An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky Read online

  AN IMPENETRABLE SCREEN OF PUREST SKY

  An

  Impenetrable

  Screen of

  Purest Sky

  A NOVEL

  Dan Beachy-Quick

  COFFEE HOUSE PRESS

  MINNEAPOLIS

  2013

  COPYRIGHT © 2013 by Dan Beachy-Quick

  COVER AND BOOK DESIGN by Linda Koutsky

  AUTHOR PHOTO Stephanie G’Schwind

  Coffee House Press books are available to the trade through our primary distributor, Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, cbsd.com or (800) 283-3572. For personal orders, catalogs, or other information, write to: [email protected].

  Coffee House Press is a nonprofit literary publishing house. Support from private foundations, corporate giving programs, government programs, and generous individuals helps make the publication of our books possible. We gratefully acknowledge their support in detail in the back of this book.

  Visit us at coffeehousepress.org

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CIP INFORMATION

  Beachy-Quick, Dan, 1973–

  An impenetrable screen of purest sky :

  a novel / By Dan Beachy-Quick.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-56689-343-5 (e-book)

  I. Title.

  PS3602.E24I47 2013

  2013003661

  for Rebecca Beachy

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  BOOK ONE

  WINTER

  BOOK TWO

  SPRING

  BOOK THREE

  SUMMER

  BOOK FOUR

  FALL

  “I believe in all sincerity that if each man were not able to live a number of other lives besides his own, he would not be able to live his own life.”

  —PAUL VALÉRY,

  “Poetry and Abstract Thought”

  “The story is as slender as the thread on which pearls are strung; it is a spiral line, growing more and more perplexed until it winds itself up and dies like the silkworm in the cocoon. It is an interminable labyrinth.”

  —HENRY DAVID THOREAU,

  24 March 1842

  BOOK ONE

  WINTER

  CHAPTER 1

  THE COCKTAIL PARTIES INCREASED IN NUMBER AND extravagance as the term neared its end. The chair—a man so deeply versed in theory that, caught in the analytic rigor of a minor point in Borges (what kind of shoes the librarians wore . . . ), wouldn’t notice that the toothpick he kept twirling had some minutes ago lost its shrimp, which, in his half-agitated foot-tapping, he was grinding into paste on the antique rug, and who, once wine enough was in him, talked about Balthus in ways so detailed, so filled with longing (“the cotton-blend of her underwear a pale coral”) that he made his colleagues uncomfortable and want to walk away, save at such unrestrained moments, he had the habit of holding whomever he was talking to by the shoulder, and bending his face toward the listener, peering at him over the rim of his glasses, whose thick lenses seemed never to have been cleaned—reserved for this occasion, term over and the night of the winter solstice, the school’s old library, lined with leather-bound books. He had initiated the evening by reciting from memory Donne’s “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucie’s Day,” flourishing in one hand a fork with which he kept the meter’s time. He recited with eyes closed. The red line of his shut lids magnified by the lenses looked like the scar of a healing wound—a thought that both fascinated and sickened me. Raising the fork higher and higher, his voice gaining emotion, timbre deepening as if he were pulling the last words from some slowly opening sarcophagus in his heart—proof that his beloved truly was interred—he suddenly opened his eyes, eyes so strangely mild and large, bluer than I ever recalled them being, over which his pallid lids seemed like a snow hill in the air, and finished “since this both the year’s, and the day’s midnight deep is.” And at that instant, with a solemn and drawn-out violin accompanied by the cello’s deeper sorrow, the chamber musicians began the evening’s performance.

  I thought he would collapse. But he only brought his hand down, looked curiously at the fork as if he hadn’t realized he had been holding it, and not being near a table, slipped it into his jacket pocket.

