{"id":156893,"date":"2022-01-27T10:33:29","date_gmt":"2022-01-27T15:33:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=156893"},"modified":"2022-02-07T18:21:49","modified_gmt":"2022-02-07T23:21:49","slug":"crush","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2022\/01\/27\/crush\/","title":{"rendered":"Crush"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Still from The Seventh Seal<\/em> courtesy of the Criterion Collection. The film is available to stream<\/a>, and as a disc set<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

We\u2019re in a room on the ground floor of a hotel, the bed facing a wall of curtained windows that in turn faces the street. It is nighttime. Rain is coming down, steadily, reflectively, a stream of passersby visible through the curtains, which are sheer. Everyone is moving in the same direction, bent slightly forward and holding an umbrella, from left to right, the good direction, from past to future, the opposite of where Death leads the knight and the squire and the monk and the smith and the mute in their final dance against the backdrop of time in Ingmar Bergman\u2019s The Seventh Seal<\/i>. The umbrella is the canopy of the heavens; the rain is never going to let up. We can see the passersby but they can\u2019t see us, though Eric has turned a light on above his side of the bed. <\/p>\n

I was obsessed with The Seventh Seal<\/i> my senior year in high school; I was obsessed with the vision it presented of a handsome knight playing a game of chess with Death. Death\u2019s face was unexpectedly round and white, the blackness of his eyes and their sparkling avidity as terrifying as the sound of his name in Swedish. D\u00f6den. <\/i>There could be no doubt of the fact that death at the end of it elevated life\u2014an otherwise lackluster affair in which human beings were obliged to eat and mate and have jobs and engage in pointless conversation\u2014into a realm worthy of passionate attachment. The knight was handsome, yes, and virtuous (though not a very good chess player, according to my best friend Peggy\u2019s older brother Marto), but Death was overfull of something that seemed more like life than whatever it was that animated his opponent. When the knight said, \u201cYou drew black,\u201d Death replied, \u201cAppropriate, don\u2019t you think?\u201d Unlike everyone else in the movie, he had a sense of humor. I was in love with Death. If I couldn\u2019t have him, I would settle for someone like Marto, a handsome, quick-witted ne\u2019er-do-well.<\/p>\n

In the dream, Eric is propped against the pillows, restless, paging through a newspaper, scattering and discarding pages across the bedspread, which is heavily quilted in hues of old gold and dusty rose. Normally I would have removed such a bedspread and jammed it into the closet. \u201cI\u2019ve had it,\u201d Eric says. I remind him that first we have to meet family. We can fake it, he says. He\u2019s been ready to leave for a long time. \u201cI thought we were happy,\u201d I say. \u201cWeren\u2019t you happy when we were watching that movie?\u201d That was okay then<\/i>, Eric explains, but this is now. \u201cNow, it\u2019s enough.\u201d He begins to move, putting weight onto his right hand in a way that suggests he\u2019s getting ready to swing his legs out from under the bedspread and onto the floor. Then, all at once, he disappears. It\u2019s as if he evaporated.<\/p>\n

For many years of our adult lives we sat in bed like this, side by side. The difference is, it would be early morning, not nighttime, the paper recently delivered, a piece of the world hurled onto our porch in Saint Louis or dropped at the edge of our front yard in Vermont, requiring me to make a trek in my pajamas to retrieve it. I can\u2019t remember the last time Eric and I sat together that way, sharing the paper. When someone you have lived with for a very long time dies, memory stops working its regular way\u2014it goes crazy. It is no longer like remembering; it is, more often, like astral projection. \u201cLike darkness in the movies, it tests the outline of your astral footprint,\u201d my subconscious mind informed me the other night, speaking from beyond the bedroom wall, whereas the great memoirist Chateaubriand, speaking from beyond the grave, observed sourly that memory is often a quality associated with stupidity.<\/p>\n

I first saw the knight on a class trip to the Cloisters my senior year in high school. Springtime, the trees along the parkway leafing out\u2014romance was in the air, along with hints of restlessness and dread. It\u2019s amazing how you see the places you\u2019re headed in life ahead of time and have no idea that\u2019s what\u2019s happening. Death awaits you, you\u2019ve been told. This is the fundamental fact of being alive and yet you try to jump across it. Eric had been reading the paper, and whatever he\u2019d been reading, he was getting impatient.<\/p>\n

In the Cloisters people trod softly. They spoke in hushed voices but even so their words echoed everywhere; it was as if the past was speaking, as if it issued from the smell of the place, water dripping on stone. I could stand by myself\u2014enamored of the thought of myself, alone, standing there, sufficient unto myself\u2014staring down at the effigy of Jean D\u2019Alluye, the French Crusader knight, more handsome by far than the boy in my class I\u2019d thought I had such a crush on and yet, somehow, both of them similar by virtue of their inaccessibility. Boys, then, were wearing their hair longer but they also had bangs. The knight\u2019s flowing locks left his forehead elegantly bare; he wore a chain mail shirt, and folded his hands piously above his breastbone in exact replication of the knight at the beginning of The Seventh Seal<\/i>, moments before he meets up with Death. There was a lion resting at Jean D\u2019Alluye\u2019s feet that our teacher had told us signified courage. He also told us, erroneously, that crossed legs signified death in battle.<\/p>\n

