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Translation: three contemporary metaphors (a critical musing on the profession); and, Guises: stories (a short story collection)

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Translation: three contemporary metaphors (a critical musing on the profession); and, Guises: stories (a short story collection)

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Content TRANSLATION: THREE CONTEMPORARY METAPHORS (A CRITICAL MUSING ON THE PROFESSION) AND GUISES: STORIES (A SHORT STORY COLLECTION) by Hanvey Hsiung _________________________________________________________________ A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (LITERATURE AND CREATIVE WRITING) December 2019 Copyright 2019 Hanvey Hsiung TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS i ABSTRACT ii TRANSLATION: THREE CONTEMPORARY METAPHORS v INTRODUCTION: A VANISHING TRICK 1 I. TRANSLATION AS CRAFT 6 II. TRANSLATION AS REMEDIATION 26 III. TRANSLATION AS DESIGN 39 GUISES: FACTS AND FANCIES 80 FACTS 81 MY FATHER’S HAND 82 THE SCENE 90 RAYMOND CHANDLER 97 ECCE BARE 105 THE ARK 130 FANCIES 142 A PORTRAIT IN THE ATTIC 143 THE BLUE ROOM 160 THE MUSEUM OF THE FUTURE 172 JEWEL OF THE NORTH 205 VISA 218 DOWN BY THE RIVER 237 THE RECOVERY 247 EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT FRENCH WOMEN I LEARNED FROM LES PARAPLUIES DE CHERBOURG 269 BIBLIOGRAPHY 290 i Acknowledgments I would like to thank the members my committee—Aimee Bender, Béatrice Mousli, and Dana Johnson—for their kindness, patience, and forbearance. Aimee has been a source of unflagging support, cheerful motivation, and gentle reminders: a friendly, insightful voice. Béatrice’s editor’s eye were indispensable at a crucial period in my translation work, and her ongoing encouragement is greatly appreciated. And Dana’s flexibility, interest, and generosity have been invaluable. My heartfelt gratitude goes to program coordinator, Janalynn Bliss, for seven long- suffering years above and beyond. Her sympathy, availability, and comprehensive knowledge of the program were a source of valuable solace and counsel at crucial turning points in my time at USC. ii Abstract My critical dissertation, informed by my work in translation advocacy, began as an attempt to shift popular public perceptions of the field by introducing new metaphors for it. Although my scholarship draws from theory in several disciplines (literature, translation, art history, media, adaptation, design), it does so in the name of engaging with a lay reading public and popularizing issues that have remained largely ivory-tower for too long. I have used excerpts from it at speaking engagements and for essay commissions in my professional career as a translation advocate. For that reason, it aims more at literary nonfiction than academic paper in tone and example. Traditionally, translation has been defined with recourse to metaphor, which accounts for much of its definitional slipperiness as a practice and a process. Moreover, such metaphors proliferate unsystematized; any attempt at surveying or grouping them reveals not only how varied and personal they are, but also how repetitive and often unexamined, or shallow—that is, incapable of extension. Yet metaphors also remain accessible, fundamental, and durable, providing immediate illustration of more abstruse theoretical points, and for these reasons, I believe them valuable. My own metaphors of translation *as* design derive not only from the shared history of these fields as traditionally “invisible”, but also present-day commonalities as fields “emerging” from “invisibility” to be articulated and appreciated in their own right. Like a translation, a metaphor can hope to highlight not all, but only specific shared elements in a given pair. The choice of these elements can and should shift over time in accordance with contexts and priorities. In these sense, I hope my new metaphors for translation will contribute to the discourse by being contemporary and instrumental—that is, focused toward a goal. iii If “invisible” professions are those that only mistakes make manifest, how might we more positively conceive of translatorial presence, as a series of informed choices rather than forced concessions? Both translation and design have not only been overlooked but have historically defined being overlooked as a sign of quality. The casualties of such thinking? The professionals themselves. Which is to say, invisible professions are ones only mistakes make visible. Isn’t there some way to give translators an embodiment that doesn’t consist solely of error? To do so, we need look no farther than the texts they produce. Translations are records of translators’ choices: every word is, quite literally, theirs. And words have different sounds, shapes, and weights in every language. With that in mind, we might ask: how is retranslating a classic like introducing a logo redesign? Does form really follow function as art would have it, or as engineer Henry Petroski would claim, is form driven more by failure, in both translation and product design? What similar roles have machines played, metaphorically and historically, in translation and design? Although often praised as transparent, how do typography and translation affect our experience of words? And is onomatopoeia in comics a case of the poetic object? My creative dissertation, Guises, is a collection of thirteen stories divided into two sections, Facts and Fancies, ostensibly to mark the shift from realism to fabulism—though in fiction as in life, I think you’ll find the borders porous, defining lines deliberately blurred. Each story is as different from the next in form and theme as I could make it, but if they may be said to concern a central question, it is this: how do we return from dream, wonder, or solitary witness to a communal world? How do we make the unrepeatable and unprovable matter to others? In Guises you’ll visit a rave in the Alang shipbreaking yards, an Indian fast food franchise, and a curious pension in southwestern France. Adultery unites a Technicolor European tour with a fantasia on iv Russian themes while young adulthood intertwines a first fall in New York with a Cooverian take on Sleeping Beauty. Experiments feature the short story as supercut (a genre-hopping meditation on gun culture) and a meditation on science fiction and mid-century technological determinism in numbered sections, each detailing some exhibit hall or aspect of an imaginary museum—a chronotope—showcasing failed and aborted futures. Other stories include a morality play of Americans in Europe, a ghost story about aging, a caustic fable of fatherhood and adultery. v TRANSLATION: THREE CONTEMPORARY METAPHORS BY EDWARD GAUVIN 1 Introduction: A Vanishing Trick I’d like to begin this discussion with something I think all translators can relate to: disillusion. (And of disillusion’s myriad varieties there are few whose bitterness is so incommensurate with their ultimate inconsequence as literary disillusion. But I digress.) There was an author I liked a great deal at an impressionable age—still do, the name may ring a bell—James Salter. A contemporary American writer known for his exquisite prose, something of a secret master spoken of in hushed tones. The linchpin of a late career revival that would enshrine him as a dean of short fiction alongside Raymond Carver was a 2002 story in The New Yorker, later the title of his 2005 collection: “Last Night”. An avowed minimalist, Salter could “break your heart with a single sentence,” wrote Michael Dirda in The Washington Post. It is with regret, and not to Salter’s credit, that I must say he did indeed break my heart, with the first line of “Last Night”: “Walter Such was a translator.” Now, what are we to take from this pithy introduction, positively sullen with suggestion? Surely not that all translators are like Walter. But by invoking profession as a shortcut to characterization, Salter must mean there is something about Walter Such that is like all translators, something intrinsic to the trade in which our nature is subdued, like the dyer’s hand. What is that something? Critic Doree Shafrir in The Paris Review is only too happy to tell us: “He is an unremarkable bourgeois intellectual; as a translator, he has spent his life reinterpreting and reworking the literary output of others.” In another context, Shafrir’s sentence could be an encomium (“He is a hero to two cultures; as a translator…”), but here, as a paragraph capper and without further comment, it makes explicit the nature of Walter’s unfulfillment. His creative frustration is our first glimpse of a rift that runs wide through his life, estranging him 2 from—spoilers!—wife, mistress, and self. Plainly, alienation, Marxist and emotional, are occupational hazards. In the very next sentence, Salter completes the stereotype: “He liked to write with a green fountain pen that he had a habit of raising in the air slightly after each sentence, almost as if his hand were a mechanical device.” *** That translation, virtually alone among fields liberally classified as artistic or literary, has been repeatedly subjected to attempts at automation points to the complex and often unexamined nexus of intersecting forces where it dwells. The label “mechanical” conjures the rote and repetitive; by extension, the heartless (dry and technical) or the mindless (beneath human effort). The idea being, I’d be better off delegating my work to a machine, which can or will soon be able to do as good a job as I, for if I don’t, I risk in part becoming one. But what concerns me most is another aspect of the mechanical: objectivity. The notion of objectivity lends itself to a pair of persistent bugbears in translation: that there is such a thing as determinable qualitative certainty (right/wrong, good/bad), and that fidelity can be achieved. Stereotypes, like common colds, float about in the air, making it hard to impute conscious intent, much less malice, to their instances, even in so typically careful a writer as Salter, or so prophetic a critic as André Bazin. The founding father of film theory seemed merely to be echoing his era’s common opinion when, to quote Hugh Gray’s translation, he claimed that “Originality in photography as distinct from originality in painting lies in the essentially objective character of photography”. Like early photography, translation suffers from a public perception that it consists of objective mapping: that equivalency is not only possible but somehow, baked-in, if you do your job right. In this way, something that is perfectly serviceable as a guiding aspiration becomes instead at once the best you can do, and the least you can do. 3 It took over half a century for the photographer’s handling of technological aspects (lighting, angle, lens, aperture, stock) to be seen as aesthetic, betraying the presence of a subjective human gaze. Not only for the critical consensus to acknowledge that “work of portraiture can reveal as much or more about the subject of the portrait as it does about the artist- creator,” as Jane M. Gaines asserts, but that “[a]s the creative subject is brought to bear on the object before the lens, a wholly new thing is produced from the merger of creative subject and object.” Because—and here’s the slippery thing—ask people on the street today, and they’ll still think of photography as… well, objective. That is to say, they know better (but when has that ever helped?). They might not be able to muster the exact arguments on which the critical establishment agrees, but a century of media literacy has trickled down enough that, if pressed, they will admit the subjectivity of the gaze, the range of options that place an image firmly in a point of view or cultural context and make it manipulable even before darkroom or digital tampering. But the knee-jerk reaction is still that with photos, what you see is what you get. After all, set a photo beside a painting, and these arguments seem… subtle. It is hard for the mind to redefine old categories when confronted with the evidence of that ineluctable modality, the visible. Photography is the first medium of modernity usually cited as achieving “transparency”. In much the same way, people pick up a foreign book and know it’s translated. But they would prefer not to engage with the issues that raises. They would prefer to go on thinking that they’re getting the unaltered, unadulterated original—just one that happens to be in a different language, an illusion that the English-language publishing industry is on the whole happy to help them sustain through any number of canny strategies: concealing the translator’s name, playing up the universality of plot and character, or actively localizing language and content. But by and 4 large this is as true of how books are marketed as how they’ve long been taught in classrooms. I think this refusal can safely be termed naïve without involving a value judgment 1 . There is an evacuation at work here, a denial of the mediating presence. Should it seem I am comparing a task with a literal mechanical component—a camera— to one figuratively considered mechanical, it is important to remember that translation, especially in our day and age, is quite often a machine-aided activity. In both cases, perceived objectivity is inextricable from the mechanical aspect. In fact, so much is credited to the mechanical component that as late as 1971, philosopher Stanley Cavell could expand upon Bazin by claiming: “Photography overcame subjectivity in a way undreamed of by painting, a way that could not satisfy painting, one which does not so much defeat the act of painting as escape it altogether: by automatism, by removing the human agent from the task of reproduction” (23). In Cavell’s formulation it is as if no human finger is positioning the camera or pressing the shutter, just as if translation itself were such a self-evident, automatic process as to require no human intervention. This removal of the “human agent” is a defining feature of what Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin call “immediacy”, one of the three “logics” of media that they identify in their book Remediation. They use the term interchangeably with “transparency”, and I’d like to toss another term into the orbit of their pairing: “objectivity”, as I have been using it. The overlap of 1 Bolter & Grusin detail this high-wire act of suspended awareness: “It is important to note that the logic of transparent immediacy does not necessarily commit the viewer to an utterly naive or magical conviction that the representation is the same thing as what it represents […] However, probably at no time or place has the logic of immediacy required that the viewer be completely fooled by the painting or photograph. Trompe l’oeil, which does completely fool the viewer for a moment, has always been an exceptional practice. The film theorist Tom Gunning (1995) has argued that what we are calling the logic of transparent immediacy worked in a subtle way for filmgoers of the earliest films. The audience members knew at one level that the film of a train was not really a train, and yet they marveled at the discrepancy between what they knew and what their eyes told them (114– 133). On the other hand, the marveling could not have happened unless the logic of immediacy had had a hold on the viewers. There was a sense in which they believed in the reality of the image… This ‘naïve’ view of immediacy is the expression of a historical desire” (30-31) 5 transparency and objectivity in a media context is how I first came to the idea of the translator’s “invisibility”, which I had heard being bandied about—it, too, was in the air—before I ever read translator and theorist Lawrence Venuti, who by coining the phrase in his 1995 book of the same name has defined translation discourse in the decades since. Organized around immediacy, perhaps the most conventional of Bolter and Grusin’ possible axes, media history would display an almost deterministic progression toward the apparent lack of mediation and ever greater immersiveness, from the invention of linear perspective to film to virtual reality. “Whether desire for transparent immediacy is a product of human psychology or human technology remains largely unaddressed by Remediation,” David Blakesley notes in his hypertext review of the book. Is it possible, however, a third potential explanation exists for the drive toward transparency? Jan Baetens, in his review of the book, “assume[s] indeed that the logic behind all media transformations has in Western countries a strong economic, and thus political and human, dimension, which the too strictly technological approach of Bolter and Grusin fails partially to grasp.” I’d like to dwell on the possibility of economic dimensions for the evacuation of the human agent by taking a historical dive, and bringing aboard the first of my primary metaphors for translation: translation as craft. 6 I. Translation as Craft In 2002, when James Salter declared Walter Such a translator, I had no vested reason for offense. I was in my late twenties and living in France—those of you familiar with Salter’s oeuvre will see his particular appeal. I wasn’t yet looking at the world through translation- colored glasses. In the years since then of plying the trade, I’ve come to find the average person’s opinion when told what I do tends broadly to fall into one of two categories: that translation is either simple, or else impossible. Simple, because mechanical. And why shouldn’t it be? People the world over do it every day, often machine-aided, and get on with their lives. I mean, I get it. However clunky, cluttered, and approximate their communication, rife with the wrong prepositions and the comedy of idiom, you can see the message for the thicket of mistakes. This matter-of-fact, workaday view is an understandable must. Loss is written off, an operating cost. Other people like to brood over loss. Impossibility is a more refined affair, for loss is always an acquired paradigm. Crimes of this order are subtler, offenses not to syntax but to taste. One must be taught, for instance, to lament the music of a Romance language brutalized by rearrangement for Germanic consonants. (As ever, a little learning is a dangerous thing.) Then again, when Freud listed his three impossible tasks, teaching made the cut. The others were to govern and to cure. Happily, translation was nowhere to be found. This much was clear to me: a practice circumscribed by assumptions of ease on one hand and failure on the other required a fundamental reframing. Translation could not succeed as an art in the literary sphere, where it was relegated to craft—that is to say, technical, mechanical, and unoriginal. Nor could it succeed as a human trade in the industrial sphere, where it was also 7 a craft, though a different set of associations inhered in that word: artisanal, traditional, and marginal. Craft’s dilemma seemed to mirror that of translation, which first led me to draw the two together. Our standard cultural narrative is one of technologically deterministic progress 2 . In this narrative, the displacement of humans by machines is naturalized as inevitable. First there was craft, then came the machines. And when they came, craft retreated to the villages where it was born. But craft as we know it, with its trappings of ancient tradition, doesn’t actually predate industry as a concept. Art historian Glenn Adamson, a former curator at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, has devoted a great deal of scholarship to recuperating the idea of craft. In The Invention of Craft, he writes: “Rather than treating craft as an ever-present aspect of human behavior increasingly threatened by technological advances… craft is itself a modern invention […] It emerged as a coherent idea, a defined terrain, only as industry’s opposite number, or ‘other.’ Craft was not a static backdrop against which industry emerged like a figure from the ground. Rather, the two were created alongside one another, each defined against the other through constant juxtaposition.” (xiii) In tracing the history of craft, Adamson cautions that the usual narrative downplays “the fact that exploitative labor long predated the industrial revolution” (xvi). We must not treat “the arena of premodern production… as if it did not contain its own stories of institutional, technological, and commercial transformation. “When I argue that craft was invented in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe and America, clearly I do not mean that artisanal work had not been done before that […] But before the industrial revolution… it was not possible to speak of craft as a separate field of endeavor— from what would it be separated?” (xvi) 2 It would seem this narrative should be shot full of holes by now, even for the average person, but by “standard”, I mean something like the discrepancy earlier noted with regards to belief in the objectivity in photography and avoidance of the fact of translatedness: a knee-jerk, embedded belief that will give way to a more nuanced response when pressed, but which otherwise, by default, seems to guide actions. This seems the very definition of a meta- or master narrative, wherein the level of consciousness at which it typically resides seems to prevent accusations of active bad faith in the actions of those in its hold. A more forgiving term might be “working assumptions”. 8 Adamson’s goal, then, is to trace the historical origins and formation of a number of “dialectical pairings” and “linked binaries” he sees as fundamentally ideological: “craft/industry, freedom/alienation, tacit/explicit, hand/machine, traditional/progressive”(xiii). He sees these bifurcations as dividing “an undifferentiated world of making, in which artisans enjoyed relatively high status within a broader continuum of professional trades… into two, with craftspeople usually relegated to a position of inferiority” (xiii). From this latter-day position of inferiority, crafts contest the modernity of industry—at least, that’s how the story now goes. To call for the human figure to be restored to the picture (even if it’s been there all the time) is to stand against progress, whether it be the drive to industrialize or the logic of ever-greater immediacy. Against the overriding direction of history, one can only raise minority protest. Narratives that feature fallen victims and heroic saviors, from the Celtic twilight to the noble savage, can be static traps, deeply comforting for their familiarity. Adamson’s truth, however, is “to present artisans as drivers of change” and “discuss the ways that modern improvers and reformers depended on craftspeople” to enact their project of modernity “even as they devised new ways to manipulate them” (xiii). In the late 1700s, craftsmanship was highly prized, primarily because early machines were unable to replace them with any efficacy. The true resource contested by manufacturers and improvers was skilled labor: the human at the machine. Small wonder, then, that the first step in effacing the human contribution was what Adamson calls “repositioning” (xix). This proves to be both figurative, in the sense of a status change, and representational, as we shall see, in the sense of what British historian Maxine Berg terms a “dismemberment”: “Skill, once identified with an ‘art’ or craft, became in [Adam] Smith’s hands a 'peculiar dexterity' which resulted from the breakdown of a craft […]“Machinery did not displace labor. Rather, it differentiated this labor.” (33-4) 9 The culprit is capitalism, not machinery. Not only is labor subdivided into rote, repetitive tasks, but depictions of artisans at work are then reduced to limbs. Take Diderot’s Encyclopédie, or a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts. The very first such volumes of their kind, one of the most ambitious projects of an ambitious era, an attempt to put the sum total of human knowledge up till then in one place, an advocate for the secularization of learning. Diderot hoped, by disseminating all this information to future generations, to do no less than “change the way people think” (“changer la façon commune de penser”). Its mission to “subdivide and clarify” (Adamson) “within an elite literary format in order to make… rational and productive” (Celina Fox, as quoted by Adamson) set a precedent for technical illustrations of craft. Seizing upon the Encyclopédie’s depictions of artisans’ workspaces(see Fig. 1), Adamson notes that “[w]hile a mid-eighteenth-century genre painter might have individualized figures in a scene of work… many of the spaces are weirdly depopulated” (7-8). 10 Fig. 1: Plate I: Gobelin Low Warp Tapestry, Manufacture and Various Operations of the Workers Employed at the Low Warp Loom (reproduction of an illustration used by Adamson from The Stapleton Collection, Bridgeman Art Library. Mine is differently sourced and so noted in bibliography) Other processes (see Figs..2 & 3) , Adamson observes, are shown using “depictions of busy, disembodied hands, cut off just above the elbow” (8). Fig. 2: Plate XII: Gobelin High Warp Tapestry, Service of the Clasp and Needle Fig. 3: Plate XI: Gobelin High Warp Tapestry, Outline of the Design and Service of the Comb (In these cases I have used different illustrations from Adamson.) “In the plates that do feature whole bodies at work,” Adamson continues, “the figures are depersonalized, mannequin-like, and rigorously productive… as if they were puppets controlled by unseen strings” (8). 11 “As craft technique was isolated as a subject of concern in its own right through division and explication, the person executing the technique was—in a countervailing move—made to seem inconsequential or generic” (Adamson, xix). Contemporaneous with this is a shift in the meaning of the word “artificial” outside the realm of artful. No longer does it refer to something “made by wit or skill, art or science” in the older senses of these words but rather, it comes to mean imitative, derivative, contrived. William Hazlitt, Heinrich von Kleist (and later, even Walter Benjamin) used automata and puppets as metaphorical exemplars of manual dexterity. “The less self-conscious the person, the better artisan he or she would be,” notes Glenn Adamson (138). The more skilled the artisan, however, the more likely it was that his or her skill would be taken as “’merely’ mechanical” (151). “Prior to the early 19th c, workmanship was usually considered a very conscious, and even self- conscious, endeavor… The shift from such an attitude to the later view that craft is all in the hands and not in the mind, could not be more stark.” (138) This early modern idea, handed down to us today, frames craft as “foundationally important, but also the work of an intellectual dead hand” (143). In these discourse-reinforcing descriptions and depictions, we see a dovetailing of three characteristic treatments of the craftsperson that are equally applicable to the translator: the removal of the human agent for greater immediacy (here, the purposes of clearer illustration), portrayal of the human as mechanical and, further to that last, portrayal of a body part as mechanical (it is this last Salter’s imagery most recalls). The issue, however, is not the traditional fear that division of labor, by turning tasks rote, led to a de-skilling of craftspeople. It is not, at least for me, that human translators “will become, within a few years, mere quality controllers and glitch fixers, rather than producers of fresh new text” as Douglas Hofstadter attributes to Gideon Lewis-Kraus in The New York Times Magazine and Lane Greene in The Economist in their enthusiastic encomia for Google Translate. As The Nation’s art critic Barry Schwabsky stresses: “not only designers but historians, sociologists and 12 craftsmen emphasize that the commonplace idea that industrial production has replaced handicrafts is mistaken; the two exist alongside each other, and to a great extent industry is dependent on craft and has subsumed it.” To be specific, this subsuming consists, in Adamson’s words, of “an erosion of the artisan’s autonomy and economic advantage” (10), and it continues today. “Far from being a settled issue,” Adamson remarks, “the control exercised over skilled hands has become an even more important political question over the last few decades” (xx). The most salient contemporary example of similar erasure is the aforementioned Google Translate. Earlier attempts at machine translation relied on the idea that a language had a system of rules with which a machine could be programmed. This was closer to a midcentury view of language as codebreaking that Brian Mossop, among others, has identified as prevalent among scientists and science fiction writers alike in that era, and may have been a legacy of information technology developed during World War II. For instance, take this now-famous excerpt from a 1947 letter by mathematician Warren Weaver, an early machine-translation advocate, to Norbert Wiener, a key figure in cybernetics, dredged up by cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter in the mid-1970s: When I look at an article in Russian, I say, “This is really written in English, but it has been coded in some strange symbols. I will now proceed to decode.” The assumptions in this sentence are staggering, but not everyone at the time was as blind to their implications as Weaver seemed to be. I’m not sure which is more alarming: his philosophically limited conception of language, his failure to appreciate context and intent in speech act, or his presentiment of global hegemonic English. As Mossop points out, it is entirely possible to decrypt a message from code into German, and then have no idea what it means in English. Early Google Translate would also alight on English as an intermediary when translating between two non-English languages, because its corpora of available English 13 documents was greater: an act that almost self-fulfillingly worked to bring into being the English dominance it foresaw. The evident clunkiness and failures of rule-based machine translation eventually gave way to more sophisticated models of machine learning. Google Translate began in 2006 as a statistical machine translation service, an approach theorized as early as the late ‘40s but not practically attempted till the return of government funding, after a two-decade hiatus, coincided with changes in collaborative work habits and advances in computing power 3 in the late ‘80s. A decade later, in November 2016, Google Translate switched to neural machine translation. The use of neural nets or “deep learning” distinguishes itself from the brute-force computation of the statistical approach primarily in its ability to handle whole sentences—though not whole paragraphs—at a time, instead of just phrases or words, significantly smoothing the result 4 . Both these models begin not from a prescriptive, top-down view of language (rules of grammar and syntax), but a bottom-up one based on use, combing millions of documents to make projections based on weighted probabilities. That this clever way of learning is closer to human language acquisition tends to mask the basic fact of cannibalism: Google Translate works because it has been fed the sum total of pre-existing translations available, translation performed by humans. The more documents in any given language pair, the better the results Google Translate produces. Which means it also has the effect, for better or for worse, of reinforcing our linguistic habits, since it merely echoes our 3 I find it poetic though not theoretically load-bearing that the hardware scientists found best-suited to run these were GPUs: units for rendering high-resolution graphics. Ineluctable visuality aside, it seems to give credence to adage: pictures being worth a thousand words, Wittgenstein’s picture theory of language… 4 That smoother linkages contributed to a perception of a superior result is indicative of yet another overlooked aspect of the translator’s task. Translators will often tell you that much of the challenge lies not in word choice but achieving overall flow, especially with an eye to global consistency of tone. It is fascinating that so much contemporary translation criticism and reviewing still remain stuck at the single-word level. 14 usages back to us, filtered through an algorithmic popularity contest. But what it offers is a clean, white interface of utter transparency and immediacy—this latter in both the visual and temporal senses—from which all sense of process and the complexities of language have been scrubbed, establishing a seemingly objective equivalence packaged in anonymized, ultimately comforting authority. Meanwhile, the foundational body of skilled human work, constantly consulted and recycled, ever-growing, nevertheless goes uncredited and unremunerated, joining like so much else online the mass of data we generate and contribute but whose uses we cannot control. Google Translate has not made translators obsolete. In fact, it could not evolve without the contributions of translators. It merely chooses to conceal that fact. Google may not pay translators for their service, but to be fair, its translation service is also free. It is convenient, widely available, and of such utility to so many people in so many different situations that its status as punchline and whipping boy among language professionals speaks as much to our profession’s fear and suspicion of it as it does to any true measure of its increasing capabilities. According to a 2015 New York Times article by Gideon Lewis-Kraus, “the service is used more than a billion times a day worldwide, by more than 500 million people a month… The camera performs real-time augmented- reality translation of signs or menus in seven languages, and the conversation mode allows for fluent colloquy, mediated by robot voice, in 32. There are stories of a Congolese woman giving birth in an Irish ambulance with the help of Google Translate and adoptive parents in Mississippi raising a child from rural China.” In their breadth, accessibility, and simultaneity, these are feats no human translator, interpreter, or even agency could dream of. And so we come back to the starting question: can an objection to this condition be reasonably mounted that does not trap translation in the same position that Adamson, in his reframing, sought to help craft escape? At this point, the traditional narrative encapsulating the craft-industry dichotomy again rears its head. Once evacuated from the picture, where do all the people go? The usual answer: 15 humans survive on the sidelines, engaged in handwork at once more personal, intricate, and unstandardized than anything produced by machine. Craft keeps up the small-batch good fight from the pastoral preserves where it’s still allowed to letterpress. But this virtue can be something of a gilded cage. For all that craft is rooted and virtuous, it is also resolutely barred from being modern. (One has only to recall the way “authenticity” is imposed on goods produced by the disenfranchised of the world to see how craft can be used conservatively to confine, to define an Other against the forces of progress.) And these are limits craft has largely accepted, internalized, taken upon itself. Craft is marginalized by industry as “fundamentally antithetical to the processes of modernization. It can only be understood as a corrective or an escape hatch, never as a contributing factor” (xv). Adamson outlines “this coercive project… framing [craft] as static, trapped within tradition… slow and intuitive” instead of “inventive, progressive, technological, efficient… pioneers in a developing realm of production” (xvii). As Barry Schwabsky notes in his review of the Adamson-edited anthology The Craft Reader: “to identify oneself with craft… is to accept greater limits on access to social and cultural capital.” In this light, the status of translation as a trade mirrors the place of translated work in the current literary marketplace. Literary translation is generally considered the last bastion of nuance, the one specialization in the field still immune to machine encroachment. As Warren Weaver himself conceded: “No reasonable person thinks that a machine translation can ever achieve elegance and style. Pushkin need not shudder.” TheYet it is also consigned largely to a vanguard of valiant and valuable small presses. The essentially meaningless category “world literature” or “literature in translation” has become through the logic of niche marketing a genre unto itself, at best a community, at worst an echo chamber, a stabilized and unthreatening “other” 16 within the industry. Chad Post, a publisher of exclusively translated works and the founder of Three Percent, a clearinghouse for global literature publishing, observes: “That sort of thing is for nonprofits and university presses. over the past few decades. Approximately 85% of the fiction and poetry published in translation every year is from the small houses—the indie presses, the nonprofits, the university publishers. These presses tend not to have much marketplace power, tend to be undercapitalized, and tend to ‘take risks’ on books they love and feel are good for culture, if not for business.” The literature in translation market provides “a model of retreat, advocating a withdrawal from modernity; or emphasize[d] craft’s ameliorative role” (xv). Where Adamson defines “meliorative” as softening the edges of modernity, I see it in translation’s case as being self- improving or virtuous. Readers of global literature pride themselves on, among other things, taking an interest in the greater world. Translation provides a specific form among contemporary literatures of that perennial American promise of becoming a better person. This is part of its contemporary identity. In the same review quoted above from The Quarterly Conversation, of Latin American translator emeritus Edith Grossman’s 2010 tract Why Translation Matters, Open Letter’s Chad Post critiques Grossman’s tack: “But the arguments that Grossman puts forth here—the impact translated literature and foreign ideas can have on writers, that literature is one of the best ways to understanding other cultures— are arguments that could be bunched under the idea that publishing international literature is a ‘moral obligation.’ One of the aforementioned trappings in trying to convince people that literature in translation is important is the “it’s good for you” argument. As an obsessive, life-long reader, it’s easy to assume that everyone else must feel the same way […] Unfortunately, I suspect the vast majority of people read for entertainment, not to improve or alter their outlook on life. […] The same can be said for the “reading about another country makes it hard to go to war with them” argument. This may well be true, but you’re already singling out a pretty enlightened group of readers capable of expanding their empathy through the written word.” Small presses form a boutique industry whose products sometimes bear explicit signs of craft: the books are lovingly handmade, defiantly anti-commercial. Consider the narrative staple of interviews and grant applications, which still holds a surprising amount of currency, of the liberal arts student who during a year abroad or at loose ends after college and in a foreign country, 17 discovers an obscure or neglected, sometimes difficult author they then devote years of mastering the language in order to translate. It’s by no means invalid as motivation (and with several points of intersection that make it uncomfortably close to my own) but as a tale it bears many romantically superannuated markers that limit or target its likely audience. As Adamson reports: “In the nineteenth century, [craft] was typically consigned either to a merely mechanical role, as the execution of designs, ideas, and imperatives, or given responsibility for static tradition. Artisans and their products… were understood in one of two ways: as in need of constant ‘improvement,’ or on the contrary, as fragile connections to the traditional past.” (xvii-xviii) The choices are still rote execution and traditionalism. Translation is allowed to be exquisite, artisanal, because it doesn’t matter in market power. It is beautiful in the same way a relic can be from an earlier age: because it is not allowed to challenge. As Adamson specifies: “This is not to say that craft is devalued under modernity, exactly; rather, it is valued differently from other forms of cultural production. It is positioned as fundamentally conservative, both in the positive and negative senses of that word. Progress is always located elsewhere—in political radicalism, machinery and technology, organizational structures—but never in skilled hands themselves.” (xvii) Headliners like Murakami, Bolaño, or Knausgaard, exceptions that prove the rule, only exacerbate the issue with a false image of cultural shift or an impact not borne out in sales. To what extent do attempts to spread the gospel translation end up more as preaching to the choir because translation is trapped in a dichotomy like that of craft-vs.-industry? Among professionals in the field, the most vocal deriders of Google Translate are usually those labeled or self-identifying as literary translators 5 . And with reason—Google Translate demonstrably still makes laughable blunders when confronted with literary texts. Not even 5 There are, to be sure, class issues at work; I have rarely seen the the hierarchies of language between types of translation—machine’s democratized communication and literary’s elite expression—and the uses to which they are put so neatly—almost accidentally, even—encapsulated as in this aside from Lewis-Kraus’ article: “(A widely admired literary translator, who wished to remain anonymous, admitted that although she worries about machine translation’s mission creep, she thinks Google Translate is a wonderful tool for writing notes to the woman who cleans her house.)” Henry Higgins, eat your heart out. 18 poetry, mind you. Take, for instance, these two versions of the opening to Ernest Hemingway’s story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”: NO. 1: Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai “Ngaje Ngai,” the House of God. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude. NO. 2: Kilimanjaro is a mountain of 19,710 feet covered with snow and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. The summit of the west is called “Ngaje Ngai” in Masai, the house of God. Near the top of the west there is a dry and frozen dead body of leopard. No one has ever explained what leopard wanted at that altitude. The first is, for better or for worse, arguably the most famous American writer of the twentieth century. The second is Google Translate, working from what is described as a “dashed off… Japanese interpretation” by Jun Rekimoto, a distinguished professor of human-computer interaction at the University of Tokyo. In the December 2016 New York Times Magazine article that Gideon Lewis-Kraus opens with these examples, he asserts: “Even to a native English speaker, the missing article on the leopard is the only real giveaway that No. 2 was the output of an automaton.” I would instantly beg to differ. As a translator, I would be ashamed of claiming credit for Version 2. I’m not talking about replicating authorial style—about sounding like Hemingway— I’m just talking about sounding like standard English. Consider a side-by-side comparison: a snow-covered mountain 19,710 feet high a mountain of 19,710 feet covered with snow Its western summit The summit of the west Close to the western summit Near the top of the west the dried and frozen carcass a dry and frozen dead body On the other hand, I’m biased. I’m a language professional with a literary background. I not only know what Hemingway is supposed to sound like, I can also make a case for why his every rhetorical choice is motivated (not to say superior, since I’ve never particularly cared for his innovations in prose). But I can admit that all my complaints fall into the category of what would 19 for the broader public be specialist quibbles (meter! prosody! economy!), and that there is nothing about the second version that indicates it was not somewhat clumsily composed by a human being. What I couldn’t judge, even had the article made it available, is Rekimoto’s “dashed off” version which was the basis for Google Translate’s own. Rekimoto’s story, from November 2016, shortly after the Google Translate’s neural net launch, offers up one more interesting detail. “First,” reports Lewis-Kraus, “[Rekimoto] compared a few sentences from two published versions of ‘The Great Gatsby,’ Takashi Nozaki’s 1957 translation and Haruki Murakami’s more recent iteration, with what this new Google Translate was able to produce. Murakami’s translation is written “in very polished Japanese,” Rekimoto explained to me later via email, but the prose is distinctively “Murakami- style.” By contrast, Google’s translation — despite some “small unnaturalness” — reads to him as “more transparent.” By dint of working over these themes for the last half-decade, I confess I have a sort of internal “Google alert” for instances of certain words, like “invisibility” or “transparent” (it’s unclear to me from Lewis-Kraus’ article whether that word, presented as a direct quote from Rekimoto, was itself translated, and if its Japanese source might have offered up other ramifications 6 ). I think Rekimoto meant more to characterize the “flattening” effect commonly and rightly attributed to all translations, which tend to err on the side of standard usage. But to characterize it as transparent at all seems to indicate that transparency is, if not a prized quality, or the Bolter-and- Grusin teleological endpoint of a media logic, at least a possibility of language, and hence of translation. “The future may not need us, but we certainly need a future,” Jaap van der Meer muses at the blog of TAUS, a translation industry clearinghouse that he helped found. Peering ahead, he outlines the categories of “FAUT (Fully Automated Useful Translation)” and “the holy grail of 6 Michael Emmerich, a translator from the Japanese, has discussed at length in his article at Words Without Borders how there is no single word in Japanese that corresponds with our notion of “translation”. 20 FAHQT (Fully Automated High Quality Translation)”. Jack Welde, the founder of Smartling, a translation and localization company, is quoted by Lane Greene The Economist as saying that “future translation customers will choose how much human intervention is needed for a translation. A quick automated one will do for low-stakes content with a short life, but the most important content will still require a fully hand-crafted and edited version.” This fate seems to me a further case of subsumption and subdivision . To be fair, not even machine translation escapes specialization. Neural nets perform better in very restricted domains, such as medical translation. And Google Translate itself is more adapted to translating fragments; its makers have shaped it that way in response to how people tend to use it. To be clear, I am not trying to be alarmist about Google taking away jobs 7 , nor that, even as literary translators, we’re all FAHQT-ed. My concern is more metaphorical. In likening an earlier Enlightenment example of the laborer’s effacement to a much more recent twentieth-century one, I am trying to show that a certain logic of the mechanical is not only intact but spans disciplines. The “artificial” in AI, coined at a Dartmouth conference in 1956 and now common parlance, is—in keeping with the word’s Enlightenment semantic shift earlier discussed—one of artifice, and not art. But if translation is being inexorably outmoded from industry, and yet refused the cultural protections of art, where can its practitioners plausibly seek just recognition of the labor they perform? Moreover, if literary translation is to be translators’ only preserve, where are they to find a living wage? *** Craft’s economic and cultural position weren’t the only things that drew me to it—after all, in any creative writing or adjacent program, the word gets endlessly if vaguely bandied 7 Even though I translate from French to English, the language pair and direction in which Google Translate regularly scores the best results because—you guessed it—it has the largest bilingual corpora. In fact, the corpora for Candide, IBM’s first stab at statistical machine translation, was Canada’s Hansard, the transcripts of their parliamentary debates in French and English. 21 about—but other aspects of craft also seemed to me to recall translation. First, craft is generally considered a tacit form of knowledge—that is, one whose processes are learned through doing, and extracted from such doing for articulation or pedagogy only with difficulty. As British critic Peter Dormer put it in his book-length study of craft knowledge, The Art of the Maker, “The constitutive rules of a craft are only learned by actually doing the activity. Indeed, they are the activity” (42). And translation has proven as difficult a craft to teach humans as it has to teach machines. Centuries of theoretical discourse have only widened the gap between rules and praxis. As translator, educator, and theorist Douglas Robinson puts it in The Translator’s Turn: in their attempts to abstract out of practice systematic set of principles, rules, and procedures for translators to follow, these theorists typically—even perforce—alienate themselves from practice […] the resistance of translation theory to feeling and the resistance of translation practice to thought… are very real problems.” (xii-xiii) Translation has long been a profession, but the path to that profession was usually haphazard. I think of myself as being on the tail end of a generation that, like ones before it, stumbled, not unhappily, into the field. Whereas many today, girded with translation degrees, or else graduates of creative writing programs with translation components, set out to become translators, with mission and devotion. This has to do, I think, with the general, gradual rise in visibility for translators—it’s rare to want to grow up and become something there are no role models for— and the nascent sense that translation can be a force for good in a changing world, not to mention the American tendency to capitalize on trades by professionalizing training. Which is to say, previously people wandered into translation thinking it was something they could do, only belatedly to find its complexities fascinated, and might take a lifetime to fail to master. While people who embark on it now do so with an aspirational esteem for the act and academic acquaintance with its potential pitfalls and issues. Only recently, with professionalization specifically in the literary sphere, has there been a concerted effort to develop 22 pedagogical techniques for the translation classroom that a) span languages, b) arise from practice rather than rule-based abstraction. Interestingly enough, these pedagogies are often closely related to those of the creative writing workshop, with its focus on craft, and the literary classroom, where monolingual translation pedagogies are used to broaden approaches to texts. Secondly, these craft processes involve physical action that is materially specific and purposefully constrained. To paraphrase architectural critic Kenneth Frampton: through craft, the craftsperson engages with the internal forces of the material; these, in turn, provide a set of constraints that test and shape the result. In the process, the material becomes the cultural. Translators, too, operate under constraints—commercial, cultural—but at the smallest level, these are constraints of language, the material they work with and through. Material—that is, medium. Thirdly, this engagement is enacted with the body—and this to me ties both of the previous points together. Tacit knowledge, the knowing of doing, sinks with practice into the bones, where it resides, mute as marrow. “I read and move to translate with my body,” muses Kate Briggs in This Little Art. “When a sentence isn’t right, I feel it immediately in my back,” asserts Emma Ramadan in her “Translator’s Diary” for the Quarterly Conversation. Douglas Robinson asserts: “Good translators choose words and phrases by reference not to some abstract system of intellectualized rules, which most of us have never internalized in the first place, but rather to ‘messages’ or impulses sent by the body: a given word or phrase feels right. Intuitively, not just for the translator but for all language users, sense is not cognition but sensation.” (xii) This investment of body in material, the very physical resistance between tangibles paves the way for a final, different take on Google Translate that both provides segue to my next main metaphor for translation and points at my overarching goal of exploring various means to translatorial embodiment as a remedy for invisibility. 23 I’ve remarked, often from an abashed sense of fair play, that I can’t imagine being a translator before the age of Google. Generally, I mean this in terms of how much research I can access from my desk; I couldn’t meet the deadlines I do did the information require physical displacement. But I also use Google Translate—not for French, but when languages I don’t know make incursions into my work (most recently, Spanish and Russian). I don’t privilege it over other similar services like Linguée, for instance, whose GUI, less definitive in presentation, to my mind affords the human agent a more proactive role. It will list various translations of contextualized usage for a phrase in highlighted snippets—something that you have to click a drop-down menu to get Google Translate to provide—that are credited to source websites (if not individual translators) in hyperlinked footnotes. And when I’ve been translating so long that I feel like I’ve lost my ear for how English sounds, I often turn to Google’s basic search engine to see if the phrase I want to use is actually something other people use—and what kinds of people, at that. Is it common? Recherché? In so doing, I’m adjudicating between differently weighted possibilities—not all that different from the task performed by Google Translation’s neural nets. If, according to Jan Baetens, “every invention remains in the first place the extension of a human power,” then perhaps Google Translate may be more profitably termed a prosthesis. Marshall McLuhan was a man fond of wordplay, and so perhaps fittingly this phrase from a book with so physical a title as The Medium is the Massage provides gentle but firm support to this idea: “The wheel is an extension of the foot, the book is an extension of the eye, clothing an extension of the skin, electric circuitry an extension of the central nervous system” (31-40). This impishly inscrutable pronouncement is generally seen as an extension of his more famous claim on the opening page of Understanding Media (1964): “the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and 24 print is the content of the telegraph” (8). Although many scholars since have called McLuhan’s examples problematic, he is generally taken to have been speaking of what Bolter & Grusin defined in the late ‘90s as remediation: “the formal logic by which new media refashion prior media forms” (273). In their eponymous book, they go on to identify “a spectrum of different ways in which digital media remediate their predecessors, a spectrum depending on the degree of perceived competition or rivalry between the new media and the old” (45). Or as Walter Benjamin said in 1920: “The medium through which works of art continue to influence later ages is always different from the one in which they affect their own age” (235, trans. Rodney Livingstone). That this unfinished fragment, unpublished in Benjamin’s lifetime, has since been assimilated to this argument is a reflection of the instability of the word “medium”. In literary studies, comics are a medium, the novel a genre; in media studies, the medium is print, while an example of genre might be a western. Similarly, painting is a medium for many, except in art, where acrylic and oil are different media of a single art. Here I am using “medium” almost exclusively in the media studies sense, and I am hugely indebted to English professor John Guillory’s philological investigation of its evolution in which he works to give a “better account of the relation between literature and later technical media without granting to literature the privilege of cultural seniority or to later media the palm of victorious successor” because “works of literature are also indisputably media. Yet literature seems to be less conspicuously marked by medial identity than other media, such as film, and that fact has tacitly supported the disciplinary division between literary and media studies (and by extension between cultural studies and communication studies) […] the exclusion of literature from the disciplinary formation of media studies was a mistake, damaging both to media studies and literary studies. (322, 361) Popular contemporary media history situates the birth of media with Gutenberg, although he did not actually invent the printing press (but rather movable type), and as McLuhan points out, print remediates writing. “The visibility of writing,” states Guillory, 25 “and its technical paraphernalia account for the perception of its materiality, its translation of speech into visible signs, ink, and paper. This difference is what we mean by technology. Writing is a technology, but speech is not.” (336) Guillory, however, makes efforts not only “to chart the reorientation of language toward the goal of communication” (326), but to trace the shift in the concept of media from mimesis, or representation to mediation. For just as translation is trapped between the categories of art and industry, so it is torn between the priorities of expression and communication. To me, these two dichotomies are analogous, intertwined, and self-reinforcing, iterations of my starting dialectic between the impossible and the simple. The ascendancy of communication as the primary function of language only highlights translation’s ties to commerce and practices thereby deemed lesser or impure, leading to their exclusion from artistic spheres. 