Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy (9 page)

Lamb in the station.
Lamb on the train.
In a compartment while a
landscape slides by, dappling in sunlight and purple shadows. Lamb giving the
eye to a young woman, long of torso and limb, sitting across from him with legs
crossed, her boyfriend stubbled and asleep with his head on her lap, her
fingers in his hair. Looking frankly back at him, at Lamb, a man, unspoken and
sexual exchange the camera can capture.
Lamb in the washroom,
throwing water on his face, looking at it in the mirror, studying its planes
and angles so that we can study it too.
At the movies mirrors pass for
narration, we watch him watching himself looking to discover what goes
unspoken, motivation, scars, marks of the past,
signs
of what’s to come.
Music under the looking, the moving train.
If the door slides open behind him and she appears, serious under dark brows
and lipsticked mouth, and advances to kiss him, he kisses her back, roughly,
the door slides shut and she’s already hooked her underwear with her thumbs,
pushing it down, he has her by the waist and hoists her up onto the narrow
sink, pushes his face into her neck, her fingers working at his crotch,
thrusting into her, watch her open mouth,
Oh
, the two of them rocking with the train,
fucking, the movies give us fucking, its futurelessness, alone in the dark in
the static electricity of watching Lamb, our surrogate, even if you’re a woman
it’s his skin we’re in, and the tight shot of her hand gripping his shoulder,
nails digging in. Then the cut, back to the compartment, where the young man
sits up, yawning, passes his hand over his face, looks around, confused. The
door opens, Lamb comes in,
he
closes it, sits down
opposite, picks up his newspaper, nods. The door opens, the young woman comes
in, adjusts her skirt, sits down next to the young man who puts his arm around
her automatically, she nestles against his chest, her face hidden. The young
man’s nostrils flare, his pupils dilate, he looks down at her, touching her
hair tentatively, he looks across at Lamb who is staring at his paper,
he
looks out the window where the sea is flashing by. He
opens his mouth and closes it: we see him deciding, as they say, to let
sleeping dogs lie. There is only this train, this stillness in motion, this
compartment bound over the sea, westward. Only the set of his jaw remembers.
And Lamb takes his laptop out of the top of his rolling suitcase, for writing
is an aid to memory and he, Lamb, is the writer.

From her high chair little Lucy looks up from
her bowl of oatmeal as the train vibrates past the house as it does a hundred
times a day. “Choo-choo,” Ruth says to her, pausing with the spoon in midair.
Lucy concentrates. “Dada,” she says. Ben’s life is the train, whether he knows
it or not. The train he rides at this moment, that he rides every day, is an
arrow; the suburb and the city are bowstring and target. What defines Ben but
this coming and going, that straddling of his own existence? Where he lives is
not where he comes to rest: the train itself, sitting alone on the upper deck
as she knows he likes to do, laptop open, coffee in hand, taking on the
business of the day before the business day proper starts. Many men, women too,
more and more, south at the start of the day, north at the end of the day, to
and fro, their computers and smartphones like the hooks of lines they pull
themselves along toward all their frantic responsibility, their indispensable
arcs, home and away. Is he ever seized by the desire to arrest that suspension,
that illusion of forward progress or backward regress? Has he ever stood up,
snatched his briefcase, and stumbled out before the train reached its terminus?
To wander streets and neighborhoods where he has, in every sense, no business:
Rogers Park, Ravenswood, Wicker Park,
Wrigleyville
?
How easy to transfer him in her mind from his perch on the commuter rail to a
perch in the ballpark or in a movie theater, still neatly dressed in one of the
suits Ruth chose for him, wearing one of the printed ties his mother, with
faultless taste, selects and sends to him each birthday, Hanukkah, Father’s Day.
Or in a strip club, in an artificial night streaked with hot lights, motionless
in a chair as some woman more than halfway to a whore writhes and gyrates
against him. She can picture it so clearly, it’s as if she’s seen it—as if
she’s been that woman, trying and failing to get a rise out of him, in any
sense. Ben is still, calm as glass you’ve mistaken for water, unruffled,
faintly smiling, looking out from his experience and giving nothing away.
Nothing but his devotion to the train, to going away from her and coming back,
but never completely, gone or here, he lingers in the sympathetic vibrations of
the house, the rattled windows, dented pillows, Lucy’s face. Ruth gives her
another spoonful of oatmeal, her left breast throbbing—she has put a bandage on
the nipple, a blood-touched plastic pasty. She looks into her daughter’s eyes
and sees neither herself nor her husband, only the stranger looking out. Lucy
takes the spoon from Ruth’s hand and thrusts it into her mouth. She takes the
spoon out and raps it once on the tray in front of her, hard. Dada!
she
cries. Dada, Ruth says back to her soothingly, and pries
the spoon from Lucy’s fist. Lucy cries.

