Lucinella

by Lore Segal

  Betterwheatling says he was at the library all afternoon and is not a good cook. Horses, he doesn’t like. He says he likes parties.

  “Betterwheatling, if you’re going to be commonsensical you’re no damn use to me,” I say, still trying to diagnose the way Betterwheatling stands talking to me; he avoids my eye, refrains from looking at his watch, but not in impatience with me (which I can always tell the look of). Why is he wearing his coat, which is the clue, of course: Betterwheatling should be leaving for another party, but cannot because he doesn’t know if I am invited or not. And here comes Cilena with her coat and William, who says for me to get mine. We’re going on to the Friendlings’. Maurie and Ulla will come as soon as they turf everybody out.

  Young Lucinella is digging for her coat in the mound on the bed. I avoid her eyes; I don’t know if she’s invited to the Friendlings’ or not.

  “Well,” she says. “Goodbye!” She stands, giving it one moment more in which to happen.

  I could invite her to the Friendlings’ with William and me.

  She says, “Well. Goodbye!”

  “Goodbye,” I say. “Come back in ten years and we’ll talk.”

  On the way to the Friendlings’, William, who is high, gets pesty and keeps saying why won’t I marry him.

  “I probably will,” I say.

  “You don’t love me,” he whines and, craning his neck into a U like Chagall’s birthday lover, sticks his outraged face into mine.

  “I do,” I say, “I love you.” It’s probably true. It’s just that there must be more to love than love.

  We dump our coats on the mound on the Friendlings’ bed.

  Winterneet comes out of the john, sees William, and says, “I meant to drop you a line to tell you how much I admire your Margery Kempe.” William’s eyes cross. Winterneet is thoughtful. “Nobody has used the ballad form so well in a while,” he says, and walks into the Friendlings’ living room.

  “I thought his bit was not to remember who you are?” I say.

  “That was at another party,” says William. Unsnubbed, he looks amused and charming.

  Benjamin walks toward me through the crowd.

  “Saul Mailer is supposed to be here. Why does one come to these wretched things?” he asks and his eyes quicken in recognition even as I have that déjà-vu feeling of déjà vu as I answer, “In case it is the right one.”

  Will is bringing me a drink and says, “Saul Mailer is here!” And, really, there, in a little clearing of homage, aging, with a small pot, graying, curly, rather beautiful, stands Saul Mailer, talking to a furiously pretty girl.

  I refuse to add my attention and turn my back. Now my back gives him my attention.

  Will says he saw a sign in the Uffizi translated into funny English, listing the reasons why visitors are not to touch the famous paintings: “It is bad for the paint. It costs a fine”; finally, “It is useless.”

  Compared with Saul Mailer, Winterneet is merely eminent, but I touch his sleeve and tell him about the sign about not touching famous paintings.

  Winterneet’s eyes cross. He can’t handle my mentioning fame to his face and says, “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Yes, you do,” I say. Winterneet looks startled. “We think fame has one foot in the millennium, and want to connect ourselves.”

  “Nonsense,” says Winterneet, looking to right and left, beginning to walk off, but I keep beside him. “I know it’s nonsense!” I say, craning my neck into a U to oblige him to look me in the eye. “That’s what I mean, Winterneet. Finally it’s useless!”

  Winterneet says he is going to freshen up his drink.

  Where’s William?

  William is talking with Saul Mailer. I walk over and stick my nose into the space between them.

  William is pretending not to see me because he’s in the middle of his story about the miracle at sea when God stops only Margery of all the company of pilgrims from throwing up by whispering in her ear: “Keep your head down and don’t look at the waves.”

  I turn ninety degrees right and smile at Newman. He says, “Fra hog higo na mo.”

  I say, “Fra hog na mo pen.” He frowns. What have I said!

  “Fra hog me,” he says, and adds he is surprised I would fall into that particular and, if he may say, not uncommon liberal fallacy, and walks away.

  I perform a left quarter turn, but there’s nobody there. No one on my right. I look into my bucket. It is empty. I am ashamed. Where is William?

  There’s Newman, on the sofa, talking into Ulla’s open mouth.

