by Lily Pond
These other women, had he asked them to lunch with him in Poland, would have said no. They had before. They would have remained aloof, from him and the other bartenders they fucked, except at night when they drank away what had pulled them to Berlin in the first place.
Not like Claire. Not at all like Claire, his new damaged Catholic girl who was already in love with him, who wanted to hold his hand in public. Claire wanted to kiss him every time they crossed the street. “I had foster parents,” she’d said in her room one night. A grand night, they had walked the Ku Dam and ended in a bar called Wonderland, where the floor was covered with sand and the lights glowed like bonfires. Adam had worn his good clothes, and she had too, and later, in her room, she’d hugged her pillow, naked and small on her stomach, her face away from him. She was unused to alcohol. Her voice, when it came, was hard to hear. “Something happened. I have trouble. I’d hoped it would be gone.” She’d paused to control her breathing. “It hurts too much,” she’d said. “Maybe with time. And no, I can’t do that either. I’ll never. Please don’t ask me to.”
“Why? What happened.”
“I can’t,” she said.
“It’ll be okay,” he’d lied, touching her back with the tips of his fingers. He focused on the clothing she’d folded over the back of a chair, and the shadows on her bookshelves, the sound of foreign sirens in the city distance, anything but the smoothness of her skin. They tried again; she was calm and they tried again at his insistence. He’d lain on his back as she told him to do, unmoving, and straddling him, she’d lowered herself, hands on his stomach, her lip between her teeth and it seemed like it was going to work for a warm minute, as if he could awaken her from a long sleep, until she’d winced and jerked away and rolled in the corner and hugged herself like she was cold. She would not look at him. He covered her with her blanket. “You’ll see, everything will be fine,” he’d said. He stroked her hair. “Not to worry. We can learn how to live with this,” and he wished that he meant it, and it felt like he did.
She’d asked him to keep talking because she could not. He told her that he knew what loneliness was like. “Sure you do,” she said into the pillow. “Tell me what I feel like.”
He explained an image he’d developed for a painting once, in college. The assignment was to portray an emotion. He chose happiness, and what he decided it looked like disturbed him enough that he’d left the States.
“You left because of a girl,” she said. “You said you left because your heart was dead.”
Happiness looked like a farmer’s field in winter. The soil rock hard and clumped, ice-encrusted boot prints, tractor-tire ruts shagged with snow. He did not know to whom the fields belonged. He said it was dark, that the sun had long since gone down, and that it was cold enough that his teeth hurt when he left his car. The air caught in his throat. Coarse snow flecked with dirt and dead grasses, broken sticks at the edges, and snow drifts, rippled by wind, shone along the pine wind-breaks and wire fence. There were no lights anywhere, no homes with window lamps and yard lights, no street lights or passing cars, and yet there was enough snow on the ground, enough light from the weak stars by which to see clearly. The hum of weather, of air, of clouds racing the moon and new snow approaching from the west, the sound of a dead leaf scraping down a furrow, and the sounds of himself, his winter boots, his sweater beneath his coat, the breath through his nose. If he listened, he might hear his heartbeat. He clapped his hands and his ice-fishing mittens boomed like shotgun blasts. When he reached the center of the field, he would raise his heels off the ground, spread his arms to the sky, pause and grow taller. Then he would begin to dance. This is why he had come to the field: to dance, jumping in the cold, his jacket spreading with air, his boots clomping, arms turning, body rising. His voice would be big enough to matter, the moon would fall behind, and no other person would ever know that he had been doing this. Even the ground was too hard for his boots to leave prints. This, he explained, was the freest image he could imagine. Happiness was freedom from scrutiny, a lack of concern for witnesses, but it was also loneliness, and it made him suspect that something was wrong with him. “What is it,” he asked, “about being alone in a place like that field that could be appealing?”
“I’m sorry,” she had said.
He felt guilty for being drunk, and yet he reached for the glass of whiskey they’d been sharing. “Have a drink,” he said.
“Maybe with time I’ll be able to do what you want. I mean, I want to so much that I think I’ll go crazy, at least I think I do.”
She said she loved him. He didn’t believe her. He’d pulled the blanket off of her, she did not move any part of her as he climbed over her, and placed his erection between her legs. Her skin was cool. He breathed whiskey into her ear.
“Don’t,” she’d said, and he wondered how quickly he could leave her apartment. She would never be what he wanted.
“I feel sick,” she’d said.
He remembered wanting to call Jane, or Sofia, or Willa, or Christine. There were plenty of good hours left. He remembered looking at the inside of Claire’s door and not knowing how to leave. In the morning he dressed without waking her, angry that he had fallen asleep, and slipped out of her building into the daylight. The light hurt his head. He bought a bottle of mango juice, a few good rolls, a box of aspirin from the chemist and returned to her apartment.
Now, he was still wondering how to leave her as she kissed his cheek in the car. She held his arm, her breast against his elbow. She pressed her eye to his cheek and blinked so that her lashes brushed his skin.