An hour later,
alone as usual in the kitchen streaked by sunlight, she touches her husband’s
name on her phone, an impulse she regrets the moment the name lights up, but
it’s too late, he answers on the first ring. The baby’s not sleeping, she tells
him. And: I miss you. He is grateful, wary,
silent
.
She paces the kitchen, her robe hanging open, left nipple on fire. She can hear
Lucy alternately babbling and wailing in her crib upstairs.

What’s wrong, he
says.

Does something have
to be wrong?

She can feel
him,
see him, his posture canted slightly from the desk, one
hand covering his brow, the other holding the phone, so that only part of a
cheek and his nose and lips are visible, and his smooth chin. She can smell his
aftershave or something like it, a brusque antisepsis, so different from her
own unshowered funk, the sour smell from her armpits, her greasy hair. It’s
just so much sometimes, she tells him.

Too much?

That’s not what I
said.

He exhales loudly,
a little windstorm in her ear. She is playing him, pushing him, she knows, into
the unfriendly emotion of sympathy, a step or two from pity. She is making
herself a burden. She knows it’s unfair and tries to pull it back.

How’s work, she
asks. He starts to tell her and she tries to listen, but really it’s just a
release valve she’s inserted into the conversation, a way of playing for time.
He says something about his boss, about where he’s going for lunch, about plans
for a meeting with the mayor’s chief of staff that afternoon. He stops talking
and she searches for something to say. You do good work.
Silence.
You’re doing the lord’s good work, she repeats. She represses a giggle.

You should maybe
try to get out of the house, he says finally.

I’m doing that, she
snaps. I’m canvassing this afternoon, remember?

Oh, yeah.

She bit me, she
says suddenly.

What?

Lucy bit me this
morning.
Hard.
Just before you left.

She’s succeeded and
she hates herself for it. He sighs again. She can see his fingers pinching the
bridge of his
nose,
see him turning finally completely
away from the desk, getting up to close his office door.

Do you need me to
come home?

No, of course not.
I just.

Is it still
bleeding?

I put a band-aid on
it.

They both find this
funny, she knows, although nobody laughs. When he speaks again the tension has
lessened.

I can pick up
dinner tonight if you like. You’ve got enough on your plate.

That’s all right,
she says. So do you.

Another long pause.
You’ve got to go,
she says.

No. No, it’s just.

Well, I have to go.
She’s crying.

I’ll call you
later, he says. She wants to tell him,
Don’t
call me.
She wants to tell him, Take care of
yourself
. She
wants to tell him, Deal with your shit and I’ll deal with mine.

Okay, she says.

He hangs up. She is
alone again with Lucy and Lucy’s needs.
Alone with herself.
She takes her robe in both hands and opens it wide for a second, feeling the
slightly chill air of the kitchen prickling her skin, the soles of her feet
cold against the cold tile floor. Then she closes the robe and ties it and
begins to move toward the stairs and up toward Lucy’s room, toward stammering
cries, guided, as so often, by an inchoate voice.
I didn’t ask for this
. To which another
voice answers,
Liar
. Outline of M in
the doorway, mothering shadow that withdraws.

