Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy (6 page)

We
accept trompe l’oeil as the truth of looking: we accept the deceit of
appearances in the name of a higher truth. If the camera follows a man we discover
what he discovers a beat after he sees it, registering how to see it in the
assumption of his stance: dully ambling, ambitiously striding, cautiously
skulking, or bridled to a short, shocked stop in the face of what must remain
literally obscene, the world of the off-screen. If the camera precedes him we
never see what he sees except what’s reflected in his face: Lamb reacts to a
reality we infer, the necessary fiction that when he looks at us, into the
camera, he sees something that is precisely not us, and yet we are his reason
for seeing it: each of us in our seats are the stand-in for the beautiful
woman, the blood trail, the nemesis, the dead end that at last receives him,
that births no further mystery. Like a bad conscience Lamb penetrates the visible
on our behalf, always two steps behind the truth right up until the moment it’s
too late. With rigid grace he navigates the labyrinth that he and we can see:
mean streets, the planes and angles of treacherous faces, a fat man’s wiggling
wattles: he’s nobody’s fool and so the biggest fool alive, taking for granted
as we do that there’s a skull beneath the skin that will ultimately grin out at
us, as skulls grinned from the spines of the books lining my mother’s shelves
when I was young: Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr, masters of the locked
room, the fresh kill, the cozy horror. Does he, Lamb, our American man, squat
down now by that same green door, that same brass mailslot, and glance around
to see if he’s alone? Does he take out a pencil and use it to poke open the lid
and peer inside? From his point of view we see only the dim shabby foyer, the
dark stairs climbing upward. And then a shaft of light illuminating where the
letter had
fallen,
and the letter is not there. We
don’t see his face, we must glean his satisfaction or lack of it from the set
of his shoulders and his slight grunt as he gets back to his feet and takes
hold once more of the handle of his rolling suitcase.

But by now some people in the audience will have walked out. After a
start that promised a degree of intrigue and the pleasures of vicarious
tourism, it has become evident to the discriminating that this is going to be a
large bad picture, a pretentious attempt to translate certain American genre
codes into the anti-vernacular of neorealism in a fundamentally uninteresting
effort to present one man’s investigation of a past in which he has neither
stake nor existence. The shamus is a blind man proud of the keenness of his
sight, whose narrative begins innocuously and yet from frame
one he is already in over his head. For the rest of the film he will collide,
vertiginous body, with the violence of facts, the implacability of the past,
discovering his entanglement with a conspiracy too vast to defeat or survive.
And without his innocence he ceases to exist. One more American crouched before
the monuments of Europe, lacking a sense of scale, of his own relative size in
regard to a thousand dollhouse churches, castles, palazzos, parliaments. Lying
down each night in a fresh bed of innocence in penziones and hotels, rising
each morning to put on his layers of protective coloration, impregnable behind
the screen he carries or that we carry for him.

Shamus or cowboy: if the
shamus bears his innocence before him like a shield the cowboy wields his like
a weapon. He penetrates the landscape, squint-eyed, the better to protect his
pitiless vision. He is, his posture insists, a force for righteousness, and so
will commit any crime in the name of his disinterested goodness. He dies
obediently and
rises
again, returns as an old man to
the beaches he renamed in his youth: Utah, Omaha, Pointe du Hoc: Dog Green,
Easy Green, Fox Green. The cowboy is there to be seen, not heard: a living
monument silhouetted against the historyless sun. Over the next rise stand the
numberless unrepresentable: natives, Americans, women and children. Can a
cowboy be a woman, can an Indian be white?
Under his
buckskins?
But his eye, like the shamus’s eye, is caught looking. The
shamus’s eye takes in the corruption, the conspiracy, the henchmen arranged on
spider strands leading toward the unbearable unrepresentable truth. The
cowboy’s eye reflects, dauntless and unwavering, crinkled by faux epicanthic
folds, refusing light, revealing an empty soul or no soul, till it extracts a
flinch from the opposed searching eye and closes it forever. Diagonal,
simultaneous, men, the cowboy and the shamus dwell in the same foreign element,
bearers of the fascination that leads them, us, hinges on which adventures and
investigations turn. They are here for the purposes of the darkened theater of
enthrallment. Those who
remain,
isolato or in couples,
testify by so doing: No matter that we’ve seen it before, done better, fresher:
we are not children, we understand we can never again see those films, those
celluloid bandages over our wounded and regenerating innocence, for the first
time. Yet we are undaunted and unblighted so long as we—though fewer and
fewer—still gather with strangers in the dark and speak together the terrible
affirmation in the open eye, following the gazes of straight-bodied men with
faces in profile or in shadow, men with guns or cameras to kill the objects of
their vision, to sacrifice, to gift our eyes. Down these streets we must go,
ourselves accompanied by ourselves, seeing how far down innocence can go before
dissolving into air, into thin air. We will go deeper yet. A hand dangles, the
gun falls, the credits roll. Let’s sit still for a moment longer under white
lights before the white screen. Close your eyes. Listen to a voice, a man or
woman’s voice, recount what he or she has seen, what we will never see
ourselves. That story, appendix to seeing and antidote to innocence, is what
this bad and peculiar film is after.

