How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly Read online

  HOW

  Clarissa Burden

  LEARNED TO

  Fly

  Connie May Fowler

  NEW YORK BOSTON

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  Copyright Page

  For Bill, My Moon Whisperer

  E = mc2

  Albert Einstein

  On June 21, 2006, at seven a.m. in a malarial crossroads named Hope, Florida, the thermometer old Mrs. Hickok had nailed to the WELCOME TO HOPE sign fifteen years prior read ninety-two degrees. It would get a lot hotter that day, and there was plenty of time for it to do so, this being the summer solstice. But ninety-two at seven a.m., sunrise occurring only three hours earlier, suggested a harsh reckoning was in store for this swampy southern outpost. The weight of the humidity-laden situation pressed down on nearly all of the village’s inhabitants, including its sundry wildlife—squirrels, raccoons, possums, rats, deer, and one lone bobcat—each of whom, immersed in its particular brand of animal consciousness, paused (some even in slumber), noses twitching, tails snapping, all steeling themselves against the inevitable onslaught of the day’s hellish heat.

  Hope’s only living being to appear unfazed by the rising mercury was Clarissa Burden, a thirty-five-year-old woman who’d moved to the north Florida hamlet six months prior with her husband of seven years. Trapped as she was in a haze of insecurities and self-doubt, and being long divorced from her animal consciousness, she peered out her opened kitchen window into her rose garden and felt an undoing coming on that was totally unrelated to the weather. It was as if her brain stem, corpuscles, gallbladder, nail cuticles, the mole on her left shoulder, the scar on her knobby shin, the tender corpus of her womb—the whole shebang—were about to surrender. But to what, she did not know.

  She watched her husband—a multimedia artist who dabbled in painting, filmmaking, sculpture, pottery, and photography as long as his muse wore no clothes—alternately sketch and photograph a sweating young woman. With the exception of a silver ring piercing her belly button, the woman stood in the bright light of morning amid Clarissa’s roses as naked as the moment she was born.

  Clarissa leaned windward to get a better look. Barefoot and still wearing the clothes she had slept in—a rumpled T-shirt and dirt-stained shorts—she tapped her finger on the screen’s dusty mesh, wondering what it felt like to be her husband’s muse. Was the young woman racked with insecurity, fearing the artist was casting judgment with each stroke of his charcoal pencil? Or was she empowered, fully aware of the spell that flesh cast on weak men?

  Her husband, Igor “Iggy” Dupuy, paused from his sketching and wiped perspiration from his bald pate and big face. “You have beautiful skin, even when you sweat.” Clarissa took in every lyrical syllable her husband uttered. And while unhappy with their intent—even if it was a harmless observation—Clarissa had never grown tired of her husband’s accent. South African by birth, of Dutch ancestry, and American by choice, Iggy was actually born Igor Pretoriun but changed his last name, favoring a French influence, to distance himself from his birth country’s racial past. She appreciated that in him. It was something they had in common, both coming from a land of racial sins and both feeling it forever necessary to let people know that the old politic was never their politic. He was a tall, strapping man with hands twice the size of Clarissa’s. It was one of the things that caused her to fall in love with him eight years ago, this stature that far outpaced her own.

  Unwilling to continue to spy—that’s what it felt like to her, but only because Iggy wanted her nowhere near him while he worked—she floated her attention past her husband and the young woman, beyond the towering magnolia with its opulent white flowers that Clarissa so loved, to the field south of the rose garden. There, hidden amid tall blades of grass, a black snake shed its skin. The snake, nearly finished with the process, soaked up the sun’s early heat, enjoying the sensation of warmth on freshly minted scales, while all but two inches of its old self draped behind in the grass like a dull transparent cape, an afterthought.

