Mysteries of Motion (17 page)

But when she came on with the same sharp “Yes?” that he himself answered a phone with, relief choked him, so that he answered from the nerve of himself.

“Will you—eat with me?” Mulenberg said.

She sat over the poem she might never finish, only enlarge or refine, maybe letting it hulk on her desk, on all the desks, until in the end it went down with her life. Meantime, it served in secret as her real calendar, neglected for weeks for the ordinary one. To tick it over always brought her back to herself. Its three stanzas belonged to three periods of her life. When she was in her teens in New York or Barbados, and first had feelings she could phrase. When she returned here from the West Indies with a university-educated psyche which by then she could no longer sever from the dreams or facts of cunt. And the ever-budding third stanza which contained her life now.

Under all three she could hear that missing stanza of her time in Cuba and its aftermath, which her pen could not write.

The poem, typed single-space, with all its hand-written annotations forming like coral, occupied one long page, and was untitled. Lievering always told his classes that the title of the piece was the most unimportant thing about it. “Ladies and gentlemen—” his brilliantly echoing, brittle Anglo-German voice said, “—can one title a life?”

His white, seraph’s face hung over all his pronouncements like a pained medal struck in memory of the era he carried with him without ever speaking of it, as a child thrice removed—Berlin to England to the West Indies—of the Holocaust. Details were unknown, but there was a sense of villages destroyed behind him. Even though he was unbranded and had gone to an English grammar school, his parents’ history, if not his own, elf-locked his face. Everyone wished to cherish his remarks, but outside his presence could no longer remember them. That presence, facially beautiful—as well as spiritual, ruined and intense—couldn’t be borne for long. That was his history.

She had been the one who’d borne it long enough to remember those remarks. At seventeen. Thirty-five, he’d been then. Now, wherever he was, he was about the age of the man who had just left. The men she chose kept pace with him.

Otherwise, he was now a man in a locket never opened, and in a stanza as yet unwritten. Once she had tried to incorporate that year, from an autumn to an autumn, during which she had been first Lievering’s student, then his protégée, finally his lover, and through all of it his companion victim. Instead, Lievering’s voice, too nasally distinguished by its own pain, had incorporated itself into her life. For in a way, some would say, wasn’t she still answering him back? Except that no one had more than an inkling of her true life scheme, either of her poem or of her actions outside of her rather public job. And no one, certainly not Lievering himself, had known precisely what his voice had been asking for.

“Is this—yours?” he’d said in his soft, compelling out-of-class manner, not looking up at the student who, only in her second week at the university, knew she was already being called the “New York transfer,” for having asked to be exempt from a freshman English course she apparently thought beneath her.

“Yes, it’s mine, whatever it is,” she’d replied, recognizing the folder of work submitted to substantiate her request, from which he was holding up a page. Her last defiance. For then he’d raised his head. Lievering had no idea of the effect his face had on people. Or his manner either. If they were at first stunned, then thralled and at last too irritated or wrenched by their pity for him to further bear his company, he always ascribed their jitteriness to their reactions to his “thought.” But he could never merely beguile just enough for people to tolerate him, much less want him about in the ordinary way. It was like meeting an archangel momentarily, one just fresh in from tortures lucid behind him.

Ten minutes later you could scarcely bear to have tea with him. Or with his intensity, which he was so unconscious of or familiar with that the effect was of some ravening bird always at his elbow, visible to all but him.

His face, uniquely his if ever a man’s was, had at that moment raised its suppliant eyes at her. Her flesh felt the shock.

Outside his office, two boys and a girl passed and grinned in at her knowingly. She’d expected yokels down here, and there were some, but many of her classmates, long-legged exquisites dressed by the island’s crop of clever designers, or by their mothers’ expertise, had been members of the new native middle class, children of merchants or, like herself, of the new black diplomats. Movie-tutored, sent to Montreal or Toronto for singing lessons and expecting to explore other resources of the Empire later, they were a knowing lot, with a softer, tropical version of British manners. Lievering’s classes, where his strange spirituality could enliven, and where the disease of hesitation from which he suffered was lessened by his knowledge of his subject, were always packed.

