The Sorrows of an American

by Siri Hustvedt

  Lane turned his back to me and faced himself in the wide hallway mirror. “I look like shit,” he said. “My parents are dead. They never wanted me anyway. My girlfriend is sick of me. My daughter is a stranger.” He eyed my reflection. “ ‘Dr. Erik doesn’t take pictures. He likes to talk.’ That’s what she said. But I need the photos, you see, it’s not like I can help it. It’s documentation, man, it’s my whole splendid mess on film. Digital magic. Jeff’s life. Warty, sad, but there it is. Moi. Giving that up would be impossible. The world’s going virtual anyway; there’s no reality left. Simulacra, baby.”

  I looked at his spiky hair. For some reason those small tufts of vanity were intolerable to me, and I had a brief fantasy of pulling them out by the roots. “I think you should leave now,” I said, my voice shaking.

  “You must have had your share of troubles, man,” he continued, as if I had said nothing. “You’re divorced, right? Must have fucked up with her.” He continued to speak to himself in the mirror in a low, thoughtful tone. “Must be hard dealing with crazy people all the time.” He paused and leaned toward his own face, then in a coy voice said, “Must lose some along the way.”

  I flinched and saw his eyes move to my reflection. My heart beat faster. I hated the man. I seized him by both shoulders from behind, pulled him backward and then shoved him into the mirror. His neck lolled backward for an instant and then his head hit the glass. It made a dull noise. Still gripping him, I was flooded by a sensation of joyous release and was about to do it again. Instead, I dropped my hands. He grabbed his forehead, turned around, took a few unstable steps, and slumped to the floor. The thought that I had killed him came instantly, and then the word no escaped my lips, a barely articulated word, more like an animal cry than a human voice. I bent over him. But Lane wasn’t dead. He lay on the floor with his eyes open and a horrible smile wet with saliva on his lips. “Big man,” he said.

  “Are you okay?” I don’t know what came over me, I thought, but I rejected the stupid incantation. I hadn’t been in a fight since grade school.

  He sat up. I put my hand to his forehead to examine it. There was no visible wound. “If you get a headache or feel any dizziness in the next forty-eight hours, go straight to the hospital.”

  “You just told me to go there for my suicidal ideation, didn’t you?”

  I noticed that he was using the jargon of my profession again, but I ignored it. “How do you feel?” I asked.

  “I’m okay,” he said. “I fell down just to scare you.”

  Rather than angering me, these words brought a feeling of relief and happiness. I helped him up, brought him to a chair, and offered him a Scotch, which he accepted. When he had the drink, he looked at me and said, “It’s not what you think. I’m an explorer taking trips into the wilderness, documenting what he finds, and then remaking the trip when it’s over.” He waved his right hand. “Every biography, every autobiography is make-believe, right? I’m creating several in real time, but it’s all staged, if you see what I mean. I’m staging it. You’re one of the players. So is Miranda.”

  “And Eglantine?” I asked.

  He nodded, but his face grew sober. “I wouldn’t hurt her for anything. I love the kid.”

  He wouldn’t hurt us, if that’s what you mean. I remembered Miranda’s words. Then thought, I hurt him. “Why the photos? Why tell me you’re planning your funeral? You goad me and insinuate . . .” I didn’t finish the sentence. It was Sarah, I thought, a hidden reference to Sarah that had made me push him. He knew about it. Somehow he knew about it. “Why are you doing all this?”

  He lifted his eyes to mine and said, “I’m trying on my various personas for the work. It can’t be simple, and it has to be dangerous. I have to go as far as I can.”

  Lane left soon after that comment. We shook hands, but I had no idea what the gesture meant, and when I had released him, I felt tainted and had a vague sense that I had been manipulated once again. I’ve had patients who leap from planes, deep-sea dive, bungee jump—high-risk sports that bring with them a feeling of being more alive. And then there are those who cut themselves repeatedly to feel a rush of realness, but exactly what Lane wanted remained nebulous. For a moment the violence had elated me, but within seconds that wild energy had been lulled into guilt. It would have been different if he had fought back. But coming at a man from behind? It was shameful, infantile, the act of a little boy on the playground who suddenly pushes a jeering playmate. As I sat in my armchair, I remembered a passage in one of Rilke’s letters to the young poet: “For if we think of this existence of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it appears that most people learn to know only a corner of their room, a place by the window, a strip of floor on which they walk up and down.”

