Fanon (12 page)

On the way home from the lecture, walking New York's mean streets again, I felt cheated. Couldn't tell my new love why. Undeniably the speaker had radiated a glow. Who wouldn't dig the swirl of
Jean-Paul Gautier silk around her neck when she tipped on stage like an adolescent in her first pair of heels. Cheated because she performed a kind of reverse striptease, spinning an opaque cloud of words, silencing the beautiful music we could have made together. My story of receiving a head in the mail yesterday's news. DOA. Too late to earn a footnote in her comprehensive survey.

Never say die. Fanon to the rescue. I accepted the fact that fact had overtaken my fiction. Waylaid my story. Wasted it. On the other hand, Fanon's story remains relatively untouched, forgotten like novels on the bestseller list the year he died. Or the list from twenty years ago. Five years. Two years ago. Who could name one of those fabulously reviewed, avidly purchased books. Who reads them now. Who will recall today's list tomorrow. Is the list always the same list. I spring Fanon's name on unsuspecting suspects. A few of my contemporaries smile wistfully. Young people generally puzzled. A blank look from just about everybody. Some ask me to repeat the name and on a second hearing, shake their heads, no, definitely, no. So maybe with Fanon a chance to start fresh. Start at the beginning—paint Fanon on my face, wear the mask of him. Pretend he's real because I am. Pretend I'm real because he is. Or was once. Behind a mask he might become real again. Better than crying over spilled milk.

And speaking of my new woman, the real one I won't name for fear of jinxing our love, I decided the morning after Fanon saved my life that Thomas needed love and I needed a love hook to jazz up the story of going to France to peddle the Fanon script. Autumnal love, a bit like mine. Part mellow and wise, part scared, obsessional, and torrid, you know, like the amours of seventy- and eighty-year-olds in
Love in the Time of Cholera.
The guy on his way to France with a Fanon manuscript in his suitcase will be a decade younger than the Marquez characters, a little younger than I am. Not much. Let's say sixty. Sixty a good round number, easy to remember. Sixty also for
many readers a bright yellow line on the far side of which a person is definitely old, definitely on the way out, if not quite numb yet. Our hero sixty and on his way south, stopping for a week or so in Paris, a city familiar from his student days when, like me, he used to spend lost weekends on the Left Bank, playing hooky from stiff grad school across the channel at Oxford University. And like me, once upon a time in Paris he meets a beautiful woman, one whose sprawling headful of blond, curly hair wouldn't fit easily into the box delivered once upon a time to Thomas's door, a woman approximately ten years younger than Thomas and who, like him and me, is compounded of fickle flesh and blood so she, like us, will stop speaking in the not-too-distant future and vanish, never seen again on the earth, yet after two weeks, one of them stolen from time budgeted for tracking down the film director, Thomas tells her and believes in his heart he means it that he has no desire to outlive her, that life without her company would lose its appeal.

If you're crazy enough to fall head over heels in love at sixty-odd, why not in a captivating place like Paris. In spite of the fact you know better. Forget Paris is a city as full of enemies as any other city and love's only a game, willed blindness, wishful thinking. Forget the fact you're close enough to your grave to smell death in your sweat, see death yawning on the other side of doors you hesitate to open and walk through for no good reason, unless being tired is good reason, and it's not that simple. Forget disappointments too numerous to count. Forget the peace of mind you've learned to maintain by lowering drastically your expectations of what's possible between two people who discover a mutual attraction. It's spring in Paris. Fall in love, Thomas. Forget the season of discontent sure to follow.

So let it be the City of Lights and Thomas sixty, eager as a colt for love, even though getting out of bed some mornings he feels like a condemned prisoner mustering for roll call. Well, maybe aging's not quite as bad as all that but you do get tired, awfully tired of sharing a
tiny cell with a dying stranger whose stink and noises you abhor, whose whining, constant neediness and selfish demands appall you. Who could love anybody like him, the drool dried on his chin, the earwax, toe jam, wild hairs in his nostrils and ears, the leaks and nasty stains, nasty habits. Who wants to listen to his nattering. This twin who either grumps around belligerently silent or chatters way too much in a language more and more opaque each day whether someone's willing to listen or not. Your cellmate.

