Will There Ever Be Another You, page 17
In one corner the Beatles biographer typed furiously. Or of a coffee cup, someone else went on, as the rest of us sat drinking our espressos. Teresa was on the floor, I didn’t want her on the floor, with everything inside me I was lifting her up. She often had to order another, she said, because a duck would steal across the lawn of the Gulbenkian and drink hers in a single sip. She would go back up to the snack bar and the barista would say, “Let me guess, a duck?” No word on whether they drank everyone’s espresso, or just hers. “We’ll have to workshop that,” she said, shaking her head, when I suggested she write a poem called “Thirst.”
For she had given it up, she had given up poetry—or was keeping it secret, as I was. “And everyone knew this notebook existed?” I asked after the Sylvia Plath session. I had been freaking out quietly during the talk, squiveling in my seat, chafing against invisible restraints, as I always did when academics talked about poets—something about it seemed to make them dead. But yes, everyone knew it but me. A mad girlfriend of Ted’s had stolen it; you had to envy him the certainty of his type. We have dreams of its extreme recovery—black catsuits, night walks along a ridgepole, and at the end of everything, jewels in the hand, last entries, the sure knowledge of why she had done it. Biography was gossip; I could have been in the stream of it all along.
But I could not read them; they seemed to make us dead, and to fail to understand the swell under the feet, the thing that sparked it. Why that, why then? Whom did she love, who was the Master? Why those years? people were always asking about Emily Dickinson, but it was the war—and every day, in the paper, and in the air, and over the tea table, came the postponeless Creature. Why guns, and black crape, and cages, and why did she write fewer poems in 1866? Not because she was too overcome. Because she would not be that overcome again. As I had neglected to write, in any book about her.
“Butterfly come be my little … BUUUUURD,” piped the fado singer through the hotel halls.
But the number struck me, and the number within the number. Had all that happened in four years? It was like the sight of the British in the summer of 2021, wearing Bo Peep dresses and looking like they had been through a war. The Portuguese were a little pale, they exclaimed over my bare shoulders in my hideous art-teacher smock, they would not truly come alive, they said, until the sun shone on them in July. In the lectures, coughs came scattered across the rows. Maria cleared her throat; the sickness had hit her hard—she had lost her scholar’s memory, been unable to read, and had the same trouble retrieving. The first two letters of a name would come, we agreed, but then the rest would be wrong. Treacherous, when your subject was flattery. You might find yourself in the wrong clown, turning cartwheels for an incorrect Henry.
For some reason I could not seem to escape the conference, to cross the enchanted perimeter into the city; there was something in the green room, and in the mazelike gardens on the property, where shadow cats went slipping and the teens wrapped each other like vines. A national story was being built, in that tightening circle of scholars; all of us were required, even me and the dune guy. I left and came back, left and came back, past the jugglers who threw clubs in the crosswalks, high into the squint of the air. The cure for jet lag was to go walking with your bare feet in the grass—Teresa brightened, for she had grown up in the country—but no, I said, no one could ever see that toe. Two rubies reached out to me from her left hand; I could set them. And … did she know there was a kind called the record-keeper? She was a poet, I must remember to tell her.
Who was it? They had emailed me about it, probably, but if you emailed me now it went into a place called Eternity. I counted my obsessions off on my fingers. Someone had written about Carmen Miranda—now there was an idea. The simultaneous translation kept breaking down during that one; the crowd in the auditorium would roar, so I knew a joke had come, but always missed it. What was clear was that he worshipped her, and her green-apple eyes, and her lips parted for a kiss in one of the anecdotes. If she had put the date on her final autograph, he said heavily, and I saw bananas and her black hair tumbling down, we would know that was the last person to ever see Carmen Miranda alive. This was the burden the biographer carried; there was always some encounter that could not make it into record, but was tucked with the handkerchief next to the heart. The heart? What was I saying? But I was still in the forty-eight hours.
