Rilke

            Although I am preoccupied with words, I cannot say what I want.  Once when traveling in a foreign country, I negotiated my desire while already lying naked on a bed, legs up in the air, toes gripping the flesh of a stranger’s shoulders.  And when this man asked me, in between wet, jaunty kisses, what I wanted, all I could say was Je ne veux rien and not Prends-tu ton temps, s’il te plait, which is what I actually thought.

I do not remember this man’s name.  (I am not certain I ever knew his name.)  But his small, dingy apartment smelled of smoke, and his body felt sinewy, race-horse lean, moist with sweat.  His hair fell across my shoulders as he moved.  He spoke of things I dare not say, and some of which, truthfully, I did not understand.  When we finished, I grabbed my purse and buttoned up my blouse, slipped on my jeans, and stole a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket.  I quoted Rilke, not in French but German and said, We are never at home in our interpreted worlds.   And the man, this stranger, lay back in bed, blew me a kiss from his cupped hand, and whispered in a smooth, soft voice, Va-t’en!

I do not believe that French is the language of desire.

I am unsure about German, though I confess that like Rilke I believe if I cried out no one would hear, that I would only be reminded of my own divisions.

English is no better.  Always I must approximate.  Back home in the States, I once dated a man who was forty-three, twenty-two years older than I was then.  This man never said I love you, though it’s true he did have a cat and a mother, so he may have been lying.  Perhaps he simply did not say everything there was to say.

I gave him pet names, Peanut Butter and Honey Pie and Bear, because everything about him was thick.  But most of the time I just called him Nabs, a shortening of his Lebanese name, Nabil.

I called his cat BooBoo because that was the cat’s name.

I never met his mother, and so did not know her name.

Nabs usually called late at night, not because he wanted to talk dirty and rub his fingers over his flesh but because he wanted to discuss philosophy.  After midnight he became extremely lucid and could speak in the most straightforward manner about Husserl and Hegel.  He could breathe the body politic, phenomenology.  He quoted Buber’s Ich und Du, which he struggled to read in poor, broken German until finally he gave up to read in English instead.  When he read, his voice put me to sleep because he spoke in whispers.

I do not think Buber has been translated to Lebanese.

Nabs called me Cutie and took me out for ice cream and walks late at night, under the moon.  When he and I kissed, our glasses knocked together, and I shook beneath his hands as if everything within me were imploding.  I nibbled him and he sucked in his belly.  The black hairs on his body felt full, furry under my fingertips.

Take the advice of Marquis de Sade, he once said while we lay in bed, arms folded around each other, sheets twisted between our legs.  Don’t ever have children.  He told me that at twenty-one, I was already very frightening.  He asked me if, like Sade’s female philosopher-monsters, I preferred an alternative kind of sex.

What a pick up line, I told him.

Afterward, he said it would probably be better if I remained single.

I never quoted from Rilke because Nabs thought all poets possessed feeble minds.  I told him that of all the poets Rilke was the hardest to pin down, born in Prague, raised in a German-speaking neighborhood, offended to be called a German and an Austrian, both in equal parts.  I spoke of his soldier-father, the destruction of his homeland in war, his time in Paris with Rodin.  Rilke, I said, never felt himself a native anywhere; he was his own country--body, mind, and heart.  In Duino Elegies, I said, Rilke spoke intimately with his readers, as if in a whispery confession, and tried to overcome distance.

Nabs asked me why anyone would ever do that.

I wrote him a poem but never sent it.

Once after we’d taken a shower, Nabs wrapped his arms around my waist and asked what I wanted from life, but there was too much, then, to say.  We stood in front of a foggy mirror, his chest hairs wet against my back, steam everywhere.  He bit my neck.  With my pinkie, I penned on the mirror what I wanted (not sex but love), and when he pulled away from me, I told him I was only joking.  I tried to laugh but felt unearthly and foolish.

Sometimes when I see the moon and it’s low and full of itself in quiet ways, I still think of him.

Of the moon, a word here about our alien nature.  It is a widely regarded belief that mathematics and not words are the universal language.  Do you know what desire translates to, in math?   Would Rilke know?

When I married my husband, he plotted our spending habits on charts, month by month, line by line until a grid became full.  He said he wanted to see what we were worth.  When I laughed, he didn’t understand what I thought was funny.

I’m not exactly telling you the truth about him because my husband was not technically a mathematician.  Actually, he counted time lines on five-hundred million year old fossils­Olenellus­in Cambrian rock.  He entered all these numbers in a database and performed statistical calculations about extinction rates.

When I first met him in a library and he told me all this, it made me horny.  I said I didn’t believe anything could last that long and asked him to bed.  We had sex among fossils because he worked in the Collections and had a key.

My husband wore boxers with symbols of r2 on them that glowed in the dark.  He bought the boxers from The Gap.  The Gap has a sense of humor about things.

He was so sweet when he smiled I knew I would devour him like chocolate bite by bite.

