Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy Read online

  What would I do afterward? Almost nothing. Listen to the radio or turn on the TV. Take a shower. Sit in the single armchair by the window listening to the hotel breathing, to the city grumbling and grating to itself, to the small sounds and movies of my own body as it turned against me. Sometimes looking at the door where no lover would appear, comfortable in the knowledge that one would appear if I so chose, if I ever wished to surpass the possible. But then again there is no surpassing the possible: the actual is cheap, experience has taught me that. Too often I’d gone to see for myself and returned disappointed in the oldest sense of that word: an appointment that was not kept, a messenger that was only a man with an empty envelope up his sleeve, a maddening sort of helpless shrug, a compassionate distracted glance over the tops of spectacles, a woman with a red face. No, look at the door, a solid rectangle of wood with its brass-covered peephole that I might lift to survey the fishbowl the lens made of the hallway, which was empty: it was emptiness I paid for. It would end with me in the bed, bedspread folded and tucked into the bottom of the armoire, lying on top of the blankets, fully clothed, listening. Dawn waked me, not with sunlight (even the highest hotel windows in the city rarely offer an angle by which the morning sun might penetrate) but by the change in tone, an impalpable waking presence of life in the streets, the gurgle of pipes feeding showers, the sober murmuring of adjacent solitary guests talking into phones. I’d wake dry, in a wrinkled dress, underneath my coat if it had been cold, a taste in my mouth, the stale sick self I hadn’t after all escaped for a single moment. It would have been simpler to take up drinking. It would have been easier to forget. But for a few hours I’d been, not your mother, no one’s wife, no singer or survivor, no one’s daughter. Only no one. And I knew, as I slipped out the door like a woman fearful of waking her husband on her way to meet her lover, that I’d be back again and again, until at last I took flight, to find my final home, to tuck the tail of my life into its beginning, in Europe, in the past.

  Yesterday is dimly starred, the day before a blank, the days before that blank but bright, like a projector run out of film. I can only remember yesterday, Elsa, can remember this morning and the first part of the afternoon, can remember everything up until the moment I discovered it: the letter. Now it’s a blur; this page is a blur. Yesterday I didn’t work, as I haven’t worked for what feels like a hundred days, but I rose early all the same and took myself down to the café where I like to have my roll and coffee, watching the traffic thicken. It’s impossible to find coffee to go in this country, you know, so no matter what you have to sit there or stand in one place while the caffeine charges you up. By the time you start moving again you’re already moving. It was like that, still early, me with no particular place to go, so I wandered down in front of the Hotel Verdi and as it happens the tram had just stopped. Without thinking I got on and we began to move—there was hardly anyone else aboard because the tram was heading back up the big hill, to the houses—everyone coming into town to go to work had already gotten off. The tram is wooden, prewar, and it doesn’t take very long for it to creak above the main buildings and become surrounded by trees. There are some low, heavy pine branches that have been trimmed just enough for the tram car to pass, so that if you look forward through the driver’s window it looks like you are entering a tunnel with a bright point of blue at the end—that’s if it’s a sunny day, which it usually is if it’s not winter, we are so blessed here, Elsa, it’s so unlike that terrible cold city you insist on living in. Out of the morning sunshine into darkness, so that for a moment I could hardly see anything. Gradually I became aware of the shadows of leaves dappling the floors and seats, the back of the driver’s thick neck, and the back cover of the book that the only other passenger, a woman in her seventies in a pillbox hat, of all things, was reading. I couldn’t make out the title but just at that moment she looked up from the page at me and I had to look away. I told myself a story about her, the inverse of my story, a widow from the hills who had come down into the city that morning to do her shopping—there was a tote bag on the floor by her feet—and was already returning home again. But then I thought again about the lipstick she was wearing—freshly applied—and her makeup. She really was quite beautiful, for all her being seventy, even seventy-five, and so then I thought that she was going home after having spent the night in town with her lover, a much younger man perhaps, in his fifties perhaps or even younger, who was passionately in love with her, who had perhaps loved her when he was a child and she was the adult, his teacher maybe, or just a local beauty whom he’d imagined speaking to time and time again as a man speaks to a woman but dared not to, who grew up and lived his life as a species of waiting, biding, while she went on with her husband, having children probably, living a bourgeois life in this little city on the edge of Europe, and then one day her husband died and her lover swooped in, so to speak—no doubt he was tactful, no doubt he could wait a few weeks or months if he’d already waited for so long, or perhaps he’d gone away, tormented by his proximity to her beauty, had made a life for himself nearer the center of things and had come back one day out of nostalgia, to walk again these quaintly cobbled streets, to partake of the town’s peculiar combination of age and historylessness once again, and there she’d been, at the flower market perhaps or sitting at the café, as beautiful as ever in his eyes, and he’d gone up to greet her, and in the course of mutual reminiscences he’d learned that her husband was dead. Then and only then did the banked fire blaze up in him, and forgetting all his old bashfulness he would tell her that he was staying at the Hotel Verdi, and staying alone, that he himself had never married, that he’d made a success of himself in the great world and come back again for her and only for her. And she would have gone with him, out of pity perhaps, or boredom, as if in a dream, into the hotel lobby and past the prying eyes of the concierge without a care, into that creaky and tiny old elevator they keep so that already they would be in dangerous proximity to each other, and she would discover that even at her age she could permit the blood to flow and permeate her body with warmth, to remind herself that she was a woman, to accept his kiss, and when the elevator opened she’d take the lead, holding his hand, pausing at each door and turning to smile at him, radiantly with the question, This? and he’d shake his head and they’d pass on to the next door and again she’d turn and ask This? and he’d shake his head once more until finally they were at the correct door, and his trembling hand would barely be able to manage the key card so that her own steadier hand would have to take it from him and swipe it once, and they’d hear that little switch of the lock. And they’d go inside together, and it is from that moment, that assignation that would have been his lifelong dream, but for her more like a gift, an unsuspected fantasy, a blazing realization that life wasn’t done with her yet. In truth she hardly remembers the younger man, may not in fact have recognized him at all—may simply have assented to the mad desire of a stranger because his misdirected passion had gone and stirred her own, and made her forget that she was a widow, forget her marriage, forget the life of disappointments and small resentments that most of us women are left with on a fine morning such as the one on which I saw her. By this point her gaze had safely returned to her book and I was looking to the left, like a child would, straining to catch a glimpse of the sea that I knew was there. And we came out of the tunnel then and the world was blind and blinding. She got off at the next stop, moving with some diffidence, older-seeming than she had when she was just sitting and turning the pages. The driver had to help her. Finally we reached the end of the line: there was no one waiting to board the tram, but we had to sit there for a while anyway. The driver got out to stretch his legs and smoke but I just sat there, on the hard wooden seat, smelling his smoke and a little sea air and the pine branches practically protruding their fingers into the windows. I had no book myself. And when the driver got back into his place he looked back at me for a moment without expression, not puzzled or curious or disapproving: I was o
nly something to look at that wasn’t his tram. I was a passenger. And then together, slowly at first, we began the ride back down the mountain.

