Seamus Lonergan
Tres major

Preview

We met among the oranges. Her down from Portland. I up from Phoenix. Both of us running.

We met among the tall, still trees of the San Joaquin Valley. Each broad, lindworm-green and overflowing itself like a fire hydrant knocked clean from the pavement. Each a violence of form and as carefully placed as the gridded streets of Manhattan. Each with branches laden down with fruit that would bob and sway in the gentle winds like buoys in the thick molasses of ocean water.

I had come to California to leave behind a family that did not care to know me. As each of my siblings grew and was married, the drumbeat of marriage came to deafen me, also. Eventually, I could no longer stall the expectations that I drowned in. I could not marry. I would not marry. The only option left was to find another path.

Eliza was fleeing disintegration. Her father had been a stockbroker from Philadelphia. Like every other five and dime plunger in the markets, he was gutted in the crash. Not long after, the bank had taken the home and by the middle ’30s, the family was living in destitution. One afternoon, they found him standing on the Ross Island bridge that runs west out of Hosford-Abernethy, as still and quiet as a heartbroken child. A witness would later say that he stood gazing out over the water with the look of a man trying to decide what his life was worth. Fearing the worst, a passerby approached, talking gently and offering a sympathetic ear. But when she finally reached out to touch him, he exploded; hitting her across the face and fracturing her jaw. Passing cars stopped to gawk and a panicked pedestrian had to pull him, screaming and cussing and raging, off of her. Eliza’s mother died a year later. After that, it was just the two of them. One morning, she packed a bag and came south. No note. No forwarding address. No explanation. No goodbye.

“It was a quiet, crisp morning,” she would recall to me. “I came out of the house and there was a blue jay sitting on the fence. It felt as if it had come to send me off. The air was as cold and as clean as it is in the mountains, and the whole day hummed as if it were willing me to run as fast as I could and never look back.”

The San Joaquin Valley was brocaded on all sides by mountain and forest. In summer, dry, desiccating winds would skate in over the tops of the groves and flush the long, sunny days with the kind of thick, parching air that made a person want to lie down in the nearest irrigation basin. In winter, fog would settle into the valley like thick sheets of cloud clipped from the vaulted alpine skies and laid carefully across the groves. A fog so singular that it possessed its own taxon; tule fog, so named for the bulrush that ran wild through the state’s lakes and ponds. A fog so thick that the police would often resort to midwifery, shepherding convoys of hapless motorists along the state’s unnavigable roadways and highways. Week by week, day by day, winter would yield to spring and melting snow would work its way off the mountains, revitalising the land and replenishing the wells and pump houses that dotted the landscape. Heavy and splendid in the morning light, the groves would be slick with a dew so crisp that you could drink it off the trees like lemonade.

As the trees fruited, swollen buds would burst into fragrant, lily-white corolla. We would work in that great swell of growth, picking the trees clean with the fragrance of orange blossom heavy in the air. Our grove was nine hundred acres square. Sixty-three thousand trees if you were to count them. The picker put a ladder into the crown of the tree, climbed it, and worked from left to right, pouring off the oranges into a sack carried at the waist. The skill was in the grace. Care of handling was the only thing that mattered for the longevity of each orange. Once full, the pickers emptied their sacks into wooden boxes. These were stacked and ferried out of the groves, where they were emptied onto a loading elevator that lofted them heavenward and to the highway.

I first heard about her on my third day.

By the time I arrived, the story had accumulated a certain embellishment, though the outline was indelibly set. Eliza had been standing at the end of a row, stealing a moment in the shade of the Eucalyptus windbreak that bordered the grove. A man up a nearby tree said something indecorous in her direction. An orange was thrown. The way the story was told, he went bolt stiff with shock as it collided, lost his footing, and went crashing through branch and foliage like something out of a Buster Keaton film. Finally, he found dry earth with a sharp yelp in a bed of burst fruit and broken bone.

I liked her immediately.

Eliza; medium height and slender with the kind of balletic poise that cut air. Like a rakish Lori Nelson understudy. A loose bun of hair and a man’s dress watch. A cotton shirt, sleeves rolled to the forearm and tortoise shell sunglasses. That rarest admixture of willfulness and gentleness. She tried for no one but her own inner command. We became fast friends and before long days were evenings, evenings were nights, and nights were mornings; together. I had not known what it would mean to love a woman. I had understood that this was the life I wanted. That I had always wanted. Though, to live something is a different enterprise altogether to wishing it. Whatever the consequences, I did not much care. To love a woman complicated things immensely, but also simplified them beautifully. Men are work. Greedy birds. Closed and sharp and moving much too fast for anybody’s good. To love a man was to love an unseeing, cocksure child; a foreign language that forever required reference and translation and forbearance.

