by Lore Segal
I follow him out into the kitchen. He says, “I’ve missed my bus, you know that.”
I know that.
“Can I sleep on your couch?” is what I think he said, but I was clanking the bottles I was putting up on the corner shelf, which isn’t tall enough for the quarts, so I take them down again, listening intently for him to say it again.
He says, “I’ve got enough money for the bus back or a hotel.”
Somewhere in all this mess there must be a towel.
William goes into the bathroom. I try the bottles on the shelf near the stove.
When I hear him moving in the living room, I go into the bathroom. I keep brushing and brushing my teeth because I don’t know if I’m supposed to put my nightgown on. All he said was, can he sleep on my couch, if that is what he said, except what else does one put on, at night?
I go in. He’s naked, I can tell, under my sheet. He says, “That’s a pretty nightgown. Take it off.”
“Then put out the light,” I say.
“Why?”
“My nose is too long.”
He’s laughing. In the darkness, in my bed, I meet warm cool male skin, a bush of bristle here, and here.
“Don’t you know I only came to see you?” he says.
I don’t know that.
He laughs.
“What?”
“I was thinking,” he says, and laughs again.
“What?” I say. I’m busy.
He says, “What if you’re a bad poet …”
“Put on the light,” I say, and leap out of bed. Somewhere in this pile is the last poem I’ve written, which might be the best thing I have ever done. William jumps out on his side. “Where’s my briefcase? I hope I brought the one in which Margery and Jesus whisper in a corner, and she tells him how everybody is mean to her and Jesus says, never mind, he loves her better than all his other saints put together, and promises her everlasting life. Here.”
We prop each other’s manuscript before us, on the pillow. William wraps his foot around my ankle and we read.
I laugh.
“Where?” he says, looking over my shoulder.
I read him his witty line. (This is no moment to mention the weakness in his second stanza.)
He says, “You’re good!”
“I am?” I touch my lips to his shoulder. He throws my poem in the air and turns out the light. I can tell he is enthusiastic. I wrap my hand around the back of William’s neck to protect it from my memory of its meagerness.
The bell keeps ringing in this black velvet well in which I am luxuriously asleep.
The floor scrapers!
“Coming!” Blissfully the ringing stops and is replaced by the impatience outside my front door while I cannot and cannot find my housecoat in this mess.
“William? They will have to move the couch, William.”
“Right,” William says, and opens his eyes, but I can see he’s still asleep. Sleeping, he rises out of the sheets.
“Bathroom thataway, William, you’re going to need clothes!”
“Right,” he says.
“I’m sorry about all this mess,” I say to the floor scraper—asthmatic, middle-age belly, tired hair into the forehead. “That’s all right, miss, we’ll do it in no time flat.” Nice face! I tend to like people when they’re walking in my doorway. And I like the young one too, big, round little head. He’s hauling the machinery into my foyer. He upends my couch. The old man fills his arms with underwear. “Put it in the bathroom, miss?”
“Yes, please. No. Not the bathroom. Dump it on the kitchen floor. Just leave me room so I can make coffee. Would you like some?”
No, thank you. What they would like is to get on, and go home.
“Give you a nice gloss only needs buffing?” yells the old man over the whirring whine of the machine, so hugely out of proportion with the size of my room and the capacity my ears have to take it in, I cannot believe it. All day I will keep thinking they’re about to turn the volume down.
“No gloss,” I yell. “Leave the wood natural, please.”
“You want a nice matte finish?” he shouts.
“No finish,” I shout back.
“Just sealer, then, and wax it?”
“No wax, no sealer,” I yell. I point where the revolving blades are milling dirt, varnish, and the top layers of wood into a fine-grade powder, exposing the beautiful raw grain. “Leave it like that,” I yell.
“Dirt’ll grind right in the open pores,” shouts the floor scraper. “You got to put sealer.”
“No sealer,” I shout back.
