“There is no history, only biography.”
“Yes. Something like that. The transcendentalist, what is his name?”
“Thoreau?”
“No.”
“Emerson?”
“Si, Emerson! I believe. He is a smart man. Listen to what he has to say. You want to make something true? Come on, Elizabeth. You know what to do. Put aside your footage, all those interviews you do. Who cares? They do not matter. These people you talk to about the mother of April, they do not know her. They may think they do, but they do not. But you, figure-toi, if you look deep inside your own self, you can write her story anyway. Or the story of anyone like her. Make it up if you have to! It does not have to be true to be true, capice? I read a statistic: over one million people every year do the suicide. One million! This is more dead in the world than everyone who die from murder and war combined. So what if you do not have yet all the facts of the story, tous les détails? You think you need facts to write truth? You think that making a documentary is truth? This is bullshit, mon Eliza, and you know it. You say this yourself, when we go together to see À Bout de Souffle, remember? That Godard think all good documentary has in it the fiction, and all fiction has in it the—”
“Documentary. You remember that?”
“I remember a lot, mon Eliza. Especially these words, because I think of them all the time in my own work, but also the woman who teached them to me. This was a woman who knew what she wanted. Who was not afraid to take risk. What happened to that woman?”
She was raped, I thought. But it suddenly felt like an excuse. I was stronger than that, and I knew it. “She had children,” I said. “She made a bargain to stay alive.”
“So write about this!” said Renzo, nearly shouting now. “Write the story of one mother who do not make it, who was pushed—how you say?—over the ledge.” His face was now less than a foot away from mine.
“Edge,” I said.
“What is difference?”
“One leads to the other.”
“Ah. So I walk on the ledge, but I try not to fall off the edge, this is correct?”
“Yes.” I was breathing hard. Neither of us spoke for a moment, caught, as we were, once again, on the lip of our own precipice.
“Bueno,” he finally said, pulling his face back a foot. “So, you, you are on your ledge. Dancing, working, shooting your little reportage on the nail polish, whatever it is you do to fill the hours. But I am sure you feel close enough to that edge every day, si? Maybe you even peek over it from time to time? Everybody do this. So. Why you not go over this edge, but this friend of yours mother, she go? What is the difference between you and that woman? There is your truth. Right there, between the ledge and the edge. Go find it.”
“You seem to know a lot of facts about suicide,” I said.
“Because I am interested in this topic.”
“Why?”
Renzo looked out the window and stared at the brick wall.
My voice grew sterner. “Why?”
“Putain . . .” He sighed. “Because, okay. My mother, she kill herself. And her father before her. Because everyone I know who do this job I do has a little bit of this wish inside. You, including.”
“Bullshit,” I said. “That’s just not true.”
“Oh no?”
“No. I mean yes, it’s not true. And I had no idea your mother killed herself. Why didn’t you ever tell me that?”
“You never ask.”
This was not fair, but I let it drop. I had asked, several times, about his upbringing, but Renzo was always an expert at deflection. The one conversation he’d ever allowed started over drinks one night in Warsaw, on the eve of Walesa’s election, when I heard him speaking fluent French to the journalist from Libération sitting behind him. “So what are you, then?” I’d said. “French or Italian?”
“Both,” he’d answered. Before he and his father moved to Paris, he’d spent his early childhood in a farmhouse in Sicily, in the shadow of Mount Etna, whose moods, he’d claimed, smiling slyly, were nearly always in sync with his mother’s. She was a painter, he said with some pride, who modeled herself after Frida Kahlo. Greta Garbo had even purchased one of her paintings, during the heyday of Taormina. “Is your mother still living there?” I’d asked.
“No,” he’d said, shaking his head. Then he’d quickly changed the subject back to Solidarity.
“So what made her do it?” I now asked.
“Mon Eliza! I always tell everyone you are intelligent woman, but sometimes you say stupid thing. You think you can point to one moment and say, ‘This is why’? She was depressed. She suffered. As long as I knew her. End of the story. It was actually a relief when she died.”
