Ideas of Heaven E-Book

Joan Silber

• Herausgeber: Allen & Unwin
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD Set in modern-day America and France, Renaissance Italy and Boxer Rebellion China, these stories embrace whole lifetimes, much in the manner of Alice Munro and William Trevor. Joan Silber skilfully and subtly ties one story to the next, as a minor element in one becomes a major element in the next, until the last is tied convincingly to the first. Intense in subject yet restrained in tone, they are about longings - often held for years - and the ways in which sex and religion can become parallel forms of dedication and comfort. From a wannabe dancer in contemporary New York City to missionaries in China, Ideas of Heaven showcases Joan Silber's extraordinary deftness as she illuminates love, faith and sex with great originality and profundity.

Leseprobe

‘Luminous, stunning...Th e stories gather wholeness through deepening meditations on devotion...and through the startling use of language’ Chicago Tribune

‘Love, like these beautiful stories, offers devotion, consolation and transcendence’ Boston Globe

‘Silber covers a lot of ground in these stories, which have an epic sweep. Years pass. People grow and change. She has an ear for language, a way of turning a phrase to make it mean more than it should’ Charlotte Observer

‘Silber’s wise, compassionate chronicles of longing, devotion and the search for comfort, both spiritual and physical, will move readers to contemplation and delight’ Publishers Weekly (starred review)

‘A standout...Silber travels the globe and centuries with ease’ Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

‘These are stories about “love’s wreckage,” yet amid the flotsam and jetsam of loss and longing, the reader is buoyed up by Silber’s elegantly sensuous prose, her elastic wit and the sheer startling humanity of her characters. Individually, each piece is an intimate marvel; cumulatively, they add up to a marvelous book, whose subtly associative structure gently but profoundly reinvents the short story collection’ Peter Ho Davies, author of Equal Love

ALSO BY JOAN SILBER

FICTION

Secrets of Happiness

Improvement

Fools

The Size of the World

Household Words

Lucky Us

In My Other Life

In the City

NON FICTION

The Art of Time in Fiction

This paperback edition first published in Great Britain in 2022 by Allen & Unwin First published in the United States in 2004 by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Copyright © 2004 by Joan Silber

Excerpts from Selected Poems by Gaspara Stampa, edited and translated by Laura Anna Stortoni and Mary Prentice Lillie (New York, Italica Press, 1994) © Laura Anna Stortoni, 1994. Used by permission of Italica Press. Excerpts from Petrarch’s Canzoniere or Rerum Bulgarium Fragmenta by Francesco Petrarch, translated with notes and commentary by Mark Musa. Used by permission of Indiana University Press. ‘Rose, Oh Pure Contradiction’ and ‘Th e First Elegy’, translation copyright © 1982 by Stephen Mitchell; from Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke by Rainer Maria Rilke, edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

The moral right of Joan Silber to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

Allen & Unwin

c/o Atlantic Books

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Email: [email protected]

Web: www.allenandunwin.com/uk

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Internal design by Chris Welch

Paperback ISBN 978 1 83895 663 9

E-Book ISBN 978 1 83895 664 6

Printed in

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Myra

CONTENTS

MY SHAPE

THE HIGH ROAD

GASPARA STAMPA

ASHES OF LOVE

IDEAS OF HEAVEN

THE SAME GROUND

MY SHAPE

I had my own ideas about a higher purpose, but not enough ideas. I could have used more. When I was in my early teens, I used to go to the bus station in my city and think about panhandling money to get a ticket to Las Vegas. A wide sky of nightclubs glittering in the middle of the desert sounded beautiful to me. I wanted beauty. I’d sit on a bench and do my homework in the bus station, and then I’d go home.

What did I want before this? I took ballet lessons twice a week in the gym of my grammar school and liked the arabesques and the leaping and even the strictness of Miss Allaben drilling us in the six positions. I worked hard at ballet until I began to grow a figure in my leotard. My other hobby was attending services in churches and synagogues all around Cincinnati, where we lived. My parents were a mixed marriage (Jewish and Catholic, a big deal then) and had solved the alleged difficulty of this by not following any religion.

So I was a fascinated tourist in any house of worship, and would go anywhere I could get taken. The whole notion of worship knocked me out. I saw Jews kissing their fingers and touching them to the velvet cover of the Torah, I saw Catholics kneeling with their mouths open in practiced readiness for the Host, I saw Greek Orthodox placing their lips on icons as if they could not bear to pass them without this seal of adoration. I would emerge blinking into the daylight, shocked at my friends’ laughter over what had gone on in there—the choirmaster’s bad haircut, the tedium of the sermon, the utter ridiculousness of somebody’s mother’s hat. I listened, harder than anyone else, to words never said in daily conversation— beseech, transfigure, abounding, mercy. The rapped chest, the bowed head, the murmured Dear Lord. I could not get over people doing this together, the gestures of submission that went on within these walls. Then the congregation got up and walked outside.

