Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy Read online

  Where do you want me?

  Producing a joint from her purse, lighting it, offering me a toke. When I reached for it she laughed and danced away. I tried to look severe. She danced back to me and held the joint to my lips. I inhaled deeply.

  Behind the sofa, near the window there. No, don’t open the curtains—that light is perfect. Stand right there.

  She stood on the bare floorboards near the tall window, from which I could hear the occasional spatter of rain on the glass in counterpoint with the piano’s cartwheels. She looked left and right, as though crossing the street, then began to unbutton her blouse.

  You don’t have to take off your clothes, I said stupidly.

  She continued to unbutton as if she hadn’t heard. I persisted in my folly.

  You realize this can take a while and be uncomfortable? Modeling is hard work.

  Simone says there’s nothing to it. Sliding out of her jeans.

  Simone…

  She said to me in English, Shut up and draw.

  She was naked. In a glance I took in the salient patterns of lightness and dark: the skin of her belly, her thighs, the tops of her breasts, her face. And the black hair on her head and the shaggier hair between her legs, and the little tuft visible beneath her right arm as she bent it back to adjust her hair. The shadows played on her neck. As an art student, and before that, I’d looked at innumerable naked bodies of every shape and age. Old men with goiters came to pose for us, and middle-aged men who removed suits to reveal the hard round bowls of their bellies, their sunken chests. Many of the women were beautiful, but just as many were not, and indeed it was the ugly and ungainly ones who were the most interesting to draw. Strangely, it was not M’s body, as enchantingly curvaceous as it was, that my eyes and pencil were drawn to; it was rather as if her disrobing had revealed her face to me for the first time. I put her through rapid changes, assuming the voice of command that up to now I’d only heard from my instructors: lift your left arm, bend your right knee, turn away from me, face me, squat on the floor, raise both your arms. She did everything I said, the features of her face unmoving, but a flush started in her cheeks and across the thin skin of her sternum as my hand moved rapidly, mechanically, sketching, getting a feel for how that face and that body could fill the blank space of the page, bear its whiteness, the viewer’s gaze.

  Are you bored? I asked her suddenly.

  No.

  Tired?

  A little.

  All right.

  I turned one more page. Having broadly and rapidly sketched the volumes and masses of her body with the broad side of the pencil lead, I now concentrated the point on her face. Strong eyebrows made more pronounced by the pale clarity of her complexion, high forehead, a slight endearing chubbiness to the cheeks, a full, almost drooping lower lip and a thin bowed upper, a Mediterranean whisper of a mustache, like Duchamp’s Mona Lisa’s, under her nose, which was angular, almost broken-looking. A face that could be starkly arresting or beautiful, depending on the light, but never pretty, never jolie, and in her blanker moods—when a dark repose overtook her features and the light went out of her bright brown eyes and her thick hair hung lank around her ears and her mouth hung slightly open, the better to let smoke in and out—she could seem very nearly malformed and hideous. It was that face, to my growing alarm, that I found myself drawing—my pencil had subtracted the twinkle from her eye and rendered it heavy, dragged down by shadow, and the upturned corners of her mouth on my sketching paper tilted down toward the center of the earth. Her nose, a challenge in any case, had become a Picasso-esque wedge dividing the Red Sea of her cheekbones, which in any case I had somehow rendered bloodless though working in monochrome, even as a slow blush worked its way across her living face and the chill in the room stippled her nipples and the fine hairs on her forearms. With a frantic blurring motion of my thick fingers I put in her hair, not the closely shaped cap that she had in life but a jagged thundercloud that darkened and darkened until the pencil point broke with a snap.

  Can I move now? she asked.

  Yes, I said without looking up. I felt a vibration, a lurch, as when a train starts unexpectedly, the woman on the sheet and the woman by the window, both utterly alive, giving and losing reality to one another. I thought about her looking at it and was frightened. With a quick slap of paper I overturned the sheet and started again. When I looked at her, I saw that she was now in three-quarter profile, and that she had crossed her left arm across her torso, slightly lifting her heavy breasts. I started with them this time, carefully but quickly shading in their volume, getting a sense of their slight ripple and pliancy, the surprising red-brown darkness of the aureoles with a stray hair or two springing from their circumferences, a little red mole the size of the tip of pinky finger on the inside slope of the right breast, just above where her arm was hugging them together to make a cleavage of nearly parodic generosity—something the curl of her lip suggested she was fully aware of doing.

  Should I move?

  No. Stay there, please.