  By the bar Maurie stands with the furiously pretty girl.

  Meyers and Winterneet are talking in the corner.

  Frank and Alice Friendling and Cilena are laughing.

  Betterwheatling, who would be so much easier to love, is wearing his overcoat.

  “Saul Mailer is here,” I tell him. He says he knows.

  “Are you leaving?” I ask.

  He says the Bernards are having people over for Harry’s birthday. “Cilena, let’s go.”

  Betterwheatling and Cilena have gone.

  Now it’s Friendling sitting on the sofa with Ulla, who seems about to swallow him.

  “Have you seen William?” I ask them.

  “Try the bedroom,” Ulla says.

  In the bedroom mirror I watch Meyers hunting for his coat on the bed; by tacit covenant sealed in the silence on Maurie’s sofa, I do not turn and he tiptoes out behind my back.

  There’s no one in the bathroom.

  In the foyer Benjamin is laughing with the furiously pretty girl.

  There’s a man in the kitchen making coffee. He turns. It’s Saul Mailer.

  “Have you seen William?” I ask him,

  “Have you tried the dining room?” he asks. “There’s an impressive pâté from Zabar’s. Coffee?” he suggests. His aggressively blue eyes smile into mine, and that does it. I want to go home!

  William is eating pâté.

  “Let’s go home,” I say.

  “Now? When it’s beginning to be fun?”

  “I’m drunk and sleepy and about to cry.”

  “Eat something,” says William. He feeds me a marinated mushroom.

  “William! The Bernards are having people over and didn’t invite us.” I drop a tear.

  “Who are the Bernards?” asks William.

  “I don’t know. They don’t even know us and already they’ve decided we’re not charming or interesting enough to invite to Harry’s birthday.”

  “I think you are charming and interesting,” says William.

  “Because you love me. That’s like one’s mother saying it and doesn’t prove a thing.”

  “J. D. Winterneet thinks you’re very bright,” says William.

  “He doesn’t love me!” I cry.

  “Ulla says you’re looking fabulous.”

  “But, William, she says that to all of us so we’ll forgive her being beautiful. You know Dylan Thomas’s twosome, ‘Always one, pert and pretty, and always one with glasses.’ That’s Ulla and me, since high school, and so I became a poet.”

  “Maurie is publishing your poems,” says William.

  “It’s no use, William. Praise doesn’t feed into the part of me that’s hungry. The two systems don’t interconnect. A mistake in the plumbing. Why do you take my hand out of your pocket?”

  “It tickles,” says William.

  But I shake my head. “At Maurie’s you took my hand off your arm and walked away.”

  William wipes my tears with his handkerchief. “You can put your hand in my pocket,” he says. “You can tickle me any time. Have a mushroom.”

  “It’s not only my hand,” I say. “Remember the little servant girl in the Chekhov story? She runs errands all day long, and at night she has to rock the baby so the mistress can sleep, and in the morning, while she’s cleaning the master’s boot, she yearns to crawl into the darkness of the shaft and sleep.”

  “You can crawl in,” says William, f
eeding me mushrooms. The room distends at the headlong speed with which I diminish. William picks me up and puts me in his pocket.

  “I’ve thought of a joke,” I say, poking out my head.

  “What?” he says.

  “What do you do if the Great Orgasm doesn’t bring on the millennium?”

  “What?” he says.

  “Wait till the Second Coming.”

  “Go to sleep,” says William.

  And now, on their giant legs, Maurie and Ulla, the Friendlings, Saul Mailer, and Newman, and J. D. Winterneet, and Benjamin with the furiously pretty girl are coming to the feast.

  Before I curl up to sleep, I fold my hands neatly. “Forgive me my vanities as I forgive all of you yours.”

  “What’s the matter, Lucinella?”

  “It’s ‘The Bucket,’ William! It doesn’t matter! Nobody will read it and they’re right. Even I don’t particularly want to read it.”

  “Poor Lucinella!” says William, “and you’ve worked so long and so hard.”

  “My working confers no obligation on the reader.”

