by Ann Quin
We lived in the annex, or tried to live. I took up
writing
painting
sculpture
photography
athletics
Zen
Judo
Karate
movie making
stocks and shares
while Lucinda knitted pink and blue baby outfits, and watched television. All night movies. Sleeping, complained of feeling sick, headachey during the day. I’d go for long car trips, check in at some obscure motel, get drunk for several days, until the limousine caught up with me, the chauffeur lifting me into the car, up to the briefing room, where the old man paced the walled room, lighting relighting huge cigars, offering me one, knowing I’d refuse. Refuse the terms, conditions, decisions. Look Si I think it’s about time you
The sweat ran down my spine, chest, between my legs. The extra water had run out. I started seeing
unmarked springs
avocado groves
fertile islands
a honeycomb of waterways
mammoth lakes
sheer walls of symmetrical blue-grey basaltic columns
crystal-clear hot springs
six packs of fridged beer
641,000 acres of lakestrewn land
sea life housing 13 large glass tanks
a 90-foot pool with perforated seals
Aquarium with prostrate mermaids
20 to 30 feet high snowdrifts
65 underground rooms
gardens
grottos
swimmingpools
white marble statuary
stained-glass windows under water
white, conical 115-foot towers
sanctuary of aquatic birds
I passed some tourists dune-buggying in their Bermuda gear. I noticed I was running out of gas. Perhaps they had also, maybe they hadn’t reached the main highway after all. I would pass them, wave cheerfully at Lucinda stretched out in semi-consciousness in the back seat, while he would be trudging through the desert. Want some help? I’d call out as my chevy churned up dust in his sweaty puffy red face. Later I’d visit her shrine. And all the rest the Wee Kirk o’ the Heather reproduction of the church where Annie Laurie worshipped.
Reproduction of the church where Gray wrote his Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. And attend the hourly lecture on The Last Supper. The Hall of Crucifixion, measuring 45 by 195 feet. Note that visitors must remain during the showing, and passing out as the lecturer got to the 180th part of Christ’s body.
The gas gauge hovered over the E where my eyes constantly attached themselves. My mouth seemed made of sand. My whole body a sinking dune buggying itself back, forward from the steering wheel. Then I saw their car off to the right. They were nowhere to be seen. Hiding perhaps in the back, the gun loaded, waiting, ready to leap out. The bloody ending as inevitable as the climax of a Greek tragedy. Or so Lucinda would want. The episode could hardly be bettered: the vaporous, honey-coloured scene as my body would writhe to earth in a quarter-time choreography of death. The tone of the scene shifting in a split second from humor to horror as the bloodied victim attempted to aim his gun, forgetting it was unloaded. And after the affair had been discreetly seen to, they would trade in the buick one afternoon for the same model in another color, borrowing her father’s chauffeur to trundle it through the desert until it had accumulated the early mileage. She might come out in hives, her usual accessory to any crisis, and her mother applies glycerine furiously over her daughter’s body, collaborating that Men are Terrible just Beasts. And for several nights she’d be frigid in their king-sized bed.
Ah that bed, and others larger, smaller, narrow, wide around which we played our games. I the dwarf, she the Queen. She my sister. I was the President. She a slave
prostitute
movie star
nymphet
lesbian
And myself a Pimp
Judge
Flagellist
We arrived at a point when even words were unnecessary. A record collection when each piece of music fulfilled the appropriate background. Head full of musical organs. Feet scaled the walls, the strips of light placed between the toes. Her ears were sitars blown by my carved mouth. Sitting in the shower spinning fantasies on to her face, plucking at myself, the feathers of geese and quail from thigh to neck. Upsidedown. From right to left. Turning her over in the flat of my dreams. Her mother waved from a desert tower. Her father lay on a bundle of stocks and shares directing the family traffic through glass stairways. I stripped a banana thrust it up her cunt, half way, ate the rest, poured sour cream over her and buried my fingers in the remaining pink areas. Her feet followed the trail of foxes in snow. Markings of spiders along ridges memories slipped into.
More than 100 life-sized figures in 35 scenes. Hand and footprints imprinted in a coral-like crust deposited by the waters of an ancient sea. In my sophomore year I was considered a clean-cut boy, permitted by girls to go so far if I was on a leash, crated or otherwise physically restricted at all times. A thirty minute color slide show on the cultivation and history of dates. A riot of color. A series of leap-frog bridges. Blind closets, trapdoors and secret passageways. A huge overshot redwood wheel. An acre of grotesquely knotted thoughts, accessible only by foot or horseback; no roads had been cut into the wilderness not then in my sophomore year.
