by Susan Taubes
Keep dozing off. Oppressive dreams of other crossings. Pink lakes in the sky, flying over new volcano near Reykjavik. Wake up in a stupor. All the engines are on. Still trying to rise over cloud banks. Water streaks black panes, roar of motors drowns out speaker announcing altitude, speed, winds in four languages.
Windows dark. No point looking out. Will sleep. Motors deafening. Men in front still playing cards; crew has joined them. Plane lurching. All the signs are on. Family vomiting. Card players have ordered more drinks; screaming their bids. Windows dark. Can’t sleep. Motors seem to have stopped. Silence. Something wrong with my ear...Crew still drinking. We’re not moving. The motors have stopped. Such stillness...
• •
On the street before his apartment house a lobster-faced doorman shovels the flying snow. It is he who slips the letters under his door. He who smiled as she entered when it was spring, the same old man who shall greet her when it shall be spring again. With a smile of greeting and thankfulness, swiftly she steals past him in a white flurry, her lids glued down with snow. In the elevator a slender Puerto Rican dozes on the stool. To the roof. Could you please take me to the roof. Yawning, he turns the lever a full half circle.
• •
“Just a quick kiss...” But he clasps her face. “It’s so nice to have you here.”
“Don’t stop working,” she says. “I am happy just being quiet together.”
But he isn’t working. He lifts her up, leads her leaping around the room—where? On the roof. On top of the desk, in the tub, on the rug, into bed. A naked man crouches over her, his knees hold her clinched by the waist while he bends over for matches on the floor. He lights two cigarets, puts one in her mouth, bites her chin. He won’t let her go. But maybe she’s had enough?
“Oh no...” She wonders how long they can keep this up. Of course she loves it when he locks his arms around her like a cage. She is just worried about his work.
“Work is a dirty word,” he says. “Don’t you know nothing I do is work?”
“Still, shouldn’t we...” She doesn’t know any more what.
“Stop?”
“No. Please.”
How can she worry about resuming normalcy at such a moment. “But will we ever?” Not that she wants to.
“Wait. You’ve just arrived. It will be over all too soon. Didn’t you know I was like this? Lazy. Sensual. Foolish,” he tells her softly, then laughs. “You look so surprised.”
“Everything is still so new.”
“Are you sorry you came? Your voice sounds so sad.”
“I’m sleepy,” she murmurs, “in Paris it’s five hours later.”
He puts out the light. But she can’t sleep.
“What is it?” he asks.
“To think that I almost didn’t come because I wasn’t sure how you felt. I had no idea it would be like this.”
“Did you doubt that I love you? How could you doubt—?”
“Then why didn’t you come to Paris?”
“I went to Paris three years ago to see a girl I loved. I couldn’t do it again. Don’t you see? I thought I told you. It’s a crazy story.”
She listens to him tell how a young man arrived in Paris three winters ago...
• •
The air is mild as they sit on the roof. It must be almost spring. He has brought out some blankets and a bottle of Scotch.
“Everything is so right,” she says.
“I was just thinking that,” he says. “Everything except me. I don’t see how I can be right for you. Aren’t you worried?”
She smiles, deaf. A woman in Paris worries. Their tongues, changed back into loving seals, frolic and laze. Her head is solid marble.
“The fact is that you shall leave me,” he pursues. “Who cares as to the reasons. There are always reasons.”
“They’re your reasons.”
“Laws,” he says. He speaks of facts, fate and laws. But she is not listening. Such a sense of vastness love gives; the night running up the Hudson River, what bays and inland lakes lie in this embrace—Alaska is her palm.
“Can you see me in ten years?” he asks.
Even with her eyes shut she can’t see further than his face. The space behind his back is a night dotted with foreign places and dates, equally past and future.
“I am asleep,” she mumbles.
“No you’re not. Why won’t you let me see your eyes? I know you’re wide awake. Open your eyes. I want to see your crazy eyes.”
• •
Weeks before the day when Sophie Blind walked up the ramp into the upholstered belly of a jet prop, weeks before she made her flight reservation, before she wrote her lover what she wanted, back in January when Paris was leafless, a bleak wet wash, and New York as bleakly wind-swept; in January at the unrecorded hour of its birth, her naked desire had started walking toward him.
• •
She stands on the terrace outside his window. It has stopped snowing. She sees him at his desk in the brightly lit room. It cannot be, she has realized. She will leave without knocking, as perfect love commands. But she can’t move from the window. The white of his shirt holds her enthralled, the cloth right next to his skin and the clean edge of the collar; she yearns for its delicate taste of heart of lettuce. She will leave. One glimpse of the wild green of his iris and she will leave.
He looks up suddenly, his eyes on the pane. Has he glimpsed the blurred face with its pupils pierced back into the outer darkness and the space between the parted lips running into the endless night? No matter, she is inside now. A figure detaching itself from the frost-grizzled pane, she glides boldly into the room.