She wraps a shawl around her shoulders, drops her keys into a simple
black purse. She’s going out. She deposits the letter into her purse and shuts
the clasp with a click. Then she stands there a moment longer. Then she turns
decisively and marches toward the door and opens it a little too hard so that it
swings open and bangs into the wall—there’s a dimple the knob has made—and we
see her lit from below going down the stairs, her back and her shoulders and
her head and then just a band of diffuse light, and around this time the
apartment door swings shut and just before it shuts we hear the street door
open, and then the apartment door shuts and we’re alone in her living room.
Straining our ears we can just make out her heels on the pavement below but
they quickly fade. Yet we linger a bit longer in this sparsely decorated room,
with its uncomfortable-looking sofa and single easy chair, a watercolor or
print of a watercolor over the sofa that looks like a negative Monet, and the
tulip with petals continuing in their process of blooming, of parting, of drying,
of desiccating, of dropping to the table and to the floor and the simple rug at
the center of the floor, off-white, the color of an empty page.

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.

She walks quickly, taking short swift steps as her knee-length skirt
requires, the short heels clacking down the little street to a corner and then
up a little hill, like a little Montmartre, for there’s a church hunched on the
hilltop framed by gray chopped clouds. The few people she passes are young,
with the scattered affect of students, moving in pairs and threes, some with
headphones and earpieces, even as they maintain a desultory conversation that’s
live there on the street. She seems to be headed for the cafe on the edge of
the plaza that belongs to the church, where a little gray fountain splashes or
rather seeps, just barely contained by its plain smooth square rim—an abstract
fountain, curiously modern, all right angles, an atonal intruder in the very
lap of the Romanesque church, a rectangle in deadly opposition to its ancient
roundness. But at the last moment she swerves left and into a doorway under a
sign that reads, simply,
Poste
.
Inside an antiseptic space, linoleum, row of mailboxes, the counter, an old
woman in black stands arguing in what sounds like Italian with the
long-suffering middle-aged overtall clerk folded down with his elbows leaning
on the counter, eyes almost closed, absorbing his customer’s untranslated
wrath. The woman with the shining black hair takes a key out of her purse,
steps up to one of the mailboxes, opens it, slides out a few letters, a folded
newspaper or broadsheet,
snaps
the door shut again.
She opens her purse, puts in the new mail,
takes
out
the letter.
Slips it casually into the slot of the letterbox
on her way out the door.
We want to follow her: maddeningly the camera
remains fixed on the blank face of the letterbox, its single slit the only
expression, while in the background the old woman in black’s harangue goes on
and on, interrupted occasionally by the clerks’ world-weary half-whispered
repetitions of
Si.
As if roused from slumber the
camera lurches away now from the letterbox, stumbles almost out the door into
the sunshine of the square, handheld suddenly canted casting about to the left
and right as though questing. This woman’s pair of legs or that woman’s
, walking
away from us: not her. Surging up to the tables at
the outdoor café where couples murmur and solitary old men read copies of a
newspaper called
Il Piccolo
;
not there. Swerving back the way it came, back up the hill, taking in the view
of the cathedral with its face nearly as blank as that of the letterbox, coming
to rest finally on her door, on its own mail slot, even more mouthlike under
the nose of the doorknocker and the pair of eyelike windows.
Resting
there.
Sounds on the street.
We’ve lost her.
The image remains.

