Elizabeth Geoghegan: writing with Lucia Berlin as a teacher

Tree Boy appears when class has already started. Tight white T-shirt, steel-toed boots, delicates-washed cargo pants covered in rubber tree stains. I have seen him using a chainsaw as many times as he has lectured on the great early photographers. Talbot. Cartier-Bresson. Although he tells me about various places where he has lived, I can only imagine him near the Pacific. A life on the Olympic peninsula. A legacy marked by forest trucks and poverty.

Tree Boy is the most spoiled and at the same time the most thug in the graduate program. He got to college thanks to a scholarship. He works in the bush out of necessity. College never lets him forget his great talent—so obvious that he doesn't need sponsors. Casual comments about his work are heard on campus: Tree Boy cuts down the branches of the university and uses the load of firewood as art material. Among so many mythical lineages originating from the east coast, it is as if he embodied everything they abhor in this city, so far north and so far west that it could very well be in Alaska. However, when awarding prizes or teaching positions, they always point to him.

Tree Boy lives for rent in a penthouse near the bluff of Lake Union with a view to the west, to his land.

I usually drive him home.

He never invites me in, but starts to sit next to me in class.

Or he's waiting for me standing outside my study with a paper cup full of coffee in one hand and a crumpled brown bag of peaches in the other.

He goes around proclaiming that he no longer takes photos, that a photograph can never live up to the real thing.

But when he shows him the ones I did the year I lived in Rome, he tells me that he would like to keep one.

One night Tree Boy wanders into my study.

It's too late.

Without realizing it, he removes the pencil from behind his ear and rolls it through his short hair, across his scalp to the nape of his neck and back again.

He tells me that he has come to see my work, and he looks at my photographs in silence.

As he scrolls through the images one by one, I feel naked under his gaze.

And I am.

I have made a series of self-portraits, close-ups of my body so close that the landscape of the skin becomes unrecognizable in many of them.

The elbow crease.

The blurred edge of the inner thigh.

In any case, I think he is capable of recognizing them.

Without asking permission, he removes a contact sheet from the wall and sits in my chair with thirty-six negatives of my left breast in his hand.

When I look up,

Then he asks if I would like a beer.

Seattle seems sweet after Chicago. Too green and too beautiful. Too calm. There is a sinister side to it, but it remains camouflaged behind the wisteria in bloom and the inoffensive little wooden houses that dot the hills. I can only glimpse it from afar, just like Mount Rainier. Endless months shrouded in fog and countless bodies of water—at every little mistake with the car, I find myself in the middle of a long bridge, forced to follow it until, at last, I can return to the other shore. My inner compass is totally useless. There is not a single lake that marks the east, as if this one did not exist. There is no light at dawn, just an occasional flash of color,the fog that dissipates already with the summer sunset and the pain before an almost consummated sunset that disappears through the Sound Strait.

For almost a semester, I watched him chop down trees or haul brush to load it into his battered truck, faded white with several smears of touch-up paint showing.

I spent months wishing I was one of those branches.

Pull me toward him and saw me free.

Feel my own fall over and over again.

To be the branch sculpted by him in a seductive way and to be exposed in the gallery before everyone's eyes.

But it happens that Tree Boy always destroys his facilities.

He creates exquisite objects and then burns them to ashes, leaving no trace or graphic document of them, he simply appears at the end of the exhibition and sweeps up the remains with a metal dustpan.

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Lucia Berlin, against the normal

As we walk across the yard, he describes the forest fires he witnessed on the peninsula as a child.

I ask him if that is the reason why he burns his work.

"No," she says, looking at me like I'm dumb, "but it always ends up in flames."

Before he sets it on fire, I sneak over to the gallery and photograph his latest installation.

Couplets carefully engraved in pine wood.

I slowly stroke the smooth, smooth wood, feeling the letters like veins on his slender arm.

I think of the contingency of fire;

in his work, which returns to earth in the form of ash under the flat, stifling ceiling of the northwest.

Later, when I tell him I should write, he lectures me for half an hour about the futility of words.

The next day, he brings me a book:

, by John Berger, with lots of loose leaves and moisture-warped pages.

Leafing through it, I notice his perfect handwriting on the list of initials with their respective phone numbers on the inside back cover.

I look at the list and wonder who they are.

Above all, I wonder how many will be women.

From time to time, he calls me to ask me to give him one of those numbers.

I insist on returning the book to him, but he refuses to accept it.

He tells me that he has already read it and there is no point in keeping it.

I keep it as a locket by my bed.

I search for answers buried in Berger's chapters.

I memorize the phone list.

