Elisabeth called three days after we had had dinner together in Soho. It was a Sunday. I was surprised to hear her voice, I had thought it was Astrid phoning when the Lebanese heart surgeon knocked at my door in the morning, still in his dressing gown, and said there was a phone call for me. Did I still want to see her pictures? Yes, I did. Our conversation had inspired me, her enthusiastic, self-forgetful way of speaking of the artists we both liked, and if in weak moments I had doubted whether there was anything new to be said of such a thoroughly interpreted and canonised movement as the New York School, every doubt had evaporated the morning after our meeting. Was I doing anything that afternoon? The suggestion took me by surprise, I had only just had breakfast and had actually planned to spend Sunday in Brooklyn, write for a few hours and afterwards perhaps go for a walk in Prospect Park, which I had not yet visited. She lived near Tompkins Square, between First Avenue and Avenue A. It was a quiet sunny Sunday in the East Village, there was hardly any traffic and I enjoyed strolling with the warmth of the sun on my back among the low brick houses with black-painted fire escapes on their façades. The jagged outlines of the fire escapes and their twisted, zigzag shaped shadows on the walls made me think of Franz Kline’s dramatic abstract architecture of broad black brush-strokes, which I had been writing about that very morning when the heart surgeon knocked at my door. There was a lazy, laid-back atmosphere, almost idyllic, although in some places it was still a rough area. The homeless basked in the sunshine among their shopping trolleys filled with junk, muffled up in their filthy coats, even the vigilant pushers stood closing their eyes against the sun when there were no customers. The Puerto Rican mothers took walks with their buggies beneath the trees in Tompkins Square and shouted jovially to each other in Spanish, that soft, childish variety of Spanish the Latin Americans speak, and the down-at-heel punks with their green Mohican hair and rings in their noses and eyebrows had taken off their leather jackets to sun their thin white arms. Some black guys with dreadlocks sat among the flickering patches of sunshine, beating their drums in a shining, drifting cloud of marihuana. It was a district sought after by young people, especially if they were artists or dreamed of the artist’s life. Everywhere there were small theatres and galleries in basements and vacated shops, and if you sat long enough in one of the chic alternative cafés you could listen to their grandiose plans for the next exhibition, the next play, concert or performance. Most of them were hopelessly untalented, but the East Village crowd formed a closed circle whose members confirmed to each other that they were cool, and rather than aspiring to a breakthrough on Broadway they seemed to prefer the studiously ragged and Bohemian cosiness in which they could feel young and subversive, long after they had passed thirty.
I found her house and rang the bell. A long time passed and I was just about to go and find a telephone box when she stuck her head out of a window on the third floor. She hadn’t expected me so early. Her long hair hung down vertically like a halted, golden-brown waterfall around her face, as she smiled and told me to let myself in and threw the key down on the sidewalk. The staircase was narrow and scruffy and there were several doors on each floor. Hers was open, I knocked lightly before stepping inside. The apartment consisted of a kitchen diner and one large room where she worked and slept. She was in the kitchen, opening a tin of cat food while a white cat rubbed itself around her calves. She had bare legs and feet, very long and chalk-white legs beneath a pair of synthetic indigo blue football shorts, and her hair hung like a musketeer’s cape around a checked washed-out man’s shirt with so many missing buttons that her stomach showed when she moved. Was she dressed so lightly because she had not expected me until later? She smiled and made a humorously apologetic gesture with the can before kneeling down and serving the impatient cat. Then she rose again and flung out her arms, suddenly a bit shy. Well, this was where she lived. Would I like a glass of wine? She had already set out the bottle on a tray with two glasses and a bowl of salted peanuts, an excellent Orvieto, I noticed, and she carried the tray into the room and put it down on the worn floorboards, almost ceremonially, between a battered sofa and an old deck chair with striped canvas. Her easel stood at the opposite end of the room, on the other side of a rolled-up futon, between the canvases leaning against one wall in stacks, with the stretchers outwards. I chose the sofa and she crouched in the deck chair with her long legs pulled up underneath her, watching me as if to see what I thought. Again I felt old in a vague way, although I was only thirty-seven that afternoon, as I sat breathing in the smell of turpentine and oil paint in her apartment, and fixed her grey eyes for slightly longer than I would otherwise have done, so as not to let myself be distracted by her folded and, something I could no longer ignore, particularly well-shaped legs. She rested her glass against her pink knee and gazed into the corn-yellow liquid for a moment, turned the glass around and said she had almost not called me. I cleared my throat and asked why. She blushed a little as she looked up at me. She knew quite well she was not really good, not yet, she still had a long way to go. We had had such a good talk and she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to live up to everything we had spoken about, so I would think she was just full of big words without knowing how to put them together. Her face didn’t seem nearly as sharp as it had done a few evenings before, in artificial light, but I was struck again by the contrast between her unruly, romantic hair and her angular features, the prominent chin, the narrow mouth, the pale grey eyes and long nose which was a trifle crooked. Her nose had a bend in the middle, which gave her a slightly degenerate profile and led you to recall certain dukes, astronomers and encyclopaedists of the eighteenth century. Her face, devoid of make-up, radiated an almost ascetic spirituality in contrast to the unpractical luxuriance of the hair. The golden-brown locks were constantly in her way so she had to stroke them away from her forehead while she spoke. They constantly interrupted the conversation like something irrelevant and lacking in seriousness which she brushed aside, impatiently or mechanically as she tried to pursue an idea, find the words that could take her on in the direction of what she was attempting to approach in her thoughts.
