Not Dead Yet

by Herbert Gold

  There was a gloom in Whitley that made me want to unlock him, an utterly forlorn meanness, which rapidly alternated with his bursts of salesmanship, his waves of manic enthusiasm for the pitch. The captain's darkness was filled with ghosts. It was grief unrelenting. It wanted to take total possession of him; it spilled into the corners of his mouth and the reddened eyelids; but he sat there vigilant, a hero against himself. I watched him study his hand as he lifted and held it in the air, pretending to shield himself against the sun, looking for the tremor of loss of control. In the gesture I could imagine his patient lovemaking over the years with the sweet round-cheeked lady in the photographs in his room at the Pension Croft.

  It was impossible to imagine Whitley losing himself, crying out in a moment of joining soul and body with another's. The captain, at the edge of very old age, was both a passionate man and burnt out, those qualities joined in him. Whitley, greedy, tirelessly needy, was a person I thought I knew and still a mystery to me.

  Back at the Croft, the captain's scalp under the coppery white hair gleamed with sunburn, his skin weathered and reddened afresh. He climbed down from the jeep and stood alongside, trying to figure out why Whitley was angry. He gave up. He said to us both, “The best day, the very best. Thank you very much.”

  Then he entered the hotel and Whitley said, “At least you should have asked him for his share of the gas.”

  “I told you,” I said.

  “And I told you.”

  “Okay, okay, I need a nap. Too much sun.”

  “I didn't have my nap this afternoon and I'm older than you are.”

  “Are you collecting errors these days, along with art?” I asked, and finally he shut up. He was handing out reproaches free of charge, a steady barrage of them, but in this heat, at the end of a long day, no one could expect perfect affability.

  The next morning, very early, on my way to the market, I watched a procession of children, girls in matching red and blue jumper dresses, heading to school for some sort of ceremony. The red and blue were patriotic colors, standing for the unity of Haiti. (According to legend, the Haitian flag had been created by tearing the white out of a red, white, and blue banner; the national logic defined the mulatto as red and the black as blue.) It was barely dawn; streaks of pink and white in the sky. Things start early so that things can close down at noon when the blasting midday furnace takes over. Again I heard that chattering and laughter that make some North Americans and Europeans envy the Haitian talent for pleasure despite the long disaster of Haitian history. Pleasure seemed especially stubborn in Jacmel.

  I was looking for presents for my children at the beach-side market—a dress sewn from many-colored scraps for my daughter, with lace around the collar and decorative buttons in improbable places, in crooked rows down the sleeves; a wooden bird carved from driftwood for a son; a painting of chickens eating corn for another son. I thought of buying something for my wife, my soon-to-be-ex-wife, but I wasn't sure she would think it appropriate. I was thinking of other early mornings with her, when everything we did together was appropriate.

  Then I went back for breakfast at the Croft, a glass of shadek, grapefruit juice, and the strong dark-roasted Haitian coffee with canned condensed milk, and the coarse white bread with its fresh, raw, sour taste, which I loved. I flung my packages down and sat at the little bar in the hall.

  The bread was on a platter on the counter, cut in thick chunks, but before I could reach for it, Madame la Patronne asked, “What shall we do?”

  I followed her upstairs. The Norwegian captain's door was ajar. A man in a red neckerchief, red shoes, maybe dressed for his daughter's school celebration, was standing fastidiously a few steps from the bed. His red bandanna was also the emblem of voodoo priests and tontons macoutes. The official was the District Something, sheriff, chef de section, probably also the coroner. The captain's mouth was open against the pillow and the pillow was wet around it.

  “Translate, please,” said the man with the red bandanna. I wondered why the captain wrote to his wife in English, not Norwegian, on the scrap of paper: I loved you, I loved you. And that was all he wrote. It may not have been a farewell letter; it may only have been a conversation interrupted by death.

