Carole Maso The American Woman in the Chinese Hat

A plane tree leaf falls.

I realize I don't understand them. Perhaps I never will.

Who can believe what the American friends are now saying? Words meant something once.

She remembers weeping at the limits of things.

But who can believe any of it?

Brilliance of the afternoon. There's no way past the surface. She'll never get beyond it. She'll never understand anything. It's easier to see in another country.

It should have been possible, I think, to have gotten by with the present tense. To have thrived on somehow on the dazzling present.

"Drinking clouds the feeling of the end," she says. "Drinking obscures the obvious implications of the trompe l'oeil." Drinking clouds the loss of everything, she thinks.

I am losing the ability to dream her, to make her up -- this lovely construction of self. The stories had said: I exist. Even when they were sad. It was something. The stories were shelter for awhile. Company.

I was hoping to tame my terror with sex or language, to bear the solitude with stories or --

Love is what is dangerous under the bright surface of saluts and ca vas and many colored drinks.

She tries to hold on. But everything begins to slip. If she could only talk about lipsticks or figs.

One feels on the verge of fluency. And then suddenly not.

...she slips out of this last credential of self.

She puts her notebook away, acknowledging the limits of things.

You take your places...Step into this last pose.

Her notebook gone. Gone the hunger for figs. The hunger for an arrangement of anything.

...to wipe the glass eye bright.