The New Naturists — Jacqueline Feldman

The New Naturists were twelve and more if someone else was bringing wine. Admittedly they were all men. The group’s greatest success was that of its golden boy, Pablo, who had recently exhibited at the new Louis Vuitton center for contemporary art the likeness, magnified four thousand fold, of a palmful of topsoil. Sestina and Yousef had gone to see it. Sestina had experienced Pablo as speaking to not her but another person, slightly taller, perfectly invisible, and when Yousef reached to run a hand over fake fungi Pablo hissed not here. She pulled at her shawl so it sausaged her shoulders and flicked the fringe comfortingly onto Yousef’s forearm; he brushed it off.

That night they had loud sex, not their thing. By then Sestina had revised her opinion of the New Naturists. Soon after she spent the last of her trust fund in renting the New Hampshire cabin to give Yousef a break from the group. (Yousef did not resist; his political differences to Pablo had grown insuperable.) The guys had picked out that English name thinking it sly. In French naturiste meant, as well as something like “botanist,” “nudist,” and Sestina had told them five million times that in English the pun did not hold. She hated people who gave unasked-for advice, and she was careful to qualify her advice, saying, Take it or leave it, saying, I know participating in dialogue in the international arena is important to your movement, so I just wanted to mention. Pablo’s palmful of topsoil, displayed on sturdy stilts, had taken fifteen laborers twenty hours to assemble and portrayed not only fungi but shoots, roots, rocks, mica blown up to silver daggers, remnants of old sneakers (from a competing grande marque), cigarette butts, apple cores, and delicately colored orbs requiring Pablo’s explanation they were bloated molecules of fertilizer and, the green ones, pepper spray. Classically archaeologists cast dirt aside like it was garbage. But, as a maxim of the New Naturists’ had it, all of Earth was precious, none would last. They desperately worked out a zoo for the natural. Sestina would think of a tale that had allowed her to daydream her way out of French class. In 1871, their Paris besieged, Communards had eaten animals zooed in the Jardin des Plantes. How had they digested the tiger, the ibex? Because she knew this story, Sestina suspected the New Naturists of preserving beauty not for its sake but in case of starvation.

Before she understood much about the silk-screening process Yousef used, she had taken the work’s appearance as another symptom of his hypersensitivity. She was trying, admittedly earnestly, to cultivate this virtue in herself. Soon she began to wonder whether her sensitivity counted if it did not surpass his, for she had only Yousef to measure by. She began to root against him. She had become confused, lately, as to whether victory had to entail another’s defeat. As a younger person, she would have laughed at the idea. Aging, however, she was finding it horribly true. Now she was twenty-four. When she first saw Yousef’s grands formats, repeated trees that were lifelike except for the colors, resembling for mottled textures wood of a wrecked ship, she thought he must start with the perfect tree, clean-lined and whole, and chip away at the image, perhaps with a fingernail, until he had worn away to the point at which he could bear to look at the beautiful tree, so soon to fall, rot, and change state, fixing carbon. Being a tree was a death sentence, Sestina thought Yousef thought.

So she at first grouped his trees with his winces, as she made her way over the creaky floorboards of his Montparnasse one bedroom, because he found her step painfully loud; with his disappointment, only half-hidden, on tasting a pairing of spices that did not go together but had seemed to Sestina just fine, or on smelling fish, on her using the wrong sort of parsley; and with his allergic sneezing fits when she had, once, brought fabric unknown to him home to the apartment, a scarf.

He showed her a photo from when he’d been a boy in Jableh, maybe eight. Heavy-lashed eyes took up his whole face. He looked preternaturally sensitive. Happily, Sestina had cried, “You look like a little girl.”

“I look like you,” he’d said.