My jacket was full of fruit. I also had a bag of macadamias, but I kept them hidden out of courtesy for Teresa, who was afraid of nuts. Poets were the same everywhere, I smiled, in Amherst, in Yeats’s cold-water flat, in Lisboa. I took out my freckled pear and ate it, but I had chosen poorly from the pyramid at the corner store. You couldn’t go by color, Teresa explained, and then we were looking at each other too much for a moment, it had to be tender near the stem. What is the scent in Lisbon? I kept asking, everywhere and nowhere, like chamomile or jasmine—but not even the biographer of the existentialists could identify it, and Teresa had not been able to smell anything for a month.
The time was approaching. Who in my life had I thought most about? All would be revealed during my hour, when the huge face of my subject would be projected behind me. Huge faces on projectors were a dangerous game. I began the Iris Murdoch session wondering why everyone was in love with Iris Murdoch. At the end of it I was in love with Iris Murdoch. Her biography, full of slits and blacked-out pages, had been written by two women simultaneously, a kind of marriage; the whole crowd was intrigued. Her bangs cut with a machete, her caveman eyes full of desire. Actually, hadn’t I written about her too, or made notes? In The Sea, the Sea … a dog tooth truly seen …
If even a dog’s tooth is truly worshipped it glows with light. The venerated object is endowed with power, that is the simple sense of the ontological proof. And if there is art enough a lie can enlighten us as well as the truth. What is the truth anyway, that truth? As we know ourselves we are fake objects, fakes, bundles of illusions. Can you determine exactly what you felt or thought or did?
Portuguese women all had to be gay because the men were preoccupied with football. During the final panel, the luminous male interviewer, seemingly polished with sugar, was said to be checking the score. Afterward, we went to a restaurant—Teresa parting ways to walk her great animal—me and Maria and Nuno, who had hair like a wolfman. They turned off the game after we were seated and Nuno became agitated. “WHERE IS MY GAME?” I shouted, to make clear that the passion was mine. “I need my game!” The waiters hurried over, relieved. Then all of us were happy, the waiters and Nuno watching, and Maria and I tormenting him with suggestions that the field should be smaller.
The night was beginning to feel like the dreams I would have later: the tree of blossoms on a lake, two flowers bending down and down until with a burst of agony they touched the surface. In the dream something would explode inside me too, and I would go running away across a green field. Maria had adopted her son when he was seven, she was saying, and he had no interest in football. She was attempting the age-old experiment of making a different kind of man, so she was sending him to Emotional Class. I think Grandpa is not in touch with his emotions, the boy said thoughtfully, because he left the room in abrupt silence once and then returned to give the boy a pack of M&M’s. But M&M’s were an emotion.
Forty years ago many men were named Nuno. Now nobody was. Nuno had hardened his heart at the age of fifteen because he had become too emotional about football. Who could bear it, for more than a season? It was not possible, you had to grow up and become a wolfman, and write a dissertation about Pessoa’s heteronyms. Now he could not feel anything about the games. What would happen if you allowed it? we asked, and he answered, and we explained that we had just taken him to Emotional Class. Nuno laughed, and closed his mouth quickly again. The thing glowed so greatly in the place of the night. He checked his phone; he had to leave, to go to a restaurant where the president always ate after meeting his mistress, and where spectators gathered in groups to watch.
Friends, he said, when Maria asked; you don’t know them. You have friends I don’t know? she said. Who?
It was our names coming toward us, Teresa and I had said, and the sudden sight of our own faces, and the way your nape would sometimes prickle as you turned a page. People would grab me and say I love you, Teresa said, but you don’t love me, you don’t know me. But maybe one or two of them really did. Maybe that was how the president had met his mistress, she had simply come up to him in the street one day and handed him all the candy she had.
Not a big deal, Nuno said wonderfully. He had said the same thing about reviewers who talked too much about your hair; that couldn’t be the thing that kept you from leaving your house. But Maria and I knew better. You could get trapped in there for years, writing biographies of objects. Nuno rose. The game was over, or he would watch it on the way. He would keep his hair forever; he was fifteen years old. In Paris, there would be lithographs and strange old prints everywhere: of hands into paws, elongate faces, greater hunger; the transformation of a creature into a human being.
