With a soft, tearing sensation, like the parting of lips, my nerves tug me and I go with her.
Spacious, limpid air resounding with outpouring sunlight of the hypnotic day, twinkling leaves in the trees and a glare shimmering on wet grass dark green as seaweed. A woman’s voice winds everywhere over the headstones, calling to her lover with a moaning song, luxurious and yearning. The love song comes out from a grave beneath a tree: the turf grows transparent and then vanishes, layers of earth underneath disappear like onion peels. In the pit, now, there is a shadowy coffin. The lid disappears; the pale violet radiance of her gauzy dress wanly mingles with her skin’s greys and blues, eyes sunken and head thrown back on the satin pillow, mouth slack. Faded hair the color of sun-bleached grass and tenuous as cobwebs streams back from her brow. Her song is still audibly emerging from her memory.
—Beneath a tree, on a green hill, a hypnotic day with a view of a valley checkered with ponderous shadows of clouds, all frothing grass below the mountains, which blaze like scattered mirrors filled with giant sunbeams. They are alone, on a striped blanket, in the effortless shade of a widespread tree. There’s one moment in particular, when there was a feeling of tipping equilibrium, and somehow she had rolled onto her back bearing him in her arms partially on top of her.
—Another memory is intruding, a painless, disembodied memory: she rolls into tiled room. His hands tug at her dress and she is kneading handfuls of his thick sweater, her body is unceremoniously lifted and dumped onto the table, a triangular rubber wedge under the small of her back. She thrusts her hands into his hair. The coroner plunges the bread knife into her abdomen and saws up to her sternum, then up in a Y shape across her chest. She raises herself slightly as he pulls her dress down, bringing her arms to her sides to help him slide it off, not looking into eyes she wouldn’t have remembered at all. Her hands are greedily rubbing the skin of his broad back, and the bone saw cuts through her ribs and the muscles around the sternum. The entire assembly is removed like the top of a pumpkin, tossed aside, exposing the heart. In her grave the memories can’t be divided, she is sighing. He covers her throat with kisses. The coroner tosses her flaccid heart into the tray of the grocer’s scale and speaks its weight to the recorder. Her back arches and her cries are briefer and briefer — swifter and swifter the coroner looping her intestines over his hand in a dripping brown bundle — my cries open out again and become desperate — her back arches as he thrusts his red arm up to the elbow into my body cavity to draw out the lungs. She wakes with stifled cries still seeming to feel the regular tug of the stitches sewing shut my empty corpse.
Dr. Thefarie checks his watch without seeing the time; it is a tic. He is waiting on an elevated platform, pacing back and forth a few steps every now and then. Strange hypnotized day. The cars passing under the elevated platform, odd variability of perspective as they come, pass, and drive away down streets visible to the end. Above him, a silver blemish in the sky, a sore spot, surrounded with eyelashes or scars.
The platform sways slightly, like the deck of a ship, and the train comes banging in. Dr. Thefarie boards the train, sitting by the window with his knees clamped in his fingers.
“Man near me is making a pointless attempt to open his clandestine beer bottle with his house keys. Once we’re moving, every vista no sooner glimpsed than cut off by sailing buildings. The sun hits the scratches in the windows from a high angle and they shine like new wire. From the gaps opening and closing in the rattling doors, a breath of tarpits, gasoline, stagnant pipes and lights. Now look at this man self-importantly eating his plastic tray of vegetables, as though he’d thought of it all on his own. Paper in disarray on the floor of the train driver’s compartment, door swings a little to and fro. The exposed headline reads ‘—or be gone!’
“We’re under ground. The tunnel lights appear vertically flattened, throwing off vertical lines of light, slanted like distinct Vs; these lines diminish in number as the source draws near. Rows of light bulbs like yucca plants are spaced out along the line. This interminable subway ride will break you down like an interrogation. Nothing is worse than a good-looking woman who doesn’t know how to dress herself—”
In a characteristic gesture, he taps the breast pocket of his tweed jacket, to feel the tube of pills there.