Thoughts now encounter shelves of ideals from these enormous arcs of nostalgia 50 feet in the arc. A large depression whose floor is scarred by numerous projections. It was about that time I guess, due to subnormal daily activities the content of dreams became so dense that the only life within them consisted of small briny shrimp and the pupae of the ephydrid fly, I began then to organise a free-form dimensional equipment in the shape of a bucket. Digging below the surface the continuous bucket line operated 24 hours a day, except on July 4th and December 25th, and I viewed the dredge, as I continue to do so, from a foreign land.
Never Trust a Man Who Bathes with His Fingernails
He was a small man. Half Cherokee. His
movements, silences were those of the Indian.
The women watched, roused, a little
frightened. The husband of one of the women,
lover of the other, also watched. From a
distance, watched from his studio as the man
hammered into wood, did odd jobs around the
house. Outside, looking in at the women.
The wife’s movements became lighter. She
laughed more. Her face flushed from the ride
on his motorbike, through light rain off the
mountains. She crouched behind his warmth.
This warmth in her cheeks, eyes, spread as
they sat in front of the fire, quietly talking,
or letting the wood speak. The other woman
waited, wanting to make a third of this situ-
ation also. Not sure of her sense of place,
the placing of where she might sit, walk,
sleep between husband and wife. Wife. Husband.
And when the husband entered the room he
hesitated. ‘I think we might have a door here,’
he said, gesturing at the space between kitchen
and bedroom, ‘what do you think—could you do
that?’ The man nodded, hands lightly rested
on his knees. The wife bent over sewing,
hair, still wet, hid her face. The other looked
at the husband, the other two. Out of the
window, at the aspens, the cloud shadows
gathering speed through the valley. Back again
to the interior of light and shade, where
the three sat, moved from room to room.
Rooms without doors. Except the studio the
husband climbed into, shut down the door,
stared at blank paper in the typewriter,
listened to the wood sawing, the man’s
low
whistling. And the wife’s laughter.
He arrived on his motorbike, a low black
figure, part of the machine. He seemed larger
then, the wife thought, as she looked out
of the kitchen window, each morning at eight
o’clock. Her hands paused over the sink.
Off the machine, he waved. His hand recon-
structing the speed, weather, landscape he
had passed through. The husband bent over
his typewriter, pulled out a page, crushed it,
and threw into the wastepaper basket. ‘Damn
it he’s just a bum—been here a week now and
what has he done—what are we paying him
for?’ ‘But he’s nearly finished the
windows—I know he’s slow but he knows what
he’s doing—besides we are paying him only
what a soda jerk would earn,’ the wife
answered, quietly smiling, quietly going on
with bread making, her fingers feeling, weighing
the elasticity of the dough. ‘It’s all very
well but I think we ought to have a time
sheet for him—always this impression he
gives of unlimited time—the last job he
had he was fired—there he was when this couple
drove up—apparently he swung the axe into
the wood when he saw them—the only work
he’d done all day—no—I’ll get a time sheet.’
So the husband drew up a time sheet, which
he nailed on the adobe wall, which the man
marked with small black crosses.
He ate with them, sitting between the
women. The husband at the head of the table.
The women talked. The men ate. ‘How about
all of us going to that hot spring pool tomorrow—
you can show us where it is—you’ve been there?’
The wife said. The man nodded, pushed his
bread around the plate, ‘it is small—but
the water is great—good for the body,’ he said.
But it’s a long walk isn’t it—we can’t take
the car all the way down there?’ the husband
paused in eating, looked at the women.
‘Oh we don’t mind walking—it will be lovely
you’ll see—oh it will be so good,’ the wife went
on eating quickly, giggling slightly, ‘and we’ll
do it in the nude.’ The other woman felt her
own weight sink into the chair, felt the weight
of the husband’s eyes, his face whiter then in
the afternoon light. The man next to her was
motionless, hands again on his knees, dark
skin shining, grains of dirt almost a lighter
shade.
The women cleared the table. The husband
climbed into his work. The man measured the
space for the door. While the women washed,
dried the dishes, their heads bent low, close
together. The wife quick, with a quicker
laughter than the other, who laughed slowly in
the spaces of the wife’s laughter. The silence
coming from the room above them, she later
entered, when the wife went shopping. A
quickness then between them on his studio
couch, listening for the car rattling over
the bridge, and all the while below them the
lower sound of nails slowly driven into wood,
the man’s whistling louder. The louder noises
of the wife returning, putting things in
cupboards, banging of dishes, as they straightened
their clothes, the couch cover. He lifted up
the door for her to clutch her way down into
the kitchen, into the bathroom where she powdered
over the heightened colour of her face.
