Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy Read online

  Beautiful Soul:

  An American Elegy

  Joshua Carey

  Spuyten Duyvil

  Table of Contents

  Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy

  1. Film for the New Reader

  2. Letters from M

  3. Pavement

  4. Miramare

  About the author

  Copyright information

  Henceforth and forever I am my own mother.

  Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary

  1.

  Film for the New Reader

  Black screen. A flicker. The letter:

  In the heart of the night the new reader lies awake with the lights turned off listening to the rain tapping on the skylight. If she opened her eyes she would see the darkness of the ceiling and a differing quality of darkness above her, a rectangle gradually reorganizing itself into a gray filmy gleam, glassy surface blistered by streetlamps, and the little shudders of water whose shadows she can feel moving across the bedspread, her husband’s sleeping body, her own face. Like hieroglyphics or Hebrew letters they form and squiggle and dissolve almost legibly before her closed eyes. The letters are falling on her roof and the roofs of her neighbors: they fall invisibly into Lake Michigan, that vast unplacid text, and coat metal and glass and asphalt from Waukegan down to the Indiana border. Others too are awake reading the weather, establishing degrees of correspondence between internal and external states of being, between the past and the present, what they expect from the day and what they are incapable of anticipating. She thinks of other bedrooms, other couples, men and women lying awake while their partners, women and men, sleep soundly. Alone, straining after significance, for signs and portents, reading clockfaces, windows, glowing screens, magazines, books. Her book is on the night table where she left it, face down, straining the binding: she reaches with her hand and feels the rough skin of the spine, its slightly crumpled edge like a lip, and then the pages dividing reluctantly under the gentle pressure of her fingertips. Under the covers, the pages marching together, many folds, many pages, the words she has read and the words she has yet to read. The book is mine while I read it, for as long as I keep turning the pages, and once I am finished it dies to me but lives in the hands of other readers, and we might meet in a cafe or the supermarket or on a bus or in a hospital waiting room and discover, without title, that we share the same blind insatiable need for print, ants at the picnic, words printed on the insides and outsides of our eyelids, passwords, like canceled checks bearing signatures negated by the loss of value, the transfer of energy from beginning to end, unceasing until the book drops from my hand, I close my eyes, the rain spools, lurches, stops. Let me live here ever. She is dropping to sleep, a few hours from dawn and the baby’s cry, as her husband breathes evenly, wordlessly. The rain carries on past consciousness. The bed is a boat for strangers.

  Sleepwalking she might arise and dress and drive in the dark to a wedge-shaped building in the heart of the city. In simple gray slacks and a white blouse under a tan raincoat, watching the elevator needle swing. And find herself in a granite hallway, in the loud hush of the janitor’s floor-polisher, knocking on the pebbled glass window of an office door with letters on it: S. Lamb, LLC.

  Sit down.

  He does and does not look the part, as she, dreamer, puckering crimson lipstick beneath a black bob, fails to resemble her limp-haired daytime self. The office is small, with a metal partition separating out the heavy desk and file cabinet from a waiting area with sofa and armchair and a table with magazines (a yellowing assortment of copies of The Nation interlaced with Guns & Ammo, an issue of Field & Stream poking out from underneath a stack of Psychology Todays) and a water-cooler gurgling discontentedly to itself. With the side lamp and the magazines and the unopened box of tissues it could be the therapist’s office it so exactly resembles: the office of Rita Rattman, MSW, where Ruth and Ben spent one awkward evening per week for three months before Lucy was born. Rita Rattman, MSW had long curly fraying hair and an oblong horsey face and sandals that slipped distractingly on and then off her long-toed feet as she curled in the armchair across from the sofa where the three of them sat: Ben and Ruth and Ruth’s belly, the future made flesh, taut as a drum if drums swallowed sound, swallowed inchoate possibilities of the life that Ruth had imagined before the morning she’d opened her eyes knowing she was pregnant, the evening before she’d peed on a stick, the sleepless night turning beside Ben waiting for the right moment. It came or failed to come in the small hours, perhaps three in the morning, to shake her boyfriend awake and say the words to him, studying his sleep-smeared face for the least hesitation, the slightest sign of doubt, horror even, all reactions she would have taken for signs of intelligence, would have let her release a little breath, feeling herself for one moment to be less alone. But the insensitive bastard had only smiled beatifically into his pillow and reached out a hand to caress her belly, for the first but not last time touching not herself but past her, like one who pushes a revolving door and travels with it for only so long as it takes to pass in or out, to where you were really going. Her knuckles whiten. The tears come.

