by Greg Baxter
Day by day, now violently, now effortlessly, I loosen my involvement in the world, my connections to people. Maria never succumbed to the temptation of regret; I live by the rule of it. Everything, to me, is out of reach; it has passed. Elísabet and Fielding search for illumination, a reconstituted paradise. I dream of a city that exists in perpetual nighttime.
After Bob’s death, Maria moved into a small apartment in Alamo Heights, not half a dozen streets from her first house in Texas. She had a few more marriage offers but was not interested. Perhaps she had loved Bob, though she never said so. Or maybe she was bored of men. She walked two miles a day with a fat dog that couldn’t keep up with her. She used to play a lot of bridge, and was extremely good, but by then her partners were either dead or too sick to get together. She found part-time work at a second-hand clothes shop, and, as she believes she still does, ran errands for Fielding’s parents. She wanted to stay busy. She didn’t need the money, since Bob had left her enough to go on comfortably for quite some time. But she was already becoming forgetful – small things – and wanted to stay active. She returned to Vienna a handful of times, twice with me: once to take me on my first trip there, at the age of fifteen, and again when I lived in Germany for a year, at twenty. We wrote letters (in German) when I was abroad – Germany, England, Ireland – and talked on the telephone when I was in America – Austin, Chicago, Baton Rouge. Signs of her mental deterioration were present when I still lived in the States: sometimes on the drive from her house to ours, she would get lost on roads she had driven a thousand times, and call us in a panic. Sometimes she telephoned my stepmother many times a day to ask the same question. These episodes made her angry, and soon there was almost no conversation she had that was not about how terrible it was to lose one’s memory – which was no different than one’s sanity – or some pill that would fix her. Nevertheless, she remained deeply unaware of her diminished independence, or refused to accept it – this was the woman who had run down a road with two sons in her arms, fleeing the Russian army. Once, on her way to visit me in Baton Rouge, when her connecting flight in Houston was cancelled by bad weather, she hitchhiked four hours in a car with a strange man rather than stay in a hotel.
Every night, for many years after Bob’s death, she had dinner with a woman named Eve, who lived in a big ranch-style house a few streets away. Eve, a rich widow and constant Scotch drinker – old-school Texas ball-breaker, the kind of woman who is sophisticated and ladylike and smarter than all the men she knows and takes no shit – was Maria’s oldest American friend. She was a lot like Bob in the end: outspoken and sharp, but an invalid. Maria ran all her errands (even though Eve could’ve paid a service), cooked her dinner, did chores around the house. Their friendship was deep, and as Maria’s memory eroded, it became symbiotic. I hardly knew Eve, but on the few occasions I visited she acted as though I might be one of her own grandchildren – though she never had children. Perhaps Maria shared us with her. When Eve died, Maria’s mind seemed to crash into the reality that the last person in the world who relied on her – who had some need for her beyond the purely emotional – was gone. She lost a great deal of acuity at this time and never fully recovered.
On the first of our two visits to Vienna, in July 1990, Maria and I arrived at the train station at around nine in the evening. We had taken the train from Frankfurt, a nine-hour journey I mostly slept through. Maria tried to wake me dozens of times to watch the scenery. I was too dozy to take note of much, and I missed, to Maria’s supreme disappointment, the sight of the Danube through Passau.
We were met at the station by our immediate relatives, the Heusslers. They were standing on the platform in a kind of anticipation I hadn’t expected, quiet, still, near disbelief, as though they suspected I might not be real. None of them had ever seen one of Maria’s grandchildren, and it was decided, immediately, that I was – and Erika gasped when she said it – an exact duplicate of Herbert. Maria had taught me a few phrases – Es freut mich sehr, dich kennenzulernen and Ich küss die Hand, gnädige Frau – but even after two years of high-school German I found them difficult to remember and was too embarrassed to use them.
It was the first time I had been outside the US. It was also the first time I had been to a city, or rather, my first realization that places like San Antonio and Houston were not cities at all but vast and loose agglomerations of parking lots.
