by Martha Ronk
It began, no doubt, as a protective device. That seems to make sense. But when you try to think of when it was that the other time became important, you can’t. It ought to have been a sharp pain that wrenched one time from another, made you opt out for good reason, but you can’t think of one. You can think of a year when you fell from the rotted tree in the side yard and broke your arm but the pain is merely a word, not even as vivid as the small scar. And anyhow, what would it be to think of a sharp pain which is not something most of us can do. All I can think of is someone large leaning over my hunched shoulders telling me to try, try she said, to sit still. The racing part of my body was still racing out the back door, into the backyard, and out into the street where it had been just moments before and I was trying. The idea of trying is what puts one in two places at once since the idea of trying also contains the idea of not trying. I want to try, I want to know how to say to her in that time so long ago, but I have no way to think about what I am thinking and so I don’t.
He doesn’t have to try to drive, but I do. I guess he is paying attention all right, but he isn’t trying. When I drive I have to try hard to pay attention, to keep to the road, to follow directions, to fend off the fear of getting lost. Nothing seems so bad as that fear of turning the wrong way or finding oneself broken down on the country road with only a dim light from a distant farmhouse. I am surrounded by darkness. I try to keep calm. I try to remind myself way ahead of time to keep calm if anything should happen. I get tired of trying even when everything goes smoothly and I clutch the steering wheel. Here I am, I say to myself, trying to get myself to watch the view as if it were an unnatural act, even though, one would suppose, it is the most natural thing in the world. Look at all those people doing it, I say to myself; surely you too can look out the window at the view. You too can admire the scenery. His subject, the landscape. Try it.
But even the ringing in her ears takes her away and even the effort of sitting still in the car for so long, even the book she tries to forget. Her novel is a novel in which the narrator becomes someone else momentarily. She loses herself in imagining herself a child and she imagines this so strongly that she begins to blurt things out, slurp the milk out of her cereal bowl, race in circles among the trees stomping in pools of shallow water. She makes no attempt to conform to the rules, this child, but neither does she break them; she simply moves through the world and does what comes to mind. What comes to mind is rather sing-songy and windy, hooting softly, gazing out and running far. The child stands in the side yard by the rotted tree. She takes off her red sweater and makes a cape. She fixes the buckle on her red shoe. She stares for hours at the view. Although she doesn’t at that time live anywhere near what one might call a view, no vistas or California coastlines, it doesn’t matter to her. She stands at the side of the road and looks down it. She doesn’t move. She sees a rock and she sees it up close for a long time. Her mother calls for her but she doesn’t come, not because she is trying to disobey, but because it just doesn’t occur to her to come.
Years later she sees an elaborately constructed miniature garden planted into the cleft of a great stone, the tiniest rock garden she’s ever seen with lichen, alpine plants of various sorts, saxifrages, gentians, pinks, penstemons and what looks to be a fold with a red dot in the center. The novel isn’t a great novel, perhaps it hasn’t yet been written, but it is what she is thinking about when he says again, look at the view and there are waves crashing against the boulders and melting down into waterfalls and crashing again. It is almost larger than she can stand and she’s back at the restaurant looking through her water glass. Through the crash of the waves, she thinks she hears him asking something.
The Gift
The two are perfect lovers because neither can focus or is interested in focusing. What each likes best as it becomes obvious to them both is the neutrality each is able to effect after a sexual encounter—each of which is necessarily quickly and almost matter-of-factly executed, more for each of them by the very fact of its being less, more pleasurable as it approaches the experience of simply the drinking of a coffee at a café, sipping a glass of peach iced tea against the heat of August. Thus it is not, as one might expect in the heat of summer in Italy, the sexual liaison which binds them so tightly, but rather the hours of nonchalance afterwards, the pretense that is so perfected as to call absolutely no attention to itself, to be banal and, occasionally and at its best, even slipshod.
Perhaps the story begins with Paola, the woman. Perhaps with the man, an American in charge of the language program and having an affair with Paola, the director of the college in Bologna which houses the program, an affair that cannot—fortunately they agree—be acknowledged even by the two of them even in private, in part because such acknowledgment might change their behavior in small but perceptible ways, and in part because to acknowledge it would be a confession that one’s body is not ruled by one’s mind. Or perhaps it all begins with the narrator herself who might describe herself as attentive and agile, but also a bit out of her element, having just and somewhat awkwardly arrived from the States on invitation, an invitation that turns out to have been issued prematurely, from the man.
To begin with, Paola is trying to attain a more prestigious position as Cultural Affairs Director in the local government and since her boyfriend, a minor but influential politician, can help her to this position, he must be kept in the dark. Indeed neither of the lovers is willing to be fully cognizant of the affair, not only because of political complications, but more importantly for reasons which have to do with temperaments which in this case are similar in an uncanny way, as when one finds a match to a plate one already owns in a junk store in a distant and entirely other corner of the globe, a match which provides its own vivid if not especially significant pleasure.
