Motion Sickness
Lynne Tillman
Red Lemonade
a Cursor publishing community
Brooklyn NY
2011
In memory of
Nathan Tillman
and for
Sophie Merrill Tillman
and
Barbara Merrill Tillman
Chapter 1
Tourist Attractions
“I am…the fellow citizen of all that inhabits the great furnished hotel of the universe.”
—Flaubert
PARIS
I am in my hotel room, on the bed, reading The Portrait of a Lady, and nursing an illness I might not have. As I am unhappy, I might just be unhappy and not suffering from the flu or la turista, but a Frenchwoman named Arlette has sent me a get-well card. She seems to take my illness seriously. The card has a Tibetan symbol on it whose meaning I don’t know and which might have significance if I did. Her concern might also be ironic and when she appears at my bedside the next day, I can’t read the gesture as graciousness or solicitude only, since I don’t really know what she means. I both feign surprise at her visit and feel surprised, a mixed response for what might be a mixed get-well visit. She talks about adjusting to changes of all sorts—the weather, leaving one city for another, a friend’s betrayal, the end of a love affair—some of which she knows I’ve experienced. Leaving a city, a lover, good weather for bad. I want to get back to my book, the heroine of which, Isabel Archer, has an end that must be worse than mine, something I’ve always loved novels for. I decide to leave Paris when I’ve finished it. There are Turkish baths, hamams, in Paris, which reminds me of Istanbul, but I try none of them as I don’t feel well enough to leave my hotel room. Except to go down the street for some bread. Or pain, as they call it here.
*
ISTANBUL
My hotel room is small and dark and it’s been raining for weeks, and even the walls look wet, though when I touch them, as if reading Braille, they are in actuality dry. It’s a good room to read in and the hotel itself stands about five hundred yards from the Blue Mosque, which I have not yet gone inside. I’m told you have to take off your shoes and will have a hard time finding them later. My shoes are wet, and they’re my only pair, since I threw out another as dead weight, determined to travel light. I travel dark and wet, I think to myself, because I’m reading Mickey Spillane’s My Gun Is Quick. Reading it makes me want to make movies, but I’m not sure why. The hotel manager, perhaps its owner, a slight, elegant man with a moustache, knocks on my door and brings me a tray with a teapot and a glass. I haven’t asked him for this, and he is either curious about what I’m doing in my room, or a very nice man whose sense of hospitality extends beyond the mercenary unctuousness of other hotel managers I’ve met. Sipping the tea in a glass shaped like Dolly Parton or Mae West, associations the hotel man here probably wouldn’t make, suddenly I’m dying to go to the movies. Almost anything makes me want to go to the movies.
*
AGIA GALINI
I never meant to go to Crete, but now that I’m here, I’m glad. My room faces the harbor and I have a small terrace. Because the sun is hot—we may be near the equator—l stay under the shade of the terrace’s overhang. Above me are two Australians, Tina and Graham, who live in London, and they’re out most of the day, and John, a man from New Zealand, who calls himself a traveler and a visitor. He smokes endlessly and I know he’s there because of the smell, and like my father’s occasional cigars, I find the smell, at a distance, reassuring. They say that smell for women is a much stronger sense than for men, and I’d like to know why it should be, and that as you grow older, everyone’s sense of smell increases. Why this should be I don’t know.
The New Zealander yells down that we should have a drink. He has a bottle, he says. Of what, I wonder, but don’t ask. I say, I’m reading but all right. I don’t know why I put it that way—“reading but all right.” Perhaps I meant to suggest that his visit ought to be short. But I’m in Crete with all the time in the world, as well as an increasing sense of smell, for that matter. John and I empty the bottle, sitting on the terrace, the hotel room and its bed in the background. A small room with a single bed. The night grows darker and darker, until I can only hear the water slapping against the harbor, but can’t see it. Just as I can barely see John, but can smell him.