Since no one—not my friends or family or even the clergy themselves—seemed to take this to heart the way I did, I had to keep quiet, like a spy with encoded notes or a tippler sipping a flask in the ladies’ room. I made up perky reasons for wanting to go each week, “just to see how people are really all alike.” After a while, I heard myself making fun of it with the others, and I stopped going. All at once, suddenly, cold turkey. I turned my back on the whole thing.

So. Then I grew the mounded body that was to be my adult shape. I came from a family of women with large breasts, and by fourteen I had my own set, which I sheathed in satin brassieres that made them point forward in military cones. Torpedo tits they were called (by us girls too). Everyone knew that grown men became entirely helpless at the sight of cleavage, the compressed hills rising gloriously above a strapless gown. This fashion in bodies has faded, but I was glad of it then. It is true that in junior high the boys yelled dirty comments (they mooed like cows, they made milking gestures with their hands), but I believed that these immature oafs, as we called them, liked me.

By the time I was out of school, everyone seemed to be telling me that I might enjoy certain privileges if I played my cards right. Once that idea got unpacked, it was more complicated than I guessed—what these privileges were and where contempt hid in the granting of them and what had to be paid for them anyway. People think they know all about this now, but they don’t, not exactly.

I wanted to be an actress. I was too silly and shallow to be any good at acting, but I could keep my composure onstage, which is something. I was given small parts in summer stock, the hooker or the stenographer or the cigarette girl in the nightclub scene. The summer after my first year of college, I worked in the Twin Pines Theatre. I slept with the bullying director, a fierce-browed man in his forties who had sex with a lot of us and didn’t give anybody a bigger part for it. Sleeping your way to the top is a bit of a myth, in my experience.

I liked acting, at that age. You got to dwell on feelings, which were all I dwelt on then anyway, and turn them over, play them out. We had long discussions: would a child afraid of her father show the fear in public? would a man who was in love with a woman talk more loudly when she entered the room? Those who’d had real training (I was not one of them) spoke with scorn about actors who “indicated,” who tried to display a response without actually feeling it. An audience could always tell. What was new to me here was the idea that insincerity was visible. I understood from this that in real life I was not getting away with as much as I thought.

But otherwise I was a little jerk. I was so hungry for glamour that I put a white streak in my brown hair, I wore short-shorts and wedge heels, I drank banana daiquiris until I threw up. I thought the director was going to find himself attracted to me again and we might have a legendary romance, although I could hardly talk to him. I didn’t know anything.

One of the other women told me about a job on a cruise liner. If I could dance a little, which I was always saying I could, I might be one of the girls strutting around in sequins in the musical revues they put on to keep the passengers from jumping overboard in boredom. I could get to Europe, to the Caribbean. They didn’t pay you much but you ate well.

The woman who told me this was the director’s new cookie, and I was not sure what she was really saying to me and in what spirit. We’re artists, you’re the showgirl, etc. But perhaps she did want to give me something.

And I worked on cruise ships for years. I went to Nassau and Jamaica and Venezuela and through the Greek islands. I worked in clubs in Miami too, walking around with a big feathered headdress on and the edges of my buns hanging out the back of my satin outfit. I lived with a bartender who was irresistible when he wasn’t a repetitious, unintelligent drunk, and with an older man I never liked. I was twenty-seven—getting old for this stuff— when I got work on a ship going through the Mediterranean, along the French Riviera and Monaco and Liguria.

It was a French ship and that was how I met my husband, who was the ship’s purser. He was a soft-eyed man with a whimsical blond mustache, who looked wonderful in the white uniform of the cruise line; everyone on the ship had a crush on Jean-Pierre. He was really just a boy. He was older than I was by a year, and he had poise and good sense, but he was not very worldly. I seemed to dazzle him, which was certainly nice. And I fell for him, his genial flirting and his down-and-dirty ardor in bed.

There is an hour on any ship when twilight turns everything a bright and glowing blue and the horizon disappears, the sea and the sky are the same. The line between air and water is so apparently incidental that a largeness of vision comes over everyone; the ship floats on the sky, until night falls and everything is swallowed in the dark. I have memories of being very happy with Jean-Pierre while standing out on the lower deck in that blueness, before the ship’s lights came on. He asked if I looked like my mother or my father, and if I was close to them (I certainly was not). He wanted to know if I could ever live away from my family and my country for good, if I had ever thought of such a thing, and I saw myself moving toward a destiny as interesting as any I could have wished.

