That I had said yes was why I said to John, a couple of days after the event when we were recovered and were discussing travel plans, let’s go here.
Why? said John.
I’ve heard it’s beautiful, I said.
John has never approved of my engagement with this world, a world for which he has always found me, rightly I suppose, ill-suited. Quite a number of years before, in fact, he had helped me to get started in another line, one that for various reasons I did not pursue.
But we did go where I proposed because my lie, this particular lie at any rate, was not, or so I then thought, detected.
Of course I knew you were lying, John later said.
That week, before our trip to the country, I slept beautifully.
And then we were driving up to the tops of the low round hills that occur on that drive and down them.
At one point, as we had stopped the car at the top of one of these hills and were looking out over a vista of undulations, in the direction of the ocean, Deau announced that her tour had now begun, and that she was ecstatic that we were all with her, so at our next stop in a little town we toasted the beginning of her tour with a glass of wine, then lightly burned our mouths on some delicious stewed apples. Deau and John had a certain level of unusual gourmandise in common. It was Deau, for example, who had insisted we order the stewed apples. And this had endlessly charmed John, who had insisted the meal before that we select only the most colorful dishes available — borscht, pomegranate, horned melon, and candied plums.
Stewed apples was, we agreed, an excellent word and concept, and before leaving the restaurant we acquired a handsome jar of it. So you can see that it was all going along very well.
At that business meeting on that rainy day it was like this. I had never before met the woman I met that day and she was persuasive, strangely. I had met many other women and not-women in the course of my career, but not this one. She was one of the ones I had heard about, or perhaps the only one, it’s difficult to say.
I think, probably, it was more than just her — that behind her, so to speak, were other women and not-women, with other cigars, in other rooms, who had other perhaps more important individuals than me doing projects for them. I do not of course mean to imply that if the woman with the cigar had superiors, or even just partners, that they were all smoking cigars and wearing gloves, etc.
This seems unlikely. Boss types, it has been my experience, all have their own special stamp. In my previous place of residence, for example, I had worked for a person who had in his office a very complex model train system that was always in operation, at every meeting and otherwise.
The organization that I was currently working for, by the way, was reputed to be immense and immensely effective, although largely staffed by part-timers like myself.
Probably not much like myself.
Or only maybe.
At any rate, the woman with the cigar who I was standing in front of was definitely a boss. Perhaps there were more-unnerving-to-look-at bosses, perhaps there were not. Once, I had been told, someone at a meeting had seen an eyeball set on top of the model smokestack on the model train in my former boss’s office, but there are many such stories, actually.
She sat there smoking the cigar, which is an endless thing in a meeting, never finished, and I was standing in front of her, and I could see myself reflected in miniature in her sunglasses, and it was a small room.
Yes I’ll do it, I said.
Also, however, she had a stutter, quite an intense one, and sometimes into the center of the stutter she would insert the cigar, and, the story of the eyeball on the model smokestack notwithstanding, I still have not seen or heard of anything quite as impressive as that.
This is all about why I said yes.
You’ll find I have precious little to say later about why I changed my mind.
What? I said.
She was speaking to me, not in the car anymore, we had left the car and were now, the four of us, installed in a hotel in a small city on the coast, and the two of us were in our room, and she had been speaking to me. Here is what she said:
It is not the objects, not the objects at all. It is not the words either, although often they are lovely and the contrasts are surprising when you have one in your head shaped like a rectangle and then you have another in your head shaped like a square, for example. That is lovely, as is the sound of your voice saying them, when you say them, but it is not the fact of the objects or the fact of the words, really, it is the fact of establishing the correct establishments on which to place them, that is all.
Each uncombined expression can mean one of these, she said, i.e., what, how large, what kind, related to what, where, when, how placed, in what state, acting, or suffering. See? For example, a woman may be five-foot six and a writer, a student of philosophy at her desk at midnight, sitting down and writing, and suffering from the cold.
Substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, state, action, and affection, she said.
I can’t do it, of course. I can’t say, again, what she said, not ever, not exactly. It is all there, inside me, is what I mean, but I can’t say it, not even for myself. It seems tragic that in matters of the heart one should have to suffer, even in discourse with one’s self, from this sort of aphasia.
Lately, for example, I have been thinking of an instance in which, to say it in general terms, she came across the room toward me, and even though it was considerably more than this, it is only in these general terms that I am ever able to say it.
She came across the room toward me.
It was too many shelves, at the end of it. It was a hell of shelves. From where I sat that day, I kept losing count of them. Over and over I would count and then lose count, and then begin again.
The next morning the four of us set out to visit the city. John and Deau were already walking with incredible synchronicity, and it was agreeable to follow them up the steps of that building and under the arches of this. She looks happy, she said. John’s happy too, I said. Old men limped along pulling carts and young women went by on scooters. We stopped at a flower shop where I bought her a daisy and a tulip and a rose and a carnation and a sunflower and a narcissus and a gladiolus and a lily and a tulip and a sunflower and a ranunculus and she said, they’re lovely, thank you. In one place, we drank tea poured from above the server’s head, and in another we ate fresh-made ice cream mashed green with pistachio nuts. Sometimes John would drop back and take my arm, and sometimes she would walk ahead and disappear with Deau. Once they disappeared for quite some time, and John and I sat down before steaming bowls at a table under a hideous bluish candelabra in a warm room that smelled of cinnamon and saffron, and, very powerfully, of what we were told was goat.
John, I said.
Tell all, he said.
Nothing.
We sat and sat and took care of another round of steaming bowls and talked. John talked about Deau and I talked about her and found I didn’t really have much to say. Then we paid and left and found them sometime later wearing completely different clothes.
Actually, they found us. Sitting on the terrace of another establishment sipping yellow drinks and watching old men play a game with shiny steel balls.
It was then that we walked down through the gently sloping streets of the warm city and saw the pair of monkeys, which made all of us, but especially her, and I do not know why especially her, laugh.
Then we slept.
I woke.
You were shaking, she said.
I was shouting? I said.
Shaking, you were shaking, you are shaking, stop.
I did stop, gradually, and then it was the second day in the small breeze-swept city on the coast.