26 II. Translation as Remediation My earlier comparison of photography and translation focused primarily on how both disciplines vanished human practitioners and their subjectivity into the invisibility of assumed objectivity based in a perception of the mechanical. But photography also sets a useful precedent for the reception of new media in modern society—a trajectory that for me powerfully mirrors translation’s contemporary attempts to emerge as a discipline, only to be disparaged, or understood only in terms of existing practices, before its unique and salient traits become apparent. Indeed, as John Guillory notes: “The emergence of the media concept in the later nineteenth century was a response to the proliferation of new technical media… that could not be assimilated to the older system of the arts… the development of new technical media perplexed thereafter the relation between the traditional arts and media of any kind” (321-22) Photography’s early years were spent in remediation: it inherits its techniques (composition, lighting) and functions (portraiture, landscape) from painting. Meanwhile, photography’s perceived objectivity freed painting from what Bazin called the “resemblance complex”, precipitating its exploration of abstraction, and one way in which it did so was to refuse transparency, its status as a window or representation. Emphasizing such formal properties as color and texture, painting achieved a kind of opacity or density that foregrounded materiality of the medium. A major struggle for the “wholly new thing” that Jane M. Gaines called photography was to be considered “artistic or intellectual property” (47). Walter Benjamin rightly classifies this struggle, at least on the artistic end, as “much futile thought” in his now- classic essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (227, trans. Zohn). Photography is not only a medium but one of the pivotal media whose introduction precipitated a reformulation of art as media. What these pivotal media have in common is that 27 they are all technical—c.f. the printing press—an aspect that highlighted their materiality: their medium. Despite the many parallels to be found between concepts of media and translation, I am not attempting to define translation as a medium, like photography, but rather a form of mediation between the media of different languages. And as Bolter and Grusin contend, “all mediation is remediation”. Media are conditioned by usage; each has its own strengths, specificities, possibilities, and limits, cultural and technological or historical and syntactical. French, for instance, has no apostrophe-s possessives. Contemporary English often verbs nouns, while French more easily nouns adjectives. Languages have unique tolerances for redundancy. These technical and syntactical features and constraints affect the possibilities of sentence structure, which in turn affect rhythm, tone, spacing, and pacing, while other affordances, like a language’s cultural clout, affect reception and responsibility. The clamor to be translated into English today is at least in part a reflection of its broadcast reach (itself a historical contingency); making it into English, the language of world publishing, is like having your book optioned by Hollywood— suddenly accessible to audiences that might not otherwise have sought it out, or even heard of it. French publishers will use an excerpt from an English translation of a given book when shopping the rights around to editors from other countries at book fairs, because English is the current lingua franca. The motivation for developing this metaphor was dissatisfaction with one of the presiding contemporary metaphors for translation: namely, translation as performance, theatrical or especially musical. This is a highly flexible metaphor, to be sure, with a great range of contemporary applications and potential for instrumentality (no pun intended). It is capacious and capable of greater extension than many other popular metaphors for translation (the most 28 popular trope for which often involves a spatial journey). It highlights creative idiosyncrasy, accounts for variation, and prizes expressiveness, all under the umbrella of rendition. In such a mapping, the score is the original text, the composer the author, and the performer the translator. Performance, like translation, is singular, ephemeral, artistic, and non-definitive; performers bring out what they have deemed the essential qualities of a piece and bring to bear their own style. My dissatisfaction stems from the lack of a clear mapping for language in the performance metaphor. Is it simply musical notation? But what language is so universal and invariable? That makes it seem like there is only one language all translators are reading, and all composers writing in, of which only the vast unwashed readership remains ignorant. I have heard it suggested that different instruments are different languages, but surely there are more translators, personalities, and styles than there are musical instruments, even were it possible to group translators by some perceived likeness into such instrument categories as woodwinds, strings, percussion, etc. And music already has a different word for this: transposition. If the same song is transposed from one instrument to another, the resulting difference is prior to and runs deeper than performance. Even to myself, this sometimes seems like rather picayune hole-poking. But the primacy of language’s role felt true to my own experience of translation. Deep in the thickets of work, translation has sometimes seemed a purely manual activity of moving words around to avoid repetition. Or a thought experiment along the lines of rewriting each sentence to preserve meaning after shifting several of its pivotal words to other parts of speech. It has seemed that the key to translation was, when confronted with part of a sentence, to have an intuitive, even preternatural sense of the rhetorical probabilities for where it might go, almost like the 29 autocomplete function. Finally, I don’t know that I can claim so noble a thing as Barthes did for Mallarmé in “The Death of the Author”—that language speaks through me—but to some extent, genre does, tropes and clichés alike. Fidelity, when brandished as a stick to beat translators with, generally means fidelity to the author’s text and intent (for which scholars will beat you). But there are different kinds of fidelity: to the conventions of the target language (for which the average readership will beat you), to the conventions of the source language (for which a select readership will beat you). Working in comics has allowed me to translate across more genres—westerns, epic fantasy, science fiction, biography, reportage, memoir, chick lit, children’s, war, noir—than I might have encountered in prose, simply because the range of French prose we get here is narrower, and to my mind at least more closely tied to national reputation or stereotype. (French import staples include gastronomy and high theory.) Genre is a deliberate game of ringing a few canny changes at a time on a familiar formula, and this is as true of style and language as it is of plot. Works in a given genre contribute to the ongoing conversation that is that genre itself, even or especially internationally (for instance, French and American crime novels. When I call translation “the most participatory form of recommendation,” when I say that more writers should try it out, I am thinking of translation almost as a kind of fan fiction, whose available tools are not plot and character, but rather tone, pace, and wording. The choice usually given translators of bringing the reader closer to the work or the work closer to the reader, in which the latter is often looked down on, is a false one in this case: reader expectations are part of genre—any genre—and reception an issue often overlooked in translation in favor of authorial intent, when the author as 30 a concept is a relatively recent cultural formation inseparable from the commodification of literature 8 . Language itself was retroactively conceived of as a medium—after the invention of writing, whose content was speech, foregrounded its materiality. But languages themselves have not to my knowledge been considered different media. If my avowed goal is a focus on the translator’s role, bodying the translator forth from invisibility, why elaborate a metaphor that downplays the centrality of that role as interpretive performance in favor of a focus on technical details that might seem, well… more mechanical? It is because I believe language has a special status as a medium. It has always been the most transparent of media, for many reasons: because it is the oldest and least overtly technological, because it has the most widespread and fundamental use. And the transparency of the medium entails the transparency of the practitioner—again, “Thence comes it that my name receives a brand / And almost thence my nature is subdued / To what it works in, like the dyer's hand.” Craftspeople are bodily subject to the constraints of their media. 8 Though author and work are often conflated—“like the twin suns of a binary star… the center of the modern literary system” (65), according to Mark Rose, their mutual origins muddied by the legal arguments that led to copyright—I tend to feel close not so much to authors as texts. Then again, I tend to like recordings, not concerts. With what I think deliberate, yet likely quite sincere perverseness, William Gass called a fictional character “any linguistic location of a book toward which a great part of the rest of the text stands as a modifier” (53) To enter into a relationship with a work of fiction is to make of its author a figment. The engagement is with the page, not its demiurge. There are pleasures the work affords—the endless process, the finished product—and opportunities the work opens up, sometimes only tangentially related. Sleeping over in one author’s guest bedroom, gabbing movies with another, applauding this one’s virtuosic gypsy guitar playing, or witnessing that one at death’s door—these are not experiences I would trade, but it is difficult to trace how they inform my work on their work. Anton Kuh, friend and rival of Karl Kraus, advised, “If an author disappoints you as a person, it is because you have overestimated his work.” Like many things said ironically, or by an unreliable narrator, this is almost exactly half true. Meeting an author stands to one side of the work in question, much as translation does, though not in equal and opposite ways, as if authors were in some sense their own work adapted to the mortal medium of life. A surprising number of authors, having voided their expressive needs in their works, are spectacularly ill- equipped to discuss them with any insight, which is why we tolerate critics. Never trust the teller, trust the tale. 31 Translation is an invisible profession; an invisible profession being, as Shea Hennum puts it (in an essay on legendary comics letterer John Workman at the back of Shutter #7), one that “only mistakes make manifest”. (Which begs the question: what things or categories of things constitute “mistakes”? Some are merely departures, and intentional to boot. The question of latitude for change is a translator’s entire horizon.) But the idea of mistakes making translators selectively visible produces, by extension, a body of lesions, a Frankenstein’s monster of sorts, all seams and suppurations 9 . Whereas in fact the entire new text can be seen as the translator’s body. A record of our choices, and hence of our passage, our intervention. As British translator and translation activist Daniel Hahn chides in “On Reviewing Translations” at the online magazine of international literature Words Without Borders: “By all means compliment the author on the tightness of the plotting, on the deftness of the characterization, and ignore me—they’re supported by my work, of course, but marginally. But a reviewer who thinks he can praise the rhythm, the texture, the beauty of the prose, the warmth and wit of the voice, without acknowledging who’s responsible… that’s a reviewer who simply has no understanding of what translation is. There’s a reason the copyright in my translations belongs to me and not the original author. The plot and the ideas and the themes aren’t mine, but the words are, all of them, and the way they all fit together, too.” The degree to which the words collaborate to produce or reinforce the plot, ideas, and themes is, frankly, beyond the scope of this paper, which is more concerned with tracing the pressures of prejudice and preconception on the form vs. content dialectic as it iterates across contexts, 9 For reasons subsequently explained, I have interpreted the violence wrought by error as being done to the body of the translator or the translation, though often it is sometimes also seen as being done to the body of the author or the source text—the latter of which, as Karen Emmerich has claimed, is unharmed or, in my case, alive and well and living in Paris. As for the author, the harm is putatively one to international reputation—a reputation that would not exist without translation in the first place. Even Tim Parks, with whom I disagree on many points, concedes in the New York Reviews of Books blog: “Better to have it than not”—“it” in this case being an enjoyable, excellent, but in his eyes, ultimately failed translation—though in his eyes all translations are doomed to do so. Benjamin Moser, in his NYTBR critique of Kate Briggs’ musings on translation, This Little Art, would disagree “that Mann’s ‘major stature’ in the English-speaking world ‘is to a very large extent the direct result of the efforts of his authorized translator.’ Dare I suggest that Thomas Mann’s stature might be the direct result of the efforts of Thomas Mann?” But given the usual time lag between a foreign author’s heyday and their anointment, if ever, in English, I would tend to side with Briggs. 32 becoming variously: artistic vs. commercial, expressive vs. communicative, original vs. mechanical, impossible vs. simple. But if it is true that the text bodies us forth completely, that the body of the text can be seen as a surrogate of the translator’s body, then strategies can be devised to make readers more aware, more appreciative of that body. Hence, separating the single medium of language into the media of languages works to foreground the differences between them as material. John Guillory remarks: “It is much easier to see what a medium does—the possibilities inherent in the material form of an art—when the same expressive or communicative contents are transposed from one medium into another. Remediation makes the medium as such visible.” (324) Bolter and Grusin outline a spectrum of possible approaches for remediation. “At one extreme,” they begin, “an older medium is highlighted and represented… without apparent irony or critique” (45). And this is the kind of remediation translation is usually viewed as. Guillory details that “printing… reproduced the content of manuscript writing at the same time that it opened up new possibilities for writing in the print medium. Still, the transposition of writing into print did not elicit at first a theoretical recognition of media as much as a reflection on the latency of print in the technology of writing itself. It was as though print were there, already, in the medium of writing. This is how Bacon understands print in the New Organon: ‘the technique of printing certainly contains nothing which is not open and almost obvious.’” (324) So, too, is a translation in a target language believed to contain nothing more than what the previous medium, the source language, contained. While Guillory ascribes the “latency of the media concept” to a potential prejudice against the mechanical—“because technical media emerged from later versions of mechanical arts” (324)—I believe it is more of a traditional error of mistaking content for form. If McLuhan is so strident about the medium being the message it was because he felt the prevailing habit was to see only content and to believe that tools were neutral, only the uses which we put them to mattered: he energetically tirades against both these 33 attitudes. “[I]t is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action” (9). Other “remediations seem to want to emphasize the difference rather than erase it,” the new version offered as an improvement, although… still justified in terms of the old” and seeking “to remain faithful to the older medium’s character” (46). The most obvious analog to this in translation is the re-translation, which mediates between source language, the earlier instance of target language, and the contemporary instance of target language. “In all these cases, the new medium does not want to efface itself entirely… The borrowing might be said to be translucent rather than transparent.” (46) The new medium can be “more aggressive in its remediation. It can try to refashion the older medium or media entirely, while still marking the presence of the older media and therefore maintaining a sense of multiplicity or hypermediacy… This form of aggressive remediation throws into relief both the source and the target media” (46). Finally, the new medium can “remediate by trying to absorb the older medium entirely, so that the discontinuities between the two are minimized. The very act of remediation, however, ensures that the older medium cannot be entirely effaced; the new medium remains dependent on the older one in acknowledged or unacknowledged ways.” (47) Not only do translations partake variously of these remediation strategies, it is possible for them all to occur within the context of a single work. However, it is the last of Bolter and Grusin’s three media logics that I would like to single out as a strategy for translational visibility: hypermediacy. Bolter and Grusin present hypermediacy as the opposite of immediacy, defining it in the glossary of Remediation as a “style of visual representation whose goal is to remind the viewer of the medium” (272). In hypermedia settings, the user is made hyper-conscious, continually brought back to and made aware of the interface and the multiplicity of older media 34 simultaneously deployed yet contained within the frame of the new. Hypermediated phenomena are fascinated by their own status as media constructs and thus call attention to their strategies of mediation and representation. Bolter and Grusin reference as examples such early devices as the diorama, the phenakistoscope, and the stereoscope, but also the multi-windowed graphical user interface. They also locate it in the “frenetic graphic design of cyberculture magazines”, the “patchwork layout of… mainstream print publications,” and “even in the earlier ‘multimediated’ spaces of Dutch painting, medieval cathedrals, and illuminated manuscripts” (31). Bolter and Grusin quote William J. Mitchell in describing its visual style as one that “‘privileges fragmentation, indeterminacy, and heterogeneity and . . . emphasizes process or performance rather than the finished art object’” (31). But I would argue that hypermediacy is or can be a state of mind; rather than elicited by an object, it can be a practice that governs an interaction. It can be brought to bear, rather than solicited. That translations are never finished is usually viewed to their detriment, as a sign of their inherent impossibility, but through hypermediacy, that can be presented as a feature, not a bug. Through a hypermediatized lens, we can see translation presented self-consciously as such, rather than as a transparent layer over the original, making us begin to question process. And greater transparency of process encourages greater appreciation for the difficulty, necessity, or ingenuity of aesthetic choices. People want to think translations are determinate, but that falls in the same vein as the immediacy fallacy 10 . Were they viewed as indeterminate, they might more easily take their place in a conversation from which they have been, till now, excluded: the postmodern proliferation of intertextuality. 10 I am wont to term “immediacy” a fallacy, but in identifying their three media logics, Bolter and Grusin do not impose any linear progression, but rather argue for the simultaneous and entangled existence of all three. Nor am I trying to impose any linear narrative that would hierarchize these three logics; rather, I see myself, in applying them metaphorically to translation, as redressing a perceived imbalance. 35 Remediation, it should be noted, marks a major shift away from the idea of representation, or the clear window. “In the whole of their former history,” Guillory says, “poetry, painting, music, and other so-called fine arts were not dominated by the concept of communication but by imitation or mimesis” (322). The shift comes about through the recognition of medium as intervening and material, on the one hand preventing mimesis and on the other, necessitating mediation. And “the medium makes communication possible and also possible to fail” (334). According to Guillory: In the most general sense, the principle of mediation denies the possibility of an immediate (unmittelbar) relation between subject and object, or the immediacy of any knowledge whatsoever. (343) In other words, it insists upon the act of change, which in turn brings into focus the presence of an agent effecting that change. The other idea it introduces is that of distance. As Guillory charts language’s turn toward communication, he traces the shift in the prevailing usage of that word. From the physical proximity of a “communicable” disease and the physical movement from one “communicating chamber” to another, the word loses its senses of physical contact, the assumption of presence, and face-to-face conversation, coming “contrarily to be associated with an action often involving distance in time and space” (331). Meaning shifts even further as physical distance gives way to mental distance. “Communication by signs,” then, “compensates for the absolute distance between one mind and another,” while “long distance communication can stand as a figure for the inherent difficulty of communication” (334). Guillory assigns the terms “distance” and “distanciation” respectively to physical and figurative distances, noting that “Distanciation creates the possibility of media, which become both means and ends in themselves—not the default substitute for an absent object… The media concept already supersedes the identity concepts of sender and receiver, as media theorists have long been telling us in connection with remediation.” (357) 36 It is tempting to see this move from physical to figurative distance as contributing to the vanishing of a bodily presence effecting change, but what I’d rather focus on is the aforementioned “inherent difficulty of communication”. Guillory assigns two attitudes toward language to the rough contemporaries John Locke and John Wilkins, respectively. Locke was suspicious that words would inherently fail thought, whereas Wilkins emphasized their material and technological aspect. Either way, “the effect is to bring the medium into greater visibility. The difference between Locke and Wilkins, however, is reinstated at another theoretical level because it makes a difference precisely where one locates the operation of the medium. For Locke, it would be correct to say that words are the medium of thought, whereas for Wilkins, one must say that writing is the medium of speech… The difference between language as medium (of thought) and writing as medium (of speech) produces a certain philosophical confusion, an unstable or mutually blind relation between mediation as an abstract, even logical process and medium as material technology.” (338) Guillory identifies this confusion as recurring “in the later history of communication theory” (338) and persisting “well into our own time” (337). Now, the Lockean version—words as medium of thought—provides “a philosophical basis for a new canon of language use, a stylistic norm applicable indifferently to speech and writing. This is the familiar notion of clarity, that language should always be transparent to meaning” (338) Guillory quotes at length from George Campbell’s The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776), among the “rhetorical and belletristic handbooks of the period” which Guillory sees as “concerned to establish a post-Lockean stylistic norm” by asserting “perspicuity as the chief rule of style” (338- 39). “The norm of clarity,” Guillory maintains, “is extraordinarily important as a literary historical event and leaves virtually nothing in the realm of literary culture untouched” (339). There is, however, a special case: one area in which language is repeatedly afforded an expressive opacity over a communicative transparency. It is what various artists and scholars, from Plato to Sartre to Roman Jakobson, have termed the poetic or literary function. Its purpose is “to interrupt the referential or representational function” (353). Guillory goes on: 37 “The poet… is granted the license to ignore the injunction to communicate, a freedom that has major consequences for the stylistic norms governing the poetic mode of discourse, and brings that mode into sharp distinction from the philosophical and, later, scientific.” The technique of poetry after Romanticism is “a technique of writing that deliberately confounds the reader, that retards comprehension by provoking a hermeneutic exercise of no small complexity or duration” (340). The author, after Romanticism, is enshrined as a godhead and the source of all originality. This reputation has survived till the present day despite later attempts to dismantle it, whether with tools of modernist allusiveness (Eliot, in “Traditional and the Individual Talent”), economic analysis (Northrop Frye in Anatomy of Criticism) or poststructuralism (Roland Barthes in “The Death of the Author” and Michel Foucault in “The Author Function”) 11 . “Disregard for communication,” says Guillory, “results in a thickening of the medium, a darkening of its substance even as attention is drawn to it” (340). And yet this medium made palpable is precisely what the translator is never given credit for. When a translator deploys attention-seeking, exceptional language, it’s either attributed to error or the author. Up till now, my strategy has been to take a Wilkinsian tack. By emphasizing the physicality of the medium, I hope to foreground its form—language, words—and draw attention away from the more metaphysical relationship of words and thoughts that preoccupied Locke. I saw that latter domain as being too closely tied up with the notion of inherent loss and failure, themselves notions too long associated with translation. It could be said that I sought to align translation with communication, if not simplicity. 11 Almost twenty-five years after Lawrence Venuti coined the “translator’s invisibility”, translator Kate Briggs asks in July of this year, during her lecture at the British Centre for Literary Translation, “When we say ‘I’ve read (a translated author)’, what does this mean? Is there any sense in this statement of the process involved in translating that author’s work?” The translator has performed a service, devotional or professional, allowing the reader to commune directly with author, through the elucidated work. 38 At the same time, however, I sought to insist on the uncertainty inherent in the endeavor of remediation. Media have presence, which points to a mediator, which in turn points to… the possibility of failure. That failure be allowed for, but not assumed, seems to me a vital distinction. It is precisely this aversion to an awareness of mediation, this reluctance to consider it that then informs the sheer virulence and vituperation that have been the dominant tone of translation criticism. It is the tone in which calls for retranslations are couched, as if our grasp of language were subject to some linear idea of progress rather than arbitrary fashion. It is the tone of what translators call the “translation police,” be they critics or academics, who from the blind of expertise take potshots at word choice with no discussion of the gestalt, as if meaning were fixed. It is in fact even the tone of one translator berating another for “not getting” an author, as if one reading might be anointed with invariant truth-value when all readings are contingent and likely instrumental. It is a tone of woundedness, of having been sold a bill of goods when, if anything, these people knew all along, were complicit in their own willful deception: they should have known and in fact did know what they were getting into when reading a translation, they just preferred not to think about it, because it seemed to open such a can of worms. (If that sounds like victim-blaming, how do you think translators have felt for a very long time?) Here, then, lies a paradox. The translator must communicate when the author has prioritized expression. And yet, in order to see translators, we must open our eyes to the expressiveness in their choices. Is there a category of language, or a way of looking at it, for whose physicality translators could be feted? 39 III. Translation as Design Translation, it seems, is always late to every liberating party. Surveying both popular and scholarly sources, I was surprised to find translation repeatedly elided from the ranks of disciplines struggling for legitimacy. David Zweig’s bestseller Invisibles: Celebrating the Unsung Heroes of the Workplace describes workers prized for niche skills, including fact checker, guitar tech, engineer, cinematographer, and UN interpreter—but not translator. When Roland Barthes declared the Author dead, freeing critics and readers, the translator remained shackled to the crumbled idol. Though Wimsatt and Beardsley proclaimed the irrelevance of authorial intent—critical inquiries are not settled by consulting the oracle—translators alone were still expected, oracularly, to divine it. “We come too late to do anything unique,” writes Julie Sanders, but at postmodernity’s freewheeling remix party, translation is apparently not “original” enough to make the guest list. Adaptation and Appropriation, Sanders’ Routledge survey of the field, features an ingenious and extensive glossary, an attempt at taxonomizing the proliferating fauna in the adaptation family, but the only instance of the word “translation” in her book occurs in a quotation from a novel. Yet in reading Sanders or Linda Hutcheon on adaptation theory, what struck me was how often I could replace the word “adaptation” with “translation” without detriment to the pertinence and veracity of the given assertion. I’ve since developed the odd habit—call it an occupational hazard—of looking at the world through translation-colored glasses: swapping the word “translation” into discussions of other disciplines to see how well it fit, perhaps from a sense that my own was so little discussed, and the hope that it might reveal similarities across a wide spectrum of “indentured” or “supplementary” activities. 40 Sheer intellectual idleness, as a thought experiments go, and likely the truest source of these musings. So: why design? On the broadest level, design may be likened to translation because it gives form to culture: by shaping the physical objects that mediate and regulate people’s behaviors and interactions, it takes a hand in shaping society, and as a practice plays a central role in cultural reproduction. Graphic designers structure much of the world’s communications. Industrial designers structure its physical objects. I’ve been trying to position translation between both these poles. To quote Michael Bierut 12 in “Warning: May Contain Non-Design Content”, the opening essay to his collection 79 Short Essays on Design: “The great thing about graphic design is that it is almost always about something else. Not everything is design. But design is about everything.” Like translation, design it is a profession, or field, of nascent visibility—it has a rising profile. And there are two parts to this. One is what I call the “movie credits are getting longer” effect. In his review of Avengers: Endgame, film critic David Edelstein noted with amusement that the credits included the names of the personal chefs to Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Hemsworth. More and more previously unsung professions are emerging into the limelight as we become aware of what translator Heather Cleary calls, in the latest Two Lines, the literary semiannual of the Center for the Art of Translation: “the networks of support that create the 12 A few words of introduction on him, then, since I will be drawing extensively from his work in later chapters: Bierut (1957 - ), a current partner at Pentagram, is among the elder statesmen of the contemporary design scene, and former president of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA). His work is represented at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Library of Congress, but he is perhaps best known for the logo to Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign and his revamp of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock. He is a pivotal figure in contributing to the contemporary public perception of design, and helping shape its current reputation which, as earlier discussed, has two key aspects for me: 1) its visibility, through Bierut’s willingness to explore media channels (often web-based, like podcasts and blogs) that bridge high- and pop-cultural discourse and 2) its critical self-consciousness. Bierut is a senior critic in graphic design at the Yale School of Art, a founding writer of the Design Observer blog, and co-editor of several volumes of Looking Closer, an anthology series seminal to ushering in a more standardized practice of graphic design criticism. 41 conditions of possibility for any significant achievement.” The “material reality of bringing out a book,” she continues, “almost always involves discussion, debate, and compromise within an institutional framework.” Or take Julie Sanders again, speaking of adaptation: “a shift away from the idea of authorial originality towards a more collaborative and societal understanding of the production of art and the production of meaning.” Or take translator Emily Wilson, in her review of translator Mark Polizzotti’s memoir Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto in The New York Review of Books. She critiques the older translator’s “relatively little consideration to all the many intermediaries involved in the process, including the editors who commission translators to do their work, the publishers who pay for it and market it, the media people who decide whether and how it will be covered, the reviewers who assess how it is to be judged, and the readers who buy it, or refuse to buy it.” The other part of rising visibility is that such interest has largely come about through communities of interest online, making often deep or obscure knowledge available, stimulating debate, generally enabling the like-minded to find each other and geek out: and design might have the edge on translation here. It’s not that I think all traditionally overlooked fields now coming into the limelight need to be lumped together, their practitioners made to gather out of some solidarity, and Lord knows the world needs another metaphor for translation the way translators need a pay cut. What attracted me to craft as a metaphor was historical. What attracted me to media was contemporaneity. What attracts me to design as a metaphor is its potential for instrumentality. If people think of design and translation in the same breath as both up-and-coming, that can only be a positive shift in perception, especially if the similarities they share can provide mutual illustration, new ways to clear up misconceptions for the greater public that we as translation advocates are trying to educate and convert. 42 And insomuch as visibility is preceded by self-consciousness, the field of design is currently tackling the attendant questions of such awareness, questions literary translation is also asking of itself: what constitutes good criticism? What constitutes “good” or quality? Can our practices be used to effect political change and do good in the world? You see this at work in the theoretical interrogations of the anthology series Looking Closer: Critical Writings on Graphic Design, where like Borgesian writers creating their own precursors, leading figures of the field attempt to sift through the morass of casual, impressionistic manifestoes from the last half- century and retroactively assemble a canon of ethics and aesthetics to light the way ahead. Like translation, design occurs under some pretty heavy constraints: mandates from clients with power over final call, precedents set by existing designs that simultaneously inspire and circumscribe the designer’s work and limit the range of possibilities that clients and users will find acceptable. These things strike a personal chord for me as a practicing freelancer. Much of design’s activism and criticism revolves around how to square aesthetic or ethical impulses with corporate demands. The design client can alternately be likened to the translator’s author or editor. And like craft and translation, design is seconded to art: it is artistic but not art, para- artistic as translation is para-literary, partaking of the same tools, practices, and materials but somehow still peripheral. Which puts it, like translation, at the center of our benightedly capitalist contemporary struggle: who gets to be called creative? (And who gets paid for it?) While I’ve been anxious to accord translation some of the advantages and indulgences afforded art, its cultural capital and status, I’m not particularly interested in anointing translation as art. Partly because it seems such capital-R Romantic elevations and enshrinements of work and creator are exactly the kind of thinking that got us in trouble in the first place: individuals 43 and originals to which neither translator nor translation can ever measure up. As Linda Hutcheon wrote of the “shared lessons taught by Kristevan intertextuality theory and Derridean deconstruction and by Foucauldian challenges … One lesson is that to be second is not to be secondary or inferior; likewise, to be first is not to be originary or authoritative.” (xv) And partly because the question of what is or isn’t art elicits answers neither illuminating nor interesting. I’m not particularly thrilled when well-meaning authors from Michael Cunningham to Teju Cole dub translation an art, because these commendations, however generous, are couched in fairly vague or naïve terms. To say translation is “a matter for the brain as well as the heart” is the sort of mushy non-meaning that sends a practicing translator running for the nearest theory. As Theodor Adorno proclaimed, “Posed from on high, the question whether something… is or is no longer art leads nowhere. Because art is what it has become, its concept refers to what it does not contain.” Glenn Adamson has suggested we think of craft as “a conceptual limit active throughout modern artistic practice” (2). While art is “a matter of nomination within an infinite field—that is, art is anything that is called art—craft involves self-imposed limits... Yet in the very marginality that results from craft’s bounded character, craft finds its indispensability to the project of modern art.” (4) If design and translation are examples of frontiers at which the modern aesthetic construct of art stops short, then in that very stopping, what presumptions are revealed? One of the first things to get me thinking about design was a 2017 interview with Michael Bierut on the architecture and design podcast 99% Invisible. With perhaps fitting attention to form, Bierut closed his interview with a discussion of the humble exit sign. The only true requirement is that the sign say EXIT clearly, he asserts. If you can read the exit sign then you can find your way out of the building, whatever typeface it happens to employ. Of course, the 44 exit sign’s design can be better or worse, fitting the architecture or contradicting the aesthetic of a place, but those small differences are “rarely a matter of life and death.” There are three things I’d like to tease out here. On the surface, Bierut’s words would seem to support one of translation’s central challenges to the conception of art. In another essay, Bierut has written, “The graphic designer’s role is largely one of giving form to content” (67). Which would presuppose that in design, as in translation, form and content are separable. And in so much as true art purports to indivisibly join the two in seamless union, translation inevitably must put them asunder. But this view of the work of art is almost always a belated, retrospective, and critical construct from a teleological vantage of finishedness. By reopening the process of making, translation disturbs these rationalizations of perfectedness, and gets called inferior for its trouble, when it is in fact simply different: capable not of equivalent or restored union, but if successful, a new union altogether. The work of art, in using the whole pig, so to speak, obscures the act of sausage-making—in which, contrary to conventional wisdom, people are increasingly interested these days. Second thing: to the extent that we live in an age of “content”—one where the perceived immateriality of digital technologies have dissolved the borders between distinct media—we as translators ply a trade of form, if only we can bring people to revel in the formal qualities of that most historically transparent of mediums, language. But embedded in this assumption is a split along the lines of form as appearance and meaning as content. To semantic meaning we supply the new form of words in a new language, with all the changes that entails: sound, weight, length, look. But also, spreading out like tendrils, implication, connotation, etymology, mouthfeel. I believe this separation, however theoretically useful to me, is a slippery slope. Who’s to say where content ends and form begins, how meaning is made? This divide lends 45 itself to the sorts ofspatial and transportational metaphors of translation that have traditionally dominated translation discourse in English. Not only do these get process wrong, but they lend themselves to the idea that meaning, by affording transference, is stable, invariant—even eternal, like the work of art itself, which gets to abscond into the ether of Platonic forms while leaving dull materiality behind. Take, for instance, the casual persistence of such views in high-minded, and for me, ultimately empty encomium. There is, for instance, the rhetorical dusting-off of etymology followed by its fobbing off as some deeper truth, a favorite tactic of armchair translation theorists: “The English word translation comes from the Middle English, which originates from the Anglo- French translater. That in turn descends from the Latin translatus: trans, across or over, and latus, which is the past participle of ferre, to carry, related to the English word ‘ferry.’ The translator, then, is the ferry operator, carrying meaning from words on that shore to words on this shore. Every work of translation carries a text into the literature of another language.” A true acknowledgment of translation might involve cursory research into how many words for the act in other languages derive from completely different metaphors, and how “carrying over” in ours, beyond a tired metaphor, represents nothing more than centuries of arbitrary, accreted convention. To go from the company of translators to the greater literary world is to realize how many battles you believed won are still to be fought. I have no wish to slander the previous author, who only means well. But editor and scholar Benjamin Moser all but painted a target on his back when, with a “general tone of condescension and occasional misogynistic sniping”, Moser spent most of his review of Barthes translator Kate Briggs’ essay-novel on translation, This Little Art, “debunking points Briggs never made”. His review was so “reductive and misrepresentative” as to prompt a collective letter to the editor from a number of leading translators, from which I am 46 quoting here. A translator himself, Moser should have known better—but that is the problem, isn’t it? That many translators themselves merely parrot traditional views of translation, as Venuti has noted, in ill-considered and sometimes contradictory ways. Moser asserts that it “is usually quite easy to distinguish between a good and bad translation. Though we quibble about diction, and though critical evaluations will diverge, we can at the very least agree that a translation that misrepresents the author’s meaning is bad.” Perhaps it is the scholar in him who speaks with such certainty about the author’s meaning, when what accounts of his editing style seem to reveal, perhaps, is that he privileges his own reading thereof. I am unwilling to go so far as the writers of the open letter do, calling out Moser’s “simplistic and retrograde (Nabokovian?) insistence on accuracy as a universally determinable gold standard”, perhaps because I feel that the chief way in which translation has suited my personality is as an enterprise against certainty. Moser goes on to claim that “Barthesian mystifications notwithstanding, translation is a concrete art.” Infelicities of phrasing—certainly Moser means no reference to the abstract movement that favored geometric abstraction?—only further obfuscate unclear thinking to outmoded concepts. What light, if any, does “concrete art” shed? How does it deepen our understanding? That all this may seem like infighting among practitioners brings me to my third point: “At the end of the day, graphic design is really important,” Bierut concludes on the podcast, “but it’s also one of the most cosmetic things in the world”. I understand the impulse to critique the decorative. For critic and visual theorist Johanna Drucker to say: “Most style choices are made to please the eye, make a text legible and presentable, or produce an ‘aesthetic’ design—not as studies in historical understanding” is like Lawrence Venuti lambasting the prevalence of unexamined belletrism masquerading as a coherent translation strategy when in fact all it 47 produces is a text in keeping with current standards of smooth prose. When meaning, content, and concept are invariant and transcendent, it necessarily follows that translation and design are decorative, with echoes of “purely” and “merely.” But that Bierut, an expert in his field should end with a reflexively self-deprecating dismissal purportedly putting in perspective what he spent the last forty minutes passionately analyzing rang eerily familiar. One might pass it off as a formulation of courtesy, or even tout it as a productive paradox, but to me it seemed to crystallize the plight of the traditionally invisible practitioner: an internalized sense that what they do goes unnoticed and ultimately does not matter, has a seemingly unlimited negative capacity to obscure, but at its best only to represent clearly (and never really to heighten). As Douglas Robinson remarks, only somewhat parodically, “Translators’ prefaces are notoriously apologetic: ‘My humble efforts have produced but a fair approximation of my author’s brilliances, and it is my sincerest hope that a later translator will be able to correct my deficiencies and better render this immortal work in English.’” (xii) So you hear this, time and again, and in other fields I liken to translation if only for the similarities in their discourse. To quote Aldous Huxley writing on typography in 1928: “Good printing cannot make a bad book good, nor bad printing ruin a good book.” To the extent that a translation’s gain is that it exists at all—and I’ve often heard this used to reframe the debate and combat the idea of inherent loss, first from Michael Emmerich—that there is now something where there was once nothing, then yes: rather a bad translation than none at all. Every time. But… this threshold of conventional not-mattering, this constituency of stickling and nitpicking that makes us apologetic and fearful of inducing tedium or coming off as persnickety when explaining our choices: isn’t that the very narrow margin in which we move, in which we make all our differences that cumulatively matter? That’s our playing field, and this keenness of 48 sense, of judgment, deliberately developed and practiced, capable of exceedingly fine distinctions: this is our practice, right? Edward Tufte, dean of data visualization, “Getting rid 9 million colons adds up.” (My personal favorite of his: “Shouldn’t that be an Italic period?”) And Huxley does get it, at least where typography is concerned: “Every outside has a corresponding inwardness. “The inwardness of letters does not happen to be literature; but that is not to say they have no inwardness at all. But good printing can create a valuable spiritual state in the reader, bad printing a certain spiritual discomfort… our minds are sensitized by the contemplation of the simple visual beauty of the letters: they are made more susceptible of receiving the other and more complex beauties, all the intellectual and spiritual content, of the verse. For our sensations, our feelings and ideas do not exist independently of one another, but form, as it were, the constituent note of what is either a discord or a harmony.” (344-45) On, then, to “the inwardness of letters”! In my research for translating a graphic novel history of typography, I was surprised by how much of the discourse revolved around the same language of glass, transparency, and invisibility. In 1932, writer and typography scholar Beatrice Warde, a marketing manager for the British Monotype Corporation, penned “The Crystal Goblet; Or, Printing Should Be Invisible”, which she first delivered as a speech, and to which designers are still ragefully reacting online and in print today. In it, she makes several claims along the order of the following: “All the virtues of the perfect wine-glass have a parallel in typography.” (109) “Type well used is invisible as type.” (111) “The book typographer has the job of erecting a window between the reader inside the room and that landscape which is the author's words.” (113) The injunctions recall George Orwell’s “Good prose is like a windowpane” from his essay “Why I Write,” and perhaps less well-known to the wider public, the nevertheless oft-quoted assertions of Norman Shapiro, translator of Verlaine and Baudelaire: “I see translation as the attempt to produce a text so transparent that it does not seem to be translated. A good translation is like a pane of glass. You only notice that it’s there when there are little imperfections—scratches, 49 bubbles.” I find it odd that such advice should be blithely dispensed to professionals, when in “Getting an A on an English Paper,” Rutgers Newark English professor Jack Lynch advises students: “[D]on’t talk about the ‘real world.’ Talk about writing. Don’t assume literature is a transparent window that shows us the real world – it’s not something we can reliably look through. Often it’s more like a painting than a window, and instead of looking through it we should learn to look at it.” Of course, where reality leaves off and representation begins is a source of such constant confusion that Belgian Surrealist René Magritte dubbed the painting he devoted to it “The Human Condition” (Fig. 5): Fig. 5: René Magritte (Belgian, 1898 – 1967), "La condition humaine", 1933. oil on canvas, 100 x 81 x 1.6 cm (39 3/8 x 31 7/8 x 5/8 in.) National Gallery of Art 50 Such that I was inspired to use his painting as the basis for a similar allegory, this time of translation. Artist Claire Stephens provided the form, we might say, for our collaborative short comic (Fig. 6): Fig. 6: Edward Gauvin and Claire Stephens, from “Invisibility” in The Arkansas International. “Words,” said Aristotle, “are the images of cogitations, and letters are the images of words.” Graphic designer Ellen Lupton says “Typography is what language looks like.” The curator of contemporary design at NY’s Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, she reminds us that “Words originated as gestures of the body. The first typefaces were directly modeled on the forms of calligraphy” (13). 51 The letterforms of type have their own materiality. Poet, typographer, and translator Robert Bringhurst asserts us that they exist in three dimensions, embedded by metal into the waiting page: “from the middle of the fifteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, most roman letters were printed by a technique rooted in sculpture” (138). The resulting image was both tactile and visual: “The color and sheen of the ink join with the smooth texture of crushed paper, recessed into the whiter and rougher fibers surrounding the letters and lines. The black light of the text shines out from within a well-printed letterpress page.” (138) In another essay, he goes on to specify that “fonts of foundry type are bodies. That is to say, entanglements, conspiracies of gravity and mass with the weightlessness of vision” (196). Geoffroy Tory (1480-1533) was an engraver and one of the first theoreticians of serifs and accented characters. In 1529, he wrote and published Champfleury, one of the first books of typographical analysis, and one of far-reaching influence. Named for a French idiom for paradise, it was subtitled “The Art and Science of the Proportion of the Attic or Ancient Roman Letters, According to the Human Body and Face”. Regarding the letter A, he wrote: “The crosstroke covers the man’s organ of generation, to signify that Modesty and Chastity are required, before all else, in those who seek acquaintance with well-shaped letters.” There is no right typeface for a given text, but as when developing a translation strategy with which to approach one, graphic designers, “when choosing a typeface,” says Ellen Lupton, “consider the history of typefaces, their current connotations, as well as their formal qualities. The goal is to find an appropriate match between a style of letters and the specific social situation and body of content that define the project at hand.” (32) And as with rules of language and usage, meaning, and even individual words, a typeface has an identity that is at once stable but subject to time, history, shifts in fashion and taste: a matter of cultural consensus. The typeface known as Futura was developed in 1927 by Paul Renner 52 according to the geometrically purifying principles of the Bauhaus movement, with a few concessions to readability. An instant hit, it became one of the most widely used typefaces of its age. After the Nazis came to power, Renner, who had been dismissed from his post, sat out the war in Switzerland. The Nazis favored Gothic blackletter, but its legibility in public signage was becoming an issue in conquered countries. They adopted Futura, which became so closely identified with the Nazis that it was banned in France after the Liberation. However, it was such a favorite with designers that they resurrected it and smuggled it back into use as Europa. Today, known by its original name once more, it has become a marker of taste, the preferred font of such diverse filmmakers Stanley Kubrick, David Fincher, and Wes Anderson. It has been used by Nike, Louis Vuitton, SwissAr, Fox News, Union Pacific, Party City, Absolute Vodka, Shell, Volkswagen, Vanity Fair, and Vogue. “There is no playbook that assigns a fixed meaning or function to every typeface,” Lupton concludes. “Each designer must confront the library of possibilities in light of a project’s unique circumstances” (32). *** I’d like now to turn to two examples, drawn from personal experience in comics, where elements of design and, specifically, typography, in foregrounding the physical and formal features of language, pointed to the translator’s presence. For me, this foregrounding is a kind of hypermediacy, drawing attention to the continued existence of the previous medium, French, in the current medium, English, and drawing attention to the fact of translational remediation. Upon finishing revisions on my first book-length prose fiction translation, a volume of short stories by French fabulist Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud selected from across almost forty years, I sent the manuscript to the author, who remarked upon his feeling of “dépaysement” at encountering stories that were both his and no longer his. Dépaysement is often translated as 53 “culture shock”, but this relatively recent English phrase, traced back to the 1920s but formalized as a concept in 1954 by Canadian anthropologist Kalervo Oberg, turns away from the older French word’s focus on homeland, with its root of pays (“country” or “land”), and instead toward confrontation with the new. As if to address this shortfall, dépaysement is sometimes also rendered as “homesickness,” which highlights its strains of nostalgia, a word whose compound of the Homeric Greek νόστος (nostos, or “homecoming”) with ἄλγος (álgos, “pain” or “ache”) was first used to describe the anxieties afflicting 17 th -century Swiss mercenaries fighting far from home. But you give up to get (and don’t translators know it): “home” is restored to the word, but the French specifically stipulates “de-homing”, with all its attendant distance, spurring French professor and poetry translator Cynthia Hogue to coin the term “farsickness.” Dépaysement’s affective connotations run the gamut from a refreshing change of scene to pleasant bewilderment to paralyzing disorientation, but at its core abides a sense of bodily movement, a physical displacement to foreign surroundings. Its hints of the “unhomed” even associate it with the German unheimlich, which the translation of Freud’s essay of the same title cemented in English as “uncanny” but which in French is étrange—just plain “strange” but also “foreign”. What a tangled web we weave… Traduttore, traditore: translator, traitor, indeed. “Translation is movement, the twin of metaphor, which means ‘to move from one place to another,’’ writes poet, scholar, essayist, and translator Eliot Weinberger. At the time, young and inexperienced, I made little of the author’s metaphor, except to note that Châteaureynaud’s stock-in-trade were stories of just such haunting and haunted displacements, albeit to and from fantastical surroundings, and one of his favorite novels was Hungarian Ferenc Karinthy’s Epepe (trans. Metropole by George Szirtes), a Kafkaesque tale of a linguist lost in a city whose language he can neither identify nor understand. But a few years later, Châteaureynaud did me 54 the honor of translating one of my own short stories, “My Father’s Hand.” (My version was published in The Kenyon Review Online, and Châteaureynaud’s appeared in the short fiction revue Brèves.) There are moments when one stands beside oneself, not in anger but wonder or some other detachment, looking on at life as it happens, and others that raise the hair on the back of one’s neck, as if someone else were watching, a conviction the senses belie. Upon recognizing, in Châteaureynaud’s translation, my own ejected thoughts come back to me with a certain alienated majesty (apologies to Emerson), I recall a similarly eerie sensation of twinning and removal. I, the author named on the page, had not written these words, and through them someone else stared back at me—a grinning, impish namesake—who knew them with the same intimacy with which I had known the words whose place these had usurped. Even now, I still have difficulty believing how physical the experience felt. In a formulation from the same essay, now well-known in translation circles, Weinberger writes: “Metaphor makes the familiar strange; translation makes the strange familiar.” This is a proposition that succeeds less on sense than sound and the rhetorical neatness of its antimetabole: that is, more formal properties of language. Which may be as much a lesson for translation as it is a nice segue to my next episode of disembodiment and doubling. Late last fall, I received complimentary copies of my translation of Gébé’s Letter to Survivors, a graphic novel published by the comics imprint of New York Review Books. It was my second book with them, and dear to my heart: I’d pitched it unsuccessfully to publishers for almost decade before they picked it up. In France as in the U.S., it has come about that most graphic novels aspiring to or considered as art or literature happen to be the work of a single cartoonist or “creator” (the reverse is far less true on both sides of the Atlantic). This means that not only are the writer for 55 the text and the artist for the images one and the same, but that person is also the letterer. There is a true auteur-ism at work in this almost total creative supervision of the product quite rare in film, the medium for which auteur theory was conceived (one thinks of almost-exceptions like David Lean directing A Passage to India, adapting it from E.M. Forster’s novel, and editing it). Lettering involves not only making the digital or manual typographical choices pertaining to text in speech balloons (font, size, weight, spacing), but also to other textual elements of page and panel such as notes, credits, captions, reproductions of documents and signage, and sometimes even onomatopoeic sound effects. Furthermore, it involves locating these elements as meaningful compositional elements of an image. Lettering in translated comics, especially art/alternative/indie comics, is so important that publishers highlight this issue when selling rights to foreign markets. For instance, in Canadian publisher Drawn & Quarterly’s rights catalog, listed after title and author will be the information “FONT AVAILABLE” (meaning a typographic digital font is available) or “ARTIST WILL RELETTER” (meaning the comics artist has indicated their willingness to reletter the comic in another language, like an actor learning foreign lines phonetically). 56 Figs. 7 & 8: from Canadian indie comics publisher Drawn & Quarterly’s foreign rights catalog (Source: https://www.transatlanticagency.com/catalogues/adult-catalogues/drawn-quarterly/) Eventual contracts may stipulate the foreign publisher provide lettering samples before publication is authorized. “It takes a rare combination of letterer and cartoonist,” Gene Kannenberg Jr. points out, “to create a page as well-integrated and harmonious as a single cartoonist can make” (190). And yet translating a comic usually entails, among other things, replacing most or all of these textual elements. As ever (and per Lawrence Venuti), “translation changes everything”. At the beginning of the current decade, when first attempting to find an American publisher for Gébé’s Letter to Survivors, I placed an excerpt of in Words Without Borders. At the time, Gébé had already been dead for six years, the French publisher, L’Association, had a font made from his handlettering used in the original. Here is a sample, set beside Gébé’s French: 57 Fig. 9: from Gébé’s Lettre aux survivants, page 12. Fig. 10: from my translated excerpt published at Words Without Borders. French and English mostly share an alphabet, at least, but since the words are different, the distribution of letters is surely different, the shapes of letterforms. For the full-length translation’s 2019 release, publisher New York Review Comics commissioned a Quebecois comics artist, cartoonist François Vigneault to hand-letter the book. When first confronted with the English print version, I had something like the typographical version of the “uncanny valley” experience. As you can see below, Vigneault’s rendition of the late French satirical cartoonist’s hand-lettering was both like and unlike the French original. 58 Fig. 10: from Gébé’s Letter to Survivors, New York Review Comics, page 6. While letter for letter the digital font is recognizably Gébé’s writing, the evenness of kerning and tracking lends a machinelike regularity to the text and page. Vigneault’s lettering, on the other hand, creates a very vivid overall impression of similarity that cannot be traced to individual elements. In an email interview I conducted with Vigneault, he confessed that “It took several attempts to get something that felt like Gébé’s original lettering… My early attempts were in general too tight, too strict in feeling. Gébé’s lettering is at times very idiosyncratic, changing in size and scale, becoming more or less italicized, bending to fit into his word balloons and sometimes running right across his art… I’ve used a wide range of lettering in my work, both hand-lettering and also creating digital fonts, but in general I strive to keep my own lettering as tight and consistent as I can… I feel like Gébé had a much more natural, improvisational style, adapting to his artwork. I had to really ‘let loose’ to get close to his style.” 