Ideas of Heaven Read online

  IDEAS of HEAVEN

  ALSO BY JOAN SILBER

  Lucky Us

  In My Other Life

  In the City

  Household Words

  IDEAS of HEAVEN

  A Ring of Stories

  Joan Silber

  W. W. Norton & Company

  New York London

  Copyright © 2004 by Joan Silber

  Excerpts from Gaspara Stampa, Selected Poems. Edited and translated by Laura Anna Stortoni and Mary Prentice Lillie. New York: Italica Press, 1994. Copyright 1994 by Laura Anna Stortoni. Used by permission of Italica Press. Excerpts from Petrarch’s Canzoniere or Rerum Bulgarium Fragmenta by Francesco Petrarch, translated with notes and commentary by Mark Musa. Used by permission of Indiana University Press. Excerpts from The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell, copyright © 1982 by Stephen Mitchell. Used by permission of Random House, Inc.

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

  Production manager: Julia Druskin

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Silber, Joan.

  Ideas of heaven: a ring of stories / by Joan Silber.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-0-393-07073-6

  I. Title.

  PS3569.I414 I33 2004

  813'.54—dc22 2003024324

  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

  www.wwnorton.com

  W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

  For Myra

  CONTENTS

  MY SHAPE

  THE HIGH ROAD

  GASPARA STAMPA

  ASHES OF LOVE

  IDEAS OF HEAVEN

  THE SAME GROUND

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I want to thank Myra Goldberg, who read this manuscript more times than anyone should ever have to and always gave peerless advice. Andrea Barrett, Charles Baxter, Kathleen Hill, Margot Livesey, and Noelle Oxenhandler were also generous readers who gave crucial suggestions and support. I have been extraordinarily lucky in having Carol Houck Smith as my editor and Geri Thoma as my agent. Special thanks again to Sharon Captan for her friendship. I am grateful to the MacDowell Colony for a residency during the writing of this book.

  “The High Road” appeared previously in Ploughshares, and won the 2003 Cohen Award from Ploughshares. It is included in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2003 and The Pushcart Prize, XXVIII: Best of the Small Presses. “My Shape” appeared previously in The Story Behind the Story: 26 Writers and How They Work, ed. Peter Turchi and Andrea Barrett (New York: Norton, 2004).

  IDEAS of HEAVEN

  MY SHAPE

  I had my own ideas about a higher purpose, but not enough ideas. I could have used more. When I was in my early teens, I used to go to the bus station in my city and think about pan-handling money to get a ticket to Las Vegas. A wide sky of nightclubs glittering in the middle of the desert sounded beautiful to me. I wanted beauty. I’d sit on a bench and do my homework in the bus station, and then I’d go home.

  What did I want before this? I took ballet lessons twice a week in the gym of my grammar school and liked the arabesques and the leaping and even the strictness of Miss Allaben drilling us in the six positions. I worked hard at ballet until I began to grow a figure in my leotard. My other hobby was attending services in churches and synagogues all around Cincinnati, where we lived. My parents were a mixed marriage (Jewish and Catholic, a big deal then) and had solved the alleged difficulty of this by not following any religion.

  So I was a fascinated tourist in any house of worship, and would go anywhere I could get taken. The whole notion of worship knocked me out. I saw Jews kissing their fingers and touching them to the velvet cover of the Torah, I saw Catholics kneeling with their mouths open in practiced readiness for the Host, I saw Greek Orthodox placing their lips on icons as if they could not bear to pass them without this seal of adoration. I would emerge blinking into the daylight, shocked at my friends’ laughter over what had gone on in there—the choirmaster’s bad haircut, the tedium of the sermon, the utter ridiculousness of somebody’s mother’s hat. I listened, harder than anyone else, to words never said in daily conversation—beseech, transfigure, abounding, mercy. The rapped chest, the bowed head, the murmured Dear Lord. I could not get over people doing this together, the gestures of submission that went on within these walls. Then the congregation got up and walked outside.

  Since no one—not my friends or family or even the clergy themselves—seemed to take this to heart the way I did, I had to keep quiet, like a spy with encoded notes or a tippler sipping a flask in the ladies’ room. I made up perky reasons for wanting to go each week, “just to see how people are really all alike.” After a while, I heard myself making fun of it with the others, and I stopped going. All at once, suddenly, cold turkey. I turned my back on the whole thing.

  So. Then I grew the mounded body that was to be my adult shape. I came from a family of women with large breasts, and by fourteen I had my own set, which I sheathed in satin brassieres that made them point forward in military cones. Torpedo tits they were called (by us girls too). Everyone knew that grown men became entirely helpless at the sight of cleavage, the compressed hills rising gloriously above a strapless gown. This fashion in bodies has faded, but I was glad of it then. It is true that in junior high the boys yelled dirty comments (they mooed like cows, they made milking gestures with their hands), but I believed that these immature oafs, as we called them, liked me.

  By the time I was out of school, everyone seemed to be telling me that I might enjoy certain privileges if I played my cards right. Once that idea got unpacked, it was more complicated than I guessed—what these privileges were and where contempt hid in the granting of them and what had to be paid for them anyway. People think they know all about this now, but they don’t, not exactly.

