Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy (25 page)

Is that what I look like?

To me.
Today.
Yes.

She was looking at me.
Unwillingly, as though in a magnet’s grip, I turned my gaze to meet hers. Her
body was blinding, her eyes blurred. I tried to desiccate that gaze.

How you must hate me, she
said softly.

Not at all.

My tongue was confused but
I knew that I wanted to use those words I’d heard in so many songs and movies.
Non
, je t’aime
. But all that came out was
that
Non
. It convinced neither of us, I knew, but what would
it have taken to turn that
Non
into
a
Oui
?
Maybe
everything.

Can I keep this?
she
asked. She picked up the drawing and held it in front of
her, that
second self, homunculus, black with soft
pencil and disclosure. Then she turned away and walked across the living room
to her bedroom door. She opened it, paused,
looked
back at me. Men are all the same, she said softly. She closed the door behind
her.

The second drawing was mine to tuck into my portfolio
and take home, where it took its place on the wall among a dozen other
anonymous nudes, what Charles called my jerk-off wall. He wasn’t home that
night; he was home less and less. I watched the shadows of the raindrops walk
down each woman—ink or pencil or pastels or oils, in similar and dissimilar
poses, so that the row of them resembled nothing so much as the letters in a
ransom note, different and disjointed but fundamentally legible, living letters
spelling out a phrase or two, a poem of nudes, a demand.

Lie of the linear;
micrologic of sentences.
The new reader gets past that by reading multiple
books at once, by skipping the pages in which the killer’s identity is
revealed, by reading only odd-numbered pages, by reading poetry. The new reader
wanders the text-torn landscape looking for something to surrender to. The new
reader writes at odd moments, in odd places: the desk is too neat, sterile in
its brick of light on the second floor in the corner of the guest room, where
no books are stacked, where the laptop could stand pristine or the guest bed
beckons the new reader from writing to napping, dreamlessly, recovering bit by
bit the nights lost to the stack of unfinishable books by her beside. No: she
writes in a black notebook, self-consciously, interspersed with lists that
point back always to the objective life: errands, groceries, phone numbers,
friends
. In the kitchen, constantly interrupted by e-mails,
links, YouTube, and by cooking, the child, the husband, the telephone,
her
own mind, somehow frenetic and lazy at once. She cheats
an hour: Ben is home on a Saturday morning, she puts her laptop in one of his
old briefcases and walks six blocks to Starbucks, sits down with a latte, far
as she can get from the cozy chairs where the insane are clustering, opens the
computer and is immediately lost in e-mails, links, YouTube, the telephone, her
mind making rabbit tracks across the window, following passersby wonderingly:
where can she be going in such a hurry, too young to have children; why does
that well-dressed man move so slowly, will he yes he will reach down into the
trash can, sorting and searching; who is that woman in the black SUV with the
windows rolled up and the engine running, talking to herself and laughing; the
barista calls someone named Bethany and she appears, a woman in her sixties
with iron gray hair in a ponytail down her back, where shall wisdom be found,
and she strides out the door licking a spot of cream from her wrist.

She types I am alone and
stares
at the words, floating mimetically in the white
window of what is not exactly a page. Flicks the cursor, changes it: I is
alone.
Je
est
un autre
.
My own private Rimbaud.
An
erect figure, flat on top like a broad-brimmed hat, flat on the bottom:
flatfoot. An image out of the detective novels she used to consume
indiscriminately when she was younger. Not the English locked-room mysteries
her mother favored; Ruth liked the hard-boiled Americans. Hammett and
Chandler’s morose and witty heroes, men talked out of breath (
Breatlhless
), making self-pity look as
noble as it is inevitable. There were women too, hard-edged and wisecracking,
V.I. Warshawski and Kay Scarpetta and at the very bottom or top of the list
there was wide-eyed infallible Nancy Drew. It was the men who drew her, the
Hardy boys
outscheming
the bad guys, Bogart tugging
his ear empathetically as Marlowe or coldly, cynically as Spade. What saps they
were, these guys, how easily they were taken in by a beautiful and heartless
woman. It was not even the women who were responsible but the man’s own
narcissism, his “code,” his chivalric idea of his own ruthless perceptions. A
man like that of limited intelligence and ruthless cunning, sealed off from the
world of commitments and distractions by pride, immense privacy, loneliness,
drinking. A man like that might accomplish something, might venture, while a
woman stayed home and did the necessary raveling of his legend, his shroud.

