Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy Read online

  Interior. A simple apartment, finely if anonymously decorated in muted feminine style. Closed French doors, a sofa, a vase offering a single tulip, a lamp. Doorway to a kitchen, to a bathroom, to a bedroom. Tidy, silent, but for sounds from the street.

  Meeting no other men with hats the solitary man continues dragging his suitcase down the narrow street. Does he wear it unselfconsciously? To scratch his bald spot does he raise the hat with his free hand or do his fingers creep under the brim? How can we know about his bald spot? Close in, encircled, like a tonsure, like Henry Miller. He pushes (he pulls) on his way.

  The apartment is empty. No: there is a breeze. It stirs the curtains. There is a whistling kettle in the kitchen. Extreme close-up of a smudged tall glass that fills with boiling water, with black particles that rise and swirl to fill the screen, touching the water with their color. The plain pewter kettle replaced on the stove with a clank. The specks like sparrows entering a black cloud, suddenly pushed down and pressed out of sight. Ceramic rattle, cube of sugar in a chipped cup. The coffee streams out of the French press into the cup and presses down on the sugar cube, breaking it down but not utterly: a sweet residue underneath the bitter surface. The cup is carried out of the kitchen.

  The envelope on the table by the tulip. It is a bill, billet doux, it is news. Perhaps it’s news from some man gone to fight in the war. The camera is always before the war, never after or inside it. The camera is still, it’s a wide still shot, but our eyes are drawn irresistibly to the empty hatrack. A shout in the street, can’t make out the language, ricochet of a soccer ball off of someone’s stoop, a short barking laugh. We are Americans and we call it soccer and there is a woman who is of an age, a fadedness, a resilience we don’t have a name for. Something Mediterranean or Semitic in the angles of her face, the prominence of her nose, the darkness of her eyes. The hair shimmers with its blackness, the beautiful gradated blackness of a silver gelatin print. Alone she holds her beauty before her like a mask or a microphone, in one untrembling hand, so that we can’t see what the other is doing. When she turns her back to us we are blind. Is she weeping? Is she whispering? Is she judging the time of day by the angle of the light? There are no clocks in this room. The envelope, torn.

  The old reader sunk in her English cozies while the new reader is up to her neck in noir. Meeting only once on a twilit sofa a hundred years ago in the afternoon of a fever together thrilling to Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief, her alien blondeness like fate itself co-piloting Cary Grant’s little convertible along the twisting mountain roads of a Technicolor Monaco. But she shuns her mother’s library, curls up on the floors of chain bookstores with shiny American paperbacks in her hands on the trail of serial killers, mass murderers, conspiracies that go all the way to the top. The new reader favors the cipher, the hard face, Eisenstein’s principle of montage: intercut with happiness or sadness the face is happy or sad, though the eyes never move, though the mouth remains the same, level and transitory as a hyphen, a wink: Harry Lime vanishing in the Viennese fog. Missing man formation. Paradise alone of M walled in on herself, Murder on the Orient Express, Paris to Istanbul, open the first-class compartment: the lady vanishes. The new reader follows mean streets to the city’s edge (My Business Is Circumference) where a desert opens in front of her like a map of blankness. Meeting the man, landscape of a man’s face half-obscured by sunglasses, confronted like an object of increasingly durable celebrity: Gabriele Ferzetti, David Hemmings, Richard Harris, Jack Nicholson. Navigating the face to a lonely place, a precipice with a view of the vast conspiracy that includes her, us, the secret to which she herself is the key (I’m not in the business; I am the business). In the heart of the mountain reclines M languid with the old world pages, inside the locked room with the Colonel and the Countess and the Doctor and the Housekeeper and the Scion and the Mistress and the Dowager and the Lame Footman and the Reformed Burglar and the Lusty Squire and the Poetess and the Inspector with his pipe and his precarious infallible chain of clews: “I knew it all along,” sniffs the Countess. We knew all along that it had to end this way: in this drawing room this hunting lodge this tramp steamer this prop plane this stable this abandoned warehouse this by-the-hour motel this funicular this fishing shack this philosopher’s forest hut this fire lookout this Duesenberg this nightclub this country road this burning barn this suburban ranch this first-class stateroom this hospital ward this churchyard this cattle car this lonesome prairie this dilapidated greenhouse this twilit empire this retreat from Moscow this siege of Leningrad this Sarajevo motorcade this occupation of Paris this Ukrainian nuclear facility this march to the sea this grave of narrative that demands only death to start its dominos and only death, perhaps a symbolic death, perhaps a birth in disguise, to restore the uncontradictable order that rescues us, that decrees What Was and Shall Be, that foils novelty and sells novels, that denies all possibility of aerial views, from the precipice the locked room the womb. The new reader in sleep reading on, effortlessly converting text to moving images, restoring words to the purity of their referents, the things, as the novel gives birth to cinema, to a narrative launched by the immobile visible inspecting face of a man who has made his deal with the devil, the man who never compromises, the man who is well paid to navigate and pull taut the disparate threads, to shuttle in black and white, among the multitudinous cities incarnadine of Europe the only colorless thing, cutting like a slender blade to the essence between frames. Riding for days on a train, on a horse, on a camel, walking blind, bound for the locked room, to the desert, to the pyramid of skulls, to find her standing there on her naked native ground, heart stripped bare of secrets, and the man, guided by a love he himself will never feel: a speaking knife, a spear, a plunging tongue.

