Cathedral Hill

Cathedral Hill in St. Paul is where F. Scott wrote his novels, and where he and Zelda smashed up shit like rich hoodlums. The buildings are antique, bronzed, and not much taller than the trees. There’s lot of trees. And there’s the cathedral which sits sideways, watching over the city like a benevolent monster. Depending on the luster of your soul, it inspires comfort or terror, and for us half-breeds, both.

I parked my car at the top of the hill, got out, still shaky from not eating for a week. It’s amazing that I survived on coffee, bread and broth for so long, but it’s all my stomach would take. You might be the same way, but my stomach’s an emotional barometer, and nothing was going in or coming out that week. I had 10 minutes before my appointment, so I walked around, dizzy to the point where I thought I might pass out on the street. There were enough people around to witness my fall, and this is Minnesota, people call ambulances for strangers. And maybe I wouldn’t be a stranger, for long. Maybe this would be my new digs: a place to write my novels, to recover. How beautiful the first snow would be on the cathedral; I’d walk there each day. I’d light a candle. I’d start smoking, and track the streets like a ropey beast. Romantic!

Romantic on paper. Not in real life. There is nothing romantic about a broken heart; there’s really, really not. It’s romantic after it’s done, and it’s romantic when it happens to other people, fictional other people, but in the end, it’s about as romantic as a broken toe, and just as fixable.

The property manager was what we called a Wayzata Housewife: rich blonde highlights, starched shirts, caked make-up, sparkly ears. She was on the phone and motioned for me to come over. The office was sparse, and decorated like the Moulin Rouge, which I tried to take as a good sign, ah, yes, HOME!, but instead I slumped in a chair. She had two senior portraits of her equally blonde daughter facing out. The daughter had a horsey-smile and what we would call a softball-player face, and I looked away.

I knew exactly what I looked like, but didn’t have the energy to apologize: dull auburn hair (dyed last week), chipped black nail polish, untied sneakers with no socks and jeans that were falling off my hips. My face, Halloween-colored. There might’ve been a time when I wanted to look like this, when I would’ve cultivated the look of a kidnapped child locked in a closet for seventeen years, but that morning I’d spent more minutes that I wanted to admit spackling my face in a desperate hopefulness.

We were on the street, walking into the sun, talking about the weather. She walked fast; I did not. I didn’t know everything slowed down, you know? And soon we were in an apartment, and it was quaint and small and pretty, and I nodded and made tiny bird noises about it, and then suddenly we were in the laundry room, which was cemented and spidery and had rows and rows of industrial machines, and my stomach took this moment to thump against whatever inner wall surrounds it: OH HELL NO, said my stomach, and I put my face into my coat to keep from gagging.

There was an idea, of course, that if I left our house, if I moved into my own place, some cute, sparse studio with the cats – where I would write! I’d write like Scott and wail like Zelda! – that I’d feel better. Just get out of that house, everyone said. That house is suffocating you! You can’t live there alone like the last pea in the can. And of course, because I am this person, this imaginative, deathly hopeful ingenue, I thought – well, if there’s a change of venue, if he sees Writer Me in my adorable apartment overlooking the church, well, maybe then he’ll…

The next apartment was fine. Then we got in a car and drove down the street and she asked in a distracted, bright voice, “Doing anything fun today?” And I blurted out why I was looking at apartments, which was not the correct answer to her question, and she, like any stranger who’s had a three-ton unsolicited confidence hoisted on her, mumbled something, and kept driving. And the next apartment was fine, too, next door to the cathedral, really beautiful, actually, but then she showed me the “fitness room” which was a treadmill stuffed in a basement corner, lit by a single bulb swaying on a chain, and I could not shake the idea of, this is where lonely people live, this where single people live, this is where ____ people live. And I thought of our home, my home, which was sticky with memory, every corner, every inch of wall, but there was the noun of it: home.

She knew I wasn’t going to take it. Didn’t even hand me a card. Driving down the hill, my ribs aching, I called my dad, who’s been visiting for the week. He was at my home, watching the football game. “Let’s get pie,” I said, and told him I’d be there in 10 minutes. I stopped on the side of the road to cry a little, because I do this lately, this crying thing and I wondered how Chris was doing, and where he was, and what he was thinking, and I remembered that Zelda died in a fire and Scott died of a heart attack, and thought, OK, maybe we’re better off, maybe this is all for the best. But we aren’t fiction, which has always been the problem.

It costs to light candles in the cathedral, anyway.

Posted by: Zosia | 10-18-2008 | 05:10 PM
Posted in: General | Comments (3)