Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy Page 9

  What pleasure! What pleasure! The voluptuousness of it. Do you understand?

  It’s stupid, Lamb says.

  Pleasure is information, she persists. And seeking information. Is the pleasure in the seeking or in the having? What happens when you cannot solve the case? When the trail goes cold? What then?

  There are no unsolved cases, Lamb says. There are only cases that I haven’t solved yet.

  So you do understand.

  You are exquisite, Lamb does not say to her. Your denial is like a sculptor’s chisel. You are the artist of yourself.

  She smiles at the water.

  Your reticence hides you from me, she says to him. But does it hide you from yourself?

  These questions don’t interest me.

  Let me tell you another story. One rainy afternoon in Rome I hailed a taxi pulling over where I was standing at the curb getting soaked, trying to keep dry holding a shopping bag over my head. It’s a one-way street so that the passenger who’s in the taxi got out on the opposite side. I didn’t get a good look at him: he was a large heavy man in a raincoat, he unfolded a black umbrella and hurried away. I got into the taxi on my side and gave the driver my address. The rain beat down on the thin metal roof, it was very loud in there, and the driver was playing pop songs on the radio so I could hardly hear myself think. And then just as the taxi was pulling into traffic I notice a briefcase on the floor where it’s half tucked underneath the driver’s seat. At first I assumed that it belonged to the driver, or maybe I was just thinking about something else; it was getting dark, it was winter in Rome and it gets dark early, and the rain was heavy and wet, and I felt damp and wanted to be home. Then I realized that it couldn’t be the driver’s case, if only because the driver had a bag of his own, a big canvas satchel like a postman’s that was sitting next to him on the front passenger seat. Besides, the briefcase was too expensive and well-made to be a taxi driver’s, well beyond his resources if not his taste. I tried to tell him that his previous passenger left his briefcase behind but he didn’t hear me or he didn’t listen. We were pulling up outside my building; I told myself the cabbie would find the case at the end of his shift, or some other passenger would be more successful in calling it to his attention. But then I had an impulse. Having paid the driver, I grabbed the handle of the briefcase and pulled it out from where it was wedged and took it with me. He didn’t turn around, he drove straight off, I hurried to get out of the rain. In my apartment I examined the case for clues. Smooth soft leather, a narrow profile, a little calfskin monolith or obelisk, no monogram or other distinguishing features. There’s a combination lock set to 7 7 7, I try the tab and it opens. No one’s looking, I told myself, and I lifted up the lid to look inside. And what do you suppose I found?

  A gun? Money? Drugs? Passports?

  I can tell you this. There was no evidence of the owner’s identity. Not a business card or a mobile phone, not a scrap of paper with a name on it. Nothing. The case might as well have been empty.

  But was it empty?

  I held onto it for a day or so, the Mediterranean woman says. Then I decided to advertise it. On Craigslist I placed an ad that read FOUND: Black briefcase in a taxi on the Via delle Sette Sale outside the Banca di Roma. I renewed it every day for a week. At the end of the week, on a Friday, someone responded. That Saturday at eleven in the morning I waited at a café, the same café I mentioned earlier, with the briefcase sitting next to me for company. A man approached me, a large man in late middle age, handsome in a rough sort of way, with the face of someone who has seen much of life. He introduced himself and sat for a while, flirting with me a little out of politeness, before asking to look at the case. He opened it and looked inside, the back of the case to me, moving his hands around purposefully as though looking for something. He took something out of the case and slipped it into his jacket pocket. Then he closed the case and looked at me. It’s not mine, he said. Oh, I said surprised, but you did leave a black briefcase in a taxi on the Via delle Sette Sale outside the Banca di Roma. Yes, he said, it’s very strange, but it’s not mine. And it was raining, I said, when you got out. Yes, he said, and I hurried inside to conduct my business, and then I felt stupid when I realized I’d left my briefcase behind, but it was too late, the taxi was gone. And you didn’t see me, a woman taking your taxi. No. And you waited a week, why? I didn’t wait a week, I was frantic, I went to the police, I called all the cab companies, I tried everything, it was my secretary who thought to look online, I don’t use computers you see, she does that for me. How luxurious, I exclaimed, how wonderful, you mean you don’t even use a computer for email? No, he said, I don’t, I write all my correspondence by hand on a yellow legal pad, there’s quite a lot of it actually, and my secretary types it up for me, she’s a treasure, I’d be lost without her. And the briefcase? It’s not important anymore, he said, it’s unfortunate but I was able to make the necessary adjustments. So why did you come? Curiosity. Thank you, Signora. I must be going now. Let me pay for the coffee. He put a large bill on the table, far too large, enough money for a month’s worth of coffees, nodded to me, and left.

