Lynne Tillman

Motion Sickness

In memory of

Nathan Tillman

and for

Sophie Merrill Tillman

and

Barbara Merrill Tillman

Chapter 1. Tourist Attractions

“I am…the fellow citizen of all that inhabits the great furnished hotel of the universe.”

— Flaubert

PARIS

I am in my hotel room, on the bed, reading The Portrait of a Lady, and nursing an illness I might not have. As I am unhappy, I might just be unhappy and not suffering from the flu or la turista, but a Frenchwoman named Arlette has sent me a get-well card. She seems to take my illness seriously. The card has a Tibetan symbol on it whose meaning I don’t know and which might have significance if I did. Her concern might also be ironic and when she appears at my bedside the next day, I can’t read the gesture as graciousness or solicitude only, since I don’t really know what she means. I both feign surprise at her visit and feel surprised, a mixed response for what might be a mixed get-well visit. She talks about adjusting to changes of all sorts — the weather, leaving one city for another, a friend’s betrayal, the end of a love affair — some of which she knows I’ve experienced. Leaving a city, a lover, good weather for bad. I want to get back to my book, the heroine of which, Isabel Archer, has an end that must be worse than mine, something I’ve always loved novels for. I decide to leave Paris when I’ve finished it. There are Turkish baths, hamams, in Paris, which reminds me of Istanbul, but I try none of them as I don’t feel well enough to leave my hotel room. Except to go down the street for some bread. Or pain, as they call it here.

* * *

ISTANBUL

My hotel room is small and dark and it’s been raining for weeks, and even the walls look wet, though when I touch them, as if reading Braille, they are in actuality dry. It’s a good room to read in and the hotel itself stands about five hundred yards from the Blue Mosque, which I have not yet gone inside. I’m told you have to take off your shoes and will have a hard time finding them later. My shoes are wet, and they’re my only pair, since I threw out another as dead weight, determined to travel light. I travel dark and wet, I think to myself, because I’m reading Mickey Spillane’s My Gun Is Quick. Reading it makes me want to make movies, but I’m not sure why. The hotel manager, perhaps its owner, a slight, elegant man with a moustache, knocks on my door and brings me a tray with a teapot and a glass. I haven’t asked him for this, and he is either curious about what I’m doing in my room, or a very nice man whose sense of hospitality extends beyond the mercenary unctuousness of other hotel managers I’ve met. Sipping the tea in a glass shaped like Dolly Parton or Mae West, associations the hotel man here probably wouldn’t make, suddenly I’m dying to go to the movies. Almost anything makes me want to go to the movies.

* * *

AGIA GALINI

I never meant to go to Crete, but now that I’m here, I’m glad. My room faces the harbor and I have a small terrace. Because the sun is hot — we may be near the equator — l stay under the shade of the terrace’s overhang. Above me are two Australians, Tina and Graham, who live in London, and they’re out most of the day, and John, a man from New Zealand, who calls himself a traveler and a visitor. He smokes endlessly and I know he’s there because of the smell, and like my father’s occasional cigars, I find the smell, at a distance, reassuring. They say that smell for women is a much stronger sense than for men, and I’d like to know why it should be, and that as you grow older, everyone’s sense of smell increases. Why this should be I don’t know.

The New Zealander yells down that we should have a drink. He has a bottle, he says. Of what, I wonder, but don’t ask. I say, I’m reading but all right. I don’t know why I put it that way—“reading but all right.” Perhaps I meant to suggest that his visit ought to be short. But I’m in Crete with all the time in the world, as well as an increasing sense of smell, for that matter. John and I empty the bottle, sitting on the terrace, the hotel room and its bed in the background. A small room with a single bed. The night grows darker and darker, until I can only hear the water slapping against the harbor, but can’t see it. Just as I can barely see John, but can smell him.

* * *

ISTANBUL

An Englishman has taken the room next door. I hear him speaking to the hotel manager in that unmistakable accent that brings up so many associations, even ones that aren’t movies. He, like me, stays in his room most of the time. At least I don’t hear him leaving. His door rarely opens or shuts. Perhaps, like me, he has bought oranges, bread and yogurt. Or not. We pass each other going to the toilet but as he doesn’t acknowledge me, or act friendly, I decide I won’t either. If he knows I’m American, he probably expects me to make the first move. I feel under no such cultural imperative. Although as the days pass, this resolve appears foolish. On the other hand he might think I’m Irish, German or Italian, as others have, and hold different expectations.

I read The New York Times or Herald Tribune nearly every day, which marls me as a foreigner, one who desires contact with her home, indicating attachment. Sometimes I buy a local paper, simply to appear to be trying. I look at the pictures and puzzle over the captions. The hotel manager, Mr. Yapar, approves of the oranges. He smiles broadly when I come in with my groceries and newspaper, nodding his head up and down with enthusiasm, I think. And if he is with another man when I pass by, he also nods at his friend. This might not, of course, be approval, but day after day, the hotel man and I smile and nod and gesture and I believe he’s getting used to me, as I am to him. I suppose we have a sense of each other and are like babies together, communicating preverbally.

I decide he does like me, as I have a need anyway to feel I am liked. No doubt this marks me as an American. I must be full of national characteristics that are hidden from me and are palpable to others, to Mr. Yapar, for instance, as home becomes palpable to me only because I’m not there. Still I don’t really want to meet or talk to anyone, and revel not only in this silent relationship but also in my quiet hotel room whose walls look damp. The Englishman, when we passed, touched his hand to his head, a kind of salute, and I did likewise, a gesture that has absolutely no meaning to me at all.

* * *

AMSTERDAM

The hotel I am staying in has a history — as I guess does everything — a living history. Three generations of a single Dutch family sitting or standing in the room I am eating in, who have owned this hotel for as many generations or more. The grandfather, the father, and the son, all owners of this small, cozy, or gezellig, as the Dutch might put it, establishment. I’m eating a raisin bun, drinking coffee and reading I Should Have Stayed Home, a Horace McCoy novel about Hollywood. I’m also wishing there was a television in my room, and glance furtively at the three generations as if they might become a sitcom. Actually, looking more carefully, they’re closer to Western types, on the order of Rawhide or Bonanza or Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and from now on whenever I see them, either the theme song from Bonanza, or “I’m a Lonesome Polecat” from Seven Brides plays in my mind.

I finish I Should Have Stayed Home in the breakfast room, and I believe it is also in this room — cheerful and warm that I read that vampires do not suck blood, they lap it.

* * *

ISTANBUL

The Englishman — Charles — and I take a walk to a site below the city, a special place he knows about, some kind of tunnel system that all large cities have. Charles’s hair grows in clumps or batches over his head, and he has large eyes and a soft voice, his whispers, very hard to hear in the cave — or was it a sewer? Several hours might have passed with us in conversation. Flat-bottomed boats float by occasionally. There are people in them. At least I think it is here that I saw the boats. Charles reeks of oddness and vagueness which must contribute to the blight on this recent cavernous memory. As I lie in bed and look at the wall, the more I try to recall it, the more I think I’m remembering a movie like Blade Runner or one by Fellini, not the submerged cloudy place I went to with Charles, who I suppose I could say is also cloudy, if not submerged. I can’t remember how we got in or if we paid. I can barely remember it at all.

Later in the front room of the hotel, kindly Mr. Yapar serves us tea, pastries and oranges, a privilege I hadn’t yet been granted. I worry that the hotel manager wants to pair me off with Charles so I try to appear independent no matter what, hoping the manager won’t get the wrong idea. Of course what does it mean to appear independent, anyway. This is some horrible fiction that no one can project, I think, and then I relax and drink my tea. Let him think what he wants, as he will anyway.

* * *

AGIA GALINT

Screams from the street wake me and I think I’m home. A dog owned by a shopkeeper has been found dead, poisoned, and women in black cotton dresses hurry up and down the street, agitated. New Zealander John reports that the dog was murdered, an act of revenge against the shopkeeper, and as we’re in Greece, the home of tragedy, the event resonates peculiarly. John has brought us feta cheese, bread and tomatoes, as well as an English-language newspaper only five days old. This assures us of our being in a remote spot in the world, I suppose. I’m writing postcards to friends, having purchased all the best ones from the cigarette vendor downstairs. The very best a black-and-white real-photo postcard, printed badly, of a man in a suit walking, rushing, in the foreground, with a large freighter docked in the background, at the harbor.

My postcards home annotate this image, refer to the dead dog, and the hot sun, as well as John, and I think about that scene in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie when the dinner guests look at tourist postcards as if they’re pornography. I feel very much the same way talking about sex as I do landscapes and monuments, events and sights that we all do and know, that are always there and never new. That are maybe even impossible to see — in the same way that sex, for me, is unrepresentable because the tongue, for instance, is privileged with information indifferent to words. And now I want to see a movie, having thought about Buñuel. But John wants to make love. He thinks he’s in love with me. I don’t think I’m in love with him. The Australians, Tina and Graham, are leaving. They tell me to look them up in London.

* * *

LONDON

The hotel is Victorian in more than its architecture. Men are not allowed in one’s room, which strikes me like those signs on New York subways that read No dogs or No spitting. This place, with its fake red velvet wallpaper, reminds me of Tad’s Steak Houses and is welcome because of that.

The hotel’s breakfast room, crowded by nine, emptied by 10 A.M., when I generally take mine. Breakfast is served, the card says, until 10:10, and I’m aware that latecomers engender hatred among the staff but I find it difficult to get out of bed earlier and refuse to simply because I will be disliked. This goes against my general desire to be liked by everyone and I wonder if I’m making progress.

Another American woman joins me for breakfast and starts to tell me her story. I hear many stories and tell some too, but this morning I’m just listening. Her name is Jessica and her husband, an Englishman, has left her, vanished. She begins to describe him and suddenly I know she’s talking about Charles whose face rises out of the mist where I last saw him. It now seems appropriate that it was a sewer, if it was. I don’t know whether or not to tell her that I saw him in Istanbul. I know I will, but this breakfast room, with its impatient waiters, doesn’t seem the right place. But then travel doesn’t ever produce the right place, I’ve discovered, so I describe Charles and my encounter with him. He is, indeed, her wandering husband, a fact that at first silences both of us as we spread orange marmalade over cold toast — I’ve grown to like cold toast and almost instantly I am her best friend in the world, the world being so small these days that it takes only one encounter to make us fast friends. Or so we think.

