Lee Upton
/2010
THE BEAUTIFUL THING
“they’re guided / by the light of that beautiful thing,”
BY lEE UPTON - FROM ROANOKE REVIEW, 2010
current work
Night Walkers
“Night Walkers” first appeared in Visitations: Stories, Yellow Shoe Fiction Series, LSU Press, 2017.
The first thing I noticed about my much-married mother-in-law: she wore jewelry the way generals wear medals—as evidence of successful campaigns where her own blood wasn’t shed. And she smoked. More than once I got into coughing fits because of the trapped fumes coming off her sweater, whereupon she told me—absurdly, without irony—that my problem was undiagnosed chronic lung disease.
My mother-in-law possessed an enviable certainty, even though the lights in her eyes were often changing in a way that in anyone else would reveal vulnerability. The thing was, I liked her pretty much instantly, and was grateful for the way she came to believe in me. Upon hearing about my projected divorce from her son, her words proved to be a clear indication of our mutual incomprehension: “Be grateful you don’t have children.”
My husband used to want a child—at least he claimed to. And then he changed his mind. But the woman he left me for was pregnant with his child, and my husband didn’t disguise his excitement about that.
I’d seen pictures of the woman my husband was going to marry. Online. In the only full- length photograph I could find she looked elegant and thin and was wearing a dark fashionable sheath that would make any other woman look like a funeral director. It was impossible to imagine her pregnant. At first. Then I began picturing her as one of those women whose baby hardly makes a ripple.
After I found out the truth I lost my ability to read.
How did it happen? How could reading anything that stirred emotions at more than one level become something I avoided? Suddenly I couldn’t stomach fiction or poetry.
And who understood?
Not Beverly. She was the daughter of one of my mother-in-law’s friends and must have been recruited to help me. Perversely enough, she wanted me to join a book club.
We were the only two customers in a deli known for its shortbread, and I had the impression that she had followed me. “We’ve gone from novels to short stories,” Beverly said. “No one has the time.” She drew her jacket tight, the sleeve ends tucked into her fists. “We’re trying, you know, classical works.” She pressed her shoulders back, all the better to launch into a prepared speech. “Classic short stories. ‘Bartleby the Scrivener.’ Stuff like that. You’re probably thinking: why should people join book clubs? Can’t they read alone? Does everything require a group—a committee, a forced conversion? What is it about these book clubs? They died out, turned unfashionable, blah blah blah—and then you waited a few years and they were back.” She exhaled loudly before going on. “What do you have against book clubs? You wouldn’t be forced to read anything you don’t want to.”
“I just—I like the quiet moments I have with a book. I like my own misunderstandings of the book.”
“And we’re really together just to, you know—I don’t know. And sometimes in the deep past we used to work on puzzles.”
“Oh God no.”
“Then let’s not read.” Beverly broke her shortbread in half. “Really. Some of us don’t actually read the stories anyway. We could drink? The club’s really just social.”
“You only read short stories lately? And most of you don’t even read them? How could people not at least read a story?” I wanted to ask her: Why can’t I just be friends with you, Beverly? Why does a group have to be involved? It would be exhausting enough simply to be your friend, Beverly.
“I know,” she said, nodding her head violently. “It’s disappointing. But we wouldn’t entirely ruin reading for you given that some of us only pretend to read the stories. My stepfather—wait till you meet him. When we used to read novels he pretended to get upset about the death of Madame Bovary. Like he didn’t know it was coming. He taught high school French for twenty-five years. And the Champlain twins, they’re shameless. Well, actually, my stepfather’s shameless. He had them believing that the novel contains a chapter about the slow death of a horse. But like I said, we’re down to short stories. We’re maybe the world’s laziest book club.”
“You want me to join a book club whose members hate reading?”
Beverly was smiling with what appeared to be genuine affection. “So that’s why you won’t join! You’re afraid it will make you feel awkward. It won’t. You’ll feel superior. It gives us a lot of pleasure to pretend we know what we’re talking about when we obviously don’t. And we walk at night. We’re mentally lazy but not physically lazy—not much. It’s a mobile book club. We don’t just sit around in somebody’s living room and chat anymore. We walk. At night. And talk. Walking. At night. In the woods.”
