You Shall Know Our Velocity (35 page)

“How long are you out at the house this time?”

“Just a few days,” she said. “I have work back in the city. I have to get back late Sunday.”

“To Auckland?”

“Yes.”

I was trying to get a grip on her accent. It was not British, but it sounded more British than it did New Zealand … ish.

“What day is it today?” I asked, and hated myself for asking.

“Thursday. Don’t tell me you’re one of those.”

What did that mean? I didn’t know. I said:

“If I was, I wouldn’t tell you,” and confused myself more. I didn’t know what she’d meant, and I have no idea what I meant in response. It was a wash, and we moved on. When the sun had appeared today I felt awake again, felt locked in battle with the sun, and felt good about that. I’d felt strong, and when I’d seen Sonje I felt so much stronger, but what was coming out of my mouth?

“Have you seen that thing out there?” I said, pointing to the black shape on the beach. Sonje was lovely, but already I was back to the shape. I couldn’t help it. She turned and cupped her hand over her eyes.

“I thought it was a log, but I suppose you know better,” she said.

She brought to mind English actresses. She had a straight back, was thin without being shapeless, and had a nose that I associate with aristocracy in film—straight, small, but strong. Her voice projected like an actress’s, an actress who was also a wit, who could tell stories, who could make a group of children laugh but who also knew dozens of filthy limericks.

“We’ll have to investigate it together,” she said and I almost flew. I was so shaky in the head that I blurted something about dinner and she accepted, as long, she said, as we ate early, around five in fact, because she was expecting a phone call, from Amsterdam, at eight. Then she went back to her hose, and waved, though I hadn’t moved.

I went back inside, determined to get as much down as possible, in the five hours before I’d knock on her door and we’d drive around the bay, and through the twenty or so turns, all coastal, to Whitianga—the closest town for a good dinner out. And now I’m here, and what I want to talk about is the idea of the sacrament. I want to explain why I’ve retitled this formerly mistitled book, and the explanation starts in Copenhagen, at the airport chapel.

There was a priest there, an Episcopal priest, heavy-set, with a neat beard of black and grey, and wire-rimmed glasses. Around him were a group of travelers, mostly businessmen, and one family of six, all Indian. Will and I walked in, having time to kill; neither of us had ever been to an airport chapel. The priest, who was American for no apparent reason, was talking to them about the useless-ness of what he was doing. He was noting, and I paraphrase: “What I’m doing here, and what the church is doing here, and to some degree what you’re doing here, is not of much utility. But you do not need me to tell you, while here, what to do. You are doing what your soul tells you to do, without my help or the help of God. The Bible, in some part, is a handbook for those who might forget our obligations to each other. And those obligations are obvious, and constant, even though they become more obvious, more pronounced and more urgent and immediate at a time such as this. [His voice carried, and was a beautiful voice, I should add. It was obvious that he was a singer of some kind, and one who sang from deep in his chest, his core.] What we are doing is much like the sacrament I will be handing to you shortly. For what is the sacrament? It is not in itself nourishment; it is, rather, an outward symbolic act of an inward grace. It is the external, social demonstration of how we feel within. It is not practical and without it we would feel the same way; it is a reminder only, and a relatively unnecessary one at that. But that does not mean it is dispensable, nor does it mean it is unbeautiful.”

This was the first time I’d ever heard this word,
unbeautiful
,
though since hearing it I have stolen it and now it is mine. It was clear he was a theologian, a scholar, but one with a taste for the irreverent. Will and I knew, with a brief glance out of the corners of our eyes, that our own Catholic priests wouldn’t agree with his assessment of this particular sacrament as in some way unnecessary, but we liked his style. We always loved going to the Presbyterian church Youth Night, wherein we were given the run of the church basement, full of pool tables, Ping-Pong, pinball machines and couches, in exchange for listening to twenty minutes of the minister’s thoughts, which were, we always had to admit, a lot more applicable and comprehensible than what we got at our own church. And as I was listening to the airport priest, I was loving the notion of the sacrament, or rather was quickly forming my own version of it, a secular version of the sacrament, because the only way I ever could make it through any Mass, or any Youth Night, was to take whatever message they were sending and bend it, sometimes beyond reason, to give some holy weight to the things I was already doing or already believed. In that airport chapel, I nudged Will, and he smiled. I want to think he knew what I was thinking about, but we never had a chance, afterward, to talk about it, because he was late for his flight to Mexico City, and afterward all we had a chance to do was shake hands and say good-bye. (He nodded a few times at me, like he was taking my picture, mapping my body, and then backed away. It was the last time we saw each other.) But what I was doing was connecting the idea of the sacrament to what we were doing that week, on the road, with those strangers. First, what we did was intensely ritualistic, in that the procedure was very similar each time, and involved the observance of certain rules, namely that the recipients should seem needing of the funds, and that, whenever possible, they should be asked for directions, given them, or should have helped to take us along our journey. Second, the exchange of the money was much, if
I may be so bold, like the exchange of the Holy Eucharist, in that in each case it is preceded by a brief and seldom-changing dialogue. In the case of the Holy Eucharist, the recipient is told of the symbolism of the communion wafer, and accepts this symbolism and reinforces his or her Catholic faith, by ingesting the wafer. In our case, we asked directions, and were pointed where we were already headed, and the recipient, by acknowledging the significance of the funds, accepts the symbolism of the money, and the symbolism of our giving it to them, and perhaps even reinforces his or her faith a little, too, in this case a humanistic faith, which I personally find even more difficult to keep …

I am being called away. It’s Sonje. She’s knocking on the glass—it’s five already, gah—that separates this home from the air outside, and I am going to answer that door.