“Men like to think that they’re beautiful peacocks,” Eliza intoned one afternoon with wan air and quiet solemnity, “but they’re really ocellated turkeys. All of the colour and none of the grace.”

We bought the apartment in the January of 1955. We’d looked for months and talked for longer. Though spartan, the space bristled with possibility. High ceilings slung with wooden beams, a vast skylight, and long, frosted windows along the outer wall. “Tule windows,” Eliza had remarked the first time that she saw them. We had been saving feverishly, living in a shoe box and subsisting on not much more than subsistence itself. An uncle died in the August and Eliza inherited, accelerating our plans substantially. But it was impossible to get a mortgage; two women, unmarried. The father-in-law of a friend was a senior partner at the bank in Stockton. Even he couldn’t get a loan through. Finally, he and several colleagues wrote us a private loan out of their own pockets. A large downpayment and a two-income household meant that we could manage their usurious rate.

“It’s a nice little loan,” I heard one of them quietly say to another as we were signing the documents, “Pity he doesn't know any more of them.”

Them. To our faces.

It became something like a joke between us; a mordant cut to be deployed at inapropos moments. I would be home with fresh bread. Eliza would inspect it, poke it, turn it over in her hands and smell it. With a faint mockery, she would hold the loaf up in the light, assaying it like a Medici inspecting the coin of a foreign land – “it’s a nice little loan,” she’d declare ceremoniously.

I had never understood what a home was. The feeling of being ensconced and held by a place that was not owed to the world. That made no judgements. Expected no favour. We soon strung ourselves across the space and made it our own. We piled up books and records and bought a television set and radio. I hung a painting rescued from a gallery that was shutting down. Tre Läsande Kvinnor i Sommarlandskap; Three Reading Women in a Summer Landscape. We quickly made friends. There were parties and outings and neighbours cajoled to fraternity. Museums and bookstores and rickety antique shops that felt like they’d slept through the last half century. We acquired a Saluki sighthound named Count who only barked in multiples of three and whom Eliza was forever teasing by barking at in multiples of two.

Like this, we made an honest to goodness life together.

Love, like the scattershot umbrage of forking branches on open grass. All light and colour in the verdant dapple of the afternoon.

Perhaps I had never understood what a home was because home was never a place. Perhaps home was always no more than the uncomplicated revelation of seeing and being seen. In the early morning, before the sun was fully up, I would watch Eliza moving quietly around the apartment, silhouetted in the semi-dark. A kissing dawn streaming through the windows and across the beams and frames of the space. When the light was just so, you could watch it dancing in brilliant columns of standing air, flickering as she moved through them, momentarily obstructing their passage. In those languorous mornings, when the world seemed so large and mysterious that it might burst without cease in all directions; when life was one unending, unalloyed passage of mystery and gratitude, I would find my repose in the warm embrace of our lives and daydream of a future pulling us forward like the tugging hand of an impatient child with a treasure to share.

That first summer was a heatwave. It was so hot that even the birds were grounded. We’d find them nestled in the corners of the window frames, or slowly following a patch of shade across the afternoon. They’d spread themselves out, fanning their wings across the ground whilst lying still and quiet. It was so hot that even the cats left them alone. Each morning began the same. I would ream grapefruits and we would drink juice and soda water in the morning light. Eliza would cook eggs and ham steaks, or we would eat fruit with oats and cold yoghurt. In the evenings, we would go up to the roof of our building, lie around on lawn chairs and eat cut melon whilst the dusk rolled its patient arms out across the city below us. On clear evenings, the whole sky would glow like molten steel. “California orange,” Eliza would say through a melon shot grin, “sweetest in the world.”

To the young, ritual is nothing but empty gesture. Something between indulgence and superstition. But those who have braced themselves against the world, strained to hold life’s blows to the threshold of the self, know differently. There are the rituals of faith, held in the dark. The rituals of love, intended to salve and remind. The rituals of dignity and honour, gifted on those afforded neither. And there are the rituals of loss. Each in its hour, for its season. Each a poetry of gesture, symbol and will. Each fanned to life like dry grasses rippling into a sheet of flame. And each standing in the breach between the clean lines of what the mind wished were so, and the flooded caves of what the heart knows of the world beyond the borders of the self.

When I tell the story now, perhaps it sounds strange. But all the rituals and play of a love are a foreign language to those who do not speak them. That summer, in that heat, Eliza started writing. I woke one morning to find her working at the back of my thigh with a ballpoint pen; the tiny, greasy ball sliding over skin; pinching and tickling as it went.

