Galatea 2.2, page 12
C. had been a bribe to keep her mother in this country. A baby, for a woman already middle-aged. “I’m responsible, Rick. I’m responsible for their dislocation in the first place. And now I’m responsible for their hauling up stakes again. It’s too awful. They’re old, Beauie. How are they supposed to put everything they own in a packing crate …? They’ll never make it, once they’re back there. Never.”
“Don’t be crazy,” I said. “They never stopped living there.”
Men are worthless; they always think the issue is what’s at issue.
“They’ll make it just fine,” I reasoned. The last thing C. needed.
“They have two dozen brothers and sisters. They have more nieces and nephews than we have cockroaches. In another five years, they’ll forget this continent ever existed.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
C. took the rap for her own abandonment. Since my father’s death, the bonds of my blasted family had mercifully weakened. So it surprised me to see how desolate someone could be at the prospect of seeing hers just once or twice a year. C. broke out in a rash and began vomiting. The doctor put her on a popular sedative. Nothing I did seemed to help at all. Except listening to the stories.
Frantic, C. dragged out all the stories that her mother raised her on. Stories invariably meant the war. All tales came back to that. How the Germans tried to steal the bell out of the church steeple to melt it down, and how something like God stymied them. How her mother nursed a teenage Wehrmacht conscript, a story that almost split C.’s parents before they were even married. How her father’s friends in the labor camp joined together to grow parody Hitler mustaches. How he escaped, evading his pursuers by leaping out of an upper-story farm window and limping off, broken-legged, into the night. How the government up north hid The Night Watch in the marlstone quarries under Maastricht. How C.’s uncle, forced to stand guard over his fellow coal miners during the occupation, was tried for complicity in the post-war hysteria, and imprisoned again by his friends.
C.’s fellow students, in that class of mine, could not identify Treblinka or date that war on a pop quiz I’d once given them. C. knew these things from nightly dinner table conversation. As if the occupation had ended yesterday. If then.
Our life in B. closed, really, with that first phone call from Limburg. I lay in bed one Saturday dawn, thrilling to the sound of my C. speaking another language. Another woman lived in the body of the one I lived with. C. had been accommodating me, making herself into someone she thought I could love. I hadn’t the first idea who this other person was.
She spoke a dialect that ran like the fabled brook through the heart of E. Out of her mouth flowed an unparsable cascade of phonemes. She talked with her mother for a long time. Then her father, ear to the transatlantic taxi meter, came on for a verbal minute waltz. Then a dozen or so aunts, each with a bit of news. I’d moved in with all of them, without knowing.
A flurry of dialect goodbyes, and C. hung up, wrung out. “They’re home,” she said. “Come on. Outside.”
I put my hand to the pane. The windchill was sub-desperate. “Only if you’ve been good.”
C. began to cry. I fell all over myself telling her I was joking.
We bundled as best we could and hit the street. Her aimlessness was always hard on me. But I’d learned by then not to ask for destinations.
Everything was still the same, she assured me. B. would go on being bearable if we could keep making our long, random walks. That day, we ended up in her beloved public gardens, now frozen over and empty for the winter. The day after, we kept our standing cantata date, at that church that had sung one a week for years before our arrival and that would go on singing them long after we were permanently out of earshot.
Things would be all right, she implied, if we just kept busy. In the evenings we played board games, or sang songs that I wrote for C.’s perfect, clear alto. We watched old films on a black-and-white set with tinfoil antenna, on loan from friends. Gradually, C. convinced me that movies have been going downhill since 1939.
At night, we read to each other—more biography, history, legend—following no program but delight.
Things would be fine if we kept out of the house whenever possible. Saturday morning was free day at the Fine Arts. C. was the only woman alive who would want to return in her spare time to see the same objects she’d just stood in front of for forty hours that week. “It’s not the same, Beau. They’re much more interesting when you don’t have to worry about protecting them.”
We went to see the first American retrospective of a German photographer neither of us knew. C. had not yet been assigned the special exhibition. So Saturday was the day. We crossed the swamp that B.’s Brahmins had a century ago called in the Dutch to drain. We strolled into the gallery and around the corner. My photo waited for me there, although I would never have expected it in any number of lifetimes.
First image on the left-hand wall, just inside the door. That room’s geometry has fused to the floor plan of my brain. I stood face to faces with three young men who were scrutinizing me. They’d waited two-thirds of a century for me to come along and swing into view, just past the photographer’s shoulder.
The photo was itself a prediction of its own chance viewing. The three men prearranged the way I would someday see them. And now it seemed that every book I’d been dabbling in, all our random readalouds, the long list of irrelevant classics I’d memorized for my master’s, the swerves our narrative lives had taken all found their retroactive meaning in this one memory posted forward from the past.
The boys were C.’s grandfather and two great-uncles on their way to kermis, to one of those huwelijksfeesten she told me about. That was what the lens said. The caption said something altogether different. German peasants on their way to a dance, 1914. The wrong celebration. The excluded guest list. But very much the same family album.