  As the music played, I wandered, looking at the books on the shelf. I wondered if anyone would dare inform the chair that he had misquoted the poem’s ending, had transposed deep and midnight, damaged not only the force of the alliteration, but also the shock there of the double-stress that resounds in the final line like the banging of the bright tongue against the mouth of a dull bell: day’s deep. I gazed at the books: gilt lettering flame-like against the dark leather bindings. Titles of no interest: Barbary Captivity in the Late 18th Century, The Worm in Its Element, Pestilence in the Second Kingdom. Two instructors walked past me holding hands. The music filled the room and, so I thought, subtly reechoed off the plaster ornamentation circling the room’s ceiling: autumnal harvest, branch of bare tree, spring grass in which the nightingale nest sat, sunflower, all repeating at regular intervals, and joined together by Pan’s repeated face, grinning beneath his horns. Hearing the music once was hearing it twice. My colleagues, people I spend every day talking to or avoiding, seeing in committee or hallway, hearing their footsteps as they walk down the hall to the copier, took on a new aspect; each seemed part of a masque in which his or her own music played, the music of a peculiar drama shifted miraculously but imperceptibly from a strain deep within their own minds to a music in the air, a music all could hear, and hearing, move through, live in, an atmosphere. There are no words to this masque; it is a silent play, a mime. All play themselves perfectly. Even Doris—looking at the arabesque in the carpet into whose swirl her toe encroaches—swaying, anonymous: sea grass in the tide. Pan leered down from the sky. I felt myself blushing: the scent of talc arrived, and the soap underneath the powder, only after Doris has walked by.

  I noticed, in my error—that is, my wandering—a book I loved in my childhood, a book forbidden for me to read but which I did read, sneaking into my father’s study, reading under his desk. Wonders and Tales, by Anonymous. Pages that were the verdant field. Illustrations I would stare at for hours, lines of such minutiae that the detail seemed never to end. I remember an oil lamp on a desk in an empty room, smoke or steam curling out of the spout, and in the midst of the substance a woman materializing into form, naked back to me, the curve of one breast marked by the curve of one line as she stretched, awakened from how many centuries of pensive sleep. I couldn’t help myself, as the music played, to reach for it. I felt like a child again, illicit among the adults, stealing license into that world I would inherit and longed for, the adult world with its mysterious rites of longing, its erotic insinuations, that I felt would never be mine.

  I reached for the book, bound in green leather, curious to see it again, to feel it in my hands, expecting, perhaps wrongly, that the page would be a portal back to my childhood—that perhaps, this being the hidden wish in all my reading, I still was the child, safe in the dark beneath my father’s desk, that cave in the den, and this room in which the music played and the people lived so strangely in their strange lives, lives so separate but connected to my own, was just one of the stories, one of the tales or the wonders, and that this scene, musicians in an alcove by the windows, ice sculpture of a fawn melting into the punch, the secretary drinking wine, her décolletage, was an illustration I was looking at too intensely, entering into it, not noticing when the page became a world, nor when the illustrator’s black-and-white line became color, became flesh. I reached for the book, hoping, and my hand knocked against the glass behind which the books sat on their shelves, glass polished to such clarity, I had not seen it. And on
ly on knocking against it, finding barrier where I thought had been air, did my eye adjust, and I saw, reflected behind me, my good friend looking at me quizzically.

  “Should we break it?” he asked. “I brought a little hammer for just such an occasion.”

  “Yes. Break it,” I said.

  Olin made as if he were heaving a sledgehammer up from the ground, staggered back with its impossible weight, and then brought it crashing through the glass case. “There,” he said. “It’s yours.” Flourishing his hands outward, the master of an abundant house.

  “Thank you, Olin.”

  We walked off to get a drink; the music ended, the tinkling applause, I like to think, sounded a little like glass falling from its frame to the ground.

  CHAPTER 2

  A SINGLE GRAIN OF SAND.

  In the oyster’s mouth—whose whole body is mouth—it becomes a pearl. The bivalve’s irritant becomes the lady’s jewel.