*
ISTANBUL
An Englishman has taken the room next door. I hear him speaking to the hotel manager in that unmistakable accent that brings up so many associations, even ones that aren’t movies. He, like me, stays in his room most of the time. At least I don’t hear him leaving. His door rarely opens or shuts. Perhaps, like me, he has bought oranges, bread and yogurt. Or not. We pass each other going to the toilet but as he doesn’t acknowledge me, or act friendly, I decide I won’t either. If he knows I’m American, he probably expects me to make the first move. I feel under no such cultural imperative. Although as the days pass, this resolve appears foolish. On the other hand he might think I’m Irish, German or Italian, as others have, and hold different expectations.
I read The New York Times or Herald Tribune nearly every day, which marls me as a foreigner, one who desires contact with her home, indicating attachment. Sometimes I buy a local paper, simply to appear to be trying. I look at the pictures and puzzle over the captions. The hotel manager, Mr. Yapar, approves of the oranges. He smiles broadly when I come in with my groceries and newspaper, nodding his head up and down with enthusiasm, I think. And if he is with another man when I pass by, he also nods at his friend. This might not, of course, be approval, but day after day, the hotel man and I smile and nod and gesture and I believe he’s getting used to me, as I am to him. I suppose we have a sense of each other and are like babies together, communicating preverbally.
I decide he does like me, as I have a need anyway to feel I am liked. No doubt this marks me as an American. I must be full of national characteristics that are hidden from me and are palpable to others, to Mr. Yapar, for instance, as home becomes palpable to me only because I’m not there. Still I don’t really want to meet or talk to anyone, and revel not only in this silent relationship but also in my quiet hotel room whose walls look damp. The Englishman, when we passed, touched his hand to his head, a kind of salute, and I did likewise, a gesture that has absolutely no meaning to me at all.
*
AMSTERDAM
The hotel I am staying in has a history—as I guess does everything—a living history. Three generations of a single Dutch family sitting or standing in the room I am eating in, who have owned this hotel for as many generations or more. The grandfather, the father, and the son, all owners of this small, cozy, or gezellig, as the Dutch might put it, establishment. I’m eating a raisin bun, drinking coffee and reading I Should Have Stayed Home, a Horace McCoy novel about Hollywood. I’m also wishing there was a television in my room, and glance furtively at the three generations as if they might become a sitcom. Actually, looking more carefully, they’re closer to Western types, on the order of Rawhide or Bonanza or Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and from now on whenever I see them, either the theme song from Bonanza, or “I’m a Lonesome Polecat” from Seven Brides plays in my mind.
I finish I Should Have Stayed Home in the breakfast room, and I believe it is also in this room—cheerful and warm that I read that vampires do not suck blood, they lap it.
*
ISTANBUL
The Englishman—Charles—and I take a walk to a site below the city, a special place he knows about, some kind of tunnel system that all large cities have. Charles’s hair grows in clumps or batches over his head, and he has large eyes and a soft voice, his whispers, very hard to hear in the cave—or was it a sewer? Sev
eral hours might have passed with us in conversation. Flat-bottomed boats float by occasionally. There are people in them. At least I think it is here that I saw the boats. Charles reeks of oddness and vagueness which must contribute to the blight on this recent cavernous memory. As I lie in bed and look at the wall, the more I try to recall it, the more I think I’m remembering a movie like Blade Runner or one by Fellini, not the submerged cloudy place I went to with Charles, who I suppose I could say is also cloudy, if not submerged. I can’t remember how we got in or if we paid. I can barely remember it at all.
Later in the front room of the hotel, kindly Mr. Yapar serves us tea, pastries and oranges, a privilege I hadn’t yet been granted. I worry that the hotel manager wants to pair me off with Charles so I try to appear independent no matter what, hoping the manager won’t get the wrong idea. Of course what does it mean to appear independent, anyway. This is some horrible fiction that no one can project, I think, and then I relax and drink my tea. Let him think what he wants, as he will anyway.
