Drinker of Ink

by Shannon Castleton

I want to skip to the day I can write actual books and bake in New York and help care for Maman when she is tired or ill or aching. By then, a grown man might watch from a distance, maybe sitting on the steps of the Met, as I tie my hair, miraculously smooth, in a knot. He might approach me and ask, “What’s your name?” in English or French or possibly in Russian. We could wander the museum and talk about paintings, artists and books, sculpture and pastry, economies and planets and after-lifes. Later, we could lie side by side on a Central Park lawn and make up our own constellations. He’d touch his fingers to my chin before brushing them down my neck, the whole time watching my face as if even the stars weren’t so luminous. Leaning toward my lips, he’d hover a minute before kissing me like he invented it.

I keep feeling that if I were in New York, where my life is, nothing could change or ever go wrong, because I’d be aware of everything and everyone I love, and you can only be surprised to the same degree as your ignorance.

Peter Breznik did his almost-smile right at me, no doubt because I had once again distinguished myself as the primmest of all know-it-alls in a class. I never mean to do it. I don’t even know that many things—it’s just that the things I say are sometimes not the things other people have thought to say yet.

I leaned down to extract a pen from my backpack, because honestly, I think a spell is attached to his eyes—if you look for too long, you’ll start unbuttoning things in slow motion.

He does have a somewhat mature, though faint, “V” of lines that span from the outer corners of his eyes to his temples when he smiles, which he was doing right then. It was making me want to live my life with the sole purpose of seeing him smile, especially first thing in the morning, lying beside him, our three children asleep in bright-curtained rooms, the sharp peaks of snow-capped mountains outside our window.

Along the walkway to the steps, leaves shook in the breeze. I wrapped my arms around myself thinking, That’s evolutionary grace—that human beings have two arms long enough to hug themselves. But even as I thought the words, I knew that a person’s own arms aren’t enough. A body wants another person’s arms to hold it. It does not long to hold as badly as it longs to be held. Here, it wants another body to say, rest here a while.

“But in the meantime,” Peter resumed his more teacherly volume, “I like your poem title, Vivienne.” I glanced at the poem he had placed on my desk—“What Can I Blame Her for? Even My Body—”. I was trying out a fragmented title that connected to the first line of the poem—not Anna Swir-ish at all. “It makes me feel like you intend to say something.” Peter lifted his hand as if he might drop it on my poem for emphasis, but then he pulled it back and addressed the class. “Let’s examine titles today.” Ah, Peter Breznik. Sometimes you feel like the title of everything.

So much happens to and inside every human being on this planet—it’s as if we are all small infinite worlds. And how do we connect? How do we come to see each other’s constellations? Peter Breznik (many thoughts lead to him) says poems are one way to connect. I say food is another. I think every baked good and poem is a world. When you create one, you hand a person a view of the stars within you. When you eat someone’s bread or read someone’s poem, you walk the roads inside them—their memories, their joys, their sadnesses.

He sat down in his chair, leaned into his forearms over a snow-white sheet of paper set precisely in the center of his desk. He smiled. “How are you?” I could tell he was trying to be careful—like a doctor bearing both good news and bad. “Fine,” I said. I was thinking, This is such a small moment, housed in such a small space, but it will spin like a planet in my memory. Peter’s body and mine had hardly ever touched. He’d never held my hand or my waist; we’d never occupied the same material space for longer than a class period. Yet I had given him my words.

And if between the time you wrote to me and are reading this, you have pledged yourself to the debonair future medical student I watched in slow-motion lift your hair from your neck to clasp the necklace he presented you at Arugula, I would be desolate to hear it, but would wish you great happiness and many vivid flashbacks of our brief, extraordinary acquaintance. All best, etc.— Peter p.s. I’m sorry about my eyes. I don’t know that they’ve ever affected anyone in quite the way you describe. I’d close them or look away if I could live with the thought of not seeing you.

“I love that face.” Peter and I stood between his desk and his student chair. I barely heard my own voice say, “What face?” “The one you're making right now—when your lips part a little and your brow’s pinched. You look like you’re trying to see something, but it’s something in your mind—you’re thinking.” I shut my mouth, then opened it. “I was picturing a door.” His closed-lip smile spread slowly across his face, and though it is a loss not to see his teeth when he grins, his closed-lip smile is the rarer gift, I think—the soft one he saves for people he lets into the quiet. “I opened a door for you,” he said, as though he apprehended every glint of my metaphor.

The present we live in vanishes before we blink, let alone write it down in ink. I’m not sure that I want to remember that sentence, and not solely because it rhymes.