They always have, the narrator surmises, so much to attend to with the students, one of whom tries to commit suicide ineffectively and theatrically. Indeed, all of the theatricality of the lovers is transposed onto the students and they—Paola and the man—tell endless stories of the students’ sexual adventures, their hysterical reactions, their betrayals—not to contain their own and certainly not as substitute, but as simple fact. It is not that their many meals together, cooked for themselves, students, friends and other colleagues, are a means to spend more time together; rather, they are part simply of the ordinary unfolding of a day in summer in Italy—what anyone would expect. Nor do they glance at one another longingly across the room while they serve wine or pasta—such would be shabby and beneath them—rather, they are fully in the event as it is, not in coy relation to it, not wishing to be elsewhere, not living with the pressure of time and an imagined next encounter.
They exchange no symbolic gestures, no bits of paper, no gifts. His having brought her a knife for cooking is only a knife for cooking since he must prepare food for the guests, since her kitchen was without one, since it is a practical thing and, moreover, since it is only a mildly generous gesture, not excessive or out-of-keeping. If anyone were to point to the obvious symbolism, they would scoff and be embarrassed, not for themselves, but for the person who would think such an obvious thought. The absence of such thinking is what binds them. The power of ideology is what makes it possible for them to turn from the metaphysical and sentimental in a manner which implies neglectful lassitude, no matter the depth of the roots, the tangle of historical precedence. What these lovers are so adept at is simplification by means of high drama, but always high drama not their own.
Also the man’s daughter is visiting and it might be, the narrator once thought wrongly, necessary for painstaking discretion, but, neither lover has noticed her presence, or rather neither has noticed in any excessive way, although he praises his daughter’s adolescent beauty at every opportunity and especially in public when she has gone in to bed for the night. For the daughter’s part, she adores him and is always pulling her clothes aside to show her sunburned skin or talking about the reaction to her see-t
hrough bathing suit on the beach or insisting on shoes so high-heeled and uncomfortable that her father must call cabs for her to go anywhere, which he believes she is owed because unlike the students he teaches, he insists, she is without wealth or guile. The cabs pay for his guilt.
He is guilty for having left his wife in the States. Although they are psychically estranged and live together guardedly—she having taken up a purportedly secret lover—he knows she has done this in response to his years of neglect and so feels, not guilty—since his leftist ideology leads him to oppose guilt on principle—but uneasy, although others would think it, he knows, perfectly within his rights to have taken a lover as well. Only he also knows, to his credit perhaps, that their estrangement is not the result of her lover who is simply a lover. He knows that his inattentiveness (not in bed—it hadn’t so much to do with that—but with a vaguer and more encompassing inattentiveness that he would will away if he could) has not encouraged her, but has left her open, if not vulnerable, to anyone who might approach her.
One night he was relieved to watch his wife’s new lover sit at table and engage her, ask her questions, listen to her not foolish responses (because indeed he allows himself to think no one foolish, especially not his wife whom he finds touching), but to responses that he felt obliged to dismiss, for reasons he couldn’t name exactly. Her facts weren’t wrong; they were, rather, extravagant—she tended to “enthuse”—and so it was more with relief than jealousy that he watched this lovely man take on his lovely wife as if her gestures were, as he knew they were, beautiful, as if her account of a walk she had taken the night before were, as it indeed was, expressive, if also, so he judged, overly poetic and gushing. He didn’t wish to be embarrassed by her lack of verbal restraint, and, indeed, wasn’t just one moment later when he found himself still sitting at table, entirely at ease and cheered by the thought of acute angles, infinity, space. He might, he thinks, looking at the lover looking at her, want to behave in exactly this way, if by some stroke of fate he were another person or a person he used to be, perhaps, or if it weren’t at odds with his resolve, or more precisely his leaning towards the inattentive, but such lines of thinking he found useless and he cut them into shorter and shorter segments.
Sometimes he wondered himself when his wife described the shape of flowers which she loved so well, getting the color of a petal exactly right or the color of their daughter’s “faded rose” socks which he himself had folded in the laundry basket (thinking also of how he loved both of these women, the older blond and the girl with the same blond hair), why such description drove him mad, made him want—although he never would do so decidedly crude a thing—an act of violent disruption. At night at home he would get in his car and drive and drive until emptiness defeated her too heady perfume.
Which is why, the narrator thought, his new Italian lover had such a so-much-better chance with him, because she drew him not intellectually exactly, but disembodyingly, not because she was not a physical being, indeed her particular and acrid odor was the very announcement of sexuality, but that she knew how to set it aside for him so that it was impossible for him not to be at her side, not pulled—for that would suggest something too raw, but drawn there nonetheless.
At a local restaurant they sit across from one another at a large table looped over by fellow teachers, resident philosophers and their girlfriends, students and leather jackets. He never looks in her direction although she is speaking in a voice raised just a notch over the din of glasses and conversation so he can be sure to hear her without anyone’s attention being drawn to the fact that everything she is saying is directed at him, designed for him, an echo of his phrases and his words of American slang, albeit with a slight but pronounced accent. He sees the narrator looking at her and then at him and he accords her a quizzical if fleeting moment of attention as if he were noting the pressure of her overt attention. Paola laughs easily as if the efforts on his side were only communal and not at all meant, as the narrator is sure they are meant, for her.
