Another Insane Devotion

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by Peter Trachtenberg


  told this story over and over; some things

  root in the mind; his boldness, of course, was frightening

  and unexpected—his stubbornness—though hunger

  drove him mad. It was the breaking of boundaries,

  the sudden invasion, but not only that it was

  the sharing of food and the sharing of space; he didn’t

  run into an alley or into a cellar,

  he sat beside me, eating, and I didn’t run

  into a trattoria, say, shaking,

  with food on my lips and blood on my cheek, sobbing;

  but not only that, I had gone there to eat

  and wait for someone. I had maybe an hour

  before she would come and I was full of hope

  and excitement. I have resisted for years

  interpreting this, but now I think I was given

  a clue, or I was giving myself a clue,

  across the street from the glass sandwich shop.

  That was my last night with her, the next day

  I would leave on the train for Paris and she would

  meet her husband. Thirty-five years ago

  I ate my sandwich and moaned in her arms, we were

  dying together; we never met again . . .

  One moment stands in for other moments or contains them, hundreds, thousands, a lifetime of moments curled inside that one like the strands of DNA inside the nucleus of a cell. What makes that possible is memory. Memory stretches out for fifty-seven lines the moment in which the poet eats beside the starving creature to which he’s surrendered a scrap of his sandwich and packs within that interval days and nights of lovemaking and a lifetime of reckoning and regret. Unless it’s literally written in the moment, scrawled between kisses on a cocktail napkin on the nightstand, the lyric is a memory masquerading as the lived present. And its beauty is that it feels like the present: it feels more like now than now does.

  A further paradox is that the lyric, although inspired by love for another person, often leaves that person in shadow. All Sappho tells us about her beloved is that her voice is a sweet murmur and her laughter is enticing. Of Stern’s we know this: she was married, or was about to be; they floated naked in the sea and moaned in each other’s arms; she was going to have a baby; it was his. This isn’t much. And yet Stern’s lover haunts his poem as Sappho’s lover haunts Sappho’s, manifested in one poet’s outrushing of memory and the other’s burning speechlessness. Both poets evoke a hidden object by registering her effect on them. In the same way, by measuring the perturbations in a star’s orbit, astronomers can determine the existence of a black hole.

  My favorite photo of that summer is one I took of F. in Volterra. There was some wind that day, and her long hair is blowing about her face. It was F. who showed me that if you cover one half of a face in a photograph, its expression changes, sometimes so dramatically that you seem to be looking at an entirely different face, animated by feelings that are barely discernible in the original. If you move your hand to the other side, still another face appears. In the photo I’m speaking of, F. seems, if not happy, confident in her loveliness. Her gaze meets the camera boldly. But when I cover the left side of her face, the other half turns watchful and melancholy, with a nostril dilated as if from crying. And when the experiment is reversed, the half face that peers out from behind your hand is taut with defiance, as if she were daring you to breach her privacy, and the half smile that tugs at the corner of her mouth is devoid of pleasure.

  It was Rome that F. liked best. It was more alive than Florence or Siena; it didn’t just unroll its past and invite you to sample it. It gave you sexy teenage couples horsing around amid the ruins, a mezzo with no chin and a tubby baritone singing arias in a church. F. marveled at their plainness. She loved it that people so plain could enact desire frankly, without apologizing, eyes flashing, bellies heaving. Yet, even in Rome, she was tormented by thoughts of Gattino. She prayed for him in churches. She called the veterinary clinic to ask if he was eating. She worried that the vet wouldn’t be able to get him cleared for travel: there were rumors of bad blood between him and the regional official—the head veterinarian of the entire region of Tuscany—who was supposed to sign the papers. The airline specified that cats could only travel in-cabin in carriers of certain strict dimensions, and nowhere could we find one the right size. The variety of merchandise in the pet shops was jaw-dropping. There were cat carriers covered in soft leather and rip-stop nylon, cat carriers belted like trench coats. All displayed the Italian genius for design, but all were off by centimeters in one or more dimensions. F. took it as a bad sign. “They won’t let him on the plane.” I told her they would. “They’re Italians, sweetheart, they don’t give a shit about bureaucracy.” But even as I said this, I remembered that they had also more or less invented it. I think it was the Romans who came up with the first initialism.