“A relief? That’s an odd thing to say about your mother’s death.”
“Oh, you think so?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“That is your right. You do not live with her. I do. And it is my right to say it was a relief. For her especially, but for me also and for my father. You know, everybody always say that suicide is act of the coward. And yes, perhaps it is. Morally, at least. But it is also, il faut dire, the act of courageous. A ‘clumsy experiment,’ like Mr. Schopenhauer say, because the answer come from the destruction of the question, but courageous, too.
“Think about it this way. We do not judge someone who do something crazy to end his physical pain. A soldier who cut through his own leg to release it from under the rubble. A person who must eat the raw flesh of the dead in order to survive. Heroes, we call them. We put them on the TV and say look at this! Incredible! He eat his brother’s dead wife! He saws the knife through his own bone! But when a person do something crazy to relieve mental pain we judge. We say bad person. Evil, cowardly person. Maybe a little sympathy for the suffering, yes, but we say, I never do that. I am better than that. But maybe somewhere deep inside we want to do that same thing. To end it. To find peace. To be or not to be, right? That is always the question. But we are afraid of that feeling. That wish for the dark. So we pretend it is not there. So who is the coward? The man who figure out a way to end his pain or the man who sits there comme un imbecile and endures it?
“You want to know why my mother kill herself? Because she had a piece of rope and she could. Basta.”
We didn’t speak for what seemed like several minutes. “May I see your photos now?” I said. I felt a sudden, overwhelming urge to flee that dusty room, my cobwebbed past, Renzo’s crystal clear lenses, but I knew that to have done so without at least a cursory glance at his work at that point would have been rude.
“Yes, okay.” Renzo opened his portfolio so that it lay half on my lap, half on his, to the first picture, a single house in an open field, tiny in the frame, going up in flames. Everything about the image, except the house itself—the late-afternoon light, the slight blurring of the foreground grasses, suggesting a gentle, spring breeze, the fluffy cumulus clouds punctuating a perfect blue sky, the sun-dappled leaves of the scattered trees, the carefully considered physical arrangement of objects in the frame—all harkened back to classical landscape painting. And yet without the burning house, the composition would have seemed, at least to the modern eye, bland. With it, the image was nothing short of masterful.
“Wow,” I said. “That’s gorgeous. Where was it taken?”
“Djakovica,” he said. “The day you left.” His voice struck a surprising note of umbrage. Somehow, in all the years that had passed since our break-up, I’d never once considered how it had affected him. I was the one who’d been told I wasn’t loved. I—or at least I’d always assumed—was the injured party. “I like it better when it’s enlarged, actually,” he said. “These are just work prints—”
“Stop,” I said. “It’s lovely. Let me see the next one.”
He turned the page to reveal a picture taken in the mountains of Afghanistan, with snowy peaks in the far distance, a group of mujahedin walking single file along a steep ridge—their figures tiny, insignif
icant in the frame. Then I looked more carefully and noticed the two dead bodies, their mid-ground placement in the composition more of an afterthought, accidental. “Renzo, these are . . . these are really amazing. I’ve never seen anything like them.”
And for the first time since I’ve known him he blushed. “Thank you,” he said. “I am pleased with it, I think. But it is just the beginning. Juste un petit gout.”
I flipped to the next page. Then the next. First a funeral on a hillside overlooking what looked like Jerusalem, shot from a polite distance, the bodies gathered around the gravesite like ants around a crumb of bread. Then a young mother, cradling her dead son, but again tiny in the frame, like a cigarette butt, or a crushed soda can, just one of the many abandoned elements littering a nondescript sidewalk, somewhere on earth, probably Baghdad, but it didn’t matter where. And that, I realized, was the point of the whole exercise: destruction, anger, grief, all that detritus of humankind didn’t need a dateline, didn’t need to be locked forever in time and space. Hatred has never warranted a sell-by date. It simply is. And will always be.
