Gary Waring did not walk at a princely pace. He had immediately slipped his hand loose from Fay’s, running ahead of them or falling behind, zigzagging back and forth across the sidewalk, doubling the distance they covered, stopping to pick up a worm from a sidewalk crack, running the palms of his hands flat along the caragana hedges and transferring the glistening rainwater to his mouth. As though driven by a rubber-band motor he circled trees and poles, scooted pebbles along with the side of his foot, kicking at cracked cement, at fences, knocking experimentally against the side of a mailbox, even putting his ear up to its slot, listening. Turning the corner onto Stafford Avenue, he drummed on the glass window of Murray’s Bookstore, humming to himself all the while, chanting some uninhibited breathy tune, bobbing his head up and down extravagantly, and reminding Tom of what he had not thought of in years: the curious and brave efforts of children to charge their immediate world with brilliance, making it glow with color as they move among common objects, bringing those objects alive with incantatory music, alive with texture and outline, alive with life.
HE COULDNT REMEMBER afterward what he and she had talked about, and this seemed strange to him, as though the act of walking, of rhythmically placing one foot before the other, had absorbed and determined the nature of what they said. He knows that they traded lists of current information, that she was thinking of buying a car but hadn’t had time to shop around, that he was thinking of investing in a Macintosh computer but couldn’t imagine what he would do with it. That she sang in the Handel Chorale, that he jogged in the park on Saturday mornings. That besides her brother, Clyde, she had one sister, named Bibbi, which was short for Beatrix. That “Niteline” was in its sixth year. That she was writing a book on mermaids – “Yes, mermaids!” – as seen from a feminist perspective but was beginning to think she would never get her various theories glued together. That he was continually surprised, and sometimes shocked, by the candor of the people who phoned in to his show, that he believed people were rendered defenseless in the middle of the night, pouring out more than they really wanted to, their loneliness, chiefly. Maybe it does them good, Fay told him; it may be that they don’t regret it the next morning at all, but feel better for it, relieved in some way, better able to cope with – loneliness. If that’s what it is.
They agreed, walking along, that it was surprising how quiet it was at this hour, only a single car passing, its tires hissing on the damp asphalt. The air was cooler than it had been in weeks, but this hint of fall was false; there would be plenty of hot weather yet.
He looked down at the top of her head rather than into her face. He would have liked to reach out and touch her hair. Her bare arms swung at her sides. He could see the weave of her blouse, the way it sat on her shoulders, and the shoulders themselves, the curving arc of bone and smoothed skin. He felt that if he wanted to, he could see straight into her head. He wondered if she was cold. They crossed Stafford at the light and turned into Grosvenor Avenue. Gary danced beside them as they crossed, and Fay reached out and put a hand on the middle of his back, lightly. Tom, observing the particularity of her touch, felt something like enchantment.
Someone had once told him that Grosvenor, directly translated, meant gross way, or broadway, and he wondered if she knew this; it seemed like something she might like to know.
He asked her how long she planned to be in Europe.
Four weeks, she said. That was long enough when you were traveling alone.
He almost stumbled with happiness. The word struck him full force – “alone.” He posed a casual question. “You’re not married?”
“No.” Lightly. And then, “Are you?” So lightly he could tell she had not been deceived by his nonchalance.
“Divorced,” he said to the top of her head. He’d long ago learned to keep things simple.
“Ah.”
They’d come to a stop now, standing in front of her building, and she turned directly toward him. “Nice to discover who lives in your own neighborhood.” She said this socially.
Struck with inspiration, he asked her how she was getting to the airport, and she said her parents were going to take her, that they lived close by on Ash Avenue, that they’d be coming for her – she checked her watch – in just one hour.
“I suppose I should say bon voyage,” Tom said. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Gary pick up a stick and test it rhythmically against the tub of flowers by the door.
What had she said next? Thank you?
They stood, half smiling, divided, it seemed to him, by her fine dark hair and the soft air of congeniality. Motionless. Something holding them there.
“I’ll probably,” he said, looking at her with amazement, “be running into you when you get back.”
