by Anne Garréta
You stood in your boxer shorts, toothbrush in hand, when the telephone rang. One might say it’s too good to be true, that your memory is playing tricks on you, reassembling the same shot in the film of that night. Perhaps. But why do you see, so clear and distinct, the blue stripes of the shorts you were wearing?
Here you go again out of your room, taking the elevator back down, threading the maze of hallways toward room number you don’t remember what. There is something rather delightful, you think, in journeying thus in the middle of the night, walking past door after door, and knowing that a woman is waiting for you behind one of them. It’s a scene out of a very bad novel or a bad film, and the professional mechanic in you relishes it. You’d think it was a parody. And you the willing character. You have taken a seat in a driving school two-cylinder, with two steering wheels, two sets of pedals. The gears shift with terrible scrapings, reverse is barely distinguishable from fourth, the suspension is abominable, and the landscape goes by slowly. The other driver pumps the accelerator and the brakes with both feet at the same time. What a ride.
And before calling you, she has taken a double dose of sleeping pills, or so she tells you…! You’re not even sure there’ll be enough fuel to reach the next step… She is awaiting, furthermore, an important phone call that she would like to be confidential. You’ve never seen a driver so terrified of the road she’s taken. Has she only ever driven on an uncongested highway, on flat terrain, and with automatic transmission and cruise control on top of it…? Let’s engage.
It was as though she was witnessing the spectacle of her own stunned desire. The suspicion even crossed your mind that she was faking it, faking the revving up of the engine, as one does when sitting in a cardboard box and going vroom vroom, pretending to be racing in the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
Her body, naked in the light seeping in through the slightly open curtains, a slender body, tensed up in your hands. Her gaze, fixed on you without pause, without abandon, looms in your memory. It seemed as if she had taken leave of her body and left it in your hands, reacting noticeably but almost automatically to your investigations and proddings. You were tempted to blindfold her, but concluded it would have required compelling her to surrender entirely. To escape her gaze, you lied down on top of her. She instantly wrapped her legs around you, and you buried your face in her hair.
Then you started to get bored. You were tempted almost irresistibly to think of something else. It bewildered you to find yourself sentenced to spend this absurd night in the arms of a mechanical doll whose springs each of your oscillations seemed to wind up, who clung to you but did not move you, and whom you despaired of ever moving. You were freewheeling downhill, and at the intoxicating speed of this ride, the failures of the suspension, far from giving you energy, rattled you. Bad trip. And what idiotic point of honor forbade you from wresting yourself from her arms and ditching her to return to your own bed where you wouldn’t be watching yourself neither sleep nor dream?
You know that you fell asleep. But later, filtering through your sleep, a worry woke you with a jolt. That upon opening your eyes, you would see her watching you, see her face leaning over you, spying on your sleep. Insomnia would have been preferable to that.
You asked her what she was doing. She replied that she was watching you sleep. You surreptitiously glanced at your watch. In thirty minutes the two alarms she had set would go off, signaling the agreed upon hour of your departure. Did she remember the deadline that she had so imperatively ordained, had made you promise to respect, and which would signal game over?
You asked her if she was in the habit of watching the people who shared her bed sleep. She said no.
There is a blank in your memory that extends until the moment when she took your hand and brought it against her pubis. You let her position your hand, curious to discover just where she wanted to lead it. More curious still when you saw her close her eyes as soon as she slipped it between her legs. Your fingers sliding along the natural slope, spreading the labia open, you feel her shadowed and palpitating wetness. Her eyelids quiver but remain closed, even when your fingers force their way in and pull back, losing themselves in the folds of her flesh. You listen to her, taking care not to rush her pleasure. Breaking the rhythm when you sense she is getting too close to coming, slipping from one caress to another without leaving her the time to settle in. How strange that she would now let you play her thus, and that her body would follow all the detours you were taking. At what point would she take hold of your hand to force it, compel it to finish, drive it into her flesh and with a thrust of the hips deliver herself from the unbearable elusiveness of pleasure?
