Хелен Девитт - Some Trick - Thirteen Stories

Ralph came back with fresh coffee.

Rachel put each file card back at the midpoint of the sofa as she finished it.

Ralph did not return to the squashy chair. He poured himself a mug of coffee and wandered tactfully off to browse bookshelves.

An experience you tend not to have at the Van Gogh Museum is of a security guard wandering tactfully off and rummaging through your backpack while you are staring your eyes out at paintings you have only seen in books and calendars and posters.

In some kind of weird activation of peripheral vision Gil not so much saw as sensed Ralph pausing by the 18 inches of shelving dedicated to Peter Dijkstra. Which was a good 13 inches more than were taken up by the stories and the novellas.

Gil had met Rachel in the gift shop of the Van Gogh Museum in the heat of the hype. She had picked up a paperback, Vincent Van Gogh, een leven in brieven .

He had seen her across a room but kept his distance. If you have never been to Amsterdam before and maybe never will be again you don’t want to smear the paintings with a lot of boy-meets-girl stuff. There were paintings on the walls that had been in a room with a crazy guy, a guy who never sold any paintings; you want to be alone with the craziness. He walked from room to room, seeing her across each room, keeping his distance.

The gift shop did seem like this space designed to ease the transition to the world of men.

She saw him and held up the book and smiled. (They had been so many places at the same time, it was like running into someone at the mall who was in five of your classes.) He asked if she knew Dutch. She said, “No, but maybe it’s better that way. It’s as if there were special words for colors that nobody else had ever used. Koningsblauw — I don’t even know how you say it, but maybe I just want to know it exists.” She showed him a page on which he saw the word Sterrennacht .

They did not agree to leave together but they left together. As they passed a bookshop Gil said “Wait!” and ran in and bought five books by Peter Dijkstra that had not been translated, because he might never be in Amsterdam again and he had to have them. If he had not met her it would never have occurred to him to buy books he could not read and probably never would and yet had to have.

Neither of them was stupid enough to tell anyone, even close friends, because you never know who will say something to someone and then it is out in the world, something that meant something all cartoonified and fatuous. But he looked at the pages of the notebook and thought of the Van Gogh Museum and keeping his distance and running into the bookstore.

He did not want to share this with Ralph and he also did not want Ralph to leap to conclusions re his apparent immersion in the oeuvre and suddenly it seemed it had to be one or the other.

Gil finished the notebook before Rachel finished the file cards. He put it at the midpoint of the sofa and picked up the file cards she had finished and when she had finished the file cards she picked up the notebook and when they had both finished they put the things in their hands back at the midpoint of the sofa.

Ralph returned to the squashy chair. “You see ,” he said simply. “You see .” He said he had e-mailed Peter and asked how many more notebooks there were and there were about 50. (It was weird hearing him called “Peter.”)

He talked again about the moment and what he could do if Peter Dijkstra and his notebooks were brought to New York.

If Ralph had not been there they would have gone on passing the notebook and file cards back and forth in silent wonder. Or maybe one would have said, “Look at this,” and the other would have said, “Look at this.”

Ralph went on being there.

Instead of “Look at this” they got stuff like, the longer there was no actual deal, no major player with an option on the backlist, the greater the danger that someone would snap up the next 2666 for peanuts.

Gil stood up. He padded down the room to a shoe rack from which he took a pair of socks and a pair of Timberland boots which he slipped on before opening the door. Turning.

He said, “I’m sorry, but I can’t — This is too important for me. It would mean a lot to see the other notebooks, if he was willing to show them. If you think it would help, I can pay his airfare to New York and he can stay in the loft and you can show people the notebooks in the loft if that helps and I will move in with Rachel until it’s over. But I can’t do this other stuff and I can’t talk about this anymore.”

He closed the door behind him.

“Oh God ,” said Ralph, “I didn’t mean—”

Rachel made a vague soothing affectionate noise.

Striding barelegged and booted down Vestry Street, down Hudson, Gil had this sudden paranoid image of the 50 notebooks, these Van Goghy things , these things it would be transcendent to sit quietly down with, on a big table in his loft with the five Dutch books placed inconspicuously by as if to imply without Gil even saying a word that he had read them in the original Dutch (such being his fanatical devotion to the genius) and could vouch for King Kong being the next 2666 . This or that editor being ushered in and not even having the books pointed out by Ralph because they’d just quietly accidentally be there. But this was totally paranoid, right? Right ? Because nobody would do something that icky, would they? Would they? Or should he take them to Rachel’s to be on the safe side? Or would giving in to paranoia make it worse? Or —

The Timberlands had propelled him east on Worth. They crossed West Broadway, turned south. He was just thinking that maybe he would do something totally normal such as go to Edward’s for a hamburger and fries, Edward’s being a block away, when he saw, sitting dreamily outside at Edward’s, Miss Total Weirdness. He sidestepped into the nearest doorway. Which turned out to be that (the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want) of a bar. It was maybe not totally normal to have a double vodka at 12:02, but fuck it.

One of the very few benefits of fame was that the bartender recognized him, so it did not matter that he had come out without any money.

Peter Dijkstra had recently discovered a nice fact. There is a German word, getigert , for a cat with striped fur. This immediately transforms one’s view of the animal. (This small domestic tiger.) This had led to other nice facts: the verb, tigern , means an activity which corresponds to the English words mooch , loiter (this on the authority of pons.eu), the French word flâner , all surely with radically different connotations from the Dutch word lanterfanten . A lord of the jungle, off the prowl, proceeding as chance takes him velvet-pawed through his domain, twitching his lordly tail — this is quite different, clearly, from, well, lanterfanten is also the word which goes into the English for fiddle while Rome burns . And a flâneur , this is Baudelaire, this is an inhabitant of Walter Benjamin’s Passagenwerk , the Arcades Project . Jeepers!

He wrote getigert!!!!! on one file card and tigern, mooch , loiter , flâner , lanterfanten , and lummelen on another. At the bottom of the second file card he wrote Sp? It? And, presently: bighellonare?

Gil ordered a second Potocki and took it to a booth. (He loved booths. But who doesn’t love booths?)

The notebooks had, maybe discomfort isn’t something you can crystallize, but he felt really uncomfortable.

When he had read Rachel’s first book it was not exactly whether it was good or bad, but he wanted to feel he knew the most important thing about her, that every single detail was something she had picked out of the world. But the genius could not be in the details because the details were exactly what Ralph prided himself on attention to. So any detail could always have displaced some other detail, which was the detail Rachel had chosen before the detail attracted attention. How could someone just casually displace that? This was a guy who would pay $100 to have a crocodile on a polo shirt. To say that it wasn’t even that he liked crocodiles would be to miss the point, there was no way he would wear any shirt with a crocodile motif even if he did like crocodiles, or any shirt with any motif, unless it was an emblem you had to pay $100 to have on a shirt.