A City Made of Words Read online

I stood up, and took matters into my own hands. After another bout with the bucket he was less combative. I mopped the floor while he shivered and slept. Finally he spoke to me, and I would have had to have been a fool (and not worthy of my MFA and four years of subsequent adjunct work, sleeping in my car, selling blood, and eating at food banks) to take him seriously or at face value. It was my minor in psychology from Haverford that enabled me to understand how his curricular recommendations, when he made them, could be read as a response to his current circumstances, occurring in an alternate reality, say—to use his lingo—where we had more and different resources and a different sense of time and scale. A world or universe where people like himself were lionized and respected and not thrown away like garbage. “I imagine a stone courtyard and an empty fountain,” he said, “surrounded by dry, raked gravel and a few stone benches. A warm, dusty wind would shake the lime trees. This is what we learn: music theory, chess, and go. In the breaks, the students make jigsaw puzzles with some pieces missing, the more the better. A student, blindfolded, is led through the world. There are sequences of focused observation. There are classes in drawing, acting, and scenic design. We would alternate periods of extreme attention with extreme inattention, like running mental sprints. We would write no stories at all until the seventh year. Instead, we would tell jokes and invent stand-up routines. We would train ourselves as architects and chefs. This would all be the foundation for a new kind of literature that would have no connection to our actual experience, to what we thought or felt or could imagine. Who has time for any of that anyway? That’s not what fiction is about. In our liberation, we could imagine stories in which each word was unique, untethered to consensus meaning. “Ack, ack, ack, ack,” we will say. “The plenipotentiary cannot but suffer from the rift.”

  At other times he would be more subdued. “The only possible story is this one,” he said. “A man sits in a room, his chair moving back and forth. It is a flimsy object that he cannot quit. Another man alternately draws and scribbles on an oblong piece of serviceable green plastic with a rubber back. He describes someone without a head. But he can only guess at what he cannot see, the part of the wall and empty bookcase that is hidden behind the actual head in front of him, which consists of two layers of solid yet insulated bone, still largely intact. Therefore he cannot see the crack or rift in the old-fashioned plaster, and the light beyond it that penetrates into the room. You would think he might guess there is a hole, or at least something he has not understood or accounted for, because of the indirect effect of the light, which is not harsh or inefficient like the single tungsten bulb that hangs from the center of the room, but is instead palliative.

  “Beyond the head, between two shelves, there is the inside wall of plaster, and an insulated space behind the lath, and then an outside wall. That wall is also breached, and the source of light is out there somewhere, dredged in fog. Way off in the distance, though, lies another country, and a city built entirely of words.”

  Climate Change

  WHAT SEVENTY-YEAR-OLD MAN WOULD not want to receive, on cream-colored stationery, in rigorous yet graceful handwriting, the following instructions?

  Join me on the island, from January fourth to January fourteenth, for a confidential reading of the cards. I’ve booked us at La Reine Hortense (it still exists!), for the white cabin. Please bring your cock, if you can, as I shall need the loan of it, about three yards at appointed intervals.

  Which is how she’d used to talk in the old days. After breakfast, lying on her stomach by the edge of the sea, flies buzzing: “I shall need some cock in a bit. Did you remember to pack it along?”

  Barbara had brought in the embossed envelope and of course she was curious. One gets so few actual letters nowadays. “It’s about Charles’s reading,” Mark said, apologetically, because she hated Charles.

  “Why is it from London?”

  Mark shrugged. “He lives there now, part of the year. But the event is going to be in Philadelphia.”

  Three yards was really a lot these days, depending on how you measured. A year’s supply, maybe more. Later, in the afternoon, he and Barbara sat at the kitchen table. This was in the Hoboken apartment on the third floor. Light fell in strips through the windows over the street. “I’m thinking of doing a follow-up for that old article,” he said. “You know the one?”

