Under my head till morning, but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh—
Viv, for a moment I wanted to take her candle and break it in half, to throw the pieces into the fireplace and melt her soul into nothing. I wanted to see her writhing at my feet, begging me to let her live.
But all I did was to throw that poem in her face, and I left.
I’ve been wandering around the streets of New York all day. I can’t keep her savage beauty out of my mind. I wish my soul was heavier, more solid, something that could weigh itself down. I wish my soul wasn’t this feather, this ugly wisp of goose down in my pocket, lifted up and buffeted about by the wind around her flame. I feel like a moth.
Your Elaine
Rina put the book down.
To be able to set your soul afire, she thought, to be able to draw men and women to you at your will, to be brilliant, fearless of consequences, what would she not give to live a life like that?
Millay chose to light her candle at both ends, and lived an incandescent life. When her candle ran out, she died sick, addicted, and much too young. But each day of her life she could decide, “Am I going to be brilliant today?”
Rina imagined her ice cube in the dark, cold cocoon of the freezer. Stay calm, she thought. Block it out. This is your life. This bit of almost-death.
Rina turned out the light.
? ? ?
When Rina’s soul finally materialized, the nurse in charge of watching the afterbirth almost missed it. All of a sudden, there, in the stainless steel pan, was an ice cube, the sort you would find clinking around in glasses at cocktail parties. A pool of water was already forming around it. The edges of the ice cube were becoming rounded, indistinct.
An emergency refrigeration unit was rushed in, and the ice cube was packed away.
“I’m sorry,” ?the doctor said to Rina’s mother, who looked into the serene face of her baby daughter. No matter how careful they were, how long could they keep the ice cube from melting? It wasn’t as if they could just keep it in a freezer somewhere and forget about it. The soul had to be pretty close to the body; otherwise the body would die.
Nobody in the room said anything. The air around the baby was awkward, still, silent. Words froze in their throats.
? ? ?
Rina worked in a large building downtown, next to the piers and docked yachts she had never been on. On each floor, there were offices with windows around the sides, the ones overlooking the harbor being bigger and better furnished than the others.
In the middle of the floor were the cubicles, one of which was Rina’s. Next to her were two printers. The hum of the printers was a bit like the hum of refrigerators. Lots of people passed by her cubicle on the way to pick up their printouts. Sometimes they stopped, thinking they would say hello to the quiet girl sitting there, with her pale skin and ice-blonde hair, and always a sweater around her shoulders. Nobody knew what color her eyes were because she did not look up from her desk.
But there was a chill in the air around her, a fragile silence that did not want to be broken. Even though they saw her every day, most people did not know Rina’s name. After a while, it became too embarrassing to ask. While the chattering life of the office ebbed and flowed around her, people left her alone.
Under Rina’s desk was a small freezer that the firm had installed just for her. Each morning Rina would rush into her cubicle, unzip her insulated lunch bag, and from her thermos stuffed with ice cubes, she would carefully pull out the sandwich bag holding her one special ice cube and put it into the freezer. She would sigh, and sit in her chair, and wait for her heart to slow down.
The job of the people in the smaller offices away from the harbor was to look up, on their computers, the answers to questions asked by people in the offices facing the harbor. Rina’s job was to take those answers and use the right fonts to squeeze them into the right places on the right pieces of paper to be sent back to the people in the harbor offices. Sometimes the people in the smaller offices were too busy, and they would dictate their answers onto cassette tapes. Rina would then type up the answers.
Rina ate her lunch at her cubicle. Even though one could go some distance away from one’s soul for short periods of time without getting sick, Rina liked to be as close to the freezer as possible. When she had to be away sometimes to deliver an envelope to some office on another floor, she had visions of sudden power failures. Out of breath, she would then hurry through the halls to get back to the safety of her freezer.
Rina tried not to think that life was unfair to her. Had she been born before the invention of the Frigidaire she would not have survived. She didn’t want to be ungrateful. But sometimes it was difficult.
After work, instead of going dancing with the other girls or getting ready for a date, she spent her nights at home, reading biographies to lose herself in other lives.
Morning Walks with T. S. Eliot: A Memoir
Between 1958 and 1963, Eliot was a member of the Commission for the Revised Psalter of the Book of Common Prayer. He was rather frail by this time, and avoided tapping into his tin of coffee altogether.
One exception was when the commission came to revise Psalm 23. Four centuries earlier, Bishop Coversdale had been rather free with his translation from the Hebrew. The correct English rendition for the central metaphor in the psalm, the commission agreed, was “the valley of deep darkness.”
At the meeting, for the first time in months, Eliot brewed a cup of his coffee. The rich, dark aroma was unforgettable to me.
Eliot took a sip of his coffee, and then, in that same mesmerizing voice he used to read ?The Waste Land, he recited the traditional version that had infused itself into the blood of every Englishman: “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil.”
The vote was unanimous to keep Coversdale’s version, embellished though it might have been.
I think it always surprised people how deep was Eliot’s devotion to tradition, to the Anglican Church, and also how thoroughly his soul had been imbibed by the English.
I believe that was the last time Eliot tasted his soul, and often since then I have wished that I could again smell that aroma: bitter, burned, and restrained. It was not only the spirit of a true Englishman, but also that of the genius of poetry.
? ? ?
To measure out a life with coffee spoons, Rina thought, must have seemed dreadful sometimes. Perhaps that was why Eliot had no sense of humor.
But a soul in a coffee tin was also lovely in its own way. It enlivened the air around him, made everyone who heard his voice alert, awake, open and receptive to the mysteries of his difficult, dense verse. Eliot could not have written, and the world would have understood, Four Quartets without the scent of Eliot’s soul, the edge it gave to every word, the sharp tang of having drunk something deeply significant.
I would love to have the mermaids sing to me, Rina thought. Was that what Eliot dreamed of after drinking his coffee before sleep?
Instead of mermaids, she dreamed of glaciers that night. Miles and miles of ice that would take a hundred years to melt. Though there was no life in sight, Rina smiled in her sleep. It was her life.
? ? ?
On the first day the new man showed up at work, Rina could tell that he was not going to be in his office for long.