by Calvin Baker
“It was a fine dinner,” I said, trying to take the edge off, and wondering how much I was included in her criticism.
“No, I enjoyed it. Yes, very much.” She would not be appeased. “What is not to enjoy? It was like the ancien régime.”
“That bad?”
“Please do not make me go with them again. We do not have to, do we? No, of course not.”
I agreed, but as we exited the subway back to my apartment, she stopped in the middle of the street. “Amour, promise me we will never be with the Philistines.”
“Okay, but don’t be a snob.”
“Not a snob. The values I wish to live,” she turned intently. “To live, you must be like a simple person with no pretense, or else like a genius, who does not care about convention. Nothing in between. If that makes me a snob, I’m a snob. Not about the things that come from money, but how I live. Democracy is for how to act with other people. For ourselves, and whom we love, everything we do must have a meaning. Only Philistines confuse little pleasure and real joy.”
“You mean Americans, don’t you?” I asked defensively.
“Not because they are Americans, because they are materialists.”
“Well, there was land, then power, and now we care about all the simple pleasures we did not have before. Eventually we will get it right.”
“Just promise me we will not be with the Philistines.”
“They are just people fumbling through life, like all of us.”
“They are Philistines. I do not care. We will not be like that, but like civilized people, who know the difference between the stomach, the mind, and the heart. We will live the right way.”
“What does that mean to you?” I asked.
“Like a poet.”
I nodded as we came to my building, wondering whether I, or anyone, could live up to her way of seeing.
8
She was a fine, beautiful girl. Spirited, open. Full of love for me. I decided to spend the rest of the summer in Paris. She was there, and Davidson was there. And that was work and that was love and that was most of life.
Genevieve’s apartment was tiny, so I rented a hotel room near Canal St. Martin to use as an office, but stayed most of the time in her little flat on the hill in Montmartre. The walls were hung with her work and the rooms suffused with her energy, making the close quarters intimate and restful as a sanctum.
She worked at her studio in the morning, before going to the office where she did temp work. I spent afternoons in my room on the canal, or else worked in cafés, until we met again each evening. It was as she said it would be, I was a free man, and happy as I had not been in as long as I remembered. I felt cared for and I felt free.
“We are on a ship, my love,” she declared one morning, opening the windows as high as they would go, onto a narrow widow’s walk. “You see, the antennae of the buildings are masts, and we were sailing on a great journey in our red boat.” she swept her arms out to the imaginary sea. “Where shall we go?”
“I’ve never been to Tahiti,” I suggested.
“That is a great plan. We can see what inspired Gauguin, and if it inspires us still we can stay. I am a citizen, you know. But in order for you to stay, of course, you may have to marry me.”
“Maybe I can get a work visa.”
“That will be impossible. You are American, the great imperialist. The only way will be to get married.”
We were goofing around, but the sound of the words pleased me. I remembered her admonishment from before, though, refusing to be too light with what we had. “We should not joke about the things that have meaning for us,” I said, turning the words back at her.
“You are awful,” she yelled over the rooftops. “Here I thought you were so sweet, like a sad puppy I would pick up and take home, and—what is the word?—redeem. Yes. I would redeem you, and then you would be full of life again, and not anxious or afraid, and be my wonderful little pet.”
“In your little cage.”
“Mon Dieu, non. Mon amour, a cage large as the world. Large as love. Strong as gravity. But mine, yes, all mine. Now it is too late.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because you second-guessed your heart again. You say you want to be together, but you think there are rules for how to do everything. But there are not, only what we make. You were supposed to say, ‘Yes. Let’s elope to Tahiti.’ Then we would be married. You were not supposed to say, ‘Why?’ The prince never asks the princess why? He knows why. She knows why. Little babies in their cribs know why. Everyone knows this when they are born, but they forget. You are supposed to remember that, not analyze it and be impossible. Your line should have been, ‘Genevieve, my true love, I am your knight at your service. I have my armor and my sword but I am lost without you, my grail, my purpose.’ Or else, she feigned swooning, ‘Let us gather up the threads of our affection and braid a rope to raise a sail on our little ship, to journey wherever we wish.’”
“Okay,” I said. “I am your knight.”
“Why are you my knight? See how it all goes away? Now, tell me again what you think of Tahiti?”
“I think we should go,” I said.
“To do what?”
“Become citizens?”
“I already am a citizen.”
“Then I suppose I will have to marry you.”
“No. That is entirely insufficient. Don’t you know anything? I thought you were my man.” She laughed.
“Okay,” I said, infected by the idea of doing something spontaneous, “why don’t we take a short trip this weekend?”
“A short trip? No one knows how long a voyage will be when it begins, only how far away the place is you are going.”
Our playing around turned into plans to spend a few days in Spain. I liked the spontaneity, but it was a spontaneity with which she approached everything, and found it liberating to give in to it.
