fiction by veronica wasson

Six Portraits

1. The Captain

Dear Mother. You created this daughter and sent her into the world.

As captain of an icebreaker I looked upon the blind expanse. The sun sat low on the horizon like a soft white egg. The floes broke apart with a crack, the smashing of a cosmic cymbal. From her height the goddess regarded the tiny figures of my crew with neither benevolence nor malignancy. Oh, but Mother I stood alone at the helm.

Later in tropical seas, the breeze carried the distant scent of hibiscus and jasmine. Wax dripped from the candle onto my manuscript. I asked, for what? The goddess sent a gentle explanation, a touch of her fingertip against the tender spot that lies behind the eyes, the wellspring of all dreams.

I lived as a man might live, full astride life. The going was hard. Today I see my weather lined face in this gilt framed mirror. In this drawing room I fit ill, a bit of driftwood cast upon lace. 

Never would I wear dress or corset, as you well know Mother, to the despair of the aunts who tutted and tsked. I believe indeed she has the soul of a man, you explained to them, and she is as God made her.

I have dressed as a man. Have I loved as a man? But there I raise a hand to silence my interlocutor and draw the curtain discreetly on such matters. (Too late my memories bound ahead.)

If I have loved, I have loved with the best part of myself.

Alone, I stood below the streaming lights of the aurora borealis. The cold stabbed through my limbs. A great rustling trembled the world. The goddess entered my heart, rose up through the esophagus to the base of the skull. I felt her presence like the quiver of a moth’s wings. 

This was the reason I had voyaged north to the polar zone. To discover the parameters of thought. The pulse within the earth like a slow heartbeat. The sigh of the ice. The silent clap of thunder. The voice of the goddess, faintest tremor, silence beneath the silence.

The daylight wastes as I write these lines. Mother you had wanted something practical of me. The rigamarole of life. Husband, children, canning, stitching, simple comforts, long confinements, agony of childbirth, Paris fashions, prayer books, parasols, seaside holidays.

But the silence beneath the silence told me otherwise. It held before me the glittering light of a billion stars, within each the raging inferno of a lost desire.

Never could I. And with this refusal I became, Mother, the daughter such as the goddess made me, the daughter full astride life, the woman cast like driftwood.

*

2. The Poet

My affair with the poet Gabriella Prieto.

I was introduced to Gabriella Prieto at a party in late September when the sunlight warmed the streets with a soft sepia haze, nostalgic.

Conceptual art has a purity that I admire, she said in her way of making pronouncements as if she spoke a plain fact, as one would say the weather was mild today.

That night I wrote in my diary—jotting, Tall poet. 

I remembered her hands, long and tapering. I wanted to masturbate.

After a few false starts, I gave it up. Still—those hands. 

I let the book fall open to a poem at random. If you’ve read Prieto, you understand how these lines struck me. Of course, by now we’ve all read Prieto.

I shaved my legs in the shower. Water and shaving cream and black hairs swept down the drain. This feminine ritual grounded me. Had I become the sort of woman who won’t leave the house without makeup? No, not quite. But I peered into the mirror and wondered about my eyebrows.

The vinyl seat cooled my palms. Utility poles swung past the windows. Power lines bisected the sky. We ate our sandwiches. The commuters looked at their phones or blankly into the middle distance, earbuds delivering the daily playlist. Sunlight dappled my thighs and the hem of my skirt.

We walked from the station toward the corny quaint downtown. Gulls wheeled beneath the gray sky. The bed and breakfast stood a ways back from the main street, demure behind its frilly curtains.

“If you don’t make this space for yourself, then you fall into habit, into systems of control. It is, structurally at least, that simple.”

Gabriella peered through her reading glasses. I was nervous, never understanding poetry, never entirely happy with myself, never remembering how to position my body, never inhabiting time.

For two days and nights we fucked and wrote, until our mingled words and spit merged into a lattice of perfect clarity. 

*

3. The Painter

Renata indeed appeared in my life at a time when her presence was what I lacked indeed. With her small compact body like a featherweight boxer all wiry calm.

Renata was a performance artist and her pieces dealt with the female body as a locus of oppression.

We sat in my loft studio drinking wine from ceramic mugs. Natural light gave everything a crisp outline that gradually softened. We talked about art, gallery shows we had seen and liked or disliked. We talked about our bodies, Renata’s heavy periods and my struggles with hormones. We talked about the political situation and our fears within it.

My jeans had paint spatters. I showed Renata my canvases and she studied them never saying indeed not saying.

Painting went slowly with me. Sometimes a canvas would sit half finished for weeks. But I never rushed them for they could not be rushed, for each painting was a small universe that did unfold according to its rhythm.

A line bisecting space. On one side, art. On the other. . . ? Who knows. 

Renata radiated masculinity vibrant and bracing like chill air on a spring morning when you’ve been cocooned under warm blankets and you step outside onto the porch in pajamas and bare feet while the coffee percolates darkly in the kitchen.

Thinking about the masculinity of women and the femininity of women, I’m only now beginning to unpack the disaster my first puberty was. How hard that hits one. To stop avoiding mirrors and photographs your whole life. To blossom this time around rather.

Have you? she asked. Blossoming. And asking again. Marveling again how the gender boundary can bleed like Helen Frankenthaler’s color field paintings.

Renata bled red paint onto the performance space. Her work dealt with viscera. Deep in her guts an anger like a polemic by Andrea Dworkin set loose to fly dangerously unshackled. What Renata enacted on the wooden floor under a single spotlight surrounded by darkness and folding chairs were her psychic dreams, and the audience was implicated.

