Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy (8 page)

2.
Letters From M

Hotels.
How I loved them.
The intoxicating combination of anonymity and privilege, as though
living in an American city could be made somehow portable, bearable. There were
times, of course, when I needed that feeling, that departure. Midweek, in the
unreal interval after my diagnosis, I would find myself on a train or in a cab
wandering without luggage into the lobby of an old hotel, out of the chaos of
unmade decisions into the cool echoey atmosphere of marble and steel, the
lobbies with their heavy upholstery and mirrors and chandeliers and fresh-cut
flowers winter and summer and the silent tread of the uniformed employees and
the laughter of temporarily unrumpled businessmen and visiting wives as they
traipsed in and out to the cabs or over to the elevators or across to the
winking comfortable cavern of the bar. Sometimes it was enough for me to sit,
just sit on one of the sofas by a white telephone, as if waiting for a call,
and to read the newspapers and brochures I’d find lying there, or even the
occasional discarded paperback. Skin on my neck prickled against the
possibility that I’d be discovered, asked to show my key, asked to leave, but
it never happened. I looked like a traveler, I suppose, or less flatteringly,
like
a tourist. Other times I’d walk right up to the front
desk and ring the bell, if necessary, and some cleanly young man with
brilliantined hair or a dignified older man with a carnation in his buttonhole
would assume the proper distance from me to be heard without shouting, to
assume the friendly impersonal intimacy of hotels, and I would take bills from
my purse and place them on the counter between us and he with a faint formal
gesture of precisely calculated embarrassment would pick up the bills as though
they were litter and make them disappear in a drawer, and he would hand me a
key, that is to say a card, a little plastic rectangle with an image, as often
as not, of the skyline printed on it, or the hotel façade, or an ad for a
nightclub. With prize in hand I’d deflect the suggestion of luggage, but accept
the accompaniment of a bellboy to escort me to the elevator and we’d be carried
up up up (I always asked for the highest floor I could get) and the door would
open onto a whisper-quiet carpeted hallway with its glowing sconces, a kind of
silence and antiseptic grace over everything, and the bellhop would lead me to
the room, bearing my key in place of a suitcase, and use it to open the door to
what was invariably a small, almost cramped room with a single queen-sized bed
and an armoire (rarely were there closets) and a television and a window, and
he would busy himself drawing the curtains or lighting the bathroom or pointing
out the telephone while I stood there breathing in the pure, false, expensive
air, until at last a small bill would find its way from my hand into his and
he’d step out with a little bow that reminded me thrillingly and fearfully of
the uniformed men of my childhood and close the door behind him with the
quietest of clicks, and I would stand in the window for a while looking at the
city from an angle unavailable to my apartment, a taller bleaker more brilliant
city than the sleek fat domestic cat of a city that lies perpetually purring
with its tail of suburbs wrapped around it; or I’d lie on the bed fully clothed
after carefully removing the bedspread (it’s there you’ll find the bedbugs and
all varieties of dead matter, the maids never wash them until they are
vigorously and permanently stained) looking up at the ceiling, listening to the
faint sounds of traffic and the occasional timbrel of sirens from below, or the
muffled voices in the next room (the finer the hotel the thinner the walls),
sometimes accompanied by the creak of furniture, or the empty high-pitched
whine of a television, or of course, more frequently than not, the sounds of
people making love. I remember once coming into the room with the bellhop while
my neighbors were at it, a comic opera of bedsprings and low moans and lumping
thumps that shook the large bad painting over my own chaste bed, and the
bellhop, who was very young, perhaps not even eighteen, turned scarlet to the
roots of his hair and rushed out of the room without so much as unhooking the
drapes or extending his palm—it probably didn’t help that I was laughing loud
and hard and painfully and for so long that I imagine the lovers could hear me,
for they quickly subsided without audible climax and I went on laughing until
the tears came.

