Going gone
by Barry Jay Kaplan
[ fiction - may 09 ]
Breathing hard but steadily after her long speed-walk up from the river, Ruth Flood sat on the steps of the National Gallery and looked out at the pigeons hovering over the statue of Admiral Nelson. She felt slightly discomfited that she had inadvertently attracted the attention of two elderly women waiting for a bus on the square, startling them with the rush of air she created as she passed them in her final sprint. Other than that hot squirmy feeling of being noticed, Ruth felt fine; felt, that is, nothing.
It was her second trip to London but the first that would really matter. The first trip, the one with Thomas, didn't count because she had only done what Thomas had insisted they do and seen what he determined was worthwhile. And it was on that trip, as she watched him read from the ABC Guide to London, then match their steps with the ones in the book, then match the picture in the book with one monument or museum or garden after the next, page after page after page, that she came to see Thomas as a construction, his personality something tacked together out of opinions and points of view he'd borrowed and assimilated in his forty years of becoming a man. It had taken the background of London, a city at once strange and familiar, to see this and to see herself as perhaps even less solid. This made it clear to her that London was the place where she must come to be herself, to be alone, and to die. To do this, she had simply to make another trip, this time without Thomas, which she had done, and arrange things, which she was in the process of doing.
When her breathing had slowed to normal and the perspiration had dried on her back, Ruth got to her feet. She had as her ultimate destination the room she'd rented above a vegetarian restaurant in Fulham from whose one window she had a view of a busy shopping street but was in no hurry to get there and instead allowed herself to be borne along with the flow of foot traffic arcing up the hill; this feeling of involuntary movement suited her. She thought of crossing the street but doing so would put her smack in front of St Martins-in-the-Field, in whose basement lunchroom she had eaten the day before, and on whose steps so many American tourists clustered. So many of them on the cafeteria line too and at the bare wooden tables; she had hesitated to speak and thereby to announce herself as one of them.
There was also the young man. He was stationed behind the counter and had evidently noticed Ruth's indecisiveness as she hesitated over the desserts. "The bread puddin's not half bad," he said.
Ruth nodded, resisting her instinct to look at him when he spoke, only noticing his hands, once she had nodded her assent, as he dished up and passed her the bowl. The hands were very long with wide flat fingers; she could imagine them stretching full octaves on a piano or making deep impressions in clay. Of course he might just be someone who dished and served. She glanced up quickly as she put the pudding on her tray but he had turned away; all she saw was that he was extremely thin and had long shiny black hair tied in a knot at his neck.
She had found a seat against the stone wall, relishing the feat of not looking at him again, of not knowing his face. This was what she had come to London for, to take no particular notice of things, the way people did when they were inherently part of something and knew tomorrow would bring more of the same.
Now, the next day, on the street, not wishing to spoil her beautiful isolation by seeing him again when it suited her that everyone be a stranger, she stuck to the opposite side of the road and found herself jostled into an informal line of people entering the Tate Gallery.
On her first, false, trip, she might have gone inside. She in fact had been in the Tate during the Thomas trip, she and he wrongly assuming the other interested in such a thing. The exhibit she remembered most vividly—it was the setting of her nightmares for weeks after - was of tiny pointillist mosques and minarets constructed of exceedingly small pieces of colored glass. What kind of person would devote herself to such labor? Surely it had to be a woman. There was something domestic, even infantile, about the act of pasting things, wasn't there? And didn't the attention to such detail bespeak a kind of obsessiveness bordering on insanity? Didn't it suggest a person who had to keep things tidy or go mad? Thomas said that was exactly what an artist was, an unhealthily obsessive person. I hate art, Ruth had thought, shuddering, turning away, vowing never to put herself in the presence of such a bizarre and disturbing imagination again.
When she returned to London on her own, she easily avoided museums and theatres and gardens, did not seek out important buildings or landmarks, never went anywhere but along plain empty streets or let herself be lost in crowds pushing towards or away from something. She often walked by the river with her eyes on the oily black water. Ruth did not want imagination or suggestion but their opposite, which she took to be ordinariness and certainty, regularity without meaning or significance.
She was unable to swim against the tide of the crowd edging into the gallery. Though she tried as unobtrusively as possible to extricate herself from its pull, she was already near the front of the line, face to face with a huge photograph of Elvis Presley, thirty feet tall at least and half as wide. It was only of his face, lit to make it seem as if the subject were carved of ebony and silver. The words 'Portrait of America' rested atop the vertiginous waves of his hair, and beneath it the name of a famous American photographer.
"How'd you like the puddin'?"
