Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy Read Online Free Page A

Papa. Happy birthday.
    Thank you, Ruth, he says, trying it out. He walks away down the hallway,
almost singing it in his deep voice. Ruthruthruth.
    When she shuts the door Elsa is there. No, she’s gone. Elsa is gone.
    She sings it softly to
herself down the hall to the bathroom to the shower. Don’t
let them win.
    Following the figure of a man, her man, ours, his
back, walking away from the camera and taking our vision with him. We want to look at a man looking at the Alps, a battlefield, the sea, the
sublime cityscape, an image consuming itself. The
scene that includes him does not include us, and that is its perfection. We see
him as part of the landscape, landscape defined as that portion of terrain that
the eye can comprehend at a glance. And if an itch crawls up his spine to
tickle his neck and the head hunches, snaps backward to peer over his shoulder,
accused or accusing, what will he see? We are the audience. We are not there.
    Poet or assassin, we follow the man. The camera is a gun, the gun is a
microphone, the microphone is a pen, the pen is a
telephone. Calls in the small hours, between two and four,
gone straight to voice mail. In the morning she deletes them without
listening, noting only the times and the country codes. Two fathers, one
father, then no fathers at all, no mothers any more. M. Tense and alert before
the page, the phone downfaced on the bed beside her, on vibrate. Her husband
sleeps.
    Fathers are depressing.
    Mother of invention, asleep or awake, she dreams him, Lamb: a
black-and-white man in a simple lineless suit, gray raincoat over it, a fedora,
out of the airport, out of a cab, pulling a black wheeled bag behind him over
the cobblestoned streets of a nameless European city. Call him anything, she did not pay for his name. She quit smoking so
he still smokes; she rarely drinks so a bottle stands by the bed in they small
dry hotel room, where a single window overlooks a trellis or an alley or a
canal or a blank whitewashed wall. Tethered to her by cords of time: the
mother, the daughter: she needs a man without appendages, masculine and alone.
The camera is close enough to smell the back of his neck: tobacco, cornstarch,
bay rum. On audio: waves’ scumble, foreign voices, a kicked ball, shouts, a
busker accompanied by electronic orchestra, handclaps, bumblebee scooter engines
whistling and whining. He sits with his back to her, us, smoke drifting from
his left hand, its bandless fingers. The right hand, the writing hand, the
knowing hand is still. Rests tarantula on his knee. If
we look closely at the back of a man’s head, whose face we have only seen in a
dream, seeing only the skin of his neck and the pattern of hair (black flecked
by gray) and the two ears standing wide astraddle, and the barest movement,
fleck of tension. Is he listening. Is his breath, in
exhale, part of the mix.
    A woman’s fantasy. A man.
    He goes out and takes care of
things.
    Exterior. A narrow street, black ribbon in a yellow canyon of blank-faced
apartment buildings. Too narrow to be an American
street, too few cars. Lamb in medium shot, seen from behind, wearing a
black-brimmed hat, someone’s idea of the eternal past. His pace is unhurried,
almost unmodern: he slouches, he ambles, like a man
with no destination or agenda. But he has the crucial thing, a knowledge he
bears in his body: how to ignore the camera that follows his every move. As he
walks or shambles along there’s a rasping sound, a grating noise, and as he
shrinks in the frame we can see the plain black rolling suitcase that bounces
and drags and skitters on the pavement as he pulls it behind him. Something
paper in his hand, completing the image of a lost tourist. He pauses at a
doorway, a wooden door with flaked green paint, a brass mailslot like a
tarnished mouth. He folds the map and slips it inside. The map is a letter. The
letter vanishes.
    Interior. A
woman in a severe black dress, in late middle age, bends down with a little
grunt and