by James Sallis
That was also as good a description as any of the life Alouette, and in reflection I myself, would have to live over the coming months.
Perhaps after all, for all our talk of change, redemption or personal growth, for all our dependence on therapists, religious faith or mood-altering drugs both legal and non, we’re doomed simply to go on repeating the same patterns over and over in our lives, dressing them up in different clothes like children at play so we can pretend we don’t recognize them when we look into mirrors.
After lunch, as we drove on through Vicksburg and veils of rain toward Natchez, Alouette began talking about the hospital. Though barely conscious at the time, she remembered the intubation, fighting against it, to her mind then a worse violation than anything sexual, worse than anything possible.
“But then, suddenly, I broke free. Really free. I was floating, drifting, nothing could touch me, nothing could hold me down. I remember thinking: How wonderful this is, I don’t even have to breathe now.”
Later, pain made its way in, though a pain she could at first easily ignore: therapists drawing blood from her radial artery for ABG’s, as she later learned.
“For a long time I was floating just under the surface of things. I could decide whether to come to the top or stay where I was, or at least it felt like I had that choice-though I always stayed right there.”
But then after a time, half an eternity, the time it took to rebuild the world, light flooded in. “Light everywhere, so much light that it hurt. God, how it hurt!”
She settled back in her seat and closed her eyes, staring, I suppose, into the face of her own pain and the world’s, as I drove on.
We reached New Orleans a little before nine that night.
Chapter Thirty
Across the street new apartments were going up. Broussard General Contractors had torn down the 140-year-old Greek Revival manse with its rotting gingerbread, burst columns and disintegrating friezes, left wing for years drooping at an ever steeper angle. Doorways, newels, mantels and windowwork had been stacked in trucks and carted off for resale. Only a few stanchions still stood totemlike near the lot’s borders, exposing a once-enclosed central courtyard, the bare heart around which new luxury apartments would be constructed. On the balconies of these apartments in four months, or six, young men and women would stand squinting into the sun, memories watching silently over their shoulders.
We sat outside at steel tables painted yellow and green, under a sky whose sagging bellies of clouds reminded me of the upholstered walls and draped ceilings of old Russia. Every few moments wind puffed its cheeks and Clare put a hand on her napkin to hold it in place.
“I’m sorry, Lew,” she said suddenly.
I’d been telling her about Alouette’s baby. “It’s for the best.”
She shook her head. A gesture I’d seen often before, when the wrong words came, or when words wouldn’t come at all. “I don’t mean that.”
I looked back at the clouds, lower now. Something was blowing in across the lake, groping for new ground here.
“I don’t know how to say this. I don’t even know what it is I want to say. And I was never good at speeches-even before.”
A sketchy wave touched at the length of her body, hinted at the difficult thing her world had become.
“But I won’t ever understand it, won’t even begin to understand it, if I don’t.”
She moved her fork in a gentle sweep through pasta. There was a fleur-de-lis on the plate, and she had pushed sauteed bits of green pepper into one leaflet of the trefoil, red into another.
“I never wanted anything to work out more than I wanted this, Lew. Not that I ever really thought it would.”
I reached across the table and put my hand over hers.
“Somehow as women we learn to say that all the time: ‘I’m sorry.’ As though it’s our all-purpose social formula, good for any occasion, one size fits all. And a lot of time we’re not sorry at all; we don’t mean to apologize, only to say ‘I understand’ or ‘too bad.’ But right now, that’s exactly what I mean.”
She looked at me, smiled.
“Where do messages like that come from? How can we learn to read them so well without even recognizing that they exist?”
I remembered a poem I’d seen recently in a magazine at Beaucoup Books: We must learn to put our distress signals in code.
“That’s what socialization is, Clare. Most of the messages-maybe all the most important ones-are silent.”
“I guess.”
She took a mouthful of pasta, chewed slowly, sipped at her wine. Pacing herself, making herself hold back. Like a runner, or like a hard drinker taking the first one slow, half convincing himself for the few minutes it lasts that this is only recreational drinking.
“I think I love him, Lew. I think he loves me. And I have to do everything I can to give this a chance. Maybe later on we’ll be able to see one another again, if you want to. But for now … It bothers him, Lew. He doesn’t say anything about it, but I can tell. It hurts him, in some very quiet way he probably doesn’t even know or understand himself. But I see it. And I can’t do that any longer.”
Clenched about her regret and misgivings, her hand had become a small fist beneath mine.
“It’s okay, Clare.”
“No, it’s not okay, Lew, not at all. But it’s how it has to be. Do you think we could go now?”
On the way to her car, wind swirling torn paper wrappers and magnolia leaves around our ankles in tides, I asked how Bat was.
“Gone. I got home last Tuesday and he wasn’t there on top of the refrigerator where he always was. Or anywhere else. I still don’t know how he got out. Or why, for that matter, since he never seemed to have much interest at all in going out. I waited, thinking he’d show up again. Last night I finally admitted he wasn’t coming back and put his things away in the pantry, his bowl and all.”