I tried to approach the work with a cold and critical eye, but as each page was turned, each landscape devoured, I found myself transported, emotionally at one with the man who made it. Renzo could clearly sense this, or perhaps he’d guessed even before he showed me the photos what my reaction to them would be, as our knees began pushing against one another, the pressure between them mounting in a way that had become impossible to toss off as innocent. Then it was our shoulders, our elbows, the backs of our hands. “I really like what you did here,” I said, barely able to form a coherent sentence, pointing to a puff of smoke, presumably left over from a bomb, but floating, like a postscript, in midair. “If I had to choose one, I think this might—”
But before I could finish, Renzo pushed the portfolio to the floor, took my face in his hands and began to kiss me, roughly. Without the slightest resistance, without any remorse, I climbed into his lap and let his hands wander. Now he was unbuttoning my blouse, one frustrating impediment at a time, until the only barrier left was an easily unhooked bra, which he tossed, without ceremony, behind the couch. I pulled off his shirt and buried my face in his neck, breathing in his once-familiar scent, running my cheek along the taut sinew of his shoulder.
Renzo stood and carried me over to the futon on the floor and laid me down, yanking off my jeans in one swift motion. I’d like to say I had a small tinge of regret at that point, lying there, naked, before a man not my husband. I’d like to say I felt guilt-stricken, or paralyzed. But in fact, nearly the exact opposite was true. As I lay there under Renzo’s gaze, I felt ecstatically alive, the years slipping away, one by one, like icicles under the sun, until there was no more Tess, no more Daisy, no more Mark, no more me. I was just a body, pulsing with need; just a vessel, begging to be filled.
“Laisse-moi gouter,” he whispered, and he bent down between my legs. I closed my eyes and ran my hands through his fine hair, my thumbs over his ears. “Wait, wait . . .” I now said, scooting away, wanting to prolong the moment.
He flipped me over onto my stomach and, with tiny flicks of his tongue, ran his mouth up my spine until I could stand it no longer. I turned to face him. “Vas y,” I said. And I led him inside. Our bodies moved together as they had a hundred times before, the languid rhythms and syntax of our past couplings rushing back.
He stared into my eyes now, his expression uncharacteristically vulnerable. “Do you know . . . how often . . . I think about this?” he said. “Do you know . . . how much . . . I missed this?”
“Then you’re an idiot,” I said, tears now welling in my eyes. And after his body shivered, after his arms clung to me as if he’d tumble to his death otherwise, after he lifted me out of my own body and into the only version of heaven I know, I reminded him of our conversation about love.
FOR A LONG TIME afterwards neither of us spoke. I was halfway to sleep when Renzo, still clutching me, finally chipped through the wall of silence. “I actually said that? I said love is a ‘mythical construct’?” He clucked his tongue and shook his head in disbelief.
I turned around to face him, propping myself up on an elbow. “Yes, you did.” The brick outside the window was growing darker. Soon it would be time to go. “Right after you told me that the story I wrote about those lovers who died on the bridge—what’re their names?—was sentimental—”
“Admira and Bosko.”
I stared at him in confusion. “You remember the names of the dead lovers, but not what you said about love?”
“Names stay the same. Opinions change.”
“Oh, give me a break. A half hour ago you were reciting, nearly word for word, Godard’s opinions on docu—”
“This was theory. Not opinion.”
“You have an answer for everything, don’t you?”
“Not everything.”
“Fine. What about my name? How does that fit into your little theory about flux?”
“Flux? What is this word ‘flux’?” He cupped his hand under my breast, circled his thumb around its rising center.
“That’s flux,” I said, glancing down at my hardening nipple. “It means change. Instability.”
“Oh. Life.”
“Not exactly.”
“Yes, exactly. That Greek man say this, remember? About never putting the foot in the same river twice.”
“What are you, a one-man quote repository?”
Renzo laughed. They were precious, his laughs: infrequent enough to be surprising even to him. I suddenly wished I could box this one up and store it with my emergency supplies, between the jugs of water and the batteries.
“Heraclitus,” I said.
