American Purgatorio

by John Haskell

  Now I say something to Polino about leaving trash on the beach, and Polino tells me he’s tired of my goddamn goody-goodness. “Don’t walk around here if you don’t like it,” he says. “Walk someplace else.”

  Being the conciliator, I say something like “Yeah” or “Whatever.”

  But Polino has renounced, not only his desires, but me, who, strangely enough, represents desire, and when he tells me to leave, to fuck off and get out, what he’s really saying is, Don’t destroy my world.

  So fine, I think, and I tell Polino that I’ll see him later.

  He says, “You don’t get it, Van Belle. I don’t want to see you later. I want to see you never. Go to a different beach. Find some other beach to do your … This is my beach.”

  So I apologize. “I didn’t mean to…”

  “Go fuck yourself,” he says.

  I stand there, not moving.

  “Fuck you,” he says, and he walks away.

  And then I walk away.

  And ever the man to adust, I adjust to this. Okay, I think, and I walk to another beach. I have my meeting with Linda, and this meeting has become, or Linda has become, not the light at the end of a tunnel because I’m not in a tunnel, but a beacon, let’s say, or a lighthouse.

  I take a swim that afternoon. In my underwear I swim out far enough so that I’m floating in the salt water, beyond where the waves are breaking, away enough from everything I know to feel free of everything I know. I can feel the water surrounding my skin, the buoyancy of the water, the swells of water cradling me. I imagine what it might be like, taking a last breath and going down, under the water, holding my breath until I can’t hold it anymore and then, when the time comes, when the breath runs out, to let the water come into me and take me. That would be fine. It would almost be desirable, except there’s the human urge to maintain buoyancy. I can feel the water pushing me, incessantly, back to the shore, back to the world. And after a while I’m ready to go back. I’m ready to go back, and yet at the same time, I feel that I could float on the water forever.

  VII

  (Avaritia)

  1.

  Although the idea of sin is almost extinct, there are still certain things, certain habits of mind around which human beings seem to orbit. By habits of mind I mean the distractions that fill our world, the things we hate and love and get used to. We don’t want to let them go. I don’t want to let them go. I’m standing at the La Jolla Cove, in San Diego, orbiting now around something, and whatever it is, I can feel it pulling me. I’m looking out over the green lawn with the cypress trees and palm trees, and there’s Linda, spreading a blanket on the grass. She’s sitting on her knees, pulling out picnic items from a wicker basket.

  It’s sunny and cool and I sit beside her on the worn wool blanket. I’m looking forward to talking with her, to sharing with her something profound and personal. I’m searching, down in what I call my gut, for something with which to begin our conversation, and it’s not that I’m empty, but before I can find anything down there, or even find the place where something might be hidden, she asks me a simple, unprofound question about living on the beach.

  “Living?” I say.

  “Isn’t that what you do?”

  “Well, yes,” I say.

  “I don’t see how you manage,” she says.

  I shrug. I don’t know what to say. There’s nothing in me that I can think of. I’m relying on her to do the talking.

  “It’s a beautiful day today,” she says.

  We both look out to the sea. And as we do, I can sense her go into herself, into her private thoughts, which is where I would like to go, into her life and her personality, to reach across the space between us and find—not love, but there’s something I want from her, a feeling I want to have, and if I could get it, then love wouldn’t matter.

  “I hope it lasts,” she says.

  “Me too,” I say.

  My interest in her is obvious. She can see that I like her, and although she likes that, because she doesn’t want to lead me on, she begins talking about seagulls. She says they make her nervous. She tells me about an arch that used to exist, carved by the sea in the sandstone cliffs, and that over time, because of the sea’s incessant pounding, the bridge of the arch has worn away, and the thing that used to be there, that you used to be able to walk across, is gone.

