A World of Infinite Difference 0 comments

by Caroline Langston

THEY are supposed to talk about what to do with their mother, who fell asleep smoking a Kool cigarette in bed and woke up just in time to burning sheets, but all Raoul wants to know is why Sophie can’t get over the seventies. “You don’t even remember them,” he accuses her in the car, driving back toward downtown from picking her up at the New Orleans International Airport. Up on the left, the Canal Boulevard cemeteries loom, a metropolis of tiny white temples. She has come home, and this time together, they will face the music their mother has made.

His sister, who’s thirteen years younger, and who was born in 1967: Love child, the older children crooned, during the Summer of Love, when Mama brought her home from the hospital.

That, and the decade afterwards, Raoul remembers. Sophie does not. This does not stop her. Whenever they are in the video store, he tires of telling her that he does not want to watch Taxi Driver, The Deer Hunter, or The Conversation again, and especially not Last Tango in Paris: his little sister, imagine!

Tonight, sitting over po’boys at Domilise’s, her face falls when he says that Chinatown was magical to him the first time only, he can’t imagine replicating the experience, and on the small screen at that. As he knew it would. It’s happened so many times already. It’s always satisfying to see her expression crumble, though in the next moment he is sad.

The first time he saw Chinatown, he tells her, taking a swig from his bottle of Dixie, he took the Metro-North train into the city—the city, he actually calls it that, even though they are from Mississippi—from New Haven by himself, to a theater in Midtown that had spotlit red velvet drapes and a crumbling plaster architrave over the proscenium.

That theater is gone now, Raoul is sure, swept up in the gentrification of Times Square. In his mind calendar pages flutter backwards, the way old movies objectify “Time.” The city was dirty then, only a couple of years away from being broke, in fact—which he also remembers, as well as the Blackout of 1977—really, he remembers it all.

Sophie doesn’t. “Tell me,” she says, expectant, like she’s seeking to divine knowledge. She does not look old enough to be an adult.

“It was winter,” he says, and describes the sheen of light on the streets, the rush of cold wind under his overcoat’s vent, as he wandered by himself across town. They leave Domilise’s and go on their way to the site of their old showdowns: the video store. They drive through Uptown along Saint Charles Avenue, maybe the most beautiful street in America, but the tangle of greenery blurs past. Instead, she is paying attention to him.

He conjures up for her the legion of four-door sedans, bright in their depthless colors, that scuttled like waxed beetles under the Pan Am building. Which hasn’t been the Pan Am building in years. Never mind that Sophie, in Boston, now lives closer to the city now than he. As he tells her this story, her face slowly begins to glow richly, her gray eyes alight, as he knew it would. It is as though he were an undiscovered country, his formless history a treasure. She is stout Cortez, silent upon a peak in Darien. It is complicated, this devotion he knows he can rouse in her—sometimes it fills his heart, other times it just annoys him half to death. He depends upon it, nonetheless—that he knows. But he doesn’t want to think about it, any more than he wants to think of the journey they must make in the morning, the scorched sheets in their mother’s room, and what they will tell their siblings. It is far easier to stay irritated about Sophie’s seventies obsession.

Which does not stop at movies. Other times she’s come to visit, he’s sat through hours of reruns on Channel 26—Good Times, The Jeffersons, Mary Tyler Moore. Tonight, after they come back from the video store empty-handed, she even tries to put on Welcome Back, Kotter—“It’s something light,” she says. “No heavy movies.” Heavy movies were all that they noticed at the video store.

But he ultimately snatches the remote and turns the channel to Seinfeld. “You have to live in the present,” he says, when he’s really thinking that what they must do is live in the future, where their mother awaits them.

“Oh don’t change it!” she cries. Just like she’s done before, when they’ve been going somewhere in the car, and all of a sudden some Peter Frampton song comes on, forcing him to endure an interminable seven minutes of Peter Frampton whining “Do...you...feel...like...I...do?” through a Heil talk box, while the insipid crowd behind him cheers.

What’s scary is that she’s got the whole culture following along behind her, giving her the illusion of legitimacy: As far as Raoul can tell, New Orleans classic rock stations—WCKW and at least two others—play only Led Zeppelin, Foghat, and Rush, as though the last twenty years had simply evaporated like mist. Or never occurred at all. Any time he turns them on, there are the same lyrics, chord progressions, melodramatic guitar riffs repeated in infinite loop. They play Deep Purple’s “My Woman from Tokyo” in the same cyclical manner as monks on Mount Athos successively chant the psalms.