William comes out of the bathroom, hair wet, shirt open at the throat, looking nice behind the cloud of powdered matter, which cannot be good for the poor floor scraper’s lungs. He’s wheezing. I try to imagine hungering for breath. A poem: “Death of a Floor Scraper.” I look affectionately at him, but he turns his head away. I irritate him, I know. He looks toward William, who leans his back against the wall, slides into a squat, and goes back to sleep; the floor scraper turns toward his assistant, who keeps pushing the hellmachine, making a beautiful new furrow.
“It isn’t that I don’t think you’re perfectly right!” I say, ashamed to be making such a fuss. I try to imagine world starvation, destruction, I visualize that final mushroom cloud, but at the still, hard center of my heart what I want, what I must have, is my wood left natural. I can’t explain to the floor scraper, because I myself don’t know that I believe that when I’ve got a chest of drawers for my clothes, found the right shelf for the bottles, and have filed each paper according to its kind, there will be no dirt, neither shall moth nor rust corrupt.
My ears shatter, my throat burns with dust and my eyes with the lack of sleep. Coffee! I climb over the upended couch in my kitchen door, where presently I see William standing with his tie on, mouthing a long sentence ending in O, I think. I put my hand behind my ear, meaning, “What?” He throws his right hand out, meaning, “Never mind.” “Coffee?” I holler. “What?” He puts his hand behind his ear.
I wake from an indeterminate period in which I’ve stood staring into the black coffee in my cup, like a horse sleeping on its feet.
Where’s William?
I climb over the couch into the foyer. Behind the noise and mist, over by the front door, in a jacket and tie, skinny, glasses, with a briefcase, a man beckons.
I draw back from his alien kiss. “Walk me to the elevator,” he yells in my ear.
“Did you know,” he asks me, “that it would take a month across Europe, on muleback, to visit Emperor Constantine’s holy thumb, or one or another of the two heads of St. James the Less, or a piece of the true sponge that had touched the lips of Christ crucified?” The doors open, close. The elevator has carried him away.
I call my friend Ulla on the phone. Did she know, I ask her, that you had to bring your own frying pan, mattress, and chickens to last you all the way to Jaffa? “This guy I met at Yaddo came down to New York to research the financing of a pilgrimage. And he stayed over,” I say. (How do the girls in commercials formulate their words while their mouths are smiling?)
“He stayed over?” says Ulla, her voice smiling too. Ulla is my best friend.
“A poet,” I say, “called William. Ever heard of him?”
Ulla says, “No. Is he any good?”
“Oh yes!” I say, “except for a weakness in the second stanza. He says he only came to see me,” I say, helplessly smiling.
The floor scrapers are gone. The new silence holds in suspension the stuff this world is made of ground back to its ur-particles.
Monday I sit cross-legged, at the heart of chaos, putting the canceled checks of years past in chronological order. I’m having a good time.
Tuesday I file Art. The soap operas I write evenings go in a pink folder. Mornings I write poetry, which I subdivide into the poem that won a prize, which goes into a blue folder tied with a ribbon; abandoned ideas I put in a black one, and those on which I am at work in green, is
n’t it, for hope?
Wednesday I call Ulla on the telephone. Aren’t men who sleep over supposed to write or call?
Ulla, like the good friend she is, thinks up a score of reasons, all flattering to me, why William hasn’t.
Thursday I file People. Letters of business go in a gray folder. I put Ulla and Winterneet and the note Betterwheatling tacked on the table at Yaddo asking me to drinks at 5:15 in a red folder labeled FRIENDS. I meant to weed out correspondence of no intrinsic interest from people I don’t even like, but I can’t put old Mrs. Winterneet into the wastebasket just because she fails to amuse me! (If I preserve you, will you, by sympathetic magic, hold on to me?) I put Mrs. Winterneet in a manila folder for ACQUAINTANCES.
