* * *
ISTANBUL
The Englishman — Charles — and I take a walk to a site below the city, a special place he knows about, some kind of tunnel system that all large cities have. Charles’s hair grows in clumps or batches over his head, and he has large eyes and a soft voice, his whispers, very hard to hear in the cave — or was it a sewer? Several hours might have passed with us in conversation. Flat-bottomed boats float by occasionally. There are people in them. At least I think it is here that I saw the boats. Charles reeks of oddness and vagueness which must contribute to the blight on this recent cavernous memory. As I lie in bed and look at the wall, the more I try to recall it, the more I think I’m remembering a movie like Blade Runner or one by Fellini, not the submerged cloudy place I went to with Charles, who I suppose I could say is also cloudy, if not submerged. I can’t remember how we got in or if we paid. I can barely remember it at all.
Later in the front room of the hotel, kindly Mr. Yapar serves us tea, pastries and oranges, a privilege I hadn’t yet been granted. I worry that the hotel manager wants to pair me off with Charles so I try to appear independent no matter what, hoping the manager won’t get the wrong idea. Of course what does it mean to appear independent, anyway. This is some horrible fiction that no one can project, I think, and then I relax and drink my tea. Let him think what he wants, as he will anyway.
* * *
AGIA GALINT
Screams from the street wake me and I think I’m home. A dog owned by a shopkeeper has been found dead, poisoned, and women in black cotton dresses hurry up and down the street, agitated. New Zealander John reports that the dog was murdered, an act of revenge against the shopkeeper, and as we’re in Greece, the home of tragedy, the event resonates peculiarly. John has brought us feta cheese, bread and tomatoes, as well as an English-language newspaper only five days old. This assures us of our being in a remote spot in the world, I suppose. I’m writing postcards to friends, having purchased all the best ones from the cigarette vendor downstairs. The very best a black-and-white real-photo postcard, printed badly, of a man in a suit walking, rushing, in the foreground, with a large freighter docked in the background, at the harbor.
My postcards home annotate this image, refer to the dead dog, and the hot sun, as well as John, and I think about that scene in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie when the dinner guests look at tourist postcards as if they’re pornography. I feel very much the same way talking about sex as I do landscapes and monuments, events and sights that we all do and know, that are always there and never new. That are maybe even impossible to see — in the same way that sex, for me, is unrepresentable because the tongue, for instance, is privileged with information indifferent to words. And now I want to see a movie, having thought about Buñuel. But John wants to make love. He thinks he’s in love with me. I don’t think I’m in love with him. The Australians, Tina and Graham, are leaving. They tell me to look them up in London.
* * *
LONDON
The hotel is Victorian in more than its architecture. Men are not allowed in one’s room, which strikes me like those signs on New York subways that read No dogs or No spitting. This place, with its fake red velvet wallpaper, reminds me of Tad’s Steak Houses and is welcome because of that.
The hotel’s breakfast room, crowded by nine, emptied by 10 A.M., when I generally take mine. Breakfast is served, the card says, until 10:10, and I’m aware that latecomers engender hatred among the staff but I find it difficult to get out of bed earlier and refuse to simply because I will be disliked. This goes against my general desire to be liked by everyone and I wonder if I’m making progress.
Another American woman joins me for breakfast and starts to tell me her story. I hear many stories and tell some too, but this morning I’m just listening. Her name is Jessica and her husband, an Englishman, has left her, vanished. She begins to describe him and suddenly I know she’s talking about Charles whose face rises out of the mist where I last saw him. It now seems appropriate that it was a sewer, if it was. I don’t know whether or not to tell her that I saw him in Istanbul. I know I will, but this breakfast room, with its impatient waiters, doesn’t seem the right place. But then travel doesn’t ever produce the right place, I’ve discovered, so I describe Charles and my encounter with him. He is, indeed, her wandering husband, a fact that at first silences both of us as we spread orange marmalade over cold toast — I’ve grown to like cold toast and almost instantly I am her best friend in the world, the world being so small these days that it takes only one encounter to make us fast friends. Or so we think.
Chapter 2. Details
Some people keep diaries or journals so as not to go mad. A guy I knew in college insisted this was true, then stopped keeping his, and voluntarily committed himself to a mental hospital. Jessica writes copious letters home. Early in the morning and late at night I hear her banging away on her typewriter. Apparently she has many friends, along with a large family. Secretly she could be hard at work on the great American novel, although no woman I’ve ever known has ever used that phrase, one that’s ridiculous to me, and I can’t imagine Jessica engaging in that notion. But you never know what people contain within themselves, if anything at all, and Jessica might just have a vast fantasy life, were I able to crack her open and look inside. I prefer to think that she does. For instance, I’d like to read her deliberate movements as emerging out of a fully conceived sense of herself as being anyone from Cleopatra to Merle Oberon, to that woman who used to be a Republican representative from New Jersey, Millicent Fenwick. Which would have been a great name for Jessica, except she herself is far from being a Republican and left the U.S. toward the end of the war in Vietnam and stayed away after Watergate. Her family are staunch conservatives with ancestors dating back to the American Revolution. Some of Jessica’s aunts are active in the D.A.R. Jessica has escaped that, yet has a kind of grande-dame quality to her, something that carries over into her present incarnation as an American Buddhist. She sits across from me at breakfast, a tiny Buddha, spreading orange marmalade over cold toast with a seriousness and grace usually reserved for bigger things.
I don’t have many fantasies. Perhaps I lack a fantasy life altogether, although you could consider my interest in other people’s lives entirely fantastic, even a little crazy. I do keep a diary, though. For some days, anyway. Not a good one, but sufficient to record the days that pass, my own prime-time soap.
I tell Jessica that I want things plain. Or direct. When I read a book I’m suspicious of description. Too much embellishment or an excess of adjectives bothers me, as if the speaker or writer were attempting to overcome me, to finesse me like a bridge player. Or to seduce me.
I don’t mean I don’t like details. “Some people like excess and elaborate descriptions, some even like to be seduced,” she says almost haughtily, and I imagine her in the throes of a great excessive sexual passion, Charles planting tiny wet kisses at her wrist, his mouth moving up to her shoulder and neck, and in profile Jessica’s mouth is slightly open, as in perfume commercials. She hurriedly drinks more coffee, looking at me as if she knew what scene was playing on my tiny stage, or launching pad, so to speak. She’s reminded of a man she knows, back home, whose vocabulary was so rich no one understood him, and whose stories so elaborate, by the time he reached the point, you felt exhausted and as if you didn’t care. Jessica could just be speaking about excess and elaboration or she could be speaking about us, or me, in some subtle way.