  How can I help you.

  Watching, in three-quarter profile, profile, waning, turned entirely away. A mass of black hair, too vivid to be natural, tentacular, gone.

  Did she speak? Has she spoken? Did she hand over, across the featureless surface of the table, the manila folder he now leafs through, with its documents, letters, photographs? Where did it come from? Is he repeating back to her what she told him?

  The photos.

  He pushes the magazines aside and lays them out on the coffee table, one next to the other. Three women, or three photos of the same woman, or two photos of the same woman and the photo of a different woman, or one photo of a woman and two photos of a woman trying to look like the first woman, or two photos of different women and one photo of a woman trying to look the platonic ideal of the woman the first two only resemble. The possibilities are not exhausted.

  The same woman. Not the same woman.

  One of the photos is black and white, one is in color, and one had once been in color but has faded. The black and white photo shows a slender young woman with long dark hair looking full at the camera, features placid, but there is something of an angle, a subtle arch to her eyebrow, that creates the impression of barely suppressed laughter. It has the dimensions of a passport photo but is about twice as large. She wears a plain blouse of a pale wheatlike color, almost no color at all, and no visible jewelry. If there were a hand, for instance, wearing a ring, it does not stray into the territory that the photo so sharply delineates. For identification purposes only.

  The color photo shows a slightly less young woman with dark hair, cut shorter than the hair of the black-and-white woman, in profile, bare of arm with pink palpable flesh, leaning her elbows on a railing looking down at water. The landscape bends behind her, raises obscure buildings: a river or a canal, a palace or a church. The profile is pensive, but the presence of the first photo on the table sets up a sort of vibration, a call and response. The lip of the profile the color photo doesn’t show might be quirked upward, as the eyebrow of the woman in the black and white photo suggests a bitter hilarity. Her hands are folded in front of her over the railing over the water. If she’s wearing a ring the ring is hidden.

  The faded photo, a Polaroid, shows a woman older and heavier than the others, with dark shoulder-length hair. This is a candid shot, whereas the others are manifestly posed. She is sitting laughing on a blanket in what looks like a park or meadow. There is a basket, there are plates, there is a bottle of wine and a plastic cup in her left hand. A plain metal band—the fading
makes it impossible to say whether it is silver or gold—adorns the fourth finger of that hand. The other hand reaches down around the shoulders of a small girl, perhaps three or four years old. She is dark-haired like the woman and her eyes are squinted shut and her mouth is round in an O. She could be yawning or yelling. She is certainly not laughing like the woman who holds her lightly, laughing hard, doubled over slightly, as though she has just been tickled or poked. The image is poorly framed, for it shows most of the head and body of the woman but the girl’s body is cut off. She is a yelling or yawning head with a single disembodied hand outstretched in protest toward the sky.

  The man rearranges the photos in reverse order. He stacks them in a pyramid. He puts them in a line again and flips them over and studies their backs. One photograph’s back is blank. One has the words “Venice 1972” in blocky print along the bottom. One has an indecipherable scribble. He flips them back over one by one arranging the faces side by side, crossing their gazes.

  “The skill of police artists is to make the living appear dead.”

  He looks at her, we see her face as though over his shoulder: the dark circles and fierce beak, full lips stained bright and bloody.