Brown horsey girl with plump feet, black and white clothes, and this small prim blonde with a ski jump nose, but the real vision, she’s coming through the turnstile. (Dr. Thefarie makes his transfer and leaves the scene — now we can be alone). Black hair medium-length and straight, fair, with glasses and red lips, lovely white dress with red blossoms. Her proportions are breathtaking. I want her and me pressed tight as Inca masonry.
Her dream is a silent film. She is a pale waif like Mary Pickford in a virginal frock. She will marry both of these high-stepping suitors, one dark one fair, both with stirrup trousers, snug-vested floating weightlessly together arm in arm through the door on pointed toes...
Years later they have become cowering old men with beards down past their waists. She comes home from work, grown into an enormous harridan of a woman, her hair in a kerchief and wearing an apron for some reason, her small feet in their dark practical hard shoes convey an impression of compact power and danger like horses’ hooves. The husbands wait helplessly afraid in the parlor of a huge dilapidated house. They fling their arms around each other shaking violently, knees knocking, their cheeks pressed together, staring at the front door. She storms through, swinging her heavy lunch pail, bellowing curses at them and brandishing her gargantuan arms in pantomime rage as strings of silent firecrackers go off in the corners. The husbands cower and wince, seem to shrink.
But now they have laid a cunning trap for her: one of these two husbands has released a little petted mouse into the room. She catches sight of it scurrying along the bottom of the walls and her eyes light up. She pounces, scooping the mouse up with one deft swoop she has it in both hands and tears it in her fierce teeth, blood dribbling down her chin, eyes shining like starlit water. The two husbands have taken advantage of this distraction and advance on her from behind carrying a huge portrait of her as a younger woman. Pulling the canvas free of its wooden frame they wrap her in it, now toss over her a massive and costly Persian rug so heavy it knocks her flat. In a twinkling, they’ve rolled her up inside and bound her with two lengths of twine. Her kicking feet protrude from one end of the bundle, but her head is inside. The two husbands clasp left hands and dance jubilantly around each other in a circle, wagging their right index fingers in the air. In their transports they hop over her, turn, and hop back, in perfect time, back and forth, in opposition.
Their children, legions of boys and girls in sailor suits, file into the cavernous kitchen below, in the basement. Chopping blocks stand there in rows, like schoolroom desks. The floor is inundated with pecking chickens. Each child goes to a block and takes up a meat cleaver. In exact synchronicity with their fathers’ little bounds, the children seize up chickens from the flagstone floor, slap them down on the blocks, and whack their heads off with a single chop. The husbands hop, the children chop, the husbands hop, the children chop...
Inside the carpet, she stares in horror as the mouse in her hand transforms into a little naked man in white fibrous wadding — he’d been one in disguise, and now he’s dead and can only return to his former shape, not his former size. His body is whole, but he looks as though he’d fallen from a great height, lying there in her palm. Her heart swells with pity and sadness. But now it occurs to her that she might be able, for some reason she can’t be bothered to acknowledge at the moment, to restore him. No means present themselves. She lies back and imagines what would be nice if he were to join her there, at his proper size. He would see leeches of fire adhering to the raw nerve — flames sucking like leeches on a web of throbbing nerves...
This woman’s monotonous speech like rattling chain, ghosts stand clear the doors. There’s a metal plate on the floor, a circle with three concentric r
ings and four screws. A brown-skinned man with a devilish face, moustache, benign expression, his ears barely attached to his head sits opposite Dr. Thefarie. Also a nodding man who squints at everything. Look along the car to all the bobbing knees — doors open — Spargens, a big, boxheaded man with crumpled features, graying hair, huge glasses, points across the platform at a vagrant type hunched in the handicapped seat of the car on the parallel track. The vagrant is filthy, his head is nearly hidden in a chaotic profusion of clothing, and his eyes peer out with electric brightness like the beast in the jungle.
Dr. Thefarie nods almost imperceptibly, and Spargens shambles onto the vagrant’s car. Those electric eyes are fixed on a woman with dark, nape-gathered hair gathered at nape, white armless top, pale glasses, monkey-like expressions faintly traverse her fine-featured enchanting face.