“I am so happy,” she said, giving me a hug. “It will be wonderful. You will see. And, just so you are aware, we do not ever have to get married. It is old-fashioned, unless, one day it comes from inside you, when you have no doubt of your heart and future, and everything else belongs to your past.”
9
We spent two splendid days in Madrid, where all our meals were communal, the wine abundant, and the street music came from a time before their Civil War, when the people had killed each other, which they tried to forget and hear as songs of forgiveness, putting aside what they knew of history. When the heat from the meseta descended on the city, we took the train north to the emerald coast and periwinkle ocean for respite. The little towns of Galicia were inspirited by pilgrims on the Camino; the food was simple, and the wine tasted of sea grapes and loss. We drank our share, knowing we would overstay our tickets.
When the weather turned gray we fled to find the sun again in San Sebastián. There the locals were clever, leaving the crowded streets to tourists, to enjoy their own vacations by the shore. The wine was fresh and evanescent as we danced with the country folk and ate their offering, which was the best we could hope for.
In old Castile the people were taciturn, starchy as their food. The kind of realists who scoff at Quixotes, so we were out of there by the end of the afternoon.
In Barcelona the locals were self-protective and hard to fathom, but the art and architecture were fanciful, rich, and rebellious, telling us everything the people did not say. Seville was where the Arab gardens were cool, as the musicians played flamenco cautiously, for Catholic ears.
In Granada they fried everything unrepentantly, washing it down with wines sweet as revenge like Phoenician princesses.
On that island we visited last, every female creature except her was pregnant, and before we left the ewes gave birth; the mares in the ramshackle barn, the nannies in the fields, and in the distance, the she-wolves. Only a new bride in white, sitting on the sea wall every day, like a Cappadocian vase, mending her husband’s nets, had yet to complete her labors. After evening ti
de her imperiled husband returned from the wine-dark sea in the tiny boat he had named the Argo, or was it Arco? The letters were faded. Fat little goddess, you called her. If only we had been as full. At night, climbing along the volcano, the ocean below shone like obsidian and the stars fused above us. We fought over what we always fought over. Fire from you calling to the fire in me, until the heat of our passion flagged, and we knew what the ancients did when they reached the end of primitive reckoning. Zero, nothing, was unfathomable. The same way we counted on increase. Believed ourselves indivisible.
What things we fought about seemed so minor that I thought of our relationship as faultless, and by the time we returned to Paris any doubts I may have had before had been banished from my mind. But as we dined in the open air the evening we returned, I realized how much I still did not know about her when we saw her family at a nearby table, and she called nervously for the check.
“Don’t you want to greet them?” I asked. “Or are you worried about introducing me?”
“No, I am not,” she said. “Let’s just go before they see us.”
She was adopted, and I knew she was not especially close to her parents, but the reasons she’d given were only the benign differences everyone has with their family. When the waiter next came to the table, though, he told us our bill had already been settled.
“We should at least thank them,” I said.
“Fine. We will just say hello, and leave.”
We gathered our belongings, and went over to their table, where her parents insisted we join them for coffee. They looked like a model family, genial and healthy, but as we sat with them I sensed a deep underlying tension.
Her two younger sisters talked excitedly about their summers. The youngest was just returned from camp and in the throes of her first crush. The middle sister was in her last year of college, weighing the future.
The mother was a cultured, attractive woman, poised in a manner that comes only with age, but clearly unhappy. The father did not seem to notice his wife’s unhappiness, or else did not wish to acknowledge it, though he made all the gestures of a caring spouse, in the old-fashioned way.
Despite the surface of achievement and mirth, as I sat there I kept sensing their deeper unhappiness—the crease of suffering in the mother’s brow, the overburdened slope of the father’s shoulders as he drained his glass, the nervous, fleeting joviality among the girls, as though performing their happiness for the world and themselves—until I was struck at length by the silent realization the father was having an affair, and not a passing one. Perhaps a whole other family. The effort of maintaining their masks of happiness in the face of their inner compromises strained them nearly to breaking.
Genevieve was eager to leave, and as we finally walked home I sensed her relief to be free of them.
“So what did you think?” she asked.
“They seem like fortunate people,” I lied.
“Don’t be blind. It is not as happy as it looks,” she shrugged. “It is only a pretense. My mother gave too much. My father controls them all with money.”
“They are from a different age.”
“She gave too much. She should have left long ago. Now it is too late. She will die miserable, and for what?”
“Maybe she thought she was making a sacrifice for her family.”
“Perhaps,” she said. “And perhaps it is only a lie we tell to make sense of another lie, in order to make a two-faced life seem less cruel.”
It was then I began to understand how little I knew.
10
When I went to meet Davidson that Monday I was anxious again about work, and found things had only taken a downward turn. He looked as though he had not slept for days, and he was pressing me for a rewrite of the draft I had shown him. It was beginning to seem like the project would never be done, even if the rewrite would trigger clauses Westhaven, my lawyer, had written into the contract, that improved my terms.