*
AGIA GALINT
Screams from the street wake me and I think I’m home. A dog owned by a shopkeeper has been found dead, poisoned, and women in black cotton dresses hurry up and down the street, agitated. New Zealander John reports that the dog was murdered, an act of revenge against the shopkeeper, and as we’re in Greece, the home of tragedy, the event resonates peculiarly. John has brought us feta cheese, bread and tomatoes, as well as an English-language newspaper only five days old. This assures us of our being in a remote spot in the world, I suppose. I’m writing postcards to friends, having purchased all the best ones from the cigarette vendor downstairs. The very best a black-and-white real-photo postcard, printed badly, of a man in a suit walking, rushing, in the foreground, with a large freighter docked in the background, at the harbor.
My postcards home annotate this image, refer to the dead dog, and the hot sun, as well as John, and I think about that scene in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie when the dinner guests look at tourist postcards as if they’re pornography. I feel very much the same way talking about sex as I do landscapes and monuments, events and sights that we all do and know, that are always there and never new. That are maybe even impossible to see—in the same way that sex, for me, is unrepresentable because the tongue, for instance, is privileged with information indifferent to words. And now I want to see a movie, having thought about Buñuel. But John wants to make love. He thinks he’s in love with me. I don’t think I’m in love with him. The Australians, Tina and Graham, are leaving. They tell me to look them up in London.
*
LONDON
The hotel is Victorian in more than its architecture. Men are not allowed in one’s room, which strikes me like those signs on New York subways that read No dogs or No spitting. This place, with its fake red velvet wallpaper, reminds me of Tad’s Steak Houses and is welcome because of that.
The hotel’s breakfast room, crowded by nine, emptied by 10 A.M., when I generally take mine. Breakfast is served, the card says, until 10:10, and I’m aware that latecomers engender hatred among the staff but I find it difficult to get out of bed earlier and refuse to simply because I will be disliked. This goes against my general desire to be liked by everyone and I wonder if I’m making progress.
Another American woman joins me for breakfast and starts to tell me her story. I hear many stories and tell some too, but this morning I’m just listening. Her name is Jessica and her husband, an Englishman, has left her, vanished. She begins to describe him and suddenly I know she’s talking about Charles whose face rises out of the mist where I last saw him. It now seems appropriate that it was a sewer, if it was. I don’t know whether or not to tell her that I saw him in Istanbul. I know I will, but this breakfast room, with its impatient waiters, doesn’t seem the right place. But then travel doesn’t ever produce the right place, I’ve discovered, so I describe Charles and my encounter with him. He is, indeed, her wandering husband, a fact that at first silences both of us as we spread orange marmalade over cold toast—I’ve grown to like cold toast and almost instantly I am her best friend in the world, the world being so small these days that it takes only one encounter to make us fast friends. Or so we think.
Chapter 2
Details
Some people keep diaries or journals so as not to go mad. A guy I knew in college insisted this was true, then stopped keeping his, and voluntarily committed himself to a mental hospital. Jessica writes copious letters home. Early in the morning and late at night I hear her banging away on her typewriter. Apparently she has many friends, along with a large family. Secretly she could be hard at work on the great American novel, although no woman I’ve ever known has ever used that phrase, one that’s ridiculous to me, and I can’t imagine Jessica engaging in that notion. But you never know what people contain within themselves, if anything at all, and Jessica might just have a vast fantasy life, were I able to crack her open and look inside. I prefer to think that she does. For instance, I’d like to read her deliberate movements as emerging out of a fully conceived sense of herself as being anyone from Cleopatra to Merle Oberon, to that woman who used to be a Republican representative from New Jersey, Millicent Fenwick. Which would have been a great name for Jessica, except she herself is far from being a Republican and left the U.S. toward the end of the war in Vietnam and stayed away after Watergate. Her family are staunch conservatives with ancestors dating back to the American Revolution. Some of Jessica’s aunts are active in the D.A.R. Jessica has escaped that, yet has a kind of grande-dame quality to her, something that carries over into her present incarnation as an American Buddhist. She sits across from me at breakfast, a tiny Buddha, spreading orange marmalade over cold toast with a seriousness and grace usually reserved for bigger things.