Once he had run out of breath for more sentences, he lowered himself to his kitchen floor, leaned his back on the refrigerator door, laughing until tears splotched his cheeks. Lifting his head, he met my eyes. “Come here!” He did not even pull the phone away from his face as he reached out one of his Michelangelo-sculpted arms to me. “No, no,” he continued in English, drawing me into his conversation. “Not you, Tilen—God knows you won’t come here. Although you should humble yourself for Hana and David, and”—he raised my fingers to his lips when I sat down beside him—“so that you could meet this girl.” He set our two hands together on my knee, his eyes holding mine, happy crescent moons of light in them. “This woman I met . . . She’s nothing short of . . . brilliant.” His whole face lifted with a smile. A wide, I-won-the-Pulitzer kind of smile. Kindled, I think, by . . . me. This girl . . . This woman he met.

I keep thinking about the words we don’t say, but the feelings we communicate anyway, through things. Longing, hope, heartache, love. Through stories, baked goods, sweatshirts, poetry.

“You’d do this,” he said, trying to angle his face to where my eyes were staring. “You’d stand here in front of me, essentially holding a map to happiness in your hands and shred it like you’d never want to know the way back.” He braced when I burst out in mad laughter. “There are no metaphors here, Peter. It’s just me. This is who I am. I thought I was direct, as an adult would be—I never said I’d go with you. I never said I’d be yours if you left. There are things I can’t do, places I won’t go. Not now, maybe not ever. This is who wrote a response to you in her journal. This is who you wrote back. This is who you kissed and walked with and wrote poems to and convinced to love you without even trying.” His blue eyes filled with tears. I peered down at my Keds, my kid shoes. I thought, I just told him I love him.

“I think there are words—” I couldn’t decide how to rationally say, Vivienne, I need to tell you I love you. I want you. I have never not loved or wanted you. I thought I would give you what you thought was best for you, but it was not what was best. I am best for you. We are best together. Every day since we met, I have seen you in my mind in innumerable sweet ways—in my arms, beneath my lips, your fingers in my hair, your palms on my wounds, your belly swollen— “There are always words.” She twisted the ring on her finger, her shoulders tensing almost to her ears.

“Could you tell me before I go—” I looked at her chin, then her hands, remembering how ink would be splotched there. Her skin was a scrubbed-blank page. Except for a dusting of flour above one eyebrow that I would have loved very much to kiss away. “Are you still writing?” I asked. Pulling her arm from my grasp, she reached into the refrigerated case and ran a finger along a few wrapped items before tapping a cookie and picking it up. She set it in my hand without touching my skin. “Not writing”—an oven-timer was buzzing—“but I perfected the chocolate chip cookie.” She took another step away from me. “Among taking care of some other things.” I peered down at the cookie in my hand as though it were a gift of the most fragile blossoms.

I know—to write is to allow pain and love and memory and time to exist outside yourself. You breathe when the words are out.

How will she greet me—wearing her ladybug-printed apron? (Here, I could say, I can help you untie that.) Would she touch my arm, or my shirt over my heart again, as she flushed to the tip of her nose? Would she allow me to cut to the core of my questions—Are you with someone else now? And if the answer were no, could we swing our tired hands together as we made our way home? To her home in a literal sense, but also to the home I feel when we are together—the home she has written about in her journal. The home I can’t un-imagine us making.

I touched my free hand to the door. “We could still talk if you wanted. I don’t have to stay for long. I could heat up your soup, salt some oil for the bread.” I felt the tension of her hand on the other side of the door. I braved saying exactly what I wished for— “Let me take care of you.”

I slipped off my shoes. I slid under her covers and pulled her, as I had imagined, to my chest. “You’re warm,” she sighed, turning into me, the tip of her nose grazing my neck. I had wondered for years—if any miracle might be wrought to grant me such a moment—exactly what touching her body again might feel like. Like hang-gliding from Everest? Like lying strapped to a torpedo as the fuse lit? It felt like returning home. Not that I had ever before experienced that feeling. Not that I have called any place I lived home. It was the first time I had felt it. Weightless and grounding, a warmth in my chest. Purpose, relief, and stillness.

She rolled away to step out of her bed as I fought an ache to pull her back in, wishing for things she could not be prepared for, like combing my fingers through a tousled shock of her hair, or nuzzling my nose to her cheek. Or pressing my lips to her belly until she whispered my name. I was sleep-drunk and love-struck and hungry. My veins were a flickering circuit board.