56 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER21, 2020
a skirt with nothing underneath. She
told us this as we crossed the frozen
field on our way to the bus stop, and
we laughed. But then Soraya stopped
and cupped her lighter from the wind.
In the brightness of the flame I caught
her eyes, and for the first time I felt
afraid for her. Or afraid of her, maybe.
Afraid of what she lacked, or of what
she possessed, that drove her beyond
the place where others would draw
the line.
Soraya had to call the banker from
the pay phone at school at certain times
of the day, even if it meant excusing
herself in the middle of class. When
she arrived at the Hôtel Royal for one
of their meetings, an envelope would
be waiting for her at the front desk,
containing elaborate instructions for
what she was to do when she entered
the room. I don’t know what happened
if she failed to follow the banker’s rules,
or follow them to his exacting stan-
dards. It didn’t occur to me that she
might allow herself to be punished.
Barely out of childhood, I think what
I understood then, however simply, was
that she was engaged in a game. A
game that at any moment she could
have refused to go on playing. That
she, of all people, knew how easily rules
could be broken, but that she elected,
in this instance, to follow them—what
could I have understood then about
that? I don’t know. Just as thirty years
later I don’t know if what I saw in her
eyes when the flame illuminated them
was perversity or recklessness or fear,
or its opposite: the unyielding nature
of her will.
D
uring the Christmas break, Marie
flew to Boston, I went to stay with
my family in Basel, and Soraya went
home to Paris. When we returned two
weeks later, something had changed in
Soraya. She seemed withdrawn, closed
up in herself, and she spent her time
in bed listening to her Walkman, read-
ing books in French, or smoking out
the window. Whenever the phone rang,
she jumped up to answer it, and when
it was for her she shut the door and
sometimes didn’t come out for hours.
Marie came to my room more and more
often, because, she said, being around
Soraya gave her the creeps. As we lay
together in my narrow bed, Marie would
tell me stories about Bangkok, and,
however full of drama they were, she
could still laugh at herself and make
me laugh. Looking back, I think that
she taught me something that, how-
ever many times I have forgotten and
remembered it since then, has never
really left me: something about the ab-
surdity, and also the truth, of the dra-
mas we need to feel fully alive.
From January, then, until April, what
I mostly remember are the things that
were happening to me. Kate, the Amer-
ican girl I became close with, who lived
in a large house in the neighborhood
of Champel, and showed me her fa-
ther’s collection of Playboy. The young
daughter of Mrs. Elderfield’s neighbor
whom I sometimes babysat, and who
one night sat up in bed screaming when
she saw a praying mantis on the wall,
lit by the headlights of a car. My long
walks after school. The weekends in
Basel, where I would entertain my lit-
tle sister with games to distract her
from my parents’ arguments. And Sha-
reef, a boy in my class with an easy
smile, with whom I walked to the lake
one afternoon and made out on a bench.
It was the first time I’d kissed a boy,
and when he pushed his tongue into
my mouth the feeling it ignited was
both tender and violent. I dug my nails
into his back, and he kissed me harder;
we writhed together on the bench like
the couples I’d sometimes watched from
afar. On the tram ride home, I could
smell him on my skin, and a feeling of
horror took hold of me at the thought
of having to see him again in school
the next day. When I did, I looked past
him as if he didn’t exist, but with my
gaze softly focussed, so that I could still
see the blur of his hurt in the corner
of my eye.
Of that time I remember, too, how
once I came home from school and
found Soraya in the bathroom, doing
her makeup in front of the mirror. Her
eyes were shining, and she seemed happy
and light again, as she hadn’t been for
weeks. She called me in and wanted to
brush and braid my hair. Her cassette
player was balanced on the edge of the
bathtub, and, while her fingers worked
through my hair, she sang along. And
RAUSCHENBERG
Our first concern might be did the artist consider the impossibility
of defining
nothing without speaking of absence without speaking
The white paint of the artist carefully selected and applied so as to seem
an uncreased space unwrinkled unnippled a whatever indefinite
nondescript discreet
But even without a mouth without figure or form or face the canvas if it
were to speak
as we the viewers imagine would it not speak of powdered sugar
and cocaine,
chalk, marshmallows, and salt
and even that a betrayal of substance
Would it not privately murmur something about the white simmer of stars
Would it not speak of something not nothing would it not
Perhaps here then is the problem
of the art not the art but the reflection the world cut in a pane of glass
or rather being as it is latex paint on canvas
Here the artist invites questions from the audience
The girl in back who asks if this is the moment before being
The man with glasses who asks if this is a room called grief
