After James (12 page)

“We know something about one another”—Durant was still addressing me—“but we'd like to know more about you. Tell us about your origins, your family.”

“I don't talk about my family.” The words were immediate, sure, and yet they surprised me.

“How intriguing,” said Anton flatly. “One of you must be a monster. Was it Daddy?”

“Then what else is in your heart?” asked Durant. “By ‘heart' I mean ‘memory,' of course. Which poems have taken up there? Recite one.”

As I pictured myself pulling the folded euros from my pocket, rolling them tightly, stuffing them down his throat, I tried to fend off the request by reminding him I wasn't a poet, that my connection to poetry was now professional and so to call it up socially would be to mix business and pleasure.

“I'm sure Patrice has landed many planes in heavy weather but let's not have him land one here tonight,” I said.

It turned out that everyone at the table had in their hearts and on their tongues a little poetry, or in Davide's case, banal song lyrics. The poems tended to be very old, things learned in school, I was told, and as they were approximately translated seemed to be full of stale, romantic imagery or clunky metaphors about the stages of life or the horrors of war. When someone forgot a word or line, the others imagined possibilities, sometimes from what were apparently well-known advertising slogans or catch lines from popular television shows. There was much laughter.

Davide sang his lines in a surprisingly good voice, uninflected with earnestness.

Then it was my turn. I had very little to offer. A few years back I had tried to memorize not whole poems but stanzas that I liked. Did I still know them?

I offered a few lines from the American poet W. S. Merwin, from a poem called “The Dreamers.”

a man who can't read turned pages

until he came to one with his own story

it was air

and in the morning he began learning letters

starting with A is for apple

which seems wrong

he says the first letter seems wrong

They waited me out for a few seconds, expecting more. Yves declared the stanza a “paradox” but didn't explain what he meant. Durant asked why I found it significant.

“I don't find it significant so much as…” I almost said “beautiful and true.” “Language belongs to a lapsed world. It can't quite reach what it grasps for.”

“And yet,” said Durant.

“And yet in this stanza language describes what it says can't be described.”

“To what end?” Carlo asked. “Language is a problem. We all know this. Poems should be about the heart or the world, not the words in between them.”

“That is a stupid thing to say,” Davide maintained in a calm voice, without looking at his father. He glanced at me apologetically.

“Promise me, son, that you will write a song about the word
pollice
the next time you hit one with a hammer.”

He said this as I've written it, in English except for the Italian word
pollice
, which I assumed didn't mean
police
, though that was the image I pictured, Davide hitting a policeman with a hammer, then singing about the words involved rather than the act.

For a moment father and son looked silently at each other and then Italian broke loose. They spoke rapidly,
passionately, almost murderously, until Davide got to his feet and left without saying good night.

Carlo poured Durant and himself more wine.

“I'm sorry for my son. His boyhood will not end.”

The rest of us cast around for suitable comment, found none. Showing great valour, I thought, I stepped into the conversational breach.

“Merwin was unlikely to offend. Or so I thought.”

“
Or so.
No more bear stories, please,” said Anton.

He tended to address his drink when he said these things.

“What have you pretended to misunderstand now, Anton?” I asked. The others, even Patrice, I noted, seemed delighted.

“I'm not the pretentious one.”

Patrice explained that Anton thought I'd used the Italian word for bear,
orso.
He apologized for his copilot. I wondered how it was sitting with Anton, this third instance of someone apologizing for another person. Patrice explained that Anton was bitter that Air France had without warning informed their pilots that all communications to towers globally were to be in English.

“His ear for English isn't precise. He's worried there will be incidents.”

I pictured Anton, upon the wrong angle of incidence and some misidentified English word, flying a plane into a woods full of
orso
s. I was exhausted. For three days I'd been reading poems, looking for patterns, hearing echoes. The work survived into my off-hours. What I needed, in fact, was
to hear banal song lyrics in a good voice without earnestness, maybe on a beach somewhere with the waves being waves.

I stood, waved, gave a little bow. I apologized to Anton for whatever misunderstanding was about to ensue, thanked everyone for their company and mindfulness of my unilingualism, and walked off, crawled through the dormer, our entry/exit point, which led into Yves and his wife's rented apartment, which led to the hallway and stairwell and Durant's apartment, and my hard bed, where shortly I curled up in a dark full of floating foreign syllables.

On my third day in the apartment a woman appeared. As was his habit Durant had gone out for the afternoon and I was at work in the little station he'd prepared for me, a desk with a printer in the corner of my bedroom, with a window to my left looking out at the opposing windows and flaking stucco of the rust-yellow apartment across the narrow street. For only a few minutes in the early afternoons the sun would drift between the buildings and fire them to a light I'd seen before and marvelled at, but never contemplated. In sunlight the walls became the very planes upon which, to their makers, God's energies met those of common, untabernacled man. I had already come to love that window and the street's thin slot of sky, and I was sitting with a stack of poems from Three Sheets, waiting for the full sun, when I heard the front door being unlocked and opened. I bent back to the lines at hand, a short poem called “July” that seemed to be telling me something I couldn't quite hear, when a voice spoke from my bedroom doorway.

“So you're the new me.”

I turned to find a tall young woman, maybe a little older than I. Her face was slightly tapered, fine-featured. Sunglasses propped on her head pulled her brown-blond hair back to reveal a widow's peak that returned the eye, pleasingly, to her face.

“I'm Amanda. He didn't tell you about me.”

“James.”

“Any breakthroughs, James?”

I was trailing the moment, aware of looking, and of her awareness of being looked at.

“A lot of leads,” I said. “I didn't know anyone else had had the job.”

“Then you weren't meant to know. He won't be happy that we've met. I won't tell him if you don't.”

