by
Lucia Berlin
project/valet-story
Jennifer Egan,
Brittany Newell,
Susan Taubes,
Lucia Berlin,
Gina Frangello,
Lauren Elkin,
Jenny Erpenbeck,
Sándor Márai,
Rachel Kushner,
Emily St. John Mandel
I hoped he’d say he’d wait for me, that he’d still be here when I got back. But he said that if I really loved him I’d marry him right now. I reacted to that. He needs to graduate; he only works part-time. I didn’t say more of the truth which is that I don’t want to leave school. I want to study Shakespeare, the Romantic poets. He said we could live with his dad until we had enough money. We were crossing the bridge over the Rio Grande when I said I didn’t want to get married yet.
“You won’t know for a long time what it is you’re throwing away.”
I said I knew what we had, that it would still be there when I got back.
“It will, but you won’t. No, you’ll go on, have ‘relationships,’ marry some asshole.”
He opened the car door, shoved me out onto the Rio Grande bridge, the car still moving. He drove away. I walked all the way across town to the dorm. I kept thinking he’d pull up behind me, but he never did.
(the inspo is her desire to see the world, not his reaction)
Time stops when someone dies. Of course it stops for them, maybe, but for the mourners time runs amok. Death comes too soon. It forgets the tides, the days growing longer and shorter, the moon. It rips up the calendar. You aren’t at your desk or on the subway or fixing dinner for the children. You’re reading People in a surgery waiting room, or shivering outside on a balcony smoking all night long. You stare into space, sitting in your childhood bedroom with the globe on the desk. Persia, the Belgian Congo. The bad part is that when you return to your ordinary life all the routines, the marks of the day, seem like senseless lies. All is suspect, a trick to lull us, rock us back into the placid relentlessness of time.
My husband and I still have sex. We still go on dates. We still take family vacations. Nobody could call us “estranged.” It’s just that for the past four or five years, significantly predating my emotional affair, we seem to speak different languages, that old feeling of connection refusing to click into place, constantly getting stuck in the wrong groove. Maybe this is just what a long-term marriage looks like. Does my husband even think anything is wrong? He swings between chilliness and volatility lately, and I find myself acting overly polite toward him, like he is a customs official or a cop, knowing things will go more smoothly if I am “nice.” I used to be so intense that I exhausted him with my attempts at engagement. When I look at the early years of our relationship (when I loved him madly), the woman in those memories strikes me as a needy little dog perpetually trying to jump up on a too-tall couch, yapping the whole while. I don’t know what to make of the fact that my happiest marital years now also make me ashamed of myself. When we were first living together, he complained that I was too intense, too much, and three times made noise about breaking up, but then committed, became acclimated to my perpetual pursuit. If he’s noticed I’m no longer chasing, he hasn’t said so.
Nice for an afternoon—but too strenuous a business to incarnate some guiding star or even an exotic fish for a floundering millionaire. Has she missed her calling? She recalls backing out of a very attractive offer two years ago: a yacht, villa in Nice, apartment in Paris. Wanted her to fly to San Francisco with him. Took her three days to realize the futility of it. Sorry now? But then other things wouldn’t have happened. As for the tyrannical rich man who was usually on the other side of fifty, that too was impossible in the long run—and anything over a day ran into a long run or just a waste. No, it was just too much trouble to comply with an assured, vain man’s whims, or revolt, or get around him—that was the kind of patience Sophie knew she didn’t have. It naturally occurred to her that she might use a floundering rich man for her ends, indeed this was mostly on her mind. It wasn’t so much a question of the means; it wasn’t at all a moral problem, but simply that if you’ve set your heart on going to Rome, the Shanghai Express won’t get you there. You’re better off walking. The Shanghai Express might be great fun, you might fall in love with a station master, it could make you forget about ever wanting to go to Rome, revolutionize your life or be just an adventure. All this was possible but it wouldn’t get her to Rome.
lol
[...] “Consider it as a business proposition,” he pursues with gentle irony. “I am not pleading with you; I will not use force. We are in the twentieth century; you are a free woman and I want you to make a rational choice. I hope one day you will feel some affection for me. I have a right to hope, after all, but I accept your present feelings of hostility. I want you to look at this as an offer in terms of your interests, professional ambitions, your taste. I know how important it is for you to live in the right setting. We have struggled through such difficult years; now for the first time I can offer you what you always wanted.” A city of culture, he pursues, and reminds her that she always wanted to live in Europe; and she could go to Greece every summer. As for her Paris apartment, he can think of any number of solutions. “Isn’t it reasonable?” he asks. “Be reasonable,” he says.