59 Vigneault worked digitally, “right over the original artwork and lettering so that I can get as close as possible Gébé’s placement, particularly when it comes to line spacing and character size”. For Vigneault, this had the advantage of “always keeping the artist’s original letterforms right in front of me, so that I don’t accidentally stray too far”. He read the original and my translation “in tandem, very slowly and carefully” as he lettered, claiming that this made him very aware of little nuances in Gébé’s language and style. The process was laborious and painstaking: “I’ll frequently redraw a word or even a single letter multiple times, if it doesn’t feel like it’s working I’ll just erase it or ‘undo’ and draft it again, over and over sometimes! But the good thing is that this allows me to be bolder with my initial strokes and lines, to be a little reckless, and I think that really helps to approximate the feeling of a book like this.” Issues of fidelity and holistic effect reared their heads, enjambment and design: “We tried very hard to never alter Gébé’s original artwork or word balloons, even going so far as to preserve his ‘mistakes’; when a word in the original would run over the edges of a word balloon, for instance. But I definitely had to consider where the white space was on the page, trying to replicate the original, which sometimes had unusual line breaks and other things that made the white space quite striking, visually.” Significantly, this approach to perceived “mistakes” extended not only to author but letterer: “I also left in many minor ‘mistakes’ if I felt that they looked right…. A too-thin stroke, or a little ink blob, that adds to the ‘hand-crafted’ quality and I don’t mind that at all.” It is a matter of some pride to me how many of the keywords for my concerns in this dissertation popped up organically, and without prompting, in Vigneault’s answers. For instance: “But again, this wasn’t so much a creative effort as an effort to try to seamlessly recreate the original feeling of the work, with all its little quirks.” “Hopefully the art is ‘invisible’ in some ways… If I did my job right few people will take note of my work, it will be as seamless as possible with the original.” In a visual and immediate way, François inadvertently foregrounded, for me, the “translatedness” of my translation. Both he and I seemed to be attempting very similar hoaxes: to pass off my words, in his letterforms, as the author’s own—to sneak them in without disturbing the holistic artistic and design integrity of the original, conceived and executed by one mind and hand. When 60 I invoke the term “uncanny valley,” borrowed from computer animation, I mean that it was precisely the subtlety of the differences in lettering that made the experience alarming; the unsettling feeling rose in direct relation to the similarity between Gébé’s lettering and Vigneault’s. The more right Vigneault’s lettering felt, the more aware I was made that these words, beside Gébé’s drawings, were not the Gébé’s. It made gallingly clear to me my naked attempt at imposture. François’ lettering both challenged and confirmed the place of my translation by embodying my work: giving abstractions of tone, register, and nuance—a translator’s tools—undeniable physical form. It reinforced the permanence of the changes I had wrought upon Gébé’s book in a way that the altered typeface of a prose translation never had. Still—would Anglophone audiences be able to tell? Would anything even seem amiss to them at all? It was only because I had, through long hours of working on the translation, grown used to Gébé’s lettering that the difference was immediately apparent to me. The material turn in cultural studies urges us to acknowledge that there is no such thing as a text unmediated by its materiality, that as Jerome McGann says, “the material and typographic forms of a text, necessarily and essentially contribute to its meaning ‘whether we are aware of such matter when we make our meanings or whether we are not’” (12-13). Yet the effect of a typeface, our ability to appreciate and evaluate the aptness of its choice, deepens with knowledge of its history. To David Bellos’ point in “The Paradox of Foreign-Soundingness” (a chapter from his book Is That a Fish in Your Ear? that is often excerpted as standalone essay): “Foreignizing translation styles rely for their foreignizing effect on the reader’s prior knowledge of the approximate shape and sound of a foreign language” (39). Comics critics and creators alike have long claimed that words and pictures form a gestalt in comics: their artistic effects cannot and should not be separately evaluated. Text from dialogue 61 to captions to onomatopoeic sound effects, are as much verbal signifiers as pictorial elements in an overall design. If this is true, then is it also true that in comics, lettering is an analogue of translation—a visual correspondence and transformation that foregrounds the physical nature of the language media that translators mediate. *** I confess that I am, as a writer and translator alike, too often seduced by the plastic properties of words. In my first drafts, I am guilty of letting convincing sound (assonance, consonance, alliteration) stand in for sense, or led astray from intent by appearance. Often, I come to realize only in revision that I have said something that sounded good rather than what I meant to say, or what consistency and coherency might require; in making, I am swayed by pure physicality. This is not quite the level to which Gilbert Sorrentino was referring when he affirmed his famous credo “Form not only determines content, but form invents content”; he was speaking at a more macro level of novelistic structure. But I believe it applies especially when one is saying nothing—that is, when language is used to denote pure noise. A service letterers and lettering studios sometimes but not always provide is placing onomatopoeic sound effects. With meaning dialed down, the form and feel of words take a front seat. By foregrounding the plastic attributes of words—shape, weight, size, sound, assonance, consonance, appearance—onomatopoeia makes words into poetic objects par excellence. Much has been written about onomatopoeia as a special category within the special category of poetic discourse, as well as its place in linguistics as an argument for sound symbolism vs. Saussurean conventionalism’s prevailing doctrine of arbitrary meaning. Gérard Genette has called onomatopoeia a bone that the language “system tosses to mimetic desire” (332), while Roman 62 Jakobson speaks of the poetic function of language as “promoting the palpability of signs, deepen[ing] the fundamental dichotomy of signs and objects” (356). As Guillory elaborates, “The poetic function introduces a kind of melodious noise into the channel of communication, heightening consciousness of the channel as such and so distancing the message from the object or referent.” (352) Or as poet and translator Rosemarie Waldrop noted, “When poets speak about the medium of language (and are not complaining) one often gets the impression that they are thinking primarily about the phonetic aspects of the word, its physical properties as it were.” (50) I lack both the expertise and background in poetics to do justice to onomatopoeia, but nevertheless I’d like to borrow a few tools from that body of theory and apply them to far coarser effects in comics. As master translator Anthea Bell, who’s done everything from Goscinny’s Astérix to Sebald’s Austerlitz, once said self-deprecatingly: she avoids poetry but adores doggerel. There are two primary kinds of onomatopoeia in comics. Swapping the French “meuh” for the English “moo” or “pan” for the “bang” of a gunshot seems very basic, on the order of “chat” and “cat”. And it is true that such onomatopoeia might as well be “real” words: they’re in the dictionary. They’re subject to convention. But if we are to take the argument that onomatopoeia are pure form to its logical extreme, then even such swappings lead to changes: visual, and by implication, aural—in other words, phonemic. The “euh” phoneme just isn’t as legible in English: not only does it not produce the right sound, and hence the bovine association, it doesn’t really produce any sound at all: the English eye and ear are stymied by it. The idea that certain phonemes do or don’t scan segues nicely to the second kind of onomatopoeia: the purely original or creative. The comics creator has devised a collision of consonants and vowels to describe a noise without orthographic precedent. And in theory, at 63 least, the composition of said sound would take off from existing emotional or lexical associations with specific phonemes. The issue of original sound effects comes up often in translation. Take, for instance, the use of a very small, subtle sound, “Toc!” to mark a glass being set down on a tabletop. This is, by and large, a moment that few American creators would choose to mark with a sound at all (though doing so is arguably influenced by manga). In this, the system of onomatopoeia mirrors that of language: that sounds in other languages are applied to situations we in English have no sounds for is analogous to words in other languages that map to concepts for which we have no word. I have noted that in most cases, the comics sound effect is an intensifier, rather than a primary conveyor of information. With a few exceptions, as when the source of the sound is out- of-panel or off-page, the word serves to reinforce information. A certain segment of today’s alternative comics creators, striving for cultural respect, eschew onomatopoeia, seeking to escape associations with campiness (the Biff! Bam! Pow! popularized, ironically enough, by the 1960s Batman TV show) or childhood (onomatopoeia are indelibly associated with early language acquisition). The only sound effects in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, for instance, actually are primary conveyors of information that would not otherwise be clear from the image due to constraints of the comics medium: “Knock Knock!” coming from a closed door, “Ring!” from a telephone. In onomatopoeia, then, meaning can be either particulate (inhering associatively rather than denotatively in phonemes), or evacuated (in the case of an intensifier). This evacuation of meaning opens up is the possibility of foregrounding words as objects. Considering the philosophy of language, art critic Susanne Langer writes: 64 “A symbol which interests us also as an object is distracting. It does not convey its meaning without obstruction… The more barren and indifferent the symbol, the greater is its semantic power… That is the source of the ‘transparency’ of language, on which several scholars have remarked. Vocables in themselves are so worthless that we cease to be aware of their physical presence at all, and become conscious only of their connotations, denotations, or other meanings. Our conceptual activity seems to flow through them.” (75) It is not about meanings, or ideas. As Mallarmé famously chided Degas “You can’t make a poem with ideas. You make it with words.” Rosemarie Waldrop says that “poets have long had a grudge against the transparency for concepts or things which is usually attributed to words and considered their advantage—by philosophers”; they would prefer to “attract attention to their words as objects. Just as a painter might draw attention to a color rather than to the object painted in it” (50). Comic book onomatopoeia is the distracting object magnified. Roy Lichtenstein might agree. Because there are no rules to creating onomatopoeia—what is the sound of a rocket ship crashing into rocky soil? More to the point, how should it be spelled?— creativity is also highlighted in the translational process. I would go so far as to say that because its primary purpose is intensification and not communication, the sound effect is synthetic—just as much so in comics as in cinema. It is a staple of so-called “movie magic” that what we hear is not what we see: the boulder of the sprung booby-trap threatening to crush Indiana Jones in the opening to Raiders of the Lost Ark was not only made of Styrofoam, but its sound was sound engineer Ben Burtt’s Toyota backing down his gravel driveway. The thwack of katana contact in Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai is a bundle of sticks smacking a pig carcass: hence the bone crunch and the flesh impact, all at once. In 2012, I worked on a book called Weapons of Mass Diplomacy. The French title, Quai d’Orsay, is a popular metonym for the Foreign Ministry and refers to its location on the left bank in Paris’ 7th arrondissement. The book covers goings-on at the Ministry during the fraught 65 period in Franco-American relations from 9/11 to Gulf II from the perspective of a fledgling speechwriter, and culminates with the 2003 Valentine’s Day address on Iraq famously delivered by Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin to the UN Security Council. It is an insider political satire, which is to say all the names have been changed; the text of Villepin’s address is the only element taken verbatim from real life. The writer published under a pseudonym, Abel Lanzac, revealing himself only onstage to accept a prize at the International Comics Festival in Angoulême. Originally released in two volumes, the graphic novel was a runaway success in France, perhaps because it vindicated somewhat, in retrospect, the country’s principled stand against American unilateralism. In place of Dominique de Villepin, a man of average height, the book gives us his spiritual portrait: the looming, imposing Alexandre Taillard de Worms. A whirlwind of a man, broad-shouldered, bull-forward, himself a force of nature, with the kind of Gallic schnozz that has become cartoonist Christophe Blain’s specialty. His very name rings with aristocracy and faint ridicule, grandeur and delusions thereof. In the book, he is variously pictured as Darth Vader and the Minotaur. Fig. 11: from Weapons of Mass Diplomacy 66 He doesn’t enter a room so much as storm in, accompanied by a gust of wind, a flurry of papers, and this word: Fig. 12: from Quai d’Orsay At first I thought it was just another variation on the classic French door slam, VLAN! or VLAM! But VLON had other uses in the book besides Taillard’s actual entrances. It could sound his imminent arrival, or accompany his impatient disdain. Finland and Spain had done rather basic replacements with loud sounds: PAUK and BLAM, respectively. Italy and Germany were content to leave well enough alone. But then, in the course of one of our phone conferences— one of the closer and more rewarding collaborations I’ve enjoyed with a writer—Abel Lanzac reported that German fans had taken up VLON as a nickname for the Minister’s character, and with Lanzac’s support, I began to probe a bit further. I began to think more metaphorically, as if VLON were not a sound but a catchphrase, a tag that not only signaled the Minister’s presence and accompanied his actions but expressed something of his character. 67 Figs. 13-15: from Quai d’Orsay After all, Spider-man is signaled by the THWIP of his web-shooters and Wolverine by the SNIKT of his adamantium claws emerging from his hands. This idea seems as old as comics, but not only are these now-copyrighted sonic staples in pop culture fairly recent, as comics historian Alan Kistler points out, “they began their life as entirely different word constructions or were simply [missing altogether]... What started as a WHIZZZZZT in 1962's Amazing Fantasy #15, became a TWNNNNG! in 1963's Amazing Spider-Man #1. A year later, Steve Ditko (or possibly Stan Lee) gave Spidey's web a THWUP! sound effect which again went through several subsequent iterations—including THWAP, WHAP, WHIPP and ZAP. It wasn't until John Romita Sr. took over that the thwip we all know and love became a permanent fixture.” 68 In other words, these sounds iconically associated with specific characters evolved like all language through variations in spelling until reaching lexical stability in some consensus of popular support and practice. And now that precedent has been set, SFX as character tag can consciously be used as a technique. At the core of the Minister’s character was a paradox: a man willing to stand up to superpowered America for what he believed in, a man willing to wage figurative war for literal peace. It was crucial to convey this martial quality, an expression of force, even menace. And, like his name—Alexandre Taillard de Worms—it had to be just a tad ridiculous, because here was a man who took himself very, very seriously, unaware of his own outsized theatricality. One early candidate was the ominous BRAAAM(PF), the bass note of monumental dread from the movie Inception that was quickly saturating movie trailers. But this was so relatively recent that it lacked a standardized, instantly recognizable orthography. Besides, on the page, it looked more like a bleat. Perhaps something hard, almost Germanic with consonants, that invoked Ragnarok? “But we should keep the N/M sound,” Lanzac told me. And so I took a page from a comic often cited as a classic of sound effects: Walt Simonson’s Thor. As J. Caleb Mozzocco put it at Comics Alliance: “John Workman‘s lettering on that seminal, still-beloved run was so integral that it’s difficult to imagine those comics without it. Workman’s big, bold DOOMs, THOOMs and KRAKATHOOMs hit readers’ eyes and imaginations like graphic hammer blows. Simonson’s art alone could tell powerful, affecting stories, but Workman’s lettering really made those Thor comics sing… and scream and thunder and crash and splinter.” Another often-noted aspect of Workman’s sound effects, apart from their clean lines and design sense, is their integration on a literal and figurative level into narrative. At the beginning of his run, Simonson planted Surtur the Fire Giant forging the Twilight Sword, and for over a year kept 69 him in the saga’s background, slowly building up the threat he represented. The final DOOM!, sliced in two by the finished sword, is a smashing payoff for that slow burn. Figs. 16-17: from The Mighty Thor issues #340 and #353, 1984-85. I felt comfortable drawing from this well because as a book, Weapons of Mass Diplomacy is very aware of pop culture. In addition to Star Wars, its references include Lord of the Rings and such deep cuts from an ‘80s French childhood as Space Sheriff Gavan. Its characters have Metallica songs as their ringtones. And though its mockery of bureaucratic doublespeak has been likened to Molière, it is very much a comic by people who love comics. One of its most famous scenes revolves around the idea that an effective political speech has the same virtues as a volume of Tintin: pacing, punchiness, constant peril and continuously rising stakes. To take the edge off the cosmic angst, I hit upon the umlaut, that cultural signifier of mock-menace and would-be badassery. It de-familiarized an English word, helping to split the 70 difference between booming sound and bellicose meaning appropriate to character while also undercutting both in tonal keeping with the book as a whole. And so we tried to take readers on a journey of DOOMs escalating in color, intensity, and violence. 71 Figs. 18-20: from Weapons of Mass Diplomacy None of this would have been possible with Christophe Blain’s support. When it comes to integrating sound effects that give an organic, original feel, an artist’s participation is key. *** On Tuesday, October 21, 2003, the New York Times administered to itself what it called “a gentle typographic facelift.” In his essay “The New York Times: Apocalypse Now, Page A1”, Michael Bierut charts the changeover to Cheltenham, replacing its previous variety of typefaces 72 Latin Extra Condensed, News Gothic, Century Bold Italic, Bookman Antique, and retaining only a single headline style from the previous regime. A few days later, Bierut reports, the paper published two letters: Patrick O’Carroll from Seattle congratulating the Times on its “subtly cleaner and sharper look,” while Martin Beiser from Montclair says: “You have made bland the quirky persona that made the Times special and given us the typographic equivalent of New Coke. It’s the end of the world as we know it” (14). In October 2010, clothing chain The Gap unveiled a new logo that was an abrupt change from the one it had had since 1986: white letters in a proprietary condensed serif font (very close to but not quite Ann Pomeroy’s Spire Regular) on a dark blue square. The new logo attempted a cleaner, more modern look by switching to a white background featuring black letters in Helvetica which, as the premier product of the Swiss International Style, the go-to font for modernizing facelifts and overhauls. “This is the worst idea Gap has ever had. I will be sad to see this change take place,” user Rodolfo Hernandez Cattafi wrote on Gap's Facebook page. “If this logo is brought into the clothing [store] I will no long[er] be shopping with the Gap. Really a bummer because 90% of my clothing has been purchased there in the last 15+ years.” After huge outcry from designers, brand fans, and citizen critics, the new logo lasted a week, giving way to an ignominious attempt to crowdsource a new logo online, and leading, in the end, to the resignation of Marka Hansen, the executive who oversaw the logo change, the following February. The design firm of Laird and Partners was issued the most common of client briefs: to simultaneously signal heritage and modernity. The Gap, in a 40th anniversary move was trying to hearken back to its 1969 roots, when they sold “Levi’s, records and tapes” out of a storefront in San Francisco. Helvetica was meant to recall the clean, stylized, a customized version of 73 Avant Garde. But instead, this history had been obscured, such that a callback to it was equally obscure. Moreover, Helvetica is so overused that it “fails to provide a unique visual identifier for any company that chooses it as its logo,” according to designer Armin Vit. Worse yet, one of Gap’s main competitors, American Apparel, used it widely. The rhetorical shape of this discourse reminded me of nothing so much as the furor— whether laudatory or vituperative, but always loud and aggrieved—that surrounds any noticeable alteration in the retranslation of a classic literary work. Take, for instance, Sandra Smith’s 2014 reworking of Albert Camus’ novel L’Étranger. Camus’ novel, which has since its 1967 Stuart Gilbert translation through Matthew Ward’s 1988 reworking has been known in the English- speaking world as The Stranger, was retitled The Outsider by Smith. These divergent translations both highlight plausible meanings of the word l’étranger, which in its most everyday use simply means “foreigner”, although its root adjective étrange carries connotations of strangeness in the “uncanny” sense, as well as the social and emotional “estrangement” which reigning interpretations of the novel have traditionally highlighted as its theme. Thanks to decades of pedagogy, however, The Stranger as a title has an iconic power, and a hold on the Anglophone imagination of both foreign literature and literary history. Our emotional attachment to the place those words occupy have endowed them over time with something like Benjaminian aura. Readers, enabled by open forums such as reviews and reading groups on the internet but also such traditional forms of protest as letters to the editor, came out in force both to praise and to damn Smith’s work, sometimes brandishing no greater expertise than an outraged conviction of rightness based on a fond memory of high school French, such that no less than novelist Claire Messud, in the pages of The New York Review of Books, felt it necessary to come to her defense. Discussions also revolved around Smith’s retranslation of L’Étranger’s famous first line, 74 opinions about which have long served as a sort of cocktail party litmus-test for those who dare pretend to the title of translator from the French. No less than Lawrence Venuti defended Matthew Ward’s translation at length as a politically praiseworthy example of “foreignization,” when Ward’s translation, immediately prior to Smith’s, was something the latter specifically reacted to as a shortcoming. It may seem I am painting with too broad a brush here; resistance to any change, whether initial and knee-jerk or else rancorous and entrenched, is likely to have a discourse of similar rhetorical contours. It may also seem I am mocking, belittling, or making light of a serious literary endeavor, one that could by degrees incline our interpretation of a classic in the coming decades, by likening it to something so crass, commercially-driven as brand identity. But what drew me to this particular example was first of all the vehemence of public response, which however short-lived, points to emotions that should be honored with clarification and query. And second of all, the response of the respective establishments. The design community proved among the most vitriolic of responders, fuming over the Gap redesign with a sense of impotence and resignation that to me felt powerfully familiar as a translator. At its heart lay a conviction that its very practice was, any brief brouhaha aside, frivolous and would ultimately go unnoticed. Both The Stranger and The Outsider are, without wading into the kind of value judgment that I find counterproductive—and which, this paper contends, have too long plagued translation discourse—translations. A conscious choice was made, from an informed reading: the results of an interpretive act both individual to the translator and arguably also reflective of cultural factors of her era. Certainly The Outsider, by virtue of subsequence, cannot claim that it was not in some way a reaction to what came before, but it would be reductive to dismiss it as change for change’s sake, even though the primary driver in the retranslation of classics—sometimes to the 75 detriment of the translation of new work in our market economy—is publishers’ hope of a lucrative and durable academic market. That the circumstances of production have everything to do with money and the periodic expiration of copyright need not impinge upon the translator’s motivations for the work itself, just as they do not necessarily show in a designer’s product. In the earlier-referenced podcast episode on Logo Design, Michael Bierut defends the outrage in reception as a good thing, preferring it to indifference and pointing out that “those people are the loyal fans … [the] passion that makes them sit in those seats when the weather is terrible [is] the same passion [that] is going to make them take it personally” when a new logo is released. He rightly observes that with greater visibility comes increased criticism. In response, Bierut says he writes back politely: putting a name and face to the work he has done won’t always change someone’s mind about a given design, but showing people there is a thoughtful human behind its creation always helps. In another essay he notes that “logos don’t mean anything in and of themselves”. Instead, people use them “as tabulae rasae, upon which they project their hopes, dreams, fears and, sometimes, nightmares” (75). It seems to further reify words as objects to understand them also as vessels that readers invest with meaning above and beyond dictionary definition: that the perceived “rightness” of words can not only be an instantaneous perception that sends a shiver down the spine, but also come into being over time. Who knows if Smith’s title will be similarly long-lived as its predecessor? But if time favors one, it will have proved nothing “right”: such rightness is an essentializing and always retrospective argument that has the effect of shutting down rather than extending the sorts of interpretive conversations translation iterates. It is time we did away with the teleologically-derived critical stance that a work could not, in its perfection, have been any 76 other way. This stands in the way of the textual proliferation and open communication foundational to postmodern theory. There’s an idea that progress attaches to retranslations when we might instead speak more helpfully of difference. The necessity of a retranslation, even or especially when commercially motivated, is nevertheless couched in terms of improvement—a narrative translators are forced to adopt in grant applications, where they must justify retranslation in just such terms. It’s not the linearity I mind so much as its direction: as Linda Hutcheon asserts of adaptation, “Multiple versions exist laterally, not vertically” (xv). Progress attaches to the idea of form ever more closely following function, rather than horizontally proliferating change. But some design critics, historians, and theorists have written that form follows failure. Not failure in some definitive sense, but in the particulars: what Henry Petroski calls “the real and perceived failure of things as they are used to do what they are supposed to do” (20). This train of thought can be traced further back to David Pye: “All designs for devices are in some degree failures, either because they flout one or another of the requirements or because they are compromises, and compromise implies a degree of failure […] It follows that all designs for use are arbitrary. The designer or his client has to choose in what degree and where there shall be failure. Thus the shape of all things is the product of arbitrary choice… It is quite impossible for any design to be ‘the logical outcome of the requirements’ simply because, the requirements being in conflict, their logical outcome is an impossibility.” (70) Pye goes so far as to declare function a fantasy: “the form of designed things is decided by choice or else by chance; but it is never actually entailed by anything whatever”(13). This is a huge claim to make, that form is arbitrary rather than necessitated or constrained. Instead, “the concept of function in design, and even the doctrine of functionalism, might be worth a little attention if things ever worked… Nothing we design or make ever really works. We can always say what it ought to do, but that it never does… Never do we achieve a satisfactory performance.… Every thing we design and make is an improvisation, a lash-up, something inept and provisional.” (13) As Robert Bringhurst reminds us, 77 “To design things means to interfere with things: to think of how they might be and to alter how they are… That interference with the given world can still be founded on admiration. Where it is not, what is the point of designing at all?” (196) Again: always a bad translation, rather than none at all. And I really think that, for a while, in English at least, that is the choice. Thanks to a translation, someone will find out about something they might never otherwise have heard of. They might be inspired to learn a foreign language (stranger things have happened). They might find out upon comparing the translation with the original that they have… questions. Which might lead them to write, about this work they love, an evaluatory piece on the things they would have done differently, or (rarer but greatly encouraged) actually go out and do those things by contributing their own translation. At least with a translation, something is out there, in the same way that a writer can’t revise a work if there’s no rough draft. And this is how a text sneaks into the culture: through repeated iterations. You could think of everyone who’s translated the same text as engaged in a vast collaborative process of revision, like a workshop spread across time, but laterally so, in response to changing trends and definitions, reigning voices, moving targets of what constitutes “good” rather than pointed toward some singular, teleological endpoint of perfection or identity where we are finally reunited with the original. We are moved to pick up pen and paper when we have something to add—“it is really want rather than need,” says Petroski, “that drives the process of technological evolution”(22). Improvement is the usual putative motivation to take up previously done work, when perhaps we could reframe it as to contribute. To leave a mark, and by retracing—the manual act, and not the mental—to make it our own. And here, again, translation could take a page from fan fiction: infinite iterations coexisting simultaneously, in parallel cultural universes independently, none canon or truth, no palimpsest nor a series of replacements, but a series of 78 expansions. Conversely, this model of anonymous contribution recalls more that of science than art, and arguably the unsung human contributions to a project like Google Translate. Translator Peter Cole cites Max Weber’s “Science as a Vocation” in reminding us that in such fields one engages “in the production of a kind of knowledge he knows will become outdated—taking a strange if complicated delight in that knowledge and the process of production. Weber then asks: ‘Why does one engage in doing something that in reality never comes, and never can come, to an end?’” (7) Critic Barry Schwabsky, writing on craft, says, “the belief that there is a single ‘best’ or ‘most coherent’ way of fulfilling a function that creates the greatest mischief. Every function exists with respect to a need, and industrial culture produces new and ever more finely differentiated needs even more prodigiously than it produces new objects.” He goes on to suggest that “Perhaps we should take a cue from the psychologist D.W. Winnicott’s idea of the ‘good-enough mother’ and speak of the good-enough object. Just as the good-enough mother is not necessarily the one that fulfills all her child’s needs but the one who enables the child to handle her failures, the good-enough object might be one that overshoots the need it aims to satisfy and thereby gives its user a new sense of his or her own spontaneous potential.” It may seem strange for someone who claims he wants to get translation some respect to end on an aesthetically ugly note, so maybe it’s entirely due to my very keen sense of my own work’s provisionality that I would like to introduce, in closing, the concept of the “kludge”. In Jackson W. Granholm’s original definition, it is “an ill-assorted collection of poorly-matching parts, forming a distressing whole.” In his tongue-in-cheek 1962 article, Granholm even provides a fake etymology: derived from the same root as the German "kludge" (Dutch kloog, Swedish Klag, Danish Klog, Gothic Klaugen, Lettish Kladnis and Sanskrit Veklaunn), originally meaning "smart" or "witty". Now, when artists say their every work is a failure, there’s something noble about it. If a translator says so, there’s something obvious about it. It’s taken as a given. But the kludge is not 79 a failure. It is a now generally defined as a “workaround or quick-and-dirty solution that is clumsy, inelegant, inefficient, difficult to extend and hard to maintain”. Wikipedia notes that the term is used in such diverse fields as “computer science, aerospace engineering, Internet slang, evolutionary neuroscience, and government,” and it was in an engineering context that I first came across it, long before I had any inkling I would translate for a living. “There is,” Granholm observes, “a certain, indefinable, masochistic finesse that must go into true Kludge building. The professional can spot [one] instantly.” 80 GUISES FACTS AND FANCIES by H.V. Chao 81 FACTS 82 My Father’s Hand My father was not a man to show anger, but to hold it in. He did the same with pain. When his mother died, he must have mentioned it at dinner. Maybe it was a month later that I snuck into his room, I can’t remember—long enough that the death of a woman I’d never met had slipped my mind. I was surprised to see her unframed photo, still propped on the dresser against a plain candle of white wax, as from a blackout kit. These were not my mother’s candles, tall and red in silver holders in a dining room copied from a catalogue. The other white candle had fallen over, and the photo—so fragile, like the bony woman in it—was askew. I righted these and left. The room reeked of shut-in sweat and unwashed sheets, a smell my mother abhorred, and one I have since come to associate with privacy. His room was a bastion of it, but his closed door kept it from the hall with surprising completeness. It is always startling how localized strong smells can be. I recall that smell from his undershirts but not his suits, his coats but not his car. If, while clutching his hand as we walked in the park, I strayed to the span of our outstretched arms, it was completely absent, but should I press my face into his slacks it grew overpowering. There was no in-between. I preferred my father’s left hand for holding, as it was unique. A scar that predated my birth covered the back of it. The accident was never explained to my satisfaction: something about being scalded by a pan of hot oil he had unaccountably brought to the doorstep to dump out. I had rarely known him to cook, much less carry pans of hot oil through the house, but perhaps he’d learned his lesson? Safe in thick blankets at night I thrilled to the thought that his hand bore a mark like a thief’s, like a man who had done wrong. The scar was thick—at least a raised eighth of an inch—and aggressive in its edges, unkempt as if recalling the original searing 83 splash. Its mottle ranged in color from a tan darker than his skin to flecks of keloid pallor. Best of all, it was utterly smooth to sight and touch. The reticule that maps our skin more finely than the secret writing in a microdot balked altogether at that scar. I interrogated his hand, pressed and probed as if to force study’s reward. Sometimes all we have is our need, which must be taken as a gift. I pinched the hand; he pulled away. I clutched it back. By the time I was twelve, the scar had grown smaller—not from any trick of memory or perspective, but because scar tissue is slowly resorbed by the body. I read this somewhere: it was a normal process, and would continue. I thought then that someday, somewhere—perhaps an airport in a distant city, for it was already clear then that my father was going to leave us—a man would hail me as his son. I imagined him serene and beaming with his new life, and this would make him as much a stranger to me as the flawless hand he extended in greeting. Around this time, my father began to pace the hall at night between his bedroom and the bath. I lay in bed and listened to the floorboards shift, his shuffle on the carpet. Leaning over the toilet to pee, he left a handprint on the wall, which my mother begrudged him. In a rare fit of rage, he accused her of being unfeeling. Did she even have any idea how much it hurt? I learned—again belatedly, though just how much so I’m not sure—that at this time he was trying to pass a stone. It sat in pieces in his kidney where the doctors had shattered it with sound, and every day he shook out a few excruciating crumbs. Was it like the movies where convicts strolled the yard, shaking bits of tunnel from their pockets? The last thing my father did before he left was to whitewash the bathroom—shoddily, my mom pointed out with some bitterness, for his inexperience had left streaks and drips on the silver towel rack, the outlet plates, the edges of 84 the mirror. But I have told you all this because of what happened to me in Shanghai, the reason for this story. *** It was clear why the company had sent me ahead. I suppose I am Chinese—I look and speak it— though it is not how I think of myself. And the work was important, as I was encouraged to believe. That first month in Shanghai, error freighted my every move. I wanted never to have been spotted in the stores I entered on a misconception, believing from some foreign logic of categories that they might have something they didn’t. When, after two or three false starts, I’d finally found what I set out for, I wanted to be done paying so I could disappear, a fleet reflection in a closing door. I kept waiting for someone to catch me in the act. What act? The act of trying to pass. I was trying to live up to my face, and failing. I moved furtively along the sidewalks, looking down, dodging shoppers strolling three abreast, girls with one hand in a boy’s and the other making a point with a lollipop. The sky was so constantly the gray of used suds I suspected day and night did not really exist, their cycle instead supervised by the wax and wane of electric signs. Night seemed to smoke from these neon brands, tarnishing the air. Lighted characters and animals brightened with stinging intensity until they dominated boulevards flooded by the fluorescence of stores, which grew magically more luminous until their glow spilled from cramped rooms across piled goods through open doors to bleach the colonnaded sidewalks. The hotel was safe and clean, the furnishings familiar, of a certain Western luxury my mother sighed over in showrooms. And in this way they provided some measure of home. It is 85 not that my mother was materialistic. She was merely sincere in her belief that if we stood in living rooms as coordinated as our neighbors’, there would be no telling us from them. At work I knew myself as I did not the minute I was released into evening. But gradually, I began to see gaps in the great machine of the city where I could slip in unnoticed. I ventured from the hotel’s sterile comfort, if only to the newer malls at first. In the evening, the bookstores were filled with people. I went out just to be among them, shoulder to shoulder. They thronged the display tables, browsing with a holiday urgency. In coats half-shed, the fur trim of a hood riding the shoulders, they stood absorbed by the magazine racks. I borrowed purpose from their studiousness, an ersatz belonging. To legitimate my presence, I made a purchase like an offering, a penance: a notebook, a steamed bun, something I could pocket. I was not trying to fool them, for they were oblivious to me—I was one of them, for all they knew, or not, for all they cared—I was trying to fool myself, as though by standing among them at a corner, waiting for the light to change, a small bag of some warm food swinging from my wrist, I would go back to something very much like what they, short and tall, male and female, smiling or preoccupied, were hurrying home to, in heels, in sandals, in buses, in taxis, on mopeds leaning as they rounded a corner. Then that month came to an end, and I turned thirty alone in a foreign city. *** On the night of my birthday, I had decided to try dinner at a night market. Wrappers, napkin scraps blew across the alley strung with paper lanterns. The restaurants all looked the same: dingy, informal, anonymous, decked out with mismatched lawn furniture and folding tables. It was as if families had simply opened their own kitchens, in all their shabbiness, to the public. I 86 picked a fluorescent parlor of tile fronted by a battered range—really, a parked pushcart where an aproned grandmother turned up the heat beneath a beaten wok, a cigarette limp between her lips. A stain-encrusted stockpot, tended with one hand, on constant boil; wire baskets of noodles, soy meat, mushrooms. The hand that peeled the cutlet from the frozen stack was the same that plunged into a bowl of diced scallions to sprinkle them on soup, or carried half a papaya, or brought a bamboo steamer tray of dumplings to the waiting skillet. That hand was never still, nor its owner: the asphalt was her kitchen floor, the city gutter the drain into which she rinsed or swept. Her tools were shabby. The wok held oil thick as honey; on its sides were dark rings like a vinyl record’s. The makeshift scene staked no greater claim to permanence than the crud of habit, cooking grease on the pipes and valves. I was almost finished with my dinner when the waitress asked if I would follow her to the family’s apartments. Perhaps I had misunderstood her? She was embarrassed, but firm in her request. “The owner would like to see you,” she said. She could have been the daughter of the grandmother up front, and wore a kerchief over her hair. She led me in back through a beaded curtain and up a flight of cement steps of inconsistent height. The room was dim, and cramped with the assembled family. A small shrine had been arranged atop a dresser, where beside a Buddha and wrapped oranges, smoke twisted from incense sticks to sting my eyes. And yet beneath that smell, incompletely masked, was a sour one of sweat and illness and close living. In one shadowed corner, paper streamers fluttered from a whirring fan into the light. In another, a man lay in bed with his arms on the covers pulled halfway up his chest. 87 “We are so happy you’re here,” said a man in the row of family members on the far side of the bed. He was balding, bowing slightly, his hands clasped before his waist. His face was kindly and familiar. “Imagine!” cried the woman beside him, who might have been his wife. The chest of her red tracksuit bore an embroidered butterfly. “Of all the nights, of all the—” No sooner did she step forward than she took two steps back, her hand over her mouth. The fan turned away, and back again. “He saw you earlier,” the woman with the kerchief explained in a low voice. I started. I hadn’t realized how close to me she was. “Now he is sleeping.” “Of course, we couldn’t have known you’d come.” The tracksuited woman cast a look around the room and saw a box of scallion crackers on a chair. Her avuncular husband put a hand on her shoulder, but she shrugged him off and picked up the crackers, holding them out to me. “Here—take this, at least.” “I’m sorry,” I said in English. “You must have mistaken me for someone else.” “No sorry.” The other woman, having removed her kerchief, had been worrying it in her hands. She stopped. “No mistake.” “Come closer,” she urged, and tugged my sleeve. She couldn’t have known how much I hated that. How old ladies here, as I was leaving the bus, would grab my arm with one hand, the other pointing to their groceries expectantly, as if I were a universal son, when all they had to do was ask. 88 I shook her off. “There’s nothing I can do.” The family kept their gazes lowered at the floor. The woman with the kerchief walked slowly to the bed and, taking the man’s hand, began to stroke it gently. “Wait,” I said. The man on the bed wore a frown of pain kept only briefly at bay, like a nearing storm. Closer now, I could see the stubble in the folds of his face was gray. His scalp through his thinning hair seemed eggshell-thin. One eyebrow was trim and normal; from the other, a single bizarrely long hair snaked out. “Do you know where is your father?” the woman asked. “I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t heard from him for eighteen years.” “This is your father,” she said. “He is dying.” Gazing at him, I did not question the truth of her words, only their unfairness. I’d seen men living on the streets older than the man who lay before me. Sometimes all we have is our need, which must be taken as a gift. When she put his hand in mine, I did not pull away. The hand was not warm and full, but dry and light as a leaf. How little what I knew then seemed beside how much I wanted; how much longer I’d go on, indebted and dutiful. I passed my thumb over the back of his hand, even and unblemished. That was when he opened his eyes. 89 It was a smile radiant with certainty. In that moment, the years melted away, and I saw my father: serene, unlined, and terribly familiar. He had the face of a young man about to make, in utmost confidence, the greatest mistake of his life. “No.” I stiffened. “I don’t know this man.” 90 The Scene You always see the same types at the scene. For months, it’s been somewhere in the shipbreaking yards—the farangi riviera—most recently, a box boat with its gaping hold where moonlight sinks in shafts through blowtorch holes to catch raised arms, glow bracelets garish in the dark. By ten on Friday, Connell’s sent his ESL cram course of addled kids back to their nagging parents fresh off call-center shifts. He’s grabbed dinner in the basement food court of the high-rise where he teaches and, in his souped-up polaamboo, a seven-seater sharecab all his own, is on the coast road, Ahmedabad miles behind. His second year here, he and three roommates threw in for these wheels, and now that he’s the only one in country, it’s all his. The sea breeze brings the fuel reek of the breaking yards past the straw huts and the paddies. On the shoulder a pristine fridge waits for two men sharing a beer beneath a palm to resume their bearer’s duties. The dark fronds stir above with sovereign indifference. Then, to either roadside, the salvage bazaar starts: a five mile corridor of sheds still busy, at this hour, with glare and shouts. It’s like a tent settlement outside a shelled city, except the refugees are things: doors, dishwashers, pillows, bathtubs, fans, fire extinguishers, styrofoam, row on row of mauve chairs from a hundred staterooms. Give us your huddled, your poor, Connell thinks, and then, this is what it will be like after the bomb. These eager vendors, these men whom no clothes seem to fit. Their wifebeaters droop from bowed brown shoulders; their sweats balloon below the waist. A dented truck picks up a fleet of brand new used dishwashers. A rickshaw wallah pedals past a line of exercise bikes. Connell’s a connoisseur of these exquisite incongruities, which the third world tosses up with such fecundity. Just beyond the bare bulbs, boys in men’s shirts and house slippers sprawl asleep on rubber cables in piles broad as toppled baobabs, ends snaking off 91 rootlike into the dark. In the distance looms the graveyard of discarded ships. By chain link fences and at wooden booths, palms are greased and smiles flashed, gates opened for Connell’s vehicle. In back, the padded cases of his speakers, mixer, CDJ clack as he jostles down the cinder drive. As usual, Julio is early, with his van of handpicked beauties. Destination ¡Fiesta!, reads the bumper sticker on his windshield; out tumble, too, the on-again off-again Sarah and Becker, and that grizzled fixture of the scene, Hicks. Hicks, junkie mascot, ersatz Kurtz of the expatriates, with his long hair and German army jacket. No one knows his story, or how long he’s been in country. Becker says that on Hicks’ torso those are fishhook scars, man; that back home he headlined in a circus of pain whose website has disappeared; that he came to India to learn how to pull a Volkswagen with a rope tied to his dick. Julio’s heard nine different figures for how many girls he’s laid by pretending to be Iggy Pop. Sarah’s heard Becker whisper how one time, ransacking a hostel and jonesing for a fix, Hicks got his ass handed to him by a pair of Danish backpackers, one of whom was a five foot blonde. “Ladies,” Julio says, “ladies.” In lucite pumps and lamé miniskirts, this week’s girls are milling on the greasy sand, between the massive tomb of the container ship and the crumbled headstone of the bow. He herds them up a stretch of gangplank that rises past the ballast tanks into the cavernous hold, Becker following with a generator, Sara bringing up the rear with strobes. Hicks breaks into a wild sprint inside, hurling LED throwies at the walls. Every night, another piece is missing from the rotting hulk—scar tissue from torch cutting along all the edges—and the scene pulls further back into the unlit depths. It won’t be long before they have to move on down the shore and find another boat. Connell’s setting up shop against the far bulkhead when a new girl wanders in: torn jeans, jutting chin, tomboy ponytail pulled through a baseball cap. Connell’s seen her kind before. She’s 92 waiting on her LSAT scores, or is it MCAT? The year her parents ordered her to spend here, getting to know her own roots, is—already? not even?—half over, and she’s afraid she’s getting too used to her surroundings, losing her ironic delectation for Engrish, for outrageous Bollywoodiana, but worse yet, losing touch with the wonder of first contact. Where’s that thrilling alien feeling, that xenosensation, the assault and fascination of walking down a crowded street bewildered, without a filter for the noise, the smells, the color? She’s gone looking for that feeling everywhere… Now he watches as she glances around. The hold’s still empty. She bites her lip, like maybe she’s too early. “Doesn’t it remind you of—” Connell searches for some sculptor’s name another girl once dropped, “Richard Serra?” She says, “I’m Anjali.” He nods, and starts the music. He’s never gotten over the spooky acoustics. Davie and Donnie show up, slap hands all around, shout out, “Hicks, you’re still kicking!”—the customary greeting. “Where’s Gunther?” they are asked. The lovers shrug, identical in white sportcoats and gold chains. He said he was getting a ride with Maria and Cunha, but when the Brazilians roll in, they say they waited for him half an hour at the place with the best jalebi—you know the one. They picture him, gangly in camos, plucking at his lip ring and checking his watch. Everyone laughs. From the edge of the hold, Anjali eyes a man wheeling his moped past the spotted barrels, the frayed ends of snapped steel cable. He’s caught a flat. “O homem do terno,” Maria observes. Another regular, always in a suit. Sometimes a woman will be perched behind him, sometimes not. He always wears a pale green shirt and never speaks. Over the beach shingled in scrap steel plate, crisscrossed by rivulets of leaked fuel, they come: Euro students, Ozzie expats, Japan teens with plaid skirts and day-glo fright wigs, pothead Canadian career English teachers like Connell himself. Headphones on, Connell scans the faces in the crowd. His first roommate’s ex-girlfriend, other wage slaves from the ESL academies, the 93 Lithuanian au pair he met last month at karaoke, the bodybuilder, the liquor-pushing hostesses from the hookah dive, off-shift but still in company miniskirts and tight tees that say Jack Daniels, Johnnie Walker. The flooring booms and flexes to the bass, the thump and shuffle of a hundred feet at midnight. They come to breathe disease, to inhale ruin: paint flakes, heavy metals, liberated insulation. They come because they’ll scrape themselves on frayed hull walls and curled steel shavings. They come because they know someday that science in a white gown will whisper in their ear that gentlest of annunciations, you have a tumor. They come because that day is too far off; they come because that day was yesterday. They come because cigarettes won’t kill you fast enough; they come because just living will. They come to have some mute postfatalist longing consumed by bass pounding in the bulkheads and their bones. They come to dance. Outside, Gujarati pushers slouch in twos and threes, lighting pipes for NGO interns, the wall behind a mural of rust and barnacle to the waterline above. Surfers paddle up in wetsuits, shake droplets from their frosted hair. Pushcart vendors from the breaking yards are selling beer from homemade coolers. By flashlight and by kerosene lamp, skewered meats glisten on a dented grill, turned over now and then with brand-new tongs from a galley. Men with bandaged heads, men missing hands, men with one leg cut off at the knee, beg for change. “It’s a freakin’ sexual Disneyland,” Hicks is saying to Cunha. Hicks was in Gulf One, Hicks was in the Peace Corps but went AWOL, the Red Cross flew him in for some disaster and he ripped them off: two thousand dollars of laptops and sedatives. An old lifeboat bobs in the high tide shallows, lights blinking, full of Filipinos in factory second cowboy shirts. The night is young and someone’s already heaving off the side. “To America.” Hicks raises his beer. “Fuck that,” Cunha replies. A 94 couch lands in the shallows of high tide with a magnificent splash. People look up. Davey and Donnie, tiny figures in white, wave from on deck way overhead. In the hold, it smells of sweat. It smells like rapture. It smells like the last night of the world. Bits of glass wink from the floor, where a mirrorball gets kicked around. The man in the suit has, as usual, jacked his laptop to his projector. Ghostly men in clunky robot costumes trade blows on the numbered bulkheads. The Japanese teenagers bounce in sneakers with six-inch soles. Anjali sways alone, eyes closed, biding time. Connell beckons to her. “C’mon,” he says, headphones round his shoulders, “I want to show you something cool.” It’s almost silent in the sterncastle. The scene is only a distant throbbing in the ship’s depths. “So what are you looking for?” asks Connell. He checks over his shoulder, shines his flashlight back, catches Anjali running her fingertips along the cool wall. “I’m looking… for the last word on youth,” she says. They’re in the museum of leftovers from suddenly deserted lives, farther than the salvagers have penetrated. In room after room, his flashlight plays across stopped clocks, unmade beds, chairs drawn out from desks. Old Playboys and, in refrigerators, unopened sodas. Connell corners her under a stairwell and leans in for a kiss. She hooks her fingers in the safety treads above her head and swings back, away from him. When she runs up the stairs into the dark, he’s still standing there; her footfalls shower his hair with grit and dust through the perforated metal. The bridge is so old school, its lights and buttons like a 60s TV spaceship’s, or a missile silo console, Connell thinks. “… 40,000 tons,” Anjali is saying. The ship’s weight is pure abstraction, means nothing to him. They start heading back downstairs. “Tell me the truth,” he says, “after all those the-day-after movies from grade school, all that prep and paranoia, aren’t you kind of disappointed the world didn’t end?” Anjali says, “I was two when the wall came 95 down. When were you born?” In the dank gym, among the broken mirrors, she finally kisses him back. They’re surrounded by white armatures, black padding, stacks of numbered weights on pulleys: strange, purposeful evidence of a civilization quite suddenly consigned to exquisite irrelevance. “I’ll tell you a secret you already know,” he says, drawing her down onto a bench. “It doesn’t matter what you do here. It never matters. Nothing you do here ever matters.” It takes his breath away, the otherworldly beauty of these creatures beyond consequence, armored by their promised future, by that ordered progress mapped out by parents and admissions. As they fuck his mind expands; he wonders if, in some tiny eatery, he’s ever checked himself out in a mirror originally from a ship’s berth; he wonders if the rebar skeleton of his ratty apartment building is rolled from melted freighters. Outside, Hicks has torn his shirt off. He’s howling at the stars. The man in the suit, pants rolled up around his shins, is wading with his laptop case in hand, entranced by the propeller: four times his height and, even with one blade mired in the sand, suave as calculus. Julio and the Brazilians are sitting on the waterlogged sofa like stranded conquistadors, like scions of the governors of Goa, passing around a massive blunt. “The best minds of my generation,” Hicks begins, “traveled to these fragrant shores where they could misunderstand, and be misunderstood, but America is wherever you are having a good time.” He pitches face first into the sand. “Fucking Gunther,” Maria says. “He never showed up.” *** First light finds Connell staring his slashed tires. Fucking Filipinos, he thinks. He remembers when he could sleep anywhere and wake up unaching, kinks shaken out or shrugged off, with no memory the night before and ready to do it all again. He turns around, looking out to sea. Hicks 96 is snoring almost gently in the shallows. A shipbreaker in a hard hat and plaid shirt prods him with a gumboot, and he groans, rolls over. The man in the suit flips up his kickstand and guns his moped. Connell starts running, leaving his black cases in the sand. “Wait!” he shouts. “Wait!” In the gray damp, the barest stirring of the palm fronds. The man in the suit weaves his moped stop-and-start through the morning bazaar, behind backfiring trucks and ox-drawn carts. Despite the oil slick, the black sand, the smell of fuel and first smoke rising from the steel rerolling mill, there’s a cleanliness to dawn over the marsh that makes Connell feel an invalid. A stork takes flight over the silver water. In a few months he’ll be going home to Vancouver. He’ll see his high school friends and live in his parents’ basement for his annual two months’ vacation. The traffic comes to a halt. The moped idles by the stall with rows of mauve chairs. They remind Connell of work, of the class he has to teach at noon, the chattering, expectant faces. He looks away. Down the beach, a ship has come in. It must have been there last night. It must be a few days old already. Connell squints as, high up on deck, two men hoist a goat bound by the legs. Another man bends over it. His arm moves, three quick flashes, and blood spurts from its throat. Connell blinks. It takes a moment for the pieces to click, for Connell to recall a story Hicks once told. Tradition, Hicks had said, windmilling his arms, then they butcher it and give the meat to the first wave of men in, the cutters. On deck, the men are showering the blood about to bless every part of the ship. Connell looks away. His eyes meet those of a boy sitting in the front row of chairs, watching. The boy wears a white shirt that reaches to his knees. His dark eyes are unkind to Connell; they say, tourist. 