They had been a confident lot also. While the inhabitants of the greatest cities were often barred by private owners from direct access to their own city’s beaches and waters, by law no Bajan native could be kept by the richest estate from strolling the morning or evening shoreline. So, when she and Lievering had apparently become a pair, gossip, though strong, had been surprisingly free of racial sentiment alone. Or they knew Lievering. So they went on past without rescuing her, which they might have done, watched her and Lievering’s association grow, in class and out—and left her to discover him.

“Read this out,” he’d said, at the torturous pace she’d mistaken for a stately one. As if he thought a poem was important—anyone’s. But she was to learn that so might he pause before any of the details of life. A crumb on the floor, a bit of sauce on a spoon, a telephone call, a pencil raised, would all halt him equally. The trivia one must pass through in order to exist burred and gouged at him as if he had to react to each with an outsize sensitivity. Whatever had happened to him—or to his parents—had made it impossible for Lievering to summon the slightest indifference.

Already dazzled, bemused, she’d looked down at the stanza she had written. Hunter had been a smart, hip school, poetically oriented the way her whole generation had been, via the sluices of rock music, the jazz prose of popular journalists, and the sing-alongs of radical politics. Except for the page Lievering now handed back to her, the folder on his desk contained essays and stories only; she hadn’t really chosen poetry yet. “Miss Lacey’s” had already chosen her. Those years as Vivie’s inherited stepchild and Ollie’s evening sister, and as a quiet high school girl among whores, had focused her. As Lievering would later even congratulate her for, Miss Lacey’s had been the “concentration camp” experience of her life.

She'd never written of it before, and no one else had seen the one stanza. She read it out, in its first version:

Miss Lacey’s is gone from Carnegie Hall.

Times
published her soul food on the Women’s Page;

Pimps’ limousines brought her black girls at a crawl,

Revving up again around the corner, turning on a dime.

“Half-ass time,” the tires whisper, “—oh Miss Lacey,

Gas cost something awful, girls blow your mind.”

Across in the building built like a Florentine bank,

An old white lady sits, eating Bath Olivers

From the gourmet store; Taste like beaten biscuit

If you squeeze your eyes and come from Georgia—

And who doesn’t like watching whores?

But Miss Lacey’s is gone now, from Carnegie Hall.

She read well.

A long pause. “Yes—” Lievering said then, “—it’s yours.” She felt as if he’d given it to her.

As in a way he had. Raising her head, she gazed absently around the apartment the man who wasn’t Ventura had just left—into which she herself these days came perhaps once or twice a month. Mulenberg, he’d said. She’d remember it; she remembered all of them, always asking, if they didn’t give their names, always knowing when they gave them falsely. No matter; she treasured them. These were their names to her. The import with which they always told or concealed the one name that held them together always surprised. She herself would have enjoyed being named to the hundredfold, one for each hour, each dress and each outer garment she chose to cover it, each country her lucky job submitted her to, and each stopping place. And each man on whom she perpetrated adventure. To which man she always told her real name. A name was a word. Words were her honor; those she would never falsify. Why should she? Through them, she’d learned to move with the current, poetic or not—and that it was useless to falsify. Hopeless.

Stretching her long arms high above her head, she exploded a great
waw
of breath. She was full of hope.

She bent to her page again, seeing in the gap between first and second stanza what hadn’t been written there.

That week following, Lievering had invited her and another student, an upper-class Bajan boy who’d once lived in Philadelphia, to come out to dinner with him and a pair of visiting professors from the States. Part of the learning process, he’d said: the university would pay. Lievering was poor—but he was also said to have the habit of it. Which she and Vivie did not. She and the boy knew they’d been hand-picked, and not only because they were bright students; the boy because he was a cripple, she because she was—she hadn’t yet known what. In class Lievering was firm. Each poet, he said, has one ikon the student must search for. Raising his arms crosswise, he added more haltingly, “Each person.” The crippled boy nodded, rapt. Maybe Lievering had already searched out his for him. She already felt she was to be given hers.

