Motion Sickness (7 page)

With Clara I venture into a disappearing world. It’s as if I were an extra in
Fantastic Voyage
, exploring an oceanic universe, or an archaeologist digging for a vanished civilization, congealed in Clara. She herself may be concealed in terms like “witness” and “survivor” which make her larger than life, her slice of life. lt turns out, not surprisingly, that she is writing her memoirs. Time is short and her memory, she reports, is not what it was even ten years ago. It seems sharp to me. The wine is warm now, she complains to the waiter in Spanish. Then she gives him a winsome look to soften the effect of her testiness. “People in that time—now too—they expose
Schadenfreude
. You know that word, it is joy, happiness in another’s loss. German is a wonderful language.
Schadenfreude
, that was also a part of that period.”

Clara clasps my hand and looks into my eyes. Let me interpret myself, she exclaims, I am so happy to be with a young American woman. She doesn’t seem to be ironic. This stated, or read into the record, she flies from one anecdote to another, eager to divulge her past as if I will capture what she releases, one repository to another. In one instant she is ebullient and the next, piqued or downcast. Like Zoran, she’s mercurial. Liquid and solid. The quicksilver god Mercury, god of luck and travel, may be at our table and if I’m lucky on my travels she’ll be a favored messenger of the gods. Although to look at her one wouldn’t suspect those godlike qualities.

On the avenue Clara walks slowly, is crablike and cautious, glancing to her left and right, as if expecting to be interfered with. Or she comes to a sudden halt for no reason I can figure out. She is sure she doesn’t have long to live, an idea that haunts her. She has outlived both her husbands who were years older and several friends who weren’t but she has no illnesses, or none that she has mentioned. I am not afraid to die, she emphasizes. I only hate it. There is much to do. And aging has no mercy. She looks at her hands. But of course, she reflects, it is worse when the young die. Then she shakes her head and brightens up. Anyway, I am not dead yet.

She sculpts when she can—she avows that art has been her life—and writes about culture,
Kultur
, for German magazines. I cover the scene, she says cryptically. I have connections in Germany. She inquires, on impulse it appears, if I might be interested in helping her with her book, the organization, the typing. It’s a job if I want it. At her door, she clutches my arm and, like a little girl, whispers into my ear, Gregor adores me because I am the kind of German he wishes his parents were. She leaves me and I watch her as she climbs the stairs, each step a small triumph—arthritis, she yells out, without looking back, confident that I’m watching her.

I'm in Arlette's apartment, lying on the bed, reading Horace McCoy's
No Pockets in a Shroud
, and nursing a hangover. The hangover has allowed me to dismiss temporarily the shape of my finances, which are hopeless, since my mother is not, as she so aptly put it in a recent letter, a bottomless pit, and my savings are nearly used up, but Arlette's made me welcome, put me perfectly at home. She's even offered me a job in her bookstore. Eventually I must learn to speak French. My scant reading knowledge wouldn't help with customers. I can assist only behind the scenes. I'd like to surprise Arlette and speak French, a kind of magic act, pulling language from me as if it were a tender rabbit. I'm sure it can be done.

If I spoke French, I’d cherish the word
dégoût
and use it often, closely followed by
dérive
. Disgust and drift. In French they’re nearly liquid on my tongue, but maybe they’re not on French tongues. French tongues give French kisses—what are they called here?—
rouler une pulle
, Arlette tells me. To shovel a big one, to roll a big one. It’s a more ugly image than I expected. Soul kiss is lovelier than shoveling a big one. Although you can turn your tongue into a shovel if you can flex your tongue at all. Tongue here is
langue
, the same as language. Mother tongue would be redundant, I suppose. I’ll ask Arlette some day. The French call French letters
lettres anglaises
. They must have been sending letters back and forth across the English Channel way before the passport came into existence. Unfettered intercourse, or fettered intercourse with letters. They must be called letters because they were carried in envelopes, so the condom itself is like writing paper, to be wrapped around the
stylo
—pen—whose destination is a mailbox, or just box. We use the tongue in a French kiss, something that I’m not sure comes naturally, at least I believe I learned to do it in grade school.
Dé-goût
. Dis-gust: far from
gustibus
: pleasure. But disgust isn’t far from pleasure, it’s pleasure’s other side, or twin. Being a twin must be disgusting, pleasurable.

