Good on Paper

by Rachel Cantor

  You sure the aliens aren’t making you queen of Venus? Durlene asked.

  They haven’t been in touch, I said.

  If so, I’ll have to leave you to it.

  No need to leave me to it, I said.

  My best bookkeeper is waiting for the Second Coming in a potato field, she said.

  Silence from the study. Paper jam? I dropped a stack of tea towels back into the laundry basket and brought the phone to the fax.

  You sign with someone else? Durlene asked. What did they offer? We’ll match their rate, more or less.

  I lifted the pages from the tray. Ten pages, numbered in fine European lettering. The A4 size, slightly longer, more narrow than our standard letter. Strange in my hand, that unfamiliar shape.

  Ten pages, there were no more.

  I got a job through a friend, I said, jerking open the paper tray and checking for jams.

  A friend, Durlene said. Is that a euphemism for competitor?

  I’d never sign with anyone else, I said. Now as to the question of my hourly rate …

  Ten pages? Maybe Romei was having technical difficulties. Maybe I was having technical difficulties. I unplugged the fax, plugged it in again.

  Shira? Are you there? Mr. Ferguson was quite upset.

  Why?

  You quit without notice! Durlene said. Look, I’m authorized to offer you an additional twenty-five cents an hour.

  The fax whirred and hummed but there were no more pages. I plopped onto the velveteen loveseat, pages on my lap.

  Fifty cents, Durlene said. That’s my final offer.

  •

  Ten pages. I didn’t know what to make of that.

  I put a Pop Tart in the toaster, then went to visit the Flying Girl.

  The Flying Girl was Ahmad’s most treasured possession, drawn by Jonah the day he died. I often snuck into the studio to see her. She flew above a light-soaked table, in a drawing of Jonah’s mother pointing (with a chicken bone) at a childlike me, floating over his mother’s head like an angel: fourteen-year-old Shira leaping for a volleyball.

  I’d immortalized Jonah’s drawing of the flying girl in “Tibet, New York,” a story I wrote about Jonah’s last weekend.

  I don’t understand, I said, sitting cross-legged before her like a devotee. Is Romei testing me? He’s in an almighty hurry, but he only sends ten pages? Am I translating on spec?

  Sometimes the Flying Girl spoke cryptically; today she just said, You’re dropping crumbs! Ahmad won’t like that!

  Oops.

  Have you looked at the pages? she asked.

  Not exactly, I said.

  You’re fearful, she said.

  Never!

  You know I’m right.

  I knew she was right.

  I needed courage. Because now that the pages were here, it was obvious: I would fail. I’d be revealed as the dilettante, the fraud I knew myself to be—an unworthy, pretending to be People of the Book. Romei would find someone else—a poet, someone with a track record. His former translators—a dashing Poet Laureate, a fashionable translator of literary theory—were dead, but surely they’d been survived by folks more qualified than I!

  Normally I could turn to Ahmad for a pick-me-up. He’d understand. But he was cranky, for some reason, on the subject of Romei: I wasn’t in the mood for another lecture about the UN. My best girlfriend Jeanette should have been good for a pep talk, but she wasn’t talking to me.

  Look out the window, the Flying Girl said. Your answer’s right there.

  Benny? I whispered.

  Silly rabbit! she said. Go!

  14

  SECOND COMING

  It had been two and a half decades since I was lyricist for the proto-punk band Gory Days (What’s behind Door Number Two? It had better not be you, you, you!). In our Den of Propinquity, we listened to qawwali and Raffi, but sometimes when I was alone I played the band’s one cassette—the relentlessly pornographic Second and Third Coming—tapping my tambourine ironically against my thigh. When I entered People of the Book, and heard that Benny’s raga had been replaced by a grunge band I didn’t recognize, I felt old. I also felt like pulling my ear drums out with my fingernails.

  And there she was, our sleepy connoisseur of noise, head resting on a pile of lit mags. Snoring, her hair no longer green but red, white, and blue. Dreaming up her next billboard, I was sure.

