The Fugitivities Read online

  Phineas. Newborn. His voice was still going in Jonah’s mind, tinkling as it receded like a caboose. How far back did one have to go to understand a man? He had seldom found a single word to fit his own question mark. Was there a way to the inner directness of the thing, the things that he had never found he could say? Shades of history and cries of a people. Was that what Phineas had finally moved into the light? Fear of the missed life. Like that of the Ex-Colored Man discovering one day he has chosen the lesser part? There was only one way to find out. Get out ahead of it. Complete a turn toward whatever was out there that he had yet to know. Grasp and hold. Or be held.

  It was time to get real. Get a real job, deal with the real world. New York was a place where you figured some shit out, where whatever people could handle could be found, along with a good dose of whatever they couldn’t. The force of a decision brought with it a fresh inlet of perspective. His room, when he finally got home, looked entirely different, Jonah said. The things in it were no longer just the haphazard accumulation of restless days. They formed an image of his life up to that point. The nobody he saw there bothered him.

  He stared at the map on the wall over his bed. It was a gift from his mother. A Mercator projection, the Earth squared to the tidy scale of one to five hundred thousand. In the corner above the legend, the Air France Pegasus reared up with the national colors flaming in its mane. Air routes sprang from the world’s magnetic poles—Paris, London, New York—and sailed off in falling parabolas to distant cities, crossing the time zones. Underneath the map was a wide and low bookcase that ran the length of the wall.

  He pulled out a novel by Aragon and read the first sentence. It was as arresting as he had remembered. Arna had given him the book and he had promised her he would read it. He flipped through the pages, pausing over her elliptical notations. It was long and he had put off finishing it at some point without giving himself a reason for doing so. He could perceive now that it wasn’t anything about the story or the style that had failed to enthrall him. It was something in the sadness of the fate gripping its characters that he wanted to avoid resolving. It was the implication of her deciding this particular story was one they ought to share. He had concealed this to himself and chalked it up to distraction. But the truth was that he was afraid to read too far, to accept an ending that her intelligence had absorbed, reflected upon, and deemed cautionary.

  7

  Arna Duval Fignolé. A name redolent of fronded colonial mysteries, some obscure relay between la France hexagonale and the American South (perhaps if it had never sold Louisiana to Jefferson after defeat at the hands of her revolted slaves), a combination that, for one reason or another, Jonah associated with Arna’s equally unusual areas of expertise, such as how to knot a cherry stem inside one’s mouth; how to split matchsticks into figurines; how to carry anime jingles with a boyish whistle before lapsing into an awkward, hissing laugh.

  Despite these talents, Arna wasn’t exactly popular, Jonah told Nathaniel. Outside of school, she wasn’t easily reached. Jonah would call the landline. If her French father answered they would exchange the usual greetings, and then he would receive (crystallized in the impersonal politeness of French conversation) the default declaration that his daughter was unavailable. But if her American mother answered, it was another story. He would be quizzed on everything: school, his parents, weekend plans. Her mother spoke in high bursts of spirited Southern drawl that had been amusingly livened by a distinctly Parisian chirrup full of assumed common sense about the way things are done. If it was her mother, he would gladly talk all evening, because he knew it meant, sooner or later, she would pass him along. There would be a “Hey, hold on,” and through the receiver the plink and clatter of the kitchen would yield to the thudding of footsteps and the snapping of coil on the cord as Arna yanked the phone back to her room.

  In art class, he often sat behind her. The uniform-blue smock was tied in a bow at her back; her hair was the color of a chestnut you find in the yard and pocket for safekeeping. She was the beginning of poetry, and the idea of it spread contagiously to his tender nerves, like the smell of a face drawing near. Overnight, he was Lermontov. The great Russian poet, Jonah explained, whose very name (even if he was unsure how to pronounce it) had suggested the dashing sound of what poetry ought to be, and of all that it promised to do. Every sonnet smoldered, even the formidable Séyès lines of the composition books could not regulate them. The finest lyric achievements of an evening were delivered up the rows to Arna’s desk the next morning. With respect to these strenuous developments, Arna maintained perfect inscrutability and a distanced cool.