What would I do afterward?
Almost nothing.
Listen to the radio or turn on the TV. Take a shower. Sit in the single
armchair by the window listening to the hotel breathing, to the city grumbling
and grating to itself, to the small sounds and movies of my own body as it
turned against me. Sometimes looking at the door where no lover would appear,
comfortable in the knowledge that one would appear if I so chose, if I ever
wished to surpass the possible. But then again there is no surpassing the
possible: the actual is cheap, experience has taught me that. Too often I’d
gone to see for myself and returned disappointed in the oldest sense of that
word: an appointment that was not kept, a messenger that was only a man with an
empty envelope up his sleeve, a maddening sort of helpless shrug, a
compassionate distracted glance over the tops of spectacles, a woman with a red
face. No, look at the door, a solid rectangle of wood with its brass-covered
peephole that I might lift to survey the fishbowl the lens made of the hallway,
which was empty: it was emptiness I paid for. It would end with me in the bed,
bedspread folded and tucked into the bottom of the armoire, lying on top of the
blankets, fully clothed,
listening
. Dawn waked me, not
with sunlight (even the highest hotel windows in the city rarely offer an angle
by which the morning sun might penetrate) but by the change in tone, an
impalpable waking presence of life in the streets, the gurgle of pipes feeding
showers, the sober murmuring of adjacent solitary guests talking into phones.
I’d wake dry, in a wrinkled dress, underneath my coat if it had been cold, a
taste in my mouth, the stale sick self I hadn’t after all escaped for a single
moment. It would have been simpler to take up drinking. It would have been
easier to forget. But for a few hours I’d been, not your mother, no one’s wife,
no singer or survivor, no one’s daughter.
Only no one.
And I knew, as I slipped out the door like a woman fearful of waking her
husband on her way to meet her lover, that I’d be back again and again, until
at last I took flight, to find my final home, to tuck the tail of my life into
its beginning, in Europe, in the past.

