Last Night in Montreal Read online

  “Joie de vivre,” said Geneviève.

  “Whatever.” He used a coffee-stained napkin to blot sweat from his forehead. “He’s just a blurred naked guy.”

  “Maybe you just don’t get it,” said Geneviève helpfully.

  “Jesus—” said Thomas, but Eli cut him off.

  “No, she’s right. I don’t get it. I work in a gallery, I’m supposed to sell this shit, which I consider the work of frauds, I actually do sell this shit, which clearly makes me a fraud, and I don’t get it. I don’t think it’s good enough. I don’t believe we should be calling it art.”

  “Then what is art?” Geneviève asked. “Let’s get to the bottom of this. It’s eleven A.M.; we can have this figured out by lunchtime.”

  “Look, I’m not saying I know,” Eli said. “I’m not saying I’m any better. I just think you have to do more than take your clothes off in front of a camera. I think you have to have some talent, not just a clever conceptual idea. I think you have to actually create something. They’re artists because they issue statements saying they’re artists, not because of anything they actually do or produce, and that’s really where my problem begins. I’m not claiming to know the answer here.”

  This quieted Geneviève—she only liked arguing with people who were willing to claim that they did know the answer, for the sheer pleasure of tackling them. At a loss, she got up and went to the counter for a coffee refill.

  “And this is what’s been bothering you lately?” Thomas asked while she was gone. “You’ve been a little off.”

  “I don’t know. It’s not just the artists in the gallery. They’re only part of it. I got a letter from my brother the other day.”

  “Zed?”

  “He’s the only one I have.”

  “I haven’t seen him around in forever. Where is he these days?”

  “Africa somewhere. Working at an orphanage. Before that he was building a school in some village in Peru. In between he went hitchhiking in Israel. And the thing with those letters is, they come from these unbelievable places, and you know why?”

  “Because he’s somewhere else. Are you feeling okay?”

  “No, look, what I mean is the letters come from these unbelievable places because one day years ago he decided to travel, so he travels. He doesn’t talk about travel. He doesn’t theorize about travel. He just buys a ticket and goes. It isn’t the gallery that’s been bothering me, it’s the inaction,” Eli said. He was watching Geneviève returning to the table with her coffee. “All the theorizing we do. Everyone talks about being an artist, everyone theorizes about their art, but no one actually does anything. No one ever takes the leap.”

  “What leap?” Geneviève asked. She was considering him over the rim of her coffee mug.

  “They never do anything. We never do anything. I’m not saying I’m exempt from this. I always thought that once the thesis was done I’d be a writer and write, you know, really groundbreaking stuff in my field, but let’s be honest here, I’m never going to finish my thesis. I’ve been writing my thesis for six years, and I’ve been a third of the way in for four and a half of them. All I can do is talk about writing, theorize about writing, but I can’t take the leap, I can’t just write. But I still call myself a writer. What the hell do you call that, if not somehow fraudulent?”

  “And the rest of us?” asked Geneviève dangerously. She hadn’t painted anything in a while.

  Eli realized he was about to step on a land mine, and retreated.

  “Sorry. I’m rambling. Ignore me,” he said. He drew a long breath. “Look, I’m not naming names here, I’m not saying I know anything, it’s just hard not to notice that none of us are actually . . . I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me today. Forget it.”

  “It’s cool,” said Thomas warily.

  “Why is it bothering you now,” Geneviève asked unpleasantly, “if you’ve been a third of the way in for that long?”

  “It’s my birthday on Thursday. I’ll be twenty-seven, and it dawned on me: twenty-seven. It’s been six or seven years since I’ve been a promising academic, or a promising anything, actually, and I think my school’s actually forgotten about me. I always wondered what would happen when I failed to meet my last thesis deadline, and then when it happened . . . my thesis deadline passed a year ago, and no one contacted me. No one. There was nothing. It’s like I’ve been struck from the school records, or like I don’t exist. And then when I think of Zed, doing things, I just don’t . . . Look,” he said, “I don’t want to talk about this. I think I’m going to go for the paper.”

