FORMATTED FOR READING ON CELL PHONE ONLY
Love Is A Simple Thing,The Sound Of A Cello Singing
380 pages, $3-99 ebook
Available for reading on this website only. No downloads.
More information on this novel.
Bookstore for more purchasing information.
The Ocean
1
There is only one world and it is the world inside us. It is made of us and we are made of it.
And everything which flows in and out of us leaves a trace behind.
Like wounds.
Like scars.
Like imprints of kisses on our skin.
Even the things which are forgotten are always there. Leaving shadows.
We are always dying.
But life can re-create us and we can re-create the world.
Those who dare.
Those who have the passion and the inspiration.
Those who have the mad fever.
Gene remembers the great passenger liner which took them across the Atlantic Ocean. He remembers it as if it was yesterday. The purr of the elegant ship easing away from the West Side piers of Manhattan like a great floating cathedral. The skyscrapers rising up to the clouds. He remembers how his breath caught in his throat when the thick ropes were finally cast away from the dock and he realized he was free of the weight of his country.
There is a time somewhere in each of our lives, certainly before we reach the age of thirty, when our youth achieves a kind of perfection. A glorious time when we are perfectly balanced between youth and maturity, between optimism and worldliness, between idealism and inertia. It is a brief period, lasting only a year or perhaps a few of them, when it is clear that we have finally become all we are ever going to be.
Then the vision of our true life finally opens up before us and reveals itself.
We are at a perfection of power and courage and capability. Life will never again be as effortless, we will never again be as strong or as passionate or as free.
And it is in this moment that we each define all our lives will ever become..
Gene remembers how the rain lashed the steel deck when they were mid-ocean. How they crouched low against the wind and ran to the rail of the ship to watch the waves roll up and disappear under them. Deep ocean waves, traveling across thousands of miles to throw themselves upon a foreign shore.
This lashing rain is cleansing us of our useless old lives Slim, he said to her.
She nodded and smiled at him to hide the fact that she did not believe him.
He kissed her up against the rail and he promised her that their lives would be full of radiance and light. There on the ocean under leaden-black clouds.
Our lives will be radiant with beauty, he said.
And the rain lashed them.
And the wind howled at them.
And the ocean was relentless.
And Slim secretly wanted to jump into the deep rolling ocean waves and have them sweep them both away in forgiveness, sweep them away across a thousand miles of ocean together.
This is how she loved him then.
This is how the desolation in her made her want to die.
The year that Slim and I abandoned our life in Chicago and moved to Paris was the year of our greatest perfection.
It must have been the early-mid 1920s, perhaps 1924, or thereabout..
Things were bad and Slim and I desperately needed a change. I was headed for a life of sorrow and regret, a life lived only in longing and dreams. Instead of writing the great novels which I had always dreamed of writing, I was being slowly crushed by the weight of my wasted days spent as a Chicago city newspaperman. And now the days were adding up and turning into years.
This is the way our lives turn to dust. Days and days add up until we are crushed by the weight of them lying upon us. Until at the last, our finest dreams of what might be, become only fantasies of what might have been.
And in the end we think ourselves fools for ever having dared to imagine that we might surpass the ordinary in our lives at all.
Slim’s heart was broken. She had fallen downstairs and lost our first baby in a terrible accident. She was hurt so deeply that even the sureness of my love could not console her. She seemed to me a woman who was slowly drowning within sight of shore. And I could not find any way to revive her spirit.
Our routine lives in Chicago had been suddenly burned to ashes. We were broken and falling into despair. And that glorious future without limit which had once spread out before us like a banquet for our youth, now seemed to be closing in around us. Bringing darkness. The grayness of daily existence slowly crushing us in the cold grip of a future without inspiration. A future without radiance.
Gene sees himself standing on the deck of a rolling ship on the endless ocean. He cannot sleep, it is dawn, he is surrounded by the gray water which melts into a colorless dawn sky. On the deck his eye are closed, in his mind he is projecting a cinema newsreel of the city of Paris upon the blank canvas of his life.
The majestic wide boulevards..
The flamboyant bohemian cafes..
The sensual women..
Their fine flowing silks..
Caressing the skin like kisses..
Now his life is filled with incandescence.
And then like a miracle, a new life opened up before us. If only we could find the courage to reach out for it.
This was Paris in the full bloom of a golden age.