Now, my correspondence with my editor requires some interesting discriminations. Does his first letter go into the purple folder labeled PEOPLE I HAVE NEVER MET, where I’ve put the fan letter from that man in Boston? And his second letter, after we had lunch, does that go into manila for ACQUAINTANCES? And after that, does he go into the gray folder for BUSINESS or the red one for FRIENDS? Into FRIENDS retroactive to the first letter? Then, after we quarreled, would he go back in the gray file? Retroactively? I don’t think you can file ENEMIES (what color?) until you have a minimum of three or four. Now that we’ve made up, I’ll put him in the red.
I’m sitting on the floor arranging each letter chronologically within its category when the bell rings. It’s the mailman. A card, postmarked Yaddo. It says:
Oh Westron wind when wilt thou blow
the small rain down can rain
Christ that my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again.
I bring it to my lips, but I’ve run out of folders—what color is William when friendship is already red, and he’s no friend—we never even got acquainted. I don’t think one can have a folder for … No. That’s not nice! I stand in the middle of the floor holding a lover’s unfilable postcard between thumb and forefinger, and morning passes into evening, night into day, until the bell rings.
It’s William, a man with a skinny neck and glasses, of no interest to me whatsoever, walking into my foyer. I say, “I’m sorry about the mess.” He drops his briefcase. I’m kissing the edge of a lapel, blinded with emotion, I suck a button.
Morning. Where’s William?
No one in the kitchen; the bathroom is empty, but as in the fairy tale, the dream has left a token: a damp towel is scrumpled on the towel rack.
The doorbell rings. It’s William with his suitcases.
“Put your things on the floor, I guess, till I find us a chest of drawers, and you’ll have to get colored folders and organize your papers,” I say. So we are going to live together, are we, William and I! And sleep skin to skin, nights, Christ, yes—and all day we’ll write poetry knee to knee. Walter Pidgeon and Marie Curie sitting across from each other, discovering uranium late into the night, leaning back, smiling wordlessly into each other’s eyes.
“I don’t even like him that much,” I tell Ulla on the telephone. But Ulla says, “You like him.” Her voice is smiling. Ulla is an expert on things like that. She’s writing a novel called Poets and Lovers.
William is lying on the couch with his shoes on the white bedspread. There’s nothing one can say, of course. Now he’s taking them off. He says, “Come over here.” He’s taking his socks and his pants off, and his glasses. From here on in, this naked William, double-exposed upon the man in the jacket and tie framed in my doorway, like an old acquaintance in a fading snapshot, wakes mornings in my bed reaching for his glasses. I fill the air with the black smell of coffee, I’d coddle him an egg if I could find a pan. We have our breakfast out, then William goes back to write. I take the bus downtown. I can’t work till I have everything in order.
“I’m looking for the perfect paper for my kitchen shelves,” I say to the man behind the Contact paper counter.
“If you don’t find it here, it probably doesn’t exist,” he says. Brown suit, face of a failed ambassador; from the islands of stubble in the creases of his cheek I deduce a wife in a nylon robe who packs him overripe bananas in his lunch bag every day. The Contact paper man despises bananas and never brings back the plastic Baggies, though she’s asked and asked him. I rub the Contact paper salesman’s back with glue and stick him in a poem called “The Contact Paper Salesman.”
Is it okay to do this with a fellow human being?
He says, “We have stipples, speckles, spots, and circles, and our dots have Op effects. Here are the abstracts, conversationals, and florals, or if you like traditional, there’s a fleur-de-lis, lotus, willow, and tartans, which we personalize in decorator colors, custom-keyed to your own home. Here’s lace. Here’s flocking you can’t tell from cut velvet, and blue-jean regular or faded, with a real fabric feel. I can take a special order for your monogram, no extra cost, six weeks’ delivery.
“We carry genuine marble reproductions and wood grain better than a tree, just sponge off with soap and water. I can show you our Famous Artists Series, actual brush strokes. Here’s Van Gogh, here’s the Lascaux Caves, or the Cimabue crucifix before the flood. Our man’s in Chartres this moment, putting the stained glass on transparencies. In the eventuality of a nuclear disaster, you can glue your own rose window. We were first with environmentals, look at this seashore with a tie-in to our book department, 20 percent off an illustrated dictionary of crustaceans.”
