Here Until August

by Josephine Rowe

  Why here? Because certain arrangements had already been set forth. Bruno, still engaged by an American institution, where he had accepted a yearlong appointment of hazy obligations, to shuffle his papers and to deliver the occasional rant on Metin Erksan or post-Fascist Cinecittà or whatever he was so inclined. Still at leisure to plot weekend indulgences of wineries and oyster farms and perhaps the five-hour odyssey to Westwood Memorial Park to stroll amidst the famous dead.

  As long as I proceeded with the arrangements, he would arrive in due course—sweating, overdressed, underpacked—already lighting up as he paid away the taxi driver, swearing that they had discovered their license at the bottom of a Bonux box.

  Or, however he came: there he would be.

  No matter that this American apartment—a furnished sublet acquired at short, disinterested notice—would not be to his satisfaction. A comfort to imagine him crowding its doorway, lighting up again despite building regulations, blowing disapproving smoke towards the broken light fixtures, the peeling paintwork, the bad art prints badly framed, the insufficient kitchen, before finally turning his longest-suffering face down to me:

  Séverine, what have you got us into? You have a spider on your ceiling, or what?

  Another reason: because here I was not known. Here no one thought to clutch my hands and wag their heads in tremendous pity. Another reason: the city so recently known as Home had become a facsimile of Home. Which was far more unsettling than being elsewhere. Each time I left or returned to the apartment I had shared with Bruno, there was still Christoph nodding gravely at the entrance of our building. At the MBA, still the exhibition of nineteenth-century figurative art. Outside the pharmacy, still the old Resistance fighter who would scream Magdalena! for no reason. I should say, no reason anyone could determine. I am now ready to believe he had a reason. In any case. Past this man, forsythia was still blooming in the park, and Melancholy Vanessa still polished glasses at Les Pléiades, and the World Cup was still blaring from large screens, angled towards the entranceways of every other bar. As I have said, it was unnerving.

  Disaster does not choose people. I try to console myself with this thought. Somebody must be standing on the bridge when it collapses, riding the plane when it goes down. Disaster does not care to seek us out; it simply is, and we are, and we meet along some terrible axis we are too small and too stupid to understand. I know, at the center of my logical self, that this is true. But at night it is not enough only to pull the curtains: I must also turn off all the lights and disconnect all the twinkling appliances and move around in the darkest dark so that nobody outside can know by my shadow exactly where I am, what I am doing. Even if what I am doing is only making tea, or giving water to the sick monstera plant. Once in bed I curl up into a ball, very tiny, so if someone were to enter my room I might be the very last thing they would notice.

  I can get by on very little. All during my adult life I have been proud of this fact. I do not mean only food. A handful of sleep and a few pages of Saroyan. Black coffee and an eavesdropped conversation with a woman who claims to read the auras of birds. This is sufficient.

  But what I was down to, what almost forced me out into the daylight was the fact that the only noncondiment items on my cupboard shelves were one jar of maraschino cherries and one half-bag of rice. And a jar of cherries is really perched upon the condiment/noncondiment divide. In the end I decided that I could last two days on that, perhaps three. Because there was still coffee, if half-stale, and also various spices to enliven the rice. And if one day I permitted myself a cigarette instead of lunch …

  Oouut, bays Maria’s poorly named dog.

  And so it happens that I see my building from the outside for the first time in a week, and I am surprised to find it beautiful. It is, when one is looking from the street at its bricked-over carriageways and oriel windows.

  Chavez walks as if he is performing dressage. He piaffes ahead of me at the end of his leash, stopping obediently when the crosswalk tells us wait, wait, wait, in a voice that sounds more forlorn with each repetition. Wait, wait, wait. But as soon as the traffic ceases we are parading again towards the water, and I remember—too late—that it is Sunday. Meaning: all of the people, all of their dogs. In this neighborhood the dogs all appear to be named for philosophers or jazz musicians or tragic figures from classic literature. We go past Mingus and Søren and Brutus, and whoever their people are. There are shouts for Gorky to come back right now, for Heisenberg to get out of that damn trash.

  We are both slight women, myself and Maria. But the difference is that I am not the one to be listened to, and Chavez leads me where he pleases. I am pulled like a clumsy musher in his wolfish wake, from hound to hound, fence post to light post, from cheerful Hello to How do. Does he like other dogs? these people ask. I say I do not know. Is he friendly with children? I say I do not know. What sort of breed is he? I pretend I have forgotten all of my English (except I am sorry, I do not have much English). We pass by one woman alone on a bench, who waves her magazine at us and calls to the dog by his name.

  Chavez, beautiful beast, she says in a luxurious drawl, reaching lacquered nails to scratch his scruff. Who’s your new mistress? Then she addresses me, winking, Where’s the old mistress? Well, we all get traded in, eventually, don’t we? Yes we do! Hahah!

  I like the way she looks, this woman, with her gold-shadowed eyes and widely spaced teeth. As though she tried and failed at Hollywood in the seventies, but does not feel too bitter about it. I like her washed-up glamour. She reminds me of Lotti, I realize. But even so I do not wish to speak with her. It is difficult enough speaking with the real Lotti, who makes a point of observing, when she video-calls, how I have let the gray into my hair. (In fact, the gray has always been in my hair.) She is worried, I know, that I am fading away.