  It is a little world, smooth and round. It can be strung on a thread that, worn against the throat, warms to a blood-heat. It can be set on the golden throne of a ring’s setting—a surface milky white, lustrous, but giving back no reflection to the one who brings her hand close to another’s face, one who asks to see the ring, and nearing it, sees his own face in silhouette, a shadow slightly distended across the curved surface. It can be kept loose, in a wooden box with a brass clasp, a box lined with black velvet, a mirror on the lid’s underside—not unlike the nacre in which it was formed—and a child who plays at “mother,” who furtively sneaks into Mother’s room, removes with nervous hand the box from the dresser on which it lay, catching a glimpse of herself as she does so in the wardrobe’s glass, then running out of the bedroom, down the hall, the pearl crashing against the box’s wall, marking the rhythm of her hurried pace.

  When she opens the box she sees herself; then she sees the luminescent world against the plush black. A stolen world glows brighter against the night, the night in the box. She picks it up. It weighs almost nothing; isn’t cool to the touch, nor warm—it feels as if it has no temperature at all, a sort of absence in the hand. She rolls it around in her palm, mesmerized, the pearl caught briefly in its orbit by the lines in her palm, in which a palmist would read the future: it will be thrown up in the air, love and life, and transformed as it falls. And as if hearing the seer’s prediction—this seer who does not exist, or doesn’t exist yet—the little girl picks up the pearl between two fingers, picks up her mother’s pearl saved for the day when she has enough for a bracelet—and tosses it into the air. The girl meant to catch it, but didn’t. It hit the side of her hand and bounced away, fell onto the ground, and rolled across the floor with a noise that sounded like a pencil drawing a dark line on a page, rolled underneath the girl’s bed, through the quilt’s tassels that brushed against the floor, the pearl rolled through that loose veil into the darkness under the bed, disappeared to the girl’s eyes, and then, she heard it as it happened, rolled into the heating register and fell in, one tiny metallic clank revealing its fate. The girl sat up; she had been peering under the bed; she didn’t cry, but felt on the verge of tears; she didn’t know why, she didn’t know how to explain it to herself, but she felt proud.

  There is no end of detail to things that don’t exist. This pearl?—it had a little mark, a scar almost, like a birthmark, that the jeweler would have drilled through when the time came to pierce through the flaw to make the object flawless. The mother, when she toyed with the pearl, something she did not do often, would unconsciously rub her thumb against that slightest scar, caught in some reverie, some daydream, about her past—a series of thoughts with no connection—she remembered being a little girl with a sore throat, and that her father brought to her bed a cup full of shaved ice about which she thought, when she held it, that the cold rose above the rim as steam rises above a mug of tea, but opposite, and invisible; the mother thought she could see such things. The day of the total eclipse when the silver poplar’s shadow turned into flame, and the disappointment after, when the flame was only shadow again—she remembered these things, holding the pearl in her fingers, rubbing the scar with her thumb. There is no end of detail in that world that doesn’t exist; it is in this world where detail is a limited resource, this world in which I live. There is a line across which the fact wanders and becomes imaginary, but like the equator, it is an imaginary line—one crosses it and knows something is awry only when the stars rise at night in ludicrous combinations. One remembers how the stars should look, though it is impossible to describe to anyone else—to one’s wife: that the bluish star should be closer to the triangle in which two points are more or less reddish (and then pointing), see?, there by the moon! There is a blurry edge, a blurry end, to detail in this world—the ragged moon.

  I have a memory, certain memories, in my head. I don’t trust them but I need them. When I close my eyes I can call them to mind, a world that unfolds in the darkness of my head, a world my head contains, in which I watch myself inside myself, in which I can even see my own face, eerie mirror of thinking backwards through time. I see myself standing in the door to my father’s study, leaning against the jamb; he doesn’t know I’m there; he has a scroll and a book open on his desk; the scroll, which he looks at often, his eyes opening wide or narrowing in wonder or in scrutiny, and then he writes in the other book open on his desk; the sound of his writing, of pen on page, I cannot see it, but in my memory I see that sound in lines swirling up from the paper, multiplying as he writes, cocooning him in his own work until I cannot see my father at all, only gray lines moving by their own volition, slowly stilling into form, and my father some strange pupa within the inky silk, becoming something I don’t know.

