Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy (7 page)

She sits in the armchair nursing. Lucy’s hand strays up to grasp Ruth by
the chin sometimes with surprising firmness; Ruth moves to grab her wrist and
Lucy giggles, her lips still fastened around the nipple. At moments like this
what Ruth thinks and feels seems strangely separated from everything else about
her—her bent posture, her arms cradling the baby, the cooing sounds that come
from her throat or from Lucy’s, it’s hard to tell. Only that sweet sharp tug of
Lucy’s mouth on her nipple—that pain in which she takes a sober delight—unites
her sense of distraction with that rootedness in the moment she usually only
recalls afterward, nostalgically, even when she’s wishing for a moment’s peace,
or thinking fondly, guiltily, of the time before Lucy, before Ben, before Ruth
was Ruth. She hears the door open and shut downstairs, hears his heavy
breathing. She thinks about Ben’s life, which impinges on and shapes her own.
His blank-eyed fondness.
His toil, his
sacrifice.
His hard, lean body, so different from that of the softer man
she had married, with long hair she used to tousle, like a boy’s. On the brink
of forty he’s all grown up. And where does that leave her? She tenses—something
in Lucy has coiled, her back, her lip—

Don’t bite! Lucy…!

Lucy bites. With a little cry she yanks the baby upright and stares at
her. Lucy stares back, a trickle of blood visible at the corner of her mouth.
Ruth’s whole breast throbs.

Lucy!

Lucy starts to cry. Ruth, not knowing what to do, opens her mouth to
call Ben, but nothing comes out. Lucy keeps crying. She puts Lucy’s mouth to
the other breast and Lucy sucks. Somewhere a door closes. She breathes deeply
and lets it bleed.

Legwork.
Montage of faces, closed or partially opened doors, fingers pointing out of doors
or out of windows or poking Lamb in the chest; a montage of hotel rooms,
cigarettes, furrowings of his brow in front of his laptop, receiving messages
from concierges and desk clerks, sitting in cafes alone with a pen and notebook
or the
New York Herald Tribune
;
a montage of stakeouts, from the backs of cabs and from alleyways and rooftops,
snapping photographs of license plates, men on streetcorners, old placards and
posters, railway schedules, lit windows in the rain behind which a woman’s
silhouette can be glimpsed, descending. A montage of monuments: Big Ben, the
Eiffel Tower, the Prado, the Piazza del Campo in Siena, the Brandenburg Gate,
the Chain Bridge in Budapest, the Vienna Staatsoper, the campanile of the
Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, the blank faces of rivers (the
Danube, the Po, the Rhine, the Seine), the Brandenburg Gate again, the Eiffel
Tower again. In Paris, outside La Hune with a book under his arm, meeting a
furtive contact; in London, touring Samuel Johnson’s house with an unusually
forthcoming guide; in Hamburg, strolling the St. Pauli quarter in Hamburg with
a talkative old sailor; in Berlin, standing under an awning in Kreuzberg in the
rain exchanging a few tense words with a Turkish man in a leather jacket and pink
Mohawk. A hotel bedspread, frigid with anonymity, on which documents appear:
the three photos, the letters, hospital bills, official certificates,
passports, currency, a driver’s license, more letters, more papers, until the
bed is covered except for a square in the middle, filled then by a photo, a
face, massive head of an old man with heavy jowls and brows, nearly bald, small
eyes pouched and folded, meeting the camera’s gaze with ineffable humor and
sadness.
Smoke.
Lamb, standing in his shirtsleeves, arms
folded, knees pressed against the bottom of the bed, a single harsh lamp,
through the window, considering, and a city, any city, pressing up against the
surface of his meditations, the dank heavy paws of the night.

Time has passed, or shifted, unguessably, fading in on a kind of open
hangar,
une gare
,
stazione
,
or
Banhof
, where suited, hatted Lamb
sits at one of three metal tables beside an oil-drenched falafel stand, just a
few meters from platform 7. Sitting across from him is another man, thirty or
forty years older and many pounds heavier than the man we have come to identify
with as the bearer of our voyeurism, our agent, our Lamb. He’s the man from the
photo, with craggy gray brows and a few extra bobbling chins and an improbable
cap of thick white bowlcut hair, a rheumy gaze, a paper cup of espresso and a
folded newspaper with a cellphone on top of it squared in front of him. Lamb
takes off his hat and perches it on the upright handle of the black roller bag
standing sentinel beside him.
A garbled announcement over the
loudspeaker, people hurrying by, little leisure at the train station.
The fat man is asking a question, he’s speaking English with a heavy accent, a
generic European accent to our ears, but clearly enough to be understood
without subtitles.
The gangster question.
She got the
message?