  It didn’t take much for her to look at him like that. At fifty-nine she was still beautiful, prettier than Jane had ever been. Dark hair, possibly dyed—who knows these things? She was worried about him, and he was glad for her concern. She was the one who had suggested he might take a trip just by himself. Prior to their marriage he had gone all over. And he had actually written a travel article about Melanesia in the mid-1990s. “I’m interested to see what’s happened now,” he said, “with climate change.”

  “It’s a long way,” she said, scratching the back of her hand. He loved her thick-knuckled fingers. She could do a lot of things, draw, paint, sew. Making things with her hands constituted her own therapy, she claimed. Many things owed her their existence in the world—these napkins, for example, and these napkin rings, carved in the shapes of birds. These cups with the temuco glaze. These framed pictures of the children. This watercolor of laundry on the line.

  Because she had so intimately designed the sets and stages, it was easy for him to imagine, late at night in the apartment, that he was wandering around the theater and the green room after a performance. The children had relocated to the West Coast. They were older than Jane had been when she’d first spoken to him on the plane from Noumea to the island, thirty years before.

  “I was thinking somewhere in the next months,” he said.

  He had been younger too, of course. He had no sense of that. But he saw her clear as a photograph as she’d appeared that afternoon. It was impossible to imagine what she might look like now, and he didn’t try.

  “Melanesia.”

  “Yes.”

  He didn’t look at Barbara as she poured tea. Instead he looked at Jane standing in the doorway of the airplane at the top of the ramp, the liquid sun behind her, backpack slung over one shoulder. It was not a romantic moment. The light was so bright. Mark had thought he’d have the cabin to himself. He had found the twenty-seat puddle jumper on the sweating asphalt and had climbed aboard.

  She sat down next to him across the aisle. Early in the flight, maybe so he wouldn’t get the wrong idea, she announced that she lived in a planned community in Nottinghamshire, a farm without male animals, a village without male inhabitants. It sounded like a location in a fairy story or a utopian fantasy. Women had daughters but no sons, she claimed, and smiled. He smiled back unsurprised—she wore a brownish greenish sleeveless singlet with no bra, and some kind of iron talisman on a cord around her neck. Later he would get to know it well, a pendant in the shape of a hammer. She was squarish, small, with small breasts, short hair with a single braided rat tail. Her arms and shoulders were sweaty. That was the first thing he had liked.

  After twenty minutes they circled the volcano and came down onto the island. The pilot opened the door and then went back into the cockpit. Mark got his bag and the two of them descended into the light. The propellers never stopped spinning. The plane moved away as they were walking to the only airport structure, a prefabricated cabin that was deserted also.

  “How odd,” Jane said. She sounded posh to him. He couldn’t remember if he’d thought so at the time. Now, in Hoboken, he heard her voice, filtered, perhaps, though layers of Sunday-night television. By contrast, each visual image was single and precise. At this moment he saw, for example, the tattoo of the quill pen and inkstand on the inside of her forearm and the drop of crimson ink in the middle of her wrist as she brought the back of her hand up to her forehead. In those days it was rare to see such a beautiful tattoo. “My girlfriend made it for me,” she’d told him, then or later.

  And of course, it was at that moment that he realized he had seen her before, which explai
ned why she had been so chatty on the plane and was walking with him now as if she knew him. That splotch of red. On the boat to Koh Samui. She had been standing by the rail and he had looked at her and her tattoo, and she had turned and stared back, unblinking, which was something a child might do, but not a young woman on holiday. He’d noticed her mouth, which was wide and big.

  If he had been able to categorize that realization on the tarmac as they walked away from the moving plane, the red splotch would have signified the first instance of those lapses of cognition that increasingly beset him now, thirty years on, and which he hid from Barbara as much as he could.