  What is the point of this story? asks Lamb.

  What is the point of a briefcase, the woman sighs, or a suitcase, or any appendage that we drag along with us? When we know what’s in it it’s like a prosthetic, it’s just part of us, we don’t think about it, we call it our luggage, a necessity. But when we don’t know what’s in it, or what it’s for, or whose story it is part of, it changes. We can try to find out, but sometimes discovery is impossible. Then it is something else, it is metaphysical, it reveals itself to us—a briefcase—and conceals itself—what is in it, what does it mean? Like a stranger, like your own face in the mirror when you catch your own eye unawares. We are always masked. Your profession is to unmask, isn’t it, you call yourself a seeker of truths. The truth is out there, as they used to say on the television. But it is not possible. You should be more like me, Mr. Lamb. Put what you think you know in that suitcase you’ve been carrying around, and lose it in a taxi sometime.

  But he took something from the case, you said. Something that did or didn’t belong to him. Either way it’s suspicious. Unless it’s something that you planted there, for him to find, but not to acknowledge.

  Perhaps the original owner left it for this other man, the Mediterranean woman says. I think often of him, the way he just got out of the taxi and hurried away. I don’t think he was heading for the Banca di Roma at all. He had an umbrella but I imagine him rounding the corner and discarding the umbrella too. Letting the rain spill down on him, plastering his thick white hair to his head. Lifting his face to the sky, grateful and anonymous, drinking the falling water. With the light heart of someone who’s left it all behind.

  You sound envious.

  What does a mask look like from the inside?

  It doesn’t look like anything.

  The Mediterranean woman leans forward suddenly and gives Lamb the softest and gentlest of kisses. Her soft lips meet his rougher ones, both give a little under the pressure. The night surrounds them like a halo. You have what you need, she whispers. He closes his eyes. when he opens them again, she is gone.

  Lamb stands at the edge of the rooftop for a moment longer, surveying the patterns of light and darkness, and the larger darkest surround that is the sea bearing La Serenissima up toward the stars or down into the drowning abyss. These are your thoughts, accomplished cinematography, iconography of a lone man, a seeker, poised at a height, a figure that orients space around himself, point of reference, spectral and incapable. He reaches down and picks it up, where she left it leaning against the wall. A black leather portfolio. He takes it in both hands to carry it in his arms like a child and turns and redescends into the ongoing tumult of the party, holding his upper body stiffly, arms cradling his burden.

