Lucinella

by Lore Segal

  “What he doesn’t understand is my poetry depends on a certain looseness in some stanzas,” William says. “And I’m not, Lucinella, going to his goddamn party!”

  The bell rings. It’s for William from The Magazine.

  Terrific. Fall issue.

  OK? M.

  William is waiting for happiness, which does not occur.

  “Bastard!” he says. “Two triple-spaced lines! I don’t rate a letter of acceptance? Okay, okay. I guess we have to show up at the party.”

  IV

  “Lucinella! Come in!” cries Ulla. “You’re looking fabulous!” (So William said, but then he even wants to marry me.)

  Ulla is wearing her harem pants and looks beautiful. She says William looks terrific, but there I know she’s fibbing. “Dump your coats on the bed inside. Cilena! Come in! You’re looking fabulous!”

  Here comes Maurie, his fat face gleams. He puts an arm around my shoulder. I really like Maurie, but don’t, Maurie, please don’t ignore William, now look what you’ve done!

  Maurie’s snub has uncovered William’s Underground and let out his company of little black familiars with their barbed and poisonous tails. One crawls out the bottom of his trouser leg and says, “You’ve got a weak second stanza and at Maurie’s, Thursday, Winterneet didn’t know who you were.” Another falls out of his sleeve. It says, “Your poetry is worthless!” There’s one clinging to his lapel, like a boutonniere, which says, “Remember Lila, who put out for the whole tenth grade except you and that kid with the adenoids? And your wife killed herself, no wonder Lucinella doesn’t want to marry you!” And one, a meany, sits astride William’s nose and regards him with the precise slant of eye Miss Colman, in kindergarten, wore seeing the pee puddling at his feet and William groans out loud.

  “The trouble with Maurie,” he says, “is he doesn’t have the first idea what publishing is all about.”

  This is not true. I clasp my hands around William’s arm and keep silent. And I add, “Also, he picks his nose.” (So does William in private. So do I.)

  William undoes my hands from around his arm and stalks after Maurie.

  What I cannot forgive is the meagerness of the back of William’s neck; tomorrow I’ll tell him I want out. Tonight, while I’m looking fabulous, I’ll practice operating solo again, and there’s Meyers in the doorway.

  Fondly we embrace. Ridiculous, we say, how we never get together! New York is impossible. We figure the year and month to the day we did the crossword at Yaddo, walked to the village, saw the Chinese lady’s impossibly tiny shoe in the museum, drank beer all afternoon, and talked. “You watched the ball game,” I say. “We ate peanuts.” He says, “Next day was Monday and I went home.”

  We get drinks and sit down on the sofa, and that is our undoing.

  “We saw Winterneet at Maurie’s, Thursday,” I say.

  “The Betterwheatlings are here,” Meyers says.

  “Have you seen Bert?” I say.

  “Pavlovenka,” he says.

  “Zeus,” I mention. “So. What are you writing?”

  “I’m not,” says Meyers. His fingers tremble. His mustache droops. “You?” he asks me.

  “A poem called ‘The Bucket,’ ” I say, but the prospect of explaining brings on an extreme lassitude. I close my mouth.

  Meyers’s mouth is closed. I like Meyers. I want to frame a question to which his answer will be something true, preferably intimate, but a glutinous film is growing between my lips and I know if I don’t part them my mouth will be sealed up forever.

  (Over by the bar, at a tremendous distance, I see William talking to Maurie. From the way Maurie leans backward I know William is telling him what publishing is all about.)

  Meyers’s lips part. “Have you seen Winterneet?”

  “At Maurie’s, Thursday,” I say.

  (Maurie turns his back on William and walks away.)

  “There’s Winterneet!” says Meyers. And here’s Maurie coming to greet his famous guest and I know what Meyers wants is to go talk to Winterneet, but he cannot get up from the sofa because he doesn’t want to hurt my feelings. I want to go to William, who stands alone, holding his glass, but I cannot. I don’t want to hurt Meyers’s feelings, and now it is too late. Our rumps have put roots down into the sofa. Here Meyers and I will sit in mutual silence through eternity.

