by John Klima
And then, I went back to work. Although things were different. And still are different. Mostly little things. Mops don’t work particularly well inside the store; they’re always soaked. Mist comes into the convenience store at odd times, making the guns unusable. We’ve stopped selling them. My boss doesn’t mind since business is better than ever. Tons of cars. A lot of people on horseback have shown up recently, so we have opened a livery next to the gas pumps. My boss gave me a raise, on account of my “valuable, noble service.” I moved out of the trailer on the edge of town and into an apartment complex.
I’m looking for a confidant, someone to follow, but no one has shown up at the store like that.
The angels and their guns are no longer fearsome to me. Several angels live in my apartment complex. They smoke a lot.
I often wonder about this—their dwelling amongst mere mortals—and I think I’ve finally figured it out. The angels are mere weapons—the sycophants, if you will—and the winged guns call the shots. The winged guns reproduce, follow or break customs of society, fall in love. They don’t live in apartment complexes like the angels, but rather in burrows deep underneath the earth. The guns travel great distances through underground pneumatic tubes. I had always thought these were gopher holes in the desert, but obviously I was wrong.
And so, everything that happened with Lydia makes perfect sense to me now. If you’re not a gun, then you’re an angel. This includes me. Lydia was probably a gun. It doesn’t matter if you’re made of water or not, or flesh and blood, or…well, whatever angels are made of. Angels are meant to do things—guard borders, build cars, safecrack waterfalls, operate cash registers. The guns, on the other hand, do what they love. They love the waterfall, and love to control it, to control who comes through.
Even now I’m not sure whose side I’m on. I only want to do the right thing, to live with what the world will give me. The question is, which world? Did I cross? That green hillside of music that I saw for just a few seconds—is it impossibly close or impossibly far away?
I want to know.
* * *
E•L•E•G•I•A•C•A•L
el·e·gi·a·cal 'e-le-'ji-e-kel
adjective
1 a: of, relating to, or consisting of two dactylic hexameter lines the second of which lacks the arsis in the third and sixth feet
1 b (1): written in or consisting of elegiac couplets
1 b (2): noted for having written poetry in such couplets 1 c: of or relating to the period in Greece about the seventh century B.C. when poetry written in such couplets flourished
2: of, relating to, or comprising elegy or an elegy; esp: expressing sorrow often for something now past
* * *
The Last Elegy
MATTHEW CHENEY
I RECEIVED A LETTER from Grete. I hadn’t heard from her in at least a decade, since before the war. After Andrea’s death, I didn’t want to stay in contact with anyone who knew her, or anyone who had known Anders, because I didn’t know any other way to escape my sadness than to erase all the memories of what had happened, the memories of the cabarets and theaters, the cafés and galleries, the late nights that became early mornings as we talked about politics and poetry and philosophy, the hopes we had. Hope has always been a source of sadness, because it makes me vulnerable to fantasies and delusions, and it took me many years to see that time with Anders and Grete as anything other than the most awful delusion of my life.
In her letter, Grete tells me she is ill, and she would like to see me again before she dies. She asks if I ever finished the elegy for Anders. She still lives in the apartment she shared with him, though it is different now, having been damaged in the war. She says she got married again, but her husband is no longer alive, and now she is alone, but she has wonderful friends. She still paints occasionally, though she says materials are sometimes hard to come by. She says she has missed me all these years.
I lie awake and stare at the rusted tin ceiling of my little bedroom. Perhaps I, too, am ill; perhaps I am dying. Perhaps the elegy I should write is for myself. Self-pity is my strongest talent. But I am not to blame for what happened. I may have been a fool, but I was a brave fool to risk so much, to feel so much, to lose so much. (I tell myself this, just as I have for many years now, even though after all this time, the sadness remains.)
Afterward, everything reminded me of him. For weeks, it seemed every item in my apartment, every object in the city had some memory attached to it. A pen he had given me sat on the desk. Above the desk I had hung a postcard he’d sent from Venice. I threw them both away. We’d talked about nearly every book I owned, and so I covered the bookcase with a sheet. One night, drunk and maudlin, tears streaming down my face, I carried all the books out to the street and threw them one by one into the river, saving his favorites, Baudelaire and Rimbaud, for last. (He read to me in French. I knew no French.) I had stuck a scrap of paper with the date of his birthday on it to the wall so I could not forget it. I took the paper in my hand and tore it into the tiniest shreds I could and threw them all out the window. I covered my ears when I heard familiar songs echoing through the streets at night. I avoided the parks where we had wandered so aimlessly so many times. There did not seem to be a café anywhere in the city that we had not been to at least once, and so I stopped going to cafés.
“Anders is dead,” she told me. “Don’t talk to me about Anders anymore.”
This is the first time I have been on an airplane. It is noisier than I would have expected. For some reason, I thought once we got up off the ground, everything would be silent. When I first came to the city, I came by boat. Now, looking down at it all, it is not familiar. It could be any city in the world.
