SHE PRACTICALLY STOPS eating. Hardly anyone is concerned about the fact, and then suddenly they are worried sick. They travel to Italy, she and a girlfriend, and she perspires until thin, up and down the hills of Cinque Terra, in the streets of Levanto, where spring is coy and reluctant. It is the coldest spring in forty years, at least, says the eldest brother in the family-run hotel on the coast of Amalfi. They are the only guests, their guests. They sit in the café on the edge of the cliff, the sea its tall baseboard of blue. He tells her, as best he can in his own peculiar variety of English, that his parents are dead, that now only the three brothers remain. They don’t think they can afford a room, and are allowed to put up their tent on the patio in front of the house. He unlocks the door of an annex, leaving it open so they may creep in to sleep at night. The extravagance of the blue sea, Italian espresso maker in chrome and shining red, men in attendance. The Italian wants her to guess how old he is, but she doesn’t want to, she knows he is over fifty. He pulls a chair out at her table and sits down. She has no newspaper from which to glance up, nothing to put aside, and instead must rearrange her napkin. His lips begin to speak before he utters a sound, he wants to take her sailing with him, he says. Tonight. Fishing, he corrects himself. She dares not, declines, and feels she has never regretted anything as much ever before; the night that could have been.
A SINGLE ROOM. A bed beneath a window, a desk, their suitcases gaping. Her dress on the chair; and he on the bed, in the shade. The doorway teetering, a slab of hot light. A little window facing the sea. The Amalfi Coast. The sun is high, the rented room dark and cool. From outside they look like lovers.
She goes out onto the terrace and leans over the railing, is giddied by heat and altitude, the sea crashing against the rocks below, atomizing into spray, vomiting its white insides. He comes out and stands beside her, a bottle of wine in his hand. He drinks from it without any semblance of elegance, the slosh of its contents as he tips back his head to swallow. He goes back in and lies down again; he is tired, but cannot sleep. How can anyone sleep in this heat, he asks.
How can anyone do otherwise.
The roads here are gouged from the cliffs, half the time they lead through tunnels in the rock. The sudden astonishment of a view, a division of travel into dark and light, twisting the twine of day into rope of two continually interchanging complexions. He couldn’t be bothered to leave, and she wants to stay here forever. But the next day they pack their suitcases and head on as planned. There are no birds here, he says. Yes, there are, she says. They are sitting in a bus on the way to the train station. No one knows how long they must wait there.
IN NABOKOV’S LOLITA there’s a scene toward the end where the brutality of desire is revealed in a glimpse. It’s when the reader and the main character see Lolita, there in the bathroom, her distress. At once, a darkness is cast upon all that came before. You realize you’ve been seduced. You see yourself in that mirror, humbled, because you couldn’t see any better. Again, you have involved yourself in something you didn’t believe existed.
THEY MEET IN the sun one morning. He has just opened up the second-hand bookstore he’s taking care of for a while. She gets off her bicycle and wheels it along to the little café table and the chairs they’ve put out front. You can get coffee there, and sit outside.
This is nice, she says, and gives him a measured hug, as though she were afraid he might fall inside her if she held him too tightly for too long. Their bodies: open wounds that may join up and heal as one if they’re not careful. A merging of tissue, like plants climbing a trellis to arch across a garden path, across disorder.
Congratulations on your . . . success, he says.
She bows her head, gaze fixing the ground to make her seem shy; then slowly she unfurls and looks him in the eye. She doesn’t know what success he’s talking about, but she knows he means the book. As if that meant anything. It means nothing to her, not now. Thanks, she says, emptily. It’s not like I got the Nobel Prize or anything, she says.
He shrugs and says congratulations anyway. Just getting published is reason enough.
She shrugs. Thinks: what kind of sadness is this. All the leaves of the linden trees are pale, the sun is drawing the color out of everything. They don’t speak.
