Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy Read online

  You should maybe try to get out of the house, he says finally.

  I’m doing that, she snaps. I’m canvassing this afternoon, remember?

  Oh, yeah.

  She bit me, she says suddenly.

  What?

  Lucy bit me this morning. Hard. Just before you left.

  She’s succeeded and she hates herself for it. He sighs again. She can see his fingers pinching the bridge of his nose, see him turning finally completely away from the desk, getting up to close his office door.

  Do you need me to come home?

  No, of course not. I just.

  Is it still bleeding?

  I put a band-aid on it.

  They both find this funny, she knows, although nobody laughs. When he speaks again the tension has lessened.

  I can pick up dinner tonight if you like. You’ve got enough on your plate.

  That’s all right, she says. So do you.

  Another long pause. You’ve got to go, she says.

  No. No, it’s just.

  Well, I have to go. She’s crying.

  I’ll call you later, he says. She wants to tell him, Don’t call me. She wants to tell him, Take care of yourself. She wants to tell him, Deal with your shit and I’ll deal with mine.

  Okay, she says.

  He hangs up. She is alone again with Lucy and Lucy’s needs. Alone with herself. She takes her robe in both hands and opens it wide for a second, feeling the slightly chill air of the kitchen prickling her skin, the soles of her feet cold against the cold tile floor. Then she closes the robe and ties it and begins to move toward the stairs and up toward Lucy’s room, toward stammering cries, guided, as so often, by an inchoate voice. I didn’t ask for this. To which another voice answers, Liar. Outline of M in the doorway, mothering shadow that withdraws.

  But the new reader too has a skin, transitioning from degrees of tautness to degrees of looseness, folds approximating experience, if not wisdom. She has eyes with imperceptibly thinning corneas over dark brown irises, modified by glasses, spectacles; but she is nearsighted, she puts them on when she rises from bed in the morning and goes forth to be in contact with the other bodies for which she creates a context: a husband’s body, a daughter’s. In the evening, alone with sleeping bodies like buoys in the darkness of the house, she folds them and sets them on the night table, then lifts a volume and props it on her knees and reads, and the moon like her family is an invisible watchful presence through the ceiling, through the clouds. She has given birth, has been wrenched from one ecstasy to another, has felt the crush of the growing fetus on her bladder, has felt less and less pretty and more and more beautiful: the word not the feeling, beautiful, the word her friends used, that Ben used, and they even said You’re glowing and she nodded, feeling it, hands straying again to the rise of her belly, elapsing half-life of herself as an adult with some place in the world outside of nursing, meeting needs, biting her nails, reading. Now the baby is no longer a baby and the husband is only a husband and she is neither beautiful nor pretty, only now in the night of books is she not someone’s object, in bed, just reading. I’m somebody’s mother she thinks, wondering if her mother thought the same, concluding instantly No, she was no one’s mother, not in her mind, maybe in her heart but no. She was indignant to be a mother, a minor character, blamed backdrop for someone else’s story. And so I have no story to call my own, she gave me everything but. But she did read. She can close her eyes at last when the night gets old and see her, the old reader, at the kitchen table when Ruth came home from school, still in her bathrobe maybe, with the cloud of black iridescent hair voluminous around her shoulders and eyes blanked by glasses (the old reader never removed them, she saw what there was to see through heavy glass lenses of the Seventies and Eighties), always smoking cigarettes, menthols, and a cold cup of coffee, holding some heavy hardback encased like a sausage in the public library’s cellophane, murder mysteries (the series with the little silver skull grinning at the base of the spine: Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr: the old reader loved a locked room) but sometimes nonfiction, feminist keys to all mythologies (Gloria Steinem, Susan Brownmiller) and then the books she never actually saw her reading, the ones she owned, haunting shelves otherwise innocuous with thrillers and policiers: the books of the vanished and the murdered, the oldest readers of them all, the books that set Ruth on the first false umbilical trail when her mother began her disappearing act, right there at the kitchen table, a process of years, long before her actual body up and vanished, magnificent in its age and volume and remoteness (she was glowing, wasn’t she, before her books like a cat by the hearth, soaking and storing away heat), its death-haunted beauty (memory of Ben kneeling in the first weeks in the doorway of the old apartment to kiss Ruth’s still-flat belly, looking up at her wet-eyed and she smiling down, bemused, fingers nesting in the vigorous black thatch of his hair), in flight all those years from little Ruth’s hungry incurious gaze, on fire to be elsewhere, now achieved, that vanishing, not a reader any more to Ruth’s knowledge but a fugitive to be pursued down paths of memory, through questions asked of oneself in the hard small hours when one can read no more, when one longs only for facts, figures, dates, reports in the best objective style, one wishes for a procedure, an agent, a white or black knight in pursuit of the quarry, sleep, so long denied her, a woman reading late and long into the life that’s passing her by. Somnambulist, self. She closes the book and snaps off the light and the darkness rushes up to greet her. The el clacking by. His breathing. Lucy, learning to dream. Ruth in the alien corn once again, hugging herself, waiting for her story, sorrily, to begin.

