“I have to hand it to you, Vera. You know how to make an entrance.”
Vera smiled sweetly, raised her glass, clicked Rogers’ bottle and then Ram’s, looking from George to Ram, then settling her gaze and smile on Rogers.
“Of course, I do. After all, it’s my profession.”
Ram beamed proudly. “Lights me up like a Christmas tree every time she does that.”
“I can certainly see how,” Rogers said. “She’s a beautiful woman.”
Vera soaked it in a minute, then remembered the intent of the evening. Tonight, she wasn’t the focus. Ram was. Vera steered the conversation into a general discussion of Ram’s work, hoping it would stimulate him to talk about what he’d been writing lately. Ram did so briefly until Vera found an opening that led to the topic that Rogers wanted to propose to Ram, who was then talking about a radio show he and Tomas had done to announce the annual Refugio poetry festival. Vera interrupted in mid-sentence.
“Sweetie, have you given any thought to television?”
“What do you mean television? What does that have to do with a poetry festival?”
“You can reach more people by announcing the festival on television than you can on radio, not to mention the fact you could use it to promote yourself.”
“I fail to see the point. Who’s gonna want me on TV?”
Rogers seized his opening.
“Actually, there’s a new cable channel that’s started here. A friend of a friend of mine has a show on it. Her name’s Jenny Avoirdupois. My friend said she called him asking for suggestions of who she should have on her program. It’s called”Art Talk."
“Art Talk?”
“It’s a dumb title, sure, but it’s already reaching 30,000 viewers according to the ratings. Anyway, I called this woman, Miss Avoirdupois, and suggested you.”
“You what?”
“Take it easy, Ram.”
“Well, when were you thinking of consulting me on this?”
“Well… now. I called Vera and ran it by her the other night when I heard from my friend. She suggested I call the woman and float the idea, and if there was a favorable response, then we’d bring it to you.”
Ram looked incredulously at Rogers, then turned his gaze to Vera who sat with her face resting on her left palm looking back at him fixedly. Ram felt discomforted by the situation, felt something akin to betrayal, but then let go of it, for there was nothing that he’d truly been betrayed with, or by, or for. He’d just been left out of the loop, perhaps for good purpose, he couldn’t say. Still, it seemed that Vera and George conjured the whole affair, and it made him uneasy. He looked at Vera probingly, confusedly, then shook his head and chuckled bitterly.
“Well ain’t that a wonderment,” he said finally.
“Don’t get crazy, baby. I knew this might make you mad, but we’re just thinking of your work and how to get it out to more people,” said Vera, reaching over to squeeze his hand.
“Did you ever think that maybe I didn’t want to get it out to more people? That maybe I’m comfortable with my relative anonymity and that I might not be interested in living in a fishbowl?”
“Take it easy,” Rogers said. “She’s just trying to help you. We’re both trying to help you.”
“Man, I don’t know. I need to take this in. If you’ll excuse me, I’m going outside.”
Ram rose before George and Vera had a chance to respond and made his way across the room toward the portal leading onto the patio overlooking the river. He fired up a Camel, inhaled and looked up to the rising moon. A star pulsed alongside it, a planet perhaps, although Ram couldn’t identify which one it was, Jupiter maybe, he thought. Then he came back and reentered the present.
‘So what’s the big fucking deal here, Le Doir?’ he asked himself. ’So Peach and Vera cooked up a plan to get you on TV, on Art Talk… Indeed! So fucking what? It’s not like they’re asking you to demonstrate a Vegematic or something is it? Or is it? Will any sort of serious discussion ensue from this? Who fucking knows?’ he thought.
Ram French-inhaled, then laughed—to himself and at himself. He was acting the prima donna, making a mountain out of a molehill, and, besides, if this woman wanted him on her show, then Ram could steer the discussion in a direction he wanted, couldn’t he? He’d nearly resolved the conundrum when he sensed Vera behind him.
“Are you going to strangle us, baby?”
“No, I was thinking that burning you at the stake would be better.”
“Oh, Ram,” said Vera, moving closer to him and kissing him softly on the forehead. “Kill me but don’t hurt George. He’s just trying to help in the way that he knows,” she said softly. Then she saw Ram smile. “What?” she said. “What is it, baby?”
“Nothing,” he said. “You’re both forgiven. I know you mean well.”