Ruth turned to face an unfamiliar Chinese man; she hardened her face and pressed her lips together but as she turned away caught a glimpse of the lustrous sheen of black hair and realized it was the young man from St. Martin-in-the-Field. His silky black hair hung loose now, hanging down past his shoulders; he must have just washed it, Ruth thought, it shone so. But how could I have not noticed that he was Chinese? It made everything easier; nothing could actually happen between her and a Chinese person.
Ruth turned to him. "You probably serve bread pudding to a lot of people," she said. The young man nodded, his hair falling over one side of his face. It made him look quite glamorous, Ruth thought. A tiny silver arrow pierced his left eyebrow. "I was undecided. Lucky for me you were there."
He licked his dry lips and gave her a tiny smile - had she said something amusing? "American, eh?" he said.
Just at that moment, the doors to the gallery swung open. The crowd surged forward and Ruth, feeling suddenly weightless, as if the strangeness and familiarity of the young man had inflated her, let herself be pulled in with it. The young man floated at her side; he smelled of perspiration and gingery cologne, as if he didn't bathe but doused himself in scent instead.
Inside, the crowd moved along the marble floors as if it were one body with a single guiding intelligence, dutifully, respectfully, stopping the proper amount of time before each photograph, shifting its weight, shaking its head and assessing, open-mouthed with awe.
"Everyone getting his fill of culture," Ruth whispered to the young man. She turned to see how he received her perception; he was staring up at an enormous photograph dominated by shining lips, heavy eyelids and glistening teeth, and hair so solidly curvaceous it seemed like molten steel.
Ruth tried to move at her own speed, her eye on the exit sign up ahead. It soon became apparent that unless she used significant force she could only move at the speed of her neighbors: stopping when they stopped, shifting weight when they did and moving on in measured paces to the next stop. She leaned her head to the boy again.
"It's like the stations of the..." She stopped talking when she saw how absorbed he was in the immensity of Marilyn Monroe.
"Always having to look up at 'em," the boy said.
"It is silly, isn't it? And yet..."
"As if they was more important than us," he went on. "As if their lives was bigger'n our lives."
Ruth was surprised to hear the hard metallic tone in his voice; it didn't quite fit his pale, serene pallor or the smooth fall of his silky hair.
"Who d'ya think they think they are? They're nothin'. They're dead. What's the point?" His hands were clenched into tight white fists. Ruth was amazed to see that his lip had split, that he'd drawn blood; one bright dark bead, pendulous as a ruby.
"Like it or not, we're looking at them, aren't we?" she said. "Isn't that the point?"
He looked around, mildly surprised that someone had heard him since he'd been talking to no one in particular, and when he saw that it was Ruth, he smiled and his tiny pointed tongue licked the blood away.
"I hate America."
They had managed to walk out of the exhibit and now down the strand towards the river. "How can you?" Ruth said gaily, relieved to be outside again, amused by the boy's youthful vehemence. "I mean, how can you hate a country?"
They came to the river and sat side by side on a hard stone bench, an immense cathedral behind them, the river spooling along before them. The boy shrugged and tossed a few pebbles at a pair of squirrels.
Ruth could think of nothing to say. She could not reciprocate his hatred of her country with her own feelings for England, nor could she in good conscience defend her place of birth. And how could he say the word "hate" so easily? They sat in silence; there was the smell of orange peels and rot as a garbage scow passed on the river.
"Me mum were Chinese. In case ye were wonderin'."
"I wasn't but..."
"She's dead."
"Oh. I..."
He looked at her with a faint smile. "She were a beast. She were the kind of woman gave the female sex a bad rep."
Ruth sensed he wanted her to argue in defense of her gender but she would not be forced into siding with his mother; he would mock her for that. "And your father?"
"A Finn. Explains why I'm tall." He took an unfiltered cigarette from his pocket and lit it with a crumpled matchbook. Ruth noticed that he did not offer one to her. She would not have taken it but still. "On vacation?"
"No!"
"Work?"
Ruth shook her head. "I live here."
He smiled as if he'd caught her in a lie, though she'd said nothing to give him that impression. She touched her wedding ring then remembered she'd left it at home, on the bureau in the bedroom she once shared with Thomas, as a sign.
"I thought ye were a schoolteacher on vacation," he said. "We cop a bit of them at Martins the saint." He looked away, drawing on his cigarette. Ruth could hear the hiss of its paper burning. She stared at his neck. She wanted to ask him the name of his cologne. She followed the boy's gaze out to the river. When she looked back she saw he was watching her.
"Like the show?" he asked.
