Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy (3 page)

Then you’re done with trying.

Trying? I have tried, Elsa. I’ve tried my whole life. It’s time for a
new life of not trying.

Ruth is my name.

Of course it’s not so easy to find good curry on the Continent, she says
dreamily. At least it didn’t use to be. You have to go to England for that.

And where do I have to go?
Swallowing the words.

But this is not the conversation. These are the gestures and
countergestures, the motions of forks and glasses, the perfectly ordinary
congratulatory words and details of a trip long dreamed of, the trip of a
lifetime.
Without her.

Smiling, reaching a hand to stroke my cheek. I suffer the touch but look
away.
Couples, families, eating.
The
sky’s traffic.
The city.

I’ll write you, she says, motherly, faraway.

Eaten behind the eyes, both of us.

Produce a threat.

The image of Elsa Ruth, sixteen years of age, rising
listlessly into view of the full-length mirror in her mother’s bedroom.
Outside it’s the suburbs, New Jersey, birdsong and acid rain.
Empty Saturday afternoon, the well-made bed.
Tears for Fears playing somewhere.
Plucking at her shapeless
nightshirt and shapeless skin with thumb and forefinger, watching red marks
fade on her neck, cheeks, arms. Without bothering to shut the door moving to
the bureau, opening and shutting drawers, the dressing table where elaborate
earrings hang from a sort of tree, glint of the silver and turquoise New
Mexican jewelry her mother favors. Passing over a photo on the nightstand of a
young woman in off-white, another somewhat older posing with a man and little
girl, this woman in a gray suit next to a big placid bespectacled man with a
daylily in his buttonhole, the little girl like a solitary bookend between them
holding a little basket of daisies, the background bare and institutional, a
courtroom Ruth remembers, no not a courtroom, just an office, a judge’s
chambers, a long time ago, a hollow in the grit of the matchstick decade of her
birth, New York. Drifting out at last down the upstairs hall, listening for
voices from below, the radio mumbling in the kitchen, a few sharp scrapes of
cutlery on a plate. Into her own room, shuts the door. Lies down on the bed,
arms and legs outstretched and stiff, sweaty, clutching the strip of paper in
her palm, wondering if her mother knows, down there in the kitchen, why doesn’t
she call me, how doesn’t she know, is there still time to get out of bed and
brush my hair and come down smiling, like none of it happened, return the paper
to its hiding place in her mother’s nightstand. The door was opening. Eyes
squinted shut, the sun was on her, her mother leaning in.

So?

And when Ruth says nothing:

You’re sick? You do remember that it’s Saturday, don’t you? Being sick
isn’t going to get you much.

Steps in briskly to put a cool hand on Ruth’s
burning brow.
Ruth’s hand holding the
piece of paper
relaxes,
opens, like a flower inviting
the wasp. Creak of bedsheets.

It’s that time of the month, is it?
her
mother
croons softly. You stay in bed then if you want.

It’s not that, Ruth manages to say, though of course on top of
everything else it is that, that very thing. The cramps churning at the center
of her body like the lobsters she’s seen in the tank at the supermarket, trying
to unclench their rubber-banded claws.

You don’t have a fever, you’re just hot, her mother decides. Take a
bath, that
always helps.

I’m fine.

Her mother shrugs. Suit yourself. Remember we’ve got Papa’s birthday
dinner
tonight,
we’re going to John’s. I do hope you
at least remembered to buy him a card. If not, take one from my desk and sign
it. I’m off.

And she is off, leaving without having noticed Ruth’s paper or closing
the door after her, a terrible habit of hers. Ruth waits a long moment then
leaps out of bed, slams the door histrionically, dives back under the covers
and waits. But there is nothing. No: the garage door opener is shaking the
house with its prodigious yawn, how many times has Ruth reacted to that signal,
her parents coming home, stubbing out the cigarette or the joint, urging the
boy back into his jeans and out the back door as fast as his skinny deer legs
will carry him. But now she is still. The car starts.
Her
mother driving away.
The sun begins its long trek down the wall as she
lies there staring at the ceiling.
Closes her eyes for just a
moment.
She must have
slept,
her eyes open to
the sun striking full on a poster of Morrissey inscrutable and dead-sexy in his
chaste removal, his aerie. After a while she gets bored listening to the
neighborhood, the radio still mumbling downstairs (she never turns it off), her
bedroom stereo singing tinnily to itself at low volume
every
body wants to rule the world
. I do so have a fever, she
insists weakly. She reads the paper again with its dates and numbers, its
signatures, its blank spaces for missing names.
Feels the
raised indentations of the notary’s seal.
It’s thin paper, waxy,
inflammable. Why did you keep it?
she
asks her
silently. Keep me. Keep me twice. She considered the possibility that somewhere
sometime there had been another daughter with the same name, a secret sister
who’d died, and she, Ruth, is the hasty replacement, a bridge over the river of
grief.
My sister Elsa, beyond the sea.
She can see
her, just fifteen months older but infinite in her experience, wearing the
short tulle skirt that her mother had scorned to buy her, made-up, sitting at
the end of Ruth’s bed. More developed than Ruth, heavier breasts, hips wider,
lighting a joint with practiced aplomb, offering it to Ruth after taking her
own deep appreciative drag. Slightly hunched, sitting up in bed, searching the
shadows of her eyes. Where is my father? Give me my father. What is he like?