She can’t be reasonable even if his proposition appears reasonable—reasonable and attractive for someone else. She cannot be that person. Even if her own position is groundless, the fact is she has no position, she has no plans, she is nowhere. She has only her feelings to rely on. And she must say no. Perhaps she is really in another room, a young woman listening to Ezra Blind’s marriage proposal fifteen years ago. Must this time say no.
AAAHHH
It is a hot, lazy day. They are becoming torpid from so many days of lying in the sun. They will be ready to go back to Chicago tomorrow.
“It reminds me of that place in France two years ago,” Lucy says. “What was that hotel?”
“Can’t remember,” Parker says. “Never can remember that stuff.”
They have been all over the world, Lucy thinks, watching the sea. Yet so little of it has stuck with her. She clings to names, to snapshots and matchbooks, but the many seasons have mingled hopelessly. She used to arrange their photographs according to which bathing suit she was wearing—the polka-dotted one in Cannes, the striped red in Spain. But the sand and water around the bathing suits all look the same.
Josephine’s apple pie arrived, and she heaped a bite with ice cream and ate vigorously. Her jaws flexed under her wide cheekbones. “You remember,” she began, speaking slowly, “how we used to imagine being rich? Do you remember that?”
Lucy nodded. She sensed from Josephine’s tone that this was a last attempt to get at some basic thing. “Yes …” she said, cautiously.
“All I’m asking is, is it actually like that?”
Lucy considered. It was true, there had been moments when she’d thought, I can’t believe this is happening to me. The feeling came sometimes when she and Parker traveled, sometimes just when she looked around her own house at the fireplace and thick rugs, at the vast green lawn outside. Whenever she had that feeling, Lucy longed to tell someone. She would turn to Parker, who was usually reading, or anyone else who was there, but no one ever behaved as if anything special were happening. Soon her wonderment would begin to fade. As time went on, it came less and less often.
“I get excited,” she said, speaking carefully, “but it’s not like the magazines.”
She could not explain. Something separated her from Josephine, for the first time in her life. Josephine seemed to feel it, too. She sighed and pushed her pie away, lighting a cigarette and looking out at the rain. “Well,” she said, “at least you’re happy.”
Hans remembers her smile and her breasts, but the way she looks overall, he perhaps doesn’t know. But there she is, turning onto Schiffbauerdamm, and he recognizes her right away. She’s swinging her handbag as she walks, she’s dressed all in black, and as she comes closer, he sees she’s put up her hair and tied it with a black velvet ribbon. Exposed, he thinks, her face. He wanted to be straight with her today, he knows now he will have to be. It’s his only chance. He gives a nod as they pass the two waiters with long white aprons at the entrance, who are performing France for French soldiers over from West Berlin who like to have a cheap meal in East Berlin’s expensive Ganymede.
What these qualities meant, how they conjoined to form a human being who looked and moved a certain way, I had no idea. As a teenager, I first became aware of people’s eyes catching on me as I walked down Michigan Avenue with my mother and Grace during shopping trips to Chicago. They glanced, then looked—each time, I felt a prick of sensation within me. I knew how transistors worked; my father had shown me a picture of the very first one, at Bell Labs, a crusty, inauspicious-looking rock that had performed the revolutionary feat of transmitting and amplifying electrical current. The jabs of interest I provoked in strangers struck me as an unharnessed energy source; somehow, I would convert them into power.
I flicked on the lights, and my apartment ambushed me. I can sell the apartment, I thought. I can sell the sectional couch. I could sell the expensive necklaces and bracelets and earrings I’d been given over the years by rich, insolent playboys. I could sell my kitchen appliances. My towels, my makeup. My purses. My clothing! My Halstons and Chanels, my Gallianoses and Isaac Mizrahis. I could sell my stereo, my TV, though neither was state-of-the-art anymore. My furniture, the antiques I’d bought in Europe. I could sell my Japanese woodblock print of a snowy rural landscape.
And if I sold all of that, would I have enough?
Enough for what?