Guesting
Elijah took his two legs across the desert as it made the room for him that he needed, and he sang of the god he couldn’t see. The bread-keeper, the one who harks at dough and pricks it under the rush of fire rising, rising, the one who formed the cactus that sucks on a few splats of rain and radiates the red bloom whose spines will pierce you, if you try to claim what ought to lie beyond the human hand. The one who, shaping hands and feet and fur and fin and wing, fluxed through them all the blood that will always be a flush of longing for more. So we got settlements, Elijah thought. We got kings, officials, their eyes over-opened on the more they thought was theirs and which they saw sideways, instead of close enough to breathe with. For the god who guards the bread, Elijah became a thin-fleshed human tube pushing out words that warned of the gleam-anointed one who was coming, who would right the wrongly broken. At every Passover table, surpassing reckoning, a place would be arranged for him, this Elijah who will return to see the gleam that gave him the song he was.
For over a thousand years, Elijah didn’t know where he was or that he was, until he stood in in a new body — tree-branch tall, pale like the underside of a leaf, the veins going on a journey through him, and he was their upholder. He had radish-colored hair. He spoke a language he had never known. Answering to another name, he was the one who would run spear-fast through this valley, the Perceval who, losing the vales of his father, would make good that failure far from the forest where his mother kept him safe from men, the takers hacking at each thing not yet their own. All the green around and above him murmured that this wooded place wasn’t for stopping. That his aim should be a distant hill overhanging the sea, where he’ll sit at a table rounder than the sun, among men who amount to more than what they can take. He didn’t know where his god, the bread-stoker, was. But every sprig of fern, in pooling wet, carried the image of an earthenware bowl once touched by the oil-shining one. Finding it will mean that the glow must come again, because the bodies of the earth needed to be warmed by the light he gave.
That was some of what your mother told me, Alex, when you were in her kitchen, fiddling with a wine-opener. We’d come to her house in Guyancourt, not far from Paris, a town produced after the second World War by the laying down of streets over what had been farmland, the owners urged to shuttle off elsewhere. A town struggling to pose as a wayside spot, encircled by woods and lakes and brambles considered more country than city, so they were permitted to last. The place had raised you to leave it, you said, this pastoral fakery obscuring the lives forced to pay for it. We’d arrived early for dinner from your studio on the Right Bank, and I met your half-brother, Jean-Sébastien, eight-years old to your 23. He looked like pampas grass topped with a yellow spikelet, so other than the dark that you and your mother were. At his early goodnight to us, before we were about to eat, I remembered he had been seeded by a never mentioned father who, like the town’s old farmers, was forced to go. So there had been three of us at the dining table, but as you left for the kitchen, I saw the four place-settings above which your mother stood, poised, spine-straight, her black hair gone chalky at the ends. Monique, in her white tunic and pleated skirt, incanted about the prophet who will reappear when the need for him outweighs his absence. She merged Old Testament toughness and Arthurian greenery and the Jesus who must walk through that great door in the sky on his way to us, because our pining was what he listened to. When you returned with the wine, Alex, when your mother ladled the watercress soup she had spent her day making into that fourth bowl, insisting we were now ready for anyone who would show, I knew that coming back was a theme she couldn’t find the will to drop. I heard her maintain how my resemblance to Elijah and Perceval lay in my being this exceptional American boy, her son’s first boyfriend. And I wondered if the gone, the lost, the absent, the dead, can be magnetized.
But to aim at magnetism requires you to know what you wish you to pull your way.
I was thinking of a scene in Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie, or To Live Her Life, which opened Monique Messine’s pathway into the industry that would, years later, shut her out. It’s 1962, the year you’ll be born, Alex. Anna Karina plays the film’s lead, Nana, and Monique’s her colleague, Elizabeth. At 22, both are trying not to be defined by the prostitution that earns them the right to go on living. Their world offers them little else other than husbands who wrestle with owning you, anyway. Nana’s in a café, talking with Brice Parain, who performs a version of himself, the philosopher, the one working at loving wisdom more than the knowledge of what it is. She speaks about words and their difficulties and wonders how to manage them, so that intention and verbal phrases are married by the movement a mouth can make. The camera looks at them frontally, the two in a rhythm of profile and three-quarter view they don’t acknowledge. Parain speculates that learning to speak well requires you to renounce life — for a while—in favor of its opposite, the not-talking, the silence sliding under what we add to it. After this next to last scene, Nana will lie bloodied on a Paris street, punctured by the gunfire of pimps who battle over the money they demand she continue earning for them. She attempted to greet a new life with the man she’d come to love, and desires loaded into bullet-spray pinned her. You, Monique, and I were in the kitchen after dinner, scrubbing dishes in that silence Parain held high. Through the window over the sink, midges wavered in a looping pang to eat, to mate, and any onlooker wasn’t real to them, until he’d step into the space that quivering marked as theirs. This turning aside at the center of renunciation, how do you pay for it?
I didn’t know then and don’t know now if the notion of cost/exchange brought me closer to the woman who made you possible. Or to you, even while our bodies were like braided dough in your bed on the floor, under the many eaves. Moonlight hard on the Paris rooftops beyond the slit of your bedroom window. I get Monique’s ritualizing the reappearance of the departed, her plaiting together histories considered separate by custom, by myth: you link differences into a whole, you ready a place, so the advent of the one gone too long demonstrates an order whose production will be yours. I get how Monique’s focus on the disappeared meant you’d only be tangible to her once you strategized an exit you couldn’t undertake, since her controlling need and your efforts to flout it gave you the life you called yours. And I know that behind all this stood Andreas, your father.