I want to give her a long bath... she dreamt she stood naked before a huge audience and sang to them from the end of a long spotlight that breathed and sighed and caressed her.
*
Lovely bookish type, pale face, and shoulder-length straight black hair. The foggy mystery of her naked body takes shape in my mind. I see her sweet, inadvertently tranquil features. A memory dream... I think of her heavy bangs... white and death... stiff feelers rattle like dead boughs... I press my lips to her cold cheek, sticky with jam... cold child ghost Victorian...
She is borne away from me on the ghost train, where she rides with another man in a vampire cape. The cars roll off into the distance, pulled by a tiny locomotive trailing smoke against the mountains. I’ve left the track.
I pass a dead tree made from painted foam rubber and draped with paper maché spanish moss. I’m kicking through heaps of foam rocks. A huge cobweb, stretching from one dead tree to another, gets in my mouth and tangles in with my laces. Bit like cotton candy. These rocks hurt my feet, and I nearly fall. Wind rattles dead branches. I can hear an owl hooting. The soot and silver sky still seems as close as the backdrop had been. Clouds bisected by the horizon move swiftly by.
All the light from above goes out; only a wan glow from the phosphorescent ground mist remains, shining up on blue tombstones. Shrill cries come from the graves. Surrounded by a heap of brittle black wreaths is a stately bier, on which a glass coffin rests. A woman lies on her side within it, dressed in white lace, white stockings, black shoes. One hand lies on her hip, the other under her cheek. Low, funereal music rises from her — an organ, sounds like — and a woman’s voice quietly recites an elegy to its accompaniment.
I must see her face!
Her abundant black hair radiates from her head like a sheet of rippling water, and her face has been painted silver-blue, even her eyebrows and lashes. I notice that she is breathing peacefully and it shocks me like a physical blow makes his insides tremble. He strokes the glass tenderly, gazing in awe at her tranquil, sideways face. A weblike cloud of nerves curtains him its tendrils rub the coffin longingly. Somber voice, resignedly beautiful music, go on eternally in the ceremonial gloom here. But when he wakes up — I can’t remember it! I never saw her before! Who is she? I want to go back!
Old wives, if there are any left, will tell you that, if someone stares through a window persistently enough, that person’s image will faintly remain in the glass. Her face in my memory is just like that, I imagine. Only her expression stays with me, of which the music, and the voice if not so much the words, are a part. I want to go back!
*
Elfin woman, lean as a rail, poised, tasteful, a little extravagant, bewitching texture of her skin as the light from the candle on the table makes it glow, in the V of her shirt where her skin is stretched over the bone. I forget himself. His behavior becomes artificial, painfully self-conscious. Picking up a paper he isn’t interested in reading, he holds it before his face at an unnatural angle, moving his head ostentatiously back and forth, screwing up his mouth with apelike concentration as though he were devouring every word. Meanwhile he keeps looking back in her direction in a way so flamboyantly concealed as to become only more obvious, reeking with embarrassment. Pretending to search his pockets, his stinking clothes flabby as wet sacks, for some elusive personal item gives him a painfully transparent pretext to turn his head in her direction. The dear knife is gradually stabbed into me, through my eyes. The icy shit of strangers runs down my legs and pools at my feet.
Love at last sight, half-formed phantom of desire mechanically snuffed out by shuffling feet, subway doors, time tables, the phone company. Life, élan vital complete with foul smells and slimes, invisible beneath layers of muck in me, somehow sticks through to me, urging me on to collect and shelter all those stillborn phantoms as it did the cadavers I rescued from being forgotten.
He won’t fight I, it. The night in that place gathered together like a sheaf of wheat and was cut in half by the bow-shaped ruby edge of her upper lip, hard and elastic. I sit on the fire escape and tiny cherries adorn the branches — I have only to move my hand to pick them. They sprout directly from the branch, long tubes with brilliant red bulbs at the end. Eating these cherries would be like plucking off bits of rash; they would tear free with a soft rip, a relief for the sighing tree. I look in through the window, into her bedroom. She is somewhere in the remoter parts of the apartment, arranging something. There is a table by the sill, and on it there is a folded map with
CITY OF SEX
in a white panel. Like the City of Destruction, or the City of Commerce.