I felt the shock of recognizing a thing I knew I had never seen before. Every text I’d ever read formed an infinite, convergent series calling out for the recursively called-for, the obvious next term. In that narrow space between what the picture handled and what the caption named, I had my story.
THE FOLLOWING MONDAY, I went in to my tech editing job and gave my two weeks’ notice. C. backed me every inch. “Buddy. When you have a calling, you don’t worry about what it does to the résumé.” Our nest egg had doubled during our year of work. We had a little time. We could buy a chance.
In fact, C. would have preferred a much deeper plunge into the precarious. Ours was always hedged. I had my programming skill to fall back on. When the account dipped into the danger zone, I freelanced. I worked the smart-appliances gig. I wrote an options trading program for an exiled prince who needed several million dollars to return to his land and finance an election. As he explained, “These things can be very expensive, Rick.”
Writing met all the expenses. At least, I meant it to. I must have written that book to gladden C. again. I say “again,” but she may never have been. Perhaps to receive gladness you need a forwarding address. Maybe the Polish boy’s death cheated her of that, long before her unborn soul stood in line for a residence.
Her transience made a pallet for my head. From the first, C.’s locus of non-time and un-place indexed my imagination’s coordinate plane. That’s why living with her completed me. Why being with her always felt like coming to rest, returning to some otherwise that no one else ever suspected.
She was my midmorning’s hypothetical. The givens of my day revealed their thinnest convention, so long as I loved her. Here and now reversed in convex reflection, abidable, on the outside of her eyes.
All we can ever do is lay a word in the hands of those who have put one in ours. I thought I might write my way to a place where my friend C. could live.
I used all the material I had at hand: the vanished Limburg she told me so much about. Her synaptic map of the walled city of Maastricht. The endless cousins who infiltrated my brain like thieves on bicycles in the night. The anthology poured into me through every gate except experience. The disruption of the timeline circling our room. The parents, the uncles, caught between nations. The invasion of Trois Vierges, escalating into permanent violence. Big reaching down and annihilating little. Total war, always the same war, placing its embargo on the free passage of lives over the border.
I already possessed all the components for a page-turner. The secret document linking the displaced life back into its continuous frame. The immigrants’ island in Chicago. Our apartment in B., with its courtyard and seasick saxophone scales. A chance trip we made by train to Detroit, where her brother lived. Always, always, that invisible village, the one that time mortared to a stump. The white diffraction pattern of crosses, and the villagers who volunteered to tend them. And that glance back, over the shoulder. The triple stopped lives, lined up on the muddy road, waiting for someone to pick up their story and extend it.
I WROTE OF C.’s country without once having seen it. I used her language, fragments of it, helped only by C. herself, who had never spoken anything but the secret dialect of family.
I made the beginner’s mistake, the one no first novelist can help but make. I knew, deep at heart, that I would never have another chance to write a book. I could never again ask C. for that luxury. This was a one-shot deal, and to redeem her faith in me, I had to pack my read-aloud with everything I knew. Everything she taught me. Her surrogate home would have to be as wide, as uncrossable as this Atlantic century. If we had just this one dance, our tune would have to be flat-out tutti.
I guess there are two kinds of love letters. If you don’t get out after the first three words, you need to press on, forever. C. taught me that, too. Desperation is always more moving than discretion, or more recognizable, at least, to the person addressed.
C. earned the daily bread, while I sat alone with the swelling handwritten canary legal pads. As I completed each new chapter, I read it to her. She came home, ate the dinner I made her, then settled in expectantly. She sat close. C. was partially deaf; she always staked out the front seat in classes. Mine especially.
I don’t know who was more nervous, performer or audience. Chapter One, I assured her. I outfit myself for a trip to St. Ives.
I knew that this book would never be published. My audience was never more than C. I wrote for the way her eyes would start to water by chapter’s end. How she would nod her head yes, place her hand on her chest, rise from the bed to grab me in the chair where I sat reading to her.
Yet that spell would not have worked if her private code of survival hadn’t been cast in a public key. The tale had to be open enough to appeal to the random gallery-browser, snared by the lens. C. alone knew where all the nested frames had started.
Those nights of first draft will not happen again. Never, anymore, that simple passion. We lost it the minute I handed the gift over, the instant I read aloud the epilogue. Years later, when I started getting invitations to read to rooms of perfect strangers, I never had the heart.
Sometimes after I read a chapter to C., we made love. We climbed over each other, brown, frighteningly young, vulnerable, exploring the sad distances, warming each other after the radiators packed it in. Once, as I kissed the birthmark that stained the small of her back, this seemed to me the point of literature. I could not think of a book that was not either by, for, or about this. The elaborate seduction of the already attained. Reforestation of the wilds of time, the one biome where love will not die from lack of cover. I can see that birthmark with my eyes wide open, clearer now at fifteen years’ distance than it was when an inch from my eye.
Sex was her present for transcribing her. My feeble thank-you for her sources. And the sounds we listened to then, the calls we made to each other in the winter dark were the vowels that all stories tried to find their way back to.
Afterward, without fail, we fell asleep, her back to my front, two spoons put away in the kitchen drawer of an abandoned cabin. C. was a foot shorter than I was. But when we lay like that, trig turned us to the same length.
