by Lucy Durneen
There was a postcard from Claudine L. this morning, which was why this story was on your mind. Otherwise today would have been nothing special. Routines don’t make things any easier. You stand in the shower and wonder how you can trust the shampoo bottle’s claims for the welfare of your hair when the packaging company hasn’t even got a basic grasp of the apostrophe.
Claudine’s postcard was stamped Tucson, Arizona, with a picture of the Grand Canyon on the front, falling away into the mantle of the Earth under a pale brown sun. It is such a familiar landmark and yet it looks so much like a world you cannot possibly know, that even holding it in your hand felt dangerous. It says something about you that the time when you were happiest was based on an error of perception, but as a Drama and Movement Therapist you can probably work out the significance of this for yourself.
You pick up the postcard again now, touch your fingers to the words like they might burn. Then you put on a song by Paul Simon, the one about African skies. The one where he sings of Tucson, Arizona, and wings to fly through harmony. You dance around, loose and free. It is never a good idea to dance on your own, especially in front of a window. Especially not when you are thinking about the light, that first light on Christmas Eve, and your father, out there in the snow taking on the world. You hear his voice every time you walk into your practice, which is really just a room above a Travel Agent with your name stencilled on the door. ‘Clap Trap’, he is saying. ‘You couldn’t have been a doctor. Hell, a lawyer even. We threw good money after bad with you.’
In response to your call
Dear G –,
I’m in Paris. The last time I was in Paris was probably the last time I wrote a letter... I’ll apologise straight off for my handwriting; I want to say it’s screwed from years of typing, but the truth is I’m just impatient, and ink hurts. And yes, I have a passport now, I can go anywhere, which is a thing I haven’t been able to say for more than ten years, (did I tell you this story? It ends with the lesson: never destroy your marriage certificate, no matter how much you hate the bastard…) The first thing the Immigration guy said to me was—hey, you can flee now if you want to!—like running away was a thing that I’d won. Did I want to? Is this what I’m doing? It was you told me once, all that stands between the moment of disaster and the collapse of humanity is seven days. Or was it less optimistic—five. I try to imagine you striding out against the apocalypse with a gun and can only suppose you must be right. I think what I’m saying is: aren’t we all, always, ready to flee, at some level?
I’m writing this from a Salon de Thé on the Rue de Rivoli. The signature drink here is hot chocolate, strong as coffee, the milk served in white china jugs and little rosettes of chantilly cream on gilt-edged saucers. None of it looks particularly generous at first, but I promise you, five minutes in and you’re seeing stars. The queue to get in the place was long; I was an hour just in line on the street, not even inside, face pressed to the window looking at the macarons like they were terracotta kings in the Forbidden Palace. Not everyone would consider patisserie to be worth the ordeal - but there’s a signature drink! And the age-old question: milk or chocolate in first? The waitress was definitely telling me something about the correct order but I wasn’t going to ask her to speak English, thinking the system would be self-evident. Here’s a sign the establishment you’re in is way out of your usual league; that your drink has a system and an understanding of it cannot be assumed. It goes where? And—when? (A measure of one’s loneliness: that there is no-one to turn to and ask. Or this: learned at a talk at the Polar Institute, right before I left: that there are whole islands in ‘existence’ literally imagined by explorers, willed into being by the enormity of the emptinesses they were trying to chart...)
There is an American girl at the table opposite. Long-haired and kind of hip. She’s with a Frenchman—he’s older, of course. Sometimes she looks over from her Chocolat Africain and catches my eye and I think of the last time I was with someone this way, doing that thing where the conversation is mostly about figuring out which parts of yourself you’re going to need to conceal. And don’t think badly of me that I imagine them in bed later—or, no, afterwards; if sans l’urgence, they will lie in separate silences, if he will be cold, if this will confuse her—if everyone feels this. Fifty Euros says he’ll be fucking someone else this time next year. And yet. Maybe I should have done this; loved less and more often.