  You want to know something more about her: what she ate, what makes her smile, what she is looking at in the photograph in the white dress like a bride’s, in three-quarter profile looking at a river you can’t place—the Hudson, the Thames, the Seine, the Po, the Danube. Your question is always the brute one, the necessary one: Did she love you? Whatever the answer, you will not be satisfied with it. Whatever the answer she will elude you, as water eludes, flowing through her memory that can never be yours.

  My mother is dead.

  Dead.

  But she sends me letters. I have them here. Touching the manila envelope sticking out of the top of her purse. Didn’t she already hand it to him?

  Legs curled under her on the sofa. When did she take her shoes off? They lie discarded like patient animals under the plain pine table with its magazines.

  The therapist sat with her legs pulled under her in the armchair across from the couple on the couch, shielded by the low table, by the box of tissues, by an expanse of cream-colored carpet. These were night sessions, and the room was inadequately lit by a single lamp in the corner opposite where the therapist’s armchair was. A bright lamp in a dark room makes strong shadows. It lit one half of Ruth where she always sat, her right arm and right earring, if she wore them, sparkled and reflected in the dark window opposite. Ben at his ease in the fuller dark, right ankle on left knee, his wristwatch and glasses glinting whenever he moved or spoke, which was not often. The therapist sat cross-legged in her chair making sudden grotesque gestures with her large ringed hands, subsiding, looking up at the ceiling with the whites of her protuberant eyes showing while she gathered her thoughts, or fixing Ruth orbicularly and nodding with exaggerated attention. Ruth, hands folded on her belly, swelled up with right words that did not come. The words that did make an appearance were stupid and obvious. The therapist gestured for Ruth and Ben to face each other, for one to speak and the other to listen and to repeat what she or he heard. Some words went unspoken that were neither wrong nor right: job, jealousy, abortion. Ben said something about Ruth’s mother and she heard herself say, like a character on TV, Leave my mother out of this. But that hadn’t been what he’d said at all. You’ll be a wonderful mother said the therapist, referee, recording secretary. Not her words, not Ben’s. But she’d been looking right at his mouth. She knew what she’d heard.

  The listening man is dressed neatly, monochromatically, in dark suit, white shirt, and dark tie. But where are his shoes? She tries not to stare at the mobile toes in thin black dress socks, kneading the carpet.

  Answering a question. She hoped she hadn’t misheard. Almost three years.

  And no contact since then?

  Except for the letters.

  When did they begin to arrive?

  Three months ago.

  Real letters?

  On paper, yes.

  Handwritten?

  Some. Some are typed.

  You mean printed?

  I mean typed.

  Stamped? Postmarked from where?

  Europe. Different cities in Europe.

  Where?

  Paris Rome Vienna Venice Budapest Berlin. Trieste.

  Trieste, he repeats.

  Trieste. The far edge of Italy. There’s a sea there, or a river. The sea is warm, the river cold. Rivers remember the places they pass through. The sea is blank and unmemorable like a sunbather in dark glasses, prone, dead, on a beach strewn with hundreds of other inanimate bronzed bodies. Germans, most of them, or Austrians. There are no Americans here, Elsa. Just like home.

  A stray line comes to her, a wandering sentence from a poem: Do I not withhold the penetrations of red from you?

  She puts down the letter and shuts her eyes for just a moment. But to shut your eyes inside a dream is only to open them more widely.

  And you want me to find her?

  I know where she is.

  Where I last saw you, where you were supposed to be. A field. A small oblong stone set in the earth among others. A bronze vase inset that can be inverted and filled with flowers.

  In the halftone room the man leans toward her, vulpine, unsmiling, patient, takes a cigarette out of a pack from the drawer, leans back, produces matches, lights one, lights the cigarette, tosses the match into a glass ashtray. Each action leaves behind it a little shimmering trail in her sight, like one of her migraines. No one smokes any more except in the movies: smoke creates texture, the illusion of depth, pulls focus. He leans back, plumes it up and outward, makes a little indescribable generous gesture with his hand. The blinds slat the wall with light from a streetlamp. It is all more perfect, more familiar, than she could have hoped.