The car slowed as they passed an old man working a field with a horse-drawn plow. Nadia was filing her nails. Warren asked Adam how long he thought he would stay working at the Nineteenth Hole.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t have anything keeping me here.”
“How can you say that?” Warren said. He pointed his thumb over his shoulder at Claire.
“Oh sure,” Adam said. He reached around Claire and pulled her against him. He said he had no doubt that he was falling irrevocably, permanently in life-long-love with her and would probably never be able to leave. “Already,” he said, “after just two weeks, she is becoming the most beautiful thing in the universe to me, the best thing ever, and I have no reason to believe that process will change.”
Claire kissed his cheek.
Adam laughed and said, “Like hell.” When nobody laughed with him, he said he was kidding. “Of course I am kidding,” he said, but he was unsure of where the joke lay.
Warren slowed past an East German car, a Trabant dead beside the road, its driver standing back, oil smoke flowing out from beneath the hood. Adam explained how Trabants have a two-stroke engine like a lawn mower, that you mix the oil in with the gasoline, that they shift with a lever that comes out of the dashboard. “Pull and twist,” he said. He explained how, on a bet, he’d tried to lift one. He’d stooped and gripped the bumper with both hands, looked up as he’d learned lifting weights, and started to straighten his legs. When the wheels were nearly off the ground the bumper had snapped in half like a chicken bone.
“But I guess that’s not interesting,” he said to Warren. Warren was kissing Nadia, his hands on the steering wheel. “I said, isn’t that interesting, Warren?” Warren kept on kissing her, their jaws working like fish. The speedometer read one hundred and forty kilometers an hour. Adam wondered how fast that was in miles. He should know how fast that was in miles but the conversion escaped him.
Claire said she thought it was very interesting.
Her leg leaned against his leg. She hooked his little finger with hers. He was tempted to push her away, to tell her to stop this farce. He was tempted to push his tongue into her mouth, to push her down on the back seat and unzip her pants and yell that she was healthy because she looked and smelled and felt healthy to his hands and lips because she had to be, because he wanted her to be.
Little Jane whose skin tasted of salt, her
ass high and strong, had she been beside him, she would have ignored him now as completely as she always did sober and dressed; and dark Sofia, with her enormous soft breasts and nipples like grapes on saucers, she who loved the feeling of grass on her skin, of twirling naked around dark putting greens with a bottle in hand, she would’ve been bored now, or stoned, and would’ve made everyone uncomfortable to prove it. He thought of the slender gold crucifix Claire wore, of the place it hung, of how Jesus had clacked between his teeth when she’d been on top of him, before the wince. He thought about how cold her skin was in places. Adam removed his arm from behind her, found nowhere to put it that was not touching her, and returned it, across the top of the leather seat.
They passed miles of open dirt on poor roads. The sun came out in patches, and went away again. They saw a hawk gliding slowly, ten yards off the ground. In the next half hour they saw a dozen hawks; large and dark, hunting in straight lines instead of circling like American hawks.
Near the Polish border, they pulled to the side along a field of grass. At the back of the field was a copse of trees, oak trees still holding their brown leaves. The wind was blowing and the leaves stirred like water. Across the road, long wooded hills piled up like waves. Cloud shadows slid west. Warren said he needed to relieve himself. Nadia started to unbuckle her seat-belt and he stopped her.
“No,” he said. “Wait here, please.”
A flat-bed truck roared past, shaking their car. It carried a full load of wrecked Easty cars bound for Poland to be taken apart and re-assembled. The new Germany had no use for the old East German cars.
Adam pulled on his jacket and followed Warren across the field, into the trees. The damp grass soaked through the sides of Adam’s sneakers, and it felt good to breathe the foreign air, to be in motion.
“This would be good football weather,” Warren said.
“Sure,” Adam said. When they were out of sight of the car, Adam wanted to tell him everything. To ask Warren what he would do if he were in the same situation, but he could not. People in love are not good listeners.
“I want to tell you something. You’re a lucky man, Adam. She looks like a keeper. Do you think you could be serious about this girl?”
“What do you mean? Okay, I know what you mean. I guess I don’t know.”
“You aren’t getting any younger.”
Warren unzipped his pants and pissed against a tree. He looked at the sky. “Yes,” Warren said, “You are a lucky man. But what I wanted to talk to you about is Nadia.” Warren fastened his belt and took a jewelry box out of his pocket. He opened it and showed Adam a ring. “It’s a half carat. What do you think?”
Adam held it to his eye and handed it back to Warren. He wanted to call Warren an idiot. He wanted Warren to laugh and tell him he was joking. “Good, it’s a good stone,” he said. His eyes felt out of focus. “I’m happy for you.”