  I felt now that surge of energy in me that was not only the surge of arousal—though it was surely that—but of attention, a kind of inward leaning toward the object of my gaze I had experienced from time to time when drawing or painting from life, which I was capable of not only when confronted with a beautiful woman (in fact it was rarely the case, for I summoned an excess of sang-froid in such moments to avoid embarrassment) but with men of strong physique who would flatly or twinklingly engage my gaze, and sometimes even when doing natures mortes, when I would permit myself to engage the full voluptuousness, color, and albedo of a plumskin, an apple core, a blue China bowl. It didn’t last long. My hand moved more slowly and caressingly up the planes of her body to the face, then in a few sudden motions the picture was done. I stood there for a moment, hands at my sides, then lurched back from the table and sagged my head to the rainy glass, conscious of my burning cheeks.

  Can I see it? She stepped lightly forward and around the table to examine the drawing. I couldn’t see her face but was left to read the angle of her inclined neck and the fine hairs quivering there.

  It’s beautiful, she said at last. But it doesn’t much look like me, does it?

  I shrugged.

  She arched an eyebrow. You’ve had your vision, is that it?

  I shrugged again. She lifted the paper to examine the first drawing; I thought to stop her but then didn’t, instead continuing to watch the rain streak down the leaded glass windowpanes. Lights and colors free of figure and form rippled on the pavement below. I heard her inhale quietly.

  Is that what I look like?

  To me. Today. Yes.

  She was looking at me. Unwillingly, as though in a magnet’s grip, I turned my gaze to meet hers. Her body was blinding, her eyes blurred. I tried to desiccate that gaze.

  How you must hate me, she said softly.

  Not at all.

  My tongue was confused but I knew that I wanted to use those words I’d heard in so many songs and movies. Non, je t’aime. But all that came out was that Non. It convinced neither of us, I knew, but what would it have taken to turn that Non into a Oui? Maybe everything.

  Can I keep this? she asked. She picked up the drawing and held it in front of her, that second self, homunculus, black with soft pencil and disclosure. Then she turned away and walked across the living room to her bedroom door. She opened it, paused, looked back at me. Men are all the same, she said softly. She closed the door behind her.

  The second drawing was mine to tuck into my portfolio and take home, where it took its place on the wall among a dozen other anonymous nudes, what Charles called my jerk-off wall. He wasn’t home that night; he was home less and less. I watched the shadows of the raindrops walk down each woman—ink or pencil or pastels or oils, in similar and dissimilar poses, so that the row of them resembled nothing so much as the letters in a ransom note, different and disjointed but fundamentally legible, living letters spelling out a phrase or two
, a poem of nudes, a demand.

  Lie of the linear; micrologic of sentences. The new reader gets past that by reading multiple books at once, by skipping the pages in which the killer’s identity is revealed, by reading only odd-numbered pages, by reading poetry. The new reader wanders the text-torn landscape looking for something to surrender to. The new reader writes at odd moments, in odd places: the desk is too neat, sterile in its brick of light on the second floor in the corner of the guest room, where no books are stacked, where the laptop could stand pristine or the guest bed beckons the new reader from writing to napping, dreamlessly, recovering bit by bit the nights lost to the stack of unfinishable books by her beside. No: she writes in a black notebook, self-consciously, interspersed with lists that point back always to the objective life: errands, groceries, phone numbers, friends. In the kitchen, constantly interrupted by e-mails, links, YouTube, and by cooking, the child, the husband, the telephone, her own mind, somehow frenetic and lazy at once. She cheats an hour: Ben is home on a Saturday morning, she puts her laptop in one of his old briefcases and walks six blocks to Starbucks, sits down with a latte, far as she can get from the cozy chairs where the insane are clustering, opens the computer and is immediately lost in e-mails, links, YouTube, the telephone, her mind making rabbit tracks across the window, following passersby wonderingly: where can she be going in such a hurry, too young to have children; why does that well-dressed man move so slowly, will he yes he will reach down into the trash can, sorting and searching; who is that woman in the black SUV with the windows rolled up and the engine running, talking to herself and laughing; the barista calls someone named Bethany and she appears, a woman in her sixties with iron gray hair in a ponytail down her back, where shall wisdom be found, and she strides out the door licking a spot of cream from her wrist.

  She types I am alone and stares at the words, floating mimetically in the white window of what is not exactly a page. Flicks the cursor, changes it: I is alone. Je est un autre. My own private Rimbaud. An erect figure, flat on top like a broad-brimmed hat, flat on the bottom: flatfoot. An image out of the detective novels she used to consume indiscriminately when she was younger. Not the English locked-room mysteries her mother favored; Ruth liked the hard-boiled Americans. Hammett and Chandler’s morose and witty heroes, men talked out of breath (Breatlhless), making self-pity look as noble as it is inevitable. There were women too, hard-edged and wisecracking, V.I. Warshawski and Kay Scarpetta and at the very bottom or top of the list there was wide-eyed infallible Nancy Drew. It was the men who drew her, the Hardy boys outscheming the bad guys, Bogart tugging his ear empathetically as Marlowe or coldly, cynically as Spade. What saps they were, these guys, how easily they were taken in by a beautiful and heartless woman. It was not even the women who were responsible but the man’s own narcissism, his “code,” his chivalric idea of his own ruthless perceptions. A man like that of limited intelligence and ruthless cunning, sealed off from the world of commitments and distractions by pride, immense privacy, loneliness, drinking. A man like that might accomplish something, might venture, while a woman stayed home and did the necessary raveling of his legend, his shroud.

