Lineage (4)

When it begins to exist for others it ceases to live in us.

—Arthur Schopenhauer

You’ve been so quiet, so much quieter than I, even if you’re still less quiet than your father, whose only sound each evening, as he puffs on his after-dinner cigar, lost in a reverie of woolly smoke, like a mountain-top, is a long belch-like groan of satisfaction. Still, we hear things at night (the pop of a cork, a chair scraped back) and believe, lying upstairs in the dark, that you must be talking to somebody, leaning in close, giving away all your secrets. In fact we worry that you’ll soon have no private life at all, no warm interior space in which to hide, as a ground squirrel hides—needs to hide—under frozen earth, wrapped in its thin tail. And then, tell me, what will you do? You will wander the brick streets looking for others’ secrets, for the quietest people, as though you could hide (and you cannot hide) inside them. Maybe the best way to protect you is to show you, here, now, in this letter, that language contains innumerable trapdoors: the word pebble is uttered, and at once you’re standing on the bank of a sunset-smeared river littered with white funerary petals, squeezing my pinkie finger, and talking about how the water gurgled over stone, or what one decrepit woman whispered, or why you could not look at the red-faced men sobbing and gripping their hat brims—so that a secret, a private feeling, however minuscule or trivial, is now outside of you, now an object that strangers can lift and peer into, the way a monstrous eye can fill a dollhouse window. Would you even believe that last night, because I heard, as your father’s belly quietly rose and fell, nothing at all, I tiptoed downstairs and out of the house and from shadow to shadow, my wine-colored bathrobe streaming behind me, slunk toward the louder neighborhoods, expecting to find you? Quite soon, behind a corner maple, I spotted a man I used to know, before I’d met your father, chatting with a young woman (not you, thank goodness) outside a Moroccan restaurant, no doubt exchanging some exotic-breathed secrets en route to a cinematic kiss, and I realized that I could, after all these years, still taste the salt on his lips, still feel his thick mahogany hair (now flecked with silver) between my fingers, still hear him breathe—pant almost—right in my ear. I didn’t love him, this older man, this onetime Assistant Professor (“Ass Prof,” he used to quip) of Cultural Anthropology, yet he activated something inside of me (an exuberance, a verbosity) that your father, who I nevertheless love eternally, seemed to shut down. Ohh, it is so quiet in our house, in our bedroom—only the faint scratching of my pen as I write by candlelight at our roll-top desk, like a monastic scribe. Indeed, listening to the sharp ring of silence, I suddenly believe that you are sound asleep, you are your father’s daughter, and I am the odd, unquiet one who hears things and gives away secrets and in the quiet center of the night must scribble in her little lavender notebook, sighing. Maybe I should thank you for surrounding me with such quietness; then again, maybe my quietness is the best expression of my gratitude. Thus, as quiet as this candleflame, as quiet as my tall empty glass of milk reflecting the candleflame in our dresser mirror across the room, I’ll slip into bed, and I’ll pull the gauzy covers up over my voice and body. Gute Nacht, my daughter. You may not hear from me for a long time.