  A hundred years pass. Benjamin, that princely man, climbs through the thickly growing crowd toward me. His eyes are friendly. He bends his beautiful and clever head, and kisses me on the cheek. I wake. I rise. My unsealed lips say, “Hi, Benjamin! I thought you were at Berkeley! You know Meyers, of course,” I say, but Meyers is gone. A girl with glasses whose face needs a good wash points her eager nose into the space between Benjamin and me.

  He says, “I couldn’t leave New York. So? What are you writing?”

  “A poem called ‘The Bucket,’ ” I tell Benjamin and the bespectacled girl. “It asks the question, ‘Why does one go to parties?’ ”

  “I never go to them,” a man says in passing.

  “Who’s that?” asks the bespectacled girl.

  “Max Peters, the nasty critic,” we tell her.

  “I always throw up at parties” is what I think the girl says. “I come to have conversation and meet people, but I never talk to people I don’t know and I don’t know anybody so I never have any conversation or meet anybody.”

  “You will, at the next party,” I say, meaning to include the elderly woman standing on my left.

  “That’s why I couldn’t go to Berkeley,” says Benjamin. “I might have missed the next party.”

  The girl looks at Benjamin and smiles and turns expectantly to me. She’s lighted upon a conversation.

  “We cannot leave New York,” I say, “although the Bomb will get us if we stay.” I don’t want to keep turning my shoulder against the elderly woman, but Ben is saying, “By the way, what is it that’s going to be happening at the next party?”

  “It! The Great Orgasm,” I say, but a swell in the nice noise of the growing party carries the sound away. Benjamin leans down his ear toward me. “Which?”

  I raise my chin. “The Great Orgasm!” I shout with a false sense of déjà vu: we really have been here before, at the Betterwheatlings’ party, Sunday. Benjamin’s eyes quicken. He recognizes himself saying, “What’s the use of that the morning after?”

  “But, Ben, there is no morning after, not after the Great One,” I return familiarly.

  “Damn!” Benjamin says, “I’ve been to all the wrong parties.”

  “Of course you have! The right one is the one you’re not at,” I familiarly, comfortably say, and notice the guilty chill on my left side where the old woman’s bulk no longer displaces air.

  Behind me stands William, and says, “He runs that magazine like a shoe business.”

  I turn back to Benjamin. He’s gone.

  The bespectacled girl has disappeared.

  “Lucinella!” says Winterneet, and takes my hand.

  “J. D. Winterneet!” I say, pleased.

  “How do you do, sir,” says William.

  Winterneet puts out his hand and says, “Winterneet. I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name. I’m too old for parties, Lucinella. Come and sit down on the sofa.”

  “Better not,” I say, “because when we run out of things to say we will be stuck with each other for eternity.”

  I’ve made Winterneet smile. On my right, William’s Underground gapes.

  “We can go and freshen up our drinks,” says Winterneet.

  “That’s what I mean! And there’s always the john, but that means going clear out of the room and staying out and god knows what one may miss.”

  I’ve made J. D. Winterneet laugh.

  “I’m writing a poem all about parties,” I say, “which explains why we can’t simply say, ‘Thank you, now I’ve had enough of you and want to go and talk to someone else.’ It’s Courtesy which wisely constrains us, and by tacit contract you will treat me
as if I mattered in return for vice versa, so that we keep the rug in place to cover the abyss under one another’s feet.” I tell Winterneet about my Underground, where I preserve the company of persons who have thought me less than perfectly interesting and charming, reinforcing my suspicion that they’re right. I’m talking too much, I know, but Winterneet looks at me so kindly that from where I haven’t figured floats up the highly unstable, rainbow-hued, transparent company of persons who like me, confirming my suspicion that I’m charming and interesting. I feel myself delicately taken under the armpits and borne upward: three quarters of an inch above the rug, I float.

  “Now you’ve closed every avenue of our escape,” says Winterneet smiling, “we’re stuck with each other for eternity.”

  “Not if we keep standing up,” I explain. “If we can keep talking ten minutes longer, the room will have filled to capacity and we’ll maneuver the quarter turn: you will accidentally turn an angle of ninety degrees and find yourself in the middle of the adjacent conversation.”

