Death Will Have Your Eyes (10 page)

Deep in the
night I woke thinking of Gabrielle.

“Are you okay?” Jeanne said beside me.

“I'm sorry. Restless, I suppose. I didn't mean to wake you.”

“It's all right. I don't sleep much anyway.”

She got beers from the kitchenette and brought them back to bed. Periodically lights, some dim, others vivid, swept across the back of the room's heavy drapes, as though another world were trying to break through into this one. Traffic was a far-off rumble, like the sea.

She drank, and rolled the cool bottle along the side of her breast, where the scar was.

The room was lit indirectly by the TV screen faced away from us; the flicker of scene changes plucked at the periphery of our vision. Its volume was full off now.

“Are you married?” she said. “Or have you been?”

I shook my head, put my hand on her narrow waist. She covered it with her own.

“Neither have I. I'm thirty-one, and there's so very much I haven't done. I've only seen this one little cluttered corner of the world. I haven't made much effort to understand things that always seemed far beyond my reach, or to become a better human being in any way that matters. Just tread water mostly, tried to stay afloat. I've never loved anyone, or been loved.”

“You're an excellent musician, Jeanne. There's tremendous feeling in what you do, every chord or run, the pitch of your voice. And understanding of a sort, too, even if it's intuitive, instinctive, rather than intelligible.”

“But that always came easy, like breathing. Or like the way I look: I didn't have much to do with either. I'm attractive, I can play guitar passably and sing. Pretty thin for a biography, and not much of an epitaph. There's one last beer. Split it?”

“I'll go, this time.”

We sat quietly drinking, passing the bottle back and forth, and after a while she said, “Two years ago they removed a tumor from my breast. I went to my doctor for a checkup and wound up that same afternoon on the operating table. It was the size of a marble, they said, and benign. There was nothing more to worry about. They'd caught it in time.”

After a moment she went on.

“I think sometimes we know things we
can't
know, things that don't make daylight sense, or any sense at all. And we realize how absurd it is for us to believe them. But, still, we know, we just
know
.”

She took my hand in her own and traced the curve of the pale, fine scar along her breast with my finger. The nipple stiffened.

“You're the first man I've been with since then. Somehow despite whatever they told me, I always knew that when I had a man again, when I finally made love again, the cancer would come back.”

She handed me the last of the beer.

“I know how ridiculous this sounds, how crazy it must seem to you. And please don't be frightened. But I can feel it already, like a flower slowly blooming, opening dark petals, inside me.

“Will you make love to me again, David?”

We had breakfast
and parted. Jeanne had shopping to do, she said, and would be leaving that afternoon for Gulfport and the Holiday Inn there. I sat for a while by the pool. It was nine o'clock, cloudy, and a little like one of those science fiction movies where a few survivors are clinging to the wreckage, living out their days in the dry husk of civilization.

Around front, a chartered Greyhound pulled in. I watched through gaps in the weathered wood fence as twenty or so tourists debarked. All Asian, but a curious mix: Koreans, Thais, a couple of Cambodians, scattered Vietnamese, mainland Chinese in both western and traditional dress. They waited silently in file as the driver went into the motel office and came back out. He stepped along the line, passing keys out.

I didn't think Jeanne's fantasy (if, finally, it
were
fantasy) much stranger than others I've known. We all create such fictions out of the stuff of our lives, small myths, private lies, that help us go on, help us remain human, reassure us that we understand our own tiny fragment of the world. But most of us don't share these myths with strangers. Most of us don't share them at all. And we believe them while knowing at the same time that they
are
fictions.

Maybe that's all my vision of contemplative life, of a life devoted to trying to understand, to the pursuit of balance and beauty, came down to. A private lie, a myth no longer relevant or useful. After all, here I indisputably was. And it was neither balance nor beauty I pursued. The old game, as Holmes said, once again afoot.

I
spent the rest of the day afoot as well, treading the streets of Piltdown, in and out of bakeshops and butcher's and haberdasher's and milliner's, from time to time looking off towards the Alabama horizon almost expecting to see thatched-roof cottages there at the town's edge.

Or men with scythes, perhaps, dark against the sun.