Chapter 2. Details

Some people keep diaries or journals so as not to go mad. A guy I knew in college insisted this was true, then stopped keeping his, and voluntarily committed himself to a mental hospital. Jessica writes copious letters home. Early in the morning and late at night I hear her banging away on her typewriter. Apparently she has many friends, along with a large family. Secretly she could be hard at work on the great American novel, although no woman I’ve ever known has ever used that phrase, one that’s ridiculous to me, and I can’t imagine Jessica engaging in that notion. But you never know what people contain within themselves, if anything at all, and Jessica might just have a vast fantasy life, were I able to crack her open and look inside. I prefer to think that she does. For instance, I’d like to read her deliberate movements as emerging out of a fully conceived sense of herself as being anyone from Cleopatra to Merle Oberon, to that woman who used to be a Republican representative from New Jersey, Millicent Fenwick. Which would have been a great name for Jessica, except she herself is far from being a Republican and left the U.S. toward the end of the war in Vietnam and stayed away after Watergate. Her family are staunch conservatives with ancestors dating back to the American Revolution. Some of Jessica’s aunts are active in the D.A.R. Jessica has escaped that, yet has a kind of grande-dame quality to her, something that carries over into her present incarnation as an American Buddhist. She sits across from me at breakfast, a tiny Buddha, spreading orange marmalade over cold toast with a seriousness and grace usually reserved for bigger things.

I don’t have many fantasies. Perhaps I lack a fantasy life altogether, although you could consider my interest in other people’s lives entirely fantastic, even a little crazy. I do keep a diary, though. For some days, anyway. Not a good one, but sufficient to record the days that pass, my own prime-time soap.

I tell Jessica that I want things plain. Or direct. When I read a book I’m suspicious of description. Too much embellishment or an excess of adjectives bothers me, as if the speaker or writer were attempting to overcome me, to finesse me like a bridge player. Or to seduce me.

I don’t mean I don’t like details. “Some people like excess and elaborate descriptions, some even like to be seduced,” she says almost haughtily, and I imagine her in the throes of a great excessive sexual passion, Charles planting tiny wet kisses at her wrist, his mouth moving up to her shoulder and neck, and in profile Jessica’s mouth is slightly open, as in perfume commercials. She hurriedly drinks more coffee, looking at me as if she knew what scene was playing on my tiny stage, or launching pad, so to speak. She’s reminded of a man she knows, back home, whose vocabulary was so rich no one understood him, and whose stories so elaborate, by the time he reached the point, you felt exhausted and as if you didn’t care. Jessica could just be speaking about excess and elaboration or she could be speaking about us, or me, in some subtle way.

It helps that we’re both reading Henry James. It probably amuses her that I like him because he’s not direct. She’s on The Europeans and I’ve got The American, which seems apropos. Conversation with Jessica, and nearly anyone else, leaves me confused, because like the proverbial river that is never the same, all conversation leads from subject to subject, a horse that trots, canters, then gallops away from one’s initial point of departure. I don’t ride horses; I did once, as a child, but Jessica rides them and they’re in my mind now.

My hotel room, plain and verging on ugly, is easy to ignore. The landscape on the wall, inoffensive, the fake wood bureau, serviceable. The room is cleaned by women I never see. I don’t want to see them, because my sense of privacy will be violated if I know the people who come into this space. Sometimes I don’t let them in, we’ve all seen that in movies, and then I hear muttering outside my door. But it stops. Sometimes I wait until everyone has left the floor, and only then do I go out of the room. Adventure creeps into this mundane event, and I remember my father talking about someone’s being out of his element, which is, I suppose, one way to put it, my trips in foreign places. But I can’t write my father a postcard because he’s dead. Sometimes I forget that.

Jessica’s good about death. She doesn’t avoid discussions about it and seems to think it’s a suitable subject for analysis rather than a morbid preoccupation of mine or others. Similarly she can discuss Charles as if he hadn’t abandoned her. Her equanimity appears endless, making her a kind of metaphysician about even her own life. Jessica had wanted to be many things, a veterinarian, a physicist, an opera singer, a biologist, even a missionary during an early Protestant awakening, as she put it. She had come, emerged full-blown, from a long line of people used to doing good. But she became a poet, an antique jewelry stall — owner — on the Portobello Road — as well as a Buddhist, and suffers from being missionless, a despair I don’t think I have, not having come from people like hers. Insanity roamed through her large midwestern tribe, cloistered in proverbial dark closets in gabled houses in areas of the country where no one else lived for miles and miles, as if the openness of the land, the nothingness that seemed to stretch forever, and lack of contact outside the family provided the most fertile ground for a certain kind of American psychosis.

But Jessica loves that same fertile intemperate ground, the depopulated landscape, and communes with nature, noticing trees and naming them, saving leaves and drying them, until her hotel room resembles, with its Buddhist altar and woodsy decor, a certain kind of diorama, like one at the Museum of Natural History, from my point of view. To Jessica anything natural inspired awe and was beautiful, whereas what people made in order to look beautiful or to look at beauty was always and forever tainted. I tell her I can’t see the trees for the people.

One of whom is Charles: I feel I’ve tainted her life with my report that Charles had not dropped off the face of the earth but was seen walking around an underground tunnel and in an Istanbul hotel. Perhaps she would have preferred him living as a monk in a monastery, separate from the human race, disconsolate, or maybe she’d rather have him dead and with the angels. Jessica believes in angels. Then she could have held on to him in memory. That’s what I do, hold on to memory. You relive memories, you develop them, you make them bigger and better and add a touch here and there, like a dab of perfume behind the ear of a memory. Death gives you a reason to remember, to put it all together. To put together a new body, of evidence, of evidence of love, of evidence of something solid to battle the ephemeral. People always say you shouldn’t live in the past, but that’s so stupid because it’s not a matter of will, it’s not voluntary. A person without a past is like a nation without history. It’s impossible. Jessica says things like, I must get on with my life, and I think of Goodbye, Mr. Chips. She’s unquestionably and remarkably good about death.

When we discuss Charles, I try to recall for her, and for me, those few conversations he and I held in the hotel and in the tunnel or cave. Now it seems important to take the pieces of dialogue that lie strewn in that tunnel and pile them on top of each other. And like the jigsaw puzzle that always comes to mind when someone says my life is in pieces, one wants to fashion a whole, something like a personality or a character, but I never finished those giant puzzles when I was a kid, and the way I pick up the pieces and display them for Jessica must be nearly useless. He said, I say, “I’m not much good at anything.” “I hate London.” “I think I’ll travel for a while. Just read and think. Maybe learn to play the clarinet.” He talked, I report, about Anthony Blunt and the Cambridge spies, then segued to Suleiman the Magnificent, the sixteenth-century Turkish sultan, who patronized the arts, particularly those craftsmen who worked with gold, because that was the trade he knew. Ottoman emperors had to learn a trade, which was the kind of thing my father would have appreciated, I told him then. Charles said, I can’t do anything with my hands. Then he held his hands up in front of his face and wiggled them, but as we were underground they were covered by shadow and I couldn’t really see them. He, I supposed, knew what his hands looked like, and the gesture, now that I think of it again, is entirely unreadable and not at all in character with the character I’m pasting together for Jessica. He has become, to me, like the underground man, a nihilist full of angst, who tests the limits of rationality whenever possible. For example, perhaps he left her for no reason at all. This is not what I tell her. Just as I don’t tell her that I sometimes feel like a female version of the underground man, which would make Charles and me transnational siblings. In my imagination anyway.

It’s possible that Jessica intuits how Charles and I are alike, and likes me because I’m like him, if I am. Now I think I am, though I didn’t when I talked with him in Istanbul, which leads me to think that one remembers even the recent past so imperfectly and so much in relation to oneself that every object is skewered upon one’s own identity, like a kind of shish kebab. I can identify with and feel like any number of people, though, people I’ve met briefly or have known over a longer period of time. Everyone is just as chameleonlike, personality fragile as old glass in the windows of historical houses or, like dust, easily shaken from a very dirty mop.

Thinking of dirty mops, I can’t visualize Charles and Jessica having sex together. Jessica seems as much out of her body as in it, and Charles, I can barely recollect his body at all, just his large head and those pale bluish round eyes that stared into dark spaces along with mine. I imagine many people couldn’t dream of sex with me or imagine my having sex with others. This doesn’t stop me from applying unyielding and unimaginative standards to them.

Before going into our separate rooms which are next door to one another’s, Jessica says, putting her key into the lock, I’m not sure, though, what importance beauty has, except for the peace it gives me. But is that enough? Not to worry, I say to her, borrowing one of her phrases which is already borrowed from the English. A transplantation of a sort. Easy to do. Simple. Quite simple. In bed I feel like a body claimed by a name. Then a name claimed by a body. A thing, a human thing, small and powerless. I don’t confide these thoughts to her. Beauty has never had much importance to me.

Chapter 3. Small Pleasures

Outside there’s shouting, yelling. It’s a fight between two men which I watch from my hotel window. I enjoy watching fights, as if I were a participant fighting my own dark and dirty battles. I don’t like to fight. The two men don’t look English and their angry sounds are twice removed, male and foreign. Foreign also to the English who stand on the sidewalk, also watching. They’re arguing about money. One could be the other’s father. The younger man shouts: I worked all day yesterday, all day, I want some money. The older man bellows: Work? Work? I worked too, you’ll only spend it on drugs. They’re standing close to each other, the public scene grotesquely intimate. The younger man slaps the older man across the face and pulls a black wallet from his back pocket which he brandishes, as if it were a sword or handkerchief, waving it in front of his adversary’s face. The younger man then strides to the center of the street, looks around, walks back to the sidewalk and throws the wallet down in front of the older man. The older man, who had been standing on the sidewalk as if he too were an observer of the spectacle, picks up the wallet almost casually and marches off, unruffled, a briefcase in one hand, the wallet in the other. Neither man looks back as they get farther and farther from each other, both turning a corner at the end of the street, leaving the other behind without a second glance.

The fight is much less conclusive, though one got the wallet from the other, than, say, a prizefight or baseball game in which there is a winner. It’s much more like fiction — I could never do that — or haven’t yet — leave someone behind without that second furtive glance. What was that song? “I was looking back to see if she was looking back to see if I was looking back at her.”

The street returns to its ordinariness, and the passionate battle, familial or otherwise, forgotten on a summer’s day. It’s at moments like these I relish being away, and am almost happy about having been an only child. Almost happy to be in a country different from my widowed mother’s. This scene from my mother’s eyes would have been edited differently. She works as a textbook editor in New York. She used to work as a script supervisor in Hollywood. In those days she was called a script girl. But that’s a different story. One I’ve heard and told a million times. “You can’t right — r-i-g-h-t — history,” my mother would say, “but you can rewrite it and then edit the hell out of it.”

