Motion Sickness (3 page)

My favorite place near the hotel is a small French café on Moscow Road, off Queensway, an international street filled with Middle Eastern, Greek and Italian restaurants and shops, and a tremendous mixture of nationalities, in which I feel comfortable. There’s a transitory Times Square feeling to the street, not down-and-out, just a way station’ The people who will stay here forever, I feel, might get stuck in a kind of limbo, a not-London, a not-anywhere. Voluntary and individual diaspora is a luxury.

Depending upon whether I think I deserve it or not, I’ll stroll over to the French café, for a café au lait and a small pastry. A small pleasure. Small Pleasures could be the title of a film I might go to or a store I might work in, or only what it is now, a moment in my life. But why not, I think, title these moments in a life?

The café is nearly empty. There’s a sign outside it which reads Morning Coffee, leading a visitor like me to suspect a difference later in the day. As I walk in, Claudia, the proprietor and coffee maker, announces, We’re having an English summer. It’s early June and this statement strikes me as preemptive or at least premature. Also it’s an entirely new idea—an English summer. An elderly man and woman smile knowingly, almost as if Claudia had divulged a secret or told a dirty joke, then they bite into pastries that ooze from all sides. Claudia’s Italian, born in Bologna, a Common Market European, but she’s been in London long enough to be a kind of hybrid, and I wonder if that will be my fate too, as it appears to be Jessica’s. Watching Claudia, I’m thinking about the English summer, hybridization and the elderly couple who are engaged in an animated discussion about the time their currency, not that long ago, either, he says, changed from shillings, half-pennies, and sixpences to its present decimal system, more or less making the pound like the dollar. Everything got more expensive “right off,” the woman remarks, everything changed overnight. She recalls a discussion on a bus, where complete strangers, dismayed, sought conversation about this radical move by the government. She doesn’t say radical. She says horrid. Life changed overnight, she repeats. Became less English, the man notes, and they both nod. Claudia smiles at me.

On an unusually sunny day when it was remarked again that we were having an English summer, Jessica moved out. Moving from one street to another or one city or country to another requires about the same amount of energy, and I made plans to return to Amsterdam. It seemed easier to go somewhere I’d already been. I wanted to hold my London life in suspension, a bit of fluff caught in a solution, or hold my life in suspense, if suspenseful could be used to describe my life in London. Certainly life is filled with everyday mystery—we’re given answers to questions that answer nothing—and doubtless life goes on without me, and things don’t remain the same, but can “I” ever know that?

This question, like so many other conundrums, puzzles and pleases and fills time, as does trying to imagine a mountainless valley. I eventually pack my bags and one rainy morning wander onto the street to get a taxi to the train station. In Victoria, I head for the ticket window and buy, in what strikes me as a fit of perversity, a ticket for Venice. I don’t want to go back to Amsterdam. I want to go somewhere I’ve never been. It’ll be my little secret. I like secrets. Secrets are sacred.

The photobooths in the station do black-and-white and color pictures, four different shots on a strip, and I spend the rest of my English change catching myself in all sorts of poses, looking at the camera and thinking one thing or the other, waiting for the machine to whir and develop them, knowing that the camera cannot discern this inner life of mine. This secret life. And contrary to what Jessica thinks, one doesn’t necessarily leave a place to leave someone in particular. I’m reading Buber’s
The Legend of the Baal-Shem
, which Jessica recommended (she’s reading all of Jean Rhys), and on the train to Dover, landscape and brick houses passing by indifferently, it strikes an eerie blow: “An angel born of twisted intentions will have twisted limbs.”

The white cliffs of Dover look like a quarry, and I’ve just had an argument with the concessionaire who sold me a cheese sandwich and gave me the wrong change, so that I can’t experience the cliffs the way I think I should. Several heads turn in my direction as I labor to make my point. From the expressions on their faces, mirrors behind which their opinions sit, I see myself as the ugly, that is, imperialistic American and, alternatively, the bossy New York woman. Or, less problematically, as just plain rude. Instantly I’m a set of conditions and positions, a reluctant but undeniable conduit, and Jessica’s epiphany resonates in this stuffy train car where I can conjure her enigmatic smile at will. If I were English, perhaps I wouldn’t have objected so vigorously, if I were more like my English friend who visits New York about once a year. He asked a counterman in a Greek diner for the time and was handed a cheese sandwich, which he ate. Then he asked for the check and was given a vanilla milk shake. John drank it down and paid without protest. To him that’s a New York story.

