Motion Sickness Page 6
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 v
ery 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) colle
cted 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
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