My favorite place near the hotel is a small French café on Moscow Road, off Queensway, an international street filled with Middle Eastern, Greek and Italian restaurants and shops, and a tremendous mixture of nationalities, in which I feel comfortable. There’s a transitory Times Square feeling to the street, not down-and-out, just a way station’ The people who will stay here forever, I feel, might get stuck in a kind of limbo, a not-London, a not-anywhere. Voluntary and individual diaspora is a luxury.

Depending upon whether I think I deserve it or not, I’ll stroll over to the French café, for a café au lait and a small pastry. A small pleasure. Small Pleasures could be the title of a film I might go to or a store I might work in, or only what it is now, a moment in my life. But why not, I think, title these moments in a life?

The café is nearly empty. There’s a sign outside it which reads Morning Coffee, leading a visitor like me to suspect a difference later in the day. As I walk in, Claudia, the proprietor and coffee maker, announces, We’re having an English summer. It’s early June and this statement strikes me as preemptive or at least premature. Also it’s an entirely new idea — an English summer. An elderly man and woman smile knowingly, almost as if Claudia had divulged a secret or told a dirty joke, then they bite into pastries that ooze from all sides. Claudia’s Italian, born in Bologna, a Common Market European, but she’s been in London long enough to be a kind of hybrid, and I wonder if that will be my fate too, as it appears to be Jessica’s. Watching Claudia, I’m thinking about the English summer, hybridization and the elderly couple who are engaged in an animated discussion about the time their currency, not that long ago, either, he says, changed from shillings, half-pennies, and sixpences to its present decimal system, more or less making the pound like the dollar. Everything got more expensive “right off,” the woman remarks, everything changed overnight. She recalls a discussion on a bus, where complete strangers, dismayed, sought conversation about this radical move by the government. She doesn’t say radical. She says horrid. Life changed overnight, she repeats. Became less English, the man notes, and they both nod. Claudia smiles at me.

Chapter 4. Twisted Intentions

On an unusually sunny day when it was remarked again that we were having an English summer, Jessica moved out. Moving from one street to another or one city or country to another requires about the same amount of energy, and I made plans to return to Amsterdam. It seemed easier to go somewhere I’d already been. I wanted to hold my London life in suspension, a bit of fluff caught in a solution, or hold my life in suspense, if suspenseful could be used to describe my life in London. Certainly life is filled with everyday mystery — we’re given answers to questions that answer nothing — and doubtless life goes on without me, and things don’t remain the same, but can “I” ever know that?

This question, like so many other conundrums, puzzles and pleases and fills time, as does trying to imagine a mountainless valley. I eventually pack my bags and one rainy morning wander onto the street to get a taxi to the train station. In Victoria, I head for the ticket window and buy, in what strikes me as a fit of perversity, a ticket for Venice. I don’t want to go back to Amsterdam. I want to go somewhere I’ve never been. It’ll be my little secret. I like secrets. Secrets are sacred.

The photobooths in the station do black-and-white and color pictures, four different shots on a strip, and I spend the rest of my English change catching myself in all sorts of poses, looking at the camera and thinking one thing or the other, waiting for the machine to whir and develop them, knowing that the camera cannot discern this inner life of mine. This secret life. And contrary to what Jessica thinks, one doesn’t necessarily leave a place to leave someone in particular. I’m reading Buber’s The Legend of the Baal-Shem, which Jessica recommended (she’s reading all of Jean Rhys), and on the train to Dover, landscape and brick houses passing by indifferently, it strikes an eerie blow: “An angel born of twisted intentions will have twisted limbs.”

The white cliffs of Dover look like a quarry, and I’ve just had an argument with the concessionaire who sold me a cheese sandwich and gave me the wrong change, so that I can’t experience the cliffs the way I think I should. Several heads turn in my direction as I labor to make my point. From the expressions on their faces, mirrors behind which their opinions sit, I see myself as the ugly, that is, imperialistic American and, alternatively, the bossy New York woman. Or, less problematically, as just plain rude. Instantly I’m a set of conditions and positions, a reluctant but undeniable conduit, and Jessica’s epiphany resonates in this stuffy train car where I can conjure her enigmatic smile at will. If I were English, perhaps I wouldn’t have objected so vigorously, if I were more like my English friend who visits New York about once a year. He asked a counterman in a Greek diner for the time and was handed a cheese sandwich, which he ate. Then he asked for the check and was given a vanilla milk shake. John drank it down and paid without protest. To him that’s a New York story.

On the ferry to Calais, on the top deck, I switch from Martin Buber to Patricia Highsmith and read Edith’s Diary. Nothing like a woman going mad for the right political reasons, as well as other more arcane ones, to reassure one of one’s necessary differences from others. A typically gray sky blows gustily over a sea covered with white caps and I’m wondering about the many swimmers who’ve been challenged by these inhospitable waters. The ship’s motion makes me queasy, nearly sick, and I look toward the horizon line. My father, who also got seasick, told me it’s what you have to do and if worse comes to worse — or worst — you drop your head between your knees.

At the point of no return, where France is closer than England, the sky clears, very suddenly, and turns a bright cloudless blue, and some English people on deck raise their glasses to toast the sun, which hovers on the horizon like an apparition or, more comically, like a mark of punctuation.

Switching trains in Paris at the Gare du Nord, there’s time to telephone Arlette, just to say hello. She’s probably at her bookstore. But I don’t. I change money, receiving large colorful notes for smaller English ones, buy black-and-white real-photo postcards of places I haven’t visited and French and English newspapers, drink a bowl of café au lait, wonder at French bread, reminisce about the smell of Gauloises and the nice Frenchman in Paris who ecstatically began at my ears and the nasty one in New York who wanted me to work harder, as he put it. Wantonly I enjoy hearing the French language, knowing that in a few hours it’ll be Italian. I write postcards. All this can make one feel like a traveler.

Chapter 5. Ruin

VENICE

The hotel was once a convent. Down the road, or canal, is a church of the same name that’s no longer used for services. This parallelism doesn’t escape me and surprisingly I like to go into the church just as I like sitting in the hotel’s lobby and garden. The empty church has a dank smell, maybe it can be said that it reeks of disuse, although this may be too vivid. Its aroma, redolent of mortality and the ephemeral, embraces one in a perfume of long ago, much too ripe, too long past, where the present couldn’t intrude. I breathe in, very deeply, the sweet old air, reminded that in that movie, Putney Swope, it was admonished that you can’t eat atmosphere, and I’m not sure that’s absolutely true, especially when you’re not physically hungry. A man sitting close to me, the church’s other lone visitor, hears me, shifts on the velvet seat and may believe I’m sighing. I think he’s Hungarian but have little to base this on. As I’m wearing black, he might imagine I’m a devotee of some sort, an ambiguity I momentarily enjoy and have already played with while temporarily sequestered in the ex-convent. All my devotions are secular.

Another visitor makes her presence felt by moving from alcove to alcove and dropping fifty lire in slots in metal boxes which activate spotlights. Sudden illuminations fiercely disrupt the quiet dark spaces, making visible the Madonna with child, saints in ecstasy, chubby angels hovering above the holy couple. Tintoretto, the Hungarian hisses as if we’re in collusion. Beautiful, I answer, not knowing what else to say. He nods. These paintings are beautiful, because they’re everything they’re supposed to be and nothing more. They’re constant, like pets or old friends, the ones who ask for the same old stories and jokes. The friends to whom you want to tell the same old jokes. As if you and they were identical twins. And then tell them, word for word, gesture for gesture, just the same, like the last time, and wait for their response, as if your life depended on it. Today, breathing in church air, I’d like to be an extra in someone else’s story. The young American woman in black who intrudes upon the reverie of the somewhat older Hungarian man in tweed. The Hungarian crosses himself as he rises from the pew, murmuring Adieu or something like that. I mumble too then bow my head toward the altar penitentially.

Two men walk in and point at the paintings. They’re speaking English in sober whispers and I follow them, to hear what they’re saying. One is lecturing the other about perspective and the vanishing point. The other says he likes skewed perspectives. I agree silently. Perspective wasn’t necessarily advantageous, he continues. Even the discovery of fire wasn’t really an advance, says the other one. The lecturer continues, the figures in medieval paintings, the incongruent relationships represent a different world view.…I’m getting too close to them, and linger in front of another painting, losing their conversation. It’s the way we draw as children, I hear the other one say finally. Looking at the two men, I remember being told about a filmmaker who taught his classes that vision was an erection of the irises, which makes me wonder if learning perspective is something akin to and as traumatic as circumcision.

Chapter 6. Indulgences

SAN GIMIGNANO

Walking along a dark alley whose paving stones were trod by grander feet, nearing an historic site, I take in, as best I can, the fact that so-and-so died or lived or passed through, then look again at the innocuous structure that once housed him, sometimes her. Immortality continues to elude me. Alfred’s learned commentary makes our trip more like a documentary than a narrative film. We are investigative reporters about to discover clues that everyone else had overlooked, not romantic leads in an adventure or mystery. Which would be more to my liking. But we do fit into an ecology. Without us equals not seen.

The sun’s pernicious rays make everyone happy. Men in white jackets and black trousers carry small cups of espresso on round silver trays, moving from table to table or from shop to shop, shouting pronto, sometimes with annoyance, and ciao with pleasure. On the street women sell blue-and-white-striped umbrellas made of linen, a local product, or they work inside stores behind counters, standing on high-heeled leather sandals, their well-padded feet spread over the sides of their shoes. I look at feet almost as much as teeth. Their feet look healthy, brown and pink, but probably are not. Late at night the women must rub them in their hands, exclaim at their exhaustion and soak their feet in soothing salted water held in ceramic bowls they’ve had in their families for years. That’s what I imagine when I look at these saleswomen who smile patiently rather than broadly and murmur grazie without obsequiousness.

Medieval houses teeter on the edges of narrow streets. I’m drinking an espresso in the Piazza della Cisterna, having persuaded Paul and Alfred to go off without me and do all the seeing they can. My stack of postcards grows, progeny of these travels, and I look from one card to the other like a proud mother, if I can understand that feeling. I try to as I watch women I take to be mothers walking by with children, doing the marketing and not stopping for an espresso. And because years ago one of these little girls could have been coffee-shop Claudia, I select a postcard to send her in London, one of a man and woman locked in an embrace, their lips barely touching, with “Amore” written in red letters across their chests. On a black-and-white real-photo postcard of the San Gimignano medieval “skyscrapers,” I write Zoran’s name and address just as Alfred sits down. I put the card in my diary. He tells me how much I missed by not going with them. He always says that.

