The Last Romantics

by Tara Conklin

Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself. —Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being Wait, they don’t love you like I love you. —Karen O, Yeah Yeah Yeahs

She noticed the man, but she was not afraid, not at first. This was year three of the Pause. Renee was too busy to be afraid. Track practice, homework, Joe’s baseball, cooking dinners, running baths, washing dishes and clothes. Any childhood fears had been so fully realized—darkness, death, solitude—that she saw them now almost as comforts. Obstacles she had surmounted. Fears converted to routine.

Lights blazed in the windows of every house she passed. Each one its own private universe.

Why didn’t people understand the responsibility that came with being the subject of someone’s love? It made her so angry.

Standing so close to this wall of glass induced in me a sense of vertigo, as though the trees and lights and people moving sludgily along the park path were all traveling toward me, or me toward them.

She smiled. “Can’t wait for the poem. Just watch for Kyle. He’ll start the speeches.” She winked. “Oh, and, Fiona,” she said, pulling me and Noni closer to her. “I already told your mom, but I’ll have my hairdresser do you both for the wedding.” Her eyes rested briefly on my hair—curly, loose, still wet from the shower. “That way we can all be on the same page. Okay?” Noni looked at me with wide eyes and shook her head the slightest bit. No, Fiona, do not make a fuss, not tonight. “Sure, Sandrine,” I said, smiling brightly. “Whatever you want.” Flutter, flounce, ripple, bony, toothy, tart, brittle.

The entire episode lasted no longer than five minutes, but it changed the tenor of the room. The party now felt unsettled, on edge, as though the chanting had contained a message that everyone but Joe had understood.

Some days continue to exist year after year, decade after decade, as though they are happening inside you concurrent with the present. A persistent, simultaneous life. One that you consider and wish more than anything that you could change.

What I wanted to say to this man was that the greatest works of poetry, what make each of us a poet, are the stories we tell about ourselves. We create them out of family and blood and friends and love and hate and what we’ve read and watched and witnessed. Longing and regret, illness, broken bones, broken hearts, achievements, money won and lost, palm readings and visions. We tell these stories until we believe them, we believe in ourselves, and that is the most powerful thing of all.

Luna reached across and grabbed Joe’s hand and the look on her face was not flirtatious but determined. “I’m growing plants on my windowsill,” she said. “Small things. Herbs. Three tomatoes, and they are beauties.”

Silence from Fiona. Joe knew that at this moment his sister was twisting a curl around an index finger. When she was a kid, the hair twist happened in any circumstance of stress or discomfort. Scary movie, fight between Caroline and Noni, studying for a math test. The memories washed over him all at once, a composite picture that made his chest contract. But Fiona was not a kid anymore.

JOE AND LUNA drive south, following the coast until they reach a new beach, a narrow strip of South Florida sand that isn’t packed with tourists, where no radios ricochet noise, no volleyballs arc skyward. It is high tide, and Luna bends to retrieve a shell, a slice of small white conch that forms a ring. She slips it onto her finger. “Joe, look!” she says, and puts out her hand for him to see. With the solemnity of a prince, he bends and kisses it. At the far end, they scramble over an outcrop of tall, slippery rock. Here they are alone on the sand. The sun beats down, and Joe builds a tent of sorts from their two towels and a battered fishing pole he finds on the ragged tide line. In the small triangle of shade, Joe traces a finger across Luna’s tan stomach. A circle. A figure eight. A heart. She lies back, and the feeling is of a creature, smooth and cool, looking for a home in her skin.

It was only then that Luna noticed the piles of clutter crowding the floor and the tabletop, the boxes stacked against the walls. Oh, she thought, so this is what he’s been hiding. She said nothing about the mess and went straight for the photos. “Who is who?” she asked. “Tell me.”

She rode the elevator down to Collins Avenue, and now, at last, she saw the first sun, the light rising with each passing moment, washing the street and buildings around her with pinks and yellows. Luna marveled at the beauty available each and every day with a simple dawn.

A grain of doubt and regret, horror and sadness, lodged then deep within her, an oyster’s piece of grit, and it would remain with Luna for the rest of her life. Year after year it would grow layered, polished, and it would with time become something beautiful—a testament to Joe, a cautious tenderness that Luna would apply to her future choices. But in this moment, remembering the office full of talking women and the detectives’ cold eyes, Luna experienced these feelings only as sorrow, as the falling away of Joe’s life and of her own.

Since learning of Joe’s death, Caroline had been able to do this: disappear into pockets of concentration like a gopher dropping down into its comfortable hole. She had coasted through the last few days, distracted from the reality of a Joe-less world with the sudden adrenaline of crisis planning: contacting family, contacting friends, the funeral, the memorial service.

Renee always thought of her sisters as they’d been during the Pause: so little, so in need of care. Caroline with her nightmares, Fiona walling herself away in her own fantasy world with her books and notepads, her lists of funny words. All that time Renee had worried that she was failing them, that some irreparable damage was being wrought. But her sisters had become women, and their strength was all around her. Renee could lean against them, and now, at last, she did.