My husband’s naked body did not look like rock and did not look old.  His cheekbones stood in high relief, his flesh contoured like a cherub’s.  Most of his skin was smooth and white though he had fine, brown hair all over his chest that I would not have expected.  I called him my Angel.  I wanted to carry his skin on mine as a soldier carries a flag, announcing himself to others.

Once, during a rainy night he said he would give me anything I wanted, but at that time I couldn’t think of a thing I could actually keep.

He said, Let’s stay together until we die.

I quoted to him and said, Every angel is terrifying.  I read him all of Rilke’s Elegies in bed, before we slept at night.  I said, Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror.

He said, Susan, poetry sounds beautiful, but I just don’t understand it.

I told him I didn’t understand how to calculate time and the earth’s history on a one-dimensional line, from beginning to end.

We washed dishes together, cooked meals.  With him I became so full I gained weight.  He read articles while I graded papers on Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal.  We turned off the lights at the same time each and every night.

After ten years things became so quiet I developed a predilection for the future.  When we gazed at rocks and mountains, I could hear the smallest cracking and knew that neither the mountain nor I could do anything about this fact.  I didn’t know how to describe the sound of erosion in a way that my husband believed.

I still marveled over fossils.  For a long time, that was all we could talk about.  Finally, I said, Are we any less subject to time than rock?

He said he didn’t understand the question.  People are not mountains, he said.

When I left, my husband said that he was better at loving, though when he said this, it didn’t sound childish; it only sounded like a statement of fact.

Last I heard, he had married an actuary.  She computes insurance risks and premiums.  I can only hope they are happy.  Sometimes I wonder what she thinks when she sees his boxers from The Gap.  I am sure he hasn’t gotten rid of them.  He never gets rids of anything, even things that are old.

This is getting old, you say now.  We are in bed together, and I can’t tell if you are angry or joking, though I have seen you naked and felt you pressing between my legs, so I feel as though I should know.  If you’re going to talk like this every time I ask you what you want, you say, I may have to reconsider sleeping with you again.  Then you add, I was really just asking you what you wanted to eat.  I always get hungry after sex.

You are a good lover with strong, nimble fingers, and it’s true, I suppose, that you are still hungry.  You rub your belly then lie back and adjust the pillow.  You stare at the ceiling fan which swirls above us.  Rain hits the window.  I have seen the sky tonight, a shattered, pearl gray.

I want to say you are a sweet man even though you are hard, emotionally balled-up like a fist.  I want to say you have the most lovely, milky brown eyes, and your skin is warm and heavy.

I sit up, lean over and kiss your stomach instead.  It’s true, I tell you.  I said too much.  Should we fix a snack?

Not now, you say.  Now you’ve ruined it.  Now I’m only tired.

It is tiring, I agree, all this history and desire.

I could die while listening to you, you say.   I’ve aged twenty years since you’ve started.  I’m really glad you didn’t start from the beginning, or go on about all the men you’ve slept with.

That’s true, I say.  There’s a lot I left out.

I want to tell you that like the foreign man we are still strangers, and like my Lebanese man I have no way to know if I reach you, and unlike my ex-husband’s charts, there is no good way to measure the distance between us.  Instead I ask, Why did you let me talk for so long?

I dozed off, you confess.  I remember the French guy and war and also something about the Marquis de Sade.

Oh good, I say, leaning back on my pillow.  Those were all the best parts.

Maybe I can listen when you can say what you want in one sentence or less, you tell me.  Really, you need to make things simpler.

I pull up the blanket and turn to face you.  I cover your leg with my leg.  Truthfully, my wants are so large that I can’t fit the words around them.  I want to tell you I feel lonely.  I want to ask if, on rainy nights, you are ever moved to speak the language of the poets.  But mostly, I want to feel proximity of body, mind, and heart.  I want, like Rilke, to cover the terrible nakedness in you and in me, to fling the emptiness out of our arms and into the open spaces.

Perhaps Rilke was wrong.   I cannot ask you this.  You teach history and speak frequently of soldiers, countries, and war.

Do soldiers, away from their homeland, carry flags?  I ask instead.

You scoff at this and shift under the covers.  Only if they want to get shot, you say.

It’s frustrating, I say, to be without a home and country.

Not really, you say, as you strip off the covers and get up to make a snack.  There are always borders and opposition.  Sometimes, you tell me, it’s easier to remain quiet and say nothing.

Sandra Novack is an award-winning short story writer whose work has appeared in Descant, Mississippi Review, Paterson Literary Review, Northwest Review, North Dakota Quarterly, South Carolina Review, and Gulf Coast, among many others. Her collection, Love and Other Disasters, was a finalist in both the Spokane Prize and the Tartt Contest. She holds an MA in Literature and an MFA in Fiction Writing from Vermont College. She has taught at Duke University, NC State, the University of Cincinnati and on-line at writers.com.

Email: Sandra Novack

Return to Table of Contents