by Hilary Plum
Alice—Modigliani said, looking in the direction of the air conditioner—your thinking is the opposite of conspiratorial. It’s the web without the spider.
He said: I think I’ve always liked that about you.
Later I understood this was the one thing he ever said that I truly believed.
If I were a conspiracy theorist, he went on, I’d think you were trying to distract this investigation from its real target.
Bill LeRoy, I said obediently, Xenith.
Right now he’s angling to replace the military in Afghanistan, Modigliani said. All private contractors, private air force. British East India Company model.
I said: At the same time he’s selling his forces to countries hoping to keep migrants in or migrants out. Or rather, Muslims out. Turn back the boats at gunpoint.
Modigliani shifted and I thought he was going to lay his hands over the photo, over my own.
What happens, I wondered, when a spider mistakes itself for a fly?
Modigliani finished his drink and rose. The table rocked again.
Have you ever noticed, he said, how rarely I ask a question?
After Modigliani left I went on: I’d called the guy who’d served time, the guy Kareem knew. He was punished most severely because he’d visited the prisoner the most and was supposed to be the one signing off, keeping track of the others.
I was only halfway through Kareem’s name when the woman who had answered the phone interrupted: He doesn’t know anything. Don’t call here again. She was gone and with her the background sound of a child’s off-key singing. I called again. I thought of going out there, to the Midwestern farmland where they lived, not far from where I used to visit a long-dead uncle of my mother’s. Amish in buggies or on bicycles on the road’s shoulder, cornfields, trampolines in yards that back then I’d coveted. He was a farm boy, this man, and at first I thought this should damn him. Shouldn’t a boy like that have known, have understood the body and what it won’t endure? Only once did they unhook Muhammad from the ceiling and by then he could no longer bend his knees. But tonight, the refrigerator assuming the role of crickets, the floor athrum with someone’s bass, I understood why this made no difference.
Elena
Just last week I received in the mail a copy of my old chapter on Anastasia Calque, with one of my best lines (I had thought at the time) double underlined:
Each story is the story of a marriage, and who is dead in the end.
Well, I had written it; I would write nothing like it now, but what does that matter? I am no longer young and no longer need to mean everything always, like some sort of monk or machine.
My work on Calque and her minor novel Eyes of the Moth is still widely cited. The novel had vanished, out of print, long before Calque’s death, her death which must now be, it is strange to think, thirty years ago. She had died without heir and her effects were left neglected in her apartment, which a trollish distant cousin or aunt now inhabited. After a decade of unanswered letters, one of Anastasia’s former lovers had in frustration shown up at the door, to plead with the aunt for one afternoon to sort and catalog Anastasia’s things. There must be letters from her godfather, the lover had persuaded the aunt, and these will be worth something. The godfather was long dead, but his films were now being remastered, and had there been anything more than a few snapshots of him, in his silly signature high-waisted pants, eating ices with the young Calque on a dock, seagulls wheeling, no doubt they would indeed have sold. It was then that the lover had discovered Calque’s neat boxes of original manuscripts, among them Eyes of the Moth, which she retrieved, the aunt’s acquiescence reluctant. Thus seventeen years ago a copy of the novel had appeared in my department mail. Courtesy of this same former lover, whose note to me, in English, said only: This must be published. E.
At that time, of Calque’s five novels only one had been translated into English—by, it’s worth noting, the new husband of this same E, Calque’s erstwhile lover. The rest of Calque’s work was read ravenously and to some degree canonized in her home country, but never known or wholly forgotten outside it. The rest except for Eyes of the Moth, that is, which had never been available anywhere after the first print run was lost to fire. A handful of copies had always been said to have survived the flames, and in the years before E’s package arrived I had attempted several times to obtain one, although at least twice I’d paid through the nose for what turned out to be the wrong book—refunds of course, in the unhinged capitalism of that country, impossible.
