It proved to be more than road-weariness. I had learned to fear my enthusiasms – not only for the loneliness they produced, but the blindness in them. Like a sudden shower, they deepened the colours of the world; even the sidewalks grew rich and shining in the wet. But they drove everyone else inside. And when the sun returns, as it did, flickering through the bent blinds of my motel window, and the drunkenness of inspiration dries up, the colours fade, and solitude seems more desperate and unsure. ‘And so the morning comes‚’ Phidy wrote shortly before he died, ‘and as I have a thousand times in youth, I wonder at my foolishness of the night before.’ And certainly my mission seemed less grand in the late afternoon, as I drove clanking from the parking-lot of the all-day-breakfast diner with a heap of dust and broken clay in a glass box on the seat beside me. ‘My head rings like a cracked bell‚’ he muttered, and ‘my eyes blink aching against the sun which shines bright as new in the forgiving heavens.’ I was coming home. Inspirations, like shadows and nightmares – thankfully! – often vanish in the afternoon.
I crossed into Queens at dusk. The first of the car-lights glowed in the dusty summer. And after a clutter of traffic on the Avenue – amid late Sunday shoppers, and young men drinking the first drink of the early evening – I turned at the glass front of the Greek Café into poky 34th Street, eased between rows of parked cars to the pretty house with the false-brick facade, and the familiar shapes at supper within it. Familiar shapes – our solace lies in familiar shapes. (One of which just opened the front door, smelling of paints and tomato sauce.) The broad warm round of Susie’s cheeks; the tender hoops of her ribs; the soft shallow of waist between the last rib and the sharp of her hip, gathered in my hand. How passionately I turned at last to her in the hollow of my father’s death! Somehow the tide of my enthusiasms, old and revived, had begun to ebb again; and left behind its soft retreat something that looked very much like – happiness. (Love or happiness, take your pick; equally forgettable in the long run, but sweet none the less.) I was built for nothing better; and comforted myself (falsely perhaps) with Phidy’s assurance that ‘even Syme came, as we all do, like a lover to his insignificance’.
About the Author
Benjamin Markovits grew up in Texas, London and Berlin. He left an unpromising career as a professional basketball player to study the Romantics. Since then he has taught high school English, edited a left-wing cultural magazine and written essays, stories and reviews for, among other publications, the New York Times, the Guardian, the London Review of Books and the Paris Review. He has written four previous novels, The Syme Papers, Either Side of Winter, Imposture and A Quiet Adjustment. Markovits has lived in London since 2000 and is married with a daughter and a son. He teaches creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Copyright
This ebook edition published in 2010
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
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All rights reserved
© Benjamin Markovits, 2004
The right of Benjamin Markovits to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–26831–3
The Syme Papers Page 66