She smiled. “Probably.” She seemed to be waiting, as though there were one more thing to be said.
“What I’d really like …” he began, then stopped himself.
Her smile dimmed, but it was still there. Still there. “What would you like?” she asked. The sky behind her head was colored a rainy iridescence.
“I have to put Gary to bed,” he said. “And you have to finish packing.”
“Yes?”
“What I’d really like is to put my arms around you for a minute.”
∼ CHAPTER 19 ∼
The Sacred and the Profane
EVERYWHERE FAY LOOKS SHE SEES MEN AND WOMEN EMBRACING: IN Amsterdam, in Copenhagen, and now in Paris. Does this go on all year round? she asks herself. This open abandonment? This ardent, pressing, fleshly extravagance of arms and lips?
In Dutch railway stations, in the lobby of a movie theater, in the narrow streets of the old Jewish quarter – in all these places she’s seen how a simple handshake can unfold into something more lingering and sensual, transformed into an intimacy of limbs that yearns for and suggests a deeper convergence. In Denmark, where Fay spent two days attending the European Folkloric Congress, she observed an exchange of greetings between colleagues, what started simply as the wave of a hand across a meeting room, then expanded slowly until it was two circling arms uplifted like bees’ wings, indicating surprise, affection, invitation, friendship, and even – yes! – erotic rapture. People hand each other books, papers, glasses of water, and these small formalities imply a longing to become part of one vast undulation. Bodies of the old and young curl toward each other, speaking of commonplace things but signaling desire – she’s sure of it. It comes sighing through the simultaneous-translation system. She herself was kissed a dozen times, the two-cheek European buzz that can mean nothing or everything. Dr. Kottenheim from Hamburg, younger than she’d expected from his monograph on angels, hairy as a wrestler, ripely physical with a melancholy nose and smelling of starch and figs, had gathered her two hands in his, cradled them there like nesting swallows, rubbed her wrist with his thumbs, beamed viscerally – “Ah, my dear, my dear, at last we meet.” Take me, ravish me.
And here in Paris there is an epidemic of embracing lovers putting on their showy performances everywhere, in the Métro, in the student cafeterias bordering the Boulevard Montparnesse, on gravel paths in the Luxembourg Gardens, at the Louvre waiting in line for tour tickets, in the middle of the rue du Cherche-Midi with traffic rushing past, and even, astonishingly, in the luridly lit, massively furnished foyer of Fay’s hotel, where the desk clerk, slim, sweating Monsieur Martineau, stares candidly down her blouse front while she registers and twists his face into a little sexual pout.
Public and private acts overlap in this city and no one blinks. It must be that this is the season of ardor. The weather’s warmed up. In fact, it’s steaming hot. The arms of women are suddenly bare, and this bareness seems always to be begging to be taken in an embrace. Touch me, touch me, is the cry Fay imagines hearing in all the corners of Paris. Today she saw a bare-chested man, hair wild and black, mouth open, running across the Pont des Arts with his arms outstretched, and running toward him with little scissor steps was a woman in a tight white dress whos
e sandals clicked against the pavement as she ran.
Enough!
The linking of arms, the pressing of bodies, the touching of fingertips over tiny cups of coffee – all this makes Fay want to weep. It interferes with her concentration and keeps her awake through the long nights at the hôtel de l’Avenir. She sits on the edge of her bed gripping her forearms, rocking herself back and forth, trying to revive the cooler parts of herself. In the mirror she sees the face of a wary woman who’s tired of being wary, sick of it. She gulps air. Touch me, she says to herself, to the medallion-printed wallpaper of her sixth-floor room, to the wobbly square of light that falls across the floor, bringing a glut of memory with it. Embrace me.
“I’d like to put my arms around you,” Tom Avery had said to her the night she left home.
