Excerpt: Private Showings

The face of a card of a headless woman in hand meets the body of a saint cut off at the head.



The meeting comes to view at a distance of several feet from a metal bench at the side of a pool in a city park to the holy figure in stone standing guard over the water, over floating green buds that have fallen from trees in the bloom of spring. No reason appears for this meeting here. Other than missing their heads from their necks, the saint and the woman have little in common: he wears the robes of a medieval churchman and cradles his head in his upraised palms directly above the pool, while she stands naked in a slouching pose with her head nowhere in sight on the card. Still, the two find themselves paired at this small, calm square set on a hill overlooking a crowded district of a city, as the sunlight of what had been a clear April day drifts into a glow ascending from the electric lights that flicker alive together in the streets and windows far below.



Legend recounts that centuries ago, after the saint had been tortured and beheaded in martyrdom for his beliefs, his headless body walked the streets for miles in a miraculous impulse. Eventually, the body arrived at this location and this pool, where the hands washed the blood clean off the head they had carried, before the body continued on to where it would finally fall to rest a few miles from here.



In the comparison at hand, the state of the woman on the card suggests no such legend attached to her figure. Three words printed beneath the soles of her feet offer no clues to either her name, her story, or why she now joins the saint in this city at dusk. Her card has simply come up here, as if it had just been dealt off the deck in a game of chance and mystery.



The card now rises so the top of the neck of the woman appears to wear the head of the saint⎯at least, to the naked









Walking Montmartre





I⎯first name, X, middle name, X, last name, X⎯suddenly recognize your name, much like men give to pleasures: to jewels, to candies, to spices, to scents.



To elements of weather.



An element of weather becomes your name. A long slip of spring mist like a ribbon pulled from a Maypole wafts between the cabinets of internment for the bodies of poets, artists, and respected citizens, and now settles around a fresh tablet for epitaphs in an obscure, corner plot. The mist holds its ground. I, XXX, now watch it twist around the tablet like a ghost of dead ivy, and grip the stone with an embrace of markings.



By this name, I know you. I would never have known you by any other name than this name that lives for me. What the world saw as a stage name, I now see as a name of honour, among the names of notable figures in a cemetery in this strange city where I find myself. A familiar name in this city with an unfamiliar language.



I excite myself, as your name has always excited me. So I steady myself by drinking deeply from a flask of this inspired champagne native to the country of this city, in a toast to your true name. I sense that your name has come to me as a sign that I will soon view you here: What else could it mean? But as I lower my flask, your name vanishes into the evening spring air, touched with light rain.



No matter. Your name lighting on what is this milestone to me says that I am finally on the right path in this lifelong search of mine, starting in these fields of darkling memories that lay so close to neon skylines, in this city of love and light.



So I turn from the cemetery and stroll unhurried, solemnly (as I have all night) toward the boulevard of pleasure that I seek. Between the long nameless slips of spring mist before me, I see as my guideposts the parallel rows of trees planted along a gravel meridian in the middle of the boulevard, for the clumps of green buds on the limbs bring out the signs in neon around the vicinity as if they are bearing a new invention in fruit. The words give direction to me, offering to show me the lights. And they show me a host of lights. Emblazoned on buildings and shops of entertainment and amusement, the lights write themselves into more letters, more words in flowing, antique script that loop and coil over the traffic of visitors and funseekers on the dynamic sidewalks of this boulevard of pleasure. The words never stop flashing out to me, to sketch themselves in reflections on the windows along the boulevard, and to repeat their carnal messages, so full of promise. In these words, my path into the lights becomes as clear to me as the glow of the candlelight to the moth in timeworn stories of romance—only the flame of my destination glows coldly in the light from galvanic rods and tubes that rule over the sidewalks like nocturnal rainbows barely fastened to earth, from ceiling lamps that cast their off-white glow on the zinc bars and wall mirrors of the all-night cafes, and I feel myself as immersed as the moth would feel if the candlelight had suddenly turned to an amber snare before it could burn. I stand still. I am held mesmerized by a beacon in electric red, an artificial windmill whose shining vanes studded with tiny bulbs cut smoothly and mechanically above my head through the slips of night mist that brought your name to me.

The vanes move without noise, without the grinding of gears, or the creaking of axles and shafts. I still stand still. I have lost myself in this windmill that moves windlessly.