  This impossible possible. To write this past. To live it. To be a woman. A man. It is the most serious of games, in which taking the time to read the rules means you already have lost. Given birth to the ending. This is the moment, like every moment, in which you choose to follow, or do not. Close the book: if it has an off-switch, use it now. Or else, write with me: a story, this story, of the original snake in the garden, that tempted a woman, that forgot so long ago its own tail, ours, mine, at the root of the tree: the tail. Which it had swallowed.

  Dear Elsa,

  Summer shakes loose its hold so slowly here. Like a woman putting up her long hair in reverse. The days are still hot—the sun, from its strange angles, still manages to shine in every window and doorway I enter, and my back burns when I wear black, like I’m wearing today. It’s stuffy in the apartment, I go out seeking relief, I sit at a table outside the Caffe San Marco to write this in the shade. But the nights are chilly, the cold comes creeping up from the water, so when I wake, suddenly, at four in the morning, my window is like an icy mouth and the sheets are heavy and damp. The hot flashes, I never got to experience them, but it’s so easy to imagine, a sudden heat flaring just beneath my skin, a burning that goes to my bones without warming, having been cold nearly all my life. Papa used to laugh at me for wearing sweaters in summer, which was cruel, I thought. But now I can see how absurd such a thing as body temperature is, the absurd multiplication of differences between bodies that are fundamentally the same; now, that I am never really hot nor cold. Elsa, I shouldn’t be going on like this, I should be asking how you are, or more to the point, apologizing, begging even for you to answer these messages, to read them at least. But I’m not going to do that. I will continue to insist instead that we remain connected—that you are my daughter—and these letters affirm that, even if you never read them. These impossible letters. You demand them from me. Admit it’s true, wherever you might be, perhaps with your own daughter beside you. She must be walking by now. She must be saying Mama. You’re the mama now, Elsa, and I’m just an old woman in an old country, with an itch she can’t scratch. Oh, I can hear you now in your strange accent: Don’t be disgusting, Mother. Where did you learn to call me “Mother,” to be so formal, so cold? Did I teach that to you? Was it Papa? He was always so courtly, so formal: he had the real old world manner. Not like your father, of whom I never spoke
. Yes, we ought to be able to talk about such things now, especially since we aren’t really talking, since this is just the thing we aren’t talking about—our little secret. Which is what Papa and I called you, sometimes, when you were small. Papa. He never complained or whined, he just did what was necessary, like turning down that thermostat after I had cranked it up too high, and if I moved to say something he just lifted his hand as though to say, Enough! I admired that. A man should be forceful, to a point. He should know just where his power begins and ends. Certainly I resented it, his solitude if not his sufficiency, that tightly wound and overly precise mind deciding his destiny and incidentally mine too; but I was relieved at how little he seemed to need me. Not in the ordinary ways—he was a man, after all—and he needed me on his arm and in his bed and even to talk to, many evenings, about his bosses and his ideas that they’d taken credit for and his new work as a sales rep for which he was so spectacularly ill-suited. But fundamentally he kept his own counsel, and I was glad ultimately to just come along with him and not ask too many questions. It was lonely sometimes, but it was also a relief. You never forgave us that, did you? Maybe now that you have a husband and child of your own, you’ll understand. Life seizes you sometimes by the scruff of the neck and gives you a good shake, and if you’re not broken by that you just look for a place to land. Any place, it doesn’t matter. And for me if not Papa, this twilight is that place.