SHE CAN’T REMEMBER the tone of his voice when he pronounced this aberrant thing. Whether it was deferential or offhand, aggressive or halting, whether it leapt at her or fell through the air like a kind of powder. Why can’t she remember? Was he asking permission or drawing on some artfully phrased macho privilege? She remembers his face turning toward hers, puzzled, something in it anxious to explain. Was he laughing at her? No, she didn’t think so. It must have been that he spoke in exceptionally low tones, because young Gary Waring, ten feet away, banging with a stick on a tub of begonias by her front door, seemed not to have heard. The air was heavy and sweet smelling, for summer a dark evening, and cool after the rain. Grosvenor Avenue’s slick asphalt was streaked with weak, greenish, beautiful light.
What a bizarre thing for a man to say, especially a man she hardly knew, had only just met. “I’d like to put my arms around you.” Why, then, hadn’t she been alarmed? Why hadn’t she even been surprised?
What if she’d blinked and backed away from him?
A man had walked her home from a children’s birthday party, that was all, and now he was about to take her in his arms. What if she had stopped and thought about what she was doing? What if she had resisted?
But she hadn’t. She’d moved toward him through air that felt thin and neutral and had buried her face in the creases of his neck, smelling sweat at the border of his hairline and feeling its crisp tapered edge on her cheek. Her arms reached around him and she spread her hands flat against the damp tight weave of his windbreaker. Was that poplin, that closely woven cloth? His arms tightened around her, and Fay remembers that they stood together like this on the street for at least a minute.
That incongruous embrace – what had it meant? His body, a stranger’s body, had fastened itself to hers in a manner that seemed unconnected with the arrows of ordinary appetite.
She told herself later, trying to make sense of it, that the two of them held on to each other in a way that was urgent rather than convincing. Weather and opportunity had supported them. Her throat had closed. Her lips were licked clean. “Oh,” she said aloud, and he held her even tighter.
AT LAST she’s taken hold of herself. She’s given herself a talking to. Four weeks in Europe is all she has. Each remaining day can be filled with accomplishment if only she puts her mind to it, but she will have to work hard to make up for lost time. Onward!
She’s been sifting through references at the Bibliothèque Nationale, translating texts, making notes. If, after an hour or two, her back begins to ache, she hurries out for a cup of coffee, then rushes back to her assigned table in the reading room, to her stacks of books and note cards. Once or twice every day she lifts up her head and asks herself: What am I doing here? What is all this for?
She’s spent an hour with the elderly, passionate French folklorist Hélène Givière, discussing the possible authenticity of the Amboina mermaid, captured off the coast of Borneo in the early eighteenth century. The creature, a full fifty-nine inches long, was kept alive in a barrel for four days and seven hours, and during that time it refused to eat. Naturally she (it?) died, and later, excreta like that of a cat was found in the barrel. Madame Givière, whose graying hair is exquisitely unkempt, has examined the original source document and also a drawing by Samuel Fallours, who was the official artist in the Dutch East India Company, and she has concluded, sadly, that the animal was probably an eel.
Another French scholar, Gabrielle Favian Grobet, a chignon pulling tight her elastic features, gave Fay an entire afternoon. It was Madame Grobet, in her bold imaginative article “Sirène: Les tentations sans amour,” who first broke down the archetype of the sea temptress, the wicked voluptuary propelled by forces outside her consciousness. “The siren,” the heavily perfumed Madame Grobet told Fay, “has been thought of as part of nature. She has been denied her volition, her soul. She has been thought of as something driven, something culpable, the embodiment of eros but without a body. A nice irony, no?”
Well, maybe. Maybe not.
Besides these visits, Fay has been three times to the Louvre, where she has examined tiny Egyptian mercreatures formed from clay, miniature mermen, merwomen, a merdog, even a mercat, and she has made arrangements in her imperfect French to have each of these artifacts photographed, and further arrangements to have the photographs converted into slides.
She splurged one day on an expensive lunch at the Station Buffet at the Gare de Lyon, where the walls are covered with immense painted mermaids voluptuously wagging their full breasts and rounded bottoms, one of them wearing her hair in an endearing Gibson Girl mop.
