Just a week before I got locked out of the apartment on rue du Temple, I saw something I still don’t understand. Without understanding, it has become the reason I can forgive Alain. It happened so early in the morning, it was still dark. I awakened to sounds from the kitchen—Alain’s night voice, plus frying butter. I got up and went down the hall. Alain was at the stove, his back to me. At the table was the man I had seen licking the floor at the sadomasochist club. He was sitting in my place. He was naked except for Alain’s coat, which was draped over him. Under the coat, he was like a skeleton with hair and dirt on it I could see the bottoms of his filthy feet and the rims of his toenails, thick and yellow as a dog’s. I stood at the door, invisible and dumb. He stared at me like he was staring into pitch-darkness. Alain turned from the stove; he held a plate with an omelette on it. He had made it with jam. He put the sweet plate gently before the skeleton. “There,” he said tenderly. “For you!” He pulled a chair out from the table and sat in it. “Go on!” he said. Alone in the dark, the creature ate, quickly and devouringly. Watching him eat was almost like watching him crawl, even though you didn’t have to see his balls or his ass. Like the German woman, he ate as if he could not taste. Lack of taste had made her indifferent to eating. It made him ravenous. It made him crawl on his hands and knees through the no taste, trying to find taste. Alain put his elbow on the table and leaned toward him, enrapt. He didn’t see or care when I turned and walked away.
Later, I called Jean-Paul to tell him what I had seen. He would know who the skeleton man was, I thought, and he might know why Alain would take him home and put him in my chair. There was so much music and laughter on his end of the line that it took a while for him to understand me.
“Ah,” he said finally. “It is hard to believe, but this man was once a very successful agent.”
“A modeling agent?”
“A long time ago, yes. I’ve heard that he was a friend of plain's father. But don’t tell him I said so, okay?”
This incident was so peculiar to me that I didn’t tell anyone about it for a long time. Veronica was the first person I told. We were working late in a conference room, wrapped in a membrane of office noise, the clicking and whirring of machines soothing and uniting like the rumbling bus.
“I understand now why you loved him,” she said.
“You doln
“Yes. He was willing to go places most people won’t go. He was looking at himself, you know. Most people won’t do that”
She was a fool to talk that way—“you know.” Like she could know anything about Alain or where most people would go. One side of her Ups curved up in a repulsive know-it-all style, sensual and tight. But her eyes were gende and calm. I knew how trite and smug she was being, and I felt superior to it. But I didn’t know the gentieness of her eyes. They were like windows in a prison cell—you look out and the sky comforts you without your knowing why. Unknowing, I took comfort and went back to feeling superior. Maybe I was able to feel the comfort because I half-despised it. I don’t know. But it helped me to forgive Alain.
When I saw Jean-Paul next, I tried to ask him more about Alain’s father. We were at a party, some kind of function. It was dark and crowded. Big plates of food soaked up the smoke in the air. Jean-Paul frowned and blearily leaned into me, trying to hear. The beauty of his eyes was marred by deep stupor. Rum-
soaked spongy crumbs fell down his rumpled shirtfront. One hand drunkenly cleaned the shirt; the other loaded the wet mouth with more tumbling crumbs. An ass paraded by in orange silk. Half the crumbs went down the shirt. He did not know who I meant. His tongue came out and licked. “Alain’s father,” I repeated. “How did he know that man who crawls on the floor of that place?” Recognition lit his stupor and made it flash like a sign. “You believed that?” he cried. “Ha ha ha ha ha!” He threw his head back into the darkness of the room, rubbed with the red and purple of muddled sex and appetite, drunken faces smeared into it and grinning out of it. His handsome face was a wreck before my eyes. The smell of wreckage came out of his open jacket as he leaned over to cram more food in his mouth. Ha ha ha! Tiny humans lost in tiny human hell, with all hell’s rich flavors.
We ride past precious stores for rich people. The Rites of Passage bookshop. A Touch of Flair. A French-style pastry shop painted gold and red, the window heaped with cakes. The bus flies over the cakes in a blur of windowpane light.
If I do see Rene’s rose-colored lamp beside my deathbed, it will be beautiful to me. I will want to touch and linger on every thread of its carefully woven fabric, especially the bits of gold that you half-see when you lean up close to shut off the light and then forget. I will cry to think I ever forgot. I will cry to lose it. It will be the same if Jean-Paul appears before my bed in a dark nimbus of smells and party music. His oafish ridicule will be sweet, like wine. Because I won’t taste it again. I’ll wish I could hold his bloated, blinking face in both my hands and kiss it good-bye. I’ll want to take back the curse I muttered as I turned away. Or maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll miss that, too.
The bus stops at the light. Sun shines lovingly through the cloud cover and warms us through the dirty windowpanes. The bus hums in the light. We are all quiet in the warmth and the sound of the humming motor. I look outside and see a little budding tree, its slim black body shining with rain. Joyous and intelligent, like a fresh girl, the earth all new to its slender, seeking roots. I think of Trisha, erect and seeking with sparkling eyes. A fleshy nimble tree, laughing as it discovers the dirt. Stretching up its limbs to tell the sky what it’s found.