  I see I’ve crossed the equator again. A pearl is made of consecutive layers of nacre, and if one had the patience, and the right tool, one could remove layer after layer—this process might take years—remove the beautiful sheen, ignore the nacre, and find in the very center that irritant in the mouth that caused the unconscious reflex to begin, the helpless instinct that makes of small pain subtle beauty. I would find—

  A single grain of sand.

  CHAPTER 3

  A SMALL GROUP OF FACULTY MILLED IN FRONT OF THE table where the red wine bottles were placed in two diagonal rows, and the white in a square formation, three by three; it looked as if the Pinot Noir were trying to outflank the Chardonnay; I didn’t doubt a professor arranged it so as some inside joke perhaps only he would understand, a reenactment of a battle from the Wars of the Roses. Olin and I sifted through the loose crowd. Olin drank white and I drank red; we went to our respective sides. In a voice loud enough to be overheard Olin said, “Tell me again about how you met your wife. It was a cocktail party, yes?”

  Uncomfortably, “Yes.”

  “And when you asked her name, she said what? No, no. You said, ‘And what may I call you?’”

  “And she said, ‘Call me Ishmael.’” I said this with somewhat less enthusiasm than Olin would have liked.

  “Call me Ishmael! That’s love at first sight for you isn’t it, Daniel? She really knew how to get her grapples into ye!” He leered at me cockeyed, one eyebrow raised, one eye squinted shut, mouth crookedly ajar as if he were about to spit into a spittoon. The faculty around us seemed bemused by the performance, recent hires who still flocked together, and most of whom I didn’t know save by a dim recognition of face.

  I have no wife. Olin enjoys, though, sowing the minds of new faculty with blatantly false facts; he hopes to be in near proximity when the truth comes out; in the office when the new rhetoric teacher asks the secretary just what it is my wife does, and the secretary sympathetically, if still curtly, responds, “Daniel? He isn’t married.” And to the skeptical look in response: “Ask H.R.” Olin relishes that moment—he’s spoken to me drunkenly about it—when he can see in another’s face the instant, save it is an instant that is gradual, as if recognition inside a moment expands the moment past its brief boundaries, the slight tens
ing of the eyes, the senseless reflex of scrutiny that finds itself investigating a blank wall (the other’s face), the brow drawing back and lifting the eyes into a look of bewilderment; and Olin’s favorite, the slight flush of the cheek. It is, as he’s explained often to me, the way in which knowledge should come. It is the template of knowledge, the archetype, that it comes with shame, and reveals nothing at all. When asked what his pedagogy is by a precocious student, deciding whether or not to take his course on “Information and Deformation,” Olin calmly replied, “To fill your mind with dust.”

  Olin and I sat down in the leather chairs, brass studs lining the arm’s curve, ornament but still somehow cruel, whose legs ended in wolf’s paws. “What book were you staring at, Daniel?”

  “A book I read as a child; one my father said I shouldn’t.”

  “Forbidden fruit, yes. The very best reading a young lad can do.”

  “I did love it. At night in bed I’d think about the stories. And I’d get scared. But fear made me think more thickly, more fully, so that as I retold the story to myself my mind replayed it. I lost sense of what was real and not real.”

  “A worthless division.”

  “Well, maybe. Maybe a necessary one.” I paused, just an instant, but one in which the years closed the distance they keep separate. “The room I slept in became alive.” I felt embarrassed, but couldn’t stop myself, seeing before me what I thought was gone. “I could feel, well—I knew there was a soul in everything, that everything kept making a choice to continue to exist, and welcomed into the world many things that didn’t exist but that I could see, a clock that said now instead of tick or tock, other things that spoke to me, that lay next to me, a woman once, she sat on my chest, she was naked, and she told me my future.”