Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy (2 page)

Paris Rome Vienna Venice Budapest Berlin.
Trieste.

Trieste, he repeats.

Trieste.
The far edge of Italy.
There’s a sea there,
or a river. The sea is warm, the river cold. Rivers remember the places they
pass through. The sea is blank and unmemorable like a sunbather in dark
glasses, prone, dead, on a beach strewn with hundreds of other inanimate
bronzed bodies.
Germans, most of them, or Austrians.
There are no Americans here, Elsa. Just like home
.

A stray line comes to her, a wandering sentence from a poem:
Do
I not withhold the penetrations of red from you
?

She puts down the letter and shuts her eyes for just a moment. But to
shut your eyes inside a dream is only to open them more widely.

And you want me to find her?

I know where she is.

Where I last saw you, where you were supposed
to be.
A field.
A small
oblong stone set in the earth among others.
A bronze vase
inset that can be inverted and filled with flowers.

In the halftone room the man leans toward her, vulpine, unsmiling,
patient, takes a cigarette out of a pack from the drawer, leans back, produces
matches, lights one, lights the cigarette, tosses the match into a glass
ashtray. Each action leaves behind it a little shimmering trail in her sight,
like one of her migraines. No one smokes any more except in the movies: smoke
creates texture, the illusion of depth, pulls focus. He leans back, plumes it
up and outward, makes a little indescribable generous gesture with his hand.
The blinds slat the wall with light from a streetlamp. It is all more perfect,
more familiar, than she could have hoped.

These letters lead back to someone. I want you to find him.

Not her then. Who?

My father.
My real father.

How many fathers do you have?

Call him Papa, patient companion of her years, with his mustache, his
glasses,
weak
kindly eyes. Sang me to sleep, held my
hand at crosswalks,
brought
me to his classroom where
I played in the hollow of his desk while he delivered his lectures on
mathematics. He was always there, trying too hard to make up for a more
singular absence: hers.
Also his.

I couldn’t come from him. It’s someone else.
My
father.
She left him, too.

Who is writing the letters, then?
Your father or your
mother?
Or some third party?
To
what advantage?

They are… He is… She stops to think of the word, eyes lowered. Raises
them, unwavering, into the black gathering hollows of his face.
Complicit.

In the drained toplit room of shadows there
comes
a pause. There they are, framed as though from some third person’s point of
view, hovering spirit, a person with a camera, silent, not to be observed
observing detective and client, doctor and patient, animus and anima.
Headlights from the street track up the wall, gleaming obscurely on panes of
glass concealing photographs, certificates, diplomas. He’s got a drawer open,
two glasses,
pouring
shots of rye. She holds the small
hard heavy glass he hands her in her lap watching him knocking one back and
pouring another. It’s what you expect, what you wish for. You pay for this. For
the disciplined derangement of the senses, disarrangement of false reality. You
pay him to enter your dream, your nightmare. So you can wake up.
The fall guy, the sacrifice.
She notices, as if for the
first time, the long seam of the stockings on her legs, leading suggestively
ever upward, and the undone buttons of her blouse. It’s me.
The
fatal one.

It may get expensive.

I’ll pay anything. I want to know who she was.

I thought we were talking about your father.

It’s the same thing.

Thy mother’s spirit.
Doomed for a certain term to walk the night.
The glass in
her hand protects her palms from her curiously pointed nails.

He makes a small horizontal gesture with his cigarette hand.

It’s your money.
So to speak.

The king died,
then
the queen died.

How do dreams end? She sees a man kneeling in a narrow room, as though
at prayer. She sees the man in black enter with a gun in his hand. The body kicks
out as the life leaves it, falls prone. She can almost see his face.

Men take and take, her mother had told her, until there’s nothing left.
They can’t help it, it’s in their nature. They’re babies, all of them.

The baby, rooting.

She swung her legs out of bed (Ben grunts, his body jackknifed, burying
his head more deeply in the pillow) and stepped into her bathrobe, passed
Lucy’s closed door and passed through the room that Ben calls her office out of
misguided courtesy, located the pack of Marlboro Lights tucked in the back of
the top drawer where it’s been keeping company with dried-out pens and bent
paperclips for more than a year, and treaded softly down the stairs and passed
through the kitchen and out through the sliding glass door onto the deck with
the red firestarter Ben uses for the grill in her hand, feeling the cool humid
predawn air pressing itself against the parts of her the bathrobe didn’t cover,
and in a gesture that has never failed anyone propped a cigarette between her
lips and lit it, holding the handle of the firestarter away from her as though
it were a blowtorch, and blew grateful stale smoke up and away from her in a
cloud toward her neighbor’s silent black backyard, rising past the second floor
windows she imagined, moment of panic wondering if her daughter’s window was
open, decided that it wasn’t, imagined Ben’s nostrils whiffing the smoke and
turning again in the bed like the bore of a drill deeper into some quietude
where she can’t, won’t follow, and the image of her mother’s face when she was
young (which “she”) rose unbidden before her eyes, its planes and curves, the
dark bulging slightly startled dark eyes like Ruth’s own, the hair like woven
strands of coal and glitter (even at the far side of middle age), lips like hers
perpetually narrowed to mark the imprint of irony like a kiss, like the burning
coal of Moses, like memories carried like treasure in a box that’s never been
opened, is it the treasure that’s so heavy or all that iron and lead and
hollowness and the burden of not knowing what is precious, what is dross, never
dropped, buried at sea.