This moment could come to me on my deathbed, too. If it does, I will love it so much that I will take it into death with me. Perhaps if I try, it will dissolve in my arms. But I will try.
The light changes. The bus chugs forward. Veronica’s face floats in the window for an instant before blending with mine. She was right: Alain did go where most people wouldn’t, though not because he willed it. He couldn’t help it. The storm of movement was in him all the time. He lived in pieces, jumping from one falling meteor to the next, and going wherever it went. Of course, everybody has different directions in them. I saw three in my mother when Daphne and I met her in the family diner, and she had more than that. But she was not quick or flexible enough to jump from one to another. Even just to feel three at once made her awkward and confused. She didn’t have the strength to hold that much opposition in one place. That’s why she went back to my father. She still had all her different directions. She just chose to ignore most of them. She came back and became Mod again, mom with a hard d and a nasal o.
But sometimes the other directions took shape and ran against one another, filling the house with invisible war. At night, I sometimes started up with my heart pounding, scared not by a dream but by an image flying loose from thought, big and loud as a freight train: my parents in their room upstairs, their faces distorted with hate, screaming curses and lunging at each other with knives.
I yank the rope, signal the driver that it’s my stop. His head is a human pellet against the wide gray windshield. Directions:
Mottled light and shadow go down; droning wipers go side to side; driver’s head goes up.
Alain had the strength and the flexibility; that was his misfortune. I saw him with his daughter once on a windy street. I knelt to meet her; he knelt, too. He pressed her cheek to his and introduced her as “Tiny Duck.” He didn’t introduce me to her. She didn’t mind. She laughed and put her hand on his head and said “Goose” in English. He laughed, and I saw his eyes were the same as they were with me. He could not stop, even for her. He could not stop even to be sad about it. Speaking English back to her, he said “Duck” in a mock-British accent and put his hand on her head. “Duck”; he put his hand on my head. “Goose,” and she put her hand on him. She didn’t look at me. She must’ve met a lot of girls named Duck.
We stop at the curb; the door suctions open. A mist of rain and traffic noise floats in and breaks apart. People stir
and cough. I come down the aisle of heads. Duck, duck. The driver acknowledges me with the hard side of his silent head. Goose. His human hand squeezes and pulls; his crabbed wing of a door folds closed. The bus drives off with a loud swoosh, a gray rainbow of sound that twinkles and evaporates. In the distance, Alain and my mother sparkle and evaporate.
I turn off the main street and go down a wide road into a grove of giant redwood trees. It is a canyon at the foot of a mountain. It is a dignity preserve for rich people. Homes are set way back from the street or nested up on high hills with wooden stairways winding up their sides. Invisible children yell and run down an invisible path. The sun flashes in an attic window. The wet pavement is lush as a stone sponge. Giant trees grow up out of it and buckle it with their knotted muscley roots. Their bark is porous, like breathing skin. Through their skin you feel the beat of their huge hearts from deep in the ground. People drive slowly and weave around them, passing one at a time. I picture the lady I saw in the car with the bracelets driving through the trees, her mind fluttering against the glass.
When I first moved here, I lived in this town. I didn’t live in the canyon, but I’d come to walk in it. I’d come especially when I felt afraid, knowing I had hepatitis but not feeling sick yet. I’d look at the big trees and the mountain and I’d think that no matter how big any human sickness might be, they were bigger. Now I’m not so sure. How much sickness can even a huge heart take before it gets sick itself? The canyon is full of dead and dying oaks. Scientists don’t know why. It’s hard to believe we didn’t kill them.
The wind rises. The rain dashes sideways. Slowly, the trees throw their great hair. Their trunks creak and mull. My fever makes a wall in my brain. A door appears in the wall. It opens and another dream comes out. Is it from last night, or the night before, or every night? In it, a man and woman are on a high-speed train that never stops. Music is playing, a mechanical xylophone rippling manically up a high four-note scale again and again. Bing bing bing bing! It is the sound of a giant nervous system. The man and woman are built into this system and they cannot leave it. They are crying. Looking out the window, they see people hunting animals on game preserves. There are almost no animals left, so they have to be recycled—brought back to life after they’ve been killed and hunted again. Mobs of people chase a bear trying to run on artificial legs. It screams with fear and rage. The man and woman cry. They are part of it. They can do nothing. Bing bing bing bing!
My forehead breaks into a sweat. I unfasten a button and loosen my scarf. The air cools my skin; the fever recoils, then sends hot tadpoles wiggling against the cold. Drive the animal before you and never stop. Starve it, cut it, stuff silicone in it.
Feed it until it’s too fat to think or feel. Then cut it open and suck the fat out. Sew it up and give it medication for pain. Make it run on the treadmill, faster, faster. Examine it for flaws. Not just the body but the mind, too. Keep going over the symptoms. It’s not a character defect; it’s an illness. Give it medication for pain. Dazzle its eyes with visions of beauty. Dazzle its ears with music that never stops playing. Send it to graze in vast aisles of food so huge and flawless that it seems to be straining to become something more than food. Dazzle its mind with visions of terror. Set it chasing a hot, rippling heaven from which illness and pain have been removed forever. Set it fleeing the silent darkness that is always at its heels. Suck it out. Sew it up. Run. When the dark comes, pray: I love my ass.