  The camera clings to him, practically hanging on his shoulder, as he turns onto an avenue. There are cars now, there is traffic. He passes a group of schoolgirls in blazers and skirts, chattering to themselves in a language without subtitles; we understand that these are schoolgirls on the near side of puberty, talking about what schoolgirls talk about: boys, or rather not boys but those other schoolgirls not present, schoolgirls who are with or have been with those boys and what they’ve done or might be willing to do with those boys. Lamb lowers his head and pushes through them without looking back, and the camera doesn’t linger either, but maybe he swivels his head a quarter-turn to the right, a little twist; blink and you’ll miss that infinitely complex appraisable line or fractal territory suggesting a nose’s wing, a heavy black eyebrow. A little farther and he pauses in front of a window, turns fully, one hand still on the long handle of his roller bag, and the camera turns with him, so we can see something of his reflection in the spotless picture window, nothing to deter our sense of the fundamental monochrome atmosphere that follows this man like the lens itself, passing through a halftone world into which color, now, is starting to creep. Flashes now behind him of a red car, a green skirt, a blue policeman pausing to fill out a ticket, his face a depthless shadow under the brim of his cap. Lamb studies an array of jewelry, nothing particularly expensive, without moving much, his face as invisible as the policeman’s under the brim of his hat, but we can make out the outlines of a dark tie against a light shirt behind further layers of darkness: a suit coat, an overcoat, too heavy for the weather. There are watches, bracelets, brooches, necklaces, earrings, pins, ankle bracelets, chokers, armbands, wristbands, breastplates, or so it seems to the tourist and so it must seem to us, marveling now at the neatness of the trick, for we seem to be standing directly behind him and yet there’s no camera or cameraman in the reflection, just the streaks of light that resolve themselves into cars or pedestrians and the twin pillars of darkness, the man staring unresolvedly at the many watches (no one of which shows the same time) and the policeman, head bent over his ticket book, scratching away.

  Terrain of sounds. A long scraping noise. Indistinct voices. Foreigners. Small engines, tires on macadam, whine and wheeze of a bad fan belt, receding. A mot
orbike’s burr, dopplering toward us, getting louder and more aggressive, then its reflection whizzing past in the window, then dopplering away. In this film our man is closely miked: we hear his slightly heavy breathing, the soft movements of his clothing, his footsteps, when he lights a cigarette we hear the heavy snap of the lighter and the audible combustion of the first strands of tobacco, hear him inhale, hear the smoke pouring down his windpipe, scratching up against precancerous polyps, hear him cough shortly, a bark, hear his blood and heart agitated by the nicotine, starting to beat louder and more quickly, hear his pupils dilate, snapping wider with an audible click, hear the dripping sound as sweat glands above his hairline gather moisture and salt to form beads of sweat to be absorbed by his hatband, a kind of reverse sponge-squeezing sound as that no doubt already stained ribbon of cloth takes on a further burden of the very essence of his tourist’s anxiety, if he feels anxiety. We have, we hear, so much and no more. Lamb is almost a palindrome, almost a blade, petit mal, blam. He carries us toward what comes next.