  The woman on the bench says something additional to me in an odd relative of French that I am embarrassed not to understand. I nod and smile vigorously, agreeing to I do not know what, while tugging at the leash to dislodge Maria’s dog.

  No more, I tell Chavez once we are safely returned to the apartment. No more everybody-and-their-dog afternoons. Chavez does not bother to Escóndete! (perhaps my accent is not right?) but sits in the middle of the kitchen, one ear up, one ear down, as if to say, Woman who is not Maria, what is your problem?

  But I remain firm. From now on, I inform him, we must be more strategic.

  There is still, however, the supermarket to contend with—Maria’s crumpled pair of twenty-dollar bills, paper-clipped together in a logic I do not comprehend, for the purchasing of Chavez’s food.

  A friend of mine did his dissertation on supermarkets. On the theories of supermarkets. Quoting heavily from fellow lunatics who had done the same. Meaning that for some years, this is all I heard about. To whom is this useful? I had wondered then. But now I am using it. For instance, I know the layout is far more complicated than simply: milk at the near end, bread at the far end, a vast territory of impulse purchases between. I understand that both the spacing of the aisles and the music overhead are working as allies to stall us. I am aware of which colors stimulate hunger, and which colors promise comfort, purity, vitality, robust familial relationships. All of this I can outfox to some success, breaking it down into harmless pieces. It simply takes some determination. The enemy is choice, or rather the appearance of choice—so it is a matter of restricting the influence of the appearance of choice. Simply, I will buy for myself only what is located between the entrance, the pet food aisle, and the checkout. A trajectory in the shape of an isosceles triangle. Having already excluded the possibility of bread and milk (except by accident) I feel more calm.

  Once past the electronic doors, I look wistfully towards the bright pyramids of avocados and peaches in fresh produce. It is all right there, but in the wrong direction, and I march towards Aisle 9 and its seven-foot wall of dog faces, my mind buffered to everything but the brand Maria has written down for me. The dog on this package looks
not the least bit like Chavez, but I collect two of each flavor and retrace my route back towards the checkout, tipping nonperishable items into my basket along the way. Oatmeal cookies. Cans of tomatoes and beans. Dried rigatoni. Whatever can be gleaned from the end-of-lane sale displays. Salt crackers. Make-believe orange juice. Sliced peaches. Thinking of bomb shelters, I assemble everything triumphantly upon the conveyor belt, and wait while the woman ahead of me interrogates her children about a pineapple.

  Who put this thing in here? She lofts it up as though it might answer for itself.

  Her children are silent. One chews his sleeve.

  Well, sorry, guys, we’re absolutely not taking this pineapple. Not after the lychee debacle.

  The cashier places the pineapple in the corral for abandoned produce, and I avert my eyes so as not to show my elation. I stare hard into the label of the peaches—an orchard where a smiling bear pilots a tractor.

  Once the woman ahead of me has paid and is shepherding her children towards the parking lot, I announce to the cashier that I will take the pineapple. As though I am the hero of the pineapple, when in fact I am already plotting to eviscerate it.

  Be right with you, ma’am, says the cashier. Hey, Allen? Could you take this fucker back to produce? The pineapple is spirited away, and I watch mutely as my items follow each other over the scanner.

  I remind myself that it is not even the best season for pineapples. Though in fact I do not know if this is so in this part of the world.

  In the apartment, I place a bowl on the floor. I pour food into the bowl until it is full, Chavez eats the food until the bowl is empty, and this is satisfying in exactly the way watching animals eat is satisfying.

  For myself I open the jar of peaches and arrange the slices on a plate in a spiral, as though this presentation means all the difference between meal and snack. I dust the peach slices with sumac and eat them with my fingers.

  I am woken, this first night of dog-minding, by the restless clattering of Chavez’s claws on the kitchen tiles. Chit chit chit chit chit. For a moment I think the frantic tapping is Bruno, bullying his typewriter as an ugly deadline rears up. He had twelve years on me, and was still in the habit of using the electric typewriter he had upgraded to—upgraded to!—in the eighties. It was not an elegant machine, but of course I could not bring myself to throw it away. Perhaps the fledgling architects are using it now.

  I do not mind so much being woken. When I call to Chavez he comes, dropping down at the bedside with a dramatized grouff. I venture a hand from the covers to reassure him he belongs here, here for now, and fall asleep again holding on to an ear.

  Our second walk proves more successful than the first. In the still-dark morning I take him out, when the gulls are scooping mollusks up from the lake and then flapping up and dropping them from great heights in order to smash them open. The wet clacking sound they make—are they clams? Moules?—when hitting the hard ground reminds me of a poem, but I do not remember whose, exactly. Only that it includes this English word, clacking, and was the first place I encountered it.

  I watch the gulls so as not to watch Chavez, to save us both from embarrassment. When he is finished I pick up after him and we return home, creeping together past the doorways of our sleeping neighbors, the sound from his large feathery paws disappearing into the green hallway carpet.