Paul sleeps in the car, and Alfred and I find cheap hotels in Siena or Florence, which are home base for most of our day trips. We take single rooms, even though it’s more expensive and I think Alfred would prefer it if we shared one. He doesn’t say so. He doesn’t insist. He’d never say so. And he’d never insist. They don’t insist. With them I experience a kind of liberty — license, maybe — because their reticence or self-censorship permits a wide berth. I utter half-statements, which are met with cocked heads and attentiveness, but not with exhortations to explain or to finish. I tell them about a never-released thirties Hollywood movie based on the life of Schubert in which various characters walk up to the composer and ask, “Why don’t you finish The Unfinished?” They don’t think that’s as funny as I do.

Chapter 7. Foreign Skins

AMSTERDAM

On the train to Amsterdam from Milan, I sit in a compartment with other foreigners, one a Pakistani man, one an English girl of seventeen, one a Belgian man, all of us headed in the same direction for different reasons. The Pakistani and I engage in one of those fitful conversations in which neither is able to make clear what one wants to say. Finally we stand in the compartment passageway and talk about the neon lights on buildings, that blaze of created energy that gives color to our nights. Beauty, he says to me, artificial beauty. Yes, I agree. Why, he asks, are you not married? I don’t want to be. Ahh, he says, scrutinizing me, then may God be with you. I thank him. The rest of the journey he and I are noticeably silent, as if something portentous had occurred. When we arrive at Centraal Station at dusk, the Pakistani gravely shakes my hand and I bow slightly, an atavistic gesture that brings Charles to mind, but one just as grave as his handshake. With a doleful expression he takes his leave, and I’m sure he watched me throw my bag into the taxi and shook his head, certain I was meant for tragedy.

Amsterdam doesn’t seem a suitable place for tragedy, but place — the city, for instance — is as much a mental space as a physical one, and its physical boundaries, its history, are much less concise than any term such as “city” might lead one to think. Am I headed for tragedy, I wonder as the cabdriver brings me to the three-generations hotel. And are conversations with strangers necessarily uncanny?

They give me the same room. It still doesn’t have a television and I’m embarrassed to ask for one. The breakfasts are also the same, which pleases me enormously. Eat the same thing every day and you won’t go mad, also said to me by the friend who insisted upon keeping a diary for the same reason.

I think I understand why so many English plays take place in the restaurants or sitting rooms of hotels. Apart from the cheapness of their production, any aggregate of people, drawn or thrown together and involuntarily in each other’s company, poses dramatic possibilities. It’s not that you expect anything very fantastic to happen — the American woman named Helen is not going to do a strip in the breakfast room, the Irish guy called Pete is not going to sing an aria just because he feels like it, the German Ulrich will not fall to his knees and confess some terrible crime — there will be no orgy. We are all remarkable for our constraint. If something like that did happen — if Olivier, the Frenchman, exposed himself to me in front of my fellow diners — the course of playwriting would have to be altered, as would the site of the hotel. And I would not now be playing at eating this raisin bun, or krentebollen, in the breakfast room. I’d be in a state beyond words, blood racing, or I might be laughing nervously. Olivier merely smiles at me, a sly guarded slash of a grin, throws his book, Truffaut’s Hitchcock, into his leather satchel, pushes his wire-rimmed glasses up onto the bridge of his nose and strides past me, brushing against my arm ever so slightly. Why do I feel I’ve seen this scene before? And will I end up in bed with him? Is my life as predictable as it sometimes appears?

* * *

It’s cold in Amsterdam and I’m lying in bed, covered by an eiderdown. The window has no view since the hotel is almost attached to another building, joined like a Siamese twin. Why are they called Siamese? A cold gray light filters in, unwelcoming but atmospheric, right for staying in bed. Called Siamese because the first pair were born there? Or, more pejoratively, another insult to the East, deeply embedded. I meditate on this, although I believe meditation is meant to free one’s mind and thoughts like these don’t. But these are the only thoughts I seem to have.

Jessica meditates every day, at the same time. Arlette works out. New Zealander John smokes dope mixed with tobacco. I lie in bed for long periods of time, inert. I suppose a Dutch summer is what we’re having, since it might as well be the fall, spring or winter. That’s what Pete, the Irishman from London, says. He can also tell you about the weather in Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Istanbul and further east. He’s one of those devilishly handsome guys, a bit androgynous, tall and nervous — he played rhythm guitar in a band in Dublin. Pete holds things together in a loose sort of way. I take him for a dealer, cars or dope. He seems familiar. Olivier’s gay and so is Pete. Life isn’t as predictable as it often seems.

The third-generation hotel guy, Huub, is interested in Helen, an actress from New York, and she’s attentive to him, with his light yellow hair, large teeth and height of about 6′7″ when not wearing his cowboy boots which make him even taller. He seems too big for the small breakfast room where I see him every morning. Amiable and always wearing a clean white baker’s apron, Huub is drawn to or in awe of Helen’s dark beauty and studied gestures. Helen and I must have been together in the same room many times, because we know each other and keep our distance, as if we also know that further acquaintance would lead to futility. Pete and Olivier like each other and go out dancing late at night. In the morning the charged glances that fly around the breakfast room make the Dutch breakfast an extraordinary affair, even though it’s the same every day and would please Wittgenstein. Jessica once accused me of being voyeuristically engaged in other people’s lives. Which is not the same as liking gossip, but I couldn’t convince her of that. I told her my interest is more naked than hers.

Cities aren’t naked. But Amsterdam is more literally a naked city than New York. Window curtains are left open, and apartment inhabitants are casually on view not unlike the prostitutes who sit in other Amsterdam windows, half-naked, their rooms and bodies open to view, to the public, to commerce. Amsterdam isn’t a naked city. Not knowing the language or the customs, to me everyone and everything is thoroughly clothed, wrapped in the thick mysterious outerwear of the other. They have foreign tongues and foreign skins that protect them from outsiders. Or aliens.

A brown café with hanging plants is the harmless background against which I review Jessica’s latter-day revelation of pregnancy, as well as Alfred’s bite on my cheek. Such thoughts are easy to be occupied by. Not like living as a citizen in an occupied country the way Arlette’s mother and father did. A real-photo postcard that Arlette gave me documents my inexperience of that kind of occupation, showing the first tanks, Leclerc’s tanks, as they entered Paris to liberate it. People are thrusting their arms into the air, waving scarves ecstatically, welcoming the men on the tanks that signify the end of war. That kind of release, liberation, can never be merely personal, and exists on a scale different from the minute, regular events that make up any, my, life. Even if I could forget the letter my best friend of twelve years sent me after one bad fight, which revealed that for half of those years she’d been estranged from me and I hadn’t known it, even if I could get over it, be liberated from it, no one would celebrate with me this tiny release from an awful occupation. The social is definitely more than the sum of its parts.

Aborigines decide to forget an event if after great discussion and analysis its meaning cannot be determined. For instance if a child disappears because a dingo took it or killed it and after many searches they can’t find the child, having done all they can, the loss will not again be spoken of, falling under the heading “mystery,” that which is beyond explanation. I’d love to be able to reverence mystery and give it its due, let something go, but perhaps for the same reason a Bob Dylan song in Italian sounds strange to an American in Italy, I wouldn’t be able to think for long in a really different language, assuming that that language mirrors its ideas. In one African language the word for money and rain is the same. If there isn’t a word for guilt, movies or sex in some culture, could I really exist there?

On the other hand I might get swept up, embraced by events of history that would bestow upon me the dubious privilege of a certain destiny. At least where the public event meets some personal need. I’m reading Code Name Mary, the autobiography of Muriel Gardiner, a wealthy American who lived in Vienna in the thirties and early forties and became a Resistance fighter, having already become a medical doctor and a psychoanalyst, and saved Communists and Jews. Later Gardiner’s fate is to be reinvented as the friend of Lillian Hellman, as the Julia of Hellman’s Pentimento. Gardiner writes to Hellman: I understand you’ve based a book on me, then never hears from her. She was the only American woman in Vienna working in the underground. She never knew Hellman.

I walk to the Leidseplein. Older women riding bicycles have firm calves and thighs. Men and women carry infants on their backs with no worry of falling. Dutch people have bright large teeth. An Englishwoman explained to me in London that Englishmen, not Englishwomen, think going to the dentist is merely cosmetic. What do the Dutch think?

I choose a café with a view onto the square. And to shake flat wallpaperlike feelings, adaptable to any public or private space, to bars or cafés, I order a genever with a coffee, black and strong. Ordering this combination doesn’t make me feel like the Dutchman at the bar who has also just ordered it but a version of, an imitation of him. He doesn’t see m€ as an homage, but maybe he ought to consider it. Staring purposelessly at a lively group of Dutchmen who order another round of pils, with a lot of gusto, much the way I’ve done coke, staring past them, I spy American Sal, an older man I met in Lindos. He’s in front of one of the more disreputable nightspots, talking to several men, all of whom are shorter and seedier-looking than he. Sal’s turned up like a bad penny.

I move somewhat automatically out of the café into the square so that he’ll discover me. Sal shouts: “Babe, remember me from Lindos? What are you doing here?” He shakes loose from his group of smaller men and runs over, his arms outstretched. “Let me buy you a drink.” It’s about 4 P.M., and I sense I’m about to lose the night. He picks up on this instantly and says, “What’s time? Only these farmers should care about it.” He points to the men he was standing with who don’t look anything like farmers, the ones in storybooks. Then Sal waves his hand at a couple of large blond men eating leverwurst or kaas on small buns or broodjes. He points to Broodje van Kootje, the sandwich shop, and says, “l love that place. This is a great country.” He throws out his arms as if to embrace it, then sighs and grabs my arm. “Lindos,” he says, “you should have stayed. It got crazy. Bad shit went down. Basil got done for smuggling rugs into Turkey.” “Basil the rug merchant?” “Yeah, him, that guy you didn’t want to sleep with. And after all that I found Sylvie. I want you to meet her. She lives here. That’s why I’m here.” He throws his arm around me, one strange comrade to another. “Don’t you miss that moussaka?”

