Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy Read online

  She sits in the armchair nursing. Lucy’s hand strays up to grasp Ruth by the chin sometimes with surprising firmness; Ruth moves to grab her wrist and Lucy giggles, her lips still fastened around the nipple. At moments like this what Ruth thinks and feels seems strangely separated from everything else about her—her bent posture, her arms cradling the baby, the cooing sounds that come from her throat or from Lucy’s, it’s hard to tell. Only that sweet sharp tug of Lucy’s mouth on her nipple—that pain in which she takes a sober delight—unites her sense of distraction with that rootedness in the moment she usually only recalls afterward, nostalgically, even when she’s wishing for a moment’s peace, or thinking fondly, guiltily, of the time before Lucy, before Ben, before Ruth was Ruth. She hears the door open and shut downstairs, hears his heavy breathing. She thinks about Ben’s life, which impinges on and shapes her own. His blank-eyed fondness. His toil, his sacrifice. His hard, lean body, so different from that of the softer man she had married, with long hair she used to tousle, like a boy’s. On the brink of forty he’s all grown up. And where does that leave her? She tenses—something in Lucy has coiled, her back, her lip—

  Don’t bite! Lucy…!

  Lucy bites. With a little cry she yanks the baby upright and stares at her. Lucy stares back, a trickle of blood visible at the corner of her mouth. Ruth’s whole breast throbs.

  Lucy!

  Lucy starts to cry. Ruth, not knowing what to do, opens her mouth to call Ben, but nothing comes out. Lucy keeps crying. She puts Lucy’s mouth to the other breast and Lucy sucks. Somewhere a door closes. She breathes deeply and lets it bleed.

  Legwork. Montage of faces, closed or partially opened doors, fingers pointing out of doors or out of windows or poking Lamb in the chest; a montage of hotel rooms, cigarettes, furrowings of his brow in front of his laptop, receiving messages from concierges and desk clerks, sitting in cafes alone with a pen and notebook or the New York Herald Tribune; a montage of stakeouts, from the backs of cabs and from alleyways and rooftops, snapping photographs of license plates, men on streetcorners, old placards and posters, railway schedules, lit windows in the rain behind which a woman’s silhouette can be glimpsed, descending. A montage of monuments: Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower, the Prado, the Piazza del Campo in Siena, the Brandenburg Gate, the Chain Bridge in Budapest, the Vienna Staatsoper, the campanile of the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, the blank faces of rivers (the Danube, the Po, the Rhine, the Seine), the Brandenburg Gate again, the Eiffel Tower again. In Paris, outside La Hune with a book under his arm, meeting a furtive contact; in London, touring Samuel Johnson’s house with an unusually forthcoming guide; in Hamburg, strolling the St. Pauli quarter in Hamburg with a talkative old sailor; in Berlin, standing under an awning in Kreuzberg in the rain exchanging a few tense words with a Turkish man in a leather jacket and pink Mohawk. A hotel bedspread, frigid with anonymity, on which documents appear: the three photos, the letters, hospital bills, official certificates, passports, currency, a driver’s license, more letters, more papers, until the bed is covered except for a square in the middle, filled then by a photo, a face, massive head of an old man with heavy jowls and brows, nearly bald, small eyes pouched and folded, meeting the camera’s gaze with ineffable humor and sadness. Smoke. Lamb, standing in his shirtsleeves, arms folded, knees pressed against the bottom of the bed, a single harsh lamp, through the window, considering, and a city, any city, pressing up against the surface of his meditations, the dank heavy paws of the night.

  Time has passed, or shifted, unguessably, fading in on a kind of open hangar, une gare, stazione, or Banhof, where suited, hatted Lamb sits at one of three metal tables beside an oil-drenched falafel stand, just a few meters from platform 7. Sitting across from him is another man, thirty or forty years older and many pounds heavier than the man we have come to identify with as the bearer of our voyeurism, our agent, our Lamb. He’s the man from the photo, with craggy gray brows and a few extra bobbling chins and an improbable cap of thick white bowlcut hair, a rheumy gaze, a paper cup of espresso and a folded newspaper with a cellphone on top of it squared in front of him. Lamb takes off his hat and perches it on the upright handle of the black roller bag standing sentinel beside him. A garbled announcement over the loudspeaker, people hurrying by, little leisure at the train station. The fat man is asking a question, he’s speaking English with a heavy accent, a generic European accent to our ears, but clearly enough to be understood without subtitles. The gangster question. She got the message?