  We pass most of this day watching brief, grainy, unhappy footage on my laptop, and in the evening I type out an interview between an astronomer and a journalist who cannot quite manage to pronounce the name Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

  Work still finds me through a little hole in the universe. The hole in question is my own name at gmail dot com. This reminds me sometimes of these—how are they called? These systems with the canisters of rolled-up documents which go whooshing along inside tubes? Over your head and through some secret arteries behind walls. Anyway. The work is transcribing faraway spoken interviews into neat scripts, sans disfluencies, in two or more colors. It arrives mostly from journalists. The journalists are mostly the old acquaintances of Bruno and myself. Their interviews are not always interesting. Often, these days, they are not interesting at all.

  Not so long ago there were the occasional alarming subjects to reckon with. A man convicted of vampirism. A woman who had rented out her very young daughter to men in exchange for drug money. Sometimes I would need to remove my headphones and return to my desk with brandy in order to continue transcribing. But this work is all soft stuff now, all baby mush. Conversations with dreary economists and with people who have won things. Opinions of François Hollande’s opinions on Fashion Week. No surprises, good or bad. Give the poor woman something to think about, I imagine them telling each other, all the way at the other end of this air tube (pneumatique, I just remembered). But of course, never too much to think about; nothing which might upset, invite dark thoughts, trigger, déclencher. As if I no longer have access to real-time news, to radios and televisions and papers, for instance the plane wreckage in the Ukrainian field of wheat and Queen Anne’s lace. The first reports to emerge are lists of things: parking tickets, a scattered deck of cards, a child’s book. Instead of bodies, we are shown the small strips of fabric wound around tree branches to flag where the bodies are.

  In the end, though, we are still shown the bodies.

  After transcribing the astronomer and the stumbling journalist, I type up a conversation with a children’s author about an award she has just received. The book is said to have an environmental agenda. Otters in sweaters, I learn, can sell anything.

  For walking Chavez, it is not so difficult to find unpeopled hours. These are the hours when I am most awake, in any case, when everybody else is not. And Chavez seems not to mind. We settle upon late nights and very early mornings, when there is still the glow of lights strung all the way around the lake—bright little stations we can move between. Festooned is the word. For lights like that. At these times there is occasionally the small matter of cats and Chavez wanting to eat them. But the squirrels are all curled away somewhere, so it is really an even trade, cats for squirrels. The lake bobs with ducks who are asleep, looking precisely like decoys out there with their heads tucked into their wings. The wind slowly spinning them around, as if they are as light as balsa. What bad could happen here?

  There is a part of the self which is not yet caught up to the airplane age, part of the self which must journey as if by sea, while the rest of the body and brain and—soul? Fine, okay, I will say “soul”—might move at whatever absurd speeds we demand of them, at 500 knots amidst prepackaged meals and magazine advertisements for singing toothbrushes. Or perhaps it is precisely the soul that is so slow, that travels at such a lag. And so in my first weeks here I believe I weighed less—do you understand?—and I moved through these strange streets fearless even of the things I knew to be afraid of: men who waited in parked cars nodding along to no radio, or the ones who squatted in doorways yelling disgusting things. News of gun-grazed innocents who were simply on their way to buy soda but were caught in crossfire. The statistics which Lotti helpfully sent to me: one robbery for every hundred residents, one car theft for every forty, and so on. These things did not register.

  But soon enough the fear arrived, very sudden. It came right up and pounded me in a restaurant, a few bites into a harvest salad, and that was the last time I ate from other people’s cutlery.

  It was Bruno who coerced me into this habit in the first place, of eating out. Before him it seemed an extravagance to be doing so on ordinary days, for no special reason. But he was always given to extravagance.

  I have said I can get by on little. Not so when I was young. When I was young I wanted to taste something from every plate. Again, I do not only mean food.

  You’ll spoil, my mother told me, and she did not mean only my appetite.

  But my grandmother said this was the ideal way to go about life—by taking a little of all of it—and she seemed far happier than my mother, so I continued.


  What changed? I am asking myself this only now. It could not have been just the one thing. It could not have been so simple as: I simply became less hungry. Or: I became content with what I had.

  Hunger, for me, became Pavlovian. I imagine this is true for many. In recent years, it was the music of Oum Kalthoum which would cause me to be hungry. When not indulging in restaurants, Bruno liked to cook along to her mournful quarter-tone wavering. Dancing bearish but light-footed around our small kitchen, waking fennel and coriander seeds in spitting pools of ghee. Slathering aubergine with harissa and other strong spices he could detect over the taste of his constant cigarettes. So much garlic that I would be kept awake with the persistent ringing of it in my teeth and tongue. It was never enough for him to fill up a room with his voice and his opinions: he must overtake through every sensory means available.

  After so many academics with beautiful hands who smelled like soap or nothing and made no sound when they climaxed, Bruno was like a motorcycle rally in all of his noise, all of his heat and smoke and vroom. He smelled as I imagined a seal might, like an oilskin jacket, only more so. It is hard to say why I liked this. It is hard to explain why I liked many things about him.