  Words without pictures lying fallow in the dark. The new reader lies awake on her side, a question mark to her husband’s exclamation point, the imprint of their bodies palimpsesting the covers, his bare feet protruding like commas, his dark sleeping head a full stop. Sometimes she sits up awake and stares at him, head or feet, shimmering in the dark with the fullness of his rest, the head with its short hair tunneled peacefully into its pillow, the feet firm and shapely with high smooth arches, a runner’s feet. Every day he runs his miles, varying only the distance, so that the weeks and months add up in a series of monotonous clauses varied only, she thinks, by their duration and the weather. He is not a reader in any sense, old or new—on his nightstand you’ll find only a tablet computer and a few books about investing, on the tablet he sometimes tries a novel or a presidential biography but over his shoulder she sees how easily he gets diverted by email, by puzzles, by little videos at which he laughs soundlessly, discreet earbuds in so as not to distract her, though she can’t help but be distracted by his waking presence, its permanently refracted acts of attention. Reading in her sense is for him a thing in the past; I used to read, he says, but I just don’t have the time, and it’s true she remembers when they used to read together and talk about what they read: novels and biographies and poetry, not just his endless manila folders and the parenting manuals in a guilty heap at the foot of the bed. Like her he had acquired the appendage of a liberal arts education, but time is a thing of the past, just a few minutes before bed with his machine, flicking restlessly between images with impatient sweeps of his forefinger, seeking what he calls relaxation, dissipation, frittering away what she accumulates with her book, those droplets or droppings, spots of time, before lights out on his side, turned away from her, he never complains about her light, he can sleep through anything, she thinks, her resentment by this time dulled and rote, all the other mothers say the same of their husbands, men in general, it’s why they rule the world, a friend once said, not joking. For Ben words and stories and facts are all the same, in the same category as YouTube videos and sitcoms, smaller and larger chunks of data to be collected and sorted and perhaps briefly savored before being filed away in a process as good as forgetting. There was a time, in law school and her years afterward working at the firm, when she’d been almost the same, when her days, which often became her evenings, were so filled with print of the driest variety that there was nothing possible for her at night but television, HBO, The Sopranos and Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Wire; these things sustained some capacity in her, what she supposed you’d call her imagination, kept a dormant self alive in what had proved to be only a long transition between the old reader and the new. At home now with the baby, doing next to none of the work she had trained for, reading had changed for her: it was the nearest thing she had to an identity, if it’s possible to have an identity that goes unrecognized by another living soul. Identity’s probably not the right word for it; it’s only her center, the still point around which her now hopelessly ephemeral and other-driven life revolves. She is the addict, not Ben who has the job, who snaps off his own light every night at exactly ten o clock and is up before her and the baby while it’s still dark for his run, no matter the weather, while she is still trying to gather up the fragments of her interrupted sleep. He turns out the light and turns away while she goes on turning pages, trying to do it silently, wincing at the gossipy crinkle of paper or the nearly inaudible creaks of a hardcover’s spine. She is certainly tired, she’s exhausted even, the night stabs at her body with little twinges, demanding unconsciousness; but her eyes run ceaselessly over print, absorbed in story, phrases, guided by syntax, like a blind woman whose fingertips’ contact with a line of braille is more than a substitute for sight—it is her only means of transcending distance, of bringing what’s far away close, of locating in a landscape her otherwise hopeless immured and provincial body, buried in motherhood, wifehood, the Midwest, confined to understanding only what it can itself grasp, enfold, entwine. The halogen lamp presses its long finger to the page, diffusing only a little light into the underwater corners of the bedroom, outlining in shadow the volume of her husband’s submerged sleeping body, cold and lifelike in the dark. If she were to put down her book and shut out the light, turn toward her husband and stretch out her arms, gather him to her in search of warmth as she had so many times in the past, would he remain stiff and asleep, would he fold with her, two questions in the bed, journeying together to the end of the night? The shadows sharpen, the line of his body leaps away from her, instinctually his feet find the covers and disappear like a pair of divers without a splash. Her finger follows the light down the page, her lips move slightly, she plunges into the only river that will receive her, until finally it all blurs overmuch, she lets the volume slide from her hands, hits the switch that plunges the room into darkness, settles back on the pillow, feels her husband shift beside her, stares at the ceiling, closes her eyes, opens them, closes them, until the night itself is asleep.