  Hello! I shouted in her ear. When she didn’t respond, I went behind the counter and switched CDs: out with the Bloody Monkeys, in with Nikhil Banerjee.

  Hey! Marie said, lifting her head. Who said you could do that?

  I’m looking for Benny. He around?

  No, she said, and put her head back down.

  Yo! Girlie! Look at me!

  Marie looked up, confused. I could see her T-shirt now: cotton-candy pink with glittered words: All-American Girl—which I guess explained the star-spangled hair.

  Where is he? It’s important.

  Out, she said, blinking.

  I took out my cell phone and called Benny. I could hear the phone ringing in the Annex, then I heard Benny—in stereo, as it were.

  Sleeping Beauty says you’re out, I said, glaring at Marie, who was upright now and pinching her cheeks. Benny laughed and walked down the stairs.

  Wanna share the joke with the rest of the class? I said, putting my phone away.

  Benny introduced us. I was a “talented writer,” Marie an “innovative artist.”

  Grab a table, he said. I’ll be with you in a sec.

  As I started toward Benny’s ad hoc café, I heard him say: You okay, pumpkin?

  To borrow my daughter’s language: it made me want to puke.

  Then, heaven help me, the girl began to cry.

  •

  It was ten long minutes before Benny made his way to the table.

  You didn’t say anything, did you? he asked.

  What could I have said? She said you were out.

  She’s on some new meds. They’re making her sensitive.

  Whatever, I thought, unsure why she should stir such emotions—in either of us, for I hadn’t mistaken the look in his eye.

  Two visits in two days! he said. To what do I owe the pleasure? That it? he asked, and walked two fingers toward my folder. I pulled it away.

  You can’t, can you? he asked.

  Not really.

  But maybe you can tell me what you think? Broad impressions?

  I, uh, haven’t read it yet.

  Benny raised his shaggy eyebrows.

  I was on my way to Joe’s, I said. I was going to read it there.

  And somehow you ended up here?

  To buy presents, I said. For Andi, and Ahmad.

  Presents?

  Books.

  I guessed that. You have Romei’s first work in I don’t know how many years and you’re buying presents?

  Something like that.

  Hmm, Benny said, grinning.

  What’s so funny?

  What are you getting them?

  I was hoping you’d suggest something.

  I have a new Selected Poems by Pessoa that Ahmad would like and, uh, three dozen Nancy Drews to pick from for Andi. Ahmad’s been buying them in alphabetical order, so if you start with the last book you should be safe …

  The last book being?

  The Witch Tree Symbol …

  You don’t know that!

  I do, he said.

  I laughed.

  But what a cad I am! he said, rising. Would you like some ginger beer?

  Sure, sweetie, that would be nice.

  Benny raised his eyebrows again. Sweetie? he seemed to ask. I gave him a look that said, Term of endearment, goofball. And blushed, damn my susceptible cheeks.

  •

  While Benny got the ginger beer, I got the books, and congratulated myself on a win-win excuse. Andi and Ahmad deserved to share in my good fortune. I threw in a Pessoa bio and The Wild Cat Crime for good measure.

  Benny returned with bot
tles and bendable straws, Marla following.

  You can’t tell me about the work, he said, but you can tell me how you’ll go about it, right? I’ve translated a few poems here and there, but I can’t say I have a method. I’ll bet you do.

  Marla had jumped onto Benny’s lap and was now batting his beard lazily with her paw.

  You want to know my method? he said.

  Is that weird?

  I laughed.

  I use a Buber-Rosenzweig leitwort approach, I said. Not as fancy as it sounds. When Buber and Rosenzweig translated the Bible into German, they always translated the same word the same way. They didn’t look for “pleasant-sounding” variations; they didn’t translate “according to context.” “White” didn’t become “cream” so it could rhyme with …

  Bream.

  Exactly. Words echoed the way words are supposed to, like leitmotifs in music.

  Benny was smiling.

  What? I asked.

  I know Buber, he said. I know Rosenzweig.

  Sorry, I said, blushing again. Of course you do.