She was relying on me to express my honest opinion. There were so many people who just patted her on the shoulder for one reason or another, but what I had to say would mean something to her. She had read what I wrote, she was sure that at least I would be able to see what she was striving for. I said I was glad she had plucked up the courage to call me, and told her how our conversation had helped me to overcome the doubt I had sometimes felt about my plan to write on the New York School. Her genuine enthusiasm had convinced me, I said. She smiled, embarrassed, and took a sip of wine. It had been quite unexpected, I went on, to meet someone who thought the same way about Morris Louis and Mark Rothko, no one seemed to take any interest in them any more, they had been canonised and then forgotten. I felt I might have exaggerated my doubt as well as the constructive effect of our meeting on my work, but she looked at me attentively as I spoke, and after all it wasn’t totally wrong, merely laid on rather thick, for the sake of clarity. Again she supported the foot of her glass against her kneecap and gazed into the wine, as if looking into a crystal ball. It was not only because she was shy about her pictures, that she had hesitated to call. I lit a cigarette, and she looked at me briefly as I blew out smoke. She had also been afraid I would misunderstand her. People talked so much. She was not to know what the curator had said about her, perhaps I thought – no, she interrupted herself, that sounded utterly daft. What did? I asked. She smiled ironically, perhaps I believed she was the sort who ran after married men. We laughed over that, and I said she didn’t give that impression at all, and besides, the curator had said only nice things about her. I didn’t say anything about his conspiratorial smile, instead I said that actually, I had thought the same when I called her, that I too had been afraid she would misunderstand me. As a whole it was astonishing how much we had already talked about us. When you meet a woman, at first you talk about anything else, anything out in the world that may interest you. Later on you talk mostly about each other, about your own story and the other’s and about the sensational fact that you are together until you again start to talk about the world outside, if you don’t stop saying anything at all. Perhaps Elisabeth too thought we had talked enough about us, for she suddenly rose with a cheerful remark that she might as well get it over with, and began to pull out canvases from the stacks along the wall.
Her pictures were certainly not as impossible as she made out, but her own evaluation of them was actually quite precise. Her sources of inspiration were still visible, but it would be wrong to call her an imitator. There was a huge gap between the confidently balanced abstractions I saw at the gallery in Wooster Street seven years later, but the rudiments were there already, the awareness of colour and attitude to the material, and above all I could see that she was not satisfied with easy solutions. But there was still something subdued and ‘felt’ about her canvases, a slightly too busy use of sponge and thinner, as if she was afraid of being too obvious, of adding flesh and bone to her compositions, an anxiety which made her weakest pictures too decorative and eager to please. She had gone into the kitchen, I could hear her washing up, she dropped cutlery and pans on the floor, clumsy as she was and clearly terrified at the idea of what I was thinking about her work. When I was alone with her pictures and passed from one to another, concentrating on finding out what to think about them, I felt both serene and crestfallen. What I had repressed during our dinner in Spring Street because I was so relieved to be freed from my futile daydreams of the mysterious beauty in the sculpture garden behind the Museum of Modern Art, had announced itself the more painfully when we met again and sat opposite each other, I on the ravaged sofa, she in the deck chair, with her beautiful long legs folded up under her chin so the comical football shorts, probably without her noticing, crept up in tight folds along her perfectly arched thighs around the little curve of her sex. I had done my best to censor away that part of my field of vision as she was telling me how her fear of being misunderstood had almost stopped her from calling me, but I couldn’t hide my attraction from myself, and it would be hard enough to keep it from her. How depressingly trivial it was. Could I really not meet a woman who thought and talked on the same frequency as myself without immediately getting ideas from the sight of her thighs just because they were lovely, and because she unwittingly exposed them to my ferocious gaze? Even when she clearly suggested that the mutual wavelength we had been lucky enough to find should be kept free of irrelevant erotic noise. I went into the kitchen to join her. She sat at the kitchen table with the cat on her lap, apparently immersed in a newspaper article. I sat down facing her and said what I thought about her pictures. I spared neither my acknowledgement nor my critical objections, where they were concerned I was even a little brutal in my honesty, and I speculated on whether I might perhaps not have been quite so honest if she had not given me to understand that our new acquaintance was absolutely platonic. Was I even punishing her a bit? Or was I merely completing the clarification of the kind of relationship we were to have which she herself had introduced, to cut myself off definitively from the risk of committing follies? She looked at me and took pains trying not to blink, absent-mindedly scratching the cat behind the ear. Silence fell when I finished speaking, and in the silence the cat jumped down from her lap with a soft thump and stretched before slinking into the next room. Now she didn’t even have that to occupy her hands with. She cleared her throat, pushed the hair away from her cheek and said I was right. She was glad, she said, that I had been so direct, it was almost like getting a present, and in reality she did know where her weak points were, but it was sometimes easier to realise when it came from someone else, that only happened rarely, she could really put my criticism to good use. I almost felt too sorry for her and tried to retract a little, but she persisted in her self-criticism, until I was forced to praise the best pictures fervently to put an end to all this honesty.
She said she was looking forward to reading my book on our mutual painter favourites and asked why I had doubted whether it was worth writing. I wondered whether she questioned me on my self-doubt in order to redress the balance between us, now she herself had revealed her uncertainty, but I couldn’t make out whether she asked because it gave her pleasure to shake the pedestal on which she had apparently placed me, or because my confession of doubt had increased her sympathy. I replied that my problem was the same for anyone wanting to write about artists who were neither academic nor literary. The paradox involved in writing about the New York School was that the strength of their painting actually derived from its consistently non-linguistic character. Their non-conceptual pictures evaded every description, every verbal characterisation, and you would never be able to contain them or the effect they had on you even if you used the most sensitive vocabulary. Something would always remain which could not be expressed in words, and it was this remnant, this experience beyond words that made you keep returning to them. An experience that could only be expressed in painting itself and only unfold in the meeting between the eye and the purely physical, non-referential presence of the picture. A combination of consciousness, matter and form that could not be interpreted because it was unique in the deepest and most unfathomable meaning of that word, whereas language always had to make use of similarities and contrasts, in other words, of comparisons, in order to set the consciousness in motion. The only linguistic statements that came anywhere near what I was talking about were perhaps the paradoxes of the Zen Buddhist sages, because to them the exercise of disciplines such as archery and calligraphy elicited the same spontaneous insight as that which on rare occasions occurred in the meeting with a perfectly accomplished picture. She listened with an intense gaze that seemed to register every movement in my face, while at the same time in her thoughts she was in a totally different place, and I must admit I was quite moved by my little toast to pure painting. As I was speaking I actually decided that something like this should be the preface to my book. With such a self-critical prelude I wouldn’t have promised too much. Suddenly she rose, as if she could not take in any more, and suggested a walk. There is a limit to the number of ways in which you can be together with someone in an apartment, you can sit opposite each other in different seats, or you can go to bed, and when the latter possibility is excluded, there comes a time when you are tired of the first one, especially when you don’t yet know each other so well and the pauses in conversation should preferably herald a deeper stage of mutual contact. We had already become quite close through our love for the New York School, and now that was enough, now something different must happen if we didn’t want to risk ending up in a blind alley. I scratched the cat politely under the chin while she pushed her bare feet into a pair of worn-out basketball boots. She put on a scruffy old raincoat and a pair of scratched sunglasses and lifted her hair up over the coat collar with a shy smile, as if she wanted to excuse its immoderate growth, and soon afterwards we were down on the street.