Lay my burden down.
In front of the kitchen laptop casting its frail glow on her face,
saucepans, the night.
She types a few words and clicks Send. And drifts
back toward bed, where she lies sleepless, searching the backs of her eyelids
until dawn.

Produce
a match. Was that her goal?

Why do we insist on a plot for our lives?

Dark curling hair in the oldest photographs.
When I knew her short severe and flat, grayed gamine, bobbed. Tracked back in
time from heavyset to voluptuous to slender: can it be the same woman? Produce
the body. Sits in ashes, listening to the voice thunder: Where were you when I
laid the foundations of the earth? How a woman suffers. I hope you never have to
suffer the way I’ve suffered. Drama: bangles tilting on a wrist, the bob a
little longer, A-line.
Thrift shops, colorful voluminous
fabrics at her heaviest.
Her breasts, ample, tucked away, one breast,
swaying heavy that time in the bath, and then, none.
The
years between cancers in which she grew up.
Was I breast-fed? Is she
accountable? Like me she hated her ankles and short waist. Dark large
heavy-lidded eyes quivering with hurt or scorn. Arched eyebrows she used to
pluck. The elegantly hooked unignorably Israelite nose that answers mine in the
mirror: Shulamit, shalom. She was proud of her strong arms and shapely calves.
Her lips like mine of an exaggerated fullness, particularly the lower.
Dimples.
I never wore bangs again.
Eleven
years old in the locker room of the Jewish Community Center, white of cheek,
wadding a towel between my legs that I threw out later, in the dark.
You’re
like me, I also bled early.
Matter of fact, I almost said
matter of fat: the endless diets: she was contemptuous of daytime TV and slick
magazines and self-help books, lived in a self-imposed bubble of the most
elevated culture, the operas whose scores she studied,
I,
Claudius
on PBS, tunneling every weekend to the city for
doses of theater, ballet, visits to the Met: but somehow she always knew about
and followed the latest diet, the latest fad: liquid, raw food, low-carb,
no-carb. I always had to diet with her but not Papa, she insisted that he eat
what he liked, she cooked separate meals for him and for us; staring across the
table at his plate of paprikas swimming in sour cream and down at my own plate
where half of a single seared chicken breast kept company with cooked carrots.
He was decently embarrassed about it and took his dessert into his study, a
dish of ice cream or pastries she’d baked that afternoon, sometimes I’d find
the plates and lick them. Then when I went to college she gave it up and ate
what she liked. Her voice, I’ll think about that later. Produce a comparison:
I’m two inches taller, my hair is lighter, my boobs are smaller and so, oddly,
are my feet. Her shoulders slope slightly, I’m wide as a linebacker, played for
the volleyball team. Her skin is milk pale and mine runs to sallow. We both
feel the cold. The last time I touched her in New York, an awkward hug, lips
brushing one another’s cheeks. The last time I sat in her lap, the last time
she held me in her arms. The last time we raised our voices at each other. The
last time she approved of something I’d written. The last time she saw my
husband,
never
, the last time she saw my
daughter,
never
. The last time she expressed
her disappointment. The last time she expressed her disappointment with me.
The last time the three of us were together, a week before she
departed for Europe with Papa, never to return.
An
Indian restaurant on the Upper West Side.
On the phone with Ben in the
ladies room, crying. The awful bitch, I said. How dare she?
The
awful cunt.
Ben at his best then not saying anything,
just breathing on the other end of the line.
I don’t know what I’m
crying for, I said. I don’t need her any more, I’ve never needed her. I’m a
grown woman. She’s dying, Ben, do you understand? She’s dying and now she’ll
really be gone. Fuck her.
Fuck
her.

She’s going away, but she’ll come back. Of course she’ll come back.

I wish I knew, I said. I wish I knew if she were telling the truth.
About anything, ever.

Papa glancing up at me for just a moment with
his dark sad brown eyes, dropping then his gaze to study his glass of
Kingfisher.
On his
side of the table but sitting apart, regal, solitary.
Fixing her
make-up, as I had been doing moments before in the bathroom, erasing all trace
of grief, self-contempt, homicidal rage.
Smiling for both of
us.

We ordered the saag paneer, she said. I remembered how much you love it.

Produce the evidence, all of it damning.
Shards of a
life, her life, in me.
What do you call a mother who is not one?
This compulsion to repeat.

Touching my belly then, not yet showing. In six months I’d be a mother.
In ten months I’d be married. Within a year she’d be dead. She was cheerful
about it.

Call it a vacation, she said.
A long vacation.
I want to see them again, all the places I loved. Papa does too.
The old country.

Shrugging,
embarrassed, meeting no one’s eye, least of all that man, almost invisible from
embarrassment.

No one knows how to die in this country. As if she knew.

My baby.

We’ll be home in time for the baby. Of course we will.

Of course, Papa echoes.

You should stay. The doctors…

I’m done with doctors.