Read Online Motion Sickness by Lynne Tillman - Free Book Online Page B

speaking the only French I’ve been able to pick up, and hope that I’m doing a fairly good imitation of Arlette. I study Sylvie. She could be Arlette’s child or sister. They share no common features and I’m twisting them into homologous shapes. Which I’ve done before, devising little families of the unrelated. Families of the unrelated. Sounds like a horror sitcom. She moves in her chair, tapping her foot as if there were music playing. She says she always needs to move.
    I know what she means. If Sylvie had to be told about Sal’s death, then he must have been murdered when he was with a woman who wasn’t Sylvie. Unless Pete had it wrong and there had been no woman with Sal. Or Sylvie may be lying to me, not wanting to appear to have been an accessory to his murder. Sylvie’s shaking her leg under the table and dragging hard on her cigarette.
    But what about your study of the prostitutes? She puts out her cigarette. Since she fantasized about being a prostitute, she explains, she decided she couldn’t write it from a distance, like a documentary. It had to be a novel or story. And even though she never was a prostitute, in the story she will be. She’ll write it in the first person. She says, It is more a real voyeurism that way. Sylvie swallows some more wine. But now that Sal is dead, I am too sad and shaky, so I stop for the moment. My husband has been wonderful. Very sympathetic. She says she’s taking dance and I should come with her to one of her classes, taught by a Japanese couple. She likes dance because it’s about the body. It is what we have, she murmurs and then pauses. Murder is terrible. Death is terrible.
    Death is terrible. A while ago, my father died, and life changed. It’s strange to say it like that, but Sylvie nods her head, purses her lips and sips her wine thoughtfully. It’s been ages since I’ve told anyone how my father died, and though I talked to Jessica about it, a little, I didn’t give her a detailed account. How the doctors worked on him for an hour, how he was awake and with the doctor he knew, even smiling, because he didn’t know what was happening, how he went into a coma, how he suffered irreparable brain damage, how he didn’t open his eyes again, how he lay attached to a machine and seemed dead already, but then when he was dead, I realized that he hadn’t looked dead. How I touched his cold hand and hoped that it’s true that people in comas know you’re there, how my mother stood silently beside him and finally turned her back, her hand to her mouth, how we weren’t there when he actually died, how his embalmed body looked, how, at the funeral home, I noticed a slight mark on his forehead that wasn’t there before, a bruise high on his brow that showed he’d been handled badly, how the doctors said they did everything they could, how he was cremated in a place no one visited, how we tossed his shards into the sea, a few of us, how he would’ve gotten seasick if he’d been alive, how I became seasick, the boat rocking, rocking, rocking. The closing images frame it all, are freeze-frames, and like the eternity of death itself the images won’t die. They’ll die with me. When someone dies, I tell her, regaling her with unexpected lyricism, which suits my conception of Sylvie or an idea of Paris, death is like a one-way journey and it triggers in the ones who don’t die—it triggers an ordinary craziness. I pause. Sylvie screws up her face and asks gravely, What is triggers?
    I define trigger the verb but don’t bring up Trigger the proper noun, the famous TV horse of the famous TV cowboy, Roy Rogers. Trigger the horse who is now stuffed and standing on the cowboy’s front lawn. Is Roy Rogers dead, is Dale Evans? He wouldn’t get her stuffed, that’s for sure. He might want to, though. Roy Rogers is a chain restaurant for hamburgers. I don’t even mention Tom Mix and Tony the Wonder Horse whose metal statue stands in Florence, Arizona, at the Tom Mix