The Ranking of the Arts
What made Paris look like Paris? It was the absence of the Eiffel Tower, who peeped and hid, peeped and hid. Up and down the Avenue de la Bourdonnais I swept, like a spore, in the massive hypebeast shoes I was wearing for some reason. Every article of clothing I had packed was so ugly. I listened to music and wept, it was spring. I was lonely for everyone I had ever known.
Thinking of you, I wrote to my normal friend, and your residency four years ago. But I am here, she said, next week, in Paris. We would meet, at the place I would never go on my own, between old-ivory and low-crowned buildings. I put three miniature French apples in my bag, one for each of us and one for her husband, which, though we were starving by the end of things, would not be remembered, would never be shared out.
Of course I haven’t seen a rhino, she said, amazed, as we waited in line outside the Musée d’Orsay. Why have you seen a rhino? There were only two zoos in her entire country. Well, as children, we used to spend the night there, I told her. With the nocturnal animals, the brimming eyes in the dark, the bats folded in thirds like black letters. The bars. The behavior—and I described to them my cubicle at the Library, where I was locked in as an exhibit, and labeled with my species. But too, I had just seen a taxidermied one at Deyrolle, head and bust only, like a president.
Three days ago the prime minister had resigned, possibly because of a letter she had written. I told them my gossip of the president of Portugal, that it was said he had a mistress in a district where he went to eat spaghetti and meat pies every night. Spaghetti and meat pies? No one ordered that. This was exactly how regional specialties were born. In fifteen years it would be on every menu—O Presidente, that was just how it happened.
The subject of her books was often: What if there were three? In our odd number, and a blaze of paint, we strode into the museum. It was night, and said to be the emptiest time, and everyone was there. Neither of us spoke of a belief that this would return things—to what? The Origin of the World had been removed for loan. (Subject: Woman, Vulva; Period, Realism.) But even on the brochure you could see—the hair like a scene of crisp weather, and at the top of her thigh, the little oyster that was only ever seen in person. That was what realism was, the thing that was there and almost no one ever painted.
“Everyone loves the Impressionists,” my husband often said darkly—leaving no question what he thought of them, the photorealistic cow lover. Because of him I knew the mechanics of an exhibit, that someone chose the colors and painted the walls, someone wrote the awful copy, someone hung the masterpieces. Because of him I knew of the basement, where a thousand other pieces slept in the subconscious and awaited their time. He had just been laid off—because of the Rothkos, I explained, how he had poured, and also because recently they had superheated his museum, with a large silver-foil inflatable butterfly sculpture. Apparently none of the management had ever played God with a magnifying glass and a line of ants. It was our lives, but I loved to tell this part: The thing was called Earth Angel, and when the sun struck it …
We climbed upstairs and looked out on the Seine through the glass of a great going clock. There were the sunflowers, horrible. There was his ball lightning rolling through haystacks. There was the yellow bedroom, third of its kind—you could paint nothing but bedrooms everywhere you went. Could be sick. Could rest. Could sleep. “Before that I knew well enough that one could fracture one’s legs and arms and recover afterwards, but I did not know that you could fracture the brain in your head and recover from that too….”
And did you go mad? I asked shyly. Remembering her escape from the country, four years ago, and just before the borders closed. I thought it would join a circle together, to see her again. But no, she said, just in the normal way. It was the overgrowth of pattern, I told her. Time was compound, was the water droplet, and all human speech was refrains, to ring. A hyperobject, a Louis Wain cat, I said, when anyone asked what I was doing. The challenge was to find a new style for a material reality. Because there was something to it, this idea that maybe Monet just couldn’t see that well.
She liked paintings of things scattered on mantelpieces. I liked empty bottles tipped in front of mirrors, and ateliers, and eels. Man do I go for eels, I often thought, standing in front of a still life. I liked the cream concentricities of pearls, with one lick of wild blue or lilac in the center. Often in an atelier, someone naked was standing, while others simply went around their business. How would you describe the look on her face? she asked, of the little bare courtesan. But the word, I knew, must be in French, staring out between her earrings. I watched your interview, my teacher would tell me when I returned, to see if you were wearing anything you had made.
