Bonsai

I met Evelyn Roden, or rather she sat near my feet, in a figure-drawing class. Evelyn drew with furious abandon, even when models took breaks. At the end of each class, drawings pinned to the wall for review, hers were totally black, the model consumed within a dense web of charcoal slashes and the paper itself covered in rips. The instructor, a middle-aged European who looked as though he had experienced war, referred to the rips in Evelyn's drawings as wounds. Rips were good; for what was art, he explained, if not pain given form. At the end of one class, the instructor handed Evelyn a ticket to a Picasso opening and told her he would be there. Because I stood next to her, and the instructor didn't want it to be too obvious that he was flirting, he turned and gave me a ticket as well.

The first time I recall seeing a man wear bell-bottoms was at the invitation-only opening of the Picasso retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. All the curators wore them. I'd read in the paper that Picasso would be at the opening, and because he was rumored to be in ill health it was thought this might be the last time anyone outside his entourage would see him alive. Evelyn had just purchased her first bonsai tree and checked it with her coat. The bonsai tree was placed on the top rack with the hats, and at an art opening it didn't look out of place up there. I overheard a woman in a floor-length black velvet dress, say—possibly because she had been forewarned to expect something out of the ordinary and had mistaken the bonsai for it—that Evelyn was Picasso's girlfriend, but don't, she told the crowd gathering around her, tell anyone she's here. Like shrieking furies they dispersed to the corners of the gallery. Standing before small engraved images of Picasso posed in endless satyr-like guises, wherever Evelyn walked, as though she were magnetic north, arms pointed her way. Because Picasso was a known prick, no one was surprised when, aided by a woman in a black cape, he passed right by Evelyn as though she were not there.

I had never owned a bonsai nor wished to, but often found myself stopping to examine those tiny versions of big things, which I was told took continual care to keep stunted. America was growing in a different direction. I was bigger than my father, who had been bigger than his. Of the families available to me for close inspection, only my mother's has resisted the trend. My mother, like her mother and her mother's mother, did not reach five feet. If, with help, each had mounted the other's shoulders, as a group they couldn't have changed a burned-out light bulb. It was as though my maternal grandparents had fed their children only the food they'd brought with them on the boat. Whatever they'd done, they'd succeeded in producing tiny and perfectly-matched offspring. When the time came, and if space were limited, Squat, Brainy, and Afraid of the Dark, could be chiseled, with truth, on the tombstones of my mother, her three sisters and two brothers.

Despite her interest in bonsai, Evelyn was American and believed in the abstract notion of more. She ate often and fast, and between her eighteenth and twentieth birthdays, she grew two inches. I was invited to Evelyn's twentieth birthday because by then we were engaged.

Because of proximity, Evelyn's birthday celebration was always lumped in with Thanksgiving. At the Thanksgiving/birthday dinner, held at her mother's apartment, I noted right off that Evelyn was exactly a head taller than her mother and her grandmother exactly a head shorter than her daughter. I also noted that I was the only male present. When I pointed this out, I was told, as though by a chorus, that all the men had died. Later Evelyn told me that wasn't true. As the cranberry sauce made its way around, Evelyn, leaning close, told me her father and grandfather and her three uncles, alive and at a mirror gathering at her father's apartment, were probably just then sitting down to a catered meal. Evelyn's grandmother came in from the kitchen carrying the turkey, a bird large enough to feed all seated as well as the missing men. It obstructed from view much of the tiny woman.

In Evelyn's figure drawings, she drew the interior of what she saw. She attempted, it seemed to me, to put her fingers on the jugular of her model's inner lament. In my drawings I drew outlines. First, I let my eye find a point on the model's hide, then I placed my sharpened pencil to paper and let my hand, moving in thickening and thinning lines, circumscribe the world of the seen. I aimed for the concrete in my figure drawings, and, as an artistic progenitor, looked to the icy world of Ingres.

After each figure drawing class, Evelyn spent a quarter hour in the women's restroom washing charcoal from her face, hands and arms. I came out of class clean. While she washed, I mimed the sipping of water at the drinking fountain located between the men's and woman's rest rooms until she emerged streaked in gray, her attempts at cleaning only partially successful.