Do you want to see my window, he asks her, sweeping out his hand. She leans the bike against the wall. Duras, Jelinek, J. P. Jacobsen. Some nice publications that look like exercise books. A tattered Taschen, Picasso. He has angled them carefully, wanting it to look accidental and yet alluring. Two books, one at each side of the picture, have been leaned against supports. She smiles and nods; nice choices, she says. He is so enthusiastic about the display, she sees, and hopes not a book will be sold from out of his window today. That it all may stay the way it is and be resplendent.
HE IS STRETCHED out on the sofa with one leg draped over the backrest. It is morning. Drowsy from sleep: when did you get home. His bare foot dangles like a wilted child in the sun. It is summer, seven o’ clock. His face is covered by a blanket; she lifts it gently, startling them both; I thought you were asleep, she says in a voice that is quite emptied of voice. Breathless. Seamlessly, she lets go of the blanket and puts her hand to her mouth. What happened, she whispers, alternately pointing and putting her hand back to her mouth; his face is streaked with dried blood, in places near-blackened, in the creases around his eyes. Violet. And his face then moves, first the eyes, tentative and with scepticism, as if the muscles themselves do not believe movement to be possible. He groans, and furrows his brow as if to rouse his face. He shifts his weight awkwardly, like a piece of heavy furniture, and she recalls the time in Berlin when he wanted to get in the bath tub with her, drunk; the way he looked like furniture then as well.
Alcohol makes people into furniture.
Dependent on others to move them about.
What happened, she asks again. I walked into a cupboard, he sighs. She can’t help but laugh, only then to fall silent as a fire quickly smothered. She nods and leaves him on his own. She runs her usual route beside the sea, passing the Varna Palæet, following the path around the point, down the steps to the bathing jetty and the changing rooms. She writes her name in the book and finds her towel, pads serenely to the end of the jetty, the morning is quiet here. She immerses herself in the sea, and afterward she sits down on the edge of the wooden structure and dangles her legs. The planks make a bench; it’s March and they’re already lined by bodies, pale and doughy, slowly reclaiming life, bodies walking down the jetty and back again. A switch occurs in her mind, and she imagines nocturnal corpses, drifting in the swell, gently buffeting each other at the first sand bar, in the gloom beneath the jetty, wherever the current will take them. The woman next to her has only one breast. She imagines the missing breast floating amid the night-heavy corpses. She tells the woman about her morning. Perhaps to correct the imbalance of her mentally having encroached upon this unfamiliar body’s domain without having first been invited in. If such accounting is possible.
So you fill in the ledger, and then burn it. Didn’t he need stitches, the woman asks without drama. She shrugs, spilling coffee on her thigh. I suppose he did. She gets up and goes into the changing room, calls home. He doesn’t answer, of course he doesn’t. She runs through the woods and gets him into a taxi to the ER.
SHE TAKES OFF her shoes and puts her feet up on the dashboard; they are driving too fast through the Swedish forests, Småland, on their way to the eastern skerries, the Sankt Anna Skärgård, fleeing from the mosquitoes further inland, the melancholy of that remote former smallholding lay like a dropped undergarment around one’s feet, thick ribbons of mosquitoes blowing in from the lake. It is summer, we can sleep in the car or under the trees, stricken with the fever of the season, a sense of this never coming back, and at the same time the comfort of that, the fact of everything soon reaching an end, on account of it not being real.
If anything ever is.
Without you I wouldn’t have survived
a day here, she thinks, I would have died of homesickness. The AC blasts its air, her skirt billowed about her midriff as she tries to find a radio station, as she tries to love him for some other reason than necessity.
