by John Hawkes
Cigarettes always make me think of bars. They remind me of the war, of talkers around a dark table, of wine, of a woman’s hand in my lap.
But no, not even that single puff. Not even now. It cannot be. And yet while you are drenched in the aroma of your cigarette, and while Chantal may be acquiring some slight awareness of the relative newness of this automobile which she cannot help but smell, I myself am breathing in fresh air, dead leaves, ripe grapes. And the windows are closed. Quite closed.
Chantal? Do you hear Papa’s voice as through the ether? Whatever you are thinking, ma cherie, whatever monsters you may be struggling with, you must believe me that your presence here is not gratuitous. That would be the true humiliation, Chantal: to be as small as you are, to be as young as you are, to be seated behind Henri and me and hence quite alone in the car with no one to comfort you by touch or wordless embrace (precisely as I comforted you at the death of Honorine’s Mama, that splendid woman), and then to be conscious of yourself not only as so very different from the two men talking together in the front of this darkened and terribly fast sport touring car, but also to know yourself to be forgotten, only accidentally present, unwanted perhaps. What could be worse? Especially since you are in fact no child, and have spent almost the total store of your youthful sexuality on your own small portion of Henri’s poetic vision, and since you have always harbored a special regard for your Papa’s love.
But it is not so, Chantal. You are no mere forgotten audience to the final ardent exchange between the two men in your mother’s life, men whose faces you cannot even see. Not at all, Chantal. No, I have thought of you with utter faithfulness from the beginning. In my mind there were always three of us, Chantal, never two, and in all the accruing of the elements of this now inevitable event (the month, the day, the night, the route), there you were in the very center of my concern. And during these last hours it has been the same: when I thought of you and Henri finishing your dinner in the restaurant, when I waited for the attendant to go through the motions of pumping the last tankful of gasoline into this silent car, when I noticed on my wristwatch that the time of our rendezvous was approaching, even when I so unexpectedly depressed the accelerator and violently increased our speed and hence interrupted our lively conversation and signaled the true state of things: in all this you were the necessary third person whose importance was quite equal to Henri’s and mine.
That the protective parent turns out to be the opposite, that familiar accord turns out to be the basket containing the hidden asp, that it is impossible to weigh the magnitude of what your father is doing as opposed to that of what will soon be happening—this is a disillusionment I cannot discuss for now. But let me at least reassure you in this other matter: you are here, now, with Henri and me, only because of the strength of my devotion, my poor Chantal. No one can rob you now of your Papa’s love.
We are like the crow and the canary, cher ami.We are that different. And yet we are both Leos. It is almost enough to engage my interest in astrology. Or at least it is a fact that should help me to suppress more effectively my amusement at the new astrological age of the young. Of course this amusement of mine is more sympathetic than scornful: one cannot merely scoff at the signs of the zodiac sewn to the buttocks of the tight faded pants of our young men and women these days. How like them to believe in the old wizardry and yet sport these portentive signs so innocently, naïvely, on the seats of their pants.
But you and I are Leos. One more unbreakable thread in the web. What does it mean? Is it the crudest irony of all, or does it somehow light the way to our reconciliation? Is it a mockery of our differences or a hint as to the nature of that odd affinity for each other that we appear to share? Perhaps your future biographer will find in this astrological coincidence of ours the essential clue to what will always be known as your “untimely death.” Who is to say?
I seem to remember an old adage that the true poet has the face of a criminal. And you have this face. You and I know only too well that you are publicly recognized by your short haircut, the whiteness of your skin, the roughened texture of this white skin, the eyes that are hard and yet at the same time wet and always untrustworthy, as if they have been drained of blueness in a black-and-white photograph. Are you beginning to see yourself, cher ami? Yours is the face of the criminal, the lover from the lower classes, the face of someone who has just died on a lumpy sofa in an unfamiliar apartment and who lies there as if alive but already cooling, with one hand touching the bare floor and the grainy head supported in the grip of two cheap sofa cushions. And no matter how you dress, whether conventionally in your dark modest three-piece suit as of this moment, attired in exactly that same absence of flamboyance as myself, as if we had come from separate business offices only to meet on the same outmoded train, or whether you are casually dressed in a somewhat rumpled mauve shirt and loosened tie, as I have often seen you, still for me you are only dressed in one way: in black pants and in a white shirt that is open at the collar, and tieless, and a little soiled. It is the garb of the man about to be executed, the garb of the unsmiling poet whose photograph is so often taken among those festive crowds at the bull ring.
