Daniel Torday - The Last Flight of Poxl West

When I think of it now, I can say that I do know what happiness looked like then. On Saturdays when we did not need to work, afternoons before she was to play gigs with Greta, Françoise and I would borrow bicycles from my boss and ride east out of Rotterdam, the direction opposite from the harbor. Not ten miles out of the city was an area where upon the horizon the green and brown of flat grasses gave way to brilliant swatches of color: tulip fields. Françoise would strap her mandolin in its case to her back, and I would strap a guitar to mine, and after ditching our bikes we would secret ourselves back amid acre upon acre of those definitively Dutch flowers. No farmer would disturb us on those weekend mornings, and after we made love, Françoise would teach me to make new chords on the guitar. She was a mandolin player primarily, but now I saw she knew how to play guitar as well as Greta. She would hold the instrument in her intelligent hands and show me three new voicings of G chords that sounded more open and fuller than the basic version I’d first learned. One morning in early spring, the first of a spate of warm days after winter’s chill, I asked her to show me another new voicing of a G7, with the diminished seventh in the bass of the chord. But for some reason, she began to fumble with it.

“It’s odd,” Françoise said, giving up on it for a moment and cradling the guitar between her crossed legs. “I can make that chord easily if I don’t think about it. But thinking about it now, trying to think where to fret it, I can’t make my fingers do it. It’s just muscle memory, making these chords. You wouldn’t be able to think about it fast enough when playing in time if you tried. So you make your hand make the chord over and over until you don’t have to think it, exactly. You just go to make the chord, and there it is.”

She looked up at me, and in her face I could see she felt she’d expressed herself perfectly. But I didn’t have that muscle memory, and I didn’t fully comprehend. I told her I didn’t know quite what she was talking about. Now the skin on her lips bunched together, and I watched the skin around her eyes tighten.

“Perhaps you need to listen better,” Françoise said. She was no longer looking me in the eyes.

“I mean, you know the chords, right?” I said. “Of course you’re thinking about it.”

“Well I know them, yes,” she said. Her eyes were still narrowed and diverted from mine. “But I don’t think, C, and then a C chord arrives. I just know I’m about to play a C chord and my hand is gripping the neck. I don’t think it. I just do it. Maybe if you learned how to give yourself over to it, you’d learn how to play quicker yourself.”

I looked down at my hands. I wished so much then that I understood what she meant — how to give myself over to it, to develop the muscle memory. But I could make chords well enough, I thought.

“You really don’t see what I mean, do you?” Françoise said.

“Not really.”

To my surprise, after I admitted again that I didn’t understand, something eased in the tension that had gripped Françoise’s face. It pleased her I’d confessed, at least, what it was that confused me.

“To act,” Françoise said. “I just act with you now, Poxl, too.”

“What do you mean?”

“For so many years I’ve learned how to perform for men. I read what they need from me, and I give it to them. That’s the transaction: for me to fulfill their needs. And that’s the right word: performance. But with you, Poxl…”

She stopped speaking. I do not know if a conversation like this is what it is to be in love — to disagree but to stay around and find out why, so it is no longer a disagreement. To do something so simple as to talk honestly, and then to listen. But I do know it’s what it means to begin to know someone: confession, revelation, reconciliation.

“What is it?” I said. “I want you to tell me. Honestly.”

“It’s like undoing the notes of a chord and then making a whole new chord. Then practicing long enough to make a new muscle memory. For years being with men was like the same basic chord. But since we’ve been together it’s like I’ve begun to unlearn how I’ve voiced things in the past. And it grows more complicated. I tried something like this once before—”

“Before?”

“It’s where I got these instruments. There was an American; I’ve mentioned him before. He gave me all these records, gave me my first mandolin, my first guitar. He seemed not only to want things from me but to want to give. He told me he would take me back with him to the American city of Nashville. I believed him. Then I never saw him again.”

We were both silent. If love shows itself at times by giving us a sense of propriety, I suppose I came close to understanding it in that moment: I didn’t want to hear about her American. I’d kept tucked away any jealousy that might accompany our relationship, her work, but for the first time now I felt it. Blood came to my cheeks. Off in the distance the wind swayed the flowers, a huge patch of yellow tulips dipping away from us and then back in our direction. A cloud passed over the sun, dimming the world around us and honing sharp teeth in the cold air. I almost spoke, almost said that I didn’t want to hear about her American. Perhaps if I had then, if I’d admitted that feeling, things might have gone differently in the days ahead. But the smallest thing can change us if we let it, and I did not speak. The cloud blew past, left the sun, and our world again warmed.

“I’ve never told you why I left Leitmeritz when I did,” I said. Françoise looked up from her guitar, where her left hand had begun to form chords again while she listened, though she did not strike the strings with her pick. The skin around her eyes drew slack, bearing relief at having told me about her American, and gratitude for my not pursuing it when she’d finished. “That afternoon,” I said, “I came upon my mother in the drawing room of our house with, well, with a painter. Some man. Some man who wasn’t my father.”

“And you didn’t know of your mother’s infidelities.”

“No, I didn’t know! Of course I didn’t.”

“How did you know he was a painter, then?”

I told her that I’d seen his paint-splattered pants in the corner.

“I’m sorry, Poxl,” she said. “I’m sorry, but I do hope you’ll think about what must have pushed your mother there. I hope you’ll consider how complicated a marriage must be, years down the road.”

Now I stopped talking as well. No cloud came to darken those fields, but I drew inward. What did I want in those moments? To argue with Françoise, to defend my father or defend my mother? To parse that old memory of seeing them in the leather yard when I was a kid, to understand what had passed between them? What I found was not what I expected: I simply felt as if my burden had eased, having spoken it aloud. The bright sun lit the tulip field beside us like a sail filling with wind.

Françoise’s left hand gripped the guitar again. She struck the chord.

“That’s the G7,” she said, and she handed me the guitar.

I suppose there are men who know to call it love when they’ve fallen. Though it’s pained and even ruined me over the years, I know only that if I’m happy in a moment I don’t want it to end — only to move on the next day, to the next desire, then the next. I have much reason to long for forgiveness, but for that I’ll never apologize. I took the guitar back and played the new chord myself. I moved slowly, putting down my ring finger on the high E string, my index finger on the first fret of the low E string, fumbling only to grasp it later. My hand didn’t yet have the muscle memory to get it at once. Only time and practice could make that happen.