“What are you doing?” I mumbled through a restless slumber.

“My masterpiece,” came her reply.

I could not see what she’d written, and she refused to elaborate or explain. Instead, I was reduced to reading the backward letters in the mirror; contorted like a fresh doughy pretzel.

What’s green and singing at the bottom of the garden?

As soon as I had it, she gave me the punch line.

“Bean Martin.”

She: doubled over, laughing so violently that she was silent. And I: incredulous, refusing to be amused and understanding that my exasperation was the whole point of the exercise. Three days later, she did it again. This time, writing some lines from a poem on my stomach as I watched on in quiet amusement.

The tigers in the panel that she made

Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid

The novelty of the exercise turned it into a game. And what started so peculiarly quickly became deeply serious. Days later I responded, carefully working some lines from a Greek poet I loved across her back as she slept.

The stranger had a wound and we knew it not. How painful a sigh marked you? He heaved when he drank his third cup, and the roses, shedding their petals, fell from his garlands all upon the ground. He is badly burnt, by the gods, my guess is not amiss.

That summer, in that heat, we covered each other in words. One of us would take a ballpoint pen and write somewhere inconvenient on the other, somewhere where they could not readily read it, some words or lyric. Some truth or confession. In the fold of a buttock. On the nape of a neck. On the sole of a foot. We made a game of learning anatomy and would label each other off as we worked.

In the dawn

“The diaphragm is a dome-shaped, musculofibrous septum which separates the thoracic from the abdominal cavity.”

Armed with a burning patience

“Its convex upper surface forming the floor of the former, and its concave under surface the roof of the latter.”

We shall enter the splendid cities

We did this for many months. Sometimes we would write ridiculous things and fall about. Other times, we would write the words we were afraid to speak and kick the great heavy beauty of it all up into the air like lightning bugs massing in the dusk.

Love, tickling like a moth in cupped hands.

Part play, part confession. The space between the act and its reading was the game. The enigmatic tension of the moments where each of us would wonder what new confession we wore. We would carry each other around for days, until the pen wore off or washed off. But words have their limit. At best a mere rubbing of what lies beneath. If we could have written ourselves out of our destiny, on the backs of nothing but love and will, then we would have lived happily for all our time. But the great tragedy of love is that it frequently is not enough. It does not heal all wounds. It cannot mend every breach. Not all pilgrims falter for lack of faith.

When illness came to her, Eliza did not absorb it gracefully. Death tore its way through our lives like a grapnel dredging up all the muck and poison of the ocean floor. Old wounds, dormant and kept in check by the colour and movement of time, suddenly arced to life like slumbering coals hissing and glowing in the spittle of rain and wind. It had started innocuously. Light fatigue. A gentle tremor. When the diagnosis came, she did not take it well. We had six months at most. Sitting in that office, I remember how quiet she became. So quiet I could hear the clock on the wall and the children playing down the hall. So shocked that it was left to me to continue the conversation. To ask the questions. To take the notes. To digest the plan. Eliza barely spoke. She was barely present.

What I didn’t understand was the depth of the shame she felt. When people asked how she was, she would lie. And she would make me a party to her lies. I hated it. There was a way in which her pride trapped us, removing from me the resource of being seen as a party in the struggle that our lives had become.

“People treat you differently if they know,” she once said, “and people are the only holiday I have left.”

Then, I didn’t appreciate what she meant. But time has interceded. People can be so strange about illness. It crowds people in and it crowds them out. It finds some like a pall of contagion and blight. Friendships break as others shrink from the intensity of the emotional work required to understand an ailing friend. And it happens so softly. People simply stop calling. They just loosen the mooring and gently kick you away. I think this is what Eliza feared. That people would treat her the way she judged herself – unfairly.

“Illness sucks the oxygen from polite conversation. Something I never even knew I wanted until now.”

As the months wore on, her condition worsened and her needs grew. Eliza was proud and capable, and as things became harder, she more and more denied the desperateness of our circumstance in order to maintain her equilibrium. Some nights, she would wake shaking and crying; only to repair into herself when I tried to comfort her. She refused to talk about what was happening, and if I broached it, she would push me away. “When it’s your turn,” she would say, “you can do it your way.” But the harder things became, the more I needed to talk, and the more I tried to talk, the worse things became. Broaching her illness woke a causticity in her that I had never seen before. Any perceived infraction became an occasion to belittle or lash out. And she simply stopped caring for others. An imperial selfishness bloomed across her, recasting our lives in her image.