The apartment.
Nothing has changed, but everything is changing. The sun has crossed the street
sufficiently to blaze in through the windows, to send dust motes sparkling and
rippling like a second, heavenly set of curtains. The tulip is in ragged bloom;
gap-toothed, it discloses its stamen shamelessly, as death has crept an hour
further up its severed stem. A phone begins to ring in another room, an ancient
phone with an actual bell powered by an actual motor triggered by an electrical
signal that travels through twisted copper wire from an analog elsewhere. It
rings nine times. Each time the phone rings the tulip seems to tremble a bit in
our vision, the curtains seem to vibrate,
the
dust
motes seem to shiver in time to the summons. We begin to notice that the frame
is shrinking, the camera is dollying in, so that we lose the doorframe, we lose
the French doors, we lose the tips of the curtains, we lose the dust motes, we
lose the lamp and sofa, the tulip is larger and larger, but moving out of the
center of the frame, and as the seventh ring comes it is abruptly bathed in
voluptuous sunlight, afire with red depths and pink shallows. With the eighth
ring the tulip is almost gone and we become aware of its pale shadow. With the
ninth ring we see a little bell of color in the shadow’s head begin to glow
against the wall. As the ring dies away we see the tulip’s shadow born into
color, a red patch on the white wall,
a tumescence
, a
little cauldron, bubbling away its living secret in shadow form on the wall:
that no one can see. That only we can see.

In
the mornings now Ruth wakes alone. Ben has taken up running again, so before
dawn he slips as quietly as he can out from under the covers and pads downstairs
to pull on his shorts and a pair of running shoes he’s had practically since
college, though they’re falling apart and bad for his back. She’s asked him a
million times to take his keys with him and he says that he does, but at times
like now she lies awake knowing in her heart that he’s left them behind—how do
you carry a set of keys when you’re running?—and the front door is unlocked,
and anybody could walk in, with her and her daughter sleeping upstairs. She
burns, quietly, thinking of this, gripping her pillow. Ben walks fast,
limbering up, passing a few other joggers and dog walkers following the same
path as him, drawn ineluctably as though for a ritual to the lakeshore and the
sunrise unfurling there, the sky streaking with pink scissor-cuts. She lies
still, waiting for Lucy to start crying or for feet on the steps that may or
may not belong to her husband. You’re being ridiculous, she tells herself. She
sits up in bed and turns on the lamp. The book from last night is lying there
face down, its binding creased. She’s never fetishized books, any more than
she’s fetishized food: she treats them casually, roughly even, dog-earing
pages, smearing them with jam or spaghetti sauce, tossing them on the floor. It
appalls Ben, not because he’s any sort of book lover but because he’s a
sanctimonious neatnik. She rolls the words
sanctimonious
neatnik
off of her tongue and realizes that she’s in a rage,
pointlessly. Lucy isn’t up yet. She throws over the covers and stalks out into
the hall, where a few of Lucy’s toys are scattered—a little wooden car is
perched on the lip of the top stair, ready to make a racket or break someone’s
neck. The white noise machine that Lucy’s slept to since she was an infant
trills softly behind the closed door, rolling its r’s. Ben is running now,
easily, still breathing through his nose. Dark houses, mansions really, on his
left; the sun’s disc brightening the lake on his right. Sometimes he encounters
friends on these runs, men he’ll encounter later on the train platform; the sort
of not-quite-friends you never seek out, never have to seek out, your paths
just keep crossing. There’s a set of chin-up bars by the tennis courts and he
stops to do a quick set,
then
jogs off again. It’s
autumn and his feet crunch the leaves. A power-walking woman with a shitzu
scrambling behind her on its lead gives him an efficient smile as he passes
her. In forty-five minutes he’ll be showered, shaved, dressed, and riding the
train southbound to his job in the city manager’s office. In the kitchen he’s
started a pot of coffee and she sips a mug of it black and sweet after firing
up her laptop—she has to move a stack of catalogs and junk mail to find it. The
house is a mess, which means Ben’s having one of his periodic moments of
resignation in which he doesn’t dervish around cleaning up after her and Lucy,
which itself reminds her of a kind of ragefulness, which takes her back to her
own inexplicable sense of having been ill-used, even violated in some
unmemorable unforgivable way. There’s a new e-mail. Ruth doesn’t click on it.
She closes the computer and puts down the coffee and drifts to the front window
overlooking their street. The plants need watering. She puts her hand to her
cheek and looks at her fingers.
Tears.
Ben has circled
the university campus, is pounding his way back now. He’s thinking about the
day’s projects, about the upcoming election, about Lucy, about her, Ruth.
Anything but
himself
, she thinks bitterly. And
upstairs, Lucy starts to wail.