it shuts out the world except for the part he’s staring at. ‘Lost in thought’ doesn’t say enough: he isn’t lost, and he isn’t thinking. He’s wrapped himself in whatever he’s stopped with his stare. He becomes the line between his hand and the object. All the time he works on a drawing, I’m studying him as closely as he does me. It makes me insanely horny, watching him looking straight into me like that, from this sense that he has left me for his own resources and that I need to bring him back, but how? He takes himself while he works to places where only controlled intuition can guide him. At first I pose whichever way he tells, my hands anywhere, my limbs twisted and face contorted. I don’t understand why until he shows me the result, and I’d think not that’s me but that’s it. Always something new to me that he has only channelled through me. I’m a block of marble for him to carve with his mind’s hand. After a while I start to know what he’s going to want and he lets me choose. Animals live together without talking, and now I know how. He could be a God, he could be a monster, I don’t care. He can be anything he is, and I let him do what he likes. I want whatever he really is, without knowing entire yet who that will be.

Remember, you must, this about Paul – he was a horrible mistake, in the beginning. It’s that I was ready to make one. I’m no good at explaining myself, no one had ever taught me how, I’d only been told I was expected to. I tell myself now that I’m lucky I don’t know how. Otherwise, I’d spend half my life explaining myself like the rest of you, when it’s possible to live without bothering to. This would never have happened in the city, in the winter, or at any other moment. It would never have happened in any way but the way it did. He was the vision of the sum of the choices I’d never been allowed to make, that I didn’t know I had the authority to make. You must have wanted that for yourself – to know what would be left of you if your old life, by miracle, disappeared. Most people don’t have the nerve or the chance to find out. I would never be the same again, but also knew I didn’t want to be. Love had nothing to do with it, not yet. I didn’t have the courage to run from anything, but I had Paul’s. The world was cruel, but at least Paul stood still in it. He was this pool of stillness where I could see my reflection. If you wonder how I fell in love with him, it started with him just standing there, and then it was about learning to stand beside him. Just that – to stand beside him. He didn’t invite me, but I tried it once, and nothing terrible happened, and then I felt him edge a little closer, and that’s all it took – we leaned together. We had both of us always been alien beings, but suddenly – no, slowly – we weren’t that to each other.