  Marla by now was curled into herself and sleeping, a purring ouroboros.

  You used this approach for Dante? he asked.

  I caught flak for it in grad school, I said. You get stuck with certain words, which means sometimes you sacrifice sound or rhythm. Everyone’s all into Dante’s “sweet style,” so they had a problem with this. I thought it was worth it: words repeat in Vita Nuova, and when they do, they become more meaningful. Take the word “pilgrim,” like you mentioned last night—peregrino. Vita Nuova is full of pilgrims, right?

  The romei, among others.

  Exactly. There’s even a pilgrimming spirit! These images concentrate toward the end of the book, leading Dante to his final vision, which points him toward the path he must take—as a sort of pilgrim himself. But remember that earlier, when Love offers dubious advice about which path Dante should take, he does so in the guise of a pilgrim, forcing us, if we remember that image, to compare encounters and decide which path is best. We can’t do this if the earlier pilgrim is translated as “traveler,” as often he is.

  Benny was smiling again.

  I haven’t seen you so intent since that first time I heard you read!

  At Trixie’s! I said.

  The reading had been part of a short-lived series at a macrobiotic café, organized by my former writers’ group (The Purple People Eaters). It had to be Trixie’s because my first reading had also been my last. Before I went to India, before Andi.

  A banner day, Benny said, presumably because that’s when we met. But it’s getting late, he said, standing. Fascinating as this is, I gotta go.

  Or you’ll turn into a pumpkin? I thought, then remembered: there was only one pumpkin in this room.

  Maybe you’ll come in again tomorrow, and the day after? he said, leaning down to kiss my cheek. My heart lurched just a tiny bit, silly thing. I looked past Benny at Marie who, fully awake now, gave me the finger.

  Shall I tell you what I did behind my friend’s back?

  I shan’t.

  15

  THRESHOLD

  I sat down in Slice of Park to look over Romei’s pages for the first time. Prose and poems in more or less expected proportion. The pages clean, double-spaced, no typos or handwritten insertions. A subheading on page one: “The Call.”

  Odd.

  “The Call”? As in my essay, which Romei had read—he’d said so. Was he borrowing my idea? No one else I knew of had compared Vita Nuova to the hero’s journey, or maybe it was coincidence.

  The first pages of Vita Nuova recount Dante’s call to love. His first vision of the eight-year-old Beatrice (in delicate crimson) causes his spirits—vital, sensual, natural—to exclaim (again in Latin): Ecce deus fortior me, qui veniens dominabitur mihi! “Here is a god, more powerful than I, who comes to rule me.” This god being Love, the not-always-reliable mentor who accompanies Dante through much of his journey.

  Nine years later, Dante again encounters Beatrice. This time she greets him, which so overwhelms him, he has to retire to his room. Thinking of her, he falls asleep and has a vision: Love—a terrifying figure!—force-feeds Dante’s burning heart to a semi-comatose Beatrice, then carries her off to heaven. This time Dante’s call to love prompts him to write; he crosses that threshold by writing a sonnet (about Beatrice eating his burning heart) and sending it (“anonymously”) to poets of note. His response, in other words, is to become A Poet. What would be Romei’s “call,” I wondered, and what his response?

  I went to Joe’s to find out.

  PART THREE

  DECEPTION

  16

  A MOST SPIRITUAL COMMUNION

  Joe made me a double, offered it to me with a wink. I stepped over his infant twins, who were crawling among the regulars like puppies, begging sweets. I smiled at the Old Jewish Couple, the corpulent actor, removed the Reserved card from a front window table, and nodded at the boutique lady, who looked smashing in her painted silk blouse, and the Barnard student, absorbed in her Gramsci.

  I looked at Romei’s pages more carefully. They seemed to correspond with the first four “chapters” of Vita Nuova, chapters that comprise a mere six pages in my Italian edition. In these opening pages, Dante promises to transcribe events from his “book of memory”; Romei instead says he’ll rely on the “book of the mirror.” I guess this meant he’d look at his past subjectively. Not a radical or even an interesting claim.