  “YOU PUSHED HIM?” Miranda said. “Is he all right?”

  I don’t know what came over me. “I lost my temper,” I said aloud. “The photos, the phone call, his tone of voice. I had to tell you before he did. It was stupid, and yes, he seemed fine when he left.”

  Miranda shook her head. “I think he was hoping you’d admit him to the hospital, so he could see what it’s like.”

  I was sitting beside Miranda on her blue sofa. She leaned back on a cushion, her gleaming brown legs propped on the coffee table in front of us. She was dressed in shorts and a T-shirt for the sweltering July night, and I had to work to keep my eyes off her calves and ankles. An air conditioner rattled from the back room, and a fan above us kept the temperature bearable, but the air was still humid, and my arms and chest felt clammy.

  “He has a Web site, you know, very elaborate, with images and texts, some film sequences. He gets lots of hits, apparently, and he’s advertising his show in November with the idea that it’s going to contain some big revelation. He sends out mass e-mails about himself, updates on ‘Jeff’s Lives,’ but with all kinds of quotations and abstruse commentary about simulacra and superconductivity and the psychotic sublime. He likes to say he’s a post-Nietzschean.” Miranda smiled to herself. “Remember when he blanked out my eyes in the picture? He told me he was simulating a stalker as a game with himself.”

  “Simulating a stalker?”

  She shook her head. “He’s investigating insanity because he thinks psychiatry is a mechanism of control, that madness is a form of creative being that’s squashed in hospitals and clinics. He says the whole discipline’s a fraud.”

  “Nothing new there,” I said.

  “He keeps quoting someone.”

  “Thomas Szasz?”

  “That’s it. Anyway, I think he wants you in the project because of what you do.” Miranda looked down. “I’m sorry he’s annoying you. He isn’t that way with me, but since I’ve been seeing him again, I’ve remembered everything that bothered me almost from the start: his ambition, his flights into nutty philosophy, his immaturity.” Miranda sighed. “The irony is that all those flaws are also his strengths, his charm. But I can tell you this: He’s much too involved with his show to do away with himself any time soon.”

  I remembered Lane speaking to my mirror, recalled his bright eyes and my charged body as I looked at him. “Well,” I said, “I guess a simulated suicide would, by definition, be ineffective, so that’s one good thing.”

  Miranda smiled. “I found out that he never knew his black/Cherokee grandmother. His mother cut off relations with her when she left home at seventeen. He never had anything to do with that woman who’s so important to his idea of himself. It’s kind of sad.”

  “So,” I said. “Your relationship to him now is . . .”

  “I don’t know what it is. He’s Eggy’s father, no way around that. He’s started to help financially with her, which takes a burden off me. I told him I want a pause between us. He can still see Eggy. He’s on the rise, I think, and that’s good for him. There have been some articles on his work. Writer/visual artist/performance artist, the all-in-one. I noticed they all say he’s twenty-five, which isn’t true, so he must be fibbing about his age
to make himself more desirable. If he’s crazy, he’s crazy in an ambitious, clever way.” She paused. “And his work is good, Erik. It really is.”

  I looked at her. “What about your work?’

  “I’m drawing.”

  “Dreams?”

  Miranda looked suddenly remote. “In a way, yes.”

  “What way?”

  I watched her hesitate, but then, she said. “I dreamed that I was pregnant again, but the child wasn’t growing right inside me; it was a tiny girl shriveling up, and it was my fault because I kept forgetting about her, not doing the right things, and not wanting her enough. And then a woman was there, standing in front of me. A really tall dark-skinned woman. She said, ‘We’ll have to clean the knife.’ ”

  “Can I see the picture?”

  “When I’m finished. It looks like the dream drawings are going to be a book. A friend of mine showed a couple of them to somebody at Luce, the place that publishes artist’s books, and they’re interested.”