Even my dog ​​has taken a liking to Tree Boy and acts like a sloppy freshman. When I bring her to college, she cries and whimpers, banging on my work room door incessantly. I let her out and she wanders down the hall, circling in front of her study door, curling up and chasing her tail. As much as I threaten her, I can't get her to pay attention to me. I give up and go back into the dark room, soaking in the glow of the red bulb and the comforting scent of chemicals. I hang around until everyone leaves for dinner or a smoke, and then I reveal the reel with the photos I took of the Tree Boy work, I see how the silvery images break through the waters. I keep the copies in a folder and write on the cover: “Firewood”.

Things go on like this for several weeks.

She stops listening to music so she can hear the door squeak as she walks in.

We cooked some late dinner and sat down to eat on the floor.

Sketch my portrait by candlelight.

We drink

dry.

When we're alone, he never touches me, but as soon as a teacher or peer looks at us, he starts to trace small, slow circles with his fingers on the inside of my wrist, or stops mid-sentence to brush my hair out of my eyes.

One night, he tells me about the women he has slept with.

How he touched them.

How he wanted them.

Almost in whispers, he tells me about his old girlfriend.

How much he loved bathing her, sitting on the cool tiles by the tub, rinsing her hair with warm water.

How, after she left him, he ran barefoot through the Cascade Mountains until his feet were raw, bleeding, and then he crawled back on the dirt for two hours, dodging hikers and bikers and picnic families until they reach the van.

“Everything in Seattle will always remind me of her,” he says.

Tree Boy thinks I'll never be able to take good pictures because I've never had to do it on my own.

I want to think he's wrong, but part of me fears he's right.

He insists on pointing out my bourgeois education, psychiatrists and family vacations, private schools.

"I've always worked," object.

Things are not so simple.

He looks at me and makes a gesture, maybe a smile.

I strive to show him who I really am. I tell him about the lovers I had in Chicago. The bass player, the bike messenger, the architect. I tell him what I like—that I come just with a man touching my neck, just with that. I tell him that I like to be fucked from behind, because I prefer not to see my lover's face if I'm not in love with him. I tell him too much and I keep trying to say I haven't told him enough. I tell him that the first camera I had was a Brownie. I tell him that my favorite tree is the magnolia and my favorite saint, Lucia, with the tender image of her gouged out eyes arranged on the plate she always carries in her hands.

I also tell him of the long sticky days I spent in the stables, stripping off my clothes and wading into the lake with my horse, sliding down his shiny back and feeling his tail swish gently through the green water.

And I tell him about the day he was castrated.

How they left the testicles on the grass to burn and, as the days went by, at all hours—even at nine in the morning—I felt the need to photograph them.

Two lumps of blood and swollen skin drying in the August sun.

The phone wakes me up before dawn.

Tree Boy calls to ask for a phone number.

He tells me the initials in a low voice, without adding anything else about it.

It takes me a while to dictate the number, despite knowing it by heart.

He put the receiver on the pillow, I pretended to go look for it before reading it;

first the international prefix of Italy and then a long string of numbers.

After all, I am indeed a branch.

The willow that bends again and again.

But Tree Boy wants to split me in two.

When I'm in college, I strain my ears to try and hear his chainsaw.

I look in the parking lot, but his truck is missing.

He doesn't show up on campus for a week.

My dog ​​stands guard in front of the door of her study.

I call every number in Seattle on Berger's list.

I listen carefully to the sound of each female voice before hanging up.

I consider the possibility of calling Italy.

Instead, I put

on the barbecue grill.

I pour a good stream of flammable liquid on the cover, light a match and emulate the martyrdom of Saint Lawrence, while I watch how it burns, hoping, somehow, that the book will rise and face me.

In the morning, all that remains is ashes and caked-on bits of gray chalk that I scrape out of the grate with a stick.

I change the third and continue photographing my body.

I slice the images into little pieces and reconfigure them, trying to turn myself into another person.

And then, one day, he appears there, lying in my hammock, with my dog ​​stretched out on his torso.

I don't want him to realize how happy I am to see him.

“Tree Boy,” I say, casting a guilty glance at the barbecue.

“I've missed you,” he says.

But when I look back at him, he's petting the dog.

We got into the truck.

He turns the key and starts, but after a moment he stops the engine and comes over and looks at me for a long moment.

Just when I think he's finally going to kiss me, he reaches out to bolt my door.

Start up again, put first and wait to leave the block behind to turn on the headlights.

An increasingly weak beam of light observing the deserted street.

We crossed a bridge, and then another, to leave the city.

The trees in the gutter get thicker as we drive down the road.

As he reaches out to slow down, his hand brushes my leg.

"Listen," he says.

And I listen, yes.

But I listen in the same way that I can listen to the songs on the CD that precede the one I'm really expecting to hear.

Then he tells me about the painter with whom he fell in love, not because of her brushstrokes—which were great—but because of her slight Kentucky accent and her long, honeyed pauses, her penchant for the word

.

He tells me how he cheated on her girlfriend, whom he had been with for seven years, to pursue her.

