White Oleander

I lay in Paul's arms, thinking how we'd gone up to Denmark last summer to find Klaus Anders. We located him in Copenhagen. He was living in a shabby flat with his children, it smelled of turpentine and stale milk. His wife was off working. It was three in the afternoon when we came calling, he had on a blue seersucker bathrobe covered with paint. There were two kids under five, my half sister and brother from his third or fourth marriage, on the couch watching TV. The girl had strawberry jam in her hair, the baby needed changing, and I saw the chain of disaster could move laterally as well as up and down.

 

He'd been painting, a biomorphic abstraction that looked like an old shoe with hair. He offered us Carlsbergs and asked about my mother. I drank and let Paul do most of the talking. My father. His handsome forehead, his Danish nose, just like mine. His voice lilting with its accent, humorous even when expressing regret. A man who never took anything seriously, least of all himself. He was pleased I was an artist, unsurprised my mother was in prison, sorry we'd never met. He wanted to make up for lost time, offered to let us stay, we could sleep on the couch, I could help out with the kids. He was sixty-one years old, and so ordinary.

 

I had felt like my mother, sitting in his living room, judging him and his sticky children and the TV that never turned off. The old futon-couch, scarred teak coffee table with rings. Canvases on the walls, encrustations like brain coral and colon cancer. We ate cheese and bread, the large jar of strawberry jam. I gave him the address of the comic book store, said I'd be in touch. It was the first time I'd ever wanted to move on, be the first person out of the room.

 

Afterward we went to a student bar near the university and I got thoroughly, sloppily drunk, and threw up in the alley. Paul got me on the last train back to Berlin.

 

Now I took Paul's hand in the bed, his right in my left, laced my fingers through his, my hands large and pale as winter, my identity stitched in the whorls of their fingertips, Paul's hands dark from graphite and fragrant with Drum and kebabs. Our palms were the same size but his fingers were two inches longer. His beautiful hands. I always thought if we ever had children, I hoped they'd have them.

 

"So what happened with the printer?" I asked. "He wants cash," Paul said. "Imagine." I turned our hands, so we could examine them from each side. His fingers practically touched my wrists. I traced along the sinews of his hand, thinking how in less than a day I could be back in the States. I could be like my mother, like Klaus. It was my legacy, wasn't it, to shed lives like snakeskin, a new truth for each new page, a moral amnesiac?

 

But a disgrace. I'd rather starve. I knew how to do it, it wasn't that hard.

 

I looked around our flat, the rain-ruined walls, the few bits of furniture, battered pressboard chest we found in an alley, the dusty velvet curtain concealing our tiny kitchen. Paul's drawing table, his papers and pens. And the suitcases, ranged against the wall, filling the rest of the floor. Our life. The phoenix must burn, my mother had said. I tried to imagine the flames, but it was too cold. "Maybe I'll sell the museum," I said.

 

Paul traced the lacy dogbite scars on my hand. "I thought you told Oskar you wouldn't."

 

I shrugged. I would never reach the end of what was in those suitcases, those women, those men, what they meant to me.

 

These rooms were only the start. There were suitcases inside of suitcases I had not even begun to unpack. You want remember, so just remember.

 

I slipped my hands up under the wool shirt I'd bought him at the flea market. He flinched with the cold, then allowed me to warm them against his skinny ribs. As we drew close, murmuring softly into each other's necks, the Herald Tribune slid off the feather bed and fell to the floor in a soft cascade, burying my mother among her headlines, news of other crises and personages. We shed our jackets and our pants to make love, but kept our shirts and socks on. I knew I was making a choice. This, now, suitcases, Paul. It was my life, a trait and not an error, written by fire on stone.

 

AFTERWARD, I lay gazing at the patterns cast on the stained walls, the effect of the light from the street shining through our windows, the etched designs like bird feet. Next to me, Paul slept with a pillow crammed tightly over his head, product of his years in foster care, not to hear more than he had to. I slipped out from under the covers, pulled on my icy stiff jeans and a sweater, put on the fire under the kettle for a Nescafe. What I would give for a cup of Olivia's thick black coffee, so dark it didn't even turn pale when you put the cream in. I rolled myself a cigarette from Paul's Drum tobacco, and waited for the water to boil.