Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy (10 page)

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 countless 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.