  While his fevers swirled inward, Arna was slowly but surely expanding her vision outward, primarily through her admission to the circle of the beautifully scarved elite, who gathered in the nearby Parc Monceau to smoke hashish after classes. One afternoon, after much pleading on Jonah’s part, she allowed him to join her at a small gathering in a high-ceilinged apartment on rue de Téhéran where she taught him privately how to heat a stick of Moroccan hash with a lighter and fritter its crumbs into a bed of rolling tobacco. Hashish was Arna’s oblique answer to poetry. She had accessed a different portal to knowledge, one she wanted to know of through her body, and that she had somehow, seemingly without his being able to detect when or how, confidently claimed as new territory for exploration. While he pretended to watch music videos on a television fitted into a Louis XV cabinet, she moved lithely from one body to another, laughing tipsily, then suddenly entwined in voluptuous and cryptic gestures. There were no rules, at least none he could detect; sometimes she was kissing boys, sometimes caressing girls.

  Jonah worried that his wallflower inhibitions would mean losing Arna to the dizzying new world she had so swiftly, and apparently effortlessly, integrated. But, miraculously, even as he remained outside the inner circle, his skin color had come to take on new meanings, some of them positive, or at least it was made clear to him that his presence added something cool and desirable, like a prized and rare accessory. Most importantly, from his perspective, it ensured his continuing access to certain invitation-only parties at country houses in the “Island of France,” that green Merovingian radial marked by all points, no less than half and no more than one hour’s distance from the bell towers of Notre Dame.

  To get there, Arna and Jonah had to prearrange rides. Things started in the back of seat of a Peugeot in whispers, a joint passed around furtively, burning at the lips. Circumflex accents in tight sweaters caught the eye and legs brushed together in the woozy sway and tip of the car, touching off tactile collisions. Sometimes there was “free” kissing, in that it didn’t count. In the gardened manor houses, all vaguely alike, someone always put on the same album by the Doors, and Jim Morrison’s oracular pronouncements licensed and promised a time in which anything could happen, and would happen, under the sign of eternal youth. The aroma of hash and spilled Malibu liqueur, of being seventeen, caused a permanent tilt, so that there was only the possibility of bodies moving toward each other or falling away into various degrees of paranoia. In the tense, hermetic daze of the country house and its many attic rooms, skin and color were complicating assets, and Arna took it upon herself to act as a kind of chaperone, keeping her eye on him, teaming up when necessary, so that he, too, could fleetingly let his guard down and succumb to the ambient goal of pursuing new sensations. She allowed him to kiss and to discover the surface of her body, only, or mostly, above the waist. She gave him hints of desire, but he understood that it was also an act of generosity, a tacit sign of the compact that she was engaging in to protect them both. In the morning, the stone houses were always incredibly cold. Three and four under extra blankets, they lay in bed virtually naked and feverishly hot. He listened to the birds sing in the blue darkness, unsure whether the spell had broken, how much longer they might touch that way before it was time to go.

  With Arna things were never official. They weren’t “going out
,” but they also agreed that theirs was a special kind of friendship. They haunted the record stores behind the Pantheon, watched Hitchcock flicks on the rue des Écoles, and posted up in cafés, bantering about movie stars and music and the hookup scene. Arna’s hair was short like a boy’s. She should have been a member of the group of girls from the good families, but those girls hated her. She was a transfer student and the shape of her eyes and her skin tone was held to be suspicious. Behind her back they called her “a Mongol” and the rumor was that Arna was a gitane. One afternoon as they waited in line for the bus, a group of girls got a chant going. Arna walked away, presumably to cry, but she reappeared moments later with a jar full of filthy water that she tossed in a girl’s face, causing an eruption of hysteria. On one of their first hangs, Arna showed Jonah an impressive knife from her father’s collection, a lissome folding blade. She liked to play with it over lunch after slicing vertices from her Camembert. It was Arna’s idea to carve their names into the green plank of a park bench where they met sometimes after school. Their special friendship, which was always something more, but also less, went on this way until the afternoon Arna came over to the rue de Tocqueville.

