Sleepless Nights (2 page)

The beginning of June was hot. I took a journey, and of course, immediately everything was new. When you travel your first discovery is that you do not exist. The phlox bloomed in its faded purples; on the hillside, phallic pines. Foreigners under the arcades, in the basket shops. A steamy haze blurred the lines of the hills. A dirty, exhausting sky. Already the summer seemed to be passing away. Soon the boats would be gathered in, ferries roped to the dock.

Looking for the fossilized, for something—persons and places thick and encrusted with final shape; instead there are many, many minnows, wildly swimming, trembling, vigilant to escape the net.

Kentucky: that is certainly part of it. My mother lived as a girl in so many North Carolina towns they are confused in my memory. Raleigh and Charlotte. She hardly knew her own parents; they died quickly as people did then, of whatever was in the air—pneumonia, diphtheria, tuberculosis. I never knew a person so indifferent to the past. It was as if she did not know who she was. She had brothers and sisters and was raised by them, passing their names down to us.

Her face, my mother’s, is not clear to me. A boneless, soft prettiness, with small brown eyes and the scarcest of eyebrows, darkened with a lead pencil.

“Beginnings are always delightful; the threshold is the place to pause,” Goethe said. New York once more, to remain forever, resting on its generous accommodation of women. Long dresses, arrogance, more chances to deceive the deceitful, confidants, conspirators, charge cards.

I was then a “we.” He is teasing, smiling, drinking gin after a long day’s work, saying something like this to the air:

The tyranny of the weak is a burdensome thing and yet it is better to be exploited by the weak than by the strong... Submission to the powerful is a redundancy and very fatiguing and boring in the end. There is nothing subtle or interesting in it...mainly because the exercise is too frequent. A workout in the morning, another in the evening... Husband-wife: not a new move to be discovered in that strong classical tradition. Arguments are like the grinding of rusty blades, the old motor and its troublesome knockings. The dog growls. He too knows his lines.

Can it be that I am the subject?

True, with the weak something is always happening: improvisation, surprise, suspense, injustice, manipulation, hypochondria, secret drinking, jealousy, lying, crying, hiding in the garden, driving off in the middle of the night. The weak have the purest sense of history. Anything can happen. Each one of them is a palmist, reading his own hand. Yes, I will either have a long or a short life; he (she) will be either blond or dark-haired.

Tickets, migrations, worries, property, debts, changes of name and changes
back once more: these came about from reading many books. So, from Kentucky to New York, to
Boston, to Maine, to Europe, carried along on a river of paragraphs and chapters, of blank
verse, of little books translated from the Polish, large books from the Russian—all consumed
in a sedentary sleeplessness. Is that sufficient—never mind that it is the truth. It certainly
hasn’t the drama of: I saw the old, white-bearded frigate master on the dock and signed up for
the journey. But after all, "I" am a woman.

I find myself on the train from Montreal to Kingston. I am going to the university for a few days—and not so long ago. It is a Sunday night, deep winter, and we push on through the cold, black emptiness. Sometimes the bronze glow of a distant car light shines in the distance, flickers like a candle on the curves. The train seems to be always going straight ahead in the lucky, large, empty country.

It is only a few degrees above zero, but in the club car we are in the midst of a sensual, tropical heat, a masculine heat of some kind. I am the only woman in car number 50.

They are very noisy. A perfunctory noise and a good deal of the spurious laughter of a group together too long. The men are in a forced holiday condition, nearing the falling, dying end of it. Most are drunk and more than one looks sick. Canadians, do not vomit on me! It appears they have been to a meeting, a convention. They are bound together by occupation; perhaps they sell something. They are certainly not greatly prosperous; no certainly not. I am sure of that from my unworthy calculations based on the arithmetic of snobbery and shame.

“Shame is inventive,” Nietzsche said. And that is scarcely the half of it. From shame I have paid attention to clothes, shoes, rings, watches, accents, teeth, points of deportment, turns of speech. The men on the train are wearing clothes which, made for no season, are therefore always unseasonable and contradictory. They are harsh and flimsy, loud and yet lightweight, fashioned with the inappropriateness that is the ruling idea of the year-round. Pastels blue as the sea and green as the land; jackets lined with paisley and plaid; seams outlined with wide stitches of another color; revers and pockets outsize; predominance of chilly blue and two-tones; nylon and Dacron in the as-smooth-as-glass finish of the permanently pressed. On the other hand, the porters from Trinidad are traditional, dressed like princes. Black trousers, red cotton jacket, white shirt, black bow tie and black, luminous, aristocratic, tropical faces.