This took some explaining. As I understood it, one member, Enid, who was in her seventies, turned the book club into a walking club. After her husband died she began roaming at night, obsessively. When Beverly couldn’t convince Enid to stay home, or at least to walk during the day, Beverly recruited escorts.
I said I would have to think about it—and then, without actually thinking, I said, “All right. Okay. I’ll join.”
I guess I capitulated because of a burst of hope and a memory. When I was in middle school a group of us girls sneaked out of a pajama party in our long nightgowns and wandered at night by a stream across from the golf course. We were like the spirit of Catherine Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights—and ready to jump out of our skin, practically peeping with excitement over the romantic sight we thought we made. We never got caught, and that memory has always warmed me. I still like to imagine us girls sometimes and feel the thrill of it, how powerful we thought we were going to become, given time and the right circumstances and, for me, the right books. Then too, I thought of the story about Beverly’s friend Enid—how walking at night served some deep need of hers. And how she had found a way, eccentric as it was, to ease her sorrow. My other hope: I’d start reading again. Eventually. After all, I was joining a book club, even if the members were non-readers (which meant I didn’t have to be embarrassed about not reading). At least joining the club was a step toward reclaiming reading, which had been, after all, one of my great pleasures. And a sort of magnifying mirror, or maybe even a mirrorball running around the rim of my life.
The truth about my actual situation was simpler than I’ve been admitting. I couldn’t read anything that was remotely like literature because I couldn’t read without thinking of the woman my husband was going to marry—and her relationship to books. She was a writer. Of well- respected erotic literature. That is, of erotica considered innovative and revisionist and transgressive by academics. Academics: often the least discerning and most conventional of readers. Yes, her books were taught in English classes. To students. Out of self-disgust I tried reading one of her slim, deckle-edged, beautifully produced books. The foreword was by somebody whose name I recognized; his essays were in an anthology in one of my literary theory classes in college—a guy who looked like a pimply great-nephew of Harold Bloom. Though the book was written in English it sounded translated from some stiff archaic language spoken only by far-flung Greenlanders isolated on an icy spit of volcanic ash. Anyway, I suffered my way into the book until I couldn’t read any more of it, or anything else called literature. To top it off, this woman my husband was intent on marrying after the divorce was finalized, this woman was a librarian. Not just any sort. She worked, if you call it that, at a private library that was slowly being opened to the public through the graces of a foundation supposedly dedicated to preservation. Preservation of its own endowment through manipulation of the tax code. So this woman, this author of erotic literature—“literature” which had as much in common with real literature as “flight literature”—spent her days in a warren of beautiful books. She not only had my husband, she had my preferred life. Except I wouldn’t be writing erotic literature. Or at any rate, what I wrote wouldn’t be both delicate and raw in that bewildering way, with footnotes.
So books repelled me. Which was horrible. Once an English major, always an English major: that is, a person consumed by optimism who holds out hope that a solitary pursuit might someday accrue a public function—and so this person could be left alone to read. And now I couldn’t. I wanted to be comforted by books again. Or absorbed by them again. Or challenged by them again. I did not want to feel rage every time I looked at a book. And so the fact that members of Beverly’s club didn’t actually read filled me with contradictory emotions, including relief. Plus, I could hardly stand being alone anymore.
So began my membership.
There were seven of us: Beverly; her stepfather Simon; Jorge, recently divorced and wildly good-looking and attractively unaware of how attractive he was; the Champlain twins—brutal little women who seemed angry I was joining them; and Enid, the widow whose grief compelled her to walk at night.
We met behind Enid’s house, which was located in the development where I was temporarily living, and on that first night I kept turning back to search for my apartment. I’d left on two overhead lights to make the place seem less bleak when I returned.
