ALWAYS
((Queen and Conquistador, before.))
A vignette for The Fountain
He doesn't like to tell people that they were children together, because he is never really a child, not in the way she is—he is never blessed with her bright eyes and carefree laugh. He is too smart and too shy for his own good, an intrepid boy with knobby knees who grows harsh and angry in time, prone to fits of temper in his sullen teenage years. And all along she is beside him, with her pale skin and gap-toothed smile and her soft acceptance of the world, her bad poetry and decent paintings, her pet cat and bookshelf of worn paperbacks messy with cookie crumbs and tea stains, fair and gentle and marked from the very day of her conception for an early death. She is not diagnosed until her early twenties, but everyone around her labors under the conviction that the cancer was always creeping just beneath her skin, so that they look back and call sick her defining childhood characteristic, even though it isn't.
She is born five days early, and when the labor pains start her parents have not yet decided on a name for her. Eloise. Selina. Nadine. They don't want anything too simple, too common, and certainly nothing Spanish. But then her mother has the dream that Izzi, years after it has been passed on to her by some strange quirk of fate, will come to think of as hers—a dream of a wearied golden Spanish queen and a love so strong it transcends centuries and galaxies. Long after it is printed on her birth certificate, her father frowns a little each time the name Isabel reaches his ears. For as long as Izzi can remember, he has frowned, and of course she subconsciously blames the way he fades from her life on her name. She tries out others. Nathalie. Annalisa. Colette. But then she has the dream again, of blood and bone and the stars, and a ridged ring in a gloved hand, and she wakes up and finds herself answering to Izzi again.
Her mother speaks softly, with an accent from the far reaches of Europe, and often has her hands pressed to her temples, keeping a headache at bay. She keeps the shutters lowered and does not tolerate music, so Izzi sings to herself, softly at first, and then louder as her trapped voice presses at the confines of her head, begging to be freed. Never quite loud enough to reach anyone's ears, though. She is a placid child, accepting, friendly with everyone and close to no one. She retreats within herself if she needs to talk. He never learns to, although perhaps he should have. Perhaps it would have helped with the fury.
She is a carefree child. She reads, but schoolwork slips out of her head like water—it is the poignant short stories, heavy with thoughts she doesn't understand, that remain. She is a carefree child with illness in her bones.
Meanwhile, he scrapes his knees and screams at the neighborhood children and throws his books across the room and somewhere in the midst of being loud and lost and lonely, he watches the world.
He is a prodigy, he discovers as he travels through various institutions of learning. Some might even call him a genius.
He doesn't feel like a genius. He feels like someone who sees too much and feels too much and is angry at the world. He contemplates suicide. He contemplates falling in love, although not as seriously. But then he visits his hometown—his mother is insisting—and she is there, quite by coincidence, home for the weekend from art school, and he meets her eyes as he waits in line in the post office and is never quite the same again. She stands at the back of the room, in front of the windows, facing him, and the light of the setting sun sets her hair on fire, turns her skin translucent, glowing. Her eyes are dark, ageless eyes, the eyes of an artist, paradoxically soft and simple and warm, brought into prominence by the heavy shapeliness of her eyebrows.
He is no longer Tommy. He is the image of Tommy in all his crudeness, wrapped in the perfect gentility of their love. He is her complement. His rage and her gentility fit together like corresponding puzzle pieces.
He walks out of the post office with his errands uncompleted and forgotten. He wanders down the street and it hits him, he knows her, on some level, from his childhood. He has learned to control his rage now and he does not like to think of how rude he was to the neighbor's daughter who watched him through lace curtains. He sees her, now, with new eyes. She completes him, he knows at once. He loves her with the kind of love that razes cities and launches warships. The look he shared with her was an inferno. Their first kiss is a bullet wound.
She hangs paintings on the walls of his apartment and plays old French ballads on a secondhand cassette player she discovers at a thrift shop. She makes waffles for dinner once a week and irons his socks and scatters bird feed over the windowsill.
He meets her eyes in the post office and then he goes home and writes a paper for a scientific journal that will win him international acclaim.
She completes him.
She promises him—
Always.
…
"It looks bad, doesn't it? Tell the truth. It's too…it's too young for me." Izzi pushes her hair, lustrous and dark, away from her face with both her hands, her face awash in the light of their bedroom lamp. She chose the bedroom's muted color scheme, the browns and blues, and although he was skeptical at first he let her have her way, and he knows now she was right. The scene is aglow with symmetry. In her crimson dress she is startling against the soft tones of the room.
She lets her hair fall over her shoulders and tugs at the strap of her dress.
"You look beautiful," he promises her, standing behind her and wrapping his arms around her waist. "Now come."
"I hate it when your colleagues hold dinner parties. They're going to think I'm an idiot," she sighs. "I was not made for conversing with scientists."
"Izzi. They'll love you. Maybe even enough to put up with me."
She laughs, throwing her head back in a burst of spontaneity and exposing the long with line of her throat to the mirror they stand in front of. He marvels.
Her hands flutter through the dresser drawers. She picks out a pair of dangling earrings shaped into the abstract forms of birds in flight and holds them up for his approval.
He thinks of the time she turned on a waltz more static than sound on their cassette player, and pulled him into her arms and forced him to dance, awkwardly, uncertainly, with her, who was as graceful as ever. The piece ended, but he didn't notice, and later he thinks he could have sworn he heard music even as the cassette player whirred to a stop, as she pressed her fingertips into his arm and back and swayed with her bare feet digging into the carpeting.
She is graceful even when she collapses into his arms with her eyes rolling back into her head and her mouth slack, her dark hair spilling onto the floor, her head cradled in his hands, her cherry-red dress a splash of blood, too bright.
…
She fades.
Exhaustion creeps into her muscles and bones.
She reads poetry to him in the evening just as she used to, as she lies in their bed with his arms around her, the blankets pulled up to her chin, but when she wakes up it is to find her pillow wet with tears and scattered with the dark curls that are now falling out in chunks.
She dreams of a wearied queen with her own too-familiar eyes, an upright figure framed in swirls of gold and white shafts of morning light.
…
He rages.
The day of her diagnosis, he drives her home from the doctor's office and his nails tear strips of leather from the steering wheel without him noticing. At home, he holds her for a long time, until she falls asleep with her head resting against his chest. And then he walks out of the house, blindly, aimlessly, marching, pouring his fury into his steps, vision blurred by tears.
He weeps for her, helplessly.
He walks until his feet are numb, and then he gives up because he stills feels as though he's falling through an abyss. And then he panics and turns his hate towards himself and runs the miles back home, getting lost more than once, tripping and falling and bleeding and getting up again, because she's alone at home, and frightened, and she needs him.
…
He loves her with the kind of love that razes cities and launches warships.
He loves her with a love so strong it transcends centuries and galaxies.
He loves her. He loves her. Always.