  The photographs of his wife were wrapped in copies of Le Nouvelliste, the oldest newspaper in Haiti, which still looked as if it were printed on handset type. I doubt that the captain had been sick. He had tied the package of photographs with rough hemp twine from the marketplace down the street. There was an Oslo address on the package and a small bundle of currency, dollars and gourdes, slipped under the knotted cord. By the time I turned back after looking around the room to see that he had packed his clothes, the money was gone. The official was writing something on the back of a child's school tablet. He met my eyes with bland, peaceful, bureaucratic complacency, daring me to ask where the money went. In Jacmel, among strangers, in the time of Papa Doc, I was not going to ask this question.

  “If you permit, Monsieur,” I said, “I could mail these photographs to Norway from Miami when I leave.”

  “Monsieur le Notaire,” he said, correcting me about the matter of his office and proper title. It wasn't a direct answer. I felt a little nervous about proposing to carry away the package without his express permission.

  There was a heavy smell of bodies in that room, some living, some not; dust, sweat, and the accumulating heat of the morning. Whitley had come up silently behind me, hearing the disturbance one floor down from his room. He was rakishly barefooted, Princeton boy investigating events down the hall in his dorm.

  “Personally, my private opinion,” he said, “all we did was upset his routines—accomplished nothing. Tried to do something for a person and you see? You see what happens?”

  “What happens?”

  Whitley bent fastidiously toward the bed—not afraid to get too close—and then peeked up at me, hoping to move my education along. “I showed him a zombie, it was really beautiful work—Gourgue, one of my best painters, moonlight in the cemetery, the peasant leading the zombie by a rope—not expensive for a fabulous piece. Problem was, he was a zombie himself.”

  “What happens?”

  In a close and crowded room, the captain lying there in his silence, Whitley saw that he had my attention. “What happens was that we wasted our time. We should have known. A person doesn't love life, he isn't going to love this fantastic folk art.”

  6

  Adolescence Can Strike at Any Age

  Senile sex, let's take that bull by the priapic horn. Sentimentality about old lovers increases with age, time returning the widowed and wizened to days of carefree lust, even if it wasn't all that carefree. A time-honored aphrodisiac from before the Viagra conquest was said to be the touch of a lover's hand. The breath of nostalgia also performs magic.

  A friend, call him Victor, decided he was dying. He said his doctor had given him an unfavorable verdict under the illusion that he was wise and tough and deserved the truth. Or perhaps this was just a fantasy Victor enjoyed after less dramatic bouts of frequent urination. In any case, he gassed up the family Volvo, but then bought a Corvette he spotted at a widow's sale and went zigzagging across country, from the east coast to the west, having researched many of the old girlfriends from his busy, devoutly predatory, youthful Casanovaism. (Personally, with his dark good looks and brooding eyes, he thought he was more like Don Juan, cursed with the destiny of pursuing perfect true love. He considered it a Quest.)

  He didn't merely register his conquests and carelessly move on. He was a writer. He chronicled them in the stack of journals he had accumulated through the years. He treasured each near-perfect page, poignantly regretting the discovery that the woman of that season was almost, up to a point… but then not quite perfect enough. Without tragic disappointment, however, how would his deepest stories be born? Sometimes I didn't think losing a prom queen runner-up to a basketball player qualified as tragedy, but I never disagreed with him when he showed me the re
sultant tale of disillusion.

  There was a flaw in Don Juan's armor. He had married three, then four of the imperfect young women. Now, in later life, he was still married to number four, Claudia, a care-giving sort, with whom he fathered two children. Having committed herself to him, she also took up the word profession. He was a middling successful teacher and writer; she was a hopeful but unpublished poet. “What kind of poetry are you writing?” I asked.

  “Experimental poetry,” she explained.

  Victor growled menacingly: “Means it isn't printed square on the page.”

  She turned suppliant eyes toward her former professor, present spouse. “I'm working toward getting published, and I'm starting to receive encouraging notes from magazines. Poetry asked me to submit again.”

  “Never submit, conquer,” Victor said. He quoted one of her shorter poems, waving his arms to indicate the spacing of the lines on the page:

  We don't know nothing.

  About that too much.

