The Fugitivities, стр. 27
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