Some severe-looking models with sad, scrawny bodies, are sitting by the door and ducky is a lean young woman with big glasses — mannerisms of a dowager professor, also of a girl raised entirely among adult WASPs probably already middle-aged when she was born. Her smile is apologetic, but she is lit up with happiness now, who knows why, and bright clean neatness. Walks past me holding her body lightly. She dresses the way I imagine people do on yachts — her mouth as she passed was a compressed vermillion diamond. I can hear how she would say hello, with a dying fall and commiserative expression, much looking down, downcast eyes. Her eyes would rise and fall like sparkling waves.
Ducky’s models rattle together like the contents of an umbrella stand and swing their long hair. I follow her out the door into peachflesh flames and creamy webs of blue fire with golden tips.
His planchette unaccountably begins to move, he sees the bridge’s graceful arch is of interlocking metal beams... Very little commerce in the City of Sex, which is all shining steel and glass like the Crystal Pavilion, and situated exactly under this city, in the hollow earth. Those galleries there are lined with private homes, and business is often conducted in living rooms and kitchens. The natives come in two basic varieties, the tall dark-skinned Day People of the long gestures wafting hands and slow willowy grace, and the rubbery semi-aquatic Night People pale as flounders with bodies like translucent rubber. Here she is on the beach filling out a crossword puzzle with wry sadness, her mouth twisted to one side. She brushes one of his nerves from her face like a lock of hair. With one stroke of his hand he smooths her white summer dress away and sun bounces from honey skin. The northern lights tenderly part their veils to me and I sink beneath her skirts, a pink-tipped violet flame curls up her milky leg.
*
Staring at the clouds until they turn pink with my eyes’ blood: indigo shadows and pink crusts, a familiar, always new landscape, a sort of homeland. I know that is where I am going or someplace like. Clouds are mesas and rafts, icebergs, a great plume spreading out like volcanic smoke... The shadows are blue, and the land beneath — mountains and sphinxes...
Two hawks fly near me: nearly motionless in the sluicing wind, they hold their places with jerks and flows and adjustments, seesaw describing invisible U’s in the air. A gaze is emitted from them. Wire spokes flash in my eyes, I see wheelchairs.
*
Young woman talking to her friend outside the cafe, they’ve just come out, finished dinner saying goodbye. Pleasing bright features, creamy blonde. A spontaneous performer, every m
oment of the narration she is giving (that I can’t hear) she illustrates with a vivacious gesture. Warm attentive face, listens to her friend’s story with rapid nods, little frowns and grins as she eagerly sympathizes. What generosity! Luminous eyes (they really are!) whose light spills out and over the curved tops of her cheeks, a surprisingly unexaggerated smile. Twice she flings out her arms to clasp her friend warmly, all unabashed. Nothing comes from her without a flourish. Compact, warmly effusive, generous. At least from a distance — through glass. But even from here, I can’t take my eyes from her; she has me, and though I stay hunkered down where I am, by the dumpster, I go with her, like the flu. Take me with you, my heart wails, and she takes me along as heedless of me as an updraft is of the newspaper it carries soaring into the air.
She unfolds into a huge creamy blonde world. I am breaking into the old weather station in the park. Formerly the guest house of an estate that had passed to the parks department, the station is a two-story Victorian gingerbread, sealed like a mummy in rubbery institutional paint. Soft warm night, with air like fine sand.
There is an empty corner room on the ground floor, with dead leaves in the corners. He kneels on bare boards, carefully places his notebook closed on the floor in front of him, and draws his grease pencil ring around himself. A draft stirs the leaves. He recites the “universal monochord” and thick sewage flows out from beneath his coat, its circle, brown and black, spreads uniformly and stops at the grease boundary. In his mind already he sees the downy breast of her dream, an incandescent fog of caressing pink and gold light: the elegant summer dusk, the cordial house, the family.
The Great Lover Page 5