I had very little to leave behind, when I went with him to live in St-Malo, the ancient walled city in Brittany where he had grown up. Jean-Pierre acted utterly proud to have nabbed me. When he introduced me to people, he always repeated my name, Ah- lice, with a certain delighted pause before it, and his translations to me included goofy compliments no one had really said (“my cousin says you are the flower of America”). We were staying in an apartment that belonged to his uncle, two doors from a fish market whose scent I did not even mind. We married a month after he brought me there. It was a pretty town, high on a bluff, but it had been bombed badly in the war and not all of it had been built back. The rainy beaches were filled in summer with dogs and children running around on the sand. Signs insisted it was strictement défendu to bring unleashed dogs anywhere on the premises, and I was amused to see that none of its citizens paid attention.

His family was not unkind to me either, despite the fact that I tried their patience with my meager French and seemed dopey to them in general. Their friendliness was to ask me about Mickey Mouse and Elvis Presley, and in the childishness of these questions my language skills got better. At the endlessly long family dinners on Sundays, I could yammer my answers.

I had a running joke with Jean-Pierre about all the idioms English speakers have for anything sexy or duplicitous—French kisses, French leave, Frenching the bed, French ticklers. We were pretty jolly, the two of us. When we went back on the ship together, I was full of rich confidence. I beamed at the corny banter of old men and their wives, I danced like a proverbial house on fire. I wrote letters to my family from our ports of call, Corsica, Sardinia, Malta. Allo, chère maman, I said, I’m having more fun than I can tell you. Je t’embrasse, from Alice the blushing bride.

After Easter, when we went back to St-Malo, the town was full of tourists from other parts of France, and I would chat with them across the tables in cafés. People there didn’t do that, but I thought they should, and I got them going. In the winter, when Jean-Pierre was hired for another tour of duty, there was no job for me on his ship, and he said maybe I could just stay home without him this once. I had worked since I was nineteen, and this offer of leisure seemed wonderful to me.

But I went a little crazy, by myself like that. I was no longer a novelty to his family and they had conversations I could not follow. In the dank and icy months, I walked around in a heavy, dressy cape and told the children I had a gun underneath it; I told Jean-Pierre’s mother she was so cheap that she fed us horsemeat; I tried to hitchhike to Rennes but I came back after fifty creepy kilometers on the road with a dead-silent truck driver. Once I got drunk and stood on a table in a café, singing “Blue Monday” and looking down at the patrons. By the time Jean-Pierre got back, I was mopey and fat; I had gained twenty pounds. I had become a thing the French really hate, a blowsy woman.

What could we do then? We fought, quite nastily. He seemed stuffy and spiteful, not like someone I knew at all. He said everyone had told him I was a selfish baby but he had said, oh, no, I was devoted to him. We made up and spent two days straight in bed (our desire never cut so deep as then). We went on excursions to Caen and to Mont St-Michel, which even I knew was a famous abbey, although I had stopped caring about churches. We walked across the causeway to get there, and that was the part I liked, walking into the sea. We gave parties for his friends and I made American foods—fried chicken, coleslaw, macaroni salad. The wives began to think I was a big, loose, amiable fool. Jean-Pierre got work in a shipping firm in St- Malo.

For my thirtieth birthday we went to Paris. I had never been there before, and much of it thrilled me—the cake-like elegance of the buildings, the determined verve of people in the streets— and me, Alice, walking through it with my handsome French husband. But I felt too, in the thick of those groomed and confident crowds, the discomfort outsiders often know in Paris, the dawning sense that this is not, really, for us at all—we will never be this stylish or this knowing.

I came back to St-Malo in an agony of thwarted hopes. I thought that all my prettiness, all the gifts I’d been so pleased to have, had gotten me nothing at all. What did I want so desperately? What in the world is glamour, what did I mean by that? A heightening of the ordinary, an entry into the club of splendor, a feast of endorsed sensations? Whatever it was, my anguish in wanting it was almost more than I could stand. I suffered blindly. Dolly of silly notions that I was, I wept real tears.

I knew I couldn’t stay there weeping. I wasn’t bound or indentured, it was the twentieth century. But I wept like that for another year—a shrew to Jean-Pierre and a puzzle to the town. I had one affair, with a humorless older cousin of his, and Jean-Pierre had lovers. In the end, I took the train to Paris and got a cheap ticket on a charter flight, and I left—after weeks of ugliness with Jean-Pierre’s family (I might have handled that part better). I went to New York to dance and sing in Broadway shows.

