Ideas of Heaven

by Joan Silber

  “That movie was so much fun, thank you so much, I needed fun,” she said.

  At the end of the night, in front of her crummy hotel, I leaned toward her. I was old to be at an angle of public uncertainty about a woman, old to be kissing anyone on the street. But it was a real kiss, or turned into one—I had not forgotten how to swim in these waters—and the bright shock of it had its own authority.

  ALICE (THAT WAS HER NAME) talked a good deal about the U.S. but it was clear to me she had no plans. If she went to Miami, she could hardly be a showgirl again, as she had once been. Sometimes she waxed sentimental, telling me about the brilliant surf on Miami Beach or a fabled production of The Wiz she had seen on Broadway. Her mother’s coconut cream pie or her greataunt’s hydrangeas. Though she had avoided her family for decades.

  On the fourth night we became lovers. She came back to the apartment and we sat on the sofa drinking pastis and then we slipped into my bedroom without any difficulty. There was no shyness in her, but all her art (she was distinctly artful) was in the languorous aptness of her responses; I could feel her listening for me at every turn. I felt like an aging virgin, too long without sex (as she must have known), a gangling old puppy. But I thought Alice herself was moved by my swooning at her touch, and the poetry of lust sustained us through all the precipitous stages—the removal of our clothing, the lengthy exploration of intimate landscapes, the natural violence of the act itself.

  In the moments when I could think, I was full of jubilation to find myself once again in the garden of earthly delights. Here again! Not too late! But I began to see that I was not quite in a terrain where I had ever been before. I was arrived from a long journey through ashes, I was the ragged wanderer stepping out from the dark wood. Now every sensation weighed on me more tenderly. For all that I hardly knew Alice, I was her serious lover.

  ALICE WAS A little giddy afterwards. I had used a condom (after lecturing Marc for years about them) and she teased me about whether I had gone shopping and put in a good supply. I had, actually. It pleased her enormously to hear this. And then she put her head on my chest, kissed my nipple, and fell asleep. I had expected more conversation, and I lay awake, in some disappointment, but I was rapturous too. I drifted on astonishment.

  She would not eat anything I had in the house for breakfast—she only liked American cold cereal in the morning. She looked clear and awake, her light hair shining under the kitchen light. She had gotten up with me at six-thirty, when I had to get ready for school.

  “This is so cozy, your kitchen,” she said.

  “Small, you mean,” I said.

  “The best kitchen I ever had,” she said, “was when I was in Miami. We had a big apartment, with a picture window and palm trees outside.”

  I thought how her face must have been when she was younger. She was like a faded doll now.

  “The man I lived with broke the window when he was drunk. He threw a chair through it when he was angry about something.”

  “Was he dangerous?”

  “Not to me,” she said. “Or we never got to that point. He was fine when he wasn’t drunk. Alcohol was his demon. A crying shame is how I’d put it in English.”

  She had a lovely sort of wistful kindness, quite unusual.

  And she refused my coffee. She was going back to bed again, if I didn’t mind, and then she was going to walk around, just following her nose, seeing all the things she hadn’t seen when she was living in the provinces. Who knew if she’d ever have a chance to see them again? She was too lazy to follow a map. She liked to amble, she hated to worry. That was how she was.

  AS FAR AS I could see, the important thing was to make use of what time we had. Later in the week, I pointed out the waste in her paying money for the hotel, since she had stopped spending nights there anyway. I thought she could stay in France longer if she could make her francs last. Was she in a hurry to get home?

  Not yet. She gave me a sunny look. And every day while I was at school, she did her eccentric sightseeing; she went to Baroque churches (the more fanciful the better) and designers’ shops (just for looking) and every single bridge on the Seine (she loved bridges). At night we stayed in. We were in bed a good deal of the time. We seemed to be embarked on a kind of work together, an erotic project carried out with painstaking elaboration. Certain inventions had to be taken as far as possible. Certain gestures had be played out, ornamented and altered and branched into dizzying constructions. I thought it was my age that made the pointlessness of fear so clear to me, but it was probably Alice.