The Champlain twins, in yoga pants and thick sneakers, clung to Enid, one on each side. It looked like tall, thin Enid was being kidnapped by a pair of elementary school cheerleaders. Before long the twins were panting as Enid, more energetic than I had expected, dragged them onward. Within minutes, Simon relieved the twins, took Enid’s arm, and managed to get her to slow her pace.
Before a half-hour was up I decided it was my turn to help Enid. I guided her on a trail lined by birches, our flashlights trained on the ground. I could smell the creek—a brisk scent of unripe grapes mixed with a faint fishiness.
That first night and almost every meeting afterwards no one talked about books except for Beverly’s stepfather and the twins. I could see why the twins resented me. Simon was their sole focus, and at first they must have imagined that I might feel the way they did about him. If Enid was walking off her grief, I suppose I was walking off other emotions, and the twins’ chatter with Simon was almost comforting but nothing I wanted in on.
“I thought we were doing ‘The Lottery,’” Simon was saying in a pedantic tone I knew instantly not to trust. “It seems to be about small town mores and the weight of the individual conscience.”
“So they killed a woman.”
“It’s kind of like a murder mystery, isn’t it?” The twins sounded exactly alike. Only the direction of their voices indicated that two people spoke.
“Many cultures engage in ritual sacrifice,” Simon said. “I believe that we do it now—to celebrities. We watch them age and destroy them. Elizabeth Taylor was hunted down like a prize boar.”
I turned to look back at the twins. In the moonlight their flesh was undershot with a blue-green wash. They couldn’t have been older than twenty-six or so, but something about them made me think of bile-filled elderly aunts in a play Tennessee Williams wouldn’t have had the heart to impose on an audience.
“We loved her, didn’t we?” one twin said to the other.
“God, yes. We watched Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf it must have been twenty times. She looked like hell. Absolute hell. Double-chinned, ratty-haired. Like an old hobo. Why don’t we read Virginia Woolf?”
“There’s an idea,” Simon said. “But I thought we were reading short stories, although maybe we could read The Turn of the Screw pretty soon. It’s practically a short story. A novella, anyway.”
“What about The Old Man and the Sea, Simon—wouldn’t you enjoy that? The fish dies. The sharks strip the fish. It’s all coming back. From ninth grade.”
“It’s about the courage to face reality,” Simon said. “And about performing to the best of your ability.”
“Shoot me now. Weren’t we talking about The Turn of the Screw? It’s shorter, maybe?”
Soon, a pattern was established. Although formerly Jorge had spent part of each night walking beside Enid, I volunteered to replace him. My instincts told me that Beverly thought I would be good company for Enid, although Enid didn’t talk, and so I couldn’t imagine how I could be good company for her. Gradually I figured out why Beverly wanted me to join. She was being kind to me, yes. But she was attracted to Jorge, and Simon was preoccupied with the twins, and if Beverly was going to have more time with Jorge someone else had to help Enid. By the third meeting I was Enid’s designated companion—which I liked. I also liked how each night offered pockets of warm air blown apart by cool gusts. I even liked the flare up of smells—skunk, principally, the closest cousin of gasoline fumes. There were always intriguing sounds around us—cracklings and rustlings made by what I assumed to be shy, invisible woodland creatures. And as for Beverly and Jorge—they were the young lovers who lit our way, for they started heading out ahead of us with their flashlights, farther ahead each night. And Simon began to make me laugh with his mock-pedantic tone, no more self-aware of his effect on the twins than if he’d been Bottom the Weaver.
On the fifth night of walking, Simon asked the twins, “Have you two read Wuthering Heights? It’s the story of a woman in love with a horse.”
I had hoped Wuthering Heights wouldn’t be brought up by Simon or the twins. Given that virtually every other classic novel came up—including Adam Bede—I shouldn’t have been surprised.
Unfortunately, one twin responded. “That’s Emily Brontë, right? Wuthering Heights? You know, you could make a fortune from an exercise program for people who are getting flabby, you know? Withering Heinies.”
