Motion Sickness Read online

  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 th
e 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.