  Yes. A pause, then: What did it say?

  What did it say.

  Our man Lamb leans forward with an appearance of desultory curiosity and speaks again in his flat American accent, the newscaster’s accent of imperial nowhere, clear and intelligible enough to bind us to him incrementally further, to further our investment in him, a narrow middle question mark of a man whose subjectivity, we understand, is to be viewed transparently by us and for us, as we see might see a stranger approach the window of a café where we sit writing or talking and step across the invisible barrier to press his forehead against the window, shading his eyes, searching as if for us, and we stop our fingers on the keyboard, we stop the cup from reaching our lips, we half stop our breathing waiting for him to move toward the door, to become a destiny, a man in a long coat and a colorless expression, or else to drift past, to rejoin the long crazy stream of humanity past the intelligible, the acceptable, the corporate comfort of numbers in the darkened theater. But for now he speaks for us and to us as we look him full in the face for the first time: handsome but not too handsome, middle-aged but vigorous, world-weary but bristling with perceptivity, dark hair flecked with gray, dark eyes with a luster to them, eyes that see too much, windows to our own weary souls, wise as we want to be, a suitable mask for our own willed naiveté, an Everyman of exceptionalism, American by default like the audience itself imagines and wishes itself to be, of the immortal twentieth century where all imaginable futures still live.

  You do not send letters for her, Lamb says. On her behalf.

  I?

  You are her husband?

  Till death do us part! But actually, no.

  It takes some work to find you.

  Do you have a question for me, monsieur? The monsieur is a deliberate affront.

  I have one question: the letters. You deny all knowledge. But then you present me with a letter of your own. You know where she lives. You ask me to deliver it, since we have met in the city where she lives.

  I don’t like email, the man says, shrugging. I don’t trust the post. If I write a letter, I prefer that it go by hand. Which means I can’t be the one you’re looking for.

  No, you can’t. But I found you anyway.

  To find before seeking, the fat man says. That’s a motto, isn’t it? Sounds occult, like something from one of those thrillers you Americans love, about the secret history of everything, some conspiracy of old men in a star chamber that runs the world.

  People are always hiring me to uncover conspiracies, says Lamb, leaning back. It’s my job to show them that it’s all in their heads. It’s understandable. You feel caught up in something larger than yourself, that you can’t control: a machine, a system, an establishment, your life. You want to believe that someone out there has the answer, even a malevolent one. Even someone plotting against you is better than there being no plot at all. The hardest part of my job is showing people that life is simpler than that. They want proof.

  Sometimes, I imagine, the pressure to give them what they want must be hard to resist.

  It is.

  But then you give them proof. Are they satisfied?

  Not really. Enough to pay me and let it go. I’m not a priest.

  But you hear confessions. You are here to hear mine.

  If you like.

  I would like to hire you, actually, the man says.

  You can’t. Conflict of interest.

  Yes. Because the question I have is a simple one. Who is your
client?

  You know I can’t tell you that.

  But I can guess.

  Guess away.

  Not here, the fat man says. Not now. He gestures up toward the loudspeaker, which has just garbled an announcement. That’s my train.

  Where, then?

  Not here. Not now. The fat man rises, dwarfing the seated Lamb, the table, old but formidable, taking up his hat. Lamb smiles lazily up at him.

  You think you can just walk away?

  Do you propose to stop me? Mr. Lamb. The woman is dead. There is nothing for you to learn here. Go back to your client, whoever she is, and tell her so.

  How do you know it’s a she?

  Be seeing you, Mr. Lamb, the fat man says, saluting.

  That’s right.

  Watching him walk away, down the platform, carrying no luggage. Boarding the train. Lamb, he studies it, the sign for a moment. Picks up his espresso and sips it thoughtfully. Venezia.

  Time, enough.