The book became a mystery. A foregone conclusion. The more C. felt its surprise inevitability, the keener she got for the next installment. Each narrative riddle, each mental raadsel was an awkward, tenderfoot bow I tied for her, for the pleasure of her untying.
Jokes made her happy. I crammed my paragraphs full of every old joke I could remember.
Up top of each new chapter, I placed an epigraph. I copied out of my notebooks a quote that my same clumsy fingers had, earlier that year, just copied in. That book is the dance card of ideas we shared in the foyer of our joint life. A dance card where the partner’s name was already printed in, a given. I wrote down only the steps themselves, the ideational dips and sways from the course of that evening when C. was my one date, the lone museum guard of all my thoughts.
Sometimes the steps were literal. One night, I read her a chapter so short it left us more time than even love could fill. She’d listened well; it was time for a walk. We drifted out, a slow, deliberate stroll along the parkway that flanked the trolley tracks out to the suburbs.
In the chapter, my contemporary technical editor, in a city much like B., had journeyed home to his immigrant mother in Chicago to find mysterious papers up in the family attic binding him to an unknown past. The passage back left C. expansive.
“I like that guy of yours,” she said. “I like your Lithuanian graffiti on the sidewalks. Do you have any idea what it feels like to be the puppy raised by ducks?”
“Tell me.”
She heaved a sigh. “I’ve been to more Polish weddings than I can count.”
“Well, we know about your head for figures.”
She laughed and flank-attacked. “Come on, you. Let’s polka.”
“The polka is no more than a spot of local color from out of Washington Square, I’m afraid.”
“Don’t be afraid,” C. purred. She could be coy at times. Funny. I’d forgotten. “Here. I’ll show you.”
She stomped it out for me. I was comic, crippled, a laughing stock. But she stuck with me. Of all the countless thousands of things C. taught me, that polka might be the best. I picked it up somewhere along the length of that greenway down which we hurled ourselves, a couple of parka-packed, manic Polacks making tracks into the Arctic dark.
“IT MAKES ME sad, Beau,” she told me, another chapter night, perhaps halfway through.
I panicked in the space of a phrase. “What? Something’s off? I can fix it. Don’t worry; it ends happily.”
“Not that, silly. It makes me sad. You have this—work. And I have nothing.”
“I don’t get it. I thought you liked putting on that uniform.”
“Oh, I did. And it’s still the greatest job in the world. In some ways.”
“What’s wrong, then?”
She wasn’t sure. She still loved the paintings. But they had started to fade into overlearned monochrome. Standing in place for so long began to fog her. The boss was growing creepy. She felt embarrassed explaining herself to others. Ashamed of doing less than she might.
“Maybe we should look around for a new job?” The “we” that would take such toll on her.
“It’s the middle of winter. Nobody’s hiring. Besides, what am I qualified to do?”
“Well, I don’t know. Anything. If the job you have is making you crazy—”
“I know, I know. I need something more than just a paycheck. The problem is, I’m not ambitious. Put me on a rug, I’ll lie there forever.”
“‘Put me out on the lawn and I’ll wail’?”
She clouded. “It’s not funny. I’m sorry I ever showed you that picture.” I tickled her to recreate that infant expression.
“Quit it!”
“I’ll give you prickling.”
“Don’t, Beau. Not now. This is serious.”
“So serious we can’t—”
The obvious yes stopped me in mid-cliché.
“What’s the matter?” I asked. Ready, already, to be dead.
“It’s your story.” She looked down, away. Anywhere but at me. “It makes me feel worthless. I know it’s awful. Do you hate me?”
She got a new job. A friend of mine from the computer world tipped C. to an opening. Wire operator in a brokerage. “Not something I’m going to make a career of,” C. joked.
But something to engage her, salve the sense of self. She came home animated again. As I fed her, she entertained me with tales of eccentric colleagues, wigged out on Opportunity Loss. Her accounts of that quintessential late-twentieth-century business delighted me. The parasitic middlemen, extracting margin from the news feed, the Teletype romances and tragedies. The spigot attached to the pipeline, leveraging profit and hedging loss as it trickled through capital’s tap.
So I did the only thing imaginable. I went back and worked her new material into the book as well as I could. The market and mad brokers became yet another subplot. I fitted it in, between jokes from the front and tales from the tech editing crypt, between the Maas and the Rhine, between the war and its permanently militarized peace, between the Great Personalities and the clueless lives, between fairyland and documentary fact, the aperture and the print, then and now, filthy lucre and the Fine Arts.
What did the finished thing mean? It meant that our private reservoir, when face-to-face with the outside, is all we have that might help a little. That book was no more than a structured pastiche of every report I’d ever heard, from C. or abroad. All a patchwork to delight and distract her. One that by accident ate her alive.
The key to that book, the one that preserves it for me, is that the triple braid—the magic driehoek of the photograph—fails to come together as expected. The lens does not have the last word, nor does the glance of the viewer, nor does the look of those boys, out over the shoulder of the photographer, back behind the lens. The dominant tense was now. The point of stories was what you did with them.