“I shouldn’t have come,” she says, filling the room; her hair bristles in all directions, a shimmery halo of snow, very bridal. But it’s all melting very fast. She embraces him hurriedly, looking for something to cover herself with.
“You look great,” he says. “Of course it’s respectable. The gods always go nude.” She has come all this way to tell him something and now she can’t remember what it was she came to tell. There is no need now that they are together. He apologizes for the cold turkey; he wasn’t expecting her. She eats ravenously.
“It tastes like rabbit,” she says, sucking on the bone. She insists it has a gamey taste.
“You’re out of your mind to come like this,” he says suddenly. “It’s the kind of recklessness...” Taking little sips of wine, she listens to him rage. “You wouldn’t have liked me when you were twenty,” he pursues, “at twenty a woman like you wants a man like Ezra Blind. They all do.” He spits out the last words and draws her into his arms with sudden fury. Such a violent kiss. It’s bestial. They are staggering backwards, as in a love scene from an old silent movie.
“What do you expect?” he says smiling, and they both realize that they are dreaming. She doesn’t care; it’s her only chance. They are flying high over the city.
It’s day, the smell of snow in the air, a winter sky of long ago. Children are skating on the frozen river. She can see the pure bright colors of their mufflers and knitted caps. They soar upward, high up into the blue cloudless sky. He is going to fly straight into the sun. Blinded, she searches for his mouth—just once more. But she too has realized that everything has become pointless.
“...just want to tell you quick before the dream ends, I’m on my way. Coming. With Lufthansa, Air France, Icelandic...”
•
She arrived at Idlewild airport early in the morning. The plane was on time. With only one suitcase she passed quickly through customs. Still half asleep—it was best so. Heading toward the exit she thought she caught a glimpse of him standing right by the door in white pants, the familiar striped polo shirt over wide shoulders, caught brief glances of the long torso, the sullen mouth, the heavy jaw. Keeping a serene face against the strain of a suitcase and six bottles of duty-free whiskey
pulling at each hand, and her own growing excitement, she advanced still looking straight ahead. Turning her head slowly toward him only after she passed through the door. It was not Ivan. A gross imitation, she noted uneasily; only the crudest resemblance. She looked around but did not see him in the lobby. She watched the crowd thin; the last passengers met. He was not coming: the numbing thought dawned on her with each passing second; she wouldn’t go out through the glass doors and on to Manhattan. She hadn’t arrived. Another woman stood in the lobby, still clutching passport and customs papers—or was it possible that they hadn’t recognized each other? She looked around again. The young man in the polo shirt still stood by the door, leaning against the wall. It wasn’t Ivan. Her memory couldn’t be totally false. Besides, neither his posture nor his expression showed expectancy. There he stood, wide-shouldered and expressionless, staring into space; she was just about to take a step toward him when she was embraced from behind. Ivan spoke her name. She turned in his arms and looked into his face.
“You’re here. You really came,” he said, hugging her. “How do you feel?”
“Not quite down here,” she laughed weakly and looked at him, amazed. “It’s really you,” she kept repeating dumbly.
“I saw your plane fly in,” he told her. “I’ve been here since three in the morning up at the observation tower—I couldn’t sleep. It was beautiful to watch the first jets streaking out. I expected you on an earlier plane—I don’t know why. I was so impatient. I didn’t believe you’d really come.”
It was so strange sitting beside him in the big black car on winding thruways, past supermarkets and brick towers. It was the first time she had seen him in a dark suit. He told her how he had borrowed the car from his grandmother and driven it down from Providence. Every so often they looked at each other and smiled. His look softened and the corners of his mouth turned infinitesimally up. Her face felt like a fragile papier-mâché mask behind which her eyes slid furtively from the skyline to his hand on the steering wheel. It was all so strange. It would have been easier if she could have been delivered in a crate. Of course she didn’t believe it. There was something she had to tell him. But she couldn’t in the car, not just after he had said, “I’m kidnapping you.” She could not tell him when they got out, standing briefly on the Manhattan pavement with a side glimpse of the fogged Jersey shore. In the elevator, held in his arms, she could not speak at all.
In his room the sight of all the familiar objects filled her with such gladness, suddenly she felt completely at home, alive, completely awake. Even if she was here by mistake, she thought. Especially if she was here by mistake—
She looked at him coming toward her naked.
“I tried to write you.”
“I know,” he said, opening her blouse, “I know.”
They smiled at each other curiously as they lay down.
“You have invented me,” she joked in the middle of the night.
“No, you have invented me,” he replied, a trace of sadness in his voice that made her silent.
“Arrivals are always unreal,” he comforted her and put on the light. “Angst,” he said after studying her face. The German sounded funny from his mouth. “You can tell me. It wouldn’t be natural if we were always happy. Are you sad because you came? Because of Ezra?”
She shook her head, trying to smile. “Tell me all the German words you know.”
“Geist. Blitzkrieg. Heldentenor. Liebestod. Lebensraum. Sauerkraut. Blut und Boden. Ewig Weibliches. Weltschmerz. Kaputt. Angst. We’ll make coffee and read. You can’t tell me?”