  The I was blinking. She closed the laptop and hit mute on the buzzing cellphone, where she read Ben’s name. Time to return home with nothing accomplished. But there’s an emotion floating atop the expected dull rage, like a rainbow sheening a black parking-lot puddle. Anticipation, incipient aliveness. The old books are at home, the old adventures in handsome trade paperback editions, buried somewhere in the basement. She’ll dig them up again and carry them upstairs, tonight, while child and husband are sleeping. She’ll read them. She’ll reread her dreams.

  There were many days after, all the days of my life, but those first days crushed us with their emptiness. The waves had crested and found their level without, after all, having capsized the great unwieldy ship that was La France. Out of the dark, out of the smoke, humid summer air no longer stirred the red banners hanging from the Sorbonne and the Odeon and the balconies of St. Germain. The students still marched and met and made speeches and left ruin and beauty in their wake, but some irreplaceable tension had snapped or slackened. During these belated days of early June, M and Charles and I were inseparable, the more so since Thicht had left the city abruptly, for fear of being arrested and deported back to Vietnam. Simone, too, had scarpered, under silent moral pressure from M, who without effort had become the center of our little circle, and so one evening she climbed on the back of a motorcycle behind a young Algerian named Mustafa and vanished laughing into the red stream of taillights escaping the smoldering capital. What followed were dark dull days like troughs between waves, neither revolutionary nor quotidian, into which volition vanished entirely or from which senseless schemes erupted suddenly into complete life, only to be eclipsed by apathy between midnight and dawn. I thought often of Simone and her Algerian, her arms around his waist, a new wind carrying her away now that history had blown itself out. So M gave up her flat and moved in with us, into the big high-ceilinged doorless furnitureless flat just streets away from the storm that had become all eye, all silence, in the Boul’ Mich, at the apex of an imaginary triangle joining the two centers of the sputtering revolution, the Sorbonne and the Odeon. There we began to pass the time, bell jar days half-asleep, half-clothed, eating out of cans, listening and then not listening to the radio, to phonograph records, emerging only at dusk to roam the streets, together, looking for the revolution and finding only cautiously open cafes, packed moviehouses, streets aimless with youths and slogans without direction or center. The TV was drivel and hardly anyone owned one anyway; the radio was propaganda but necessary to track the convulsions and flailings of the state, increasingly comic and helpless giant, never did we dream it would catch up with us, once again incarnate La France, even if it was a corpse it was heavy enough to crush us. The city was still turbulent, garbage stacked up in neat hallucinatory piles higher and higher on the impassable sidewalks, it became natural for everyone, bourgeois and student alike, to move in the center of the street, day or night, marching or alone. People were still cramming the Sorbonne for lectures, discourses, extended carefully argued disagreements about the nature of the state to come. Cohn-Bendit was detained in Germany, there were no leaders but it was undoubtedly the case that without him things began to lose their shape, teeter and swell, like a hot-air balloon that could no longer lift its basket but sat there, billowing in whatever wind. The first sizable demo in a few weeks happened and we took our places in it, or meant to: Charles had already gone, one of the organizers. But half a block away from the Boulevard St. Germain M stopped me with a hand on my chest.

  Listen to them, she said. Can you hear what they’re shouting?

  I listened.

  “We are all German Jews,” I said in English. “We are all undesirables.”

  But it’s not true, Gus. It simply isn’t true. Someone like Charles… And they’re all of them, they’re all like him.

  A gesture of solidarity—

  With whom? With the dead?

  You aren’t dead, I said. Or German. And you are very far from being undesirable.

  Oh, Gus. Remember when I said that I liked that you were a little bit stupid? The word she used was bête.

  Yes.

  I take it back.

  She turned around and walked away from me, wiping away tears. Trapped between exigencies, I could only stand there watching, as she and the disorderly parade of students, beginning to be pressed by police, passed me by.

