Ben Greenman - What He's Poised to Do - Stories

“Metabolic studies of stressed cells?”

“No. A piece about Marcus Hebert.”

“Who?”

“The French critic of accidental literature. Do you know him?”

“No,” Boatman said. “The only French critic of accidental literature I know is no one.” He waited a beat. “Jean-Marie No One.”

“Hebert is a genius. He became famous writing these short essays about texts he would find in the street. Initially, he thought they were the literary equivalents of ready-mades, but then he designed this inverted critical structure that privileged a letter you might write to a girlfriend over, say, Tolstoy.”

“Well, of course,” Boatman said. “Stupid Tolstoy.”

“It got to the point where Hebert felt that the only way he could make good on his theory was to stop publishing, and instead write his essays in the form of letters to other critics and authors, who occasionally published them as correspondence. He went on to write about the way that writing has changed: the death of handwriting and the birth of typing, the death of words as possessions and the birth of words as currency. Anyway, he has a new book.”

“A book? Hypocrite.”

“That’s addressed in this piece,” she said. “Anyway, for years he’s been at American universities, but he’s spending this whole month in Paris. And because he’s perverse to the end, he’s doing all kinds of things to alienate himself: staying in a different hotel every week, staging a series of readings at rock clubs, speaking only in English while he’s here. I can’t believe I didn’t know that. I can’t believe this magazine.”

“I told you.”

“Though come to think of it, I can’t find the article you mentioned, the one about the men studying images of women.”

“What? Wait.” She heard shuffling on the line. “Damn it. I brought you the wrong issue. You have November and that article is in December. I’ll bring it the next time I see you.”

“Or the time after that,” she said. “No hurry.” She had time. Time had been returned to her. And now she had something to fill it. When she hung up the phone with Boatman, she went immediately to the suitcase she had brought from Seattle, which was now serving as a kind of bookcase. She pushed through until she found the slim green volume of Hebert’s work. She knew it by heart, almost, from the first sentence of the first essay (“It is lost to history who made one of the truer observations regarding our perceptual abilities”) through the final sortie of those early years, “The Notepad and the Dictionary: Writing Down as a Form of Looking Up.” She reread his work on the couch. She took the book to bed. She read in the bath. Hebert was with her everywhere, more than a lover was.

ON THE AFTERNOON OF HEBERT’S FIRST READING, weather threatened and then made good on its threat in the evening. By eight the streets were drenched, but there was no way she would be dissuaded. She had thought about asking Boatman to go with her — he was responsible, in a sense — but that ran counter to her ultimate goal.

Hebert looked as he looked on the promotional poster, which was a surprise. Usually such figures submitted outdated pictures of themselves out of vanity, but this one seemed accurate to within a few years. His hairline had receded early, and his skin was not so fine as a young man’s. He held an unlit cigarette and waggled it around in a way that was comically French. He read a pair of short pieces, performed one longer one, and then read a new essay. “I have come back to my home country after a span of nearly a decade and found its character patently obvious from the first steps off the airplane,” he said. “There is a poverty of minor detail and a surfeit of broad strokes, which makes it perfect for philosophy but in some way unsuited to artwork.” Behind Deborah, a woman murmured and said, in nearly inaudible gospel, “C’est vrai, dites-leur, c‘est vrai.”

Afterward there was a reception. Hebert stood in the corner of the lobby where the walls were covered with a growing collection of posters for all the artists who had played at the club. He was directly beneath the poster for a band named Lowest Lane, whose lead singer was a woman who had filed her teeth to fangs. His cigarette was lit now. He seemed to need it. Deborah approached him.

“Will you sign this?”

“This is an old edition,” he said. His tone was gentler than she had expected. “You don’t see them very frequently.”

“Well, I remember buying it in the bookstore in Seattle, during college.”

“Ah,” he said. “Seattle. A place I’ll never be.”

“You were there in spirit,” she said, “through your book.” She was laying it on thick, but that’s what you were supposed to do. “You are in the city now?”

“I am.”

She circled around. She showed leg when leg needed to be shown. She asked him where he was staying, and nodded approvingly. “Would you like to see it?” he said, and she did not answer right away, as if she was surprised, which allowed Hebert to feign a moment of embarrassment even as he was emboldened. Outside in the still-rainy night, the sky was many shades of gray. Hebert called a taxicab, one shade of yellow. At intervals he began to speak, and each time she cocked her head to show that she was listening. She took his hand in his hotel as they rode up in the elevator. The way to do it, she kept thinking, is just to do it. It reminded her of a sentence of his—“Opportunities will not represent themselves unless they are re-created and re-produced, and by that time they are less opportunities than products that carry the sense of opportunity”—and that made her laugh. She stifled her laugh by putting his hand in her mouth.

Hebert, though one of the sharpest and most original of modern thinkers, was uncomfortable in bed. His movements were sudden and seemed to have little to do with his pleasure. Deborah had always taken pride in her body, particularly in bed. It was one of the rare places where she could dominate and seem submissive. Here, though, she felt she was risking injury to Hebert. After working the bed from head to foot, they made their way to the couch. She sat there naked. He occupied the end closer to the window. “Do you believe that humans have bird songs?” he said. “By that I mean, do you think each of us has a native melody that, unsung or sung, represents us like a fingerprint?”

“Stop avoiding me,” she said. Many thoughts drifted across his face, slowly at first and then quickened by the winds of his panic. He was triumphant, he was contrite, he was friendly, he was brusque. Mostly, he was limp, skinny, and pale, and she was delighted. Having gone at him, she could now set him aside. The power had shifted entirely. She had been wary of returning to men, but this was precisely why her decision was immoderate. She took a cigarette and stood by the window as he got dressed.

“Next week, I will be in a different hotel,” he said. “And another after that.”

“Well, then, I will see you in one of those,” she said.

When she called Boatman the next day, she explained herself forcefully. “Got him,” she said. “Two strikes, one after the other. The second time around he took it to me a little bit more. It was like he saw something on the surface and had the courage to go in after it.”

“Right-o,” Boatman said. He was as unfazed by her as ever. “Who’s on tap for tonight? The prime minister?”

That night she read but retained little, and when she finally gave up, she did not sleep. She expected to have kept something from her time with Hebert: memories, pictures. But her recollection of the evening was pitch-black. She reread his book to try to jog her memory. The next night she painted better, but still no memories. She was drawing a deep blank. On Friday night, she went to a café down the street and allowed herself to be chatted up by a young French lawyer who loved to talk about automobiles and drugs and gourmet foods, after which she followed him to his apartment and engaged in a drunken and spirited session on a bed he had not bothered making from the night before. The morning after that, her memory of him was sharp, down to individual smells and textures. There was a patch of hair on his lower back. But she could recollect nothing of Hebert.