  When I was in my twenties, an American woman I picked up hitchhiking told me, “French men think they’re God’s gift.” I had never heard this expression in English and later could not resist repeating it to Yves, who was still a priest (he laughed). She was a sour, skinny girl from Chicago named Peggy, and I turned on the radio in the car (she hated Françoise Hardy too) to escape more discussion. But now her phrase floated up in my mind, and I thought of myself and Alice: guests at a banquet, lavished with manna. We did not thank each other directly—that would have been too meek and cloying—but beneath the abundance that exhausted us, we were, I think, both secretly humbled.

  I TRIED NOT to worry about Alice leaving. She missed her parents, who had never come to visit. She missed hot dogs, American disc jockeys, and a lake in Wisconsin where her cousins used to summer. Bernard said to me, “There aren’t really very many permanent expatriates. People usually do go home eventually, people like her.”

  It gave me such anguish when he said this that I walked for an hour in the rain, morose and sodden and too restless to take the Métro. Hadn’t I been through enough? I could not help feeling sorry for my old, battered self; I was depressed and soaked when I reached my apartment. And there was Alice—calling out from the hallway, “Giles! You’re home!”—glowing and glad to see me. What was I complaining about? When I hugged her, she was beautifully solid flesh. It was my own doing if I could feel her absence in my arms.

  At dinner we had a small spat over why she always left the carton of cream out to sour. In her own country, I said, people probably didn’t bother much about spoilage. Her voice was deep and coarse when she defended herself. Had I been longing for someone who wasn’t there? What did I want?

  I wanted it anyway. Later, when we were lying in bed after making love, I fell into dread again over how soon she was going to leave—perhaps before the end of the month, when the airline rates went up for summer—and then she’d be gone without a trace. That would be the end of it. Meanwhile Alice, in her actual corporeal form, lay nestling next to me.

  ON MY WAY to school one morning, I passed the storefront temple with the golden Buddha seated in the same spot on his lotus blossom. I had grown to know him better, from my reading; his pronouncements had colored my thought. This particular statue, with his hands carefully placed in the meditation pose, sent a strict, no-nonsense calm out into the street. I had passed this figure for years with the sense that the two of us had a private life together. Our golden hours. Often I had a secret impulse to put my palms together and bow before him, as the Cambodians of the district did when they entered the temple. To see him in the glinting April light this morning made me remember (as if it were long ago, which it wasn’t) the nourishment of my long nights of reading—not a lot of reading going on now—and the comfort of my intentions.

  Goodbye to all that. I walked by him full of regret that I had slipped from my steadiness. He didn’t care whether I had a lover or not—he was not opposed to these things, not exactly—but I had stopped needing him. I had used him and let him go. I hardly struggled anymore with his ideas. What was wrong with me that I couldn’t keep two kinds of attention in my head at once? I skulked past the Buddha, homesick for what I’d left behind. I had not thought such a thing would be painful.

  MARC SAID, “God, you look so much better than you used to. You used to look gray. Now you’re a ruddy old personage.”

  Marc was a great fan of Alice.
(Everyone said this was surprising in a son.) She adored the music on the CDs he played for us when we went there for supper—zouk from the French Antilles, zippy and fluid—and she let Catherine lead her in a few dance steps. Marc and I did not dance, but the women enjoyed themselves greatly. Marc said later, “She’s very free but not vulgar,” a compliment I did not repeat because it sounded too patronizing, too French, though it had real admiration in it. On another evening, when she wrenched open a stuck window in his kitchen—she really was very strong—he could not stop marveling at her athleticism. Catherine got her listening to the Caribbean radio station, so my apartment was filled with gently blaring brass and lilting vocals.

  It was also littered with magazines and Alice’s clothing. Alice was a carnival of abandoned objects. Sometimes she had fits of straightening up—she tried to clean the living room and drowned a favorite book of mine in spilled coffee, an old leatherbound edition of Montaigne.

