Motion Sickness (8 page)

“The expatriate represents, in fact, the normal state of an average citizen in this last part of the 20th century.”

—Julia Kristeva

The French café is always the same. Except it’s Claudia’s day off and she’s not gracing it with her special presence. Even the elderly English couple who talked about the decimalization of the pound are here, precisely where I left them. The gray-haired woman looks distracted as she complains to the bald man, her husband, of Sybil, who may be their daughter. I spread my newspaper out, covering Patricia Bosworth’s biography of Montgomery Clift, and drink a second cup of café au lait. Gregor’s letter, which arrived today, alludes to Clara; he purposely doesn’t name her. He was once, during the Baader-Meinhof era, detained by the police for questioning and let go. “Now I think to write a play based on the murder of Ulrike Meinhof. Did you hear in the U.S.A. about a psychological test then to give to the schoolchildren in Germany, to discover if they had already terrorist tendencies?” He says he’d like to meet Arlette one day, that her theory of
Meninas
is interesting, that since I’m in London I might inquire if Oscar Wilde wrote “The Birthday of the Infanta” influenced by the Velázquez painting. He begs me to forgive his bad English.

Gregor captivates me. I’m easily captivated. My mother once remarked that, with time, people wouldn’t enchant me. Marilyn Monroe thought that Monty Clift was the only person in worse shape than she was. I pay for my coffees and slide past the elderly couple who have fallen silent.

In the tube the escalators at Holborn and Piccadilly climb forever and are long enough to be runways in old Busby Berkeley musicals. Someone might burst into song or do a dance routine, passengers might become a high-kicking chorus line on their way to work, to shop, shoplift, eat, or wander aimlessly. The train fills up with groups of men heading for a soccer game in the north. It must be Saturday. They wear scarves around their necks and slap each other on the back, exuding a desperate team spirit. A friend of mine told me that the sound of ocean waves breaking, the water rushing in over rocks and pebbles on the shore, was to him like applause. When I go to the opera with him, both of us have tears in our eyes at curtain calls. The divas bow low and oceans of love crash at their feet. I miss the sound of fans roaring after a home run. My team’s home run. I don’t enjoy the game in the abstract. I yell Kill the Umpire. This doesn’t travel well.

There’s a different young man behind the hotel desk. Pradip’s of Indian descent, but English, born and educated here, he tells me. He’s just out of hotel school and likes Culture Club and Bruce Springsteen. He’s also wearing a soccer scarf. I settle into a new room but one with an abject style similar to the other as well as an absence of what Jessica would call beauty. It’s smaller, darker, and cheaper because it’s in the basement and has a half-view of the street, of shoes and socks, of calves and ankles, of the bottoms of canes and umbrellas. I’ve taken it by the month though I may move to a bed-sitter, or to Jessica’s. She’s invited me. After her youngest sister leaves.

Jessica laughs when I confess to being the underground woman. The baby, a boy she’s named Caleb after her great-grandfather, rests in her arms, while her sister, Sarah, watches. Grimly I think. I missed Caleb’s birth, a painful one, by three weeks. He was premature. Quite, Jessica says, with an English accent. She’s holding an exceptionally small English or British baby in her arms. He won’t need, as Jessica did when she was settling here, to register as an alien—and then marry to ensure his right to stay. He’ll have the chance for dual nationality. Which the Americans, Jessica goes on, don’t offer. Everyone’s so nervous about their origins—being American isn’t solid as a rock, not Plymouth Rock, she laughs. Sarah, the youngest sister, turns her head away, annoyed.

With Sarah out of the room, doing the shopping and buying several pints, not quarts, of milk, Jessica whispers that a very strange thing happened in the hospital. She heard a voice, a disembodied voice, like an angel or spirit. It didn’t speak in the normal sense, but she felt visited by or attended to by some soul, just before giving birth. It was, she felt, a good omen, an extraordinary prelude to Caleb’s arrival. Jessica’s even written a poem about the experience. She feels it may have been Charles visiting her or someone who was dead. She delivers this story in hushed tones, a stage whisper that carries eerily in the bedroom. A ghost story. Jessica trained, I learn, years ago, to be an actress and occasionally does performances which she writes. Holding her baby, she’s subsumed in motherhood which may be a good role for her, one she’s had experience with, having been the eldest in a family of four.