And let us not forget your days as a mental patient. We are all familiar with those red-letter days of yours, cher ami.
Yes, I know you well. Only a Leo could cultivate so successfully this persona of the man who has emerged alive from the end of the tunnel or who has managed to cross the impossible width of the arena. It is always the same: you are like a man who spends his life in intense sunlight becoming all the while not pinker, darker, but only whiter, as if your existence is a matter of calculated survival, which accounts for your curious corpselike expression, which in turn is so appealing to women. You are plain, you smoke cigarettes, you appear to be the friend of at least half of all those professional toreros now working with the majestic bulls, as some people think of them.
And you have spent your days, months, in confinement. We have only to see your name, or better still to see your photograph or even catch a glimpse of you in person, to find ourselves confronting the bright sun, endless vistas of hot, parched sand, the spectacle of a man who always conveys the impression of having been dead and then joylessly resurrected—but resurrected nonetheless. Of course your suffering is your masculinity, or rather it is that illusion of understanding earned through boundless suffering that obtrudes itself in every instance of your being and that inspires such fear of you and admiration. Another way of putting it, is to say that you have done very well with hairy arms and a bad mood. But I am not trying to rouse you with insults. At any rate you will not deny that in yourself you have achieved that brilliant anomaly: the poet as eroticist and pragmatist combined. Though you merely write poems, people admire you for your desperate courage. You are known for having discovered some kind of mythos of cruel detachment, which is another way of expressing the lion’s courage. And I too am one of your admirers. Just think of it.
Your modesty? Honesty? Humility? Anxiety? I am aware of them all. In you these qualities are made of the same solid silver as that courage of yours. Yes, you are the kind of man who should always be accompanied by a woman who is the wife of a man as privileged as me. Only some such woman could qualify as your Muse and attest to your courage.
Well, I prefer the coward.
Is it possible then that I too am a Leo? I for whom the bull is interesting, if at all, not for his horns but for the disproportion between his large flabby hump and little hooves? I who possess none of those externals of personality which adorn you, cher ami, like banderillas stuck and swaying in the bull’s hump? I who despise the pomp and frivolity of organized expiation? I for whom the window washer on a tall building is more worthy of attention than your torero in the moment of his gravest danger? I who must get along without a Muse and for whom poetry is still no match for journalistic exhibitionism? (The poetry of present company excluded, cher ami.)
Well, perhaps I am merely the product of an astrol
ogical error or, more likely, of some clerical slip in the mayor’s office. Perhaps I am only a counterfeit Leo, a person who has lived his life under the wrong sign of the zodiac—the coward to your own man of courage. But then how ironic it is that behind the wheel tonight we find not the poet but only the man who disciplines the child, carves the roast. Perhaps the crow is not so inferior after all to his friend the canary.
It is quite true that I am unable to bear the cold. In all her good humor, Honorine still considers it my severest failing, this inevitable capitulation of mine to the power of the falling thermometer. The shocking whiteness of our bed linen, the touch of approaching winter on the back of my neck, the painful sensation of coldness spreading like water on tiles across the undersides of my thighs, the chill my hand is forever detecting on the surface of my rather bony chest (despite flannel shirt, woolen pullover, tweed jacket), a sudden unpleasant deadening in the end of my nose—here is a sensitivity which even I myself deplore. What could be more cowardly than fear of the cold?