  Hang up the phone now. Now. The new reader is almost here. Not an electronic book, not a heads-up display, not a cybernetic prop for reading, but a brand-new reader, organized by, for, the page. She does not compile, she does not calculate probabilities, she is no search engine. She is found wherever readers are still found: on buses, under trees, in grimy break rooms, in beds beside sleeping husbands. She props the book on her knees and worries a ragged thumbnail with her teeth. The book is hushed momentarily under her gaze, a cat with arched spine and ruffled pages. It is the new novel, always the new novel, the one that everyone who still reads is talking about, the one landing on important desks in Los Angeles and New York, an old-fashioned paper brick, surprisingly heavy. It doesn’t matter who the writer is (but it’s a man). It doesn’t matter that everywhere old readers are gathering in front of television sets and computers and podcasts to hear the book discussed by other old readers. It doesn’t matter that in the academies the oldest readers of them all scoff at this book and its readers, then turn themselves and their bored charges back toward tending the classics, the immortal beloveds of literature, bricks in the picturesque ruins of our civilization’s self-image, held up not by other bricks but by hands and backs, bent, having grown deformed and nearly human under the strain of bearing its colossal weight. The new reader is coming. She grips the uppermost corner of the recto page, ready to turn it, but does not turn, lingering over the last lines, shining black in the matte white sea of rectangular space. What is the nature of her pleasure, reflected in dilated pupils, in the blush response, in breath ever so slightly roughened in contrasting tempo to her husband’s even breathing? Whatever its nature, she takes her pleasure from that page, that arrangement, that musical score so perfectly attuned to the syntax of human synapses that have been evolving for thousands of years toward this moment, this pleasure. Lux, calme et volupté—she remembers, the new reader has an imperfect memory, an ordinary memory, a random-access memory, that lights brilliantly like a landing strip when touched by an incoming stimulus, a word or phrase or image or character’s gesture or rhyme in the plot that activates the blazing network, that stirs vivid sensations in half-remembered languages: Madame Follet’s eighth-grade French class, for instance—a contoured plastic seat, a jagged replica of the Eiffel Tower (made by Mr. Bund, the metal shop teacher, rumored to be sweet on Madame Follet), the chocolate eclairs on behalf of which her mother descended from her air of rarefied sorrows for an afternoon to help her prepare for Foods of France day, the irregular verbs between being and having, her bitter disappointment at coming down with chicken pox three days before the class trip, the milder disappointment mixed with amusement when she finally sees Paris in the springtime a dozen years later, strolling the boulevards on the arm of her not-yet husband, not yet the father of her unconceived child, who won’t put his camera down even in their hotel room (only incidentally erotic, the lens pointed outward in a doomed attempt to capture the quietness of a quiet street of the Marais, the naked pear of his body photographed by her eyes in her memory from her prone position on the hard, undersized bed), the framed photograph of her lying back in her overcoat with her eyes closed on a cold sunny morning in a chair in the Tuileries, the fight they had in the Rodin museum, the image of her husband pouting in the sculpture garden while she gazed down from the second-story window, stiff shape of the back of his neck and shoulders, the rigid inverted U of his arms as he lifted his camera, framing tight lips, a stubborn chin, an Adam’s apple, the Bande dessinée shop they paused in on their way back to the hotel (to make up, to make love), the comic-book adaptation of Les Fleurs du mal that she glanced through, the eighth-grade French which she hadn’t needed once the whole trip, not even to order a glass of wine, suddenly suffusing her consciousness, so that when the new reader encountered «L’Invitation au voyage» she was able fully to accept, guided in part by the black-and-white images the artist had chosen to illustrate, no to accompany, the text: a languid arm pocked with needle scars dangling down from a bed, a needle rising to meet it that is really a ship’s mast, a ship’s mast that is really a gigantically erect cock thrusting from the hips of one grinning sailor into the eager sucking mouth of another sailor, a mouth that is really a cave lit from within by phosphorescent crystals, a cave that is really a grave straddled by a waif-thin woman in a black raincoat, wearing sunglasses from under which tears are streaming. She took all this in—the artist’s melodramatic conception and the innocent poem—in a single glance, or so it seemed, as her husband approached the register carrying a Tintin book, Objectif Lune. Murmuring to herself silently now—a split now, at once in that hotel room on the Place des Vosges and in that bedroom in a soft Chicago suburb—Tout y parlerait / À l’âme en secret / Sa douce langue natale. All illuminated, as in a flash of scarlet, by three words at the bottom right corner of the page she holds between thumb and forefinger, not even the end of the paragraph or the sentence, syntax incomplete and yet luminous: the invitation to…. The rain falls on the skylight window. The new reader is always a stranger.