Of course, Jessica remarks beatifically, you think I’m mad. Then she gazes into Caleb’s eyes. They’re bonding. I don’t think she’s mad. Caleb’s so tiny the idea of nationality seems foolish. His minuscule fingers and toes curl and uncurl feebly, spittle and drool ooze from his wet button mouth. Caleb might grow up to be a monster on the order of Gilles de Rais or Ted Bundy. Or, since he’s British, Jack the Ripper or the Yorkshire Ripper. He has the possibility of becoming a Kim Philby or a Mahatma Gandhi. Or Steven Spielberg, for that matter. But perhaps this is very American, to imagine all this, this range of possibilities. Home on the range. Jessica looks as if she’s about to sprout wings and fly around the room. A study of maternity, like a
Madonna with Child
by Bellini, this dyad is similar to a painted one I saw in Venice in that church where the English brothers, Alfred and Paul, first came into view.

Cengiz is in the café across the street from the Blue Mosque, or Sultan Ahmet. I’m sitting with the Professor, a ubiquitous figure in the café. An aged American, he lives in a van outside the café and is unkempt and bearded. Cengiz comes over to our table and kindly offers the Professor a chicken from his farm in the city. The Professor asks him to join us. Cengiz is, the Professor tells me, a chicken farmer and a poet. Cengiz relaxes, maybe basks, as the Professor proffers his condensed biography. Then Cengiz asks me why I’m here in Istanbul, alone. I stare at his teeth which are small and square, teeth that look like they could bite through anything, teeth yellowed from the cigarette that hangs from his lips. Cengiz takes my book—Spillane’s
My Gun Is Quick
—opens it to the first page and reads aloud with staccato-like precision: “You pick up a book and read about things, getting a vicarious kick from people and events that never happened. You’re doing it now, getting ready to fill in a normal life with the details of someone else’s experiences.” Come along, he says, standing up and putting on a worn U.S. Navy coat, come with me for a walk, let us go to Asia. The Professor, he tells me on the outside, is not a professor.

The walk on the Galata Bridge, which crosses the Bosphorus, takes us nearer to the East, but not to Asia, as Cengiz promised. When we reach the other side, he points to Asia and announces proudly, There, a new continent. He says we have left the West behind. While I think this is overly optimistic of him, I glance back furtively to see what I’m giving up. Cengiz’s smoky glasses give his round face a somber appearance but he smiles frequently as if to dispel my doubts and his. His hands are rough and large, very different from his small sharp teeth.

We talk in the sitting room of my small hotel. The Englishman Charles catches sight of us out the corner of his eye but pretends not to see us. On the other hand we are watched dispassionately by hotel manager Yapar, with whom Cengiz is courteous but not friendly. Mr. Yapar leaves a tray of tea, anyway, and in the sitting room Cengiz doesn’t roll a joint. Cengiz loves not only hashish, but the Bosphorus, poetry, and women who are usually married. He is in love with a married one now, the subject of many of our talks in the café, or when taking walks, or in the hotel sitting room, eating oranges and drinking
chai
. His passionate and doomed love. Our lives, we both acknowledge, are so very different that we are in some senses Martians to each other. But I’m a Martian he’s read about or seen in Western movies, an independent American woman. It becomes, or I become, a joke we can both share. On walks he points to store windows which sell busts of Ataturk and nods his head seriously as if I should be able to share with him his view of his own history. Ataturk is secular man, he says. Father of modern Turkey.
Ata
is father. His true name Kemal. Now in these days.…Then he stops midsentence and gazes skyward. I do too.