She unlocked the door and I reached around to open it for her. I told her I was sorry about Bat.
“Life goes on,” she said. We kissed and said goodbye. “I’ll call, Lew. When I can.”
I watched her drive away, holding my hand up in a wave as she took the corner onto Joseph. I walked back, crossed the street and stood for a while in the empty courtyard, looking across at the restaurant with its yellow and green tables and chairs, its laughing, chattering people. I imagined the new apartments going up around me in stop-time, slowly shutting out that world, marooning me here in this ancient, sequestered place.
Chapter Thirty-One
When I got back to the house Alouette was on the phone, as she’d been on the phone pretty much nonstop since the morning before. Thus far she had set up two job interviews, attended another, arranged for information to be mailed concerning GED testing and night classes at Delgado, Xavier and UNO, and spoken with an MHMR counselor about vocational programs. Now she was talking to Richard Garces about outpatient therapy and local support groups.
Not long after I came in, she hung up, scribbled one final note and shut the notebook.
“How’d it go?”
I shrugged.
“That bad, huh?”
“Maybe a little worse.”
“I’m sorry.”
So of course I had to laugh, then explain why.
“Did you know Richard was a hippie? And a junkie? A long time ago, of course.”
“It doesn’t surprise me.”
“Were you a hippie, Lewis? You know, wearing vests without shirts and bell-bottoms and flowers in your hair? Back in the sixties, I mean.”
“What I was in the sixties, mostly, was drunk-at least from about ‘68 on. I didn’t pay a lot of attention to social movements. Or to other people, for that matter.”
“You were a bodyguard then, right?”
I looked up, surprised. Not many people knew about that. Verne had, naturally. And Walsh, because that was how we’d first met.
“I haven’t said anything before, but I know quite a bit about you,
Lewis. More than you think.”
I poured tea into my cup, added milk.
“When I was in grade school I had this friend, your classic nerd type, glasses and ugly print shirts, the whole thing, but he was a computer whiz. What everybody calls a hacker now. He was really weird. Look, this is kind of a long story.”
“I’ll drink slowly.”
“And probably a dull one.”
“About me? Impossible.”
“Yeah, right. Well anyway, Cornell’s dad was an engineer with IBM or Apple or someone, and he always had these new computers around the house, products they were developing, or marketing. Cornell told me he grew up with these things as playmates instead of other kids. He thought everybody did. And he could do anything he wanted with them.
“I was twelve or thirteen. And I just decided one day that my father couldn’t really be my father. Mother was gone, I was hopelessly miserable. I couldn’t talk to him, or to anyone else in the house, and I knew there was just no way I belonged there.”
“Most children go through that at some point.”
“I know that, now. I think I kind of knew it even then. I was never lucky enough to be stupid.”
“But you had to set yourself apart.”
She nodded. “And I knew a little about you, just from things I’d heard. So I decided you had to be my father. It made a lot of sense at the time; it was the only thing that did. This was about when Cornell and I started being friends. Neither of us had ever had friends before, and I can’t remember now how it happened, but somehow he started coming over after school, spending recess and lunch hour with me. One afternoon we sneaked into this office my father had at home, though I wasn’t ever supposed to be in there, and Cornell showed me how to use the computer. If you knew how, you could dial into all kinds of information banks, he told me; you could find out almost anything you wanted to know.
“I thought about that for days. Then the next Saturday when Cornell came over-my father was at work, as usual-I told him about you. What little I knew, and a lot more I made up. And Monday he brought me this folder full of stuff. Copies of official forms, printouts of what I guess had been newspaper articles, parts of some kind of dossier the FBI had on you. That one said you killed a man.”
I nodded.
“A sniper, according to the dossier. It said he’d killed at least eight people.”
“At least.”
“You stopped working as a bodyguard after that.”
“I stopped doing much of anything. Just kind of drifted into it. Drank a lot. It was a bad time.”
“Every night I’d get out that folder and read it. It was like making constellations out of stars: just raw information, that you could fill out any way you wanted. So every night I’d look at some facts, facts I knew by heart by then, and use them to make up stories about you. Those stories became more real to me than the world around me, more real than anything else, and for a time, far more important. Though all along I knew it wasn’t true. I knew you weren’t my father.”
“And that I wasn’t a hero.”
She nodded. “And that life is just doing the things you have to do: staying alive, getting through the day, turning into your parents. Maybe I was wrong about that part, huh? Maybe there’s something more to it?”
“Maybe.”
“Can I make you another pot of tea? That has to be cold by now.”
“Only if you’ll have some too. I’m already sloshing when I walk.”
“Deal.”
We went out to the kitchen. I leaned against the sink thinking of meals I’d prepared long ago for Verne, for Vicky and Cherie, remembering their laughter, seeing their faces, as Alouette emptied the kettle, drew fresh water and put it on to boil, filled the pot with hot water from the tap.
