Matthew Stadler - Allan Stein

ALLAN STEIN

A Novel

Matthew Stadler

Fourth Estate

An Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 1999 by Fourth Estate

Copyright © Matthew Stadler 1999

Excerpts from Federico Garcia Lorca’s “Galeca of Love Unforseen,” translated by Edwin Honig in Four Puppet Plays/Play Without a Title/The Divan Poems and other poems/Prose Poems and Dramatic Pieces. Copyright © 1990 by Edwin Honig. Reprinted by permission of Edwin Honig.

Excerpts from Jonathan Richman’s song “Pablo Picasso” reprinted with permission of Modern Love Songs.

Excerpts from Sylvia Salinger’s letters in Just a Very Pretty Girl from the Country , edited by Albert S. Bennett. Copyright © 1987, Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois University. Reprinted by permission of Southern Illinois University Press.

Excerpts from Michael Stein’s letters to Gertrude Stein in the Beinecke Library at Yale University. Reprinted by permission of the Estate of Gertrude Stein.

Excerpts from Sarah Stein’s letters to Gertrude Stein in the Beinecke Library of Yale University. Reprinted by permission of the Estate of Gertrude Stein.

Excerpts from Sarah Stein’s letters to Gertrude Stein in the Bancroft Collection, University of California, Berkeley. Reprinted by permission of the Estate of Gertrude Stein.

The right of Matthew Stadler to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Source ISBN: 9781841151083

Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2016 ISBN: 9780007483174

Version: 2016-01-13

For Larry Rinder

What is the use of being a boy

if you grow up to become a man,

what is the use?

—GERTRUDE STEIN

Cover

Title Page ALLAN STEIN A Novel Matthew Stadler

Copyright

Epigraph

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Matthew Stadler

About the Publisher

We arrived at noon and left our bags with a woman who said she worked for the hotel. There was no one else on the platform when the train pulled away, only this stout, very serious woman, some complacent mongrel edging along a ditch sniffing for scraps, plus me and the boy. She had a pushcart littered with dried flowers, and we put our bags on that. The hotel turned out to be more of a ruin, really, than a hotel, but she couldn’t very well have said, Hello, let me take your bags, I work for the ruin. Off she went, with the flowers and the bags, down the one narrow road toward town.

I was light-headed from the air, which was breezy and, after two days of freakish winter snow without proper mittens or what-have-you, at last springlike and warm. Ocean and pine and dust mixed with heady currents of mimosa and the fresh iodine tang of seaweed left stranded on the rocks by an outgoing tide. The boy stared at the sea, probably exhausted by his fever and my having kept him up all night with the cool washcloth and the wine. It was unnaturally beautiful. Red, crenelated rock broke from the scruffy pine headlands, crumbling toward the sea, carpeted in patches with lavender, rosemary, and scrub brush. The sea was blue like metal. Where it touched the rock there was no blending, just the sharp brick-red rock against the cold metal sea. The strand of beach between the rigid headlands was white, the sand imported from some other shore so that it looked false, like a fancy ribbon or prize strung across the flushed bosom of a very determined young farm girl. (I remember her standing in a meadow of bluebells, this particular girl—not a farm girl at all, really, as it is my mother I am recalling, whose image was suggested by the falseness of the beach at Agay—sunshine raking the steep wooded hills that bordered “our meadow,” and a goat she taunted to rage so she might show me how to vault over the animal as it charged, placing her two hands on the nubs of its horns, her legs in an elegant, inverted V sailing over the befuddled goat, whose violence turned to distraction when the target disappeared. The sea was visible there too, which is maybe why I thought of her.)

I will list the features of this final vista the boy and I shared: the disappearing train, a slinky metal worm, crawling along the edge of the rocks until it vanished beyond the third headland; small groves of plum trees in the broad, shadowed canyon carved by the river on its course from the hills to the sea; that woman with the flower cart, distant but still visible, pausing to shake dirt from her shoe, on her way through town to the hotel; signs, in French of course, pointing one way to AGAY, CANNES, NICE and the other to ST.-RAPHAËL, MARSEILLE; a calendar (notice how neatly these details triangulate our location) that was unreadable, obscured by distance and the warped glass of the stationmaster’s office window; the boy’s face (this my view), pale from sickness but utterly enchanting still, the wide gap between his rabbit teeth, small even nose, and brown eyes just slightly too close so that I kept focusing on the corners where they teared; a rounded chin and big mouth so soft he looked like he might still be suckling (he was fifteen); long, dirty, sand-colored hair, dull and stringy, pushed behind his wide blushing ears. The noon sun raised a painful glare off the platform and the boy put on dark glasses, which made him look like a pop star. The sky was squashed and bruised blue. To the south, beyond the sea’s curving horizon (Africa down there), distance sucked all order from the sky and left it washed out and miasmic.

There is no hour of my life I do not see this vista obscured by signposts, around a corner, through trees, on a wrong turn past the ferry dock, or while scrambling to the edge of a sand cliff that is crumbling in the waves of another sea. I smell it in the scattering swirl of snow around an open-windowed car driving through mountains or on a crowded tram in some foreign city whose park has just opened its scrubbed, pale gardens of rosemary and gravel and lavender. It billows and collapses, this perpetual memory, continually verging on the real. The tram, my stop, and all the day’s good intentions can be swallowed in the momentary rupture this constantly returning spectacle creates. In that breathless gap, marked by my reverie, space collapses into nothing and at the same time enlarges to monstrous, devouring proportions—rather like the panoramic view of a reader whose nose is buried in a book.