  When I don’t respond about the rocks, she begins busying herself with the picnic basket. She’s brought olives and napkins and sandwiches and she begins unpacking and organizing these things on the green blanket. The seagulls are flying overhead, gliding against the breeze off the water, and one seagull drops a load of shit. It lands in the grass at the edge of the blanket and she doesn’t like it. She stands up to move the blanket, but I have an idea. “An idea,” I say, and I walk over to a wooden building at the edge of the grass. It’s a bridge club for senior citizens and some broad-leafed plants are growing near this building. I find a large flat leaf from the bottom of a bush and I pull it off the stalk. I go to the turd and attempt to scoop the turd up in the leaf. But because it’s not a solid piece of turd, it doesn’t want to be scooped up. “Come on,” I say. I’m talking to the little gray guano. “Come on into the leaf.” And it’s easier, in a way, talking to a turd than a human being. And because it’s also slightly ridiculous, Linda begins smiling. And smiling is good, so I keep trying, unsuccessfully, to scoop it up. She’s still smiling when we finally decide to move the blanket, and when we do, and as her smiling dies down, I start wondering, Why couldn’t I be with her? Why couldn’t that be my life? We seem to get along, and I’m energized by this sense of getting along and the potential for future getting along. When she pulls at the bottom of her shirt I tell her that I understand how someone might want that.

  She holds up the arm of her yellow shirt. “It wicks moisture away from the body,” she says.

  “Your shirt,” I say.

  “Supposedly.”

  She’s talking about her shirt.

  “What do you mean?” she says.

  “I mean that it must not be made of cotton,” I say.

  And although our conversation is not in absolute sync, it doesn’t matter because in my proximity to her I feel that I exist. I believe the casual touching, as we reach for sandwiches, and her acknowledgment of that touching, means that the world we’re creating is real. I’m enjoying the sense of reality, thinking about how I can maintain my promixity to that reality when she begins unwrapping her sandwich. My sandwich is still in its plastic on the blanket, but she unwraps hers. She begins eating hers. Not just eating; she brings her whole attention to the act of eating, absorbing herself in the fact of eating, staring at nothing as she chews each bite of basil leaf and mozzarella and the red tomato between the slices of bread.

  I’m sitting cross-legged on the blanket, my knee almost touching her knee, but like a tree in the proverbial forest, I seem, for a moment, not to exist.

  And then she finishes eating. She looks up.

  “There you are,” she says, blinking her eyes. “Are you ready?”

  She doesn’t focus immediately, but when she does she sees me, and we begin packing up the picnic supplies. You’d be able to see in my eyes that I want to stay with her or walk with her, to somehow be with her, and I’m disappointed that what I want doesn’t happen. She has to meet Geoffrey, she says. She’s in love with Geoffrey.

  And because I’m disappointed, and because I’m letting that disappointment show, and because she doesn’t want to be the cause of my disappointment, she invites me to dinner.

  “Tonight?” I say.

  “If you want,” she says.

  And I say that yes, I can make it. I have no previous engagements. I tell her I’d be happy to come, and I want her to see that I know it’s just a dinner, nothing more, just an invitation, but that’s enough. If I could have that, I wouldn’t need anything more.

  2.

  I spend the rest of the afternoon wandering along Garnet Avenue, a
imlessly watching the quotidian world of people driving cars, walking dogs, stepping out of dental offices. In an effort to merge with that world I walk up to a gray-haired woman and ask her for directions to the nearest supermarket. Even though I already know where the supermarket is, I’m grateful to the woman for talking to me. I can tell she’s happy to talk, pleased to be practicing the ritual of talking, glad to be useful or real. And for a few minutes I feel real. But I can also feel myself fading, feel that the woman, even before she ends her speech, has forgotten I’m there, that even before she turns and walks away, the brief reality we’d created is gone.