  These letters lead back to someone. I want you to find him.

  Not her then. Who?

  My father. My real father.

  How many fathers do you have?

  Call him Papa, patient companion of her years, with his mustache, his glasses, weak kindly eyes. Sang me to sleep, held my hand at crosswalks, brought me to his classroom where I played in the hollow of his desk while he delivered his lectures on mathematics. He was always there, trying too hard to make up for a more singular absence: hers. Also his.

  I couldn’t come from him. It’s someone else. My father. She left him, too.

  Who is writing the letters, then? Your father or your mother? Or some third party? To what advantage?

  They are… He is… She stops to think of the word, eyes lowered. Raises them, unwavering, into the black gathering hollows of his face. Complicit.

  In the drained toplit room of shadows there comes a pause. There they are, framed as though from some third person’s point of view, hovering spirit, a person with a camera, silent, not to be observed observing detective and client, doctor and patient, animus and anima. Headlights from the street track up the wall, gleaming obscurely on panes of glass concealing photographs, certificates, diplomas. He’s got a drawer open, two glasses, pouring shots of rye. She holds the small hard heavy glass he hands her in her lap watching him knocking one back and pouring another. It’s what you expect, what you wish for. You pay for this. For the disciplined derangement of the senses, disarrangement of false reality. You pay him to enter your dream, your nightmare. So you can wake up. The fall guy, the sacrifice. She notices, as if for the first time, the long seam of the stockings on her legs, leading suggestively ever upward, and the undone buttons of her blouse. It’s me. The fatal one.

  It may get expensive.

  I’ll pay anything. I want to know who she was.

  I thought we were talking about your father.

  It’s the same thing.

  Thy mother’s spirit. Doomed for a certain term to walk the night. The glass in her hand protects her palms from her curiously pointed nails.

  He makes a small horizontal gesture with
his cigarette hand.

  It’s your money. So to speak.

  The king died, then the queen died.

  How do dreams end? She sees a man kneeling in a narrow room, as though at prayer. She sees the man in black enter with a gun in his hand. The body kicks out as the life leaves it, falls prone. She can almost see his face.

  Men take and take, her mother had told her, until there’s nothing left. They can’t help it, it’s in their nature. They’re babies, all of them.

  The baby, rooting.

  She swung her legs out of bed (Ben grunts, his body jackknifed, burying his head more deeply in the pillow) and stepped into her bathrobe, passed Lucy’s closed door and passed through the room that Ben calls her office out of misguided courtesy, located the pack of Marlboro Lights tucked in the back of the top drawer where it’s been keeping company with dried-out pens and bent paperclips for more than a year, and treaded softly down the stairs and passed through the kitchen and out through the sliding glass door onto the deck with the red firestarter Ben uses for the grill in her hand, feeling the cool humid predawn air pressing itself against the parts of her the bathrobe didn’t cover, and in a gesture that has never failed anyone propped a cigarette between her lips and lit it, holding the handle of the firestarter away from her as though it were a blowtorch, and blew grateful stale smoke up and away from her in a cloud toward her neighbor’s silent black backyard, rising past the second floor windows she imagined, moment of panic wondering if her daughter’s window was open, decided that it wasn’t, imagined Ben’s nostrils whiffing the smoke and turning again in the bed like the bore of a drill deeper into some quietude where she can’t, won’t follow, and the image of her mother’s face when she was young (which “she”) rose unbidden before her eyes, its planes and curves, the dark bulging slightly startled dark eyes like Ruth’s own, the hair like woven strands of coal and glitter (even at the far side of middle age), lips like hers perpetually narrowed to mark the imprint of irony like a kiss, like the burning coal of Moses, like memories carried like treasure in a box that’s never been opened, is it the treasure that’s so heavy or all that iron and lead and hollowness and the burden of not knowing what is precious, what is dross, never dropped, buried at sea.