I wasn't comfortable introducing himself to such a passionate girl with a simple hello. I thought it better to wait for the exact right moment. Stationed between the two restrooms never felt right. As icy water rushed in and out of my mouth, I watched Evelyn recede down the hall.

At the Picasso opening at the Museum of Modern Art, standing just outside the cloak room as Evelyn was handed her coat and bonsai, the moment felt right. Standing directly in front of Evelyn and blocking her path to the revolving door, my mouth dropped open and I waited for the individual letters of H E L L O to tumble out. Before any could, the shadow of their European figure drawing instructor, and then the instructor himself, stepped between us. With his back to me, and bending at the waist in a formal and foreign way, he reached toward Evelyn as though to grab hold of her hand and give it a kiss. Evelyn jerked back, the bonsai falling. I lurched forward and caught it. Standing there, bonsai pressed to my chest, I realized why I had been born. I heard a swishing sound, then felt a sharp blow on my shoulder. When I turned, the woman in the black cape stood with her cane on the ready to hit me again. Still holding firm to the bonsai, for it was now my life's work, I stepped aside as Picasso and his entourage passed through the revolving door.

With Evelyn holding on tight to her bonsai tree in the foyer of the Museum of Modern Art at a Picasso opening, came the primogenitor of my Bicentennial question.

“Evelyn Roden,” I asked, “haven't I seen you before?”

Then I rambled on about tribes, genes, jokes and the scattering power of hurricanes. Evelyn understood, or said she did It was—looking back I still like to think of it this way—like embracing a mirror. Shorty thereafter Evelyn moved in and a month after that we were engaged.

In the weeks leading up to our wedding, perhaps sensing the tension that existed in the air, Evelyn's cat, Tom-Tom, began my day by sitting on my face. I'd threw it to the floor, and the cat would run shrieking into the closet, where, when I got up and checked, I'd find that it had pissed on my shoes. I sent the cat sailing. Evelyn leapt from bed and ran naked into the bathroom, bolted the door and with a ball-point pen crossed yesterday's message from the wall. Then, in a change of tempo and intent, she wrote on today's.

Evelyn's daily messages—giving voice to the unspoken—were bulletins under which the day, once ended, could be reexamined, given context. Or they were captions, the upcoming day materializing above them like a Polaroid. By ten o'clock on Sunday mornings, the new message hours old, newspaper spread before us, words not yet spoken, it wasn't uncommon for Evelyn to stand, point to the bathroom, and say, “See, I told you it would turn out this way.”

On the morning that would be our last together and therefore the morning of her last message, Evelyn stopped writing and shouted through the bathroom's closed door.

“Michael, was it Depcon or Detcom, or what? In the Roddy McDowall movie—you know, the one he made when he wasn't a kid, but before he made The Planet of The Apes. It was Metal Man or Man of Metal, or something. It was the one about an atomic-powered robot that couldn't be stopped. The world was going to blow up if the robot made it to Depcon or Detcon 5?”

I didn't know, and, yelling, I told her as much. Evelyn went back to scratching. I shut my eyes and pulled the blanket over my head. I was under the blanket for a long time. When all noise had ceased, I pulled back the cover, peeked out and called her name. There was no response. I glanced around the apartment as though taking an inventory for the insurance company: Four partially packed suitcases; my tux and Evelyn's wedding dress hung from hooks on the closet door as though full-sized replicas of a bride and groom from a wedding cake's top; the dining room table, covered in a sticky skim of Diet Coke; a charred mound of burnt plane tickets mixed with fondue-skewer-sized tree branches and a scattering of tiny, browning leaves.

Just to the left of the charred and Coke-dampened mound, resembling the aftermath of a miniature tropical storm, were the twisted and broken trunks of Evelyn's bonsai trees. There had been a small forest of them. The trees, like an American neighborhood—a mix of Tudor, French Provincial and Cape Cod—were perfect examples of their kind. The apartment smelled of burnt plastic, a lingering remnant of the ritual Evelyn had performed with cuticle scissors and Zippo lighter on her Mastercard. A melted Payday candy bar, looking like a Salvador Dali wristwatch, was draped over the top of a chair. A trail of kitty litter in a continuous bead, like gunpowder, went from the closet to the front door, where it puddled when she had to stop and fiddle with the three locks. Everywhere I looked I saw failure, so I closed my eyes again.