Yes, I fight the drafts. I complain bitterly indeed about the trace of ice on the windowpane, the sound of wind in our vaulted fireplace, the enemy that sets the flame of the candle dancing. Do you know that I suffer acutely because one of my ears is always colder than the other? My feet begin to stiffen inside my thick socks and English shoes, the coldness of my hands defies the most vigorous rubbing, reproachfully I tell Honorine that the walls are cold, that the fire is too small, that someone has left one of our thick oaken doors ajar. But you have heard my complaints. You have even remarked that an old chateau is no place for a man who sniffs out spiteful breezes in all seasons.
And yet you cannot know what it is to have cold elbows. The elbows are the worst. Because in them the little twin fiends of numbness and incapacity appear to sit most easily, comfortably, as if the nearly naked exposure of the bones in the elbows attracts most readily those sensations—those two allegorical envoys—of the ice that is already creeping and hardening across the very surfaces of our last night. Oh yes, Honorine is tolerant of this obsessive susceptibility of mine. She is forebearing, indulgent, good-humored, despite her critical comments and all these years of robes, hot fires, the soft and warming fur of dead rabbits. And yet hours after I have been restored as fully as possible to a condition resembling so-called normal body temperature, it is then that I am most aware of the coldness lingering in my elbows and of the fact that I can never be entirely comfortable while for her part Honorine is never cold. Actually, it is embarrassing to be unable to touch your wife at night without first warming your hands in a sinkful of scalding water. It is not pleasant to feel your wife flinching even in the heat of her always sensible and erotic generosity.
But I hope it is not too warm for you. Surely you can understand that tonight especially the heating regulator is set precisely and, I admit, at the highest possible degree. In this case the discomfort you are being made to feel is simply no match for that which I am avoiding. Don’t you agree?
So you think that I am merely deceiving you with words. You think that I am trying to talk away the last of our time together merely in order to destroy the slightest possibility of my change of mind. You think that I am shrouding the last dialogue of our lives in the gauze of unreality, the snow of evasion. You think that euphemism is my citadel, that all my poised sentences are the work of mere self-protection, and that if only you can persuade me to accept head-on the validity of your word—that word—as the simplest and clearest definition of the car accident that is intended and that involves persons other than the driver, then you will have won the very reprieve which, from the start, I have tried to convince you does not exist. Well, beware, cher ami. Beware.
But perhaps you are right. Perhaps “murder” is the proper word, though it offends my ear as well as my intentions. However, mine is not a fixed and predictable personality, and you may be right. I too am open to new ideas. So let us agree that “murder” is at least a possibility. Let us hold it in store, so to speak, for the final straightaway. But I ask only that you then find new and more pertinent connotations of that ugly word and make your most objective effort to believe—believe—that there can be no exceptions to the stages, as I’ve sketched them, of what we may call our private apocalypse. It is like a game: I cannot accept the idea of “murder” unless you are able to refuse the illusory comfort of “reprieve.” After all, how can the two of us talk together unless you are fully aware that the two of us are leaping together, so to speak, from the same bridge?
Which reminds me of a singular episode of my early manhood. It occurred when Honorine was hardly more than a seductive silhouette on my black horizon. And yet it was most instructive, this brief event, and may well be the clue to the beginning of my romantic liaison with Honorine and even to the lasting strength of my marriage. Certainly it determined or revealed the nature of the life I would lead henceforth as well as the nature of the man I had just become. It is something of a travesty, involving a car, an old poet, and a little girl. Perhaps we shall get to it. Perhaps. For now you must simply believe me when I say that, thanks to this singular episode, my own early manhood contained its moment of creativity. In my youth I also had my taste or two of that “cruel detachment” which was to make you famous. More similarities between the canary and his friend the crow. But now you must realize that you have always underestimated the diversity, as we may call it, of the members of the privileged class.