97 Raymond Chandler “When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.” ~ Raymond Chandler’s advice for writer’s block It was Sunday and the deli downstairs was closed. I’d made myself a sandwich from the mini- fridge for lunch and left it sitting by the coffeemaker. You could make a sandwich and then walk away from it, forget it ever happened. It would sit there half-eaten and never glower at you, getting cold, never wonder what time you’d be home for dinner. It was the kind of meal I could get behind. I sat there going over what I knew about the case. I could see it from every angle except clear through it. I had all the facts—boy, did I have them. I had them from the first wife who now ran a palm reading parlor on Venice and a star jockey out at Santa Anita. I had them from one son who flew in for a day to see his lawyers and the other one, still dressed for what seemed like a good idea at the time, sleeping the heart right out of another Tuesday in his Malibu villa. The light on the breakers was clearer than an angel’s tears. That was the problem with Southern California: it made you feel so good. The sun congratulated you for just crawling out of bed, and by the time you stumbled out to your convertible, all was forgiven. Except me. I wasn’t getting anywhere, so I got up. The light sliding through the blinds right now was making me feel lousy at my job. I stood there with my back to the room, watching traffic wash down the avenue. Maybe I had something against feeling good. Maybe I had something against being stumped. There was a knock. I spun around. A man came through the door with a gun in his hand. *** 98 Afterwards, they found themselves at the usual Chinese restaurant. A tiny place whose style had departed, like a glamorous daughter. By the register, the obligatory clipping—some critic’s compliments from the early days—was yellowing in plastic. Anna set the menu down, brass corners clicking on the tabletop. “I can’t do this anymore,” she announced. “What, the egg foo young?” said Clive. “I was thinking of trying something different myself.” Anna began to cry. Clive sighed. “You know, Graham Greene dedicated The End of the Affair to Catherine Walston, but afterwards, they carried on for another ten years.” Clive had an unhealthy interest in adultery in the abstract. Just once, he thought, I’d like to share with a woman something illicit that wasn’t tawdry. One of those European affairs that leave you with a profound appreciation of human nature. “I feel so completely stuck in a rut,” said Anna. Just then, the bell by the front door jangled. A man in a ski mask dashed in with a gun in his hand. *** They had come to what always gummed up this stretch: a highway swooping overhead to merge in from the left. Without fail, cars that sailed by the gridlock, merging only at the very last minute, were let in, a lesson Jerry had taken to heart. The freeway was a distillation of the social contract. Someone was going to be an asshole, and someone else was going to look the other way. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a car length open up to the left, but it was too late. A woman in a blue hatchback had closed the gap. 99 It was the wave that did it. He wrenched in right after her, to the protests of those behind. Women! What was going on in those pretty little heads? That flutter of the hand, like a royal dismissal—was it supposed to be magic? Was it supposed to make everything all right? He fumbled around behind the passenger seat. He’d been saving something up for just such an occasion. The grip fit in his hand like a hair dryer’s. It even had a strap for his wrist. He rolled down the window. “Bitch,” he said. The megaphone gave his voice official heft. It carried and echoed. A few drivers looked around, startled from their audiobooks. “Yeah, you in the blue Prius. I mean, the fuck were you thinking?” He flicked on his high beams. Then her brake lights went dark. He had not thought it humanly possible for him to be more pissed off than he was. Her car was just sitting there before him, in the road. The door opened and she stepped out with a gun in her hand. *** My dad always figured that whatever happened between him and my mom, and later between the two of us, we’d always have the movies. He only ever really opened up to pronounce upon our national dream life. He liked The Magnificent Seven because they “weren’t in it to get rich.” A red-blooded pacifist, he wasn’t above a Bond ending or a good car chase: “like watching money burn.” His idea of generation gap was how your daddy’s assholes inevitably became your idols: Paul Newman in Hud, say, or that con artist Shane. “There’s no anti-hero so low some hungry- hearted pipsqueak won’t give him credence. Next thing you know, Dirty Harry’s no psycho, just your everyday sumbitch with a sailor’s mouth and a heart of gold.” I thought Sergeant Hartman 100 in Full Metal Jacket fit the bill exactly, but when I said so, he almost burst a vein. Six months later, I enlisted. We didn’t speak for three years. “But these days,” he said the last time we talked, “what really gets my goat is when they can’t be bothered to develop a character we care about, so they put some random kid in danger. No one wants to see that. Sure, Hitchcock himself stooped to it, but it was a cheap twang on the heartstrings even then, and he was the master.” “It’s a different world, Pops.” “So they tell me. Anyhow, gotta run, show’s starting.” I can picture that multiplex perfectly. We wound up there whenever I’d visit. Now when I close my eyes, I see him pocketing his cell phone, ambling down the long slow carpeted slope. Not a single preview leaves him eager, but it gives the yahoos coming in late time to find a seat and crackle open their candy. The movie starts with a bang. Some do-gooder’s getting chased over rooftops. Shots are fired. When the screaming starts, it takes him a minute to figure out it’s coming from the back of the theatre. *** In the early hours of November 2, 2013, in Dearborn Heights, Michigan, 19 year old Renisha McBride stood on the porch of Theodore Wafer, pounding at his door. Her car had broken down, and her cell phone was dead. Her blood alcohol level was at .218—three times the legal limit— and earlier that evening, she had been smoking marijuana. The door opened, and out came Mr. Wafer with a gun in his hand. On the night of September 21, 2014, sixty year-old Iphigenia Christian woke up for no particular reason. She had been having trouble sleeping lately, for which her doctor had just that morning prescribed her pills. Remembering she had left them in the kitchen, she went downstairs 101 to look for them. The last thing she saw was her husband, wakened by the noise, coming through the doorway with a gun in his hand. These are true stories. None of them happened to me, or anyone I know. I read about the first one a week ago, and then the more I read, the more I seemed to find. Psychologists call this “frequency illusion,” in which selective attention is reinforced by confirmation bias, but the colloquial name for it is the “Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon,” named for the West German terrorist group also known as the Red Army Faction. A man who’d never heard of them before came up with this name. One day he read about them, and the next thing he knew, there were terrorists everywhere he looked. This is something that did happen to me: on December 10, 2014, I went to Home Depot with my wife. I guess this is a western, in that my wife is a civilizing influence. When I was a boy I read about a boy and a girl who ran away to a museum. I thought I’d do them one better by running away to a furniture store. Home Depot is kind of like that: a gallery of pretend. There’s a lamp for every kind of lifestyle, more lamps than lives you can ever live, even if you grew up lucky enough to have parents who said you could be anything. The model kitchens make me want to pick a mock domestic spat over some issue my wife and I have yet to face. Not money, we already fight about that. A baby, maybe? She will slam the fridge and cross her arms, and I will flick the tap on and off with an idiot grin, delighted by the lack of water. Through the paneless window we can spy on neighbors waffling over a new dishwasher. But not today. Today we have come shopping for a new front door, one that fits flush and doesn’t let in a draft. A front door is like the face you show the world, she says. In the next department down, doors hang hinged along the aisle like pages in a giant book. One door closes and another opens. Flip, flip, flip. They are running some promotion. Plastered on each door is a life-size Elvis Presley as 102 a cowboy, pistol drawn. The poster is tinged pastel, with day-glo stars shooting out. I feel dizzy; I have to sit down. My wife asks, “What’s the matter?” but I can’t explain. What should I say? That we’re lucky? That I feel guilty about our luck? That I’m dumb about the problems of the world and don’t know which is worse: that I think we’re safe or that we’re really not, or that no matter how unsafe we are, there will always be someone worse off? I want to hold her and say, in spite of all our problems we have our whole lives ahead of us, but instead I hold my head in my hands. Flip, flip, flip. It’s too ridiculous; it’s just Elvis. It never happens to anyone you know, until someone you know can’t believe it happened to you. Endless choices. Endless doors. And behind every door, a man with a gun in his hand. *** When he opens his eyes, the pain is gone. He's been squeezing them so tightly shut! His tears roll up his cheeks, paths drying behind them along every anguished furrow. They tremble at the edge of his lower lid till, with a blink, he scoops them back inside his eye. Of course his skin is still clammy and his heart a-hammer. Relax, he tells himself, and to his surprise it works—it never seems to at the office. He stretches one leg out and then the other. Was he really in a fetal curl? A woman comes darting at him sideways. Unthinkingly, he receives her with a kick. Before he can apologize, a scream comes funneling back to his wide-open mouth; he gulps it down. His throat feels raw. She backpedals away from him, waving her arms, streaks of mascara vanishing from her cheeks. He clambers out from under the row of seats by the gate. All around him, people are jogging backward through the terminal. He joins them. When in Rome... Some stop and, without breaking stride, pick up bags they've dropped. Others stumble and fall, but they get up again. A flood of Coke sweeps ice cubes back into an empty cup, and when it bounces from the ground, a man's hand is there to catch it. Nice, he nods at the man. 103 Suddenly, he coughs a piece of gum into his mouth. With every chew it seems to get some snap back, bursts of flavor wriggling into the elastomer. He loves gum, he remembers. He whips his head around just in time to catch another scream: the delicious whoompf of air in his mouth, a quick pump of receiving gut. His throat feels better with every scream he swallows. There’s a fever in the air, catching. Everyone is swallowing their screams. Is it some new fad? A whizzing past his ear. From behind, a harsh staccato chatter he knows only from action movies. Wait, so that’s what this is, right? Of course! They’re shooting an action movie at the airport. Why didn't he remember? Everyone, everything, is being recalled for a second take. A bullet is plucked from a wall; splintered plaster rushes to fill the gap. Another one removes a puncture from a garbage can. A stuntman collects his shattered shin from the floor. This is some next-level stuff! The bullets are thicker in the air now. He backpedals on, chewing gum, untouched. How do you know you’re the hero? he remembers a stuntman telling him once. The bad guys are missing you as closely as possible, expertly accommodating the fickle akimbo of each balletic dodge, like the circus knife-thrower in unrequited love with his bewitching assistant. He must be a hero. He feels his legs pump. It’s like he's watching himself already. Will he ever do better than this? But back at security, nothing is explained. There's a lot of pushing and shoving to get back in line, people insisting on the exact order they were in before. Continuity is key. Where are the cameras? TSA seems to be filling in for PAs on crowd-wrangling duty. The bad guy—is there only one?—seems really angry about the do-over, on the verge of a diva freakout. The guards hold out their hands, trying to calm him down. Finally, the man lowers his assault rifle. The crowd lets out a held breath. 104 He feels his heart slowing, adrenaline draining away. The worst part of these shoots? The wait. One last glance and he’s checking his phone, the man with the gun completely forgotten. Around him: grumbling about security checkpoints, anxiety about making flights. His saliva has almost finished restoring full flavor to the gum, just a little more prodding and smoothing. Out it comes with a trick of the tongue, clean-smelling and freshly powdered. He nestles it lovingly, absently in its foil wrapper: a matter of habit, not thought. The little acts we take for granted, in which such care inheres, like pulling covers over a loved one—for, having done them so often, it seems we will go on doing them forever. He slides the stick in beside five others just like it, and tucks the pack into his jacket pocket. Unnoticed, a man backs through the glass doors, just another in a crowd of the coming and going. 105 Ecce Bare For the first time in his life Bare was dating somebody beneath his station. There was no other way to put it. At forty-nine he had slouched abruptly into this heaven, conducting himself like a particularly risible neighbor, coming and going at odd hours, humming obviously to himself. There was a demonic momentum to it. His customary care and circumspection suspended, he could let the evenings pummel him with their newfound substance. He laughed like a baby, during his fits objecting helplessly—please, no mas!—with small flutters of what seemed newly pudgy, stunted fingers. “What’s so funny?” Sara often asked, but she never got angry. Anger was, suspected Bare, an exertion beyond her facial capacities. She met the frustration of being excluded from his laughter, if frustration was what she felt, with that face she presented to all of life, that face which so delighted Bare. Her eyes were dead. Her usual gaze involved blue irises tilted at an angle where the whites just showed beneath. It implied, under the plane of its disfocus, a world that had so long ago disappointed, and which was now so far from fulfilling, that the suggestion of any rescuing effort was ludicrous, a waste not worth derision. Everyone else lived, worked, ate, starved, slept, feared, and chased tail in this world, but her gaze had absconded to a higher level of nothingness infinitely preferable. Beneath these eyes were cheeks pouched with sullenness, in which her lips alighted, a petulant butterfly. “Well,” he had once tried to explain, “when you said clothes make the man, and I—I said, no, clothes make the mannequin.” He tried stupidly to obscure a grin with a hand. “That was funny.” 106 It was part of the pleasure of dating someone beneath your station: fiscally, socially, but mostly intellectually. She could pitch anything she wanted in conversation and he would smack it far above her fielding into bleachers stuffed with shills and plants, his own interior cheering section, his own private grandstand under his own private stratosphere in the stadium of their evening, in the ballgame of their date. For all her facial distaste, in which Bare espied infinite sophistication, nuance, and variety, what came out of her mouth was fairly vapid. He loved that he could ignore the greater part of her contributions to their conversation and devote his attention to her physical features but in fact she did not offer much conversation. He loved, then, that he could ignore guiltlessly the conversation she did not offer. Their meals were often moody denouements to more vigorous physical entanglements, a mood blue allowing them back into regular lives. “They should write poems about you,” said Bare, “or songs, or, no, standup routines. You realize that the good standup routine is the descendant of epic poetry.” Sometimes she would ask him to explain. Sometimes she would fork another thatch of bean sprouts. The stare of baleful disbelief she leveled at his every move overjoyed Bare with desire. It was what two failed marriages had lacked, and what, he realized now, he’d been looking for. He had missed being utterly ignored. He had in errant youth sought women who would appreciate and indulge what they decreed were—and what he came to baby as—his talents. Under the sun and doting moon of their solicitude, nurse-faces bent low in cherishing, he had lacked blind dark neglect, cold and regionless as space. Now he was dating a woman to whom he did not exist. (Though the very act of dating paradoxed this.) 107 He read into that expression, that sullen rondure, those cheeks slouched with apathy, a mockery which nevertheless resigned itself to his amorous attentions, and thereby mocked itself as well, a little hopelessly and without girlish flourish. Distaste, unpinched and unforced, reigned her mien, yet it kept her not from listless participation in acts which never really seemed to touch her. As a result Bare lavished himself upon her within the confines of their discreet liaisons. With every extravagance that failed to affect her he felt gleeful and wild, as if he had been justly condemned, or rather, forgiven by impassivity. In his mind he compared that face to a courtesan’s imperial detachment, crossed with Emmett Kelly. She was jaded, she was glorious, she was the temporary secretary for college payroll on the third floor and twenty-four years old. He was a Professor of Philosophy and shared half a wing with a tattling assortment of spinsters and lechers, comrades all. *** “It’s not her age,” Bare explained to Reund. His words hastened past his friend’s disbelieving face. “She’s not that attractive.” Sara was short, with hair so palely red as to be ginger. It groused about her ears, refusing placement just behind, and sometimes fell to frame her face in tapered strands. She could do little for a t-shirt, having breasts which in the natural ribs and billows of the fabric raised barely a hubbub. Her arms’ merest lassitude could craze him, the slack surrender with which she laid them on a table, as if she wished to be convinced not to leave them behind. He invented for her a freckled youth which had only recently been conquered by the cheeks blotched irritably with diffuse red. In her skin, eczematic, quick-tempered, the small ways the world chafed her floated to the surface. Of course skin only hinted at her allergies. He had been permitted to hold her 108 hand in the hospital all that night when he had forgotten to tell her there were pecans in the dinner chicken’s sauce. A few nights later they made love, in her apartment, for the first time. Naked, she had surprised him. Her shoulders were so rounded as to will her toward cower. Her hips which disappeared in pants seemed perfect for her slight proportions. He could descry the thin adolescent incompletely escaped from the fat child, her current lankness still cushioned, her breasts a chestwide murmur. When she approached him thus, sullen yet demure, it seemed she had been unfolded, head from feet, for him alone. After that night the relationship, if there had been one before, plummeted into a carnal rondelay. The days had an unlikeliness which he pursued, sometimes loping, sometimes feral. Lust shoved them up against each other inopportunely. He felt they were always having sex in a stifling closet, wedging the act into the few minutes it took, say, a slow door to shut softly, but the indignity, discomfort, or fear of being caught did not abate the frequency with which he sought her out. Each bout left him dazed, reasonlessly merry for an afternoon, prone to standing in uffish thought. Finally guilty from the speed of these liaisons during which she never failed to give a sharp shout, he asked her if she got as much out of them as he did; did she get anything? What was it...like for her? Was he—all right? Sara looked at him across the takeout carton, its flaps spread like a clumsy lily. A noodle dangled from her lip, a question mark gone limp. “It’s like...pricking your finger really quickly with a thumbtack.” Her gaze, tilting upward in thought, seemed attuned to the corner of a 109 smaller room. “But in a good way.” Horrified, he never asked again. She clicked her chopsticks. “Do you want the last moo-shu burrito?” Curious by nature, Bare used the unforeseen circumstance, the swerve of lust from better judgment, to study himself, taking notes like a primatologist far afield. He was happy if sardonic. He constantly astonished himself with his participation and then recalibrated this astonishment into the more distant emotion of bemusement, something manageable and even saturnine, a cocktail sipped instead of gulped. He took great pleasure in relating his condition at length to friends, conversations of rehearsed, enameled anecdotes where he placed a version of himself—the version having this affair—on the table between himself and his audience, where they could marvel at and deprecate it, all without touching Bare himself. But at night, with relative gymnasium of a bedroom, the sex continued to mutual fulfillment. There was no question the relationship hinged on it. It was the one act he was involved in too intensely to observe. He realized dimly that sometimes they achieved absurd contortions which he would have liked to ridicule or witness. Did it look like a collision in a trapeze act? Did it resemble something five year olds were dared to do on monkey bars? Was it like a pocketknife with all the features sticking out? Bare had heard about such romances before. They were like an exotic item, an item he had never tried, on a familiar menu. He had heard about them and regarded them shiftily, as one might a reputed delinquent. Yet he knew what to expect, and savored the exquisite duality of being pleased and bored when the affair proceeded along established lines. Her body was of course not boring, nor were his own nerve sparklers; the things they did together outside of sex, however, had to be. “Oh, please,” he groaned, and they rented her video. “Not Chinese,” he 110 said, and she picked up the phone. She turned a back rounded and softly white as dough to him and his fingers itched to knead her in the grapple of embrace, to give her handfuls of inadvertent massage. She swatted his hands but with none of the blasé disregard, he thought, with which she’d ordered beef lo mein. Bare came to convention, wise king, on his knees with his hands cupped about an offering. He did not flout it for flout’s sake. He approached it reverently, an eye out for the deviation that would grant it individuality, the rules’ approving gift. Bare had incredible respect for the hallowed formula he and Sara were following. He also took every chance he got to deride his own complicity, his abrupt capitulations. “‘A man should go where he won’t be tempted’,” said Reund. “Robert Bolt—an underrated philosophical mind.” Reund, trusted ally, Schopenhauerite, stood with his hands crisply folded before him. He was on his way to being a sprightly curio. So tight was the fit of skin to his scalp his skull seemed to be lunging out, mercilessly defined by light. His body was a thing of bones, an underfleshed chicken, a threatless frame you could take and rattle. “Oh, God,” moaned Bare. “I’ve lived there all my life.” It wasn’t strictly true. He had instead been living in a place of incessant temptation he had until now simply done nothing about, hampered by fear or conscience or simple ineptitude. These comprised what commonly men called restraint. If there were truly a place beyond temptation, where he by Reund’s words belonged... Bare preferred to dwell in this world and live beyond his means. Bare could imagine a man for whom needs like these were an acquired taste, something one struggled sensibly to appreciate, to which one lent sympathy in a halting, puzzled way, but Bare could only imagine him. 111 Sometimes before the mirror he took stock of himself, a man, a store manager, tippy- toeing with pride at the fitness of his inventory. A man saying yes sir (that’s my baby), his thumbs tucked in suspenders. A man not letting baldness bother him, rich coif receding to a tonsure’s limp perimeter. Was not confidence itself attractive? A healthy belly kept from fat’s collapse, he liked to think, by sheer act of will: something in the torso hefted it elastically aloft. Across its hemisphere his skin’s smoothness, coyly furred at the navel, had the approving tautness of pregnancy, or a flesh-colored beach ball at maximum inflation. Thighs stolid as good vodka. Vitals now in repose from the night’s bacchanal, firmly seated in the belly’s shadow. Did effeminacy peer at him from outsized nipples? Well--it made him more a lover. Pectoral remnants, sagging like the jowls of boar, until he flexed them, and they remembered tendoned purpose. Bare naked and parading. “You’re a new man,” Reund appraised him in his brittle voice. In the cluttered office which seemed suddenly to admit a swift draft, Bare flinched as if Reund had espied him and read his mind during these frequent, surreptitious midnight mirror encounters. Reund stood spotlessly erect just beyond the desk’s edge. God, thought Bare, the man might click his heels at any moment. Smart little existential martinet. Bare sought a deeper sumptuousness from his green leather chair. “I don’t believe in new men,” Bare said. “Or if renewal’s possible, I believe the reasons should be less banal. “It’s like studying a marvelous animal who keeps you sexed,” Bare said. It was of course an exaggeration. He did not doubt that he cared for Sara more than this, that he would care for her quite deeply if called upon, that he would devote himself if ever so even lightly implored. 112 Still, he had to keep his station. If one had to tell stories with power as the object he could always afford to put himself in the light of the one taking advantage and not the one being taken advantage of, or at the very least the one being taken advantage of knowingly, allowing it for reasons mysterious, publicly committed to a blazing trajectory of folly. There was a great deal he could not admit to and on top of that ways he could not say things given the assumptions held about him, assumptions he intuited from the delicate web of his comrades’ behaviors, assumptions he sometimes covertly promoted with designed actions. Between the relationship, and the face of it he presented to a world of colleagues (a world she had no contact with), Bare truly dwelled, a benign and enigmatic child, suddenly receiving the sunshine of both parents’ beaming faces. It was from here that he wished to speak to her someday, when he felt safe. If she ever caught him at this kind of lying, guilt at which grew milder with age, this kind of what- might-be-misconstrued-as-twofacedness, it was from here he would explain it to her, and she would understand. “She sounds like a dream.” Reund corrected himself. “A figment.” *** He took her to a dinner where the guests strung thread through multicolored pasta to make necklaces. Formal dress was required but you could color on the tablecloth with crayons in new boxes next to the dessert forks. The hostess was a friend, and a friend of the university, who harbored hopes at sculpture. Sara sat with her hands and the unstranded pasta in her lap. From the blind of a conversation Bare espied her, his doe. She seemed at a loss, her gaze fixed on the hostess’ shiny conical hat with its withered tissue pom pom at the tip. 113 She took him to a party where the music was deafening, the lights predominantly purple, and Everclear was threatened in the punch. “In the punch?” Bare shouted at her ear. “No, is the punch,” she said, her body wobbling, knees to shoulders, in slack circles of rhythm. It seemed to Bare she had been bodily swallowed and now succumbed to the faint peristalsis of a giant invisible esophagus. Every now and then an uncharacteristic jerk, usually from the flexed knees, represented a burp in the greater system. “Try some.” “The food coloring’s not toxic,” she told his concerned expression. They met on the common ground of Tandoori Raj, a fast Indian establishment rapidly franchising nationwide. Its premiere innovation was the Thrifty-Meal, a main course with a side of pakoras and a soft drink both available in three sizes. All around the plastic seating and windowboxed coleus photographs of Gandhi mingled with stills of Ben Kingsley. “Every budget couple food goes mainstream,” said Bare. “I mean, think about Chinese in the seventies.” He wondered what she was seeing. He wanted to freeze time, leave himself, and shove in on her side of the booth like a gregarious, exclamatory friend, and then the two of them, heads together as though for a photo booth, could gaze marveling at Bare’s own body, that raptly adoring frozen form. Bare felt himself in love and savored it. He was aware he might be a cliché, December to her May: what he was unprepared for was the sense of superiority, and how similar it was to well-being. “I was seven,” said Sara. “For the whole decade?” 114 “No,” she wrinkled her nose, “five.” She chewed contemplatively on her tikka masala patty with its rows of imitation rotisserie holes. “I was five for forever. Then the next day I got breasts.” “Chinese was a respectable night out in the fifties, student fare in the sixties, and now it’s forgotten midnight chow, gone to seed, relegated to illicit pairings—that’s us—and empty lunch buffets with polystyrene chicken wings: pretty standard wherever you go.” “For six years I had the largest breasts by virtue of having the only ones.” “Is virtue the word?” Bare smirked. “You can’t imagine what that’s like and then having that taken away from you.” “I suppose not,” Bare admitted. He filched a pakora from her toppled carton and she slapped the back of his hand lightly, indicating his unfinished own. Above their heads a placard in shape of a spiky explosion twirled aimlessly on a string, advertising the new six, eight, and twenty piece samosa-packs. Bare gazed upward at the fried delicacy, shown actual size, snug in its logoed container. His heart seemed suddenly to heave, an old whale lurching shoreward for love of a fisherman’s daughter. Or something like that. Some self-beaching, smacking abasement before an indifferent recipient. The tumult was inky, amorphous, disorienting. “You’re a troublemaker,” he murmured. She glanced at him from her perusal of the tray’s ad lining. Mistaking her level look for affront, he explained, “I’m kidding.” “I just didn’t hear what you said,” she shrugged, her mouth full. 115 *** Of course Bare expected an end to it. No fool, he knew things and had read books. Given a situation he could usually predict an ending or at least provide four guesses and a good handicap on the likeliest. There were only so many kinds of people in the world and there only so many things they had to do, limited by limbs, sockets, imaginations. Fate, the world, the unwritten rules, whatever name one assigned to the forces massed against lasting individual happiness, only let the garden path run so far. Bare toyed with several possible ways it might end. He was like a man lying in the sunshine with a string around his finger reminding him of things undone, the day’s basking as yet unearned, but the sun was warm, his skin flattered by its own satisfied tone. “Do you remember when we first met?” he asked afterwards, one night. Sara studied him a moment. “No.” “Sure you do. It wasn’t that long ago. I saw you at Russell’s desk one morning. You were the model of lackadaise.” “That’s pretty,” she sniffed. “Those were the first words I ever said to you. ‘You are the model of lackadaise.’ You said I knew a lot, didn’t I?” He watched her rise and circle the bed en route to the bathroom. “Go ahead, the door’s open,” she called out. 116 “I said, ‘Thanks.’ ” Bare settled himself gently on his back, his hands folded behind his head on the pillow. Intellect had always been his asset and his embarrassment—rather, he pretended embarrassment for the sake of a modesty he felt he should show. “You said,” he shouted to the open bathroom, “ ‘You’re the kind of person knowing stuff just comes easy to, aren’t you?’ ” Um, he had said that day, or rather did not say. He had thought confirming it would be an unforgivable boast. Not that he didn’t himself believe it, but where would saying it get you? Labeled impolite. Better to let them force it on your reticence with kindness. Not that conceit was his sole motive for silence when his intellect was singled out for praise. It was in part too the memory when singling out had not been praise but accusation, followed by ostracism. It was also a genuine regret that he did not know nearly enough, had not learned more broadly when he could have, that curiosity had somehow failed him at a crucial moment, and he would have to make do the rest of life with the crippled, piecemeal amount he knew. “I said, did you know, there’s an age in your life past which you can no longer learn facts. The brain changes the way it learns.” He had stood there in the outer office gazing down at her, waiting for Russell the chair to see him, meanwhile absorbed by his own new thought. Bare in the occasional fit of feeling he deserved a Boswell, less recording angel than underling, a way he might be witnessed and continued. He had stood there and the thought had given way to one more familiar, a foyer opening onto a hall. Bare always regretted lapses in his general knowledge and traced this to not having 117 read enough encyclopedias during the malleable era of his childhood. Now there was no time to and even if he could, he could not retain it. He had to move deeper into the field of his specialization, deeper and deeper, a lone pilgrim in esoteric wastes. You had to follow your inclinations until they inclined you flat into the ground. You became the sum of your most natural if laziest habits: yourself. Beneath his thoughts ran the sound of her faint silver trickle from the bathroom. “ ‘I’ve known guys like you,’ you said, and swiveled off to type.” Her compliment, issued from the disinterest of her face, was a spur less to infatuation than intrigue. It had begun that brief period, dawning attraction, before consciousness of the period itself hampered impartial appreciation—the isolated notice of a knee, ankle, or skirt—and Bare professed to himself in the manner of a man spilling a laden tray that he was in love. Forthwith he grew purblind, fascinated; love—that was what he called it—barred him from speaking of anything but. Now she appeared at the doorway, supported by the jamb. “Bare, you’re a teacher,” she said. “I’m a professor,” he corrected. “It must be hard being a teacher.” “What makes you say that?” 118 “When I think back I feel sorry for my teachers. I was a horrible student. You couldn’t pay me to be enthusiastic or think anything we covered in class had anything to do with anything.” “There’s always one or two like that, or a lot.” “Because being a teacher, it seems like you’re always hoping for something from somebody else. Hoping your students will learn, or want to. It’s an unnatural way to live.” “Oh God,” he said, “that’s touching.” Then, “You get over it.” She circled the bed again to her side and knelt on the mussed sheets. “You don’t expect anything, do you?” She fielded his concerned gaze like a boy with a mitt. “Dad?” was what he heard behind his surname. He could almost hear the chirping insects and feel the coarse field grass up to their knees. She tried his surname again, then said “Alan?” with a different tilt of her head and her hand on his arm. “What’s to expect?” He reached for the light. Alan Bare woke from a restive slumber later that night, a girl less than half his age beside him. The years seemed to assemble themselves into an altitude. His sudden distance from her naked back stopped him mid-reach to stare at his hand. The curl of his fingers toward palm seemed a cringe as reassurance slipped his grasp, a ghost leaving only a fist. She was a feather someone had placed between the sheets. Her dreams were weightless. Around her face the pillow rose in gentle hills covered by her tangled hair like hay. 119 This is a story I know and I know it had to go this way, Bare thought. But that was no consolation. In fact you could know a thing and most likely not recognize it when it happened to you, because life always dealt you the worm’s-eye view, myopic as a newborn if not altogether blind. It was like how Bare could wake beside a woman he’d been married to for years, as he had often done, to find a total stranger, and then find that a cliché. *** The end flew in from Denver on a Saturday and his name was Nate. My friend from college, Sara told Bare, maybe the three of them could meet for drinks sometime during the week? Bare guarded the phone until he noticed himself doing so. He was sitting in the kitchen and it dawned on him: he was waiting for her call. He abandoned the paper he had not really been reading immediately. He said to himself: I am in a place where she has left me; how did it come to this? Later he would realize she had done all the leaving in their fling—always, despite what mastery he felt over her. Crushed, a small black scribble of grief expiring heavenward over his head as in a cartoon, he flailed at his own state with disbelief, sometimes mustering a dry cackle. He had no self; his desires had rendered him, a complex man, transparent, predictable. He would instantly abase himself if abasement promised results and he only knew where to beg. He rued his own lack of thought, but the state of waiting afforded no thoughts. In waiting, someone else entered, by her absence, by her imminent and promised presence, your life, eclipsing you, your needs and desires. He could do nothing of his own, for fear that it would be interrupted by the higher priority of her call. He was absurdly suspended, suspense’s puppet. In her unexplained absence, which continued by the minute, his imagination fevered in 120 explanations, projections: where was she, what could she be doing, why wasn’t he there and sharing it? Questions answerless one and all. He was at her mercy, a quality he disbelieved in general but hoped existed. Late Wednesday night she called from Max’s, suggesting that he join them. He had never been to Max’s. He knew where it was, had passed it on the street, yet he had never heard its name dropped by one of his own students, only those of other teachers. He said, “OK! Sure!” Nate was taller and more handsome than Bare’s worst nightmares. Bucking up his usual cynicism Bare saw that this, too, was foreordained by cliché. Bare gazed at that brown-haired frame, impressed by the brute carpentry of it. But Nate’s good nature took Bare by surprise. “Sara tells me you’ve been a very good friend,” Nate began. Behind the absurdly perfect forelock he seemed somewhat abashed, genuinely grateful to be meeting here and now. Bare felt the man was trying to give him something, but Bare didn’t know what. Bare decided he would probably find Nate’s gift insulting. “Very good,” said Bare, leaning on the first word. Nate smiled, lowering his head and eyes slightly. My God, thought Bare, anything that adorned the man’s head would sell. Had he come across Nate in a magazine, Bare would have hated him on sight, then likely bought the item advertised. “Sara’s quite a girl,” Nate said. He looked up again, his hand covering his pint glass. “I know you must think so too.” 121 Bare could play this game. “She’s wonderful, isn’t she?” The two of them stared from their booth across the dance floor at her. “One thing one moment and another the next.” Nate frowned, then smiled again. “Look, Mr. — Alan, can I call you Alan?” “Sara calls me Bare.” Bare stirred his whisky soda with the thin stiff straw. “B-A-R-E.” “Mr. Bare, has Sara told you--” Sara emerged from the crowd and beckoned them to the floor. In a fit of bullish impulsion Bare stood up. She had melted into the crowd again. Nate looked at him, then followed suit. “You dance?” he asked Bare. Threading their way between bodies, Bare and Nate had found her but after a few minutes she quitted them for the bathroom. Now the two of them were, incongruously, dancing. Bare shifted his weight from foot to foot, alternately dipped his shoulders, pumped his elbows casually as if he were jogging, swiveled his hips and occasionally snapped his fingers, his gaze all the while darting about to insure the accuracy of his mimicry, its contemporaneity in this environment of abruptly shifting fads. He wondered if it looked like he and Nate were dancing with each other. “So what do you do?” Bare asked, his inflections flattened by the constant volume at which he had to speak over the music. Nate was nodding his head, his eyes closed, and Bare quickly nodded too. “I’m an escort,” he said, smiling. 122 “A what?” Nate’s eyes flapped open, but his beatific smile remained. “A gigolo,” he said. “Great music, isn’t it?” They sat down at the bar. “Sara and I met freshman year,” Nate explained. “We were both in pre-law—” “Sara was in pre-law?” echoed Bare. “Yeah—you didn’t know? But that’s not, y’know, she doesn’t know what she wants to do with her life,” he shook his head and looked in the direction of the bathroom. Was Sara still there? Bare wondered. If so, what was taking her so long? “Anyway so we were in law school and I had to make ends meet.” “You’re a gigolo,” Bare informed him helpfully. “I get that a lot.” It seemed he blushed. “One of my friends’ mom, actually, started me. What I tell people is,” he squared the air before his chest with his hands, as if preparing it, Bare thought, for a staggering announcement, “it’s exactly what you think, but not at all.” Nate leaned back and sipped his drink. “How sagacious.” It seemed not to be the same day Bare had woken up in, dislocated and floating from the firm morning moment when he had stood by the side of his bed in his slippers. It seemed to be another day entirely, and Bare felt meanly tricked. The day faced him with a stranger’s face, a Nate’s. 123 “I’m like a prescription drug,” Nate suggested. “Not everybody needs me, y’know? Some people are fine on their own.” “Does Sara know about you?” The directive force of the question made Bare feel protective, a suspicious parent. Nate seemed troubled for a moment. “Sara and I have been engaged since junior year. We lived together. I supported us with, y’know, gig money.” He grinned, a grin seeking comrade grins. “It really helps out when you’re just starting out. If you can find the time and energy.” He studied Bare. “Look, I’m sorry. I mean, Sara’s told me all about you. I didn’t know—” “Does that mean,” Bare began, sliding from his stool, “does that mean you have a cock the size of Chile?” He meant it—he was not sure how he meant it. He meant to get away with it. If Nate would take it as a joke Bare would too. He meant it to skim this side of insult, a barb only he could see sink, whose craftsmanship only he could appreciate. They could all have another round, if Sara ever came back from the bathroom. But somehow something in Bare’s voice had failed him, and Nate narrowed his eyes. “Oh come on—we’re all locker room buddies here, let’s break the ice!” Bare bluffed. “Get the old upfront out of the way: Six Weeks to Fearless Conversation by Lenny Bruce.” “Hey, now look—” Nate cautioned. 124 “Look, I don’t know anything,” Bare said. “I don’t know what you know or what you think I know but I was just fucking her. You can have her back now.” As if on cue, Sara elbowed her way through a few clumped patrons toward them. Bare flung an arm toward her for emphasis. Nate is irate, Bare noticed. Oh, Nate! “You know, I am sick of this kind of shit coming from people who—” “What’s going on?” Sara said pleasantly. She reached for Nate’s drink, bowing from the hip in an exaggeration of the necessary motion. She was dressed in a white cotton chemise with a cursive v scooped from the neckline, her sneakers green with white stripes below the cuffs of her blue jeans. She held the drink just beneath her chin and sipped from the stirrer. “Sara, you didn’t tell him about—” Nate began. She flung her hands to either side, framing her face like a chorus girl, her right open, her left still holding the drink. “Oh, is that all! Nate, Bare. Bare, Nate.” “Look, you aren’t really going to marry him, are you Sara? You don’t have to answer that,” Bare said quickly. “I like and respect you enough as a person.” “Why would you say something like that?” Sara is very angry, Bare thought. In his mind was utter quiet. The animation present upon her return from the bathroom had changed abruptly to fury. Bare had so accustomed himself to the assumption, held tightly since adolescence, that other people were the aggressors, and he the pitiable prey, that he always found himself, and usually too late, surprised that others had feelings to hurt. 125 “You don’t even know me as a person.” For the first time the pear-bell of her cheeks seemed not youth’s sullenness but the result of a wound, swollen from direct blow and unsubsiding. “What person is it, exactly, that you like and respect?” He tried, but nothing came out. He could say nothing that would not be taken wrongly, not even silence, that would not increase his isolation. He was a lone pilgrim in esoteric wastes. “I love you, Sara,” Bare admitted, moving toward her, arms stupidly open. Later he had the consolation of knowing he saw it coming. *** He was glad she was gone. Life might resume. His hand groped for the limp, neglected normalcy of days, that sagging mask abandoned in the recent fervor, and restored it to his face, but the fit was wrong. It kept slipping. The eyeholes no longer aligned and the clumsy, unlifelike rubber only clung loosely to his face. He felt himself sweat, newly unable to meet the strain of this daily act. The life he had returned to was uncomfortable and false. He exerted to sustain that demeanor once impervious to the little stings of academic living and petty departmental warfares. Work was a net of tiny hooks, his former glibness an awkward apparatus. For a week after Max’s, he wore sunglasses around the department, enduring jeers: Alan, back from Aruba so soon? Alan, it’s not as sunny here in Philosophy. At home he nursed his the eye Sara had shinered with an ice pack for more nights than did it any good, idly wondering, with his head tilted back, whether a virile porterhouse, there rawly slapped as in cartoons, might with its implied manliness, the sheer world-be-damned thwack of it, retrieve him from dejection. 126 He had hoped in her absence to find some safe middle ground, a place he could stand and call his own. He had hoped to dwell there but the best he could achieve was a longing glance down at the fabled turf as above he swung from one extreme to its opposite—missing Sara to forgetting Sara, missing sex to losing interest, loving the girl to hating her—clinging to an emotional pendulum whose period he tried desperately to narrow. The week, with its reponsibilities, seemed merely a series of successive tests. He would with some deft flattery ace one, by luck eke past another, and just when he thought he was through, lo on the horizon loomed the next, making him nervous with the prayer that it would somehow turn out well. He served a ruthless schedule, but in fact and amount it was no different from any other semester; only he was different. He longed for it only to be over. During this time Bare had habits, or his habits had him. In fact he felt sometimes merely a vessel for a collection of actions to manifest themselves in a repetition grossly energetic considering the rut it was stuck in. Bare: a thing of blood and bones only so that certain eternal tropisms, which otherwise might wander like lost souls, could be given frantic physical existence. He left the stove, electric, on. He never returned his videos on time. He bought fruits, salad materials, and forgot them, found them sopping with rot weeks later in the crisper. Deli meats, meant for solo lunches, went to stink. He always let the ice cream melt. Absorbed in a news program or an old movie, he set it down, leaning forward, found it molten on the sofa arm when he returned from a nap. He left the new pint in a plastic bag with assorted frozen juices on the kitchen floor, taken with some other task as soon as he’d huffed in the house, only to dash cursing to the kitchen hours later and put them all in the freezer. To Bare these were merely 127 symptoms. Some inner hierarchy had been upset, and in the jumble he did whatever came to mind, whatever offered itself to waiting hands. He could no longer determine priorities. A sense of fate came to rest on Bare. If there were an age past which the mind no longer quickened to facts, there seemed an analogous age past which you were set in your ways of reading people. Somehow this age came and went without your notice but left you with a vague, indelible sense of the world’s mechanics. Bare found true humility impossible: when pressed, he escaped into wily hilarity, disbelief, or intricate dodging and finally into indignation, a bullied gritted uncomprehending turmoil. Yet if in these days he had been asked, he would have been forced to say, and not unhappily, my life is humble. *** On a Saturday in early spring Reund came to Bare’s house with a bottle of red wine, as he always did on mornings when Nancy, Bare’s second ex, was due with their son Colin, with whom the contract of custodial visits permitted a biannual week. Bare, in his nervousness, was generally so grateful for his friend’s service and company that he did not question its origin. Reund arrived at ten sharp. Prior rains had sluiced the winter’s gravel from the streets. The air was clean, almost detergent, its strength and clarity applied to scouring dullness from houses and roofs, revealing bright color. It was too wet to sit on the ground with a book so Bare sat in the bright alcove off his living room, its ceiling hung with plants. 128 “ ‘The child is the father of the man,’ ” Bare read, and lay the yellow ribbon from the spine between the pages of the book. Reund came bearing claret in two glasses, and with a small nod handed one to Bare. “There’s something—something about reading Wordsworth in spring, isn’t there?” Bare mistrusted the wistfulness like a vapor in his own voice. Or he mistrusted airing it before his friend. “All the—” Reund dithered a skeletal hand. “Yellow flowers.” “Daffodils.” “Yes.” “ ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud—’ ” Bare checked his watch. “Have you ever tried to teach a—” he paused to count, “a six year old checkers?” Reund shook his head. “It’s an abyss of a task,” said Bare. “Try to teach them something and they tell you they don’t get it. You say, well, that’s why I’m teaching you, and they say it’s too hard. It’s not hard, it’s easy. You say this to encourage them but they don’t believe you. If only they’d believe you, if they could just see around themselves for a minute, but no, it’s too hard. You tell them again, no, really, it’s easy, and they cry.” “He’s afraid he’s disappointed you by not catching on,” Reund observed. “But he hasn’t,” said Bare. “He’s only disappointed me by not trying.” 129 “He’ll learn,” Reund said. “Reund, I was talking with Sara about this,” Bare began. “How is,” Reund strolled to the window, “Sara?” “Oh I don’t know,” Bare waved his hand. “Fine, I guess. It’s been a while. I haven’t seen her.” He winced inwardly, remembering not only the night at the bar but the night he had told Reund. “My friend, you have never loved anyone but yourself. It must be a lonely life,” said Reund. Reund would never advance in the department. He was a man who had no words for those he had no use for. These seemed many in number, too many for Bare to feel comfortable with, for his friend’s sake. He found Reund’s self-sought position politically fragile. Reund tended to dislike. Reund moved from the window. Through the opening his fingers had made between the curtain and the glass Bare glimpsed, before the cloth fell back, his ex-wife’s car coming up the drive. “Try being a father,” Reund suggested. 130 The Ark My first fall in the city I lived at its northern tip in a great vessel of a building that seemed to have run aground generations ago. As if halted in the heaving traverse of a dune, its prow still quixotically jutted midair at an angle of final rebuff. All it had for a figurehead was a blank concrete cartouche that a few lead-puttied seams scarred in a setting of scrollwork and vegetable motif. The ridge of this dune was Broadway, and the slope falling away in a reveal of the hull was 212th Street. To this intersection the building proudly pointed a rounded corner crowned by the cartouche and columned in windows whose slight custom curve was betrayed, as in an oil lamp, by a flaw in the ribbons of reflected light. At this corner, the building was anchored almost comfortingly by a basement daycare decked with pastel Bible quotes about children. Overhead hung the fire escape, each landing with its spindle-railinged struts like a lifeboat in its cradle of rigging. Inside, two shades of blue lined the halls, framed the windows, flecked the tiny floor tiles. The stairs and sills were gray marble streaked with pearl and black, and a weighty table of the same material before a giant mirror lent the lobby vintage dignity. Abandoned mail layered there in drifts. Beribboned molding ruled the ceiling in rectangles around dusty plaster bouquets. Housings, painted to resemble marble but betrayed by a knock as wood, hid cables beside the windows. Across from the giant mirror was another, before which a few plants failed, their leaves, still green, fallen from stalks. Tan butts blended into the dried dirt. The moment I stepped into that studio, the super in his flannel shirt behind me, I felt only disappointment. To his token praise, in broken English, of its size and niceness, I could only 131 politely agree. When I say that my school years still clung to me then, I mean more than their recency. I mean a sense of life having distinct stages of set nature and duration that followed one after the next in an orderly ladder to success. I was skilled at ascending this ladder, and committed to the picturesqueness of each stage. If the apartment—no worse than any starter studio—struck me as tiny, dingy, and sad, I also knew at once why I had moved to New York, knowing no one, at the age of twenty-five. I would scrimp, save, and suffer; gaze wistfully at lighted windows, lowering my head as I drew near; and one day this part of my life would be over. I’ll take it, I said, with a sense of accepting my fate. It was the first of several apartments I never wound up decorating. A thick, locked grate screened one window from the fire escape. The other had a view of the roof of the neighboring building. When I came home from work, I could still make out, through the darkening evening, the shapes of pipes, squat vents and chimneys, a soiled pyramidal skylight. One floor below, framed by demi-curtains, a stout Latina would be rinsing vegetables in the same dim light where I stood, that frugal amber which for all its warmth came to signal for me poverty and loneliness. Sometimes at night, still in the sway of sleep, I felt my way to the bathroom along cool unfamiliar walls. Then the nautical impression would return, as though the grounded liner were listing on a missing ocean, as a man might lunge with a phantom limb. I remember the imperfection of the wooden floors that ran to baseboards without quite meeting them flush, my feet learning the hollows where, were the ship tossed in a storm, water would gather. *** That fall I worked at a travel agency that specialized in bringing over groups of European doctors (often French) for pharmaceutical conventions. The founders referred to themselves as “the Ladies.” There was Suzanne, who in a former life had taught high school French, though that 132 was three husbands ago. She had a purebred Yorkie, and when she left on business, hired a Town Car to take Jackie to the kennel. The other partner, Josiane, was a bona fide française. When she hovered at my shoulder, hectoring my bookkeeping, she recalled my elementary school librarian, the moistly named Mrs. Beatrice Wetscher, who with a breathy sigh prefatory to a Dewey decimal sermon, would sink into and overflow a chair, fluttering her fat ringed fingers like a dowager gone to voluminous seed. The office was a converted apartment in a residential high-rise. It took up half the fourteenth floor, and spanned the tower so that north and south were walls of glass, giving onto balconies. The Ladies seldom left the master bedroom, where they nested amidst stacks of paper that almost obscured their view. We in the front room rarely ventured there, though it was common to imagine them lolling like royalty on a canopy bed, crumbs littering the coverlet. When they did emerge, it was to insult and berate us for petty error, despots of their own obscure protocols. The put-upon liaison between these two worlds was Emily, who had hired me. I was sincere in needing work and she was sincere in needing an assistant; there, I think, our sincerity ended. She left out that the bosses were abusive shrews. I left out just how finite my conception of this job was: a stage, a stepping stone. There are beliefs which, when pressed to articulate, we surround with caveats and disavowals. Unleavened by friendly mockery, or even disillusion, they continue to govern our behavior. I had a great many such beliefs, which I kept carefully to myself. Here was one: success awaited me in the city. What sort of success? I carefully kept from picturing it too clearly. No doubt because I wanted, in the vaguest way, what I thought everyone else did—why, everything!—but would never have admitted it. My success, if not of a different scope, would be of a different quality, 133 universal yet exclusive. I have always studiously avoided the obvious in every situation. I long for archetype, but detest cliché. When, for the first time in my life, I heard that classic question fall from Emily’s lips—“Where do you see yourself in five years?” —I was delighted and dismayed, as if by an overplayed song still undeniably right for the moment. Out the window behind her, skyscrapers stalked the brownstone rows all the way to the complicated gantry of the Kennedy Bridge. For lack of something more precise, I said, “Somewhere like this?” Emily was a small, boyish woman with trim hair whose red edged toward the color of her glasses, and a voice in which years of smoking was just starting to deposit grit. Her face was almost marred by long eyelashes, which lent it a certain dewy credulity out of keeping with her general briskness, though when she was hurt, her face showed it most: first flushing, then crumpling, wadding up like lumpy clay. Having been in the business the longest, she had the deepest reservations about its morality, but she also knew that for any Euro junket to the States, steak dinners were de rigueur. Glenn had no reservations; he made them in blocks, reaching out in his coarse-grained, soothing voice to the women of group booking. Between cold calls he would report on the latest audition where he’d delivered his patent monologue—not from Field of Dreams, but the book it was based on, had you read it? No? He smiled as if he got that a lot. He had the bluff, cleft chin of corn-fed brawn, but his square frame was lean and his limbs rangy, giving him a hungry look. “How do you like it?” he asked, when I’d been in the city a month. If I was reticent, it is partly because my opinions coalesce slowly and often only in retrospect. And partly because what I thought then, rather often and monotonously, was: this is only temporary. It was the source of my aloofness and later, my spite. 