by Barry Hannah
I left the room all moist and on the verge of going ugly in the face with sorrow and joy.
I was wanting to be a broader man when next we met, so I picked up Horace’s Proust and began reading it that night while he went down to the bus station to see if the magazines had changed. The great champion of sensitivity and time, in his cork-lined room, allergic to noise, claimed my pal. This thicket of nerves I could not broach, however, most likely because I had my own, clawing over the pages in competition. But it was still of great use in the room, because it was French, I thought as I tossed it away.
Horace came in with a great smile. I was on the bed dreaming high and valiant stuff. He looked behind him down the hall.
“Well, somebody’s having a good time here. Did you know there was a woman down the way? And she must be all woman. They hadn’t shut the transom. She couldn’t get enough from some guy. Oh Bertie, Bertie, deeper, deeper!” I changed from the smile of my good dreams to a face that must have been stone fury.
“You couldn’t have heard that. That’s from a dirty comic book.”
“I tell you. And get this, what she was moaning when I left: Churn butter churn! Churn butter churn! Old Bertie whamming away.”
He couldn’t have made this up.
“Your kind go from blind ignorance straight to cynicism. You don’t feel, you don’t know.”
“Hey, George, you quoting Marcel? I’m not cynical at all. She was having a hell of a time.”
Her language, an image from French dairy cow country—my good horror. How could this thing be? Albert was using the dog against her. He was forcing the paregoric down her, making her sick and blabbering.
“Now, man. You ought to see your face. What’s eating you?”
Horace was tall, too wise, knowing nothing. I hated him.
I couldn’t go see her that night. It was a bitter, bitter evening. Horace wanted to go down to the lobby and lie in wait so we could check out the woman when she came by. I told him that was a horrible sophomoric idea. Why? he asked, getting fed up with me. He said we might have found a lady with a profession here. He was ready to do a Chinese dwarf.
“Let’s leave it like the harmonica player,” I said, stonily.
“That isn’t the same at all.”
“Leave it.”
“You don’t tell me, all right? You’re not the duke of Kosciusko.”
He went down and I was happy he came back without seeing her.
The next morning was Sunday. Horace called himself a free-thinking Baptist. He’d brought a suit and he went out to that church down the way. I was apostate, but very glad he wasn’t. I checked the rail, being stealthy. That bastard Albert was in the chair, staring tiredly, having forced her twice this week. I was praying for an artery to snap in his face and vowed direct revenge if it didn’t. The man must be stomped and dragged off in a net. I could see venom popped up in his cheeks, spotting them red.
“Hey you,” I called, not very loud.
He twisted his head back, trying to find me.
“En Attendant Godot? En Attendant?”
He got up, shaken, and I watched the top of his head, gray hair brushed forward Roman, leave for the street.
When I knocked on the door and waited, I heard something clink inside. She came to the door in nothing but a house wrap, wet from the bath.
“Friend George.” Her eyes were very dull. She was on the stuff, her conscience awful.
When I went in she’d already gone back to the tub. I sat on the bed and heard her stir the water. Then I heard the clink again. For the longest time she said nothing.
“You ought to watch your transom. My friend heard you really having a good time last night.”
There was no reply at all.
“I thought wrong. You don’t need a friend so much as . . . somebody to betray.”
Nothing. You heard water sounds, just a little.
I studied the bed and carpet and dresser—all she had and was, as far as I knew. A hotel was a stupid and desperate place to live, I suddenly thought. And rotation from one to another, having her bicycle and robe and boots and chain everywhere, up the stairs dutifully with them again and again, setting up like carnival gypsies except with less dignity and no good at all even to yokels with a quarter. But I was being unfair to her, and caught myself up again. Because I cherished her, nothing could budge me.
“I so need a friend now. It’s the end of things,” she said in a little, faint voice. “Come in here and sit. There’s a curtain between us. Oh!” I thought she gasped and I hurried in, face blushing and dying to help. The curtain was closed, all right, the brown shadow of her behind it sitting in the water. “Oh!” I thought she said again.
Around the front gathered edge of the curtain near the faucets the dog chain lay out on the floor with one of its bracelets open, the rest of the chain in the tub with Felice.
“Put it on your wrist, my pal,” she said tinnily, almost sighing it.
