Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy

by Joshua Corey

  I turned heavily on my heel and climbed back into the hospital. Sat down exhausted in the row of plastic chairs outside the door through which Charles had disappeared.

  I am a lover of one thing, Charles. Like you I have no name for that thing, only aliases. For a long time it was art, a great imposing house at the door of which I camped out, waiting, almost glad when les événements came to carry me away. Then, for a little while, it was you. A man I should have hated for having everything, being everything, that I was not: money, looks, a golden tongue, above all that ease of movement, gesture, insolence. Instead I loved you, and in your own way you requited that love. For an even littler while, I loved what you professed to love: the revolution. Not because I wanted the servant to at last be the master, but only because I was an outcast, invisible, neither student nor worker, not even a peasant any more, young in a way you’ve never been, without the beauty of youth. I didn’t love your cause, only your face, its pride and haughtiness, its cruel humor. So beautiful all the faces, all the young men and women, the faces I tried to capture in my sketchbook, many faces united in single transcendent moods of outrage, euphoria, attentiveness, like so many dogs listening to the same inhuman frequency. Faces to stand behind, faces in the grips of bodies, thousands of faces floating down boulevards toward perfect destruction and loss. Even now past the end I see those faces facing the faceless—the cops and their sticks, their gas, their guns. Have you seen these men, have you seen a man like your horseman with his helmet off? I have. He is neither young nor old. A kind of savage humor in the set of his jaw, the line of his mouth. No eyes, even without the visor, without sunglasses. If he ever had eyes he lost them in Algeria or Indochina. He fought there and committed atrocities so you, Charles, could grow your own beautiful face, like a sunflower in a jar, all of you, thousands of sunflowers, until the time came to harvest them, to reap youth, to ensure that future in which nothing happens. A sunflower like Van Gogh’s, vivid with madness and joy, most alive the moment it’s torn from its roots.

  But Charles, there was another face, another flower, with invisible roots, arcing downward forever out of sight, inscrutable in perpetual half-light, a face neither old or new, the face of M. She puzzled you, challenged you. She gave you what the others had, but contemptuously, and she let you feel her contempt. She showed you nothing of herself that you didn’t have to invent for her. On my canvas that you have not seen and never will see. Her pain makes her beautiful: in that we are guilty of the same crime, seeing that or not seeing it. It sets her apart from the world, a foreigner wherever she may be. In America too I’d wager.

  A bright morning. Summer was beginning to pierce the heavy damp cloak of the long spring. The light was paralyzing, falling directly on my face from the window opposite where the still swathed form of Charles lay. And it took another moment to recognize whom the regal woman of more than middle height with her ash blonde hair in a chignon must be, standing next to a lean greyhound of a man in sunglasses and a gray mustache, both of them looking in from the doorway with fixed expressions of horror. Directed at me, I somehow felt, and not at the wreck that had been their son—for their son he surely was—in the bed there. I tried to stand, but a surge of nausea bent me double, and I sat down again.

  They were in the room. It was narrow; they had to stand in front of me where I sat in the green plush chair to look at their son, so that I saw only the backs of their coats. They stood close together and yet not touching, haloed by the glare of the sun from the window behind them. I managed with difficulty now to stand, and with greater difficulty to edge past them toward the doorway, almost believing they hadn’t seen me, that I might get away. But I felt a hand grip my arm.

  What happened to my son? the woman demanded.

  All I could see in her face—the blue eyes, the refined cheekbones, the fullness of her upper lip—was Charles. I opened my mouth and closed it.

  They say you brought him in, she said. I should call the police.

  It was the police that did this to him, I said.

  She creased her brow and removed her hand from my sleeve. It was as though I spoke in another tongue. Her husband did not change position, but I saw his hands gripping the bar on Charles’s bed, the knuckles flexing pink, then white; pink, then white. I could not take my eyes off of them.

  How could you say such a thing? How could this have happened to my boy? My beautiful boy?

  Standing at the foot of the bed I saw Charles’s face inside its margin of white bandages. It looked small and impossibly pale, severe as the carved stone face saint. And that other face, face of a mother, identical to his but for the touch of lipstick and blusher, the plucked eyebrows, the blue eyes holding my gaze for a moment longer. Then her eyes closing, slowly. Turning her face away. Leaning now into the body of her husband, both gazing mutely, crossed shadow of the window falling on them, on the antiseptic bed, barring what would not ignite in whiteness. The cross.

  Flight, then. Into the slumbering submarine streets of Paris after the revolution, the crested tide of youth, irrefutably itself, and me what I had been at the beginning, once again. A stranger.