I finally drove,
through Montgomery and Mobile, alongside Biloxi and Gulfport and over the rim of Lake Pontchartrain, into New Orleans, arriving there after many hours and one terrible meal tasting indiscriminately of salt, stagnant oil and flour, amazed that Lee Raincrow's decrepit VW had made it here, at three in the morning.

I took the Orleans/Vieux Carre exit off I-10, cut across to Ramparts and down to Esplanade and parked there, in front of a two-story Greek Revival mansion chopped up into half a dozen or so apartments and painted lime green. I walked back up into the Quarter and wandered its narrow streets for a while to unwind. Sidewalks worn smooth and concave like old stone stairs and canting abruptly towards street or stoop. Corner groceries crammed with everything from headache remedies to fifths of Glenlivet to sandwich counters serving up po-boys and muffulettas. Balconies drenched in ferns. Wrought-iron railings, fences and gates behind which you sometimes catch a glimpse of cool, secret inner courtyards. New Orleans is one of the few places in the States that always feel much the same, year after year—whatever façades they slap up on these century-old buildings, however they jam the streets full of T-shirt and poster shops, massage parlors, fast-food bistros done up in Art Deco or lavender and chrome.

I walked slowly over to Decatur and ambled by the French Market: sharp scent of spices, the deeper earth-smell of rotting fruit and vegetable. Had coffee and beignets at the Café du Monde. Sat by the river watching ships and lights and the long curved spine of the bridge across to the Westbank.

I thought how strange it was to pass directly from Piltdown's antique Oxford to this other ancient place. Something like taking off a coat, turning around and putting it back on. Only in America, as they say.

I thought about assignments and missions and fool's errands.

I thought about those things hard, and for a long time.

Then I walked back to the car, drove uptown to what once had been The Fontainebleu and was now called Fountain Bay (and by the time of my next visit would have become Bayou Plaza), and took a room.

All along Tulane, motels, restaurants and office buildings were boarded up, abandoned. A thrift store had moved into the huge grocer's across Carrollton. Several partially demolished service stations had become used-car lots with six or seven cars, and a proprietor in a folding lawn chair, on them.

“Length of stay?” the desk clerk inquired.

“Undetermined,” I told her.

I was given number twelve in The Annex, a string of cabana-like rooms surrounding the pool inside the motel's larger structure. It was like those old cartoons where a Chaplinesque little man sticks to his rights and remains in his modest house while skyscrapers bloom and sway all about him. It was also like moving to another, uninhabited country. No one else seemed to be booked into The Annex, the city's sounds penetrated hardly at all, and only the sighting of an occasional plane through the rift overhead assured me of the existence of a city, civilization, other living beings more or less like myself.

I hauled in luggage and book bag, showered, and lay on the bed product-testing TV, cable and remote tuner.

Of viable channels, four were showing movies (two mysteries, one horror, one martial arts), another couple were given over to such classics of American culture as “I Love Lucy,” “Mister Ed,” and “My Favorite Martian,” one was all news and public information, three were soaps, and the rest ranged from talk shows with impossibly earnest moderators, to British comedies and Japanese cartoons, to documentaries on the opening of the Panama Canal, prison rodeos and the Harlem Renaissance.

I picked up the phone, called the desk and asked to be connected to room service. After some initial stammering I was put on hold and listened to a lovely rendition of (I think) “Autumn Leaves.” Then the music shut off abruptly, as though it had fallen through a trapdoor, and a voice asked if it could help me. I said it could and that I'd like two beers. There was a pause but, mercifully, no more elevator music. Some conversation offstage, or off-mike, as it were. Okay, two beers, the voice finally said. Where do they come? Twelve, I told him. I didn't add: The Annex. By this time I considered the whole thing a bold experiment.

Nevertheless, five minutes later a fiftyish man in jeans and T-shirt showed up at my door with two Millers, a napkin and a chilled glass on a tray. The Easter Bunny wouldn't have been any bigger surprise. I tipped him seriously, poured and, propped with pillows, settled back on the bed, leaving the TV's volume off, watching from some far-off place the rush of images across its screen.