  “You loved that book,” Alice said. “I feel terrible. Did you buy it at one the bookstalls by the river?”

  “Yes,” I said. Actually, it was an anniversary present from Sylvie.

  Sylvie was not a secret, of course, but I did lie sometimes to save myself the difficulty of talking about her to Alice. I did this without thinking. I, who had wanted nothing so much as an honest life, was back to evasions and cover-ups. Some of these lies were forms of tact—I told Alice I enjoyed the games of honeymoon bridge she was so fond of playing. And some were flat denials of fact—I told her, for some reason, that I had always been faithful to my wife. I displayed a modest reluctance to brag about this. Yes, always. It seemed I could not be at close quarters with a woman I loved without staining myself with lies.

  And Alice too sometimes twisted the truth, I came to see. She had not studied nearly as much ballet as her earlier reports suggested. Her husband might have been wildly crazy about her, but he was the one who had ended the marriage. In Paris one day she walked for miles all the way to the Bois de Boulogne but she also took a bus in between. There must have been other half-truths I had no way to guess.

  When Alice’s money was almost gone, she got the idea that she might teach some classes at the yoga center—I didn’t expect her to be hired, but she was. So she wasn’t going home that soon, despite what she said. She took me out to dinner to celebrate her first influx of cash, and we got drunk at the brasserie on the corner where I used to take Marc every Friday night. The owner did a corny waltz when he brought us the second bottle. Alice got up and danced a few measures with him, pleased as could be. I was embarrassed (what movie was this from? not one I liked) but I didn’t mind very much. I was long past minding anything, I was like a macerated fruit soaked in happiness.

  I HAD AN easy life, those first few years with Alice. When does anyone ever get to say such a thing? I did say it, to people who made the least inquiry about how I was. Who knew better than I did what was easy and what was not? Alice was no trouble. Her slackness and her untidiness and her love of aimless wandering were the loose ends of a generous nature. My home was a cushion of no-trouble.

  We were just past the early, more exhilarated years, when I woke up in the middle of the night with a feeling as if a book had been slammed shut around something in my chest. Maybe I had simply eaten something, but it was not like anything I had eaten before. I lay rigid in fear while I waited to see what the pang in my chest was going to do. I thought about what Sylvie must have felt before she died. I was always thinking of Sylvie, I had never stopped thinking of her. She lived under my skin like a hidden layer of tissue. I felt now as if I could just almost speak to her, I wanted to speak. My heart was bursting with what I needed to say, I was on the edge of conversation.

  The pang lifted, and when it didn’t return, as the minutes went by, I could see that I was all right. I would have liked to tell Sylvie that I was okay after all. I should have told her not to go to the embassy—any fool in this century knew embassies were dangerous. Why didn’t I ever try to talk her out of going? The Chinese only kept refusing her anyway. Meanwhile, Alice lay in bed next to me, in her eyelet nightgown, with her arm flung across her forehead, in a deep and oblivious slumber. Her hair still smelled of the American chicken she had fried for supper. Had this part of my life been a lie all along too?

  I had to talk myself down from the horror of this question. It was no good asking it. I loved Alice. Sylvie was dead. End of story. How could they be vying for the same spot, when one of them no longer took up space?

  ALICE, WHO WAS really quite superstitious, had a startling reaction when I told her I’d had a chest pain in the night that was really nothing. She went out to pray. There was no religion she’d been raised in or belonged to, but she walked into her favorite church, the Église du Dôme, of all places, and knelt for a while, hoping and requesting, and she lit a candle. It moved me to hear that she had done this for me. Where had the thought come from? I was by this time more Buddhist than Catholic, and had been going again to a Soto Zen center near my school, as she knew. She had probably loved the staginess of the great stone church, but I was moved nonetheless.

  “She prayed near Napoleon’s tomb?” Marc said, when I told him the story.

