Design of the non

by David Odell

  Two weeks after I'd arrived in New York in the year of my marriage (it was a weekend, the second weekend and I was already beginning to feel the build-up of exhaustion), Berta showed me a letter that had arrived at the box number she'd rented to receive the replies to her personal ads. She used to let me read them when I was there in order to share the fun (she was less inclined to share the subsequent grief), but in this case she wanted to know if I saw the same things as she did in the letter.

  "See what you think," she said as she handed it to me.

  The letter was typewritten in English and didn't say very much, the tone was relaxed but polite, even a little conservative for that kind of correspondence. The man had seen Berta's advertisement in the personal ads in a monthly magazine and seemed interested in making contact. He mentioned he was going to be in the city for a couple of months (which, he realized, could be both an attraction and a disadvantage) and added that, nevertheless, he visited Manhattan quite often, several times a year (which was, he said, both encouraging and convenient since it would guarantee that he wouldn't become a burden). As if he were unused to writing that kind of letter and didn't know that it was normal to begin by using a pseudonym or a nickname or just one's initials, he signed off with the name "Nick" (the signature was in his own hand) and justified this by adding that, as he worked "in a very visible arena" (those were his exact words), he had to be very discreet for the moment, not to say reticent or even secretive. That's what he said, "not to say reticent or even secretive".

  After reading the letter I said to Berta what she'd hoped I would say:

  "This letter was written by a Spaniard."

  The English was very correct, but there were a few hesitations, one obvious error and several expressions, which were not only unEnglish, but which seemed to have been too literally translated from the Spanish: all three of us, Berta, Luisa and I, are very good at picking up the errors our fellow countrymen make when they speak or write other languages. If the man was Spanish, however, it seemed perverse, if not absurd, for him to address Berta in English, since the first thing she mentioned in the advertisement she placed in that magazine every month were her origins: "Young woman from Spain . . .", that was how it began, although when it came to meeting the men, she was a bit embarrassed at having described herself as still young; before going out she always thought she looked hideous and could see all her wrinkles, even after the collagen treatment, even the wrinkles that didn't exist. What intrigued her most about the letter from Nick was "the very visible arena". The truth is that, since she'd first begun her dealings or pre-dealings with strange men, I'd never seen her so excited after an initial contact. "A very visible arena!" she exclaimed and repeated it laughing a little, half at the pretentious, comical nature of the phrase, half out of enthusiasm and hope. "What do you think he does? A very visible arena, that sounds like cinema or television to me. Do you think he's a presenter? There are several of them I like, but of course, if he's Spanish, then I won't know him, I don't know who they are, but you might." She paused to think for a moment and, after a while, added: "Maybe he's a sportsman or a politician, although I don't think a politician would risk it. Although in Spain people are pretty brazen about things. Saying he works in a very visible arena is like saying he's famous. That's why he wants to pass himself off as an American. Who do you think it can be?"

  "The 'arena' business may be a lie, a trick to give himself airs and get you interested. And it's worked."

  "Possibly, but the expression does have a certain charm. 'Arena'. It's a very American expression, but if he's Spanish, where did he pick it up from?"

  "From TV where everyone learns everything. It may well be that he's not famous at all, but that he imagines he is. Maybe he's a stockbroker or a doctor or a businessman, and he just thinks he's important and therefore vulnerable to exposure, when in fact no one knows who such people are, especially not here in America."

  I encouraged her discoveries and her hopes, it was the least I could do. That is, the least I could do was to listen to her, take an interest in her world, cheer her on, give importance to the things to which she gave importance and be optimistic, which is, in my opinion, the prime function of friendship.

  "Maybe he's a singer," she said.

  "No, a writer," I replied.

  Berta wrote back to the box number that Nick had given her, "PO Box" that's what they call it in English, everyone uses it, there are millions of them scattered about the country. But although during my stay Berta was always happy to show me any letters or videos sent by her correspondents, she didn't feel the same about her written replies, which she despatched without keeping a copy and without showing me, and I understood that, because one could accept an outsider passing judgement on actions that are never seen in their entirety and are transient, but not on words, which are both legible and permanent (even if the person passing judgement does so without meaning to and from the best of motives, even if that person doesn't give expression to that judgement).