I thought back to all my years in and out of the country, in a kind of exile really, when I was able to look back on the States for long periods of time as an outsider, gathering my knowledge of its affairs from French- and Spanish-language newspapers, local (wherever local happened to be) radio and television, rumor, armed-service broadcasts and the BBC. I'd known a different America then. Maybe it
was
a different America.

Assignments and missions and fool's errands.

Lights were on all over town, Johnsson had said.

No more Cold War, no Big Bad Bear. When society has no further need of the warriors it has created, do
they
perhaps come to be perceived as a threat? Does that society come to believe that it must reject them, isolate them, find some way to set them against one another?

Were
there others still at my back?

I'd seen no signs of such purposeful companionship since that young man's death. Johnsson had seemed to think it was all over, my dance card filled. Yet he had also voiced concern for Gabrielle's safety.

1. Maybe Michael was just who and what he claimed, and it
   was
   all over.
   
2. Maybe Planchat (as Johnsson believed) was dead and out of the picture.
   
3. Maybe one, or two, or ten other soldiers were even now snuffling across Lake Pontchartrain into New Orleans, hot on my trail.
   
4. Maybe they were sent out, assigned, only to shadow me, to see where I, or whoever else was dogging me, or whoever I in turn was dogging, would lead them.
   
5. Maybe, like my shadow self back in that Memphis motel room, they were assassins-in-waiting.
   
6. Maybe none of the above.
   
7. Maybe all of the above.
   

The agency's language
school was as unorthodox, as given to getting things done by whatever necessary means, as the agency itself. When I went through, for many years afterwards in the flesh, and forever in spirit, the school consisted of Rima Palangian. Like Cohen with his theories of clothing, in another of those odd dislocations common to the era, Rima had been recruited from academia. Born of a Polish father and Russian mother, she'd once been the highest-paid translator in Moscow. In the early seventies she tired of walking her tightrope and, on holiday at a conference in Rome, requested entry to the U.S. Major American universities leapt from the water. She chose Princeton, and a couple of years later the agency chose her.

With Chomsky, and flying in the face of standard American adherence to Sapir-Whorf, Rima believed language to be encoded genetically within us. And so there were no formal classes: no memorization of vocabulary, no conjugation drills, no lengthy diagrams or descriptions of grammar. Instead, Rima showed foreign-language films and advertisements, tuned in to European broadcasts via satellite linkages, strode among us speaking full tilt in various languages, often switching from one to another in midsentence.

And she gave us poetry.

Pavese, for instance, when we “studied” (lived in) Italian. Rilke and Günter Grass for German. Mandelstam. Li Po. Neruda.

But, first of all: Apollinaire.

She was especially fond of Apollinaire, whose mother was Polish, father a mystery. He had revolutionized French poetry, hauling it by its bootstraps into the modern era. He had gone off to war and come back with a steel plate in his head. Trepanning, they called it: opening a window in the poet's pear-shaped skull to relieve pressure.

Rima would chant these poems again and again until, though we had little if any idea of their meaning, their sounds had become a part of us, mingled somehow with our own heartbeats, with our breath. And finally, suddenly, we'd reach a point where we knew, or at least
felt,
what the poems were about: what was happening in them, what they had to tell us. One moment the poem was there, an object, a sound, a cadence outside you; the next, it was within, curtains pulling back at window after window along the street. A whole new world.

With me, I'll never forget, it was a poem called “Cors de chasse.”

Rima had spent the morning in a discussion of current affairs in Europe, in French, of course, returning every few minutes to the poem, chanting it several times, going back to current affairs. On the ninth or tenth repetition, realizing that I knew what the poem said—and that now I could follow, as well,
most
of what she was saying—I looked up. It was an amazing moment; there have been few like it in my life.

Rima was watching me closely. She smiled, nodded, and went on with her teaching.

La vie,
she'd always say, breaking the back of syntax and common usage,
c'est toujours entre
. Life is always
in between
. Life was what happened while you were waiting around for
other
things to happen. Life was what sprang up in the places you never thought to look.
In between
.

Like the things we learn, truly learn, I know now, from the few true teachers we have in our lives.