On the ferry to Calais, on the top deck, I switch from Martin Buber to Patricia Highsmith and read
Edith’s Diary
. Nothing like a woman going mad for the right political reasons, as well as other more arcane ones, to reassure one of one’s necessary differences from others. A typically gray sky blows gustily over a sea covered with white caps and I’m wondering about the many swimmers who’ve been challenged by these inhospitable waters. The ship’s motion makes me queasy, nearly sick, and I look toward the horizon line. My father, who also got seasick, told me it’s what you have to do and if worse comes to worse—or worst—you drop your head between your knees.

At the point of no return, where France is closer than England, the sky clears, very suddenly, and turns a bright cloudless blue, and some English people on deck raise their glasses to toast the sun, which hovers on the horizon like an apparition or, more comically, like a mark of punctuation.

Switching trains in Paris at the Gare du Nord, there’s time to telephone Arlette, just to say hello. She’s probably at her bookstore. But I don’t. I change money, receiving large colorful notes for smaller English ones, buy black-and-white real-photo postcards of places I haven’t visited and French and English newspapers, drink a bowl of café au lait, wonder at French bread, reminisce about the smell of Gauloises and the nice Frenchman in Paris who ecstatically began at my ears and the nasty one in New York who wanted me to work harder, as he put it. Wantonly I enjoy hearing the French language, knowing that in a few hours it’ll be Italian. I write postcards. All this can make one feel like a traveler.

The hotel was once a convent. Down the road, or canal, is a church of the same name that’s no longer used for services. This parallelism doesn’t escape me and surprisingly I like to go into the church just as I like sitting in the hotel’s lobby and garden. The empty church has a dank smell, maybe it can be said that it reeks of disuse, although this may be too vivid. Its aroma, redolent of mortality and the ephemeral, embraces one in a perfume of long ago, much too ripe, too long past, where the present couldn’t intrude. I breathe in, very deeply, the sweet old air, reminded that in that movie,
Putney Swope
, it was admonished that you can’t eat atmosphere, and I’m not sure that’s absolutely true, especially when you’re not physically hungry. A man sitting close to me, the church’s other lone visitor, hears me, shifts on the velvet seat and may believe I’m sighing. I think he’s Hungarian but have little to base this on. As I’m wearing black, he might imagine I’m a devotee of some sort, an ambiguity I momentarily enjoy and have already played with while temporarily sequestered in the ex-convent. All my devotions are secular.

Another visitor makes her presence felt by moving from alcove to alcove and dropping fifty lire in slots in metal boxes which activate spotlights. Sudden illuminations fiercely disrupt the quiet dark spaces, making visible the Madonna with child, saints in ecstasy, chubby angels hovering above the holy couple. Tintoretto, the Hungarian hisses as if we’re in collusion. Beautiful, I answer, not knowing what else to say. He nods. These paintings are beautiful, because they’re everything they’re supposed to be and nothing more. They’re constant, like pets or old friends, the ones who ask for the same old stories and jokes. The friends to whom you want to tell the same old jokes. As if you and they were identical twins. And then tell them, word for word, gesture for gesture, just the same, like the last time, and wait for their response, as if your life depended on it. Today, breathing in church air, I’d like to be an extra in someone else’s story. The young American woman in black who intrudes upon the reverie of the somewhat older Hungarian man in tweed. The Hungarian crosses himself as he rises from the pew, murmuring Adieu or something like that. I mumble too then bow my head toward the altar penitentially.