  Charles was in hospital for six weeks, as long as the Events themselves had lasted. Longer. A lot happened, nothing happened. L’Ecole des Beaux-Arts had been the last stronghold to fall, but fall it had and classes had resumed. I attended a few times to see what it felt like, then stopped because it didn’t feel like anything. The young people no longer moved in invincible masses; they stood around in little clusters of three or four, talking softly or not talking, shoulders hunched, sheltering cigarettes, filing into and out of exam rooms. Men in green uniforms made the mountains of trash disappear, brought in saplings from the country to replace the uprooted trees. Work crews were everywhere putting fresh impenetrable layers of asphalt on top of the remaining paving-stones. Some graffiti was left; already these bits of brick and granite had become tourist attractions, flocked to by groups of Austrians and Italians with cameras clicking, while a self-appointed docent, subsidized by the state for all I knew, stood underneath a furled umbrella and blared the facts about the revolution that wasn’t, that hadn’t. The summer vacation was on; the city began, again, to empty. The concierge told me one afternoon as I came in from a rain shower that Charles’s share of the rent payment had not been forthcoming, and I would have to come up with the extra francs or vacate the premises by the end of July. I went upstairs, dripping, and lay down in my wet clothes on the floor. Someone had come for Charles’s things while I was out; his clothes were gone, the record turntable, the set of gold pens he’d received as the winner of a prize at lycee he’d somehow never gotten around to pawning. Of M and myself there was only my old trunk, the electric tea kettle, my paintings and sketches, and a small red suitcase which I opened and rummaged through without compunction. On top of a small collection of blouses and underthings was a stack of letters, postmarked Queens, New York, rubber-banded in a stack and unopened. I hefted them, flipped through them like the pages of a book; collectively they represented about a year and a half of steady correspondence, a letter every month or so. I held one up to the light. I sniffed it: clean paper, slight stink of ink from a ballpoint. The handwriting appeared masculine. Another lover? A teacher? Her father? I knew little of American geography but the American ambassador-at-large did not, I thought, live in Queens. She had been gone for almost a month. I heated up water in the kettle, got up a head of steam; it didn’t whistle any more, no one could possibly detect my violation, or the barefaced need that led me to it. I held the most recent of the envelopes over the steam, not caring if it singed my fingers a little. The envelope’s dampened flap curled upward like a lip. I sat by the window and slid the single sheet of blue paper into my palm. But I couldn’t read it. It was in a strange language, profligate with accents. Finnish? Hungarian? A language that I’d never seen, or heard, or suspected that M might speak. Perhaps she didn’t speak it. Perhaps the letters were unopened. It was signed az Apád. I sta
red at the meaningless clots of syllables for a while, then carefully replaced the folded letter in its envelope and resealed the flap. It rejoined its brothers in the suitcase full of similarly mute objects. There was one more item aside from clothing: a small leatherbound diary, with a rawhide strap winding it shut. I opened it. All the pages were blank.

  One afternoon not long after that I climbed upstairs with a few groceries and discovered a padlock on the door to the flat, my trunk and M’s suitcase standing at attention on the mat. My sketches were in the trunk, the painting of M was not. I called the concierge, got no answer that was clearer than the lock on the door: something had ended, it was time to move on. But I couldn’t move on. An acquaintance from the art school took me in temporarily while I tried to get my bearings. I was no longer a student. I no longer sketched or painted. M and my picture of M, both gone. My mornings were given over to reading detective novels—my friend had long shelves full of them, in French and English—and my afternoons to wandering along the Seine or the Luxembourg Gardens. I ate comparatively little and my big belly began to hollow itself out. If I caught sight of myself in the mirror, I saw only the skull beneath the skin. I went by the old building with some money I’d borrowed and the concierge let me into the still vacant flat. The walls smelled of fresh paint. There was no sign of the picture of M, she hadn’t seen it, had no idea what had happened to it, some blacks cleaned the place out, she shrugged, maybe they took it. I looked in the trash bins but too many days had passed. I heard Simone was back in town and sought her out, to see if M had been in contact with her. She had a part-time job in a handbag shop in the Marais; I found her standing in its doorway smoking a cigarette, half an hour before closing time. Simone’s beauty had become more angular, an effect enhanced by what she’d done to her long hair: she’d chopped it all off into a sort of bob, poised disconcertingly between Louise Brooks and Joan of Arc. I look like a collaborator, she said laughingly, offering me one of her cigarettes. We smoked together. An older woman in a short-waisted black frock watched us from inside with her arms folded.

  Don’t look at that bitch, Simone said. She thinks she owns the street.

  Is she a customer?

  Simone blew smoke. She’s my boss.

  Have you seen Charles? I said after a while.

  She shrugged, shook her head. Is he recovering?

  I don’t know. I suppose so.

  What about M?

  I was hoping you’d seen her, actually.

  Simone shrugged again. No. I have some mail for her, though.

  Letters? From New York?

  How would you know that? Simone said suspiciously.

  It’s just a guess. That’s where she says she’s from.