She walked fast, with long energetic strides, and as I walked beside her I noticed for the first time that we were of equal height, if she wasn’t a bit taller. All the same, we must have looked an odd couple, she in her bombed coat, with bare legs and dusty canvas boots, I in my tweed jacket and polished shoes. I felt hopelessly conventional, almost like a cop in plain clothes, as we walked through the East Village, which seemed to be inhabited by cosmopolitan village originals, so that eccentricity had become the norm while the normal was a quiet sensation. What could she have seen in me, an intellectual bourgeois creature in tweed jacket and newly ironed, pale blue shirt? I felt a stranger, not quite myself, and wondered what kind of relationship we were establishing. There was nothing in the least flirtatious or tacitly significant in the way we spoke to each other, and I felt reassured by the idea that anyway it could not be the start of an affair, now I had visited her at home and we had gone out again, into public, neutral space. Was it the start of a friendship? I pictured Astrid and the children. They had finished dinner now, Simon was most likely lost in some star war or other on his computer, Astrid was probably reading a bedtime story to Rosa, and I saw her on the sofa with the small figure who had almost disappeared inside the duvet she had dragged with her into the living room. At the same time I was walking here in the afternoon sun on the other side of the Atlantic ocean beside a girl I knew hardly anything about, far away from my life, my town, my daily round, where every step I took was a step along familiar, well-trodden paths. We followed the Bowery for a while past the dusty shops with equipment for restaurant kitchens and traversed Little Italy and Soho towards the Hudson. From time to time I pointed out some anonymous detail that had caught my attention, like a naive tourist, as I described to her how my experience of pure painting corresponded to my experience of the mysterious presence of things when you concentrated on their physiognomy alone, detached from their purpose or significance. I told her about my childhood when I had moved away from my parents into a ruin to vegetate over the passage of light and shadows across the collapsed remnants of walls and fallen beams. She understood me, she had been like that as a child too, and like me she could fall into a reverie over the pattern in a manhole cover or the torn posters on a wall. We talked about the special, though uneventful moments when the sudden lightness of an unconscious, inadvertent movement and the light that falls upon it, and the shadow that it briefly outlines, when all this is united in an inscrutable way with one’s gaze, as if the movement arose and issued from the eyes that follow it. At one point I happened to kick a big rusty nut on the sidewalk so that it ran over the sunlit paving, balancing on the edge of its own shadow like a runaway figure eight, and hovering in a diminishing spiral until it toppled over and turned into a nut again. She bent down to pick it up, then passed it to me with a smile saying it was from her to me so I wouldn’t forget our meeting. I still have it in a drawer somewhere. Then she suddenly asked me to tell her something about my wife, as if for safety’s sake she wanted to remind me of our tacit agreement, in case I might have misunderstood something.
It was quite strange to hear her speak the words ‘your wife’, and equally strange to talk about Astrid, summarily describing her, rather like the way people give a description of themselves in a lonely hearts advertisement. Thirty-eight, film editor, narrow eyes, wide cheek bones, slim, chestnut brown hair that gets curly in wet weather, previously married to a well-known film director, mother of two, the eldest from the first marriage, likes Truffaut, crayfish parties, tramps beside the sea, antiques, Catholic kitsch and trips to southern Europe, cool and reserved in the opinion of others, but in fact intuitive, considerate and sensual behind the façade. Was that Astrid? She suddenly seemed so remote and small to my inner eye. Had I said too much already, or should I have said nothing at all, because that would be too little anyhow, regardless of how much I said? Both. But yet another threatening question hit me when we reached the West Side Highway and walked in the direction of the World Trade Center with a cool breeze in our faces on the wide sidewalk beside the sparkling river, among the puffing joggers, along the same stretch I would take a week after Astrid had left. It is the same thought that has pursued me ever since the morning she stood in front of the mirror and casually announced that she wanted to go away, so casually I forgot to ask her why. The same question that poses itself each time I see her again before me, standing in the bedroom doorway regarding me, a few minutes before she vanishes. Do I know Astrid at all? Do I know anything about her except what I know about the years we lived together, the things we did together, and the fragments she told me about the time before we met, just as summarily as the description I had given Elisabeth? And does she know anything more about me? Elisabeth asked how long we had been married. Ten years?! She shook her big hair incredulously but respectfully. So it could be done then! I laughed and kept my voice light as I spoke of being liberated from the impatient and egocentric expectations of youth, of the happiness that could tolerate daylight, tolerate getting creased, and while she listened and looked at me attentively, I suddenly felt it all sounded so thin and pale, and it seemed to me that she too could see and hear the faint shadow beneath my adult smile and confident words.