  I wanted to be an actress. I was too silly and shallow to be any good at acting, but I could keep my composure onstage, which is something. I was given small parts in summer stock, the hooker or the stenographer or the cigarette girl in the nightclub scene. The summer after my first year of college, I worked in the Twin Pines Theatre. I slept with the bullying director, a fierce-browed man in his forties who had sex with a lot of us and didn’t give anybody a bigger part for it. Sleeping your way to the top is a bit of a myth, in my experience.

  I liked acting, at that age. You got to dwell on feelings, which were all I dwelt on then anyway, and turn them over, play them out. We had long discussions: would a child afraid of her father show the fear in public? would a man who was in love with a woman talk more loudly when she entered the room? Those who’d had real training (I was not one of them) spoke with scorn about actors who “indicated,” who tried to display a response without actually feeling it. An audience could always tell. What was new to me here was the idea that insincerity was visible. I understood from this that in real life I was not getting away with as much as I thought.

  But otherwise I was a little jerk. I was so hungry for glamour that I put a white streak in my brown hair, I wore short-shorts and wedge heels, I drank banana daiquiris until I threw up. I thought the director was going to find himself attracted to me again and we might have a legendary romance, although I could hardly talk to him. I didn’t know anything.

  One of the other women told me about a job on a cruise liner. If I could dance a little, which I was always saying I could, I might be one of the girls strutting around in sequins in the musical revues they put on to keep the passengers from jumping overbo
ard in boredom. I could get to Europe, to the Caribbean. They didn’t pay you much but you ate well.

  The woman who told me this was the director’s new cookie, and I was not sure what she was really saying to me and in what spirit. We’re artists, you’re the showgirl, etc. But perhaps she did want to give me something.

  And I worked on cruise ships for years. I went to Nassau and Jamaica and Venezuela and through the Greek islands. I worked in clubs in Miami too, walking around with a big feathered head-dress on and the edges of my buns hanging out the back of my satin outfit. I lived with a bartender who was irresistible when he wasn’t a repetitious, unintelligent drunk, and with an older man I never liked. I was twenty-seven—getting old for this stuff—when I got work on a ship going through the Mediterranean, along the French Riviera and Monaco and Liguria.

  It was a French ship and that was how I met my husband, who was the ship’s purser. He was a soft-eyed man with a whimsical blond mustache, who looked wonderful in the white uniform of the cruise line; everyone on the ship had a crush on Jean-Pierre. He was really just a boy. He was older than I was by a year, and he had poise and good sense, but he was not very worldly. I seemed to dazzle him, which was certainly nice. And I fell for him, his genial flirting and his down-and-dirty ardor in bed.

  There is an hour on any ship when twilight turns everything a bright and glowing blue and the horizon disappears, the sea and the sky are the same. The line between air and water is so apparently incidental that a largeness of vision comes over everyone; the ship floats on the sky, until night falls and everything is swallowed in the dark. I have memories of being very happy with Jean-Pierre while standing out on the lower deck in that blueness, before the ship’s lights came on. He asked if I looked like my mother or my father, and if I was close to them (I certainly was not). He wanted to know if I could ever live away from my family and my country for good, if I had ever thought of such a thing, and I saw myself moving toward a destiny as interesting as any I could have wished.

  I had very little to leave behind, when I went with him to live in St-Malo, the ancient walled city in Brittany where he had grown up. Jean-Pierre acted utterly proud to have nabbed me. When he introduced me to people, he always repeated my name, Ah-lice, with a certain delighted pause before it, and his translations to me included goofy compliments no one had really said (“my cousin says you are the flower of America”). We were staying in an apartment that belonged to his uncle, two doors from a fish market whose scent I did not even mind. We married a month after he brought me there. It was a pretty town, high on a bluff, but it had been bombed badly in the war and not all of it had been built back. The rainy beaches were filled in summer with dogs and children running around on the sand. Signs insisted it was strictement défendu to bring unleashed dogs anywhere on the premises, and I was amused to see that none of its citizens paid attention.

  His family was not unkind to me either, despite the fact that I tried their patience with my meager French and seemed dopey to them in general. Their friendliness was to ask me about Mickey Mouse and Elvis Presley, and in the childishness of these questions my language skills got better. At the endlessly long family dinners on Sundays, I could yammer my answers.

  I had a running joke with Jean-Pierre about all the idioms English speakers have for anything sexy or duplicitous—French kisses, French leave, Frenching the bed, French ticklers. We were pretty jolly, the two of us. When we went back on the ship together, I was full of rich confidence. I beamed at the corny banter of old men and their wives, I danced like a proverbial house on fire. I wrote letters to my family from our ports of call, Corsica, Sardinia, Malta. Allo, chère maman, I said, I’m having more fun than I can tell you. Je t’embrasse, from Alice the blushing bride.

  After Easter, when we went back to St-Malo, the town was full of tourists from other parts of France, and I would chat with them across the tables in cafés. People there didn’t do that, but I thought they should, and I got them going. In the winter, when Jean-Pierre was hired for another tour of duty, there was no job for me on his ship, and he said maybe I could just stay home without him this once. I had worked since I was nineteen, and this offer of leisure seemed wonderful to me.

