Let’s leave the job for now, you said.
In hoc signo vinces
I’ve never met a person I couldn’t call a beauty. Andy Warhol said that. I found you beautiful, Nina, and sometimes I think it’s got to do with that photograph of your mother, Nell Birtwhistle, taken at the age you were when you showed it to me, taken before you were born, for you were a late child, her only child, though not your father’s. That affair came later. And, because she looks so like you that she could be you, I used to think of you as being as old as her, were she alive — for she had died before we met — with all her experience inherited by you, her life enfolded within yours.
I always thought of you as much older than me even though you are younger. There was something in you I could never reach, something that always lay beyond my ken. Before I met you I thought that to be mutually in love would be to have a perfect understanding of the other, and she a perfect understanding of me, so that we would melt indissolubly into each other, and I hungered for that love by which I would be so understood.
But now I know it is different; and it is difference which makes that difference. For no two bodies can occupy the same space, for if they did there would not be two bodies, but one, and the other would not exist. And it is ignorance of the other which moves us to love the other, for there is always more to know in him or her, and they surprise us every day with the things they come out with, some newly minted phrase or slant on things we’d never heard or seen before, that we’d perhaps thought them to be incapable of, and so they rise forever in our estimation because each day our ignorance of them is proven, and we grow more and more attached to them because they are always one step ahead of us, like the legendary deer that will always elude the hunter. Il y a toujours l’un qui baisse et l’un qui tend la joue, according to the French proverb, and so it was with us, for you would hold your cheek for me and I’d catch your perfume as I’d kiss or try to kiss you before you would me. There is always one who kisses, and one who offers a cheek. And I wonder if it was like that between Harry Bouwer — as he became in England — and Ellie Birtwhistle. I looked at the photograph again, noting her firm stance, her broad smile that was your smile, the red and black swirl of her Dinkie pen against her white blouse, her strong hands at ease by her side. You could be twins, I said.
Your fourth postcard was not wholly unexpected, for by now the element of surprise had been diminished. And the image you had chosen, of Gemini, was appropriate. You were one of those people who do not believe in astrology, but nevertheless take its prognostications half seriously, as a playful basis for the conduct of their daily lives. Perhaps you still consult your horoscope. At any rate, you are a Gemini, and I a Libra. Your message was at first difficult to interpret — In hoc signo vinces, you wrote, In this sign shall you conquer, the words purportedly heard by Constantine when, on the eve of his victory over the pagan Emperor Maxentius in 312, an angel appeared to him in a vision, holding a Cross, which is a sign of victory over death. You had long lapsed from your mother’s nominal Anglicanism, and I did not seriously believe that you would write these words in any literal sense. So I decided that the sign in question was not the Cross, but Gemini, and I decided to refresh my memory as to its attributes.
A Gemini is lively, skilful, versatile, intellectual, more interested in political theory than direct action. But she can also be unscrupulous, cunning, and evasive, and often contrives to escape blame by imputing it to others. She can be fickle and flirtatious; she is a butterfly, a chameleon. Famous Geminis include Bob Dylan, Paul Gauguin, Marilyn Monroe, Queen Victoria, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Judy Garland. The colour associated with Gemini is not any one colour, but the rainbow, and I think of how you were once Rainbow to me, and of Judy Garland singing ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’. Cities ruled by Gemini include London, Versailles, and New York. And it so happened that your card, postmarked London, had been originated in New York, for the image was from a Book of Hours in the Pierpoint Morgan Library in that city, which we visited in the summer of 1983. The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were still standing then, of course, and I remember making a playful comparison to your status as a Gemini. Yes, you said, didn’t you know that Geminis are very good at trade? We’re ruled by Mercury, after all, the god of commerce. And of thieves, I said. I looked at the card again. Mercury, or Hermes, was the god of the corn-trade, specifically, and of music, so one twin holds a sickle, the other a lyre, emblems of these dual attributes. And Hermes is also the psychopomp, who conducts the souls of the dead to the underworld.
It was July in New York, and I had never experienced such heat, such humidity. But it was my first time in America and everything was beautiful to me, and as you conducted me through the sweltering, claustrophobic underground that smelled of metal, electricity and sweat, I was fascinated by the trains as they drew groaning and trembling into the stations emitting blue sparks from their undercarriages, their cars emblazoned with elaborate graffiti tags of letters amplified and puzzled nearly to deliberate illegibility, yet still names, their forms grappling with themselves in lime greens, glowing yellows and acid blues moving as if animated across the walls of the cars, blossoming from two dimensions into a thought-bubble cycloidal realm, or break-dancing as human figures sculpt the space around themselves, sometimes resembling the flight of birds above the city, or the intertwining pythons of the subterranean world, jagged as a city skyline sometimes, or nebulous as cloudscapes, flickering like neon in a baroque spectacle that belied the curt syllables they had been evolved from — ZINK, SHARP, TAKI 183, SKEME, STITCH, KASS, DAZE, DEAL, DURO, BAN 2, KIST, KEL, SLAVE, CRIME 79, MIN, KASE 2, SEEN. On one car I saw a Campbell’s soup tin the size of a door, but the writing read ZIP.
In the numbered grid of the streets above, everything was sign, from the cupolas of the water-towers stilted on the flat roofs to the fire escapes that ran zigzag down the walls of tenement buildings and the subway trains glimpsed momentarily between buildings on elevated sections of the track. Underfoot there was writing in the shape of the manhole covers embedded in the sidewalk, massive cast-iron shields embossed with their makers’ identities, Abbott Hardware Company Ironworks, Marcy Foundry, Etna Iron Works, Madison Ironworks, Cornell’s Iron Works, long-gone companies that that made their names felt under our bootsoles as we walked over them.