  Jonah had invited her before. This time she accepted. It was midweek and his mother had left her usual note reminding him she would be working late. They sat on the living room floor watching MTV Europe. MC Solaar, Massive Attack, heart-stopping Lauryn Hill, watery flashes of Kurt Cobain. Arna half watched as she flipped through a National Geographic. She was wearing her evergreen track shorts with the Adidas flower, and a white tank top. A new show came on, and they decided to move to his room. Arna sat on his bed, poring over an article on whaling in Iceland. He followed along over her shoulder. Her hair smelled like wet wood in the sun, like the bark of a tree hit by a sprinkler in the summer. She flicked through the pages for a while, then, with a sigh of boredom, stretched out on the bed. He picked up the magazine, pretending to read in silence. Arna said something muffled into the pillow, and he heard her pull off her top and flounce back down. He waited a moment, then put the magazine aside and lay down next to her carefully, as if afraid of waking her. At first, when she touched him, he thought it must be an accident, but then he saw that her other hand had slipped under the elastic of her shorts. She stopped and gave him a long serious look. Then she rolled over, pressing herself on top of him. He felt her heat as she placed his hand. “I want to get this over with,” she said. When it started, he felt like her body was squirming away. They thrusted in contradictory motions, meeting in tense shocks. When he shuddered, she jerked away violently. He apologized and she did not answer. They stayed that way for a time, breathing. At one point, he feared she was crying, but she wasn’t. When she got up, she wiped the back of her thigh with his T-shirt. Suddenly, there was a sound at the front door. Arna bolted. Within seconds, she was somehow dressed again, her backpack slung over her shoulder, saying something to his mother with a quick laugh of surprise in the front hall as she slipped out onto the landing. Jonah went to the balcony. He watched her cross the street in a dash, walking, then running, as she turned the corner and disappeared.

  That was the early summer of their graduation, as Arna was preparing to leave for England and he was waiting to go off to college in the States. She asked to meet him the day before she was set to go. They met for a coffee not far from the school, but ended up walking for almost an hour, down along the river and then through the hot, dusty Tuileries Gardens crowded with tourists. Arna was going to study politics, philosophy, and economics at Oxford, a compromise with her father, who had wanted her to follow the family tradition and attend one of the grandes écoles in Paris but consented to let her go abroad as long as she promised to return and not to study anything frivolous.

  They ended up standing in the proscenium by the ticket booths at the entrance of the Métro station at Concord. The pneumatic gates of the turnstiles whooshed and clattered. Against the wall opposite the ticket booths was an old indicateur d’itinéraires, one of those connecting boards that lights up when a steel node is pressed down next to the label for a destination. Punch in Mairie des Lilas and a string of pale, green dots illuminate your trajectory across the city. Jonah and Arna took turns pressing possible destinations. The board lit up, dutifully, colored bracelets radiating outward in crossing paths.

  Jonah had hoped at least for a warm farewell. Instead, they struggled to find things to say. Arna was distant. It became clear that there was too much they hadn’t acknowledged over the years. As if they had crossed some threshold, run afoul of the obscure bylaw that states that past a certain point of ambiguity in a relationship, the real one can no longer be recovered. The realization felt strange, because the possibility that they would become vastly different from each other had never really occurred to him before.

  Arna said she thought it would be a good thing to have some real distance between them. He quickly agreed. She gave his shoulder a gentle, playful nudge. Sweaty faces were streaming past them out of the tunnel. He thought to kiss her, but the jostling of the crowds, the heat, the noise, it was all so overwhelming that they briefly hugged instead.

