by James Sallis
I think that Pavese loved women as you love us. I see that his images of death—always wed to sensuous detail, the smell of rich earth, caress of wind bringing rain, curve of a woman’s hip against the sky—are like your own, in your work. And I have to wonder exactly what your message may have been in sending this book.
I will be here, David, if you choose to return, and can. I won’t be waiting, I’m not able to go on doing that, but I will be here.
There was no signature. Something within me, something that was me, had gone suddenly heavy, become a black sun pulling everything into it: matter, energy, even light.
Dearest Gabrielle, I wonder too what my message may have been.
I wonder how one ever learns to sort through and make sense of the messages, signs, signals, meanings coming down all the time on our heads, weighing on us, piling up about us. While we go on trying to guide these frail crafts, our lives, into harbors we never see yet fiercely believe, have to believe, are there.
Low in the water and listing from the burden of memories, I sat in The Cambridge Arms, Piltdown, Alabama, looking out on a small Confederate cemetery and, beyond, a bright ribbon of interstate.
29
Piltdown, an exact replica of Oxford, England, had been created in the late forties by a man named Neal Lafferty who conjured it up out of whole cloth, creatio ex nihilo, a monument to man’s indomitable will to be, well, indomitable.
Brought to you by the same people who at enormous, repetitive effort and expense filled in swampland never meant for human habitation and called it New Orleans.
Lafferty had stepped off the boat from Ireland poor as potatoes a couple generations before and within six years gone from helping build houses at a dollar a day to buying them up cheaply with his savings when the region’s economy plummeted and, much later, reselling dear. When an air force base came to Piltdown, Lafferty’s construction company got the housing contract and doubled the town’s size with an eastward warren of dozens of identical little frame houses, row after row of them, like carrots in a garden.
The base lasted twelve years before peacetime shut it down, leaving the little houses a ghost town. Many of them were vandalized, others (host for migrant workers, vagabonds, late-night teenage parties) burned; they all were crumbling. Eventually Negroes moved in and claimed the houses by squatter’s rights, plugging holes with tar paper, scrap lumber and old tin signs.
Lafferty then turned his attentions westward, where he built, to scale, a perfect replica of central Oxford, this by municipal decree some years later becoming Piltdown, leaving the old town hall, shops, post office and churches abandoned there at the edge of things like a shed skin, like so many cast-off shells.
No one knew why Lafferty had undertaken this massive and costly project, or why he might have chosen as model, of all places, Oxford; and he went to his deathbed without saying, with (when in Lafferty’s last hours the town’s mayor asked) a tight smile on his lips. One local legend had it that, from his hatred of the English, Lafferty had planned, after constructing it, to set torch to the town, but that upon seeing it completed, looking upon the beauty of it, as its creator, he could not bring himself to do so.
Some of this I knew from hearsay, Piltdown being a huge tourist draw. The rest I learned from brochures in my motel room and from an hour or two spent with afternoon talkers at the motel bar.
Motel bars at three in the afternoon are bleak, desolate places, deserts for souls turning to stone, where even the light seems somehow wrong. This one, after a late-lunchtime rush and a few stragglers-cum-historians, emptied out all at once, leaving only myself, a young blond barkeep wearing a muscle shirt and dwelling in some California of the mind, and, at a table by the crackleglass front window, the dark lady Shakespeare wrote his sonnets for.
She was reading a newspaper. Every few minutes she’d take a bite out of a sandwich in a serving basket on the table, replace it, and refold the paper to another section. There were also a plastic insulated pitcher of coffee and matching mug.
I drank another beer and watched as she finished sandwich, coffee and paper simultaneously. Then she lifted her head, shook back her hair and looked around. Our eyes met. She smiled.
That hair was so black it seemed to soak up light from the window and leave the rest of the room in shades of gray. Her skin was dark, too—Creole blood, most likely—her eyes a startling blue. She wore a loose-cut white linen suit, pale pink cotton shirt, darker pink tie.