  “It's a Sicilian saying she picked up someplace, so she thought it would make a haiku about the existence of God. Not having seventeen syllables is part of the meaning. Subtle, right?” He cast his dark eyes heavenward as he recalled the relevant critique from Much Ado About Nothing: “Stirs the wind in that corner?”

  Claudia had taken a Shakespeare class with him. She wasn't the best student, but she had the most soothing bosom.

  I could understand how, even without a fatal tumor growing, if it was, Victor might want to embark on a nostalgic road trip through great, truehearted (Jack Kerouac, Thomas Wolfe) America, stopping in Ithaca, Columbus, Iowa City, and other towns where he stored erotic memories. He would unlock them, he would restore their grandeur. Some of the women were now located in big cities and married; no problem. It would be his first time in Albuquerque.

  Find them! Bed them once more! Move right along on the next stop of the terminal sex tour!

  Be young again. Write elegiacally in his journal about the lonely hooting of the long freight trains crossing the prairie lands of great, truehearted America (see previous citations) while he pursued the dream of soulful lovemaking with women who were now, like him, in late middle age or later. Most of the cross-prairie traffic at this time in great, truehearted (ibid.) America's history was carried by lonely trucks or lonely aircraft, but that was a mere detail. In his heart the railway hooted.

  He telephoned his wife regularly during the Farewell Reprise Sex Recovered & Revised Memory Tour. She understood that he needed this experience for his writing. She was a caregiver, and besides, as an experimental poet, she understood about how permanent in a deep soul temporary loves must be. “Hi, honey, I'm in Kansas City.”

  “Kansas?”

  “No, across the river in Kansas City, Missouri. I knew her when she was at Wellesley, really nice hair. She dyes it now. How're the kids?”

  “Gwen has a cough and a runny nose —”

  By the time he reached San Francisco, he was both pensive and deeply enthusiastic, reality wrestling against mania. Even in age, the brooding dark eyes, shadowed by deep smudges (late nights, not kidney disease), were still poetic in their baleful gaze. We had been would-bees together in postdivorce Greenwich Village. Now he needed to remove his glasses to fix his eyes on the object under seduction or scrutiny. He had tried contact lenses, but the itch distracted him. Anyway, nearsightedness, farsightedness, and macular degeneration were not moral flaws unless he happened to find himself driving in heavy traffic. He forgave moral flaws easily, since who in this valley of grief can be perfect? His own novels were mostly sad, except for the ones that were hopeless. For his occasional invitations to read on campus, he kept a lucky shirt with a torn elbow—undergraduate women seemed to read the tear as someone who needed their consolation.

  “Some of them get older!” he reported. “Some of them don't care! Some of them don't remember!”

  I consoled him as best I could. “But you remember.”

  Abruptly he calmed himself. “I remember. I care.” He grinned his old handsome, self-delighted smile. “It's my job. I'll get a book out of this. Maybe I'll call it Travels with Myself.”

  “That's the ticket, Victor.”

  “And,” he said ominously, lowering his voice, “I'll find new memories. There's life in the boy yet. This time I'll make sure they'll never forget me.”

  “Hey, Victor,” I said, “don't be an ax murderer, okay?”

  We laughed together, colleagues, old friends. San Francisco was his last stop before heading home to the experimental poet, soon to be published in several journals, and the daughter with a runny nose and touch of bronchitis. Claudia welcomed him back with a nice casserole and mashed potatoes dinner. Home cooked is a treat when a person has been on the road. Later, he could rest on her familiar soft bosom. She wasn't the sharpest wife he'd had, but she was tops in the placidity field. She may have thought her poetry was importantly innovative; forgiveness of her husband's doubts was one of her strong suits. Who cared if the stupid so-called poetry mostly revolutionized the post-Ginsbergian generation by not getting printed square on the page? Devoted cooking, soft bosom, peace in the household.

  Some pillows are too soft for best alignment of the spine, also known as the backbone.

  Not long after, Victor's driver's license wasn't renewed, due to macular degeneration. If he was writing the epic of his on-the-road recap, he didn't write it; that is, didn't finish it. The terminal illness that had sent him on his quest didn't kill him. It may only have been a polite way of explaining his need to Claudia. But in fact, he died, his love affairs and his books not everlasting in human memory; his death definitely everlasting.