The flame-haired woman in the front row had shifted from her partner. She was leaning forward, her body pulled away from his, the two like magnetic opposites. Abruptly he stood and stretched his arms above his head. I heard the muffled crack of a joint, one vertebra colliding against its mate. Why had they fought? I wondered. They shouldn’t argue now. Now is when they should come together.

Since moving to Hamden two and a half years ago, Caroline had overseen a kitchen remodel, refinished the wood floors, and replaced the downstairs shower stall with a full bath. The front picture window was framed with curtains that Caroline had sewn herself from a colorful print of hummingbirds and fat red dahlias. The couch was low and long, covered in turquoise velvet, bought for a song at an estate sale. The Skinner-Duffys were not rich, but Caroline knew how to spend their money well.

I began to write again, not as a poet or a woman but as a sort of record keeper. A witness. The only thing I thought about was my brother, but putting words to paper about him was impossible. Too raw, too hurtful. And so I wrote around him. I began to record in detail the last world that existed when Joe was still alive. The last meal I’d eaten, the last book I’d read, the last pair of shoes worn, the last earrings. Soon it became a tic, almost an obsession, to document all these final occurrences. There were so many of them. Once you begin to precisely identify every action and event, every building, every tree from a particular moment in time, they become countless, they stretch on and on. And so it was with the Lasts. At first I wrote them down not as poetry—I could make nothing beautiful then—but as simple lists. Items, colors, smells, sights, speech, weather: an echo of the lists I’d kept as a child. I fixed on paper every element of the old world so that I might remember and return to it when the present world—where my brother was gone, where things happened anew for the first time, and the second, and the hundredth—became too much. I created the old world in specific detail so that I might hide there.

Louis, Caroline suspected, understood her secret. That even as she went about her maternal duties, even as she cooked and joked and brushed her teeth, her essential self remained upstairs in that bed, underneath the down duvet, wrapped in darkness.

Now her body again seemed consumed by its own set of principles and needs, divorced completely from what she herself, Caroline Skinner-Duffy, wanted. She wanted to laugh. She wanted to feel like things mattered. She wanted her brother back.

Both Noni and Danette were smiling, talking about their dead children in an easy way that made Caroline uncomfortable. It was like talking about God, like talking about love: you needed to do it with a certain amount of reverence, in hushed tones, or on your knees. Caroline didn’t care for her mother’s breeziness. Plus, Noni was wrong.

All this earth and wood, the house rising from the mossed and molded foundations, spreading itself wide. All the small items dotting the lawn—old Lego blocks, paper fans, tennis balls, a bath towel, a wooden spoon, a ruler—that spilled from the doors and windows like a fat woman who’s discarded the wrappers of her eaten bonbons. All these things she should tidy up—the party, the party!—but instead Caroline admired each with a vicious ache. She loved this house, this yard, this rusting swing set and decaying apple core, her son’s teeth marks visible on the flesh. She loved this life, but did she love him?

My sister was asleep, propped up with pillows, her face pale and calm. Caroline sat beside the bed, her two hands holding Renee’s right, her head bowed as though dozing or praying. Noni, Lily, Beatrix, and Louis sat in chairs scattered around the room. They were all asleep, breathing lightly, legs stretched before them. And there, within arm’s reach of Renee, was a small cot and inside it the compact bundle of a baby. The sight of the small, delicate head, the shock of black hair, even darker than Renee’s, delivered to me a hot shiver that moved from my center and extended out to the tips of my fingers and toes. I loved him, immediately and completely. Almost, I imagined, like a mother. “Caroline?” I said quietly, and she lifted her head. “Fiona,” she said. “You made it!”

In poetry’s stripped-down urgency, in its openness, the space between lines, the repetition and essentialism—poets can speak in ways that transcend culture and gender and time. Films and novels remain rooted in their age, give or or take a century. But poetry? Tell me The Canterbury Tales doesn’t still make you laugh and Keats make you cry. And, my dear girl Luna, why did your mother name you what she did? You asked about the real Luna. You asked about my inspiration. All of my work, from The Love Poem to The Lasts, The Pond, Mothers and Fathers, even The Last Romantic, derived from my brother and my sisters. My first and greatest loves.

I was wrong to tell you that this is a story about the failures of love. No, it is about real love, true love. Imperfect, wretched, weak love. No fairy tales, no poetry. It is about the negotiations we undertake with ourselves in the name of love. Every day we struggle to decide what to give away and what to keep, but every day we make that calculation and we live with the results. This then is the true lesson: there is nothing romantic about love. Only the most naïve believe it will save them. Only the hardiest of us will survive it. And yet. And yet! We believe in love because we want to believe in it. Because really what else is there, amid all our glorious follies and urges and weaknesses and stumbles? The magic, the hope, the gorgeous idea of it. Because when the lights go out and we sit waiting in the dark, what do our fingers seek? Who do we reach for?