I tell Arlette New York is like Paris. That’s probably not so. Days turn into nights here the way they do in New York. The cities never sleep. Cities don’t sleep. Apart from friends and my block, or the skyline, as familiar and remote as Marilyn Monroe’s figure, different neighborhoods are convincing real-life locations for movies I’ve seen. Or the city is posters, a backdrop of images and words. Delis with pictures on their walls and violent acts preceded by screams for help, take-out coffee in Greek-motif paper cups and high-school kids cracking up on subways, buses driven by witty drivers, passengers with inflamed passions, shoppers suffused with envy and hope fed by advertisements on TV, doped-up guys selling grass or coke, distraught people on the street asking for money, holding cardboard signs with sad stories, impressive shops at the base of enormous buildings, young guys hanging out in doorways listening to music. Long walls are invaded by a pervasive street humor that catches you listening to it, the city’s laugh-track. I don’t really see New York. Or when I see it, it’s always the same. I can’t see it. Or for that matter America. Just the way I don’t see Paris. Or Europe. It’s inaccessible to tourism, or it’s all tourism.

* * *

Every day is a little like this one, somewhat repetitious, with a beginning, middle and end that’s concocted of temporary habits or rituals, and a dash of discovery that appears to make it new. A bowl of café au lait and a bevy of alien characters, a newspaper’s list of new and old movies, elegant displays in
charcuteries
. I walk miles and miles, wearing out shoe leather—as my father would say—because shoes always wear out. I sit in obscure cafés, neighborhood places that serve only one dish at lunchtime—today,
blanquette de veau
—where everyone seems to know the owners who do the cooking. And today I sit down in this out-of-the-way café and look at my book,
No Pockets in a Shroud
, then at
Libération
, and order the
plat du jour
. People are speaking French and I can’t eavesdrop. I watch. They gesticulate. They purse their lips, sucking in their cheeks. They may be saying a word like
dégoût
which forces that puckering. American mouths speaking English are horizontal slashes across full faces with heavy chins and jaws. Not all of course.

I like
blanquette de veau
. Jessica hates meat and hasn’t eaten it in twenty years. Arlette scoffs at vegetarianism and says we are animals and do what animals do. A small shadow falls on the white napkin that covers the basket of pain on my table. Someone is standing there. A small animal. I don’t want to look up. It may be someone I don’t want to see—from the undead past, an ex-lover, my ex-best friend. The shadow waits patiently. And finally I do look up and am pleasantly surprised, as they say. Because it’s Belgian Sylvie from Amsterdam.
Chérie
, Sylvie exclaims,
formidable
. It’s amazing to see you. I never thought it would happen. It is fantastic. She sits down, kisses me on both cheeks, and we order a bottle of wine. That is, she does. I like Paris, Sylvie says as the café’s only waiter walls off, but Parisians are funny about my
belge
accent.

She’s thinner, more like a delicate bird than before, but just as childlike. Perhaps I need to cast her as grief-stricken and incapable of nourishment, neither of which she is. She’s in Paris, she tells me immediately, with her husband, the German record producer, and their child. They’re staying in this district—the 12th—at a business friend’s apartment. She lights a cigarette and glances about nervously. She wants to talk about Sal but first she asks me where I’ve been. Since Amsterdam. I say I saw my friend Pete in Tangier who told me the terrible news about Sal. Her eyes drift and she observes, with one rush of breath, that now it all seems unreal and anyway it was hard for her to believe him. He said so many things and at the end she thought he must have wanted to die, the way he lived, because he was always looking for trouble. She says, He made trouble. Sal had a big imagination. And grand ideas. When they came to me and told me he has been murdered, it seemed I knew already, in one moment, I already knew it, a déjà vu. But you know Sal’s type better. One American to another.

I roll my eyes, speaking the only French I’ve been able to pick up, and hope that I’m doing a fairly good imitation of Arlette. I study Sylvie. She could be Arlette’s child or sister. They share no common features and I’m twisting them into homologous shapes. Which I’ve done before, devising little families of the unrelated. Families of the unrelated. Sounds like a horror sitcom. She moves in her chair, tapping her foot as if there were music playing. She says she always needs to move.