All my life I had dreamed of being a writer, I had tried and failed many times, always unable to take flight in my imagination, always brought to the ground by the limitations of my vision, by the seeming impossibility of finding inspiration in the confining dullness of my home town.
But in Paris they were re-creating the world.
Gene remembers himself alone on a ship deck scanning the horizon. The vague line of a new continent is appearing in the thin white light.
There is the great and timeless continent of Europe..
He decides to go and awaken Slim, so that she can see the arrival of their new lives.
Inside he feels a terror rising in his belly.
Here is Europe.
I believe in a world that can be created anew by art.
Here I will become something or I will become nothing.
But I will know the truth of it forever.
As he watches, the great continent of Europe looms larger and larger, filling the world from horizon to horizon.
And so, with the divine innocence of youth. In the moment of our perfections, Slim and I reached out for it. Our great bohemian Paris.
With nothing to protect us but our love for each other and our vision of a future filled with wonders. A vision of our radiant Paris setting our lives aglow with the incandescence of great art.
There we would be kissed by magic and by miracle. There our true lives would begin at last.
And we reached out across the ocean to another continent.
At the height of our youthful perfection we reached out to our better selves.
And it changed us and it changed our lives forever.
2
Gene is standing at the ship rail watching the white gulls wheel over his head when Slim comes up behind him and takes his arm.
‘France?’ she says, barely able to hide the tremble of terror in her voice.
‘France,’ Gene says confidently.
As they watch the gloomy white cliffs of France slide past the ship rail in the early morning mist, Gene can feel Slim’s despair rise, he can feel her drift away into deep silence as she has done so many times during this winter of sorrow.
Gene gathers up his spirits for her, ‘France, Slim. France by God.. Here it is at last!’
He does a little dance on the empty deck to amuse her.
Slim laughs and takes his arm, snuggling up close to him, momentarily consoled against her desperation by his joy and warmth, so that together they appear only to be an attractive and well-to-do young married couple. Slim surely knows how to appear poised and carefree.
‘It’s going to be great sweetie,’ Gene says, his voice glowing with enthusiasm. ‘I promise. It’ll be a great new world opening up for us. Don’t worry, you won’t regret it. You’ll see.’
Slim smiles at him, she loves Gene and she believes in him. That he will write his book as he has always known he must. Still, she is not sure that she is cut out for either Paris or bohemia. She is aware she has a strongly conservative streak bred into her, although she calls it traditional.
Slim is a well-bred Connecticut daughter of wealth, she has money, refinement and a very good education. Although she is only her late twenties, she has the poise and graciousness of a much older woman, of her mother in fact.
Slim is attractive and elegant and contained, placid people always say, but Slim does not feel it. Steady they also say, but Slim does not care for it. Perhaps it was precisely because of these dull expectations of her that she fell so madly in love with Gene that she could not help herself. Perhaps because he did not belong to her world of elegant cocktail parties and social politesse, perhaps he excited her because he did not promise her steadiness. Gene represented an escape into the whole exciting real world out there, a world that had seemed so constantly closed off to Slim. Gene knew that world intimately and he wanted to show her all of it. And nothing excited her more. Even if he had not been intelligent and handsome and witty, he would still have been able to win her away. He was simply irresistible to her.
Now Gene and Slim stand in silence watching the hard white Channel cliffs pass in the thin winter light. These are not welcoming cliffs, they are merciless and forbidding, the harsh face of an indifferent continent.
As Slim stares out at the cliffs from the ship rail, she feels the gloom of endless winter settle upon her.
We are coming closer to the place where I will surely lose him. When I look at him I can only see him through a cloud of grief and pain. In this carefree Paris a woman will look at him with desire and joy, and he will go with her.
Gene puts his arm around her shoulder to warm her, he encloses her inside the warmth of his long coat. He loves Slim deeply and he longs to see her spirit revive.
If Paris cannot revive her then nothing can..
Slim feels the warmth of his body against hers. She feels the chill in her bones like ice creeping.
He strives so hard to help me. But it cannot be done. Always in the end the baby is still dead.
3
In a rattling empty train compartment Slim and Gene are sitting silently looking out the steamy-wet window at the passing French countryside in the gloomy early spring daylight.
‘I expected it would be more colorful,’ Slim says at last.