  S.P.Q.R.

  We drove back to Tuscany and reclaimed Gattino from the clinic. He looked more robust, his nose was dry, and when we presented him to the provincial vet, he stepped out of his new carrier as if he expected to be admired. But the provincial vet looked at him disapprovingly; he didn’t look at us at all. The cat, he said, was too sick to travel. Our vet, who had come there with us, argued with him—politely, he was conscious of the man’s power. His hands made soft, beckoning gestures. The official kept shaking his head. “No, no, no.” He may have said, “I don’t have time for this.” F. looked as if she might faint. I blurted something in Italian: “Senza la mia moglie e me, questo piccolo gattino non ha nessun’ amico in tutta l’Italia!” (“Except for my wife and me, this little kitty doesn’t have one friend in all Italy!”) Both vets looked at me, but it accomplished nothing. Well, it embarrassed F., and that may have distracted her a little from her unhappiness.

  On leaving the interview, our vet told us that he would go to Umbria the next day and have their head vet stamp Gattino’s passport. It would be no problem, he assured us: the vet was a friend of his. And when he gave them to us just before we left, we saw that Gattino’s papers really did look like a passport. They even had the same burgundy cover the EU uses on the ones it issues human beings.

  I spent an hour or so in the sky, gazing down at the profile of the continent and nodding and smiling as the woman next to me, who had turned from brass back to soft, perishable flesh, told me about the grandchild who was about to be produced in time for her arrival. When I told her I was going up to New York to search for a missing cat, she looked at me with what I was pretty sure was pity. Was it pity for someone who was looking for something he was extremely unlikely to find or pity for someone who had no better outlet for his affections than a cat? “Well, good luck,” she said. It was as if I’d told her I was on my way to have surgery for a brain tumor. I thanked her.

  Husbands have written lyrics, but they aren’t really suited for it. The lyric form can’t express the state of being a husband, for that is not about feeling but being. A man becomes a husband by saying, “Till death do us part,” or, if he’s squeamish about the d-word, “As long as we both shall live.” In either case, he rarely knows what he’s getting into. Feeling is brief; being has duration. A husband can feel many things, but he is one thing, and he may go on being that thing long after the feelings that brought him to it have passed. What feeling lasts a lifetime, except maybe statistically, the tissue-thin temporal slices of love stacking up higher than those of irritation, dislike, even hatred by so many microns that measuring those stacks at the end you can plausibly say, We were happy? Or I was?

  Being a husband is also about action, which is why the husband’s ideal literary form is narrative. The Odyssey, which is sometimes reckoned the first novel, is the story of a husband who’s trying to get back to his wife. Most husbands don’t have to do as much as Odysseus does to accomplish this, or for as long, and they don’t get to do it with cute nymphs and a princess. They go out on the day’s errands, buy some things for the missus, and stop
at the fitness center for a sauna. There’s a funeral where they have to pay respects. They make some business calls, have a little lunch. At a fund-raising event, a mean drunk tries to pick a fight with them; they leave shaken. Later, around the time they ought to be going home, they run into another drunk. It’s the son of an old friend, grown up since they last saw him but he hasn’t learned how to hold his liquor yet, and knowing the kinds of grief a drunk kid can get into, they tag along with him as he weaves in and out of every dive and blind pig in the city, even a whorehouse. God knows what would happen to the little dipshit if they weren’t around to keep an eye on him. It’s late, and the kid’s still shwacked, so they take him home to crash on the sofa. The wife’s asleep in the bedroom, or maybe pretending to be. No way of telling if she’s mad at them for coming home so late or. So they lie down beside her, and in a while they fall asleep too. Change a few particulars and you have Ulysses.

