Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy (12 page)

What is that?
the
first man asks, and the second man answers, definitively,
It’s brilliant.

Names swirl and
circulate as the camera makes its rounds: Hockney, Emin, Chapman,
Hirst
. Faces montaged in varying conversational attitudes:
laughter, raised eyebrows, squints, protruding tongues, scowls, lidded glances,
bland smiles.

Lamb climbing the
stairs, passing more screens, some with viewers, most without. The bass
diminishes and faint strings make themselves heard as he climbs, getting louder
and cleaner as the other sounds fade: a Schubert string quartet playing in one
of the brighter neighborhoods of
A
minor. The camera
pushes past him in a sudden urgent rush, up the stairs and straight up dizzily
into the pearlescent evening sky, swivels down to capture a pattern of
rooftops, dotted here and there by lights, and then two blazing strips with the
black ribbon of the canal dividing them, a ripple of negativity, water by
night, lined with crumbling, brilliantly illuminated landings and palaces. The
rooftop erratically lit by a few colored Chinese lanterns where a few people
term and team while the Schubert carries on without a source. Coming up to the
back of a woman in a short sharply cut cocktail dress looking out over the
city. Lamb’s voice folds into a conversation already in progress.

It’s like thinking
about the piece is more interesting than the piece itself.

Yes, of course.

The woman, one arm
folded across her chest, the other holding a highball glass, with a large Louis
Vuitton bag dangling from one shoulder. Sharp angles and planes to her face,
which has a Mediterranean cast; thick coarsely curled black hair with a white
streak at the right temple, wearing a hip-hugging black dress with green
horizontal stripes that not very many figures could pull off.

I just don’t see
why we can’t think and feel at the same time, that’s all, Lamb says. Art is
physical, I am physical. You are physical.

They are leaning on
a railing, looking out over the Grand Canal, beyond the Palace of the Doges
where the lagoon begins and history, from which the city stands recused,
resumes its course.

We are divided
between pleasures, and all pleasures are of the flesh, the woman says. Riot and
renunciation, there’s really no difference, no difference between
multiplication and subtraction; either way you lose sight of yourself. If I
taste, suckle, supple myself to another, that is pleasure. And astringency,
denial, abstraction, diets, refusing
sweets, that too is
pleasure, though of a higher sort.

What’s higher about
it?

Because denial is
always
itself
and also the thing denied. It is the pleasure
of anticipation deferred.

I think you just
enjoy feeling superior. Isn’t that what the Biennale is about? What Venice is
about?
All of fucking Europe, actually.

But the other sort
of pleasure is purely positive, the woman continues. It is mortal. It leaves no
trace. The only thing it leaves behind is itself.
The
deadliness of repetition.
One needs higher and higher doses. The law of
diminishing returns takes effect.

He has her, she has
him. They are alone at the center of the party.

One must continually
increase the level of stimulation, she says. Finally the organism can no longer
take it. Something breaks down. The capacity for pleasure, for living, breaks
down.

You could say the
same thing about denial. You can get addicted to it. It works backwards,
doesn’t it? Needing less and less until you’re hardly there at all?

She’s throwing
herself at him. Is it all words? Bought and paid for?

It depends on what
you deny and why, she says. Denial can be a secret fullness. I go to a
restaurant—a charming café. I sit outside, it’s springtime. There are lovers
and baby carriages and lecherous old men in beautiful bespoke suits. The waiter
is a dark lean and handsome young man from the East, Greek or Estonian, Turkish
perhaps, an immigrant, but cocky, with a long fall of straight black hair
curling at his collar. He doesn’t hand me a menu, he knows me,
he
brings me an espresso without my having to ask. I ask for
a pastry to accompany it, he smiles knowingly and withdraws. The people pass.
The pastry, something slightly vulgar, let’s call it an éclair, is brought to
the table with a folded linen napkin, a fork, a little glass of water. I pick
up the napkin and spread it across my lap. I pick up the fork, and press its
edge into the rich chocolate, it splits and the cream comes out. I raise the
fork to my lips and extend my
tongue,
I take a single
taste—not even a lick—of the bit of cream and chocolate adhering there. Then I
put the fork down. I do not take a bite. I do not pick up the pastry with my
hands as I did when I knew nothing of pleasure. I sip my espresso. The world
goes by. I open my purse and take out a single
bill,
I
spread it flat on the table. I use the laden plate to weigh it down so that it
is not carried away by the breeze. I stand up and I walk away. Do you
understand?

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.