  I demonstrate and find myself looking into the clever eyes of the girl with the unwashed face.

  “I’ve read everything you’ve written,” she says. “It’s exactly my cup of tea.”

  My eyes cross and focus on the bridge of her nose. I put on a falsely sweet, discouraging face and say, “Thank you! How nice.”

  She says, “I don’t suppose praise gives you any fun any more.” She has a small, sharp face, like a chicken with owl glasses, through which she looks out with a hungry hopelessness that makes me mean.

  I say, “Hemingway says you can tell outsiders because they praise you to your face. There’s no way to handle it.”

  She blushes. “I can’t see you being at a loss,” she says.

  “Are you kidding!” I say.

  “You know everybody,” she says.

  “So will you,” I say, “after ten years of parties.”

  She shakes her head. “I never get invited. I don’t know anybody.”

  “What brought you tonight?”

  “Ten wild horses,” I think she says.

  “What?”

  She says, “I fixated on this party: the Start of the New Life. But tonight I kept not getting dressed.” Inside her brown, beautifully tailored woolen dress, she stands with rounded back and belly. She says, “I figured if I came late and left early I could survive an hour and a half.” This girl, who says what she actually means, tends to mumble her words inside her mouth, so as to keep the option of eating them.

  “What is your name?” I ask her.

  “Lucinella,” she says.

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty.”

  “Hang in there, Lucinella. It gets better from here on in,” I say. “You’ll publish a poem” (young Lucinella shakes her head), “you will love a man” (she grimaces; she looks as if she’s going to cry). “When you make a faux pas, you won’t toss all night trying to unsay it.” (She laughs out.) “You’ll fatten up to accommodate your nose, you’ll wash your face, you’ll learn how to wear your hair—give it ten years.”

  “Ten years!” howls young Lucinella. The decade to which I cling by a fingernail, with my legs streaming horizontally behind me, feels to her like a drafty waiting room without a clock, when you’re not sure the trains are running. “For god’s sake, go and get yourself a drink,” I tell her.

  “Liquor makes me throw up,” she says.

  “Well,” I say, “I guess I’ll go and freshen mine.”

  I pass William telling Maurie J. D. Winterneet’s poems are old-hat and Maurie says, “Don’t be a ninny, William,” and walks off.

  There’s that old woman standing in a small clearing in the crowd, holding her glass. I will go talk to her, and by sympathetic magic next time I’m in a hole at a party someone will rescue me. But Betterwheatling is walking toward me and I remember I am in love with him. It’s just I never think of him from one party to the next.

  “How’s A Decade of Poetry coming?” I ask him. The last time we talked about it, at Yaddo, we ended kissing on the stair.

  Betterwheatling tells me the fuck-up with his publisher, in detail. It is not interesting.

  “By the way,” I say, “who’s the old woman in the frizzy hair putting on her coat?”

  “That’s old Lucinella, the poet,” says Betterwheatling. “She hasn’t written much in these last years. Used to be good in a minor way.”

  “How can she bear it!” I say. “To be old, and minor!”

  Betterwheatling and I watch Maurie and Ulla coming to make a small fuss at her leaving.

  Still, Betterwheatling stands beside me. His proximity moves me.

  “You have an English publisher?” I ask him.

  Betterwheatling tells me in detail about the fuck-up with his English publisher.

  Maurie joins us. I say, “Doesn’t Ulla look terrific?”

  “Terrific,” says Maurie, in the voice detective-fiction writers used to describe as “dry.”

  Ulla sits on the sofa, her back straight, feet neatly side by side, her lips parted to receive what William, who squats before her, is telling her. (I’m surprised anyone would flirt with William, till I remember I’m probably going to marry him.) He’s telling her the history of his publications, from the first acceptance of his poems by the college paper, of which he was the editor, to the latest contretemps with Maurie at The Magazine. He has a childlike trust in Ulla’s full participation.

  Ulla sees Maurie and me watching, and smiles demurely.

  Maurie performs a quarter turn, sees young Lucinella, and says, “I’m publishing your poems.”