“You’re damn right we do, my love. Now come back in and join us. George has something more he wants to tell you.”
Ram took Vera in his arms and kissed her probingly. She gave herself back to him, exploring his mouth with her tongue, making exclamation points of her love for him with it. Vera took his arm with her hand and steered them back inside through the open portal.
A few of the restaurant patrons followed their progress back to the table, none more so than the couple in the back corner off to their left. The woman sighed. “My God, she is so beautiful, so exotic. And he is one handsome devil, don’t you think?” Her partner didn’t respond and looked on, shaking his head. “Do you know him?” she asked her date.
“I did once, or thought I did,” Fran Le Doir said.
When Ram and Vera arrived back at the table, Rogers scanned their faces. They were smiling and at ease, he could tell, and it, likewise, put Rogers at ease. “So, has the tempest blown over?” he asked.
Ram grinned down at him and nodded. “I’ll do it,” Ram said. “It’s a good move, right?”
Rogers nodded slowly, leaned back in his chair and drank some Heineken. “It won’t hurt, Ram.”
They spent the rest of the evening discussing the particulars of the coming months. The poetry festival was at the end of July and Rogers suggested that Ram make his Art Talk appearance in early September so they could capitalize on whatever acclaim or notoriety that accrued to Ram from the festival. They talked about Ram’s recent work and the upcoming publication dates of the various periodicals and reviews that it would be appearing in. Eventually, the professional details began to bore Ram and he attempted to turn the conversation to more mundane topics like music or film. But he could see that Vera was anything but bored by the topic of building and forming Ram’s writing career and how to properly market him. The fact that this was so, intrigued Ram and gave Vera another dimension that he had never imagined her to possess. She wanted to know when Ram was scheduled to read at the festival, suggesting to Rogers that he be moved from opening the second night of the three-day affair to the spot sandwiched between Robert Norvold and Tomas Gutierrez, on the festival’s first night scheduled to end with a reading by Ken Kesey. “That way, we know that Ram is sure to be mentioned in the reviews,” Vera said. “They’ll be there for Kesey and won’t even be there for the second night.” When Rogers suggested a spot near the end of that first night, Vera vetoed the idea. “Everybody will be too fucked up by then to even notice him,” she said, “including Ram,” she laughed. “He gets nervous at readings and hits the bottle hard, George.” Rogers nodded and said he’d see what he could arrange with the promoters. “Tell them it’s a good spot on night one or no Ram,” said Vera.
Rogers stopped himself from laughing when he saw she was serious. “I’ll take care of it. Okay with you, Ram?”
Ram didn’t realize he was being spoken to until he saw Rogers waiting on his reply. He came back and recalled the question. “Fine by me,” he said.
After dinner, George ran Ram and Vera downtown where Ram’s car was parked in the lot close to the Oak Room. “I’ll call you next week to let you know how everything wo
rked out on the show and the reading,” said Rogers, speaking as much to Vera as he was to Ram. Ram and Vera thanked Rogers for dinner then got into Ram’s car for the drive home.
It was still early, and instead of heading home directly, Ram asked Vera if she minded stopping first at the beach at Heaven’s Gate. “If that’s what you want, I don’t mind.” Ram drove south on Palomar, then turned right on 26th Street, pulling the car to a stop at the guardrail overlooking the bluff. The sky was clear and black and the stars were bright and twinkling, except for the pulsing one, the planet directly below the crescent of the moon.
“Do you know what one that is?” Ram asked.
“Of course, I do. That’s Saturn, a good planet for you at this time, a good sign.”
“What does it mean?”
“Saturn is the god of Agriculture, the sign of the harvest, and I think it’s good for you because it means that you’re about to reap the fruits of your harvest, which will be good and plentiful.”
“I wish I was as sure about that as you are.”
“What are you so worried about? All you have to do is follow the steps on the dance floor. Loosen up and let the motion carry you.”
Ram lit a cigarette and walked to the edge of the bluff and sat on the guardrail where Vera joined him. He looked across to the other side of Monterey Bay, the lights of Pacific Grove gently throbbing, remembering the early days of Endymion down on Cannery Row with Fran and Tor and Suzie and Jaime and Jonas, laughing when he recalled the exhilaration of the flights aboard the Flexi Flyer. Vera saw his half-smile and faraway look and asked him what he was thinking about. Ram told her and then asked if she thought Fran would go to the festival or watch his appearance on Art Talk. Vera said no, she didn’t think so, and Ram asked her why.