We went straight from the station to the Heusslers’ apartment – Amalienstrasse 11, Ober St Veit – an address that was etched into my mind: everyone assumed I’d get split from the group and be utterly lost. Three generations of the family lived together in one building: Erika on the top floor with her husband Kurt; their son Dieter with his wife Heidi on the floor below them; and, in the basement, in a little room with only a bed, a small refrigerator full of smelly cheese, and a record player, Walter, my cousin. His brother, Michael, had long since moved out. I spent a lot of my nights in Vienna in that basement, chatting with Walter. Maria was concerned that he was a bad influence because she thought he was gay and a drug addict. He kissed his male friends fully on the mouth, worked part-time as a shop-window designer, and, well, acted generally gay. Of course, he was gay, and so was his brother Michael, who taught ballroom dancing.
That first night, we ate a dinner of bread, meats, and cheeses. I had expected the kind of meal Maria made for us – the over-abundant plates of goulash and Wiener schnitzel. I ate so much they had to bring out whole new platters. They watched in awe as I ate and ate. Maria told them, This is nothing. At home I make him ten pork chops. He never stops.
By day, Maria and I, sometimes with the Heusslers and sometimes on our own, took excursions to famous sights, museums, galleries, small cafés, and heurigers high up in the hills around the city. Maria needed no map. She hopped on and off streetcars and the U-Bahn with certainty and exuberance. We met a schoolmate of hers, and many friends of the family. She took me to laneways and street corners that had significance in her life, to the house where she grew up, the shelter where she took Nick and Peter to during bombing raids. Seventeen years later, I remember almost nothing of the conversations we had, but I try to clear my thoughts entirely, so that her voice might reappear. I remember only her happiness, not just for her but for me, because I had accepted wholly the fact that half of me was Viennese.
The second time we went, four years later, she would get lost quite easily and panic. She talked a lot about how she couldn’t remember her German, or the names of her favourite places, or where they were. I became the guide. I was living as an exchange student in Würzburg, Germany, at the time, old enough to go to bars with Walter and Michael and smoke hash in cars on the way to raves. I spent hardly any time with her, just hungover lunches before the drinking began again. By then, however, she was glad of all that. It turned out she thought boys who behaved themselves were abominations.
Before we travelled to Vienna that second time, she had come to visit me in Würzburg. I showed her the city and the university. She stayed in a pension near my dorm, and there we discussed her life in earnest. She knew her memory was going. I introduced her to my friends, many of the beautiful girls who lived in my dorm. When I introduced her to the girl I was dating, she was polite but aloof. Later, she told me it was no good to have one girlfriend: I must have them all. It is in contemplating this remark, now, sitting at my dining-room table, beside the photograph, that I sense what kind of man Herbert may have been.
Elísabet tells me she can see Maria in our house, sitting beside me at the table, waiting patiently for her story to come to something. How I wish this were the case, that I had within me the capacity to do her life justice. Elísabet’s mind creates: it is astounding to watch. Sometimes she will have a thought and start quietly dancing. She believes the world is always telling truths, and she listens. A mountain told her to write a play about her father. An American football game told her to finish a book. She is always going for coffees with people she meets on the Dart. She finds bo
ring people inspiring. Since men are inherently dull, she turns them into obsessions. She could fall in love with a peanut. It is as though someone built a weird machine designed to debunk monotony. She is like a child playing hide-and-seek with her own thoughts. Once, I saw her outside the house and she began to clap and shouted from a long way off, Hey! We are in Ireland!
When I first arrived, I experienced such moments. They would arise for no reason, in unspecial settings, in the middle of daily routines. The feeling has no light or shape or colour, only, for a moment, a temperature. By the time you have named it, you have forgotten it. The imposition of a word is the act of forgetting. A man who wishes to transfer his experience to the page might as well try to throw a typewriter at the moon.