The fire had been no accident; rather a deliberate attack on the house that published all the great leftist writers of the time. It was the eve of the military coup, and it was never at least to my research definitively clear which of the pathetic right-wing or neo-fascist gangs then roaming the streets, their moment imminent, was responsible. A custodian, a mail clerk, and a young editorial assistant had died. Quite the offensive on the intelligentsia. The other victims, however, were the novels in the print shop, still in the midst of being bound, and this included Calque’s newest, a fictionalization of her love affairs, all the participants perfectly recognizable, though portrayed in grotesque and radiant distortion. This trueness to life, as well as the novel’s radical sexual politics, would no doubt have won it considerable if not positive attention. But only six weeks after the fire came the coup, and nationwide there was little attention left for literature. By the time anyone could have tried to salvage the lost novels, the military junta was in its furious first round of censorship and reforms, and Calque had withdrawn in illness to her apartment, in the first stages of the malaise that would find her years later immensely and debilitatingly fat.
I do not deceive myself. I know the novel is flawed, knew it the first time I read it, at my desk turning the pages with care and sitting very upright. Calque’s work is so sickeningly violent, and yet I succumb, each time it offers up a sentimental morsel, too sweet, I know, but swallow anyway, and in the throat it is monstrous, a moth with razor-edged wings. It is never wise to read her fiction quite alone, as I did then, around me the building a series of settling and humming sounds, growing louder as the novel’s lovers destroyed one another, with grisly intimacy, as if the tongue could lift skin clean off bone. Perhaps it was in this vulnerable state—sitting in my office, teaching too much in those days and still alone in the city, my fingers crept to the lap of my skirt as I read, Calque’s lovers encountering one another in cinemas (of course), in baths, and by the light of an aquarium—that I fell in love with the novel. Despite its flaws. Despite or because of. As they say. But I have reread it at least a dozen times.
I wrote the introduction to the translation, which came out a few years later, and my paper on Calque’s oeuvre, which focused on this novel as stylistic keystone, the last to be written before her psychiatric treatments commenced, had been lauded, contended with, and was if not essential certainly a significant contribution to my vita when I was named chair. Calque is not of course the primary focus of my research; rather the poetry of that time, in the publishing wasteland left in the wake of the coup, no one able or desiring to publish under the censorship of the military regime, and so appearing in journals and underground publications across the continent, engaging in a bewitchingly fertile series of translations and collaborations with foreign artists in an effort to resist the cultural ruination taking place in their homeland. With her French name and French father Calque could have fled for Paris, but she did not. By that time she was too ill. And, she claimed, she hated Paris.
She claimed she hated everywhere that was not her apartment. Where I was a girl, she said in interviews, hiding in the cupboards with my cousin during dinner parties, listening to every small thing that went on. Consider how debauched her mother’s parties were. Shortly after he reached puberty the cousin became quite volatile, his psychiatric problems ultimately not unlike Calque’s, but he was a boy, and big, and when he broke the
arm of a teacher in one of his spells, he was sent to his first institution, and died some fifty years later in his fourth. And so Calque spent the junta years in her apartment, writing little, and occasionally, when illness overtook her, traveling to a northern hospital to convalesce, a luxury not widely available under the new regime, but with her mother’s money she could seek out what vestiges remained.
Calque did not travel well, as I had explained in my papers, and my central illustration of this fact and of her instability in those days was the story of the photographer. She had stayed with the photographer in America only a few months, and yet what a wreck she’d been on returning, her symptoms heightening so that she would never again go abroad; and this could fairly be said to be the only time in her forty-nine years that she turned to drink.
My most thorough treatment of the photographer was in the chapter on Calque in my book on the art of the junta years, a chapter developed and adapted from my many previous critical writings on her life and work. By my reading, the writer’s disastrous relationship with the photographer paralleled the relationship between their two nations. She: under siege, desperate, celebrated artist on the verge of exile, fighting for her work’s existence. He: in the nascence of his talents, wealthy, hardly knowing his own power, recent tribulations overcome and his success merely in its first flowering. Calque had seen some of his work and after an ardent correspondence had traveled to New York to see him. Her first novel had met with some success, despite its controversial subject and the increasingly grim state of her country; she was high with her new status, if not manic. She packed up and flew to him.
