Anthropologies: A Family Memoir

Part Three: Notes on Art

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . PartThree. NotesonArt But poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don’t know you know. —Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Thirty degrees centigrade. In London, this is hot. It’s 2006, a summer of record heat, the air is thick and still. Kathryn and I have stopped over for a few days on our way home from Prague where, for three weeks, we have been at a conference for writers and photographers. Every morning, workshops; every evening, smoky readings or foreign films. She spent her afternoons in darkrooms, I spent mine in cafés with poets or on the balcony, reading manuscripts. Now we are walking along a street with traffic in Bloomsbury, perhaps we are nearing Tottenham Court Road, the fumes heady, the crowds of people slightly overwhelming—no, for Kathryn, absolutely overwhelming. Her anxiety is a fishing line, taut between us. I want her to love London . Instead, she is already speeding toward the future moment when she is going to tell her husband she wants to leave him. We turn away from the crowds, go down a side street, find a small café with tables out front. Inside, the café is not a café but a health food store with a counter where there are bins of salads and where they will put fruit into a machine and juice will come out. We have places like these at home. Exorbitant . I hold my hand out with the coins whose denominations I do not remember. Without my glasses, I am like a child or Blanche Dubois , dependent upon the kindness of strangers. The young black man with the Rastafarian hair laughs. Oh, he says, the java must be for you. Outside, at a small round table, the wind comes up or maybe it is the swish of passing cars and we mistake it for wind. A young beggar approaches the table behind us, then ours. He is, I remember, wearing 114 Part Three some kind of long heavy coat, conspicuous in the heat. His words have hard edges but sound swallowed. I give him a few fat coins and on his face an expression I recognize. Contempt. It means he could hurt us without compunction. It isn’t often you see that on the face of a stranger. Maybe on the face of a lover, you’ve seen it, just before you realize you must leave him. I want Kathryn to love London as I do and so I lead her toward King’s Cross, toward the neighborhood where I stayed when I was eighteen. Here, I want to show her, here is where I started to become myself; where, when I saw my reflection in a window, I realized I was a separate person, free to invent my own life; where I knew, somehow, that the past does not determine the future. We are standing on the corner near Russell Square Station where just last summer, one of the bombs went off. I can see the small grocery. The phone booth, the row of apartments with glass balconies that pyramid down to the ground floor. We walk farther. The row houses curve. People around us are not wearing business suits. They push babies in strollers, pull little carts of groceries or laundry. Everything is becoming slightly shabby. We stop in front of a row house, like its neighbors, painted white. There are flower boxes with geraniums. A sign promises a full Irish breakfast. A man with a turban, a Sikh, comes out of the front door. If we walk any farther, four steps, maybe five, we will see the Indian restaurant where I ate with Richard, the little hardware store, then, in another block or so, Cartwright Gardens and the Avalon Hotel at the end of the crescent. Further down the street, the pub where the Scottish students hung out. We will step into 1972. But it is my past. Kathryn cannot go with me. She doesn’t want to. And I don’t want her to. This sudden realization is curious. Unspoken . But we both feel it. We stop walking and stand next to one another , trying to get our bearings. The wind lifts a strand of her long hair and it brushes against my bare shoulder. In few days, I will return home to take care of my mother. Kathryn will ask...