  In narrative, order is crucial, chronological order especially. Consider how that story would read if the husband stopped by the house before the unpleasantness with the drunk. Consider an Odyssey in which the hero comes home in the first twenty pages, kills the suitors, then leaves again to make time with Calypso. Sequencing is also essential to husbandry. A husband plows before he sows. He pays the rent before the premium cable. He buys heating oil before he buys a snowblower, though it would be nice to have one, especially after pulling his back like he did shoveling out the driveway last winter and getting a case of sciatica that his wife charmingly kept calling “ass-leg.” He doesn’t book an Italian vacation before he finds a job or collects an advance from his publisher, and certainly not a month before he and his wife are supposed to move to another house. Before leaving the underground parking garage in a scenic village famed for its museum of Etruscan artifacts (and, he later learns, for its appearance in Stendhal’s On Love), he makes sure he knows where the ticket is so that later he doesn’t have to spend a quarter of an hour futilely slapping his pockets while behind him a queue of Italian cars grows longer and longer and their drivers honk at him in mounting, polyphonic fury. Before changing his return flight so that he can escort his wife and her new kitten from Florence to Milan, he demands more than a customer service representative’s assurance over the phone that the airline will book his baggage straight through to New York, knowing that citing such assurance later to a desk clerk at the Milan airport, where his baggage has not been checked through, will have about as much weight as it did to insist, when as a child he was made the victim of grown-ups’ peremptory rule changes, “But you said . . . ”

  This was after I’d spent a half hour waiting for my bags to thump onto the carousel and then wrestled them upstairs to the gate for New York, where a line of passengers shuffled forward beneath the high ceilings, crisscrossing other lines bound for Prague or Cairo or Miami. Incomprehensible announcements in many languages buffeted us. I tried cutting ahead; a guard yelled at me. “I’m supposed to be on that flight,” I told him. He shrugged. The shrug was a way of distancing himself from his own authority, of disguising “I don’t want to help you” as “It can’t be helped.” In that way, it was very Italian. F. had already boarded. An attendant let me call her from the counter. We exchanged despairing good-byes. Who knew how long I’d be stranded here? Abruptly, her tone lightened. “Gattino’s doing really well,” she told me. “He hasn’t made a peep.” I may have asked her if he missed me, and she may have sworn, in a voice rich with theatrical insincerity, that he did. I remember laughing, and I remember the attendant looking at me with what, given the circumstances, was probably surprise.

  I spent the next hour or two waiting in front of various counters, wobbling between abjection and fury. (Under similar conditions, Italians went straight to fury: F. told me that on the flight over, she and her fellow passengers had been marooned for hours at this same airport, where the Italian men had expressed their displeasure by racing up and down the stairs, shouting oaths, and tearing off their suit jackets and flinging them to the floor.) Getting home less than three days later cost me another $800. Actually, if you count the price of the charmless airport hotel where I spent the night and ate the only bad meal I ever had in Italy, it cost me more.

  A limitation of the lyric mode is that it typically enacts only one big feeling at a time, or sometimes a sequence of feelings like the rooms in a museum through which the visitor passes, looking first at the Cimabues, then the Giottos, the Botticellis, the Ghirlandaios, a Michelangelo displayed behind bulletproof glass. Somewhere there may be some early Masaccios. This limitation may be a natural consequence of the immense, transfixing energy those feelings possess, whether in themselves or through the amplification of poetic language. And it’s true that looking back, the lover is likely to remember his feelings the same way. Each filled him so completely that to add even a dropperful of another emotion would have burst his heart. For this reason, even the most despairing lyric conveys a kind of joy. Few joys are greater than the joy of feeling one thing completely, to the utter exclusion of anything else. It’s probably not too different from what the angels feel as they sing beneath the dome of heaven, only the angels feel it for eternity.

  A husband rarely has the luxury of feeling one thing completely. He’s too busy checking the entries in the Michelin guide and copying road directions from his laptop onto a piece of paper so his wife can read them to him as he drives instead of fumbling with his stupid BlackBerry. Much of the time, he doesn’t know what he feels at all. And some of the feelings that impinge on his consciousness are so devoid of lyricism, so tepid and dishwater gray, that no poem could be written about them unless it were by Philip Larkin. The shame of hearing a dozen drivers backed up at the exit of a parking garage sound their horns at him—of feeling the horns’ blast like a blow between his shoulder blades—as he walks over to the cassa to purchase a new ticket, a shame compounded by the peevish thought that they could get out of here quicker if his wife would at least offer to pay the cashier so he could move the car as soon as the gate was raised. But she says her Italian isn’t good enough, and wouldn’t it be cowardly to subject her to the brays of the fuming motorists behind them, though maybe they wouldn’t honk like that at a woman? No, they would.