I am trying to tell you–. I’m writing everything down as if I will forget it.
When I came here last the beautiful girl I was travelling with was stopped on the steps of the Montmartre funicular by a stranger who wanted to take her photograph. Her surprised face, turning from the light of a winter-pallid sun, that is the picture of her I carry in my mind, as if I were the camera, the composition my own. I was 19 when I came here last, when I last wrote letters. It seems an impossibility that I was ever that age. And then there will be the time when I will think it an impossibility that I was ever 39. Is this the best I can say, that the past seems like a time when I was almost alive? Just this morning I saw something when I crossed the street at Solférino, a bird in the road, hit by a car and thrashing into the tarmac, its neck and legs broken in opposite directions, like someone had stamped on a clockwork toy. Not death throes, life throes, shaking loose the last of its life.
I wonder if this is what I am doing in Paris. I wonder if I am shaking loose the last of a life.
You called me at 3am. It was a mistake, I know that—for you it would have been what, evening maybe? I’m not good with the time difference. I don’t know whether you’re even in New York. It is that time of year when there is no way to find you if you do not want to be found. It would have been a pressure in your pocket, an accidental combination of buttons pressed, or missed, at just the right moments—not a decision, not desire. And if most of me believes in Baudrillard’s hypotheses of Chance, there is equally a part that made you an island, willed into being. It is just possible that maybe, on the other side of the world, you were writing, looking out of a window, and some word or song made you stop, put down your pen, (oh, who of us really does this?) and this something made me worthy of your call. I know it isn’t true, but because I didn’t answer–.
They are warriors—not kings— and they aren’t in the Forbidden Palace, are they?
What you asked me to tell you was the story of the human heart. But, G–, my heart is tired. It disappoints me that all I can manage is this, and I don’t even know if I should send it.
–.
They dedicated the mass for the soul of Paolo Alonso
Which was not a name that meant anything to me until I read about how on a quiet, sunlit morning in old Goa a man named Arthur De Souza woke up to the sound of his wife’s tears and typed these words into his Internet blog. Bianca De Souza was luminous in the early sun and her shadow fell long over the room, rippling over tiles, throwing itself with force against whitewashed walls, and in another room, another world, their son stirred in his bed and without realising it came back from sleep into a world that was changed because Paolo Alonso was dead. I am thinking of it now, resting my hands on my own keyboard and imagining the sounds of their morning. The call to prayer, perhaps. I imagine the quieter, subtler sounds of china bowls, the louche chatter of a mynah. The crash of the sea slams through it all, always, the way I imagine it. I smell sweet Indian bread toasting and I am blown away with envy.
I found out about my great-great grandfather in a similar way, by which I mean-chance. It turned out he was once the captain of a famous clipper ship, his saltwater blood connecting me to a long line of men who knew that words like boom do not have to mean a loud noise and the leeway is not just a margin of error. The leeway is in fact when a ship drifts off course from the direction of the wind. This is what I do now, in my mother’s garden. I shut my eyes and hold out my arms and cast off. I float on my back against the dead grass and wonder what the sun is like in Goa, whether the light is cool and white i
n the mornings as in Europe, or dangerous and vital as in the books I read by Rushdie, Desai, Mistry. In these books rain smokes down the mountains like a dragon and the light is weak as tea. The light pours in the place where Arthur De Souza sits typing at his open window. If you stood beneath it you would hear the sound of words falling from his fingers, feel the way his grief hits the page, letter by letter. He would look up, I think, startled by the sound of a footfall beneath the window, only momentarily disturbed as if by a stray cat, or a sudden memory, before dropping his eyes to the keyboard again.
My mother stands above me on the steps of the back porch, looking at me like I am a stranger, and the look I give her, I could be her child again.