134 Heidi, too, was an actor. She did afternoons in her soft sweaters, padding about the office in socks, relieving Emily with chatter about her interesting men. She had been in New York no longer than Glenn, but was readier to leave it. She spent her hours shopping for clothes, browsing her future, always the last to reach for a ringing phone. The receiver dangling blithely from a finger, she would redirect callers’ questions to the room at large. Rural grad programs beckoned; she treated us to paragraphs aloud from their catalogues, then to her indecision, punctuated by a snap of gum. Sometimes she would look up from a dating site and say, with winsome rue, “You know, you can probably go through life without ever winning a sweepstakes? How unfair is that?” It was novel, even charming, the first time. The four of us in the outer office shared a bathroom. With its single toilet and sink, its shower packed with boxes, a vacuum, cheap folding chairs and table, it recalled like no other room the setting’s former domesticity. The siena shower curtain, the beige medicine cabinet and matching tiles, the faux marble countertops streaked with umber, the cream shag rug, the dim bulbs in their sconces that brought muted glints from the bronze finishings… together, these colluded in an illusion of living—the quiet of the lampshade and the book laid aside—which even Josiane’s leopard print towels could not mar. It was to this sanctum that I retired, in the last five minutes of each day, to perform the small ritual of washing my hands and loosening my tie before making my way home. *** Commuting was a lottery of urban impediments: erratic construction, arcane delays, hoardings that forced you to the edge of platforms crowded six deep at rush hour. The more I played this lottery, the more often I seemed to lose. Each morning I descended into the subway, having slept either poorly, too little, or both, but never neither. In the stations hung identical clocks, bored and 135 disapproving, whose hands advanced so gradually as to feign inertia, yet leapt forward between stops so that, to my surprise and dismay, I seemed always to be running late. Aboveground, the bus trudged through clinging traffic to make pneumatic genuflection at the beginning of each block. At every step along the trip I took in details as if willing into being a habit. I watched the man with shower-mussed hair rinse his mouth with a gulp of coffee, the night nurse sleep had crumpled in a corner seat, the girl the wale of whose shawl was so wide as to seem the strands of a rope. I walked past the drivers of tour buses shouting into their cell phones, past after hours repairmen defiling stylish windows with brute tools, past the hygienist alone with her merciless light and her chair on the second floor of a luxury building. I walked under scaffolding, that contempt of balconies for sidewalks, in the dinginess imposed on victim storefronts, while overhead, a roof of corrugated steel and caged bulbs shuddered with workers who paced plywood ramparts filling with debris. My perspective channeled by cross-braces, I walked until one day I stopped noticing, and the commute became a single tunnel, bordered by a blur of lights and voices, from my doorstep to the office. Even now, when confronted by that French phrase, sombrer dans l’anonyme, its dark sonorities and suggestion of drowning return me to those first months in Manhattan, to the sensation of cold and lucid layers drawing with an eerie beauty over my head, between myself and a steadily dimming light. I traveled, every day, in a glassy capsule I had ceased to notice. How else to inure myself to the moving roomfuls of strangers I entered and left unchanged each morning and evening? On the N, a blind accordionist wheezed his way through a wavering tune the train plowed over like a pushcart. Somewhere in the evening a woman was stalled, scratching a ticket with a coin, outside a Duane Reade fluorescently oblivious to the end of business hours. I 136 lived in a private city identical in every respect to the city collectively inhabited except that I, in my capsule, was its moving center. *** The office had its moments. Midtown buildings ringing bright as though from a mallet that struck them, newly minted, from the morning. Desks in the afternoon spangled with reflected light, as if someone had upended a drawerful of knives. Heidi who, trying to snub her Kraft mac- n-cheese lunch, declared it “the epiphany of boring.” When Emily burst red-faced from a meeting with the Ladies, Heidi would catch her arm, hissing, “You of all people should be allowed to fucking get away with something.” Stepping out to smoke, they were instantly glamorous, faces flaring briefly close to flame and cupped hands, and then figures silhouetted, shadow puppets on a tiny balcony stage while the massive city dazzled beyond. “At any given moment,” said Heidi, coming in, “there’s enough men in Manhattan to repopulate the planet, so what is my deal?” But mostly, the office was a waiting room. There was the standard black leather sofa, piled with folders hurriedly cleared for guests—tour operators, sales reps from visitor’s bureaus—and above it, a framed print of pink, windblown poppies that belonged over a hotel headboard. Trade and travel annuals cluttered the glass coffee table, as papers did the panes of our own desktops. In this limbo we killed time, waiting for our real lives, which were also the lives of our dreams. So much unfulfillment in such close quarters filled me with anxiety and dread, and that was true of the city as a whole—all humanity jostling for a few steerage spots. I felt put-upon, pawed at, claimed; I felt like everyone in the city was asking you to believe in them. I had no stomach for it: the striving, the struggling, the clinging to hope. The desperation was exhausting. 137 Those first months felt endless, though I almost miss that now: since then, everything has only gone faster. Around this time I discovered that I, who had always considered myself a perfectionist, was in fact disastrously careless. There was a mockery of work that passed for camaraderie, but I misjudged, or abused, its sincerity. With increasingly stifled fury, Emily pointed out negligent spreadsheets, mistaken flight times, forgotten food preferences, unconfirmed reservations for the wrong number of guests. You’re late, she would never say when I was, even by half an hour, glowering and unshowered. She kept her darkened face down but her tone stayed clipped till noon. After a while, I stopped mumbling excuse or apology. I was engaged in an escalating petty war with work, shaving time from the clock in five and fifteen minute increments which I knew were noticeable but told myself were not. I felt the job owed me the time, for wasting the rest of my day. Did I hate the job because I did it poorly, or did I do a poor job because I hated it? It should forgive me every corner cut. I was entitled to shoddiness and evasion. My capacity for pettiness surprised me. I did not know it was also becoming a habit. At lunch I would go down to the residents’ gym on the third floor. There was a nautilus, a middle-aged woman on one of two treadmills, a TV tuned to CNN, a view from above of the two-lane pool. Beside the lockers with their Day-Use Only sign was a tall door of frosted glass. SHOWER, it read in serif font whose gilt matched the knob. Inside, the floor and walls were laid with the minute tiles of mosaics and poolsides. There was a sink, a paper towel dispenser of brushed metal, and a wall hook where a single plastic hanger with pant clips hung as if borrowed from a fitting room. Then a glass partition, with a door whose brass hingeplates and handle recalled those of hotel entrances. The shower took up fully half the room. 138 The room was cold and petite, like a hospital chapel. It cleanliness came not from daily ministrations but disuse, for what residents would visit when their apartments awaited, with the lineup of usual shampoos and familiar towel? Undressing, I savored not my nakedness but its impunity. It was different from the guarded nudity of communal showers, of changing in a locker alcove divided by a varnished bench. From inside, as the water warmed, I watched mist film the partition until I could no longer see my glasses on the counter. At home I huddled under a low showerhead, but here I luxuriated in the extension of each limb into glorious emptiness. The water was so voluptuously hot that any skin outside its spray was still ensconced in steam warmth. These moments, pried from routine, I spent in a cubicle of glass—in a hive of apartments, in the grid of the city—and that precarious delicacy was the source of their solace. When I finally turned off the tap, I would hear the woman again, still pounding rotely on the treadmill. I would perch on the counter to dry my feet, and step into my shoes, still neatly grouped as if I’d vanished standing. *** On Emily’s birthday, the Ladies treated us to lunch from their favorite Chinese takeout. Emily and I set to clearing the coffee table of gift cookie tins from hotel chains, the last month’s worth of New York. “Amgen, Pfizer, Lilly, Roche, Novartis, Sanofi, Schering-Plough,” she read, sorting through the stray brochures. “I knew this doctor once who collected pens with the names of drug companies on them, like they give away at conventions? Because it’s illegal for drug companies to print their names on things in France, it’s considered advertising. He said he kept them in a jar on his desk and showed them off to patients.” She looked at me and shook her head. “Stick around, kid—have I got stories for you.” 139 The cheap folding chairs were brought out from bathroom storage. The six of us sat with styrofoam clamshells in our laps, leaning forward sometimes for our sodas. The conversation covered real estate prices in Ft. Lauderdale, diets that husbands, friends, loved ones and girlfriends had tried and discarded. Glenn’s flannel shirt hung loosely on his frame, to the Ladies’ envy. “My husband,” Suzanne informed us, “has ice cream with everything. He has ice cream with alcohol.” For a moment I saw work lift and flutter from these people I had only known wedded to its pressures and exasperations. In its absence was silence, hesitations feigning courtesy, as we realized we shared a table with relative strangers. And, seated by Emily, I noticed the fineness of her skin, the dense light freckling, the tint of her lenses and the swing of her freshly dyed hair. The ice cream cake was soft from sitting out for half an hour. Emily blew out the candles on her first try. I dripped vanilla on my shirt. The ruins of a meal: cups toppled in stacks, straws askew, the folded plates stuffed in gaping boxes, utensils beaded with sauce. Suzanne had a hair appointment. Glenn and Heidi helped clean up, and the catalogues, cookies, magazines took back their tabletop. “Do you know what I’m going to do when I leave this place?” Emily asked. “I’m going to go work for a charity, or a nonprofit. Something medical and international, like Doctors Without Borders.” She had started, straight from school, as Josiane’s assistant, with her three years of French and semester in Paris. She was dating a subcontractor who stopped by to service the computers. She had just turned thirty-seven. “God,” Heidi sighed, “what would they do without you?” 140 “I know, it’s not like I’m not good at this. It’s just…” Her eyes met mine then. “How did this become my life, y’know?” I did know. I understood adulthood as a certain appointment with compromise. I was trying, at the time, to sort what I would have to endure from what I might rightfully refuse to. “Life is what happens when you’re waiting for something else, right?” Leaning back, Glenn tucked a pencil behind his ear and joined his hands behind his head. It is not familiarity breeding contempt that surprises, but how quickly it happens. The affable rookie was Glenn’s stock-in-trade, but for how much longer as his cheeks lined and his fair hair thinned? I was filled with contempt for them: for Glenn’s earnestness, for Heidi’s inanity, for Emily’s thwarted life. All this scraping by my impatience or pessimism met with dismay, deemed failure. I despised them for staying on, for needing to, for holding on to hope. “I’m surprised you made it this long,” said Emily, still looking at me. Behind her, two nearby buildings proffered their balconies at each other, like brackets without shelves. “I mean, they’re crazy! They’re terrible bosses! The worst! Why do you think we’re always hiring?” You could say this is a rather banal story: an early job I hated, which wasn’t right for me. It happens all the time. People stumble far worse during their first months in the city. Why look back? Why berate yourself? But if it meant so little, why did leaving feel like such a betrayal? Every desertion lessens us, is a lesson. In everything I have hated, I have been partly to blame. I left something behind at that office, if only a certain idea of myself. It was the first of many jobs I was unable to take seriously. While others waited in place, I would wait by moving around. A glacial light, from behind a bruise of cloud, was selecting the last white towers from the dimming city. Emily lowered her voice. “Some people don’t even give notice. Once someone walked out during lunch and never came back.” 141 She should never have told me that, because it is exactly what I did. Though that was three months later and by then, it was spring. *** The city that winter was the city saved from drowning a minute late—sodden and lifeless, dripping from every pore and crevice. The air like thin wet wool drew over my shoulders: comfortless, a tattered shawl. In the elevators, soiled carpets caught the seep from boots and shoes. I passed vendors in their hulking jackets with their grim and pitted fruit. I dined alone in city eateries crowded by mirrors whose tint seemed to bring out the brass of rails and knobs as wan and gaudy as used wrapping paper. Under tilting umbrellas, or clutching the hoods of slickers over their heads, pedestrians hurried, bent into the slanting rain. Floods welled by curbs and overflowed the gutters. The cold turned vicious overnight. One day the clouds, and not the sky, were blue, and it began to snow. The city was parceled off, block by block, one from view of the next. Streets I had walked, to either side of the one I was walking now, whose sights I could summon, some by name and some by numbered awning; entire buildings shelved with homes and lives—all these had vanished. The sense of desolation was sudden and more absolute than in the wild. The limits of my vision moved with me, an inexorable perimeter, revealing the city and removing it from view. Each further building seemed to perch at the edge of the earth, threatened less by plummet than the even grayness of unbeing, into which it might simply dissolve. The deserted avenues were almost familiar—a homecoming—and as the storm drew down its curtains of snow, I felt my loneliness upon me like a sentence. 142 FANCIES 143 A Portrait in the Attic When Whit came back from the Seattle meeting to an empty apartment, the first thing he found himself doing was cleaning. He dropped his laptop bag from his shoulder, shrugged off his London Fog coat, and set to the dishes in the sink. He wet his cuffs before remembering to roll them up and put his watch on the counter. As he soaped, his gaze swept the open plan from kitchen to king bed and beyond, out the wall of windows to Manhattan’s lighted skyline, and he still felt a burst of pride in his apartment before noticing how bare it was with all Maud’s things gone. It wasn’t that she’d had so many—after all, everything had fit into the two suitcases no longer in the hall closet—but that she’d spread them everywhere. His hands still wet, he walked to the middle of the newly empty space and stood there, as if to plant a flag on a shore. When she’d lived here, Maud had thought it sexy to leave, strewn across the carpet, her clothes which to him in their flimsiness and color had at first seemed exotic as species of undersea life. Then, wading half-asleep through a flora of underthings, he’d tripped on a thong and fallen face first into the bathroom: the end of that enchantment. Perhaps it was just some foreign habit, unfathomable like so many of her other French whims, or perhaps it was part of that general laisser aller women went through when they were sure of their men. She teased him about not shaving her armpits like the française of stereotype; one night he felt bristle on her shifting legs, and as she moved over him, her long, luxurious hair seemed hot and smothering. Yet it was the first thing he’d loved about her, that hair—the way it swung, the weight and luster of it. He’d wanted to hold it in his hand, and had asked her half-jokingly for a lock. 144 Probably the gallantry and anachronism of this had charmed her. French men were nothing like American girls thought, she’d said. They were so vulgar. Never again now would he bend to pluck a filmy dropped top or shed dress from the floor. Whit squatted, ran his hand over the carpet. He brought it up to find fine strands of her hair stuck to his fingers. From there it was a short step to vacuuming, which drove out the silence no one would break with a phone call. On the pillow was a small envelope with his name on it. He unfolded the note inside, read its cramped purple script, shuffled through a few enclosed polaroids. He couldn’t place at first the faint black stains, like an early stage of mold, on the white pillowcase; then, seeing a faded outline of dried tears, knew them to be mascara traces. He stripped the case, replaced it, and spotted across the room the broad shelf, second from the top, completely cleared of her belongings, bare but for that lock of hair she’d given him, in a ziploc bag. This he placed in the envelope, with her letter. When he looked up it was two, and he had to go to work the next day. Despite waking at six, he was still late to the office. When suds and tepid water pooled disobligingly around his ankles, he spent twenty minutes on his knees, pulling hair from the clogged drain with hooked fingers, enough hair for a drowned woman, a sodden mess with no resemblance to the silken tresses that he admired even now, in memory. Ugh—so this was her parting gift. He snuck into the morning meeting half an hour late, coat in one hand and briefcase in the other, flattening himself against the wall in apology, avoiding Pemberton’s glare. Pemberton pinned him afterwards. “Feeling all right, are we, Felman?” “Sir? Yes, sir,” Whit said. It was no place to bring up the breakup. 145 “Actually—” Whit blinked. “Actually, I feel great, Mr. Pemberton.” He himself was surprised—but for the first time in months, it was true. *** It had all started going wrong, Whit thought, the night he’d taken Maud to that Italian seafood place. They’d sat outside in the late summer on that narrow sunken patio lined with tables for two, waiters passing back and forth beneath the giant lighted neon fish. Whit sank his fork into his squid-ink linguini and twirled. “I don’t believe squid ink actually tastes like anything,” Maud said. “Does—” He sneezed violently into the cloth napkin, sat back in surprise. “Waiter!” Startled, Maud set down her wine. “À tes amours!” Whit smiled, eyes still watery as the waiter replaced his napkin. “It’s nothing. Probably just the season.” “Your hay fever.” From beneath her neat brown bangs her eyes sought his. “You never told me what you were allergic to, exactly.” Behind Maud passed a couple coming down the patio steps from the sidewalk. The girl was slim and her long golden hair lit up when her date opened the restaurant door, letting out a glow warm as firelight, which the moving bodies in between made flicker. She took her date’s hand needlessly, for the final step, wrist delicately arched, and it seemed Whit could see the fine sheen of hair on her forearm. Her short summer dress was slit up the side. She vanished into the restaurant. 146 “That old story,” Whit waved it away, “I really never told you about how I got tested as a kid?” Dr. Babitz, in gloves and a face mask, had scratched, pricked, or daubed with liquids from a tray of clear vials every square in a grid careful as a garden she’d drawn on his back. In under five minutes his skin began to burn, though just like in that science experiment when his class had poked each other in the back with pencils, he couldn’t tell where, exactly, it itched most. Dr. Babitz stuck her head into the room again, blanched at the hives and blisters rampaging across her neat rows, and made him down two antihistamines just before his throat swelled up. “Cats. Dogs. Rabbits, hamsters. Mold, pollen, flowers, trees, even grass—turns out I was allergic to everything besides horses.” Shoes scuffed the pavement, and Whit turned to glance at ankles flashing past in flats and heels at eye level. The restaurant’s railing rose like the bars of a cage; up top clung a planter of geraniums, poised to clobber like a flower pot in a silent comedy. “I was happy, because I thought I could still be a cowboy, until someone pointed out I’d have to feed my horse hay.” Maud found the story charming, as though it were perfectly natural every American not already a cowboy should dream of becoming one, and laughed her little French laugh that had until so recently enthralled him. How long had he been seeing her for now? Longer than any other girl, perhaps perilously so. Was it only because she was French the fascination had taken longer than usual to wear off? Her delight, like his own story, bored him, and he reached for his wine. His throat seized up. When he grabbed the table the mussel appetizer in the middle gave off an accusing clatter. A waiter made for him across a floor suddenly slanting, draped napkin swinging from his 147 cuff. At the E.R., a young doctor drew a needle from Whit’s arm and told him to stay away from shellfish, as though implying he were old enough to know better. “I’ve never been allergic to seafood,” Whit insisted, but his stuffed nose made it sound petulant. “I’ve never had any food allergies, only respiratory.” The young doctor shrugged. What else could it have been? On the way through the sliding glass doors Maud clung to Whit’s arm and leaned into him. “You poor poor man,” she murmured, “don’t you see? You need someone to take care of you.” She’d moved in the next night. *** Whit looked younger than his years and traded on it at work as with women. When asked how he kept his preternaturally collegiate looks, he grinned and said, “I’ve got a portrait of myself rotting in the attic.” In his thirties now, he found himself, during lunches and greetings, across a table or even the space of a handshake, studying the faces of his bosses to gauge the price of success as registered in facial wear, the better to assess its worth. In this he proceeded as though from the almost backward assumption that the lines of age conferred status, rather than being the effect of effort spent in achieving it. He was distracted from currency considerations by a crease in a senior forehead, from annual reports by bags under a director’s eyes, wondering what financial triumph was fair trade for a wrinkled cheek. 148 With Maud’s departure, sleep seemed once more to smooth from his brow the lines left by those long hours at the office of which she’d so often complained. This rejuvenation turned Whit’s wariness to relief. Moreover, when he checked his face carefully in the morning, his complexion had cleared up almost completely. He crowed aloud in vindication, hopping on the bathmat. Maud had never been shy, in that Gallic way of hers, about her disappointment, but still it had taken her two weeks in his apartment to ask why he now shied away from the press of her cheek or forehead. He’d tried to dodge the topic, but in the end his embarrassed excuse had slipped out. “Mais non! How can you say such a thing?” Freshly showered, she straightened up from where she was bent and combing over a trash can in the middle of the carpet. Her wet hair hit her back with an indignant slap. “I don’t have oily skin!” she fairly spat. He stopped her en route to the bathroom and her arsenal of creams and said, “No look, maybe it’s not that—” “Feel!” She stuck her cheek out as she did for the kisses of greeting she insisted on in front of his friends. “Okay, it’s not that,” he said without touching her cheek. “It’s just I’m breaking out all the time now that’s you’re around. I never used to.” She peered at his forehead. 149 “But this is nothing,” she clucked. “You’re working too much. I tell you to come home, but…” She shook her head, arms crossed. “You’re a hypochondriaque.” “No, I’m not. My dad was a hypochondriac. Maybe you’re just—bad for my skin.” She’d decided he couldn’t really mean anything so ridiculous, and let the humor of it defuse the situation. Whit peered at his nose now and was startled to see a few hairs poking from a nostril. How many times, poring over in-flight magazines, had he snorted at the poor schmucks who needed to throw money away on so inherently embarrassing an invention as a nose hair trimmer, a gadget whose possession was indictment? That evening he bought one, uncomfortable in Sharper Image as an adolescent purchasing his first condom. He flicked it on right after shaving the next morning; the motor gave a whir discreet and reassuring as a Brooks Brothers clerk discussing silk boxers. Step by step he followed the unfolded instructions, rinsing the blade when he was done, then watched the shaving cream and specks of hair bob in the clouded water that was clearly not going anywhere. He was hurrying, head down, around a corner when he ran right into Pemberton. “Felman, is this going to become a habit?” “It—it’s my drain, sir, I’m sorry.” “It was your drain last week.” Pemberton flicked an irritated glance at a potted plant. 150 “That was the tub—it was the sink this time. Sir.” He could not adequately have conveyed the astonishment, mounting minute by minute, with which he’d tugged the unending ugly clog of hair from the drain, like a magician plucking a crepe streamer from his mouth. Could it really all have been hers? “Well get the thing looked at, Felman. They’re all connected.” Pemberton leaned forward, frowning. Whit shrank back. “What’s this?” Whit’s boss plucked, from Whit’s clipboard, a long, luxuriant brown strand that glimmered in the light. “It’s—” “Busy morning, eh Felman?” The end of the strand was caught in the clip and Pemberton gave it a quick tug that snapped it. “Marvelous creature, that girl of yours.” Whit didn’t have the nerve to tell him the truth. “Save a little of that spunk for work, son, and you’ll go far. Remember, business before the old ooh-là-là!” “I couldn’t agree more, sir.” Whit felt Pemberton’s eyes on his white shirt, and looked down to see another hair clinging just above his pocket. He picked that one off himself. *** The first time Whit and Maud made love, they fell asleep entwined, his nose plunged in her hair as in a treasury of flowers, seeking every last whiff of her shampoo. The third Sunday after she moved in, he woke with a sneeze. 151 “Are you cold?” She stirred sleepily beside him, and snuggled closer. “I’m warm, come here.” He rolled away. Often now she woke to find him on the far side of the bed, a white expanse of sheet between having cooled glacially in the night. She tried to close the gap, her head seeking the curve of his shoulder. Her scented hair tickled his nose and cheek, and he marveled that he’d ever slept soundly with his face buried in it. He sneezed again. Then the sniffles started. She sat up. “Is it your allergies?” “Yeah, must be.” Throwing the blankets aside, he climbed out of bed. His suspicion that it wasn’t allergies, but a cold, was confirmed as the day dragged on by an unmistakable trickle of backdrip in his throat that made drinking water unpleasant, so he went instead from mimosas to screwdrivers. There was a company gala that night, an occasion whose importance he had anxiously impressed upon Maud. It was said, to Whit’s public denial and private pleasure, that Pemberton had fixed his sights on him. Whit was convinced the old man would use the occasion to rummage about in his personal life for evidence of his probity. The evening promised to be trying, so Whit kept his cold to himself, preferring to save mention of it up as ammunition. It was difficult, by cocktail time, to tell if his headache was caused by cold or drink, but all through the chatter he wore it like a halo advanced to him in martyrdom. Pemberton himself seemed to have tied on not one but several by the time dinner started. Whit didn’t know whether to take this as a sign to relax, or fret more and be on his best 152 behavior—an indecision brought to crisis when he found himself seated near the cantankerous partner. Thinking to help, Maud inserted herself between them. It was hard to tell which was more tonic to the elderly bachelor: the freely flowing wine or Maud, who sat prettily with her gauze shawl slipped from bare shoulders. It wracked Whit’s nerves to be unable to supervise, or often even overhear, her conversation. Whit was convinced that the restaurant was frigid and complained bitterly to the waiter several times while Maud looked on in concern. The breeze of the waiter bringing the tray of desserts seemed to snake down his spine between damp shirt and moist skin, rooting him to his seat. He started to shiver. The slightest shift in the air caused his skin to prickle and his flesh to crawl. Maud put a cool hand on his forehead. When she pulled it back, she set down her dessert fork with a resigned clink. “Monsieur Pemberton,” she sighed, in tones of infinite forbearance, “it was so nice to meet you at last. I’m afraid Whit is not feeling well. Perhaps you’ll excuse us for the evening?” Maud was walking Whit to the coat check when Pemberton came up behind them and clapped them on the shoulders, popping his aged face between theirs. “It delights me to see two young people happy,” he said with a leer at Maud that put the lie to his benignity. “It’s all one wants, at my age.” The taxi, too, was an arctic compartment. It seemed to Whit that if he held himself very still he would tremble less because he would be in less frequent contact with air that rather treacherously kept moving. Once in the apartment he made straight for bed, leaving Maud in the hall still taking off her shoes to call after him. 153 “Can I make you anything? Tea?” He woke to her sitting at his desk. The sheets were soaked. He tried not to move, to keep the cold from setting in along the damp edges of where he lay, but he felt warmth streaming outward as from somewhere deep inside his body, and had stopped trembling. His fever had broken. She set her book down, in the circle of light from the lamp. “I was sitting here, watching you suffer. You were absolutely still but you were grinding your teeth, and I couldn’t keep my mind on my book. You moaned once.” Slowly she uncrossed her legs, her tense vigil over. “I realized—I love you.” *** The bathroom wasn’t the only place her hair turned up. It seemed every time he rolled over in bed, a few tangled strands showed on the white sheets. Every morning, there were more to pick off and carry, trailing between thumb and finger, to the wastebasket. He feared those moments of transit when they swayed in the air, became invisible, and might slip from his pinched fingertips without his knowing. He moved the wastebasket closer to the bed. He didn’t trust the hair not to waft out when he walked by, so he pressed the trash down firmly each time, then brushed his hands off to be sure no strands stuck to his skin. Hair turned up, at work, in the folders of reports he fanned territorially by night across the kitchen table to disguise its bareness, between the papers he pored over late beneath the kitchen lamp. He excused himself from meetings when his back itched, and pulling off his shirt in the men’s room, invariably discovered an offending strand. He found hair curled, finer than the 154 thinnest ribbon bookmark, in the pages of his paperbacks, and in the cupboard among the cans and cereal. He found it on the newly laundered towels folded in the closet, in the corners, on the counters, along baseboards, tangled up with dust bunnies. He wore out a lint roller cleaning it from collars and dark sweaters he scrutinized, inch by inch, beneath the desklamp. He swept it with crumbs from surfaces. Incredulous, he spotted it dangling from the slits of the heating vent as if it were creeping in through the air ducts. He bought a hand vacuum so he could patrol the apartment untethered by a cord, and mounted the recharger on the wall. Whit didn’t wonder where Maud was. The best part of being rid of her, it seemed, was being able to recollect in tranquility uninfringed upon by this or that importunate habit, the initial heady days when he’d been utterly under her spell, surrendering at each insouciant toss of her head to her charms. She had, all along, gotten her way, from moving in to moving out, but the living together had clearly been a disaster; what else did people do after a bad match but shake hands, good sports? It was only gentlemanly to think the best of her, and that was easier without her around. Besides, he had a secret. At night she came to him in dreams, not of reproach or remorse, but rapturous eroticism. The floor was once again littered with her things, that satchel of a purse with its mouth soft as an anemone’s, a view down to the miscellany of its gullet. On the same warm current to which the purse gently opened and closed, she wafted to him, past the jellyfishes of dresses tossed on mild tides of dishabille, ribbed torsos and skirts belling below, past the flora and fauna attending her, gauzy and sheer, until at the edge of the bed she floated, naked, wreathed luxuriously in hair like Venus rising from the waters, her endless tresses modesty’s demure resort, and opened her arms to him, calling his name. 155 He reached for her, a drowning man. She fell into the bed, but her limbs remained curiously inert while her hair—so much hair it spread to cover the entire surface of the bed— slowly writhed, shifting like the tendrils of a beckoning squid but dense, too, and everywhere, dark and suffocating as a cloud of ink, without scent or taste. “Who are you?” he marveled, searching for her lips. “I don’t know you at all.” She fixed his eyes with her own. “Why won’t you hold me when you sleep?” Her body turned clammy at once and Whit thrashed his way to waking, drawing a huge breath as he surfaced from his sheets. He always got out before it turned bad. At least it was only a dream, and there was work. *** He was leaving for a plane at 8 that morning. She stood with her arms wrapped around her waist as though holding herself, and not just her dressing gown, together. Nothing outside hinted it was six and not the middle of the night: not the hard lights, glinting as though mined from the dark, nor the glowing windows of deserted offices. “But why?” she pleaded. “I don’t understand.” He worked his London Fog onto his shoulders, then from the collar where it had brushed the back of his head, dusted a veritable blizzard of dandruff. Even in the incandescence of the kitchen bulb—a dim unflattering domesticity—her hair, mussed by sleep, kept the silken gloss that had once made it seem to him the only thing in all the world worth having. Women, he thought. If you could just take the good parts, and leave the rest— 156 “Why do you always pick the worst possible times for a fight?” He fumbled in his pocket for a tissue. It wasn’t just the early morning—his nose ran all the time now. He ran a hand through his hair then, disgusted, sought something to wipe his hand with, settling on the crumpled tissue. His hair felt perennially greasy lately, his skin dotted with more pimples than he’d ever had in school. His lips were usually chapped and the corners of his mouth cracked. A sallowness, a haunted lavender, resided under his eyes. “You think I won’t do it. You think I won’t go.” “Look, Christ—I’m barely going to make the plane as is.” He was aware he sounded like a whiny child, even to himself, with his stuffed sinuses. She threw her hands up, letting the gown fall open. “I’ve been such an idiote,” she said, turning and pacing away. “Every accommodation, everything I did, I thought it was because you—” Whit had hoped he wouldn’t have to say this, but it seemed like the only way he was going to get out the door. “Please don’t take this the wrong way— “I mean this literally,” he said, buttoning his jacket, “and not figuratively, because I would never say that, though I know how ridiculous it sounds, and it can’t literally be true, though who knows? Maybe it is, I don’t know, with science today maybe they could tell us about something in your DNA, or mine, but— 157 “We just aren’t right for each other.” He straightened, one hand on the knob, suitcase in the other. She always made him feel loathsome when he was merely, he seemed, being matter of fact. “You make me sick.” Her look then was one of pure hatred, last night’s mascara running at the corners of her eyes. *** Whit leaned into the mirror, trying to angle the nose hair trimmer just right. It would not do to show up at work with unseemly nostrils. The motor’s whir abruptly stopped, as though the trimmer had caught on something. A long chestnut tress dripped from his nose. First one side, and then the other; the ends were pooling in the sink. Hair poured like honey from his ears, spilling on his shoulders to trail down his sides. He stepped backward from the mirror and onto the glossy mass now piled in ribboned layers on the tiled floor, snaring a foot in its slick lengths. The thick hair filled his nostrils; when he opened his mouth to breathe he choked, coughing out a gathered bun that unraveled on his tongue and fell in lissome folds from his lips, hiding teeth and chin. His head sagged forward with the weight. He tugged at it, as if at a fake beard, but his fingers slipped through the curtain of hair to comb it, lovingly, beneath the light it turned to stunning sheen. Panicking, he knotted fingers in the locks and yanked and felt, from deep inside his belly, the flow of glossy coils jerk and quicken, as if he were nothing but a hollowed doll filled with hair, with a crank a child could turn to make it spew forth. Whit woke up. 158 His hands leapt to his face, finding smeared across it like a cobweb a few strands of hair, which he tore away. He struggled upright, sweating as he had from fever, to find across the room the desklamp on. A book lay open, facedown in the circle of light, just below the shelf that had been hers: the shelf whose emptiness seemed to persist behind the books he’d filled it with. He rose and almost fell, surprised to find himself unsteady on his feet. His mind was remarkably clear, but his legs felt weak, his skin moist, and his clothes thin upon him. There was no wall to reach out for in the open space, so on hands and knees he advanced across a floor that seemed to slant like the deck of a ship. Reaching up, he slid from the shelf the envelope with its letter, its Polaroids, and its lock of hair. He threw these in the trash. Still on his knees, he gathered the bag, though it was half-empty, sealed it with a knot, and dragged it to the hall where, with it swinging from one hand, he stepped out of the apartment in bare feet. He ran past the elevators, the emergency stairwell, to the small room that was never locked, with its cable box and bundles of cardboard for recycling, opened the small square door of dented metal, and tossed the bag down the dark chute. *** Life is haircuts. Life is bills. Life is paychecks, and picking up the milk with its sell-by date, and a new tube of toothpaste when the old one surprises us by running out suddenly and at last. More faithfully and meaningfully than calendar months, time’s passing was brought personally home to Whit by nothing so outlandish as looking up, in line to buy a subway pass, at the memory of 159 how four weeks ago he had stood in this exact spot, thinking: already? Six haircuts later, Whit Felman told the barber to go ahead and cut it short; it was getting warm out. “How short, sir?” “Surprise me. Go hog wild. I’m in the mood for something new.” His eyes were on the barber, but the mirror beamed his grin back at himself. “I just got a promotion.” “Congratulations.” The barber, hands folded behind him, gave a courtly little bow in his white jacket. A short Romanian with a salt and pepper mustache and something of the Old World in his manner, he was as deft of movement as he was sparing of words. The lack of chatter suited Whit just fine. He was soon done, and Whit, who liked to close his eyes for the duration, opened them on the mass of his own hair, rough and scrappy on the checkered floor. Briefly, he almost expected it to jump up and bite him, like a dog, but with a swipe of the barber’s broom it disappeared into a dustpan. “What do you think?” The barber held the hand mirror behind Whit’s head, but it was something Whit saw dead on, in the reflection before him, that caught his eye. Without shifting his gaze he reached back, took the mirror from the barber, and brought it right before his face, staring all the while at what the clippers had uncovered. From under the gown then, his other hand reached for his gently lowered head, as though to certify, with the touch of his fingers, his first gray hair. 160 The Blue Room “Time is so old, and love so brief / Love is pure gold, and time a thief.” ~ Maxwell Anderson I. This is a simple tale, and quickly told. In a land we all know so well I won’t bother to name it was a high hill, and perched atop that hill, a tall castle that proudly oversaw the surrounding countryside. Today the pennants on its slender towers crack smartly in a gentle breeze, and any ivy scaling the walls only adds prestige to their refurbished stone. Now that leisured travel is the fashion, the town at the foot of the hill is an obligatory stop for burghers and their ample families in splendid coaches, entertaining their children and cultivating their daughters for marriage. The castle is open on Tuesdays and Saturdays, and visitors, having climbed the spiral steps in the north keep, may pause to catch their breath before the crib, the spindle, and the virginal bedroom, from which they are kept by a velvet rope. For quite some time ago now, as you know—when your grandmother’s mother was still too young to play in the dusty courtyard for fear she’d fall into the well—the castle was obscured by a brittle and malevolent thicket of briars. From their ebony barbs fluttered scraps of silk and velvet in the royal colors of neighboring lands, torn from the raiments of enterprising princes as with sword and buckler they braved the wicked branches. It was one such prince, in fact, drowning his failure in a stein more froth than ale—for princes are spoiled boys and cannot hold their beer—who first gave the hatchet-faced thief the idea. II. 161 It was only our second date when, returning from dessert, she laid her head on my shoulder and dozed off. The subway late that night was a picture book of slumber: laborers with open mouths and heads thrown back, smearing windows; waiters with unknotted ties, nodding into collars; and, slumped against a glass partition, queers of velour sportcoat and positively Seussian pompadour, like courtiers from some lavender castle. Sometime in my twenties I had lost the knack of sleeping in public; those golden student afternoons, dissolving in a blissful nap beside an unnamed fountain in some quaint forgotten square, were gone, along with a certain trust of my surroundings, and I associated this loss with increased canniness. The warm weight of her head on my shoulder made me feel at once vulnerable and watchful. Her pure, unburdened brow in sleep seemed to invite threat, but the arm I might have raised in defense her two entwined and pinned between us. I never closed my eyes. There is the city with an unfamiliar woman on your arm. Everywhere, it seems—down a block, around a corner—on the verge of coming true. At the foot of her building, you look up to seek a window from a life that intimacy more imminent than daydreamed has brought closer, as fruit bows the limb of a tree. Her front door opened on a dim hall crossed at its far end by a lozenge of moonlight. At the flick of a switch, a lamp in a sconce fizzled and went out. I hesitated; what I remember then was proceeding almost unwilled at a stately, inevitable pace, as though my feet were inches from the floor, past the bathroom and the bicycle against the wall. The restaurant, the theatre, the café—all the evening’s rooms—seemed physically continuous, an elaborate and narrowing succession disclosing at its end this tiny corridor. When we speak of life being like a fairy tale, we mean, I think, not elves, or children’s stories, or even wondrous and patent impossibility, but a series of self-accomplishing events, fated and ordained, in which our trancelike presence seems to play no part. We ride the golden ploughwheel between the walls of 162 flame, and no sooner does the sword fall into our hands, than the dragon’s fate is sealed. On the threshold of her bedroom she turned with a smile, sat down on her fourposter, and to my chagrin, fell asleep. III. The thief was sitting in the far back corner of the tavern, his hood still shadowing his eyes, and watched as the red-ringleted wench all but pressed the prince’s face into her bosom. Rain from his hood dripped into his twopenny bock, for the weather outside was miserable, but not as miserable as the drunken prince’s caterwauling. He turned his sharp face in the prince’s direction and listened. It sounded too good to be true, but to the thief’s surprise, the castle was almost exactly as the princeling had described between sobs: guardsmen with still-helmeted heads pillowed on the ramparts while their armor rusted at the joints, and inside, ladies-in-waiting collapsed on the steps in an enchanted faint. In the great hall, lords and ladies snoozed face-down in platters of food long since rotted, but the rats that might have stripped the suckling pig bare were snoring fast away on flagstones. The thief counted toppled chalices, medallions heavy round the necks of slumped courtiers, rings and scepters and decanters, and decided that he’d need to come back with a bigger bag. It was better than a burgher’s house left unlocked while the family summered by the sea. IV. Was I insulted? At the very least, nonplussed. I am a great lover—of women’s apartments. I slip from a stranger’s sheets, it seems, and through a tear in the very fabric of existence to some 163 secret, closely guarded part of their lives. The city is a vast gathering of rooms, like a gallery or palace. In each of these we curate, on shelves and windowsills, the exhibits of our lives, while around us brick and cinderblock wrap themselves in bastions, keeps, apartment buildings, walling out the stranger who, with a last wistful glance, lowers his head and hurries on his lonely way. There is in every bachelor, I think, something of this stranger, who arrives in a city with the sum of his earthly things in a tattered suitcase. Evening is falling on the avenues, the parks and the restaurants, and who are those people in the warm amber light with the wine and the bread and their faces full of laughter? The city hides its lives from us, which we seduce into divulgence. I was enchanted to learn the single life consisted largely of moving through these moonlit showrooms of dormant furniture. Doesn’t the path of every man lead him through a labyrinth of offices, garages, lobbies and suites, cafés and showers and living rooms, each step taking him further inside, until he is enfolded in the life he’ll call his own? We all know the dream of doors, paneled in rich leather and studded with brass tacks, opening one after the next until… In her bedroom, blue and muted bulbs dangled from the curtain rod, their soft glow catching in the sheer weave of a veil that cascaded from the canopy like a sunlit fall of dust made fabric. On the nightstand, a pink tassel trailed from an ornate leather diary beside a brass spyglass, but neither there or on the dresser did I spy a clock. V. During this time, a mysterious procurer gained fame among the sellers of secondhand jewelry in nearby kingdoms. You have seen these suspect merchants before, out of the corner of your eye, scuttling from shadow to shadow over the cobblestones: small men, all bald, whether shriveled 164 or portly, keeping cramped shop at the ends of the twistiest lanes. These men do business in goods of dubious origin, acquired from procurers more mysterious still. The one I’ve mentioned was known variably as Uncle Jake, Delaunay, Rattapallats, Göttinger, Fabrizio—a list of names as long or longer than the list of sellers he supplied. He was short, he was tall, he was slender, he was stout; he had a gold tooth or a wooden leg, his hair was thinning or a youthful straw-blond mop; he had an earring, a missing finger, a mole above his lip sprouting a single hair, a burn like a map on the back of his hand; he clomped about on a boot with a thick heel or else the sprightly bounce in his step was unmistakable. One and all, these sellers trembled with greed at the thought of someday getting their hands on the vast storehouse of treasures it seemed the procurer must, somewhere in the world, have hidden away. For object after object he brought them was of uncommon splendor and luxury. Filigreed timepieces, silver gravy boats, pendants heavy with enormous gems, cut-crystal candlesticks, brocaded chasubles: all these passed from his hands, through the sellers’, into those of distant barons, rajahs, and caliphs. And in the tavern under the sign of the surprised pig (hoisted aloft at its midriff by a black chain), the red-haired serving wench, alone in her garret, took from hiding every night a ring with a garnet the size of an infant’s heart and admired it on a hand chapped from scrubbing dishes. VI. I crossed the doorway of moonlight fallen on the floor. The scene seemed familiar, if only from commercials and romances: that room where the breeze from the starry night, stirring the gauze curtains, seems both to carry and embody a longing voice from the gramophone. In fact one such gramophone, with its gilded lily of an amplifier, perched on an antique cabinet in a corner of the living room. Trailing my finger through the dust on the record to the cabinet-top revealed a stripe 165 of marquetry. By the foam green sofa squatted a globe of sea glass bound in wire, which a cord snaking into the dark gave away as a lamp. Flaking paint lent relief to the petals of the dahlias on a decorative box. Call it stalling. Call it dawdling. I was doing here what I did in life. I knew a girl who loved me, but I was dating others. I had an apartment waiting, but I preferred to prowl a stranger’s. What was I holding out for? What did I hope to find? More urgently, how long could I make it last? The same blue desuetude suffused the kitchen. Now and then, a breeze entered from the living room and, without so much as turning a page of the cookbook open on the counter, left by the open window. A potted creeper on the bookcase cast trailing vines in a proprietary embrace. I peered at the spines through this delicate curtain of vegetable neglect. Her belongings—quaint, curious, each with its distinct and dated personality—were an eclectic set of refugees; in this shelter from disaster they paid their owner silent tribute. The relics, the antiques, the trinkets—there was an artlessness, even naiveté, to her choice of decoration, as if arrested in some earlier era of hope. Time spent waiting for some wish to be fulfilled seemed to account for the sense of a life in abeyance. VII. The blond man was rangy, with a hatchet face, as quick to smile as he was to narrow his eyes. He was neither handsome nor sweet-natured, but he always had a gift for the red-haired wench when he passed through, for he claimed she was the source of his good fortune. He wasn’t the only one to give her gifts—she was a simple creature with a great deal of sympathy, and many men found her a welcome shoulder for their woes—but the blond man’s ring, which had surprised her, was 166 her favorite. She knew better than to believe it a pledge from someone she saw so rarely and knew so little about. But there are faces that we come to love for want of seeing them, and one day we are surprised, humming some common, maudlin song of love, to have them come suddenly to mind. This very thing, it seemed, had befallen the thief, who in his patient explorations of the castle had come across the blue room in the north keep. There, beside a spindle glinting in the moonlight, a princess slept. She wasn't the ugliest princess the thief had ever seen, but she was far from the fairest. He couldn't see what all the fuss was about. He could well imagine some vain prince who'd hacked his way in past briar and serpent to balk at the final moment, bending over her face. Someday her prince would come, but meanwhile, her looks weren't doing her half the favors her legend was. He moved about the room, opening drawers, rifling chests, plucking treasures from a high shelf like fruit from a tree. He paid her no more mind than he did the red- haired tavern wench with the beseeching smile on whom he carelessly bestowed this or that worthless trinket. Soon the princess’ jewelry box stood empty and her coffers bare, and though there was nothing left to steal in the palace, the thief returned through the thorns and brambles, past the dragon that did not deign to notice him, simply to stand in the blue room and gaze upon the princess. That tragedies befall the beautiful exalts our sense of rightness, of how the world and stories work. It seemed almost unfair she should be plain and suffer so, as though a fate reserved for someone else had befallen her, as though a chambermaid had pricked her finger on the spindle meant for her mistress. One night when the red-haired serving wench, sitting on the thief’s knee and mussing his blonde hair, tried to kiss him on the mouth, he turned away. That 167 night, he refused her nothing but his lips. He was gone the next morning before daybreak, and the serving wench woke and wept, for she knew she would not see him again. VIII. Love loves sleeping things: whose heart doesn’t go out to cats curled up in the sun? Who hasn’t, for a moment, been Psyche admiring Cupid in the dark? You can watch someone sleep the way you possess a photo, among the most intimate and yet solitary of acts: rapaciously, invasively, completely. I’m never more in love than when, waking drowsy in the night from warmth and perfume, it seems I’ve somehow, for a spellbound moment, become a part of someone else’s life, privy to her every hidden yearning and sorrow. I see these in the shaped soap on the bathroom sill, the earrings in the saucer on the dresser, and I am always flooded with relief that when the sun comes up they won’t be mine. For once a part of something, we no longer have the satisfaction of watching ourselves in it. I can live whole lives in a single night. I can believe in anything, as long as it’s not real. For the second time that night, I stood at the threshold to her bedroom. The gauzy curtain in the blue glow seemed a fairy scrim reducing her to rumor, an already bleary memory from a faintly unlikely night. I moved to kiss her—on the forehead—but I couldn’t. Still, I wanted something to remember her by. On my way out, I plucked a slim, familiar volume from the kitchen shelf—a childhood favorite—and slipped it into my pocket. Not all of us are meant for princesses, but stories are for everyone. IX. 168 At this point, the tale becomes muddled. From rumor and hearsay we can, with perseverance and no little patience, reconstruct three separate accounts of what might have happened to the thief, each in its own way plausible, each giving the lie to all the others, but the true thread is lost, and no official version exists. As you know, the palace woke to a prince’s kiss. The evil sorceress lay slain at the gates, his sword through her heart, and the wall of briars vanished as if it had never been. Jubilation ensued, and pomp on such an order as only royalty can muster. In the immediate festivities for the wedding, an aging footman was surprised in the princess’ chambers with his hand in the jewelry box. Nothing was found to be missing, nor the rest of the room, but it was assumed the theft had been prevented in the nick of time. The footman claimed, preposterously, to be putting jewels back. The case was brought before the new king, who was inclined not only to be clement, but to grant his bride’s every wish. When asked why she interceded on the thief’s behalf, his bride said: I have seen him before, in a dream. The court laughed politely—surely the dreams of their queen-to-be had been many and various—while the servants were flattered that she thought of them in sleep. The footman was dismissed, but suffered no greater punishment. Only later, when the dust of celebration of settled, did an inventory reveal other missing items: filigreed timepieces, silver gravy boats, pendants heavy with enormous gems, cut-crystal candlesticks, brocaded chasubles. Still, these were as single coins in the castle’s inexhaustible hoard. No one gave them much thought but the court clerks, who could no more reconcile the ledgers than locate a record of employment for the footman, and as he stepped from the pages of their books so he now steps from ours. There were those who didn’t welcome the return of order to the realm. In the absence of a king there had been strife, petty clashes, and penury; counties quarreled and the roads between 169 them through the stands of dark wood grew unsafe at night. But this lawless place was ideally suited to a clever man with a quick hand and a cold heart. Those who had lived free withdrew to the great woods, where they might continue their thieving ways and protest what they considered tyranny’s yoke. One such was a mysterious highwayman known as Göttinger. He was broad as an oak with a fearsome patch over his left eye, and the years that had greyed his blond beard only made him cannier and more cutthroat an opponent. Though he swore bitter enmity to the throne, the bandit proved a greater tyrant to the people of the forest, whom he ruled by fear. And so the ballad lives on of how the bandit king waylaid a royal convoy one dark evening in the woods. Guardsmen lay slain with arrows in their chests, or stood terrified with knives at their throats. The plunder was swift and thorough—the trunks lay gaping and the saddlebags ransacked—but when Göttinger’s lieutenant barked for the passengers to descend from the carriage, the queen emerged onto the muddy road. It was as if he’d seen her somewhere before, the lieutenant later said, but had never expected to meet her again, least of all in the forest he called home. The lieutenant had never thought to find a weakness in the man he’d loved, hated, fought, and slept beside for twelve years, but he knew when Göttinger commanded them to free the queen unharmed that the bandit king had gone soft at last. His reign was over, and if his lieutenant didn’t kill him that very night some upstart would within a month, making for himself a name he’d never earned. So it was the highwayman was found the next morning with a dagger in his chest, and few mourned his passing. But what of the red-haired serving wench? She of all creatures on earth deserves a happy ending, or as close to it as we are likely to get, and when we see her next, it is by the sea, beside a mansion on a verdant hill. In the backyard, she is hanging the washing out to dry—how white it is, in the sunlight! how it billows with the sea breeze as she lifts it from her basket—in a mobcap 170 and a frilly apron while about her four children laugh and tumble in the grass: two tow-headed boys and two strawberry blonde girls, all her own. A woman hurries to her from the terrace door, asks a question, bows, and scurries back, and as we realize this woman is a maid, well might we wonder: why is a woman now the mistress of a household hanging her own laundry? Old habits die hard, or perhaps she simply likes the feel of freshly washed fabric in her hands. From the upstairs window a portly man, pipe in hand, smiles with satisfaction at this scene. We hear he is a rich and much admired trader, a pillar of the local community, known for his fairness and wisdom in matters of business. The town by the sea is proud to have him as a citizen, and there is talk next year, which he affably discourages, of nominating him for mayor. His sons’ sons, when they are grown and have inherited the trade, will take their families on holiday to visit castles in foreign lands and listen to fanciful tales of chivalry and magic, while from a frame at the top of the stairs, his portrait watches with dignity over the empty house. His thinning hair doesn’t bother his loving wife in the least—it leaves her more of his head to dote on. When a sudden gust sends a sheet waving like a flag, their gazes meet across the lawn and she blows him a kiss. X. You know how this story ends. Not long after, I was married. A girl from work, whom I had known for years. A country wedding, on a comely lawn. Hats were pinned to perfect buns, ties straightened over freshly pressed shirts; a light breeze, at its fiercest, toyed with the tassels of the priest’s stole. Noon shot through the silken tent, radiant in the trembling fabric as the ardent benison in faces turned toward the bride. In this veiled light—almost violet, like daytime behind eyes shut against the sun—I watched my wife-to-be draw closer on her father’s arm. 171 The reception found the guests scattered, buzzing between tables where the luncheon lay ignored. Men fanned themselves with programs, jackets open; women checked their makeup. A cake decked in candied pansies, ordered by the mother of the bride, lay with its serving trowel in a slight defeat, worn down as much by celebration as the humid afternoon. Fathers with rolled sleeves whirl their toddlers. Turning to the tables laden with gifts, I had a vision of a bed with perfect coverlet where silverware and candlesticks suddenly came crashing down in a hail of worldly weight. A few days after returning from our honeymoon, my wife and I were kneeling in the new apartment, unwrapping wedding presents and jotting notes for thank-you cards. A gravy boat, a serving dish, a parliament of cutlery… She took a stack of perfectly matched plates of regal bearing and passed them to me, beaming. Without thinking, I reached out for them—and suddenly drew back, as if afraid of breaking some remembered spell. 