by Iyer, Pico
“No time, alas. The thesis looms.”
“Yes, I do remember that part, too.”
She was opening the book by the table—Vineland—to see if it offered any clues.
“What about you? Anyone in your life?”
“You know me,” she said, looking up. “I’ve always got someone wonderful in my life. The only trouble is, he never comes out of my head and asks me to dance.”
She straightened the narrow straps on her dress, and he felt she was about to say something more. She didn’t, but looked at him directly, almost plaintively.
“He will one day.”
“One day when I’m eighty years old, perhaps.” Then, suddenly, there was a terrible crash from next door, a great silence and, after what seemed like minutes of no movement, the sound of whispers, people picking themselves up and conferring, as if about to make a new home in the middle of the debris.
“No thoughts of coming back, then?”
“That would be going backwards, don’t you think?”
“Yes. I suppose it would.”
He went into the kitchen to fetch the salad and when he came out, she was saying, in response to the commotion next door, “I do so love it here. All these places called Xanadu and Lotusland, aren’t there? With frightful battles going on behind the bougainvillea.”
“Like anywhere,” he said. “Only in England, it’s the nicer parts people always hide.”
“Yes,” she said, not sounding very convinced. “It’s what you’re writing on, isn’t it?”
“In a way. The idea that what we have inside us are not just repressed demons and all that, but something radiant. Exalted.”
“Mmm,” she said, suddenly fascinated by her lettuce. “Wherever did you get this dressing?”
It was a way of telling him, in effect, why he could never go back to England: anything can be forgiven there except the longing to be better.
“More wine?” he said, but she was lost to him now, and he realized she was already thinking about how she could cut the meeting short. He’d startled her, frightened her, by sounding serious, and now she couldn’t be sure he wouldn’t do it again.
“I wish it weren’t so late,” she said, the minute she was finished. “I have a million things to do today.”
“You can’t stay for dessert?”
“I only wish I could.”
She looked at her watch, though there was no need of that, and when she’d finished helping him take the plates into the kitchen, she picked up the scarf she’d draped across the sofa when she’d come.
“My love to Martine, please, when you’re home.”
“Absolutely. I’m sure she sends hers back to you.”
“And to you, too,” he said, and she turned away. “You’re sure you’re taken care of for the day?”
“Oh, more than taken care of, thank you.” She knew her part, her voice was saying; she’d soldier on regardless.
The next day, as he sat at his desk, thumbing through the book about Shiraz—night had fallen, and he hadn’t got anything planned (he’d only told Nicki he was “tied up” to show her she couldn’t have her way in everything)—he heard a knock on the door by the back steps and he looked up from what he was reading.
“Surprise,” said the familiar voice. “You weren’t expecting me.”
“I wasn’t.”
In someone else he’d have imagined she was here to check on him; but with her, it was almost as if she were trying to catch herself by surprise. If she didn’t make plans, her reasoning went, she’d have no time to be apprehensive.
“I’ve come at a bad time.”
“Not at all. A usual time. I was just at work.”
She came into the room and looked at the books that were scattered across the desk.
“What on?”
“The usual. How the haunted are dangerous in some way. And how their fear, their anger, comes out at anything that happens to be in their path.”
She looked at him to see what exactly he meant, and he said, “That’s why the Islamic world is such a threat to us,” and, deciding that she’d be satisfied with the answer, she went past him into the living room. As she did so, he saw her shoulders stiffen.
My ex-girlfriend’s sister,” he said, realizing she’d caught a trace of an earlier visitor. “Here to report on me to London.”
“This isn’t the one you’re taken by?”
“No. Not exactly.”
She turned around to look at him—she had to protect herself, she’d said on the phone—and then, as if determined to put her reservations behind her, she went on to the couch and claimed a seat.
“You want to see what I’ve brought for us to look at?”
“I’d love to.” From where he stood he could see candles, cards, books, all in one undifferentiated pile in the overnight bag she carried with her; she had enough to keep her going for days.
“There’s this,” she said, and as she pulled out a glossy catalogue from the bag, he realized it was an invitation to sit. She wouldn’t run away just now. When she handed over the pamphlet, he saw a picture of the mosque in Jerusalem, under the title, Hidden Treasures. Inside were glossy pictures of all the romantic old cities in the world—Cuzco, Angkor, Luang Prabang. “There’s also this one,” she said, picking out a very similar catalogue from the Bay Area, and he turned through it to see misty sunset pictures of Petra, Dunhuang, Isfahan. The places she’d studied in college, he thought (the places she heard about her sister going to). Around the margins were scribbled phone numbers and names here and there; certain sentences in the text had been highlighted with a yellow pen.
“So many places you’ve never been.”
“They’re nicer than any of the places I have been.”
She looked away, and he said, to pick them up, “Some juice? Any wine? What can I get you?”
“Just you would be plenty.” She looked at him, and now it was his turn to look away.
“It’s getting dark. Maybe we should go out while there’s still light?”