“Forget Paris. Let’s move the action to New York,” Davidson argued when we met. “A famous young director is burned out, and flees to Europe, only to find it a cultural museum. Comfortable, because he has money, but creatively exhausted. What he wants is not there, and perhaps no longer exists in the world. He returns to New York deflated, and decides to make one last movie, then find a new form. It is about a guy from the projects, who has killed a cop in Georgia by mistake. He hightails it home, haunted by the murder, trying and failing to escape his own conscience. One night he meets a beautiful girl in a nightclub and falls truly madly deeply for her. She is his emotional equal and mate, but social opposite: a wealthy liberal, who works for a leftist newspaper. The affair plays out as the cops close in.”
“Scene two, I will agree to do another revision,” I said, “because it is in the contract, but, scene one, you have to explain to me why the director wants to make this particular movie, instead of the one we already wrote, or the one before that.”
“Because this one is true.”
“How? What’s the mirror to life in this version?”
“What mirror?”
“The one that suggests to us, at each point, another possible reality, and, in that slippery depth, challenges what we think we know about ourselves and the world.”
“There isn’t one,” he said. “It is not about making meaning. It is about when there is no meaning, and just trying to hear and follow what comes from the gut so you can find meaning again. It’s finding a way forward, when we lose ourselves or get divorced from the meaning in our lives.”
“But the way forward has a meaning too,” I argued.
“Why? Isn’t forward meaning enough?” He tapped his finger impatiently. “Forward because you cannot go back.”
“You’re using a postmodern device, so you have to consider its implications whether you want to or not.”
“What does that mean? Besides theories I buried in the desert.”
“Nothing, I suppose. But what if we do it in four panels? He’s rich, she’s poor, the country is poor. He’s rich, she’s poor, the country is rich. He’s poor, she’s rich, the country is rich, and so on. Color as you will. It tells on how local conditions influence character, possibility, choice. The aspects of ourselves visible in different circumstances. What is truly the gut, and what is from outside, and the different narratives available for us to follow to make sense of it.”
“That sounds like theory. Do you think it will make a good picture?”
“It will make good art, which is what you really want.”
“Just as long as we stay away from modernity. There’s no purpose to it anymore, and I am not interested in anything I went to the Sahara to forget, or the Gobi to unlearn, or Sonora to burn and bury in the sand.”
I shook my head. “They did not have the kind I am talking about then. It is why you had to go to the desert.”
“Okay,” he nodded slowly. “Let’s make it like that, then.”
“Four stories to square the ocean.”
“Four dimensions. Four Gospels.”
“In the book,” I replied.
“What do you mean, in the book?”
“There are four Gospels in the book. In them Christ points to the Father. In the other gospels Christ points to the self. Christ goes back to you.”
“Why did they leave them out of the book, then?”
“The fathers did not like it.”
“Let’s just stick to four.”
“Fine, but you still have not told me why you want to move the action to New York?”
“Simple.” He held open his hands. “I want to go home.”
I returned to my hotel, where I spent the rest of the day in the cool darkness of the shadows cast from the courtyard, trying to work. But I could only think about our conversation and the differences between living and creation it had brought to mind. I decided to break for the next day, and removed a copy of a novel from a pile of books on my desk, then went to the balcony to read awhile. The book tur
ned out to be about a white South African professor who loses his job for taking advantage of one of his black students, then retreats to live with his daughter in the country, where they are viciously attacked in a robbery. As I registered its cold struggle, with violence and postmodernity, I could only think how much the question of redemption for its unsympathetic narrator was the same as that faced by the liberal readers it was meant for, who always believed that by extending compassion to such a character they were demonstrating their humanism rather than the moral vanity of people who have an easier time extending sympathy to those like them, no matter how flawed, than they do giving empathy to those who are not like them in life, whose inner worlds they cannot imagine at all. He is exactly like them. It is only his transgressions are easier to see and condemn. Beyond that there is a false equation of heartless violence perpetuated by and against individuals—placing the narrator’s disenfranchisement on the same plane as the African masses—with the systemic violence of the state.
As much as I enjoyed the philosophical inquisition of identity and violence, when all was said and done its concerns were still white and male. Even if they were about unlearning white male constructs, its imagination ended an inch above the author’s skin. The question of his salvation was valid, of course, but he was only able to reconcile himself to the country on Western liberal terms, making the ending a false redemption, because it was the same as the answer to all problems liberals face; not reconciliation to the difficulty of life, but release from its muddy depths.
As brutality layered on brutality, and the characters found solace within the constructs of the book’s underlying theories, offering their benevolent forgiveness to each other, it became clear why one would not wish to look outside its theoretical framework into the sucking mud of the world. Because reconciliation and redemption there was too bleak to ponder; would take five hundred years.