Yes. A pause, then: What did it say?

What did it
say.

Our man Lamb leans forward with an appearance of desultory curiosity and
speaks again in his flat American accent, the newscaster’s accent of imperial nowhere,
clear and intelligible enough to bind us to him incrementally further, to
further our investment in him, a narrow middle question mark of a man whose
subjectivity, we understand, is to be viewed transparently by us and for us, as
we see might see a stranger approach the window of a café where we sit writing
or talking and step across the invisible barrier to press his forehead against
the window, shading his eyes, searching as if for us, and we stop our fingers
on the keyboard, we stop the cup from reaching our lips, we half stop our
breathing waiting for him to move toward the door, to become a destiny, a man
in a long coat and a colorless expression, or else to drift past, to rejoin the
long crazy stream of humanity past the intelligible, the acceptable, the
corporate comfort of numbers in the darkened theater. But for now he speaks for
us and to us as we look him full in the face for the first time: handsome but
not too handsome, middle-aged but vigorous, world-weary but bristling with
perceptivity, dark hair flecked with gray, dark eyes with a luster to them,
eyes that see too much, windows to our own weary souls, wise as we want to be,
a suitable mask for our own willed naiveté, an Everyman of exceptionalism,
American by default like the audience itself imagines and wishes itself to be,
of the immortal twentieth century where all imaginable futures still live.

You do not send letters for her, Lamb says.
On her
behalf.

I?

You are her husband?

Till death do us part!
But actually, no.

It takes some work to find you.

Do you have a question for me, monsieur? The
monsieur
is a deliberate affront.

I have one question: the letters. You deny all knowledge. But then you
present me with a letter of your own. You know where she lives. You ask me to
deliver it, since we have met in the city where she lives.

I don’t like email, the man says, shrugging. I don’t trust the post. If
I write a letter, I prefer that it go by hand.
Which means I
can’t be the one you’re looking for.

No, you can’t. But I found you anyway.

To find before seeking, the fat man says. That’s a motto, isn’t it?
Sounds occult, like something from one of those thrillers you Americans love,
about the secret history of everything, some conspiracy of old men in a star
chamber that runs the world.

People are always hiring me to uncover conspiracies, says Lamb, leaning
back. It’s my job to show them that it’s all in their heads. It’s
understandable. You feel caught up in something larger than
yourself,
that
you can’t control: a machine, a system, an establishment, your
life. You want to believe that someone out there has the answer, even a
malevolent one. Even someone plotting against you is better than there being no
plot at all. The hardest part of my job is showing people that life is simpler
than that. They want proof.

Sometimes, I imagine, the pressure to give them what they want must be
hard to resist.

It is.

But then you give them proof. Are they satisfied?

Not really.
Enough to pay me and let it go.
I’m
not a priest.

But you hear confessions. You are here to hear mine.

If you like.

I would like to hire you, actually, the man says.

You can’t.
Conflict of interest.

Yes. Because the question I have is a simple one. Who is your client?

You know I can’t tell you that.

But I can guess.

Guess away.

Not here, the fat man says. Not now. He gestures up toward the
loudspeaker, which has just garbled an announcement. That’s my train.

Where, then?

Not here. Not now. The fat man rises, dwarfing the seated Lamb, the
table, old but formidable, taking up his hat. Lamb smiles lazily up at him.

You think you can just walk away?

Do you propose to stop me? Mr. Lamb. The woman is dead. There is nothing
for you to learn here. Go back to your client, whoever she is, and tell her so.

How do you know it’s a she?

Be seeing you, Mr. Lamb, the fat man says, saluting.

That’s right.

Watching him walk away, down the platform,
carrying no luggage.
Boarding
the train.
Lamb, he studies it, the sign for a moment. Picks up his
espresso and sips it thoughtfully.
Venezia
.

Time, enough.