I don’t have many fantasies. Perhaps I lack a fantasy life altogether, although you could consider my interest in other people’s lives entirely fantastic, even a little crazy. I do keep a diary, though. For some days, anyway. Not a good one, but sufficient to record the days that pass, my own prime-time soap.
I tell Jessica that I want things plain. Or direct. When I read a book I’m suspicious of description. Too much embellishment or an excess of adjectives bothers me, as if the speaker or writer were attempting to overcome me, to finesse me like a bridge player. Or to seduce me.
I don’t mean I don’t like details. “Some people like excess and elaborate descriptions, some even like to be seduced,” she says almost haughtily, and I imagine her in the throes of a great excessive sexual passion, Charles planting tiny wet kisses at her wrist, his mouth moving up to her shoulder and neck, and in profile Jessica’s mouth is slightly open, as in perfume commercials. She hurriedly drinks more coffee, looking at me as if she knew what scene was playing on my tiny stage, or launching pad, so to speak. She’s reminded of a man she knows, back home, whose vocabulary was so rich no one understood him, and whose stories so elaborate, by the time he reached the point, you felt exhausted and as if you didn’t care. Jessica could just be speaking about excess and elaboration or she could be speaking about us, or me, in some subtle way.
It helps that we’re both reading Henry James. It probably amuses her that I like him because he’s not direct. She’s on The Europeans and I’ve got The American, which seems apropos. Conversation with Jessica, and nearly anyone else, leaves me confused, because like the proverbial river that is never the same, all conversation leads from subject to subject, a horse that trots, canters, then gallops away from one’s initial point of departure. I don’t ride horses; I did once, as a child, but Jessica rides them and they’re in my mind now.
My hotel room, plain and verging on ugly, is easy to ignore. The landscape on the wall, inoffensive, the fake wood bureau, serviceable. The room is cleaned by women I never see. I don’t want to see them, because my sense of privacy will be violated if I know the people who come into this space. Sometimes I don’t let them in, we’ve all seen that in movies, and then I
hear muttering outside my door. But it stops. Sometimes I wait until everyone has left the floor, and only then do I go out of the room. Adventure creeps into this mundane event, and I remember my father talking about someone’s being out of his element, which is, I suppose, one way to put it, my trips in foreign places. But I can’t write my father a postcard because he’s dead. Sometimes I forget that.
Jessica’s good about death. She doesn’t avoid discussions about it and seems to think it’s a suitable subject for analysis rather than a morbid preoccupation of mine or others. Similarly she can discuss Charles as if he hadn’t abandoned her. Her equanimity appears endless, making her a kind of metaphysician about even her own life. Jessica had wanted to be many things, a veterinarian, a physicist, an opera singer, a biologist, even a missionary during an early Protestant awakening, as she put it. She had come, emerged full-blown, from a long line of people used to doing good. But she became a poet, an antique jewelry stall—owner—on the Portobello Road—as well as a Buddhist, and suffers from being missionless, a despair I don’t think I have, not having come from people like hers. Insanity roamed through her large midwestern tribe, cloistered in proverbial dark closets in gabled houses in areas of the country where no one else lived for miles and miles, as if the openness of the land, the nothingness that seemed to stretch forever, and lack of contact outside the family provided the most fertile ground for a certain kind of American psychosis.
But Jessica loves that same fertile intemperate ground, the depopulated landscape, and communes with nature, noticing trees and naming them, saving leaves and drying them, until her hotel room resembles, with its Buddhist altar and woodsy decor, a certain kind of diorama, like one at the Museum of Natural History, from my point of view. To Jessica anything natural inspired awe and was beautiful, whereas what people made in order to look beautiful or to look at beauty was always and forever tainted. I tell her I can’t see the trees for the people.
Motion Sickness Page 1