  A few days later she got a reply to her reply, another letter she was quite happy to show to me. It was written in that same decorous and dubious English, the language in which Berta had replied to him, or so she told me, so as not to disappoint him or wound his linguistic sensibilities, and the letter this time was shorter and more salacious, as if my friend had encouraged this change in him, or perhaps not, perhaps at this second stage the minimum of formality essential in all initial contacts tended to disappear. This time he didn't sign himself "Nick", but "Jack", the name he preferred "this week" he said, and again the name was written in his hand, the "c" and the "k" identical in both signatures. He asked her to send him a video so that he could see her face and hear her voice, and he apologized for not yet sending her one of himself (so it must have been Berta who'd asked him to do so in the first place): since he was still settling in for his two-month stay in the city and hadn't had time to buy a camera or find out where he could have such a video made, but he'd send it next time. On this occasion he made no reference to his "arena" and said nothing more about himself, instead he wrote a little about Berta, whom he briefly (in three lines) allowed himself to imagine in the privacy of her room. He was still using clichéd rather than crude phrases, the kind you get in love songs: "I already long for the moment when I can undress you and caress your soft skin", things like that. Then at the end, just before the signature, Jack signed off with a kind of brutal mischievousness, as if unable to contain himself any longer: "I want to fuck you", it said in English. But those words seemed to me to have been written in cold blood and by way of being a harsh reminder, just in case Berta should imagine that fucking didn't figure in the plan he was concocting. Or perhaps it was a way of eliminating his earlier melodic affectations or of gauging the forbearance and the vocabulary (the lexical tolerance) of his correspondent. Berta had more than enough forbearance and humour: she was still laughing, her eyes were shining, her limp was less pronounced, she felt flattered, forgetting for a moment that for this man who desired her and wanted to fuck her she was still no more than a few letters, a few initials, the mere promise of someone, "BSA", a few words written in a language that was neither hers nor his, and that once he'd seen her or seen her video and she was something more than that, she might no longer be desired or even fuckable, as had happened on other occasions, and that after gratifying his desire — if it was gratified — she might be rejected, as had happened on almost every occasion for some time now, though why she didn't know or want to know.

  She was aware of all this (once that first moment was over), but she replied to "Jack" as she'd replied to "Nick" and she sent him a copy of her agency video and waited. During those days of waiting she was nervous but also cheerful and affectionate towards me in the way women are when they're nursing some illusion, although with me she's never anything other than affectionate. One afternoon, when I got back from work before Berta and I picked up the mail from her mailbox, she made her feelings even clearer. No sooner
had she opened the door and put the key away in her handbag (and without slipping into her homely ways, her mind was on other things), she came over to me and asked urgently, not even bothering to say hello first:

  "Did you pick up the mail or didn't we get any today?"

  "Yes, I did. Yours is on the table. I had a letter from Luisa."

  She hurried over to the table and looked at the envelopes (one, two, three) but opened none of them until she'd taken off her raincoat, gone to the bathroom and to the fridge and put on a pair of moccasins that made her appear even lamer than usual. Neither she nor I were going out that night and while I was watching Family Feud on the TV and she was reading (not, I'm glad to say, Kundera), she said to me:

  "I'm such an idiot, I'm all twitchy, I keep forgetting things. Earlier on I thought there might be something in the mail from 'Visible Arena'. But if he does write to me, he'll write to my box number not here, he doesn't know my address or my name, what could I have been thinking of?" She paused for a second and then added: "Do you think he'll reply?"

  "Of course he will. How could he not reply after seeing your video?" I said.

  She fell silent and joined me in watching one of the games on Family Feud. Then she said:

