Read Online American Purgatorio by John Haskell - Free Book Online Page B

we’ve been climbing for about an hour, noticing among the climbers one blond man, without companion or rope, climbing like a muscular spider along the artificial notches and grooves that signify handholds of actual rock. When we finish, sitting at a table in the health club drinking some healthy drink, the man we’ve been watching walks up to us. He introduces himself as an Austrian mountain climber and shows us a book, a large book with photographs of him climbing various European rock faces, famous ones, he assures us. His accent is engaging and he offers to give us some pointers, a generous thing, except that during the whole conversation, I have the impression that he’s talking only to you. He’s looking at me but I can’t help noticing that his body is tilted toward you. And you’re turned toward him, listening to him, taking him in. After we get home, lying in bed that night, I can tell there’s something between us. I assume it’s that Austrian fucker, or your Austrian desire for him rather than me, and when we do make love I can feel a palpable barrier separating us. Your mind is elsewhere. And of course you assure me that the Austrian man means nothing to you, all the typical things a person might say, but I know, or think I know, that you’re not telling me everything. And maybe he is better than I am, stronger and kinder and more understanding than I could ever be. But he isn’t that handsome, not in my opinion. You, however, don’t agree with my opinion, and I see this unwillingness to take my side as a kind of betrayal. I see it and feel it, and it feels like a knife cutting us apart. I call it jealousy because jealousy is a famous emotion, but I could do something to change it. Attention is what you want and I could easily give you that attention. I could understand, or try to understand, but I want attention too. And I don’t want to compete for it. Not with him. You’ve taken a solemn vow, we both have, and I can’t tell if I’m sad or mad, and maybe I’m both because a gap opens up, like a wedge driven between us, and as this wedge slowly pries us apart, a hundred disparate emotions combine in me to create a sense of disorientation that never completely goes away.
    *   *   *
    Driving with Alex through West Virginia, inspecting the various clapboard towns for my old maroon station wagon, I was still feeling that disorientation, or something like it. My job was to find Anne, and in order to do that I needed my awareness focused on the world, and because this disorientation was clouding that focus, to cure myself I pulled off the highway somewhere in Kentucky.
    I found a small road which led eventually to a parking lot for an overpriced tourist attraction, an underground cavern or cave. Instead of visiting the cave, we got out of the car, peed in the trees, and decided to walk down the hill from the parking lot. We followed a single-track trail that led through a pine tree forest that ended at a small round pond with a steep bank and frogs making noise. It was surrounded by birch trees and maple trees, and the good old maple trees reminded me of our garden. Which reminded me of Anne. Which reminded me of my disorientation—like the hand of the woman in the restaurant—attaching itself to my heart.
    â€œAren’t you coming in?” Alex said.
    I sat on the grass slope at the edge of the pond watching him take his clothes off. I shook my head.
    â€œWhy not?” he said. “It would do you good.”
    â€œOh really?” I said, thinking that he didn’t know who I was, and that swimming in a slimy pond wouldn’t do anything any good.
    He reminded me that he’d fixed the car. “Remember the car?” he said.
    â€œI’m not a car,” I told him.
    â€œYour body is a vehicle,” he said. And then he jumped. He was standing at the high point of the bank, completely naked, looking