One evening, I arrived home to the sound of plates breaking against the wall. Plate upon plate upon plate shattering and crashing to the floor. Each sent to its end with an anguish and rage that could be heard from the building’s stairs. These were my plates. I’d bought them the first time my mother had come to visit us. The first time she had accepted me. I loved them, with their gilded edges and rings of interwoven snapdragons. We argued. Eliza was unrepentant. “You don’t understand,” she kept repeating as she paced and rocked and shivered. "You can't understand, and you won't understand." But understanding was immaterial. I had found my limit. The totalising disrespect of the act ushered me to a final reckoning with what our lives had become. “You’re not the only one doing this,” I shouted at her, “I’m here too. And you’ve abandoned me to drown in your grief. I was not put on this earth to eat your poison.”

“You're not listening,” she sobbed, falling to her knees and panicking as she gathered up the broken plate pieces. “Please stop,” she called at me. “Please stop shouting at me.” But something had changed. I could no longer absorb what I felt. I erupted again. “You selfish child. You selfish, selfish fucking child.” At this, she exploded. Trembling and shouting, she pushed me across the room and out of the apartment, locking the door behind me. “You’re not the one who’s dying, you fucking cunt,” I heard her snap through the door as the lock clicked. There is a savage economy to words calibrated to wound that ends all question and gelds all repair.

Was Eliza always this way? Was it always lurking in the background, coiled inside her like a sleeping cobra? Or had the strain and the shock sheared something loose? Nothing could be fixed or made right. All of the instincts to action seized and stuttered and lacerated below the surface of the utter powerlessness of circumstance. To well love the dying is to come to a severe and sustained renunciation of one’s own instincts toward action and resolution. And in their place can only be something like a seriousness and gentleness of purpose wrested from the very jaws of catastrophe. The finest balance of agony and grace.

When I returned, I did so understanding that something had been lost. Had been strained beyond its tolerances and could never again know its formative splendour. Love is not the absence of struggle. Nor the absence of misgivings, doubt or anger. Sometimes love is wondering whether the bargain was well struck. Wondering whether different choices might have meant different lives. And sometimes love is absorbing what must be absorbed. Quietly and without thanks. Work done in the dark. Seen by nobody. Acknowledged by nothing. The books all say that love is companionship – but sometimes love is the loneliest thing a person will do.

In the wake of love, in the catastrophe of death, to grieve towards some sort of relief is impossible and to move on feels all but inconceivable. A betrayal. Here, insoluble misery seems the only path. How one ought to feel. The only way to hold on, and the only way to remember. A prison of mirror and memory. Easing the path out of grief is the final generosity of love. The moment to offer the only blessing that matters. The permission to let go. To move on. To find clean air on the far side of grief. At death, the thoughtful know this. They encourage it. Forget me from your life and live anew.

Eliza did no such thing.

Towards the end, part of me wished it would just happen. That death would rear up to release us from the desperate squall that our lives had become. More and more it felt like the woman that had loved me was already gone. When I lost Eliza, I lost a part of myself. I lost the person I was when I was with her, and I lost the person I was destined to become had she lived. So I held onto her for years and decades. The time of my life when I first met myself, and first understood the abiding friendship that is the basis of all love. I could not let go. I would not let go. And so I lived with my tragedy because to forget felt like a betrayal of who we were; of who we were becoming. In those long days, when I felt so lonely that I thought I might drown under the weight of it all, I would return to a moment from that summer – now so long ago. I would feed it to myself over and over; my conviction, that it was Eliza at her most essential, unbowed.

I was lain down on my front, reading in bed one evening, when she leaned across me, reaching up to the Gray’s Anatomy I kept on my side table.

“This,” she said, tracing the back of her fingers across my upper back, “is the teres major.” For a moment, I watched her furrow her brow as she leafed through the pages. “Here,” she said, pointing to a full-page illustration, “from the bottom of the shoulder blade up into the armpit. Tucked underneath the deltoid.”

“The latissimus dorsi,” she read aloud, “with the underlying teres major, forms the posterior fold of the axilla. When attempts are made to adduct the abducted arm against resistance, the posterior fold of the axilla is accentuated and the lower, or lateral, border of the muscle can be traced downwards to its attachment to the iliac crest.”

“Teh-reez major,” I said, sounding it out through a face of bedding, “it sounds like a forgotten constellation.”

“Hanging in open sky,” replied Eliza.

I can still feel the pen prickling my back, and the immense swell I felt in my breast as she quietly read the words aloud.

I hope one day you can see yourself
The way I see you;

The arc of the arrow
A grace in the flood
Fast to love and slow to judge

California orange
Honeydew seeds
Blades of light cut by high wood beams

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