Motion Sickness

by Lynne Tillman

  My simple room has a remarkable view of the harbor. Like Pete, the English brothers might appear on the horizon out of nowhere, and I’d be happy to see them. Though they wouldn’t come by boat. And no Madame Butterfly is watching for them. If one of them were to dock, though, it’d be Paul, I think. Jessica might show up. She must be well into her pregnancy, by now. Unless she’s miscarried or had an abortion. Perhaps the birth was extremely premature and she had three tiny babies, triplets. What would happen if all three looked into the mirror at the exact same moment?

  In the distance the green-blue water moves toward and away from land, a gentle rolling motion that in a second could become roiling and rocking. Still water runs deep but constant movement assures one of continuity though this is against, always against, one’s better judgment. I choose a postcard for the English brothers, my mother and Charlotte. The same one, of the hotel patio.

  I lie on the bed and look out the window then at the room’s whitewashed walls with their message of past and faded glory. Faded glory isn’t failure. This room is a palimpsest, hiding many layers of lives, which can be counted by the number of times the room has been repainted. Like a tree’s rings. The hotel was once owned by French people, but is now in Moroccan hands. Mr. Mrabet may be an owner or an employee. If an owner, a small businessman, he’d be subject to, as my father warned, the fluctuations of the market. Which must be worse than the banal vagaries of love. Mr. Mrabet, responsible for all this, or Mr. Mrabet, a Willy Loman, subject to all this.

  The hotel’s past elegance is an oasis, a fantasy. It produces delicate troubling thoughts as does looking into the face of a very very old man or woman. Reading faces, reading walls. Some friends say it’s easy to read me, the involuntary expression on my face. The only recourse might be plastic surgery but if I had it done this young I’d have to do it every five or ten years and end up with no epidermal elasticity at all, with no ability to smile. Or with a fixed smile. A forehead much too high, not necessarily noble like Bette Davis’s as Queen Elizabeth, or it’d be unearthly like Peggy Lee’s. And I’d be permanently dissembled.

  From my window, the people at the tables below are flat, and if I were to draw them they’d lack any true proportion and I wouldn’t know where the vanishing point would be. I don’t have that kind of perspective. It could be anywhere. As in those old cartoons by Fleischer where the character jumps out of the ink bottle and draws himself, then jumps back in at the end of the story, leaving a blank screen.

  Chapter 11

  Schadenfreude

  “Today only exaggeration can be the medium of truth.”

  —Theodor Adorno

  BARCELONA

  Gregor’s loft is in an abandoned factory on a narrow sheet in a worker’s section of town that’s being modernized. But in a good way, he tells me, not like in New York. The old and poor won’t get pushed out. It will be better here, with more services. He hasn’t been back in Germany—he’s from Cologne—in several years. I’m not staying with him; I didn’t want to. There’s an inexpensive hotel in the center of town, a sliver of a building on a sheet across from an impressive church whose bells ring on the quarter hour. Its bell tower can be seen from my window. A Hunchback of Notre Dame setting. It suits me better. Gregor’s generosity can easily be abused. I don’t want to be one of those to do it. The hotel manager, Mr. Del Rio, speaks no English and what I speak to him is a combination of German, Spanish and French, a few words of each, and he finds this amusing. At least I hope he does when he doesn’t find it frustrating. I’m reading Highsmith’s Ripley’s Game.

  Gregor reads voraciously and keeps a diary that he writes in scrupulously each day at a desk surrounded by small fileboxes in which are stored annotated comments about what he’s read. He’s disciplined, a vegetarian, and his home is nearly bare, except for the vast wall of books which I’ve referred to as his Berlin Wall. Irony, yes? he asks. All of Freud, in German and English, Melanie Klein, Christa Wolf, Hegel, Marx, Handke, books on Hollywood film, Dickens, Stendhal, Flaubert, Resnais, Duras, biographies galore. He tells me he sometimes is transfixed in front of his books, awed and dismayed. He has put money into a few films, acted in some, written a play about, he says, his alienated generation, and receives monthly checks from his father. Guilt money, Gregor calls it. Though he doesn’t like to see people—he is, he insists grimly, compulsively counterphobic—he knows many and keeps a stack of notebooks near his telephone, with names and addresses of the interesting people he’s met. All over the world, I suppose, or at least the Western one.

