Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy (20 page)

Watching the screen, after
midnight or in the haze of late afternoon, when the world is dead, his mouth
moving.
Like a clean streak in a dirty window in which everything gets
reflected so dazzlingly that your chances of seeing through the window are
reduced to almost zero. That’s what it is like listening to him, the foreign
man, the fat man, Gustave.

The new reader has an hour while the baby sleeps. She
should clean, she should eat something, she should answer e-mails,
above
all she should sleep herself. But as she climbs
heavily into the unmade bed her hand reaches out as though of its own volition
to pick up the hardcover she’d closed far too late the previous night. No
bookmark, her finger finds the exact place she left off, the book springs open
there of its own accord. Settling into a sleeping position except for her neck
crooked uncomfortably against the headboard, telling herself she’ll just read a
couple of pages before sleep takes hold of her. It is not a novel, it is not a
book of poems, it is a book including poems but not of them. She reads a
poem—if by
read
we mean passes her eyes over words and sounds them in her mind,
subvocalizes
them in her throat. The poem is a page long in
French and a page long in English and she reads both versions with similar
incomprehension. She is or will be the new reader but she is tired tired tired.
It is enough for her in her tiredness to sound the language, to ring each word
with the little muffled mallet of her tongue, though her lips don’t move. The
new reader is happy on the surface of words; like her baby she does not think
to open the plain or colorful box with the toy inside, but the box itself is
her toy. And yet with repeated scannings the box begins to fray; roughly
handled a seam splits here and there and something can be heard rattling and
jingling underneath. Not the poem, now, but her reading of the poem, and not
that either; her misreading, for without quite meaning to the French is
becoming English:
Sur mon crâne incliné plante son drapeau noir
becomes sermon crane
inclination plants on Japannoir, that’s not a word but it ought to be, she
thinks drowsily, early Kurosawa, Mifune in a cheap suit, tormented gunsel,
there’s a word that ought to be in a poem,
gunsel
, like Hansel and Gretel in
one body. Is it the new
reader
who thinks these
thoughts or does she occupy a space, a moment, through which these thoughts can
pass? Her eyelids getting heavy, the book heavy on her chest, the spine
pressing into her sternum, the poem pressing into the wet receptive meshwork of
her brain handing off consciousness to unconsciousness, to networks of
association, cells associated with rapidly dwindling exterior senses (but her
upper lip itches and she must scratch it), rapidly approaching interior ones,
recombinant memories, sensory data attached by the slenderest and most
mysterious of threads to strong emotions, fear envy lust hatred deprivation
anxiety depression curiosity punctuated by outspread patchwork joy. She is sinking
and rising, held back by the certain knowledge of the baby’s waking, like a
balloonist hanging on to a stray rope—in another moment she’ll be too high to
let go, she’s in it for the duration, till the short sharp shock of her plummet
to earth, but for now gravity’s reversed itself, and on her mind’s eye certain
images are imprinted:

Ben’s face ten years
younger, shining below her white belly as he meets her eyes, his mouth on her
cunt.

The face of the man she’d
always thought of as her father, lined and white as his thin straggling hair,
glasses folded and unused on the bedside table, deflated body pillowed on a
white sheet stained slightly yellow, masked by plastic and oxygen and doubt,
this man she’d loved a stranger to her in more than one way.

A figure in a white robe
and hood, masked as though for carnival with a long terrifying nose that curves
out like a sinister albino banana, leading her through a riotous crowd by the
hand, turning back to glance at her as it pulls her into an alleyway, its face a
blade, pulling her hands up to its chest where she feels breasts.

The view out her backyard
one night two winters ago when she was pregnant, hand on her belly, looking out
at the moonlit snow where a single brown rabbit squatted transfixed in her view
till she tapped once on the glass and it spasmed, it hopped, in elemental
terror it vanished.

The new reader is sleeping. Her baby is crying. The
new reader fights her way up through layers and layers of perfect white sheets
on which words are printed, words in elegant typefaces, unreadable, like words
that Internet bots come up with to detect other
bots, that
only humans can pierce, words masked by static, by gridlines, by nonsense.