  “That’s great,” I said.

  Miranda narrowed her eyes. She didn’t respond to my congratulations. Instead, she said, “When I got pregnant, Mum cried. You can’t know, but she doesn’t cry, and looking at her face shocked me. It was awful, like seeing another person. She wanted me to marry right, not be a single mother.” Miranda took a breath and looked away.

  “Well, it’s harder,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said. Her white front teeth appeared for an instant over her soft bottom lip. “But you don’t come second to a husband.”

  When she spoke, I felt as if a breeze were passing through me.

  “And I can draw into the night when I have the stamina.”

  “Where’s Eggy?”

  “Sarah Bernhardt is with my parents tonight.” Miranda smiled to herself and shook her head. “Anyway, the dream came from a story my grandmother told me.”

  Miranda seemed eager to talk. I wondered if my confession about Lane had made it easier for her. “When Mum was pregnant with my sister Alice, I went to stay with Gran. I loved that house. It’s gone now, sold. One night, I remember, I was supposed to be asleep, but I couldn’t, and I saw that Gran had her light on, and I went in to her. I expected her to send me back to bed, but she didn’t. She was reading a book, and instead of yelling at me, she patted the bed beside her, and I climbed in. She smelled of camphor; my grandmother used it for her aches. That was when she told me about Cut Hill. It was a Maroon story, and I don’t know how she heard it because the Maroons are very secretive about their knowledge. It was from the wars in the early 1700s. An English soldier chased down a Maroon woman who was very pregnant, with a big belly, and he tied her to a tree and was about to slice her open with his sword, but before he did it, he spoke to the baby inside her and asked, ‘Are you a man or a woman?’ The baby said, ‘Me a man.’ And as soon as the child spoke, the sword in the soldier’s hand mashed up, and the Englishman fell down dead.” Miranda stared at her hands. “It made a deep impression on me, the baby speaking from inside his mother and the magic that protected her and the fact that Gran told it with such reverence, and of course, Mum was very close to giving birth. I was talking to Alice about it last week, and that same night I had the dream.”

  The story made us silent, and had I dared, I would have touched her then, put my hands on her and pulled her into me, but I was afraid of being rebuffed and losing the comfort between us.

  “I’ll be in Jamaica with Eggy for two weeks. My parents are going, too. I have my vacation.”

  That was when I offered to check on the apartment, water her plants, and take in her mail while she was away. She accepted, saying it would free her sisters from those duties. She looked at her watch, and taking the hint, I stood up. As I walked into the dark hallway, I saw something shining as it caught the light from the next room. When Miranda switched on a lamp, I identified the object. Lying on the low bench near the door was a small pair of wire wings embellished with silver glitter. They were crumpled, and there were rust-colored stains on the white fabric.

  “I guess Eggy’s been doing a lot of flying,” I said.

  Miranda smiled broadly, and the shrewd look I had come to recognize appeared in her eyes. I held out my hand to say goodnight, but she reached up for my face, pulled it toward her, and gave me two kisses on my cheeks. They were the usual chaste, friendly kisses, but that didn’t prevent me from feeling her lips burn on my skin long after she had withdrawn from me and I was sitting upstairs in my study recording the dream and the story of Cut Hill.

  THE DAY AFTER Miranda left for Jamaica, I had dinner with my sister on White Street, and she told me she had stopped seeing Henry Morris. Miranda had used the same word about Lane: She had been seeing him again. “Seeing” had become the euphemism of choice for relations between people that included copulation. I hadn’t told Inga about Burton’s suspicions. They had struck me as rather flimsy. Comings and goings. Entrances and exits. Divinations. Inga’s story was different from Burton’s, but there were similarities nevertheless. Inga knew that Henry had spoken not only to Edie and to Max’s ex-wives but also to the “Burger woman.” The journalist believed that Max’s letters held some ugly secret above and beyond the fact that Joel might be Max’s son, but she refused to say what she imagined that hidden information could be. Henry had found her “peculiar, obsessional, and maybe out of her mind.” It wasn’t the journalist who had come between Inga and Henry, it was Max.