Simon didn’t laugh, but I did—and felt kind of cheap for laughing. I first discovered Wuthering Heights at twelve, and my fate was set. Reading didn’t become an obsession for me until then. The passions, the sinister attachments, the sheer weirdness of that novel made actual life look small and predictable. I feared that nothing much would ever happen to me and that no one would love me with the sort of love that could ever be called wild. A love so fierce that it practically blasted your skin off, a love that was wuthering. For a while I actually wanted to call myself Catherine. If I couldn’t share Catherine’s temperament I could share her name.
The next meeting, even before the walk started, something must have happened between the twins. They were fuming. Simon, however, was oblivious and chattering on about James Joyce’s first horse.
Within a half hour one of the twins disappeared. The other twin beamed her flashlight into the trees as if expecting to see her sister perched on the branches. We called and waited. No answering voice, no signaling beam. The twin with us (the twins had names, but I hadn’t learned to tell them apart) ran back in the direction we had come. The rest of us followed, sweeping our flashlights through the shrubs. I was cynical and wondered if the disappearance of the twin was a ploy to capture Simon’s attention.
When the path split I walked alone toward the creek. The ground sank under my feet and my shoes began filling with water. Ahead of me something glimmered. I stopped, squinting.
Moonlight reflected off the water onto a crouched figure.
I couldn’t see anything clearly for long moments, as if I was stupefied, and then I made out what was ahead of me in the creek: a frog.
An immense frog.
The giant black eyes blinked and filmed over. The skin glimmered as if polished.
I might as well have been slapped across the face. The impact was that strong, that physical. The frog was a woman. And also a frog. A frog that was more of a frog than a woman. Or more of a woman than a frog. A frog woman/woman frog. With powerful haunches and immense eyes. Or was it two frogs? I closed my eyes and then looked again and saw one frog body—with long forelegs. I couldn’t get away fast enough and ran to find the others.
When I rejoined the group the lost twin was with her sister again, their arms around one another. Everything around me was strangely unreal—calm, normal, and I was speechless.
Everyone needs, at least once in life, a vision, and this was mine.
In trying to describe my reactions I find myself almost speechless again. I was stunned and overwhelmed. I was proud of the vision and terrified at the same time, for I’d broken through some membrane into another world. I was gratified by the vision and undone by it. My fingers tingled as if I’d touched an electric current.
It was Enid who sensed something was wrong. She broke her silence to tell me, “It just takes time.” She knew about my situation. Nevertheless, my first thought was that she was talking about her own grief.
We were nearly at Enid’s house when I heard the whispers. Behind me. Whispers and half-laughs. More whispers.
The twin who was speaking to her sister and Simon kept saying, “I couldn’t look away. It was the worst thing I’ve ever witnessed. I just couldn’t stop staring.”
“Was there a horse?”
I began to understand, in bits and pieces. Right there off the trail. In the woods. In the middle of the creek. For an art class probably.
Pornography. The private school over the ridge. Kids making a film.
I could hardly contain my disappointment.
Was that all I saw? Pornography? A configuration of bodies that my imagination made into a giant wide-eyed frog or one frog dividing into two?
To say I was deflated minimizes how I felt. I had been so anxious to enlarge my life that I turned the sight of a couple of bodies into a monster. With a burst of familiar rage I thought about the so-called erotic literature my husband’s girlfriend wrote and how it was watered down, spineless, less nimble pornography. Her novels were an expense of shame and a waste of experience. And then I thought a new thought. I thought about how my rival made pornography out of her life, whereas out of pornography I made frogs. Which seemed like a higher art.
Something happened later that night: I could read. I knew I could read because I wanted to read. In fact, I downloaded Wuthering Heights on my neglected Kindle as soon as I got back inside my apartment. Once again I longed to encounter the ghost of Catherine Earnshaw beating at the window, beating her cold frantic hands against the glass.