Kind.
Steady. Honest. The other says these words with her mouth twisted, as if she
intends the opposite.
Mocking the question.

This paper says you were never born.

Elsa shrugs, blows smoke. Here I am.

My papa is kind too.
But sad.

Our father isn’t sad, beyond the sea.

He’s European?

Of course.

Is he French?
English?
He’s not German, is he?
Where does he live?

Very far from here.

Can I go to him?

He’s in the dark, Elsa says mysteriously. She’s up now, walking around
Ruth’s room, looking at her things.

You mean he’s dead?

Elsa picks up a record album. No deader than I am.

Is he good-looking?

He’s not handsome if that’s what you mean.

What I mean is…

His face?

Yes. What’s his face like?

He eats too much. Sometimes he wears a beard.

Does he know about us?

If he did, he’d come looking for us.

But you live with him, I thought.

In the dark.

She puts the record on, turns the volume up.
Immediate
voices, harmonizing lonelily.

So he is dead. Or he never existed, like you.

I was never born, Elsa says. It’s not the same thing. Anyway, of course
Father exists. You’re here, aren’t you?

I’m here.

Well, that’s your problem.

Singing along with the record, eyes shut.
Hey
now, hey now, don’t dream it’s over. Hey now, hey now, when the world comes in.

She didn’t hear him come in.
A knock on the door.
Elsa?

Open the window, turn on the fan,
get
the smoke
out. One minute!

Your mother says you’re sick, says Papa through the door.

I’m much better now.

Can I come in?

Spritzing the room, spray droplets hanging in the sun. Yes.

There is Papa, his face like a moon swelling over his gray turtleneck,
wincing slightly at the loudness of the music. He turns down the knob.

I just wanted to ask if you were coming to dinner. It’s getting late.

Yes of course I’m coming. I just need to get dressed.

Awkward, hands in pockets, smiling. If you’re sick of course you should stay
in bed. I’ll bring you something.
A doggie bag.

Woof. No it’s all right, I’m coming. Do I have time for a shower?

You must hurry.

Papa, wait. Can you do me a favor?

Of course.

He is not a big man and she has shot up in the last year. It’s possible
by now that’s she’s more than an inch taller.

Can you call me Ruth from now on? I don’t like Elsa.

But that’s your name.

It’s not. It’s really not.

Wary, shrugging, unsurprised. What does he know?

All right.
Ruth.

Thanks, Papa.
Happy birthday.

Thank you, Ruth, he says, trying it out. He walks away down the hallway,
almost singing it in his deep voice.
Ruthruthruth.

When she shuts the door Elsa is there. No, she’s gone. Elsa is gone.

She sings it softly to
herself down the hall to the bathroom to the shower.
Don’t
let them win.

Following the figure of a man, her man, ours, his
back, walking away from the camera and taking our vision with him.
We want to look at a man looking at the Alps, a battlefield, the sea, the
sublime cityscape,
an
image consuming itself. The
scene that includes him does not include us, and that is its perfection. We see
him as part of the landscape, landscape defined as that portion of terrain that
the eye can comprehend at a glance. And if an itch crawls up his spine to
tickle his neck and the head hunches, snaps backward to peer over his shoulder,
accused or accusing, what will he see? We are the audience. We are not there.

Poet or assassin, we follow the man. The camera is a gun, the gun is a
microphone, the microphone is a pen,
the
pen is a
telephone.
Calls in the small hours, between two and four,
gone straight to voice mail.
In the morning she deletes them without
listening, noting only the times and the country codes. Two fathers, one
father, then no fathers at all, no mothers any more. M. Tense and alert before
the page, the phone downfaced on the bed beside her, on vibrate. Her husband
sleeps.

Fathers are depressing.

Mother of invention, asleep or awake, she dreams him, Lamb: a
black-and-white man in a simple lineless suit, gray raincoat over it, a fedora,
out of the airport, out of a cab, pulling a black wheeled bag behind him over
the cobblestoned streets of a nameless European city. Call him
anything,
she did not pay for his name. She quit smoking so
he still smokes; she rarely drinks so a bottle stands by the bed in they small
dry hotel room, where a single window overlooks a trellis or an alley or a
canal or a blank whitewashed wall. Tethered to her by cords of time: the
mother, the daughter: she needs a man without appendages, masculine and alone.
The camera is close enough to smell the back of his neck: tobacco, cornstarch,
bay rum. On audio: waves’ scumble, foreign voices, a kicked ball, shouts, a
busker accompanied by electronic orchestra, handclaps, bumblebee scooter engines
whistling and whining. He sits with his back to her, us, smoke drifting from
his left hand, its bandless fingers. The right hand, the writing hand, the
knowing hand is still.
Rests tarantula on his knee.
If
we look closely at the back of a man’s head, whose face we have only seen in a
dream, seeing only the skin of his neck and the pattern of hair (black flecked
by gray) and the two ears standing wide astraddle, and the barest movement,
fleck of tension. Is he
listening.
Is his breath, in
exhale, part of the
mix.