  The camera perfects experience, shrouds it with a fine flexible skin. So cities, so filmed. As even virtual streaming maps with their street views and glimpses of actual life—a woman leaping over a puddle, a man with a dog staring at the camera—these images falsify our street level jars, false steps, paranoid whisperings, smells of baking bread or urine, suppressed, caught but not preserved in pictures of us, we trippers and askers. Even falser the tourist’s city, even and especially the blank streets off the beaten path, uncolonized, with or without a native informant. But falsest of all is the city you’ve known all your life seen afresh at the movies, as strangers see it, as it is now traversed by cops and gangbangers and housewives and Batman. The camera is a prophetic voice stuck in neutral, it declares only that this is, that nothing else shall be, it is the enemy of every future. We depend on the soundtrack for a hint of that other, unseen world: footsteps, sirens, voices, music. The light changes, the people cross. Things speed up and slow down, but there is no true future. Ex cathedra: from the seat where your posture matters not at all. In camera: in the room. We are sheltered. We are struck.

  Lamb in the station. Lamb on the train. In a compartment while a landscape slides by, dappling in sunlight and purple shadows. Lamb giving the eye to a young woman, long of torso and limb, sitting across from him with legs crossed, her boyfriend stubbled and asleep with his head on her lap, her fingers in his hair. Looking frankly back at him, at Lamb, a man, unspoken and sexual exchange the camera can capture. Lamb in the washroom, throwing water on his face, looking at it in the mirror, studying its planes and angles so that we can study it too. At the movies mirrors pass for narration, we watch him watching himself looking to discover what goes unspoken, motivation, scars, marks of the past, signs of what’s to come. Music under the looking, the moving train. If the door slides open behind him and she appears, serious under dark brows and lipsticked mouth, and advances to kiss him, he kisses her back, roughly, the door slides shut and she’s already hooked her underwear with her thumbs, pushing it down, he has her by the waist and hoists her up onto the narrow sink, pushes his face into her neck, her fingers working at his crotch, thrusting into her, watch her open mouth, Oh, the two of them rocking with the train, fucking, the movies give us fucking, its futurelessness, alone in the dark in the static electricity of watching Lamb, our surrogate, even if you’re a woman it’s his skin we’re in, and the tight shot of her hand gripping his shoulder, nails digging in. Then the cut, back to the compartment, where the young man sits up, yawning, passes his hand over his face, looks around, confused. The door opens, Lamb comes in, he closes it, sits down opposite, picks up his newspaper, nods. The door opens, the young woman comes in, adjusts her skirt, sits down next to the young man who puts his arm around her automatically, she nestles against his chest, her face hidden. The young man’s nostrils flare, his pupils dilate, he looks down at her, touching her hair tentatively, he looks across at Lamb who is staring at his paper, he looks out the window where the sea is flashing by. He opens his mouth and closes it: we see him deciding, as they say, to let sleeping dogs lie. There is only this train, this stillness in motion, this compartment bound over the sea, westward. Only the set of his jaw remembers. And Lamb takes his laptop out of the top of his rolling suitcase, for writing is an aid to memory and he, Lamb, is the writer.

