Self Portraits by Frederic Tuten

Author:Frederic Tuten
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2010-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Self Portrait with Icebergs

They were speaking the language of young gulls and beardless seals, the language of childless ice splintering in the Arctic sun. But I understood them, having myself spoken those same languages long ago, when once I drifted, alone, on ice floes under frozen skies. They did not notice me when I entered the apartment, so engrossed were they, those two, musing on maps and charts, searching sea routes to secret islands shrouded by the massive cries of birds.

Finally, turning from her ruminations, she asked me, “What are more beautiful, words or objects?”

“You are more beautiful,” I said, trying not to look at her directly, lest she see what a fool I was. More beautiful now that the room was bare, stripped of distracting furniture, except for a mattress on the floor and a laptop sizzling on a wooden table.

Lighting a cigarette as if he were in a gale and letting my flattery pass, her lover turned to me. “And what is more wonderful, adventure or death?”

“Words,” I said, with a wise man’s expression, meant to assure him I was beyond the concerns of the flesh and lived only in the sphere of thought—where thoughts of her never set foot. In truth, I thought of them both often, living in the apartment above theirs and facing the same tame park, which for me was all the green world I needed, nature being my old enemy. Though, for them, the park always spoke of exciting vistas to come, trees meant forests and jungles, the lightest dust of snow a tundra.

“Can you shiver a timber? Or hoist a tankard? Or coil a line? Or do any of those things seamen are called to do?” she asked, loading an old leather suitcase with cartons of cigarettes.

“Of course,” I said, “and I can set a sail and hitch a sextant to the pole star; I can raise ship with an ‘avast’ and an ‘ahoy,’ I can make whales thrill to my song.” I could, but for the moment I so much more preferred to whistle for a taxi as it rushed down Avenue A or hitch my laundry bag over my shoulder and amble to the Laundromat with its row of exciting, spinning machines.

“You are just the man to sail with us,” they whispered in chorus.

Now I finally understood why the maps and charts and why a schooner was moored across the street, in the middle of Tompkins Square Park, the bare elm trees bending in ice, the snow climbing the ship’s gunwales, her running lights smeared with frost, the whole of her shivering out there in the wintry cold where only yesterday it was spring.

“Perhaps,” I said, “but not tonight or tomorrow or any other day or night or century to come. In any case, for what port are you bound?

“To none but to the ends of the earth, to the end of words,” she said.

“To their transmutation,” he added sweetly, “to the truths behind their veils.”

“For that,” I said, “we

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