At least you have always appreciated Honorine. Yet who would not? In her entire person is she not precisely the incarnation of everything we least expect to find in the woman who appears to reveal herself completely, and no matter how attractively, in the first glance? Think of her now, not sleeping in that massive antique bed of hers, but, say, outdoors and bending to her roses or better, perhaps, in our great hall and sitting on her leather divan and wearing her tight plum-colored velvet slacks and white linen blouse. Only another attractive, youthful-looking married woman of the privileged class, we assume. Only one of those conventional women framed, so to speak, by her bankbook and happy children and a car of her own. We see her against a background of yellow cloth on which has been imprinted a tasteful arrangement of tree trunks and little birds; we know that everything in her domain reflects a pleasing light, a texture of familiar elegance; we recognize that she is neither large nor small, neither beautiful nor plain, despite her golden hair cut short and feathery in the mode of the day; we expect her to be little more than a kindly person, a friend to other women, a happy mother, a fair athlete, someone who reads books and supervises the redecoration of an old chateau and secretly tries to imagine a better life. Large but studious-looking eyeglasses of yellowish shell, shoes that gleam with the aesthetic richness of the country from which they have been imported, a wedding band excessively studded with rare stones, an agreeable mind that complements the oval face, the willing personality that reflects the hot bath taken only moments before—all these telltale signs we both have scanned too often in the past, have we not? Haven’t we here the young middle-aged woman who cannot quite compete with the paid models in the fashion magazine but who yet catches our eye? The young matron not quite distinguished enough to join the striking matriarch on the facing page, yet benign enough to make us think of a drop of honey on a flat square of glass? If this is she —the woman in tennis shorts, the person who smiles, the wife with trim legs in which the veins are beginning to show—then we have seen her kind before and cannot find her especially interesting. Everything about such a person suggests the bearded father, the hand prepared well in advance to tend the sumptuous roses, a certain intelligence in the eyes, but finally the undeniable indications of the female life that is destined, after all, for unfulfillment—which is not interesting. No, we are hardly about to spend time or undertake the risks of seduction for a mere drop of honey on a sheet of glass. Let her remain in her old chateau where she belongs, surrounded as she deserves to be by husband and children and all of her uncertain advantages.
At best this woman will give us only pride or pathos, being too long descended, as she appears to be, from that original countess who in ageless vigor maintained who knows what naked dominion in the boudoir.
But how wrong it all is, how very wrong. Superficially correct, and yet totally wrong. Yes, you and I know better, do we not? Together we know that the beauty of our Honorine is that, deserving these various epithets as she surely does, still she contains within herself precisely the discretion and charm and sensual certainty we could not have imagined. On this you will bear me out. I know you will.
Just think of it: you sit beside her on the cream-colored leather divan; you remove the owlish eyeglasses and notice that the eyes are flecked in the corners with anxiety; the great hall is silent, waxen, filled with the residual afterglow of the late sun; you notice that the face turned in your direction is strong but that the smile could be interpreted as timid; your hand grazes the chaste white linen of the blouse which, her eyes still on yours, her body apparently relaxed, she herself begins to unbutton, as if without thinking; with relief you notice an endearing tobacco stain on several of the otherwise conventionally white teeth; and then like a figure from our wealth of erotic literature, you find yourself kneeling on that polished stone floor and holding a firm ankle in one hand and in the other the heel of a shoe that appears to have been molded from dark chocolate. And then she leans forward, leans on your shoulder, frees herself of the shoes you could not remove, and then stands up and, for a moment, experiences girlish difficulty with the zipper of the plum-colored velvet pants. Well, the vision is yours as well as mine: the disappearance of the velvet trousers, the strength and shapeliness of the hands that pull down the underpants, the clear uncertain tone of the voice in which she remarks (quite wrongly, as all of my photographs attest) that she has never been very good at stripping. And there at eye level, for you are still kneeling, there at eye level we find the slight protrusion of the hip bone, the modest appearance of the secret hair which might have been shaven but was not, the smallest off-center appearance of the navel born of the merest touch of a hot iron against that soft and ordinary flesh. But more, much more, as only you and I could know. Because just there, adorning that small area between navel and pubic hair, there you see once again the cluster of pale purple grapes on yellow stems—yellow stems!—that coils down from the navel of our Honorine or, to put it another way, that crowns the erogenous contours of our Honorine as it did even when she was only an unexpectedly eccentric girl. Grapes, cher ami, a tattoo of smoky grapes that move when she breathes or whenever there is the slightest spasm or undulation in her abdomen. After seeing them, who would risk any constricting definition of our Honorine?