  “You are!” she says. The world has stopped spinning. Only her head continues to revolve. She suspects a hoax: Maurie is trying to cheer her up!

  Maurie says, “I do have some quibbles—”

  “Don’t think I don’t know,” she says quickly, “that metapoetry’s been done and been done. It’s coy to be writing one’s poems in one’s poems.”

  “Yes,” says Maurie, “but what I want to say is—”

  “My metaphors don’t dovetail,” says young Lucinella.

  “Please to shut up a moment,” Maurie says, “so I can think. What I mean is, it’s okay for the narrator to mock her heroine if that’s her nature, but is it okay for the writer to be so unkind? To out-truth truth is one way of lying.”

  “That’s true!” cries young Lucinella, intensely elated. “You’re right! It’s like trying to seduce the reader by saying, ‘Look at mine, which is the same as yours,’ which isn’t even true. And no one loves you the better!”

  Maurie says, “There you go again. Why ‘seduce’? Is that what you’re doing?”

  “No,” she says, “but I thought I’d say it first so you won’t.”

  Betterwheatling’s disappeared. In his place stands his wife, Cilena, who says, “I’m no good at parties.”

  I tell her about my poem about a party where people carry buckets to collect the odds and ends of love—attention, flattery, a proposition or two, a little rape. “The object is to keep your bucket brimful at all times.”

  “I know,” says Cilena, and holds up hers.

  I show her mine. “It’s got no bottom. Say someone wants to marry you. In the act of putting him into the bucket, he’s already fallen out the other end.”

  “So that you have to collect in perpetuity,” says Cilena. “So tiresome.”

  “Why do we?” I ask her.

  “Ah,” says Cilena, “I’m reading Erich Fromm, and he says we experience separateness as anxiety.”

  “Wow!” I say.

  “I know,” she says. “Not only anxiety, but as shame and guilt.”

  “The guilt of not being loved! Jesus …”

  I tell her about the Great Orgasm. “You get fucked and stay fucked once and for all.”

  “The millennium!” says Cilena.

  I tell an elegant black man who stands near us about the bottomless bucket. He thinks I’m flirting with him. He�
�s right.

  He says that this is precisely what he’s working on. “I’m doing a piece for The Magazine on the parallel uses of attractiveness and power.”

  “Are you!” I say excitedly. “Power I never understand. Or is it another sort of bucket?” I turn to ask Cilena, but she’s gone.

  “Power is the point,” he says, very excited too. “In the social animal, the powerful male has the selective advantage of the attractive female at the peak of her oestrus.”

  “Erich Fromm says we experience separateness as anxiety, and guilt, and shame,” I tell him.

  “It’s a matter of genetic survival,” he says, “because the weak am ale ad oes an otap ass aona his age nes.”

  I say, “I at hink awe a ar eal la loo kin ga fo rat hea mill en nium.”

  He says his name is Newman. He’ll send me the article. We must have lunch and continue our discussion. He draws his head back, startled by the enthusiasm of my acceptance. He’s gone.

  Why is Betterwheatling wearing an overcoat?

  “What’s the matter, Betterwheatling?”

  “I don’t know,” Betterwheatling says. “Is something the matter?”

  “You look as if …” But I can’t tell as if what Betterwheatling looks. I tell him my theory that being snubbed brings every abject memory crawling out of its Underground, but feeling liked makes the good ones float out of … goddamn, I’ve dovetailed my two metaphors! Now I can finish my poem! Out of the goddamn brimful bucket. Of course!

  When I say damn a lot, I know I’m high, though not so high I can’t climb down if I want, only I can’t seem able to want to. I tell Betterwheatling about the bottomless bucket. True, he says, lovers fall out the bottom, but friends tend to stay in. “Oh, Betterwheatling, that’s true, but it ruins my theory.” I tell him about Erich Fromm. He says if only Fromm would not write such awful English.

  I tell Betterwheatling about the Great Orgasm, and how we come to parties to hunt the millennium.

  “Nonsense,” Betterwheatling says.

  “Then, Betterwheatling, why do we go to parties? Why not the library? Why aren’t we home cooking or out horseback riding?”