Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy (5 page)

And if the letter were blank?
A single sheet of white paper, unmarked save
for a pair of
creases? And if the woman, austerely attired, made up, not a hair out of place,
were to sit down now with it at the kitchen table, with a pen? If she looked
for a while out the window as her cup of coffee grew cold?
If
she took up the pen?
If she looked at the paper then away from it again,
as though searching, looking round at the kitchen, the apartment, like a place
she had never before seen?
If she applied pen to paper?
If she began to write?
If she wrote for a long time,
immune to our eyes, the whispery crinkle of pen on page (she has filled one
side, turns it over, begins the next side), clink of a ring on her finger on
the coffee cup, sipping mud, putting it down again, applying herself, bent low,
one manicured hand holding the paper in place, the other moving swiftly, fluently,
without pausing for thought?
If she stopped writing at last?
Refolded the map, now become a letter, and replaced it in its envelope? Taped
it shut? Addressed it? Searched a desk for stamps, found one,
applied
it?
If she stood now, in the
center of the room, hands at her sides, tapping the envelope against her leg,
deciding?

Screening
and absorbing print that isn’t print: newspapers that leave no stain,
feuilletons that
never
pucker the skin but only the
seeking, restless eye. She reads old media on its way out the door to new
media, photos in motion over changing captions, acting as though there were use
in a center—
The New Yorker
and
The New York Review of Books
and
The New York Times
washing over the transom in sloppy paper waves. She reads mommy blogs,
political blogs, book blogs, cooking blogs (but she rarely cooks, it’s Ben
who’s at home in the kitchen, who can relax there, whistling his way through
the slightly old-fashioned menus he favors: pot roast Provencal, filet of
sole), sex blogs and advice columns, blogs by women about being women, blogs by
men about everything, blogs by people in countries we have bombed, blogs by
peoples in countries we’ve yet to bomb. She follows celebrities and comedians
and authors and academics and smartasses and cleverdicks and drunkards and
addicts and her brother-in-law the author of thrillers on Twitter. Everyone
speaks English if they want to exist, but never too much of it at a time. She
reads searchingly, with bitten lip and anxious eye, trying to break out of the
bubble, to extend her breath’s reach outside the shallow mainstream of American
life in which all of us regardless of nationality are supposed to live and
thrive for all the beautiful days of our ignorance. And yet this discourse—wry,
intellectual, ineffectual—somehow slips by her trained and desperate eyes, so
that when she closes the screen with a headache it’s long past bedtime, Ben
with a pillow over his head against the light, or Lucy crying in the afternoon,
a naptime squandered, a vein throbbing so close to Ruth’s left eye it might as
well be the eye itself, hooked deep into the brain, a chain of pain leading
from the light into dark and unfulfilled hollows of her skull. Unsolaced,
unappeased, almost frantic with loneliness: the mind of the reader without
print, without the stable march of characters, same today as they were twenty
years ago in the mass-market paperbacks she devoured as a girl now solitary as
sardines in basement boxes, on yellowing paper with split spines, the books
that made her a reader, that she fell into and climbed out of as easily as a
Channel swimmer, greased like a seal, creature made for that sea. So with
laptop extinguished, with her husband breathing steady beside her and the
barest flicker on the bedside monitor assuring her of Lucy’s midnight silence,
she reaches out once again for the book that’s been waiting for her—the book no
one asked her to read, that is party to no discussion group, that no teacher or
talk show host recommended, that was patient it seems for years since she read
the first chapter standing up in the town’s last bookstore, yes years ago, that
joined a stack of books propping up the frame of her lover’s futon, the year
she thought she was pregnant every month and every month read the single uncrossed
blue bar of the pregnancy test with blank disbelief, saying nothing to her
lover or her mother or her friends but firmly believing in her own changed life
metastasizing inside her, years before Ben and forgetful striving and Lucy,
little yolk with legs. The book was waiting. Not like her mother’s books, grim
and watchful on the shelves of the den, shadowing ordinary nights of
television, books with pictures and without, objects of an impersonal terror
inseparable from M’s never-to-be-spoken sorrows, unthinkable documents of an
unthinkable past that M carried mutely into the present, in the tense pose of
her body at the kitchen table, in the spiral of cigarette smoke. Papa’s books
pleased her more: orderly rows of print or specifically riven with white space,
the science fiction novels and popular histories and even the dense lightless
volumes of mathematics; these pleased her, simply to touch them, rocking them
back on their spines to feel their heft in her hand. The best of them were
never on shelves but spread profligate throughout that house, as now in her
house: scattered on tables and under chairs and on top of both stereo speakers
and piled high on her bedside table so that there’s scarcely room for a glass
of water: more books even then that, stacked in the basement on shelves and in
boxes, some perched precariously near the sump pump, the oldest books in her
life, the thickest and most lightweight, scanned with a flashlight under
blankets prickling with static electricity so that the hair on her arms rose in
the aftermath of a thump on the door and a voice shouting Lights out and the
battery dying with her still reading, still a girl, and life on the horizon in
the form of the raked distant skyline, clouds imported from Europe, the destiny
written decades ago waiting for her to collect it.