Chapter 8. Passing

“I realized that modesty helped me to shine, humility to conquer and virtue to oppress.”

— Albert Camus

This could be a fairy tale. Each day is something of an invention. If it were a fairy tale there could be a reversal of fortune even for me. Literal fortunes are reversed daily, as the dollar drops. Dutch paper money, ornate and florid, puts the American dollar in its place. The money has shrunk. Dollars look small and grim, worrying reminders of the American way. I have many more postcards than dollars, the postcards soothing to me as the shrunken dollars are to long-term foreign sufferers of Wall Street. There could be a reversal of fortune even for me. “The Millionaire” might walk into the hotel and hand me a check for the fabled one million, or I could find a cache of diamonds in the Leidseplein, or a billfold with hundreds of sober deutsche marks in the Art Deco café of the Hotel Americain, the only part of the hotel, Huub explains, that was kept Art Deco after being bought by a British corporation. I could become a drug runner, live high for a year and then get busted at some border or other, caught red-handed and red-faced.

In a fairy tale I’d fall asleep and wake from this horrible dream of capture, a dream that seemed so real I could have sworn it had happened. Some days pass like dreams, though one can imagine that they really did happen. One day my money will run out, there won’t be a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the beast will not have turned into a prince, and Prince Charming will not have broken the spell. My mother writes in her last letter, Someday you’ll have to face the music.

Face the music. I love music but I don’t like wearing headphones and I’ve been playing the same tapes over and over and I don’t want to buy any. I don’t want to accumulate. I want to travel light. I leave books in hotel rooms when I’ve finished them. I hold on only to the pictures, the postcards, my playing cards that mark presence and absence. The more the days that pass seem like dreams, the more my dreams seem mundane, real. Friends crowd the frame. Fights are refought, humiliations and fears paraded, crazy dialogue intrudes upon a few sensible sentences, I am many different ages. The world ends. Images are fixed and unfixed. In one dream Jessica looked like an angel. And then like a devil, with a carnal smile, then an angel again.

I have a postcard of angels painted by Fra Angelico which I bought after Paul and Alfred argued about who was greater, he or Giotto. My postcard is not a vote, although these days, where I come from, it ought to be part of a write-in campaign, one meant to flood Washington, composed of postcards from foreign places or paintings by well-known artists that would flood the capital with desire for something different. The Herald Tribune is mercifully short, its inadequacies less important when every day it’s more obvious that I’m not at home and not able to be at home here, one of those mixes, mixes of mixed blessings, like cake mixes, boxed and available at stores everywhere.

In bread stores I ask for bruin brood, in cheese stores, oude kaas or yogurt, at Broodje van Kootje, a broodje met leverwurst. The storeowners hand me the goods and speak in English, as if somewhat insulted that someone tried to speak their language. Not insulted in the sense that their language is being mutilated, though it is, but insulted that someone might think they didn’t know English. If this is true, it could be because they’re proud of their ability to speak many languages, or impatient with my lack of understanding of the hegemony of English, or it just takes less of their time to conduct business this way. The most routine transaction is cluttered with such considerations.

With Huub I never try to speak Dutch, to use Dutch words,’ as if it would be a fiction he wouldn’t countenance. He reports on local politics, the end of funding for painters, subsidies, drug centers. He tells stories about local customs. About enduring hatred and memory. When Germans come to the city at Easter, suddenly Amsterdammers don’t speak German. Or they vindictively direct them, in their Mercedes, out of the city, not to the places they want to go. He tells anti-Belgian jokes, about their patates, their beer, jokes turning on the stupidity of Belgians. I’d never heard anti-Belgian jokes before, they’re the same as all anti-jokes, but to me represent a new prejudice. To this white American, white Europeans hating white Europeans strikes a different note from races hating races. At first it sounds less threatening and ugly, more eccentric and curious, or sophomoric, like New Jersey’s rivalry with New York. But a new and different prejudice seeming eccentric obscures official history, the white European wars that divided Europe into nation-states with long grievances, so that even in tolerant Holland Huub still speaks of the South as Catholic and the North as Orange or Protestant. I tell Huub about the American businessman I heard about. Years ago, when China and the U.S. opened hade, he traveled to China from the Midwest and carried a bag of his laundry with him. Because all his life he’d heard how great Chinese laundry was. When the laundry shrank his leisure suit, he was indignant. He thought the Chinese were jerks. Huub shakes his head and laughs, Yah, but he carried his laundry to China. Right, I say.

Huub tells me that in Amsterdam everyone speaks three or four languages. Changing languages is as difficult, it seems to me, as making a sex change and just as disorienting. The Dutch are tolerant of sex changes and I heard of an American man here who got the operation through the state, on the Dutch national health insurance. There’s no tolerance of the Dutch in the English language. Dutch oven. Dutch uncle. Dutch door. Dutch cap. Dutch dozen. Dutch treat. If I had an etymological dictionary I might look up Dutch and find some references dating back to Holland’s glorious moment, the seventeenth century. Dutch cap wouldn’t be that old. The English use the term, along with French letters, but Americans don’t. Dutch means things that aren’t what they appear to be. Dutch oven, a pot on top of the stove. Dutch treat, something that you have to pay for. Dutch cap, something’s that’s not a hat that’s worn on the head of the uterus, more nearly a Dutch door than a Dutch door. Huub’s openness may be a Dutch door, while Helen’s American energy and cuteness a misguided effort at trying to appear to be what she is, something she can fail at later. I could be wrong about her; maybe she’s putty in the hands of a great and wily businessman. Even on gray and cloudy days, it’s hard to perceive Huub in a bad light. Still I don’t want to sell him short.

Chapter 9. Shifter

BUDAPEST

You exhaust me, Zoran says. I want to say something witty like, you mean, in that Central European way, but instead tell him that I’m hungry. I am ferociously hungry. Hungry in Hungary, especially in those moments when, lightly covered in sweat, Zoran and I lie side by side on the bed in the guest house where we’re staying. Not a hotel but a room in a woman’s apartment that she rents to visitors like us. I don’t mind being a visitor in the abstract but in someone’s home it’s different, though Zoran scoffs at my compunctions. Mrs. Kovacs is different from a hotel manager as we are her only guests and she watches our comings and goings with something approaching concern. Her business, Zoran says, looking tired. My father once said, You exhaust me. I remember that it was very cold out. We were driving somewhere. He didn’t have the defroster on and the windshield was fogged. He said, looking tired, You don’t have to entertain me.

There’s no physical evidence but it was about thirty years ago that the Soviets entered Budapest, in 1956, something that didn’t happen to Yugoslavia under Tito. Zoran says, Tito was a great leader, like Martin Luther King, he adds. We talk about King. Zoran was born just after World War II and remembers hearing about American troops marching into Little Rock, Arkansas, to desegregate the schools. We discuss states’ rights and federalism, Alexander Hamilton, the Civil War, Justice Marshall and the Supreme Court, Rosa Parks and Brown v. the Board of Education. A “landmark decision,” I quote, like an anchor on the nightly news. Zoran’s convinced that America’s racism will mean its demise. We don’t have racism in Yugoslavia; we have national, ethnic minorities, and it’s very bad, he says. Economically, who knows. But things change. Sometimes he’s hopeful. He quotes Gramsci: Optimism of the will, pessimism of the intellect. I might easily reverse the two, I say, hoping that he’ll enjoy the irony. He lights a cigar and peers at me as if we were sifting at different tables. “A joke?” he asks. “Sure,” I say. Not mentioning paralysis of the will, the division of the intellect. “In Haiti,” I tell him, “there’s a saying: When the anthropologists come, the gods leave.” “That is too anti-intellectual for me,” Zoran says, “but interesting. Anthropology is anyway a nineteenth-century problem.” “l can’t think of one problem that isn’t technological that doesn’t go back at least to the nineteenth century.” “Touché,” he says.

Sitting in a cafe, everyone enacting to perfection my expectation of this reality, this place, where newspapers hang from wooden sticks and the aroma of pastry is palpable, I wonder if Zoran feels the hilarious intensity to our political discussions, both of us trying to display understanding like fan dancers. That is, when we’re not engaged in that other kind of heated discussion meant to stupefy ideology or, at least, deny it.

I can feel entirely indifferent to the content of what I say. A great postindustrial capitalist ennui engulfs me and sweeps away vestiges of involvement. Leaves me passionless and dissatisfied and incapable of movement. I’m threatened by this constantly. In unfamiliar surroundings the point is to shift voices. I like shifting voices. Love affairs permit those shifts, and when the lover is shifty, as Zoran might be, the ride is bumpy. But if he is a shifter, so am I’ Shifting to the right or left, shifty, shiftless. American women wore shifts in the fifties, my mother wore them. I have pictures of her looking shapeless but triumphant. These days her only child is shifting. Or shiftless. Many Hungarians wear jeans and walk tall, their faces sculpted with great high cheekbones which make them appear noble and anguished. I write Ann on the back of a postcard of the Hotel Gellert: I’m in Budapest with Zoran. I met him in Venice. The personal is shiftless and political. Gabors all over the city. I tear up the card.

I wish we were staying in the Hotel Gellert, more of that Old World charm I’ve been prepared for’ Instead Zoran and I have soup in its restaurant. His appreciation of this finer side of life is circumvented by a cynicism that he tells me is common to Eastern Europeans. I sip at statements like these but am unable to swallow them whole. Zoran’s cynicism, which he considers a national trait, mixes with a heady idealism and produces a roller coaster personality that accounts, maybe, for his impassioned speeches and intense lovemaking. I would never go on a roller coaster, that is consciously, I might be forced, maybe drugged and blindfolded and kidnapped, and could be thrown on one and end up screaming, my lace a mask of fear as in movies where so many characters seal their fates in love-or-death scenarios on that mechanical ride.

In a bookstore that caters to non-Hungarian-speaking travelers, another identity I can assume, I find an English translation of a story by Mihaly Babits. It’s the story of a wealthy boy who every night dreams that he’s desperately poor. By day he s served by footmen and butlers, treated like a storied prince’ But at night he’s the servant, barefoot, hungry and miserable. His dreams become more real to him than his waking life, a familiar sensation. Zoran has no interest in dreams, insists he doesn’t remember them and that if he did they wouldn’t mean anything. He thinks I’m superstitious. Babits must have read The Interpretation of Dreams, I declare, ready to argue about everyday life and the unconscious, but Zoran merely opens his newspaper.