The I
was blinking. She closed
the laptop and hit mute on the buzzing cellphone, where she read Ben’s name.
Time to return home with nothing accomplished. But there’s an emotion floating
atop the expected dull rage, like a rainbow sheening a black parking-lot
puddle.
Anticipation, incipient aliveness.
The old
books are at home, the old adventures in handsome trade paperback editions,
buried somewhere in the basement. She’ll dig them up again and carry them upstairs,
tonight, while child and husband are sleeping. She’ll read them. She’ll reread
her dreams.

There were many days after, all the days of my life,
but those first days crushed us with their emptiness. The waves had crested and
found their level without, after all, having capsized the great unwieldy ship
that was La France. Out of the dark, out of the smoke, humid summer air no
longer stirred the red banners hanging from the Sorbonne and the Odeon and the
balconies of St. Germain. The students still marched and met and made speeches
and left ruin and beauty in their wake, but some irreplaceable tension had
snapped or slackened. During these belated days of early June, M and Charles
and I were inseparable, the more so since Thicht had left the city abruptly,
for fear of being arrested and deported back to Vietnam. Simone, too, had
scarpered, under silent moral pressure from M, who without effort had become
the center of our little circle, and so one evening she climbed on the back of
a motorcycle behind a young Algerian named Mustafa and vanished laughing into
the red stream of taillights escaping the smoldering capital. What followed
were dark dull days like troughs between waves, neither revolutionary nor
quotidian, into which volition vanished entirely or from which senseless
schemes erupted suddenly into complete life, only to be eclipsed by apathy
between midnight and dawn. I thought often of Simone and her Algerian, her arms
around his waist, a new wind carrying her away now that history had blown itself
out. So M gave up her flat and moved in with us, into the big high-ceilinged
doorless furnitureless flat just streets away from the storm that had become
all eye, all silence, in the Boul’ Mich, at the apex of an imaginary triangle
joining the two centers of the sputtering revolution, the Sorbonne and the
Odeon. There we began to pass the time, bell jar days half-asleep,
half-clothed, eating out of cans, listening and then not listening to the
radio, to phonograph records, emerging only at dusk to roam the streets,
together, looking for the revolution and finding only cautiously open cafes,
packed moviehouses, streets aimless with youths and slogans without direction
or center. The TV was drivel and hardly anyone owned one anyway; the radio was
propaganda but necessary to track the convulsions and flailings of the state,
increasingly comic and helpless giant, never did we dream it would catch up
with us, once again incarnate La France, even if it was a corpse it was heavy
enough to crush us. The city was still turbulent, garbage stacked up in neat
hallucinatory piles higher and higher on the impassable sidewalks, it became
natural for everyone, bourgeois and student alike, to move in the center of the
street, day or night, marching or alone. People were still cramming the
Sorbonne for lectures, discourses, extended carefully argued disagreements
about the nature of the state to come. Cohn-Bendit was detained in Germany,
there were no leaders but it was undoubtedly the case that without him things
began to lose their shape, teeter and swell, like a hot-air balloon that could
no longer lift its basket but sat there, billowing in whatever wind. The first
sizable demo in a few weeks happened and we took our places in it, or meant to:
Charles had already gone, one of the organizers. But half a block away from the
Boulevard St. Germain M stopped me with a hand on my chest.

Listen to them, she said.
Can you hear what they’re shouting?

I listened.

“We are all German Jews,” I
said in English. “We are all undesirables.”

But it’s not true, Gus. It
simply isn’t true. Someone like Charles… And they’re all of them, they’re all
like him.

A gesture of solidarity—

With whom?
With the
dead?

You aren’t dead, I said.
Or German.
And you are very far from being undesirable.

Oh, Gus. Remember when I
said that I liked that you were a little bit stupid? The word she used was
bête
.

Yes.

I take it back.

She turned around and
walked away from me, wiping away tears. Trapped between exigencies, I could
only stand there watching, as she and the disorderly parade of students,
beginning to be pressed by police, passed me by.