  2.

  Letters From M

  Hotels. How I loved them. The intoxicating combination of anonymity and privilege, as though living in an American city could be made somehow portable, bearable. There were times, of course, when I needed that feeling, that departure. Midweek, in the unreal interval after my diagnosis, I would find myself on a train or in a cab wandering without luggage into the lobby of an old hotel, out of the chaos of unmade decisions into the cool echoey atmosphere of marble and steel, the lobbies with their heavy upholstery and mirrors and chandeliers and fresh-cut flowers winter and summer and the silent tread of the uniformed employees and the laughter of temporarily unrumpled businessmen and visiting wives as they traipsed in and out to the cabs or over to the elevators or across to the winking comfortable cavern of the bar. Sometimes it was enough for me to sit, just sit on one of the sofas by a white telephone, as if waiting for a call, and to read the newspapers and brochures I’d find lying there, or even the occasional discarded paperback. Skin on my neck prickled against the possibility that I’d be discovered, asked to show my key, asked to leave, but it never happened. I looked like a traveler, I suppose, or less flatteringly, like a tourist. Other times I’d walk right up to the front desk and ring the bell, if necessary, and some cleanly young man with brilliantined hair or a dignified older man with a carnation in his buttonhole would assume the proper distance from me to be heard without shouting, to assume the friendly impersonal intimacy of hotels, and I would take bills from my purse and place them on the counter between us and he with a faint formal gesture of precisely calculated embarrassment would pick up the bills as though they were litter and make them disappear in a drawer, and he would hand me a key, that is to say a card, a little plastic rectangle with an image, as often as not, of the skyline printed on it, or the hotel façade, or an ad for a nightclub. With prize in hand I’d deflect the suggestion of luggage, but accept the accompaniment of a bellboy to escort me to the elevator and we’d
be carried up up up (I always asked for the highest floor I could get) and the door would open onto a whisper-quiet carpeted hallway with its glowing sconces, a kind of silence and antiseptic grace over everything, and the bellhop would lead me to the room, bearing my key in place of a suitcase, and use it to open the door to what was invariably a small, almost cramped room with a single queen-sized bed and an armoire (rarely were there closets) and a television and a window, and he would busy himself drawing the curtains or lighting the bathroom or pointing out the telephone while I stood there breathing in the pure, false, expensive air, until at last a small bill would find its way from my hand into his and he’d step out with a little bow that reminded me thrillingly and fearfully of the uniformed men of my childhood and close the door behind him with the quietest of clicks, and I would stand in the window for a while looking at the city from an angle unavailable to my apartment, a taller bleaker more brilliant city than the sleek fat domestic cat of a city that lies perpetually purring with its tail of suburbs wrapped around it; or I’d lie on the bed fully clothed after carefully removing the bedspread (it’s there you’ll find the bedbugs and all varieties of dead matter, the maids never wash them until they are vigorously and permanently stained) looking up at the ceiling, listening to the faint sounds of traffic and the occasional timbrel of sirens from below, or the muffled voices in the next room (the finer the hotel the thinner the walls), sometimes accompanied by the creak of furniture, or the empty high-pitched whine of a television, or of course, more frequently than not, the sounds of people making love. I remember once coming into the room with the bellhop while my neighbors were at it, a comic opera of bedsprings and low moans and lumping thumps that shook the large bad painting over my own chaste bed, and the bellhop, who was very young, perhaps not even eighteen, turned scarlet to the roots of his hair and rushed out of the room without so much as unhooking the drapes or extending his palm—it probably didn’t help that I was laughing loud and hard and painfully and for so long that I imagine the lovers could hear me, for they quickly subsided without audible climax and I went on laughing until the tears came.