* * *

In the
hamam
Turkish women show me how to scrub my legs so that dead skin peels off and falls into the water that runs under our feet. It’s satisfying to see the dead skin float away, shed painlessly. In my alcove, the two Turkish women with me shave their underarms and one suggests, through gestures, that I do too. I think about doing it, to be neighborly, but I don’t. She smiles and shakes her head from side to side. I know she’s trying to help me and I appreciate the effort but have no way of saying that. I nod my head up and down, a kind of bowing motion, more Japanese than Turkish, I guess, and maybe as mystifying to her, not meaning thank you very much but something else, something much worse. At night I dream about a pair of shoes made of alligator. Their virtue is that they will never wear out because, some announcer-like character shouts, Alligators don’t wear out, do they?

There are many things Cengiz and I don’t talk about. For when we do talk it has to be in English, for my sake, and our discussions are necessarily simple. Subject verb predicate. We are primers to each other or Spillane-like characters who know that language can’t be trusted. Often we just walk together silently, sometimes back and forth over the Galata Bridge, which I’m aping an affection for, unless I genuinely feel it, which I won’t know until it’s gone from sight. The Galata has a life below it. Stalls spread the length of it, from West to East and back. Men sell fish, textiles, jewelry, and all the time the floating barges undulate beneath our feet. I say to, myself, of all things, I must remember this, this funny wavering sensation that accompanies Cengiz and me as we walk across the river on a moving floor that seems like no support at all. But the decision to remember a bridge is much too symbolic.

Cengiz wants to know how I feel about there being so few women on the streets and almost none after dark, except in the Western part of the city with its oddly named discos, at which everyone wears the latest Western styles, of which Cengiz disapproves. Cengiz likes getting to know the foreigners who visit Istanbul; he goes out of his way to be friendly and helpful, but he doesn’t want to be a Westerner. His fervent pride in his country as well as his intense anger at its failures is a grand passion, like his love for married women and the Bosphorus.

We’re in a
lokanta
, a restaurant, and I am, as usual, the only woman. One man eating alone is waving a chicken leg above his head, in a kind of ecstasy. Hashish, Cengiz whispers, he is stupid man. He walks me to my hotel and deposits me at the front door which is locked. Mr. Yapar, wearing a Perry Como sweater over his pajamas, sleepily answers the bell and lets me in. A disinclined Cengiz walks away fast, as if he’s got a late date. With the married woman who’s available at strange hours.

On the back of a color photograph of Vietnamese high-school girls bicycling in Hanoi: Dear Clara, I meant to telephone you before I left Barcelona. I hope you’re well. There’s nothing like Gaudi’s buildings, or you and Gregor. I hope I was of some help on your memoirs, but I don’t think I was. All my best to you. Love.

※

Lynne Tillman (New York, NY) is the author of five novels, three collections of short stories, one collection of essays and two other nonfiction books. She collaborates often with artists and writes regularly on culture, and her fiction is anthologized widely. Her novels include
American Genius, A Comedy
(2006),
No Lease on Life
(1998) which was a
New York Times
Notable Book of 1998 and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award,
Cast in Doubt
(1992),
Motion Sickness
(1991), and
Haunted Houses
(1987).
The Broad Picture
(1997) collected Tillman’s essays, which were published in literary and art periodicals. She is the Fiction Editor at
Fence
Magazine, Professor and Writer-in-Residence in the Department of English at the University at Albany, and a recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.

This is a
Red Lemonade
book, also available in all reasonably possible formats: in limited artisan-produced editions, in trade paperback editions, and in all current digital editions, as well as online at the Red Lemonade publishing community.

A word about this community. Over my years in publishing, I learned that a publisher is the sum of all its constituent parts: above all the writers, of course, and yes, the staff, but also all the people who read our books, talk about our books, support our authors, and those who want to be one of our authors themselves.

So I started a company called
Cursor
, designed to make these constituent parts fit better together, into a proper community where, finally, we could be greater than the sum of the parts. The Red Lemonade publishing community is the first of these and there will be more to come—for the current roster of communities, see the Cursor
website
.