We walk along the Danube. I glance at Buda from Pest or Pest from Buda. lt wouldn’t be bad to know I was in a well-plotted movie or novel, where every incident and coincidence has meaning. To be part of a mystery that would be solved. With clues strewn here and there. A mystery that I’d be able to solve. With Zoran I’d like to maneuver cleverly or make an opening that was as subtle as one by a chess master like Boris Spassky. Whatever happened to Bobby Fischer?

They say Budapest is the Paris of the East with its massive nineteenth-century buildings, cafés and large mirrors. I look furtively at the reflections of Zoran and me. We appear composed and regular. We walk in step. We walk quickly. We seem determined. His chin juts out. Mine does too. He pushes his hair back from his face. Mine falls into my eyes. I take his arm or he takes mine. He opens doors for me, I open doors for him. I wear black, he wears black. We’re best when we’re in motion.

Which is probably why we fuck most of the time. In this we’ve both become compulsive. His hand is on my lap or on my thigh no matter where we are. At a movie he throws his coat over me so that he can hold my breast and then slip his finger into my vagina. We rush back to the guest house, and fuck till we fall asleep. In the morning it begins again. Zoran is as good a lover as he was a sightseer in Venice. Here, with me, he doesn’t sightsee. He says, with a deep sigh, I am too involved to think. I’m supposed to be flattered.

Our Mrs. Kovacs makes herself scarce. She doesn’t go in for jokes, the way Signor Mancini did. That fascist Mancini, I can hear Claudia say, then see Claudia spit into the sink of the coffee shop on the Moscow Road. Mrs. Kovacs didn’t introduce herself as “Kovacs, not related to Ernie.” She just makes herself invisible or squirrels around the apartment. Maybe she’s standing behind a door. Or in the shadow in the hallway, standing in the shadow of love. I hear doors closing and opening, thin squeaky noises. She puts on bedroom slippers when she comes indoors and pads around the living room. She may be listening to our moans and grunts. I clap my hand over Zoran’s mouth, he grabs my arm and twists it behind my back. I bite him hard on his shoulder, he pins my other arm down. He won’t come unless I come. His insistence, which was at first a sign of sexual compassion and urgency, has become the tactics of a cold war warrior meant to win a wordless battle.

I’m on a roller coaster with Zoran, whose light blue eyes are encircled by coffee-colored rings. “Because of you,” he says. “l can’t sleep. I can’t even smell you anymore,” he complains. “We have the same smell. You and I. We are the same.” Perhaps that’s why we fight so much more these days, gripped by the sense we’re falling into a time before words and mirrors surfaced to key us to our separate identities. I can smell myself, I tell him. I can smell my cunt all the time. Even reading or drinking coffee in a café, I can smell it. When Zoran is at the guest house or walking near the Danube, I know he’s not with me. Perhaps I have been kidnapped and thrown into a story I’d never read or want to see on the screen’ Or maybe I would want to see it. I like romance at a distance.

I know of an Englishman who once attempted invisibility but was not as successful as Mrs. Kovacs. He had a suit made of the same pattern as his wallpaper. He put it on and stood against the wall of his room and called for his landlady. What are you doing up against that wall? she asked. Zoran laughs in a raucous way and I like him again. We get dressed. Mrs. Kovacs hovers near the kitchen as Zoran and I rush to find a cab, to go anywhere. Some kids point at our driver and shout, KGB, KGB. They know you’re American, Zoran says perfunctorily. They tease you.

I don’t know why we’re taking a cab. I suppose we’re both exhausted. I tell Zoran a story, the same one I told Charles in Istanbul. I tell it almost the same way, too, as if it’s already a myth. I once saw a man coming out of an elevator in downtown Manhattan. I didn’t know who he was but his face reminded me of someone, someone I knew. Standing next to me another man said hello to the stranger who just shook his head up and down in return. I asked the man beside me, Who is he? He looks so familiar. That’s Ethel Rosenberg’s brother, David Greenglass, the man replied. He’s worked in this building for years. We didn’t speak after that, waiting for the elevator; it was eerie. I look at Zoran. He seems to appreciate the story and puffs hard on his cigar. The Rosenbergs have never, to my knowledge, been defended, I explain to Zoran, the way Blunt and the Cambridge spies were. That’s because, he interrupts, the British are British. I go on, No one, their supporters, I mean, maintains they did it because they were Communists and obeyed their conscience, not country. The taxi driver looks in his back mirror and Zoran shoves my arm and whispers loudly, CIA, CIA. The cabdriver laughs. Zoran sighs, You think too much about betrayal and loyalty. A little later, seated in another café, looking up from his newspaper, he complains, You are like all Americans. There is no way that I can say to him, You are like all Yugoslavians, as I have no idea what all Yugoslavians are like.

To Zoran with his impossibly high standards everything is corrupt but sex. Sex and Renaissance art, the paradisiacal moment he looks back to as if it had escaped the forces of history nothing else does. We mostly agree about America’s images of freedom and the rhetoric that makes America America, constructs it, but Zoran sees evil everywhere, in every bit of American life, which he appreciates for its vulgarity. We argue about popular culture and television. He sees mass culture as something that can only bring the masses down. With our differences brandished we challenge and frustrate each other. When things hold together or fall apart, the forms are familiar. The conventions — as well as the anomalies — control our ability to imagine different arrangements. Zoran and I have become mired in arguments and positions neither of us, I bet, truly supports. But daily what we actually support and what we find ourselves defending grow more ridiculous. I defend Hollywood movies as if their contradictions really were heroic, and he defends censorship or government intervention without a trace of irony.

He’d like to undo me. I’d like to undo him. I’d like to build a Berlin Wall that places me in the East and him in the West. As for American vulgarity he makes small exceptions. He says he loves me, even though I drive him crazy. I never tell him I love him, and he says he knows I do, but I’m too young to appreciate it. One of his newer verdicts about me. I tell him he’s an elitist. He smiles gravely. Perhaps I’ve wounded him. I’d like to. Did you sleep with that invisible Englishman? he asks.

If this were a comedy Zoran might be a cranky but charming Eastern bloc intellectual on vacation. I’d be sort of bumptious and well-intentioned, a well-off, but not really rich, white American, condemned to a circle of hell Dante never wrote — reserved parking for the naive whose naiveté is laced with masochistic hope. And privilege, he always says, don’t forget that. You Americans are hopeless, he also says. History is full of Watergates. Your people are always so surprised at conspiracy. My people. Our comedy will be short-lived. But the comic will be devastatingly apparent, I think, only later when I examine life without Zoran, even though he and I are still determined to go to his country and this seems less likely every day. But Zoran refers to it, a kind of marker or signifier of progress.

There is no progress, there is repetition. John the New Zealander was very fond of saying that, but I wouldn’t tell Zoran because then he’d ask me about John and get possessive and jealous in the most so-called reactionary way.

Chapter 10. Home Sick

TANGIER

A long time ago a young woman from France or Germany or Great Britain arrived here on the start of a journey. She left home to travel when travel was hard and when few women traveled alone. Or at all. I can see her. In a long brown skirt of durable material, a dark jacket, sensible shoes, a broad-brimmed hat and a scarf, she is tall and solid, short and slight, blond, dark. She does not fall in love with anything but adventure. Adventure is to her what Jesus is to nuns — the true marriage partner — and she dedicates her life, her being, to this fascinating mate. Remarkably resilient, carrying a map and compass, and only one leather suitcase, she enters Tangier on the beginning of a journey that will be her life and over many many years she loses touch with everyone she ever knew. Or her father dies, her brother marries, her mother dies, her friends marry, her lover gives up hope of her coming back and marries her cousin, and one girlfriend, who teaches school, lives out her life as a spinster, a woman with a secret, and only she keeps in touch with her. Or, no one reaches her, she breaks off relations completely, and were she to hear that her father died, it would not touch her. She ends in the desert, knowing the ways of the Bedouin, or she ends near the jungle, or she uses her inheritance to buy a large house where she lives simply and learns to fly a plane and becomes a mail carrier. Or she is desperately poor, having given her money away, and exists as an oddity in the village or town that tolerates her eccentricity. Or she trains chimpanzees to follow her as she walks around the grounds of her estate. She is Freya Stark, the writer and traveler, who urges you to “let yourself go on the stream of the unknown.” Or she is Isabelle Eberhardt who dresses like a man, and is hungry for love, for adventure, always hungry. Or she is a character like Kit Moresby in Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky who goes mad and wanders in the desert forever, forever untethered.

She is eager to begin her trip. The future was the desert, as the future now is outer space, a future that science-fiction writers long ago colonized and have been waiting impatiently for us to enter. Perhaps going into the desert would be going backward since time might be curved, and anything can be the present, past or future. If this is true then my not going into the desert — to lose myself, my mind — is not just a matter of cowardice or lack of adventurousness. I may have already been there or will be going there. Still, I think about it often. Losing myself in the desert. Abandoning everything, being abandoned. Taking up residence in a small town in Iowa where no one would know me. I’d cut off all ties to my past, I’d use the frontier, I’d become a frontier. I’d be known as that woman at the edge of the real last frontier. I’d have a front porch in my frontier version of reality. I’d sit on that front porch and gaze out at limitless skies and pastures. Relativity would be as close as I came to relatives. Not that I have many, just my mother really. I owe her a letter.

From the patio I stare at the azure and pink sky, the sky sipping at the sun the way I sip at my whiskey soda whose two ice cubes have melted. Melted ice cubes under melting suns, days melting into nights, transient often indistinguishable moments, and why Irish Pete, Pete of Amsterdam, should walk into this scene now, walk in from nowhere, why he does and where he’s come from is just one more of those boundaryless moments. I’m glad I’m drinking Irish whiskey, I think, and close my book, Philby’s My Silent War.

Like Sal he recognizes me immediately, and like Charles he is wearing different clothes, a different fashion, which offers a very different image from the one Pete struck in Amsterdam. A newly coined image, a newly minted stamp. In any case Pete’s got on a linen jacket, baggy trousers and is carrying a small men’s pocketbook. He is, he tells me, here on business but the business is clearly not my business. Import/export, I ask good-humoredly. ‘Course, yeah, Pete answers. The call for prayer sounds and reminds me of Istanbul, of Mr. Yapar and the minarets, of a hailer of images. I ought to send a postcard to Cengiz. I suppose Pete didn’t meet Cengiz, or Charles, but I won’t ask. He and I order more to drink and sink deeper into our chairs. He didn’t go east, to Istanbul, or if he did that’s not what he’s telling me. He went south to Barcelona with some friends, then came here and is staying with people in the Socco. A rich German’s house, he says. Which may account for his new clothes. He doesn’t mention Olivier and neither do I, a lesson I learned from the English brothers. Pete may tell me in time, I content myself with that, leaving him on the veranda or patio, picking up my keys from Mr. Mrabet, the urbane concierge who, I’ve decided, has a developed sense of the ridiculous. I’m not sure why I think this.