“Yes. You see? His name stay the same. You remember it. But this is true what you say about your name. It, too: flux. You surprise me that you change it.” Now he was kissing the other nipple, feeling it stiffen between his lips.
“I surprised myself.” I turned my back to him again, pulled the covers over my body.
“Why you do that? I always wonder.”
“Because I’m not a Greek man,” I said. When I got married, they wrote in the paper, The bride, who will be keeping her name . . . Mark was called simply, The groom, without caveat. Even stasis becomes a political statement when you’re a woman. Now I lay on my back, staring up at the ceiling. “After Daisy was born, I . . . I just decided to change it one day. To have the same name as my kids.” I yawned even wider, feeling suddenly incapacitated by exhaustion.
“Ah, oui. Toujours le sentimentaliste. In this you do not flux.” He planted a light kiss on my forehead. “But I interrupt you before. The lovers on the bridge. What did I say about your story?”
I looked him in the eye, biting my lip to keep from crying, before turning away to stare at the ceiling. “You called it ‘sentimental bullshit.’ “
“Oof,” said Renzo. “What an asshole. No wonder you leave him.” He nuzzled his nose in my neck, placed his right thigh over mine. “It is funny, the way life turns out, no?” Now he was kissing my cheek. The curl of my ear.
“No. It’s not funny, Renzo.” Tears began to form again at the corners of my eyes. “It’s not funny at all.”
“Oh, mon Eliza. You cannot have one without the other. The comedy without the tragedy. You should know this by now.”
CHAPTER 18
I ARRIVED AT the front door of my apartment at a hair past 5:00 PM and found Irma and the girls sitting on the landing, their backs against the wall, the contents of my daughters’ backpacks—Daisy’s homework, a leftover banana from Tess’s lunchbox, several scarves and hats and a pencil or two—spread out before them.
“What’s going on?” I said, breathless from climbing the stairs, brushing off the snowflakes dusting my coat. I’d showered, dressed, and bolted from Renzo’s to catch the subway home, after waking up in his arms, disoriented. By the time I got off at Eighty-sixth and Central Park West, it was already 4:55 PM, and a new snowstorm had b
egun.
“I forgot my keys in Jersey City,” said Irma, looking ashamed. “I realized it when I was on the PATH train, and I thought about going back home to get them, but yesterday you said you’d be working from home today, so I thought—”
“But why didn’t you call? I would have—”
“She did call,” said Daisy, placing her math homework back in her purple folder. Her tone had an accusatory edge to it. “Lots of times. Where were you?”
I pulled my cell phone out of the front pocket of my jeans and saw “6 missed calls” emblazoned like a wagging finger across its screen. Of course. I’d switched the phone to silent during my interview with Lenny Morton. Then Renzo had rung. Then we’d had soup. For several hours. When the guilt finally came, it announced itself suddenly, flooding my veins with dark sludge. “Oh, sweetie, I’m so sorry. I was, uh . . . interviewing this guy for a story.”
“What guy?” said Daisy.
“What story?” said Tess. “Why is your hair wet?”
Daisy stared down at the striped Swatch we’d given her for her seventh birthday. “I’m going to be late for piano,” she said, ever the stickler for arriving both at school and to her various activities with extra minutes to spare.
“No you’re not,” I said. “We’ve got plenty of time.”
“I’m so sorry,” said Irma, shaking her head and still looking sheepish.
“No, Irma. It’s my fault. You’re right. I told you I’d be here working. I’m the one who should be apologizing. And my hair is wet, peanut”—I was now addressing Tess—“because it’s snowing outside.”
“But you were wearing a hat,” she said, cocking her head to the side in confusion.
“Come on girls,” said Irma, sensing my anguish, “let’s get you inside.” I recalled a conversation between two nannies outside the girls’ school about having to clean one of their employer’s adulterous sheets. I wondered what kinds of suspicions and judgments I’d now triggered in Irma’s mind. It was so much easier maintaining the illusion that she never thought about the way we conducted our lives.
Between Here and April Page 16