But it was true, wasn’t it, that was what it was like. Wasn’t it? I asked her about her own situation. Now I was the one who had a balance to redress, I who had exposed myself and expected a disclosure from her, give and take, just as I had repaid her artistic self-criticism with the account of my occasional writing crises. We had stopped to look out over the deserted quays and the empty river, the wind had freshened and pulled at her hair and her coat, and she pushed aside the locks that blew across her face as she smiled faintly and looked out at the pale blue and blue-grey and petrol-blue water ruffled up by the wind in restless fleeing flurries. It was a long time since she had been together with anyone. Two years earlier she had found herself pregnant, he was an artist too, back in Copenhagen, it had ended badly. That was when she came to America. She had grown used to being alone most of the time, she didn’t mind, although sometimes she had to ask herself whether she wasn’t getting too good at it, at being alone. Now and again she felt like going home. It was a tough city, you didn’t get anything handed to you on a plate, but on the other hand she liked having to fight. She didn’t really know what she’d expected. Sometimes she missed being in a place where people knew her. A speck of dust flew into my eye, it felt like a pine cone and the tears ran down one cheek. She turned towards me like someone suddenly waking and opened my eyelid with one finger, but she couldn’t see anything, and suddenly the speck had gone. A couple of seconds passed before I said it had gone, in which her fingers still rested against my cheek and you can say I made use of the moment, that I withheld relevant information, so to speak, as I lightly took hold of her wrist, as if I wanted to remove her hand. We stood like that for a little while, not long but long enough, I with her wrist in my hand as we looked into each other’s eyes, I with my red, tear-filled eye, then she made a movement with her hand and I let it go, and she turned to the river. I mustn’t get fond of you, she said. No, I said, and looked in the same direction as she did, over at Colgate’s clock that caught the sun so you couldn’t make out the time. Then we stood there for a while, quite close together. A crazy, aimless place to stand, with our backs to the calm, monotonous Sunday traffic, and the deserted, sooty warehouses. She turned her face towards me, serious and with a new gentleness. You are strong, she said. Why would she think so? I said nothing. She said she was cold and wanted to go home, I could get a train from Church Street, she said. I said I would walk part of the way with her. She said I didn’t need to. I said I knew that. We started to walk. I tried to find something to say, something light, anything, but managed nothing except scattered and rambling remarks separated by endless pauses, on the way back to the East Village. I couldn’t make out if she was the one who had been good at hiding her feelings or I who had been blind. As a whole we had been clever at misunderstanding each other. We hesitated in front of her street door, she took a long time to find her keys. When she had opened the door she turned to me and said goodbye. I kissed her, she made no resistance. I hope you know what you’re doing, she said. I said I knew. I hadn’t the least idea.
They are the same things you do, the same movements, and yet you feel it must be different, mean something else, because it is another person meeting your eyes or closing her eyes as you bend over her. Why did I take it so much to heart? Was it because for ten years I hadn’t slept with anyone except Astrid? Was it merely what is said to be ‘a digression’? Well, I’d apparently been digressing for a long time, although unaware of it myself, long before the afternoon I sat gawping at a modern young woman in the sculpture garden behind the Museum of Modern Art, completely led astray by the utterly improbable hypothesis that she might be identical with this Elisabeth I had originally no intention of calling, supposedly in defiance of the curator’s raffish expression, as if he had given me the telephone number of the most luxurious tart of all time, but certainly just as much in fear of what I myself might think of doing. But if it was not a question of just another weary married man who wanted a bit on the side now he had a break from the daily round, and right over in America at that, far from any curious or judgmental eyes, then Elisabeth was merely an extra in my private little drama, the absolutely chance object of my pent-up desperation. That was how I put it to myself later, chafing with shame, but I was more tender as I stood in her apartment once more that afternoon and embraced her among her canvases, while the cat rubbed itself jealously around my trouser legs and her bare calves. We remained standing for a long time without moving, she with her hands clasping the revers of my jacket and her head resting on my shoulder so her hair tickled my nose, locked in that long embrace, unable to move, perhaps because neither of us knew where we were going. I came to think of another embrace in another apartment, another twilight hour, when I had walked the town off its feet with Inès after she had turned towards me, standing alone in a quiet shadowy gallery among the weathered marble portraits of forgotten emperors. And I came to think of the chasm that had opened up in me when I left my childhood ruin, where I had lived for a couple of weeks with the mice and the wild cats, lost and happy, and moved home again to my parents’ empty, silent house. That intangible distance I believed I had put behind me many years later when Inès drew me to her in front of the window looking out onto the Jewish cemetery with its crumbling unreadable headstones. As I stood holding Elisabeth tight it seemed as if I had stepped across the same distance a few minutes earlier when I took the last stride over to her and opened my arms. As if the old distance had opened up again while Rosa and Simon grew between Astrid and me as time went on with us, without my seeing it, perhaps because I had so much more than myself to look after. Was I about to deceive Astrid, or had I, through the years with her, deceived both her and myself? Had I after all left the most primordial part of my self when I took the decisive step and seized the chance, that evening in my kitchen when I caressed Astrid’s cheek for the first time, since she happened to be the one who had turned up in my loneliness? Nor had I known then exactly what I was doing. Slowly Elisabeth loosened her grasp of my jacket, I let my arms sink down, and she took a step backwards, looking at me, shy and slightly confused. I had no idea what she read in my face, but she must be able to see something, exposed as I was to her eyes. She let her coat fall to the floor and undressed before me, until she stood completely naked, face to face with the strange, fully dressed man who had invaded her life, as if she wanted him to know what he was taking on, see her as she had been created with her small breasts and prominent ribs. Then she went over to the rolled up futon and spread it out, kneeling to straighten the sheet, and I noticed the greyish dirty colour of her heels and missed her already, although she had only gone a few steps away. I could hear the police car sirens up on First Avenue. A noisy salsa tape from a car radio echoed among the façades, grew louder and died away, and through the window I saw the shadow of a pigeon’s flapping wings approach the fire escape’s folded, hatched shadow on the wall of the house opposite, at the top where the bricks still shone with the low sun’s deep glow. The sunlit flapping pigeon and the pigeon’s flapping shadow approached each other until the distance between them was wholly harmonised as it landed on the top step of the fire escape and folded up its wings.