My simple room has a remarkable view of the harbor. Like Pete, the English brothers might appear on the horizon out of nowhere, and I’d be happy to see them. Though they wouldn’t come by boat. And no Madame Butterfly is watching for them. If one of them were to dock, though, it’d be Paul, I think. Jessica might show up. She must be well into her pregnancy, by now. Unless she’s miscarried or had an abortion. Perhaps the birth was extremely premature and she had three tiny babies, triplets. What would happen if all three looked into the mirror at the exact same moment?

In the distance the green-blue water moves toward and away from land, a gentle rolling motion that in a second could become roiling and rocking. Still water runs deep but constant movement assures one of continuity though this is against, always against, one’s better judgment. I choose a postcard for the English brothers, my mother and Charlotte. The same one, of the hotel patio.

I lie on the bed and look out the window then at the room’s whitewashed walls with their message of past and faded glory. Faded glory isn’t failure. This room is a palimpsest, hiding many layers of lives, which can be counted by the number of times the room has been repainted. Like a tree’s rings. The hotel was once owned by French people, but is now in Moroccan hands. Mr. Mrabet may be an owner or an employee. If an owner, a small businessman, he’d be subject to, as my father warned, the fluctuations of the market. Which must be worse than the banal vagaries of love. Mr. Mrabet, responsible for all this, or Mr. Mrabet, a Willy Loman, subject to all this.

The hotel’s past elegance is an oasis, a fantasy. It produces delicate troubling thoughts as does looking into the face of a very very old man or woman. Reading faces, reading walls. Some friends say it’s easy to read me, the involuntary expression on my face. The only recourse might be plastic surgery but if I had it done this young I’d have to do it every five or ten years and end up with no epidermal elasticity at all, with no ability to smile. Or with a fixed smile. A forehead much too high, not necessarily noble like Bette Davis’s as Queen Elizabeth, or it’d be unearthly like Peggy Lee’s. And I’d be permanently dissembled.

From my window, the people at the tables below are flat, and if I were to draw them they’d lack any true proportion and I wouldn’t know where the vanishing point would be. I don’t have that kind of perspective. It could be anywhere. As in those old cartoons by Fleischer where the character jumps out of the ink bottle and draws himself, then jumps back in at the end of the story, leaving a blank screen.

Chapter 11. Schadenfreude

“Today only exaggeration can be the medium of truth.”

— Theodor Adorno

BARCELONA

Gregor’s loft is in an abandoned factory on a narrow sheet in a worker’s section of town that’s being modernized. But in a good way, he tells me, not like in New York. The old and poor won’t get pushed out. It will be better here, with more services. He hasn’t been back in Germany — he’s from Cologne — in several years. I’m not staying with him; I didn’t want to. There’s an inexpensive hotel in the center of town, a sliver of a building on a sheet across from an impressive church whose bells ring on the quarter hour. Its bell tower can be seen from my window. A Hunchback of Notre Dame setting. It suits me better. Gregor’s generosity can easily be abused. I don’t want to be one of those to do it. The hotel manager, Mr. Del Rio, speaks no English and what I speak to him is a combination of German, Spanish and French, a few words of each, and he finds this amusing. At least I hope he does when he doesn’t find it frustrating. I’m reading Highsmith’s Ripley’s Game.

Gregor reads voraciously and keeps a diary that he writes in scrupulously each day at a desk surrounded by small fileboxes in which are stored annotated comments about what he’s read. He’s disciplined, a vegetarian, and his home is nearly bare, except for the vast wall of books which I’ve referred to as his Berlin Wall. Irony, yes? he asks. All of Freud, in German and English, Melanie Klein, Christa Wolf, Hegel, Marx, Handke, books on Hollywood film, Dickens, Stendhal, Flaubert, Resnais, Duras, biographies galore. He tells me he sometimes is transfixed in front of his books, awed and dismayed. He has put money into a few films, acted in some, written a play about, he says, his alienated generation, and receives monthly checks from his father. Guilt money, Gregor calls it. Though he doesn’t like to see people — he is, he insists grimly, compulsively counterphobic — he knows many and keeps a stack of notebooks near his telephone, with names and addresses of the interesting people he’s met. All over the world, I suppose, or at least the Western one.

That’s how I meet Clara, or Clare, as she was called in the States. Gregor thought I would find her appealing, this elderly but still youthful woman who has livid everywhere and done everything. A “classic” was his way of designating her. There is no one quite like her, he says. Gregor brings us together for dinner at a small restaurant that serves excellent octopus which Clara can’t eat and neither can L You have a sensitive stomach, she says, like me, except when I was young I could eat anything. She is trim, about my height, not short or tall, and speaks English infected by her native German.

Clara came to the States before the second war, a young woman just able to escape alone and with no possessions. I guess she’s in her early seventies, but has no gray hair, like my mother who is years younger. Clara offers to take me to the Picasso Museum the next day, always a pleasure for her, and so much more now that Generalissimo Franco is dead and one can be in Spain again and even Picasso can be in Spain again.

I meet Clara at her apartment house. She’s waiting in the lobby, looking at her watch. She takes my arm and leans against me with a presumption of intimacy that I appreciate. We walk like this to the museum. Clara claims each stair cautiously as we climb to the room where, she tells me, Picasso’s versions of Velázquez’s Las Meninas hang. She puts on her reading glasses to see the dates of the Picassos. The Velázquez, she remembers, was 1656. The Picassos were done in 1957. Velázquez’s triumph challenged Picasso, Clara explains, and so the little man — she speaks as if she had taken his measure firsthand — had to take it up, for the father must be slaughtered by the son. To illustrate Clara wrings the throat of an imaginary father.

Clara gestures to the paintings on the four walls. She thinks the Velázquez has a quiet movement, but that the Picassos show a frantic mind. Velázquez was in favor at the time he painted, while Picasso was in exile. “His are nothing like the original, the original doesn’t matter. This shows what a different time we live in. For that alone it is important work.”

Clara stands resolutely in front of one of Picasso’s portraits of the Infanta Margarita Maria. A detail from the Velázquez. It’s the figure Arlette humorously compared herself with and, for me, becomes another coincidence. Clara standing there is a superimposition, one that removes the scene for a moment of private contemplation, a moment I don’t want to make too much of. Anyway Arlette was Velázquez’s version, not Picasso’s. Still I can almost see Arlette rolling her big eyes from side to side, ruminating aloud about dark backgrounds or negative space, her feet curled under her on the couch in her living room. She might like Clara, at least admire her will and politics, I think, if not agree with her approach to art. Clara’s body is still rigid with attention. She turns to me. Shall we go? she asks, taking my arm. Nowadays museums depress me.

I can hear Gregor in her voice, the way she thinks, as if he were her son. We drink coffee in an outdoor café in the center of the city, with trees and plants encircling us rapturously. The hours pass. Clara holds me in the grip of her narrative. She tells me she is an artist, a Communist and a lesbian, what she calls a triple threat. Clara married twice in New York, both times to a sympathetic man, another homosexual. She doesn’t use the word gay and articulates each syllable of homosexual distinctly, proposing it as the proper formulation, the more complicated one commensurate to the position. She tells me that in those days, the thirties, the forties, even the fifties, that’s what they did, marry each other. She describes our time as a crueler one. She moves from one cruelty to another. During the McCarthy era even though like many others she had torn up her Party membership card years before and wouldn’t be directly implicated, not asked to testify, she was out of the U.S. more than in it, establishing residence in Paris and Rome. Her last husband was rich and today she is a well-heeled widow — she first says high-heeled, then corrects herself — maybe a contradiction, she confesses wryly, for a lesbian Communist, but one she carries with dignity.

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.

Chapter 12. Traveling Music

PARIS

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.

Chapter 13. Kill the Umpire

“The expatriate represents, in fact, the normal state of an average citizen in this last part of the 20th century.”

— Julia Kristeva

LONDON

The French café is always the same. Except it’s Claudia’s day off and she’s not gracing it with her special presence. Even the elderly English couple who talked about the decimalization of the pound are here, precisely where I left them. The gray-haired woman looks distracted as she complains to the bald man, her husband, of Sybil, who may be their daughter. I spread my newspaper out, covering Patricia Bosworth’s biography of Montgomery Clift, and drink a second cup of café au lait. Gregor’s letter, which arrived today, alludes to Clara; he purposely doesn’t name her. He was once, during the Baader-Meinhof era, detained by the police for questioning and let go. “Now I think to write a play based on the murder of Ulrike Meinhof. Did you hear in the U.S.A. about a psychological test then to give to the schoolchildren in Germany, to discover if they had already terrorist tendencies?” He says he’d like to meet Arlette one day, that her theory of Meninas is interesting, that since I’m in London I might inquire if Oscar Wilde wrote “The Birthday of the Infanta” influenced by the Velázquez painting. He begs me to forgive his bad English.

Gregor captivates me. I’m easily captivated. My mother once remarked that, with time, people wouldn’t enchant me. Marilyn Monroe thought that Monty Clift was the only person in worse shape than she was. I pay for my coffees and slide past the elderly couple who have fallen silent.

In the tube the escalators at Holborn and Piccadilly climb forever and are long enough to be runways in old Busby Berkeley musicals. Someone might burst into song or do a dance routine, passengers might become a high-kicking chorus line on their way to work, to shop, shoplift, eat, or wander aimlessly. The train fills up with groups of men heading for a soccer game in the north. It must be Saturday. They wear scarves around their necks and slap each other on the back, exuding a desperate team spirit. A friend of mine told me that the sound of ocean waves breaking, the water rushing in over rocks and pebbles on the shore, was to him like applause. When I go to the opera with him, both of us have tears in our eyes at curtain calls. The divas bow low and oceans of love crash at their feet. I miss the sound of fans roaring after a home run. My team’s home run. I don’t enjoy the game in the abstract. I yell Kill the Umpire. This doesn’t travel well.