Hang
up the phone now.
Now.
The new reader is almost here.
Not an electronic book, not a heads-up display, not a cybernetic prop for
reading, but a brand-new reader, organized by, for, the page. She does not
compile, she does not calculate probabilities,
she
is
no search engine. She is found wherever readers are still found: on buses,
under trees, in grimy break rooms, in beds
beside
sleeping husbands. She props the book on her knees and worries a ragged
thumbnail with her teeth. The book is hushed momentarily under her gaze, a cat
with arched spine and ruffled pages. It is the new novel, always the new novel,
the one that everyone who still reads is talking about, the one landing on
important desks in Los Angeles and New York, an old-fashioned paper brick,
surprisingly heavy. It doesn’t matter who the writer is (but it’s a man). It
doesn’t matter that everywhere old readers are gathering in front of television
sets and computers and podcasts to hear the book discussed by other old
readers. It doesn’t matter that in the academies the oldest readers of them all
scoff at this book and its readers, then turn themselves and their bored
charges back toward tending the classics, the immortal beloveds of literature,
bricks in the picturesque ruins of our civilization’s self-image, held up not
by other bricks but by hands and backs, bent, having grown deformed and nearly
human under the strain of bearing its colossal weight. The new reader is
coming. She grips the uppermost corner of the recto page, ready to turn it, but
does not turn, lingering over the last lines,
shining
black in the matte white sea of rectangular space. What is the nature of her
pleasure, reflected in dilated pupils, in the blush response, in breath ever so
slightly roughened in contrasting tempo to her husband’s even breathing?
Whatever its nature, she takes her pleasure from that page, that arrangement,
that musical score so perfectly attuned to the syntax of human synapses that
have been evolving for thousands of years toward this moment, this pleasure.
Lux,
calme et volupté
—she remembers, the new
reader has an imperfect memory, an ordinary memory, a random-access memory,
that lights brilliantly like a landing strip when touched by an incoming
stimulus, a word or phrase or image or character’s gesture or rhyme in the plot
that activates the blazing network, that stirs vivid sensations in
half-remembered languages: Madame Follet’s eighth-grade French class, for
instance—a contoured plastic seat, a jagged replica of the Eiffel Tower (made
by Mr. Bund, the metal shop teacher, rumored to be sweet on Madame Follet), the
chocolate eclairs on behalf of which her mother descended from her air of
rarefied sorrows for an afternoon to help her prepare for Foods of France day,
the irregular verbs between being and having, her bitter disappointment at
coming down with chicken pox three days before the class trip, the milder
disappointment mixed with amusement when she finally sees Paris in the
springtime a dozen years later, strolling the boulevards on the arm of her
not-yet husband, not yet the father of her unconceived child, who won’t put his
camera down even in their hotel room (only incidentally erotic, the lens
pointed outward in a doomed attempt to capture the quietness of a quiet street
of the Marais, the naked pear of his body photographed by her eyes in her
memory from her prone position on the hard, undersized bed), the framed
photograph of her lying back in her overcoat with her eyes closed on a cold
sunny morning in a chair in the Tuileries, the fight they had in the Rodin
museum, the image of her husband pouting in the sculpture garden while she
gazed down from the second-story window, stiff shape of the back of his neck
and shoulders, the rigid inverted U of his arms as he lifted his camera,
framing tight lips, a stubborn chin, an Adam’s apple, the
Bande
dessinée
shop they paused in on their way back to the hotel
(to make up, to make love), the comic-book adaptation of
Les
Fleurs du mal
that she glanced through, the eighth-grade
French which she hadn’t needed once the whole trip, not even to order a glass
of wine, suddenly suffusing her consciousness, so that when the new reader
encountered «
L’Invitation au voyage
»
she was able fully to accept, guided in part by the black-and-white images the
artist had chosen to illustrate, no to accompany, the text: a languid arm
pocked with needle scars dangling down from a bed, a needle rising to meet it
that is really a ship’s mast, a ship’s mast that is really a gigantically erect
cock thrusting from the hips of one grinning sailor into the eager sucking
mouth of another sailor, a mouth that is really a cave lit from within by
phosphorescent crystals, a cave that is really a grave straddled by a waif-thin
woman in a black raincoat, wearing sunglasses from under which tears are
streaming. She took all this in—the artist’s melodramatic conception and the
innocent poem—in a single glance, or so it seemed, as her husband approached
the register carrying a Tintin book,
Objectif Lune
.
Murmuring to herself silently now—a split now, at once in that hotel room on
the Place des Vosges and in that bedroom in a soft Chicago suburb—
Tout
y parlerait / À l’âme en secret /
Sa
douce langue
natale
. All illuminated, as in a flash of scarlet, by three
words at the bottom right corner of the page she holds between thumb and
forefinger, not even the end of the paragraph or the sentence, syntax
incomplete and yet luminous:
the invitation to
….
The rain falls on the skylight window. The new reader is always a stranger.