But the letters are real:
documents. Someone wrote them, bought borrowed or stole the unremarkable paper
they are printed on, or written on. The letters change. Some are printed,
coldly stippled in black by the head of an inkjet, streaked. Some are
handwritten, in a sometimes erratic but always legible script, with broad
looping L’s and G’s striding across the paper. The ballpoint pen leaves a
groove in the stationery that her fingertips can almost read when they brush
its surface, the papers stacked against her knees in bed or tucked
surreptitiously underneath it, where Ben never goes. The ink is dark blue,
almost black; the pen in question is not generous enough to dot some of the
hastier I’s. One letter was typewritten without the benefit of correction tape
and some of the letters are crossed out with small or capital X’s. Only the
signature does not vary: at the bottom right corner of the last page, almost in
the margin, the rapid illegible squiggle that resembles an M. M with a dash in
front of it: M and em dash: M as interruption. The pages are folded and
carefully matched with envelopes without return addresses, each stamped or
labeled Air Mail / Par Avion. It is this latter French phrase that moves her
lips, each time, a kind of mantra as she folds or unfolds each letter, perusing
its surfaces for clues since the words, she knows, are all lies.
Par avion, par avion.
It sounds to her like the name of a
long-limbed bird, a crane, unfolding itself for flight across a marshy plain, a
riverine landscape, suspended for a time over the cragged Atlantic, and then
tracking the waterways, up the Hudson River Valley as far as Albany, following
the nap of western New York along the Susquehanna, up to Buffalo with the snows
and then another slow plunge across wide waters, Lake Erie, Lake Ontario, Lake
Huron, and the dash across the state of Michigan to Lake Michigan before
beginning its final descent into her city, her Chicagoland, her home, where at
any time she might wake from uneasy dreams to find another letter neatly folded
and sealed in its envelope, another missive from across the sea, from the
country of death.
Under her nightstand blank paper, a sheaf
of envelopes.
Tucked into an old day planner, a
ballpoint pen taken from the Grand Hyatt on Wacker Drive.
In her office, squat and ugly on its stand, the inkjet.
In
the basement, by the disused sewing machine, an old Selectric that makes a
droning hum when switched on. It is a strangely soothing sound. If she finds
herself in the basement among the unfinished dresses and tatty tablecloths and
cardboard boxes unpacked from law school days, she might idly switch it on and
listen for a while to the urgent whir of analog machinery, while the little
planet of the ball waits for a keystroke to call it into action, almost faster
than the eye can track.
To make its mark.
Eyes inward.
A call or cry from upstairs so she leaves it
running, it stays on for hours, until her husband comes home that night through
the garage, stops wearily and warily for a moment at the urgent familiar hum;
then silently, without imprecation, reaches down and pulls the plug.