But it’s the duration imparted to remembrance that, coming to a close, now rushes you to conclude.
The alarm went off. You remember interrupting your unfinished caress. You remember E’s surprise and reminding her of the promise she had exacted from you. You remember putting your clothes back on, retracing your steps down the still-deserted corridors. Vanished from your memory: what you can’t have then helped but think of that night whose constrained coldness, whose paradoxical cruelty and vain anxiety today astonish you.
[Night 3]
H*
All sorts of people could be found in the club where you used to spend your nights collecting (Flaubertian tendency) the necessary information for a little book you were working on. Your passion for exactitude had even led you to take a job there as a DJ. You were thus usefully and gainfully employing your insomnia. From behind your turntables you were able to gather observations that, to make yourself feel better about the ennui or disgust that would sometimes take hold of you, you told yourself would contribute a precious mass of data—realistic, psychological, social, anecdotal, urban, etc.—to your current and future works. You were observing methodically.
One night, as you observed and officiated as usual, a stylish, seductive creature passed by your elevated platform in the company of the infamous bitch who managed the club, and who, as on a stage one exaggerates voice and gestures in order to better signal to the public the passion being represented, stopped theatrically and half fell over as she grabbed hold of the ramp that ran the length of the stairs leading to your station, and cried out in a fictitious address to the owner, in the classic stage technique of the private aside, but loud enough for you to hear, “Look at your DJ. He’s hot!”
And suspending all movement, she froze as if in invincible ecstasy at your feet.
Recognizing the meaning of the hyperbole and pantomime, but astonished at the nature of the exclamation, you smiled in return, as one smiles at a comedy threatening to slip into farce.
The boss was kind enough to set her straight with regards to your gender, a revelation that seemed neither to pique nor disconcert your actress, still swooning spectacularly in a pose that showed off the lithe line of her chest, her throat, her shoulders mostly uncovered by the décolletage of her dress, which didn’t strike you as too trashy.
You invited her, as one does, to join you, offered her the high bar stool set close to the edge of the abyss from which you had pulled her, and ordered her a drink on your tab. She sat down, crossing her slender legs, hooking the high heel of one of her shoes on the rung of the stool, took out a pack of cigarettes from her purse (a purse for a night out, one of those little black silk pockets), taking one between her fingers with long and painted nails, bringing it slowly to her mouth outlined with a lipstick discreet enough that you only just now noticed it, at the end of the scan that led your gaze from her thighs, where her purse was resting, up to her mouth.
If you were reading the scene correctly, she was playing the Blue Angel, and other dramas of the femme fatale or the woman fatally struck with love at first sight. The next stage directions would indicate something like: the hero (gentleman, thug, or young Professor Unrat) lights the heroine’s cigarette. Which you did before diving back to your turntables from which the creature had distracted you for too long, throwing a record on the slipmat an
d, from break beat to intro, delivering a standard seamless transition.
From transition to transition, you chatted. This and that, trivial things, comments on the unknown faces, the regulars, the night and its ways. You always made sure to offer H (as she had introduced herself) a light for her cigarettes and you bantered, as one does, stringing songs together, remixing the tracks and the phrases of old dramas, old romantic comedies, at the same time.
Later, she gracefully slipped off the stool, thanking you for your hospitality, your conversation, your light, and left blowing you a kiss goodbye and striking a pose of rapture at the foot of your turntables, echoing the first scene of the first act she had performed.
At the end of the night, as the club was closing, the boss asked you what you had thought of her old friend H. She was lovely. The boss let out a triumphant laugh and in her thick, husky voice of an old madam: You’ve probably guessed, my dear, he’s a tranny. He found you perfectly gallant.
You had indeed suspected: H’s voice was a little too deep, her femininity too visibly calibrated and calculated. It was, however, unlikely that she had asked the old madam to reveal such information. Why would she? To dispel a blindness from which she would have had little to fear? Why then rat out the secret of an old friend and make confessions that H might not have wanted to disclose point-blank to the object of her seductive feints? Petty betrayal, a madam’s nasty trick. Triumphal insensitivity that strips off and lays bare in two words the fragile secrets and the painfully composed and guarded modesty.