“Because he sees my influences in it,” she said. “Everything is fine for your brother so long as you remain his minion and follow his directions of what he thinks is best. Take a direction like you’ve done since meeting me, and he gets uncomfortable. Maybe he means well and is worried about your welfare, but I think he needs you to seek his approval. That’s how Fran gets his validation, from beyond himself, not from within.”
Ram thought about Vera’s appraisal for a long moment, concluding that he wasn’t sure if it were so, but admitting it was possible. He thought about how far they had come since their journey began two years ago. He thought of their dinner with Rogers and Vera’s attention to details attending Ram’s blossoming career. He smiled, enfolding her in his arms while Vera leaned back against him, taking one of his hands and kissing its palm, her ardor burning a hole through it when she did.
“I love you,” said Ram. “I know you’re looking out for me.”
“No,” she answered. “I’m looking out for we.”
A shooting star shot westward across the sky and the lovers saw it at the same time as it fell toward the horizon line. “That’s another good sign, baby,” said Vera. “It seems the whole world is full of them for us tonight.”
“You think so?” Ram asked.
“Baby, I know so,” she whispered.
When they got home, they made love until dawn, exploring one another’s bodies fully and completely like they had long ago Easter on Cedar St., as though it were the first time they made love, as though they had just discovered each other. They fell asleep entangled in one another, Ram still inside her, the combination of their exhaustion and the spiritual exaltation seeming to weld them together. It was a signal to Ram that they were now truly a couple, and as he lay there with her, Ram lost track of the limbs of their entangled bodies, not knowing conclusively whose was whose, causing a sense of dislocation that he found agreeable instead of causing anxiety and confusion. The word joined came to him as he drifted off into a deep sleep.
When he came to around 9:30, the neighborhood hounds were howling. Ram’s eyes snapped open, but Vera put her hand over them, gently closing them. “It’s nothing baby, a passing siren,” she said. When Ram awoke again, it was after 11 and Vera was gone. “I’ll be home by nine,” read her note on the pillow.
The days ran on, seemingly without end, the daylight hours growing longer as spring gave way to summer. The beach town was now filled past capacity with tourists and stragglers from the counterculture, pouring into Refugio like pilgrims making their way to Santiago de Compostela, beckoned by Refugio’s atmosphere of tolerance and acceptance. But the wheel was turning now, Ram saw, and it quantified itself in the newspaper articles Ram read about a new phenomenon called troll bashing, where some of the less tolerant Refugio residents invaded transient encampments and beat them and burned their belongings. Most of the people Ram talked to regarded it as an anomaly, but Ram wasn’t so sure it was, seeing it more as a coming trend, a metastasis attacking various organs of a body in revolt against itself.
But then Ram would pull himself away from these dismal projections, which, he counseled himself, were more the product of his too active imagination, and then come to again in the summer wonderland of Refugio where the women were now scantily clad again in short skirts, halter tops, and flimsy dresses with flowers adorning their gorgeous female forms… But there was something now that registered somewhere below the conscious level, and the unease that it caused Ram soon began to appear in his poetry in pieces like “Preoccupied at the Zoo” and “Easter Sunday”, both of which contrasted a mild world of social order and normalcy with a spreading fungus encroaching at the edge of the pleasant-seeming worlds that each poem portrayed on their surface.
It depressed Ram when such thoughts overtook him, and they seemed to crowd him into a corner where he felt terribly alone, sometimes casting him as a sort of Cassandra and alienating his friends and colleagues when he fell into these funks. As the summer wore on, moving inexorably toward the date of the poetry festival and Ram’s appearance on “Art Talk”, Ram began to isolate himself more with his demons and evil familiars.
…Two women, blonde twins in their early twenties, swooped past Ram on skateboards, doing a weave in and out of one another, tracing esses on the glittering sidewalk of the Meridian Avenue mall. Something twinkled and Ram noticed the tiny rearview mirrors extending antennae-like from the twins’ headbands, the image they summoned was that of titanic mutant insects who had grown wheels to replace outmoded wings. It was 7:30 on a July evening and Ram was wandering down the mall on his nightly constitutional, already dead drunk.