  "Every time I wait for a reply to one of my letters, I'm as terrified by the idea that there won't be one as by the idea that there will. It's always a complete disaster anyway, but while it's still all yet to come I have a feeling of absolute cleanness and infinite possibility. I feel the way I used to when I was fifteen years old, not in the least sceptical, it's odd. I can't help hoping. Most of the guys I go on to meet are vile, repellent, sometimes I end up going out and having supper with them or whatever just because they were preceded by the waiting and the letters, otherwise I wouldn't even cross the road in their company. Maybe they feel the same about me." She paused again or perhaps she was listening to another of the questions on Family Feud. Then she went on: 'That's why the perfect state is one of waiting and ignorance but, of course, if I knew that state was going to last forever then I wouldn't enjoy it. For example, a guy turns up who, for some reason or other, I'm really interested in, without knowing anything about him, like this Nick or Jack. Why do you think he changed his name? They don't usually. Before I meet him, and before I see the video or the photograph he sends, I feel almost happy. For some time now those have been the only days when I do feel happy and in a good mood. Then they send me those ridiculous videos that they think are so daring, the video's a real curse, and even then I often arrange to meet them, as if nothing that happens before the actual meeting counts. It's too artificial, I think, people behave differently when they're face to face. It's as if I was giving them another chance, forgetting what they made of their first chance or what I made of mine. It's an odd thing but, regardless of the falseness of the situation in which they're made, the videos never lie. You see, you watch a video the way you watch television, with impunity. We never look so closely or brazenly at anyone in the flesh, because in any other circumstance we know that the other person will also be watching us, or that they might see us watching them on the sly. It's an infernal invention, it's put an end to transience, to the possibility of deceiving oneself and describing the way things happened differently from how they actually did happen. They've put an end to memory, which was imperfect and open to manipulation, selective and variable. Now that you can't remember something at your leisure once it's been recorded, how can you remember something that you know you can see again, exactly as it happened, in slow motion if you like? How can you possibly alter it?" Berta sounded weary, she had her damaged leg curled up beneath her in the armchair and she was holding the book in her hand, as if she'd not quite decided whether to stop reading or to stop watching the contest: she was speaking, therefore, as if in parenthesis, that is, without wanting to say too much. "It's just as well that we only film occasional moments from a whole life, but those moments, you see, never lie, more because of the way the person watching them looks at them than because there's any real authenticity in what was filmed. When I see the videos of those men my heart sinks, even though at the time I laugh and sometimes even end up going out with some of them. My heart sinks and it sinks even further when I see them arrive in the ugly suits they've chosen with such care and with their condoms in their pocket, not one of them ever forgets to bring them, they've all thought: Well, just in case.' It would be even worse if one of them did forget to bring them on the first date, I'd probably fall in love with him. Now I'm all excited about this Nick or Jack, a perverse Spaniard who wants to pass himself off as an American. He might be fun, with his visible arena, what a way to introduce yourself! I've felt much more resigned, even contented, these last few days, because I'm waiting for a reply from him and for him to send me his video, well, and because you're here too. And what will happen? His video will be vile, but I'll watch it several times anyway, just to get myself used to him, until he doesn't seem quite so awful and even his defects begin to seem attractive, that's the one advantage of repetition, it distorts everything and makes it familiar, what repels you in real life you end up finding attractive if you see it often enough on the TV screen. But I know, deep down, that all that guy wants is to screw me, for one night only, as he's taken it upon himself to warn me, and then he'll disappear, whether I like him or not, whether I want him to disappear or not. I want to see him and I don't want to see him, I want to meet him and I want him to go on being a stranger, I want him to reply and I don't want to receive that reply. But if it doesn't arrive I'll feel desperate, I'll get depressed, I'll think that when he saw me, he didn't like me and that's always hurtful. I never know what to want."

  Berta covered her face with the open book without realizing what she was doing; when she felt the contact of the pages on her face she dropped it and then covered her face with her hands, as she'd meant to do in the first place. She wasn't crying, just hiding for a moment, for an instant. I stopped watching Family Feud, got up and went over to her. I picked up the book from the floor and put my hand on her shoulder. She took my hand and stroked it (just for a second), then slowly removed it, a gesture of gentle rejection.

  There was no face in the video sent by "Nick" or "Jack", who on this third occasion had chosen to call himself "Bill", "which might be my definitive name and then again it might not", he said, still in English, on the card that accompanied the recording, and the "i" was identical to the "i" in "Nick". It may have arrived on the day that it couldn't have arrived at the house and didn't, but Berta picked it up two days later, when she went to look at her box number at the local post office, where she received her more personal, or rather impersonal, correspondence. She was still wearing her raincoat when I got in that evening, she'd arrived only a few minutes before me, although she would have arrived a good deal earlier than me if she hadn't stopped by the post office or been delayed or got nervous when she was trying to open the silver mailbox. She was holding the package in her hand (a package in the shape of a video tape), she held it up and waved it at me with a smile, to show me, to let me know it had come. She was standing still and so wasn't limping.

  "Shall we watch it together tonight after supper?" she asked me, trustingly.

  "I'm having supper out tonight. I don't know what time I'll be back."

  "OK, if I can, I'll wait until you get back. If I can't, I'll leave it on top of the television so that you can watch it before you go to bed, then we can discuss it tomorrow."

  'Why don't we watch it now?"

  "No, I'm not ready yet. I want to wait a few hours, just to know that I've got it but without watching it. I'll wait up for you as long as I can."

  I was on the point of cancelling my date. Berta would rather watch the video with me, in order to be protected while she was watching it or in order to give it the visual importance that she'd been giving it verbally for days now. It was an event, even a solemn event, and you have to give importance to what is important to your friends. But my date was in part work-relat
ed, with a senior Spanish civil servant, a friend of my father's who was visiting the city and who had a reasonable but uncertain grasp of English and had asked me if I could accompany him and his (much younger) wife to supper with another couple, an American senator and his (much younger) American wife, in order to chat to the women while the men discussed dirty tricks and also to lend him a hand with his English if, as was quite probable, he needed it. Not only were the two ladies younger, they were also a pair of frivolous birdbrains who, after supper, insisted on going out dancing and so we did: they danced for hours with me and with various other men (never once with their husbands, who were up to their eyes in dirty tricks) and they danced very close, especially the Spanish woman, whose breasts to me felt like silicon implants, like wood soaked in water, not that I submitted them to any hands-on analysis. The two couples were both rich and sophisticated, they did deals, they injected themselves with silicon, they spoke of Cuba like people in the know, they went to places where you dance very close.