To tell the truth it was not at all unforgettable, the first time Elisabeth and I lay together on her hard futon, watched over by the white cat, who sat in the doorway with impeccably folded paws like a household sphinx, to whom nothing human was strange. I was inclined to believe her when she said it was a long time since she had been with a man. The angularity of her body seemed to be transmitted to her movements, and our venture developed into a hectic and hoarsely breathing rough and tumble, until we had to give up. She lay with her cheek resting on my thigh as she regarded my still aroused cock with a disoriented wondering gaze. I came to think of a famous photograph by Man Ray in which a silent film beauty from the Twenties with a dark pout and long eyelashes bends her head in the same manner as she regards a primitive African statuette. We both laughed, not only at my comparison but also because I should have come to think of it at all, and we went on giggling now and then as we crept close together in the dusk beneath the heavy woollen poncho that served as her duvet. She asked if I was disappointed. I wasn’t, not a bit. I was almost relieved at not having to perform brilliantly the first time, after so many years of having Astrid as the steadily more biased witness of my sexual prowess. I had never quite believed that any other woman would be as satisfied in her place, whether I suspected her of being modest or of overrating what had now become hers, merely because it was hers. But I didn’t say anything about that to Elisabeth as we lay close together beneath her poncho, and to my surprise nor did I have a trace of bad conscience, perhaps because there was nothing demonic or overly exotic to be felt in her long narrow body against mine. It was just another body, different from the one I was used to. I tried to explain to her how I was feeling, how it seemed like having traversed a distance in myself, a distance that had grown through the years I had lived with Astrid, without my having noticed it, because it had opened so slowly and gradually, but she laid a finger on my mouth and told me to stop.
Later on we never talked about Astrid. Nor did we talk about us, about what had happened between us, or what was going to happen. The future was taboo. We discussed art, our work, what we saw and heard and what we had once seen or heard, and we avoided touching on the inevitable day when I would return to what was my life. We pretended it was not approaching, and settled ourselves in our soft shining soap bubble, delighted that it stayed aloft. We did not count the days but the hours, and so the three weeks that followed became a small eternity. We spent most of the time in her apartment, and took long walks without a destination or went shopping in the middle of the night at the Korean greengrocer’s on Avenue A. I cooked for her, hearty Spanish casseroles, and she managed to put on a kilo while we were together. We also learned how to make love to each other, but there were nights when we just lay chatting and quite forgot that forbidden lovers are supposed to fuck like mad. Every other day I went over to Brooklyn Heights and slept at the Lebanese heart surgeon’s house to work for a few hours next morning, but just as often I sat writing in Elisabeth’s kitchen, while she worked next door and the cat went to and fro between us like an affectionate messenger. My book progressed more quickly than I had expected, neither Elisabeth nor her cat distracted me, on the contrary I found it easier than before to focus on the themes I was pursuing, and when I read aloud to her the pages I had written during the day I could hear they were better than most of what I had written so far. The heart surgeon was rarely at home, he apparently preferred his lady friend’s house on Long Island, and only once was there a message that Astrid had called. I myself rang home a few times and was amazed at how unaffected I was when I asked what had been happening, or talked of my book. As far as I could hear she didn’t suspect anything. I would not have believed that treachery would feel so easy and effortless, and I listened to her voice with the usual tenderness, slightly delayed by the satellite link, as if Elisabeth and she really existed in worlds apart and the boundary between them went straight down through myself.
We spoke to hardly anyone apart from the times when we were in one of the cafés in the East Village and her friends came over to say hello, nonchalant artist types who shook my hand politely, stealing curious glances at me as they exchanged local news with Elisabeth, mildly wondering what kind of bourgeois specimen she had raked up. She made no special effort to introduce me to her world, and I was only too glad to have her to myself. Only once did she take me with her to a fashionable private view in Soho. The gallery was in an old converted garage with frosted glass windows facing onto the street, so the cool white space formed a hermetic abstract sphere around the exhibit and the specially invited guests standing in groups with their backs to the pictures, conversing animatedly with each other while keeping an eye on whoever came and went. Nobody noticed me at my observation post in the furthest corner, I was momentarily invisible. I was surprised to see how many people knew Elisabeth, and from my corner I watched my graceful ragamuffin of a lover being kissed on the cheek by middle-aged men with pony tails and black T-shirts under their pin-striped suits from Saks. So they too were part of her world, the world I had disturbed and to which she would return when I had gone home. Even the artist was clearly one of her oldest and dearest friends, a little Italian with thinning hair in a white suit and sandals, who had to put his head back to look up at her as they stood giggling together. He was the only one who allowed himself to smoke, and he puffed away at a full-grown Havana cigar as he told her a story that was so funny she doubled up with laughter. I couldn’t help noticing how he jovially put his little hairy hand with the smoking Havana on her buttock in the washed-out jeans full of holes, as he stood on tiptoe in his sandals to whisper something in her ear, totally indifferent to the obviously well-to-do women in pink and lemon-yellow Chanel creations fidgeting for an audience. Again I was reminded of the curator and his foxy smile. Was I a laughingstock as I stood here, completely thin-skinned because of love in this clinical, hectically humming place?