The routine of those besotted evenings was as unvaried as the season’s comings and goings in May and November, summer or winter, heat or rain. As had become his custom, Ram began his journey that evening at the Asti at the bottom end of Meridian with Steams and beer backs, where he would raise his glasses to the ghosts of the wild animals on the wall who returned his dumb stares were with ones of their own. After an hour or so of this, Ram would leave the Asti and stroll or stumble the sixty-five steps (he had counted them) up the mall to the new Lotus, having just relocated there, and sit in the big room with the potted palms and tile floor under the glass-paneled roof, drinking draft Guinness and sweating profusely as the waning sun poured down upon him, feeling like Philip Madrone in The Big Sleep minus Major Sternwood. After one pint, Ram would move to a cooler alcove upstairs with a pint of ale. Friends and fellow literati would occasionally stop for a word or two, but soon Ram would tire of The Lotus and attention and head out into the dusk and meander four more blocks up the mall to the Oak Room. He was silent as he walked, sometimes muttering to himself, his path marked by the jewel-like specks in the sidewalk that, for Ram, were stars in deep space, knowing that when the jewels were displaced by terra cotta pavers, he had reached his destination.
Now outside The Oak Room, Ram would scan the outdoor tables looking for Vera. Sometimes, she would be there at an outside table with friends, sometimes, with a new would-be beau. Sometimes, if he had too much liquor and he took a dislike to Vera’s companion, things could get ugly, but mostly, it didn’t. If Ram was feeling social, he would drink in the upstairs b
ar amid the ogling and flirting and occasional display of flashed flesh. But as the summer drew on, Ram rarely felt social and did most of his drinking down in the coolness of the wine cellar, surrounded on all sides by tanks of tropical fish who blinked bug-eyed back at him and seemed to be murmuring to him. He would sit there drinking Steams again, the coos and shrieks and hollers drifting down the staircase circling about him, sitting there silently until the pile-driving sounds of pleasure would fall away while Ram studied the ring traces left by his glass and make him tumble Alice-like into the aleph where all his ghosts−familial, literary, and personal−would shimmer into focus to wink and nod and toast and drink with him, for in those Meridian mall barrooms during that period of isolation, Ram found the voice whose commentary and perspective was truly resonant for him and reflective of his time, he felt. And whether it was cigarette butts and ashes at his feet alongside the spittoon, or the perfect lunar surface of the textured ceiling above him, Ram saw both and other like examples too numerous to mention something fleeting and micro-cosmic, where the whole mumbo-jumbo bad juju world would become beautiful and holy if Ram could skewer it and impale it with the lance of his pen… or so he told himself.
The timelessness of those days and their expansion resonated in a part of his being that Ram was just then discovering after digesting Bergson. During summer, Ram most sensed time’s duality—the time within him which resonated to the deepest core of his being, driving backwards, forwards, and now, like a flag in a shifting breeze, involving Ram on a level that was intimated rather than understood; and the time that proceeded outside him, with hours and seasons like mile markers on a highway, like coat hangers awaiting garments of moments, of eras that could then be filed for reference accordingly. Try as he might, he couldn’t then reconcile the two; the concept was too new to him, although he had known from youth that it was true, knowing it intuitively, not empirically or deductively. During the summers, his temples were a smear of tintinnabulation; the bells of interior and exterior time, duration and demarcation fighting within his skull, one attempting to absorb the other within his consciousness. The hot days slowed everything to a walk—everything but Ram’s mind, which accelerated like mercury does when you hit it with a hammer. In the shafts of morning light falling through the trees when he drove the ridge tops of the San Gregorio’s, Ram could sense time mocking him as it trickled through the green- and wine-colored leaves, drumming a languorous beat, palpably sweet, echoing the tick, omitting the tock. And Ram imagined the light and the tick, and for time itself to be laughing, so that by 9 a.m., on the days when such thoughts overtook him, his head would be throbbing in sympathetic reaction to time’s echo and shadow. It seemed to Ram a logical enough reaction that when it was so confusedly so, he’d want to desensitize himself to the dualism of the dimension, and toward this end, Ram had effective, if temporary, tools to muffle the echo.
Windwhistle Bone Page 28