Each marriage is the story of a marriage
Whose is the end
And now, after years of dormancy, the story resumes: last week the photographer wrote to me. My book has been out almost a decade, but here was my chapter on Calque, Xeroxed and mailed back to me, with his enraged cover letter and that line crudely emphasized. I am not dead, the photographer wrote, you may be dismayed to learn. And all you have written about me are lies.
He must be in his eighties now, but he was quite articulate, his penmanship picturesque. The English translation of the novel in which he appeared, the same Eyes of the Moth, had come out twelve years earlier, a few years before my own book. Yet it seemed these events had escaped his notice until now, when they left him belatedly apoplectic—dangerously so, I thought, considering his age, and impressed that even as his insults mounted his handwriting did not waver. It was interesting that more of her lovers had not protested her treatment of them, whether in life or literature; the E who had sought out her manuscripts was the only one as far as I knew whom she had not pinned down in a novel somewhere. (Though I’ve wondered if this kindness was strategic, since E’s new husband had proved himself such an adept translator.)
Pure libel, the photographer wrote, and demanded immediate redress. His first example was that I had explained—as Calque said many times through the years—that on her arrival in New York he had refused to take her picture because she was too fat. This, she said in interviews, in her murmuring voice and with her cat-like expression, this broke my heart. He would only photograph my ankles, she said, which are still very beautiful.
Soon, she said, he only photographed women with ankles like mine. If you look closely, she said, you’ll see the likeness, all the ankles are mine.
Utter nonsense, the photographer wrote. Though I, who had pored over what slides of his work I could find (he had not, in fact, become the success his early shows had promised; after the reviews cooled then ceased altogether, he had turned to advertising and spent much of his career working for a mid-range watch company), believed I could see just what she meant.
Dear sir, I began in reply. Thank you for your letter. The novel has two sides; I would say it is two mirrors back to back. Any I is split from the start: two faces made one, the stone and the acid that bleeds it. I have forgotten your work, but I do remember Calque’s ankles, perfect half-moons, expensive shoes resting on the platforms of her wheelchair. We shook hands.
In the novel the photographer is less than a beast: one-dimensional. Every day the woman flees him; he closes the door to his studio and she takes a train into the city, where she seeks out a neighborhood known for its radicals as well as its junkies, all day she sits in a dark room and hears a chorus of laughter and vomit and copulation, a woman tirelessly serenading herself. An old man befriends her, amateur gnostic, long-time addict. With him she pretends to pray. Though insincerely, merely to quiet his fears for her.
The photographer is passionate about Eastern thought and eats one meal a day, always in some sort of broth. She hides all her chocolate, which he is sick even to look at. The day she leaves him there is an ice storm, ice sheathing every twig of the oaks on the boulevard that leads to his house, ice on the tracks shutting down the trains that run from the suburbs into the city, ice snapping whole limbs to litter roads and smash porches and roofs. She is caught in a police sweep of the building she passes her days in, but everyone else, it seems, had been warned; she is the only one there. After her release she flies home. Her clothes are stained with chocolate and she has grown only fatter.
Why must I write what you’ve already read? When he loses her the photographer believes he has known suffering, but he is mistaken. I do not know if he ever marries.
Calque was nowhere near radical enough for her fellow intellectuals under the right-wing regime. In time they condemned her, expelled her from their journals, their collaborations, their salons. She wrote only of sex and children and God. When I met her she asked me, You didn’t bring your daughter? I said, No. I said, I hadn’t realized I’d told you about her. (Louisa was so young then, just two, and the research trip on which I met Calque my first time away from her.) Of course I could tell from your voice, Anastasia said, on the phone you have the voice of a mother. She laughed, and her nurse, with whom she had no languages in common, laughed with her.
