Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy Read Online Free PDF Page B

past middle age, a desire
she herself cannot feel but understands abstractly, as an astronomer’s most
sophisticated instruments help him know about distant bodies without seeing
them, that understanding of desire that she holds at a distance because of what
we call age, what we call experience, like a second skin, and that hides the
smile or frown, though it cannot, quite, hide her tears.
    And if the letter were blank? A single sheet of white paper, unmarked save for a pair of
creases? And if the woman, austerely attired, made up, not a hair out of place,
were to sit down now with it at the kitchen table, with a pen? If she looked
for a while out the window as her cup of coffee grew cold? If
she took up the pen? If she looked at the paper then away from it again,
as though searching, looking round at the kitchen, the apartment, like a place
she had never before seen? If she applied pen to paper? If she began to write? If she wrote for a long time,
immune to our eyes, the whispery crinkle of pen on page (she has filled one
side, turns it over, begins the next side), clink of a ring on her finger on
the coffee cup, sipping mud, putting it down again, applying herself, bent low,
one manicured hand holding the paper in place, the other moving swiftly, fluently,
without pausing for thought? If she stopped writing at last? Refolded the map, now become a letter, and replaced it in its envelope? Taped
it shut? Addressed it? Searched a desk for stamps, found one, applied it? If she stood now, in the
center of the room, hands at her sides, tapping the envelope against her leg,
deciding?
    Screening
and absorbing print that isn’t print: newspapers that leave no stain,
feuilletons that never pucker the skin but only the
seeking, restless eye. She reads old media on its way out the door to new
media, photos in motion over changing captions, acting as though there were use
in a center— The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books and The New York Times washing over the transom in sloppy paper waves. She reads mommy blogs,
political blogs, book blogs, cooking blogs (but she rarely cooks, it’s Ben
who’s at home in the kitchen, who can relax there, whistling his way through
the slightly old-fashioned menus he favors: pot roast Provencal, filet of
sole), sex blogs and advice columns, blogs by women about being women, blogs by
men about everything, blogs by people in countries we have bombed, blogs by
peoples in countries we’ve yet to bomb. She follows celebrities and comedians
and authors and academics and smartasses and cleverdicks and drunkards and
addicts and her brother-in-law the author of thrillers on Twitter. Everyone
speaks English if they want to exist, but never too much of it at a time. She
reads searchingly, with bitten lip and anxious eye, trying to break out of the
bubble, to extend her breath’s reach outside the shallow mainstream of American
life in which all of us regardless of nationality are supposed to live and
thrive for all the beautiful days of our ignorance. And yet this discourse—wry,
intellectual, ineffectual—somehow slips by her trained and desperate eyes, so
that when she closes the screen with a headache it’s long past bedtime, Ben
with a pillow over his head against the light, or Lucy crying in the afternoon,
a naptime squandered, a vein throbbing so close to Ruth’s left eye it might as
well be the eye itself, hooked deep into the brain, a chain of pain leading
from the light into dark and unfulfilled hollows of her skull. Unsolaced,
unappeased, almost frantic with loneliness: the mind of the reader without
print, without the stable march of characters, same today as they were twenty
years ago in the mass-market paperbacks she devoured as a girl now solitary as
sardines in basement boxes, on yellowing paper with split spines, the books
that made her a reader, that she fell into and climbed out of as easily as a
Channel swimmer, greased like a seal, creature made for that sea. So with
laptop