know how to say to her in that time so long ago, but I have no way to think about what I am thinking and so I donât.
He doesnât have to try to drive, but I do. I guess he is paying attention all right, but he isnât trying. When I drive I have to try hard to pay attention, to keep to the road, to follow directions, to fend off the fear of getting lost. Nothing seems so bad as that fear of turning the wrong way or finding oneself broken down on the country road with only a dim light from a distant farmhouse. I am surrounded by darkness. I try to keep calm. I try to remind myself way ahead of time to keep calm if anything should happen. I get tired of trying even when everything goes smoothly and I clutch the steering wheel. Here I am, I say to myself, trying to get myself to watch the view as if it were an unnatural act, even though, one would suppose, it is the most natural thing in the world. Look at all those people doing it, I say to myself; surely you too can look out the window at the view. You too can admire the scenery. His subject, the landscape. Try it.
But even the ringing in her ears takes her away and even the effort of sitting still in the car for so long,even the book she tries to forget. Her novel is a novel in which the narrator becomes someone else momentarily. She loses herself in imagining herself a child and she imagines this so strongly that she begins to blurt things out, slurp the milk out of her cereal bowl, race in circles among the trees stomping in pools of shallow water. She makes no attempt to conform to the rules, this child, but neither does she break them; she simply moves through the world and does what comes to mind. What comes to mind is rather sing-songy and windy, hooting softly, gazing out and running far. The child stands in the side yard by the rotted tree. She takes off her red sweater and makes a cape. She fixes the buckle on her red shoe. She stares for hours at the view. Although she doesnât at that time live anywhere near what one might call a view, no vistas or California coastlines, it doesnât matter to her. She stands at the side of the road and looks down it. She doesnât move. She sees a rock and she sees it up close for a long time. Her mother calls for her but she doesnât come, not because she is trying to disobey, but because it just doesnât occur to her to come.
Years later she sees an elaborately constructed miniature garden planted into the cleft of a great stone, the tiniest rock garden sheâs ever seen with lichen, alpine plants of various sorts, saxifrages, gentians, pinks, penstemons and what looks to be a fold with a red dot in the center. The novel isnât a great novel, perhaps it hasnât yet been written, but it is what she is thinking about when he says again, look at the view and there arewaves crashing against the boulders and melting down into waterfalls and crashing again. It is almost larger than she can stand and sheâs back at the restaurant looking through her water glass. Through the crash of the waves, she thinks she hears him asking something.
The Gift
The two are perfect lovers because neither can focus or is interested in focusing. What each likes best as it becomes obvious to them both is the neutrality each is able to effect after a sexual encounterâeach of which is necessarily quickly and almost matter-of-factly executed, more for each of them by the very fact of its being less, more pleasurable as it approaches the experience of simply the drinking of a coffee at a café, sipping a glass of peach iced tea against the heat of August. Thus it is not, as one might expect in the heat of summer in Italy, the sexual liaison which binds them so tightly, but rather the hours of nonchalance afterwards, the pretense that is so perfected as to call absolutely no attention to itself, to be banal and, occasionally and at its best, even slipshod.
Perhaps the story begins with Paola, the woman.
He doesnât have to try to drive, but I do. I guess he is paying attention all right, but he isnât trying. When I drive I have to try hard to pay attention, to keep to the road, to follow directions, to fend off the fear of getting lost. Nothing seems so bad as that fear of turning the wrong way or finding oneself broken down on the country road with only a dim light from a distant farmhouse. I am surrounded by darkness. I try to keep calm. I try to remind myself way ahead of time to keep calm if anything should happen. I get tired of trying even when everything goes smoothly and I clutch the steering wheel. Here I am, I say to myself, trying to get myself to watch the view as if it were an unnatural act, even though, one would suppose, it is the most natural thing in the world. Look at all those people doing it, I say to myself; surely you too can look out the window at the view. You too can admire the scenery. His subject, the landscape. Try it.
But even the ringing in her ears takes her away and even the effort of sitting still in the car for so long,even the book she tries to forget. Her novel is a novel in which the narrator becomes someone else momentarily. She loses herself in imagining herself a child and she imagines this so strongly that she begins to blurt things out, slurp the milk out of her cereal bowl, race in circles among the trees stomping in pools of shallow water. She makes no attempt to conform to the rules, this child, but neither does she break them; she simply moves through the world and does what comes to mind. What comes to mind is rather sing-songy and windy, hooting softly, gazing out and running far. The child stands in the side yard by the rotted tree. She takes off her red sweater and makes a cape. She fixes the buckle on her red shoe. She stares for hours at the view. Although she doesnât at that time live anywhere near what one might call a view, no vistas or California coastlines, it doesnât matter to her. She stands at the side of the road and looks down it. She doesnât move. She sees a rock and she sees it up close for a long time. Her mother calls for her but she doesnât come, not because she is trying to disobey, but because it just doesnât occur to her to come.
Years later she sees an elaborately constructed miniature garden planted into the cleft of a great stone, the tiniest rock garden sheâs ever seen with lichen, alpine plants of various sorts, saxifrages, gentians, pinks, penstemons and what looks to be a fold with a red dot in the center. The novel isnât a great novel, perhaps it hasnât yet been written, but it is what she is thinking about when he says again, look at the view and there arewaves crashing against the boulders and melting down into waterfalls and crashing again. It is almost larger than she can stand and sheâs back at the restaurant looking through her water glass. Through the crash of the waves, she thinks she hears him asking something.
The Gift
The two are perfect lovers because neither can focus or is interested in focusing. What each likes best as it becomes obvious to them both is the neutrality each is able to effect after a sexual encounterâeach of which is necessarily quickly and almost matter-of-factly executed, more for each of them by the very fact of its being less, more pleasurable as it approaches the experience of simply the drinking of a coffee at a café, sipping a glass of peach iced tea against the heat of August. Thus it is not, as one might expect in the heat of summer in Italy, the sexual liaison which binds them so tightly, but rather the hours of nonchalance afterwards, the pretense that is so perfected as to call absolutely no attention to itself, to be banal and, occasionally and at its best, even slipshod.
Perhaps the story begins with Paola, the woman.
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