How it all started.

And how it ended.

That the painter was involved with her favorite professor, and she followed him to Italy thanks to a Fulbright scholarship.

But by then it was too late.

His girlfriend had thrown her most precious things on the patio one rainy day.

For weeks, he drove over her possessions, her jobs, even the photos he'd taken of her.

Drawings shattered and caught between the posts.

Crumpled sheets mixed with mud and trash from curbs and drains.

Everything that was left became embedded in the paved ground or was eaten by moss: green and fertile tendrils claiming the legacy of the one who had been until then.

"So you were in Italy," I say.

Tree Boy drums his fingers on the steering wheel, the dim light from the headlight flickering in response.

The darkness is full of sharp curves.

Air struggles to get in through the window, the car window rattles, and rubber slams against the door.

For a moment the trees clear the path and though it is night I can see that massive logging has devastated the hillside.

Only stumps remain, desolate as tombstones, between the tire ruts.

We came to a muddy road.

Bushes and branches crash against the underside of the truck as we drive slowly, avoiding potholes.

I watch his hands open and close around the steering wheel.

When he stops the engine, we roll in neutral until, finally, we come to a stop.

He gets out of the car and closes the door.

The dog jumps from the backseat and they both disappear into the darkness.

Traitor, I think.

I remove the bolt and grope for the handle, which comes off and sticks in my hand.

I look at it for a moment, then set it on the dashboard and roll down the window.

Twigs snap under her feet as she approaches.

She opens the door for me and I jump to the ground, nearly sinking into her arms.

I feel her hands and a warm breeze.

The smell of damp earth and fresh clothes, the smell of her.

The rocks begin to scatter as we go, further and further through the trees.

The dog's collar jingles as she trots ahead of us.

With a rustle of wings, a bird leaves the branch it is perched on in the dark.

As we emerge from the forest, the low, reddish moon twinkles over the lake.

I remember reading somewhere that looking at the reflection of the moon in the water is a traditional remedy for hysteria.

I almost burst out laughing.

Now I want it more than ever.

Every detail of his betrayal made me want him even more.

I listened to his story as a kind of confession, a test with which he admitted the great error of that whole story.

As if he was adjusting the aperture to finally focus on me.

And I no longer care where he has been, whether in Italy or anywhere else.

And I don't care how many he's fucked if now I'm the one in the center of the frame.

The air is pregnant with hot promises.

He moves his fingers slowly, running over my collarbone, brushing my throat.

He closed his eyes.

I do not want to see anything.

I just want it to not stop.

It stops.

When I blink my eyes open, he's already wading out into the lake, his knee-soaked jeans.

Then he comes out, gently shakes my hand, convinces me to go into the water with him, and disappears.

He then re-emerges in the distance, floating face up on the black water.

However, it is I who is drifting.

Towering trees and a pomegranate moon.

But I want to force the fruit until it opens.

Let the red seeds make juice in my mouth.

Finally, he swims over to me and leads me to shore.

It almost surprises me when he lays me down on the floor.

He unbuttons my blouse and his calloused palm traces the curve of my ribs.

He is neither abrupt nor cautious—almost cynical—as if I were a piece of wood and he was inspecting me for any flaws.

He unzips my jeans, slides them below my hips, and buries his face in the flatness of my belly.

I can feel the caress of his freshly shaved hair, the drops of water crushed on my skin.

It circles my navel with its tongue, then lowers, only pausing to guide the panties down my legs.

I want nothing more than to feel him inside me.

But first I want him to kiss me, soft and slow, for a long time.

He yanks off his wet shirt and throws it on the floor.

He has a firm abdomen, a hairless and delicate torso, a tattoo of the Virgin next to his heart.

The ink has turned green and her face is full of tears.

I sit up and grope for him, but he grabs my wrists and squeezes them with one hand.

She has such a beautiful body that I suddenly feel self-conscious.

Although I have photographed my pussy lips and hung them on the wall for all the world to see, I have never felt so exposed.

I don't get scared when he knocks me down.

Not even when he moves and, still holding my wrists, puts a knee on each shoulder and hovers over me.

He unbuckles his belt and the buckle nearly snaps me in the face.

And it's not that I don't want to.

It's just that he hasn't kissed me even once.

I just don't dare ask him.

I guide it to my mouth and remember how slowly the book seemed to burn.

The silent way the pages curled and blackened.

Sparks glittered in the air and floated around.

Ashes and ashes fell at my feet.

As if it's all getting too intimate, Tree Boy lets go of my wrists, sits up, and lifts me toward him to turn me around.

Rocks bite into my knees and my hands sink into the mud.

It didn't go the way I wanted: Tree Boy's hands splitting me like firewood, Tree Boy's wet jeans sawing through my thighs.

I am an overgrown branch that needs pruning.

I am the shadow that usurped its place in the light.

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