I button my coat and let myself sweat. I try to think of something else. I think of an interview I heard with a religious person who had two kinds of cancer. The radio host asked her if she’d prayed for God to heal her. She said that she had and that it hadn’t worked. When she realized she was going to die, she asked God why He hadn’t healed her, and He answered. She actually heard His voice. He said, “But I am.”
I am not religious, but when I heard that, I said yes inside.
I say it now. I don’t know why. There’s a reason, but it’s outside my vision.
On the sidewalk, leaves dissolve into mud. Another door opens and Veronica comes out, exhaling her smoke with a swift, cool snort. “No, hon,” she says. “That’s your sphincter.” The mud and leaves go into a slow churn, so slow that it’s invisible to me, but I can feel it. I feel something rising from the churning, also invisible. Something we haven’t killed and never will.
I went to community college two more semesters. Instead of I poetry, I concentrated on word-processing classes. When I M felt I was skilled enough to get a job, I quit. I moved to Manhattan when a friend of a friend told me about a friend (named Gandy) who needed a roommate for a six-month sublet. My father said, “Why? You were doing so well.” I told him, “Because I’m too bored to live here,” and he just shook his head. “You always expected so much,” said my mother. “You expect even more after what happened. You have to enjoy what you have.” And I replied, “But I don’t have anything here. I need to go where I can have something.” My father looked down and left the room. I had hurt him, but he couldn’t do anything about it—I still had what was left of the French money and I could do what I wanted.
Ed drove me to the city with some furniture, clothing, and a few plants. My sublet was a loft in the meatpacking district, a labyrinth of sleeping rough-faced buildings with sweet and rotting breath. We took my bags up in a clanking freight elevator with a frayed cable that you could see quivering tensely through the broken ceiling fan. When we reached the top, we emerged to find a stout gray-haired man in leather unlocking his door.
“We use that elevator to remove the bodies of our victims,” he said. He spoke in an aggressive, fluting litde voice. “Welcome to New York,” he added, and shut himself in. The door across from him opened. “Don’t pay any attention to Percival,” said Candy. “He’s just being silly again.”
Candy was a pretty southern girl with a weak chin wearing pink paisley shoes. She smiled and led us down a long hall to a big living room lined with huge windows full of daylight. She made us martinis and said, “Don’t you think we’re special people to be in a loft in Manhattan, drinking real martinis?” Late that night, the sleeping buildings woke and opened for business. I stood in a window as tall as a door and watched heavy trucks feed fresh-killed beef to an openmouthed warehouse across the street. The light from the open mouth shone on one and a half cows at a time, their bodies hanging inverted on the conveyor belt, heads wagging on fresh-cut throats, horned shadows nodding on the warehouse wall. The belt droned and the massed corpses danced with jiggling forefeet. The man operating the belt whisded a song. A snout and gentle brow was flung out, then rolled back into the mass. The man driving the truck joked with the man running the belt. I can accept this, I thought. I can live this life.
The next morning, I began interviewing for secretarial positions, including one at an intellectual magazine run by a tiny woman with a dry face. “I quite like you,” said the woman. “There’s something spooky and incongruous about you. You don’t look like a girl from a community college in New Jersey, but unfortunately, that’s what you are. Everyone else I’ve spoken to is more qualified than you—though likely you’d do the job better.” She gave me an application and told me to call her in a few days.
“She must really like you,” whispered her current secretary as I left the office. “She usually rolls her eyes at me when she’s seeing people out.”
“What the hell would you do in a place like that?” asked Ed. “It doesn’t pay, and she’s obviously a bitch.”
“I could learn about editing. I could become an assistant and then something else.”
He was visiting me for the weekend. We’d just seen a movie and we were walking to a Korean deli for bags of cherries and grapes. There were a lot of hookers standing around, flashing like something at the bottom of a deep well. A tall black girl and a little blonde came into the store behind us to buy cigarettes and two rolls of breath mints. The man behind the counter said, “Hey, slim” to the black girl. When we left, Ed s
aid, “I saw you looking at them.”
“So?”
“You look at those girls, those whores, like they’re something great.”
“It’s just. . . those two in the store were really pretty. The black girl looked like a model.”
“A model! Are you kidding me? She didn’t look like a model. She looked like shit, because that’s what she is.”
“I know what a model looks like,” I said sharply.
We went to the loft and ate our fruit lying in my bed naked, piling the cherry pits in a white Kleenex on the bedside table.
“You’re not going to try to model?” he asked.
“No. And anyway, if you don’t like whores, you shouldn’t like models, either.”
I reminded him of Lisa at Naxos with her hand down her pants. For the dozenth time, he asked me if I had ever done anything like that. For the dozenth time, I said no, because I was the mistress of the most powerful agent in Europe and I didn’t have to. But a lot of girls did. We were quiet and I felt his discomfort. I stared at the ceiling, watching shadows come and go through a stretched square of light. Soon he would want to go, and I would let him.
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