Love in Infant Monkeys - Lydia Millet (cool books to read txt) 📗

Tesla and how much she had loved him. She ironed and she remembered: dear Tesla with his gentle voice. She recalled his predictions and smiled to think of them, a world where such predictions came true.

By now the shirt looked perfect. Tesla, it seemed to her, believed in the goodness of everyone. Still, they took all he had from him. They took things only he could give and ran away with them.

And then there was Marco.

She kept on ironing and smiling. At last a flatter shirt had never been.

Marco’s music was floating in from the radio in the bedroom—Tommy Dorsey, she said. Marco was shaving at the bathroom sink; they used straight razors then. She hung the shirt on a padded hanger and tapped some rat poison into his drink. Then she took the drink into the bathroom to him.

Nothing was ever, ever so easy, she told me. As easy as falling.

She looked so calm she reminded me of the small picture of the Virgin glued into her locker, except with a harelip. She’d thought he would die right there, she said, and she would have to watch it, but the poison took longer than she expected. She thought it would be instant but he was out the door not two minutes after she gave it to him, his hair slick with pomade, taking all the money from her paycheck. They told her later that he fell down in a crowded subway car, at the feet of two older ladies from Brooklyn, where he jerked and wriggled until the car was stopped at a station and they loaded him onto a stretcher. When the police came to her door it was only to give her the bad news, she said, but she nodded and went with them right away. She put on her coat, picked up her handbag and walked right over to the morgue and then back to the precinct building.

“Why did you tell?” I asked. “You might have gotten away with it.”

I was sad it had come to this. Not for Marco—the one time I’d met him I’d known he was a vicious kind of person who more or less deserved for bad things to happen to him—but for her. I wished she could have just divorced him, a thing that went against her beliefs even more than murder. Because she wouldn’t get out of Sing Sing anytime soon, I was thinking. She would be an old woman by then.

“It didn’t matter,” she said. “I already saw the dove.”

I was looking at the groove in her upper lip and thinking how she was a better worker than I was. She worked without stopping and she always did exactly what they told her. If someone told her to wash the same wall six times, she would do it. Myself I would often stop cleaning and stare into the air, pretend I was floating in a cool lake or flying.

“The white dove?” I asked her. I figured she had pretty much gone crazy.

She said yes.

“I thought the white dove was dead,” I said in what I hoped was a gentle way.

“She was,” said Pia.

“Oh,” I said, and nodded.

“We were there on the steps,” she said, “with all of those birds. And in between them was the space where she wasn’t. Mr. Tesla showed me. ‘This was where she was once,’ he said. The third step from the top, I think. We just stood there and threw down the seeds. But I looked at the space. That was when I saw it.”

She grabbed my hands and pressed them. She was shaking, she was that agitated, and her hands were warm and damp.

“When Jesus died for our sins,” she whispered, “he turned into the universe.” She was hurrying to get the words out, as if she feared someone might come in and stop her from speaking. It all came out in a rush.

A minute later the guard came over and made us separate our hands. No touching was allowed. But by then I was almost relieved.

I never found out what happened to her in the end. I know she got an infection from some kind of internal injury; there had been rioting in the prison before she got there and it was still pretty rough. They beat her up worse than Marco had. She wrote and told me she was sick, and I sent a letter to her but it came back to me. By then I wasn’t cleaning anymore. I had saved my money for secretarial school and worked as a waitress in the evenings. I slept the rest of my hours away and had no time for friends, absent or otherwise. I thought of the house I would live in one day, with its flower garden and light shining forth from small golden windows.

The prison said she had been transferred, but the second prison had lost track of her too, as though she had never been there.

For me she did not disappear. I had her words and I could never shake them; I had her love for Tesla and his love for the bird.

My own love, it has seemed to me, has only ever been a love of feathers. However hard it tries, it never gets beneath.

She told me Jesus was the world. The sun was God’s eye, she said, the oceans were the water of his body, the rivers were the veins carrying his blood. Did I know that? The grasses of the field were his hair and the trees were his lungs, the doves and the birds and the animals were wishes of his heart. Each one a piece of his longing. The blood had run out of Jesus’s wounds, she said, and never stopped running. It ran into the oceans, over which the sun set.

All of this was Jesus and was God.

So did I see what that meant? Dead and alive were the same thing, she said. Dead and alive, they were exactly the