  Detail asserts itself just when I want a picture, the moving image’s atmospheric density of immersion, worldness, Stimmung. Realism is a temptati
on, nearly fatal. Lamb is not a character but the stilly turning point of the viewer’s axis, the camera’s ally and no more. Looking’s limitations impose themselves on sentences and paragraphs that offer up the camera as agent, as that which follows whatever action is to be found beyond and between their flow. Sting of mediation conditioned by the real, which is that drive, that motion, carrying Lamb and the camera and these words through stories, streets, cities, a tourist’s information about loss, recovery that resists the image, that wants to be multiple, his and hers and his stories, now in a city devoted to looking, which has no economy but looking, no cars or readable maps, propped up on thousands of soggy pilings and sinking by the day, a metropole that makes nothing, that births no natives, electronic art cheek by jowl with columns, pediments, porticoes, domes, massy and unimportant, relics of a lost centrality, of so much as a working port or fishmarket. When I was there I had an injured foot and limped down streets that were also alleyways, getting thoroughly lost in sweet sticky heat, crossing bridges, passing mossy stairways descending blankly into water, dead-ending suddenly into the hazy blazing edge of the city, the lagoon leveling away, the sheer improbability of it all compossible with my real staggering sweating stare, pain in the ball of my foot, wondering which way to the Arsenale, which way to the Giardini, which way to the Grand Canale, which way to my hotel. Hotels are the essence of this travel, this circulation without pauses that will be meaningful beyond one’s own precarious memories and snapshots: I bought little, sold nothing, have nothing to make of my experience but a simulacrum seeking to be unlike itself, not a record or imitation but something true to the fundamental experience of passage, passing on and through and by, passing intransitively as something I don’t feel myself to be, a citizen of the world, an American man, a self-sufficing seeker after what further thing might suffice, clumsy solitary limper (wife decamped for Crete after a fight, eight weeks pregnant) scribbling notes to himself and to the unborn, awash in consequencelessness and possibility. Lamb in snapshots he must have taken of himself: eating gelato, standing in front of the Bridge of Sighs giving a thumbs-up, sitting at a table in one of the cafes on St. Mark’s Square wearing squared-off sunglasses listening to dueling orchestras, drinking a Peroni at Harry’s Bar. In motion again, reclining in a gondola wearing his hat, the black rolling case perched at his feet, seen from above, slow ripples surrounding his head, his black eyes, the gondolier foreshortened into a straw hat, a red band, a pair of hands, an oar. Passing slowly under a bridge, the whole vanishing for a moment, re-emerging, the gondolier alone and singing, horseless horseman, pass by.

  Under the linden trees Ruth walks with toddling Lucy, who repeatedly throws out her hands and falls into a froglike crouch, then lifts head, body, arms and toddles on again down the sidewalk just a few yards from their front door. Lack of sleep has Ruth descending, it seems, through layers of consciousness, so that phenomena are less and less distinct, more and more surprising in their combination, though she doesn’t really have the energy to be surprised. Lucy tries words. Kah, car. Tway, tree. Huss, house. Buhd, bird, she says, pointing to a robin on the sidewalk, and then cries, quite distinctly, tweet tweet. See now, Ruth says to herself, how you lurch from boredom to fascination and back again. The sheer drab ordinariness of her life, her street, her leaking breasts, oppresses her, and then as though stepping through a shaft of sunlight for a moment she’s dazzled by her daughter’s continual opening and flowering, as though Ruth could see through the not-yet-closed hole in the top of Lucy’s skull and behold all the colors there ever more brilliant, illuminant, in greater and greater correspondence with the bright poisoned world that rises now to meet Lucy who falls to earth and rises, falls and rises, sometimes to clutch her mother’s finger, sometimes tumbling ahead, hands and elbows raised, out of the sunlight into the trees’ shadow. The daughter that made Ruth a mother, that tore her out of one life and deposited her in another, a life fuller somehow, more three-dimensional—when she thinks of the days before Lucy with Ben the images are sharp but flat, and further back, to her single life, it’s like she was just a point moving on a straight line, or a long curve that must eventually become a circle, a circle interrupted by Ben, Lucy, her mother’s e-mails, a circle contradicted by an ending faintly in sight, more strongly felt in this moment, the vanishing shadow of past lives, even Lucy’s life, out of whatever story Ruth can tell of herself, to herself, about herself, a story that will not end properly but will simply stop years from now or tomorrow or this afternoon. She shakes herself mentally, like a dog. M can always do this to her, will always do this: make Ruth question herself, her decisions, the shape of her story. As though Ruth were a novel and M a ruthless (ha-ha, Ruth says aloud) critic who disagrees with everything, starting with the novel’s premise, a woman unmoored from her career, caught in a continual continuity error—even its title, the name Ruth always hated that she could never dissuade her mother from using. (Who is the woman who walks beside you, eyes downcast, flat-bellied, bare feet barely brushing the suburban grass.) A form of critique, a rewriting, or insisting that an earlier and as it were unpublished manuscript should somehow supersede the published book. As though Ruth were merely apocryphal, a wavering author’s concession to a tradition that M had simply ignored, as imperially as she had ignored Reagan’s election, the fall of the Berlin Wall, 9/11, refusing to let these contingencies alter her own story of one woman’s triumph over the treachery of men and time—of history itself. Ruth, on the other hand, has made history her specialty, in college wrote an honors thesis on the leadership roles assumed by women in the Warsaw Ghetto, had once aspired to be a lawyer in The Hague prosecuting the world’s war criminals before settling into the mundanity of contract law, before letting that slip too to be a mother and glorified part-time paralegal—each step on this trail in its way an affront to the memory of M, what she remembered and what she chose to forget, what she took as a woman’s right and what she set beyond the pale. But something has changed, something has muddied the clear waters of M’s repose, from beyond the grave these letters to Ruth are arriving, once a week or so, from different European cities where Ruth has never been but tending, always, east. It’s Papa, she thinks, it’s her stepfather, there is no father, no origin, there’s no need for any Lamb. But she doesn’t want to think of that just now, she wants to be here in the moment with Lucy. In the moment, where Lucy lives, without remembrance or expectation, discovering grass. Ruth says the word to her where she’s plopped down on the neighbor’s lawn pulling up great handfuls and spreading them on her lap, and Lucy responds, quite clearly, without a lisp, Grass! Through the picture window Ruth sees her neighbor, a woman in late middle age named Margaret, pushing a vacuum through a living room that Ruth has stood in once; a room chiefly distinguished by its paleness, the spotless white shag carpet and bone-colored leather furniture, a clear sign, if any were needed, that children make up no part of Margaret’s life. She looks out the window now at Ruth and Lucy on her lawn and waves without smiling; Ruth, after a moment’s hesitation, waves back. She’s tired. She would like to sit down on the grass next to Lucy, to lie down in the sun and go to sleep. It’s such an attractive vision that for a moment she believes she’s actually done it. Then she bends down, scoops up Lucy (still crying Grass! Grass!) and carries her away, back home, back to the flawless trap of this moment in both of their lives.