Yesterday is dimly starred, the day before a
blank, the days before that blank but bright, like a projector run out of film.
I can only remember yesterday, Elsa, can remember this morning and the first
part of the afternoon, can remember everything up until the moment I discovered
it: the letter. Now it’s a blur; this page is a blur. Yesterday I didn’t work,
as I haven’t worked for what feels like a hundred days, but I rose early all
the same and took myself down to the café where I like to have my roll and
coffee, watching the traffic thicken
. It’s impossible to
find coffee to go in this country, you know, so no matter what you have to sit
there or stand in one place while the caffeine charges you up. By the time you
start moving again you’re already moving. It was like that, still early, me
with no particular place to go, so I wandered down in front of the Hotel Verdi
and as it happens the tram had just stopped. Without thinking I got on and we
began to move—there was hardly anyone else aboard because the tram was heading
back up the big hill, to the houses—everyone coming into town to go to work had
already gotten off. The tram is wooden, prewar, and it doesn’t take very long
for it to creak above the main buildings and become surrounded by trees. There
are some low, heavy pine branches that have been trimmed just enough for the
tram car to pass, so that if you look forward through the driver’s window it
looks like you are entering a tunnel with a bright point of blue at the
end—that’s if it’s a sunny day, which it usually is if it’s not winter, we are
so blessed here, Elsa, it’s so unlike that terrible cold city you insist on
living in.
Out of the morning sunshine into darkness, so that
for a moment I could hardly see anything.
Gradually I became aware of
the shadows of leaves dappling the floors and seats, the back of the driver’s
thick neck, and the back cover of the book that the only other passenger, a
woman in her seventies in a pillbox hat, of all things, was reading. I couldn’t
make out the title but just at that moment she looked up from the page at me
and I had to look away. I told myself a story about her, the inverse of my story,
a widow from the hills who had come down into the city that morning to do her
shopping—there was a tote bag on the floor by her feet—and was already
returning home again. But then I thought again about the lipstick she was
wearing—freshly applied—and her makeup. She really was quite beautiful, for all
her being seventy, even seventy-five, and so then I thought that she was going
home after having spent the night in town with her lover, a much younger man
perhaps, in his fifties perhaps or even younger, who was passionately in love
with her, who had perhaps loved her when he was a child and she was the adult,
his teacher maybe, or just a local beauty whom he’d imagined speaking to time
and time again as a man speaks to a woman but dared not to, who grew up and
lived his life as a species of waiting, biding, while she went on with her
husband, having children probably, living a bourgeois life in this little city
on the edge of Europe, and then one day her husband died and her lover swooped
in, so to speak—no doubt he was tactful, no doubt he could wait a few weeks or
months if he’d already waited for so long, or perhaps he’d gone away, tormented
by his proximity to her beauty, had made a life for himself nearer the center
of things and had come back one day out of nostalgia, to walk again these
quaintly cobbled streets, to partake of the town’s peculiar combination of age
and historylessness once again, and there she’d been, at the flower market
perhaps or sitting at the café, as beautiful as ever in his eyes, and he’d gone
up to greet her, and in the course of mutual reminiscences he’d learned that
her husband was dead. Then and only then did the banked fire blaze up in him,
and forgetting all his old bashfulness he would tell her that he was staying at
the Hotel Verdi, and staying alone, that he himself had never married, that
he’d made a success of himself in the great world and come back again for her
and only for her. And she would have gone with him, out of pity perhaps, or
boredom, as if in a dream, into the hotel lobby and past the prying eyes of the
concierge without a care, into that creaky and tiny old elevator they keep so
that already they would be in dangerous proximity to each other, and she would
discover that even at her age she could permit the blood to flow and permeate
her body with warmth, to remind herself that she was a woman, to accept his
kiss, and when the elevator opened she’d take the lead, holding his hand,
pausing at each door and turning to smile at him, radiantly with the question,
This?
and
he’d shake his head and they’d pass on to
the next door and again she’d turn and ask This?
and
he’d shake his head once more until finally they were at the correct door, and
his trembling hand would barely be able to manage the key card so that her own
steadier hand would have to take it from him and swipe it once, and they’d hear
that little switch of the lock. And they’d go inside together, and it is from
that moment, that assignation that would have been his lifelong dream, but for
her more like a gift, an unsuspected fantasy, a blazing realization that life
wasn’t done with her yet. In truth she hardly remembers the younger man, may
not in fact have recognized him at all—may simply have assented to the mad
desire of a stranger because his misdirected passion had gone and stirred her
own, and made her forget that she was a widow, forget her marriage, forget the
life of disappointments and small resentments that most of us women are left
with on a fine morning such as the one on which I saw her. By this point her
gaze had safely returned to her book and I was looking to the left, like a
child would, straining to catch a glimpse of the sea that I knew was there. And
we came out of the tunnel then and the world was blind and blinding. She got off
at the next stop, moving with some diffidence, older-seeming than she had when
she was just sitting and turning the pages. The driver had to help her. Finally
we reached the end of the line: there was no one waiting to board the tram, but
we had to sit there for a while anyway. The driver got out
to
stretch
his legs and smoke but I just sat there, on the hard wooden
seat, smelling his smoke and a little sea air and the pine branches practically
protruding their fingers into the windows. I had no book myself. And when the
driver got back into his place he looked back at me for a moment without
expression, not puzzled or curious or disapproving: I was only something to
look at that wasn’t his tram. I was a passenger. And then together, slowly at
first, we began the ride back down the mountain.

The camera perfects
experience, shrouds it with a fine flexible skin.
So cities,
so filmed.
As even virtual streaming maps with their street views and
glimpses of actual life—a woman leaping over a puddle, a man with a dog staring
at the camera—these images falsify our street level jars, false steps, paranoid
whisperings, smells of baking bread or urine, suppressed, caught but not
preserved in pictures of us, we trippers and askers. Even falser the tourist’s
city, even and especially the blank streets off the beaten path, uncolonized,
with or without a native informant. But falsest of all is the city you’ve known
all your life seen afresh at the movies, as strangers see it, as it is now
traversed by cops and gangbangers and housewives and Batman. The camera is a
prophetic voice stuck in neutral, it declares only that this is, that nothing
else shall be, it is the enemy of every future. We depend on the soundtrack for
a hint of that other, unseen world: footsteps, sirens, voices, music. The light
changes, the people cross. Things speed up and slow down, but there is no true
future.
Ex cathedra
: from the seat where your posture matters not at all.
In camera
: in the room. We
are sheltered. We are struck.