I walked over and introduced myself. Her name was Jeanne—like Baudelaire’s dark lady. We moved to a booth and ordered drinks, beer, white wine, from Mr. California.
“Are you staying at the motel?” she asked.
I said that I was, and returned the question.
“Sort of,” she said with a half-second frown. Over her shoulder I watched, on a neon sign, a rainbow of crystal-clear vodka glittering with bright colors arc again and again over the head of a Russian foot soldier who looked remarkably like Maurice Chevalier. “I work here. Again: sort of.”
She peered at me, a single huge eye, through the lens of her wine.
“I sing in the club. I’m on the circuit: here one week, at some other lounge, maybe over in Jackson or Memphis, next week.”
“Like it?”
“Beats cutting hair or checking groceries,” she said. Then: “I love it. I really do. But the afternoons will simply kill you.”
“Some people’s lives are all afternoons.”
She looked at me for a time without saying anything. The vodka rainbow arced over the Russian’s head, arced again, a visible heartbeat.
“I don’t think I knew that,” she said finally. “But you’re absolutely right.”
She reached over and rested her hand lightly, momentarily, against my own. Her nails were cut short; there was clear polish on them.
“I have to get ready for happy hour. Will you come with me?”
I paid, and we walked out into an assault of sunlight, along a corridor formed by the overhang of the motel’s second floor, and around back, where first Dumpsters, then volcanic asphalt, then a stand of oak and evergreen took over.
At her room I waited as she showered. The TV was on with the volume turned low, something old, everything charcoal and silver; she told me she kept it on all the time, for company. I held the beer she’d brought me from a closet-size kitchenette and sat looking around at a toppled stack of books by the bed, fantasy novels mostly; cast-off clothes on the floor in a corner by the bathroom, her guitar case patched with duct tape. It all reminded me uncomfortably of my own life, not so much misspent as somehow misplaced.
Shortly she came out of the bathroom, hair still wet, nipples erect. She held out a hand and I gave her the beer. She drank and handed it back.
“Do you have time to come along? It’s only for a couple of hours. We could get dinner or something then, before I start my regular gig at nine. If you want to, that is.”
When I said yes, of course, it was clear to us both that something far deeper had been decided. Signs again. Hidden meanings, messages. She bent down and kissed me, breasts swaying. One bore a scar, like a twined worm, from nipple to armpit.
She went to the closet and pulled on black jeans, a black sweatshirt, and oversize kelly-green denim shirt. Picked up her guitar case.
“I take requests,” she said.
30
Deep in the night I woke thinking of Gabrielle.
“Are you okay?” Jeanne said beside me.
“I’m sorry. Restless, I suppose. I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“It’s all right. I don’t sleep much anyway.”
She got beers from the kitchenette and brought them back to bed. Periodically lights, some dim, others vivid, swept across the back of the room’s heavy drapes, as though another world were trying to break through into this one. Traffic was a far-off rumble, like the sea.
She drank, and rolled the cool bottle along the side of her breast, where the scar was.
<
br /> The room was lit indirectly by the TV screen faced away from us; the flicker of scene changes plucked at the periphery of our vision. Its volume was full off now.
“Are you married?” she said. “Or have you been?”
I shook my head, put my hand on her narrow waist. She covered it with her own.
“Neither have I. I’m thirty-one, and there’s so very much I haven’t done. I’ve only seen this one little cluttered corner of the world. I haven’t made much effort to understand things that always seemed far beyond my reach, or to become a better human being in any way that matters. Just tread water mostly, tried to stay afloat. I’ve never loved anyone, or been loved.”
“You’re an excellent musician, Jeanne. There’s tremendous feeling in what you do, every chord or run, the pitch of your voice. And understanding of a sort, too, even if it’s intuitive, instinctive, rather than intelligible.”