May sixty-eight.
A
legendary inscription.
As if the floor of the sea had swapped itself
with dry land and all the usual creatures—students, cops, judges, booksellers,
waiters—had been replaced by their deep-sea analogues: seahorses, sea urchins,
sea-snakes, sea-lions. Exactly the same underneath, but our skins were radiant
and new. The elements had shifted.

Those of us who were not
political—I especially, a lump of Alsatian clay—nevertheless had to learn how
to swim in the political. It was not the air we breathed but something more
fundamental—the water we swam in. I sprouted gills, my hands were like fins,
from
any situation I could wriggle my back and be free. Yes
there was music and yes there were drugs. But it was, as I say, water. It had
to flow somewhere, and we flowed with it, oblivious to the truth: that water
will always seek the lowest possible point. I was in love. Not with a woman,
but with Charles, my flatmate. He was the shark who taught me how to swim. Lost
in my classes, dreaming through the studio hours, I occasionally drifted south
to the Sorbonne to attend a lecture that I had heard my otherwise aloof
classmates buzzing about: for the most part incomprehensible talks on Marx, on
psychoanalysis, on revolutionary consciousness. On a rainy afternoon I crept in
steaming to a darkened amphitheater, a vast, overheated space in which it
seemed hundreds of bodies were slumbering. At the bottom of the amphitheater
the tiny figure of the professor strutted back and forth, while overhead, on a
rippling screen, images of statuary flickered into being and disappeared, one
by one. The lecturer was saying something about the decline of the Greek
spirit; I was fascinated by his big belly, a brilliant white convexity at the
center of his abstract figure, and the gleam of his spectacles as he stepped in
and out of the path of the projector. There was a haze of smoke in the room,
not all of it tobacco. I stumbled into the first empty seat I could find and
was immediately confronted with a glowing roach, handed to me from my left.
That was Charles. In the sunshine breaking through the massy clouds afterward I
was stunned by his beauty: the waving honey hair he wore nearly to his
shoulders, the clarity of his skin (myself a mass of pimples and scars), and
the way he wore his T-shirt and Levis on his long, sloping body—he was always
leaning against something, hips cocked, looking like one of those Greek statues
that the lecturer had just been going on about, one whose armlessness seems
integral to its beauty. I had seen him before, in the hallways outside the
ateliers at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts: he read philosophy but came to art school
to score: he said the art students always knew how to find the best hash and
they appreciated (said with an unnervingly straight face) his own efforts at
consciousness-raising: you artists, he said companionably, you’re such dopes,
Plato was right to be suspicious of you. And as our friendship began to unfold,
I began to understand how very much further from the center of things I was
than I had suspected. His friendliness, his openness, seemed genuine and ironic
at the same time. Certainly he acted by conviction, for he was a Marxist, the
sort that spoke scornfully of the “official” Communists and glowingly of Castro
and Che; I meanwhile was unmistakably a product of the working class, or even
lower, so that I must have had as much glamour for him as he had for me. He
asked me endless questions about the oppression I had suffered at the hands of
the state and the Church. I did my best to oblige him, but I could tell he
found my stories disappointing. When I tried to tell him about my benefactor,
Father Juneau, he refused to listen until I told him Father Juneau was
homosexual. Of course, he said, smiling, all those priests are faggots. That’s
all right then. I understand it all. What he understood, or thought he
understood, I didn’t dare ask after that.

