It wasn’t over yet, but it had to end.
That period of solitude in my scriptorium, at first it had felt like a sentence, but the sentence changed from solitude to the love of solitude, a predilection discovered and claimed, a longing instilled for good. I did not know what I was waiting for, only that I was to wait, attentive, bent over the pages Miriam had asked me to translate. Just as the efficacy of the analytic session depends on the session’s fixed limits, the power of this reverie derived from the fact that it had to end. My task was approaching completion, and Miriam would be back in a few days. I had scribbled a commentary for each of the poems, and the commentaries had filled the notebook. The notebook’s weight satisfied me, each side of each sheet dense with words and each sheet now somehow more substantial, textured with the impress of my pen, so that the notebook took on a new thickness, as if the book had been left out in the rain and then carefully dried, its pages now puckered and curling at the edges.
—
As for the fact that such happiness was possible only in the strict condition of solitude—will you charge this to my affliction, Father? Have you diagnosed in me a malady of the soul by then, no doubt, already advanced? Surely I knew that this fever dream had to end, not only the dream of studious solitude, but the dream of Miriam’s and my affair. Had we not called it a dream, and in the very act of calling it that, hadn’t we acknowledged that the dream had already ended? At times this regret has consumed me, even though regret is in its own way a kind of wishful thinking: there was in fact no choice to make. What was to happen had already begun to happen. What had been stored up had to spend itself. It had already begun to spend itself, had already begun to spend the lives it was to spend.
Even then I must have known it. Had I not spent those days staring at the pages themselves? Had I never comprehended them?
Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses,
A box where sweets compacted lie;
My music shows ye have your closes,
And all must die.
TWENTY-FIVE
“Shit shit shit shit shit putain fuck shit!” said the American girl behind the cash register as I stepped over the threshold of the tall, narrow bookshop. Her hair was short, a shock of shorn flax, her tone more amused than enraged. A loop of harness bells had been hung on the door, and they jangled as the door closed behind me. “Merde de la fucking merde!”
—
When I was a boy, no more than seven or eight years old, I saw my first movie. I remember nothing of the circumstances, neither who took me nor where the theater was. All I recall is the plot, a kid’s feature, the story of a girl growing up amid snowy mountains. The girl was a skier, a tomboy, and had a big dog, a St. Bernard, maybe, or a Newfoundland. There was something about saving for new skis and bashing open her piggy bank when she had enough money to buy them. Alone on her new skis, she ventured off-trail, against the admonitions of her father, in spite of her dog’s yelping protest. In the inevitable avalanche that followed, she was trapped, though not entirely buried. Someone, probably the dog, summoned aid. A search party, led by the father, arrived and pulled the girl from the snow.
A simple formula, briskly executed, but it drove into me a kind of barb that snapped off in the bone. For days afterward that girl’s face visited me, at school, in daydreams, in sleep, renewing each time that strange ache. Absurd to think a wound could be sustained from such a story, less a story than a frieze-flat arrangement of customary forms, the girl’s face, for all its freshness, stamped from the die of ironbound convention. One kid, spunky—check. One dad, kindly—check. One dog, fearless and cautious—check. One calamity, fearsome and toothless—check. Surely, even as a boy, I knew how it would end.
But ah, you will say, you had fallen in love! The wound was only that sweetest wound, the wound of first love!
Was it?
I believe it was not.
When I think of that girl as she is today—a woman more or less my age, pinched by the frosts of midlife—even now that broken-off bone-pang emits its pulse, and I know that it is not the wound of love, but the wound of—I have no word for it except an encounter. Yes, that is the word, however unsatisfactory, though I am certain now that the encounter was not with a person, or even with desire, but with the impossible itself. The ache inside me knew that she was unreal. The object of my longing was a figment, not of my imagination but of what was not. I did not know this, but the ache knew it. The ache knew that her face was the mask that nothingness itself had chosen.
Of course I had no words for that then. Even now I cannot say what I mean. Yet throughout my life, that ache has accompanied me