She has visited a private collector (pouchy, wizened) in his apartment in the Fifteenth Arrondissement, and there, seated on a carved pink-and-silver sofa and drinking iced Scotch, feeling lopsided and provincial, she listened as he bitterly excoriated all feminist scholars, particularly those from North America, and allowed her to gaze at a Phoenician coin stamped with the image of Atergatis, the feminine counterpart of Oannes, the Babylonian fish god.
She has gone to the marble foyer of the École des Ponts et Chaussées, climbed halfway up a stairway, leaned backward over the banister, and photographed a wan sculpted mermaid entangled in twisted marble foliage, its long tail rather ugly and reptilian. (It pleased her to see the mermaid of myth flourishing here among engineers and technicians!) She has taken the Métro to Trocadero, walked two streets over to the rue Longchamps, and found, after only a minute or two, the extraordinary Belle Époque building (number 12) whose ornate front door is surrounded by two ecstatic double-tailed sirens, diving down toward a bouquet composed of an anchor, rope, and swirling waves, their faces masked by sexual desire and numbed by their enforced solitude. This, Fay decides – and she stops in the street to make a note – is the mer-condition: solitary longing that is always being thwarted. No, not thwarted – denied. (She had observed, one week earlier, the same chilly denial, only more prim and simpering, on the face of the Copenhagen mermaid.)
SHE HAPPENS TO SEE one morning, while sitting and writing postcards in a café on the Avenue du Maine, a parade of pilgrims who are walking to Chartres, forty miles away. A thousand pilgrims filling the broad street.
At the table next to her sits a heavy, purple-faced, talkative woman in a dirty raincoat who is drinking, though it is only ten o’clock in the morning, a glass of dark beer. It is she who tells Fay – mumbling, hissing into the beer foam – about the annual pilgrimage from Paris to Chartres, about the magic number one thousand, and the fact that the walkers traditionally begin their trek with a mass at Notre Dame.
They are coming from that mass now, still bathed in a coating of holy spirit – or so Fay thinks, watching them file past. “Ils sont fous,” the purplish woman concludes, blowing into her glass and licking the thick rim.
But Fay is enchanted by the procession, which bears lightly along on its wisps of hymn song a bearable, sentient faith. The love for God, God’s love. She wonders, a little enviously, what it feels like to be part of that holy contract. These pilgrims are of all ages and include a great many sturdily shod children whose composed, steady eyes seem to gesture toward a world in which responsibility, for the most part, prevails. (S
eeing them, she thinks of her nephews, Matthew and Gordon, their hard, perfect young legs and arms.) Elderly women, both angular and ample, are present, and also numbers of very young women, fine-featured, pale of skin, some of them beautiful, and a scattering of priests, mostly middle-aged, who are not leading their charges but mingling in a way which Fay supposes must manifest the newer, more democratic Catholic Church. What she finds most startling, though, is a handful of marching friars – if that is what they are still called – robed in coarse brown cloth, their absurd tonsures shining in the bright sunlight. They look like extras on a film set, moving foward with clumsy, sacred assurance. What sort of man these days, in the last years of the twentieth century, chooses rough hooded garments and cruel barbering?
One of the brown-clad friars abruptly leaves his place in the procession and makes a dash for the café where Fay is sitting. His face is boyish, rounded in its features and pinkened by the morning heat. He glances her way, blinking at the café’s dim entrance, and then, with a look of swooming deliverance, catches sight of a door marked “Toilette.”
In a minute he is out again (Fay feels the enacted comedy of his lifted robe, the collision with stained porcelain). He stumbles slightly at the exit of the café, made dizzy by sunlight, then dodges the crowds of people who have gathered along the street and runs forward awkwardly, his skirt hiked up in one hand, hurrying to rejoin his companions.
“Fou,” growls Fay’s neighbor. Her glass is empty. Her tone is both harsh and elegiac. “Complètement fou.”
At which Fay smiles and shrugs. She finds herself unexpectedly affected by the young friar’s clumsiness and the beauty of his sandaled feet, feet that will carry him to the outskirts of this immense, puzzling city, and beyond. His maladroit body, its shaved modest head, stirs in her a kind of love and cracks open seams of sentimentality she would have thought beneath her. Well, I love him, she says to herself, I love him.