Free Motion Sickness by Lynne Tillman

Memorial. I used to love Westerns, John Ford Westerns,
The Searchers
especially, but Italian Westerns changed that, and war and gangster movies fill the gap. Sylvie and I pay our bill and agree to meet again, not accidentally, at a disco. We kiss each other once on each cheek, though I’ve been told that three times is correct in certain circumstances. I don’t know if this is one.
    Pissoirs and men’s legs. Trousers and shoes. Walking back to Arlette’s I pass an ancient pissoir. Guys back home piss against buildings or in doorways. One called out to me, Don’t look. I’m pissing. I said, I won’t. Then he said hesitantly, You can look if you want to. There are also plastic outdoor toilets shaped like newsstands whose insides turn upside down and sterilize themselves after each use. Arlette tells me the French are mad about toilets and that much innovation and inventiveness, especially with plastic, goes toward the development of new and better ones. She may be joking. Pissoirs are a vestige of an idea of Paris. Paris includes the trousers and shoes of anonymous men in circular steel chambers. The French may be building the perfect toilet, but Sal would’ve pissed anywhere if he had to go. When you gotta go, you gotta go. Give me some traveling music. I’ve revived Sal. He’s a hypnagogic figure, a hologram. Not a taxidermist’s dream.

Chapter 13
     
Kill the Umpire
     
“The expatriate represents, in fact, the normal state of an average citizen in this last part of the 20th century.”
    —Julia Kristeva
     
LONDON
     
    The French café is always the same. Except it’s Claudia’s day off and she’s not gracing it with her special presence. Even the elderly English couple who talked about the decimalization of the pound are here, precisely where I left them. The gray-haired woman looks distracted as she complains to the bald man, her husband, of Sybil, who may be their daughter. I spread my newspaper out, covering Patricia Bosworth’s biography of Montgomery Clift, and drink a second cup of café au lait. Gregor’s letter, which arrived today, alludes to Clara; he purposely doesn’t name her. He was once, during the Baader-Meinhof era, detained by the police for questioning and let go. “Now I think to write a play based on the murder of Ulrike Meinhof. Did you hear in the U.S.A. about a psychological test then to give to the schoolchildren in Germany, to discover if they had already terrorist tendencies?” He says he’d like to meet Arlette one day, that her theory of
Meninas
is interesting, that since I’m in London I might inquire if Oscar Wilde wrote “The Birthday of the Infanta” influenced by the Velázquez painting. He begs me to forgive his bad English.
    Gregor captivates me. I’m easily captivated. My mother once remarked that, with time, people wouldn’t enchant me. Marilyn Monroe thought that Monty Clift was the only person in worse shape than she was. I pay for my coffees and slide past the elderly couple who have fallen silent.
    In the tube the escalators at Holborn and Piccadilly climb forever and are long enough to be runways in old Busby Berkeley musicals. Someone might burst into song or do a dance routine, passengers might become a high-kicking chorus line on their way to work, to shop, shoplift, eat, or wander aimlessly. The train fills up with groups of men heading for a soccer game in the north. It must be Saturday. They wear scarves around their necks and slap each other on the back, exuding a desperate team spirit. A friend of mine told me that the sound of ocean waves breaking, the water rushing in over rocks and pebbles on the shore, was to him like applause. When I go to the opera with him, both of us have tears in our eyes at curtain calls. The divas bow low and oceans of love crash at their feet. I miss the sound of fans roaring after a home run. My team’s home run. I don’t enjoy the game in the abstract. I yell Kill the Umpire. This doesn’t travel