We read and read: there
were runs on the few open bookshops as people fled their boredom, their stasis,
I read indiscriminately, passing each book as I finished it to M: the letters
of Rosa Luxemburg,
The Count of Monte Cristo
(I had read it again and
again when I was younger, and now, again), a popular history of the Commune, a
paperback edition of Fourier’s
Theorie des quatre mouvements
, the fourth volume of
Proust, the third volume of Churchill’s autobiography I found in our usual
shop; someone had written in black marker on the inside front page in English
Memoirs of a Fascist
and underlined it three
times. Charles too read everything, but what he cycled back to us was didactic:
he was shocked that I’d never read Rimbaud, the key to the revolution is in
here, he said, but I found it incomprehensible. It’s true certain aphorisms
floated up from the frantic murk and stuck with me, I found myself looking at
the window reciting to myself
si le cuivre s’éveille un clairon, ce n’est pas sa
faute
,
if the brass wakes a trumpet it’s not its fault, or «
Matinée d’ivresse
» which thanks to M’s
English I thought of as a sort of movie review of the revolution itself:
On nous a promis d’enterrer
dans l’ombre l’arbre du bien et du mal, de déporter les honnêtetés tyranniques,
afin que nous produisions notre plus grand amour
, They promised to inter in
darkness the tree of good and evil, to deport the tyranny of respectability, so
that we might bring forth our purest love. We have faith in the poison. We know
how to give our whole life every day.
Voici le
temps
des
Assassins. I said that to
myself again and again until it sounded like a train leaving the station,
picking up tempo:
voici le temps, voici le temps, voici le temps des
Assassins. We then watched
the film of that title, revived for one week only at a crusty little shoebox of
a cinema on the Rue St. Jacques, eyes wide watching the hapless Jean Gabin (the
face in other films of that sublime detective Maigret) undone by every woman in
his life, one woman whipping another in a greedy frenzy until it all ends in
blood by the banks of the Seine: we said it together leaving the theater
joining the roving bands of students under cover of night, all of us thinking
or muttering “Voici le temps des
Assassins
!” Charles grew more baroque in his demands on our
time and attention, he suddenly forbade American films, then rescinded the ban
when
Bonnie
and Clyde
came to town (the cinemas were packed, none of them closed, throughout May and
into June they had a special status, like monasteries in the Middle Ages in
which any common criminal might claim refuge), then reinstated the ban. After
every film he’d lecture and harangue, our flat for an auditorium, M would lay
her head in my lap sometimes looking up at the ceiling while he talked, leaving
me the task of following him with my eyes, trying to resist the natural impulse
to stroke her hair, I compromised by resting my hand there, huge paw on her
head, like a hat, she closed her eyes. What am I doing here, I asked myself,
how had I, of brute Alsatian stock, come to follow this road, to Paris, the
path of striving toward the respectability Rimbaud would deplore, throwing in
my lot with my fellow-children, sons and daughters of the bourgeois, in their
sleek well-fed skins, who’d been so good as to take me for one of them, who was
I to refuse this destiny, to sink temporarily with the mass and then rise with
it, the new ruling class in a society without classes, as Charles described it,
for all his personal despotism there was an undeniable light in his eyes, it
held us both, this intensity, was it my birthright too, would I too feel the
sand under my boots, the Midi come to colonize the capital, the whole world,
the paradise of Fourier’s maddest dreams, the seas turned to lemonade, the
arctic regions temperate, wild beasts spontaneously transformed into the glad
servants of man? I had made their cause my own, though the “they” and the cause
were splintering, had worked night and day in a fever to transmit telegraphed
slogans of defiance and hope that seemed capable almost on their own of
conveying us into the new, unimaginable reality. But something had shifted,
something had snapped. I was awake now, watching the dreamers, watching
Charles, hurt like a child’s sticking to his face. It was not his revolution I
mourned, nor my own stalled destiny as an artist, which I saw so clearly to be
finished before it began; I was a painter, perhaps, but not an artist, I lacked
the architecture for that particular brand of madness, I was simple, binary, a
keystone arch that ideas, things, people passed through, in and out, on and
off. It was the woman in my lap, asleep now, dreams uncertain, in the revolution’s
orbit (or is that redundant), embodying the more-than-life that the others had
passed from hand to hand in the lecture halls of the Sorbonne and down from the
stage of the Odeon and most of all of course on the streets where we’d all been
in the momentary grip of love, revolutionary love. But the vast majority of
them, Charles and Cohn-Bendit and all the rest, they were little old men at
heart, little old men before it began and little old men forever after: I saw
it so clearly, as though already in hindsight, in Charles’s stricken angry
arguing face in the underheated flat on the first of June, forty years gone.
Even when M awoke, and rose, and went to him, casting me out once again from
the little circle of warmth, I knew enough to pity Charles and the others, the
sleepers, who suffered the illusion of a destiny. Charles stood there in an
embrace with M, remote as always, head tucked down under the fall of his blond
hair, whispering in her ear, hiding from the death that was before them, us,
behind me already it seemed, the death of youth.
The old
man’s brute-hearted and calculating betrayal of his younger self.
Oh,
Charles, even now, I would shield you from such a fate if I could.