172 The Museum of the Future apologies to S.M. “How could you communicate with the future? It was of its nature impossible. Either the future would resemble the present, in which case it would not listen to him: or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless.” ~ George Orwell, 1984 I. The Museum of the Future is located in an outlying district for which further development was planned, but never realized. It may be reached by taking northbound buses 6 or 23A, or the spur route of the green metro line to the final stop. The station sits behind the desk of a vast plaza which it supervises, with its massive clock, like a concrete bureaucrat. Emerging from this terminus we seem to face, with the sun just beginning its ascent, a desert of human manufacture, 173 were it not for the gaiety of a lone gelato vendor under a striped umbrella. From there, the museum is a ten-minute walk. As we proceed through this concentric suburb past houses with their spruce lines, all of a piece, the lingering impression is one of uniformity imposed on a staggering scale, an attempt to transcend the present with design. Yet if seen from above, the neighborhood might have the forlorn air of a tattered spiderweb, in which can still be discerned the original radial arrangement, however interrupted: here by a run-down dwelling, there by a gaping excavation for one never built, while all around unfinished streets run dry in gravel piles backed by unplanned woods. The era of exuberant experiment is over. A shaggy hedge extends unkemptness towards us as if in greeting, and a toppled marble bust nestles by a broken mower in the weeds. The museum itself remains an imposing edifice, conceived on a colossal scale the air of gentle desolation does little to dispel. It is hard to tell from the mottled concrete whether the façade is blank from wear or still awaiting ornament. To our left, the oblong pool holds only old 174 leaves; the stricken plaster of its basin is pale blue as though recalling skies the vanished waters once reflected. Dandelions push up between the fitted flagstones. Interest in the future begins with disappointment. II. A gigantic hourglass fills the atrium of the museum’s entrance. The future, that immense and sandy mass, flees grain by speeding grain into the past through the blinding transit of the present. The hourglass requires no periodic upending; in a gesture toward infinitude, the sand in the upper bulb is mysteriously replenished. We have often wondered why a technology so anachronistic— though some say timeless— was chosen to greet visitors to the museum. And really, the concealed mechanism must be rather simple, on the order of the detached faucet that, from midair, releases a torrent barely hiding the plastic column within, through which water cycles up to fall again. We recall such gimmicks and enticements from the fairs and midways of our youths, with all their noise and garish lights, and this causes a certain resentment, amplifying our befuddlement, for isn’t the future meant to be altogether different from everything we’ve ever known? And yet 175 the actual mechanism remains satisfyingly mysterious. Engineer fathers, with their families in tow, can only offer guesses on the process. From time to time, sand in the upper bulb shifts, resettles. A reflected skylight makes an opaque shape on the perfectly transparent glass. III. We are delighted by the miscellany of moving walkways in the Hall of Transport: walkways encased in corridors of colored glass, walkways under sectioned canvas awnings, walkways rising at steep angles, walkways corkscrewing slowly floorward from great heights. Shadows dapple us, waft and ripple past, and for a moment we might be forgiven for believing ourselves on the ocean floor, so various are the airships that dally and meander overhead: the fanciful airphibians, the discopters, the gyroyachts, the flying wings. Busy ogling the countless conveyances, we realize only belatedly that although we have stopped in our tracks—are, in fact, standing stock still—we have not ceased to advance: beneath our feet, our own moving walkway bears us imperturbably along, at a stately pace suited to admiring the sights without letting our eyes linger on any single one. For there is a secret the museum’s curators know well: it is in glimpses, flashes, shards that the future lodges most deeply in the heart, pieces of a dream or puzzle our memories return relentlessly to reassemble. 176 IV. With what vintage rollick the young songwriter serenades his upright, which perforates his tune onto a parchment roll! His dramatist roommate, dictating to a speakwrite, is nearly tearing his hair out over the racket. The dioramas continue downstairs. Guests at a dinner party have gathered to enjoy the opera remotely via telephonoscope, and in the boudoir next door, a lady preparing for the evening rollerglides behind a dressing screen, faces of the latest cabaret sensations forming and dissolving on its magisilk. From the nightstand, an olfagraph releases sweet oleander into the air. Outside, a taxicopter chattering receipts delivers a gentleman caller in a one-piece Dacron tuxedo. The future is busy. Bobbing, weaving, pointing, we press on through this congestion of invention, this chaos of progress. We almost fail to duck as the monoflyer on its single rail makes a roller coaster swoop just past our heads. About to run us over, a hoverflivver takes abruptly to the air, oblivious to the whistle of an autocop. Youngsters snapping hormone gum bop by in mopods and helibeanies on their way to Maze Tennis and Obstacle Golf, and in the oncoming lane, a tricar commuter breaks bread with his neighbor from a battery-powered toaster. Between city blocks yoked together by wires, a funambulator propellers its way with a dainty teeter down a laundry line, collecting shirts with 177 precise pincers. Cocooned in a whir of automation, the portly robot chef, each of whose twenty- nine flailing limbs end in a kitchen implement, blinks dismay from the bulbs dotting its tin torso. Lighted signage promotes hyperzippers, canine dentures, and in neo-neon that has lost some of its sizzle, autofrott showers at hourly hotels. Critics have quite rightly pointed out there is a great deal of gimcrackery in the Hall of Gadgetry: the moon capsule with its upholstered salon, the pedal-powered pogomobile, the empathic soda fountain, the threever, the spherical atomic folly, the astrodavenport… the wave of junk and clutter banks, threatening to drown us in hokiness, but already we are climbing toward the the exocoupe with its three headlights on a dais of pink glass, pointing the way out with its nose. A gentle but insistent wind from that darkened doorway makes its form, its fins, its trim, the ribboned light along its polished chrome all seem arrowed at a single whispered word—tomorrow—and this would be our last impression of the hall, were it not for an old man in a cardigan nearby. Only his shoulders, hunched against the wind from beyond, and the occasional shiver betray him as a visitor, instead of a museum mannequin. With his back to the exit, he stands rapt before the display of the levitating lounger. A faint round print, as though from use, depresses the yellowed doily of the headrest; on the seat lies a folded paper, its front page forever showing the same grainy five-second footage of a zeppelin. A sleeping dog lies curled beneath the floating ottoman with its tasseled fringe. The scene, bathed in an amber glow, glazes the codger’s spectacles, tingeing a single memorial tear. V. 178 In fact, an unbroken series of moving walkways paves museum corridors between the themed Halls. Sometimes visitors may be seen pausing in these halls with an absent air: their ears have picked up the walkways’ near hum, as of a river that locates us in a wood. Once we know to listen for it, we are apt now and then to tune in, then resume our journey oddly refreshed and reassured. Some have speculated these moving walkways are meant to sustain the illusion that the future will be delivered to us without our having to lift a finger. Such is its imminence that we need only stand and wait to come into our own, heirs to a kingdom of confirmed prediction. 179 Others claim it is rather the reverse: that we, instead, are being delivered forward. Itching, twisting, aching, slouching, saddled with cameras or suffering our children’s tugs and pleas, lost in thought or plunged in conversation, fervently awaiting or utterly oblivious, we are with every moment and in every attitude brought closer to the future, whether we like it or not. Black and sleek, the placid belts roll on, tines glinting in the muted light. VI. What first strikes us in the Hall of the White City is its blancheur and éclat. The noonday of Cartesian reason seems to tumble from the rows of slanted glass above to bless this resplendent scale model. For although the White City is far less than life size— our gazes travel at eye level the fiftieth stories of towers, and we could, if we wished, rest a casual elbow on a ledge of stepped skyscraper—the reigning impression is nevertheless one of monumentality. By our ankles, broad and stately boulevards fan out like winning hands. The lithe passerelles of the heights remain out of reach, and gloriously crowned by the sun from whatever angle we crane our necks to squint at them. 180 Some visitors are content to be awed by the White City. Perhaps it is their first time; perhaps they are susceptible to beauty, or among those to whom hope comes easily, and often. We find these people everywhere, the very lifeblood of museums, admiring with soft gasps the sunflowers or poised apples no matter the artist’s style or school. To others, the White City is simply an outsized architectural maquette, as if inflated with the pomp of civic promise. The whiteness of the buildings is a curdled dream. How eagerly they’ve waited for the White City to come true—how terribly, unforgivably long. If only they could tear in rage through the display, avenging disappointment! Still other visitors wander the White City with their minds on the laundry, the roast marinating at home in the fridge. In its clean lines they see sterility. Where is the grit, the smoke, the sewer smell, the groans of trucks and honks of thwarted cars and cursing pushcart vendors? Chafing at the silence of their fellows, they keep up a steady stream of gossip with their friend— 181 they never come alone—about who misbehaved at last night’s party. Their minds fizz, populating the White City with a thousand cares and worries, reducing it to the level of their own distraction. Finally, some visitors are quieted, even subdued. We find them already weary in this, one of the museum’s first rooms. The men are studies in gray, and a few strands of the ladies’ hair have come loose from whatever holds it. In their unfocused gaze, the White City seems its truest self: an assembly of curiously vacant façades whose blankness they meet with their own. Are these pristine walls a tabula rasa or, more likely, a reflection of inner exhaustion beyond both hope and disappointment? And so, coats folded over their arms and slipping down their laps, they wait for the future they have given up imagining to impose itself upon them, to become inevitable. VII. In the Museum, the future is not restricted to exhibits; the very architecture bodies forth futurity. The walls’ immense expanses race up, wordless and replete, melting into rarified heights. The pyramids and cones, the saucers and paraboloids disposed about have the splendor of platonic forms. And in these vast, impartial spaces, visitors to the Museum of the Future sometimes seem engaged in a curious game of hide and seek. Husbands, pivoting with a 182 quip to find their wives gone, may spot them framed smartly by a steel arch. Mothers calling for their children may, on turning toward an echoing reply, feel their gazes funneled down a torqued arcade to the vanishing point. Having climbed the spiral sweep of a suspended ramp, we emerge onto a massive, empty mezzanine where, as if to furnish scale for some supreme portraiture, we are the only human figure. These visions give us a dizzying déjà vu—what is it they remind us of? And opening the brochure to orient ourselves, we find our answer. On page after page, the architecture of the future seems to conscript us, with careful compositions, into the authority of its geometry. Clustered, staggered, segregated, posed, austerely decentered or strategically distant, we are forced by features to conform, subjects of setting, elements of an absolute décor. For if anything the future is a totality, and possesses a supernal coherence. It comes all at once, or not at all. At such moments, there seem to be two museums: the one where we stand, and another, purely on paper. It is this second museum that we set out from home today, lured by the brochure, to visit. And with a creeping sense of disenfranchisement, we wonder how we wound up here instead. For the museum where we stand seems, strangely, somehow less than the sum of its photos—or rather, less than the world suggested by that sum, beyond the edges of the frames. 183 In this light, the game of hide and seek among the visitors takes on an altogether different air. And in their faces we now see fulfillment or surprise not at found parents or partners, but at glimpses of something else hiding in plain sight, more conjecture than locale. VIII. Docents wear white, the preferred color of the future. Their seamless uniforms blend in with the spotless walls and, when glimpsed in distant galleries, they seem to be disembodied heads bobbing about. Here and there a head pauses, bent forward with a kindly smile to address a child. Its hushed speech is cadenced, stately; its attitude unfailingly attentive and obliging. In these postures approaching some ideal of solicitude, the docents can seem like oracular automata, roving interfaces of a master computer. But drawing close for questions, we see crow’s feet to either side of the men’s clear gazes, gray traces in the hair pulled back from the women’s brows. And of course, there is no master computer. Docents are engaged on a strictly volunteer basis ever since the museum suffered severe budget cuts. 184 IX. In the course of our visit, we encounter room after immaculately furnished room which, it seems, someone has just left. The sliding door of floor-to-ceiling glass stands open on the empty patio; the impeccably positioned cushions provide swatches of apposite color by the pool. Beckoned by its seemly waters, we pace its rectilinearity and, through a portal in the far hedge, find a further living room with floating globes shedding soft light on a table of smoked glass. From yet another salon, we survey a green lawn where, among discreetly situated white stones, two chaise longues slung low from bright steel bars bask 185 in a startling mimicry of morning sun. And on, and on, tickled by an impish sense of trespass, drawn forward as if by the echo of footsteps, overheard laughter, the updraft of someone’s passing, we plunge deeper into these deserted chambers after our vanished hosts. 186 Who are they, the people who lead such a charmed life? How different it must be, of another order altogether, one in harmony with the lithe vase in its alcove and the intuitive canvas centered on the otherwise bare wall. In fact, as we look around, we are increasingly aware that it is we who sound the false note: we, with our dazed eyes and faintly aching feet, and always in the wrong clothes. Where are the undone tie, the kicked-off heels, the sentimental tchotchkes, the coats slumped on a sofa arm after a long day at the office? We dare not disturb the artful disposition of glasses on the oval coffee table, or even perch in rest on so much as a corner of the teledivan with its untouched smartpillows. We have with piercing clarity pictured surroundings that exalt and inspire us, but failed ourselves to make the matching transit, and in the scheme of their garden, this thought is a serpent. Heads bowed, we hurry from the room, lest another visitor should, on rounding a corner, chance upon us, and we should ruin, if even for a moment, the illusion of flawless appointment. 187 X. A balcony of glass and brushed steel supervises a view of roofless cubicles repeated in a grid across the floor. Our eyes tire as quickly of counting them as of inventorying their glumly identical contents: a chair, a desk, a filing cabinet, a waxen potted plant with dusty leaves. We have come, in the years since the height of its popularity, to recognize this as the very landscape of drudgery. For the Hall of Work belongs firmly to the past, a future we believed left behind. Indeed, the curators would long ago have closed it, but for a curious ritual that visitors lingering through evening may witness. On certain weekdays after business hours, a sea of seeming employees will flood the hall, purposeful of stride: the men in gray flannel, the women providing color in chic but decorous dresses. While bars outside the museum are filling up for happy hour, they hang their hats and open their briefcases on vacant desks, taking out folders, paperweights, framed photos. Then, men and women alike, they embark on an elaborate and unsmiling pantomime of work. An escalator brings us down for a closer look. 188 Once among them, we are startled by their youth. And the framed photos they set beside the phones are not of their children, but of their own childhood. For they are all young enough for someone to still think of them as children—if, in some cases, only they themselves. There is a penitential aspect to their postures in their cubicles—awaiting, like a monk or a nun in a cell, some confirmation. Watching them, we are moved by their devotions. For one and all, bent studiously over a document or conferring intently by a coatrack, they carry out their self-imposed tasks with the devout and utmost gravity of children at play. With their the smooth, rehearsed, and almost automatic motions, it is as if they are living out some memory of labor, enslaved to an outmoded seemliness; as if the only real work of the world occurred in offices like these, to which their parents once led them by the hand—that there, some seriousness since mislaid still awaits them, and never in their own offices of loosened ties and t-shirt Tuesdays, pinball break rooms and four-thirty board meetings with beer. XI. 189 Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow: will our eyes never tire of this undifferentiated dazzle? In fact at our temples insist the faint beginnings of a headache, the residue of appreciative effort; we seek a blind and quiet spot, unassailed by any marvels imploring admiration. The doors ahead gently part. A corridor whose lavender cedes stealthily to violet delivers us into a beguiling gloom where, with eyes that strain as though through falling evening, we see a family relaxing. Mom sits on a sunken couch encircling a low table where a fuzzy miniature of Sis sprouts from the vidcube, gesticulating in fluorescent armlets. Overhead, the holocalder’s balanced pendants turn idly in a virtual breeze. Junior orchestrates palettes, practicing scales on his chromatic theremin, and our gaze, moving past Dad and his crystal garden out the picture window, is drawn up into the massive sweep of a toroidal colony as its landscape, beneath a suave curve of paneled sky, bends out of view. A blue unbroken lake runs down the middle, between a neat quilt of farms and green repeated yards. Outside, capsules scuttle to and fro among the stars. Here in the universal suburbia, leisure has come into its promised land. So convincing is the scene we almost feel a thrum, the implacable rotation underfoot that like the earth’s keeps the tumblers on their coasters. 190 In a lighted alcove to our left, a silver megahabitation soars from the depths of Valles Marineris, rising higher than the neighboring stone spires to brush young clouds. Buttes and mesas, carpeted in crops, bear witness to the verdant desert. Here the future’s spaciousness is made a garden, and its flower is the family that, in the glass bubble of a sunroom perched at the chasm’s edge, barbecues away a Sunday afternoon. Dad #1 hangs up his jetpack by the hot tub on the redwood deck. Dad #2 ticks boxes in the weather preferendum on a tactual slate. Their daughter putters over aeroponic bonsai. Here our rituals are perpetuated intact into our tomorrows. With a hum of wingines, rainmakers pass overhead. The house slowly revolves to turn its back to the wind. 191 The Hall of Domesticity is sometimes called the heart of the museum. And many credit its lasting popularity to its evident ties with tradition. For the silhouettes of visitors against the bright displays, the black flooring in whose scuffed varnish the dioramas become a blurred glow— these remind us of nothing so much as the museums of our childhoods, with their cavemen in bear pelts, their sabre-toothed tigers, their alert and regal elk. And just as in those museums, on days school trips have stretched unbearably long, we surrender to a curious somnolence, a magical disorientation. For if this is the future, why should it feel so much like coming home? The dim solemnity, on the verge of dream, extends a promise of haven and, enfolded in these early memories, we watch a mother readying dinner. The chronofridge informs her which 192 vegemins and vitables are about to expire. She wears a flowered terry apron over her moodsuit, currently a tranquil green. From a screen in the wall, her partner promises to be home soon. Curled up in a convex porthole, a toddler in cadet pajamas makes faces at his pet dolphin nosing the glass. The kitchen trembles in a net of blue glimmer and seaweed shadows, imbricate traceries of light. It seems we have come to these scenes a prodigal, a penitent, and after all these years, a stranger—a crescent of reflected face, half an expression, no more than a ghost in the glass that divides us from their happiness. These animatronic parents and siblings, if they could see, would stare right through our yearning selves. Why should these fulfillments be refused us? Why should they hold us at arm’s length? Now that we have found our way back, why should we ever leave? And looking over our shoulder, we see that we have come a long way from the entrance to the hall—that in fact, we are almost at its end. The sameness of these happy families set against the distances, these automatons, ridiculous and pitiable: is it not they, locked in the performance of memory, who are ghosts? Tied to the enactment of these scenes by some unfinished business, they cycle through their 193 motions almost ceremonially. The lighted windows, abducted from their context by the dark, align in backward repetition to infinity. XII. Among the many rooms of the museum, there is always one that opens—each time in a different wing, it seems—from behind a sagging barrier of hazard tape on absolute dark. No sudden Jupiter looms forth, as from an orrery, to startle and locate us. From out of the hidden distance, not even the wink of an exit sign hints at the extent of the void. Most visitors pass up this entrance gaping like a chasm, some with a mild dread they would be hard pressed to explain, and others from mere uninterest, construing it correctly as a room unused or under renovation. But still others linger, fascinated, at the brink of the immaculate black as though the emptiness itself were worth consideration. For is this not the blackness from which all exhibits are born? Does it not, as we lose ourselves in their illusory depths, secretly underlie even the most luminous dioramas? And when at last they are dismantled and removed from rotation, is this not the darkness to which the room will return? In that sense—or so the hands, clasped behind backs, of those visitors stopped in rapt contemplation, seem to whisper—is this not the truest future, from which all others arise and subside, of pure potential and abiding repose? 194 XIII. We emerge into what seems to be a mockup of a monorail station. A single steel line, gleaming with reflected light, runs beside a platform and into tunnel at either end. To our right, a digiposter resolves into the face of a blonde, beaming at us in advertisement, but someone has with marker blacked out the exact squares of her front teeth and given her a swarthy mustache. Reassured, even perversely pleased, we cannot repress a chuckle. As we proceed past empty benches, something like a chill rises from the cement, recalling all the nights it took us too long to get home alone from parties, their residual elation drained away with waiting. The sense of dereliction is powerfully familiar, as though the universal fate of public transit were disrepair. We glimpse naked wiring through a breach in the drywall, a map of the museum savaged as if by a knife. At such times we are disenchanted with the museum and impatient with its lapses, its fiscal woes and disrepair, for the illusion of futurity is, if anything, sustained only by consummate cosmetics. We cannot hide our disappointment at these cracks in the veneer, and just then, a fluorescent bulb begins to stutter. 195 We are almost at the far end of the platform. Leaning forward, we peer first into the dark, then down at our own feet, and step back in shock. A pair of legs in dark gray pants stick out from under the platform edge. Mud has dried pink on the thick-soled boots. There is an inert slump to the hips. We are backing away when what we took absurdly for a dead body twitches, and we hear a clanking from below. A metal panel in the floor pops open, and through it we spot scattered tools, a bucket of dirty water. The supine man in coveralls gives us a wave. Flustered and apologetic, we back into an orange cone, and stumble through a steel door. It seems to be a back alley behind the museum. The dilapidation is drastic. Lingering smoke palls the scene. Two dumpsters, marred by spray paint, drift toward a cement runnel in the asphalt, as though with menacing sentience to block the way forward. The door clicks shut and is, we find, locked. A grimy pane lies shattered at our feet. How did we lose our way? Through no fault of our own—a chance misjudgment—we have exited the museum, but how can we return? The odor of burning plastic overpowers the sewage stink. We recall the rumor that for every seemly, ideal hall in the museum is another one of sludge and grime and metal grate and exposed plumbing. And as we pick our way past the dumpsters, our fear, while never leaving us, gives way to dark relief and then a wild delight, as of a dream shrugged. The fires guttering in oil drums, the dented shopping cart with one lame wheel run up against the cinderblocks—these free us from the onus of becoming. We plunge in shame and glee into these looted ruins, fleeing the memory of our intentions. 196 Then a peal of silver laughter rings out. Through an undimmed pane, we see a well-dressed couple at a table in what we recognize as one of the museum’s many conveniently located cafés. And lurching through a wreath of steam, we find that we have joined them. A display lists the daily specials; pastries line the doilies in a case of curved glass. Still shaken, we sit down with our snacks. A TV is playing in the corner. On it, an urchin generation with smudged faces clamber over chunks of fallen buildings to escape the feral clans, combing the ruins for an unopened can of peas, only to find, in the curved face of an urn, the chrome portrait of their own desperation: matted hair, chapped lips, blood drying at the temple. And we too laugh, for surely that future—why didn’t we think of it?—is also part of the museum. XIV. Among the maps and highlights, our brochure contains a welcome from Simon Elgin, a beloved figure. Simon was always an imaginative child, and so when, at the tender age of twelve, he ran away from home, it was to take up residence in the museum. He was a precocious student whose 197 brilliance won him the flattery of his teachers, and his parents, at a loss to occupy his lively curiosity, often took him there to while away their Sunday afternoons. As they approached the colossal entrance, he would run up to the reflecting pool, and taking his father’s hand, make his teetering way along the lip, twinned by his own image in the water. He fell in once, and another time, got lost. After that, his fear replaced by wonder, he would deliberately dawdle in some ignored corner, long past the closing time announcements when they paged his name, until guards finally returned him to his worried parents waiting in the lobby. But soon their marriage faltered. Simon’s grades fell and, once a keen follower of current events, he tired of the papers he so avidly devoured. Impatient for the sluggish now to catch up with tomorrow, he decided to make his home in the latter. He managed to remain undetected in the museum for five years. He slept in the model rooms and stole food from the many cafés. When he was finally found out, the picture of him— caught by a curator’s flashlight behind the wheel of the teardrop exocoupe—made the front page of every local paper. It emerged that he’d stayed hidden for so long thanks to Henry, a museum 198 handyman who’d befriended him. But when the time came to leave, Simon had been living in the future so long he was unready for the present. His first feeling, on stepping out into the sunlight, was one of disappointment. The reflecting pool lay empty, and the leaves that had once spotted the water’s surface now filled the basin with its cracked and peeling plaster. His father had moved to another city. The present no longer seemed interested in overtaking the future, but had instead veered off in an entirely different and inscrutable direction. Simon felt frightened—unmoored—and sought refuge in what had always been his safest haven, a known quantity, a fixed point (if always fixed on the horizon). During his stay in the museum, Simon had learned a great deal from Henry about exhibit upkeep, and so it was thanks again to Henry that after a brief sojourn in the world outside, Simon was allowed to return, this time as Henry’s legitimate apprentice. Visitors, recognizing him from the news, would wave when they saw him adjusting an automaton, or in coveralls sweeping up with a headlight broom after departed re-enactors in the Hall of Work. Ever an avid learner, Simon worked his way up to head docent and finally curator, and that is how, hands clasped behind his back, we find him in the lobby today, surveying the departing visitors at closing time. Of all the curators, only he makes his home in the museum, in a small room off his office. He is older now—glasses frame his softened features chastened by 199 spots, and a hint of belly shows through his sweater vest—but accompanying these changes is an air of patience. He has learned that things that happen do not happen for the better or the worse—they are simply those that happen. But for all that he has not given up hope. As ever, he refuses to keep up with the news, which is easy in the museum’s cloistered atmosphere. Still, he sees the signs coming: here, a soaring arch snuck into a civic center, there the resurgence of a gleaming fin. He knows that one day when he finally leaves the museum, the world will look exactly like his dreams. Cars, whether they fly, will in every way resemble the ones meant to. From beside the ticket counter he watches with approval as the guards turn away late would-be entrants, while evening blue settles on the slate walk, just beyond the hours he can make out backwards on the glass doors. XV. Wandering through the Museum of the Future, it may strike us that some of the objects on display are already part of the present we know and navigate daily. The egg chair, the residential 200 obelisk, the foam igloo, the visiophone, the sleeping tube, the skybridge, the machine for living—all these we often overlook, so ordinary have they grown. Have we managed somehow to smuggle bits and pieces of the present into tomorrow? More likely, these bits and pieces of the future, borne on some inconsistent current, have merely trickled back to us, talismans of hope and progress, advances on a promise. Their presence in the museum makes them somehow seem to shimmer, ghostly. Wrested from the everyday and in their rightful context, we see them again and as if for the first time, less clearly but more forcefully. These visitations lure us forward, into ever hazier precincts. The bridges in the sky become bridges to the merely imagined, drawing away from our outstretched fingers in this gallery of reverie. 201 XVI. Some have said that the Museum of the Future is irrelevant—that its universal baggage, jetscalator, moon jeep, dolphin lexicon, having failed to come about, have outlived their usefulness and no longer serve a purpose, not even novelty, not even kitsch. The museum, they say with some bitterness, is a monument to folly, a public embarrassment, a showroom of broken promises. These words come to mind as we contemplate the City Under Glass. Each time we return to it, we notice something new—although whether these elements have just been added, or whether they have always been there, we cannot say. Standing over its dome, we watch as, slowly, in a way we know by heart, the room darkens and the model begins to glow from beneath, lighting our faces as though we peered into a scrying pool. It recalls, in its serene containment, the train sets that formed our first ideas of towns and mountains, roads and rivers; that gave us, as the linked cars sped by at eye level, a sense of the possibilities of the world. Now, from above, our imaginations populate every recess. We can encompass it, every flickering window a neuron, every line of light a firing synapse— holding it, as it were, in the palm of our mind, or the dome of our skulls. 202 There is the city we live in, bequeathed to or imposed upon us, which we struggle against daily that we might with toil wrest from it a place to lay our heads, and there is this city of spires, of pods and contoured towers, of crystal buildings bound in rows of light, hanging gardens, streamlined cars forever frozen in their place along the ruled acreage of boulevards. We cannot inhabit this city: that is the source of its infinite perfectibility, and melancholy solace. It is precisely at this point, freed from the burden of pertinence, that the museum joins the ranks of dream, 203 and becomes part of that compost of longings from which we draw the consolation we call art. XVII. Only one film ever plays in the theatre at the Museum of the Future, but it plays continuously. We may enter at any time, without fear of having missed a thing, by purchasing a ticket from the student in the booth. Among museum employees, he alone seems bored, his hair disheveled, his face disgruntled, leafing through a weekly with the latest goings-on elsewhere in town. His dress never conforms to code, consisting often of torn jeans and, variously, a worn leather jacket, a flimsy pinstriped vest, or a blazer spotted with slogan buttons. Without rising from his slouch, he takes our money and pushes, with our ticket, a pair of glasses through the window slot. Beside his half-smoked pack of cigarettes on the desk, an empty candy wrapper peeks from a gift shop copy of a book his boss has lent him, which he will never finish. In the film, a man and a woman are driving down a highway in the dark. Their headlights pick out the dotted yellow on the faded asphalt. They may be in the desert—is that a cactus whipping past, that distant silhouette a mesa?—but one thing is clear: they are pressing on with quiet, seemly urgency, as if afraid of being late. They tear through veil after veil of mist, the tatters slipping from the windshield. We cannot see the odometer, but from the bottom of the screen comes the green and faintly comforting glow of the dash. From time to time, the camera pans out the 204 window on the driver’s or the passenger’s side, and through the parting mists we see the city of the future—bright rotundas, louvered ziggurats orbited by blinking vehicles, silver glideways ringed in arches slender as a rocket’s hurtle—and a gasp comes from the audience. But where is it? Are they going too fast? Have they passed it by? When will the beams of their headlights find the sign, its dazzling reflective letters? Where are the exit, the off-ramp, and the blazing portal? We clutch our glasses and we wait. We are waiting for the moment we have heard so much about. When the instructions scroll across the bottom of the screen, we bend our faces forward and bring our cupped hands to our eyes. We put them on; we put the glasses on. We look up. 205 Jewel of the North The first news reached us in the form of ash. Its waft and tumble made us wonder: early snow? We tried to brush it off our shoulders, but only smeared it on our coats. Then we looked out at the smooth lake and remembered that the fall had been unseasonably mild. The warmth of late October was a dream from which we waited to be roused. We have always been a hamlet in a paperweight, and that is just the way we are remembered, I imagine, by the people from all over who have summered here: as a quaint mountain-ringed resort untouched by time, gradually reduced in memory to a snow globe on a desk, a parting souvenir from one of our many shops which close, for want of customers, in mid-September. When ash began to float down through the still, damp air, we thought, an explanation will reach us at its own pace, and went about our lives. *** Fialta in the low season is indolent and melancholy. The gay lakefront facades with their Dutch gables, postcard darlings, seem flimsy when deserted by displays of shoes and shells, while a silhouetted local down a side street takes on the singular materiality of a stagehand vanishing into the wings. In this theater we all have our parts to play. Mine is to be illicitly in love. With Anya. Anya! Whose spectacular white swan song of a neck rises from the fur collar of her coat. She plucks a cigarette from that despairing smile and asks, “Do you think I’m getting old?” The café has been slow to fold the seats that offer us the spectacle of weekday market across the square. We sit, drinks slowly cooling—I coffee, she tea—in view of ashen pigeons and wan passersby. 206 Not vanity but honest worry, I know, bids her ask. Nor has the line that now divides her brow in frowns escaped my notice. “Quelle question piège, my pet.” “Not at all.” This is what we do at hours when the good world is at work: languish in handsome costumes, making bored displays of glamour or, if roused to fitful passion, public pledges of undying love. Work, of course, is just a manner of speaking: in the off-season, no one of a certain social standing really works. There are no financiers, no world affairs, no factories or farms. Down by the pier, the rides are closed and on the carousel, the ponies’ bucktoothed grins will go unrefinished till spring. Yet even in a town of our modest size, someone must be cheating on a spouse. We are that scandalous liaison, Anya and I, and by our carryings-on are others tantalized and chastened. This is what it means to be a state-employed adulterer, and we have been at it for twenty years. I protest: “It’s like asking, ‘If I die, will you ever take another lover?’” She knows, of course, I wouldn’t: we both recall how harrowing official vetting was. That chill, forbidding bureau where we were questioned, measured, probed—had my nose enough patrician arrogance? What price her high cheekbones?—and finally pronounced man and mistress. And the reams of forms! Once around is enough. “If I said yes to either question, what then?” She gives my hand a fond pat. I blink. And lift a finger to a whitish speck caught on an eyelash. The ashfall heightens the impression of neglect in dusty windows where summer’s novelties await their desuetude. I watch as Anya sinks her cigarette into a sedimented tray. It is hard to say exactly when the winds that fanned the flames of our affair became those snatching the warmth from its very embers. We were still young when we embarked with all our 207 headlong folly on our careers, and I wonder now if we wouldn’t have done better to await the doldrums of middle age: not as I had imagined them at twenty, believing them in vivid anguish already upon me, but now, as I live them at forty, benumbed and even unimpressed by the unoriginality of ennui. My innate grandiloquence comes to the rescue. “Darling, I’m the luckiest man in the world.” “You used to say that about my husband.” “Well…” I cast my gaze about the square and am rewarded when I spy a stocky, aproned mother whispering in her neighbor’s ear. She sees us turn to watch, and off she marches in a huff, yanking her son in line behind. “I have a better job.” Anya uncrosses and recrosses her legs, and up her briefly straightened spine passes that shiver of willowy surrender I’ve so often felt in darkened rooms, with my hand at the small of her back. I reach out to smooth the worry from her brow. But the gray flake I plucked from my eye still clings to my thumb, and leaves behind a smudge. *** Happy adulterers are all alike; each unhappy adulterer... In my diary—not the sensational tidbits I purposely forget in nightstand drawers for prying bellhops to pass on to Nikolai, nor the reports I send monthly to the capital, encoded in a cipher based on “The Kreutzer Sonata”—in my own true diary, I keep one of my most treasured possessions: a picture of Anya as a young woman. The points of her white collar lie like leaves where the stem of her throat rises to her smile, but the flower of her true beauty is as yet a bud tightly furled, awaiting the occasion to astonish. Surely her story will unfold in the pages of magazines; she will sparkle in the lavish settings of the world’s bright stage. 208 These days we rarely make love. Once a week we move about afternoon hotel rooms wetting towels and mussing coverlets, providing evidence of passion’s disarray, while below, in a lobby of furniture draped in sheets, an elderly clerk snoozes at his desk. Whatever made Anya choose me and our career? If ever I thought I could answer for her too, that time is long past: the years since then seem not to have drawn us closer, but to have lowered veil after veil between us, until her very motions, not to say her motives, have become lost in depths of shifting shadow, uncertain as rumor. “What do you think?” Anya emerges from behind the dressing screen, holding up a Paris- dispatched evening gown. “For dinner.” “You look delectable.” “Moscow never sends the latest anymore.” Where once she might have pouted, she now seems merely lost in thought, and sits down beside the window. “I suppose it’s because we’re so far away.” “Moscow! Oh Yuriy, do you still remember Moscow?” “How could I forget?” Years spent perfecting French and handwriting, applications filed with our billets doux, nerve-wracked months of waiting for official summons, that thunderous and frigid night train. And finally, our shining capital! Bauble of blown glass, of ice teased in globes and spires, domes and turrets, from the lips of the north wind! Hand in hand, we strolled its powdered lanes: illicit bliss. “It seems like yesterday.” Though surely they lie detailed in some Moscow vault, I am at a loss to account for the years that have passed since we set out to be great lovers. I cannot help but feel the girl in that photo, whom I coveted, has eluded me as surely as she has Anya herself. 209 “It seems like twenty years ago.” Anya rolls her stocking up a calf posed in the gap between the windowsill and blind. “Do you think anyone still watches?” From the bed, I can see twilight gild the weave of her hose. When the state assessors searched our faces with their lights and lenses, was it for this very moment? These days, it is increasingly Anya’s sense of professionalism I admire. I am heartened, even aroused, by the sight of her absorbed in the act of maquillage. Her movements are sensuous and deliberate as those of a grooming cat—almost performed, but for their absent air—and at such moments it’s as if she’s forgotten I’m in the room. I have, from the first time I stood before the closed door to my parents’ room, equated love with subterfuge and seriousness with secrecy. After all these years, I am still privy to an Anya no one else sees, for it is in the care with which, after scheduled trysts, we prepare once more to meet the outside world that our devotion to our work most shows. I walk to the window and stand behind her chair. “I’m sorry, Anya.” She looks up at me, eyes wide. “Yuriy, whatever for?” “It isn’t much of a life, is it?” The rue in my voice, sudden and true, surprises me. My hands rest on her shoulders. She rises and kisses my forehead. “You’re sweet. We’re going to be late.” Then she’s dressed, and it is time to douse the lights. There’s always some restaurant waiting, which we arrive at separately, with our spouses. Topcoat draped over an arm, I hold the door open for her, then shut it slowly behind me, leaning against it for a moment. The carpet is soft and deep beneath my shoes. Love is what adults discuss in hushed tones. Love, they said in Moscow, is what goes on behind closed doors. *** 210 A week ago the winds stiffened, shifting direction. A few days later, the first scraps fell: the curled edge of an almanac, half a canceled stamp, a charred bit of receipt with a price still partly legible. At the café Anya, frowning, fished the scorched end of a ticket stub from the tea dregs at the bottom of her cup. Some believe these tatters, with their evidence of daily lives, an attempted message met en route with accident. But who really has the time, in this of all seasons, to worry? November in Fialta is a carousel of galas from time to time enlivened by a traveling salesman. At the debutantes’ event, the Mayor mutters brief announcement off a wrinkled slip of paper fumbled from inside his waistcoat. “The strange weather has to do with a sinister disaster whose exact location has yet to be determined.” He briefly fidgets with the slip, then crumples it in a fist and tucks it away again. Thinning silver muttonchops frame his beaming face. “Moscow instructs us to stay calm.” We all raise our glasses. “Moscow, jewel of the north, which the north preserves!” Anya’s husband says, “I’ve heard the capital’s vast libraries send roving book wagons to the provinces to interest farm laborers in literacy. Perhaps partisans have attacked one?” Cuckoldry and correcting grammar errors have stripped Nikolai’s scalp, it seems, of all but a few hairs, which Anya straightens, only adding to his air of strenuous bewilderment. “What an imagination our dear society editor has,” I enthuse. “But why stop at one burning wagon? Why not conjure an archival train, a traveling Alexandria, savaged by barbarians’ burning arrows in the night?” The others titter. I lift my glass to my lips and from across the table, Anya darts me a dark glance of desire. Such moments restore all the skullduggery to romance. The only true knowledge is carnal: secrets vital as those smuggled between nations. 211 Beside me, Lydia surprises us all by lifting her gaze from her folded hands. “Forgive my husband, Nikolai,” she begins quietly, “he gets carried away. But I don’t think these bits of paper are from just any library wagon.” The Mayor harrumphs, but her prim voice is firm. “Father, if I may.” She opens her hand, and in her palm the face from a lost photograph stares up at the chandelier. Neither voice nor hand trembles as she speaks. “I think these fragments are meant for us directly—I mean, that we are to make sense of them. I believe they are a test, and that when the proper emissaries arrive—perhaps soldiers from the capital, perhaps the officers of heaven itself—we will have to deliver the intended message, and be judged on what we’ve managed.” From under the table then, she pulls out a worn tome and opens it beside her soup. We see fly past, as she leafs quickly toward some well-remembered spot, scraps meticulously mounted by the date and place of their discovery—a scrawled surname from a check, an exclamation from a children’s comic, digits from the margin of a ledger, a few notes from a musical score—until she finds the page from which the face has come, and gently presses it into place. I stare in wonderment. Marriage is no alliance, but an uneasy détente, and its Sunday outings summits between rival heads of state. Mine and Lydia’s now seems to have been one of convenience, as though adultery were land adjoining property bestowed in dowry. What’s a cheat without a principle to flout? “Gnostic nonsense!” I declare. “No doubt it’s attractive to believe this quizzical confetti the arrival of a promised reckoning, and I’ll be the first to admit the pathos in a sliver of letter 212 that begins, Dear Ivan, but look at your book! Not a single one of your puzzle pieces has a mate!” Nikolai adjusts his spectacles, peering at the album. “It’s true,” he murmurs, “the sources are simply too various.” But Lydia’s head—her plain brown hair pulled back tightly in a bun—is already bowed once more. It’s said the same face every day fades slowly from sight. I know her downcast eyes are brown, but if I closed my own, I could not picture their exact shade. Yet I detect in her stiff back familiar rebuke. She never was any good at parties. *** There is a castaway among us, washed up on our shingle from the greater world. A trader, he styles himself a traveler. He makes the presentation of his wares a parlor entertainment, pulling from an old brown coat silk handkerchiefs, fur hats, merino stoles. “Marco, is it true the Tartars burn their dead?” Tonight Anya has eyes only for the newcomer. He himself disdains the splendid fabrics he traffics, sporting instead a battered hat, earflaps ridiculously upturned, and lined with lambswool like his boots. He lacks only bells at his toes to be a jester. “Yes, my lady, and to their funeral pyres are added their most treasured possessions, that these ashes may mingle with their own in an eternity of windborne drifting o’er the plains.” His tales are motley as his costume. We pester him for details of unrest, distant sunsets, thrilling dangers barely dodged, all the tumult and turmoil we are—thankfully—spared. “I hope this recent weather hasn’t been an army of dead Chinamen,” I remark, and am rewarded by the Mayor’s chortle. We have always gotten on famously. 213 “Of that, sir, you needn’t worry, for the Chinese are a cultured folk and keep the ashes of their dead in porcelain urns that line the shelves of their elaborate temples.” When he leans in with a tale, the gleam in his eye seems the spark of one’s own interest whetted on his sharp and narrow face. “I’ve heard they light the rooms of their brothels with glowing moths,” I offer. “How fanciful!” Anya claps. Her bright fork rests, overturned, beside her plate. “Yes, and at dusk one finds the scholars most beloved by the courtesans silhouetted at the edges of rice paddies, luring these moths, which they call fireflies, into paper lanterns dangling from the ends of bamboo rods. For these poor sages cannot afford to pay the ladies of merchants and generals except,” he glanced at Anya, “in wisdom and illumination.” “What about the ashes?” Nikolai splutters. Marco surveys the silent faces. The only sound is the precise clink of a spoon as Lydia stirs her coffee. “We live in interesting times,” she notes tonelessly. Her cup touches her saucer in porcelain punctuation. “That,” says Marco, “is a thing the Chinese would wish only on their enemies.” Without firm word, rumor is rife. Does the government know anything at all? At cafés, cigarettes in one flitting hand, impassioned students debate the fall of ash and scrap until the traceries of smoke left hanging in the slanting light seem details from their involuted theories. A sharp snort or impatient wave dismisses them all. “Do you think he knows more than he’s saying?” asks Anya at the vanity, her head tilted to affix an earring. “Who—oh, the trader?” I am almost certain he does, and have said so in my diaries. “What about?” 214 “The weather. Honestly Yuriy, what else is there to talk about?” “It seems you and your husband are in agreement.” I give the paper a brisk shake. The gossip column mentions neither us nor Marco. *** Outside, fine ash lines the architraves, cakes in niches, and begrimes their plaster saints. Townspeople totter over slickened cobblestones, or streak the gray with brooms before their doorsteps. A short walk is enough to ruin a suit. A new and nearer burning tang rises from townhouse courtyards, where concierges set alight dry leaves and paper scraps in barrels. In streets these scraps silt up along the curbs or, in the lees of buildings, pile in heaps high as those Lydia has gathered. My wife encamps herself among them in my study and refuses all social occasion. What began as an awkward bid for attention—an exaggeration of her innate religious bent—has become a genuine mania, mystic and unfathomable. I round the corner to see Anya and Marco already waiting at the restaurant. Pert and perfect in fur ruff and hat, she hops lightly, like a schoolgirl. The night is chill, and black as the broad lake until a beam of light pierces it from a box in Marco’s hands. Their heads draw close together, and the light casts tiny pictures on their mingled exhalations. “In Yuandong,” Marco says, “is a village of the blind, forgotten by the emperor, for governments know nothing of the people's hearts. There wicker cages dangle from the former lampposts.” The scenes he narrates leap to life, flicker and scatter on the swirls of breath. “The villagers navigate by the twitter of birdsong, which is to their heightened hearing as starlight’s twinkle is to us.” 215 Anya sighs through parted lips. The colors are delicate, outlandish, and through the vapor tint her cheek like pastels on an eggshell. “The caretaker, once a lamplighter in Prague, gave me a tour. He made his way along the streets, draping cages in black silk so that the birds might rest, beaks tucked beneath their wings.” “Oh, the wonders you describe! I shouldn’t care if they were all lies!” Marco throws a square of black silk over his box. Swiftly, he raises it aloft and jerks the cloth away. We watch a white dove rise into the night. “Yuriy, isn't it marvelous?” Anya turns to me at last. Her eyes glisten. The wind has chafed her cheeks to a ruddy cheer indistinguishable from those induced by love, fine wine, or a fire’s warmth. I give a dumb guffaw, my smile surely clumsy as a carousel horse's. As if on cue then, they appear: the evening’s principals, that familiar company, kicking through the banked and drifted shreds. Amidst huzzahs and dusty backslaps, the men doff homburgs and bowler hats, while the women proffer grayish cheeks for bises. In their wake whirls and settles the detritus of entire lives, as though from a plundered accountancy. We are buoyed into the restaurant on a warm wave of well-wishing. That night the atmosphere is one of exclusive reprieve. In the hearth, a tamed blaze underscores the conversation with forgiving crackle. Winter coats crowd claret glasses lined up on the bar. After dinner, we plunge into a desperate festivity. If the town has hit an iceberg, then in these paneled rooms we hold last dances to a muted band as plates and trays begin their gradual slide. Clasping Anya to me tightly, I watch our reflections in the broad front window, swaying like ghosts in the street. 216 Her face is turned away, her cheek pressed to mine. The sleek torque of her neck recalls to me how once we lay, after love, arms outflung as though on falsehood's cross, each cradling the other’s face: martyrs to the extramarital bed. “I feel generous,” I whisper. These prudish people, provincial and dependable, eating in their small-windowed kitchens, slipping at night between familiar sheets, their fantasies intact. Tonight all is forgiven. For a moment we really are, Anya and I, emissaries of the great world, come to demonstrate the stylishness of sin. Envy, contentment, sanctimony—these and more we inspire; through our exquisite betrayals are their desires atoned. “Anya.” I search for her gaze. Dinner’s wine is sour in my mouth. “Let’s go to Moscow!” She frowns, faintly. That line on her brow! It delights me, as though it were a tribute she brought, at the risk of unattractiveness, to the years of our success as lovers. “Tonight?” “Sunday!” I whisper fiercely. My voice throbs with credible melodrama. “Yuriy…” At the dark bar are faces animated by an urgent clemency. She places her head gently on my shoulder. “We'll always have Moscow.” *** Moscow, jewel of the north, which the north preserves! Snowflakes settle on the pages of my diary, blurring my words. I sit waiting at our table in the main square. It is unlike Anya to be this late. The café around me is abandoned, the umbrellas shuttered close about their bare white stalks. Long since out of season, they seem in their helpless stiffness last adherents to some distant, absurd principle. The long, folded flaps flutter faintly in the wind. Snow coats and soaks the unkempt curbs. Strange people dressed in rags have wandered from the mountains into town, and stand in small groups warming their hands over the barrels’ 217 guttering flames. There is talk of an investigative expedition, but with the roads soon to be impassable, it is doubtful the initiative will go any further than a grumble. The Mayor was last seen chasing a train, one sleeve trailing from an overstuffed valise. When Lydia saw me with my suitcases, she locked herself in my study. Through the door I heard her sobs and moans. Briefly, from across the street, I watched the papers swirl about her raging figure, a blizzard in a bubble—but I have been safe too long from the chaos of her heart. Soon snow will stop the skittering scraps, turn charred tatters into sodden slop, and smother the concierges’ fires. A bit of paper drifts onto my cuff, then tumbles to the page. I lift my hand to brush it off, but the wind turns it over, and I stop. It is the corner of some stiff certificate, heavy bond. I pick it up. The fancy pattern of the border seems familiar. I run a gloved finger down the rough charred edge, and recognize, in neat gothic script, the first few letters of Anya’s name. Then I know what it is, and exactly where I last saw it, so many years ago, in the hands of officials as they conferred on us the status of adulterers. Slowly, without finishing my sentence, I set my pen down on my diary. Soon pen and page lie unseen, swathed in white. When Anya comes, I will hold this corner out to her. No doubt, once recognition dawns, she too will be surprised to see it. She will wonder what it is doing so far from the capital’s vaults—from the file in the archive in the bowels of that building, where it has safely lain for so long. Then I will tell her: “Moscow is burning.” 