In their set position the edges of her mouth curled slightly upward so that her expression ran against her tone. They present all at once, the proportions of beauty, but it's the incongruences that mark them out and steal into us. That's not at all why Yeats was so attached to the idea that “there is no excellent beauty without strangeness,” but it's what came to mind.

She delivered unprompted the account of how she had come into Durant's employ. Seven months ago, just after she'd graduated with a master's degree in something called Truth and Justice Studies, Durant emailed her with the same job offer made to me. They'd exchanged comments posted at SHEPMETSOR and he said he liked her description of the poems as “mysterious little buildings with their doors ajar.” Durant flew her to France, where he was working, and they
both transferred to Rome, just before she quit the job. “We were becoming too attached.” That she said all this so freely, so fully, and so soon upon meeting, should have left me wary of her, but she seemed without guile.

She excused herself and went about watering plants while I sat staring at the doorway where she'd appeared, failing through vertigo to connect my recent life in a Montreal basement to the one I was now living, though in both all I seemed to do was read. My first impression of her hurt slightly, in that I was sure Durant must have realized upon meeting me how far short I fell of Amanda's easy confidence, and very likely of her abilities. I am twice as present on the page as in person. If the same was true of her, then compared with mine her interpretive skills must have been of a different order of sophistication. Besides which, she had studied Truth and Justice, two nouns in that category of words I'm ashamed to utter for my lack of service to them as principles. Only the shame counted in my favour.

In a minute Amanda came in and watered some fern-looking thing beside the dresser.

“August doesn't notice plants. If I don't do this, they'll die. It's why I still have a key, our last arrangement, though I think he's forgotten it. I doubt he knows when I've been by.”

“You only come by when he's out?”

She finished watering and stood there, just beyond arm's reach. I had not been this close to a woman paying attention to me since I was last in Europe.

“It's easier. He's out every afternoon. I see him sometimes for dinner. He likes to know that he hasn't stranded me
here.” She now worked in a bar that catered to Americans. In time she intended to head north to The Hague, where she had some connections, to see if she couldn't scratch up some social justice internship for one of the tribunals. She made it sound like migrant labour. She held a dented tin watering can. “What are you working on? Can I ask?”

I told myself it would contaminate the experiment to reveal my thoughts—for this reason Durant left me alone by day—though in truth I was afraid she'd be unimpressed. I was considering the possibility that the poems were posted in an order designed from the outset rather than randomly, which would mean that, because certain details seemed to allude to current world events, elsewhere in each poem would be lines that had been preselected. Upon this idea, I was extracting the most telling words in a few poems I'd marked by the date of their first appearance on the Three Sheets site. And I'd come to one that held me in its little mystery, door ajar.

“Do you remember ‘July'?”

“Let me think. A swimming pool. And a bird. What else?”

Rather than hand it to her I pulled the poem out and slid it to the edge of the desk. She put down the can and moved one step closer. I read along with her, my eyes on the poem, my focus caught in lonely adolescence.

That summer the heat wouldn't quit

and the water in the 1963 blue

concrete pool climbed

to 89 degrees a robin

appeared on a branch in the stairs

landing window with so many

twigs in his beak so symmetrically

held that he presented long

whiskers and a helmet of horns,

looked, in fact, like a Kurosawa

character. I am telling you

they were exactly measured

and held just so by a force

whose agency is at work again

now in this question you ask of me,

its dimensions concealed from you.

Ridiculous, really, the

accidents of likeness,

that you should want to know

the magicked secret of it all.

“Right,” she said, “ ‘the magicked secret.' ”

“It's beckoning us to solve a mystery. The poem's showing us the concealed dimensions but we aren't seeing them. Or at least I'm not.”

She was still focused on the page, but she blinked, deliberately.

“The poem is complete,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

Now she looked out the window. The rooftop shadows claiming the walls meant I'd missed the minute of perfect light. She took hold of the pot with the ferny thing and held it up in front of her.

“Let's not name this plant.” (I couldn't have.) “Let's look at it. We can touch it, put it in different lights, care for it. But we don't ask what it means.”

I was looking at her, not the plant, but she kept holding it, so I looked. It was, all in all, a plant.

“Yes,” I said. “Well, I don't think the Poet is at quite the same level of creative power.”

She set down the pot.

“The speaker in the poem is writing about the mystery of likeness. In any given case, is the likeness of one thing to another an accident or not? He's been asked a question he doesn't want to answer, which means there is an answer, and yet there's the mystery of the memory it brings on, the bird unknowingly having made a new face for itself. That's all, it's complete.”

“You think I should just let the poem be.”

She picked up the page and was handing it to me when the light through it revealed the notes I'd made on the back of the sheet. She turned it over. I watched her read.
Date of the pool, hot summer, house with a landing, thermometer reading in Fahrenheit. So a U.S. American house. Two-storey. I picture it mid-twentieth century. Not suburban, maybe somewhere in the West. Can't say why I think this.

“I should be going. Will you look after the plants now?”

“I'll forget them, too. I know that much about myself. Why did you quit the job?”

Her expression shifted minutely—toward doubt?—and she looked down to the page in her hand, as if surprised to find it there, and handed it back to me.

“These poems,” she said. “The moment you touch one, turn it over, it gets ahold of you. Whether he admits it or not, that hold is why August gets up in the morning. It's what he doesn't know that matters to him, not the answers to puzzles. He thinks he wants to find the Poet, who he's convinced lives in Rome—it's why he's out every afternoon, playing hunches, sitting in cafés, staring at the people gathering at statues—I bet he pulled that trick on you, too, didn't he? ‘The Art of Memory' in Campo de' Fiori?”