  It was Arna’s idea that they should correspond, and he enthusiastically co-signed. They kept in touch “across the pond” while attending university. Though there was no positive sign of the romance that had made their friendship special, the letters, which increased in volume over time, took on increasingly intimate hues. He knew a good deal of what was going on in her life—at least, the portion she wished to share with him.

  Jonah said he only saw Arna in person once during college, however, around the same time the following year back in Paris. On that occasion she was in town for a few days and said she could only do coffee. They met at one of the large corner-sweeping brasseries by Courcelles. Even though it was a little windy, they sat on the terrace in rattan chairs, not facing each other, but side by side, oriented outward toward the traffic of the boulevard and beyond it, the high gates sealing off the cool verdant mass of the Parc Monceau and the plump facades of the grand villas overlooking its “English” gardens.

  Arna told him she was seeing someone, a guy who went to the London School of Economics, who played in a band and was studying to be a human rights lawyer. She spoke well of him, without particulars, but added that she wasn’t sure it was going to work out on account of her plan to take a postgraduate fellowship with the Directorate-General for Regional and Urban Policy under the European Commission. In theory, it was based in Brussels, but in practice she would travel almost the entire time, all across the Union, gathering statistical data and meeting with local and regional political actors to gauge various measures of compliance. She would essentially be “taking the temperature of the European project,” as she put it. Once people could see the numbers, she explained, recalcitrant populations that were being manipulated by local politicians would realize the many benefits that they were ignorant of or took for granted. She had learned at Oxford that a totally politically integrated Europe was now only a matter of time, possibly less than a decade away, and it was crucial to martial more popular support for the supranational conception of citizenship that it would entail. She was animated about her looming professional debut, and it struck Jonah, as he in turn explained to her something about his dismay at the decline of the film industry, that their conversation in person was far more formal and stilted than in their letters.

  “Ack, I’m sorry. I hate it. This will just take a sec.”

  “No worries.”

  She was responding to a text message. From the guy, Jonah thought, although it would turn out that she was actually making plans with her mother. Jonah reflexively felt in his pocket for his own phone. He had text messages from his parents too. His father wanted to know if he had seen the latest news about the torture scandals from the war. He had heard about them, seen a handful of the images. But it was the last thing he wanted to think about just then.

  In
college, a friend had urged him to join a small group gathered in a dorm room to watch the beheading of a Jewish journalist. He had gone to check it out, and then, as the tape began, excused himself. It wasn’t only the gore that he sought to avoid. Or even the dissociation of being a random onlooker watching this snuff film from Karachi on a laptop in snowy western Massachusetts. There were those who whispered that, like the September attacks, this was one of the signs of the coming “clash of civilizations.” Jonah didn’t have the courage to face that bleak possibility, nor could he imagine what confronting it would require. He hated conflict and didn’t have the stomach for it, even if it was inevitable. But he also, more reservedly, couldn’t comprehend the self-evidence of that phrase to many of the students around him. To him, if anything, there was a clash of barbarisms, and the barbarians could be found just as easily in Columbine, or Howard Beach, as in Baghdad. What truly made the video impossible was the foreknowledge that there would be so many more like it; that this spewing taste for cruelty and hatred was just the beginning of a long death-spiral that would shroud the future in its cold spell. That their future had already disappeared.

  They both looked up from their phones. Arna was wearing a handsome jacket, and Jonah complimented her on it.

  “Thanks! Mariam helped me pick it out from this great little shop in Notting Hill. You would love her. Actually, I’m hoping she will come with me, you know, when I start. She’s got this consulting thing based in London—I think I told you about how she was freaking out when going through the interviews. But they need her to do liaising with the offices in Frankfurt and Paris, and she speaks like seven languages or something, so I’m thinking we can coordinate some time to get away together. Plus, I feel like we would travel well together.”