I liked a badly rendered animal in someone’s lap, and orange rinds. I liked, in Starry Night over the Rhône, a color that was almost annealing: deep dark inside an abalone shell. “But the painter of the future will be a colourist such as has never yet existed.” Possibly I had been too long in Paris; I was lonely for people who hadn’t been born yet. It was beautiful last week, I kept repeating—imagine saying that to one of Berthe Morisot’s babies. It was blue just before you were here, and crystal, and everything holding its breath. Paris was convinced I had a child—a crib next to the bed in my hotel room, and I would not have it taken away.
A person’s life was in her neck, I thought, the great axis, upon which balanced the vision of things. We were afraid of each other—of each other’s gifts—and often found ourselves in the same cities without knowing, and once or twice a year had dreams, mine about little chauns in the countryside, hers about McDonald’s. Or perhaps the fear was of being born different. Certainly I would rather have been an emotional genius, and able to pull people out of air. Her soft raining atmosphere all round. One strand of hair escaping like the first drop of dye in water. How she had managed, like the world in those early shutdown days, to keep having the dream in which everyone was there.
I wanted to ask if she had become afraid of her name. I wanted to ask if she had noticed the new grammar, like people falling down spiral staircases. But turned away from her, the acrylic observer, and allowed myself to become lost in my hypebeast shoes, until I came round the corner and saw her again, looking very long at a portrait by an Irish painter. I took a picture of her looking—a sin against her nature. She was, as I saw her, a series of pink pivots. And how, she asked me, turning neatly on one ankle, do you rank the arts?
FILM
I am not sure why I mentioned it first. I watched in such a way that my vision would sometimes open on a human face, so that the whole thing was broken into alps and folded napkins and swirls of spread cream cheese; that was Marlene Dietrich, last time it had happened. NOT TRUE! I ALWAYS HATED CATS! she had written in an unauthorized biography of herself, which the Library kept in a box of treasures and tenderly showed me first thing when I showed up. It had broken on the face of Shakespeare’s wife, suddenly free from the zoo of her films, as she told me how we would do it in the movie: It’s simple. We build an animatronic baby with a lamp for its head, as her loveliness lifted from her neck and floated, as my heart began to plummet through strange levels of art.
DANCE
We agreed that dance would be high, if we ever saw any in person. Actually Jamie, my dancer friend, had come with me for the first week of my stay. At the Airbnb, on matching sofa beds—with one of her boobs sometimes out, for the Dance—we talked into the small hours about the Six Viewpoints. Space story time emotion movement shape. I spoke of my cubicle downstairs at the Library, where I was displayed to the people, next to a sign printed with my name. A perfect opportunity for performance art; we began to spitball ideas. That I would slowly dress or undress, or cook a little meal on a doll’s stove, or hang my laundry, or pull an Abramović and invite them in to do things to me. I locked my notebook in when I left—a thrill, like leaving my arm or leg—to see if anything happened to it overnight. But why leave at all? I could sleep on the floor. I could burst through the glass. I could buy that weird baby doll in the shop on Rue Cler that appeared to scream while extending Jesus fingers, and hold it.
COSTUME
Anything can be dance, can be performance, I thought, as Jamie broke new movement into the stillness—as she strode through the Tuileries and into Serge Lutens, to try a perfume that described itself as “fruity floral and insane.” She dabbed me with it before the 1920s-themed party the Library was throwing, which had been a source of great stress to my mind as I packed. How twenties should I be? I wondered, searching the shops before finally finding a period headpiece with a real bird talon on it, nearly as painful to wear as it must have been for the bird. “Now here,” Jamie said, “this is how the Charleston goes,” and that was painful too. Before the party there was a dinner, at which a man named Bertrand in full tuxedo kept cleverly gathering to himself all the rolls. The theme, as it always did now, exploded into the night. Black feathers all over the bathroom. A former Miss America sang very, very low. Bertrand recently had his feet removed, his most loving wife explained, tall, with her hair like the torch of the Statue of Liberty, as she took my arm and accompanied me downstairs and to the dance floor.