My life is the opposite of an adventure. In this I am like almost everybody, except I will not struggle in the grip of delusion. I will remain very still, its hold will relax, and I will slip out. Maria always wanted me to return to Vienna. It was she who inspired me to live in Germany for a year, where I met an Irish woman who would introduce me to the woman I would marry. Maybe one evening I’ll arrive in Vienna unannounced. I will find a small flat just outside the Ring – something I can afford for a little while – with a view of nothing much. I will go grocery shopping and read books; with diminishing impact I will live out the resurrection of a dead history.
4
Health. Success. Children Every Year. Die in Ireland. (A Toast)
Just the other morning, the cold came back. It had struck the city for a week in October, but it left like a disinterested ghost. The sky was floating very low above the houses, and blue, and the streets had been licked by a little rain in the night. I stood on my terrace for half an hour, up early, drinking a few glasses of water. The Belfast train shot through a gap in the estate, which is still under construction; lit on the inside, bleared in its velocity, a whir of violet and grinding.
The first day of winter, not by date but in essence, the first day you realize you are not waiting, but in it: the sun slowly drained the blue off; the sky became the colour of whalebone. Or the colour I imagine whalebone to be: it reminded me of the sea – hulking, low, wet, and bodily. I went downstairs to leave for work. I unlocked my Vespa from the concrete column that holds up the front of my house. I bundled up: rain gear, scarf, headphones, helmet, gloves – summer gloves – still wet from the day before. The first flights of the day were descending over the estate from the east, in from the sea. When the clouds are especially low, the jets materialize above the coastline, which is less than a mile from me. The sound they make is like a little avalanche, or one that is huge but very far away. It is an elemental image of my twenties, a time when my life consisted of elemental images, when almost every year I moved to a new country: descending through cloud, as though gobbled up in the whale’s mouth, the sudden disappearance of pure light, shot through the crystal of pure atmosphere, a minute of turbulent blindness, through the gut, then excrementally dropped into the weak-lit air above the city, moving, wet, matchbox: Vienna, Frankfurt, London, Dublin, Chicago, and the little cities I lived in between them.
The scooter woke up the sleepy street. A woman packing child accessories into her car stopped to glance in my direction. I gave a little wave and she responded with a smile.
Life on my Vespa is precarious. I have a problem with a ball bearing, or so I have been told – I have no idea. My front wheel wobbles at slow speeds, and badly on slick surfaces. I hold the handlebars like a bad tightrope walker holds a balancing stick, weaving between jammed lanes, trying to avoid wing mirrors.
It is almost December, and the city centre has been lit up for Christmas; the lights and decorations are strung from buildingtop to buildingtop, and in the dark evenings they reanimate the twinkling sense of childhood gaiety, except drunk and spending money: snowflakes on George’s Street, bells and angels, Nollaig Shona Dhuit in lights, over and over, on Henry Street, and giant new chandeliers on Grafton Street. The journey from my door to the door of my office lasts thirty minutes, though I have, through the great denying power of the mind, convinced myself it takes twenty, so I am always late. It means nothing, since I take a coffee break immediately, and since, if I do any work at all before lunch, it is only to write my own things, and email Katie, a strange, erratic and lonely 24-year-old Welsh girl with an athletic body and tattoos. Only on Mondays, when we go to press, do I heave a little effort toward the paper.
When I am sent to daytime conferences, I tend to pay them short and angry visits. Afterwards, I take my Vespa all around the city, listening to loud music. Once I drove out to Sandycove Strand and sat on a bench with a book, bundled up tightly, and looked out to the sea, but I felt like an idiot. A few times I have parked at Dun Laoghaire pier, and thought of walking it, to stare in the direction of where I live across the grey width of the bay. But I am not that kind of person, as much as my old self wanted me to be. Now, I like to whiz around Stephen’s Green and soak in the sight of good-looking women, and I like to drive around hardscrabble portions of the city, stop on footpaths and smoke cigarettes, observing people pushing buggies around without babies in them.