  I try it again, this time with a man, his hair tied back in a ponytail. He walks up a street with vines growing over the sidewalk and I follow him to the corner. While he’s waiting for the light to change I get close to him and look at him and I would speak to him but so many other things are going on. A million things are happening—the cars and the houses and the weeds in the cracks in the sidewalk. When I don’t pay attention to any one of them, in that moment of not paying attention, they seem not to exist. For a moment the man has left my mind, and when I turn back to him he’s already crossing the street. He’s already walking away, getting smaller and smaller and smaller.

  I’m trying to fill the time of waiting with something other than waiting, but all I do is wait. I notice, while I’m waiting, the obvious fact of the sun on my skin or the bus-stop bench I’m sitting on, but my concern isn’t the bus-stop bench. My concern is later, the future, and then the future arrives.

  I’m sitting at a table with Geoff and Linda, in a crowded Japanese restaurant. I seem to be able to listen, to direct my mind away from the thought of my feet in my shoes, and by listening I seem to be able to keep the world intact. I can hear Geoff talking about picture frames, the existential implications of picture frames. He works at a frame-making shop and he’s talking about how a picture frame, by eliminating the extraneous distractions of the world, imposes order on the world. By focusing attention on a limited field of awareness, even an empty frame on a blank wall causes us to see the wall, and the color of the wall, and the cracks in the plaster, in a way we would never have noticed before. He says that without the frame—he’s talking about the metaphorical frame—the world would turn into chaos. Which is fine for him, because his frame is solid and firm and agreed upon.

  My frame, on the other hand, is fading away, which is why, after Linda serves herself from the various dishes of food, I reach over, take the large spoon, and start scooping food onto my empty plate. I want to try everything, I think. Load it on, I think, and I keep filling my plate until the plate is piled with food. I separate my chopsticks, but when I look down at the pyramid of rice and tofu and green pieces of vegetable, although I would like to have even the slightest desire to eat, I don’t. I have the desire for desire, but not desire itself. I can’t even imagine taking a bite, or if I did, that eating food is something I’m capable of doing.

  I can hear the background sounds of the restaurant, the voices and the clattering, and I look at my bowl of soup. I squirt some sauce from a plastic container into the soup, but it’s not the soup that’s a problem, it’s me, or something lacking in me, and I try to recall the smell of soup and the enjoyment of that smell, and I imagine that maybe there is a certain flavor. I take an experimental slurp, hoping to taste something, but there’s nothing to taste except in my imagination. I know it’s my imagination, and even my imagination is wavering, like a radio with bad reception. Nothing seems to exist unless I make it exist, so that’s what I do.

  Which would be fine except that Linda, at this point, is looking at me, waiting for me to say something. And it’s not that I have nothing to say, but anything I had has already passed away. Not only that, I feel that I am passing away. I want to extricate myself from the sense of this passing and prove that, yes, I exist, but since I can’t think of any logical way to do that, I excuse myself and walk to the bathroom.

  I close the door and go, not to a urinal, but to a toilet stall. I sit on the toilet, hoping that something might happen to give me a frame of reference, or bring my current frame of reference back to something manageable and real. I try to relax, to let the muscles, if they are muscles, do the work they’re made for, but nothing seems to be happening. Sitting there, I remember when Anne and I used to be in the bathroom together. It was nothing out of the ordinary but I liked it, and I realize that no one will ever see me sit on a toilet again. No one will ever see the parts of me that matter, never know the person I was when I was most alive. Only Anne would know that and now she’s gone.

  When I return to the table Linda and Geoff are still talking to each other, leaning into each other. I can see Geoff’s hand, just below the table, probably reaching over to Linda’s jean-covered thigh. Their two hands are probably touching, and I can see the love that exists between these two people. I picture them sealed inside a bubble of love, a bubble in which they seem to have found some happiness, a bubble that I will never penetrate. They’re in one bubble and I’m in a different bubble, and the bubble I’m in seems to be getting more and more impenetrable. I’m disappearing. I haven’t gone away completely but I’m disappearing, and I won’t go without putting up a fight.