But the new reader too has a skin, transitioning from degrees of
tautness to degrees of looseness, folds approximating experience, if not
wisdom. She has eyes with imperceptibly thinning corneas over dark brown
irises, modified by glasses, spectacles; but she is nearsighted, she puts them
on when she rises from bed in the morning and goes forth to be in contact with
the other bodies for which she creates a context: a husband’s body, a
daughter’s. In the evening, alone with sleeping bodies like buoys in the
darkness of the house, she folds them and sets them on the night table, then
lifts a volume and props it on her knees and reads, and the moon like her
family is an invisible watchful presence through the ceiling, through the
clouds. She has given birth, has been wrenched from one ecstasy to another, has
felt the crush of the growing fetus on her bladder, has felt less and less
pretty and more and more beautiful: the word not the feeling,
beautiful
, the word her
friends used, that Ben used, and they even said You’re glowing and she nodded, feeling
it, hands straying again to the rise of her belly, elapsing half-life of
herself as an adult with some place in the world outside of nursing, meeting
needs, biting her nails, reading. Now the baby is no longer a baby and the
husband is only a husband and she is neither beautiful nor pretty, only now in
the night of books is she not someone’s object, in bed, just reading. I’m
somebody’s mother she thinks, wondering if her mother thought the same,
concluding instantly No, she was no one’s mother, not in her mind, maybe in her
heart but no. She was indignant to be a mother, a minor character, blamed
backdrop for someone else’s story. And so I have no story to call my own, she
gave me everything but. But she did read. She can close her eyes at last when the
night gets old and see her, the old reader, at the kitchen table when Ruth came
home from school, still in her bathrobe maybe, with the cloud of black
iridescent hair voluminous around her shoulders and eyes blanked by glasses
(the old reader never removed them, she saw what there was to see through heavy
glass lenses of the Seventies and Eighties), always smoking cigarettes,
menthols, and a cold cup of coffee, holding some heavy hardback encased like a
sausage in the public library’s cellophane, murder mysteries (the series with
the little silver skull grinning at the base of the spine: Agatha Christie,
John Dickson Carr: the old reader loved a locked room) but sometimes
nonfiction, feminist keys to all mythologies (Gloria Steinem, Susan
Brownmiller) and then the books she never actually saw her reading, the ones
she owned, haunting shelves otherwise innocuous with thrillers and policiers:
the books of the vanished and the murdered, the oldest readers of them all, the
books that set Ruth on the first false umbilical trail when her mother began
her disappearing act, right there at the kitchen table, a process of years,
long before her actual body up and vanished, magnificent in its age and volume
and remoteness (she was glowing, wasn’t she, before her books like a cat by the
hearth, soaking and storing away heat), its death-haunted beauty (memory of Ben
kneeling in the first weeks in the doorway of the old apartment to kiss Ruth’s
still-flat belly, looking up at her wet-eyed and she smiling down, bemused, fingers
nesting in the vigorous black thatch of his hair), in flight all those years
from little Ruth’s hungry incurious gaze, on fire to be elsewhere, now
achieved, that vanishing, not a reader any more to Ruth’s knowledge but a
fugitive to be pursued down paths of memory, through questions asked of oneself
in the hard small hours when one can read no more, when one longs only for
facts, figures, dates, reports in the best objective style, one wishes for a
procedure, an agent, a white or black knight in pursuit of the quarry, sleep,
so long denied her, a woman reading late and long into the life that’s passing
her by.
Somnambulist, self.
She closes the book and
snaps off the light and the darkness rushes up to greet her.
The
el clacking by.
His breathing.
Lucy, learning to dream.
Ruth in the alien corn once again
, hugging
herself, waiting for her story, sorrily, to begin.