I know what she means. If Sylvie had to be told about Sal’s death, then he must have been murdered when he was with a woman who wasn’t Sylvie. Unless Pete had it wrong and there had been no woman with Sal. Or Sylvie may be lying to me, not wanting to appear to have been an accessory to his murder. Sylvie’s shaking her leg under the table and dragging hard on her cigarette.

But what about your study of the prostitutes? She puts out her cigarette. Since she fantasized about being a prostitute, she explains, she decided she couldn’t write it from a distance, like a documentary. It had to be a novel or story. And even though she never was a prostitute, in the story she will be. She’ll write it in the first person. She says, It is more a real voyeurism that way. Sylvie swallows some more wine. But now that Sal is dead, I am too sad and shaky, so I stop for the moment. My husband has been wonderful. Very sympathetic. She says she’s taking dance and I should come with her to one of her classes, taught by a Japanese couple. She likes dance because it’s about the body. It is what we have, she murmurs and then pauses. Murder is terrible. Death is terrible.

Death is terrible. A while ago, my father died, and life changed. It’s strange to say it like that, but Sylvie nods her head, purses her lips and sips her wine thoughtfully. It’s been ages since I’ve told anyone how my father died, and though I talked to Jessica about it, a little, I didn’t give her a detailed account. How the doctors worked on him for an hour, how he was awake and with the doctor he knew, even smiling, because he didn’t know what was happening, how he went into a coma, how he suffered irreparable brain damage, how he didn’t open his eyes again, how he lay attached to a machine and seemed dead already, but then when he was dead, I realized that he hadn’t looked dead. How I touched his cold hand and hoped that it’s true that people in comas know you’re there, how my mother stood silently beside him and finally turned her back, her hand to her mouth, how we weren’t there when he actually died, how his embalmed body looked, how, at the funeral home, I noticed a slight mark on his forehead that wasn’t there before, a bruise high on his brow that showed he’d been handled badly, how the doctors said they did everything they could, how he was cremated in a place no one visited, how we tossed his shards into the sea, a few of us, how he would’ve gotten seasick if he’d been alive, how I became seasick, the boat rocking, rocking, rocking. The closing images frame it all, are freeze-frames, and like the eternity of death itself the images won’t die. They’ll die with me. When someone dies, I tell her, regaling her with unexpected lyricism, which suits my conception of Sylvie or an idea of Paris, death is like a one-way journey and it triggers in the ones who don’t die—it triggers an ordinary craziness. I pause. Sylvie screws up her face and asks gravely, What is triggers?

I define trigger the verb but don’t bring up Trigger the proper noun, the famous TV horse of the famous TV cowboy, Roy Rogers. Trigger the horse who is now stuffed and standing on the cowboy’s front lawn. Is Roy Rogers dead, is Dale Evans? He wouldn’t get her stuffed, that’s for sure. He might want to, though. Roy Rogers is a chain restaurant for hamburgers. I don’t even mention Tom Mix and Tony the Wonder Horse whose metal statue stands in Florence, Arizona, at the Tom Mix Memorial. I used to love Westerns, John Ford Westerns,
The Searchers
especially, but Italian Westerns changed that, and war and gangster movies fill the gap. Sylvie and I pay our bill and agree to meet again, not accidentally, at a disco. We kiss each other once on each cheek, though I’ve been told that three times is correct in certain circumstances. I don’t know if this is one.

Pissoirs and men’s legs. Trousers and shoes. Walking back to Arlette’s I pass an ancient pissoir. Guys back home piss against buildings or in doorways. One called out to me, Don’t look. I’m pissing. I said, I won’t. Then he said hesitantly, You can look if you want to. There are also plastic outdoor toilets shaped like newsstands whose insides turn upside down and sterilize themselves after each use. Arlette tells me the French are mad about toilets and that much innovation and inventiveness, especially with plastic, goes toward the development of new and better ones. She may be joking. Pissoirs are a vestige of an idea of Paris. Paris includes the trousers and shoes of anonymous men in circular steel chambers. The French may be building the perfect toilet, but Sal would’ve pissed anywhere if he had to go. When you gotta go, you gotta go. Give me some traveling music. I’ve revived Sal. He’s a hypnagogic figure, a hologram. Not a taxidermist’s dream.