I never told you about this distant grandfather, but then I didn’t have the time to tell you about a lot of things. A thing I planned to share with you was the time I was chased by a prostitute who was selling garden gnomes by the side of a motorway somewhere outside Bratislava. It’s the sort of truth you can’t put in a story because who would believe it? At best it’s a good after-dinner anecdote. But we hadn’t long moved off the Cat in the Hat, so you were not ready for this kind of memory, the kind that alerts you to the existence of that remote time when your mother was not your mother, which is a time not one person on Earth is comfortable hearing of.
Outside the clinic it is turning to spring and a wind blows the light across the glass like a squall coming in from the sea. For a minute, sitting in the milky light, I am invisible; Ramani, in front of me, is invisible. A wildness takes me. My mother, who taught pre-school children, used to say that on a windy day the children become savages, but Ramani isn’t familiar with this phenomenon and she doesn’t comment. She sucks on the end of her pen and reviews her notes, the ones she made last week. The light stays outside the window for a moment and then rushes in like it’s coming for us, and suddenly we are neither of us there, as if we have simply been returned to molecules of Hydrogen and Oxygen. I imagine we are both holding our breath. I think of Ramani as air and I water. And then suddenly I feel too light, as if it is no longer enough to simply speak of water; at this moment, I need to be submerged.
I tell Ramani the end of that other story, the one about the grandfather who jumped overboard in a mutiny and drowned in the Java Sea. Joseph Conrad later wrote about it, which is the only thing I can say about my life that is genuinely interesting. I don’t know the end of Paolo Alonso’s story. I worry that it was a gun, or terrorism. People use the phrase in cold blood when they talk about violent death, but this is not how people die. People die in heat. Even the ones who choose their own death, they die trying very hard to find a reason to want to stay alive.
I tell Ramani about Paolo Alonso and how on the morning of his funeral Arthur De Souza blogged that he would take his young son to Mass, and they would dedicate the mass for the soul of Paolo Alonso. What Ramani does is sit back in her chair and write, very slowly, on a square, unlined notepad: they dedicated the mass for the soul of Paolo Alonso. And then she waits for my cue, which I won’t provide because it is me paying her and not the other way around, so it is only right that she should have to work to get the answers she wants. I tell her it is a Latin American name and she nods slowly, as if she is trying to remember something. Then she writes something I cannot see.
She asks if I have ever tried writing a blog, if I think this was a way for Arthur De Souza to heal himself of the grief he felt for Paolo Alonso. I tell her that I don’t really know that I can understand Arthur De Souza’s grief. She asks if that’s because grief itself is hard to understand and I tell her no. No, absolutely not. I tell her that ultimately it’s easy to understand grief, but what is hard is the process of comprehension, like algebra, which is impossible until you let go of the basic neural reluctance to view letters in place of numbers. And once you learn that it is possible to find x simply by knowing a and b, it’s possible—it’s possible—to understand anything. Relativity. The appeal of reality television. The fact that there is no special reason why you, you personally, would be exempt from suffering.
But it’s not for this kind of armchair philosophizing that I pay forty bucks an hour.
My geography— it never was very good. Is Goa a part of India? Ramani wants to know if I think that is significant, the fact I am not fully aware of my place in the world—in its histories of grieving. I tell her I don’t believe so but then, I have never really thought about it before. I feel as geographically grounded as any of us can, living as we do on a planet that is dependent on the random turn on its axis, that depends in turn on the continued nuclear fission of a dying star. ‘Fission,’ I ask her. ‘Is that the right word?’ Ramani writes this all down, shorthand. ‘If you’re interested,’ she says, ‘Goa is a province in South West India.’
‘It’s like Stingo eating a banana while Sophie’s daughter is led to the gas chamber,’ I say. But then I am suddenly not sure what I mean, or even whether Sophie’s choice was her daughter or her son, or if it was about something else entirely.
‘That’s a fiction,’ Ramani says. ‘That didn’t actually happen.’
Still, I wonder what it was I was doing on the day Paolo Alonso died. If I was here, on Great Eastern Street, answering Ramani’s questions, while he was dying, if it was fast, if there was time for him to pass on a message to those he loved.