So I did and snapped it on. I would be a gypsy too. I’d be the panting boy in the wings, waiting until her act was over and the others had had their fill of her. Until we made our move. This charity and long-suffering had never even nearly come near me before. I’m just sailing along the current in the rain gutter, a piece of nothing, nobody can touch me without drowning. The steel of the cuff was very serious and required a key for release, I noticed.
“You will be with me down down down oh! There’s a way to do it in the liver they said brings it there quick but oh! no no no.” This was all so faint and not recollected until a long while afterwards.
“Felice! Are you okay? I’m buckled on the chain with you.”
“Something’s not right, and I’ve used the last one.” Her voice was faint, dimming like a small girl going to sleep, her breath wet on the pillow.
“Everything will be all right. Everything. I know you’re under horrible pressure. I’m reading Proust, drawing closer to your world. The French Proust.”
There would be no way for me not to view a lot of her with the chain binding us, I reckoned. This would be an unearthly familiarity. The die would be cast. The new world would begin right then, and I felt actual waves of a kind of happy nausea.
“Oh oh oh oh ohh! Not right.”
This voice did not rise in friendship or passion. She was very sick and I knew something was wrong, unpretended and real.
“I’m not dying the right way, George.”
I got up, thinking, and pulled the chain to the door. I couldn’t look at what I wanted without pulling her a little, with a splash from the tub. I finally had my eyes just past the jamb and looked on the dresser. The paregoric bottles were there, three empty, but where the long acupuncture needles always were was empty space. It was too catastrophic a thing to even consider; but I knew she had them.
“Felice, I’m opening the curtain!”
She was lying over with her head forward, drugged, on the shower plunger between the faucets. Her hands were down on her stomach. The tub water was pink around it with three streams of blood. She’d pushed them in the right side where the liver was, I found out. Oriental, Oriental, I remember thinking over and over, trying to call the dread something.
I got in the tub with her and lifted her. You think you are one muscled champion until you try to lift a wet naked woman dead-haul. It can barely be done, and I thought she was already dead, so that in this fear I finally did it and we both fell over together, confused in the chain, off the tiles into the carpet of the room. My nose was flat in it and it smelled like the dusty feet of a horde. She was whimpering. When I saw the heads of the needles, puffed out with blue and darker skin, with a near-black blood dripping out like spread fingers, I almost went under.
I looked for a phone, but we had no phone in these rooms. Her legs began moving although her face looked dead. I drew up and whirled my head around looking. I reached the robe on the hanger and dragged it off, then threw it over her and put my arms under hers, tugging and pleading with her.
With as much ease as I could I got her out on the stoop and she began walking a little, saying oh oh oh. We went down the stairs very slowly. When we got toward the bottom, I raised up and there Albert was staring at us from his black suit, his eyes seeming beyond a known emotion. I gasped at him to phone help, she was dying. Some others behind Albert stood there, but I barely noticed even their shoes. I settled her on the last stair then sat myself, unwrapping the chain around us both and getting some free length to my wrist. Then I saw she was revealed and I pulled the robe together on her.
She had a great deal of blood in her lap and on the side of the robe, up level with the circled cross of the Klan.
“This is my affair,” said Albert. “Let her go.”
“It is not. I’m with her now. Can’t you see? I’m her future now!”
“No you ain’t, son,” said my father, who’d come up with Horace, the both of them in suits.
He’d come up to bring us some treats from Mother and had intercepted Horace coming in from church. My father had a cigarette in his mouth, but it had almost fallen out of his sidelips and hung there while he stared with an open mouth at the bloody woman in the Klan robe. He looked so damned distinguished and in charge I felt dimmed out and pushed back to about age ten, staring at the handcuff of the dog chain on my wrist. Horace was holding the sack of goodies and seemed exactly the son he deserved.
I didn’t see Harold again until almost twenty years later. I was in a very bad band playing at cocktail hour for peanuts and for a convention of educators in San Antonio, Texas. I had been fired from my regular job for drinking, and before that I had been jailed and nuthoused for setting fire to my estranged wife’s lawn, which blew up her lawn mower. In the band I was desperate and would have been throbbing in shame but I was still drunk enough to ignore it and was majoring on the theme Whim of Fortune, and I believe trying to attach myself to a woman of such low estate that the two of us would destroy ourselves in spontaneous combustion at an impossible diving speed. But I had clarity enough to see Harold walk out of the milling pack of cocktailers in the ballroom and come right up to the bandstand, natty in a good slim blazer, and stare at me with an even brotherly smile.