To Raoul, it’s as though the great well of civilization were only a Disposall unit that had backed up into the sink. “What about something new?” he always asks her, if he is feeling transgressive. He does not, for example, want to listen to Grand Funk Railroad ever again. Grand Funk makes him think of their older brother Bobby and all the years they had to share a room together back when they were in school. Their mother, in her early forties and lovely, always yelling at them to get along. More things Sophie does not remember. Bobby laughed a lot very loudly and slept late and drank Falstaff beer. Nothing could be more of the seventies than Bobby, listening to Led Zeppelin and Grand Funk, in his jeans that faded white around the rivets, and wearing aviator shades. Bobby snuck out of the house at night, went duck hunting, spat tobacco into a Folgers can that he kept under the bed, and took mescaline on the Mississippi River Bridge. Along the way he made fun of Raoul: Raoul’s art books, Raoul’s Frank Zappa albums, the spell when Raoul, like e.e. cummings, would only write in lower case.

Only then, his name was not Raoul, but Ralph, after his mother’s great-uncle, a hill cotton farmer whose one valiant act was to donate his land for a refugee camp after the Great Flood of 1927—an act his mother always adored, as a sublime instance of simple Baptist charity. But he had always hated the name, and legally changed it as soon as he was of age. The first week of freshman orientation, he went down to the sixth circuit court in downtown New Haven to fill out the papers. He’d already begun calling himself Raoul.

He is embarrassed about that now. Like a tattoo he can’t get rid of, it’s an eighteen year old’s name, chosen in a rash moment, and now indelible. There is a nameplate on the door of his office at Tulane. If he’d just waited a few years, he could have styled himself “Rafe” after Ralph Fiennes, but nobody in Mississippi had heard of pronouncing it that way, back in 1972. Instead he became Raoul, which sounded dark, Gallic, entitled. The Sophie whom he helped to raise is thirty now, her blond hair touched with a fine dusting of gray. And he is forty-four, the age that Friedrich Nietzsche died of syphilis.

The name is vain fancy now, but Raoul has stood up under it. He has borne its consequences. He has known that the making of some choices precludes the selection of others. He has taught Kierkegaard, and Marcus Aurelius. Whereas Sophie—for lack of a better way to put it—is a slut. She is indiscriminate in her affections. In the face of all that minutiae about the seventies, she is like a catfish. She consumes everything and breathes it in and out through her gills.

She admits of no gradations in her thinking about the decade, holding an identical, genial warmth for 1971, 1975, and 1979. For her, everything is equal to everything else—Brian Eno and Star Wars and John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, and Convoy, a movie about truckers starring Kris Kristofferson and Ali MacGraw. Also Sam Ervin, Jacques Derrida, Brutalist architecture, Soap. Barry Manilow; the New York Dolls. ZZ Top. For her, it’s all one continuous piece of cloth, a seamless garment, and it’s all great.

Raoul, though, is a man of distinctions. He knows, unlike Sophie, that between 1971 and 1979 is a world of infinite difference. The part of the seventies to which he holds, inasmuch as he holds to anything, is the latter end: Patti Smith and the early Talking Heads, wearing skinny ties with his hair shockingly short, while Bobby’s still grew long and feathered, like a dog’s, past his ears. Reading French writers thoroughly for the first time. The seventies he treasures were in direct contrast, nay, revolt against all the detritus Sophie loves—the Eagles, Watergate, Chico and the Man.

The main thing Sophie objects to, it seems to Raoul, is Now. Now is the problem. Tendrils of smoke rise in their mama’s hair and her expression does not comprehend. She calls them at weird hours to talk about who Bill Maher’s guests were last night on Politically Incorrect. But Now is the problem that has no solution. There is no solution to Now. Hence Sophie’s limitless nostalgia.

Whereas Raoul is glad that he does not have to go back. Sitting beside her on the sofa, in his little camelback cottage, he is still pleased to have escaped. It’s spring in New Orleans. Jazz Fest is coming. He’s tried to tell her that the Mississippi he remembers from when she was small, before their father died and the family fell apart, was not so special. Racist, though he remembers some funny stories about the public high school during integration. Provincial: all that land—cotton fields, levees, sloughs and ravines—and all of it stale, like a tray of trucked-in vegetables in a chain supermarket. That’s why it still pains him to drive further out on I-10 than Kenner, though he will do it tomorrow. When he remembers that delta land, and the downtown streets of the town where they lived, it is as a landscape in perpetual need of rain: its hills hung with vines of dead kudzu; the closed-up shop windows on the ragtail Main Street soaped over from the integration boycott. When the letter arrived admitting him to Saybrook College, Mama stood in the carport with the paper folded in her veined white
hands and said, “Go.”