Enough about growing old, Thomas complains. You could just say old's a rerun of youth, of feeling ignorant, sidelined, inadequate. Reexperiencing childish terrors you spent a lifetime trying to put behind you. Painfully eager and willing to please, unable to comprehend why no one seems interested in what you have to offer. Except, back when you were a kid, you believed in time. Believed you had time to grow. Time to prove yourself. Time to hurt others who hurt you. Believed time on your side and the world would change if you just hang on, keep pushing.

The lovers meet in line at a Paris theater where the latest American hit's showing, dubbed in French or French subtitles, Thomas can't recall which, nor remember who joined the line first, followed by the other, or who smiled first, only recalls that initially neither spoke, except with looks, polite, respectful, casual looks, two strangers acknowledging each other as markers to identify a place in line, glances traded, quickly dropped, then their gazes bumping again, perhaps accidentally, then the next time not an accident, was it, and it's okay, fine, I see you too and approve of what I see and return your glance's positive appraisal of me with my positive appraisal of you. I'm pleased by the exchange as you seem pleased by it, thank you, you're welcome, time to look away, and it could end easily here, a look away, never a look back. Thomas studies posters on the walls under the marquee—lots of naked flesh, men brandishing oversized weaponry, buildings burning, weird helicopter-like vehicles—
looking away from her and then back too soon, both pairs of eyes instantly averted after they bump, a bit embarrassing, except also almost funny, who's pretending they're new at this old business. But it requires practice either way, doesn't it, requires time and luck to get the timing right. Thomas stares over his shoulder at the line that's lengthened nearly to the street. Pedestrians framed by the marquee's glitter and running lights bustle past. As he turns back he widens his eyes and nods, his gaze brushing hers, letting her share if she chooses the information his eyes carry about how rapidly the crowd's growing for this matinee performance in dismal weather and somewhere in there between glances and glances away he says hi or says hello, an English greeting in France, and she responds with the same English word and he repeats it, the echoing maybe a bit too cute, more playful than cute he hopes, aren't adults allowed to be playful, though there's a chance someone standing in this line or in the crowd streaming by on the boulevard would, if given the opportunity, torture you, chop off your head, stuff your carcass in a freezer, or bury you in a backyard pit except for certain delicate tidbits of choice cannibalized before bidding you farewell, sayonara, darling, a person perhaps not very unlike the villain starring in the movie you're about to watch—
Silence of the Lambs,
wasn't it, Thomas can't say for sure, it seems right, he'll ask her later and ask what else she recalls of their swift courtship or flirtation, whatever, a very unlikely happening whatever you choose to call it, given their different personalities, their different colors, nationalities, the ten-year age gap between them, but eye conversation and a single word spoken three times enough to persuade whichever one of them—Thomas probably—who purchases a ticket first to step aside and wait just beyond the booth for the other, the unknown person addressed only once, only minutes before, enough conversation to convince them both that it makes perfectly good sense to stroll into the darkness of a movie house together and sit side by side, both guessing—who knows to
whom the guess occurred first—that it might also be okay when the movie's over to risk leaving the theater together, risk what comes next.

Growing old mostly a pain in the ass, so why not perform love's rites one last time in Paris, in spring, in spite of drenching rain when you exit the movie house with her, torrents, geysers, flying columns of rain, loud, splattering, sluicing rain spilling from gutters and eaves onto sidewalks, flooding the streets. Rain he welcomes like the ancient Greeks welcomed it on wedding days because they believed rain augured a fruitful union. Pouring rain a backhanded, assbackwards gift in this Paris case too, because sheets of rain obscure the corny, buffed-up city Thomas's x-ray eyes, sixty and counting, had been straining, without success, to penetrate, searching for the old city's hiding place beneath a new Paris he didn't recognize. A stalled reunion. The city invisible in this downpour not the old Paris he'd crossed the ocean for the first time in twenty-two years to find. Getting soaked not exactly the kind of fun he'd anticipated either till he realizes how tightly she squeezes the hand squeezing hers and he smiles out loud, echoing her laughter, and just as quick as that, with one hit of the magic wand, zingo, there it is, instantly visible, in spite of the blinding rain, his old Paris solid and real around him, risen in the blink of an eye, like Venus on her half-shell from the sea or like a movie flashed on a screen, the whole remembered city intact, remembering Thomas, the old Paris shimmering, its golden stones, bridges, spires, cobbled alleys, rows of buildings lining the Seine like shelf after shelf of elegantly bound books.