***

Their cabin was shaped as a rectangle except for a corner that had, like a glacier, calved, with shingles and splinters falling off into the forest. Yousef loved this wildness, which blue tarp covered that was cut to exactly the dimensions of the gap. All the surrounding towns of the Lebanon Valley had biblical names. The nearest one was called Esau, a little farther off sleepy Gabriel sat on a shoulder of the Appalachians, and finally, nearest the freeway, King of Persia had a heroin problem. In the days after their arrival, Sestina and Yousef sat on the porch of their cabin in the late afternoon. Without meaning to, they timed these sessions to coincide with the moment of a sun angle throwing wildflowers below them into high relief. Sestina taught Yousef the names for these flowers, which he called magnifiques noms du paysan américain, magnificent names of the American countryman: Black-Eyed Susan, clover, thistle, cattail, Queen Anne’s Lace, dandelion, and so on. Though Yousef did not drink, Sestina sometimes drank whisky on the porch. “Keep teaching me,” Yousef would say. “I want to eat you up.”

“I grew up hundreds of miles from here,” Sestina would say, and then, “Also, when I told you I was part Native American, I was lying.” 

He would vow to eat the very dirt as proof of love and never follow through.

Inside, he cooked for them: simple things. Apples, fried potatoes, occasionally a dish with rice and zucchini. Sestina shopped, as Yousef spoke no English, only French and Arabic, and had no license to drive. He behaved extravagantly when he cooked for her. She was forbidden to help. She paced their cabin, a space small enough for her to get to know it well and inject it with excitement. She watched the wood whorls as they turned into old man’s faces—a lost variety of wildflower—and back.

She held against Yousef that his work did not address an ongoing war in the country of his birth. She decided to focus her work on the war while they stayed in the cabin. She wanted to atone for or outdo him. She was losing her hold on what was for him and what was for her. She was a writer. She would have to do some research. One book available in the libraries of the Lebanon Valley contained a mention of Jableh, Zeitoun, by the American writer Dave Eggers. The first six paragraphs of book took place there to describe men fishing for sardines on moonless nights. Fish in their nets filled them with silver light. Sestina asked Yousef about Jableh. The only thing he remembered about Jableh was that summers, sons of mafiosi who ran the country came out from Damascus to take over the town. Mafiosi was the term he used.

“Can you give examples?”

He got excited. “They drove so fast they killed. They picked up all the women. They took over the bars. They would go into a bar, wave around their guns, say, this bar is our bar, everybody out, and drink everything.”

She asked if to his memory the fishermen used nets. “No.” He was grave. “They used dynamite. Horrible.” Seconds passed in which the sizzle of potatoes was the only sound. “Other times,” Yousef said, brightening, “they used bombs made in fava-bean cans. Or bought from the Russians.”

***

A week after they arrived, Yousef let Sestina know he couldn’t work when she was present. She quickly said she suffered from the same problem without pausing to consider if it was true and thereafter left the cabin each morning.

After leaving, she would picture Yousef. She imagined him spending a long time putting away the breakfast things before starting work, like an old dog winding circles before it can sleep.

Then, she set tasks for herself, to help her in writing. After that, she went down to the lake and swam two lengths as she tackled her tasks, which were mental in nature. She would have to recall a news article, especially the numbers. Then she would take the news article farther. How did the baker feel when his ovens exploded? Did he have any savings? Brothers? Sisters? Age? Height? Shoe size/eyes/organ donor? She worked to free her thinking, but the sentences that were her thoughts tended frequently to take on the rhythm of her stroke, a breaststroke faster than most other people’s breaststrokes. She would surface to see, revealed, a ridge behind the lake, which gave her time to ascertain it looked like an old, puffy woman lying on her side. Combined with its reflection in the lake it would resemble a sarcophagus. Leaves beginning winks at the glorious transformation that made renting in its season expensive to Sestina were a prompt for her to meditate on death and rest. Figures of speech that sounded hokey in English were commoner in French: one’s final repose. Sestina’s final, most difficult exercise concerned sardines in the water off Jableh. She had to imagine them killed by dynamite. Sometimes the fish shot out of the water in a huge sparkling cloud. Other times they died where they swam, turning the water red. By this point in her swim, Sestina was tired. Last exercise over she rolled belly-up and she floated, watching the sky.