  I wish I were from there, Simone said fervently. I wish I were from anywhere else. I wish I weren’t stuck in this shithole. The spiraling gesture she made with her cigarette encompassed the shop, the street, all of France. You know, he really believed that a new age was dawning, Charles did. This wasn’t what was supposed to happen. There ought to be a revolutionary committee right now, with Charles on it, running the show. Rich little cunts like her (flashing her sweetest smile) pushed up against the wall and shot like the counter-revolutionary pigs they are. Now, I’m selling fake alligator bags to women just like her. And when fall comes again I’ll go back to school and meet some guy like the kind of guy I knew before I met Charles. He’ll want to take care of me. And I’ll let him. The fucker. The poor fucking bastard.

  I don’t understand anything, I said, crushing out my smoke.

  That’s why I always liked you, Gus, Simone said, looking up at me through her bangs. You know what you don’t know, unlike the rest of them. And you’re gentle, and sweet. Did you ever show M that giant dick of yours?

  If you see her, I said, starting to walk away, tell her.

  Tell her what?

  Just tell her, that’s all. Good luck, Simone.

  She didn’t say anything until I was almost half a block away. Then I heard her shouting Bonne chance! ironically at my back. I waved without turning around.

  It all happened like she said. She met a guy whose father owned a car dealership in Rouen, and dropped out of school and married him and moved there. They had three kids. Dropped into the stream of life that flows steadily and without interruption. No happier or unhappier, I’m sure, than anybody else. It makes me feel cold inside to think of it. As for me, I kept on living in the aftermath of an inchoate hope. A hope that had taken an improbable twinned form: the beautiful young people in the streets, the beautiful face of my American. A desire that persisted in the wake of that hope, a spiritual hangover. For one wide horizon-to-horizon moment I had kept company with beauty. I could never be beautiful myself, I knew that. Nor could I expect the beautiful, the chosen ones, to love me. It would have been better to hate them, and I did hate them. But I also loved: je les aimais. I adored, je les adorais. All the intimacy of the tu folded up in that anonymous plural: me and the students, me and M, our fellow Americans. That plural preserves the proper distance from the I: I the freakishly large, I the uncouth, I the dirty-minded peasant boy, I the secret German, son of Vichy, son of Pétain, the reluctantly claimed son of a village lawyer who could barely meet my eye when he was alive.

  It was time to go home; or rather, since there was no home to go to, just as there was no glimmering future, then it was time to go on with some sort of decision about who and what I was. If not an artist then an illustrator; if not an illustrator then a painter of walls and houses and signs. This is how I brought in the little money I needed to keep overlarge body and attenuated soul together: in white coveralls, on ladders, in genteel apartments, applying layer upon layer of the subtle and inoffensive colors of the bourgeoisie: off white, pale lemon, cream blue, watered rose. My comrade and employer was Yusuf, born in Tunis, raised in Marseilles, a small and wiry man with a black widow’s peak shot with an arresting streak of gray, a prominent nose hanging out over his perpetual, somehow shaggy grin, into which an American cigarette was often fixed. Mutt and Jeff, Stan and Ollie, we toured the better neighborhoods in his little Renault van, stopping always with the concierges and managers who were our true employers so that Yusuf could slip them a couple of cartons of cigarettes and a bottle of Hennessy, the price of doing business he explained to me. We rarely saw or interacted with the high hausfraus whose domestic interiors we freshened; when we did, swarthy Yusuf who was always quick with a filthy joke on the ground floor suddenly became shy and nudged me forward to doff my cap and speak, pulling unexpected rank as native Frenchman, as le Blanc. The White.

  Make sure your man there doesn’t touch anything he doesn’t need to, I was told on more than one occasion by well-kept women holding their purses tightly against their sides, in their own homes. And I, playing my part, would reply Certainly, Madame. You have no occasion for worry, I assure you; he’s been my faithful employee for years. Eventually I ceased to wonder at how these women could possibly take me for the employer and superior of a man twice my age. But I’m proud even now to say that my use to Yusuf extended beyond these necessary deceptions, for though a deft enough hand with a brush he would always call upon me to execute tricky scrollwork or to follow a line of molding where it met expensive antique wallpaper. I would lie almost prone on the dropcloth like Michelangelo, applying quick sure strokes of the brush, never spilling a drop, while Yusuf took one of his frequent cigarette breaks, talking incessantly of the perfidy of his wife, referring to her always with pride as a native Frenchwoman, une vraie femme and like all of them a spendthrift, whore, and liar. His imagination had been fully stocked by the Swedish blue movies he screened in his spare hours with a crowd of other painters, mechanics, and cabbies from his homeland, many of them his cousins, in a nameless sort of social club in the shadows of the housing projects of Belleville. Even now, he said, gesturing expansively, she’s no doubt greeting some salesman at the door in her dressing gown, nothing underneath, while my son’s at school and I�
�m out here breaking my back so that she can wear those fancy perfumes she likes. It’s a scandal, I tell you. It would serve her right if I got one of these hoity bitches alone for once like the one who lives here. Did you see the ass on her?