A surprising number of people caught outdoors in the storm, dashing here and there, you know, like water's not wet if they hurry. Thank goodness it's not a cold day, at least not cold unless you're totally soaked as she is, lips blue, teeth chattering, chilled from head to toe. Her feet might as well be bare in those silver harem sandals splashing along beside him through the drowned streets, little
sprints from one bit of cover to the next—the theater marquee, a hotel balcony, porticoed entrance of a restaurant, an awning, a cloister scalloping the façade of a grand apartment building—
clack, clack, clack,
a torn silver strap clacking as she runs. Thomas sees a rain parka in a shop window, cheap, and she lets him buy it for her. They pause under the shop's canopy to get their bearings and her eyes are closer to green than blue when she looks up at him from beneath the canary-yellow plastic hood, lifting her face nearer to his so they can hear each other over noisy rain. Is it okay to kiss her cheek. Yes. Yes. Yes. The yes in her eyes tastes so good Thomas savors it, saves the first kiss for later, for her lips. Shapely, full lips, dark against skin that's washed unnaturally white and bright by rain, skin glowing like marble, he thinks. It's marble Thomas thinks of again when he rubs her chilled feet, later, out of the weather, snug in her sister's apartment on Rue Blomet, alone with her for a couple of hours until her sister arrives with Vietnamese takeout she called and asked her sister to pick up on the way home from work.
Delicious,
she promised. My, my. Yum-yum. Thomas sixty and counting on this day he's met a shiny new woman, enjoyed a movie, found the old Paris, slogged through it in the rain, and it's barely five, no company expected before seven-thirty at the earliest, so he rubs slowly, each icy lump of foot in turn, chaffed, squeezed in both hands, blowing his breath on those snow-white feet, perfect, Thomas thinks, as a marble statue s.

If he ever returns to the novel that begins with the delivery of a head, Thomas will be much younger in it. A teacher of creative writing at a university. Newly married, maybe one or two very young kids, maybe, a professor of color adrift in a hostile sea of colleagues and students, a writer afflicted by writer's block, beset by lots of issues, personal and political. Decades younger than the character in the Paris romance (the Paris
Romance?
—see Hawthorne's preface to
The House of the Seven Gables
for distinction between Novel and
Romance). In Paris no choice about age. Or rather he chooses to give himself no choice. His age is what it is. No choice. No sweat. Sixty plus and counting. In the other story he intends to shed decades. A young man in his prime will receive a head from a delivery person one morning and, like the life fate has delivered to him, he won't know what to do with it. Not like the old fool in Paris who pretends to know precisely what he's doing: who arranges his balding head on a platter and offers it to love.

Riding the bullet train from Paris south I wonder what she's thinking. If I 'll ever see her again. Rub her bare feet. Kiss her painted toes again. If she were beside him she'd probably be reading. Reading a kind of narcolepsy, a disappearing act she performs. With a book in her lap, she can be talking or staring out a train window and if he looks away from her a minute,
poof,
she's gone when his eyes return, dropped off the edge of the planet into whatever she's reading. A few words, a sentence or two enough to capture her. If no book of her own available, she might lean over and peek at what he's reading. The pages disappear behind her sprawl of hair. She's gone, caught up in the writing's spell. He'll have to pinch her, tickle her ear to remind her the book where she's hiding belongs to him. A cute habit he teases her about but sometimes a stupid sting of jealousy. Whose writing has smitten her, stolen her. Would his words on a page do the same trick. And so what if they do. Why believe his writing's a special treat for her if somebody else's words will do.

Thomas daydreams about the pleasure of dreaming about her. Wonders if people dream less as they age, if the dreaming faculty wears out like everything else wears out. He seldom remembers his dreams. Not much practice in dealing with dreams. When he tries to retrieve dreams they fray. He worries rather than remembers the few dreams he recalls, even though worrying them—trying to find words for them—shreds the original.