Life #6. Diana Wagman

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СКАЧАТЬ quite complex.” Doug paused before each word. “It seems like… telepathy, but birds communicate on a… high level…not always visible to us.” The more he spoke, the less he stuttered. “Tiny movements of feathers and wings. They can even transmit and receive information simultaneously.”

      “Like when you’re talking to one person, but actually listening to another conversation?”

      He nodded. “Better th…than we can.”

      “I’ll never call anyone a bird brain again—unless he’s a genius.” Fiona broke up another pretzel and threw the pieces into the air. A breeze blew the pieces back toward her and she squealed and ducked as the gulls came at her. Laughing, she turned to Doug and he put his bare hand on her shoulder.

      “Where is… your boyfriend?”

      She didn’t want to say she didn’t know. She stepped out from under his hand, shrugged, leaned over the railing to look at the rainbow stain of oil floating on the water.

      Nathan threw his cigarette into the water. “I sent him on an errand. A long time ago.”

      “Where? To do what?” she asked. “Did he take the car?”

      Doug took a pretzel rod from the bag. He held it in the air. “Shhhh,” he said to both of them. “Watch.” He waved the pretzel a little. A gull investigated and hovered, checking him out, turning its head this way and that. He whispered, “It will be a sign. If it takes the pretzel out of my hand, then we will have a wonderful trip.”

      “Scientists don’t look for signs,” Nathan said.

      The bird swooped down, plucked the pretzel from between Doug’s fingers, and careened away.

      “Oh!” Fiona said. “Wow.”

      “Yes.” Doug appeared to swell, his face grew even broader, and at the same time he exhaled and relaxed. His eyes were shining and she couldn’t help but smile back at his smile. “Yes,” he said again. “This is going to be a very good voyage.”

      The gull soared, the pretzel in its beak longer than its body. Fiona cheered.

      Nathan looked at her. “Put all this stuff away.” He gestured to the bags and boxes. “Stop feeding the rats. Then we’ll go find your boyfriend.”

2.

      Approximately two thousand five hundred years ago, Hippocrates wrote that an excess of black bile in the body was what caused cancer. He called it karkinos, the Greek word for crab, because the tumors—when they eventually erupted through the skin oozing black fluid—appeared to have many claws. His recommendation was to leave a tumor alone; in his time, surgery killed more than it saved. Cut it out, he said, and it would just reappear somewhere else. He wrote almost nothing about cancer of the breast. His only mention of it is a woman in the town of Abdera having a bloody discharge from one nipple. Did they not have as much breast cancer in ancient Greece? Is it a modern illness brought on by environment, toxics, a stressful lifestyle? As a child, I rode my bicycle behind the DDT trucks that drove through my neighborhood spraying for mosquitoes. I called it flying in the clouds. Now the same company that manufactured that DDT makes the drugs used in chemotherapy. I couldn’t help wondering why me, but was there a why? Why me? Why not. I had already lived longer than many people. My child was well on his way to being an adult. My husband and I loved each other and had settled into a comfortable companionship and okay, maybe now it was rocky, the waters turbulent, but if I died tomorrow he would remember mostly good.

      I could have sat in front of Venus forever. I didn’t want to move, go home, think about what I would do next. I would have happily become a statue: the Los Angeles Fiona, American, circa A.D. 2009, a decent example of postmodern middle-aged life, the spread in the hips and thighs, the rounded perimenopausal belly, unfortunately one breast destroyed, but arms, legs, nose intact. My skin was white enough to be marble, if not as smooth anymore, my pale blonde hair pulled back in a sculpted, sleek bun. If I could just stay on this bench forever. But I would be fifty soon. Too late for anyone to put me on a pedestal.

      My high school tour group came noisily into the gallery and I stood up and smiled at them. Twenty or so tenth graders, mostly Latino, looking both bored and happy to be out of the classroom. Their teacher stood in the back, white, rumpled, tired, his brown necktie askew over his beige short-sleeved shirt.

      “Hi,” I said. “I’m Fiona. Welcome to the Getty Villa.” Greek, Etruscan, and Roman art had been my concentration as an art history major in college. This was the perfect job for me, spending three days a week talking about something I loved. And I liked the kids, younger than my son, from public schools all over the city, most of whom had never seen a real marble statue before. I could share the myths, the stories these artworks told, explain how they were the movies and Nintendo of their time.

      Two boys in the back whispered to each other in Spanish. They snickered about naked Venus behind me. A girl beside them in tight jeans and a tighter purple top looked over and pretended to be annoyed, but I saw the start of a smile on her glazed lips, the twinkle in her thickly made-up eye. She shushed the boys and then giggled. Would she have cancer one day? Would those fresh fifteen-year-old breasts in her pink push-up bra betray her? I looked at Venus and again envied being made of stone.

      The teacher cleared his throat.

      “Right,” I said, coming back to the waiting group. “Okay. Let’s begin. Who is depicted in this statue behind me? Why does she have a dolphin beside her? Why is she naked? Can anybody tell me?”

      I walked backwards, I said the words, I even got a few laughs from those who were paying attention, but for the entire tour, my hand kept straying to my left breast or my hair, wondering if I would lose one or the other or both. I’d had a biopsy and the tiny suture stung when I touched it. Which I couldn’t stop doing. It was not my best tour. At the end, the students sat down to fill out a questionnaire and I apologized to their teacher.

      “What?” His eyes were as empty as a statue’s. “They’re a pain in my ass.” He thought I was talking about their behavior, not mine.

      “They were pretty good. That boy in the front is smart.”

      “One out of seventy-five ain’t bad.”

      I tried to chuckle sympathetically.

      I had two more tours and did my best to push my diagnosis out of my mind and concentrate on the art. It wasn’t easy. The rain refused to begin and the clouds were pregnant and overdue. I felt the earth’s expectancy, the ponderous hesitation before the water broke. I was antsy and so were the students. We all kept looking up to the sky, our limbs trembling like the skinny branches on the olive trees, anticipating the deluge.

      On my way to the staff parking lot, I stopped to look at the Lansdowne Herakles, Roman, circa A.D. 125, more than six feet tall, with a lion skin in one hand and his club over his shoulder, the marble so sumptuously carved it looked alive. He was a perfect six-packed specimen I’d seen a thousand times, but in the unusual gloom he was different. The shadows made his head seem to turn more sharply toward me. His curls glittered as if moving in the waning light. His Cupid’s bow lips looked on the verge of speaking. The curve of his bicep, the strength of his thigh. I held my breath. He was Luc in marble. Of course he had always been there. I knew in every statue, in every relief and fresco, I could see my lost Greek boy, my vanished Luc—if I allowed it, which I didn’t. That day I was caught by surprise, by the impending rain, the gray light, СКАЧАТЬ