  From her high chair little Lucy looks up from her bowl of oatmeal as the train vibrates past the house as it does a hundred times a day. “Choo-choo,” Ruth says to her, pausing with the spoon in midair. Lucy concentrates. “Dada,” she says. Ben’s life is the train, whether he knows it or not. The train he rides at this moment, that he rides every day, is an arrow; the suburb and the city are bowstring and target. What defines Ben but this coming and going, that straddling of his own existence? Where he lives is not where he comes to rest: the train itself, sitting alone on the upper deck as she knows he likes to do, laptop open, coffee in hand, taking on the business of the day before the business day proper starts. Many men, women too, more and more, south at the start of the day, north at the end of the day, to and fro, their computers and smartphones like the hooks of lines they pull themselves along toward all their frantic responsibility, their indispensable arcs, home and away. Is he ever seized by the desire to arrest that suspension, that illusion of forward progress or backward regress? Has he ever stood up, snatched his briefcase, and stumbled out before the train reached its terminus? To wander streets and neighborhoods where he has, in every sense, no business: Rogers Park, Ravenswood, Wicker Park, Wrigleyville? How easy to transfer him in her mind from his perch on the commuter rail to a perch in the ballpark or in a movie theater, still neatly dressed in one of the suits Ruth chose for him, wearing one of the printed ties his mother, with faultless taste, selects and sends to him each birthday, Hanukkah, Father’s Day. Or in a strip club, in an artificial night streaked with hot lights, motionless in a chair as some woman more than halfway to a whore writhes and gyrates against him. She can picture it so clearly, it’s as if she’s seen it—as if she’s been that woman, trying and failing to get a rise out of him, in any sense. Ben is still, calm as glass you’ve mistaken for water, unruffled, faintly smiling, looking out from his experience and giving nothing away. Nothing but his devotion to the train, to going away from her and coming back, but never completely, gone or here, he lingers in the sympathetic vibrations of the house, the rattled windows, dented pillows, Lucy’s face. Ruth gives her another spoonful of oatmeal, her left breast throbbing—she has put a bandage on the nipple, a blood-touched plastic pasty. She looks into her daughter’s eyes and sees neither herself nor her husband, only the stranger looking out. Lucy takes the spoon from Ruth’s hand and thrusts it into her mouth. She takes the spoon out and raps it once on the tray in front of her, hard. Dada! she cries. Dada, Ruth says back to her soothingly, and pries the spoon from Lucy’s fist. Lucy cries.

  An hour later, alone as usual in the kitchen streaked by sunlight, she touches her husband’s name on her phone, an impulse she regrets the moment the name lights up, but it’s too late, he answers on the first ring. The baby’s not sleeping, she tells him. And: I miss you. He is grateful, wary, silent. She paces the kitchen, her robe hanging open, left nipple on fire. She can hear Lucy alternately babbling and wailing in her crib upstairs.

  What’s wrong, he says.

  Does something have to be wrong?

  She can feel him, see him, his posture canted slightly from the desk, one hand covering his brow, the other holding the phone, so that only part of a cheek and his nose and lips are visible, and his smooth chin. She can smell his aftershave or something like it, a brusque antisepsis, so different from her own unshowered funk, the sour smell from her armpits, her greasy hair. It’s just so much sometimes, she tells him.

  Too much?

  That’s not what I said.

  He exhales loudly, a little windstorm in her ear. She is playing him, pushing him, she knows, into the unfriendly emotion of sympathy, a step or two from pity. She is making herself a burden. She knows it’s unfair and tries to pull it back.

  How’s work, she asks. He starts to tell her and she tries to listen, but really it’s just a release valve she’s inserted into the conversation, a way of playing for time. He says something about his boss, about where he’s going for lunch, about plans for a meeting with the mayor’s chief of staff that afternoon. He stops talking and she searches for something to say. You do good work. Silence. You’re doing the lord’s good work, she repeats. She represses a giggle.