“It will pass,” she said, getting up. “I’ll take a shower.”
“Here,” he said, and winding her in a big white towel, held her. “I don’t know if I can let you. Promise you won’t disappear.”
Crying under the shower, she has never been naked like this. Had she really intended to tell him at the airport? Tell him what? That she is not the woman who wrote from Paris? Dead? Mad? It’s just that she would have liked to arrive in better shape. But actually, as she reviews her past selves, what she was before Ezra, with Ezra, even her most recent self in Paris, it horrifies her how false and insubstantial she was, a lot of poor contrivances; the fact is that she has never been as simply herself as now, wrapped in Ivan’s towel. But it’s terrifying to be this naked, to have given up all personhood, the old wraps and cloaks, some never worn, all burnt up. This nakedness, she knows, can never again be clothed.
• •
“I dreamed that you deflowered me,” she said, smiling in her sleep.
“And what will you do now?” he asked. “Have you thought about what you’re going to do about Ezra and the children? I suppose I’m not the person with whom you want to discuss this...” His voice pursued in the dark.
Outside it’s snowing and night; naked under the blanket, January of another year...
Lying motionless, she reflected how strange it was to have beheld him in fact outside her, moving about the room, her lover and yet a stranger who had been her own dream; odd, delightful, ridiculous, lovely and illicit, to awake in the morning of a particular day to the hum of street noises, to look out on the water tanks and soot on the window sill, with his head on the pillow beside her.
But their last hours are not to be described—the sensation of his weight descending, the impropriety of the mattress tilting when he sat beside her the last time. The freshness of winter in the sleeve of his coat, snow and just-peeled oranges, perhaps her last sensation. Fragrance of spices from another world in his sleeve, his cool hand on her throat.
He shrugs, rises smoking.
“Was,” he says, standing before the dark window. “Was what was.”
“What was?” she wants to ask, but she can barely whisper.
He sits smoking on the window sill, watching for daybreak.
“Go on,” he says, his face dark in the blinding light, “you were telling me your dream.”
“I told you. I was sitting strapped in my seat in the plane. I wondered if the engines went dead. Then I felt a sudden drop; it was endless like a movie still, the sensation you get after taking sleeping pills—everything stops, it really stops and the lights have been left on.”
“That’s a good one. Death is just...” his voice trails off.
“What? Death is just a bad high? Is that what you said? The last part of the dream is really funny. The scene changed, everything was clear. It was in a square in Prague: women beating rugs over the railings; the Emperor had sent a man to give the Jews a name; everybody was singing like in a comic opera—I realized it was really on a stage. The dust from the carpets filled the square but the women continued singing in passionate sopranos. I heard the messenger call out the name Staubman and I was sure it was me.”
“Are you asleep?” he asks.
She is not sure whether she is making any sound. He is sitting on the edge of the bed. He has just come in, his cool hand on her bare shoulder, the freshness of winter in his sleeve.
“Why is everything so strange?” she asks. “Why?”
“Because you’re dead,” he says simply, his voice quiet and comforting. “Dead, dearest.” And rising with sudden energy he strides to his desk. “Sleep, Sophie,” he says, his voice far away, and writes: Day is breaking.
THIS PLACE must be the morgue. Yes, that’s why Ezra is sitting with police blankets over his winter coat. It is Ezra, the crying face, I know by the way he sniffles and blows his nose. Muttering to himself, Na ja. So ist es. It’s cold like the night he sat up with me in the hospital after the miscarriage when they couldn’t turn the air conditioner off. In the most expensive private room in the hospital, just after we were married, the only room available that night. He blows his nose in a handkerchief the size of a towel, one of the old batch from his father, and he’s got the battered old briefcase on the ground beside him. Some things never get lost. —Na j
a, he repeats. Then with finality: Ecce homo.
—Mulier, I want to correct him. But he means himself.
—Na ja, he starts again, his nose very full. Now she is jenseits. She got there before either of us.
There are two huddled under the blankets. Master and disciple. Naturally he had to bring someone along. There must always be at least three people for Ezra. Terrible to be alone with me, alive or dead. Nicholas is with him; he’s grown a beard. A ghoulish, goat-faced Jesus-after-the-deposition lights up in the flare of a match. He chuckles and coughs. Ezra is showing him the present he bought for our fifteenth wedding anniversary. Eternal watch. Self-winding. Has day of month. —Paid five hundred marks, he says. Won’t need it. Jenseits.
His crammed briefcase bulges open. I see the titles of the old periodicals: Acephalos, Empedocles, Chimera, Exodus, Second Coming. He has brought with him material he needs for a paper on the woman messiah in Auguste Comte. Due the day after tomorrow at the conference in Amsterdam. He will write it tonight. But it’s dark. They light matches. —I understand why it’s cold, but why does it have to be dark? Ezra complains. They give up lighting matches.