What was I thinking? That it was my last chance. I had never been to New York, and I didn’t know how to go about any of it. I showed up for one audition and waited in an outer room crowded with women much younger than I was. In the studio, I could keep in step, when they had us copy a sequence of dance moves, but I was not really dancing. I could sing on key, but in a watery, underpowered warble. I sang “Je Ne Regrette Rien,” which made the casting people smile wryly.

This did not make me want any of this less. I thought I had never worked hard enough for anything before (this part was right). Being in a show seemed like the exalted professional use of the body, the gold spun from sweat. In Variety I saw an ad run by a man who coached performers for musical auditions—twenty years’ experience, proven methods. I was so happy after I called him—I was taking charge of my life, as I meant to do. I walked back to the Y where I was staying and I celebrated by eating a steak at the coffee shop next door. I can remember chewing it happily, sitting alone at a table in private joy, putting little charred pink-brown bits of it on my fork with the baked potato, reading a Vogue magazine as I ate. I liked food in America.

I was late getting to the coach’s the next day. The studio was on Tenth Avenue, farther west than I’d been before, and I had not realized how far this was from the subway.

“Should I bother with you?” he said when he opened the door. “What do you think?”

“Oh, yes,” I said, tittering and dimpling. “Please.”

He was a tall man who had probably once been handsome; he was stark and sinewy now. His dance studio was on the sixth floor of an office building, and the room smelled of old wood and mildewed drapes. I had to display myself for him. That is, I had to strip down to a leotard (I did this in a corner, awkwardly sliding out of my skirt) and follow him in a few dance steps, then perform them again while he looked glumly at me. Next he sat down at the piano and asked me to sing “Three Blind Mice.”

“You remember that one, right?”

I tried to carry it off as jauntily as I could. Then he had me sing “Frère Jacques,” which I at least did with a decent accent.

“Not much of a singer, are you?” he said.

I shrugged cutely, but I was very miserable. “I can be a dancer,” I said. “Don’t you think?”

“Maybe. How much do you want it?” He glowered at me from over the piano, a scratched black upright with a hoarse tone.

I answered that question with so much fervor that he smiled, a thing he rarely did, as it turned out.

His name was Duncan Fischbach and I was to spend many hours in his studio. At first it was like any dance class—he demonstrated some steps, and we did them together, and then we linked a few of these sequences, which I was supposed to remember. “Listen to me, are you listening?” he said. “The word oops does not get you anywhere in this world, no matter how big a rack you’ve got on you.”

I laughed a little. Women did not take umbrage in any club I’d worked in.

“I hate a giggler,” he said. “Do it again till you get it right.”

I did the steps again. He circled around me, checking. “Your balance is bad,” he said. “Stand on your right foot and don’t move until I tell you.”

I stood for as long as I could, swerving and dipping and regaining my center. “You have to do better than that,” he said.

I had to jump in place for fifteen minutes without losing the beat. I had to run around the room and change direction on a dime. I had to hold a number of positions for long spells of time—a split, a high kick, a stretch to my toes with my butt in the air. All of them were exposing, implicitly sexual positions, and I felt like a crude cartoon, twisting and straining, muscles trembling. Nonetheless I was proud of my discipline in the regimen this strange maître was drilling me in. And I did get more limber.

At my age I had no chance of getting anywhere, Fischbach said, unless I practiced at least seven hours a day. Minimum. I could not do much in my closet of a room at the Y, so I paid to use Fischbach’s studio in the evening hours. I was given a key, and I went into that room, with its old-gym smells, always afraid that he was going to appear, but he did not. My body grew lighter and trimmer. I was skipping meals to save money, as the savings I had brought with me ran lower. I had taken a vow to myself not to look for other work. I was so lonely my voice cracked from disuse when I spoke, but I was elated too in a starved and ghostly way.

Sometimes I went to shows (or halves of shows—I walked in at intermission, the one way to go for free). Things had been changing in the theatre; the hit shows of the decade were Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar. They were okay, but I liked the older ones better—Gypsy, Guys and Dolls, Oklahoma—an earlier style of full-throated, tip-tappy entertainment. Most musicals gave me pleasure, but it was not a fan’s love for them that made me knock myself out. I saw them as a way to be in a parade of dazzling motion, to be a lovely dancing version of myself, without the rawness of the clubs. The best of me (I believed) was in that lineup, slim-legged and tight-waisted, too delightful to keep under wraps. That parade, which is always passing through this world, was what I was made for, I thought. I could not bear to have it go by without me. It hurt me to think it might have slipped by already, that I might be too old. I probably was too old.