  But he also said he’d “write of her that which has never been written of any other.” Now that was interesting, for it is with these words that Dante ends his tale. By making this promise up front, Romei says: Sorry, Dante, the superior poetic has arrived and it is mine. In saying so, he challenges Dante to a duel, naming me, of all people, as his second—to watch his back, tend his wounds, and bear witness to his victory.

  I considered getting a chocolate bomb, decided against it. Instead I left my belongings on the table, and ran across to the Love Drugstore to get a hard-backed notebook.

  Door Number Two: Notes for a New Life, is what I wrote on its cover. And on page one: “The Call.” Then I shut the notebook and began to read.

  •

  The first thing we learn about Romei in “The Call” is that he’s blocked: he can’t write. He’s wandering through Rome, regretting the emptiness of his mind, the impermanence of his income, when he sees, is struck out of his self-absorption by, Esther in the park. She sucks delicately on a finger, is absorbed in a notebook, the sun streams down onto her bobbed brown hair.

  Romei suffers often from unrequited love: there are women all over Rome with whom he cannot bring himself to speak. In Esther, however, he senses a weakness (una debolezza) that makes it possible for him to approach, a helpless carnality, a vulnerability that finds expression in tentative gestures, a tendency to put hands to face. He stands over her, blocking the sun (rather as, in my story, Paul Celan stood over my young protagonist Rose). Gold shines from her bright brown eyes.

  What are you writing? he asks, in English.

  A translation, she replies. Song of Songs, in her spare time, something in rather short supply (she gestures toward a child flying circles in the grass). Her expressions are particular, unforgettable. She has few perfections, yet somehow her parts—her fleshy nose and thick ankles, her sweater set (a Beatrice-inflected crimson), her chewed fingernails and readiness to satisfy his curiosity—add up to a compelling whole. Modest, yet direct; anxious, yet eager to please; decorous, yet wanton.

  Why does she do this? Romei wants to know.

  It’s the only thing she knows how to do, she says, as if apologizing.

  Why the Song of Songs?

  Because it’s the greatest love poem ever written, she says. Mutual, mysterious. Embodied and erotic, suggestive of a most spiritual communion (comunione, with all its religious undertones).

  I don’t remember that, he says. In fact, he’s never read the Song. The priests of his childhood forgot
to mention it, and as an adult he finds himself drawn to classical and medieval verse. Esther intuits his ignorance, “reminding” him that the Song concerns the innocent, impassioned love of a man and a woman.

  Here, she says, placing pages on her knee, I’ll show you. You read the part of the boy. I’ll read the part of the girl.

  He stands there stupidly.

  I have not guarded my vineyard, she says.

  He sits down quickly, close enough to read, approaching her “threshold,” or so he says.

  My dove, hiding in the shadow of the rock, he replies. Let me see the sight of you, for your voice entices me. You are lovely to behold.

  They continue, “the lover, the king” and his “sister-bride,” sitting ever closer on their bench, becoming drunk on poetry, seduced, the narrator says, much as Paolo and Francesca, swirling in the winds of Dante’s Inferno, were seduced by tales of adultery.

  Pretty story, the child murmurs, falling asleep at their feet.

  One imagines one knows what will happen next: Romei will cross Esther’s threshold—but in fact, we don’t know: this was all he’d sent.

  •

  I returned home, presents in hand, to find Ahmad reading a fat Indian novel on the couch, Andi leaning into him, reading a Nancy Drew. I was reminded, not for the first time, of their resemblance—not just their brown skin and shiny black hair, but their bright, smart eyes, their quick features and watchful expressions. I smiled, remembering how Aunt Emma, my father’s sister, had listened to the story of how I’d met Andi’s father in Delhi, looked back and forth between Andi and Ahmad, as if to say, You can’t kid a kidder.

  My family, my beautiful family!

  Ahmad’s sons thought him a monster, or so he’d been told—he wasn’t allowed to see them, not that he went back to Pakistan much. When the youngest is eighteen, he said vaguely, he’d get in touch. They’d understand: a parent never stops loving his child.