Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy (13 page)

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 temptation, 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 smear. 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.

The lake has a
leaden cast to
it,
ambiguous cirrus clouds refracting
a gray piercing light that makes Ruth wish she’d brought her sunglasses. She
pushes the stroller along the path that winds alongside the rock wall that
separates it from the water, eyes on the young couple a few yards ahead of her,
hands in each other’s hip pockets. He’s got a shaved head and a tattoo of the
astrological sign Libra on the back of his neck; she’s got a purple ponytail
and what she’s heard is called a sleeve, a complex web of tattoos that
completely cover her bare arm from shoulder to wrist: mostly Ruth is fascinated
by the spiderweb tattoo on the girl’s elbow, on which the spider, with the face
of Betty Boop, is only visible on the downswing of the girl’s arm. Ruth pushes
the stroller in which Lucy sits silently swinging her feet and wonders, rolling
her eyes a little at herself, if she was ever that young. The occasional
cyclist passes, runners, a small gray woman wearing a headband and sweats
chuffs along in a kind of shuffle-run. Almost everyone has earphones on, though
not the tattooed couple, who are conversing in a desultory way about their
plans for the weekend. He says something to her and she pulls away and hits him
in the upper arm, in a playful way; he pulls her back to him (she’s a whole
head shorter) and they stop dead in the path to kiss. Ruth should just pass
them on the grass but instead she stops dead and waits for them to finish. The
girl opens one eye and sees her there, and she gives her boyfriend a push. They
get out of the way and the
girls says
“Sorry!” in a
brightly scrubbed voice that belies her punkish exterior: a nice Jewish girl
from the western ‘burbs, after all, and he’s probably not much different
(though judging from the Asian cast of his eyes not Jewish, or at least not
wholly so). It’s a bad habit of Ruth’s to always identify people by their
Jewishness or lack of Jewishness: she knows Ben doesn’t think that way, and
anyway a lot of the Jewish people they meet here don’t actually set off her
Jewdar: it’s not just facial features or curly hair she looks for, and it’s
certainly not the religion itself, it’s mostly the voice, its grain texture and
speed, an East Coast voice she’s homesick for and rarely hears here, a voice
with toughness and mockery to it, a voice that shrugs, that pushes and pulls
its listener; the opposite of the broad and bland voice that almost everyone
she meets in Evanston, even people she calls friends, people who go to shul and
light candles on Friday night, speaks with, a voice that carries heavy boredom
into even the most interesting things someone might say. The voice or voices
that she now hears ringing ahead of her, having left the young lovers behind to
approach the playground at a bend in the water up ahead, where women mostly ten
years younger than Ruth are sitting or standing while their children riot
adorably on swings and slides and play structures—what used to be called jungle
gyms but aren’t, somehow, anymore. Lucy says “Whee! Whee!” which is her word
for the swing, and Ruth obliges, unbuckling her and lifting her up and
depositing her in the baby swing seat and giving a push. As she does this her
eyes scan the faces of the other women, recognizing most but only putting names
to a few—there’s Katherine and there’s Yasmin, each talking to other women that
Ruth only knows by sight. The tattooed couple she can see are standing not far
off watching the children play, or at least the girl is; the guy’s face is in
his cellphone, texting away. The girl’s face has a simple open longing look to
it which makes Ruth smile to herself: as she envied her so does the girl seem
to envy Ruth and the other women, the mother-women. It must be so, she’s far
too young to envy the children, as Ruth only occasionally does, she’s too close
to their world now to be sentimental about it; she knows that children are
fierce desiring machines moving constantly from anticipation to anxiety so that
you can hardly tell the difference, and babies Lucy’s age are devoid of
empathy, looking blankly at others that cry or have hurt themselves (though
there are exceptions: Ruth has an acquaintance whose child Thomas bursts into
tears whenever he sees another child crying, tears that greatly exceed in
volume and intensity those of the template, so that the original crier
generally stops and stares; the parents are worried enough to take the boy to a
psychologist though he’s not even fifteen months yet; standard deviations are
to be expected, Dr. Einmann says, but who makes the standard? Ruth she knows
errs in the opposite direction, assuming all of Lucy’s freaks to be normal,
leaving her husband to worry that she shows incipient signs of this disorder or
that, ADD or autism: let him do it, she has enough to carry just getting
through the ordinary day). Ruth watches the punk rock girl as she pushes Lucy
on the swing, unable for the moment to remember what she herself was doing and
whom she might have been with when she was the girl’s age—no older than
twenty-two, surely. Ruth had been more goth than punk, really: she had favored
black clothing, which she still did, come to think of it, except her blouses
and skirts were now fashionably cut and generally accented with a single color,
generally red or purple: she had loved, still loved, The Cure and Morrissey,
Sleater-Kinney and Hole, and had gone to industrial parties and raves trailing
a string of boyfriends as well-kitted out with piercings and tats as the tall
Libran boy, always in search of aliveness, that feeling of intense and physical
presence; and yet hanging back too, never as wild as her other girlfriends,
clinging to lucidity, wanting to think and talk her way even through Ecstasy
trips, and the boys hadn’t been much different, she still kept up with a few of
them and Ricardo with the safetypin in his left nipple was now a labor lawyer
and Kenneth the bass player worked in public television in Atlanta and Louis
her last boyfriend before law school, with his thrillingly nasal and sardonic
voice, a drawer of underground and filthily funny comics, had also become a
lawyer but was no longer practicing, he’d had some kind of breakdown and was
living with his parents in Sun City. Ruth’s boys had cleaned themselves up, cut
or grown out their hair, and the few tattoos visible were simple generational
markers scarcely worthy of censure or comment once paired with a business suit
or polo shirt. Ruth herself had no tattoos, though she’d always been drawn to
men and boys who had them (and Ben, in fact, had a single simple tattoo on his
right upper back of a DNA strand, a relic of his days as a pre-med student at
Brandeis, and she had once loved to touch it, in bed but also just out in the
world, a secret sexual touch to an assuming shoulderblade rendered permanently
erogenous to her fingers), but she’d been brought up with the Jewish
prohibition against so marking the body and although she’d broken almost every
other law she’d been raised with, often deliberately, this one had somehow
maintained its hold, and her skin was unblemished by ink, though blemished in
other ways by moles and wrinkles and cellulite, motherfucker and alas. If I had
a tattoo what would it be?
A Star of David, maybe.
Cretan paradox irradiant with irony.