My weeknight dinners are always the same – a tuna sandwich with mustard on brown bread at the Centra on Parnell Street, thirty minutes before class begins. I have been eating the same sandwich every Monday through Thursday for months, and always order from the same woman, though she never gives any sign of recognizing me. I eat, standing, at one of two tall tables that are also rubbish bins, and people throw their trash away under my elbows. The television high in the corner is tuned to Sky News, which I watch inattentively, because there is no sound out of it.
Within and around the edges of the pattern of my working day, I foist nothing upon the accidental nature of the world. My observations stand without the imposition of plots or meaning: I am not interested in fictions. I have used up all the characters in my head. They are all at the beach. They have walked off the pages of all my old stories and gone to Mexico. A lot of them swam out in the ocean and are dead. Those who remain hang around a bar and watch the sea all day. They move from job to job. The sun boils them. They fuck each other in dirty motel rooms. They go drinking and fall into gutters, where they lie unconscious for days, and in the rainy seasons, when the streets flood and the mud from the green mountain slops down like a fat brown tongue, their bodies float around like empty aluminium cans. This is the end of them, the Giudecca in the hell of the free self.
After class, the students and I head down to the Hop House on Parnell Street, a sadly decorated Korean sushi restaurant and sports bar with cheap pitchers of beer. It is full of young Korean dudes with freakishly beautiful girlfriends, and, worryingly, an increasing number of Dublin hipster types, the gig-goers in hats and T-shirts and beards and jittery on E or amphetamines.
The drive home is up the same streets I came down fifteen hours before, empty but for taxis. I run all the red lights. I come home and fall into the couch.
From out of this paralysed universe comes the concussive reality of women. These days I am up to my neck in luck.
I hate a surly and gloomy spirit that slides over the pleasures of life and seizes and feeds upon its misfortunes. [Montaigne]
I am annoyed that my essays serve the ladies only as a public article of furniture, an article for the parlour. This chapter will put me in the boudoir. [Montaigne]
I carry, through the static tableau of my everyday routine, memories of bodies and the noises they make, the positions they prefer, the intricate texture of beauty – moles, bellybuttons, breastbones, fat and skinny nipples, wet cunts, irises, teeth, callused bottoms of feet, smudged make-up, freckles on noses, toenails and fingernails.
I like women who are so pale they can disappear in white bedsheets. Undressing them in my bedroom, they glow white in the street light. When we wake, they are the colour of cold mornings. I like them falsely demure – they blush at the mention of things they desire, and things they do.
My
former housemate Elísabet – who is something of a sensation in her country, and only dates men half her age – writes very beautifully about sex because she is not afraid of what people will think. She says an orgasm is like a hand that reaches up inside her, grasps her by the spine, and shakes her like a rattle, an inch away from the death of one self and the rebirth of another. I have no capacity to write beautifully about sex. Often I am battling through the swamp of a dozen pints, the smoke of twenty cigarettes, and no real sleep for days. The exercise is nauseating, and I feel like the young Orwell working in a small, hot, Paris kitchen.
There is a blonde named Juliette who comes three or four times during one long act of fucking. She can come just from humping with clothes on, even giving head. She lectures in physics to undergraduates. She got her PhD for something that did not interest her, and now she is wandering disinterestedly through post-doc research, and resents academia. She has very bright brown eyes and does not hold her drink.
Olivia, a junior doctor, has a problem with falling when she gets drunk, and likes tequila. She gives head with the enthusiasm you only find in good Catholics, and she, who usually doesn’t sleep with men she likes for months, lies around in the mornings wondering what has happened to her morals. She is nearly thirty but could pass for nineteen. This creates a funny incongruity – she is always saying things that seem too wise for her years. Because she works very hard in a competitive field that prizes success at the expense of others, she is also slightly mean-spirited. She sees right through romance and does not trust men. She has straight brown hair that she is proud of, and a wide mouth. She is enormously pretty but looks uncannily like a cousin of mine, which makes me feel uncomfortable. She comes with an almost unnoticeable shiver.