  What does she need, the woman she leaves behind, who waits there prone, sun hammering closed eyes? Her violent desire to connect, to penetrate, but at a distance, requiring what? A new reader, a new verb: to extimate. Mr. Lamb. Be my eyes. Wear this skin for me.

  She feeds Lucy: Greek yogurt with hard little frozen blueberries embedded in it and a piece of day-old cornbread cold from the refrigerator. It’s a terrible lunch, slack and uninspired. Lucy chows down: picks up her spoon by the wrong end and drops it casually onto the floor, plunging her fingers in, picking out the blueberries and spreading yogurt on the front of her onesie in a broad Rauschenberg smea
r. Ruth picks up the spoon and slumps back in the Shaker-esque kitchen chair watching, picturing Ben’s lunch. A sandwich at his desk, most days, but today she imagines him on Michigan Avenue in the brown pinstripe suit she chose for him, without the messenger bag he uses as a briefcase, hair rippled by the wind, striding purposefully down the street and then turning smartly as a soldier into some little sunlit bistro, sliding into a booth across from her. There is no woman, she knows and believes; but if there is no woman why can Ruth see her so clearly? True, she changes shape: sometimes she’s the conventionally beautiful thin long-haired blonde that Ruth is not and sometimes she’s the unconventionally beautiful zaftig brunette that Ruth also is not. But today the smooth-looking blonde sitting across from Ben in Ruth’s mind has no name, just a big bright smile of the sort Ruth herself can rarely summon lately, one more beam of sunshine for her husband, but with tits. Lucy is banging on her half-empty dish now with her spoon, like a prison inmate in an old movie. It’s a bright fall day: after lunch Ruth must find the energy to take Lucy outside again, even if it’s just to the park down the block. Or to the lake, retracing Ben’s jogged steps that morning. He’s out there and she’s in here: that’s the point that Ruth sticks on. And he’s surrounded, it seems, by the infinite varieties of feminine allure, while her own flesh is tired and flaccid and her own skin has to her a strange smell, scorched, electrical, like insulation melting on a wire. Lucy throws her spoon down on the floor again and yells, mouth wide open: Ruth yells with her. Lucy’s mouth is still open but no sound comes out, she stares. Then she giggles. Ruth giggles too and the evil vision is dispelled. Ben’s back at his desk, a paper napkin tucked into his collar to protect his tie, eating soup and crunching numbers, as cut off from light and air as she herself. But no longer. Come on baby girl, she says to Lucy, removing the empty bowl. We can’t stay in here.