  The experimental poet asked a number of his friends to contribute reminiscences of him for the first issue of a magazine she planned to publish, later issues specializing in post-Ginsbergian poetry not printed square on the page. We celebrated him for virtues that came into relief when he was no longer present to insist on the imperative reality of his dreams.

  Gwen, the annoying daughter, dropped out of school and ran away with a skinhead at age sixteen. Pregnant, she got a job at a Wal-Mart in Jacksonville, Florida, where she could support her husband until he got a job as a rock star in a heavy metal Aryan Nation band, as soon as he bought a guitar and learned to play it.

  Hasn't Changed Since the Senior Prom

  Francis Xavier, unhappily but persistently married these many years, needed to confide the rediscovery of his glamorous youth one fateful evening. It was not a dark and stormy night; such weather would be mere melodrama—this was life and Fate. It was also an art gallery opening at Modernism, balmy and springlike in San Francisco, many of the women dressed in black pantssuits, most of the others in form-fitting black frocks. In front of a Mark Stock painting, The Butler in Love, stood a rule-defying breaker of all the current prescribed art opening dress codes.

  She was wearing an orange top over a black skirt. Her eyes met his across the room, the recognition urgent, immediate. She had been his college senior prom date forty years ago.

  “Forty years? You still recognized each other?”

  “It was easy,” he said proudly. “She hadn't changed one bit.”

  I did the math. From age approximately twenty-two, she was now age approximately sixty-two. And she hadn't changed one bit. Evidently it had been that one meaningful prom event that kept her preserved as a delicious revenant from the nineteen-sixties. Rediscovered love, retroactive great passion, works miracles, especially for Francis Xavier. “Amazing,” I murmured.

  He stared meaningfully, mournfully, because they hadn't seen each other in so long, and each had gone through marriages, and now they were both lonely, he married, she widowed… It was a beautiful time to re-meet. Fate must have had a hand in it. Prostate surgeries and hysterectomies are not immediately visible at art gallery openings.

  Frank's wife dressed like an escapee from Vogue (they were rich) forty years ago. She had seen no reason to change her style
. He was tired, tired, tired of her. She felt the same way about him. She might have wanted a divorce, but the community property issues… much too annoying. He might have wanted a divorce, but he was shy by nature. Also, he didn't know what damage his wife's lawyers might do to his family trust. It would be a happy solution for his wife if she could find a lover, and the thought didn't bother him at all because it was only a thought. When he gazed upon her nose hairs, carelessly untrimmed, he knew a lover wouldn't happen… But for him, in general, meeting the miracle lady who hadn't changed one iota in forty years was splendidly serendipitous.

  “So now what, Frank?” I asked.

  He meditated. The loneliness of an unhappy marriage is worse than the loneliness of widowhood. It was important to explain this fact to Lisa, for that was her name.

  “You spoke?”

  “I asked if she wanted a drink elsewhere, not just the wine they were serving for the vernissage, red or white, no valid choice. Someplace where we could sit down. The little bar at the Palace, not the Palace Court, but the intimate lounge—you know it?”

  “And?”

  “She said she was a graduate of A.A.”

  “Do they graduate?” I reasoned my way through the problem. “But maybe she can drink coffee.”

  “Um,” he said. He hadn't thought of that in the fever of the moment. He leaned toward me and whispered, “But she gave me her cell phone number. I told her she still looks like Edie.”

  “Who?”

  “She also told me I still look the same, too. Edie Sedgwick.” He had been an Art History major until he discovered people thought he was gay and changed to French. There was a lot of nostalgia for Andy Warhol still operating. I was sympathetic. The sixties had been fun. But Edie Sedgwick had died very young, the sure way never to change the look.

  Paradoxically, the fact that his wife never changed her look annoyed him. Her hair had grown frizzy. Her thighs… But he didn't want to speak ill of his wife. All he was willing to say was that he really hated her, and the kid was grown up, but still they were stuck.