The plane descends.
It could be any city in the world.
I met Anders because of Grete. A newspaper had asked me to write about new artists, and not knowing of anything better to do with my time, I accepted and began going to gallery openings, even though I knew nothing about art. Grete’s opening was the liveliest I’d ever attended, a hot and crowded room full of laughing people and abstract paintings in pastel colors, badly lit with small lamps set on tables every few feet throughout the room. Now and then someone jostled a table, a lamp fell, an explosion, laughter.
“This is my husband, Anders,” Grete said, leading me to him by the arm. “He hates parties,” she said. “He’s an actor. You might have seen him in Werther at the State Theater. He’s a genius,” she said. “You’ll love him.”
I didn’t like parties any more than he did, and so, after dutifully taking notes about a couple of paintings, I stepped outside with him. He gave me a cigarette and we walked down the street, stopping eventually at a café where a man on the balcony above played an oboe, its soft notes bobbing away on the breeze.
Anders spoke to me in clear, formal English. He said he had spent some years touring the British Isles, but had not yet had the chance to see the United States, a place that, in his mind, contained two types of territories: The West, a wild frontier enthralled and terrorized by the ghost of Jesse James, and New York City, which he talked of as if it were the size of Texas and filled with nothing but cigar-chomping capitalists and ladies be-decked in the furs of white leopards. I told him his impressions were entirely correct.
As Anders talked, I paid close attention to his face for the first time, his soft skin and eyes of such a light blue they seemed nearly translucent. His thin nose bent slightly to one side and his lips were narrow and somehow childlike. High, prominent cheekbones gave him a regal air, and he showed no trace at all of a beard. His dark blond hair was unfashionably long, and now and then he brushed strands back over his little ears. In the shadows and smoke of the café he had, I thought, the face of a nymph.
Grete meets me at the airport. The skin of her face is sallow and slack, her eyes sunken deep into shadows, her hair thin and grey. She was a tall woman once, but she is not now.
We ride to the apartment in a black
taxi. “My English got better during the war,” Grete says.
“Your English was never bad.”
“Still, it got better. Anders made me read Shakespeare, thus I always sounded like Shakespeare. I don’t sound like Shakespeare anymore.” She laughs, and I force a smile.
The city is full of rubble. I don’t want to look at Grete, so I stare out the window of the taxi. Shops with bright new signs stand beside shops with shattered windows. Women and men in expensive clothes climb into big American cars. An old man pushes a wooden cart filled with cabbages down the street.
“Do you still write poetry?” Grete asks.
“Not in a long time,” I say.
The old man pushing the cart stops to rest. When he sets the end of the cart down, cabbages roll off onto the cobblestones. He leans over, picks them up, and puts them back in the cart, but for every cabbage he puts back, two or three more fall. We drive on.
As a young man, I quite inadvertently made a name for myself in certain parts of the world as an elegist. My first book was a slim volume of poems memorializing a lost love at a time when, because of war and illness, such a subject could find favor with a large audience. Intoxicated by the sudden attention, and even more so by the sudden wealth, I gave in to the pleas of my publisher for more and more poems, a seemingly endless series of elegies published in memory of every imaginable occasion, until newspaper cartoonists repeatedly turned me into a caricature (portraying such things as a man who writes verses for each grave in a graveyard stretching off to infinity), and my name appeared often in books and magazines, as well as some of the lesser motion pictures of the day. Each week I received hundreds of appeals for more elegies, poems to memorialize not only particular people, but also pets and objects and lost elections. Each week, I wrote fewer and fewer, as my poems felt even to me as if they had become parodies of their own parodies. Finally, unable to write a single word on a piece of paper without succumbing to utter nausea, I fled.
“Fame is so nice when you don’t have it,” Anders said to me once. We were sitting on a bench in a park at twilight.
“I’d rather have love than fame,” I said, though I wasn’t sure why.
“And what have you had for love?” He said it casually, not looking at me, watching people walk through the darkening shadows around us.
“That’s how I started writing elegies,” I said. “A lost love.”
“Lost?” He turned to me. “How do you mean?”
“I wrote poem after poem to her. As if she had died.”
“But she had not died?”
“No. We were great friends, and I had thought, I had hoped, that we might be something more than friends, eventually, but…no.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“And you? What have you had for love?”
“I love Grete,” he said. “I have loved others. Three or four people, I think. When I was younger. But Grete was the first who could accept me for all that I am. And I realize how rare that is, how lucky.”
Anders stood up, and a flock of birds that had gathered around our bench took flight, rising toward the grey sky, startling me, and for one tiny moment I thought he had shattered.
