A Strange Conjunction
What I want is a strange conjunction with you—
—D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love
In sixteenth century Europe, certain recipes for poison weren’t complete without fat dribbled from the corpse of a redheaded man. Red, the rarest hair color, sprouts from only four percent of the world’s scalps. Many of art’s and literature’s most famous redheads include a host of untrustworthy biblical rogues: Lilith, Cain, Judas, the serpentine temptress painted on the domed sky of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. Even Eve’s brunette locks sizzle to crimson after Adam bites the apple. One of my favorite notorious redheads is the witch queen of Arthurian legend, Morgan le Fay, who rules the enchanted Isle of Avalon. On Avalon, people live to be a hundred years old, or more, and the island’s magical forests and fields give forth apples, grapes, and grain without the inhabitants having to lift one blissful finger in labor. The word Avalon comes from the Welch afal, meaning “apple.”
It was there, on the mythic isle of apples, that the Lady of the Lake, the high priestess of Avalon, presented King Arthur with the sword, Excalibur. After Arthur receives a mortal wound from fighting Mordred in the Battle of Camlann, the king sets sail for Avalon, in a black boat, with Morgan, in the hope that his witchy half-sister might heal him. Some folks believe Arthur died on the island, and others say he waits there to reclaim the throne of Britain someday. The location of the Isle of Avalon remains mysterious; it’s rumored to appear and disappear in the mists, forever shifting its location. Here, in Southern California, I’ve stood on the Venice pier, near the psychedelic Sikh on rollerblades and a silver-haired ukulele player, and watched Catalina Island appear in the vaporous blue distance, then recede into the white sea-fog.
~
California’s Avalon is a tiny seaside city, on the island of Catalina, whose pastel houses and wide-balconied hotels slope up the cove in a bright shuffle of tangerine, rose, and cornflower blue. Naming a city off the coast of Los Angeles after an enchanted isle may be one way to locate a myth. The act gives a latitude and longitude to that longed-for place of magic apple trees, where one might enter a forest—where a fairy can heal a mortal wound.
~
I eloped in ripped jeans and a shirt of ivory lace, to be married on the cliff-edge of a dirt-covered stagecoach turnabout, in the mountains above Avalon. Our ceremony’s officiate, Anni, and her husband drove my husband-to-be, David, and me up the island’s mountainous dirt roads in their shuddery, cherry-red Volkswagen bus. Watching Anni’s dyed orange hair flap in the wind from the cracked window made me repeat a phrase in my head from Norman Dubie’s poem “Ars Poetica” in which the jilted, strawberry blonde muse has hair “[t]hat second chaste coat of red on the pomegranate.” In the poem, a man tricks a woman into stripping off her clothes. He then swims off with the bundle into the night surf, leaving her alone on the beach. “Dubie’s saying,” my undergraduate poetry teacher had explained, “Don’t fuck with the muse.”
~
The stagecoach turnabout was flanked in ancient, gauzy-barked eucalyptus and a hip-high cedar fence. In the nineteenth century, the loop allowed a bulky coach to change direction with ease, so the horses wouldn’t stumble trying to turn around on the narrow path and send everyone over the cliff. As David and I stepped from the van, menthol oil wafted from the trees’ sage-green leaves. I can’t smell the air around a eucalyptus without conjuring the scent of the cigarettes I smoked in high school—the mentholated Newports I’d suck down between lunch and gym class in the graffitied bathroom stalls. Once, after reading a Xerox copy of Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” in my tenth grade creative writing class, I scrawled the poem’s final tercet in white-out over the olive-colored wall: “Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air.” The air hung sharp with menthol vapors on the day I married, and there in the trees wavered a line of pale girls exhaling their time-warped incense of smoke.
~
As Diane Ackerman notes in A Natural History of the Senses, migrating monarch butterflies prefer to rest in coastal eucalyptus groves because the pungent oil helps keep predatory insects and blue jays at bay. This way, the butterflies sleep within a kind of fragrant force-field.