  If she had known the snake was out there, Clarissa’s sense of imminent implosion might have lifted, because, while not stupid, she was superstitious and believed that the presence of a snake meant she was going to come into money. Without good cause except for a writer’s ingrained insistence on avoiding clichés, she had long overlooked the importance of shed skin and what that might predict. She batted at a fly that had been pestering her ever since she’d put on the coffee. If it weren’t so hot and if her husband weren’t out there with a naked woman, she would have gone for a walk. They owned ten highly treed acres, and she was taken with it all: leaf and petal, blade and stamen. The north Florida landscape reminded her of abundance; it was such a far cry from the south Florida, palm-tree-stuttered trailer park of her youth.

  She closed her eyes and breathed deeply. A cacophony of scents enveloped her, the floral high notes mingling with the musky scent of things dying. Clarissa was proud of her garden. It was becoming what she had envisioned the first time she’d stepped onto the property: her own private Eden, genteel and spilling over with rosebuds, jasmine, pendulous wisteria. Every time she tucked a plant’s roots into the rich soil, she felt the distance between her adult life and her fatherless childhood grow ever greater. And that was a very good thing. She opened her eyes. The snake wandered into taller grass, leaving its former skin behind. Clarissa saw the grass sway but didn’t think a thing of it. She was meandering through her garden’s history: how she had, without her husband’s labor or input, dreamed, planned, tilled, planted, sweated over, bled over, and adored her garden into existence. Wind rippled through the branches, bringing not a respite from the weather, but a mobile wall of heat. Clarissa tightened her ponytail, shimmying it up a tad higher on her head, and decided that she hadn’t wanted his help. Not really. Her husband ignoring dirt, and plants, and compost was, she knew, the least of her matrimonial worries.

  Iggy’s big voice cut through the humid air. “Aye, Christ, this heat!”

  “But when you sweat,” his model said, “sex is the best.”

  “Fowking A, sweetie, fowking A!” That’s how he said “fuck,” as if the vowel were an o; stupid man. Determined to ignore them, Clarissa scanned the far boundary of her yard, where the regimental hand of her design gave way to the exuberant chaos of an oak grove. She watched a pileated woodpecker on those long wings with their lightning bolt patches of black and white dart through the cloud-free sky, and she considered the possibility that the malaise her marriage had slipped into was (a) inevitable; (b) temporary; and (c) possibly fatal. The woodpecker zigzagged over the treetops, cawed raucously, and then disappeared into the swamp’s verdant green veil.

  Batting again at that annoying fly, Clarissa thought, Iggy’s art is his kingdom, but I am not his queen. He had many queens, models all: She was very clear about that issue. And also this one: He had not touched her—not so much as a peck on the cheek, an arm around her waist, a caress amid dreams on a warm night—in nearly two years. His amorous intentions had not stopped like a switch being flipped. They had slowly—over a period of… Clarissa wasn’t sure, maybe four or five years—evaporated. Maybe, she thought as she scratched at a raw mosquito bite on her elbow, this is normal; maybe all men lose interest in their wives; maybe the whole “seven-year itch” thing should be renamed “24/7, 365 days from the get-go” itch.

  As she stood there, looking at her garden teeming with hidden but complex activity—grubs eating tender roots, parasites sucking precious sap from nimble stems, mole rats digging underground labyrinths—she thought back to the first time they had met. They were bot
h living in Gainesville. She had taken a visiting writers gig at the University of Florida, and he was an artist everyone in town wanted to know, because in those days he was funny and expansive; he didn’t constantly bitch, and the whole foreigner thing was in.

  A mutual friend who taught in the History Department, Jack Briggs, had invited a dozen or so people over to watch President Clinton’s televised address regarding an alleged tryst he’d had with a White House intern. She and Iggy never saw the president speak, because not long after Jack introduced them in the kitchen, they wandered onto the back porch, where they settled into a couple of rocking chairs and talked for a good three hours.

  Clarissa had been immediately struck by Iggy’s otherness—his height, his big-boned frame, his Afrikaner accent that, she would discover, grew thick and impenetrable when he was angry or drunk. He was sixteen years her senior, and because she’d never known her father, she’d decided an older man in her life might offer stability.

