Motion Sickness (2 page)

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.

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.

One of whom is Charles: I feel I’ve tainted her life with my report that Charles had not dropped off the face of the earth but was seen walking around an underground tunnel and in an Istanbul hotel. Perhaps she would have preferred him living as a monk in a monastery, separate from the human race, disconsolate, or maybe she’d rather have him dead and with the angels. Jessica believes in angels. Then she could have held on to him in memory. That’s what I do, hold on to memory. You relive memories, you develop them, you make them bigger and better and add a touch here and there, like a dab of perfume behind the ear of a memory. Death gives you a reason to remember, to put it all together. To put together a new body, of evidence, of evidence of love, of evidence of something solid to battle the ephemeral. People always say you shouldn’t live in the past, but that’s so stupid because it’s not a matter of will, it’s not voluntary. A person without a past is like a nation without history. It’s impossible. Jessica says things like, I must get on with my life, and I think of
Goodbye, Mr. Chips
. She’s unquestionably and remarkably good about death.

When we discuss Charles, I try to recall for her, and for me, those few conversations he and I held in the hotel and in the tunnel or cave. Now it seems important to take the pieces of dialogue that lie strewn in that tunnel and pile them on top of each other. And like the jigsaw puzzle that always comes to mind when someone says my life is in pieces, one wants to fashion a whole, something like a personality or a character, but I never finished those giant puzzles when I was a kid, and the way I pick up the pieces and display them for Jessica must be nearly useless. He said, I say, “I’m not much good at anything.” “I hate London.” “I think I’ll travel for a while. Just read and think. Maybe learn to play the clarinet.” He talked, I report, about Anthony Blunt and the Cambridge spies, then segued to Suleiman the Magnificent, the sixteenth-century Turkish sultan, who patronized the arts, particularly those craftsmen who worked with gold, because that was the trade he knew. Ottoman emperors had to learn a trade, which was the kind of thing my father would have appreciated, I told him then. Charles said, I can’t do anything with my hands. Then he held his hands up in front of his face and wiggled them, but as we were underground they were covered by shadow and I couldn’t really see them. He, I supposed, knew what his hands looked like, and the gesture, now that I think of it again, is entirely unreadable and not at all in character with the character I’m pasting together for Jessica. He has become, to me, like the underground man, a nihilist full of angst, who tests the limits of rationality whenever possible. For example, perhaps he left her for no reason at all. This is not what I tell her. Just as I don’t tell her that I sometimes feel like a female version of the underground man, which would make Charles and me transnational siblings. In my imagination anyway.

It’s possible that Jessica intuits how Charles and I are alike, and likes me because I’m like him, if I am. Now I think I am, though I didn’t when I talked with him in Istanbul, which leads me to think that one remembers even the recent past so imperfectly and so much in relation to oneself that every object is skewered upon one’s own identity, like a kind of shish kebab. I can identify with and feel like any number of people, though, people I’ve met briefly or have known over a longer period of time. Everyone is just as chameleonlike , personality fragile as old glass in the windows of historical houses or, like dust, easily shaken from a very dirty mop.

Thinking of dirty mops, I can’t visualize Charles and Jessica having sex together. Jessica seems as much out of her body as in it, and Charles, I can barely recollect his body at all, just his large head and those pale bluish round eyes that stared into dark spaces along with mine. I imagine many people couldn’t dream of sex with me or imagine my having sex with others. This doesn’t stop me from applying unyielding and unimaginative standards to them.

Before going into our separate rooms which are next door to one another’s, Jessica says, putting her key into the lock, I’m not sure, though, what importance beauty has, except for the peace it gives me. But is that enough? Not to worry, I say to her, borrowing one of her phrases which is already borrowed from the English. A transplantation of a sort. Easy to do. Simple. Quite simple. In bed I feel like a body claimed by a name. Then a name claimed by a body. A thing, a human thing, small and powerless. I don’t confide these thoughts to her. Beauty has never had much importance to me.

Outside there’s shouting, yelling. It’s a fight between two men which I watch from my hotel window. I enjoy watching fights, as if I were a participant fighting my own dark and dirty battles. I don’t like to fight. The two men don’t look English and their angry sounds are twice removed, male and foreign. Foreign also to the English who stand on the sidewalk, also watching. They’re arguing about money. One could be the other’s father. The younger man shouts: I worked all day yesterday, all day, I want some money. The older man bellows: Work? Work? I worked too, you’ll only spend it on drugs. They’re standing close to each other, the public scene grotesquely intimate. The younger man slaps the older man across the face and pulls a black wallet from his back pocket which he brandishes, as if it were a sword or handkerchief, waving it in front of his adversary’s face. The younger man then strides to the center of the street, looks around, walks back to the sidewalk and throws the wallet down in front of the older man. The older man, who had been standing on the sidewalk as if he too were an observer of the spectacle, picks up the wallet almost casually and marches off, unruffled, a briefcase in one hand, the wallet in the other. Neither man looks back as they get farther and farther from each other, both turning a corner at the end of the street, leaving the other behind without a second glance.

The fight is much less conclusive, though one got the wallet from the other, than, say, a prizefight or baseball game in which there is a winner. It’s much more like fiction—I could never do that—or haven’t yet—leave someone behind without that second furtive glance. What was that song? “I was looking back to see if she was looking back to see if I was looking back at her.”

The street returns to its ordinariness, and the passionate battle, familial or otherwise, forgotten on a summer’s day. It’s at moments like these I relish being away, and am almost happy about having been an only child. Almost happy to be in a country different from my widowed mother’s. This scene from my mother’s eyes would have been edited differently. She works as a textbook editor in New York. She used to work as a script supervisor in Hollywood. In those days she was called a script girl. But that’s a different story. One I’ve heard and told a million times. “You can’t right—r-i-g-h-t—history,” my mother would say, “but you can rewrite it and then edit the hell out of it.”