218 Visa to J.S., with the great debt of youth I heard this story while I was traveling abroad. Here, home, amidst all the familiarities and the distractions, it loses something, I don’t know, its eminence—the ability to devour. Like the best talk, it exists only once; everything else is rumor. Still, I tell it. It’s something I remember. She was an American. She went to Europe to fall in love; that’s not unusual. I picture her, anonymous as a student, in the early days before she meets him, stopping to peer through windows, if only to be enclosed by an architecture of precedents, vertical and cloistered, dense with privacies. *** A beautiful day, a shortsleeve day. Yesterday was rain; today it's as if a coin's been flipped, a decree passed, the sidewalks bear no evidence of ever having been wet. A small pub with outdoor seating across the street, picnic tables in a low walled court under the shade of a generous tree. Sorrel and Gerard stand waiting to cross. She starts, but he catches her elbow. A car—small, snubnosed, with the white elongated plates—shoots past, startling her skirt. For a moment, her calves are illuminated. Later, at lunch, she shakes her head. A light wind seizes strands of her hair. “I’m not used to it yet.” “The traffic?” “The direction of it.” She poses a roll like a question between them, buttering it slowly with her knife. “I’m still looking the wrong way.” 219 “It’s not that way everywhere. Only in the countries Napoleon did not conquer. With a few exceptions.” He smiles. It’s a broad, patrician smile. One can’t imagine him without his mustache trim, with strokes of gray. “You will grow accustomed, I think.” “I’m not worried.” She puts the knife down and leans forward for a bite. Her neck is languid and shadowed, the skin clear, it seems to him, as a freshet. His own is much darker sometimes, around his shoulders, loose. It’s their third lunch together in a week. A pattern is beginning to emerge. He calls her more often, more freely now, for dinners, afternoons in the country with a blanket and a borrowed car. The manners, the quiet, graceful propriety, smoothing the napkin on one’s lap before beginning, they’re all part of a complex pantomime, a shadow-play, a gathering preamble. It’s almost rotten, the elaborate, knowing deceptions: the things they build up only to tear through, when the time comes, like paper. “In Sweden,” Gerard says, “they changed overnight. The government decided. One day they all drove on the left...the next, on the right.” He gestures abstractly in the air, then sits back, studying her. “One night.” “It’s impressive.” “It’s absolutely true.” *** He introduced himself to her at a party in South Kensington. A small gathering at the Beneforts’, friends and the friends of friends mostly, the doors had been thrown open after a private dinner. The neat, Edwardian houses, stately as a string quartet. At the corners, around the doors and windows, crenelations articulate as trumpet notes. In the gardens nearby the taller 220 trees, with their thick leaves, were culling the last pink light from the sky. Who was the woman now speaking with Amanda? I’ve never seen her before, she came with George... London forms a natural habitat for arriving Americans; the shocks are tepid, the languages are themselves cognates. The surrounding countryside is perfect for day trips: Bath, Cambridge, Brighton, Stratford, the Cotswolds. Had she been traveling long? he inquired. No, well—three weeks, she admitted. The days had been so full; they had gone by so quickly. Her arms were thin, bright, like exclamations, he watched them as she spoke. Alone? She eyed him above the rim of her glass and nodded, mostly. She’d come into some money as a result of the divorce, but one looks and sees a woman unblemished by marriage, sure of her youth. The brief union is childless, untraceable. Oh, there was a friend or two she still wrote in the states... I see them, small, white cards with exotic postmarks announcing only where she’s been and is no longer, like poor detectives. These careless, enigmatic messages that pretend to glamour, to the nights she yearns for but doesn’t yet possess—in these days she is slowly inventing herself, emptying herself of the old life. This learning: it was as if she had been in hiding during its length, passing unknown, unnoticed, from city to city, until tonight. You must tell me... where are you staying in London? Her hair was short, somewhat brown; she smiled widely, with her teeth. Her own calmness astonished her. She felt brazen, empowered... he was quiet. He laughed often, genially, mildly, before allowing the sound to fade. He said to himself, it goes like this: tonight he will say little to her, almost nothing, but in the next days, more and more, until she knows everything. Some men will always be lucky with women; it’s ordained. He wore his own luck glitteringly, like remembered mockery. Others surrounded him, yes, but it was because they wanted to see how long his luck would last; they wanted to see him fail. 221 They spent the evening that way, in pleasant, weightless talk. Once a woman came up from behind and pressed his arm with her fingers, as if imploring privacy. Gerard, she said. The American lady studied his mouth, his hands, his eyebrows as they whispered and he lifted the woman’s hand lightly from his arm. She was quite tall, with a wide, importunate face, palpable breasts. One could see the licit curve of her belly through her black dress; just below it tapered off and away from her body. She wore heelless shoes that made her ankles seem bony. This is Andrea, Gerard said, gesturing with his free hand. And you are? She hesitated. Sorrel, she said; she was a little embarrassed. It was a name she had chosen for herself. *** It’s only in these early days that she writes. Her letters are sparkling, alien in their apparent disregard. What else can they be: she lives in such freedom now, it’s dreamlike. The days with their tangent encounters. Hours, minutes, begin one way to become, alarmingly, amusingly, something else. Nothing she does now is of consequence, there’s only the act, the overwhelming present, and then, something else entirely, the next moment in a surreal pursuit. She agrees, then, when he asks, to accompany him. “Where are we going?” “The continent.” Gerard is vague, hopeful. The summer is just beginning. In France, Spain, people are fleeing the great cities for the shore. “I’ve arranged for a car.” *** Summers on the Cote d’Azur are the color of flesh. Bright apartment buildings from the fifties; roads, crowded with polished cars, that run down to the sea. In Nice—precocious, 222 incarnadine—secretaries walk down to the beach during lunch and choose a spot for their towels. They reach behind themselves briefly, then drop their arms; the tops of their bathing suits fall to the sand. From London, it’s a short night train to Nice, but Gerard and Sorrel are headed for the country. He takes her to a small hotel near Digne—Aix, he says, is crowded this time of year, but they’ll swing through for the festival. When they arrive they’ve seen nothing but farmers for hours, and the bright, tan shimmering fields. It’s a weary stone building; the sides, unshaven, are thick with blond dust from the roads. One stumbles over a driveway of broken cobblestones encircling a dry fountain to reach the entrance. Inside the air is dim, brusque. The windows, in the cool, shaded walls, are as bright as shouts. The owner is a thin, fussy man with the face of an accountant—reluctantly, it seems, roused from watering the plants. The middle of the hotel hides a small garden. Their room is on the fourth floor. The elevator has old wood paneling and an entrance, half its width, through a folding metal gate. They stand close together, and in such nearness the curve of her neck from her ear to her shoulder seems to him an extravagant possession. Outside, the door whose upper half is glass clicks slowly shut. L’ascenseur, they read, backwards in peeling gold, as they rise above and away. A fan drifts lazily in the air above the bed, where they leave their things. The sink is porcelain and stands apart from the wall on its own pedestal, the underside of its small bowl ridged like a scallop shell. The windows have faded, meticulous blinds which Gerard closes, his fingers on the long thin spine of wood that joins the slats. At dinner, her earrings gleam like advertisements, and in the darkness of the room when they return, they’re all he can see at first. He watches as she takes them off and sets them on the counter, one by one, and, moving her 223 dress from her shoulders, he begins to kiss her neck. She’s standing perfectly still. His hands cover her breasts. They watch, together, in the mirror, as his touch evokes her nipples through her dress. The plain, illicit sight of them slips into him like a thief. What they’ve come here to do silences her, a silence he mistakes for her power. She unbends her arms at the elbows, crinkling her dress by exquisite degrees. He moves it from her hips, they stumble a bit, it pools at her feet. He is ruminative, deliberate—like a man preparing for a long absence, walking the rooms of his house, dousing the lamps, lacing his shoes carefully, with his fingers. She stands with her side to him, slender as a chapbook, slim as a volume of poems. They approach the bed from opposite sides, like a married couple. When she wakes, the night is cool. It’s the hour before dawn when everything is shades of black or white. She walks to the mirror and, very slowly, raises her eyes. She’s not displeased. Her limbs are warm and saturate. Her breasts are full, drowsy, her nipples soft. She shifts her weight uncertainly from one foot to the other, watching the shadows play over her waist. It’s begun, she thinks. She feels herself at the beginning of a great life, a life of departures and intensities, in the end redeemable only by memory. She moves to the window and looks down. In the garden is a tree. A table of wrought iron, camouflaged in filigree. Three chairs, a bench of stone. Shadows make the blinds heavy, like lidded eyes. She returns, quietly, to the bed and pulls the covers to her waist. The pale night lies across her back in lines thin as swords. *** They stay for six days in Digne, making trips along the coast: Hyères, Toulon, St. Raphael. At dusk the red, stretched rectangle of sun slips from the walls. The evening, descending, sinks across the tautened ridges of the sheets. Gerard is quite happy. Her body seems a salve for all 224 his flaws and fears. Her cries are candid and inquiring. She is seated on the windowsill, her back in his hands. His stirrings in her confirm the broadest boasts of vanity. Her eyes are closed. Her head turns. Her cheek is so tender!—it denies every accusation of age. He bends, quickly, to kiss it, acquitted of self-pity, of suspicion. When he lifts her, the motion is serene and joyous. She gives a frank, unhidden yell. He staggers to the bed, weak with delayed volition, her legs about his waist slick with sweat. When he lays them down, her arms spill aside like a doll’s. He watches her estimate, oblivious motions as if from a benign height. He feels himself straining in a strange body. When he comes, it seems to ring his brow. He is brilliant with love. *** The best vacations are time and wandering, subtle changes in the tempo of hours. The days spacious as a room without furniture, the floors are bare, the light falls in. The eye paints the possibilities, the hands frame the spaces, we pace about enthusiastically: here, we say, and here. The small towns that open to swallow them, to shelter them. Towns with their delicate, piercing steeples, towns encircled by peaks. The unobserved Europe. They’ve disappeared from the world and into love. That’s not to say they’re always alone. Sometimes they visit his friends, share their time with others, and always, their guests are enveloped, made envious by their generosity. It takes them so little effort to please, to enchant. What little they choose to disclose feels somehow like a feast, is devoured, yet its source is decorous, inexhaustible. Rich, implicit lines between which a life eludes me, races away. He leaves a table and a few moments later she excuses herself, you’ve been so kind, I couldn’t have another, really, and which way is the ladies’ room? Murmured demurrals, pretenses thin as tissue. Her face denies knowledge. She can’t be embarrassed; her absorption precludes it. In fact an innocence governs the transparency of her excuses. She’s inviolable: this transparency is useless against her. Envy 225 must find another weapon. That room they’ve left... I imagine it suddenly grown wicked with glances, but what could glances know? Glances are all they’ve bequeathed, husks pretending at fruit. And then, later, they may be glimpsed, like the owners of a restaurant, through the darkened glass, dancing after hours amid the white tables and empty, overturned chairs. Slowly she was being drawn into the folds of another world. He taught her the names of wines, cheeses, books, towns, hotels, people whom he admired. He told her stories meant to shock and to sour. His eyes were mocking and narrowed appreciatively. He touched her elbow. She turned to face him, smiling. He did not face her as one does a student, with a set of lessons; instead these things were divulged gradually, woven into dinners, nights of love, like asides. In Rome they stood before the Palazzo dei Conservatori in the great oval atop the Capitoline Hill. Pale, translucent day, a day like the morning before a festival, slowly the streets were filling with people. Sounds thickened, layered like colored threads enriching a fabric. “The face is his, but the building is not. Because he added these... the walls inside have been all but eliminated.” He gestured at the great pilasters of the facade. Michelangelo was one of his heroes: unoriginal, perhaps, he conceded, but ambitious. “Do you know what he said?” The oval of the Campidoglio was ringed with cars. Farther down the steps were vendors with their gay umbrellas, their shouts and their gelati. A child, trailing balloons, ambled past. His head swiveled slowly, bobbing. His face sifted mysteriously through a continuum of expressions. His privacy was dense, sovereign. “He who is not a good master of the nude cannot understand the principles of architecture.” He bent his lips to her shoulder. ¬She stood watching the child pass. In the car she was often silent, the drive quiet, sunlit, the wind clear as a glass of water. They were headed north, into early spring. They fled the cities, stopping at the borders where they examined her 226 passport and with polite tilts of their heads reported that she did not resemble her picture. It was true, her hair was longer now, lighter. Her limbs were tanned. Her mouth closed differently. Her thoughts touched rarely on what she had left behind, the objections, the accusations, the thin, pale voice of hurt uncompelling to desire. She had outdistanced a world of judgments, things people said which they themselves did not believe, right recited like lessons memorized to please an elder. They had sounded almost precocious: glancing, weightless commandments unacquainted with desire. After all, I’m not talking of the right way to live, but of the irresistible. All it takes is a tug. Her gown falls open. Last night the neighbors were pounding on the walls. They’re moving toward the bed in erratic, occupied steps, as if standing in one another’s way. He stops her, placing a finger on her lips. “We must be very quiet,” he says. “Abbiamo bisogno di stare zitto.” She bends his face to hers, her breath thin pale and narcotic. When he kneels before her, he can smell her through her underwear. Her knees clap, her thighs. He slips between them. Her breaths are great and guttural. The awkward sounds of joining flesh complete the silence. When she begins, her arms are dumb, sullen, they smack his sides, like the thick, insensible rebellions of a mute. He rises to watch them both, to see himself disappeared within her. In these days he likes to do everything: to undress her, to turn her about, observing. Her complaisance astonishes. That’s his tragedy, of course: he will come to believe his acts are inalienable. Mornings with the curtains drawn, the room in a pale light, the world irrelevant. He awakes, his thoughts unfastened, to find her stretched, fully naked, on the bed, tumbled in sleep, from her wide fallen breasts to the dark, careless smudge between her legs, like a glorious accident. He reaches to wake her with kisses intimate as handwriting. Her palms open to receive his face. Her eyes closed, she points with her fingers. Here, she says, and here. 227 Nights that close like a book. The town lies silent beneath its own shadows. In certain rooms, a lamp flickers on the table by the bed, like a place in a book where one’s finger remains. The corner, peeled furtively back, is dim and brown; the page cannot be read often enough. She sits astride him. He’s moving, gently, attempting a rhythm; her hands knead his belly in vague, absent accompaniment. Her calves encircle his hips like warm and folded parentheses. His sight has never been so supple, so lucid. He comes quite unexpectedly, loose and unthrottled. Her shoulders graze the ceiling of her dreams. Rothenburg. Fussen. Oberammergau. Garmisch-Partenkirchen. These German towns, with their fortified names. The forests, ranked and bristling, close as fur. The children are all asleep, coerced with folktales. In these rooms, cries that linger in the walls like history, like marrow. ** It begins to blur, to blend. It has all the qualities of a continuous dream, the swift unsurprising dissociations, the abstractions of time and place, witty and distant. Travel cleanses, abets forgetting. Dimly, she remembers her first days, boarding a train, finding an empty compartment. Inside, it’s silent; through the windows the station, robbed of sound, begins to swim in all its activity. For a moment she feels faint, weakened, but then the train jerks to a start. When she sits down, she’s facing backward, she finds. They’re leaving the platform, the waving people standing their ground on the narrow cement. The roof gives sudden way to sky, the yard with its indecipherable weave of tracks, divergent, imminent. Soon, she can no longer see the station, then the city. The wheels give a cough, the car lists slightly from side to side. The whole world is in rattling, shuddering flux. The passing of houses, farms, grows swift and rhythmic, like short, definitive statements; the express disdains the small, provincial stations 228 whose names dart by, grey blurs, like swallows. Her wrist is limp on the slim sill, and she watches as the land ebbs away from her in billowing ribbons. *** The autumn is aged in wood. Its enthusiasms are quieter, more modest: coals, cracked with orange, still glowing after the meal is cooked. Gerard and Sorrel stayed with friends by the Chiemsee. In the summer the lake was sown with small craft, the sails white blossoms in the breeze. They walked down to the lake each day now and fed the swans, white except for their necks. Sorrel watched the last days of heat disappear, the mountains coming clear as indefinite shawls of gray replaced the haze. Sometimes the snowy tops appeared, striking as thunderclaps. They took fewer trips now; it was as if they were gathering their strength for the cold. Gerard was despondent. Last night, for the first time, he had told her his age. Now, he looked it. “The difference a year makes.” A large, dark room with curtains of disheartening weight. The light is austere and expressionless. He can hear his own breathing, the brittle, distinct syllables of glass as Andrea mixes their drinks. “In the end, it’s like the last few minutes of daylight. One looks away, and...” In the mirror, the wrinkles about his neck seemed to have widened in surprise. His shoulders were blunter, the flesh looser. His chest was softer, and around his waist when he knelt, he could feel the thickening. Gone were the days when he would come back from a party at three, four, a lovely girl on each arm, rapping on the glass loudly to rouse a bartender who would know his name. He had lived his life as if, someday, the pieces would unite; it would all make sense. It would become self-evident: its meaning would be clear to others. Instead he saw the waste, the flotsam of a life spent pursuing pleasure. The softness, the ruin. In the 229 lightest of her stirrings, he saw his age, contemplative, reptilian. It would be wooden to his pleas, mute and unmoved. “Age is our consequence,” he said. “Unjust, except that it happens to everyone.” In the winter he and Sorrel made trips to Italy, to the sea, the shore towns with their cliffs and beaches. The water was gleaming and frigid. Sorrel felt her life changing, something was taking leave of her. She went for long rides alone in the woods. Winter is a landlock. The ground is hard, the grass crackles underfoot. The nearby hills raised the silhouettes of trees along their ridges like hackles on the back of a cat. Beyond, through the leafless stands, she could see straight across plains to the knobs of gray rock, earth’s bones. Everything had been laid bare, was unmistakable. The land had been stripped of all artifice, had become harsh and ascetic, an unbeliever. She could see through to distant vistas usually obscured by lush, wanton growth, now sliced, divided, by branches into shards. When he came to her at night it was as a man who had come to his captor for comfort, who looked to his cell as home. He knew its walls, its dimensions down to the inch, the arrangement of objects, the unchanging view from the one small window with the bars that descend like shame. The act was unconvincing, like a story one no longer believes in. One prepares it patiently for the children. *** Dinners in the cold house, long tables of dark black wood, the heavy crystal and the silver. Slowly the days were turning over into spring. There was a lively new guest, his parents were friends of the Schwangaus. His name was Kearn Eberle, from San Francisco. He had graduated recently; his uncle had secured for him a year’s position in Antwerp, working for a telecommunications firm. He had a summer before it began, but he was rich with time; like a 230 spoiled child, he was spendthrift with it. The future meant nothing to him; it was too possible. He was easily, even impatiently partisan. Sometimes he felt he knew everything, or could. His dreams were dark; he did not remember them well in the daylight, or from one day to the next. “It’s only for this year,” he said. “My parents suggested it. Then... I don’t know...” He’s hopeful. He walks with his mind dilated, inhaling. He travels in the company of possibility. “A life’s work is the creation of a personality,” said Gerard. “The task of age is detail. In the end, one is limited to infinitesimal gestures.” In these days he was separating from the world a realm of his own, creating an audience bound to him by common assumptions. He surrounded himself with connoisseurs of his own personality. Like the artists he admired, his life began atop a great foundation that predated him, that had existed since antiquity. His work would be celebrated not for its depth or breadth but for its refinement: tiered, intricate, penultimate moments, the construction of a man’s life, brilliant, attenuated. Sorrel was solemn. He turned to her sometimes and saw a daughter, then panic seized him. Her solemnity invited his confessions; he made promises, he was grasping. He had never truly been happy with anyone else, he told her at night, never. She had opened for him a world previously hidden. She was his counsel, his defense, his sole remaining self, he had never in his life seen such power. If she left him... she had not ever really given it thought, but the suggestion gnawed at her. His forehead creased now at the slightest register of feeling, but it’s not an unoriginal face, he thought, it’s aged evenly. “When he painted the Sistine Chapel Michelangelo lay on his back atop a scaffold no more than a foot from the ceiling at all times.” A closeness to the ceiling, the electric fineness of detail: these were the ingredients of his life. 231 “Michelangelo,” Sorrel interrupts, “is one of his heroes.” She gleams with wine, she is limned by it. They sit, three about a table, at a small restaurant in Lausanne. It’s April. Sorrel and Gerard have begun to travel again. Lausanne is in western Switzerland, on the banks of Lac Leman: Lake Geneva, as they call it, in that other city farther south. Coming from the east, one hears the train conductor gradually begin announcing the stops first in French, then German. “Kearn...it is Kearn, isn’t it?” “Yes. We met at the Schwangaus...in Prien-am-Chiemsee.” Sorrel smiles at his stiff, formal German. Kearn. How simply he believes things, accepts the hierarchies. The ease of his receipt blinds him, divides him from the great world he sees in his dreams. He is about to enter: he places his fingers on the glass, and it trembles, blurring, like water. Yet he will never, though he yearns to, join it; he is barred by his admiration. It marks him, this eagerness, servile, amenable, a flaw that invites derision. He must lose his love for it; it must melt from his eyes, disappear. Sorrel’s arms are quite bare. Their indifference reproaches him, like a charge that makes one blush. In them resides such power—cool, isolate, they command the afternoon. “Would you pass the salt?” she says. “What a coincidence—meeting you here again.” Gerard reaches for the shaker, but Kearn has already picked it up. “It’s a small continent.” Sorrel’s fingers brush his as he hands her the shaker. He can’t help noticing her wrists. In Prien, in that room, he steps back to unbutton his shirt—his fingers are quite stupid. She has her back to him. It’s as if she were alone, undressing before the mirror. Her nakedness is shocking. The gleam of her bare skin rebukes him. The pictures, the clumsy, vulgar jokes, the ribald laughter, nothing has prepared him for this. He cannot look at her; she is 232 too bright. His sudden hunger is jagged and weakening. He apprehends her in sections, glimpses, associations. “Did you take the train in?” asks Gerard. “There’s a marvelous view, coming out of the tunnel, of the vineyards sloping down to the lake.” “Yes. I was in Interlaken for—” “Interlaken? Really...” “There’s also a giant fork,” blurts Sorrel. She’s almost giddy, remembering Interlaken. Days without character, supine, indolent. They wake in long, whitening afternoons, drained, volitionless; the breeze plays over them both, sunk in sheets. The only other sound is their breathing. If Kearn opens an eye, he can see their clothes draped about the room, an account of the noon’s activities, and he begins, improbably, to grow hard. Gerard frowns, slightly. Eliot, he was about to say, finished The Waste Land in a nearby asylum. “Yes, that’s right. Have you seen it?” Kearn is trying not to laugh. “The one in the lake?” “It’s quite a large fork.” She’s holding up her own, in illustration. She’s his; she has allowed it. She receives his prayerful attentions. A wind is coming through the curtains, white curtains of Lausanne. Her hands in his hair, she moves his head from her breasts to below, between her legs. It’s like lifting the needle on a record player from one song to the next. She yearns her head backward, into the pillow, her forehead entering the light. *** It’s here, in Lausanne, that I might have seen her; I’m not sure. She would have been on her own, on the Rue Tollier, perhaps between apartments, going in the opposite direction from myself; it could have been anybody. I’ve no way of knowing, of course, her features are 233 hearsay. I’m working, like a police artist, from babble, from words after a crime. The eyewitness, implicated in his own terror of the moment, is unreliable, and keeps contradicting himself. I compose her, it seems, from coarse charcoal; I smudge the face with thumbs. I construct her from a record of bruises. Yet I believe in these words, their limitations; I reside there. Sometimes I am unhappy. I don’t know why it’s important for me to have seen her, or to tell myself I have; well it’s not. Vital; it’s not vital. There is under all the pretended omniscience, under the games, of education or compassion, which one plays to enlarge oneself—to know, as it were, different worlds—to excuse, to forgive, or to explain, out of boredom or obsession: there is only one life, inescapable. There is only one native voice and everything else is imposture. It’s possible I’m in love with her; no, that’s not it. I’m in love with her love. *** When Gerard woke in the evening, she was gone. He knew it without opening his eyes. The coolness of the bed beside him, its indented sheets—an emptiness the shape of his mouth, robbed of exclamation. Everything was bare—the closets, the shelves, the drawers by the bed and in the bathroom. She had left nothing of hers but a used bar of soap. Deprived of strength we imagine ways to undermine it, to assault and besiege it in others. He saw himself as if from above; he had become jealous and unimportant, running the curving, knotted streets like a rat in a warren. He had been belittled by love. It was one, it was two, the town was closed, the buildings turned facades to him like raised, refusing hands. Like a man in the midst of illness, he could neither remember his health nor imagine his recovery. The narrow lanes doubled back on themselves, depositing him time and again in the same squares, the same deserted plazas. Finally, he stopped. 234 Stillness. The night was finished, there was only the slow uphill crawl toward morning. It began, lightly, to rain. Headlights sought him out to spurn him. His hands searched his pockets. He did not have a cigarette. He did not have enough money for a cab. He steadied himself by gripping a metal pole by the curb and took deep breaths, staring at the pavement. A bus stopped and knelt with a weary hiss at his feet. Yes, he thought, that’s right. The lights caught quick schools of rain in their beams. The inside, small like a bunker, had the dimness of poverty. He was surprised to find there were others on board. A couple sat across from him. Love will seek us out, will find us, he thought, the miserables and the prostrates, to flaunt itself before misfortune. He wanted to rise up, to terrify and flay them; he wanted the girl to forgive him, to draw him back with warm arms. She lay sleeping, across a seat, her hair spilled on the boy’s lap. Her face was splendid and pure. His throat trembled with the urge to tell them everything, as when, out of the graces of those dear to us, we seize upon a stranger and reveal the details of our lives; he coughed. His breath clouded the window. The wipers, like brushes, made arcs with soft, ragged edges. When they passed beneath streetlights he could see every bead of rain on the windshield at once. The glow of taillights shattered, softly, in drops. *** Their life had the lightness of constant travel, the fluidity, the dearth of association. In May, she became Mrs. Kearn Eberle. The ceremony was casual, transitory, attended by a few members of his family and the friends she had made. He had proposed one morning in a gondola rising in the Alps; she was charmed. It was if her life were a book she had laid aside long ago and forgotten, but now she had found it, life had resumed its rightful course. Everything that had come in 235 between was cast aside, irrelevant. It had all, she saw, been in preparation for this moment, the triumphant return. She lay sprawled like the page fallen wide at the bookmark. His hands traced the length of her sides. His face bent to her thighs. He touched his forehead to her damp, rich hair. He wanted to raise it to his mouth, to sing into it. The thick, swelling smell gratified him. His lips formed silent, innominate murmurings. Summer with its wide, revealing days. She strode down to the sands with her robe open, wrapping her like a flag. In its dismissive flarings one caught a flash of the breadth of her hips. Her legs dangled lightly from a chair as she sat watching him in the surf. In September, he would begin working for his uncle in Antwerp. She would be a good wife to him, she thought. There was much he could learn that she could teach him. He revered her; he adored her sense of style and her elegance. He saw in her an entrance to greater worlds, worlds of mention and of prestige. The world to which she belonged now enthralled him, beguiled him: she extended her slim hand at the portal, he dashed up the steps to receive it. She knew people, names of importance, she would help him. Now she waved to him. He stood, unsheathed by the ocean. He knew only simple things, acts of grace and power, the old order of might, but the sun was kind to him, crowned him daily, he walked unharmed beneath it. One day she received a letter addressed to a Mrs. Sorrel Eberle. The envelope bore no return address. Inside was a single slim sheet of folded paper. He had forgotten her, it said. He was doing well, had she heard of him? There were nights in small towns on the coast of Brittany, orange lights alive in the blue hours of dawn... It was all lies. She had ruined him, destroyed him. The writing was small and black, the letters like knots, evenly spaced. He had heard that she was married now, to another American. He had heard that they would be living in Europe. Do not forget who first opened its doors to you. His world had been irreparably broken. 236 He wished her only the best. He hoped her husband would treat her well. Do not forget me. The last line was repeated, three times, and beneath that, Love, Gerard. She looked up, moving absently to the window. It was August. Outside was the city with its successive eras like layers of sediment beneath the houses, its brick, its cracked and peeling stone. She could see the shutters of the building opposite, its balconies, and above, the spires of churches, the domes and roofs of monuments, museums, low and whispering. For a moment she remembered the vistas of her childhood, horizontal and endless, leaping from the window of her room like a shout, but then, as quickly as it had come, it vanished. She folded the letter and carefully replaced it in the envelope. She stood squarely in the center of the window, still as a picture in a frame, almost invisible. Below, she could see the ebb and flow of people issuing from the narrow, sudden stairways and corridors, unceasing as the tide. Around her, the arches, squares, walls, and streets closed, like the movements of a great and ancient play. 237 Down by the River “By this, and this only, we have existed Which is not to be found in our obituaries Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider” ~ T.S. Eliot “Little high, little low Any way the wind blows doesn't really matter to me.” ~ Freddie Mercury They started out at eleven—late for him, early for her. The sun in that run-up to summer was lordly, lolling at the zenith. Noon sprawled over hours. At the trailhead, she turned to look back at him, shading her eyes. “I’m sorry.” She knew how he felt about apologies, but it just came out. “I know you wanted to get an earlier start.” At twenty-four, she still had the knack of sleeping in; there was something spoiled, even lewd about it. Awake and alone he had watched her, sunk in wrecked sheets as if on the sea floor, her dark hair the storm that had drowned her. In this and other things he envied her abandon. It was cool in the room, but when he had stepped into the courtyard, he could feel the heat of the coming day. He bent now, in the shade of a pine, to shoulder the daypack. The air was cool against his shins but thick already between his shirt and back. “Well, we’re here now.” It was something she might have said—but more brightly, meaning it. He straightened, walking past her into the tunnel of woods. She caught his elbow. “Look!” High and to the right a hummingbird fluttered, with its iridescent breast and a beak like a line of pencil lead, pointing this way and that. They stood watching for a moment. 238 “Do they ever stop?” He looked puzzled. “You know… going?” He shook his head. “I’ve never seen one alight.” Such a life flitted now through his imagination—one unbroken nervous hover, perishing heroically from sheer exhaustion. “They must.” For a while the only sound was their footfalls. The trail was of beaten dirt that did not rise when scuffed, and clay that held each pebble embedded. “See these?” He patted a tree marked by a patch of white like the rear of a fleeing deer. “If you get lost, keep going till you see another one.” “And if I don’t?” “Then turn around.” They came to a low stone bridge. The railing was crooked and rust-red, but smooth to the touch. Below lay a sheer creek over a dark bed, its burble barely audible. From the shallows rose a few thin beeches. “It’s okay, you know,” he said then. “I was up anyway. You know me.” It was not so much waking as ceasing to sleep, or having it taken from him. His eyes were dry and his hands and feet cold. The aimless hours stretched before him, a cell. That morning, he had wandered barefoot over chill stone floors. The chambre d’hôte where they were staying was less of a B&B than a vacation rental—more rooms than they knew what to do with. On counter, table, couch, and rug lay their things, strewn for convenience. These scant belongings seemed greedy to domesticate the emptiness. But they had brought too little. The 239 house seemed not so much inhabited as full of things left behind. In the stillness and gray light, he felt like a man on a suitcase in a train station, someone else’s photograph of loneliness. “It’s true, old people need less sleep.” He snorted. It’s a start, she thought. The woods had come alive around them, or they were just deeper in: ticking insects, bird chatter, scamper amplified by the rustle of dry brush. To the right, uphill, opened frequent clearings of dust and butterflies, low scrub laid bare to the blinding sun. “Is it really just lizards?” It was hard to credit such racket to something so small. “I’m pretty sure.” After a moment she said, “Tell me again why you hate apologies so much?” He could be brusque, even dismissive about them. “I used to apologize a lot when I was young. I guess I just don’t see the point anymore. It’s all water under the bridge.” “But clearly it’s not.” He clung to some core of the unforgiven, like a man who discards the fruit and gnaws the stone. “I just mean, they don’t fix anything.” “They’re not about fixing. They’re about moving on.” “Yes, but they sort of force the point, don’t they? Moving on is all you can do; eventually everyone gets around to it. I just don’t like to be… rushed.” “You’d rather stew?” She smiled. Small surprise, really. He hung on to so much else. “Let’s be clear: if the choice is between being happy with less, or completely unhappy, it’s not really a choice. No sane person would choose unhappiness. And apologies remind me of that—how powerless I am to choose, or to change things.” 240 “Is that how you feel about getting old?” He stopped and turned. And smiled crookedly, despite himself. “Very good.” “And death?” The question took him by surprise. The thing he professed never to worry about—had he spent his whole life fleeing it? Had his whole life been one of denial? Well yes, life was by definition death’s very opposite, a refusal. “What about death?” There, he had said the word. Younger, he had worried his lack of interest in death made him a shallow person. Younger, he had worried a great deal about a great many things. “I’ve always detested simple things.” “Like the truth?” “Rarely simple.” Hated, too, the obvious, the irrefutable; there always had to be more to it. Take love, for example—the constant flux of desire and regret, selflessness and privacy—he loved in constant uncertainty. Or was it just that when you pared everything back, got down to the hard, obdurate kernel, he wanted there to be something to soften the blow? She put her hand on his shoulder, raising one foot to her knee. “Can we stop? I think I have a rock.” It was meant to be a hike of five hours or so; the kilometers made it hard for them, as Americans, to tell. They were headed, following the river Méouge, for a hilltop village; there were several in the area: Antonaves, Upaix, Le Poët… “Which one again?” “The one with the historic sundial.” He folded the map; really, it was more of a brochure. He tapped the photo of a fresco on the back: a faded goddess beside radiating, Roman-numbered lines. They were to arrive just in time for a cool drink on a café terrace. The bounded European wilderness: civilized comforts were always in reach. Even lost without vista in a thicket, you 241 were never far from a town that had been settled for ages. “We’ll watch the old men play pétanque.” It cheered her, the thought of cobblestones, a stray cat, the steady trickle of water into a stone basin from a lion’s mouth. She felt a rush of affection for these irrigating guardians and their fierce, cartoonish scowls. “How far are we?” He watched her fiddling with her boot. “Well, back at that boulder where we turned left—how long ago was that? I think that was about a fifth of the way in, so…” After a certain point—probably a third—fractions ceased making sense to him as estimates. He could imagine having yet to go the distance he had come, or half again; imagining it four times over, in distance or time, defeated him. Besides, it gave way to imprecisions, introduced too many variables. Half the journey ahead, and you were likely to cover it in the same time it had taken so far; but who knew how much your pace could vary from fifth to fifth? “Say… a third?” He wanted to be encouraging. She had laced up her boot. “Let’s go.” It was hot now even in the shade. Gnats danced about their heads. They were like lunatics, plagued by the unseen. At one point he walked into a spiderweb and stopped, flummoxed by silk. “What is it?” He had blundered into one earlier that morning, strung across the courtyard. Had it been there yesterday, when they’d walked through, stopping to marvel at the peonies? Unconscionable, how quickly they surfaced, these signs of neglect and decay, emerging from closet and corner to bind the vibrant and the thriving. The bathroom that morning was cold as the grave. From the skylight fell a baleful shaft of gray. Alert after the courtyard, he’d found another 242 spider just under the toilet seat, its web spanning the bowl, and in the tub, the tiny gnarled carcass of a third, like a hand clutching after fled life. “I guess not many people pass this way.” “No—didn’t you know about webs?” She liked telling him things, with a prickle of vanity; she could help it no more than her apologies. Perhaps it was because he told her so much, or discounted so much that she told him. “They put them up every night and take them down every morning.” So it was everyday, and not accrued disrepair. He felt some meaning had been lost. He said, “Or forget to.” Slowly they had risen through the layers of vegetation, and emerged now on a ledge above the gorge. The other side was clearly visible, barer still at the same elevation, scrub in sparse clumps studding the scree slope or clinging to the limestone tiers. “Reminds me of… chest hair.” She flushed, though hardly shy about her lovers. “This one ex.” He took her by the shoulders, turned her around. “Look.” His nose was close now to a few damp strands pasted flat against her nape, which smelled of soap and sweat. Touching thumb to forefinger before her face, he framed the scene. Back the way they had come, clouds saddled rounded hills with shadows, a dappling at odds with the greenery overlying gray escarp. Three hot air balloons dawdled in the blue above. “Oh right,” she said. “I always forget.” “To look behind?” “I guess I figure I’ll catch it on the way back.” “We’re not coming back this way.” 243 “Next time, then.” The next times, the somedays of which her life was so full, simply because so much of it still lay before her. No: life was fickle and difficult. Full of friends you never saw, that restaurant—unforgettable! What was it called again? I can’t believe it’s been so long! We have to go back! Long after the rare call from an old friend was over, promises hung ghostly in the air. “Do you always think there’ll be a next time?” “Do you never?” “I used to be like that.” It was one of the more condescending things he said. The funny thing was he didn’t mean to condescend, not all the time; in fact he often seemed taken aback when she pointed it out. The terrain was constantly shifting, up and down, never a harsh grade but a broken wave. It was not hard going but she was just breathless enough. She tried humming, but the rhythm of her footfalls on the rutted dirt was uneven and jostled the melody, like a vase from a table on a train. “So you’ve really never… broken up with anyone before?” He took the water bottle from his pack and handed it to her. She took a sip and passed it back. “I've never had to: does that sound pathetic?” “You mean they've always left you?” “No, it just sort of happens... falls apart, I guess. Unravels.” “You both walk away from the wreckage.” She rolled her eyes. “Oh, there’s never any wreckage, just... less, one day.” She was bashful about hurt and surprised by pettiness, resentment. She always wanted to be on the folksong side of a breakup: serene and moving on, beyond bitterness if not regret, 244 beyond her years, looking back with an aerial wisdom compounded of tears and clear sight, having let go and forgiven. A safe place from which to contemplate the beauty of what had been. It was a nice idea. The end of love, for him, was always bound up in anger and blame. The time and generosity, at worst wasted, at best simply spent. “Not the things you did with someone,” he tried to explain, “but the things you did for them.” “Those are the only things you can’t regret,” she said. It was her eyes that made him wonder. Pale, brilliant, like light in ice, a lens for any meaning. Aloof from her face, they were its most riveting feature—ageless, unlike her lined hands, which were the oldest part of her. They picked their way along the ledge, one hand on the beige, crumbling flank from which it had been cut. Sometimes a yellow flowering of furze relieved the arid drab. “It's part of why I picked you. Of the two of us, you seemed likelier to hold on.” Lest it make him feel weak, she added, “I feel safe with you.” He snorted. “Funny. It's usually women who go in thinking it'll last forever.” They climbed in silence, breathless, sweating. The exposure was brutal. The limestone mesmerized, a history of force in the undulant lines, like wood grain on a larger, coarser scale. Then the forest received them again, their sunstruck eyes failing in the new gloom. He said, “I think we’re past the peak.” “Oh, so soon?” “It’s good to have it done with.” He heard the flirt in her voice a minute late. “Women take longer, you know.” She plopped down on a rock. In a grove off the trail, a massive trunk lay in the ferns, fallen to splinters. 245 Still sitting, she bent forward, reaching for her ankles. She had taken her hair down, and now it slid bit by bit from her nape, like a curtain with a weighted hem. Her boots were dusty. With the back of his hand he smeared sweat from his brow, then stood watching her, thumbs tucked under the straps of his pack. “If we were crossing the desert, we’d be sleeping off the burning hours and marching later when it was cool.” She sat up, slowly, luxuriantly. Her smile was dazzling. “Why don’t we do it in the woods?” *** Time passed differently for the two of them, at different speeds. Take this trip, for him: each day felt long enough while light lasted, but by evening seemed abruptly fled, like a favorite song that comes on the radio and end before the traffic light has changed. In the silence broken only by raindrops he would realize he had not really been listening, and now it was too late. There was dwelling in the moment, and dwelling on it—dwelling on, she pointed out, always happened after. “You’re always so… happy, afterwards.” What he meant was self-sustaining, contained. Unto herself. Dreamy and harboring secrets, as if she took whatever he gave and held it suspended inside, a honeyed lozenge under her tongue. They were not yet past that early fascination with each other’s bodies: groping, ingenuous, instinctive. That movie moment, always from overhead, when two people chastely draped in sheets fall away from each other sweating, pleasantly surprised... She rolled over, slowly, onto her back. “Aren’t you?” France had been his idea—a gamble, but not really. Once on the ground it seemed hers in its fullness; it seemed to spring from her. She gave it life. “Are you glad we came?” 246 Solemnly she nodded, a rustle of leaves against her hair. “But you always say yes,” he sighed. It was her kind of company, uncomplicated. It was easy on him. Not that she was obedient, merely obliging. She went along freely with things, with the smile of someone nodding to a song—private, enticing. Her complaisance was compelling, replete with its own reasons. As if in agreeing, she were the one leading him along. “Hey, I started it,” she said. The world was coming back to him now: patches of damp, nettle, needle, thatch. Nature was never as comfortable as it looked. The soil beneath them was probably teeming, swarming. On the shattered trunk beside them, a millipede performed its sluggish, gleaming roil. There was afterglow, and afterhollow. After sex, he always felt chastened, reduced, settled without being clarified. How to explain that comedown, the littlest oblivion, a pinprick of loss in a sea of satiety? Or a drop of color spreading in water soon to recall it only as hue. A familiar heat like trapped wings blossomed in his upper back, faltering toward the extremities: a sign of exertion. “Ah, la petite mort…” “What’s that?” “I’ve told you before.” “Oh, right.” She raised an arm straight up at nothing in particular, sighting along it at the empty sky. “What about it?” He was up on one elbow, combing leaf debris from her hair. “Do you think you sleep better than I do because you’re so young?” The important thing was she was younger, or that was the least important, once he got over it, and in these early days, he had to get over it again and again, alternately guilty and 247 amazed. He had felt compelled to ask understanding for the difference in their ages, if not forgiveness. She had taken it in stride. These things happen, she said equably. They were to be enjoyed, or refused, but not worried over. It was just part of them now, who they were together. How had he managed to live so long, fretting so much about what people thought? “I mean, I’m old enough—” “Don’t say it!” She crossed her arms over her head to ward it off. “—to be your father.” “My who?” They both laughed. “But seriously,” he said. She was up on her elbows now too. “Well, if you’re so worried, there’s always the campsite rule.” “… only you can prevent forest fires?” Who, me? she mouthed, eyes moon-huge. “No, doofus. Leave it better than you found it.” He studied her: her startling eyes, her smooth body, her strange hands, ten years older than the rest of her. The vaunted honesty of nudity—if only. Bare flesh was the best liar; it had the most innocent face. “I think I can manage that,” he said at last. “How about the other way around? He could be such a baby, sometimes. “Not everything different between us is because I’m younger.” “Not everything,” he said, “but a lot.” *** 248 He was a photographer—not people, no, he’d said when they first met. Landscapes. A show of his, in a small gallery. What he sought, through the lens, was beauty. He had been to stark places, difficult places, in search of it, and some contingent illumination of the soul. “I like to think… if you’re lucky enough to encounter it, you shouldn’t get to walk away unchanged.” It was a line if she’d ever heard one, except that he went on. “But you do, of course. That’s the worst part.” He was at peace now with weather—atmospheric oddities, shimmering aurora—changing only the “nothing” that poetry is supposed to. What was it, exactly, he had expected? Something he’d never admitted to himself. “But you keep at it.” The stem of the wineglass was cool between her fingertips. “Why?” His face had flickered with amusement, or abashedness. “Well—you still have the pictures.” Later that night, he had asked to take hers. On her belly in his bed, she shrugged. “I thought you didn’t take pictures of people.” “You’re the first girl I’ve dated who didn’t mind having her picture taken.” “Were they all that ugly?” “That’s mean... I was thinking it had more to do with smartphones.” She had two rules, she told him the next morning. I won’t be mistaken for someone else. I won’t go anywhere, do anything you’ve gone or done before. I want everything to be new. Life’s too short for anything but first times. He had his own theory about relationships. In the first few heady days, you saw everything, and after that, less and less. You knew, right from the beginning, what would one day drive you apart, but somehow you managed to forget. All he’d said was, “Well, don’t you move fast.” 249 “Hold up a sec,” she heard him call out now. Since lunch, he had been lagging behind. It had been one thing or another, a sip of water, a stop to catch his breath, a thorn through his sock pricking his ankle. The trail cleaved mostly to cover, stands of hornbeam and holm oak. Short and small- leaved, they were a poor filter for sun, so that shade, too, was violently spangled. It was giving him a faint headache. He kicked up what he thought was a pebble, but its flight seemed too graceful, unrelated to his dragging boot. When she turned around, he was bent over, examining his pants leg. “What is it?” “A cricket, I think.” The strange thing about it was it was stuck. He watched it wriggle on the khaki fabric. When with two ginger fingers he plucked it off, a long streamer of gossamer followed, almost invisible, briefly recalling the luxurious strand swaying and glistening that morning in the courtyard, from awning to shrub. “All good.” Though really, he was feeling feverish. His back was soaked where the pack pressed against it, the same spreading heat as before, in the clearing. The same spreading heat as when he woke drenched in sweat: hot, folded wings smothering a patch of skin flushed with rash. At the same time, every inch of exposed skin—lips, face, and arms—felt oddly parched. His eyeballs were dried to their sockets, as when he’d underslept. He lurched forward, catching up. “So… how is it you know so much about spiders?” “Oh, I liked them a lot as a girl.” She alternated between facing forward, and turning back to speak over her shoulder. “I saw a spider—in the top right pane of the living room window—eat a fly from its web once, just sink its mandibles into its head until it quit wriggling.” 250 “That’s macabre.” Since the cricket, he’d grown sensitive to every graze and tickle. He found himself staring at the back of a finger where he had felt a gnat’s tiptoe, incredulous there was nothing to be seen. And spiderwebs—you could never really be sure you’d gotten rid of them. “I guess. I thought of them as… little spirits who protected against insects, guardians of house and home. Like hearths, big old pots, twig brooms, hanging satchels of spice.” The river gorge was sinuous, always hiding with a bend how far they had left to go. From time to time the trees parted to tease them with a glimpse of destination that seemed distant still. He kept his eyes lowered, on the trail. There were turns where a tree leaning sideways for light grappled with an outcrop. At such moments, he felt he was seeing the truth: the elemental thing, the obdurate structure they clambered. The rest was just dirt that the years would wash off along with whatever it anchored. As in their rented rooms where, thinly masked by their belongings, some abiding vacancy showed through, so one day, in the earth’s old age, nothing would be left but bare rock jutting from the plain. It occurred to him they had not seen a trail marker for some time. “How much further?” “You’re asking me?” She grinned. Minutes later he stopped short, pointing through the branches at a spire of uneroded rock rising from the valley floor below. “I think that’s Elephant Rock.” “I don’t see it.” “Right there.” His dry eyes twitched in the sunlight. “No, I mean—the elephant.” “But it can’t be, because… that means we’re less than halfway. Unless we missed it earlier, and that’s something else?” 251 “Don’t worry,” she said cheerfully. “There’s still plenty of daylight.” “Is there?” She showed him her phone. There was no signal, but the clock ticked on, unaffected. It felt later than it was. “Hold still,” she said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “You’ve got—” Her finger touched his eyeball so briefly he barely had time to flinch. He stood there blinking madly, hoping for a tear. “Make a wish?” She was peering closely at her fingertip, puzzled. “I don’t think so,” she said at last. She held her finger out toward him. On the tip lay the leg of a fly. At that moment, he felt a touch of something on his neck, lighter than breath. He was jumping up and down, a frantic tantrum. “Get it off! Get it off, get it off, get it off!” For a moment, she saw the spider abseiling into emptiness, lengths of silk behind like splintered light, and then, in midair, catch itself, check the force of his panicked fling. Now it rode the breeze, buffeted on updraft from his thrashing arms. How little it needed to stay aloft: a whisper, a stir of heated air! “Did it bite me?” he was saying. It must have. He hadn’t felt it, but that would explain everything. It must have crawled on him while he was fucking in the brush. He was still slapping his neck and ears when she said, “Ssh, listen. Can you hear it?” It was the river the trees hid. Invisible below, but they were closer. “C’mon! We’re almost there!” She darted off, reinvigorated. He hurried to follow. They were descending now, sometimes steeply. The canyon walls began to narrow. They were too low by far, but what he wouldn’t give for a vista, a glance back at where they’d begun. 252 To see not how far, but simply how they’d come: to piece together from terrain a continuity, as if making sense of landscape might make sense of where they found themselves. But it was useless—looking back, he could see no further than the last rise or bend in the trail. And how to tell one clearing from another, this rock from that boulder? There was no order to it, just sustained woodland sameness. She heard him grunting and whuffling behind, exerting himself to keep up. It was odd— had her pace really changed that much? His footfalls were heavy, clomping, scraping. “Where do you think this is going?” she heard him say. “To a village where we can have beers on a terrace.” She was thinking of the pleasantness, the plane trees, the long sweet evening slung like a silk hammock between the appointed hours of apéritif and sleep. “By a fountain, and watch the old men play pétanque.” “No,” he said, “I mean us.” “Hey—isn’t that my line?” How rare for her, to be the one who was short, who avoided a subject. “But… where are we headed?” “Wherever this goes, as long as it’s good for. Is that OK?” Finally, he said, “I think so.” “I mean, isn’t that what we agreed on?” “Did we agree on something?” His voice came from far away, as if reaching her through a tunnel. “Well, not in so many words. I just mean, I thought we both knew what this was.” It was odd, hearing the words come out of her mouth. They seemed to echo, or maybe she just heard herself saying them. It was his style, and she felt she had usurped it. 253 “Let’s just… enjoy what we have while we have it?” Somehow, from his mouth, this protestation would have sounded like a ploy. From hers, it sounded like… wisdom? In youth—he remembered it now—the days took ages, each hour a minor epoch. How vast time seemed to stretch, and him with no idea how to fill it. And at day’s end awaited that special exhaustion, which made even time squandered feel casually heroic. Moments still opened for her that special timelessness. “I mean, it’s beautiful here.” Lifting her arms, she twirled to take in everything around them. To their right, the southern wall rose steeply, rimmed with brightness from the sun behind. It was hard, looking up, to believe they had come from such heights. The blue sky that the canyon had once yawned wide to gulp down was now but a strip. She had stopped, waiting for him. His steps were slow, halting. She was suddenly afraid he might fall. When he drew abreast of her, she took his arm. “Why do we have to worry about what happens next?” she asked. Whatever happened next… she gave herself over to it gladly. It was fine with her, or not, but would happen anyway. Her trust, her confidence scandalized him. He wanted to run, arms open wide, shouting No! as if after a child. But she was in no danger. What was it he feared? “Because,” he said. He was sweating freely. His mouth was dry. He felt a squeezing in his lungs. He could not think of a good reason. He could not think. His brow pounded. “Because…” He wiped the corner of his mouth and the back of his hand came away with a long strand of spider silk. “I’m really sorry,” he said. He sat down heavily. His legs were trembling. Her hand was on his shoulder. “Are you feeling all right?” 254 “I can’t,” he said. “I can’t see from my left eye.” She bent to look. The eye was glazed and milky. At its outer corner, flush against his skin, was a web like a snowflake, starred by a single tear. Somewhere deep inside him, an itch built to a seizing of his chest before he coughed. As she watched, the fat glossy drop shuddered and rolled, scattering in smaller droplets like filtered dew. It did not occur to her to be terrified. “I want to tell you something,” he said. And before she could stop him, “I remember every woman who ever gave herself to me.” He could not help seeing it as an act of generosity, even with those to whom it meant the least. “Like when I look at every photo I’ve ever taken, I remember what I was thinking at the moment I pressed the shutter, and why. Such trust.” As every lover believes he has invented love, so he now believed he had invented sadness. “I’ve made so many mistakes,” he said. “But someone had to be the one to worry.” In scant minutes, he was completely blind, his eyes sewn shut at the lashes. When she took his hand, her own was cool, and he allowed himself to be led. The path ran by the river’s edge, sometimes far, sometimes near, fringed with feathery grass and wildflowers. Through the trees the far side of the gorge could be seen, streaked tan or black with runoff, vegetation shelved in slate. She was telling him about his grandmother’s house, a steady stream of chatter to relieve and reassure. It was a humble cottage on an empty plain, at once cozy and drafty, the shingles like dead leaves peeling up in the wind. There were trapdoor spiders with their webs flat against the wood siding. In the final days of fall, crickets gathered on the screen door, dropping on the porch as the weather turned, while the spiders made their way inside, one to a room. As a child, she had watched them on the white walls, unmoving for days at a time and then, one morning, a 255 foot to the left, three to the right. So long as they kept to their distant orbits there was a truce between her and them, an understanding. What strange, patient migration were they enacting, from a corner of the ceiling to the other edge and back, toward the motionless fan? In their erratic progress hid a cryptic calendar, clued in somehow to the true nature of time, its idleness, its fits and starts. It was all happening so quickly now. The air was drying out the inside of his lungs, an ancient air, fine with grit. He felt the organs hollowed in his chest, preserved, like the liver of a camel he’d once handled in a museum, mapped with a brown mottle that had been the flush of health and blood's reverberations. His body was becoming a place of neglected things. She could not touch him without drawing from him clinging strands of light that would have blinded but for their slenderness. She thought of the lavishing he called disrepair, webs strung with spider daring from eaves to peonies, across the side alley, and between the trash cans. Every night they put them up and every morning took them down, and the ones not taken down the birds tore through. She had a rush of feeling for the busy creatures. Webs were everywhere, holding the world together, every crack in glass every and cleft in wood, every filament of damage until the world was bound in rifts. His lips hardly moved now when he spoke, and the barest breath passed through them,. “I’ve been there before,” he was saying. Her hands on him were a balm: cool, soothing, like water on a stone in the sun. His own hands were gauzy, the fingers almost mummified. “The village… I never told you.” It had been his first time abroad, a young man. Europe was a continent of buses. Every day was an endless exhilaration. He was curled into a seat with his massive pack beside him when he saw the village perched atop its hill, passing in the sunset. Shortly thereafter, he had 256 fallen asleep, and when he woke in the dark, it was as if he had dreamed it. “I’m going back… but I’ve never really been.” At last, they came to the river. Sun had bleached the dusty pebble shores. Shale overhung teal pools rimmed by brown shallows. The water was milky with rock flour. Large slabs, frost- wedged from the walls, rose from its swirls, mighty except that they had already fallen. She was carrying him now, cradling him as he had curled, like a child, though he was lighter than a child, a basket of reeds without a baby. Light, so light that if she bent him in any way he might crack. If she set him in the water, he would float away. The spiders were a ballet in the air. How freely they swung from their invisible lines, at the whim of waft! How meticulously they flexed each spindly leg! His skin where she could still see it was wizened. It had the lacquered feel of rattan, or palm fronds, stiff and burnished. His mouth was frozen, a small cavern where the wind whistled, and though he could no longer form words she knew from the way he implored her from his sightless sockets that he was asking her to sing. She began to, her voice lilting and wavering like sunshine finding its way through leaves. The tune, slight as a breeze, grew tangled in the grasses by the shore. In the blue heights, the buzzards were no larger than the nearer dragonflies flushed from bushes by her passing. She left him there, by the river, and moved on. 257 The Recovery In the Gers, there are towns that fit in the palm of your hand. They have a wayward, homely charm: no seams plumb, and no lines true. Time with its rasp has been at every surface. The shops—there is one of each kind, in a row, as in a picture book—post no opening hours. At night, cats scatter trash from the empty square to the old gate with its single lantern. In the halle the gutted ducks lie Sunday-ready, necks drooping from the trestles. I had taken a room that summer in Sauveterre, at a pension with weathered green ogival doors and a knocker like a lady's hand—lace cuff and wedding ring—as if proffered for a kiss. The house had remained empty till the last weeks of August, when I acquired a neighbor, a hangdog man I had yet to meet. The proprietress claimed he was a producer of films. Late one night, the old woman went on, he had fetched up in his expensive shoes ruined by the rain—like the leaf, Monsieur, that receding floods bequeath one’s doorstep. She straightened from serving me tea and glanced over her shoulder. The back door was open, the hallway dark. The house was still shuttered against the morning. Towns keep secrets from those who only walk its streets and never enter its parlors. From the front, the pension’s façade belied the extent of the yard, which sprawled between swaybacked walls to the overgrown banks of a creek and a disused mill, part of the former priory annexed during the Revolution. I derived a certain delectation from my breakfasts at the white cast-iron table, by the trellis with its cloying roses, but never once, since arriving, had the only other tenant joined us. Floods, storms—surely these were rare this time of year? I asked our hostess, and we returned to discussing the weather. 