  “Poor darling,” says William, who saw me through that first, tentative skeleton plan, underlined with green, blue, and orange felt tip. For months William watched me sharpen my twelve pencils down to nubbins. Then, on that February night, at Maurie’s, while I was chatting with Betterwheatling, my Underground dovetailed with my Bucket and I was struck as with the shock of coincidence, by which the people whom I kept telling and telling it kept failing to be struck, because it wasn’t their, it was my, coincidence of two disparate ideas that explained everything. Rightness ramified down to the least of my metaphors, which I cross-referenced with my meanings on five-by-three index cards. I kept shuffling and by midsummer I’d realigned the skeleton correctly and recognized the creature. Last night my end collided with my beginning. This morning I woke and saw that the whole thing doesn’t matter!

  I call Ulla on the telephone to tell her I’ve written a poem that doesn’t matter.

  “Read it to me,” she says. Ulla is really a good friend.

  Ulla says both in conception and execution this is the best thing I have ever done.

  “But, Ulla,” I say, “what about the contradiction in the second stanza?”

  “That’s what I mean,” Ulla says. “You have knotted the first and third stanzas across the denial of both in the second, creating an incredibly subtle model of our broken modern processes.”

  What’s seductive about Ulla’s enthusiasm is she’s so specific. “It is the inevitable sequel,” she says, “to your ‘Root Cellar.’ ” She recites my poem in its entirety, correctly emphasized. I want to marry Ulla.

  “But,” I say. I tell her whence I plagiarized the opening idea. “Exactly,” she says, “you have used those resonances in your own vastly richer context.”

  I experience a sensation like squinching up against more than I can accommodate of something that is forcing in upon me, and try my last line of defense. “What about the half-assed banality of the last line, Ulla?”

  Ulla explicates exactly the depths I had intended.

  Why do I experience her going on to say she’s read nothing quite like it in Western literature as an act of hostility on Ulla’s part?

  “What’s the matter, Lucinella?”

  “It’s this soap opera I’m writing. It’s a story, about people. Horrible!”

  “Why write it then?” asks William.

  “To have something to read. Everybody likes soap opera. I myself read it all the time. I like stories.”

  “What about your poems? They’re good.”

  “I know they are,” I say, “but I never read them. Nobody does except my soap-opera heroine, who’s a poetry reader, poor thing. Such a lot of trouble!”

  “What seems to be the matter?’

  “Just that her latest catastrophe is running out its course to the inevitable resolution. If I don’t hurry, she’ll make it into bed with the man she loves. I’ve known all along that I should be planting the seeds of a new disaster, but I’m no good at plotting. What I love is to get right down to the excruciations.”

  “What is your soap opera called?”

  “Forever Tomorrow.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “Bliss and disaster in their most exquisite forms. The Great Orgasm held indefinitely in abeyance, and doom perpetually, barely avoided. The trouble is I’m fresh out of calamities. Five hundred years of fiction have exhausted our resources.”

  “For instance,” says my straight man.

  “Depending on the style and preoccupation of the age, there was evil pure, in the guise of a witch or devil, or the machinations by elements at court for selfish purposes. Then there’s fate: the inherited enmity of the two lovers’ families, an abnormal length of nose. There used to be moral compunctions: nine hundred pages of chastity preserved against all odds, or the bonds of fealty, or a prior marriage to a crazy lady imprisoned in an upstairs room, or tyrannical fathers implementing the taboos of class to keep our lovers apart. Or one can separate their actual bodies by means of a naked sword in the bed or geographical distance due to war, from which the lover returns decades too late, or with a permanently damaged member, or suffering hysterical amnesia, paralysis, or blindness. There’s the temporary insanity of one or the other in alternation, simple games of lovers’ leapfrog, or with Midsummer-Night complications. There’s always the misunderstanding that can be perpetuated by withholding the communication that would explain it.

  “Finally there’s the psychological foul-up. My heroine’s problem was the gap between her arrogance and her abjection, which a successful analysis will resolve within the next six or seven pages, but I know what I can do. I’ll make the syndicate kidnap them and lock him in an abandoned warehouse and her in a vault, no, an icehouse—which hasn’t been done this season. Don’t talk to me, William.”