H came back several times to spend the night hours seated immutably on the high stool near you. Smoking patiently, crossing and uncrossing her legs, attracting the looks of the women passing by. There she basked, exposed for all to see, like an obscure object, seductive and fatal, a siren fastened to her chosen rock.
Your manner remained the same. You treated her with all possible consideration. You let her reign over the little kingdom from where you governed the rhythm of the nights. Sometimes she would nonchalantly lean on your shoulder to whisper things in your ear in full sight of all present.
One night H told you the story you had been expecting. You had never asked her questions that would have forced her to reveal or disguise the secret of her identity. You had also avoided questions about her vocation, her past and present activities.
Is it really necessary to recount her story in its most tragic or sordid details? I’m probably not telling you anything new. Not of the prostitution, nor of the butchery of these affairs. She seemed to speak of them calmly. And you listened calmly. She recounted just as calmly what had been her biggest fear: that a client, roused from his blindness, in a flash of lucidity or horror, would murder her. Or, alternatively marveling at the fact—was there flirtatiousness or despair in this remark?—that they never noticed anything, that they did not see the difference, that they did not even see it after she had told them.
She came back to see you once more after this confession. Just as dressed up and lovely as ever. You welcome her as you did the first day—or rather the first night—offering her her usual drink. She takes her pack of cigarettes out from her silk clutch, holding one between her fingers with long, painted nails, which she brings slowly to her mouth lined with a lipstick that’s a bit more violent than usual, observing your gaze as it ascends in the wake of the cigarette, from her thighs to her mouth. Deeply inhaling the first drag of her cigarette, lit with the flame of your Zippo. And you chatted about frivolous things, as before, as always; she murmured sundry secrets and nothings in her deep voice. Then she left, acting out once again at the foot of your cliff the selfsame scene of rapture and regret.
[Night 7]
I
It’s three in the morning. You automatically convert that to the time right now on the other side of the Atlantic. You live in two time zones simultaneously (or rather you escape and slip between them constantly). Is it so surprising that you should go to sleep at nine in the morning if it is in fact six hours earlier in another region of your brain? And it’s at decent hours that, despite appearances, you get up (except on the days you have to teach… on those days it’s torture to wrest yourself from bed at the hour when ordinarily you’re just getting into it…). But once rendered on the other side, why are you not free from insomnia?
American night: that’s what we call the cinematographic process designed to give the illusion of nocturnal darkness while filming in broad daylight.
It’s three in the morning and as you type on your keyboard, your machine pipes into your headphones—for it is actually three in the morning for your neighbors, and thus out of the question to use your stereo—the music of your (real) American nights.
Highway music: something that booms through the speakers, synchronized with the speed of the journey.
Your American life: a road movie without a camera. Average: two thousand miles per month. A record, once, at five thousand miles in three weeks. Highway music, played in a quasi-hypnotic loop on the CD players of the wheels you rent while there. Your rule is to change car every month. However, you have a predilection for certain models. Thus, for a long time, the Pontiac Grand Am (you liked its name: grande âme or grande dame… for the rest, a decent face, above all dressed in red, but a Spartan drive, ascetic even in its austerity…); if unavailable, Buick Regal or Chevrolet Lumina (soft sofas on wheels… morbid cowards, as you’d say in Italian); finally, sole infidelity, a Toyota Solara. V6 always, coupe as often as possible, and automatic transmission for the fluidity and the cruise control.
It’s three in the morning. You’re awake. You brew a ristretto. You wedge your computer into your bag. You lock the door. Hit the road. Ahead, five or seven hundred miles to go. You’ll drive up or down the East Coast, you’ll cross the Appalachians. On a strip of paper you scribble the numbers of the routes you’ve studied in your Rand McNally.
The streets are deserted. The sky a translucent black. The windows rolled down to let in the scents of the night. The rumbling basslines of your highway music comingle with the rumbles of the V6.
