There was a final argument between us, before you left, that I have since forgotten, and have consigned to some fire in the hopes of never remembering. The memories that separate us hold us apart as if phantom limbs. So vivid, and yet, when I open my eyes, there’s nothing to be found.
If we cannot wrap our arms around each other, then who can? Then who will?
Perhaps that is the difference between us. I am certain you have found an answer.
I do wonder, at times, how you remember me.
I had been invited to the exhibition of Claude Baudrillard over at the Met a few nights back. You’ll remember (or not) how we used to go to those events. How did we laugh at the assorted nouveau riche and the beatified corpses of the museum board while maintaining our distance, all while sipping the same champagne? I struggle with these things now.
A lover provides a bastion from the world. Were I to walk the museum alone in the night, which, yes, I did, I might be met by odd glances and some amount of disdain, and then, perhaps, suffer in ignominy, abandoned by the cliques around each table. And I was, that night. But we never were.
Were we to circle around the richly paneled floors of the museum that night I am certain that our passing back into the exhibition hall would tantalize the delicate cillia of each socialite, husband, mistress, donor, and on and on. I am left without that power, now. And so I must have never radiated it then.
What an embarrassing thought. How transparently pathetic a man I must have been to bask in attention that was never reserved for me. When Richman attended us at a fete at the MOCA (you’ll remember he wrote quite a fantastic review of A Gentle Earth in the Los Angeles Book Review, or perhaps not) I studiously etched his compliment in memory, like I do all compliments. “Such hypnotic precision,” he had said. “A presence haunts the page.” Only now do I recall that he was speaking of your translation of the novel in French. (A few million copies is nothing to scoff at, as you did. So difficult for you to accept praise. I suppose I did it for you.)
I can no longer preen as I did with you by my side. I feel that I am a balding peacock. Or a pig just now finding a mirror.
In the literary world we call this state hell. It is not the twilight of my career just yet, but I am careening into those darking hours with every unwritten second that goes by. The new generation bursts forth with my entrails as their repast, and breeds new odious thinkpieces by the dozens. (You always did like Milton.) My diction is not outmoded, I assure you. Neither are my characters and their motivations stodgy, or filled with unrelatable angst, or my thoughts laden with clumsy emotion that strains itself inexpertly on the page. Praise is simply the province of youth, their wine and their water. At this age, pleasure and sustenance have divided, and the need for the former is much decayed. Anything but a bracing criticism falls flat on its obsequious face.
But I was drunk on things you told me when Wendy Burrell, my agent from a stint at Simon & Schuster, you’ll remember, had set a meeting for us together. I needed to meet the firm’s new translator, she said. You quoted Clara’s lines from A Study on Pleasure: “Accept me,” you said, in the mild cafe evening, passerby streaming, “or not. But lay my body down to rest between your belt and the sea after your pleasures.” The first time we met. So bold of you.
I still recall how your splayed fingers gripped the novel’s worn spine, how your other hand lingered above your heart, how your half-lidded eyes roved over the words and then lifted and rested on my face. My face, of all things.
Lover! Why do we say that, us writers. I did not love you then. I had wanted something from you that the word sanctifies, that might otherwise be repulsive.
Some shard of adolescence remains when I write lover, about “lover.” The word yearns for something more complicated, more elegant.
There was a line from Objects of Beauty I was quite proud of. “He wants nothing else but the singular high of his biology as he believes he believes in nothing else but the tidal crash of his hips finding shore.”
It did rather well in Greece. I owe that to you.
You told me you were resigning from your position as translator in my room at the Chateau du Mourne in Paris. It was halfway through my book tour.
I struggled to find a response, even some platitude about your talent (unmistakable) and the certainty that your career would only ascend from me (which it has. I did not realize Nobel Prizes were awarded to the translators as well.)
What I should have said would be this: these scenes of the heart are never, for anyone, neat portraits and statues of those we adore, never well-dressed and rehearsed scenes set to stage. The dialogue is halting and the performances trite and done before. If you can say the words, it is enough. It is perhaps far more than enough.
But I thought the way you locked the hotel door and walked back to me was likely more concise.
How could you trace my back, the skin wrinkled and sagging as if a rich tapestry of my self, and retain desire in your touch? I often feel that my body is a sieve through which beauty is always passing through but never contained.
I am writing again. I started after you left me, at first in bitter spite, and then the hopes that it might win you back, and finally in resignation. I have nothing left. Except, of course, for bitter spite and the hope it might win you back.
“From his bed, he hears the baying of a car alarm, muffled by distance and city and night. It is the sound of a wounded animal.
If he has been tempted then he has been tempted. If he has been lost then he must be lost, cast aside to wilderness bereft of warmth but in the bonfire embrace of bodies.
“‘If I do not want you,” he thinks, “‘then whose dog am I?” Alone, he is a sterile animal, and the night is filled with the sounds of his weakness.”
