Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy Read Online Free Page B

picks up her mail where it lies scattered on the ragged tile floor.
The strange envelope doesn’t register at first because she flips through the
letters looking at their right corners so that the postmarks blur by, and the
hand-delivered letter of course has no postmark, and no stamp for that matter. Tight shot of the bundle of mail in her hand as she goes back up
the dark wooden stairs, and drops the letter on the mat in front of a door, and
keeps climbing. The camera retreats suddenly, staggers back like a
drunkard and points up the stairwell to the next floor where another woman,
also in black, stands watching. It could be the same woman, climber and
watcher. We hear a door shut and the sound registers in her eyes.
    Interior. A
simple apartment, finely if anonymously decorated in muted feminine style.
Closed French doors, a sofa, a vase offering a single
tulip, a lamp. Doorway to a kitchen, to a bathroom, to a bedroom. Tidy, silent, but for sounds from the street.
    Meeting no other men with hats the solitary man continues dragging his
suitcase down the narrow street. Does he wear it unselfconsciously? To scratch
his bald spot does he raise the hat with his free hand or do his fingers creep
under the brim? How can we know about his bald spot? Close in, encircled, like
a tonsure, like Henry Miller. He pushes (he pulls) on his way.
    The apartment is empty. No: there is a breeze. It stirs the curtains. There
is a whistling kettle in the kitchen. Extreme close-up of a
smudged tall glass that fills with boiling water, with black particles that
rise and swirl to fill the screen, touching the water with their color. The plain pewter kettle replaced on the stove with a clank. The specks like
sparrows entering a black cloud, suddenly pushed down
and pressed out of sight. Ceramic rattle, cube of sugar in a
chipped cup. The coffee streams out of the French press into the cup and
presses down on the sugar cube, breaking it down but not utterly: a sweet
residue underneath the bitter surface. The cup is carried out of the kitchen.
    The envelope on the table by
the tulip. It is a bill, billet
doux , it is news. Perhaps it’s news from some man gone to
fight in the war. The camera is always before the war, never after or inside
it. The camera is still, it’s a wide still shot, but our eyes are drawn
irresistibly to the empty hatrack. A shout in the street, can’t make out the
language, ricochet of a soccer ball off of someone’s stoop, a short barking
laugh. We are Americans and we call it soccer and there is a woman who is of an
age, a fadedness , a resilience we don’t have a name
for. Something Mediterranean or Semitic in the angles of her
face, the prominence of her nose, the darkness of her eyes. The hair
shimmers with its blackness, the beautiful gradated blackness of a silver
gelatin print. Alone she holds her beauty before her like a mask or a
microphone, in one untrembling hand, so that we can’t see what the other is doing.
When she turns her back to us we are blind. Is she weeping? Is she whispering?
Is she judging the time of day by the angle of the light? There are no clocks
in this room. The envelope, torn.
    The old reader sunk in her English cozies while the new reader is up to
her neck in noir. Meeting only once on a twilit sofa a hundred years ago in the
afternoon of a fever together thrilling to Grace Kelly in To
Catch a Thief , her alien blondeness like fate itself
co-piloting Cary Grant’s little convertible along the twisting mountain roads
of a Technicolor Monaco. But she shuns her mother’s library, curls up on the
floors of chain bookstores with shiny American paperbacks in her hands on the
trail of serial killers, mass murderers, conspiracies that go all the way to
the top. The new reader favors the cipher, the hard face, Eisenstein’s
principle of montage: intercut with happiness or sadness the face is happy or
sad, though the eyes never move, though the mouth remains the same, level and
transitory as a