The day before I left we went out to Coney Island. We had a beer at a bar on the promenade, where elderly men in dented baseball caps sat bent over in silhouettes beside the sea. The ugly cries of seagulls resounded inside the bar, which naturally was called the ‘Atlantic’, and behind it the ferris wheel was spinning in the empty pleasure park. The television was on above the bar, the football pitch was almost the same green colour as the walls in that scruffy place. The players jammed together on the pitch in a confused bunch of numbers on their bowed backs and the next moment spread out again like a flock of heavy, clumsy gulls. One glittering aeroplane after another approached in the sky over the sea and prepared to land at John F. Kennedy airport, and the anglers out on the jetty dropped their lines into the water again and again. They had tied little shiny fish onto their lines as bait. Behind them, on the other side of the park, were the last tenements in America, their windows facing the ocean, brown, tall and square. Elisabeth thought the melancholy housing blocks resembled the thousand-year-old highrise mud-houses in Sana, Yemen. White bulbs flashed above the switchback linking the letters of the name, Himalaya. We stayed for an hour on the beach. She rested her head on my lap and closed her eyes in the white cloudy light, her hair spread out in a fan over my knees. I watched her face and the sea. I asked if she still thought of moving back to Copenhagen. She didn’t know. Perhaps. We didn’t say a great deal that day or the next in the taxi on the way to the airport. She smiled wryly as we stood opposite each other before the check-in barriers. It had been great to meet me. It sounded as if we were never to see each other again, as if nothing special had happened. Then she kissed me briefly and left without looking back. Six months later I stood on another beach with Astrid. It was the day after we arrived at Oporto. We intended to go straight to Lisbon, perhaps with a stop in Coimbra, but first we wanted to see the sea. We hadn’t seen it since San Sebastian. We followed the Douro along the increasingly shabby façades with sooty black tiles, rusty balcony railings, lines of sheets and washed-out children’s clothes, out to the river mouth where the anglers stood on a sand spit, small and lost in the mist. We drove all the way to Matosinhos and walked across the enormous deserted beach with our backs to the neglected beach cafés and beach cabins and the great oil tanks further away, glittering dully in the misty sunlight. We walked until we could get no further, until we could just stand before the yellowish surf of foam and whirled-up sand, and see as far as we could, out where the sea became one with the fog. I discovered afterwards that Matosinhos and Coney Island lie almost opposite each other, at about forty and forty-one degrees northern latitude. The beach where I sat with Elisabeth’s head in my lap trying to imagine what it would be like to leave Astrid, and the beach where I stood with Astrid six months later, after I had taken leave of Elisabeth for the second time. A beach in the old world and a beach in the new, divided by the sea which so many before me had traversed full of hopes, as if the world were not after all one connected place that is merely very large. As if it was a matter of separate worlds.
Astrid was not waiting for me at the airport the first time, in spring, when I came back from New York with the memory of Elisabeth as a blurred, unreal after-image at the base of my fatigue. It was a great relief. I had been afraid she would be standing there holding Rosa’s hand with Simon a little in the background, wearing his baseball cap and walkman, restless and impatient because it was rather beneath a sixteen-year-old’s dignity to fetch his stepfather from the airport. I had prepared myself so intensively for this reunion in the arrival hall that I had had no time to foresee what else would happen. Would anything happen? As I dozed in the plane my treachery had dawned upon me in all its incalculable dimensions. I couldn’t think of it as a mere affair, what had taken place in the East Village during the past three weeks, even though I was now several kilometres above the surface of the sea, alone again, and should have made the air corridor over the Atlantic into an elegant, painless sluice that divided me from my secret and closed again behind me. Of course I knew that an affair like this was something utterly banal when you were an adult who could only smile at your own guileless youth, just as you smile at the old pictures of yourself looking so naïve, with your soft cheeks, dressed in clothes long since dated. I knew very well that it need be nothing more than a harmless diversion without any side effects, that there was no reason at all to make an issue of it or burden Astrid with quite unnecessary pain. But the idea of my own silence was just as painful as the thought of Astrid’s reaction if I told her what had gone on in New York. Until three weeks ago I had been the man I had become over the years with Astrid, but I had only been that man because I believed she knew all there was to know about him. I had never wanted to have any secrets from her, on the contrary I had always been afraid of the thought that there might be something I hadn’t managed to tell or show her, something she had not seen and seen through. I only dared to believe in her love if I could rely on her loving me despite all she knew about me, despite all my faults and failings. Ten years ago when I kissed her for the first time one winter evening in my kitchen, a strange girl I’d picked up in my taxi and given shelter merely to be kind, and when ten months later she told me she was pregnant, and I replied with my reckless why not, I had spontaneously seized the chance to escape my loneliness and become someone in the world, together with someone else, in her eyes and in everything we did together. After Inès left me I had felt as if struck by a curse which made me invisible. It hadn’t been in the least like the feeling I had when I lay on the mouldy sofa in the idyllic ruin of my youth among the heaps of broken tiles and watched the birds flying through the roof as I dreamed of being no one. It hadn’t been as I had thought in my childish arrogance, and as it said in the poem I had learned by heart: how dreary to be somebody, how public, like a frog … On the contrary, in the most cruel way, Inès had punished me for my ill-starred passion and transformed me into a hideous toad, slimy and fusty-green with loneliness, and not until Astrid kissed me did I become a person again like everyone else, though not just anyone. For I became precisely that human being she had met so fortuitously and yet liked more than so many others, and I determined on the spot, from one moment to the next, without hesitation and rather irresponsibly, that he was the one I wanted to be, the man she had called forth from invisibility with her gaze. And thus I had closed the door behind me on the innermost room in myself, I thought on board the plane as it grew dark over the Atlantic with unnatural haste. That was how I had turned my back on the room in my overgrown ruin, where I had been myself more than anywhere else because I had the company I needed with the mice and wild cats around me and I did not need somebody else’s eyes to hold me fast and prevent me from vanishing. I had escaped invisibility, I thought in my aeroplane seat as I watched the sky turn dark blue above the clouds, but only to disappear from myself and get lost in the visible world’s welter of faces and forms and ways of being carried along by the days in the labyrinthine delta of coincidences.