  “You can get it here.”

  “And then sit in the park for a bit,” Eli said, ignoring this, “and then maybe go home and not write. Ciao.”

  Thomas waved. And he did hear Geneviève’s whispered What the hell’s wrong with him? as he walked out of the Third Cup Café into the brilliant sunlight of Bedford Avenue, but he ignored it. He stood on the sidewalk for a moment and decided not to go to the park after all, then walked slowly in a diagonal line across the deserted intersection and under the blue awning of the Café Matisse. There was a girl who read books there whom he wanted to meet.

  HIS THESIS DEADLINE passed like a signpost through a slow car window, like the last sign before the beginning of a trackless wilderness. For several nervous weeks after the circled date on the calendar, actually several nervous months, he had a falling sensation in his stomach every time the phone rang. It took some time to realize that no one was going to call him. He wasn’t about to call them. He ceased any pretense of being just on the verge of completing the document and immersed himself as completely as he could in research.

  Eli never felt particularly calm, or that he was moving even remotely in the correct direction. Still, he felt that the research in itself wasn’t without merit: he’d become somewhat of an expert in the study of absence. Specifically, dead languages, or if not dead, then at least terminally ill. He studied small languages on the edge of extinction: the oldest languages of Australia, California, China, Lapland, obscure corners of Arizona and Quebec, fading out for exactly the reasons one might expect—colonization, the proliferation of residential schools and smallpox, the dispersal of native speakers over vast distances, etc. He’d grown used to watching girls’ eyes glaze over when he started talking about it; that Lilia actually seemed to find the whole thing fascinating, watching him seriously across a table at the Café Matisse, came as a bright and exuberant shock.

  The majority of languages, he told her grandly, will disappear. Since she still seemed somewhat interested, Eli flashed his favorite statistics across the table like a Rolex: of the six thousand languages currently spoken on this earth, 90 percent are endangered and half will be gone by the end of the next century. An optimistic few hope to save a handful of them; most hope for nothing more than a chance to document a fraction of the loss. His work was part reconstruction, part thesis, part requiem, he told her. She listened quietly, apparently rapt, and asked intelligent questions just when he thought her interest couldn’t possibly be sincere. She said lightly that she was used to much more localized vanishing acts: individual people, motel rooms, cars. She wasn’t used to disappearance on a larger scale. Imagine, he said, losing half the words on Earth. Although what he was actually trying to imagine just then, as he said that, was what it might be like to kiss her neck. She nodded and watched him across the tabletop.

  Three thousand languages, destined to vanish. He’d become obsessed with the untranslatable: his idea, and the subject of his thesis (or what had been a thesis, some years earlier, before it suddenly imploded and went unfinishable on him overnight), was that every language on earth contains at least one crucial concept that cannot be translated. Not just a word but an idea, like the French déjà vu: perfect and crystalline in its native language, otherwise explainable only by entire clumsy foreign paragraphs or not at all. In Yup’ik, a language spoken by the Inuit along the Bering Sea, there is Ellam Yua: a ki
nd of spiritual debt to the natural world, or a way of moving through that world with some measure of generosity, of grace, or a way of living that acknowledges the soul of another human being, or the soul of a rock or of a piece of driftwood; sometimes translated as soul, or as God, but meaning neither. In a Mayan language, K’iche, there is the Nawal: one’s spiritual essence but separate from the self; one’s other, not exactly an alter ego or merely an avatar but a protective spirit that cannot be summoned.

  And if you accept this, he told her, this premise that every language holds something that exists in no other tongue, an entity far outweighing the sum of its words, then the loss takes on a staggering weight. It isn’t so much a question of losing three thousand words for everything. There aren’t three thousand words for everything; the speakers of Yup’ik have no reason to describe tigers in the high arctic; the speakers of the jungle languages need no language for the northern lights. It isn’t even so much about the words. His belief, the premise of the thesis, was that these are not just languages we lose in the gloaming, not just three thousand sets of every word, but three thousand ways of existing on this earth.