  When the two of them finish eating, Geoff, who apparently is an amateur photographer, begins taking pictures of Linda. He has a camera with special low-light film, and with it he takes one, then another, and what about me? What about my picture? I strike a pose, waiting for him to turn to me, but he seems interested only in Linda, in taking pictures of Linda, so I ask him, a little aggressively, “Are you a professional photographer?”

  “Hardly,” he says. “I’m an amateur.”

  “An amateur?” I say, and for some reason it bothers me that Geoff is the one with the camera. Although it’s aimed at other people, notably Linda, the person behind the camera is in charge of framing the event. The camera is recording what’s happening, but it’s the photographer’s eye that places it into memory. And maybe it’s memory I want because when Geoff sets the camera on the table I reach out. I say, “May I?” and before he can answer I’m holding the camera, looking down into the viewfinder. I’m looking down into a mirror reflecting the world, looking at Geoff then Linda, panning back and forth, and it takes me a while to adjust to the—not distortion, but because I’m looking through a mirror that reverses what I’m looking at, what seems to be one side is really the other.

  Being a man of adjustment, however, I adjust to this new way of looking. I aim the lens at Linda and press the button that controls the shutter. I take first one picture, then another, shots of Linda and the restaurant and the busboys moving between the tables. And then Geoff. “Hold still,” I say, and at first he tries to dodge the camera’s lens. “I’d rather you not,” he says, but I keep winding and clicking and firing away, shot after shot of Geoff’s outstretched hand in front of his face, and after a while the lowering of his hand. I’m not even focusing, just snapping as fast as I can, each individual picture becoming a frame in a movie that somehow might capture him. Or capture the world.

  My connection with the world is dying, and naturally, it’s something I want to maintain. When I sight Geoff in the camera I’m not trying to kill him. I’m not married to Linda. I’m just trying to save my place in the world. Even when the film runs out I keep snapping and snapping, in a frenzy of photographic greed that leaves me, when I finally stop snapping, as unconnected as I was before.

  I put the camera back on the table.

  “Anytime you want to use it,” Geoff says.

  And the way he says it, and the way he looks at me when he says it, makes me think that, not only does he mean it, but that in letting me go a little crazy, he was accepting me as a living person.

  He seems to be asking if I can be trusted, telling me, with his eyes, that he can be trusted. And trust is good, and I look at him and try to signal that I also think it’s good. I can see the generosity in his attempt to allow me to e
xist, and so I do the same for him. I include him in the world.

  I try to smile, and for the most part, I think I succeed.

  We follow the accepted rules of conversational etiquette—one person talks, then another—and when it’s my turn to talk, although they seem to be listening, what I’m saying doesn’t seem to make much noise. And I don’t really hear them either. I’m watching them, and I can see that they’re moving their lips, but my response to whatever they’re talking about, or the lack of it, doesn’t seem to affect the conversation, or anyone’s understanding of the conversation. Somewhere along the line I see them whispering to each other. They turn to me and I get the idea that they’ve offered me a room for the night. I can feel my head nodding in affirmation, and my voice indicating that Yes, that would be nice. And more than the actual content of our speech, the meaning of the conversation is contained in the fact that by speaking to me they’re acknowledging that at least I’m there.

  3.

  So we all go home together, like a family, like Mom and Dad and Jack. They show me the house, and Geoff says, “Why don’t you get your stuff.” I tell him I don’t have any stuff. And it’s true. I’m wearing everything I own. Moving into the bedroom at the back of the house consists of walking in and sitting on the bed.

  Geoff brings me into the master bedroom, their bedroom, and I can picture them lying in the big, newly made bed, loving each other, the laughter in the bed almost audible. To me. Not to Geoff, who opens some drawers in a dresser and brings out some pants and shirts and socks. He holds them out to me and I hold them against my body to check the fit. They’re cleaner than my clothes and I begin wearing them. The pants have a stripe down the sides of the legs. The shirt is white, button-down. The shoes have a spongy insole.