Calque never had children and by then her husband was dead.
Years later she drowned, a seemingly accidental result of her medications and an oversized bathtub.
I wrote my letter to the photographer in the margins of the novel, on only the pages in which he appears. Not the translation, but the original: one of the rare extant copies, which I had through years of diligence at last acquired. It was a gift, then, of some value, or would have been had I not defaced it. He had never learned her language, of course. Calque was—all agreed—a linguistic genius, and learned English as though it were an extended joke, punchline delayed; she claimed she learned only from television programs, but her vocabulary was multifarious and syntax dizzying. To this I myself can attest. She knew when she wrote the story of the photographer that he couldn’t read it; it was only upon the translation of Eyes of the Moth, after her death, and with my own writing about her that he could learn the role she’d assigned him. He told me Anastasia had read him everything she’d written, in her own flawless translations, as they sat on the porch among the fireflies and lush green of Westchester County. I did not believe him.
Alice
Someone might have said: Move on. Eight months since I’d entered those bloodied rooms, and what? At night I envisioned masked men flitting across the rooftop out my window, visible in the light not of the moon but this city’s merciless incandescence. Who were these men, barely seen, passing through a mirror of my own mind? In my dreams in what guise did the killers appear? Mercenary, militant, operative, terrorist, troop, fool… Whose face turned away from me? Who got rich in the end? I stood before the window, bare belly to the air conditioner, in one hand a glass of warm gin.
Around me the apartment was like a home—Kareem’s investigation pinned up in one corner, a folding table I’d found in a dumpster and hauled up the stairs bearing my notes, my clothes folded on the bookcase, beside the bed a stack of magazines. The old smell was gone, my smell must have driven it out. Wha
tever admixture of raisin bran, gin and lime, Corona and lime, perfume, and purple dish soap defined me.
Home to what? For what? I’d written three pieces on the whole mess, and someday I would write, I might write, something on Xenith. Not tonight and not tomorrow. I wasn’t broke. I was working on a story on the high accident rates among veterans, everything that could not be called suicide but betrayed exceptional recklessness. I pressed my forehead against the window, butt thrust out to keep my skin’s distance from the chill air.
After the hurricane shootings—after I had left the city, left it all unsolved—I had gone up to some little college city where a series of fights and two rapes had occurred that seemed to be racially motivated. The city was Victorian coal-era rowhouses, nice shabby brick or quaintly painted facades. Half the college’s buildings were on the historical register. I did my best. Some said that this was in fact my best piece. Most cohesive, this was the phrase, though who would have read enough of my work, the whole corpus, if you will, to compare? My disdain for the place swelled up in every preposition, I couldn’t comprehend why I was there, tripping over Adirondack chairs and trying to charm these baby-faced brutes, when the hurricane shootings remained unavenged.
But that can’t be the right way to remember it. That can’t be right. I was the one who had decided to leave the hurricane behind me, forget whoever we’d found in the morgue. Forget all the ways there now were to raise a gun, to deny an insurance claim, to buy or sell someone else’s land. I’d had a beautiful grant, I could have lived off the hurricane for years. I wasn’t broke. I was tired of wearing the same T-shirts, everything I owned stank of a perversion of perfume, sweat, sewage, the dead. Was I just tired? The feds dawdled and that city sat in its stink and tears. The militias were gathering, we could all sense their presence, two bodies—our two bodies, Modigliani and I claimed them, a man and woman we’d never known—should have sufficed as evidence, and yet we had nothing. Modigliani and I, nothing. Every night it was as if we had to stand before the figurative chalkboard and rub away the script in which we’d written each name, each suspicion, and the trace of those failed phonemes endured on the side of my fist. And now it seemed clear that had I found 2,000 more perfect words, something or everything might have been different, or at least I might have been. As for the dead, what could be done for them, though they cry out for justice—a phrase I hope I would never write.