~
Two months before we eloped, David and I lay in bed with the windows open. The scents from the night garden sifted through our screens: the neighbor’s white-starred hedge of jasmine, the raw olive-smell of the beach fog, the sweet pools of condensation on the coral tips of the Finger Mound—that bizarre, Martian-like succulent. I lay there thinking about the dream David had had a couple of weeks earlier: we flew to Rome to get married and rented a room at the end of a crimson-carpeted marble staircase, in a hotel just off the Piazza di Spagna. In the dream, getting a marriage license became a Kafka-level bureaucratic absurdity. David would run to and from our hotel, up and down the staircase, with a stack of paperwork, only discover that each time, upon arrival, we were missing a form. Oh, yeah? I’d said. I said nothing else, but each night, for two weeks, I went to sleep smiling. You know your dream about Rome? I finally asked as we lay in bed that night, listening to the neighbor drag her trashcan to the curb. Ever think about doing that kind of thing in real life?
~
In high school, I tried to forget the fact that I lived in suburban Fairfax, Virginia—
its beige, 1970s ranch houses and pruned sugar maples in each yard. I read fantasy books about the taboo love affair between Robin Hood and Maid Marian, the heroic adventures of hobbits and elves, the fantastical legends of Merlin and King Arthur. I taped a map of Tolkien’s Middle Earth to my bedroom wall, wrinkling and staining the paper with green tea to make the drawing of the realm seem more aged, more credibly a relic. I thought wearing velvet dresses with princess sleeves would seem too conspicuously sentimental, so I wore my royal blue crushed-velvet bellbottoms with peasant blouses to feel more fantasy-maiden than suburban teen. I even managed to convince my parents to buy me a twenty-two-string Celtic lap harp, on which I learned to pluck the ballad “Scarborough Fair” and the theme song from Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, “A Time for Us.” Every so often I’d sit on a log in the backyard, under a wild dogwood, even though the lumpy burls made for a less-than-magical cushion. Once a little boy crept across the woods and spied on my practicing.
~
At various times in my life, I’ve been told I could pass for one of those red-haired maidens found in paintings by the Pre-Raphaelites. Once it was a man buying mulch when I worked as a cashier in the garden section of Lowe’s hardware shop. I’d been leaning on a grey stone display fountain tiered in potted delphinium. Once it was a girl tripping on a headful of acid, who spun in circles with me at a Flaming Lips concert in Norfolk, Virginia. Most recently, it was Susan, a friend of David’s, who sent me an email after she saw the wedding photograph in which David and I make peace signs with our right hands as we stand in front of Anni’s Volkswagen, my bouquet of sunflowers jammed in the bus’s windshield wipers. Love the fact that you chose Avalon—the place of immortality—for your wedding, Susan wrote. And you, starring as Morgan le Fay . . . check out the Pre-Raphaelite painting of her by Frederick Sandys. In it, Morgana has hair astonishingly like yours! (Though she’s wearing a bit more clothing . . . most of it not for you, but the leopard skin might make a great sarong.)
~
Sandys—a debt-ridden and never popular painter—lived for a time in Chelsea with one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who admired the exacting, sensual lines and somber beauty of Sandys’s works. Many women obsess Sandys’s canvases, particularly mythology’s femmes fatales: Helen of Troy, Morgan le Fay, Medea, and the Arthurian temptress Vivien, who seduces Merlin to discover his secrets. Many women, too, populate Sandys’s love life: Georgiana Creed, his first wife; Keomi Gray, a gypsy woman who modeled for many of his paintings; and Mary Emma Jones, a young actress with whom he had nine children.
In Sandys’s “Morgan Le Fay; Queen of Avalon,” Morgan stands, gesticulant in a flowing emerald gown draped in jagged leopard skin and golden fabric ashimmer with esoterica. She wears a crimson-and-lavender cape in a room crowded with red silk wall hangings and richly carved wooden knick-knacks and alchemic oddities. An open book and a scroll lie on the floor at her feet. Instead of the omnipotent satisfaction or manic self-regard of a witch caught mid-spell, there’s a melancholic intensity to Morgan’s torqued lips and downcast eyes. It’s as if her incantation is fraught with desperation. Maybe she strives to close the wound of her half-brother Arthur. Maybe the king’s fate depends on the magic of her words.
~
I tried to come up with some magical words of my own to read during the elopement ceremony. I began writing my first epithalamium: on their wedding night, a couple sits on a seaside hotel balcony, sharing an heirloom tomato. I typed the title, “Wedding Night: We Share an Heirloom Tomato on Our Hotel Balcony Overlooking the Ocean,” which quickly took an ominous swerve: “Wedding Night: We Share an Heirloom Tomato on Our Hotel Balcony Overlooking the Ocean in which Natalie Wood Drowned.” The island’s dark history had slipped into my would-be love poem.