The men are very white, very fair, and even their nut-brown hair lies over a reddish-blond brow. Their whiteness reminds me that they are truly my brothers, going home to my sisters, my sisters-in-law. The presence of the men makes me uneasy; one of them stirs my memory because of the small chip in a front tooth that brings back a woeful night on the sofa in a fraternity house. Another has taken off a tight shoe and sits for a long time voluptuously staring at his liberated foot. Not one is a stranger, so near are the pale eyes, the part in the hair, the touching, sluggish hilarity.

Borges asks the question: “Are not the fervent Shakespeareans who give themselves over to a line of Shakespeare, are they not, literally, Shakespeare?”

Here, rushing on through the black night, these men with their bright clothes, under the waning moon of their drunkenness, mingle with my own flesh, as if I had been in the back seat of a car with each of them, had “pored over” their unsettled text. Men with red-lined eyes, heavy high-school signet rings, white cotton undershirts, days at the filling station preparing to face the labor for those families that are from their first youth already in their eyes.

The club car, now rattling with debris, raced backward. A gate whined on its rusty hook, an old car and truck stood in the gravel, the door closes on my own brothers and sisters slipping in late to fall silently on one of the many beds with pleasant depressions in the middle. The sighs and tears, the shouts of injustice, all the destinies linked by a likeness of forehead and nose, by irresistible sympathies and such distances that each one gorged on a pretty vanity, the fantasy of being an orphan.

Pasternak’s line:
To live a life is not to cross a field
. It is not to climb a mountain either. Leconte de Lisle spoke enviously of Victor Hugo as having the “stupidity of the Himalayas.” The murderous German girl with her alpenstock, her hiking boots, calls to the old architect, higher, higher! He falls to his death and this is Ibsen’s disgust with the giddiness up there, or the assumption of up there. For himself, he adjusted his rimless spectacles and the corners of his mouth turned down when fervent young girls thought he was dumber than he was. Ibsen was not a happy man. Work all day, more than a little schnapps in the evening, and back home at the hotel, the resort, the pension there was his strong wife who after she had little Sigurd Ibsen said: That’s it, that’s enough.

Neither more nor less straight across the field, destination the clump of trees or the stone fence that ends your property; nor upward slowly, often out of breath. Yet, profound changes and removals along the line split the spirit apart. Where is Vermont or Minnesota after you have packed up your things and taken your old wife to Florida—to live, to live, without the furnace and the snowplow? While you are living, part of you has slipped away to the cemetery.

Kentucky, Lexington; the university, Henry Clay High School, Main Street. The cemetery of home, education, nerves, heritage, and tics. Fading, it is sad; remaining, it is a needle. Trees, flowers, noble old houses, triumphant farms on the outskirts of town—little distraction to the heart in that before the antiquarian interests of middle age. Store clerks and waitresses are the heroines of my memories, those ladies cast off with children to raise; they keep things open, light up the night on Main Street, that paradisiacal center of towns then. Woolworth’s, the cigar store, three segregated movie houses, two sensual hotels where the wastebaskets contained memorandums of assignations and the hyperbolic, misshapen prose of illicit love letters.

It is not true that it doesn’t matter where you live, that you are in Hartford or Dallas merely yourself. Also it is not true that all are linked naturally to their regions. Many are flung down carelessly at birth and they experience the diminishment and sometimes the pleasant truculence of their random misplacement. Americans who are Germans, Germans who are Frenchmen, like Heine perhaps.

The stain of place hangs on not as a birthright but as a sort of artifice, a bit of cosmetic. I place myself among the imports, those jarring and jarred pieces that sit in the closet among the matching china sets. I have no relations that I know of born outside the South and hardly any living outside it even today. Nevertheless, I am afraid of the country night and its honest slumbers, uneasy even in the daylight with “original settlers” and old American stock. The highway, the asphalt paths, the thieves, the contaminated skies like a suffocating cloak of mangy fur, the millions in their boroughs—that is truly home.

I have always, all of my life, been looking for help from a man. It has come many times and many more it has not. This began early. We, several girls from the neighborhood, met a very nice-looking old man, not dressed like our own people, but a gentleman in a black suit and white shirt, wearing a kind and courtly smile. He was indeed kind and courtly. He waited for us on Saturday afternoons, paid our way into the movie, bought us the whitened, hardened chocolate of summer. In the dark, with a little girl on each side, sitting as straight as caryatids, he ran his hand up our thighs, under our dresses. The predator’s first gift, mixed with the bright narrative on the screen and with the chocolate, was to reveal early to us the tangled nature of bribery. This at least was a lasting lesson. Bribery and more bribery—it grows within you like your molars. Another truly broken old man, poor, ignorant, with a rotten, rooty old grocery store like a cellar, handed out scum-covered pickles and soggy gingersnaps.