The phone rang. It was Rachel Roden, Evelyn's mother. I started to explain what had happened, or started to. She cut me off.

“If, God forbid, you see ever see her again or if she calls, just tell her it was The Metal Man, but it's checked out from the video store.”

Evelyn's autographed Andy Gibb poster hanging near the table might be something she would come back for, even though it was badly singed. Once, just after Saturday Night Fever came out, I, too, had been a fan of the Bee Gee's. Like Evelyn, I wasn't shocked by disco, although we both understood why established jazzmen hated drum machines and the disco beat. If she came back for the poster, I would tell her about her mother's call.

I went into the toilet and tugged on the light to see what Evelyn had written. She had crossed-out Genuine Mutual Creative Differences, yesterday's message written in a shaky cursive, and in large block letters she'd written today's. Her new message, STUCK ON DEPCON (or DETCOM?) 4, held within it, in a milky tracery of criss-crossing lines, the old message, which cut through its center the way all new history holds within it the veiled past. Her old message, now useless as the buried dead, was available only to memory and conjecture. By mid-afternoon, if I tried to call it up, I might remember what she wrote as Creative Mutual, or Genuine Creative, or some other permutation of the truth.

Still in bed, Evelyn not gone more than an hour, there was a knock at the door. I peeked through the spy-hole. It was—and this is the way I thought of my soon-to-be mother-in-law at the time, as a kind of honorific—Rachel Roden, Her Mother. She had her hands in front of her face as though studying lines of text written on her palms.

“I've come,” she said, shouting words through her fingers, “to gather her things.” Like a soldier responding to some internal command to stand at attention, she dropped her arms to her side to await his response. She would, I knew, wait there forever. I unbolted the door.

After stuffing what she could into the suitcases, Rachel Roden pushed them into the hall; then, the way the marines return to the field of battle to retrieve their mangled dead, she marched over to the dining room table and scraped the remains into a black trash bag. In went the broken bits of Evelyn's bonsai trees, the soggy airplane tickets, the Mastercard fragments and, from the top of the dining room chair, although it was mine, the part of the Payday candy bar that hadn't permanently affixed itself to the fabric. On her way out, trash bag slung over her shoulder, she turned and handed me a charcoal-encrusted box closed with slashes of masking tape. In size the the box was that of a sampler of chocolates, yet it had the feel of a bomb. Affixed to the top, one slash of tape held down a lump, and when I explored it with my X-acto knife, I found Evelyn's engagement ring.

The box was wrapped in a drawing, which I flattened and pinned next to Evelyn's Andy Gibb poster. The drawing was a blackened silhouette that in truth could have been a record of anyone's lament, but scrawled across the bottom Evelyn had written, This Is You, Asshole. And maybe she was right. The universality of what she saw inside all her figure drawing models and me, was the underlying brilliance of Evelyn's art. In the poster Andy Gibb's shirt, opened to the waist, reveals tufts of wispy blond hair. Like the curators at the Museum of Modern Art, he wears plaid bell-bottoms. His hair, a sparkly clean and feathery page boy, just touches the top of his shoulders. But it's Andy Gibb's smile, muted by what may be a drug, that spoke to me. It said—and possibly this is the reason I've kept the poster—“This is going to go on forever.” Inside the box was a video tape, The Metal Man. I slipped it in the VCR, hopped back into bed, and watched.

In the film's climactic ending scene, Roddy Mc Dowall struggles in a rickety freight elevator with a refrigerator-sized robot. The floor indicator, shown in close-up, tells us the elevator is on Depcon 3 and going down. As Roddy Mc Dowall is being strangled, and just before he dies, the wrench he's been using to try to disconnect the robot from its atomic power source, which the robot wears like a backpack, falls from his hand and, slipping through a crack in the elevator's floor, comes to rest wedged in the elevator's gears. The film's final image, over which the credits roll, is of the wrench jammed in the gears. Jerking and bucking, the elevator and robot are stuck on Depcon 4. Of course, it was an image that invited a sequel.