***

September started. The fruit he liked this time of year was fresh dates. Sestina, done with her swim, drove to town, did research or wrote at the library, and bought groceries. She drove all over the Lebanon Valley seeking fresh dates and, to save face, pretended she’d found none on purpose. She gave him apples. She said, We should eat local. He hated the apples yet peeled them carefully so the skin came off in one long spiral, as he had peeled pomegranates in Paris, out of habit or to please her. When he ate an apple of his own, he would neglect, by contrast, to peel it. Sometimes he ate the apple so close to the core she wanted to cry stop! It’s not good for you, that part. Sometimes when the apple was just for him he tore it apart using his hands and a power she had no other occasion to witness and had not known abided in his hands, and it gave off the sound of a tree felled by lightning. She became wary of his hands. He had used to cut fruit as fast as she could eat it as they both stood at the sink. Now the happy gesture seemed to her hostile. He prepared food for them both and insisted on standing as he ate, as she sat down to eat. Soon she left the room whenever she saw him lift a knife and, later, whenever she saw a piece of fruit.

***

One day, Sestina arrived to find he had walked in the forest collecting materials. Of course the cabin had none of the equipment needed for silk-screening. It had inessential items: fishing poles, blankets thick with dust and spotted by Sestina to bale in plastic their first day. He had smeared mud from the forest across canvas. Sestina looked for figures in the smears before she said, “It looks like shit.”

Later they made love as they often did evenings. The next evening, Sestina said the same thing, for it was also true the next evening. And the following evening, and so on. Soon she became superstitious their sex relied on her telling him his work was shit, and she carefully told him so each night. Over time her superstition metastasized into a graver fear her love for him depended on the shittiness of his art. If his paintings were not shitty she would not have been able to love him, though she had thought his work good.

She stayed awake.

“I couldn’t sleep,” he would say.

But she had listened to hear only crickets, bullfrogs, a whisper of branches; she had been alone, with shadows. Shadows led a chase across the roof to disappear, whooping, into the chimney.

***

He watered the plants outside the cabin. He walked uphill and watered plants that were in the forest. He moved plants from this forest to a patch of dirt in front of the cabin where the ground was bald. At last he brought the plants inside, where they died. He asked, “Did you do this?” In French he asked, “Who is it who is the responsible?” Above them flapped a bat or drunken bird.

“Do you think I’m not serious enough?”

He gave no answer. With a short knife he was spinning off chunks of apple and stuffing them punishingly into his mouth. 

At their very first meeting she had seen his paintings and registered them as abstract or sinister. She had wanted to ask, in a friendly way, what they were of. She had been slow to see them as trees. 

In Paris he had brought, always, a gift, sometimes a drawing, other times a natural object like a branch of pine. She got the door to find he had clipped daffodils where they grew, in a park. “Those are for everyone,” she said. He brought her to the Jardin des Plantes and put on winning imitations. Some animals were considered by French to make the same sound as they did in English while to others the French language assigned a different onomatopoeia. How interesting, she had reflected privately. Their outing was fascinating to have brought up such a thought.

Now she was spending whole days away, out of the cabin. She told herself that she should bring him gifts, for the first time experiencing the weight of her failure to do so. She would return to find possessions rearranged in situations that would never have occurred to her, whose cleverness she could not begrudge. He’d aligned her notebooks head-to-foot, alternating spines so the stack used less space. She had not gotten so angry when he rearranged the jars for drinking or her socks. Was she too precious about her writing—she wondered—or too careless with her things?

***

The air developed edge. The trees, the ones in town as well, were changing, better than others at sucking up pollution. Bars advertised specials for students. Metal sculpture sprang up thanks to a slush fund belonging to the college of which this town was college town. Though its sidewalks were cobblestone, the streets were smoothly paved. Motorists, the many cyclists, enjoyed the appearance of these stones at their convenience. History didn’t trouble them. She found baklava for his mal de pays at an environmentally friendly bakery.

His eyes grew wider. He was handsomer, in that way. He had continued, however, to leave off his shoes. His feet had changed. Grime had worked itself under the first layer of skin. He looked as if he had been dipped in a contaminant that would be spreading up his body. When all of him had filled with mud like mud he used to paint the season would have changed.

***

She woke up weeping without knowing why, and he, still sleeping, used two hands to smooth her hair. The experience had qualities of a dream though she was awake.