I had only known Charles
for a week before I found myself living with him: for a flat he had to himself
the entire, barely furnished floor of a crumbling former hotel on the Rue de
Mézières. All the walls that weren’t load-bearing had been knocked down
(Charles had knocked them down himself, and proudly showed me the
sledgehammer); it was a vast open space out of which Charles sometimes composed
rooms with paper curtains that aped Japanese screens but were closer to the
ward dividers in a hospital. Every Saturday he would rise late and groom
himself in front of the full-length mirror he kept near his bed; then in just
his shorts or sometimes nothing at all lead himself through a series of
exercises, based I think on yoga but largely invented by himself. Sometimes I
would join him and we would stretch and bend and hiss together, like a pair of
shadows. On Sundays he woke morose, threw on yesterday’s clothes and headed
straight out without so much as brushing his teeth, returning only late in the
evening; I learned this was the day he visited his parents in Poissy, and was
undoubtedly given his allowance, for he would burst in on me as I was painting
or reading and recruit me to come out to a rock show or the bars, buying all
the drinks and all the drugs, staying up as long as possible, so that neither
of us ever made it to our Monday classes. He had lots of girlfriends, of
course, in a variety of shapes and sizes and even ages (I was once only a
little surprised to discover the henna-haired woman who ran the corner tabac
perched primly on the toilet one weekday morning; she couldn’t have been a day
younger than fifty), but he favored most of all a type he called the Swan:
long-necked, small-bosomed girls with long hair like Bardot’s or cropped hair
like Jean Seberg’s. These beauties haunted me, quite literally, for as I said
there were no real walls in our flat and so time and time again I’d open my
eyes in the dark and, from my mattress, catch glimpses of these naked apparitions
gliding to and from Charles’s bed. Once in a while, out of curiosity or pity,
one of these girls would come to join me on my own mattress on the floor, but
not knowing what to say or do, I would just lie there petrified until she
withdrew, confused and offended. I recall one particularly humiliating
adventure, the morning after one of these encounters: I was in my life-drawing
class and as I began to rub charcoal on the paper, I realized that the model
was Charles’s latest Swan, the same girl who’d come to lie next to me just a
few hours before, whispering filthy nothings into my ear and groping for my
penis while I had tried to express my diffidence by turning away. It made no
difference, she pressed her breasts against my back and reached around to
fondle me so that I was forced to grasp her wrist and squeeze it until she
cried out. Motherfucker, she said, and stalked off. Now in the studio she sees
me by my easel and smirks, then abruptly shifts from her neoclassical pose (a
virgin cradling an imaginary jar), ignoring the instructor’s protests, and gets
down on all fours and thrusts her buttocks in my direction and looks back at me
and sticks out her tongue. The electricity in the room shifted suddenly in my
direction, though not a soul looked at me; I heard someone laugh once behind me
as I stared at the blank blackened tablet, my face burning, my peripheral
vision overwhelmed by the dark tufted cleft I dared not confront directly,
itself a grin of perfect insolence, and I seemed to hear that laugh a second
time (but it was not so, everyone was silent, concentrating, working earnestly
to capture the new pose) and I knew that it had belonged to Charles, though he
was not enrolled in the class and should not have been there. And now comes the
most humiliating part: not the humiliation itself—not the compromised position
that Charles’s Swan had put me in, nor Charles’s own easy contempt, but the
fact that I was now excited, intent, and hard as a stone. I began to sketch,
using just a rubber eraser and my fingers, working with tremendous rapidity to
lighten the charcoal veneer in the right places, so that curve and volume and
depth began to make their appearances, each globe of her rump taking shape, and
the grimy soles of her feet, the valley of her spine leading down to her
angular shoulders like white outcroppings in a black bay, the black mass of
hair and the sliver of visible face and just the tip of her tongue now panting
between the white rows of her teeth, and then picking up again the stick of charcoal
and working with intensity to deepen and blacken the profusion of pubic hair,
which in my drawing seemed like the outer layers of a vortex leading into the
null space, the utter darkness of her asshole and cunt, I couldn’t see them
with my eyes but the charcoal could. My hands completely blackened, I stepped
back and almost bumped into Charles, who had stepped away from his own drawing
to study mine. He said nothing. But that night, in our usual café, where some
awful folksinger was the center of attraction so that we had the sidewalk
nearly to ourselves, in spite of the November damp, he jumped to his feet and
moved into the crowd and returned with the same Swan on his elbow. She looked
at me unsmiling, her cornflower eyes kohl-rimmed under the sort of glasses John
Lennon had made famous.