  That’s how I meet Clara, or Clare, as she was called in the States. Gregor thought I would find her appealing, this elderly but still youthful woman who has livid everywhere and done everything. A “classic” was his way of designating her. There is no one quite like her, he says. Gregor brings us together for dinner at a small restaurant that serves excellent octopus which Clara can’t eat and neither can L You have a sensitive stomach, she says, like me, except when I was young I could eat anything. She is trim, about my height, not short or tall, and speaks English infected by her native German.

  Clara came to the States before the second war, a young woman just able to escape alone and with no possessions. I guess she’s in her early seventies, but has no gray hair, like my mother who is years younger. Clara offers to take me to the Picasso Museum the next day, always a pleasure for her, and so much more now that Generalissimo Franco is dead and one can be in Spain again and even Picasso can be in Spain again.

  I meet Clara at her apartment house. She’s waiting in the lobby, looking at her watch. She takes my arm and leans against me with a presumption of intimacy that I appreciate. We walk like this to the museum. Clara claims each stair cautiously as we climb to the room where, she tells me, Picasso’s versions of Velázquez’s Las Meninas hang. She puts on her reading glasses to see the dates of the Picassos. The Velázquez, she remembers, was 1656. The Picassos were done in 1957. Velázquez’s triumph challenged Picasso, Clara explains, and so the little man—she speaks as if she had taken his measure firsthand—had to take it up, for the father must be slaughtered by the son. To illustrate Clara wrings the throat of an imaginary father.

  Clara gestures to the paintings on the four walls. She thinks the Velázquez has a quiet movement, but that the Picassos show a frantic mind. Velázquez was in favor at the time he painted, while Picasso was in exile. “His are nothing like the original, the original doesn’t matter. This shows what a different time we live in. For that alone it is important work.”

  Clara stands resolutely in front of one of Picasso’s portraits of the Infanta Margarita Maria. A detail from the Velázquez. It’s the figure Arlette humorously compared herself with and, for me, becomes another coincidence. Clara standing there is a superimposition, one that removes the scene for a moment of private contemplation, a moment I don’t want to make too much of. Anyway Arlette was Velázquez’s version, not Picasso’s. Still I can almost see Arlette rolling her big eyes from side to side, ruminating aloud about dark backgrounds or negative space, her feet curled under her on the couch in her living room. She might like Clara, at least admire her will and politics, I think, if not agree with her approach to art. Clara’s body is still rigid with attention. She turns to me. Shall we go? she asks, taking my arm. Nowadays museums depress me.

  I can hear Gregor in her voice, the way she thinks, as if he were her son. We drink coffee in an outdoor café in the center of the city, with trees and plants encircling us rapturously. The hours pass. Clara holds me in the grip of her narrative. She tells me she is an artist, a Communist and a lesbian, what she calls a triple threat. Clara married twice in New York, both times to a sympathetic man, another homosexual. She doesn’t use the word gay and articulates each syllable of homosexual distinctly, proposing it as the proper formulation, the more complicated one commensurate to the position. She tells me that in those days, the thirties, the forties, even the fifties, that’s what they did, marry each other. She describe
s our time as a crueler one. She moves from one cruelty to another. During the McCarthy era even though like many others she had torn up her Party membership card years before and wouldn’t be directly implicated, not asked to testify, she was out of the U.S. more than in it, establishing residence in Paris and Rome. Her last husband was rich and today she is a well-heeled widow—she first says high-heeled, then corrects herself—maybe a contradiction, she confesses wryly, for a lesbian Communist, but one she carries with dignity.

  With Clara I venture into a disappearing world. It’s as if I were an extra in Fantastic Voyage, exploring an oceanic universe, or an archaeologist digging for a vanished civilization, congealed in Clara. She herself may be concealed in terms like “witness” and “survivor” which make her larger than life, her slice of life. lt turns out, not surprisingly, that she is writing her memoirs. Time is short and her memory, she reports, is not what it was even ten years ago. It seems sharp to me. The wine is warm now, she complains to the waiter in Spanish. Then she gives him a winsome look to soften the effect of her testiness. “People in that time—now too—they expose Schadenfreude. You know that word, it is joy, happiness in another’s loss. German is a wonderful language. Schadenfreude, that was also a part of that period.”