‘Hmm..’ Gene says, thinking the same thing but unwilling to admit it.
He feels foolish that he has somehow not expected to find winter here. Gene is a good deal more provincial than he’d ever admit, this is his first trip outside America and he is not nearly as confident about it as he appears when explaining to his friends his reasons for abandoning his promising journalism career in Chicago. He never tells them that he feels like a nervous expeditionary in search of a great bohemian adventure he has only read about in magazines.
Gene knows that the only truly sophisticated thing he has ever done in his life, is to marry Slim. Her quiet elegance already gives him the appearance of a cosmopolitan writer.
‘I thought there might be a landscape with blazing flowers perhaps,’ Slim says, ‘Like in the Van Gogh paintings. A field of yellow sunflowers.’
‘Paris will be blazing with color especially for us,’ Gene says optimistically.
Slim, smiles, ‘I do hope so. I hear they’re desperate in Paris for more writers these days.’
Gene laughs, ‘Yes. According to the New Yorker, two of the best Montparnasse cafes had an empty seat for almost twelve minutes last month.’
Slim drifts off to look out the window again. Winter is still shrouding the land. Gene watches her, even now after the dawn start from the gloomy docks, she is so groomed and poised that if she wasn’t quite so pleasant and charming, she might find herself envied and disliked for her polish. But Slim is always quietly self-effacing, always unintimidating and sympathetic company. Slim has always been smart and witty and subtle, it has been bred into her in those monied New York circles, how to be a damn good wife.
‘Maybe I’ll write a magazine column about how different the landscape looks than it does in photographs,’ she says contemplatively.
‘Maybe I’ll write about it.. Before you,’ Gene says, teasing her.
Slim turns from the window, their eyes meet in the silent playfulness of lovers. Smiling without smiling.
‘Huh,’ says Slim.
When she looks at Gene she sees a large-spirited man with an easy charm, handsome and unaffected, a manly mid-westerner, with a gentle and confident virility that always makes him appealing to women. But underneath his attractive warmth lies a quick wit, the incisive eye of an artist and a quiet brilliance, carefully tempered by his unpretentious charm to give no offense. He is a seductive personality to both men and women alike, people always adore to help him. They sense his good humor and generous camaraderie. Just the sight of him always comforts Slim, after five years of marriage they have an easy companionship together, now they are friends as much as lovers.
Gene laughs under her gaze, he loves to tease her. He loves to see it slowly dawn in her that she is not being taken earnestly. He loves to shake her out of her elegant poise. He loves it best of all when he fucks her hard and she moans softly from the deepest part of herself.
4
At the Gare du Nord, Freddy Angstrom isn’t there to meet them. They are standing on the train steps, anxiously scanning the crowds on the busy platform when he finally rushes up waving madly. He’s wearing an expensive tuxedo and, even though it’s almost noon, he looks as if he has come straight from a party.
‘Slim!’ yells Freddy, ‘Right here in front of you!’
Slim steps down on to the platform and Freddy joyfully sweeps her up in his arms. Gene notices it’s a little too passionate as always, but he lets it pass. Freddy is his closest friend and he has always been discreetly in love with Slim, ever since childhood, since long before Gene knew him and he first introduced them to each other at Princeton. When Freddy was decent enough to agree to share his room with Gene, the bright impoverished scholarship boy.
Without Freddy, Gene would never have gained access to their world, would never have been able to seduce Slim away from it and into his bed. Without Freddy to vouch for him, Slim’s parents would never have approved of their marriage at all. Freddy was simply one of them and Gene was not. Slim was one of them too but she didn’t care about it, she hated the snobbery and elitism. She loved Gene so madly she would have abandoned her own class rather than abandon him. Although Gene does not know it, this is precisely what she told her father when he voiced regret over her engagement. If I am forced to choose between you father, I will always choose Gene.
Slim hugs Freddy back with a platonic warmth, she has known him and his parents well since kindergarten and thinks of him as a kind of distant cousin. Although it is never discussed, she knows all too well how Freddy feels about her.
‘Freddy, how nice to see you,’ she says.
Freddy turns smiling to Gene and warmly offers his hand, ‘Welcome to Paris. At last.’
Gene ignores the hand and gives him a warm bear hug, ‘Ah, you’re a handsome devil Freddy!’ he laughs, happy to see him again.