Two men walk in and point at the paintings. They’re speaking English in sober whispers and I follow them, to hear what they’re saying. One is lecturing the other about perspective and the vanishing point. The other says he likes skewed perspectives. I agree silently. Perspective wasn’t necessarily advantageous, he continues. Even the discovery of fire wasn’t really an advance, says the other one. The lecturer continues, the figures in medieval paintings, the incongruent relationships represent a different world view.…I’m getting too close to them, and linger in front of another painting, losing their conversation. It’s the way we draw as children, I hear the other one say finally. Looking at the two men, I remember being told about a filmmaker who taught his classes that vision was an erection of the irises, which makes me wonder if learning perspective is something akin to and as traumatic as circumcision.

Walking along a dark alley whose paving stones were trod by grander feet, nearing an historic site, I take in, as best I can, the fact that so-and-so died or lived or passed through, then look again at the innocuous structure that once housed him, sometimes her. Immortality continues to elude me. Alfred’s learned commentary makes our trip more like a documentary than a narrative film. We are investigative reporters about to discover clues that everyone else had overlooked, not romantic leads in an adventure or mystery. Which would be more to my liking. But we do fit into an ecology. Without us equals not seen.

The sun’s pernicious rays make everyone happy. Men in white jackets and black trousers carry small cups of espresso on round silver trays, moving from table to table or from shop to shop, shouting pronto, sometimes with annoyance, and
ciao
with pleasure. On the street women sell blue-and-white-striped umbrellas made of linen, a local product, or they work inside stores behind counters, standing on high-heeled leather sandals, their well-padded feet spread over the sides of their shoes. I look at feet almost as much as teeth. Their feet look healthy, brown and pink, but probably are not. Late at night the women must rub them in their hands, exclaim at their exhaustion and soak their feet in soothing salted water held in ceramic bowls they’ve had in their families for years. That’s what I imagine when I look at these saleswomen who smile patiently rather than broadly and murmur
grazie
without obsequiousness.

Medieval houses teeter on the edges of narrow streets. I’m drinking an espresso in the Piazza della Cisterna, having persuaded Paul and Alfred to go off without me and do all the seeing they can. My stack of postcards grows, progeny of these travels, and I look from one card to the other like a proud mother, if I can understand that feeling. I try to as I watch women I take to be mothers walking by with children, doing the marketing and not stopping for an espresso. And because years ago one of these little girls could have been coffee-shop Claudia, I select a postcard to send her in London, one of a man and woman locked in an embrace, their lips barely touching, with “Amore” written in red letters across their chests. On a black-and-white real-photo postcard of the San Gimignano medieval “skyscrapers,” I write Zoran’s name and address just as Alfred sits down. I put the card in my diary. He tells me how much I missed by not going with them. He always says that.

Paul sleeps in the car, and Alfred and I find cheap hotels in Siena or Florence, which are home base for most of our day trips. We take single rooms, even though it’s more expensive and I think Alfred would prefer it if we shared one. He doesn’t say so. He doesn’t insist. He’d never say so. And he’d never insist. They don’t insist. With them I experience a kind of liberty—license, maybe—because their reticence or self-censorship permits a wide berth. I utter half-statements, which are met with cocked heads and attentiveness, but not with exhortations to explain or to finish. I tell them about a never-released thirties Hollywood movie based on the life of Schubert in which various characters walk up to the composer and ask, “Why don’t you finish
The Unfinished
?” They don’t think that’s as funny as I do.

On the train to Amsterdam from Milan, I sit in a compartment with other foreigners, one a Pakistani man, one an English girl of seventeen, one a Belgian man, all of us headed in the same direction for different reasons. The Pakistani and I engage in one of those fitful conversations in which neither is able to make clear what one wants to say. Finally we stand in the compartment passageway and talk about the neon lights on buildings, that blaze of created energy that gives color to our nights. Beauty, he says to me, artificial beauty. Yes, I agree. Why, he asks, are you not married? I don’t want to be. Ahh, he says, scrutinizing me, then may God be with you. I thank him. The rest of the journey he and I are noticeably silent, as if something portentous had occurred. When we arrive at Centraal Station at dusk, the Pakistani gravely shakes my hand and I bow slightly, an atavistic gesture that brings Charles to mind, but one just as grave as his handshake. With a doleful expression he takes his leave, and I’m sure he watched me throw my bag into the taxi and shook his head, certain I was meant for tragedy.