"At the gallery?"
He nodded but she sensed he was spoiling for a fight again.
"Elvis. Marilyn," he said. "So borin'. So artificial."
She knew he was baiting her but felt she should answer anyway, no matter that he would disagree. Of course he loves them, Ruth thought, and sought to acknowledge that without offending him. "It's the largeness, isn't it?" she said.
"What about it?"
"That makes the photos seem religious." That wasn't exactly what she had intended to say and saw how it antagonized the boy.
"Gods, you mean? Them?"
"A facsimile of divinity." She shook her head. "No. I'm not being clear. What I mean is...
"Not like me and you, eh?"
"Their size makes them seem to be..." It felt important that she get this exactly right. "What I mean is that celebrities live under the weight and curse of their responsibility to represent you..."
"Me?"
"Us. The human race."
"Oh. The human race."
He turned to glance at the river again, making sure she saw that mocking smile again. She didn't care.
"Yes!" she insisted. "Yes. To make us see the folly of our aspirations."
The boy turned and stared at her for a long moment. His face softened, as if all their sparring could simply be dropped at will. "And what's your aspirations?"
"I don't," she said.
"You're quite mad, you know."
Ruth felt his coming at her as a looming, an enlarging, an immensity. He had small and irregular pointed teeth and she thought it would probably not be very nice to kiss him, that it would hurt to have those teeth pressing into her lips. And when he did finally she felt the sharpness of teeth and the hardness of bone behind the softness of flesh. She feared he could move right through her, press and press until he had come out the other side and realized with a sudden flood of sensation that this was exactly what she wanted.
She thought the word 'yes,' and struggled to speak it, to say 'yes, yes.' She gripped the bench very hard, as if to ground herself. His tongue touched hers, his tongue was replying, licking the word 'yes' onto hers. She tasted the coppery salt taste of the blood on his lip. She wanted to be pulled closer but instead he pulled back and regarded her, as if it to measure the effect he'd had.
What does he want? What am I supposed to do? His expressionless face gave her no clue. He stood and extended his hand to her. She didn't look up. Tiny shreds of old paint had peeled from the bench and stuck to his trousers. She reached out to brush them off; he stood still while she brushed and kept brushing long after the paint was gone. He finally jerked his leg away and extended his hand to her again.
She looked up, shy and fragile as bird. "You're not going to hurt me, are you?"
One side of the boy's face twisted into a smile. "I weren't thinking, of it. Were ye then? Is that what ye like, eh? I'm an accommodatin' sort of fella, ye know."
Ruth stared at his long, flat fingers. A sculptor's? A pianist's? A strangler's? She shook her head. She had no answer for the hard, compacted thing in her that separated wanting to go and not going.
First the hand dropped to his side then jammed into his pocket; she could see the outline of his long flat fingers. They moved slowly, fanned out and back into fists; she couldn't take her eyes off them. Each tiny motion was so eloquent but what did they add up to? What did it all mean? And then the legs turned, the fingers disappeared and the boy walked away. By the time Ruth dared to look up, he was already a distance from her, taking long slow measured strides, as if he knew she would follow.
She looked around; surely someone had witnessed the boy's sudden departure. Ruth wanted to reframe the incident somehow so its lingering impression would be of a simple, temporary parting. She straightened her skirt and ran a nervous hand along her hair. No one was looking. Good.
She walked in the opposite direction the boy had taken though it would lead her farther from her room. Her eyes were on the river; the oily black waves in the wake of a barge made her think of Elvis Presley and the exhibit.
What she meant to say, what she had hoped to say but found no words for was that she had appreciated how very small the immensely large photographs made her feel, how small and insignificant, how cozy and neat and not responsible to the world the way the subjects of those photographs were. They crumple under the weight of celebrity, she thought, and their poor, beautiful, benighted faces had only served to remind Ruth of how free and weightless she herself was, how simple life was now that she had nothing to hope for and nothing to regret.
But in fact she did have something now, she saw, the slowly fading humiliation she'd received at the hands of the boy, the sense of danger escaped, the prospect of safety in her room in Fulham, and the very tininess of her life, its very perfection.
She found she had stopped walking, frozen in place, her hand at her mouth as if she could pull out the words that would save her. In her stillness, a dank smell rose up off the river and settled on her like a veil. She turned very slowly and saw something moving, something far in the distance, so far she was not sure that what she saw was anything but the limbs of a tree bowing into the fog. Her limbs were heavy as she started to run.
"Wait!" she cried. Her voice felt thick in her throat. Had she made any sound at all? "Wait!" And again: "Wait!"
