Imagine yourself traveling to a country where you won't be sick anymore. This country is full of the thing you want most. As much of it as you ever dared ask for. Whatever that thing is. The one thing that means more to you than anything.
This country is a continuous outdoor café. When all else about the account fades like a moldy fresco, this image lives on in your inner travelogue. In this country, at this café, you can sit in the sun from dawn till dusk. On the piazza. The piazza d'. Your private pool of shade remains bathed in unimaginable azure. And iced drinks on endless tab.
You can sit on this terrace for as long as you ever wanted. The terrace is life's arrival. All you need do is picture it.
No one can chase you away, and you can do whatever you like, until closing. Until the next chapter. Watch women walking across the public square. Read. Read this story, if you like. Or talk. Toast the waiter. Sing. Listen to the next table sing. Anything.
You have never thought twice about cafés, but you might like to sit in one now. You would like to order, then spread out a book in front of you. Sit and watch people walking, from a distance. A pleasure, just to picture this pleasure. This description, the sun, the one desirable thing, yours for the asking.
Reading: yes. Of course. To spend all day — that nom de plume for "forever" — doing nothing but reading! Just entertaining the thought, just following the idea fleshes out a scenario of composite delight. Your one surreptitious afternoon in the sunny countryside, exiled, at the last minute, from wartime, from inescapable disaster.
When I came home to E., things were different. Different again. Still different.
To my astonishment, I now passed for fluent. A demotic, misleading fluency, in fact, became my undoing. A week after losing it, lying on the floor of the apartment listening to the cassette of Taylor's funeral, I found myself walking past E.'s modest hardware store. I turned in, deciding on a whim to buy an item we had needed for as long as I'd lived in Limburg. As they always did in E.'s archaic shops, the salesperson greeted me on entry and asked to be of help.
"Good afternoon. I'm looking for this mechanical device, about yay big. It's a gizmo with an adjustable center pivot that allows you to apply increased torque. ."
"Hmm. N-no, I don't think we have anything like that here, sir." She gestured with her palms outward. You see where you are: a pocket, one-church town. Little call for the esoteric. "You might try Maastricht."
"No, no. It's a common little commodity. Every home has one. You might use it to fix your plumbing, or tighten a loose dowel rod. ."
Her face stayed blank, helpful but passive. Finally, something I said broke through. Her expression fled from confusion to anger in the space of one thought.
"Do you mean a wrench?"
"That's it!" I shouted.
"Then why the hell didn't you say you wanted a wrench?"
I had been better off with the impenetrable accent and the babble grammar. I'd communicated more when the only words I had were "I don't have the words."
I went about in a daily grief that, like Taylor on the effects of his chemo, I could not describe adequately in the most native of languages. C. mistook that sadness. She felt it directed at her, at her idea to move us to this invented place.
She grew defensive, self-accusing. "I know you love me, Beau. But you don't need any of this."
"Any of what?"
"I'm not sure I need any of it either. What are we doing here? My parents don't need me to take care of them, do they? They chose to come back here all by themselves."
"A good choice, no?"
"Oh yes. They're happier here than they ever were in Chicago. They haven't a minute to themselves."
"What's the problem? I thought the point was to discover what nationality you were."
"I'm further from that than I was in the States. I look at myself, and I can't even recognize what I've become."
"Gone native?"
C. laughed, protecting me. "Sometimes this country drives me up the bloody wall. The village patrol, eyeing every irregular behavior. The social agenda, all worked out for you in advance. The gezelligheid. The close little shops. The lines for everything. The little old ladies shoving you out of the way, or choosing the narrowest possible aisle in the densest country on earth to stop and gossip. Nothing's ever open. Half the country's on the dole."
"You sound like the American ambassador."
"And I've dragged you into the middle of all this!"
"I'm fine. I'm having a great time." A lie on the surface. But not, if this meant anything, deep down. "We can walk to four major language regions from our front stoop. Two hours away from three of the world's greatest museums. And green herring by the bucket. I'd never have had this chance. Except for you, C."
That much was true, even on the surface. Her gamble had thrown open all possibility, however much possibility now upended us.
When my second book came out, C.'s restlessness pitched into the distress bands. Publication of a novel is a nonevent arranged to look like news. Prisoner produced a spate of statements, positioning my career on the turnpike of contemporary letters like a dot on the AAA Triptiks. The point often seemed to be to spare people the inconvenience of reading.
It killed C. to read that I was a fresh commodity to keep an eye on. That I was intensely private. That I lived in U., when in fact I lived in E., where the shopkeepers scolded me for linguistic perversity. That I was a fast-rising star in the literary firmament who had X's brains and Y's punch lines. That the eighties had been waiting for me.
I tried to tell her. "It's all nonsense. Market-making, for an increasingly smaller market. They do it, we ignore it, and keep working. It's part of the business."
"So we're in business now?"
"No. Okay. Not business. Part of the… C. Sweet. Let's not make ourselves nuts."
"We don't need to make ourselves anything." She smacked the pile of newsprint that New York's clipping service kept sending us. "The pros will make us into anything they want."
"C. You know who we are. The pair bond. All the rest of this is somebody else's construction. Nothing's changed."
"Of course it's changed. It's not just you and me anymore. You're obligated. You have to make good on opportunity. Everyone and his typewriting monkey would kill for a shot at what's fallen in your lap."
I tried to tell her that there was no obligation, no opportunity that we didn't already have. I tried to comb out the snarls left by public evaluation. That was my job: to keep things unchanged and make them right. But the better I did my job, the more I condemned C. to the opposite employment.
Nor did it help when mourning for Taylor led me into a period of work more intense than I will ever know again. The simplest possible tune had come to me — four notes, then four more, four times over. Selection had whittled at that tune until it grew as long and polyphonic as the planetary concert hall.
The book I needed to write sat on the simplest of bases. Life remembered. Life described. It wrote down and repeated what worked. The small copying errors the text made in running off examples of itself, edited by the world's differential rejection and forgiveness, produced the entire collaborative canon.
For what turned out to be years, this seemed to me a book's only conceivable theme. And thirty, the only age that would take such a theme on — old enough for a glimpse at meaning, immature enough to still think meaning pursuable.
I would fail, of course, in my aerial survey. To make a map on the scale of one to one, to bring the people, the genomes I loved back to life would have required contrapuntal skill on an evolutionary scale. But while I worked on my variations, work itself seemed to be the grave where buried love did its living.