That teacher is dead now. He may not have known that the knight\u2019s sword came from China, or that the effigy of the knight, face-down, had served for a period of time following the French Revolution as a bridge over a small stream outside of Tours, watching the little fish swim by below. Of course the knight himself was no longer there to watch anything; whatever was left of him had been summarily disposed of by the sansculottes. We read \u201cThe Knight\u2019s Tale\u201d in the original Middle English in that teacher\u2019s class. \u201cLove is a gretter lawe, by my pan \/ Than may be yeve to any erthely man; \/ And therefore positif lawe and swich decree \/ Is broken al day for love in ech degree.\u201d The words barely hovered at the thin edge of familiarity, not unlike the overwhelming beauty of the knight\u2019s face, thoughts forming behind it in a mind of stone.<\/p>\n

Eventually we were on the bus going home. It was dark; I was sitting beside the crush who, amazingly, had decided to take the seat next to me. The darkness of the bus was nothing like the darkness of the Gothic Chapel where Jean D\u2019Alluye lay on his back, his eyes wide open, staring up at the ribbed vault of the ceiling for all eternity. Some of my classmates had lit the little lights above their seats but the crush and I kept ours unlit, his intentions perhaps having been amorous, whereas mine were to sink deeper into the darkness, made darker still by the intermittent lights appearing out the window once we\u2019d left the city behind. In those days it was a three-hour ride from New York City to Philadelphia. The boys sitting behind us had brought whiskey in a flask. I could smell it, the smell of cocktail hour on Woodale Road. I don\u2019t live here, I thought. I am not here. In the Gothic Chapel the only light had come from outdoors through the stained glass double lancet windows. It was hard to see anything, really. When we first came into the room there had been a single large candle in a candle stand in the corner, but at some point the candle had gotten blown out.<\/p>\n

Shaken, not stirred, the crush said, accepting the flask from the seat behind us. Bond, replied one of the two boys, James Bond. The candle had gone out and the wick was still glowing, emitting the trail of smoke our teacher told us signified the presence of the Holy Ghost, the most mysterious and hence most terrible (as in causing terror, awe, or dread) aspect of the Trinity. Outside the window the lights of apartment buildings loomed near the highway, the shapes of trees, the great heaving bodies of the willows.<\/p>\n

The boys were talking about Dr. No\u2019s metal hands. They were his Achilles\u2019 heel, the crush said, solemnly, and I knew, just as well as I would ever know anything in the course of my long and\u00a0fiercely cherished life, that nothing would ever be sufficient. \u201cThe proof that the little prince\u00a0existed is that he was charming, that he laughed, and that he was looking for a sheep,\u201d my adored sixth-grade teacher, Mr. Fine, had read to us, and my adored sixth-grade crush, Eddie Williams, had rolled his eyes.<\/p>\n

The point is, a crush goes nowhere. It\u2019s called a crush because it\u2019s like something landed on top of you, making movement impossible. It isn\u2019t the same as a love affair that\u2014whether star-crossed or blessed\u2014confers motion, ferrying you through time. There you are, crushed, the sole stirring of life in you occasioned by the sight of the crushing object, no matter the grace of its limbs or the lightness of its spirit. And, truly, what is the point? In terms of the future of the planet, for example.<\/p>\n

On the bus back from New York City I courted the terror, the whole span of what it is like to be born, to fall in love, to love someone and live a life with them and then at the very tail end of it encounter death. The dark room, the great dark vaulted ceiling. \u201cFour suns hung in the afternoon sky,\u201d sang the squire, following his knight across the plague-ridden landscape. \u201cBut if the sheep eats the flower,\u201d Mr. Fine read, \u201cfor him it\u2019s as if, suddenly, all the stars went out,\u201d and Eddie Williams doubled over laughing. I wanted to be alone more than anything and I wanted to be in love. I wanted the entire history of it, not just a lifetime but something vaster, infinite even, except not really<\/i> infinite since infinity was too frightening. \u201cCause I know just as well as I\u2019m standing here talking to you,\u201d Peggy Lee sang, \u201cthat when that final moment comes\u2026\u201d And the seven angels who had the seven trumpets prepared themselves to sound.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Kathryn Davis\u2019s most recent novel is\u00a0<\/i>The Silk Road<\/a>. She\u2019s received the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award and the Katherine Anne Porter Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim, and the Lannan Literary Award. She teaches at Washington University in Saint Louis and lives in Vermont.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

This excerpt is adapted from Davis\u2019s forthcoming memoir <\/em>Aurelia, Aur\u00e9lia<\/a>, to be published by Graywolf Press on March 1, 2022.<\/em><\/p>\n

Still from <\/em>The Seventh Seal courtesy of the Criterion Collection. The film is available to stream<\/a>, and as a disc set<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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