I landed early in the morning. The others had already left when I let myself into the apartment. There was a note from Astrid on the kitchen table, she had laid a tray with coffee and rolls, and Rosa had made a drawing of me, a man in a flowered jacket, standing smiling among skyscrapers only half a head taller than himself. On top of her clumsy rendering of the Empire State Building stood a chimpanzee in spotted bathing trunks. It too was splitting its sides with laughter, and it had what looked like a Barbie doll under its arm, with long wavy hair. I went to bed and slept all day. When I woke up the sun had set. I was roused by Rosa’s hand stroking my stubble, and I heard Astrid call her in a whisper. I opened my eyes and saw them for a moment in the doorway of the twilight blue bedroom before they disappeared. I lay still for a little while listening to their distant voices out in the kitchen and the screaming brakes and excited American dialogue in the film Simon was watching in the next room. I felt as if I too was watching a film that had been stopped and now continued again with the same actors, the same plot. I looked at the verdigris-green, illuminated hands of the alarm clock. It was half past twelve in New York, Elisabeth might be working on the picture I had seen her start a couple of days earlier, or perhaps she was walking along First Avenue now with long, quick strides in the sun and wind that made her hair wave like a shining flag. I rose and went into the living room to Simon. He looked at me vaguely, quite lost in the film, then he stood up and embraced me, a little shyly, as if he was really too old for that kind of thing. He asked how it had gone. On the screen behind him a man hung in the air over Manhattan clutching one of the runners beneath a helicopter with a wild look in his eyes, while another man crushed his white knuckles with the heel of his boot. Well, I replied and told him to watch to the end of the film. He smiled apologetically, it was at the very most exciting place, I smiled back and went out to the others. When Rosa heard my steps she came rushing along the corridor and leaped into my arms, nearly knocking me over. I kissed her and carried her into the kitchen where Astrid was peeling potatoes. She stood smiling at us with the potato peeler in her hand until I let Rosa slide down on the floor and embraced her. She had lost some weight, I could feel, she looked beautiful, beautiful and unsuspecting as she stood there recognising me with her eyes, as if she saw all there was to see. As usual when I came back from a journey, I told them what I had experienced and gave them the small presents I had remembered to buy. Later in the evening, when Astrid and I went to bed, it surprised me that she could see nothing, and I made love to her, rough and impatient, as if I could hide behind my violence, as if I wanted to get it over with, in a sudden rage, as if I wanted to punish her for her ignorance, punish her for my own crime. Afterwards she said it was a long time since it had been so good. I kissed her eyelids and she opened her lazy narrow eyes a little and creased her lips into an ironic smile and said she could almost wish I went away more often, so I could come home and make love to her like that.
I lay awake in the dark beside her when at long last we put out the light, for several hours I lay listening to her breathing and the occasional cars driving along by the Lakes. I thought of Simon’s bashfulness on the sofa, watching his hair-raising video, of Rosa’s happy scream when she reached out her arms to meet me and leaped into my embrace. I thought of Astrid’s eyes in the kitchen when she turned towards me and seemed to make my home-coming face regain its outlines in her memory, and I thought of Elisabeth, who was probably sitting eating a tray of sushi she had bought in the Japanese restaurant on Avenue A, while the cat regarded her with its cool, unparticipating eyes. What was it about her that was such a watershed? Was it the earnest timbre of her deep voice? Her profuse wild hair and her hectic, breathless way of making love? Was it the lofty nonchalance of her appearance and the dust that gathered along the walls of her ascetic apartment, self-forgetfully absorbed as she was in her painting? Was it our mutual love for Mark Rothko and Morris Louis, her intuitive, understanding way of anticipating what I was going to say about them and about everything else we discussed because each of us had thought and felt the same thing? Was it this remarkable, finely tuned, undisturbed and noiseless wavelength, where we had found each other without hesitation, because for years we had transmitted on the same frequency without knowing it? Or was she merely an exterior, incidental opportunity that made me open my eyes to what I had ignored for years and forced me to answer the question I had for years allowed to remain unanswered throughout the fleeting, foaming, whirling current? The question Inès had left in me when she kissed me goodbye on the Place de l’Alma a year or two ago and vanished down into the metro, out of sight again. The embarrassing question that had stayed within me after I had answered so maturely and almost didactically, so calm with adult and experienced wisdom. Had I been happy? Or was it merely a conciliatory substitute, this everyday happiness that could stand both daylight and the daily chores, this patient and modest, laid-back bourgeois happiness that could be washed and ironed? Had I gone wrong after all, somewhere on the way through the years? Had I been in too much of a hurry, a little too quick off the mark when I replied to Astrid’s unexpected appearance with my flippant, frivolous why not? Was my real treachery that ambivalent reply, when Astrid offered me a child and a meaning for my young, pointless and melancholy life? Had I only grabbed at her out of cowardice when she turned up in my self-pitying loneliness, because loneliness had made me cave in? Had she herself been happy, or have I wasted her time? Did I love her, or did it just look like it? Had Inès left an empty room inside me which Astrid was never allowed to enter because I had locked the door and thrown away the key? Had I really believed that I could condemn my own despondency and forget myself in my new life of restless activity, fond duties and humming, quotidian tenderness? Was it there, in my empty interior, that Elisabeth suddenly appeared through a hidden door in the peeling, rotten wallpaper? A door that had been so secret that it was possible to hide its existence even from myself?
The next day I thought Astrid had found me out. When I woke up in the morning and went into the bathroom she was sorting out dirty washing. As I was cleaning my teeth I saw her in the mirror removing a white cat’s hair from one of my shirts. Elisabeth’s cat had left an astonishing number of hairs in my clothes, which I had carelessly allowed to lie about in her apartment. I rinsed my mouth and told her the Lebanese heart surgeon’s cat had kept me company as I wrote. It probably felt as lonely as I was, now its master preferred to stay with his lady friend on Long Island, I said, and it had more or less moved into the guest room with me. While I stood there telling lies with toothpaste foam at the corners of my mouth, it struck me how likely it sounded, as long as I kept the image in my mind’s eye of the white cat that lay sunning itself in the window looking out on Orange Street. Astrid smiled, she didn’t think I liked cats, and it was true, I had several times objected when Rosa pestered us to get her a kitten, because I could all too easily see who would end up changing its cat litter and removing its hard, stinking little turds. But this cat had been rather likeable, I said, visualising it strutting around the big old house in Brooklyn Heights or sitting on the window sill watching me write, arrogant and inscrutable. As the days went by it grew easier to manage my economy with the truth. The film continued and I fell into my customary role, after all I did know my lines by heart, I knew precisely when I was in the frame, and what was expected of me. Besides, it had always been one of my characteristics to be slightly preoccupied, even distrait sometimes, which Astrid only thought charming, and at most would tease me about in an affectionate tone. Now I had to ask myself if it was the concentration on my work or an unacknowledged awkwardness towards Astrid, that had been the cause of my growing distraction through the years. I still had my book as a pretext for being absent-minded, and I entrenched myself in my study and wrote a great deal in the weeks that followed. When I was not writing I carried out my domestic duties, and in the evening I was even more attentive and available to the children than I used to be, perhaps in an attempt to compensate for my black conscience. Only when I was alone with Astrid did my fondness become somewhat distanced and conventional, but she was accustomed to that in the periods when I worked intensively, just as she knew the symptoms of a bad conscience when I spoiled the children, anxious lest I should neglect them, absorbed in my self-centred work.