  The impatience that mars his pity as he watches her weeping over what is, after all, just a cat. Even as he feels this, he understands that “after all” and “just a cat” are phrases he will have to keep secret from her until the day he dies.

  The white-knuckled anger of circling endlessly around the Aventine in his flimsy Lancia, crossing and recrossing the Ponte Sublicio or is it the Ponte Testaccio? Impossible to tell, since the traffic moves quickly and the streets don’t have proper signs with their names on them, only stone plaques on the sides of buildings that might be legible to somebody on horseback, if the streets were better lit, which they aren’t. With each circuit, he becomes more angry—who built this fucking city?—but also more afraid, because it seems they’ll never find the street they’re looking for, just keep whipping around and around until they run out of gas or get rear-ended by one of the cars behind them: by Italian standards, he’s driving like somebody’s nonno.

  But his wife wants him to slow down. In the glow of the headlights, her skin is ashen, and the small vein above one eye is throbbing. “Don’t you know where we are?” she pleads. Through clenched teeth, he says, “In principle.” Her voice gets higher. She’s tired; she’s hungry; she’s dehydrated. They should never have driven into Rome. He says she’s right and imagines wrenching open the passenger door and kicking her into the street. She begins to whimper, a horrible sound. It’s this that makes him pull over to a curb. “Okay,” he says, “we’ll stop. Look, look, I’m stopping.” There is a space—he doesn’t know if it’s legal, but fuck it, let the fucking polizia give him a fucking ticket. He tells her to get out. She looks at him in fright. Can she have guessed what was in his mind a few moments ago? He makes his voice softer. “Let’s get out and find something t
o drink.” He takes her by the hand and leads her to a little grocery store whose lights cast a bluish-white trapezoid onto the sidewalk. Stepping inside, he has the momentary illusion that they’ve entered a bodega in his old neighborhood in the city, a place where you could buy a bag of plantain chips and a Diet Coke: the Diet Coke in Italy is terrible. He asks for a bottle of water and hands it to her. “Drink,” he says. She protests. They don’t know where they are. “Shut up,” he says, but he says it gently. “Just drink.” It’s only watching her tilt her head back and take long, grateful swallows from the upended bottle—a creaturely gratitude that isn’t directed at him but at the water itself—that he remembers he loves her.

  We don’t think of cats as beings that feel two things at once, but this is one explanation—as far as I know, only an anecdotal one—for why they sometimes lash their tails. And when Bitey was dying, F. noticed that Suki, who usually was just cranky, seemed both angry and sad. For most of the night, she remained in the narrow hallway outside the bathroom where my cat sat listlessly in the tub. Her expression was unmistakably a glare. But once F. pointed out that her eyes were filled with liquid. The liquid was clear and bright, and it ran down the gray tabby’s cheeks, and I don’t think it’s too great a stretch to call it tears. They may or may not have been tears of grief.

  By the time New York appeared below us, it was dark. Most of my memories of landing there take place at night, though when I’d come back from Italy the year before, it was afternoon. That may be part of why it felt so anticlimactic. On October 2, 2008, my plane landed at night, the voluptuous night of New York in autumn, violet as ink and lit from beneath by the radiance of its traffic, not just the vehicular kind but the traffic of money and its shape-shifting surrogates—collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps—the traffic of power, the traffic of beauty, the traffic of appetite, of talent, of sex. Everything was moving; every lighted window signaled others. And in darkened offices, machines spoke to other machines thousands of miles away in a language of pulses, clicks, and blinking lights. An immense conversation was taking place below, and the aircraft circled it the way a newcomer circles the fringes of a party, a party where his welcome is uncertain; he sees nobody there he knows.

 

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