That evening, Lievering and the boy picked her up at home. Vivie had approved of Lievering’s suit, worn daily in class and bought a lifetime ago in London, but ignored the boy, as she’d ignored all people of color since returning to the Islands. The boy owned the car which brought them; Lievering had never owned one. It was hard to imagine his tautness at any wheel. But though he exclaimed at the luck, he wouldn’t have elected the boy for that reason. Later she would understand better the workings of his innocence, which wasn’t childish but desert-dry, absolute. Fatality had picked him clean. Since then he’d lived in the great, nervy spaces between good and evil. To him, anything blown at him by either was gratuitous. No wonder hesitation was his disease.

So, for instance, a friend and a friend, pressing their wits together, had blown him into the university, which like others, as soon as the discomfort he occasioned outweighed his gifts, would blow him out again. For although he was neither mad nor sick, he had a fault of memory which kept him remorselessly and inconveniently in the present. Where a normal personality’s sense of the past gave it footholds to live forward from, articulating these as it went, Lievering’s past, of which he couldn’t or wouldn’t speak, co-existed with him, only partially latching him on to a present he wished to live by entirely. Slowly as he spoke, ate, taught, he was lucky to do it at all. His silent central pain took the form of ever-heightening discriminations. He could just barely choose—his speech, his bread. In harness with other people’s easy onwardness, this could grow worse. That night they had a demonstration of it.

“Where we going?” The elder professor had been white, a psychologist with a desk body and gold-scrolled glasses, and genial in a hard way. The younger one, whom he’d introduced as Terence, hadn’t seemed like a professor at all. Robin, the cripple, who was yellower than most people of color here and not as pretty, was already irritated with him. “We could eat here at the hotel,” Terence said. “It’s
very
super.” He was a smooth copper color, with features so little raised in his round head that he looked to her like a melted penny.

“We’re on tour to study race relations,” his elder said. “Why not go where race
is?
I mean—both, of course.” His laughter did nothing to age him.

Lievering smiled.

Terence whistled. “Anybody ever tell you you look like Raphael’s David? That one in front of that gallery in Florence?”

“Michelangelo’s,” his elder said.

His friend had mugged up at him. “We were
both
there.”

Robin had jerked his bad foot.

“Buonarroti?” Lievering said slowly. Informing always eased him. “Yes?”

They waited again.

“Well, then—what do you say?” The elder professor had written a well-known book and was a leader of men. “Where we eating?”

“There is a restaurant.” Lievering had doffed his schooltime tie for an open collar with long lapels, neatly darned. Always interested in white bodies, she’d noted his well-modeled throat.

“Bridgetown? Outside it, huh. West?” In the end, Robin, interpreting Lievering’s vague gestures, limped the way to the car, seating Lievering in front with him to direct. Or deflect.

They drove for hours. At first, when eating places were passed by as too neoned-up or not the one, they assented, but soon they began to understand that nothing being good enough for them, nothing was what they might get. “Any, but
any
old tippy-oh joint,” Terence said fretfully from the back seat, where she sat between him and his friend. But Lievering was hunting the perfect place for them—one he’d heard about but had never had the money to dine at himself—and urged here, backtracked there, through woods, half-lit hills, and down the crashing coastline, they had found it. She heard Lievering give the relieved sigh of decision resting. Though the place was a burnt wreck. They all stared at the charred heaps smelling of sweet-potato ash, the spars sticking up like a ship in starlight. And the sign.

“Take us back to the Sandy Lane,” the professor said.

On the way back, he and his friend had a low-voiced exchange, half French, half English.
“Incroyable,”
Terence said. “But he
is
marvelous.” The professor answered in English. “Not for you, doll.” Adding in French, “So is the girl. Marvelous.” Terence replying with a French snigger; “And not for
you.”
Adding, even with a frank glance at her, “What’s she along for?” “Dunno,” the other had answered. “Dunno if
she
does. Where
are
we?”