“I’ll take plain white, please,” I say.
“That’ll run you twenty cents a square foot higher.”
“Okay,” I say.
“And we don’t carry it,” he says.
“I’ll give you a special order,” I say.
He says, “It’s been discontinued. There’s no demand. If I had it here, in my hand, I wouldn’t sell it to you, you’d be back next week complaining it showed every speck of dirt.”
I say I’ll think about it and I’ll be back. The Contact paper salesman’s eyelids click shut and register “No Sale.” His flat cheek infinitesimally sags: the Contact paper salesman has grown five minutes older. Already he has forgotten me.
I take the elevator to the furniture department and visit the chair I cannot afford. I touch the wood. Its temperature adjusts to my blood. My finger follows the slightest shift in the direction of the carver’s tool. The carver sits in my soul with his back to me (centuries divide us; and he’s never Jewish). He carved these armrests like two halves of an embrace that opens courteously outward, before terminating into formal scrolls.
I take the elevator down to stationery and buy a dozen pencils.
Is that stout odd body in the striped stockings waving at me? “Pavlovenka! I didn’t recognize you! What are you doing out of Yaddo?”
Pavlovenka says she saw me upstairs, in the furniture department, and called me by name, but I was stroking a chair and she tiptoed away. And what am I working on, she asks.
I tell Pavlovenka about my poem called “Euphoria in the Root Cellar,” which I’ve just finished. She shrieks with the deliciousness of the coincidence: a student in her freshman class is writing just such a poem, about a poet writing a poem in his poem!
“Mine’s different!” I cry. What I need is a brand-new notebook for a poem I am going to be doing that will be so different, literature will never be the same again.
William is glad to see me. “Lucinella, where’s the bourbon?”
“Oh!” I say. “I moved the bottles to the shelf near the refrigerator.”
“I’m hungry,” says William. “Let’s go out and eat.”
“How can I eat!” I cry. “I bought a notebook and twelve new pencils.”
“So, let’s sit down and write.”
But how can I write with chaos breathing in my ear, yearning for just such a crack, such a fault in the system, to come creeping back among my papers? I must find the place, quickly, to put my new notebook, and here is exactly the right white folder. I’m surprised! There are two notebooks, both blank, already in it,
and now I remember the time I was going to write this new and completely different poem which needed a brand-new notebook, and buying one and bringing it home and putting it into this white folder. I remember my surprise at finding a new notebook already in it and remember remembering needing, buying, bringing, and putting it in a white folder.
“William, when are you going to organize your papers?”
“My papers,” William says, “are in an ascending and descending order of non sequitur.”
“That’s funny, William.” I like that. I kiss him. He says, “Come and lie here,” but how can I make love so long as there’s disorder among my pencils.
I sit in the middle of the floor sharpening the twelve new pencils to precision points, each one exactly equal in length to each of the eleven others.
What is this straining, almost a rasping, in my chest? It’s the pain of the discrepancy between Walter Pidgeon sitting upright and William lying down on the couch again.
I go and kneel by William. I untie his shoes and rub his feet for him and say, “William, be a love, don’t put your shoes on the white bedspread, the damn thing costs four bucks to dry-clean.”
“More feet rubbing,” William says. (Mark down the day, a Thursday, on which it is established I can tell William what to not do: the future is all before us.)
“And straighten out your towel on the towel rack,” I say.
“If I remember,” says William, “I will.”
“Try to remember, William,” I say, “that a scrumpled towel cannot dry, and William, why do you lie down instead of sitting up when you’re writing?”
“Because, Lucinella, we don’t have a chair,” William says.
“That’s true,” I say.
Next day the bell rings.
Outside my door is a man with a chair upholstered in turquoise crap with tulips, quilted in gilt thread.
“You have the wrong address!” I scream, but he shows me the label:
To:
Lucinella,
New York.
I love you,
William
“William, could you imagine that for some people an ugly object can cause physical distress, like a bad smell?”