“But that always came easy, like breathing. Or like the way I look: I didn’t have much to do with either. I’m attractive, I can play guitar passably and sing. Pretty thin for a biography, and not much of an epitaph. There’s one last beer. Split it?”
“I’ll go, this time.”
We sat quietly drinking, passing the bottle back and forth, and after a while she said, “Two years ago they removed a tumor from my breast. I went to my doctor for a checkup and wound up that same afternoon on the operating table. It was the size of a marble, they said, and benign. There was nothing more to worry about. They’d caught it in time.”
After a moment she went on.
“I think sometimes we know things we can’t know, things that don’t make daylight sense, or any sense at all. And we realize how absurd it is for us to believe them. But, still, we know, we just know.”
She took my hand in her own and traced the curve of the pale, fine scar along her breast with my finger. The nipple stiffened.
“You’re the first man I’ve been with since then. Somehow despite whatever they told me, I always knew that when I had a man again, when I finally made love again, the cancer would come back.”
She handed me the last of the beer.
“I know how ridiculous this sounds, how crazy it must seem to you. And please don’t be frightened. But I can feel it already, like a flower slowly blooming, opening dark petals, inside me.
“Will you make love to me again, David?”
31
We had breakfast and parted. Jeanne had shopping to do, she said, and would be leaving that afternoon for Gulfport and the Holiday Inn there. I sat for a while by the pool. It was nine o’clock, cloudy, and a little like one of those science fiction movies where a few survivors are clinging to the wreckage, living out their days in the dry husk of civilization.
Around front, a chartered Greyhound pulled in. I watched through gaps in the weathered wood fence as twenty or so tourists debarked. All Asian, but a curious mix: Koreans, Thais, a couple of Cambodians, scattered Vietnamese, mainland Chinese in both western and traditional dress. They waited silently in file as the driver went into the motel office and came back out. He stepped along the line, passing keys out.
I didn’t think Jeanne’s fantasy (if, finally, it were fantasy) much stranger than others I’ve known. We all create such fictions out of the stuff of our lives, small myths, private lies, that help us go on, help us remain human, reassure us that we understand our own tiny fragment of the world. But most of us don’t share these myths with strangers. Most of us don’t share them at all. And we believe them while knowing at the same time that they are fictions.
Maybe that’s all my vision of contemplative life, of a life devoted to trying to understand, to the pursuit of balance and beauty, came down to. A private lie, a myth no longer relevant or useful. After all, here I indisputably was. And it was neither balance nor beauty I pursued. The old game, as Holmes said, once again afoot.
I spent the rest of the day afoot as well, treading the streets of Piltdown, in and out of bakeshops and butcher’s and haberdasher’s and milliner’s, from time to time looking off towards the Alabama horizon almost expecting to see thatched-roof cottages there at the town’s edge.
Or men with scythes, perhaps, dark against the sun.
32
I finally drove, through Montgomery and Mobile, alongside Biloxi and Gulfport and over the rim of Lake Pontchartrain, into New Orleans, arriving there after many hours and one terrible meal tasting indiscriminately of salt, stagnant oil and flour, amazed that Lee Raincrow’s decrepit VW had made it here, at three in the morning.
I took the Orleans/Vieux Carre exit off I-10, cut across to Ramparts and down to Esplanade and parked there, in front of a two-story Greek Revival mansion chopped up into half a dozen or so apartments and painted lime green. I walked back up into the Quarter and wandered its narrow streets for a while to unwind. Sidewalks worn smooth and concave like old stone stairs and canting abruptly towards street or stoop. Corner groceries crammed with everything from headache remedies to fifths of Glenlivet to sandwich counters serving up po-boys and muffulettas. Balconies drenched in ferns. Wrought-iron railings, fences and gates behind which you sometimes catch a glimpse of cool, secret inner courtyards. New Orleans is one of the few places in the States that always feel much the same, year after year—whatever façades they slap up on these century-old buildings, however they jam the streets full of T-shirt and poster shops, massage parlors, fast-food bistros done up in Art Deco or lavender and chrome.