He had heard about my troubles, and commiserated, seeming the picture of sobriety and successful wisdom to me. His hair was all gray, but his posture had improved, and his baldness was distinguished, even at the ears all around. Something terribly healthy was going on in his life and I envied him. I hadn’t felt decent in three years.
“Oh, no. I’m not nice, my friend, not at all. I’m just ordinary as potatoes.”
“Aw Harold. I doubt it.”
“That was the last gasp of riot, in school when you knew me. That was the whole wad.”
“You didn’t reach your juicy scandal, the great one?”
“Never. My head simply turned around and I got old. I just wasn’t even looking that way anymore. All I had was divorce—very usual—and my memories. It’s like I knew you’d be here. C’mon up to the room. I’ll show you something. Pathetic, and I can’t leave it alone.”
“Telepathy, Harold. Remember?”
I dragged my horn case along with him to the elevator. Harold began attacking the stupefying hopelessness of his students. I had grown enough to know only a good teacher could assault them this meticulously, and that he adored them. He was reading a paper on mild innovations in the classroom here at the convention. Many of his students had won national honors. He was still at the same obscure little school.
In the room he pulled out his albums—the one with the Asian women, and then another one with photographs of all his college girls in total surrender, bare, and all of them very happy about it, Harold beaming among them. The effect was more of an arcane archaeological find where a race of drab and ungainly women were frozen in postures of ritual fulfillment. How could he get them to be so glad about it, all of them? I wondered. Only the last album was very sexy. There were pictures of that big woman he married, from clothed to very unclothed, to inside her, many angles. In these the woman seemed cruel and proud, with threatening smiles, dominating the photographer himself, and triumphant in a near-fascist way.
“See, I’m not nice. I’ve got to keep them. Look again, caress them.”
Given the times, none of this was very scandalous, and you had to reimagine the fifties to get very disturbed. They were curios, and Harold did seem pathetic, hanging on to them, and having them along to assist his biography, which nobody was ever going to write.
“I’m a sad old man,” he smiled.
“I had a great scandal, I think,” I told him.
“Well. Word gets around. It must have been rough.”
I stared at him. It must have been blankly.
“Not those. Those are nothing. Those were mere absolutely typical drunkenness, right on schedule,” I at last admitted to somebody.
Then I tried, and failed, with boorish pauses and needless lies, to tell him about Felice.
She lived, but just barely. All three needles had found the liver, and others had died with a third of the same wounds. I understand she was yellow and even black all over for weeks. A newsman called our home. I had been identified as “a youth” in their local small paper. My father took the call and politely told him that I really had nothing further to add and was trying to get on with my life. The newsman himself was very understanding and polite. My father wasn’t, not to me. He had a name in town. Above all things, he despised scandal.
My love for Felice went on belligerently, sullenly, for a month. It was all I had that was undiscussable and untouchable, and it pulled me through, wondering about her and the difference I might have made in her life. I would see her in other hotels, and there she behaved much like a nun of the old tales, looking out a drab window with a bar of light on her face, and you saw a tear under her eye for remembrance of wholesome youth and true love and what could have been. I tried to rave on the heath but was too conscious of the real fact that I was just bawling like a brat.
“But Harold, Harold!” I took the sleeve of his blazer, shaking it. “I was real then. I throbbed, buddy. I did throb.”
Harold was stunned.
“That woman got you. But she needed me,” he said.
Hey, Have You Got a Cig, the Time, the News, My Face?
HIS DREAMS WERE NOT GOOD. E. DAN ROSS HAD CONSTANT NIGHTmares, but lately they had run at him deep and loud, almost begging him. He was afraid his son would kill his second wife. Ross often wanted to kill his own wife, Newt’s mother, but he was always talking himself out of it, talking himself back into love for her. This had been going on for thirty-two years. E. Dan Ross did not consider his marriage at all exceptional. But he was afraid his son had inherited a more desperate fire.