  “Don’t make fun of her,” I said.

  “It’s a pompous church,” Catherine said. “But Luc loves it too.”

  Yves’ oldest son was getting his doctorate in architectural history. “Get Luc to take you on a tour of Invalides,” Marc said. “He’s actually not boring.”

  “Luc is smart,” I said.

  “Can you imagine if there were no Luc?” Catherine said. “Imagine if Marc’s uncle had stayed celibate forever.”

  “Everybody thought he was going to,” I said.

  “I don’t get it. How did Yves ever do it?” Marc said. “It makes no sense to me that people do that.”

  “Yves didn’t mind so much,” I said. “For a long time he didn’t.”

  I THOUGHT THAT night about when Yves was young, when he first went into the Church. All my friends wanted to know if a girl had jilted him, was that the reason? Perhaps a girl had, but I didn’t know about it. And perhaps later the Church jilted him, let him down with its arid institutional cruelty, and so he had been drawn to Marguerite. I could see that sex and religion were always fighting over the same ground—both with their sweeping claims, their promises of transport—and each ran into the breach left by the other, each tried to fill in for the other’s failings. Forms of devotion, forms of consolation.

  I COULD REMEMBER when Yves first left the priesthood, and he brought Marguerite to our apartment to meet us. Sylvie had wondered whether it would be all right to curse in front of them or to mention smoking dope. “Absolutely,” I said. In fact Yves came stiffly through the door in his tweed jacket, with his hands clasped behind him like a priest. Marguerite was so shy she would hardly take off her coat. They had, after all, just come out of years of lying about each other. Sylvie and I did our best to be irresistible and to draw them out—we told them our liveliest stories, we fed them our most successful food, we had them tiptoe in to view the sleeping Marc. We were eager to pull them into the joys of coupledom. From our naturally elevated spot, we found the two of them quite charming, adorably embarking on an enterprise that was for us so familiar and durable.

  I could not help feeling more advanced than Yves, who had taken so long to know that he needed what I already had. Sylvie was wearing a bright silk scarf around her hair and looked very pretty that night. How smug I was then. I watched her, as if I had invented her, out of my own cleverness; as if this were the only life I was going to have in this world, as if no others were waiting.

  A NOTE ON SOURCES

  In “The High Road” and “Gaspara Stampa,” I have quoted directly from the poems of Gaspara Stampa, using the modern translations in Gaspara Stampa’s Selected Poems, edited and translated by Laura Anna Stortoni and Mary Prentice Lillie (New York: Italica, 1994).

  “Gaspara Stampa” also contains a
passage from Petrarch’s Canzoniere, translated into verse with notes and commentary by Mark Musa (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University, 1996).

  For information on Gaspara Stampa, I have relied on Fiora A. Bassanese’s Gaspara Stampa (Boston: Twayne, 1982). I was also helped by Patricia Fortini Brown’s Art and Life in Renaissance Venice (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997).

  “Ashes of Love” includes selected passages from The Duino Elegies. I have taken these from Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Selected Poetry, edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell (New York: Vintage, 1989). The quote from Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is from the translation by Stephen Mitchell (New York: Vintage, 1985).

  “Ideas of Heaven” is inspired by Eva Jane Price’s China Journal, 1889–1900: An American Missionary Family During the Boxer Rebellion (New York: Scribner’s, 1989). The character of Liz is my own invention but the details of her life in China owe much to these letters. I am also indebted to Nat Brandt’s Massacre in Shansi (New York: to Excel, 1994, 1999). I owe special thanks as well to Li Xing Ye (Mark Lee) of Luoyang, Henan, People’s Republic of China, for his conversation and letters about his experience with the Oberlin missionaries in Shanxi, and to his classmate, Raymond Chu, of Boulder, Colorado, for his translations and generous help.

  “The Same Ground” is informed by the discussion of Marco Polo in Jonathan D. Spence’s The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), the book that also led me to Eva Price.