  “I’m sorry,” he said finally. “I didn’t mean to get so pedantic about it.”

  “It’s all right. It’s interesting,” she said.

  She had been listening for a very long time. They’d met early in the afternoon, and it was almost evening now. It had been weeks since he’d first noticed her here, sitting quietly in the Café Matisse when he walked by the window or came in for a coffee. She came here often, and when they were here at the same time he liked to try to sit as nearby as possible. On this particular day, when he’d left Thomas and Geneviève at the Third Cup Café across the intersection, there were no empty tables when he’d wandered in— thank you, God—and in a catastrophe of blind courage he’d walked across to her table, insinuated himself into the opposite seat, and introduced himself. By some small miracle she’d smiled back and said her name instead of telling him to leave her alone and wait for his own goddamn table, and that had been six or seven hours ago. The café was quiet now, and the morning waitress had left for the day. The afternoon waitress was leaning on the countertop, staring out at the uneventful street.

  “But what about you?” he asked. “You know I like dead languages, but what do you like?”

  “Live languages,” Lilia said. “Reading, taking photographs, a few other things. Do you work in the neighborhood?”

  “Yeah, a few blocks from here. I stand in an art gallery staring at the wall four days a week. You?”

  “The wall? Not the paintings?”

  “There aren’t that many paintings there—actually, there aren’t any— I don’t want to talk about my job,” he said. “I don’t like my job very much, to be perfectly honest. What do you do for a living?”

  “I wash dishes. Do you like to travel? I went to New Mexico recently; have you been?”

  “Several times. And what’s interesting,” he said, “is that we’ve been talking for hours now, and I hardly know anything about you. Where are you from?”

  She smiled. “This will sound very strange to you,” she said, “but I’ve lived in so many places that I’m not entirely sure.”

  “I see. Well. How long have you lived in New York?”

  “About six weeks,” she said.

  “And where were you just before that?”

  “You mean where was I living when I boarded a train to New York?”

  “Exactly. Yes. You arrived here from somewhere.”

  “From Chicago,” she said.

  He felt that he was finally getting somewhere. “You lived there for a while?”

  “Not really. A few months.”

  “Before that?”

  “St. Louis.”

  “Before that?”

  “Minneapolis. St. Paul. Indianapolis. Denver. Some other places in the Midwest, New Orleans, Savannah, Miami. A few cities in California. Portland.”

  “Is there anywhere you haven’t lived?”

  “Sometimes I think there isn’t.”

  “You’re a traveler.”

  “Yes. I try to be as up-front about it as possible now,” she said.

  He wasn’t sure what she meant but let it pass. “You said you liked live languages,” he said.

  “I like translating things.”

  “What do you translate?”

  “Random things that I come across. Newspaper articles. Books. It’s just something I like doing.”

  Four and a half languages not including English, she said, when pressed for more details. Español, Italiano, Deutsch, Français. Her Russian, she admitted, was shaky at best. Her wrist was warm beneath his fingertips.

  “I envy you. I don’t speak any living languages except English. What else do you like?”

  “I like Greek mythology,” she said. “I like that Matisse print over the bar. It’s the reason why I come here, actually.” She gestured at the opposite wall, and he twisted around to look. The Flight of Icarus, 1947: one of Matisse’s final works, from the time when he’d subsided from paint into paper cutouts and was moving closer and closer to the end of the line, unable to walk, his body slipping away from him. Icarus is a black silhouette falling through blue, his arms still outstretched with the memory of wings, bright starbursts exploding yellow around him in the deep blue air. He’s wingless, and already close above the surface of the water: Matisse would be dead in seven years. Icarus, plummeting fast into the Aegean Sea, and there’s a red spot on him, a symbol, to mark the last few heartbeats held in his chest.

  “I like mythology too. When did you get interested in Greek legends?”

  “Two days after I turned sixteen.”

  “That’s very specific. You got a book for your birthday?”