The man went on hammering, hummed, bent
into his work. The typewriter a jerky rhythm
above. The wife talked, her voice higher
pitched, movements quicker from cupboard to
table, from table to cupboard. ‘Can I help?’
the other asked, standing behind the table,
her hands becoming steady from the firmness of
wood, the stone wall behind her. ‘I’ll show
you how to make stuffed pimentos and cabbage,’
the wife said. ‘Oh yes that would be nice.’
She came round to where the wife bent over the
vegetables, watched the deftness of knife against
green, red, slicing into, through, pulling out
the seeds. The hammering a steady sound. The
typewriter paused, went on, paused, while the
women worked with sharp knives.
He did not arrive at eight the next morning.
Thunder stirred over the distant mountains.
A sirocco wind spiralled sand in the desert.
Three spirals on their own, that approached,
joined up into a whirling tower of sand. Stilts
of rain came slowly down the mountains, faster
over the valley. Apples were flung on to the
ground, some breaking open on the cracked dry
earth under the wet surface. ‘He’s holding
off until the storm passes I guess—oh I hope
it clears up did so want to make that hot spring
today,’ the wife said, ‘he did say today didn’t
he—he didn’t say he wouldn’t be working today?’
‘Lazy bastard,’ the husband muttered, then in a
louder tone, ‘it won’t clear up look at those
clouds piling up there on those mountains.’
He went up into the studio, and put the radio
on very loudly. So loud that none of them heard
the motorbike crossing the bridge. Though the
wife looking out at the sky changing, small
patches of blue that widened, edged off the
clouds either side of the mountains, mesas,
saw the large black shape hurled,
suddenly from that clear space between clouds,
river and the trees. ‘There—here he is,’ she
shouted. ‘What?’ shouted the husband from
the opening at the top of the stairs. ‘He’s
here—get ready—it’s clearing we can go after
all,’ she shouted back while opening the front
door. The man approached, his heavy boots
hardly made any sound. He stood in the porch-
way, shaking off the rain, rain over his goggles,
eyes, hair. She began rubbing his head with a
towel, but he took it gently from her. ‘Oh
you are soaked through—you better change
you can wear something of his—though nothing
I guess will fit.’ He stood between the women,
when the husband swung down the stairs. He
rubbed himself quickly then, and put back his
shirt. ‘But that’s wet,’ the wife said. He
shrugged, ‘It doesn’t matter I feel warm
enough.’ ‘Well are we going or not?’ the
husband asked, not looking at the three, seeming
to look with concentration at the half finished
dishes stacked. ‘Of course we’re going—look
it’s going to be a beautiful day.’ ‘Very well
don’t blame me if we get caught in a storm.’
The men sat in front. The women at the
back. The husband drove, and manoeuvred the
rear mirror until he could see his wife’s face.
His own, he knew, had a strange pallor, and
his hands, gripping the steering wheel, paler,
next to the other,
whose darkness was darker,
glistening there on his knees. They drove in
silence along the valley road, turned off, and
bumped across the desert. ‘You’ll soon have
to stop,’ the man said. Where—here—there—
where?’ the husband asked. ‘See those rocks
over there well there—it’s a few miles down
to the river—there’s a small track we can take.’
The husband brought the car to an abrupt halt.
They all climbed out. ‘Did you bring any towels
for drying ourselves?’ the husband asked his
wife. ‘Oh the sun will dry us,’ she replied,
walking quickly on, following the man. ‘I brought
one,’ the other woman said, as she caught up
with the husband. She glanced at him, but he
looked ahead, to where the other two now were
at some distance, then they disappeared round
the larger rocks. He quickened his pace. She
tried to keep up, and stumbled. He caught hold
of her hand, released. She fell back, breathing
heavily. ‘Where have they gone I can’t see
them?’ His face red now, as they clambered
on over large stones, dry grass, sand. She
looked back at the mountain range, clear cut
against the expanse of blue, the car, a fallen
grey object, in the desert.
They turned the corner and saw the river,
a thin strip of steel from that distance.
‘They must have run down here,’ he said, and
slowed up, waited for her to be beside him.
She stooped and looked down over the yellow
boulders, then up at his face, further up
into the sky that narrowed as they went on
down the track.
She saw his clothes on a flat piece of
rock, but could not see the man anywhere.
The wife’s face appeared over some bushes.
‘Isn’t it lovely here—so warm—so quiet.’
She stepped out, naked, her arms raised,
hair tossed back, as she climbed over the
rocks and disappeared. The husband slowly
undressed. The woman did likewise. She
followed him over the rocks, slipping a little,