She smiled, as if some supposition had been confirmed, and then walked ahead of him down the steps to the beach. When she got to the sand, she leaned down to untether one shoe, and then the other, and handed them to him as she went off, away from him, down the beach, following the trail that the ocean had made, hopping back now and then when the tide came in around her feet.
She walked and walked, away from him, all the way down to the point. Then, when she got there, she scrambled up onto the rocks— he could see from where he followed—as if to gauge what was ahead, around the corner, versus (she turned back now) what was behind her, where she’d come from. Then, as if she’d come to some decision, she started walking back to him. By the time they were a little apart, the sun was fire on the water and her face was gold. It looked as if she’d walked free of something, and her face was open now, relaxed.
“You like to stay where it’s dry,” she said, and he, not knowing what it meant, said, “Only when it’s light.”
They went back up into the room, now dark, and when she sat on the sofa, she curled her bare feet under her, a spot or two on her skirt where the water had caught her.
Then, closing her eyes, she put her head back on the sofa. “It’s nice here. Safe.”
“You’re where you’re meant to be.”
She opened her eyes and smiled; after nightfall—the books on his desk said—you can be anyone you choose.
“I have a question,” he said, since it seemed she was relaxed and a better moment might never come.
“What’s that?”
“What’s the nicest thing that ever happened to you when you were young?”
She thought and thought, as if not many candidates came to mind, then said, “You first.”
“I lost my way in the woods and got saved by a fairy god-mother.”
She looked at him strangely—he had no more idea of why he’d said it than she did—and then, very slowly, “Someone called me �
��Dove,’ once. In fifth, no sixth, grade.”
“Because of your eyes?”
“Not only that.” He remembered how she’d said she’d never fit in here.
“That’s strange. I was just reading this.” He picked up the book he’d taken out of the library after McCarthy’s lecture and, in a voice not quite his, and not quite McCarthy’s, read,
“ ‘O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs, let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice; for sweet is thy voice, and thy countenance is comely.’ ”
She looked at him as if to see what he’d intended, and he said, “I hadn’t recalled . . .” and then stopped. Hadn’t recalled how the words sounded in the King James translation, he might have said. Or hadn’t recalled how he had such a gift for saying the wrong thing with her.
“I used to write, too,” she said, as if forgiving him the intrusion.
“Poems?”
“Stuff. Silly things.”
“What kind of things?”
“I’d make a poem, and every line would start with one of the letters of my name. So the first line would begin with a ‘C’ and the next line with an ‘A’ and the next line with an ‘M’ and so on. A verse form for narcissists.”
“And your parents didn’t approve of it?”
“My parents only approved of me when I was sitting in my prison at home.”
She was coming into focus, as the darkness in the room intensified, but he was careful: jog her once, or say too much, and, as in a Polaroid, the image would blur forever.
“When I was young,” she said, and the words carried strongly in the unlit room, seemed more full of weight, “I always thought that every one of us had a place, a secret place, even if we never found it. Like déjà-vu in advance.”
“You don’t think that now?”
“Now I think you’ve got to be very lucky to find your place. It’s certainly not going to come and find you.”
“But it could be something else, couldn’t it? A book. A song. Even a person.”
“I believed that once upon a time and I almost died of sadness.”
It was the kind of thing she said that sounded as if it came from one of her plays. And yet the way she said it was not studied, but startled.
“The Sufis believe that everyone has a home, hiding out somewhere in the world, and all we have to do is find a key.”
“They obviously haven’t met my mother,” she said.
“She can’t be that bad.”
“She’s worse. She’s evil.”
And then, realizing, perhaps, that she’d gone too far, she fumbled in her bag and brought out another offering, wrapped in dark-blue paper. “I brought this, too.”
He went across the room to turn on the light, to see what she was extending, and when he got back to her he saw she’d unwrapped what looked to be a dome, midnight-blue, with gold stars around it: a desert sky. Then, getting up again to fetch a box of matches, he applied a light to the wick of the dark-blue sphere, went over to turn off the light and they were alone in a lighted room, reduced to a shining dome.
“It’s beautiful.”
“I thought it would remind you of your poems.”
“The best part of them, perhaps.”
She sat back again, rested her head against the couch, and said, “If you could have anything in the world, right now, what would it be?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m fairly content, I think.”
“There must be something.” Nothing more distrusted in California than the impression of settledness.
“I suppose I’d like to make a discovery in my field. See something or find something that nobody’s ever seen before.”
“You’re such an optimist,” she said, as if looking at some souvenir he’d brought back to her from Spain.
“It’s not me, it’s them. They’re apostles of hope, the way I see it.”
“ ‘Apostles of hope,’ ” she said, as if turning the phrase round in her hands. “You have such a bright way of looking at things.”
“And you? If you could have anything?”
“I’d get a new me. A new life.” She didn’t say it dramatically, or with any emphasis; just matter-of-factly, as if it were something she needed from the supermarket. He extended an arm along the back of the sofa, and she came a little closer, rested her head against it. Since the evening on the mountain, they’d stepped back in a way, but closer, too, as if passing up the illuminated entrances on a hillside to search for something darker, deeper down.