‘My livelihood these days depends upon it, I can assure you,’ Freddy says, sheepishly allowing Gene to hug him.
Freddy Angstrom is weak, passive and amoral, but handsome and thoroughly charming with it. Freddy is well-bred and beautifully well-mannered, a son of one of the richest families in the nation. There is no-one he admires more than Gene, and in his secret heart, no woman he has ever loved more than Slim.
Freddy has gone to quite some trouble to bring them over here to live, religiously sending glowing reports each month to Gene, each designed to incite him into action so that he will commit himself to the life of a writer in exile. Freddy has always been firm in the belief that here in Paris it will surely be possible to finally seduce Slim, but the matter has taken on an urgency now that he has been disinherited by his father who does not approve of Freddy’s life as a expatriate playboy.
Now for the first time in his life, Freddy is poor and adrift in Paris where he imagines himself a starving writer. But like most young Americans living in Paris, Freddy does not actually write, instead he hangs around the cafes discussing the great novels he shall one day write, as soon as his circumstances allow it. In practice he is not a starving writer but a starving gigolo. And now he can wait no longer in the vain hope of somehow winning Slim away from Gene one day. Now that he has been disinherited by his father, Freddy knows he must marry as soon as possible. He must marry someone with money.
‘How’s the writing going?’ Gene asks pleasantly.
As his friend, Gene is willing to keep up the pretense that Freddy is here to write books rather than chase skirts and spend money, which Gene knows has always been his true talent.
‘Oh you know..’ says Freddy evasively, ‘It’s hard to find the time when I have to make a living now too.’
Gene laughs heartily, ‘You making a living Freddy! Who’d have thought? It must be a hell of a shock to your system.’
‘I can assure you it is,’ Freddy says solemnly.
‘Have you just come from a party now?’ Slim asks guilelessly.
‘Yes.. Eh, no.. I um.. I’ve been working.’
Freddy realizes with relief that Slim does not know exactly how he makes his living. He knows that Slim is easily shocked and he is glad that she does not know that he has sex with older women, usually rich American lady tourists, for a living.
‘I’m frightened to ask your vocation,’ says Slim, innocently considering his tuxedo. ‘Are you a waiter perhaps?’
Freddy glances at Gene, desperately hoping for rescue.
Gene aids him with a generous laugh, ‘As soon as she sees a man in a tuxedo she wants to order champagne. You know you’re a very expensive woman sweetie.’
Slim laughs, her wealth is a joke between them. Gene teases her over it because it makes him uncomfortable. Slim never takes offense, no matter how close to the bone he sometimes comes, she knows it is a price she must graciously pay for his comfort. Poor boys rarely marry rich girls and always there is a price to pay for it.
Gene’s face is lit up with mischief, ‘Freddy’s working in the Salvation Army now Slim. He’s a general. In charge of all their poor waifs and virgins.’
Freddy laughs too, the awkward moment is averted and he’s relieved. Gene drapes his long arm affectionately around Freddy’s shoulder, as if to protect him from Slim's curiosity.
‘You wouldn’t by chance have something to eat on you would you?’ Freddy asks. He hasn’t eaten anything since dinner last night, the prospect of breakfast with his graying patroness of the evening having been unbearably depressing.
Gene searches his pockets and pulls out a half-eaten wax-paper wrapped sandwich.
Freddy takes it gratefully and bites into it hungrily.
Gene watches him, suddenly realizing that Freddy can’t even afford food. He brightens his tone to hide the embarrassment he feels for him.
‘Freddy, grab Slim’s suitcase before it kills her. It weighs a ton. She insisted on bringing her favorite china. And then also her sideboard to display it on. They’re all in that damn suitcase.’
Slim goes across the platform to instruct the porters loading her baggage on to a handcart and Freddy turns to Gene.
‘I’m grateful you didn’t tell her.’
Gene shrugs, ‘If you want to go around screwing rich older ladies for a living then it’s your place to tell her not mine.’
Freddy nods, ‘Is she alright about losing the baby?’
‘No.. She’s not alright at all I’m afraid. But she’ll pretend beautifully for you.’
‘I’m sorry old man,’ says Freddy sympathetically.
Gene nods, he doesn’t want to discuss it. Gene too, has become skilled at pretending beautifully.
5
In the taxi coming from the station all three of them ride together in the back as they look out the window at the frantic wide boulevards, busy with cars and the occasional horse-drawn cart carrying baskets of vegetables or coal.