Across a canvas I painted a large X. Over this I painted a portrait of Renata in half profile. The planes of her face I built up with a palette knife, slabs of gray and periwinkle and yellow. Tiny nude figures of uncertain sex swam from her left ear into the void.

I had a vision of myself and in this vision I was beautiful. Seen in half profile as if on the cover of a fashion magazine, in a red wool coat, pensive, unaware of my own beauty. This woman would strike all breathless for a single perfect instant. And I would be her. 

A line bisecting space. On one side, woman. On the other. . . ?

*

4. The Actress

Recently I had occasion to watch one of my early screen tests. In that moment of film I look scared and arrogant at once. I still had a girlish figure then. And a certain indefinable power. I don’t know where it sprang from. Beauty—of course. A conventional sort of beauty, half youth and half makeup, applied with care. But unformed and very raw.

From the vantage point of the present I can see my awkwardness, the way I had of holding my body. In later films, more in control of my craft, I began to show the “feminine” power that so impressed critics. It was not feminine at all, rather I simply learned to inhabit my body. And that is a kind of power.

The wife of a famous producer has recently begun to confide in me. We meet at a cafe for coffee and cakes about once a week. These confidences—tiny things, unimportant to anyone so that I cannot even remember them to tell you—well, but this only shows that I can be entrusted with a secret, for I am unlikely to remember it, such things fly right out of my head.

But what I meant to tell you was about this woman, the wife of a famous producer. The fragility of her shell. If her makeup cracked what might spill out.

The wife of the famous producer is an accomplished collagist. I hadn't known about this art form prior to our friendship. She creates them as a hobby, something to fill the time between galas and awards shows. Her collages often incorporate fragments of mirrors, so the viewer sees shards of herself reflected from within the composition. A disconcerting moment of recognition.

In films I see the image of myself almost as a stranger, and the same for those photographs the paparazzi snap and sell to the tabloids. I see the line of a jaw, a pair of black sunglasses, a haughty look, a leg emerging from a limousine, and from these fragments I can assemble a sense of myself, an impression like the ghost of a photographic negative. 

I share this much in common with the wife of the famous producer: How we have fragmented ourselves, smashed ourselves into bits, and call the resulting breakage art, proudly and shyly displayed like scars on our flesh.

*

5. The Dreamer

I dreamed I was pregnant with my second child. Strangely enough for in fact I don’t have children. In the dream I placed my palm over my round belly. Later I bathed the infant, letting it rest on my chest in the bathtub, wet and slippery.

A dream is like a story with no proper beginning or ending, like a badly composed novel. And then you wake up. 

Each day begins in medias res. You get up, make the coffee, look out the window to gauge the sunrise, the band of pale light over the lake. Somewhere, there is a narrative thread to pick up from the previous day.

I thought about texting you. I found it impossible to settle on a tone. Any opening felt either too jaunty or too desperate. 

I drove into the city crossing lanes of freeway to reach the offramp and circled around looking for the entrance to the parking garage and saw my endocrinologist who asked about my progress and explained to me about my estrogen and my T levels and I walked the sky bridge to the other wing of the medical center for my blood draw and the phlebotomist tied the latex band around my arm and the needle slid in and I drove back over the bridge over the lake with the water sparkling with little triangular waves like in a picture book and I drove to my therapy session and cried in her office and fixed my makeup in the little bathroom that smells of lavender and I’ve got a voice in my head that tells me things about myself.

My phone burbles and it’s your number on the screen and I don’t answer it.

*

6. The Traveler

It was tea time, before the lamps came on. Over the town and dark green woods lay a sky of purest indigo. For days I had walked, it seemed. My walking had given me many hours of silence and solitude.

I crossed the threshold into the chalet. Memories of other thresholds crossed floated up from my past.

The heel of my boot rapped sharply on the floor board.

The interior of the chalet was rustic, wooden beams and darkening shadows. A stag’s head surveyed the room with doleful glass eyes. Quickly and gradually my eyes adjusted to the gloom. Here was a clock on a mantel, there an embroidered sampler.

Had I fled here blindly? My divorce was less than a week old, the ink barely dry.

I removed my coat and stamped the snow from my boots. I drew the woolen mittens from my hands.

Two old spouses greeted me. It is pleasant to see old people, perhaps, at times, if.

Come sit by the fire, Madame.

Within each instant of time another instant doubled. At this rate we’ll make no progress.

The first spouse dropped two sugar cubes into my cup with trembling hands.

I remembered the course of my marriage. My mother’s words on the eve:

He’ll never amount to much, Natalie.

Steam curled upward from the tea cup. I sipped the dark tea, my body outwardly calm but thoughts agitating. When had I lost, and how had I regained, my independence? My husband had been a tracker, always on the tail of something just out of reach. Finally his grasping became too much for me.

Eyes bleary, I stood up from the table. My body had warmed and soothed in the close air of the chalet.

The second half of a journey stretched before my mind. It seemed just then an impossibility to continue forward as I had done and had been continuously doing for some stretch of time hence. How was I to proceed?

I twined my woolen scarf around my throat. Even the first step seemed impossible. Outside the snow continued to fall in great soft flakes. And I left at sunrise, after shaking hands with the two old spouses.

Veronica Wasson is a writer based in the Pacific Northwest. She has studied creative writing at Hugo House in Seattle. She lives with her wife, son, and two guinea pigs.