“So,” she said, and her eyes were closed and she was clearly as relaxed as she would ever be, “tell me about this woman you’re taken with.”
“I’ll tell you about Martine. That’s safer.”
She said nothing, so he continued.
“She was bright, funny, full of life. Though she liked to hide it behind a tough exterior.”
“Sounds familiar.”
“And we got on well enough for a while.”
“And then?”
“Then, I don’t know. I think there was always something in me— a restlessness, a kind of distance, perhaps—that was unsettling to her. She used to say that I was faraway even when I was next to her. I’ll never forget this one time, in Turkey, soon after college, we were staying near the Hagia Sofia. And as soon as the day’s first call to prayer went up, I went out, to see what the mosque looked like at dawn. I wanted to see it at its purest. When I came back, it must have been seven-thirty, eight, I realized I’d done the wrong thing: gone out to see the mosque when I should have been with her.”
“Did she say anything?”
“Not then. We went on with our tour, had our breakfast. But a few weeks later, after we got back to England, there was this call, in the middle of the night, and it must have been a boy in his teens, very shy, polite even, but persistent. ‘Mister Macmillan, I’m calling to say I saw your friend Marty last week. We had quite a big time together. She told me she was going to call you herself, but I didn’t think she would, so that’s why I’m calling. To tell you we had a big time together.’ He didn’t need to say any more, though he did, being young, and somehow I felt that he was being completely straight with me, was an innocent in his way. And Turkey had been the cause of it.”
“So you let her go?”
“The opposite. I held her closer than I’d ever done before. We went, the next time we had some time free, to Cephalonia, this amazing island from Homer where you can feel the gods and ghosts of Odysseus’s time all around you. A dazzling blue sea and white buildings everywhere so you just disappear, fade into the brilliant light, and olive trees and shepherds that might as well have been there four thousand years ago. It was beautiful. But it was already too late, we both of us knew. Something had been broken, and there was no putting it back together again.
“The last day, in Athens—we were back in the Plaka, in a small hotel—she said, ‘I’ll never be complicated enough for you. I couldn’t be. I’ll never give you something to get your teeth into.’ And that was more or less the end.”
“You drifted apart?”
“Not in so many words, but yes.”
“And Rumi became your consolation.”
“Not exactly. But he was reliable. And reliably uplifting. That was another thing Martine could never get over. ‘How can I ever compete with some legendary old man who’s been dead for donkeys’ years? I’ll never be as mysterious as he is. I can’t be. He’s got seven hundred years on me.’ If there were anything she could do, she said, she’d do it. But there wasn’t.”
“So how can I compete?”
“By giving me something he couldn’t. By being yourself.”
He’d done it again. Like when he’d leaned in to kiss her goodbye on the beach, or reached for the Song of Songs when he’d only been trying to pass the time. Somehow with her he seemed to have a genius for saying more than he intended and coming out with lines he’d have laughed at in the Cine
plex.
She turned her head a little and kissed him now, deeply, imploringly, as if to try to summon up someone deep in hiding. Her hair fell around their cheeks, their mouths, and they were tented in its golden fall.
Then, remembering how quickly she took flight, he pulled back a little. “Maybe we should wait.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, as if the fault was hers. “It’s been a long time since I was intimate with anyone.”
The words she used, like the Alice band with which she kept her hair in place, her high-buttoned dress, its whites and pastels—all of it issued a warning more forcibly than anything she said. As if she were a vase only inches behind a velvet curtain. Move one inch too far, and she’d be broken.
And yet her face, when she forgot about herself, was filled with an ancient light and clarity. He thought of the time, as a boy, when his mother had dragged him around the Uffizi in Florence, and he, a typical schoolboy of nine or ten, had yawned conspicuously with each new room, and looked in the other direction. Then they’d come into room 10, the madonnas of Botticelli, and something had caught at him. It wasn’t the cackling cherub at the center of each painting; that seemed almost a joke. And yet the girl who cradled him in every picture was almost painfully alive. Half glowing with a mother’s pride, half holding back, as if startled by the light with which she’d been entrusted. Half moving towards the Angel Gabriel, to hear what he was whispering; and yet half withdrawing, as if not sure if she wanted this new destiny.
He hadn’t known at the time that Botticelli is the obligatory favorite of every romantic schoolboy; hadn’t even heard that Simonetta Vespucci’s uncle was the one to find America. He’d known nothing about the Angel Gabriel’s connection with Mohammed. Yet what he’d seen had been more real than any of that: a girl awakened to a light she hadn’t known about, and fearful, disconcerted, now, lest her life would never be the same.
“What are you most afraid of in the world?” she said, and the spell, for the moment, was broken.
“Of losing myself. You?”
“Of losing everything. Being alone.”
“Being abandoned, in a way.”
“I guess,” she said, and then turned away, as if the interlude was over. “Anyway, that’s safer than any of the other answers.”