  “It’s not that I felt he was dishonest,” my sister said. “He didn’t lie. The attraction between us was real. He told me I was beautiful, and he meant it. Old lady that I am.” She shook her head, her face both sad and ironic. “But you see, he quoted Max a lot. We’d be having dinner and out would come a whole paragraph from Derelict John or Mourning Clothes. Of course, that’s what he does day in and day out. He’s on sabbatical, and he’s writing his book. Still, it began to unnerve me. I tried to talk to him about it. He was sympathetic, but you know, I don’t think he could help himself. He met Max only once, and so Max wasn’t a person for him. He was a literary saint. Then four nights ago, we were in his apartment and we made love. It was a kind of drowning. I can only tell you, Erik. You’re the only one. I can’t even tell Leo, dear Leo who’s half in love with me, I think, just half, but anyway, Henry was ferocious and strong. I felt all lit up. I was dizzy afterward. Then, as we were lying there, he said, ‘In her he recovered the country he had lost. When he entered her body he was no longer in exile.’ ”

  I looked at Inga.

  “I recognized it right away. It’s from Living Mirror, the first novel Max wrote after he met me. For a little while I just lay there stunned. But then I felt smothered. It was as if I had no value for myself. I got up and walked out. I spoke to him on the phone that afternoon. He said he hadn’t meant to hurt me, but it’s too late. I feel as if I’ve debased myself.”

  “That’s entirely the wrong word.”

  “I don’t know. What kind of a woman sleeps with her dead husband’s biographer?”

  The question was so odd, I didn’t know how to respond. Then I said all kinds of women might sleep with their dead husband’s biographer.

  Inga grimaced. “Yesterday, when I went to read to Leo, I let him touch me.”

  “You did?”

  “Yes, with my clothes on, but he ran his hands over my whole body.”

  “And it was nice, not awkward?”

  My sister nodded. She looked up at me with that peculiar shining expression she used to have when we were children. “I can’t live without intimacy,” she said. “I can’t do that anymore.”

  DURING THE TWO weeks while Miranda was gone, I took in her mail and mine, noting that there were no envelopes from Lane addressed to either of us. I let myself in downstairs to water the three plants in the front room and found myself slightly awed by my presence in the vacant apartment. I was alone with her things, and this felt mysterious in itself. Miranda had left the place spotless, but on a table in the fro
nt room seven drawings had been laid out, and I lingered over them every evening. The first three were of the woman in Miranda’s dream, rendered several times in black ink on each page. The lines of the looming figure were swift and forceful, and I could see that she was trying to get it right. Each line had to do a lot of work. The woman appeared to be immensely tall, thin, but with powerful arm and leg muscles. A giantess. She wore a loose dress and held a raised knife in her right hand. We’ll have to clean the knife. There were two drawings of a fetus: the first a shrunken little body in a sac and the second a hearty, much fatter creature with an open mouth. The enchanted manchild. The last two were unfinished—ink sketches of the same image. A man wearing a hat lay on top of a woman in a long white dress. He had pinned her to the ground by her wrists. There was an air of violence in the picture, which may have been created by the simple fact that the man was white and the woman black, a contrast that summoned the brutal story of white masters raping slave women. Although his face was invisible, hers was turned outward toward the viewer. She had the expression of a dead person—a blank. In the second version of the drawing, the color difference between the figures wasn’t so pronounced. A gray wash had been applied to both their arms and faces, and they looked as if their bodies weren’t discrete, but turning to liquid. They seemed to be lying in a shallow pool of filmy water. After three or four days, I found that the first thing I did after my brief chores was to lean over this second version of the sketch, stare at it for a while, and then go back upstairs.

  Two nights before Miranda and Eggy returned, I carried their mail downstairs and went to look at the drawing. Examining it again, I asked myself what I was looking at. What is it? Was she dead? I leaned close to the fine lines of the woman’s face, her long arms, the shoulders of the man, the brim of his hat. I closed my eyes to meditate on the two people, and for a fraction of a second, in this fleeting, blind afterimage, I saw the woman’s wrists jerk upward. When I opened my eyes, I had the bleak thought that perception itself is a form of hallucination.