But when Catherine says “I am Heathcliff!” I didn’t respond the way I had whenever I reread the book in the past. No, this time I thought, “No. No, you’re not. And never will you be. You are being ridiculous, Cathy.” It occurred to me that I had never been remotely like Catherine Earnshaw. No, it was my husband, my romantic, obsessive soon-to-be former husband, who was Catherine Earnshaw.
The part of the novel that wasn’t ruined for me was the ending, when the lovers’ spirits are reunited to wander through the dark. I too knew the appeal of night walking and thought—and still think—that of all visions of eternity it’s one of the better ones.
Not long afterwards, our night walking ended. It was too cold to continue. Let’s not give Enid pneumonia, everyone said.
Simon took on contracting work that kept him busy and pretty much exhausted, especially given that the twins turned up at his place on too many nights. Beverly and Jorge began seeing one another without needing the club as an excuse. And Enid moved in with her oldest niece and turned to shopping obsessively online. The club would start up again, everyone promised, once spring returned and we could walk in the woods without freezing.
In mid-October a greeting card arrived from my mother-in-law: a turkey caught inside a pumpkin, doing double duty for two holidays.
I was tempted to tell my mother-in-law everything, except about my vision of the frog. Nor was I going to tell her about how I had stopped reading literature for a while. She might humor me about the frog, but she would never understand why I’d let the woman her son was going to marry get in the way of anything that gave me pleasure. I imagined, with some satisfaction, that if she read her future daughter-in-law’s erotica she’d be tempted to correct it.
When I got around to calling my soon-to-be-ex-mother-in-law I didn’t know if I was ready to explain how anything was going for me. Then I didn’t have to.
As soon as she heard my voice she said, “You sound elated. Getting divorced, I tell you, especially when all the loose ends are taken care of, is the best thing ever. Those were the happiest times of my life.”
After we talked I wondered what it would be like if, when reconvened, the club became more like a genuine book club. Where people agreed to read at least one book. Some of us would read the book. And some of us would pretend to read the book. And some of us would only read our way through the first half of the book. And some of us would skip right to the ending.
The thing is: At least I made friends. Plus, I’d had a vision.
And, after all, as I have to admit, books are wonderful, but probably books aren’t what any book club is about.
a note from the author
“The Beautiful Thing” has lived other lives since it first appeared in The Roanoke Review and reappeared under another title (“Even If”) in my collection Bottle the Bottles the Bottles the Bottles. A truncated version of the poem, retitled as “The Beautiful,” is lettered on the door of the Easton Public Market in the town where I live in Pennsylvania. Recorded in English and in Spanish and French translations, the poem was used for a dance created by my colleague, the choreographer and writer Carrie Rohman, in the Rivers Merge Dance Festival. Most recently, the poem became part of a song cycle on the recording Autumn Winds by the gifted composer Kirk O’Riordan. I feel more gratitude than I can express to those who’ve read the poem and cared for it, and to the editors of The Roanoke Review who first chose the poem for publication.
The poem was written quickly, unlike so much of my work, and at a time when I felt I needed self-forgiveness. I felt, too, that I couldn’t be alone in that need.
“Night Walkers,” in spirit, is much different from “The Beautiful Thing,” although aspects of forgiveness and redemption appear in the story. In some ways, “Night Walkers” is a love song to books, book clubs, and friendship. Like a number of other stories in the collection in which it appears, Visitations, the story centers around the act of reading or, in this case, a character’s temporary withdrawal from reading. It was gratifying to pull several characters together and to give an about-to-be-ex-mother-in-law a few words of unlikely wisdom. Initially, I was considering another title for the story—"The World’s Laziest Book Club”—until I realized that the members weren’t lazy at all. They were all working hard to get their needs met. Plus, it was such undeniable fun to visualize giant frogs.
Lee Upton is the author of eleven books, including the new novella The Guide to the Flying Island. She has written five books of poetry, most recently Undid in the Land of Undone, and four books of literary criticism. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the National Poetry Series Award, and awards from the Poetry Society of America. Her poetry and short stories appear widely. She is a professor of English and the writer-in-residence at Lafayette College.