Some tracks are practically glued to the landscapes through which they carried you. They superimpose on the computer screen or the windshield of any car, a strip of road carved up by headlights.
The part of I-95 that, one night when your plane had arrived at three in the morning, takes you north toward New Haven. At the halfway point, you see the power plant plunked down on the estuary of the Housatonic River, drowning at night in the clouds of steam spewing out of all its chimneys. The race against the planes that land or take off from the runways of the Newark airport, parallel to the New Jersey Turnpike, among the giant refineries dotting the swamps, flickering, the only visible stars in a sky smeared by their exhalations. The dim night of devastated Philadelphia neighborhoods, windows boarded up or gaping, scorched by fire, cadavers of cars embalmed in the tall grass of dead ends. The highway that crosses West Virginia, soaring on stilts above valleys, barely touching the landscape. When it touches it, it’s to butcher it. Blasted through the rock, the trenches where your car headlights are devoured. Veins of coal that show on the surface, black, striating the walls. After a mountain pass, a bend, a river. In the cold February night, the tangled volutes of white steam from Marmet’s factories, halos of arc lamps illuminating the docks, the barges loaded with an intensely black ore. Ten miles and three bridges later, the gilded dome of the Charleston Capitol. Exiting the Interstate at Ripley to take US-33, the procession of mobile homes and trailers, on each side, American flags fluttering in the wind. At dawn, on the banks of the Ohio River, Pomeroy’s main drag looks as through lifted from the photographic archives of the WPA, for at that hour the world is still a black and white picture. A two-lane road—from Michigan, from Illinois?—that no one travels anymore, crosses little towns from another time, solemn when they sleep, heralded from afar by strings of churches planted in open fields. A highway—in Georgia, in Carolina?—a deep asphalt black, lined with reflective strips of a blinding
white, in the middle of a never-ending forest. Where you follow no one, pass no one, and discern in your rear-view mirror only the glow of your own sidelights. A lake under the moon, almost Chinese, its flatness defying perspective, gray reeds punctuating the calm silver plane. Your car seems to surf on the surface. Chesapeake Bay swallows up body, lane, and soul. Spiraling ramps and arching suspension cables, a thin strip of steel and concrete surfaces and plunges anew into an endless vertigo. The cliff against which the Tappan Zee Bridge seems to want to throw itself, the elegant swerve of its deck skirting the abyss.
Rrose Sélavy was right: bridges are the great American art.
In the bracing cold of the mountains, in the humid summer heat of the Southern plains, when you stop to get gas, fill up on Coke, and take a leak in the toilets stinking of Lysol, you set foot on the ground, you’re walking on the moon. You’re two thousand light years away from home. You drive through this place where you will probably never return (there are so, so many gas stations… what are the odds that, even on an identical route, you would stop twice at the same one…?). You stare at the cashier counting your change. When you speak to him, your accent betrays you. You are not from the neighborhood, not from this neighborhood. They’ll comment on it sometimes. But can never guess where you’re from.
So many miles for what? To feel in the world and outside of the world? In a country that is familiar (you speak the language, you live there) and foreign (you were not born there, possess nothing there but memories without moorings)? You marvel at this land, so vast and so empty.
The fragility of the human presence. These collapsing shacks by the side of Southern roads, windows and doors smashed, kicked in, overgrown with vegetation, a tangle of vines and ivy. In the French countryside, it is said that from one church tower you can always see another. Here, from one steeple, you’ll see twelve others in a single file, or else nothing, as far as the eye can see. There are Baptist churches pitched in clearings. And then not even a silo on the horizon. Or else a road lined with gas station, church, motel, church, gas station, church, church, Baptist, Pentecostal, Exxon, Adventist, Best Western, Baptist, Sunoco. A pawnshop for variety. A tattoo parlor for cruelty. For fifty miles. At the sixty-sixth Baptist Church, you decide to take the first right. After one minute, there is nothing but pine forest, cornfields, cotton fields, a mass of undergrowth, the luxuriance of a swamp.