Like a sightseeing bus pushing slowly through inundated streets. That’s
how he moves, deliberately, lugubriously, like someone who has rehearsed this
path a hundred times before without any appetite for the destination. Yet
there’s something or someone that he carries with him for whom it’s all new,
and so once again he patiently treads past the cathedrals and plaques and
statues and fountains and squares and shops, pausing occasionally to discharge
or take on some other passenger seeking novelty, a shade of distraction,
something to photograph for the express purpose of forgetting all about it.
As though tourist and guide were one.
The guide remembers
for the tourist, but if he too has forgotten all about it he has a script he
can follow in one of several languages, and if this script has been repeated
often enough he’s free to think about other things, to daydream or worry or
remember scenes from his own life, his own history, forever unnarrated except
by himself to himself: a native to this place, let’s call him Marco, thinking
there’s the flower shop where I bought her roses when they were out of those
magenta daisies she likes, and she laughed at me, with real scorn I thought,
for my unoriginality; there’s the auto shop where Hector works, who never looks
me in the face any more since I saw him one night with his trousers down in the
alley behind the bar with another bloke kneeling in front of him, and Hector’s
eyes were closed and he opened them and saw me seeing him, but all he did was
close his eyes again; there’s the school where the nuns beat me black and blue
but mostly black, black around the bone, until I thought I was becoming a nun
myself; there’s the office building where my sister was a secretary for just
one little month to that bastard she married before he knocked her up with
twins and knocked her down when he was drinking and then took her and the twins
(Luis and Ramona) away forever to some fucking Spanish island, where they’ve
never invited me to so much as visit; and all the time this secret narrative is
unfolding, or jigsawing, through his mind there’s another narrative coupled to
it: the history of the city, the layers of centuries peeling and disclosed to
the bored, avid ears of the picture-snapping listeners on the upper deck, above
it all, while all around them swirls the ordinary traffic and weary populace of
the city of now, each of them unfolding or jigsawing the private narratives
with which this ancient history has only apparently very little to do. Thus
Marco, thus the private invisible stream making its pressure felt to the
viewer, indirectly, in the length of the shot, the minutes uncut. So Lamb,
weaving and waving his way down the high street, halting occasionally to tug
his bag’s wheels loose from some snag in the paving stones or a curb’s edge,
edging, it’s clear, with steady trepidation toward his ultimate goal.

What
he, Lamb, has to go on.
Very little.
A client’s
scantly documented claim.
The folded letters.
M.

He turns his gaze from his
reflection or the array of watches or the policeman’s reflection (blue back to
him now, putting the ticket book away in his hip pocket and looking at the sky
reflected in his sunglasses), tips his roller bag from a vertical to a diagonal
position and begins once again to move. We follow him into more crowded
streets, now thronged with traffic, stoplights and gridded lines mazing the
intersections and crowds of shoppers and tourists and idlers, men and women,
really more people than you’d expect in what had seemed such a small and sleepy
town (is it the same town or is it a geographical atrocity committed by the
filmmakers, splicing together two or more places with superficially similar
architecture and light, a sign of their commitment to a global audience
implicitly ignorant of the difference, a rejection of local knowledge in favor
of the spectacle intrinsic to film and film editing’s capacity to get along
without visible parentheses), and there’s no mistaking now the sticky overlay
of modernity coinciding uneasily with that stone miscellany, the flagstones and
paving-stones, because there are people with cellphones pressed to their ears
in the crowd, and a line of Japanese motorbikes the color of hard candies in
front of a café, at which a young woman is briefly visible at an outside table
tapping on the keyboard of her laptop—flash of her eyes as she looks at the man
and his hat passing over the tops of her designer shades, but he takes no
notice and walks on bent and leaning as though into a wind, free hand loose at
his side like some sort of slow sea creature eddying past a slower one,
whistling in the dark, prey and predator. She slides off the edge of the
visible world as the camera tracks the man in the hat in profile, riding on
parallel rails, the man’s face shadowed in the hat’s brim and his monochrome
clothing and most of all the hat itself sustains a sense of his sliding somehow
on the edge of time, outside our era, so that he belongs to the early Sixties
at the very latest or the early Thirties at the very earliest, though his
suitcase is the very mark of the modern cosmopolitan, dense and compact and
massy, allocated to the last centimeter for an airliner’s overhead bins. Then
he passes in front of another shop window, sheer reflection this time, just a
glint of red—velvet? meat?—and again the whole street beheld behind his mirror
image and no camera or tracks or crew in sight, miraculous perspective, that
puts us into the scene and removes every trace of spectatorship.
Just looking, not seeing.
Just telling, never showing.