  At the afternoon tea table she picked up a magazine. But Mark was living in a world where she did not yet exist to him. He stood with Jane on the gravel road, curious to see what happened next. No cars, no houses once they’d left the airfield, but just the dense semi-tropical green, a barricade of vegetation on both sides of the road. Jane looked up at the high cinder cone with its witch’s cap of black and gray. “How odd,” she said again, and then was silent, because a bus turned at the end of the long straightaway and trundled toward them out of the distance and pulled up opposite, a yellow school bus driven by an obese Melanesian driver who cranked open the doors and motioned them inside. Once again they were the only passengers. Mark wore a T-shirt, cargo shorts, and tire-bottomed sandals. He carried a canvas bag (a change of clothes and his notebooks) and slung it across his lap as he sat down.

  Jane, her soft face in profile against the green window, a smudge of dirt above her eye. Jane, uncertain, glancing sideways toward him—he had read in the Lonely Planet guidebook about a place to stay, a collection of whitewashed huts above a sugar-sand beach. There wasn’t another car on the road and they passed nobody on foot. In time the driver pulled over and pointed wordlessly up a footpath leading away from the main road; Mark had told him where they were going in his uninspired French.

  “When would you go?” Barbara asked, not that day at the tea table but the next, when they went out to breakfast at a little place on Washington Street and Tenth. Once again he found himself staring at her veined and knotted hands, today in fingerless alpaca gloves, which she now removed.

  “I’d have to wait until I could get some time off,” he said. “Maybe in January? After Christmas, in any case. I’d see when I could take some time after Christmas. Summertime there, of course.”

  Mark ran auctions and wrote articles about third-world handicrafts for an online retailer. Christmas was the busy season and then business fell off a cliff. His employers were imbeciles.

  But in the 1990s he had written some travel articles for major publications. The one on the South Seas had run in National Geographic. It would have been ridiculous to think that Jane had been responsible for that success. But he thought a lot of untrue things, more and more. “I’ve been looking at pictures of the rising seawater,” he said. “Places I’ve been.”

  They had arrived on Christmas Eve. At La Reine Hortense, they found the paillote empty, the plein-air central kitchen under its thatched roof. No one in the whitewashed little cabins with their diamond-paned windows. Jane left her backpack propped against a palm tree, and because it was a hot day and it hadn’t yet rained, they climbed down through a fringe of vegetation to the beach itself and changed into their bathing suits. Jane turned her back and stripped. She had another tattoo on her side, words of a text. Mark was shyer and changed behind a tree. It was the solitude that made the space so intimate, though the beach was a mile long. White sand, transparent water, high flat-bottomed clouds.

  In the Hoboken restaurant he stared down at his eggs, choosing his words. “I went to this place,” he said. “This was a year or so before we met. A resort in New Caledonia, just a few cabins by a pretty little beach. Now you look at it on Google Earth, it’s almost disappeared,” he said, which wasn’t true. Only about half of it was gone.

  Barbara smiled. “Was there a woman involved? I feel sure there was a woman.”

  “No, not really. There was one other guest. But she was philosophically opposed to men.”

  He was about to say she was English until he remembered the cream-colored envelope. “She was from Arizona,” he continued. “Plus, she was a lot younger, so it didn’t count.”

  “Huh. I’ve heard that can be a turn-off,” Barbara said.

  She was teasing him. As an exercise, he closed his eyes and tried to picture what she was wearing now, right now, sitting across from him. Something brown? Not long before, he had spent an evening with a good friend whose daughter the children had grown up with. He had known her since she was a baby. What was her name? Where had she gone to school?

  “Are you okay?” Barbara asked.

  “Yes. Fine.” He was glad they weren’t talking about Jane anymore. He had no desire to share the thought of her, to release her into his wife’s custody even in this deceptive version. He paid at the register and they went out into the November morning. Barbara never forgot anything. She wore a brown cardigan with buttons made of bone. Gray piping on the sleeves. He had seen it before, many times.