He calls her a cultural geisha, his only and always public acknowledgment of her gifts; Paola speaks to him only of office arrangements, train schedules, and the abroad students, knowing that these are the absolute arrows to his heart. What the narrator has to come to try to see is whether their behavior is a philosophical choice or a moral failing. And to whom would it make a difference? Certainly not to the narrator, since it has nothing to do with her, but to anyone? And if the narrator is drawn ever more powerfully to the man, for what reason could it be except to state the obvious, to bring into the open all that is, not hidden from anyone since everyone knows even if no one speaks of it, including the almost totally self-involved student who burns her arms with cigarettes and weeps into the night. So, the question becomes whether the narrator knows that someone will be hurt and who that someone will be. She must come to recognize the crudeness of her own responses, knowing as she does the sexual odor coming off Paola’s clothes and squirminess of the men smoking cigars at the back of the café.
If the narrator becomes the interpreter of events between the man and the woman, what does that mean except that they have maneuvered her, without lifting a finger, only counting on her pallor and paranoia, into a position that they had not even dared to hope for and have, therefore, a witness which neither one of them is willing to be and which makes their affair not more but less real, for the very unreliability of the witness, and also, somehow, protected.
Like a person without a reflection, each needs another sort of person to be a witness, which is why the narrator is useful to them and perhaps why the affair ultimately fails or is able, depending on the complicity of the narrator and her ability to dampen her own ardor and to become, devotedly, the third point in the triangle, to go on unacknowledged for quite some time.
My Son and the Bicycle Wheel
In 1913 I had the happy idea to fasten a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool and watch it turn. . . . It was around that time that the word “Readymade” came to mind to designate this form of manifestation. A point which I want very much to establish is that the choice of these “Readymades” was never dictated by aesthetic delectation. This choice was based on a reaction of visual indifference.
—Marcel Duchamp
He said, my son said, you just don’t get it, I’m not like you. What does it mean, I’m not like you. I think differently, act differently, move about differently, don’t like you, can’t stand you and what about the waver in both our voices when we come to this point in the conversation. A street sign: Go Left or None of Your Business. That could be it, I’m asking too many questions as usual and interfering in his life, of course.
You’d get on with them, he says, you’re like them, but I don’t. I couldn’t do it, work there I mean or anything. I can’t adopt the pose, manage the portfolio, stand at attention and besides they think I’m weird. You don’t see me, but they do and they know I don’t fit in. You’d fit in, he says it again, you would, because it’s where you went to school and everything, but not me and I don’t want to anyhow.
It’s a hot day and growing hotter and I hate talking on the telephone when I’m late and it seems I’m always late when he calls with something important to say.
He makes up stories. Sometimes when he’s talking I am back in time with his father but I never tell him this because he is, of course, a separate being, but then the only person who reminds me of him is his father telling stories and making me laugh as I never laughed when I was growing up where laughter was a mockery of whatever serious endeavor we were all supposed to be engaged in.
But the stories don’t help with I’m not like you. What can it mean exactly. It’s like an abrupt bend in the road which you don’t see and are out over the air in your mind, wheels spinning, heart pounding. Not that you think you are alike since even you can see that you’re not. But it’s the phrase and what it means beyond the fact that he likes one kind of food and you like another or that he grew up here and you grew u
p there or that you analyze everything and he thinks it’s weird. He’s a great cyclist, Cat 2, and has raced in several cities and then smaller ones I’ve never heard of and he comes in with the pack or wins or trains by riding to the top of Mt. Wilson which is about 65 miles round trip in a day and comes in and walks to the refrigerator, ravenous and bent over in insect clothes unable to utter a word much less tell a story.
When he was a kid I was a single mom. I thought of course that I could do everything because that’s really what one has to think, but as the years unfold, one realizes that one is a paltry number and also that as he reminds you, you live in one world and he in another. He saw a home movie once of me riding a bike decorated with crepe paper in a Fourth of July parade in the middle of Ohio. No wonder he says, and he shakes his head.
So what do we talk about. We talk about the movies which of course is what everyone talks about, although again, he likes movies in which things happen and I like those in which things don’t. Who wants anything to happen and I think this more and more; there is too much happening all over anyhow and what we need to do is slow things down.
He races bicycles. Brilliantly as it turns out. When he was five I took him to the nearby park to learn to ride which he didn’t want to. I won’t he said and he said it again. You will I said. I held the back of the seat and launched him forward until he fell and then launched him again until by the end of the afternoon he could do it. He didn’t want to but then he did and then he did every afternoon when I came home from work and before I could put my feet up or listen to my messages, we were at the park and he was riding and jumping over jumps and taking off.