Every room he stepped into, windows and doors seemed to shoot up and open, air whisked, swirling, leading anyone who would notice to an outside he presented as his gift. Andreas was haunted by how things could be made to fit or be ruptured into a new accord, a material one. His three short films picture a saw slicing metal into limb-like shapes, a magnet tugging objects from their accustomed spaces, what happens to veins slushed by a flood of chemicals dispensed to counter an ailment that the camera can’t record. He wasn’t big on context because he didn’t know how to make room for it. When Andreas found Monique in Godard’s spotlight, he towed her his way so he might see what he could do with her. So he made you, he liked to think; so he urged Monique to believe that child-rearing time was another role, one producers would later judge her for, rejecting that connection. So he structured the suburban life he’d abandon in favor of future harmonies, elsewhere. I note the example of his mother in these maneuverings, that Irene who understood context as something to use.
Irene von Meyendorff belonged to a Baltic German family whose minor nobility they intended to scale up, into the major reach that must be their due. The first-born child, she was expected to be the means of that elevation. She’d marry the man with a title exceeding hers. She’d yield herself to the familial rise and lift everyone up to a future that would sustain it. Her family had a manor house in Reval, Russia, later to become Tallinn, Estonia’s capital. The money generated by that estate, on the backs of workers she never cared to know, brought her to Berlin, where she upraised herself over the family that treated her like a machine for the betterment of lives larger than her own, so long as they were male. In the 1930s, not yet 20, she was an ice-sharp harpoon of a woman, her hair the paradox of a cold kind of heat. Babelsberg Film Studio taught her, its first female cutter, how to re-sequence shots into a progression of moments that resembled her, this Baroness rearranging her predetermined life. The beauty she could use got her a part in a film about pirates and booty and lovemaking in shadowed doorways, but in the middle of that failure, she glinted. Glinting through films across the 1940s, she stayed. She married a doctor, birthed Andreas, and stayed. Scorning the attentions of Joseph Goebbels and his Nazi pack, she stayed for their devastations. Near the final swerve of a century that brutalized so many, Irene lived in an almost-palace with her last husband, an English shoe magnate. The money she took from a once Russian city, the money she earned, the retail chains she married into supported you in your studio. Your grandmother, now an English matron serving country teas, renamed herself Irina, because it seemed easier for those she called the natives to say. You admired the charm in that, Alex, but you discounted who paid for it.
I’m sure these lives slunk behind you when we met. At a combination gallery and concert space in the Marais, our mutual friend, Julie, hung photographs whose double exposures made every object her camera froze as if accompanied by a variant of itself. You couldn’t tell original from copy. A man in a speedo’s about to leap into a pool, but his replica will get there first. Peonies in a transparent vase couple with their twins. Waiting for wine at the bar, you spoke to me about Glenn Gould. About his moans and yelps while he made piano-love to Bach, reminding everyone who listened that he was there. I answered with Gould’s late idea of diminishing the distance between audience and performer: he’d yank his piano into that plain of seats so the people who filled them could share in each shaped phrase, each colored line of phrases, as if any music were what collaboration realized. You leaned your eyes on me then. You told me that my copperish hair looked like what was left of your father’s. You told me that Andreas was 5 months dead. His car crushed by a truck on New York’s West Side Highway. His new and pregnant wife escaped that horror without a single bruise. I thought how outside, under cobbles, the ancient marsh with its lichen and moss and loam was fuming up into mist, the past walking in the way it could through the present.
I didn’t want the exceptionalism that you and Monique gifted to me. The Latin ghost at its root says: the exceptional ones must be excised from, taken out of, the mess and mire birthing all life, which paraphrases the fact that you’re dead. Plucked from sludge, you don’t change in the way that the living need to. I didn’t want the bedmate-terms you seized on, how — as you said — you’d have your long-time fiancée, Dominique, on weekends, while for 5 days straight, I’d be yours. But America teaches its gay citizens about submission, to be silent or die, though the one will forever be the sibling of the other.
As a boy, you knew Dominique from the Rudolf Steiner school Irina paid for with the shoe-man’s money. The place let you invent your own language because you couldn’t bear the everyday words; they had to be special: they had to be yours. At her first glance, Dominque trusted that you were like water — Alex, she’d drink you and go on. She tracked you to Paris, got a closet-sized space on the outskirts, got one of Irina’s rings from you, and hired out her caregiving skills to a school whose children were the height of my knees. I didn’t want nights in your 5th floor studio where, below us, Algerian women were locked in, sewing polyester clothes for the nearby market, their bargain prices a curse on the lives that formed them. Your floor buzzed with their electric stitches, as if the explosion that should be coming would equal a gate through which each woman could rake her way up and out. I didn’t want the newspapers, the piano scores stacked on your trestle table, those dishes grimed with food-scraps in the too small kitchen sink. I knew Dominique spent her weekends making tidy what reappeared over the days that were mine, your Steinway baby grand buffed and shining in the center of what passed as your living room, the only thing whose upkeep you were ready for. To you, we were more fitting incarnations of the Monique forced to loosen her grip on your father’s hand and of the Andreas you’d lost twice. Aloud, I hoped to tell you that Elijah and the Perceval he transmogrified into weren’t coming back. But I didn’t yet know the words, no words for saying how, at 28, I wasn’t Andreas, reanimated. I needed to return to my country with its uncritical affection for fixed ideas, its volatility, to learn what talking back demands — and survive.
I’m the man who slept with you for two years, face to face, your eyelashes beating against my cheekbone at the surge of a dream I could never save you from.
Thousands of miles from you, years away from you, I can say: Alex, wake. Pivot into waking up.
I hope you did.