  The thing is, we skate over a plain of ice. If we were to break through into the actual world, we would freeze or drown. Outside in the street, Mark felt on his cheeks a spray of rain just hovering on the edge of snow—cold weather in New Jersey and not even December. All morning he had been thinking about the island, which after all existed now and not just in the past. Jane’s letter had reminded him of this. “Now,” of course, meant fifteen hours ahead, the middle of the night, and Jane standing naked in the open doorway as the rain came down, the wind in the high palms, Jane simultaneously twenty-one and fifty-one, according to his bewildered arithmetic. Barbara was the only woman he had ever met who never got any older.

  No, the island would still exist in January if he managed to get away with this pathetic scheme. Nor was it impossible to imagine that something solid could come out of it, some piece of publishable writing. Already the merging of the past, the present, and the future into superimposed transparencies had given him a sense of vertigo that rendered him unsteady on the broken sidewalk. Barbara clutched his arm.

  The thing was, Jane lived inside these merging chronologies; she felt comfortable in them; she searched them out. She was a vocal lover, and not because she yelled and screamed, but because the physical act was always part of a narrative. When she got going, the story would separate into three strands that she would braid together alternately or else murmur to him all together in a fashion that, he thought, would have been unintelligible to someone who was not caught up with her inside the moment, balanced, as she liked to put it, on the edge of the blade.

  So for example (and this is what Mark was thinking as he shuffled up the icy sidewalk in the swirling snow, Barbara holding him above the elbow), she could put down a base story in the past tense that typically wouldn’t even be about the sex, and it would have a plot—they would be running through the dark woods, something would be chasing them, and it probably would have made sense to separate, only they didn’t and instead ended up holding hands beside a river choked with ice.

  And also she’d be right there with him in the white room on the island, slippery with sweat, and describing every little feeling or sensation—he had never been with a woman like that.

  And at the same time she’d be telling him about the future, another story about them as they had gotten older, or else far, far forward into another time or space, some irradiated beach at the end of the world where there was nothing left to do but fuck. Often in that future time, in what he regarded as the ultimate tour de force, she would look backward through the years they had spent together, many years sometimes, and go back and back until she found the present moment once again, when they’d met in New Caledonia, right now, in fact—only she pretended to misremember what had happened, what was happening. Or she would get the gist but some of the details wrong, like what she was wearing right now, or how she was touching him. Sometimes the futu
re story would be more complicated, a treble melody, because that was another way to think of what she said to him: a Dixieland combination of cornet, trombone, clarinet—present, past, future.

  Once she told him, “You saw me on the plane and thought that was the first time. But there was another time you forgot and then remembered, when you saw me on the boat in Koh Samui. And now I’m telling you there was a third time that you haven’t remembered even now, when I was waist deep in the water on Langkawi and I called to you to see a baby octopus curled up next to my foot. I was wearing a red T-shirt. How could you not remember? You commented on my tattoo—not that one, no. This one,” she said, indicating the line of Hebrew under her arm.

  It was possible. People had the same itinerary, the same stops on the same Malaysian Airlines ticket. You ran into them in Penang, Singapore, Papeete. But it was also possible that she was remaking the past for him, extending it in time, a gift of more experiences they’d shared. A little riff on the bass. It was obvious that what was happening here would only last a few days, seven at most, because of the limits of their itinerary.

  “What are you thinking about?” said Barbara. They were walking through the snow on Washington Street past the post office. He must have looked worried, because she squeezed his arm. “Just make something up. That’s what I need.”

  She always teased him when she was worried. “I was wondering about Scheherazade in the Arabian Nights,” he said after a moment. “You always figure she and the king made love every night and then they got up and got dressed, or else half-dressed, and she started talking. But I wonder if it might make more sense if she told him the story while they were actually having sex, part of the act. Depending on the translation, you could recreate what they were doing by paying attention to when the story speeds up or slows down or even parts of the plot.”

  “Huh.”

  He wanted her to smile and she did. She let go of his arm and gestured down the street. “Wasn’t her younger sister there too? Wasn’t she always in there listening? Don’t answer that. And don’t get any ideas. I guess I should just assume that all these old men walking with their wives are thinking about sex.”