A woman pants in screams, and shatters the spell of the windmill on me. Is that you, calling to me? No, this woman is in a song that surges on the beats of a bass and drums, joining at the heart of a thudding pulse; synthetic strings pull away from the heart in a spiraling crescendo, and now they sweep back down as the backing rhapsody to a monotonic chorus that chants in one stiff voice, “Love. On the Beat. Love. On. The Beat.” The song comes out of speakers from the nearby cafes on the boulevard, and from the shops that display tiers of cheap radios and portable stereo music systems in show windows full of white light⎯all tuned to the same station with the song of the hour. The resonant, throaty voice of a man now speaks to the chant with a recitation in the language of this city that I cannot understand, but which sounds to me⎯in its lowing, near whisper⎯like a raw, Latinate incantation toward the use of lust. A saxophone wails, and the woman’s voice breaks into shrieks. “Love. On the Beat,” echoes on. “Love. Love. Love. On. The. Beat.”

The song grabs me, spinning me backwards in a dance that mimics the walk of the groups of visitors who mingle with the locals on the sidewalks. This international community appears to wrap me into its body as if I am entering a New Orleans funeral parade: My head lolls on my shoulders in time to the song that keeps me to the beat of the night; my face becomes a wide-mouthed, grinning mask; and my body flows with champagne like a transfusion of sparkling young blood into me. I grin openly at the Greek and Tunisian shopkeepers waiting in booths along the street to serve up sandwiches of thick rolls and spiced meats to the tourists and funseekers who surround me. In a rush, a group of chattering Japanese tourists pass by me, and wave and point and aim their expensive cameras at the turning vanes of the electric red windmill that I have just left behind; they surprise me, so that I lose my step here, and now I walk straight into these portable clothes racks where I am hung up, caught in a row of black and brown leather bomber jackets that cling to me in body and musky smell. Wrestling with these jackets in front of rows of open-air stalls, I begin to feel as if I, XXX, am as much on display as the gimcrack watches and souvenir trinkets and strands of gold-plated jewelry and even more of those radios and stereos that keep playing “Love, On the Beat. Love. On The Beat” all at the same time, incessantly. Finally, I manage to push myself out of this heavy leather tangle, and I stumble out into the sidewalk again, trying to regain my sense of direction along with this group of plodding German hausfrau and their sodden husbands who have congregated around me, and who argue like gaggles of geese clucking and squawking about where they should fly to next.



I slow down, to let the Germans go ahead. I have found my direction, there, down a well-worn sidestreet that a crowd of dead-drunk Americans has just entered. I hear their loud laughter and vulgar words erupting from the sides of their big mouths⎯the same words that you would revive and enliven with the spark due to them, until they were no longer bitter and ugly and violent oaths from doltish louts such as these. Their lurching bodies disappear into a patch of mist skimming just above street level, so I follow along with the sound of the voices. Now I discover the doors of two tiny bars, bearing signs with the names of Aphrodite and Cleopatre, written in the neon antique script common to the signs of this district. Each bar contains only one square window no larger than the screen of a portable television set, and they glow softly with a light that appears to me like tufts of red cotton. I peer into the window of the bar named Aphrodite. A woman inside notices me and smiles and continues to look at me as she sips her drink and lounges in the velvety interior tinged with red and blue bulbs from shaded desk lamps set on the bartop. She sips her drink, her eyes stay on me, she places the drink carefully on the bartop, and she smiles at me exactly as she did before. I am tempted to enter and sit with her in the light, and share the champagne I carry with me...but I now feel weak with that thought. …



I am thinking of how I might become sickened by my contact with her: How she would just take me inside and hurry me along to make room for her next visitor⎯leaving me with what I do not know. And so she brings you⎯the only hostess I want this evening⎯to mind again. You were always there for me, and you allowed me control of the length of our time together. You never sickened me in any of my viewings of you, no, you were cleanly removed from such embarrassing and fatal consequences. You knew⎯and you still know⎯how to use lust, and it is only natural that you should call me to this city of our destination. As I look at how near I am to this woman in the light of the bar (practically feeling her against me, with her smile in my eyes) my thoughts return to how you are truly due the offer ahead that I bear for you along these streets, this night.



So I, XXX, turn away from the bars, and return to the main boulevard. To these pools of men and women in the mist and light rain, and directly into the crowds of spring. I slide my hand into the right side pocket of my clean, stylish English raincoat that I purchased especially for this occasion, find the flask of champagne that has carried me through this night … and I instantly catch sight of that grandiose white marble church up there, set on high atop a bluff overlooking the pleasure district, there, at the end of the street to my right. Those ivory spires, the gaudy flourishes of stonework, the supreme reach of the floodlit walls bring to my mind a celestial cake that has been baked and frosted in heaven for a holiest of holy matrimony. “I do,” I whisper at the sight. I drink a toast to it, whispering again, “I do.”



And, of course, I, XXX, know that the “I” in the “I do” is the “I” of XXX.



That was too good. The fizz of the champagne on the roof of my mouth, and my whisper of “I do” together feel like your kiss on my lips and your