There’s a different young man behind the hotel desk. Pradip’s of Indian descent, but English, born and educated here, he tells me. He’s just out of hotel school and likes Culture Club and Bruce Springsteen. He’s also wearing a soccer scarf. I settle into a new room but one with an abject style similar to the other as well as an absence of what Jessica would call beauty. It’s smaller, darker, and cheaper because it’s in the basement and has a half-view of the street, of shoes and socks, of calves and ankles, of the bottoms of canes and umbrellas. I’ve taken it by the month though I may move to a bed-sitter, or to Jessica’s. She’s invited me. After her youngest sister leaves.

Jessica laughs when I confess to being the underground woman. The baby, a boy she’s named Caleb after her great-grandfather, rests in her arms, while her sister, Sarah, watches. Grimly I think. I missed Caleb’s birth, a painful one, by three weeks. He was premature. Quite, Jessica says, with an English accent. She’s holding an exceptionally small English or British baby in her arms. He won’t need, as Jessica did when she was settling here, to register as an alien — and then marry to ensure his right to stay. He’ll have the chance for dual nationality. Which the Americans, Jessica goes on, don’t offer. Everyone’s so nervous about their origins — being American isn’t solid as a rock, not Plymouth Rock, she laughs. Sarah, the youngest sister, turns her head away, annoyed.

With Sarah out of the room, doing the shopping and buying several pints, not quarts, of milk, Jessica whispers that a very strange thing happened in the hospital. She heard a voice, a disembodied voice, like an angel or spirit. It didn’t speak in the normal sense, but she felt visited by or attended to by some soul, just before giving birth. It was, she felt, a good omen, an extraordinary prelude to Caleb’s arrival. Jessica’s even written a poem about the experience. She feels it may have been Charles visiting her or someone who was dead. She delivers this story in hushed tones, a stage whisper that carries eerily in the bedroom. A ghost story. Jessica trained, I learn, years ago, to be an actress and occasionally does performances which she writes. Holding her baby, she’s subsumed in motherhood which may be a good role for her, one she’s had experience with, having been the eldest in a family of four.

Of course, Jessica remarks beatifically, you think I’m mad. Then she gazes into Caleb’s eyes. They’re bonding. I don’t think she’s mad. Caleb’s so tiny the idea of nationality seems foolish. His minuscule fingers and toes curl and uncurl feebly, spittle and drool ooze from his wet button mouth. Caleb might grow up to be a monster on the order of Gilles de Rais or Ted Bundy. Or, since he’s British, Jack the Ripper or the Yorkshire Ripper. He has the possibility of becoming a Kim Philby or a Mahatma Gandhi. Or Steven Spielberg, for that matter. But perhaps this is very American, to imagine all this, this range of possibilities. Home on the range. Jessica looks as if she’s about to sprout wings and fly around the room. A study of maternity, like a Madonna with Child by Bellini, this dyad is similar to a painted one I saw in Venice in that church where the English brothers, Alfred and Paul, first came into view.

Chapter 14. A State of Flux

ISTANBUL

Cengiz is in the café across the street from the Blue Mosque, or Sultan Ahmet. I’m sitting with the Professor, a ubiquitous figure in the café. An aged American, he lives in a van outside the café and is unkempt and bearded. Cengiz comes over to our table and kindly offers the Professor a chicken from his farm in the city. The Professor asks him to join us. Cengiz is, the Professor tells me, a chicken farmer and a poet. Cengiz relaxes, maybe basks, as the Professor proffers his condensed biography. Then Cengiz asks me why I’m here in Istanbul, alone. I stare at his teeth which are small and square, teeth that look like they could bite through anything, teeth yellowed from the cigarette that hangs from his lips. Cengiz takes my book — Spillane’s My Gun Is Quick—opens it to the first page and reads aloud with staccato-like precision: “You pick up a book and read about things, getting a vicarious kick from people and events that never happened. You’re doing it now, getting ready to fill in a normal life with the details of someone else’s experiences.” Come along, he says, standing up and putting on a worn U.S. Navy coat, come with me for a walk, let us go to Asia. The Professor, he tells me on the outside, is not a professor.

The walk on the Galata Bridge, which crosses the Bosphorus, takes us nearer to the East, but not to Asia, as Cengiz promised. When we reach the other side, he points to Asia and announces proudly, There, a new continent. He says we have left the West behind. While I think this is overly optimistic of him, I glance back furtively to see what I’m giving up. Cengiz’s smoky glasses give his round face a somber appearance but he smiles frequently as if to dispel my doubts and his. His hands are rough and large, very different from his small sharp teeth.

We talk in the sitting room of my small hotel. The Englishman Charles catches sight of us out the corner of his eye but pretends not to see us. On the other hand we are watched dispassionately by hotel manager Yapar, with whom Cengiz is courteous but not friendly. Mr. Yapar leaves a tray of tea, anyway, and in the sitting room Cengiz doesn’t roll a joint. Cengiz loves not only hashish, but the Bosphorus, poetry, and women who are usually married. He is in love with a married one now, the subject of many of our talks in the café, or when taking walks, or in the hotel sitting room, eating oranges and drinking chai. His passionate and doomed love. Our lives, we both acknowledge, are so very different that we are in some senses Martians to each other. But I’m a Martian he’s read about or seen in Western movies, an independent American woman. It becomes, or I become, a joke we can both share. On walks he points to store windows which sell busts of Ataturk and nods his head seriously as if I should be able to share with him his view of his own history. Ataturk is secular man, he says. Father of modern Turkey. Ata is father. His true name Kemal. Now in these days.…Then he stops midsentence and gazes skyward. I do too.

* * *

In the hamam Turkish women show me how to scrub my legs so that dead skin peels off and falls into the water that runs under our feet. It’s satisfying to see the dead skin float away, shed painlessly. In my alcove, the two Turkish women with me shave their underarms and one suggests, through gestures, that I do too. I think about doing it, to be neighborly, but I don’t. She smiles and shakes her head from side to side. I know she’s trying to help me and I appreciate the effort but have no way of saying that. I nod my head up and down, a kind of bowing motion, more Japanese than Turkish, I guess, and maybe as mystifying to her, not meaning thank you very much but something else, something much worse. At night I dream about a pair of shoes made of alligator. Their virtue is that they will never wear out because, some announcer-like character shouts, Alligators don’t wear out, do they?

There are many things Cengiz and I don’t talk about. For when we do talk it has to be in English, for my sake, and our discussions are necessarily simple. Subject verb predicate. We are primers to each other or Spillane-like characters who know that language can’t be trusted. Often we just walk together silently, sometimes back and forth over the Galata Bridge, which I’m aping an affection for, unless I genuinely feel it, which I won’t know until it’s gone from sight. The Galata has a life below it. Stalls spread the length of it, from West to East and back. Men sell fish, textiles, jewelry, and all the time the floating barges undulate beneath our feet. I say to, myself, of all things, I must remember this, this funny wavering sensation that accompanies Cengiz and me as we walk across the river on a moving floor that seems like no support at all. But the decision to remember a bridge is much too symbolic.

Cengiz wants to know how I feel about there being so few women on the streets and almost none after dark, except in the Western part of the city with its oddly named discos, at which everyone wears the latest Western styles, of which Cengiz disapproves. Cengiz likes getting to know the foreigners who visit Istanbul; he goes out of his way to be friendly and helpful, but he doesn’t want to be a Westerner. His fervent pride in his country as well as his intense anger at its failures is a grand passion, like his love for married women and the Bosphorus.

We’re in a lokanta, a restaurant, and I am, as usual, the only woman. One man eating alone is waving a chicken leg above his head, in a kind of ecstasy. Hashish, Cengiz whispers, he is stupid man. He walks me to my hotel and deposits me at the front door which is locked. Mr. Yapar, wearing a Perry Como sweater over his pajamas, sleepily answers the bell and lets me in. A disinclined Cengiz walks away fast, as if he’s got a late date. With the married woman who’s available at strange hours.

Chapter 15. Postscript

On the back of a color photograph of Vietnamese high-school girls bicycling in Hanoi: Dear Clara, I meant to telephone you before I left Barcelona. I hope you’re well. There’s nothing like Gaudi’s buildings, or you and Gregor. I hope I was of some help on your memoirs, but I don’t think I was. All my best to you. Love.

※

About the Author

Lynne Tillman (New York, NY) is the author of five novels, three collections of short stories, one collection of essays and two other nonfiction books. She collaborates often with artists and writes regularly on culture, and her fiction is anthologized widely. Her novels include American Genius, A Comedy (2006), No Lease on Life (1998) which was a New York Times Notable Book of 1998 and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Cast in Doubt (1992), Motion Sickness (1991), and Haunted Houses (1987). The Broad Picture (1997) collected Tillman’s essays, which were published in literary and art periodicals. She is the Fiction Editor at Fence Magazine, Professor and Writer-in-Residence in the Department of English at the University at Albany, and a recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.

About the book, and a letter from the publisher

This is a Red Lemonade book, also available in all reasonably possible formats: in limited artisan-produced editions, in trade paperback editions, and in all current digital editions, as well as online at the Red Lemonade publishing community.

A word about this community. Over my years in publishing, I learned that a publisher is the sum of all its constituent parts: above all the writers, of course, and yes, the staff, but also all the people who read our books, talk about our books, support our authors, and those who want to be one of our authors themselves.

So I started a company called Cursor, designed to make these constituent parts fit better together, into a proper community where, finally, we could be greater than the sum of the parts. The Red Lemonade publishing community is the first of these and there will be more to come — for the current roster of communities, see the Cursor website.

For more on how to participate in the Red Lemonade publishing community, including the opportunity to share your thoughts about this book, read what others have to say about it, and share your own manuscripts with fellow writers, readers, and the Red Lemonade editors, go to the Red Lemonade website.

Also, we want you to know that these sites aren’t just for you to find out more about what we do, they’re places where you can tell us what you do, what you want, and to tell us how we can help you. Only then can we really have a publishing community be greater than the sum of its parts.

All the best,

Richard Nash

Content

Lynne Tillman
Motion Sickness

Chapter 1. Tourist Attractions

Chapter 2. Details

Chapter 3. Small Pleasures

Chapter 4. Twisted Intentions

Chapter 5. Ruin

Chapter 6. Indulgences

Chapter 7. Foreign Skins

Chapter 8. Passing

Chapter 9. Shifter

Chapter 10. Home Sick

Chapter 11. Schadenfreude

Chapter 12. Traveling Music

Chapter 13. Kill the Umpire

Chapter 14. A State of Flux

Chapter 15. Postscript

About the Author

About the book, and a letter from the publisher