  But I went a little crazy, by myself like that. I was no longer a novelty to his family and they had conversations I could not follow. In the dank and icy months, I walked around in a heavy, dressy cape and told the children I had a gun underneath it; I told Jean-Pierre’s mother she was so cheap that she fed us horsemeat; I tried to hitchhike to Rennes but I came back after fifty creepy kilometers on the road with a dead-silent truck driver. Once I got drunk and stood on a table in a café, singing “Blue Monday” and looking down at the patrons. By the time Jean-Pierre got back, I was mopey and fat; I had gained twenty pounds. I had become a thing the French really hate, a blowsy woman.

  What could we do then? We fought, quite nastily. He seemed stuffy and spiteful, not like someone I knew at all. He said everyone had told him I was a selfish baby but he had said, oh, no, I was devoted to him. We made up and spent two days straight in bed (our desire never cut so deep as then). We went on excursions to Caen and to Mont St-Michel, which even I knew was a famous abbey, although I had stopped caring about churches. We walked across the causeway to get there, and that was the part I liked, walking into the sea. We gave parties for his friends and I made American foods—fried chicken, coleslaw, macaroni salad. The wives began to think I was a big, loose, amiable fool. Jean-Pierre got work in a shipping firm in St-Malo.

  For my thirtieth birthday we went to Paris. I had never been there before, and much of it thrilled me—the cake-like elegance of the buildings, the determined verve of people in the streets—and me, Alice, walking through it with my handsome French husband. But I felt too, in the thick of those groomed and confident crowds, the discomfort outsiders often know in Paris, the dawning sense that this is not, really, for us at all—we will never be this stylish or this knowing.

  I came back to St-Malo in an agony of thwarted hopes. I thought that all my prettiness, all the gifts I’d been so pleased to have, had gotten me nothing at all. What did I want so desperately? What in the world is glamour, what did I mean by that? A heightening of the ordinary, an entry into the club of splendor, a feast of endorsed sensations? Whatever it was, my anguish in wanting it was almost more than I could stand. I suffered blindly. Dolly of silly notions that I was, I wept real tears.

  I knew I couldn’t stay there weeping. I wasn’t bound or indentured, it was the twentieth century. But I wept like that for another year—a shrew to Jean-Pierre and a puzzle to the town. I had one affair, with a humorless older cousin of his, and Jean-Pierre had lovers. In the end, I took the train to Paris and got a cheap ticket on a charter flight, and I left—after weeks of ugliness with Jean-Pierre’s family (I might have handled that part better). I went to New York to dance and sing in Broadway shows.

  What was I thinking? That it was my last chance. I had never been to New York, and I didn’t know how to go about any of it. I showed up for one audition and waited in an outer room crowded with women much younger than I was. In the studio, I could keep in step, when they had us copy a sequence of dance moves, but I was not really dancing. I could sing on key, but in a watery, underpowered warble. I sang “Je Ne Regrette Rien,” which made the casting people smile wryly.

  This did not make me want any of this less. I thought I had never worked hard enough for anything before (this part was right). Being in a show seemed like the exalted professional use of the body, the gold spun from sweat. In Variety I saw an ad run by a man who coached performers for musical auditions—twenty years’ experience, proven methods. I was so happy after I called him—I was taking charge of my life, as I meant to do. I walked back to the Y where I was staying and I celebrated by eating a steak at the coffee shop next door. I can remember chewing it happily, sitting alone at a table in private joy, putting little charred pink-brown bits of it on my fork with the baked potato, reading
a Vogue magazine as I ate. I liked food in America.

  I was late getting to the coach’s the next day. The studio was on Tenth Avenue, farther west than I’d been before, and I had not realized how far this was from the subway.

  “Should I bother with you?” he said when he opened the door. “What do you think?”

  “Oh, yes,” I said, tittering and dimpling. “Please.”

  He was a tall man who had probably once been handsome; he was stark and sinewy now. His dance studio was on the sixth floor of an office building, and the room smelled of old wood and mildewed drapes. I had to display myself for him. That is, I had to strip down to a leotard (I did this in a corner, awkwardly sliding out of my skirt) and follow him in a few dance steps, then perform them again while he looked glumly at me. Next he sat down at the piano and asked me to sing “Three Blind Mice.”

  “You remember that one, right?”

  I tried to carry it off as jauntily as I could. Then he had me sing “Frère Jacques,” which I at least did with a decent accent.

  “Not much of a singer, are you?” he said.

  I shrugged cutely, but I was very miserable. “I can be a dancer,” I said. “Don’t you think?”

  “Maybe. How much do you want it?” He glowered at me from over the piano, a scratched black upright with a hoarse tone.

  I answered that question with so much fervor that he smiled, a thing he rarely did, as it turned out.

  His name was Duncan Fischbach and I was to spend many hours in his studio. At first it was like any dance class—he demonstrated some steps, and we did them together, and then we linked a few of these sequences, which I was supposed to remember. “Listen to me, are you listening?” he said. “The word oops does not get you anywhere in this world, no matter how big a rack you’ve got on you.”