  Clara clasps my hand and looks into my eyes. Let me interpret myself, she exclaims, I am so happy to be with a young American woman. She doesn’t seem to be ironic. This stated, or read into the record, she flies from one anecdote to another, eager to divulge her past as if I will capture what she releases, one repository to another. In one instant she is ebullient and the next, piqued or downcast. Like Zoran, she’s mercurial. Liquid and solid. The quicksilver god Mercury, god of luck and travel, may be at our table and if I’m lucky on my travels she’ll be a favored messenger of the gods. Although to look at her one wouldn’t suspect those godlike qualities.

  On the avenue Clara walks slowly, is crablike and cautious, glancing to her left and right, as if expecting to be interfered with. Or she comes to a sudden halt for no reason I can figure out. She is sure she doesn’t have long to live, an idea that haunts her. She has outlived both her husbands who were years older and several friends who weren’t but she has no illnesses, or none that she has mentioned. I am not afraid to die, she emphasizes. I only hate it. There is much to do. And aging has no mercy. She looks at her hands. But of course, she reflects, it is worse when the young die. Then she shakes her head and brightens up. Anyway, I am not dead yet.

  She sculpts when she can—she avows that art has been her life—and writes about culture, Kultur, for German magazines. I cover the scene, she says cryptically. I have connections in Germany. She inquires, on impulse it appears, if I might be interested in helping her with her book, the organization, the typing. It’s a job if I want it. At her door, she clutches my arm and, like a little girl, whispers into my ear, Gregor adores me because I am the kind of German he wishes his parents were. She leaves me and I watch her as she climbs the stairs, each step a small triumph—arthritis, she yells out, without looking back, confident that I’m watching her.

  Chapter 12

  Traveling Music

  PARIS

  I’m in Arlette’s apartment, lying on the bed, reading Horace McCoy’s No Pockets in a Shroud, and nursing a hangover. The hangover has allowed me to dismiss temporarily the shape of my finances, which are hopeless, since my mother is not, as she so aptly put it in a recent letter, a bottomless pit, and my savings are nearly used up, but Arlette’s made me welcome, put me perfectly at home. She’s even offered me a job in her bookstore. Eventually I must learn to speak French. My scant reading knowledge wouldn’t help with customers. I can assist only behind the scenes. I’d like to surprise Arlette and speak French, a kind of magic act, pulling language from me as if it were a tender rabbit. I’m sure it can be done.

  If I spoke French, I’d cherish the word dégoût and use it often, closely followed by dérive. Disgust and drift. In French they’re nearly liquid on my tongue, but maybe they’re not on French tongues. French tongues give French kisses—what are they called here?—rouler une pulle, Arlette tells me. To shovel a big one, to roll a big one. It’s a more ugly image than I expected. Soul kiss is lovelier than shoveling a big one. Although you can turn your tongue into a shovel if you can flex your tongue at all. Tongue here is langue, the same as language. Mother tongue would be redundant, I suppose. I’ll ask Arlette some day. The French call French letters lettres anglaises. They must have been sending letters back and forth across the English Channel way before the passport came into existence. Unfettered intercourse, or fettered intercourse with letters. They must be called letters because they were carried in envelopes, so the condom itself is like writing paper, to be wrapped around the stylo—pen—whose destination is a mailbox, or just box. We use the tongue in a French kiss, something that I’m not sure comes naturally, at least I believe I learned to do it in grade school. Dé-goût. Disgust: far from gustibus: pleasure. But disgust isn’t far from pleasure, it’s pleasure’s other side, or twin. Being a twin must be disgusting, pleasurable.