  She sits on her sofa staring into a compact, fixing her make-up. It’s discreet, made visible only by her application of it, or by her repair, for there’s a little black streak of mascara under her left eye that even now she wipes away with a bit of cotton. She studies herself in the little mirror and sighs, not quite audibly, then bends again to her tools. As she reapplies her mascara we are struck by the absoluteness of her concentration, of her utter presence to herself in the mirror as simply a face, a severe beautiful face with lines at the brow and at the corners of her eyes, and slightly sharper edges around the cheekbones, the curve of the mouth. She gives herself the kind of scrutiny our films don’t give to women her age, older than thirty, older than forty or fifty, an American unperson’s face still lovely in its mobility, though just now she’s holding it steady, as steady as any starlet or woman holds her muscles when not being looked at; though a woman is never not looked at, so if she smiles or frowns because of that she does so invisibly, under the skin so to speak. She bears our looking, she wears our desire, masculine and feminine, men and women desire her, that still firm and erect body, though past middle age, a desire she herself cannot feel but understands abstractly, as an astronomer’s most sophisticated instruments help him know about distant bodies without seeing them, that understanding of desire that she holds at a distance because of what we call age, what we call experience, like a second skin, and that hides the smile or frown, though it cannot, quite, hide her tears.

  And if the letter were blank? A single sheet of white paper, unmarked save for a pair of creases? And if the woman, austerely attired, made up, not a hair out of place, were to sit down now with it at the kitchen table, with a pen? If she looked for a while out the window as her cup of coffee grew cold? If she took up the pen? If she looked at the paper then away from it again, as though searching, looking round at the kitchen, the apartment, like a place she had never before seen? If she applied pen to paper? If she began to write? If she wrote for a long time, immune to our eyes, the whispery crinkle of pen on page (she has filled one side, turns it over, begins the next side), clink of a ring on her finger on the coffee cup, sipping mud, putting it down again, applying herself, bent low, one manicured hand holding the paper in place, the other moving swiftly, fluently, without pausing for thought? If she stopped writing at last? Refolded the map, now become a letter, and replaced it in its envelope? Taped it shut? Addressed it? Searched a desk for stamps, found one, applied it? If she stood now, in the center of the room, hands at her sides, tapping the envelope against her leg, deciding?

  Screening and absorbing print that isn’t print: newspapers that leave no stain, feuilletons that never pucker the skin but only the seeking, restless eye. She reads old media on its way out the door to new media, photos in motion over changing captions, acting as though there were use in a center—The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books and The New York Times washing over the transom in sloppy paper waves. She reads mommy blogs, political blogs, book blogs, cooking blogs (but she rarely cooks, it’s Ben who’s at home in the kitchen, who can relax there, whistling his way through the slightly old-fashioned menus he favors: pot roast Provencal, filet of sole), sex blogs and advice columns, blogs by women about being women, blogs by men about everything, blogs by people in countries we have bombed, blogs by peoples in countries we’ve yet to bomb. She follows celebrities and comedians and authors and academics and smartasses and cleverdicks and drunkards and addicts and her brother-in-law the author of thrillers on Twitter. Everyone speaks English if they want to exist, but never too much of it at a time. She reads searchingly, with bitten lip and anxious eye, trying to break out of the bubble, to extend her breath’s reach outside the shallow mainstream of American life in which all of us regardless of nationality are supposed to live and thrive for all the beautiful days of our ignorance. And yet this discourse—wry, intellectual, ineffectual—somehow slips by her trained and desperate eyes, so that when she closes the screen with a headache it’s long past bedtime, Ben with a pillow over his head against the light, or Lucy crying in the afternoon, a naptime squandered, a vein throbbing so close to Ruth’s left eye it might as well be the eye itself, hooked deep into the brain, a chain of pain leading from the light into dark and unfulfilled hollows of her skull. Unsolaced, unappeased, almost frantic with loneliness: the mind of the reader without print, without the stable march of characters, same today as they were twenty years ago in the mass-market paperbacks she devoured as a girl now solitary as sardines in basement boxes, on yellowing paper with split spines, the books that made her a reader, that she fell into and climbed out of as easily as a Channel swimmer, greased like a seal, creature made for that sea. So with laptop extinguished, with her husband breathing steady beside her and the barest flicker on the bedside monitor assuring her of Lucy’s midnight silence, she reaches out once again for the book that’s been waiting for her—the book no one asked her to read, that is party to no discussion group, that no teacher or talk show host recommended, that was patient it seems for years since she read the first chapter standing up in the town’s last bookstore, yes years ago, that joined a stack of books propping up the frame of her lover’s futon, the year she thought she was pregnant every month and every month read the single uncrossed blue bar of the pregnancy test with blank disbelief, saying nothing to her lover or her mother or her friends but firmly believing in her own changed life metastasizing inside her, years before Ben and forgetful striving and Lucy, little yolk with legs. The book was waiting. Not like her mother’s books, grim and watchful on the shelves of the den, shadowing ordinary nights of television, books with pictures and without, objects of an impersonal terror inseparable from M’s never-to-be-spoken sorrows, unthinkable documents of an unthinkable past that M carried mutely into the present, in the tense pose of her body at the kitchen table, in the spiral of cigarette smoke. Papa’s books pleased her more: orderly rows of print or specifically riven with white space, the science fiction novels and popular histories and even the dense lightless volumes of mathematics; these pleased her, simply to touch them, rocking them back on their spines to feel their heft in her hand. The best of them were never on shelves but spread profligate throughout that house, as now in her house: scattered on tables and under chairs and on top of both stereo speakers and piled high on her bedside table so that there’s scarcely room for a glass of water: more books even then that, stacked in the basement on shelves and in boxes, some perched precariously near the sump pump, the oldest books in her life, the thickest and most lightweight, scanned with a flashlight under blankets prickling with static electricity so that the hair on her arms rose in the aftermath of a thump on the door and a voice shouting Lights out and the battery dying with her still reading, still a girl, and life on the horizon in the form of the raked distant skyline, clouds imported from Europe, the destiny written decades ago waiting for her to collect it.