The apartment is not as I remember it, because most of the building has been rebuilt. The walls are clean and white, illuminated by light from many windows and from fixtures overhead. The air is fresh, and immediately I miss the old, comforting odor of cigarettes and incense and wine and people, the rich scent that used to relax me the moment I stepped inside. The furniture is much the same, the couch familiar in its hardness, but the doorknobs are all different, and as I wander through the apartment I find myself opening doors, feeling the knobs in my hand, each one smooth, and smoothly turning. I am fascinated by how new the doorknobs feel, free of any past or history, so typically American and out of place here. I laugh at myself, a previously intelligent and cultured man reduced to ruminating on doorknobs.
Grete makes me a cup of tea, and we sit across from each other in the little living room, me on the couch and her in a large chair with worn, red upholstery. I look around the apartment, noticing the framed posters from cabarets and galleries.
“I lost all my pictures in the war,” she says. “I have no photographs of anyone. The posters were sent to me by friends in Sweden. They found them in their attic. They forgot they’d put them there.”
We sip our tea. She smiles and looks out the window. “There is so much to say. I don’t have enough words.”
I nod.
“You’re the poet,” she says. “Words are your business. I make pictures, that’s all.”
“I haven’t written a poem in a very long time,” I say.
“Why?”
“Because I couldn’t finish the poem for Anders. It’s the only one that feels worth writing, but I cannot write it.”
I expect her to question me, to prod me, to praise my talent and remind me of something or other that Anders, or even Andrea, might have said on the subject. But she does not.
“It’s funny,” I say, my voice sounding strangely hollow in my ears. “I’ve spent every day since he asked me to write it feeling…well, feeling elegiacal. But I could not, I cannot, write…”
I am not a man who cries easily, except at chamber concerts and the conclusions of sentimental motion pictures, but suddenly, surprisingly, tears fill my eyes, and when Grete sits beside me, placing her hand gently on my back, I bow my head and weep.
During many evenings, before we would go out for dinner or to see a show, Anders and I spent an hour or two in my apartment, looking through books, reading poems and stories to each other. He had a lovely voice, high for a man, but his years on the stage had taught him fine articulation, and he had a perfect sense of cadence, so that his readings were the most emotionally affecting and most natural I have ever heard. Some of the purest moments of bliss I have experienced were those times when I listened to him and closed my eyes and let the sound of the words wash over me.
“What do you think makes a poem great?” he asked me one night. (We both had a weakness for grand questions.)
“Truth and feeling,” I said.
“Doesn’t one destroy the other?”
I told him I would need many more days to ponder the topic, and that really the only way to know a good poem was to read one, and so I read him the end of Spenser’s “Daphnaida.”
So when I have with sorrow satisfide
Th’ importune fates, which vengeance on me seeke,
And th’ heavens with long languor pacifide,
She, for pure pitie of my sufference meeke,
Will send for me; for which I daylie long:
And will till then my painful penance eeke.
Weep, Shepheard! weep, to make my undersong!
I remember that moment well, because it was the only time Anders seemed truly moved, moved to the point of being unable to speak, by anything that I read to him. Finally, after a long silence, he said, “I think we should go out and have a terrible amount of fun.”
“I always thought you were in love with Anders,” Grete says to me. “Fond enough of Andrea, but in love with Anders. Why do you think that was?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “It’s not something that can be understood with logic.”
“No,” Grete says, “I suppose not. Maybe poetry.”
“I’m not sure any words help explain such things.”
“Perhaps you should try painting,” she says. “For me, the world makes more sense when I can shape it with colors.”
“What color would you make me?”
“I’d begin with bright red, and then paint over that with a deep purple, and then cover it all with grey.”
I first met Andrea at a dinner party at the apartment. She answered the door, handed me a glass of champagne, and led me inside. I noticed her eyes first, because they were as blue as Anders’s eyes. “I’m Andrea,” she said. She wore a light red dress, and amidst the curls of her blonde hair rested a lily.<
br />
“Are you a relative of Anders?” I asked.
“Oh yes,” she said. “Very much so. But he will not be here tonight.”
“Does he have a performance?”
“Of a certain type, yes.”
Waiting at the table was Gilbert Barton, a British playwright I’d seen at various parties and gallery openings, a friend of Anders whom I found repulsive. Anders accused me of disliking Barton because he suffered the same disease as Oscar Wilde, but I assured him that I did not much care about that, unfortunate as it was, and that it was Barton’s pathetic qualities, as well as his need to dominate a conversation, that made me dislike being in his presence. Grete felt sorry for him, though, because his plays were not popular and his life seemed to be perpetually crumbling into ruins, and Anders told me he liked Barton because he always felt sane and successful when the wretched man was around.
As I stepped into the room, I noticed that Barton’s doughy face was red from, I assumed, already having had quite a few glasses of champagne, and he looked like some sort of water-logged elf. He was regaling Grete with his latest tale of woe. “And then he tells me that because he’s the director he can change any line he likes, and I tell him no no no no, that’s not how it works, and he says he’s just trying to make the play actually into a comedy, and I tell him that it was a comedy before he got his hands on it but now it is most certainly a tragedy, and a dull one at that—Oh, hello, Edward, what are you doing here?”
“I was invited,” I said.