On November 29, 1981, Natalie Wood slipped from a yacht anchored off the shores of Catalina and drowned. She’d been drinking wine all evening with her husband Robert Wagner and Christopher Walken, her co-star in the in-progress sci-fi film, Brainstorm. When Walken suggested that Wood spend more time starring in films and less time caring for her two young children, Wagner smashed a wine bottle on the table, causing Wood to flee to the cabin below. When Wood’s body was discovered the next day floating in the Pacific, she was wearing a down jacket over her nightgown, and socks. The heaviness of her wet clothes must’ve dragged her down. And the coroner found on the side of the yacht’s rubber dinghy the drowned actress’s scratch marks. She may have heard the loose dinghy banging against the side of the boat, stooped to tighten the rope, and slipped on the swim step. Or perhaps someone shoved her overboard. As I wrote my poem, I watched the speaker recognize Wood’s briny scratches in the tomato skin’s salted pleats. She realizes the tomato she shares with her husband must have been grown from an heirloom seed that washed ashore, decades ago, from the yacht—that the actress must’ve slipped a gelatinous, green sliver of tomato on her tongue sometime before she rolled into the water. I’ll never be able to read this damn poem at my wedding, I thought.
~
Instead of my epithalamium-turned-elegy, I selected a passage from Rainer Maria Rilke’s letter to Emanuel von Bodman, written in 1901:
It is a question in marriage, to my feeling, not of creating a quick community of spirit by tearing down and destroying all boundaries, but rather a good marriage is that in which each appoints to the other guardian of his solitude, and shows him this confidence, the greatest in his power to bestow. A “togetherness” between two people is an impossibility, and where it seems, nevertheless, to exist, it is a narrowing, a reciprocal agreement which robs either one party or both of his fullest freedom and development. But, once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them, which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky!
~
When Rilke wrote, at the turn of the century, about the importance of lovers guarding one another’s solitude, stagecoaches still roamed the backroads above Avalon. As David and I clattered along the winding dirt paths of the island’s menthol-saturated interior in Anni’s van, we decided that the florist had wrapped my sunflower bouquet too tightly in white ribbon (“like an amputee’s stump,” David joked), and we began to unwind the stems. The ribbon grew longer and more diaphanous as it lost its layers. We re-tied the bow into something more free, more appealingly askew.
As we drew near the wedding site, Anni began to tell us about the island’s javelina infestation. Ten years earlier, Catalina had teemed with an overpopulation of bristly, brown, dwarf-hippo-shaped “skunk pigs” and so flew in a team of Midwestern hunters to thin the herds with machine gun fire. I think Anni’s trying to outdo me in the inappropriate epithalamium category, I whispered to David. Anni continued. She recalled how the whole island stank for weeks from the shot carcasses that stacked the hillsides. She’d drive to work, leading couples to various island peaks to say their vows, and packs of black-eyed orphaned javelina would stampede the groves, crossing the path of the van. Swarms of yellow jackets soon rose from the decaying meat, so the island then faced a winged plague. The javelina hunters had to trade their shooting skunk pigs for poisoning insect nests with soap.
~
Most brides likely would’ve been furious to receive such a gruesome, corpse-strewn send-off into holy matrimony. I liked the story, though. It humanized an otherwise stilted scene: four strangers in a van filled with beach mart champagne; my mangled sunflowers; my feeling ridiculous about booming Rilkean proclamations from a seaside cliff. If javelina feel threatened, I learned, they rub their tusks together to create a rough, chattering sound. I imagined Catalina’s forests must have echoed so profoundly that the whole island couldn’t sleep. I imagined the seed of the heirloom tomato we shared stretched back to an ancestor plucked up by Natalie Wood. As the van stopped and I slid open the door, I imagined Morgan le Fay finally finding the right words, her whispering over the wound, and the wound as it healed and shut. 
Anna Journey is the author of the collection If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting (University of Georgia Press, 2009), selected by Thomas Lux for the National Poetry Series. Her poems are published in a number of journals, including American Poetry Review, FIELD, Kenyon Review, and The Southern Review, and her essays appear in At Length, Notes on Contemporary Literature, Parnassus, and Plath Profiles. Journey holds a PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Houston, and she recently received a fellowship in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts. She teaches creative writing at the University of Southern California.
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