In looking outside they looked through branches of twinned hemlocks that had grown together unbelievably, an inverse fork, plunging each tree into seeming pain. Not an arrangement one expected from nature, it was natural; no imitator would think to manufacture “tree trunks” in such a configuration. Rashes of lichen had erupted on the bark, white-green, as if the trees had inner cooling.

Later that month, he stopped shaving. She was losing her French. They were getting along in gestures. When his steps scattered pebbles, she ran. He fell, tripping over a lone root far uphill of the cabin, and thereafter left it rarely. 

A silence was missing of the kind that had settled in the courtyard of his Montparnasse apartment building. Quiet in relation to the city could not be had without it. They were fighting—they were naked as they were fighting because it was early in the morning; they were getting up—and she, in her fury at a loss, looked out and, casting a glance across the courtyard, saw his neighbor watching from behind a scrim of prayer flags, at which they laughed, made up.

***

At a secondhand bookstore she asked after French-language books, explaining that she needed to improve. A truck passed. She heard a snap that meant catastrophe. A tandem bike sticking out from a rack on the sidewalk was halved. The sound had broken the day, leaving in its wake a hazy, listless pause. A couple of pedestrians had rushed into the bookstore, clutching at each other. The looks they gave the bookseller were sheepish. He nodded at them gallantly and turned back to Sestina, lifting and absently jangling a little tin can on the register that read MY OTHER CAR IS GEORGE W. BUSH. His face softened, Sestina thought, years disappearing. Here was a man who reacted to fear with kindnesses. He rose, crossed the floor to a back room, and soon had returned with Camuses, the plain white spines like those of books that sold in Paris. “I’m sorry for my attitude earlier,” he said. “I thought you’d come from the naturist colony up the road.”

“What?”

“You know, nudists. Naked people.”

“Of course,” Sestina said. “Thank you so much for all of your help.” She turned away.

“You’ve got a good head on your shoulders,” the man added loudly. “Hang in there.”

Students lay on tie-dyed sheets as if the lawn were lava. A pair of doves was moving in among them. Sestina saw the pigeons almost every time she came to town, that pair. She preferred to think of them as doves, not pigeons. They had neon feet, black beaks, and, above the beaks, white moustaches. The eyes moved ceaselessly, and the pupils were small, so the birds looked shifty and dumb. But those eyes, which were red, were almost their only displeasing characteristic. The doves’ necks glittered like gems. She thought they were clean animals and would be clean if she touched them. The students threw pencils and food at them, and the doves, which could not tell the difference, set off after these agreeably. The steps seemed of a piece with the endless waltz that was their lives. As she watched, though, Sestina saw they were competing, racing. One dove wrestled the other to the grass and pecked at its eye. A few of the students sat upright. They took photos using their phones. Sestina watched until the eye was gone. She had to go to market. Now she was running to the market.

***

She stopped at the lake on the way to the cabin. He was the black dot in the water. He didn’t know how to swim. Was he drowning? He’d been teaching himself. He had secret routines, too, his solitude structured as hers, as ambitious.

He hoisted himself up and onto the dock dripping. 

“I bought eggs,” she cried. She set them down, waiting half a second as the cardboard found its level.

He was standing. “Can I have one?”

She took an egg, feeling its weight. “Duck!” 

It burst on him. He slid it around and into his skin. He flicked fragments of shell away from him into the water. She threw another and another. She had thrown many, yolky eggs. He was covered in egg. He had to clean himself in the lake. He fell back off the dock and was gone.

***

The sound let out by her in that moment of believing she had lost him counted, for the whole group back in Paris, as a breakthrough, very animalish, for—not his—Sestina’s art. Vivid, resolved. She took up with Pablo. Increasingly her thoughts would turn not to the siege of Paris but to the experiment in self-governance that followed and particularly the Federation of the artists of the Commune, described enticingly in English by the scholar Kristin Ross as “a trade union whereby each artist’s dignity was protected by all the others.” They were just missing one.

***

Jacqueline Feldman is a writer whose first books, On Your Feet and Precarious Lease, will be published next year by dispersed holdings and Rescue Press.