Freddy tries to draw them out of their tired silence, ‘So how are things in America?’
‘Repressive. You can’t even get a legal drink.’
‘Frivolous,’ says Slim, ‘The whole country is booming and drunk on bathtub gin.’
‘America is swimming in illegal booze,’ Gene says,‘There’s a speakeasy on every street corner, twice as many as there ever were bars.’
‘Well what’s wrong with that?’ says Freddy delightedly, ‘I’ve always rather liked a good hooch.’
‘Serious things do happen in the world too you know Freddy,’ says Slim, her politeness slipping. His shallow frivolity has always irked her. Slim has always thought he has the arrogant carelessness that only the very wealthy display, and even among the wealthy Freddy’s family are very well off indeed. Although Slim seems rich to Gene, she is not considered at all rich when moving among her own set.
Freddy turns to Slim, ‘I was so sorry to hear about the baby Slim. Gene wrote me. I know you wanted it so much.’
Slim nods, but says nothing. There is nothing to say. The silence fills the taxicab like rising water.
‘Thank you,’ she says at last.
Slim feels herself filling with emotion, being taken over again by the relentless sobbing.
‘Tell Freddy about your column sweetie..’ Gene says gently, always able to read her with ease, always there to quietly rescue her.
Slim feels her emotion begin to subside under Gene’s guidance, everything becoming alright again, taking the form of a reasonable world.
‘I’m going to be writing a weekly Paris column for the Manhattan Review. Called On The Continent.. About the Paris scene.’
Gene breezes in to help her, ‘You’ll be able to get your name in the magazine Freddy.. Suave tour guide, and man-about-town, Freddy Angstrom!’
‘That’s wonderful,’ Freddy says, ‘I always knew you’d be a big success Slim.’
‘Well I haven’t actually written any columns yet, so congratulations may be a little premature.’
Slim can do no wrong with Freddy, ‘Just to get the column is a success. You can’t imagine how many Americans in Paris would kill for just such a column.’
‘Including him, so you’d better watch out,’ says Gene, laughing.
‘Did Cousin Squeaky give you the assignment?’ Freddy asks.
‘Yes. I asked her immediately, once I knew we were coming over here.’
Freddy sighs with regret, ‘If only I’d thought to ask her myself. If only I’d known how desperately things would turn out. And you Gene? Are you glad to be finally out of the newspaper business? You were always too good a writer for that.’
‘Ask me in three months when my novel is going. Or languishing..’
‘Do you have a subject yet?’
Gene looks out the taxicab window and laughs expansively, suddenly filled with joy at the sight of Paris at last.
‘Life! How beautiful it is when you’re young and alive and in Paris with such good friends!.. And not in the damn newspaper business any longer.’
As Gene looks ecstatically out the window, the taxi pulls up outside a dilapidated old tenement building off the rue du Cardinal Lemoine. Here the wide boulevards adorned with majestic buildings are gone, replaced instead by damp, moss-green stained tenement walk-ups with iron balconies which are crumbling into the streets and the empty waste lots which flank them. This is a decaying and impoverished district on the far fringes of Montparnasse. The buildings are centuries old, perhaps old even when Napoleon ruled the city.
Freddy is unconcerned by the way the building looks. It is a perfectly normal building for artists to have their studios in, art and squalor are bedmates here, and he knows he has been lucky to secure such an apartment for them at all.
‘Here we are. The apartment is up on the top floor.’ Freddy says.
Gene admires the building, it’s at least as bad as anything he has ever seen as a newspaperman on the dangerous South Side of Chicago. He is thrilled that it is so run down and eccentric.
It looks just like an artists’ building should look, he thinks. I just knew it would be like this when we came..
As Gene chuckles happily, Slim stares silently up at the building in disbelief. She’s never seen anything like this at all, never in real life, only in photographs of big city ghettos, with poor Negro people lounging hopelessly on the sidewalks outside.
We are going to live in squalor and decay..
Slim feels her heart sinking as she climbs from the taxi.
Copyright Lee Vidor, 2010. All rights reserved.
Love Is A Simple Thing,The Sound Of A Cello Singing
380 pages, $3-99 ebook
Standard PDF for all eReaders and computers.
Immediate download.
Purchase -AS A LINK