  We read and read: there were runs on the few open bookshops as people fled their boredom, their stasis, I read indiscriminately, passing each book as I finished it to M: the letters of Rosa Luxemburg, The Count of Monte Cristo (I had read it again and again when I was younger, and now, again), a popular history of the Commune, a paperback edition of Fourier’s Theorie des quatre mouvements, the fourth volume of Proust, the third volume of Churchill’s autobiography I found in our usual shop; some
one had written in black marker on the inside front page in English Memoirs of a Fascist and underlined it three times. Charles too read everything, but what he cycled back to us was didactic: he was shocked that I’d never read Rimbaud, the key to the revolution is in here, he said, but I found it incomprehensible. It’s true certain aphorisms floated up from the frantic murk and stuck with me, I found myself looking at the window reciting to myself si le cuivre s’éveille un clairon, ce n’est pas sa faute, if the brass wakes a trumpet it’s not its fault, or «Matinée d’ivresse» which thanks to M’s English I thought of as a sort of movie review of the revolution itself: On nous a promis d’enterrer dans l’ombre l’arbre du bien et du mal, de déporter les honnêtetés tyranniques, afin que nous produisions notre plus grand amour, They promised to inter in darkness the tree of good and evil, to deport the tyranny of respectability, so that we might bring forth our purest love. We have faith in the poison. We know how to give our whole life every day. Voici le temps des Assassins. I said that to myself again and again until it sounded like a train leaving the station, picking up tempo: voici le temps, voici le temps, voici le temps des Assassins. We then watched the film of that title, revived for one week only at a crusty little shoebox of a cinema on the Rue St. Jacques, eyes wide watching the hapless Jean Gabin (the face in other films of that sublime detective Maigret) undone by every woman in his life, one woman whipping another in a greedy frenzy until it all ends in blood by the banks of the Seine: we said it together leaving the theater joining the roving bands of students under cover of night, all of us thinking or muttering “Voici le temps des Assassins!” Charles grew more baroque in his demands on our time and attention, he suddenly forbade American films, then rescinded the ban when Bonnie and Clyde came to town (the cinemas were packed, none of them closed, throughout May and into June they had a special status, like monasteries in the Middle Ages in which any common criminal might claim refuge), then reinstated the ban. After every film he’d lecture and harangue, our flat for an auditorium, M would lay her head in my lap sometimes looking up at the ceiling while he talked, leaving me the task of following him with my eyes, trying to resist the natural impulse to stroke her hair, I compromised by resting my hand there, huge paw on her head, like a hat, she closed her eyes. What am I doing here, I asked myself, how had I, of brute Alsatian stock, come to follow this road, to Paris, the path of striving toward the respectability Rimbaud would deplore, throwing in my lot with my fellow-children, sons and daughters of the bourgeois, in their sleek well-fed skins, who’d been so good as to take me for one of them, who was I to refuse this destiny, to sink temporarily with the mass and then rise with it, the new ruling class in a society without classes, as Charles described it, for all his personal despotism there was an undeniable light in his eyes, it held us both, this intensity, was it my birthright too, would I too feel the sand under my boots, the Midi come to colonize the capital, the whole world, the paradise of Fourier’s maddest dreams, the seas turned to lemonade, the arctic regions temperate, wild beasts spontaneously transformed into the glad servants of man? I had made their cause my own, though the “they” and the cause were splintering, had worked night and day in a fever to transmit telegraphed slogans of defiance and hope that seemed capable almost on their own of conveying us into the new, unimaginable reality. But something had shifted, something had snapped. I was awake now, watching the dreamers, watching Charles, hurt like a child’s sticking to his face. It was not his revolution I mourned, nor my own stalled destiny as an artist, which I saw so clearly to be finished before it began; I was a painter, perhaps, but not an artist, I lacked the architecture for that particular brand of madness, I was simple, binary, a keystone arch that ideas, things, people passed through, in and out, on and off. It was the woman in my lap, asleep now, dreams uncertain, in the revolution’s orbit (or is that redundant), embodying the more-than-life that the others had passed from hand to hand in the lecture halls of the Sorbonne and down from the stage of the Odeon and most of all of course on the streets where we’d all been in the momentary grip of love, revolutionary love. But the vast majority of them, Charles and Cohn-Bendit and all the rest, they were little old men at heart, little old men before it began and little old men forever after: I saw it so clearly, as though already in hindsight, in Charles’s stricken angry arguing face in the underheated flat on the first of June, forty years gone. Even when M awoke, and rose, and went to him, casting me out once again from the little circle of warmth, I knew enough to pity Charles and the others, the sleepers, who suffered the illusion of a destiny. Charles stood there in an embrace with M, remote as always, head tucked down under the fall of his blond hair, whispering in her ear, hiding from the death that was before them, us, behind me already it seemed, the death of youth. The old man’s brute-hearted and calculating betrayal of his younger self. Oh, Charles, even now, I would shield you from such a fate if I could.