“Transportation’s going to be the biggest problem,” she said. “I figure between work, group meetings and whatever classes I settle on, I’m going to be piling up a lot of miles. I’ll centralize what I can, find locations closer in to home. But some of it, like work and school, won’t be so easy.”
“Give it time. We’ll see. Things start working out so that you decide you need a car, I’ll match whatever money you can save up for one. And I’ll take you to a friend who has a used-car lot and owes me a few favors.”
“All right.”
She emptied the pot, measured in Earl Grey, poured water, stirred once and set it to steep under a brocade cozy Vicky had sent me from Scotland years back.
When the tea was ready, we went back into the living room. Alouette settled on the couch with her notebook, feet tucked under her. I sat in my chair with a copy of Queneau’s Zazie dans le metro. I looked up at her after a while and thought how strange this tableau, this quiet domestic scene, was for both of us. Then how very alone I had been all these years, and how good it was to have someone here again.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Queneau once remarked that just about anyone could learn to move characters around, getting them from place to place and scene to situation, pushing them through pages like sheep until finally one arrived at something people would read as a novel. But Queneau himself wanted the characters and their relationships-to one another, to the sprawl of human history and thought, to the book itself-to be structured, wanted those relationships to be in the word’s purest sense constructed: in short, he wanted something more.
There are those who would argue-engages like Sartre, or perhaps in our own country the late John Gardner-that, in eschewing the tenets of “realistic” or mimetic fiction, he wanted less.
This strain of what we might call irrealism, this motive of artifice, in French fiction reaches back at least to Roussel, whose Locus Solus some of you may have encountered in Jack Palangian’s magic-realism seminar, and persists today in the work of Georges Perec, the group OuLiPo-cofounded by Queneau, incidentally-and American expatriate Harry Mathews.
Le Chiendent, Queneau’s first published novel, in fact consciously, deliberately parodies most all the conventions of realistic fiction.
It is a rigorously structured novel. Ninety-one parts: seven chapters each containing thirteen sections, each of them with its three unities of time, place and action, each confined to a specific mode of representation, or narrative: narration only, narration with dialogue, dialogue alone, interior monologue, letters, newspaper articles, dreams.
The novel, a meditation on the Cartesian cogito, in fact had its beginning in Queneau’s attempt to translate Descartes into demotic French. It opens with a bank clerk, Etienne Marcel, coming to consciousness, surfacing out of the slough of his unexamined life, while looking into a shop window. Taking substance from his sudden self-consciousness, and from the objective existence accrued from Pierre le Grand, who has happened to see him there at the window and become curious about him, Etienne is plunged headlong into a series of adventures-into the thick of life itself.
At one point le Grand, through whose eyes we witness much of the book’s early action, says: “I am observing a man.” And his confidante replies: “You don’t say! Are you a novelist?” To which he replies: “No. A character.”
As things go on, and as still more characters and situations are introduced, many of them truly bizarre-it’s rather like those jugglers who begin with a small cane or club and end up piling chair atop chair, all of it tottering there far above them-the novel turns ever more fantastic, drifting further and further from the moorings of realistic fiction, until at last the reader is forced to abandon any pretense that he’s reading a story about “real” people or events and to admit that he is only participating in the arbitrary constructions-reflective, complex, but always arbitrary-of a writer. A sophisticated game-playing.
From one of the novel’s many discursive passages:
“People think they are doing one thing, and then they do another. They think they are making a pair of scissors, but they have made something quite different. Of course, it is a pair of scissors, it is made to cut and it cuts, but it is also
something quite different.”
A character muses: Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be able to say what that “something else” is? And that is exactly what Queneau attempts, here and in all his work: to touch on that “something else” we sense, yet never locate, in our lives.
Yet because he has a kind of horror of seriousness, it’s often at their most profound moments that his books and poems turn outrageously comic, dissolving into puns, bits of allusive and other business, vaudeville jokes, slapstick. One often thinks they are books that might have been written by an extraordinarily brilliant child.
Which brings us, quite naturally, to Zazie, a best-seller for Queneau and perhaps his most easily accessible novel.
As the book opens, murderous dwarf Bebe Overall has abducted little Zazie from the department store where her young mother was choosing fine Irish linen and has taken her into his underground lair far beneath the Paris metro lines, a place frequented by old circus performers, arthritic guitar players and legless Apache dancers, ancient socialists with Marx-like beards and tiny Trotsky spectacles. There Bebe-
Yes, Miss Mara?
I see. You may be right; perhaps in my enthusiasm I am not describing Queneau’s novel at all, but rather some alternate version, some possibility, of my own; have begun, as some colleagues might say, deconstructing it. Why don’t you tell us what actually happens in Zazie dans le metro?
Chapter Thirty-Three
I was, in a sense, singing for my supper. A latter-day minstrel show for ol’ massuh, ol’ massuh in this case being Dean Treadwell, who had chosen today-my first day back, after yesterday sheepishly calling my department chairman, apologizing for my absence so profusely that I began to stammer, and finally pleading a family emergency-to audit, as was his custom once each term with every course offered under his aegis, my class.