  But the letters are real: documents. Someone wrote them, bought b
orrowed or stole the unremarkable paper they are printed on, or written on. The letters change. Some are printed, coldly stippled in black by the head of an inkjet, streaked. Some are handwritten, in a sometimes erratic but always legible script, with broad looping L’s and G’s striding across the paper. The ballpoint pen leaves a groove in the stationery that her fingertips can almost read when they brush its surface, the papers stacked against her knees in bed or tucked surreptitiously underneath it, where Ben never goes. The ink is dark blue, almost black; the pen in question is not generous enough to dot some of the hastier I’s. One letter was typewritten without the benefit of correction tape and some of the letters are crossed out with small or capital X’s. Only the signature does not vary: at the bottom right corner of the last page, almost in the margin, the rapid illegible squiggle that resembles an M. M with a dash in front of it: M and em dash: M as interruption. The pages are folded and carefully matched with envelopes without return addresses, each stamped or labeled Air Mail / Par Avion. It is this latter French phrase that moves her lips, each time, a kind of mantra as she folds or unfolds each letter, perusing its surfaces for clues since the words, she knows, are all lies. Par avion, par avion. It sounds to her like the name of a long-limbed bird, a crane, unfolding itself for flight across a marshy plain, a riverine landscape, suspended for a time over the cragged Atlantic, and then tracking the waterways, up the Hudson River Valley as far as Albany, following the nap of western New York along the Susquehanna, up to Buffalo with the snows and then another slow plunge across wide waters, Lake Erie, Lake Ontario, Lake Huron, and the dash across the state of Michigan to Lake Michigan before beginning its final descent into her city, her Chicagoland, her home, where at any time she might wake from uneasy dreams to find another letter neatly folded and sealed in its envelope, another missive from across the sea, from the country of death. Under her nightstand blank paper, a sheaf of envelopes. Tucked into an old day planner, a ballpoint pen taken from the Grand Hyatt on Wacker Drive. In her office, squat and ugly on its stand, the inkjet. In the basement, by the disused sewing machine, an old Selectric that makes a droning hum when switched on. It is a strangely soothing sound. If she finds herself in the basement among the unfinished dresses and tatty tablecloths and cardboard boxes unpacked from law school days, she might idly switch it on and listen for a while to the urgent whir of analog machinery, while the little planet of the ball waits for a keystroke to call it into action, almost faster than the eye can track. To make its mark. Eyes inward. A call or cry from upstairs so she leaves it running, it stays on for hours, until her husband comes home that night through the garage, stops wearily and warily for a moment at the urgent familiar hum; then silently, without imprecation, reaches down and pulls the plug.