258 I am unskilled at eliciting gossip, a talent whose lack I have always mourned. Some fondness for surfaces—their continued seemliness—keeps me from public prying. Or else a native reticence, a desire to remain unremarked. Maugham bemoaned that his admissions of profession prompted wild confidences, all couched in the hope he would use them in stories. But privacy was different then... the south of France looks much the same. These country routes and, nearing towns, the sudden, triumphant processionals of plane trees mincing slanted light with leaf shadow. Imagine my delight, then, when my unseen neighbor began making assignations almost nightly in the garden. I had doused the light and closed the shutters, but left the windows open to gather the night air. I was in that haze of half-consciousness when I first heard the unmistakable murmur—plaintive, vehement, aggrieved—of a man spurned in love. He had been unlucky, suffered setbacks, unwisely tied his finances and flirtations. But the great heaving rehearsal of injustices had found a sympathetic ear. Night after night, he unburdened himself freely of the greatest banalities as if they were the most fantastical occurrences. I learned to sift his voice from the verdure’s rustle, the trickle of the hidden brook the willow filtered, as Midas’ servants learned to tell the barber’s secret from the whisper of reeds. What else could I do? I listened. *** I am a writer, and require seclusion. I came to Sauveterre to be unknown: to have no conversations, no community, to eschew so much as the single bar-tabac where the départementale, rounding a bend toward the Pyrenees, rushes right past the road into town. The owner, all bones and gristle like a stripped chicken, does the crossword on the terrace, pen in one hand and cigarette in the other, her princely Alsatian bored to stupor under the table. 259 Of course, no sooner had I sequestered myself than inspiration failed me. The notes I had brought from home seemed a stranger’s reminders. And so, to hide my shame, I made an act of idleness. Carefully donning a bespoke insouciance, I strolled the empty streets at sunset. By then, the day’s dust has settled on the cobblestones. That still hour… the trick is to hold the town intact while taking possession of it. These façades, these alleys—I pocket them with description. And then… an imperceptible pushing forward, beckoned by suggestion, past the slit of a gate ajar, a gap in a fence, a fallen span of wall disclosing a courtyard where weeds taller than a man have rumpled the flagstones. Crumbs of mortar dribble from between brick teeth bared over a window’s gape—black, until twilight slanting in picks a rafter from the gloom. This slightest violation, the infiltration of surmise. A havoc of swallows bursts forth, fleeing south past the loggias. On a drawn-out afternote, a shutter drifts open, the Pierrot-head meant to hold it open nodding off. If I could not be the person I had meant to in coming, I might at least play the role these façades pressed upon me: the visitor. What was I waiting for? The town to reveal itself. Or perhaps, in the slow opening of these abandoned spaces, my own mislaid desire to return, if only in echo. And so I received these nightly confessions with glee. If I became their amanuensis— well, how willingly they lent themselves. The mystery of what went on outside my window seemed somehow complementary, the aural underside to what I daily saw. Moreover, my neighbor’s vomitous shudders of recrimination had taken a new direction: seduction. What tender shoulder pillowed his complaints? I pictured a girl from the local peasantry, a slip of a thing, arrogant with youth she found no outlet for. Lavished on her, it left her sullen. 260 With a downturned mouth, she bore beer on trays to loud boys crowded round a table in a bar the next town over. Boys in soccer jerseys their fathers wore in photos on the wall. Of course, he was a film producer. He had been put-upon, a father all his life, nagged to pieces by creative egos, long-suffering before they met. What exits, what escapes had he promised? Her whole history, had it led to this moment? Or abandoned her here, on the damp grass, staring at her hands in her lap? She was utterly silent, quelled by the steady stream of words. Or else she only murmured, under my hearing. He had spoken of her flesh, praising its rose and pearl, caressing it. He narrated his ministrations, every nibble and bite, detailed the accomplishments of fingertips even as they accomplished. He needed only poetry to understand him. Those limbs, each despite their slenderness drowsily leaden. Torpor of a sort that excites, incites. The waste of youth upon her like a sentence. How exactly I know her. *** I am an inveterate eavesdropper—an aureur, if you will. I obtain, from overhearing, pleasures I would blush to mention. Shall I tell you of my sexual awakening? It was late—I was twenty-three—oh, late—half past midnight. One of those pitiful, calamitous fleatraps that prey on the young and poor. The room was a trundle bed jammed into a bay window. When unfolded, it blocked the front door. I lay bathed in the pallor of lighted signage through the listless curtains. I had thought myself alone upstairs. So did the couple next door. Her cries were neither loud nor long, but startling and unearthly. And over, before I quite knew what they were. (It had this in common with the only earthquake I have ever experienced.) But of course the body quickens while the mind trails behind. To think such sounds could be 261 wrung from pleasure, from someone adored. When it was over, I rose to clean myself but thought better of it. The only bathroom was down the hall, and I would have had to fold the bed. I wished to do nothing that might announce myself, embarrass them, revoke their trust in the delicious night. Their utter unabashedness had made a ghost of me, and I was surprised to learn that was how I preferred it. I had heard (and seen) such acts before in films, oh yes. And I went looking for that feeling there again, to no avail. Neither her ecstasy nor her cries gratified, but the surprise of them, reaching through a wall to rivet the viscera and hasten the heart. I the painlessly ravished and effortlessly ravishing at once, in this theft whose victim missed nothing, in which the mere idea of theft, much less a thief, remained unsuspected. Terror through a partition. Listening is the perfect crime. Had the serpent only sampled the fruit of that private frolic, he would never have urged another on the Edenic duo. And even today, when I hear love through the walls, I stiffen. *** The landlady was wrong. A spate of squalls has suspended all recent garden trysts. My days had shaped themselves about these incursions. I am left privy to nothing. I go out squinting now at noon, the driest hour, stepping over puddles. One worries for the gutted buildings, with a staircase in the cool vestibule. Viridian lichen bakes on red roof tiles. A brow of gable pierced by an occulted oxeye, rheumy with piled belongings. The black, compacted wood of half-timbered houses, all the more stalwart for its warp. Plaster like a scab torn from a wall, brick pink as a wound beneath. The bridge is low to the lazy olive river gorged on rains. Blowsy branches, leaves akimbo, trail in the current. Thronged by green, a single Calla lily with its furled spathe seems to 262 mark a virgin spring, or the spot where a saint pricked his finger. The moss along the low stone walls sends up brown tendrils like fine hair raised along an arm by the breeze. And I, having completed my submission to distraction, wait alone in my quarters for the only fly to age and slow, so I can swat it. *** When the nightly trysts resumed, my neighbor returned bearing canny gifts: a pair of costly earrings he asked her permission to affix. His careful ministrations, the cautions a man who thinks himself safe will jettison. And all the while, his prattle (forgive my condescension): she is a blessing he cannot comprehend, but does not question. What miracle created and imprisoned her here for him to find? He cannot but imagine her unique in all the world. I too admit to curiosity. Why does she never say a word? Sometimes on the route des Pyrenees, empty at nine on a Saturday night, a motorcycle pulls up at the blinking red light beside the old men playing petanque. A bare thigh pressed to the seat and curled into a boyfriend’s. Long hair spilling from under a helmet. Or summer cashiers, five to a car, laughing their way to a roadhouse with a buvette outside, the light from its counter spilling over the gravel lot. I wonder. Perhaps if I only saw her, I would understand. I might confirm my intuitions, or shred and discard them. Tonight, I hiked to the chapel of the town’s patron saint. On the way, you pass something like a chimney sprouting from the ground. Topped by a Madonna, it marks the spot where the saint is said to have sauvé la terre, vanquishing a dragon by throwing his ring in its mouth. The chapel was flanked by pines but had been locked against vandals. On a near rise were the remains of a long, low barn: the fractured roof timbers, a wall of wattle and daub still whole, but reeling as though from a mighty blow. The decrepitude bespoke neither neglect or the cheap 263 residue of expedience, but the weight of centuries withstood. From atop the hill, I could see the cemetery. The town was there, gathered by a grave. Their backs were turned to me, and with their murmur a tremor passed through the group like its subtle physical embodiment: shoulders swayed, weight was shifted to the other foot. I saw the butcheress draw closer to my landlady and further from the cheesemonger. I watched until the group scattered, then skittered down the hill to the graveyard. Wrought-iron masts and crosses, plaques, shattered flowerpots. On the tomb beside were a shovel and a bottle of wine, but the grave was empty. I was standing there when it began to rain. A village is a murder mystery. The conversation of locals is rich with allusion, red herrings to shared histories you don’t understand. The air of conspiracy inspires you to imagine a crime. Everyone has something to hide, but you cannot tell if it pertains to the case at hand, or if it will merely prove a false lead: another skeleton, in another closet, a private and irrelevant embarrassment. Yet surely this suspicion of wrongdoing is only a hallucination of exclusion. All these months, and I was still a stranger to the town, while my neighbor had not only found love, he would abscond with it. My landlady was already back when I came in the door. I must have looked a sight. Pity me: tumbledown, bedraggled and bereft, from my chin tucked in my collar to my sopping shoes, every inch the visitor none wishes to receive. Yet I was not turned away. Indoors threw it warm arms around me. A hallway two steps down, and immediately the low, solid beams oppressed you with the weight they shouldered. If wood could groan! Ushering me into the dim kitchen, my landlady sat me down for soup beside the massive hearth, a brick deposit anchoring the house. Perhaps there 264 are two towns: a town of sidewalks and exteriors, which visitors stroll, and another of hidden courtyards and garden doors under armfuls of bougainvillea. Locals, if they wish, can go from their kitchen to the baker’s without ever setting foot out their front door. I stayed late in the study that night. Lying in wait, or in hope of companionship? These swaybacked houses shouldered upright by their neighbors, these towns time has brought to one knee, idyllic and sinister. How much they have seen. Leafing through a gilded history, I perused the account of a woman in the region, collectively murdered and dismembered. As at some ritual banquet in which she was offered to the town, the various parts were buried each in different places. The stump of a foot filled the exact center of a cornerstone. An elbow folded in a corbel, a hand weighting the mantel of a hearth, fingers distributed to individual bricks. The eye that watched from a keystone, and another blindly immured, untraceable but for a green weeping stain down the creamy stucco. A tibia, entrusted to the reliquary of a broad doorsill that time and passage have scooped out like a shallow basin. That night I had a dream. The mayor, while his wife is asleep with her eye mask and her rejuvenating creams, wakes beside his white phone on the tulle-trimmed nightstand. He finds his glasses without turning on the rose-shaded lamp. He slips quietly from bed and pads across the thick carpet downstairs, downstairs, taking the steps one by one in the blue dark. In the kitchen, he opens a cupboard, and behind the sugar, the flour, the baking powder, is another, smaller cupboard, in every way identical to the first. He opens it. There is nothing inside but a pair of lips, fixed to the back. Carefully, he applies his wife’s lipstick. A faint, enticing smile plays across them, and they begin to speak. They tell him who has been sleeping with whom, who has cheated on his taxes, who is buying up property along the river, who, based on dinner chatter, will rise to oppose his motion at the next town meeting. They tell him everything my neighbor 265 has told his young lover, about the women who’ve hurt him, and the places he’ll take her. The mayor stands on a chair, eyes closed, his slippered feet beside the flour and sugar in decanters, an expression of utter beatitude on his face. *** Shortly before I was to leave Sauveterre, I treated myself to dinner in the neighboring town, at a restaurant that was part of an old inn. The courtyard, where the passenger-and-mail coach had once changed horse teams, was now decked with verdure. A lighted pool of opaline modernity completed the oasis. The terrace was full when I arrived: two couples, a family of five, four friends, and in one back corner, an older man. He sat there, gray hair boiling over a shirt open halfway down his chest in the summer heat. I watched as he smoked a brown cigarette down to the butt—tapping it, from time to time, into the only ashtray at any of the tables. I had never seen the man before, but I knew, even before I heard him order, that he was my neighbor from the pension. The edges of umbrellas fluttered in the breeze. Their shadows seem to float when stirred, as if on some clear river layer above the bed of the ground. “Monsieur a l'air de savoir bien se régaler,” I said, nodding at my neighbor. I closed the menu. “I’ll have what he’s having.” The only waiter was young and scrawny; partway through the sitting, his shirttail came untucked and stayed that way. He brought me a perfectly ordinary rump steak and a thin local rosé. I don’t know what I expected—a business traveler? A cosmopolite? Not the heavyset troglodyte with his crassly unbuttoned shirt, eyes pouched with weariness. From where I sat, the pool’s chlorine masked the smell of his cigarette. Half a globe of pistachio ice cream skidded in 266 his dish. Between finger and thumb, he toyed with what seemed a single pearl earring. It was all beginning to take shape in my mind… How little it takes to fire the imagination! The merest hint summons a sympathetic being, if only all the details of setting are in place. Predictable, of course, this parochial romance. He was waiting at the restaurant that night for her. They were to leave together, and never come back. His disappointment was exquisite. What would he try to do now? I did but taste a little honey with the end of the rod that was in mine hand, and, lo, I must die… The waiter had just brought me my middling mousse au chocolat when he left. An assortment of glass vessels voided on the table, as in an abandoned laboratory. I lingered, savoring my Sauternes. The inn at dusk had the slightly monstrous aspect of a house eaten by ivy, the flyspecked white shutters intruders in the green scheme. In the bathroom, cream-white washcloths lay folded and stacked beside the sink. That night, I worked late, trying to give shape to this summer affair, these pages of scribbled transcriptions. My useless old notes lay shucked in a corner, husks of what another self had once thought sufficiently interesting to say. If that world was shriveled and gone, so be it; we cannot rid ourselves of voices that hold sway, whose weather we fall under. It felt cheap, predatory, melodramatic, messily torn from life, but I was grateful for a sense of renewed urgency, the need to tell and make known. And so I was surprised when I heard the sound of footsteps in the yard. I waited. I strained to hear, and heard nothing. I saw a sliver of myself, lit by the desklamp, in the casements to either side. Then, with the vengefulness of one teased with and denied for all these weeks his impending, almost promised release, I flung the shutters open. 267 I had not mistaken his voice earlier. The man I had seen at dinner was naked in the yard, with his back to me and his buttocks clenched. Was he urinating in the flowerbed along the wall? There was no girl anywhere to be seen. Had she fled? He half-turned then, though I doubt he ever knew I was there. He seemed blind to the world, to himself. With one hand he held the curtain of green away from what seemed a pale pink patch of wall, and with the other, furiously stroked his erect member. Then in the light from my open window—raging, lunging, wrung and racked, led and funneled by this spurting appurtenance into the world, he splattered himself in arcing gouts and jets over the wisteria, the wall, the night. *** The next morning he was gone from the pension. Not long after, I too left Sauveterre. The bed was made, the shutters screening out the morning. I had brought scant belongings, but once they were packed, the room looked barer than before I had come: the wooden chairs and tables unaltered, yet somehow diminished. When we had finished with breakfast, I stayed in the yard while my landlady brought the tray of dishes back inside. I did not know what I was looking for, exactly. Something to substantiate that night out of all proportion to my sense of lived life, that consummation of loneliness. Something to justify or dispel what I had thought to see—a gap in the hedge where lovers whispered; some sordid hole, as in a sheet or a bathroom stall; a tear in a partition—to explain that glimpse of pink wreathed in his glistening expulsion. And there, under the wisteria, I found it, or something. An ear, or the sculpture of an ear, in stone. The wall around it seemed utterly normal. I could find no evidence it had ever been a part of anything else (a bust, a toppled statue), nor any to suggest it had been added as an 268 afterthought. Time might have removed it from the center of the stone, as if surfaced from something interred; the wall might just as easily have put forth this growth, or in assimilation, blurred the seam between itself and an addition until both were of the same mottled gray. In the lobe was a single pearl earring. Beside the stone, it had an air of freshness—not the least of which was due to the maroon stain, as of dried blood, just beneath it. I let the curtain of wisteria fall. As the taxi took me from the pension, the town seemed to close behind me, the scalloped shadow of a tiled roof scaling the building beside, houses crowding an alley till it narrowed from sight. I have never returned to Sauveterre. The town, like that man, have vanished from my life. And left me with a story to tell, but where, where is that believing ear in all the night? 269 Everything I Know About French Women I Learned from Les Parapluies de Cherbourg Until the age of twenty-one there was only one thing I wanted in life: to fall in love. From a great height, like a bird struck from the skies. So I went to France. There is a work you encounter at a certain age that informs or colors everything to come: tarot and schematic, prophecy and dramatis personae. The events that befall you only recall its plot. The people you meet fall into the types it provides. It is, for a while at least, the answer key at the back of the world. “Like the Bible,” said Romy, “or Tolstoy.” Yes, I admitted. But did not say: Or Les Parapluies de Cherbourg. The French have a word for it. Idée fixe. At the time, I rarely finished books I started. It wasn’t laziness so much as an excess of enthusiasm. I wasn’t interested in novels for what they had to say about other people, only novels about people like me, or people I wanted to be—basically, me. I wasn’t interested in novels for their stories, but for what they had to tell me about my own life, and any tips on how to get there. I especially liked novels that began with promises, predictions, vague statements of theme. These prefatory generalizations seemed to guzzle the world, lay out buried, binding principles of which life itself only offered the rare gleaming glimpse. The right alchemy of opening elements set my mind racing: all the possible outcomes, all the implications. Why bother with the rest if you 270 could imagine it all? I set the book down, dazzled by my own future. In this way many a spine was broken. I was always running out of bookmarks. Les Parapluies de Cherbourg is a fable of first love, which is to say: boy loves girl, boy loses girl. I don’t think those count as a spoilers. More precisely, Les Parapluies de Cherbourg is a story of the failure of first love which, presented in so pure a form, comes to seem as axiomatic as it is deeply moving: the failure of first love as commandment of fate. It’s almost like the particulars don’t matter; in the film, the boy is drafted and goes to war, leaving the girl pregnant and alone. But he could’ve stayed. They could’ve gotten married, run out of money, had a child, failed at having a child, woke up one morning feeling trapped beside a stranger, wanting something different out of life. There’s any number of ways she could’ve wound up at that window in the next room, suddenly feeling just as alone. Any number of reasons, but the takeaway is this: young love is a casualty of mere life. Four years later, they meet by chance shortly before Christmas. It’s her first time back in town, just passing through. In her current husband’s black Mercedes, she pulls into the gas station her former love now owns. In a way, they both have exactly what they once said they wanted out of life—except each other. Even their children have almost the same name: François for his son, Françoise for their daughter. When she vanishes into the dark night, a sudden gust of blizzard seems to bring the music to a terrible crescendo, and in its wake, snow settles on the grave of former feeling. Years later, I passed through Amiens again, my first time back since the year I had spent there. On the train from Charles de Gaulle were two plump girls—“from Michigan,” one of them told the elderly gentleman who’d kindly moved his luggage to make room for their framepacks. She 271 pressed her nose to the window. The other girl promptly nodded off. Picardy raced by: potato blossoms, poplar windbreaks. She prodded her friend excitedly over a farmhouse, but her friend was having none of it. “Your first time?” asked the elderly gentleman, after a long pause— courtesy, reflection, or casting about for English. “Oh, yes,” said the girl at the window. “What do you think of our country?” Soybeans, sugar beets, wheat. How different could it be from her home? She gushed, “I think it’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen.” I wanted her sensible friend to wake up and smack her. In Amiens, my friends were waiting for me on the platform. They drove me on a nostalgia tour around town, pointing out old haunts, exclaiming fondly over storefronts, my memory and return a way for them to measure the change they’d merely lived with: the completed glass pavilion over the station square, the ever-hideous concrete column of the Tour Perret, the brand new cineplex, the quay where at Saturday market I bought my favorite smoked magret, the cathedral spire pink in evening light, the sundial high on the south tower that cleaning had uncovered. Little had changed, yet nothing was the same. The plum trees by the park dropped magenta petals on the sidewalk between peeling sycamores. “You know, I never felt young when I lived here,” I said, “but now I see I was.” Jacques Demy’s musical, starring Catherine Deneuve as the girl, Geneviève, and Nino Castelnuovo as the boy, Guy, is considered a classic. In 1964, it won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. No one French my age I’ve ever known has ever loved Les Parapluies de Cherbourg. But how many Americans do you know who love Love Story, or will admit to it? 272 Love Story, of course, is despite a theme by Francis Lai, a vastly inferior movie. Les Parapluies de Cherbourg is myth in its purest state. There was a book, however, that most French people my age pressed upon me the first time I was there: Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours. A cult classic, it seemed to have about the same standing as The Catcher in the Rye. Its foreword begins with these words: “The most important thing in life is to have a priori judgments on everything.” That was about as far as I got, though years later, I watched the movie, hoping it would shed light on those occluded years. I knew a lot of epigraphs by heart. They seemed so full of potential. I don’t mean every moment of my life in France was like Les Parapluies de Cherbourg. I just mean my life in France made the most sense when it reminded me of something from Les Parapluies de Cherbourg. For instance, all that rain. It rained all winter long in Amiens. It was raining in the morning dark when I went to class, and when class let out it was dark again already and still raining. It rained on the Somme, which wound through town on its way from the fields of the Great War to the sea, and on the drab buildings, squat products of an unlikely reinforced concrete craze that arose postwar from the rubble of Allied shelling. Rain dripped from the blunt jutting brutalist eaves and the bearded saints of the cathedral façade, black with runoff. It clung to the bare boughs of trees along the boulevard. I walked home down blocks of shuttered windows, shut out of life. 273 It was my first time abroad. I wrote a girl back home, saying, I do, however, sometimes feel like I’ve passed some invisible threshold where I don’t actually meet new people anymore, just variations on people I used to know. This may just be people I know and miss haunting me, so that I carry on old unfinished conversations with those I’ve deemed their heirs and successors (I’ve usually left a lot unsaid), importing whatever charity or mistrust is leftover from the earlier relationship to someone who’s essentially done nothing to deserve it. I think most people sidestep this situation by staying in the same place, so the people who remind them of someone they used to know are actually those very same people, older and foolhardier. This is maybe nowhere more evident than among expats, of which it seems only a finite number of models were created. For the moment I definitely think of certain classmates by the names of people back home. The girl back home wrote back, saying, That seems a very jaded outlook... Of course, we all categorize in an attempt to understand and establish a basis for interaction, and those categories can only be based on previous experience, so it makes sense. Stung, I dropped the subject. Of course the cheese was good, the bread, the wine… everything one thinks of as France. But when I passed the bakery every day, the meaning I read in the word in its window was not the French one, bread, but the English, pain. 274 Les Parapluies de Cherbourg is also the name of the umbrella boutique, on a cobblestoned street in the Norman port of Cherbourg, that lends the movie its title. The shop is run by the widow Madame Emery and her daughter Geneviève. Strong, loving, adorably vain, a victim of her own difficult life, Madame both worries she stifles her only child, and depends on her for companionship. The women live in a world of two amidst the umbrellas—plaid, patterned, colored—standing in racks or dangling in the window displays, a tad too sparsely for whimsy. The boutique has two such windows, and a door between. The façade is black with a fringe of yellow awning, and the sign across the top canted forward slightly, so that it cannot be read when we first see it, one drizzly night. In fact, the first time we can read the title of the movie on it is when Guy, the love of Geneviève’s life, returns from the Algerian War at the beginning of the third act. Stepping from the train station with his new limp, he heads straight for Les Parapluies de Cherbourg before even stopping to see his sickly aunt, but it’s too late: the shop has been sold. His hair plastered to his face, he squints with incomprehension through the windows where there is nothing left but crumpled paper, by which time the drizzle, with perfect pathetic fallacy, has become a downpour. Later, just as all soufflés must someday fall, so the premises become a laundromat. I was diffident about pronunciation. If French was the language of snobbery, I didn’t want to come across as a snob. I had two sets of pronunciations for French words, depending on context. If the context was American—other exchange students—I didn’t say Ee-ren Zha-kobe. I said Irene Jacob, who might have been a housewife from Delacroix (Dellacroy), Indiana. If the context was French, I said De-la-kwa. I uttered it as delicately as I could, and snuck a look around to see if the French had noticed, but no one had. Why should they? To them it was just a 275 normal name, pronounced normally. They chattered on, oblivious to my effort. In the early days, I took this as evidence of their snobbery. There was only one French teacher in the town where I grew up, which kept her rushing around from school to school. She was Hungarian, and her name was Madame Almasyi. When a woman is said to be birdlike, a certain delicacy is implied, so instead I’ll say she resembled a robin. Not that she wasn’t petite, but she seemed to carry all her weight in the middle of her body. In the short red dresses she favored, her round belted belly rose to the scarlet proclamation of her bust. From her thighs down, her legs were twigs. She pulled her brown hair tight against her tiny head and balled it up in back in a bun. Her blue eyes were large, alive, and bright, with lashes of startling artificiality. She told us she’d never gotten a traffic ticket—pulled over, yes, but ticketed? She batted those lashes. No officer had ever had the heart. I think of that as the most French thing she ever said. She did Tuesdays and Thursdays in the middle schools, and Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays in the high school. No matter what grade we were in, Madame Almasyi was always showing us movies. These movies were at least a decade old, and made France seem more unimaginably remote than gendered nouns and adjective endings. I think now she was tired and lonely. These had been the movies of her youth. No matter the movie, Madame Almasyi was always sighing over how young someone looked. When she screened Chabrol’s Le Boucher, she swooned over Stéphane Audran. When she screened Le Retour du Martin Guerre, she bragged that she’d been in lycée with Nathalie Baye. When Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can came out ten years later, who among us recognized Nathalie Baye smoking bitterly on a sofa in a Connecticut suburb? 276 In the imperfect darkness of those classrooms with their crumpled blinds, we passed notes and squinted at subtitles. When Emmanuelle Béart cavorted naked by the spring in Manon de la Source, Madame Almasyi shouted, “Cover your eyes!” Dutifully I lifted my sixth-grade hand, but peeking through my fingers saw Madame Almasyi standing in front of the TV, waving her arms. The boy beside me pitched facefirst into his palm as if her request made his head hurt. “Lady, I’ve seen Top Gun,” he whispered with the perfect bravado of ignorance, and waggled his tongue like Tom Cruise frenching Kelly McGillis. I have never seen an umbrella boutique in France, but the single-product shop, with the name of the proprietor name gilt-scripted on the glass door, is a unicorn in the wastes of late capitalism. No, not its specialization but rather the rarefied interiors make the shop unbelievable: the beige and fuchsia wallpaper, the gilt-trimmed baize green countertops, the black cabinets of long flat drawers like blueprint files, presumably for the slumber of umbrellas awaiting customers. I wouldn’t know; no one ever opens them. The shop seems to have no stock other than the umbrellas on display. Their wire shafts and Malacca handles seem too impossibly thin and fragile to be anything but objets d’art, an impression Geneviève’s tactful, distracted dusting only reinforces. The ladies are always wearing outfits perfectly matched to the wallpaper, as if to blend in with the artifice of their environment, camouflaged in glamour. Or perhaps it is the setting that has risen to the occasion, and the ladies are birds in the only hothouse deserving of their plumage. And yet there are familiar details: that peasant chair in the corner with its seat of tightly woven rush and sturdy wood frame. At how many tables, in how many homes, have I sat in one exactly like it? 277 Critics have remarked upon the artificiality of Les Parapluies de Cherbourg: some have called it glorious, others overdone. The fabulous Technicolor-coordination, from costumes to décor; the dialogue entirely through-sung, the first such movie of its kind. Song and setting alike explode in thunderous opera the characters’ emotions, yet the movie is also somehow precious, artifactual, for all its location settings, deliberately stagey, the perfect parlor version of emotion: a Fabergé France inside an eggshell. How is it a movie of such naked sincerity, so guileless that we wince and look away, accusing its feeling of sentimentality, is also a movie of the most florid artifice? How is it I courted a girl with borrowed postures and declarations, and came away with her true love? How is it, almost but not quite unbeknownst to myself, I planned a finite affair, only to have it haunt me the rest of my life? When we meet the Emerys, the business is struggling. Geneviève shrugs this off with the casual optimism of youth: she could find work, she could marry Guy. Everything will turn out. But her mother knows that to turn out, things must be arranged—like flowers in a vase, or umbrellas in a stand. We make our own fortune. I too know this. There are certain things we cannot will to happen, but we must arrange our lives as if they were certain, or imminent. The table set, we must pull out the chair—just so, not too much, and arrange the napkin. We must make a space for them in our lives like a lure, in waiting welcome—listening, as ever, for a knock on the door. What I’m talking about, of course, is love. Catherine Deneuve confesses she’s been seeing a boy, and her mother, Anne Vernon, condescends to her emotions. “No,” insists Geneviève, defending her feelings. “We’re in love.” 278 With an indulgent smile, Madame Emery chides, “You think you’re in love, but love is quite another matter. No one falls in love, just like that, with a face in the street.” (Trust me—it sounds better in French, almost rhyming, set to slightly rueful music.) But that is exactly what I did. All right, it wasn’t on the street, but in my literature section. I saw her from across the room, then every day schemed to sit closer, until I introduced myself. Why did I love her? To be honest, I loved her for her face. I thought I would be content to gaze upon that face forever. Faces in movies do so much work. Where are the movie faces of literature? The girl I loved: her name was Romy. After the actress? No, she blushed, after her grandmother Romina. She looked more like Anouk Aimée—the dark, dramatic brow arching over the sloe eye. The collar of her white shirt open at the throat, a slender stem rising to the blossom of her smile. Her favorite flower? Lily of the valley—she was a Taurus. Her favorite aria? “Vissi d’arte.” Her favorite novel? Or the last good one? “Hold on,” she said, “Anna Karenina.” The last good one: Une vie, de Maupassant. Had I read the chapters for class yet? “But enough about me, what about you? Why do you come in France?” Me? Mademoiselle Romy, why all the hard questions? My dirty little secret: at the time, I had never actually seen Les Parapluies de Cherbourg. Not all the way through. In high school, I’d fallen asleep right after the lovers said goodbye and woken up again for the final scene. Nevertheless, I thought I knew what it was about. It seemed like a fairly straightforward story. When a restored version made the rounds of municipal cinémathèques, I asked Romy to go see it. The newly lush colors, the operatic score, blew my heart out. “It’s kind of boring, don’t you think?” she said when we came out, squinting into spring daylight. I was reconfirmed in my belief it was a masterpiece through which one glimpsed 279 inexorable laws of love and fate binding the world. “It’s just a story about two people,” she shrugged. “They have problems. Who doesn’t have problems? Anyway, compulsory military service is over. Cherbourg is a hole by a huge nuclear plant.” I was frustrated by her refusal to generalize the plot into principle, to draw any lessons from it at all. Perhaps that was because both she and the movie were French? Like when you live somewhere, you never go see the sights. “In English we say, not seeing the forest for the trees.” Yes, she nodded, yes, almost impatiently. “It’s the same expression in French.” “Besides,” she suddenly added, a few hours later, “they weren’t even singing with their own voices.” When Guy walks his bike into the building’s vestibule, Geneviève remains standing at the blue gate, afraid. The tawdry streetlamp slicks the cobblestones and makes the shadows of a cage on the pitted puce-green walls. “Don’t leave me,” she says, staying where she is. He must ask her twice to come, tugging her arm, while she clings to a bar. It’s hard to tell what frightens her more right now, as she wrings her sky blue handkerchief: his departure the next day, or the night before the two of them. The ugly ungainly cement, trash piled to the right and graffiti in the stairwell. The wall is pitted and the paint scraped, wooden laths showing through the plaster. All is silent as he leads her up the fateful stairs and into his room, in the apartment of the aunt who raised him. A boy’s room: a table lamp sits atop magazines on a chair. On the wall is one wing of a model airplane: the naked frame, stripped of cladding. When Guy enters after bidding his aunt goodnight, Geneviève is lighting a fire. I’m afraid, she says. The kerchief lies discarded on the floor. How could it be anything but tawdry: fraught, rushed, dire, squalid, wanted, demanded, imperiled, tragic, painful, squandered? How could she wish it to be anything but over? How was 280 she to know they would never have more than this night? The first time I entered Romy she let out a long sigh like a flat tire. Afterwards, I told her, with great solemnity, that she was my first. She rolled her eyes and sniffed, “Americans.” A friend back home wanted to know: does she say oui? In bed, does she say oui, instead of yes? Oui. On an offhand remark from her daughter, Madame decides to sell her pearl necklace, but even their penury has an aspect of theatre. The two women—slim, fashionable, French—sit down to a lunch fit for rabbits. Geneviève takes a bite of what looks like a celery stalk, while her mother attacks with fork and knife, as if a steak, a single tomato. They nibble amidst panic of foreclosure and the table’s usual residents: crystal decanters for wine, water, oil and vinegar. France has standards, after all. It is one thing to be forced to sell a pearl necklace for rent, but tomatoes without vinaigrette, and the country might as well go to the dogs. Assessing her necklace in the mirror sends Madame into a tizzy of vanity; after getting their jewels appraised this afternoon, the first order of business, she vows to visit the coiffeur. When I was in love with Romy, I felt sick all the time, a constant flutter in my stomach. I fancied myself a wan scholar in a Gothic romance, sunken eyes and parchment skin, but consumed by an inner light. I thought I would frighten myself in the mirror; I thought my hair would fall out. These things never happened. They were all in my head. But this did happen: from the time I woke up in the morning to the time I went to bed at night, I was nervous. I couldn’t remember 281 any of my dreams. I filled notebooks with small writing: letters, bits of poetry, imagined conversations, the record of every giggle I’d startled from her with a bon mot or a bit of English or the accidental buffoonery of dictionary French. I was elated, and terrified. I shivered for no reason. I lost weight. I couldn’t swallow more than a few mouthfuls at a sitting. The doctor prescribed an esophageal relaxant to increase the food flow to my stomach. I went to dinner with Romy and when the dishes arrived, apologized in advance for not finishing my beef cheeks. I’d been eating a lot less lately I explained. She smiled, her earrings catching the warm light. The candle wept a single waxen tear. “Do I ruin your appetite?” “No, no,” I assured her, with the grateful stare of a prisoner for his jailer. “I’ve never been happier.” Only once in the movie is its title ever spoken: in Monsieur Dubourg’s jewelry boutique. If anything, it looks even more like a set than the umbrella shop, not because of its fancy but its austerity—that, and the fact that it’s simply drowning in chandeliers. Monsieur Dubourg, a paternal baritone like Spencer Tracy, regrets to inform Madame he can’t take on her necklace. Enter Roland Cassard, a cosmopolitan jewel broker. He has an urbanity, a cultivated handsomeness—nothing like the boyish Guy, who wears every feeling on his face—and a villain’s mustache fanning from his philtrum (director Jacques Demy insisted, calling it a “Clark Gable”). Cassard doesn’t have enough cash for the pearls on him, but offers to stop by the umbrella shop tomorrow. Madame Emery is all too enchanted by this gallant rescue. Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, she lilts, j’y suis toujours—I’m always there. 282 Roland Cassard isn’t really a bad sort. He, too, has known suffering in life, romantic disillusion—chagrin, the French would say, meaning sorrow where we would simply mean setback. In an earlier movie of Demy’s (Lola, 1961), the same character had lost Anouk Aimée’s sweetly ravishing showgirl—endless legs and feather boa and breathless candor—to an American in a white Cadillac, or Jacques Harden posing wordlessly thereas. Over dinner with Madame Emery in Les Parapluies, he alludes to this episode: “I loved a woman, once. She didn’t love me back. Let down, I tried to forget. I left France. I traveled to the far ends of the world, but life seemed meaningless to me.” During this measured confession, the camera makes a stately circuit round the mezzanine of the Passage Pommeraye, a covered shopping arcade in Nantes with, at perfect intervals, immaculately melancholy statuary. A tracking shot around a beautifully deserted memory palace. In Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, the past is always an unpopulated place. And so a journey round the world becomes a journey round the inside of your head. No matter where you go, there you are. I never feel as adult as when I’m in Europe, I realized recently, now that I go at least once a year for work. Perhaps it’s being beyond easy contact, though that has changed with email and cell phones, or rather beyond easy reach of help. Had I fallen ill that first year in Amiens, my parents would barely have been able to understand whoever had found a way to call them at what would probably have been an inconvenient hour. Had they hurried over, they would have had a hard time finding me. Europe was the apogee of my orbit round the familiar, which awaited my inevitable return. At any given moment, no one might know where I was. I might hop a train to Venice, or Berlin. This sense of abrupt freedom extended to the boudoir, of course. The walls everywhere were generally thinner, but the bedrooms felt more private. The beds were smaller, 283 but spread out like a limitless plain. What I did there was my own business; I alone was responsible for the consequences. The threat of doing something irrevocable, something that might cut you off from home forever and strand you in a future you couldn’t imagine, underwrote every moment, making life serious and thrilling. But of course that wasn’t true. I had freedom, sure, but only for the space of a school year. I wasn’t on my own, I was just getting away with stuff. The only time I feel adult in America is behind the wheel of a car, wielding two tons of murderous steel, capable of destination. Parents are the villains of Les Parapluies—not from intent, but from well-meaning. When Geneviève come weeping to her mother that Guy must leave for war, when Geneviève bewails his distance, silence, absence, Madame Emery is so sure her wisdom will assuage her daughter, or prove superior to the certainties of Geneviève’s heart. If not, what use were Madame’s own hard-earned lessons? If not truths, why was their price pain? She passes them down as edict, prediction, solace: “You will forget him,” she sings. But she doesn’t understand. Yes, her daughter will move on, but forgetting Guy is the one thing she will never do. We know this because Geneviève tells us so—not her mother but us, staring straight into the camera at the audience. The very part of Geneviève her mother never sees is what makes Geneviève forever separate and different, her own individual. Never was a daughter more distraught; never was a mother more delighted. What terrible amused dismissal: “Have some fruit,” sings Madame, holding up an apple. In inflicting our accommodations on our children, we doom them to the same unfulfillments. But if you turn out like your parents—well, there are worse fates. At least this way, they know where to find you. With a baby on the way, Geneviève consents to marry Roland Cassard, the older man her mother has picked out for her. To be fair, Roland is loving 284 and generous. The financial security he offers will rescue both women from the precarious life of the umbrella boutique. And how could Geneviève reasonably be expected to refuse her mother’s counsel? Who else, besides Guy, has she ever known? And Guy is nowhere to be found… When the black Mercedes pulls away from the church door after the wedding, Madame is in the front passenger seat, reaching back to help her daughter sort the billows of her veil from her bouquet. Her mother met me at the door and took the lilies from my hand. She passed them to Romy and waved her to the kitchen, showing me into the living room. She wore her hair short and favored black, like her daughter. I find I myself slipping into stereotype when speaking of her: that worldliness of French women, at once starched collar and boudoir, blasé and wise, fatalist and feminist. Her posture was impeccable: an unyielding spine, and bedroom eyes that had seen it all. Danielle Darrieux, I thought, or Suzy Delair. I said so. First impressions are unrectifiable. I lived for them, but never felt ready to make them. Madame Gaillet smiled without showing her teeth. Later, when she laughed, I saw why. She did not ask if she could smoke. Women with cigarettes a finger away from their wedding bands. She was widowed when Romy was six. She’d raised her daughter on her own. She motioned for me to sit down on the sofa, then stayed standing by the mantel, waving smoke from her face. “How do you like Amiens?” she asked. I said it was very beautiful: the cathedral, the houses along the canal... her daughter, I thought but did not say. “Americans confuse charm for age,” said Madame Gaillet, “often for lack of the latter.” I began, “It is a vanity of youth to think oneself old—” She gave her cigarette a brusque, impatient tap to kill the ash. “Until it’s no vanity anymore, but a verity.” Madame Gaillet’s mother had come looking for work after the war, looked down upon like every other immigrant from Portugal. She had met a kind Frenchman. Now Madame, who 285 had spent her youth in Paris, lived in the provinces, this regional capital. “What do you think of it?” I asked. “I think the people here have hard lives, and it shows on their faces. They wear out young.” “You could move...” I suggested. I thought of the temperate, indeterminate gray of that day Romy and I had spent by the sea, the same gray as Romy’s eyes. “Menton?” In February, the Riviera town hosted lemon festival, or so I’d heard. “Menton?” She snorted. “In Menton, I could not afford even a studio. Besides, what would we do with so much sun?” I spotted Romy first, in the mirror behind her mother’s right ear. She stood in the doorway to the living room, a little girl with a vase full of lilies. But Les Parapluies de Cherbourg had prepared me for this, too: the reflection of Deneuve, in a corner of a mirror where her mother is primping (thus, a reflection twice removed). That same mirror, by also revealing the open back of a clock, shows us what the shot itself purports: the inner workings of time itself, which separate mother and daughter, age and youth, maturity and callowness. “Your daughter looks like Anouk Aimée,” I said, turning to look at Romy. “Doesn’t she?” Madame Gaillet also turned. Then she laughed, with all her stained teeth. “Who is this American? Why does he love movies so much?” “Don’t cry, look at me,” sings Madame Emery, “no one dies of love except in movies.” But no one dies of love, not even in Les Parapluies de Cherbourg. 286 Things I understood about Les Parapluies de Cherbourg: first love. Things I imagined I understood: financial hardship, parental pressure, long-distance relationships. Things I didn’t understand about Les Parapluies de Cherbourg: postwar France, single mothers, Catholicism, compulsory military service, opera, class mobility, Algeria. Or time, maybe it’s time. When Guy gets his draft notice in the mail, he tells Geneviève that marriage isn’t important: “We have all the time in the world.” What is two years’ compulsory service to a romance that they’ve waited all their lives for, a romance that will last forever? But of course marriage was important. Marriage might have saved them. She presses her head to his chest, he draws her to him with an arm, and it’s like they haven’t moved: only the scenery has changed. They’re in a bar now, their foreheads leaning into each other as if weighted with worry, as if by rolling them against each other like stones they might wear away the senseless hardness of the world. No man can ever stand a woman’s tears. A few drinks later in the evening, he’s changed his mind. “We have so little time left,” he says, “we mustn’t waste it. We must try and be happy. Let us keep of our last moments together a memory more beautiful than anything, a memory to help us live…” But that’s what you tell all the girls, right? He smuggles her to his room, past the grandfather clock in the foyer. Later that night Geneviève staggers home, virgin no more, to pillow her head on her mother’s knee. Madame Emery counsels time: le temps arrange bien les choses. Time has a way of sorting things out. And the true villain of the movie, time, rears its head. Time—if we left everything to time, without lifting a finger, what would happen? Age and decline, dwindling and entropy. Time, which absolves us of all wrong, since we have no hand in it. There is a silence past forgiving, a speechlessness where no one is to 287 blame. Time pried these lovers apart, which their love could not withstand: it was as simple as that. But in this story, my own story, it was entirely my fault. It turns out that, having fallen in love, there was now only one thing I wanted in life: I wanted to fall out. In Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, Guy must leave because he is drafted. Geneviève marries because she is pregnant. Guy marries because he must move on with his life. The absence of any pressing intervention in my life meant that I had to contrive one, dramatic circumstances of the kind that tore lovers apart. It turned out to be easy. My school year was over. “My mother,” she told me in tears, “always said you weren’t serious.” It was raining the first time I saw Les Parapluies de Cherbourg. This was in tenth-grade French. I was in a mood I can’t quite explain. The rain outside and the rain on that far Atlantic coast were one. Right from the first scene—jocular mechanics comparing evening plans—the recitative drew titters from the baffled class. At first sight of the young Deneuve in her breakout role, Madame Almasyi drew a sharp breath. I imagine everyone did in 1964, that face of otherworldly radiance, innocence, and composure minted freshly on their awestruck consciousness. Cinema is the colossal unfairness of the riveting face. “She was so young then,” Madame Almasyi sighed afterwards. When I look at a photo of Romy now, I think the exact same thing. 288 The worst thing that can happen to some people is life goes exactly the way they expect. Still, there are surprises. I mean, I became a translator. Who could have predicted that? I was jealous of every translator with a French spouse—the ladies especially, strangely enough. Someone to consult at home during the long, lonely deskbound hours in one’s pajamas, bound to this world only by chains of words. I thought the advantage should be marked, like corrective lenses on a driver’s license, on the professional cards none of us carried. The profession was loosely organized at best. I happened into the work, like I happened into my French. I thought nothing of the fact of my fluency; rather, I thought of my fluency as the mark of a wound. The best way, they say, to learn a language is across a pillow. One day I woke up alone, but I could still speak French. When I heard it now, meaning was no echo. Meaning was an arrow: immediate, unflinching. I couldn’t not understand. If I were being glib, I’d say translating for me was like going to school on the GI Bill. I took the money as if it were owed, in thanks or reparation. In a way, I didn’t hear French anymore; I just heard what I knew to be true. When I watched Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, I didn’t need subtitles. I won’t say I’m popular at cocktail parties, but that people always come upon what I do for a living with a certain relief. At last, they think, someone who can tell me about wine, cheese, or the Louvre. I had opinions about grammar, which I was willing to share, and about romance, which I wasn’t until perhaps after several glasses of wine I had no opinion about. I had no opinion about cheese, or the Louvre. “Yes,” I would say, “but have you ever seen Les Parapluies de Cherbourg?” 289 Once, a woman told me a story about her vacation in Paris. Her daughter was nine, and going through a princess phase. They’d just spent a fortune decking out her room Disney-style. In Paris they went to an exhibit on Marie Antoinette, from which the daughter emerged looking pale and shaken. “So I asked her what was wrong.” “Mommy…” she began. “I don’t think princesses are good people.” “When we got home, we had to re-do her room top to bottom.” The mother looked at me. I looked across the room at the blond child with a red velvet bow in her hair. Her green dress hung straight down her thin frame like an apron buckled at the shoulder by two oversized buttons. She was trying gracelessly, amidst grapes and cracker crumbs, to slice the rind from a small wedge of brie before lifting it to her plate, but the runny cheese kept sticking to the nearby grapes, and what kind of knife was this anyway, with the two sticky-out prongs in back? When she finally succeeded, she gave her fingers a quick lick and looked around. I approved of this child. France had been useful to her in that it had deflowered her of a stereotype. Still, she would probably be the kind of girl who wound up going to France. I hoped she would see right through all the boys. There is no end to the making of books, and much study wearies the body. “La chair est triste, hélas! et j'ai lu tous les livres,” lamented Mallarmé. Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, j’y suis toujours. 290 BIBLIOGRAPHY Adamson, Glenn. The Invention of Craft. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Adamson, Glenn. Thinking Through Craft. 2007. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Allen, Esther and Bernofsky, Susan, eds. In Translation: Translators on their Work and What It Means. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Ammon, Theodore G., ed. Conversations with William Gass. Oxford: University of Mississippi Press, 2003. pp. 46-55 Bazin, André. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” trans. Hugh Gray, in Film Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 4. (Summer, 1960), pp. 4-9. Bellos, David. Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything. 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Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957. Lanzac, Abel and Blain, Christophe. Quai d’Orsay (intégrale). Paris: Dargaud, 2011. Lanzac, Abel and Blain, Christophe. Weapons of Mass Diplomacy. trans. Edward Gauvin. London: SelfMadeHero, 2013. Lewis-Kraus, Gideon. “The Great A.I. Awakening.” The New York Times, December 14, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/magazine/the-great-ai-awakening.html. Accessed August 5, 2019. Lewis-Kraus, Gideon. “Is Translation an Art or a Math Problem?” The New York Times, June 4, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/is-translation-an-art-or-a-math- problem.html. Accessed August 5, 2019. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch. 1689. London: Oxford University Press, 1990. Lupton, Ellen. Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designer, Writers, Editors, and Students, 2nd ed. 2004. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010. 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Creator Hsiung, Hanvey (author)

Core Title Translation: three contemporary metaphors (a critical musing on the profession); and, Guises: stories (a short story collection)

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Literature and Creative Writing

Publication Date 12/02/2019

Defense Date 12/02/2019

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag adaptation,comics,craft,design,Fiction,France,gun control,magical realism,media theory,OAI-PMH Harvest,retrofuture,shipbreaking,short story,supernatural,translation

Language English

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Advisor Bender, Aimee (committee chair), Bennett, Beatrice Mousli (committee member), Johnson, Dana (committee member)

Creator Email hanvey.hsiung@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-240572

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