For Astrid my intellectual life had been an inaccessible zone from the outset, and she wouldn’t dream of interfering with it, whether out of respect, not wanting to disturb me when I sat at my window overlooking the Lakes bent over my manuscripts, or because my scribblings did not particularly interest her. I was never offended by her lack of interest in what I wrote, on the contrary. When I met her I had in fact felt that she released me from my brooding solitary nature. Her sure, languid movements, her crooked smile and her subtle narrow eyes had saved me from myself. She had drawn me into a sphere of unworried ease, and even the greyest days had never been ugly or chilling in their inevitable triviality. With all its necessary repetitions daily life had rather been transformed into a light, vibrating mobile of repeated activity, turning gracefully around itself, set in movement by the warmth between us. I had never expected her to disturb me in the solitary circles of my work. It was as if only by keeping outside could she remain a counterbalance to my abstractions and prevent me from completely losing sight of the real world. In a subtle way my intellectual loneliness was the price I had to pay not to be lonely. Therefore I never thought about her when I worked, although Elisabeth was constantly on my mind as I was finishing my book. To think of Elisabeth and write about the artists of the New York School was the same thing, not only because she had thought about them in the same way as I did, but also because for the first time in many years I had dreamed anew that life and work could merge in one unbroken movement. For I had indeed discovered it was possible, in the transient soap bubble in which she and I had spent the days in the East Village. The thin membrane of the bubble had broken, but I could not forget its radiance and iridescence, I could not let go of the idea that it might be possible to blow up a new and larger bubble that could go on hovering. Some dreams are so detailed and lifelike that you go on dreaming them even after you have woken up. I kept on returning to what she had hinted at once or twice, that she might think of going home to Copenhagen, and I indulged more and more frequently in idyllic fantasies of our living together in another part of town, that she would paint while I wrote, and get to know Rosa and Simon. It was all very delightful, and Astrid was always conveniently out of sight when I indulged my hopeful hallucinations.
Even before I met Elisabeth, while I was living at the Lebanese heart surgeon’s house in Brooklyn Heights, I had found it hard to visualise Astrid clearly. I saw the well-known situations at different times of the day, the same every day, but she remained an indistinct figure, and when I tried to focus on a close-up of her it was always one of those slightly stiff, posed and far too self-conscious portraits that hide more than they reveal. My recollection of her was not that of a clearly defined, fast frozen moment detached from the flashing, unsteady stream of time, for she had been there the whole time, in all the years we had been together. I couldn’t catch sight of her because she was everywhere. The recollection of her face couldn’t be isolated into firm, unmoving images, it blended together with my diffuse memory of time itself, the continued movement through the years, which made the contours of hours and days flow together in the shining fog of speed, the haste with which everything had happened around us and with ourselves. On the other hand, I could see Elisabeth quite clearly, she merely grew clearer as the weeks passed, after we had parted in the John F. Kennedy airport. She sat with closed eyes and her head leaning back in the sunshine, on the sidewalk in front of a café opposite Tompkins Square, the cigarette between her lips outlined its changing calligraphy of blue smoke in the air, and the transparent shadow of the smoke drew a fine veil over her calm, sunlit face. She stood before her easel in the backlight that made the colour on the canvas glitter like a metal sheet, herself only a grey silhouette with her hair gathered into an untidy turban of loose locks, bare-legged, with stripes of chrome yellow and crimson on her thighs. She sat with legs apart in a sun-ray on the floor in front of the open window, bent over my sheets of manuscript, which she had spread out in front of her while she ate yoghurt, completely absorbed in her reading so she forgot to wipe away the white stripe that emphasised her upper lip and curved upwards at the corners of her mouth like a stiffened, unintended smile. I saw her so clearly in my mind’s eye as I sat watching the fresh shining green shoots on the trees along the lakeside under my window. Two weeks later I gave in and called her, early in the afternoon while there was still time before Simon and Rosa came home from school. Her voice was heavy with sleep, it was only half past six in New York. I asked what she was doing. She said the cat was lying on her stomach, and it had its eye on a pigeon sitting outside on the window sill. I said I missed her. She said she missed me too. The words were almost like an impediment between us, they did not connect us, only made it all the harder to reach her. She told me she had a commission to exhibit at a nearby gallery, I talked about my book. It all seemed so dull in contrast to everything I had been thinking after we parted. She asked what it was like to be home. I said it was difficult, that I thought about her a lot. She thought about me too. Was it just something she said? I said I would come to New York, I didn’t know exactly when, but I would come. Then we’ll meet, she said. There was silence over the telephone, a long, satellite-transmitted silence, faintly hissing, as you imagine the silence in space. I repeated that I missed her, chiefly to fill the hissing emptiness with something, kill the silence that spread out between us all the way across the Atlantic. Soon afterwards we ended the call.
It was not until Astrid left that I began to see her as clearly as I saw Elisabeth then, after I had come home, in calm and clearly defined, easy to grasp images. The images are all I have, and I go on looking at them for fear they too will disappear. But the more clearly I see them, the more incomprehensible they become. Her story is not the same as mine, after all. The pattern of my story hides the story Astrid could have told me if she had not left, and I am only telling my own because she isn’t here, but the longer it gets the more she withdraws. And yet I have to tell it if I’m to reach the point where my words die away, the boundary where they have to give up, faced with the distance between Astrid as she appears in my self-centred narrative, and the Astrid who hides behind my pictures of her. Astrid, standing on the balcony on a summer morning looking over the tree tops and the lake with a distant gaze, as if wondering about her life. Astrid, in her coat in the bedroom doorway looking at me silently for a few seconds before she turns and disappears out of sight. Astrid in sunglasses, surrounded by the river’s glittering snowstorm of reflections, smiling before the view over Lisbon from one of the ferries to Cacilhas. Her inaccessible eyes and her dazzling smile among the minute houses rising up behind each other on the heights of Bairro Alto and Alfama, brilliant white in the low light of afternoon.