‘You do know it was just a book,’ she says again and louder.
I understand. She has to establish if I have any grip on reality whatsoever.
I do not pay the forty dollars up front. When I leave her office I will give Ramani’s secretary a manila envelope containing two twenties, because these days the hole in the wall doesn’t dispense anything less—to make the slide towards terminal debt even faster, Martin says. Since June of last year cards or cheques are no longer acceptable; high banking charges, the secretary tells me. Martin tells me this is nothing to do with the banks but a way of avoiding tax. ‘You don’t need some quack to tell you what’s wrong with you,’ he says. ‘You don’t need to pay to hear that.’
In this regard, he is right. My mother would be happy to tell me for free. But what can I say? I need the questions. Isn’t it obvious, I want to say, don’t you see that if Ramani asks me enough questions, one of them is going to throw up an answer. Like the chimpanzee who would type the works of Shakespeare, if you had a lifetime to wait. I am like a chimpanzee with a typewriter, I will try and tell Martin. It has to happen, eventually.
‘And if you get an answer,’ he says, ‘What then?’
A sudden hail splinters through the sun, hitting all the window sills in turn before clotting into deep amber quarters of light, and what I am reminded of is fireworks, or rather, the November Fifth when my father sat us down and told us that my mother hadn’t lived up to his expectations and he was going to live in Germany, where a girl with a distant connection to the heir of a luxury car manufacturer would make him happy in ways my mother would later read about in the back pages of a well-known magazine. ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer to talk with our bereavement counsellor?’ Ramani says quietly.
‘I’m happy with you,’ I say. ‘Really.’
I tell her how I imagine Paolo Alonso’s Mass to be. Incense and magic. Shadows and light. She says I am confused. Maybe I am thinking of black mass, which is another thing altogether.
‘I’m not even a Catholic,’ I say.
Ramani’s face does not change. I tell her that Martin came round last night to change my light bulb.
She says, ‘Remind me. Martin is your neighbour?’
‘Martin’s my neighbour.’
‘Perhaps,’ she says, ‘changing your own light bulb would give you some sense of independence. I think you need that. I think that would be good for you.’
‘I am independent,’ I say. ‘My independence isn’t compromised by Martin.’
But I will wonder. The next time he stops by to wax the runners of the kitchen drawer that sticks, I’ll make a concerted effort to watch
the motion of his muscles, marvel at the fluctuation of them under his skin. I imagine myself easing the candle against the sides of the drawers, rubbing it gently the way he does until the drawer gives way in a crash of silver, the disaster that would result. I am okay with this, if it is dependence. It is never me who asks him to stay. When he fucks me I feel his skin is strong, and mine is like tissue paper softly wrapping my bones. All I can say of this is that it seems to help.
I tell her again, ‘Martin’s just my neighbour.’ This is true, in spite of how it sounds. I know nothing else about him, other than that we shop at the same store; we are both insomniacs, looking for ways to kill time before morning.
In Goa they drink Chai, sweet and spicy, but here it’s just tea, with sugar, with sympathy. ‘Let me fix you a drink,’ he said that first time I invited him in, because I was shivering. Fix my heart, I wanted to tell him. Fix my heart.
Another time we talk about emotions. For example, if I had to sum up this year in one word—. Just one word, Ramani says gently, as though she is coaxing the word out, asking it to step into the space between us in her room above Great Eastern Street so that we can look at it, and deconstruct it together. Deconstruction is something that Ramani holds in high regard. Only when we have learned to be destructive can we become constructive beings. Together is another word she likes to use. Together we will survive this journey. There will be ups and downs, mountains to climb, but we will tackle them together. She talks to me like I am an animal in a rescue centre. In response, I eye her straight, like a dog. ‘Anger,’ I say. ‘I’m angry that you and I ever had to meet.’
‘Okay,’ she says softly. ‘But who are you angry with?’ She pauses. ‘Are you angry with yourself?’