Newt had been fired from the state cow college where he taught composition and poetry. Newt was a poet. But a friend of Ross’s had called from the campus and told him he thought Newt, alas, had a drinking problem. He was not released for only the scandal of sleeping with a student named Ivy Pilgrim. There was his temper and the other thing, drink. Newt was thirty. He took many things very seriously, but in a stupid, inappropriate way, Ross thought. There were many examples of this through the years. Now, for example, he had married this Ivy Pilgrim. This was his second wife.
The marriage should not have taken place. Newt was unable to swim rightly in his life and times. The girl was not pregnant, neither was she rich. If she had made up that name, by the way, Ross might kill her himself. He could imagine a hypersensitive dirt-town twit leeching onto his boy. Newt’s poetry had won several awards, including two national ones, and his two books had been seriously reviewed in New York papers, and by one in England.
Ross did not have to do all the imagining. Newt had sent him a photograph a month ago. It was taken in front of their quarters in the college town, where they remained, Newt having been reduced in scandal, the girl having been promoted, Ross figured. Ross was a writer himself. He was proud of
Newt. Now he was driving to see him from Point Clear, Alabama, a gorgeous village on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay. Ross and his wife lived on a goodly spread along the beach. He worked in a room on the pier with the brown water practically lapping around his legs. It was a fecund and soul-washed place, he felt. He drove a black Buick Riviera, his fifth, with a new two-seater fiberglass boat trailing behind. It was deliberately two-seater. There would be no room for the girl when they went out to try the bass and bream.
He saw ahead to them: the girl would be negligent, a soft puff of skin above her blue jeans, woolly “earth sandals” on her feet, and a fading light in her eyes, under which lay slight bags from beer and marijuana and Valium when she could get it. Newt’s eyes would be red and there would be a scowl on him. He will be humming a low and nervous song. He will be filthy and misclothed, like an Englishman. His hands will be soft and dirty around the fingernails. He’ll look like a deserter on the lam. This is the mode affected by retarded bohemians around campus. Cats would slink underfoot in their home. Cats go with really sorry people. If anybody smokes, Newt and Ivy will make a point of never emptying the ashtray, probably a coffee can, crammed and stinking with cigarettes. Somebody will have sores on the leg or a very bad bruise somewhere. They will have a guitar which nobody can play worth spit. A third of a bottle of whiskey is somewhere, probably under the sink. They’ll be collecting cash from the penny bowl in order to make a trip to the liquor store. This is the big decision of the day. Old cat food would lie in a bowl, crusted. Shoes and socks would be left out. Wherever they go to school or teach it is greatly lousy, unspeakably and harmfully wrong. This was his son and his wife, holding down the block among their awful neighbors in a smirking conspiracy of sorriness; a tract of rental houses with muddy, unfixed motorcycles and bicycles around. Somebody’s kid would sit obscene-mouthed on a porch.
E. Dan Ross, a successful biographer, glib to the point of hackery (he prided himself on this), came near a real monologue in his head: your son is thirty and you see the honors he has won in poetry become like cheap trinkets won at a fair and now you know it has not been a good bargain. A bit of even immortal expression should not make this necessary. It should have brought him a better woman and a better home. Your son has been fired in scandal from a bad school. Newt must prevail, have a “story.” These poets are oh, yes, insistent on their troubled biography. The fact is that more clichés are attached to the life of a “real” writer than to that of a hack. Every one of them had practically memorized the bios of their idols and thought something was wrong if they paid the light bill on time. When I talk to my son, Ross thought, it is comfortable for both of us to pretend that I am a hack and he the flaming original; it gives us defined places for discussion, though I have poetry in my veins and he knows it, as I know damned well he is no real alcoholic. The truth is, Newt would drink himself into a problem just for the required “life.” Nobody in our family ever had problems with the bottle. It is that head of his. He did not know how to do life, he did not know how to cut the crap and work hard. He did not know that doomed love would wreck his work if he played around with it too much. There is cruelty in the heart of those who love like this. There is a mean selfishness that goes along with being so deplorable. You will say what of the life of the spirit, what has material dress to do with the innerness, the deep habits of the soul, blabba rabba. Beware of occasions that call for a change of clothing, take no heed for the morrow, Thoreau and Jesus, sure, but Newt has no mighty spiritual side that Ross has seen. Newt’s talent, and it is a talent I admit, is milking the sadness out of damned near everything. Isolating it, wording it into precise howls and gasping protests.