WINDOWS THROWN OPEN, something else to come, and the thought, in the mornings especially, of everything now in flux, the sky above us is different, and the light, a totally different light, settled on all things that surround us. Our legs, in that light, as if finding sheen, the glow of shoes on newspapers outside front doors, scuffed boots polished by sun, laundry basket gilded on the tiles of the laundry room. Health. The fact of you lifting your legs a little higher when you walk, the fact of you wanting to come, of saying yes, that would be nice; and the fact of her once again dropping something that smashes into pieces and cannot ever be repaired, and there being no point crying about it. He has this idea, and asks her to help him move the sofa over there, just to see what it looks like, to see what it does to the room. All of a sudden she feels so tired, she thinks to herself, and lifts the sofa with him, carries it across to the other side of the room. It looks like it’s trying to escape.
That’s it, he says, and takes up various positions, viewing the arrangement from all angles. It makes her think of cattle auctions, or just the horse trader from Femmøller, this act of appraisal, though without their sceptical point of departure, with an enthusiasm instead that seems to her like a tribute to everything there is, but which perhaps in actual fact—this is the feeling she has—is the exact opposite. A way of not seeing what is. He claps his hands together, a crack of sound. So what do you think, he says, already on his way to the kitchen to make coffee; and everything is already the same.
THERE ARE TWO tight bundles of images and recollections; have I told you this before, he asks. Yes, you have. He slows down, holding up the traffic, leans over and points: that’s where I used to live. And that’s where I worked once. The warehouse, how hard was that, a warehouseman, and he tells her once again about their fingers in winter, having to wear those gloves with the fingertips cut off, never exactly knowing if it was so they could work the machines more safely or because the gloves would wear out at the fingers anyway. She stares stiffly through the windshield. She wishes they could drive quickly through a landscape that is unfamiliar to her. A fleeting face without history. This disinclination toward him, that in actual fact is an allegiance to the love she still awaits.
SOMETHING ABOUT HIS face. It snowed again today. The sun never arrived in the sky, it was as if something were holding it down at the other end. All of a sudden she thought he looked like the few other men she had been with. She felt like there were too many of them in the apartment. And the feeling of she herself being someone else, that she likewise was a number of other women. He sits slouched over his books; she kneels beside him and grips his thigh; he swivels the chair, and she crawls between his legs. Puts her arms around him and buries her face in his crotch. He strokes her hair. The winter wouldn’t leave: every time you thought spring had come, snow came instead. No cars on the roads. Jobs made to wait. The ground is frozen: you can’t plant the bulbs, or bury a friend, all you can do is stand around and wait, for all your good intentions of getting things done, and a new face every day, no matter what.
THEY WHEEL THEIR bikes along the canal. They talk about going swimming, but know it won’t be today. It’s late afternoon, she senses an imbalance in the picture, she gets up so late, and it’s as if she’s going forward in the wrong lane. Everyone is going home from something. Her younger sister is exhausted by work; says there’s no time to be unhappy. She nods. I can see that, she says. It might be easiest that way.
Her sister is offended and hides it badly. She herself doesn’t know how it feels to be angry in that way, it’s like there’s always been this great pool of emotions and characteristics to be shared out between the two sisters, and no one has ever bothered to divide up the individual emotions, split the pile fairly into two equal portions. She says she’s convinced it’s because of her book, those scenes from home. That whole project of yours. What is, she asks. Mum having cancer, he sister replies.
That’s the sort of thing people with cancer say, she says.
The two sisters sit down on a step to drink sodas. She says nothing, puts the bottle to her lips, tilts her head, puts the bottle down on the woodwork.
Is that what you think, she says—I say—eventually. Is that what you think.
It’s what they say, says my sister. That it’s usually psychological, triggered by a depression, or some enormous grief.
I nod without knowing one way or another, rocking my head like a weaving horse.
There’s a crane on the other side of the canal, lifting rust-red plates of metal from the cobblestones onto the bed of a truck. Dangling sheets of iron, delivered like well-aimed slaps to the face. The blue sea, a blue belt dissecting the picture. The crane is a strong arm slashing the sky. And then the feeling of discarding masks, of coming home. I’d like that.