  I have resumed writing.

  “William, what’s the matter?”

  “My poem is no good,” says William.

  “Yes, it is,” I say. “William, you’re wrong. Your poem is very good. It’s very funny.”

  “You and I, Lucinella,” William says, “know that my poetry is worthless.”

  “Poor William,” I say. “That’s terrible!”

  “Maybe I’m wrong,” cries William. “Maybe it’s that my poetry is so original, so unlike anything to which it could be compared, that I myself might hardly understand how really good my poem is, do you think? Lucinella? Do you love me?”

  “Yes.”

  (I do? I don’t? I did, I remember, just now, before he asked me if I did, but right this moment I don’t remember what love feels like.)

  “Will you marry me?” asks William.

  “Yes,” I say, and my heart falls on the ground.

  Ulla calls me on the telephone. The Magazine, in collaboration with an upstate university, is sponsoring a symposium and Maurie wants me to be the woman poet. “A weekend in May in the country!” says Ulla. “Everybody’s coming, except Alice. Friendling has left her—you didn’t know?”

  “No!” I cry. I like Alice. Why am I smiling?

  “And Meyers,” says Ulla, “if he recovers from his nervous breakdown.”

  “What happened!” I cry, appalled. I’m grinning.

  “It was at our place,” Ulla says. “We were sitting on the sofa. I was explaining his profound influence on my writing, when he went into a psychotic episode. Winterneet is doing all right after his heart attack.”

  “I had no idea!” I have begun to giggle.

  “They put old Lucinella in a home,” says Ulla, “suffering from aphasia.”

  When we stop laughing, Ulla asks, “So. How is it being married to William?”

  “I’m thinking of leaving him.”

  “We’re bringing young Lucinella,” says Ulla. “She’s got a crush on Maurie. It will be good for her to see him coming to breakfast in his crumpled pajamas showing a white hairy triangle of belly the
fly doesn’t close.

  And so she washed the soot off

  her face and hands, opened the

  walnut, and took out the dress

  that shone like the sun.

  Grimm

  Young Lucinella takes the bus downtown to look for a new housecoat. It isn’t that there’s anything the matter with her old one, except it’s not the kind in which to come down the stairs to breakfast.

  On the rack, in the lingerie department, robes handwoven of Thai silk glow with the self-generated ruby, cerulean, amber, and natural light of the raw yarn. The outlandishness of price adds a magnificence young Lucinella can in no way afford, so she might as well try on the red one, please. The saleslady genuinely stares. “It does something for you!” she says, and young Lucinella, too, sees herself suddenly lovely, lips parted in surprise, eyes rapt, her skin glamorous in the reflected pink luster. “It isn’t me,” she says. She buys the housecoat in the no-color of raw sacking.

  Young Lucinella takes the elevator down to the stationery department, remembering that she needs a notebook for the brand-new poem she is going to write, and goes home and puts the new notebook in a fresh white folder.

  V

  They’ve put us in a fine old fraternity on campus. I unpack and come down the stairs. There are voices. I open a door into a kitchen. At a large deal table Ulla and Cilena Betterwheatling are making sandwiches for lunch. “Lucinella!” cries Ulla. “Come in! You can make the mayonnaise and help us gossip. Why did the Friendlings get divorced?” The emotions we imagine excite us. Like children mucking in the warm, delicious mud, we mold the Friendlings’ disaster into hypotheses.

  “Shush, please,” Maurie says.

  “Why don’t you use the hall phone?” Ulla asks.

  “Because I like to be where everybody else is,” Maurie says.

  “Why did one get married?” Ulla asks. She stands still, holding a green pepper, Cilena arrests her knife, I stop whipping. Three wives in our bare arms and summer skins, trying to remember love.

  “A symposium on writing,” Maurie explains, into the telephone. “Hell no—a short opening statement—couple of sentences. Lucinella, our token woman, will talk about ‘Why Write?’ The Zeuses are flying in tonight. He’ll be our writer from outside New York and his subject is ‘Why a Symposium?’ ”