I walked slowly over to Decatur and ambled by the French Market: sharp scent of spices, the deeper earth-smell of rotting fruit and vegetable. Had coffee and beignets at the Café du Monde. Sat by the river watching ships and lights and the long curved spine of the bridge across to the Westbank.
I thought how strange it was to pass directly from Piltdown’s antique Oxford to this other ancient place. Something like taking off a coat, turning around and putting it back on. Only in America, as they say.
I thought about assignments and missions and fool’s errands.
I thought about those things hard, and for a long time.
Then I walked back to the car, drove uptown to what once had been The Fontainebleu and was now called Fountain Bay (and by the time of my next visit would have become Bayou Plaza), and took a room.
All along Tulane, motels, restaurants and office buildings were boarded up, abandoned. A thrift store had moved into the huge grocer’s across Carrollton. Several partially demolished service stations had become used-car lots with six or seven cars, and a proprietor in a folding lawn chair, on them.
“Length of stay?” the desk clerk inquired.
“Undetermined,” I told her.
I was given number twelve in The Annex, a string of cabana-like rooms surrounding the pool inside the motel’s larger structure. It was like those old cartoons where a Chaplinesque little man sticks to his rights and remains in his modest house while skyscrapers bloom and sway all about him. It was also like moving to another, uninhabited country. No one else seemed to be booked into The Annex, the city’s sounds penetrated hardly at all, and only the sighting of an occasional plane through the rift overhead assured me of the existence of a city, civilization, other living beings more or less like myself.
I hauled in luggage and book bag, showered, and lay on the bed product-testing TV, cable and remote tuner.
Of viable channels, four were showing movies (two mysteries, one horror, one martial arts), another couple were given over to such classics of American culture as “I Love Lucy,” “Mister Ed,” and “My Favorite Martian,” one was all news and public information, three were soaps, and the rest ranged from talk shows with impossibly earnest moderators, to British comedies and Japanese cartoons, to documentaries on the opening of the Panama Canal, prison rodeos and the Harlem Renaissance.
I picked up the phone, called the desk and asked to be connected to room service. After some initial stammering I was put on hold and listened to a lovely rendition of (I think) “Autumn Leav
es.” Then the music shut off abruptly, as though it had fallen through a trapdoor, and a voice asked if it could help me. I said it could and that I’d like two beers. There was a pause but, mercifully, no more elevator music. Some conversation offstage, or off-mike, as it were. Okay, two beers, the voice finally said. Where do they come? Twelve, I told him. I didn’t add: The Annex. By this time I considered the whole thing a bold experiment.
Nevertheless, five minutes later a fiftyish man in jeans and T-shirt showed up at my door with two Millers, a napkin and a chilled glass on a tray. The Easter Bunny wouldn’t have been any bigger surprise. I tipped him seriously, poured and, propped with pillows, settled back on the bed, leaving the TV’s volume off, watching from some far-off place the rush of images across its screen.
I thought back to all my years in and out of the country, in a kind of exile really, when I was able to look back on the States for long periods of time as an outsider, gathering my knowledge of its affairs from French- and Spanish-language newspapers, local (wherever local happened to be) radio and television, rumor, armed-service broadcasts and the BBC. I’d known a different America then. Maybe it was a different America.
Assignments and missions and fool’s errands.
Lights were on all over town, Johnsson had said.
No more Cold War, no Big Bad Bear. When society has no further need of the warriors it has created, do they perhaps come to be perceived as a threat? Does that society come to believe that it must reject them, isolate them, find some way to set them against one another?
Were there others still at my back?
I’d seen no signs of such purposeful companionship since that young man’s death. Johnsson had seemed to think it was all over, my dance card filled. Yet he had also voiced concern for Gabrielle’s safety.
Maybe Michael was just who and what he claimed, and it was all over.
