Bas-Meudon

Nine summers

The figs came in late August and Lia bought far too many of them, and she would split one with her thumbnail and turn it inside out on her palm, red, the seeds wet and crowded, and hold it out to him across the small table, and Emil would say, “later, you have it”, and she ate his as well as her own. She had been holding figs out to him for nine summers. He had been saying “later” for nine summers. He thought he had all the summers there were.

The barge was moored below the bridge at Bas-Meudon, where the river ran the colour of an old bruise in the afternoons and the wake of the working boats came up through the boards under their feet. He had come for a week. He stayed because she left the small window open over the bunk, even in the cold, even when the rain blew in and soaked the blanket and she slept in the wet without complaint, and somebody had to close it, and that somebody became him. A habit is only a decision you have stopped noticing you make. She opened; he closed. They never discussed it. A whole life can be carried out through a window catch.

She wanted him, and she said so without lowering her voice, at the dinners, in front of the poets. “Your mouth, Emil, what a criminal waste of a mouth on a man who only opens it to decline things.” The poets laughed. He laughed. Underneath the laughing something turned over slowly in him, a fish rolling in shallow water. He wanted her past speech, past pride. He had built a whole theology out of not having her, in which his restraint was the finer love, the rarer and more difficult thing, set cleanly apart from the river of men who came down the plank on a Sunday and left in the grey before light with their shoes in their hands. He was proud of the theology. It kept him warm. It kept him apart, and he mistook the second thing for the first.

There were other men. He counted them, which he despised in himself, and counted them all the same. The sculptor who spoke only of his own hands. A married doctor with soft eyes. A boy of twenty something whose stammer she cured for a single night and handed back to him at breakfast, worse. She took them down to the bunk under the open window, and on those nights, Emil slept up on the deck with her coat thrown over him and listened and refused to listen, and the river went on beneath him saying nothing, saying her name, saying nothing.

She undressed anywhere, the cabin so small that there was nowhere for his eyes to go that was not her, and so he looked, and pretended the looking was an accident, and she let him pretend. In the heat of August the porthole sweated and so did she, a sheen along the collarbone, in the small of the back, and she would stand in the doorway drying her hair with the coat half on and talk to him about Umberto Eco, about money, about a dog she had loved as a child and never replaced, wholly unbothered, while he sat with his hands folded on the table like a man at a service for someone he had not known well. He had memorised her. He could have drawn her from the inside of his own eyelids. He had never once touched her below the wrist.

The coat was hers, an old man’s coat, camel-coloured, much too long, the cuffs turned back twice over her wrists. She wore it over nothing at all. She wore it down to the baker. She lent it to him on the deck nights and it held her smell, river and cheap pastis and, under those, bread before it has become bread, warm and yeasted, and he lay zipped into the smell of her three meters of planking from the actual woman and did not go to her, and called this loyalty to something he could not have named.

She had come from somewhere east of where she would say, a town she named differently on the rare occasions she named it at all, and there had been a husband, or a man she let people call a husband, who was either dead or merely elsewhere, and the distinction did not appear to cost her anything. Emil did not ask. He had the standing of a man who does not ask, and he guarded that standing jealously, and it bought him nothing in the end except the right to know the least of all of them.

Once she came to him on the deck. Past two in the morning, the bridge lights doubling down in the black water, and she knelt over him in the coat and the coat fell open and there was the long pale fact of her in the cold, and she took his hand and laid it flat on her breastbone where the heart was knocking hard, and she said, “here, this is just me, no poem in it, come and get me before I change my mind, because I am not always going to be kneeling here.” He felt the heart going under his palm. He felt the cold lifting off her skin and the heat banked under the cold, both at once, and he was harder than he had been in all his life and more frightened, and he heard his own voice say, “you are drunk, Lia, you will despise me in the morning, let me get you inside.” He drew the coat shut over her with his own ruined hands. She looked at him a long moment with no expression he could read. “All right”, she said. She went in. She pulled the small window shut herself, from the inside, and it stayed shut a week, and he lay out in the cold he had earned and told himself he had been good. He had been good. There is a particular cowardice that puts on the coat of decency and stands very still in a corner and waits all night to be thanked.

In the mornings, the figs. She would split one and turn it inside out and offer him the first, the seeds glistening, and he would say, “later”, and she would eat it, and her mouth afterwards was sweet and he knew that it was sweet and did not find out for himself. Later. He built a small country out of that word. There were no roads in it and nobody else had ever lived there.

People came to the barge, poets with wet shoes, the two sisters who painted the same bridge from chairs set a metre apart and loathed one another tenderly across forty years, the doctor, the sculptor and his hands. She fed them all on nothing. Emil poured the wine and afterwards washed the glasses in river water hauled up in a pail, and the poets called the barge bohemian and free and never once wondered whose hands the glasses had passed through, and he did not enlighten them. He liked being the one who knew. Knowing was the shape his love had taken, and it asked for nothing, because it suspected, and rightly, that what it wanted could only ever be taken and never given, and he was a man who did not take.

She swam in the river, which the boatmen swore would kill her, out past the moored hulls to where the current ran in earnest, and she let it carry her down a length and then cut back across it on a slant, unhurried, and came up the iron ladder streaming and laughing with her lips gone blue. He would put the coat round her. Once she pressed her cold mouth onto his and he tasted the river inside it, silt and green and the underside of stones, and she drew back and watched his face while he tasted it, and that mouthful of the Seine was the most of her he was ever given.

Twenty strokes out she was a head. Then a smaller head. Then the suggestion of a head, and the trick the eye plays, where the thing you are most frightened of losing thins into the general glitter a moment before it is actually gone. She always came back. He let himself rely on that. He relied on it completely.

In March they telephoned. He will not be made to describe the spring; it carried on being lovely, criminally, the plane trees along the quay coming into leaf as if nothing had occurred. The river was high and fast and very cold, no one’s swimming water, and she had gone into it at night, alone, and whether she misjudged the cold or judged it to the exact degree he was not asked and did not offer. He had become, by then, an expert in the things one does not say, and he was not going to spend that expertise on the men with the forms. She had swum out too far. That is the whole of it. She had been doing it for years. The river merely collected on a debt that he had never once had the nerve to call in himself.

He kept the coat. There was nobody to stop him. It smelled of river and of damp and, when he pressed his face into it in the bad hours, of nothing at all, the bread gone out of it, the her gone out of it, only wool and the cold it had never managed to keep out of either of them.

He lives in two rooms now, above a courtyard that does not flood. There is a window over the bed. He leaves it open. He lies under it in the cold and makes himself want the cold and manages most of the night because the body will learn anything if you punish it long enough, though to bear a thing is not at all to stop minding it. She had not minded it. He minds it. He means to go on minding it until he dies.

He buys figs. He never cared for them, the wet red mouth of them, but he buys them and splits one with his thumbnail and turns it inside out on his palm and holds it up to the window light, and there is no one across the table from him and no one to say “later” to. He eats it. It has gone soft in the middle, just past, a thin ferment under the sweetness. He eats the next, and the next, the whole bowl, she always bought too many, and the juice runs down to his wrist, and he does not get up to rinse it. “Later”, he says, once, aloud, to the empty room, to hear what is in it. There is nothing in it. He reaches for another fig.

Tamara Arden – T;A

Not a tip jar. A ledger for what you underlined in your mind.

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“La Baigneuse” (The Bather), 1910, by Léon Spilliaert (wikiart.org)

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