  “No, someone I knew was talking about the story, so I read it as soon as I could. I don’t really know Matisse, but I like that print. I like the story,” she said. “I think it’s the saddest of all the Greek legends.” She blinked; her voice seemed suddenly tired. “What time is it?”

  “Late,” he said. “Probably eight o’clock or so. May I walk you home?”

  HER HOME was a rented room with a window that looked out on an airshaft, a brick wall three feet from the glass. Night fell at one-thirty in the afternoon. The times when he came to her in that room he had the feeling of stepping into a cave, or stepping outside time. She slept on a mattress on the floor. A suitcase, opened against the wall, held a jumble of clothes and a battered manila envelope. She had a Polaroid from her childhood pinned neatly to a wall: Lilia in a diner, twelve years old in the summertime in a faroff Southern state, leaning over the countertop with the waitress.

  Lilia: she had ink stains on her fingers, and the most beautiful eyes. She wore a silver chain necklace but wouldn’t say where it was from. She was obsessed by the topography of language: she followed the maps of alphabets over obscure terrains, parted the shifting gauze curtains between window, fenêtre, finestra, fenster and peered outward, wrote out long charts of words and brought home books in five languages. She maintained a secretive, passionate life of study. She was without precedent; Eli had dedicated his life before her to not being alone, he had surrounded himself with other people for as long as he could remember, but he had never known anyone remotely like her.

  She had a mind like a switchblade. She sometimes stayed up all night. She worked four or five nights a week washing dishes at a vast Thai restaurant near the river, where Manhattan shone across the dark water at night. She returned from the restaurant at midnight with an aura of dish soap and steam, peanut oil, kitchen grime, her face shiny with exertion and her eyes too bright. She stayed up reading till morning, her lips moving as she struggled with the Cyrillic alphabet, and crawled into bed beside Eli at dawn.

  Her hair was dark and cut unevenly, in a way that he found secretly thrilling; he knew that when it got too long she cut it herself, fast and carelessly, not necessarily in the presence of a mirror. The ef
fect was rough but she was pretty enough to pull it off. She had scars on her arms, a faint and complicated pattern of lines suggesting a long-ago accident involving a great deal of broken glass, visible only under certain lights; she never talked about them, and he could somehow never bring himself to ask. She had four or five unevenly spaced freckles on her nose, like Lolita. She gave the impression of harboring enormous secrets. She had been traveling alone from city to city, in his understanding, since she was no older than sixteen or seventeen years old. She alluded occasionally to her father in New Mexico and she talked to him on the phone sometimes; her father had a girlfriend, and they had two small children together, but Eli was never sure if there was anyone else. The existence of a mother, for example, was far from clear. When he asked, she said she’d never known her mother and then went quiet.

  She moved in with him at the midpoint: three months after he walked her home from the Café Matisse and three months before she disappeared. Cohabitation held certain surprises. She had a specific way of living that seemed to him at once erratic and ritualistic and frequently caused him to wonder about her sanity—a faint unease came over him while sitting beside the bathtub, for example, chatting and watching her shave her legs, change razor blades, and then shave her legs again. She would pause occasionally to sip from a tall glass of water that sat on the edge of the bathtub next to four or five bottles of shampoo, which she used in rotation. She could disappear with her camera for hours, particularly in thunderstorms; her shift at the restaurant ended no later than midnight but on stormy nights she came home at three or four in the morning, hair plastered to her forehead, soaked to the skin. He would have suspected her of cheating in those times except that it was clear from the condition of her clothing that she hadn’t been indoors all night. She’d extract herself from layer upon sodden layer of clothing, happy and shivering and her skin cold to the touch, and then she’d spend an hour or so in a steaming-hot shower and sleep in until at least noon. She had no explanation for these evenings except that she liked walking in rainstorms and her camera was waterproof. He was desperately curious but never asked where she went. He tried not to press her for too many details, about her scars or her family or anything else; she’d come from nowhere and seemed to have no past, and it seemed possible, even in the beginning when everything was easy, that the tenuous logic of her existence in his life might collapse under close examination. He didn’t want to know.