I HAVE NEVER before wanted anything, she understands that now. It’s not a competition, you say, meaning: I can’t stand to lose anything more.
THE NEW MAN
WE MEET BRIEFLY, he’s with his girlfriend and son. Copenhagen’s Nørrebro district late morning, it must have been autumn, though still with summer’s remains, making everything a matter of postponement. How long like this. Borrowed time. I’m wearing a red dress, black wellingtons. He doesn’t need to see any more than that, even in that instant he has already seen too much. His gaze, indiscriminate: seeing what soon will be possessed, and all that must thereby be renounced; images assail him like a blazing pack of hounds dropped from a loft aflame, and we are drenched, saturated by fire and body. Something on the verge of happening, something already happened, something painfully absent. He greets the musicians, leans a guitar and a saxophone case against the wall. All the time, his eyes are on me. And his girlfriend sees it all, though in reverse, a mirror image reflected in all surfaces: a gleaming eye, a polished boot; and in that way it is enfolded, in the look in his eyes, and we tear off each other’s clothing, the three of us there, inside the storm, a morning dawned upon an island from which we must depart on different ferries; no time to say goodbye, an uncertainty as to where we stand, now, and to what it means; a disenchantment, a sudden degeneration of substance, a feeling of having staked everything on a horse, only for it then to abandon the race, a sense of the entire world being a trick, everything fixed in advance. And in that same gaze I put a phone back into my pocket in the parking area outside the former slaughterhouses of Vesterbro, telling myself out loud that it’s best that way, to give him time, knowing full well that there is no time, that time is past; the beginning and ending of everything in one insane displacement, a cloudburst, the rip of an awning, its sudden deluge. This is how it is again, this is how it is that morning in the rehearsal space: some flowers whose stems you cut and place in water; the same stems are dry and withered as you break them in the middle, stuff them into an empty milk carton you then drop into the bin under the sink; something you hope for, and something you regret, a single displacement, a continuing drift toward the center. A core, that nevertheless can never be found; a reverse explosion of life, a reverse explosion of death.
He puts out his hand and introduces himself by name. I do likewise, only to realize that instead of telling him my own name I have repeated his.
His girlfriend walks up the stairs to the stage, where I am placed on a tall stool in front of a microphone. There is something wrong with the sound, a squeal of feedback as she steps up. She hesitates, tiptoes almost, ducks her head slightly between her shoulders, an apology. She comes toward me and I point the microphone away. Hi, she says, extending her hand and introducing herself. Her hand is cold, but mine is colder. Are you a singer, she asks. I shake my head. No, I say.
I smile. She smiles back. She is so warm and friendly, she takes my hand and clasps it tight. As if we’re going to have a life together. Only we’re no
t, I think to myself; perhaps we’re going to share one. Half for you and half for me; not a whole life for either of us, not a whole man.
When they leave, he carefully closes the door behind them. I can’t help but smile, for there’s something involuntarily symbolic about the world at that moment: him closing the door so carefully—as if you can close a door.
The body remembers.
A dead man, who will never again be alive for you, but who will continue to breathe his breath into your face without end. And all your kisses will taste of something that was.
He walks at your side, the dead one, sheet-white skin, sheet-white eyes, sheet-white orbs, apples, dangling like droplets. And snow. It is the mind that forgives; the body does not. The body bears its grudges, a maudlin procession of things past, a mourning in the streets. Marrow and bone.
YOU’RE SO YOUNG. Is what she sees the new man thinking. About her, her being so young. Later, he tells her this, though by then it is a repeat, for she has already heard him think the words. They are in her apartment: you’re so young.
She studies him. Sighs and then tells him what she feels to be the truth: that she doesn’t think it’s important. That she has tried to think it is, but simply can’t.
He nods, the same serious expression as hers, accepting the gesture of her nod, as if it were a plate being passed around for the second time, an unconscious plate.
One of Us Is Sleeping Page 10