  Standing in June’s webbed heat, thinking about that first meeting, Clarissa felt her heart swell with love and hate. She remembered gazing up at him, thinking he had the most amazing imperial blue and to-drown-in eyes, when he said, “I fowking hate the Afrikaners and what they did to the country. All the whites should leave, including my family. It is not their land. It is the black man’s. Every last drop of white blood should leave the continent.”

  He placed his immense hand on her shoulder and squeezed. His touch thrilled her, as did his passion. Still young and inexperienced in the art of seduction, she tried to appear slightly bored, because boredom—she thought at the time—was an interesting, artsy conceit. “So, your family is still there?”

  As men are wont to do with their facial hair, especially when it’s the only hair they have, he stroked his beard, which, she decided, made him appear thoughtful, smart, and I’m-too-sexy-for-my-politics in a Marxian sort of way. “They will never leave,” he said, leveling his eyes to hers. “They love their money and their land too much.” He swirled his Scotch, studying it, and then leaned in very close to her. She could smell the oak-and-oat aroma on his breath. “But it’s not their land. They stole it and delude themselves into thinking God gave it to them.” He tapped his temple. “My parents don’t deserve me to be their son. My sisters and brothers don’t deserve to breathe the same air as I.” He shot her a smile that was a nearly irresistible mix of self-deprecation and ego. “Racist bastards!”

  As he spoke, his Dutch face, which seemed to Clarissa to be impossibly long and redolent with the hint of shadows, reminded her of someone Rembrandt would have painted. And at that moment, she had wanted him to kiss her. She found the very idea of him disowning his family on moral and political grounds to be courageous. Blinded by the hormones of early love, she did not see that it might also indicate a man who easily divorced himself from loyalties and truth. She did not ask, “If a man walks away from his mother because he seriously disagrees with her politics, how deep is his allegiance to a wife?”

  Clarissa picked at the mosquito bite until it bled. The fly settled on the window’s top sash, and from there, the scent of her skin and faint suggestion of blood enveloping him, he watched her. Though a mere insect, the fly had a complex existence, full of near death experiences and matters of the heart. With a life span of only fifteen to thirty days—and that was without humans swatting at you—he lived in a perpetual state of pregnant urgency, as if each moment might be his last. He was well aware that he was in love with this human who, he thought, with her fair skin that often carried the scent of ripe apples, was the most beautiful creature in his world. At that moment, while she searched her yard for reasons he didn’t grasp, the fly wanted nothing more than to light in her blond curls and never leave.

  Oblivious to his intentions (how could one ever know the hidden desires of insects?), Clarissa ignored him. Her gaze drifted from the fringe of lesser oaks and skinny towers of bald cypress to the sprawling backdrop of a giant sentinel oak whose trunk was of such circumference, she believed it would take ten people, arms outstretched, fingertip to fingertip, to encircle it. This is where the swamp began. Jake’s Hell was a gator-and-mosquito-infested expanse of fetid water that led, as far as she could tell, to absolutely nowhere. But the oak was beautiful; its widespread crown was home to a heron couple that rose daily into the dawn sky, squawking as they ascended, and returned at dusk—one behind the other—still squawking. In her six months here, Clarissa had grown attached to the birds and their noisy pronouncements. They were a real team: hunting, gathering, loving. And she found herself, even on this still young and fragile June solstice, hoping that the herons portended change: a wild turn toward passion in her marriage. This morning she had missed the birds; dawn had come earlier than she had expected. As she turned away from the window and the garden where her husband was asking his model to look toward the wisteria vine, and yes, yes, lower her chin just a bit, Clarissa concluded that the detour in her routine—not seeing the birds take wing at first light—was the reason for her unease.

