The Name of the World - Denis Johnson [35]
Gradually the things she surrounded herself with, the materials she collected, were separating themselves from one another. I would live here among her bits of glass and shards of mirrors, strips and patches of astronomical and topographical maps, nautical charts; I’d live here in sunken Atlantis. It got bad light for a studio, all from the North and West, with the windows, though high in the room, set low to the ground outside. Or I would put her in the finest studio on earth.
She kept glass jars of buttons and boxes of marbles. Here was the lid of a large box like a tray holding multicolored strings and yarns, the silvery papery bark of a birch tree, small chrome and plastic emblems, the ones I could see saying Satellite, Coconut, Rolls-a-Lot, Susie, Ramon, Camaro. I was ready to fall in love. I was willing if she’d let me. On the floor against the wall among her leaning paintings was a black boom-box fingerprinted with the entire spectrum. It played low music, apparently always on. I thought I recognized an old Billy Srayhorn tune called “Blood Count.”
I liked her environment very much. These intricate and unintelligible objects. Again I felt tremendously shy. I couldn’t quite develop any of my reactions into a word.
Something was missing. She saw me looking around. “What?”
“Where’s your big old cello?”
She laughed. “It’s in the music building. I’m in a chamber group.”
“Right. I heard.”
“I’m pretty bad at that, too. But you can play just about any piece if you practice it enough.”
“I think as long as we’re getting a little personal,” I said, “I’d better get right to the question on everybody’s mind. What’s your middle name?”
“No Middle Name,” she said. “That’s ‘N.M.N.’ on all the forms, but my sisters called me M ’n’ M.”
“Sisters! There are more of you? What a world.”
“Two sisters. One’s married to an out-of-work pseudo-actor-type asshole and the other has her own business, one of those catering trucks that sells lunch at construction sites. You know the ones with the shiny dimpled aluminum all over? The beautiful ones?”
“What are their names?—your sisters’—including middle names. If any.”
“Daisy and Kali. After my maternal granny and the Hindu goddess. So we just call her Goddess. As far as middle names, you’d better ask them. I don’t think they’d like me to tell.”
“The goddess of death?”
“You mean Kali?”
“Isn’t Kali the goddess of death?”
“The goddess of death, yes, the blue one, with how many arms and those thick black eyebrows they all have, all those gods and goddesses.”
“Wow.”
“She looked good on a poster in a head shop. She looked quite beautiful and blue and they didn’t know what she was the goddess of, with all her extra arms. They were new and hip, and they’d renounced all concepts. They were too hip to know anything at all.”
“Your parents were flower children, maybe.”
“No maybe! We all went to the Rainbow gatherings every summer. Every July Fourth until ’93, for an orgy of pantheism and anarchy. After Goddess left home they moved to The Land—that huge commune down in Tennessee. My dad met Mom in ’68 when he was a fisherman in Alaska. She worked every summer in Anchorage.”
“Anchorage? Doing what?”
“Well. As a matter of fact she was a whore.”
“Fantastic,” was about all I could say.
“She made enough in ten weeks to live all year. I mean—back then. Before they met.”
“Ten weeks…” She had a way of making anything I could say sound stupid far in advance of my saying it.
“After they met, no, she quit the seasonal whoring, and then all she had was her memories.”
“Of course, you could be kidding me.”
That seemed to hurt her. “Why do you say that?”
Now we had one of those pauses, but it wasn’t hers, it was mine, because I hadn’t thought she could be wounded.
“…I guess because I don’t want to seem gullible.”
“Okay. Nobody does. Should I tell you what I like about you?”
“That depends.”
“I know. But I like you because you’re small. Everything about you is the right size. Your spirit, too. Everything’s portable.