Before I make some notes on the preceding passage, let me first say that Sonje makes an extraordinary bundt cake. When I left you last, she was knocking, wholly unannounced, on my sliding porch door of tempered glass. I was surprised but not all that surprised, because when you’re one of a pair at the cusp of something brief but strong you know when someone might arrive. Her hair was down, and her hair is a thing of such extravagance that I sucked in a quick breath. I hadn’t seen her with it down yet, and it was like something painted by a Wyeth, any of them—I thought first of Helga, because wasn’t she Andrew’s neighbor, and wasn’t her hair, though rust-colored, rendered strand by strand?

She drove us to Whitianga, her Volvo tight around the coast. She drove like a lunatic; she knew the road and its many turns, and even in the rain she slowed for nothing. We ate on the second floor of a casual place, tables without cloths, where we both had sea bass,
after I confirmed—I had to make sure with the manager because the waiter couldn’t verify anything—that it wasn’t Chilean.

At dinner, in the soft light from the room’s corners, Sonje looked older. Her eyes, when she smiled, pulled a dozen tiny lines from her temples, I liked her more and though the food was plain it tasted fantastic. Her mouth was still full-lipped and while a baby downstairs wailed I wanted to be alone with her in her house, to see how she arranged her pillows. She was a banker, she said, or used to be. She’d also been a lawyer, almost a judge, and once worked in Connecticut for the World Wrestling Federation. She liked professional wrestling a lot.

“We have to go see it,” she said. We were now talking about the shape on the beach.

I didn’t want to.

“I can’t understand why,” she said. “You don’t seem like someone who’d be afraid of a shape on a beach.”

Back in her house, with all the lights turned on, she gave me a tour; the house was full of outsider art, much of it American, and African sculpture, which always looks the same to me, indistinguishable from anything you’d get at a flea market, but again, I know nothing. We walked in and quickly out of her bedroom and I understood but by the time we were in the second guest room, and she was pointing out the view from the shower, I couldn’t hold back and from behind I wrapped my arms around her and sucked on her neck.

This morning we walked over the dunes and down to where the beach was flat. The shape was no more than fifty yards away. I stopped and squinted at the shape. Sonje waited for me.

“You notice the colors in this country are so bright?” she said. “I was in Massachusetts last year, in February. There weren’t any colors. It’s not that there was snow, because there wasn’t. But it was monochromatic anyway. Just a kind of grey-brown everywhere. And I know it was winter and all, but I still missed New Zealand.
It’s a kind of cartoon palette down here, wouldn’t you say? The ocean is blue and the hills are green. They keep the good colors handy.”

“You don’t think it’s a body, do you?” I asked.

She smiled and shook her head.

She hadn’t let me stay long the night before. We groped each other while standing in the shower, and for a time with her sitting on the sink, but she’d wrapped things up.

“That was needed,” she said, and led me to the door.

I couldn’t concentrate when I woke up, knowing she’d come over after breakfast to take me down to the shape. She had her theories about it, which she wouldn’t divulge, and she wanted to prove herself right. I hadn’t slept much; I fell asleep after getting home, but already the bed was stupid with just me in it, and I had to use the vodka and Orangina trick again, which brought me awake at six, before the sunrise, which came without rain.

Sonje was wearing shorts, blue plastic sandals, a long-billed baseball hat and her margarine scarf. We walked to the shape. It was bigger as we walked closer. If it was a person, it was a very large person, at least three hundred pounds. Still the body was laying on its side, but now perhaps a third of it was beneath the sand, and as we walked closer, the smooth blackness of the shape became dotted with sand, and what seemed to be hair. The shape was wearing black everywhere. I stopped again.

“Hand, you’re being irrational now,” Sonje said, and she took my fingers in hers and continued.

Within seconds we were upon it, and the smell was upon us. A farm smell, thick and meaty.

“I had a hunch,” she said. “There’s the snout.”

“I didn’t know pigs got that big,” I said. The thing was enormous, the size of a cow.

“Beautiful thing, though. Look at that coat. It’s still in good shape.”

“Don’t touch it!” I yelled. She was leaning down to touch the damned thing.

“I’ll wash up afterward,” she said.

And she did, and I was there.

Sonje has a great walk. It’s slinky, in that her feet precede her shoulders, and she has a fluidity that’s reassuring. We played Hide and Seek last night, we really did, and it was one of the most oddly intense things I’ve ever done. We took it very seriously, and because neither of us knew my rented house too well, there were many places to hide. Afterward, still walking around the house, we drank most of a bottle of red wine the owners had left in the pantry, and eventually were laying on the couch, where we were temporarily too tired to move.

I’d been telling her about my work on Will’s book, and about that trip, and about Will generally. She asked if I missed him and I said yes, reflexively.