  She stepped into the center of the room—no chance to watch her husband from there—and decided she needed something to keep her unsettled mind occupied. Perhaps she should be a couch potato for the day. Watch TV, turn on CNN. The war in Iraq—the casualties, the lies, the misery delivered on the wings of ineptitude, the casual quagmire of it all—infuriated her, and she wondered why Americans, including herself, hadn’t taken to the streets, demanding an end to an immoral war. It was as if the entire world, in the early years of a new century, had given up believing in higher callings. Peace, love, and understanding felt like quaint ideas proffered by naive people. She absentmindedly rubbed the back of her left calf with her right foot’s big toe and took in her farmhouse kitchen—its marble-topped oak island where she kept her mixer and rolling pin and food processor, the Marilyn Monroe cookie jar that was stuffed with pink sugar substitute packets (the fly lit on the tip of Marilyn’s nose; Clarissa shooed it away), the jadeite dishware stacked in pale green heaps behind glass-front cabinet doors—and she decided that the new century didn’t feel new at all. It felt overwhelming, as if change were out of reach and stagnation all the rage.

  Clarissa tapped her fingers on the marble—it was still cool to the touch—and noticed that quivers of dried rosemary littered her Spanish tile floor. Yes indeed, the floor needed a good cleaning. Her ovarian shadow women (that’s what she called the exuberant chorus of voices that swirled up from, she supposed, the depths of her unconscious and did their best to alternately ease her rising anxieties and inflame them beyond all reason) clucked and twittered, but she could not understand a damn thing they said.

  She grabbed her broom and began sweeping, gathering the rosemary quivers into a diminutive, spiky pile, when finally, one voice—it sounded suspiciously like Bea Arthur—broke through the chaos and asked, “Don’t you have a novel to write?”

  Then they all chimed in, prattling among themselves that, yes, she surely did, whatever was she thinking, it was high time she stopped procrastinating, sweeping up rosemary wasn’t going to pay the mortgage.

  Clarissa shoved the broom into the space between her fridge and the wall. “Oh, be quiet,” she said, exasperation cooling her tendency toward long vowels. Noticing that the coffeepot was still on, she flipped it off. She knew the ovarian shadow women were correct, but she also felt helpless to remedy the situation. Clarissa Burden, author of two highly acclaimed and best-selling novels, had not written one decent sentence in over thirteen months. The longer the dry spell dragged on, the greater her fear of facing the virtual blank pages of her word processor. And the fear on that June morning was enough to inspire in her a slew of mundane tasks—sweeping, dusting, vacuuming, dishwashing—all designed to prevent her from laying even a single finger on her keyboard.

  She pulled her T-shirt away from her body—she was finally beginning to succumb to the high morning heat—and thought about closing the windows and cranking the air-conditioning, but if she d
id that, she wouldn’t be able to hear what was being said in her garden. Besides, in these past few weeks she had learned just how challenging it was to cool a circa 1823 home.

  She retrieved the dustpan from its hiding place behind the door and, using her hand, pushed the rosemary into it. As she walked over to the trash can, she considered the advantages of hygiene. Maybe she should shower and dress and put on makeup. This was not like her, to sloth around in dirt-stained shorts, a T-shirt reeking with the sleep-stink, her face not yet washed; but she had awoken to the solstice, fully convinced that nothing interesting was going to happen on this clear, hot day, so therefore there was no need for pretense or the appearance of hopefulness. She attempted to dump the herb pile into the can, but the wind gusted, scattering the rosemary.

  “Shit,” she muttered. Even the wind was conspiring against her. On a normal day, Clarissa would have tried again, but being addled, she simply gave in, returned the dustpan to its hiding place, walked over to her sink, washed her hands, and wiped her hands on her belly as if she had no manners whatsoever.

  As she leaned against the counter, considering her next move, music, faint at first and then more vigorous, wafted into the kitchen, but she couldn’t tell from where. Tilting her head, she tried to zero in: a fiddle swirling a strange and lovely melody. Two nights prior, she had drifted up from a deep sleep, feeling guided and tugged by a similar tune. She had dismissed it as dream music—syncopated, foreign. But here she was, wide awake, and it was back.

  She walked into the central room that, architecturally, was your typical shotgun affair (you could shoot a gun through the front door and the bullet would, barring impact with a human being, a hound dog, or ill-placed furniture, zip straight through the house and out the back door). But the large space with its gleaming French crystal chandelier and gracious curved staircase left no doubt that this house had little in common with typical southern shotgun shacks; unlike Clarissa’s home, they appealed solely by virtue of their simplicity.