  I tell Arlette New York is like Paris. That’s probably not so. Days turn into nights here the way they do in New York. The cities never sleep. Cities don’t sleep. Apart from friends and my block, or the skyline, as familiar and remote as Marilyn Monroe’s figure, different neighborhoods are convincing real-life locations for movies I’ve seen. Or the city is posters, a backdrop of images and words. Delis with pictures on their walls and violent acts preceded by screams for help, take-out coffee in Greek-motif paper cups and high-school kids cracking up on subways, buses driven by witty drivers, passengers with inflamed passions, shoppers suffused with envy and hope fed by advertisements on TV, doped-up guys selling grass or coke, distraught people on the street asking for money, holding cardboard signs with sad stories, impressive shops at the base of enormous buildings, young guys hanging out in doorways listening to music. Long walls are invaded by a pervasive street humor that catches you listening to it, the city’s laugh-track. I don’t really see New York. Or when I see it, it’s always the same. I can’t see it. Or for that matter America. Just the way I don’t see Paris. Or Europe. It’s inaccessible to tourism, or it’s all tourism.

  *

  Every day is a little like this one, somewhat repetitious, with a beginning, middle and end that’s concocted of temporary habits or rituals, and a dash of discovery that appears to make it new. A bowl of café au lait and a bevy of alien characters, a newspaper’s list of new and old movies, elegant displays in charcuteries. I walk miles and miles, wearing out shoe leather—as my father would say—because shoes always wear out. I sit in obscure cafés, neighborhood places that serve only one dish at lunchtime—today, blanquette de veau—where everyone seems to know the owners who do the cooking. And today I sit down in this out-of-the-way café and look at my book, No Pockets in a Shroud, then at Libération, and order the plat du jour. People are speaking French and I can’t eavesdrop. I watch. They gesticulate. They purse their lips, sucking in their cheeks. They may be saying a word like dégoût which forces that puckering. American mouths speaking English are horizontal slashes across full faces with heavy chins and jaws. Not all of course.

  I like blanquette de veau. Jessica hates meat and hasn’t eaten it in twenty years. Arlette scoffs at vegetarianism and says we are animals and do what animals do. A small shadow falls on the white napkin that covers the basket of pain on my table. Someone is standing there. A small animal. I don’t want to look up. It may be someone I don’t want to see—from the undead past, an ex-lover, my ex-best friend. The shadow waits patiently. And finally I do look up and am pleasantly surprised, as they say. Because it’s Belgian Sylvie from Amsterdam. Chérie, Sylvie exclaims, formidable. It’s amazing to see you. I never thought it would happen. It is fantastic. She sits down, kisses me on both cheeks, and we order a bottle of wine. That is, she does. I like Paris, Sylvie says as the café’s only waiter walls off, but Parisians are funny
about my belge accent.

  She’s thinner, more like a delicate bird than before, but just as childlike. Perhaps I need to cast her as grief-stricken and incapable of nourishment, neither of which she is. She’s in Paris, she tells me immediately, with her husband, the German record producer, and their child. They’re staying in this district—the 12th—at a business friend’s apartment. She lights a cigarette and glances about nervously. She wants to talk about Sal but first she asks me where I’ve been. Since Amsterdam. I say I saw my friend Pete in Tangier who told me the terrible news about Sal. Her eyes drift and she observes, with one rush of breath, that now it all seems unreal and anyway it was hard for her to believe him. He said so many things and at the end she thought he must have wanted to die, the way he lived, because he was always looking for trouble. She says, He made trouble. Sal had a big imagination. And grand ideas. When they came to me and told me he has been murdered, it seemed I knew already, in one moment, I already knew it, a déjà vu. But you know Sal’s type better. One American to another.

  I roll my eyes, speaking the only French I’ve been able to pick up, and hope that I’m doing a fairly good imitation of Arlette. I study Sylvie. She could be Arlette’s child or sister. They share no common features and I’m twisting them into homologous shapes. Which I’ve done before, devising little families of the unrelated. Families of the unrelated. Sounds like a horror sitcom. She moves in her chair, tapping her foot as if there were music playing. She says she always needs to move.

  I know what she means. If Sylvie had to be told about Sal’s death, then he must have been murdered when he was with a woman who wasn’t Sylvie. Unless Pete had it wrong and there had been no woman with Sal. Or Sylvie may be lying to me, not wanting to appear to have been an accessory to his murder. Sylvie’s shaking her leg under the table and dragging hard on her cigarette.