  The recurring dream:

  In from the yard, suburban dirt covering my knees, hands, face. There she sits at the kitchen table under a blue corkscrew of smoke. The coffee cup stained by her lipstick. The stack of books I’d later take from her shelves and page through with their sentences, statistics, first-person accounts, photographs in grainy graphic black and white. The spell of the halftone, tumbling bare motion made still. The foreign familiar names, I won’t repeat them, names of unmaking, cancelling like stamps the other, equally foreign names. Photographs of bodies with all the color bleached away. It’s a cliché even to me because I grew up with it, in the shadow M carried with her everywhere like a torch, like a strange pride, up to the very moment she put it all away, married the man I call Papa, moved on. The thick academic books on the kitchen table replaced by thinner and broader pages, by musical scores, as she reclaimed, at forty, her singing voice. It’s in her already, the cancer, waiting, lurking, undetected, inevitable. Meanwhile memories of a suffering not quite hers, certainly not mine, linger for me like a rumored inheritance, a birthright, the deed to a property one has never seen in a country one has never visited, whose laws might not ever acknowledge the deed’s validity. Meanwhile the photographs of bodies, for the books had come to live with me. Surveying these materials, composing a rhetoric to meet M’s silent speech. She will not speak of these things, these books she’d read and abandoned to me. Her silence captures me when I open those books while she opens her mouth only to sing. An anorectic silence fills her song with terrible pits and echoes only I could hear. Photographs of coun
tless emaciated bodies. She stands on stages and in church basements and at weddings and funerals and sings the German songs of Strauss, Schubert, Kurt Weill: German, the language of evil, an evil language, harsh and seductive, evil in itself and as an accent in the mouths of the movies I watched on television, mouths of men with slick hair and black uniforms clicking the heels of their polished boots. German was the language of my worst dreams, twisted into something beautiful when my mother stood up and sang. A cartoon language that my mother takes inside herself and hones into the pointed instrument behind which she puts all her velocity. A language, she says, she doesn’t know and will never learn: she sings phonetically and with perfect pitch. But this mishandled memory is only a scar, a negative identity, dry and imaginary as the seas of the moon. I never studied Hebrew, I wasn’t bat mitzvahed, we planted no trees in Israel. In this way she tries to stand apart from the wound she had spent so many years making her own, which later I took up like a barbed and bloody instrument. But sometimes, oftentimes, she can not stand. So many mornings she doesn’t get out of bed, at all. Papa emerges from the bedroom freshly rumpled for his workday, shutting the door behind him with exquisite tact. Papa standing at the kitchen table spreading butter on an English muffin, saying to me Your mother’s resting. By this I understand that I won’t see her until lunchtime, and that lunchtime might not come until one or two or even three o’ clock in the afternoon. I understand that I an on my own. It’s summer. I go upstairs, go inside my room and shut the door. I sit at the desk under the single window through which sounds of traffic filter through the waving green leaves of the maple tree that edges our postage stamp of a lawn, and look at the heavy spines on the shelf propped up over the desk that Papa made for me with his own hands. I take down one of the books and open it on the desk and out it all spills. A crime scene. A name for the nameless affliction that we all feel, heads bent at the breakfast table and one empty chair. The clean ashtray. Countless photographs of countless emaciated bodies spilling—the photographs are spilling into ditches and rivers all over the Europe of my dreams, the Europe of depths, black Europe I read about, read into, whirlpool of my mother’s unspeaking, into which I fall.