Now, twenty-five years later, he can sit on the front porch with good music and a book, his lamps radiating warm yellow light out the windows, and know that he will never again be called back to a kitchen smelling of hot spattering oil to eat salmon croquettes that streak the melamine plates in trails of grease. He remembers endless hours, like the town’s grid of dragging streets, a whole life half-toned as a hospital ward in an old film. In the midst of it all, he remembers Sophie swimming, in the circle of those years: the baby he held and diapered when his mother’s depression sent her temporarily away. He sees the child whom he taught to read by sounding out the names on headstones in the Mount Olive Cemetery, remembers her little feet white and delicate on the springtime grass, like pieces of water-hollowed soap, as she toddled among the plots.

And then he left: Became Raoul, and that seventies receded. Its roar grew more and more quiet until it shrunk to fit a shell, though when he thought to hold it against his ear, its contained sound expanded as big as the ocean.

His father died. His mother, Dora, became a monument. She went inside her room and that was that. Eventually Sophie escaped in the way that he had taught her, moving from book to book, each of the Great Ideas leading one into the next. Good colleges, fellowships—Anywhere is Nowhere in the economy they have chosen. On and on they have gone, into the terrains of their minds, but further out and away, as far as that receding frontier in space where the old radio signals and game shows transmit, endlessly and unaware.\

Only Sophie can’t stop watching One Day at a Time, Maude, and Soul Train, hosted by Don Cornelius. Out of the black screen’s dark, a telephone rings— Hello, this is Jim Rockford—and around that voice the light takes shape. Jim; his father, Rocky; Angel. Raoul’s surprised that he, too, remembers them all, can visualize the form of Rockford’s Trans-Am speeding down the sunlit interstate, the Ventura Freeway sign overhead.

There is a secret to why Raoul hates the seventies. Whenever he penetrates the layers of memory, the recollection of that day makes him shudder.

He was living in the city by then. Earlier that summer, his father had died; Raoul had flown back to Mississippi on a nine hundred-dollar Delta Airlines flight. That summer was hot in New York, as hot, in fact, as he’d ever  remembered it at home, only there were no warm green peaches hanging over the Hermans’ arbor, no lingering smell of cotton poison in the air. That day, a Wednesday, the temperature reached higher than 93 degrees: at midday the bright streets were blurred and listless. Then at dusk, as the accounts say and everyone would later know, “a line of thunderclouds passed rapidly into Westchester.”

When the lights went out in the East Village he waited for them to come back on, but minutes lengthened into hours and they did not. He didn’t have any candles. Out in the hall, he began to hear his neighbors’ voices bobbing up and down in the stairwell like buoys, yelling to one another in Ukrainian. Later, palming the banisters carefully, he ventured down the six flights of stairs to the sidewalk. To his right, Fifth Street stretched westward like a wasted river, illumined here and there only by the faint light of candles in windows, like reflected stars. Darkness was general over the city. When a waft of humid air carried the acrid smell of smoke to his nose, from something somewhere burning, he made his way back inside.

All that night of the blackout he sat, in his apartment by the window, sweating in the close room. Down below, the familiar sounds of movement coalesced into a random din, echoing through the canyon of the street. Clumps of obscure figures jostled their way down the block, and somewhere, a shop window gave way to an ecstasy of shattering glass.

So he has lived through history. Caught between sleeping and waking, Raoul knew that it was meant for him, that this was his darkness. His little sister, mother (her veined white hands), the sisters and brothers that were always more like acquaintances to him—all of them seemed as indistinct as particles, illusions. He had left them behind already. He did not believe in God, but now, and forever after, he would believe in Judgment. The failure inside him had been punctured and leaked out all over Manhattan. But he was still lying on the warm wood floor of his apartment, wounded with a grief that wouldn’t close.

And didn’t. When Raoul looks at his sister, he knows that of all her repetitions, none will take her back to the place she wants to go, none will rescue their mother from the twilight where she’s gone. None will recover the point of origin, the old garden, their family’s inscrutable house.

Instead, he realizes now, they are going to have to try and salvage what remains. This is all they have: their mother and her imperfect, impenetrable love.

Sophie rises suddenly from the sofa and yawns. “’Night, Mister Man,” she says, using an old nickname for him. “We have us a long day tomorrow.”

Sometimes, like tonight, when he looks through Sophie’s eyes, he can catch a glimpse of the sublime she sees: in one of the Allman Brothers’ last, falling chords; in the final frames of Annie Hall where Alvy Singer stumbles through New York’s browns and grays, once again alone. And in that moment, he sees himself, and his sister, both of them transfigured, precious. It’s only for a second, though. And then the credits come on, and the screen goes black.