The Palace of Illusions. Kim Addonizio
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closed, says our guide, simply watch your breath. She says this looking straight at me, so I have no choice.
But how are you supposed to watch your breath? My breath doesn’t look like anything. First I imagine my tongue is a road, and my breath is wind whooshing down from some black space in the back of my head, but I can’t really see the wind. All I see is a long road disappearing into the horizon. I make my teeth the mountains and put some tall trees on either side of the road, and I add a river behind the trees on one side, flowing in the same direction as the wind. I see the leaves shaking, and some of them coming free to land on the road, and then a car comes by and runs over the leaves. I see a dragon kite with a long green tail. I see the river flowing into an ocean, and waves scrunching up into white foam, then one big wave carrying all the dead kings and queens of England and Wales and Scotland and France and Spain, smashing them on the shore, and there’s a sand castle on the shore that also gets wiped out. The towers turn to wet stumps and the moat fills with salt water. Soon there’s nothing, and then some man’s big shoe print appears. Thinking about the ocean makes me have to pee, and I wonder if I’m allowed. Amber is sitting on the cushion next to me. I wonder if I can get away with whispering to her and asking if we can go. Probably not.
The room is warming up from all these bodies breathing.
Inside my head I see the space heater glowing in the bedroom Bethany and I used to share. I remember a night I was lying awake in the dark, listening to the little fan in the heater. This was right before she got sick, before we knew how bad it was all going to be. I watched car lights crawling through the window, along the carpet between our beds and up the wall, sliding across our dressers. Bethany was asleep in a pocket of shadow. Her feet stuck out of the covers on the side of the bed. Her feet were all I could really see of her, when a car came by and the beams went over them like clear water, and I was kind of hypnotized by how they looked, small and perfect, like an angel’s feet might look, or a fairy princess’s—she’d been running around all day in a green tutu and a pair of pink and purple wings. I imagined her falling off some glittery cloud to land in our bedroom, her long hair fanned out around her face. Then she sighed and shifted, rolled over, maybe, and I couldn’t see even her feet anymore. I knew she was there, though, right beyond the arc of the car lights. That’s what I see now. Our old room and everything that belonged there, Bethany and me and our dressers and the lights of other people going back to their houses at night. I watch my breath fill the room, and I hold my sister inside it as long as I possibly can.
It would end in disaster, everyone said, and everyone was right, but everyone was on the outside of the situation and therefore did not know everything. She was on the inside, living with a man and in love with another woman, loving the man but not being sure anymore she should live with him, loving the extravagant Italian meals he cooked and the way he stood frowning when he painted in the corner of their living room that served as his studio, loving his longish black hair on the nape of his neck. But she also loved the longer black hair of the other woman, and how the other woman would kiss her and then pull back and look at her intently and then kiss her again, laughing; the other woman’s mouth was softer than the mouth of the man she lived with, and she could not stop thinking about kissing her.
The man she lived with knew that she cared for and admired the other woman, who was older; he admired the other woman as well. She was a well-known artist represented by a prestigious gallery. So far, he had been in only a couple of inconsequential group shows, but the other woman assured him that his work would be appreciated in time. He loved his girlfriend, whom he called his partner. The other woman sometimes stayed over when they all had drunk too much, sleeping in their king-sized bed with them, and though nothing had happened between any of them (though he wasn’t positive about what, exactly, had or hadn’t happened on the days the two women went off alone to spend time together), he enjoyed the aura of sexual possibility. He felt as though he had two beautiful women, and when the other woman was around he felt sexier than he did with his partner, whom he had lived with for nearly six years now.
The other woman had not been with anyone for a long time, and longed for a man to be her partner. Instead, this lovely, sensual younger woman had appeared in her life to confuse and exhilarate her. Every day she listed to herself the reasons why she should not be drawn more closely into this relationship with a young couple, but in the end those reasons did not seem very important when weighed against her own loneliness. She liked the man very much; he was generous and witty, and he had promise as an artist. She was drawn to him sexually, but the younger woman had declared that she was far too jealous to share the man she lived with. The other woman thought this was wise, because things would likely fall apart very quickly if the three of them were to start up anything in bed. She thought it would be wisest not to sleep in their bed at all, but she lacked the willpower to carry through on this insight. It felt too good to lie between them, or on the side next to the wall, to occasionally feel one or the other’s arms around her, to wake to the man making coffee and asking if anyone wanted toast, and if so, cream cheese, butter and jam, or just butter?
The life the young woman was living with her partner, that had once been so satisfying, had now begun to seem hollow and dull unless the other woman was around. Yet she also felt as though she was betraying her partner every time she felt this, and thought that if the other woman were not around, they might eventually return to their former domestic ease and intimacy. She tried not to call the other woman, but still she thought of her all the time, and in the end would invite her over, and feel immediately as though life was interesting again. The three of them played cards, or watched movies; they cooked meals together, or he cooked for the women while they cuddled in bed, reading to each other. On weekends, they all sometimes drove upstate for an afternoon to visit antique stores and farmer’s markets. At parties they sprawled comfortably together on their hosts’ couches while everyone speculated about what was going on between them. The other woman was having an affair with the man, or had become a lesbian; after years of painting men, she was now exhibiting female nudes, several of which clearly resembled the younger woman.
But the other woman had not become a lesbian and was not having an affair with anyone. It was true that the younger woman had modeled for her. But she had only kissed the younger woman, less than a handful of times. She thought she might really like the younger woman as a friend, and not a lover, but then again, life was mysterious; maybe, now that men did not seem as interested as they used to be, it was time to experiment, to explore another aspect of herself. How could she do this with the younger woman, though, without feeling as though she were betraying the friendship of the man? Even if he didn’t mind—and she wasn’t sure whether he would mind—she would make herself too vulnerable to the woman. Sex always made her vulnerable, and it would not be wise to give her heart to someone who also, clearly, lived with another person, slept with him every night and sorted through the bills with him and discussed who would use the car that day and who would take the train. No, it was impossible to enter into any kind of sexual affair, and she grew jealous that the younger woman had someone, while she had no one, only this halfway and increasingly unsatisfying relationship.
The man could not figure out how to make his partner happy. He would come home from work and find her crying, or in bed in the middle of the day. Lately, she didn’t want to leave the house, and he often ended up having to do the grocery shopping and other errands. He was glad that she had the other woman as a friend to talk to. She called and texted the other woman every day. Whenever she talked to the other woman, her voice grew light, and happy, and he felt this was a good sign, and that soon she would shake off whatever was bothering her.
Then the other woman had a show in England and went away for several weeks. The man’s partner grew more and more withdrawn, and often seemed angry at him. She was never in the mood to make love. He worried now that she would fall into the kind of terrible depression she had suffered around the time they had first met, when he had been married, when the woman who was now his partner had been the other woman. What a mess that had been. Disaster, in the end. Eventually that time had begun to feel like the distant past, as though those miserable, confusing events had happened to other people. All that was over, finished.
Although