Fischbach had other students. A few times I met women going in or out, girls with pearly lipstick and pixie bangs. Never any men. I couldn’t tell what his own desires were, which gender he liked, or whether he couldn’t stand the thought of doing anything with anybody. There was no gallantry in him—the tools of his trade were mockery and command—and he was uncharmed by femaleness in general. He was a strong dancer himself, not miraculously light on his feet but muscular and sure; his lines were always clear. He called me an oaf, a potato, a slob, a blight, a hippopotamus.

He believed in tests for me, rehearsals of my resolve, as if the strongest desire had to win, simple as that, in any instance. “Pop quiz,” he would say. “If a director asked you to stand on your head with a dead fish in your mouth, what would you do? If someone stepped on your hand in the middle of a number, how would you act? If you were in California and had to get to a performance in New York and no planes were flying, what would you do? If your grandmother wanted you to stay at her bedside in California, what would you tell her?” There were no trick answers, but the recitation of responses was my practice in “mental clarity.”

Sometimes I called France collect and talked to Jean-Pierre on the phone. The life I’d had there seemed cushioned and soft, a child’s tented garden. When Jean-Pierre was friendly (sometimes he was not), I would get off the phone and shed tears. I would sit in my room at the Y and have to talk myself back into doing my exercises. How had I, who had once been loved and had a home, thrown myself into this pit?

This could not go on forever. Fischbach had forbidden me to go near any audition until he said I was ready, but I had had thirty-six sessions with him. Week after week. On Labor Day weekend he was going away (did he have friends? it was hard to imagine) and he would do a special extra-long class with me before he left on Friday afternoon.

I was a little late, and he said, “I might have known. Do you have any idea at all what traffic is going to be like this afternoon? Any clue at all?”

“I’ll dance fast,” I murmured brightly.

This was the wrong joke to make, because it gave him the idea to have me do routines in double time. He hammered at the piano with his fingers angled like claws. I was beet-red and sweating heavily when we stopped.

“Now that you’re warmed up,” he said.

He took up a wooden yardstick from the corner. For a second I believed that he was going to hit me with it. “You know the limbo?” he said. “Did the frogs limbo in your part of La Belle Frogland?”

He held the stick out stiffly, like a traffic gate. “Under,” he said. “Lean back. Go with your pelvis first.”

I had done this before, as a teenager in Cincinnati. “Oops,” I said now, as I bent my knees and cakewalked under the ruler, my shoulders and head going last. It had been much jollier with a line of guffawing kids and calypso music on the hi-fi.

“Again,” Fischbach said.

He lowered the stick. I wriggled under. The silence was not pleasant.

“Again,” he said. The move meant thrusting my private parts at him—that was the whole comedy of this game—and for once I was not happy to be doing that. Fischbach kept his face impassive; he looked stony and perhaps a little bored.

“Again,” he said.

I had to spread my knees wider to keep my footing.

“Again,” he said.

I tried to angle one hip lower and twist my torso under the stick, which made me lose my balance. I righted myself by holding on to Fischbach’s arm. “No,” he said, and shook me away. I skidded and landed hard on my tailbone.

“You didn’t last very long,” he said.

“Yes, I did.”

“Stay, don’t move. I have floor work for you.”

He walked to the far wall. “Okay,” he said. “Come to me. On your hands and knees.”

“What?”

“Just a little crawling. Fast as you can. It’s a good workout. Don’t argue.”

I was going to argue, but then he told me not to. I thought I would just get it over quickly—I put my palms flat on the floor and I lunged and scuttled forward, like a swimmer in a race. My bare knees scraped the floor, but I kept thinking I was almost there. Soon, soon. This was a nightmare, but if I did what I had to properly, it would be finished.

“Very good,” Fischbach said, when I had reached him. “Very nice. Don’t get up, sweetheart.”

I sat on the floor, cross-legged, waiting. Sweetheart, he said that?

“One last thing,” he said. “Then you’re ready.” I actually nodded.

“Lick my shoe.”

“What?”

“You need to do this. You pick. The right or the left.”

He was wearing white canvas tennis shoes. I looked at his feet and I looked up at him. His face had almost no expression, but his eyes, in their hooded sockets, were fixed on me, to let me know that I had to do this. I respected (that is almost the right word) the clarity of his will. You might have thought we were both in the service of a great idea. For a moment I did think that. I lowered my head and I touched my tongue to the tip of his shoe, just once. The roughness left a dry spot on my tongue.

I was crying, of course, when I looked up at him. Not a mild flow of tears, but helpless, snotty sobs. Fischbach stayed poker-faced. He really did believe in some theory of severity and triumph, some grand dedication, but there was nothing at its center. He did not care whether I danced or not, or whether anyone did. There was no divine substance he was burning me down to.