For the rest of the way to the border, Adam told stories about the golf course, about geriatric Charley who never meant to go into the army, even his thick glasses hadn’t kept him out, and now Charley was seventy and a liver-spotted drunk who stared at the fireplace and moved his lips like a chimpanzee, and fat old Hans with his pink cherubic cheeks, the way cheese would run off his chin when he ate nachos, and Rick, special forces Rick, how forty-three-year-old Rick was married for the second time to the same twenty-two-year-old, and Clause who owned a whorehouse and went there with Dean who didn’t wash his hair. Dean wrote stories about knives. He hired hookers to beat him like his father used to, and Dino, what Dino from Utah did with one of Peter’s girlfriends from Clause’s business on the table while Peg, blind drunk Peg, Dino’s wife, slept on the bar, and about Mr. Weiss, the king of ladies day, and the guys who run the driving range, and the groundskeepers, and the pro-shop girls, and the German girls in the kitchen, and the saucy English girl in the maintenance shed.
Claire squeezed his wrist and pointed as they passed another hawk, standing in a bare dirt field, eating something. She asked Nadia how to say things in Russian. “Polo-gee yahzik too Da,” she said. Put your tongue there. “Yah Lou-Blue Teebeya,” she said. I love you. “Lou Boof Nee Car Tow-shka,” she said. The love is not potatoes.
The closer they came to the border, the more cars they passed pulling other cars, Easty cars with smashed glass and missing wheels, tied on homemade trailers and the backs of small trucks, and now at the border, long lines of Polish cars waited with their wreckage in tow. Broken things that looked as though they would never be fixed, and to Adam, it made perfect sense to be pulling wreckage across borders. He looked at Claire, a moment of sunlight came through her window, and he looked at the backs of Warren’s and Nadia’s heads; he felt a rushing in his brain and wanted to say aloud that he would be okay, that he was normal, that he was completely different from the people with whom he spent most of his time, and yet there was the rushing noise from the pill and last night’s cognac shot with beer, and his lungs felt stiff from smoking, and other parts of him hurt that he could not name.
Adam held the handle of the car door. He promised himself he would look for a ticket away from Berlin, not to go to the place where his parents lived again but the other direction. Maybe to China. He’d heard there were teaching jobs for Americans in Beijing. As soon as they got back to the city he would look. Until he left he would be kind to Claire, as kind as he could, or so he hoped. Off in the distance, another hawk, barely a speck in the sky, coasted in a straight line above a forested hill, and Adam envied its ability to travel so.
Standing Stone
Carmela Delia Lanza
“And Ruth said, Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people and thy God my God …”
“Charles is where the garden will be,”
I tell my son on Palm Sunday,
the frost may still hit while we transform
the sand into soil for plants that pull me back,
an umbilical cord to my father.
I have resisted this gardening for a long time but now
I water the tree and feel this planting in my bones:
he talks about heirloom seeds from one generation to another
and my mother holds a bag of seeds in her garage,
she tells me she doesn’t know what to do with them.
“The grass has taken over the garden,” she says
as it should take over the world,
“I can’t bend over anymore, I fall down.”
Your body is over me and you ask me if I think of anyone else
while we fuck. Coming with you inside of me is not like my past.
I feel I turn myself inside out, skin is gone and I feel all
I have done, all I have meant to do brings me to this place,
the world moving night to day slowly under our bodies,
a thin moon is holding its breath, forgetting our names again.
We walk in the snow on this island where I was born,
my mother has no boots and steps in my footsteps,
the snow is up to our knees.
I have the number of the row and headstone,
my mother stops, she can’t breathe,
she jokes that this would be the best place to die,
we would save some money, we could just throw her in a hole.
I keep going until I am standing over
my father’s half-year grave,
the wind wants to lift me over the headstone.
But I stand, a marker of gravity, feeling the pull
to the center, feeling your heavy back against my breasts,
licking your black hair in the night,
no more talking, no more waving a hand, “forget about it,”
I have no moment left, no passing of fingers,
no stand of hair on my backbone,
I bury the seashells and let the wind lift me up;
my mother g
oes back to the car and says
she thought she was going to fall down.
I take my son to the ocean and we gather winter sand for you,
a man who is now my friend and will soon be my lover,
a seagull shivers a few feet away, looking for a warm spot.
I cannot offer him any hope while I dig with my fingers down,
your request was said as a joke and yet I take it seriously,
I will not understand your intensity until I am breathing
alone in my bed holding air that was once you.
V. From the South
“I am the moisture the heat.”
Nice Girls Do It, Too
Dany Laferriére, translated by Carrol F. Coates
AT THE LAST MINUTE, Christina changes her mind, decides to stay home and rest. She hasn’t felt well all afternoon. Of course, it may just be the beginning of a case of flu, but she doesn’t want to go out in that state. There are times when she has the impression of being chilled to the bone (in a tropical country!). Since she arrived in Port-au-Prince, her greatest fear has been of catching malaria. She knows what she’s going to do. She’s going to fix a good toddy (rum, lemon, sugar). Then she will hop into bed with John Le Carre’s latest novel. She likes his cool, refined sense of humor. That will make her evening. Harry will go to the Widmaiers’ alone.
