Charles leaned against the wall, dizzy, displaced, his eyes flipping as they did past subway posts, and had to concentrate to hold himself within one aspect; he fixed on the chin showing beneath the brim of the black hat, then on the hand fretting the strings, the fingers spreading, barring, standing high, stretching and returning to former chords, moving autonomously, of their own passion, over the strings, while the music, a phenomenon rising from a realm unrelated to the man or his hands, came from the opening in the guitar and across the length of the room, where empty chairs were standing, in widening waves of sound that were silver-colored and struck the front of Charles with the familiarity of his name. He felt his chest part, his ribs lift, and a cavern expand to admit the sound, exposing a region where his heart glowed orange and rode along the current of tones, gliding down smaller steps, leaping to a higher level, sweeping along to a crest that left him breathless, and then dropping into the deep driving plaint of the blues refrain until death drew so near it became a part of the Liquid blackness enveloping his heart.
A slow learner? Slow burner? Sad-assed Catholic from the Badlands? No, ho, he wasn't from there. Who cares? He'd wake in his rented room at seven or earlier, hours before he wanted to, and find himself thinking of his father, and the day ahead would appear as barren a vista as the plain, so he'd fall back into bed and sleep until noon. And when he woke, he'd be filled with dream fragments of home and how his father changed after his mother died; never spoke unless he had to and then in the most minimal phrases; couldn't look you in the eye; lost thirty pounds; was so restless it was torture for him to sit, and yet sat in front of the television for entire evenings, looking chained to his chair, and the most implausible sort of melodrama had the power to move him so much he had to leave the room. "Oh, if your mother were here," he'd say in a general manner, to the air, and then his eyes would mist and he'd glide off into a wordless reminiscence. Or he'd say, "Oh, I suppose much of my ambition was for her."
He said to Father Schimmelpfennig in a letter that he was ill for company, and a few months later three students he'd taught in Hyatt and who'd graduated since appeared at the house; Jay gave them jobs, and beds were moved into the garage—into the basement in the winter—and they roomed and boarded for occasional groceries, for free, really. His father returned to teaching that fall, but wasn't meticulous about his appearance, as he'd once been, and wore work clothes to school, or mismatched jackets and slacks and no tie, his collar open and a stenciled T-shirt showing beneath, and—
And now Charles realized there was a period in his life he'd closed off until now. His father took a leave of absence from the high school in Pettibone and went back to Hyatt to teach for a year. Red Wing. The girls and Charles went with him (Tim was in Wisconsin, Jerome at the house with the students) and found their father was a hero, a legend in Hyatt, because one year when he'd taught there his basketball team had gone to the state tournament (there were only nine males in the school at the time) and they'd taken third place. The school board wanted him to coach again, of course, but he told them he'd rather let that final record, nearly perfect, stand. The girls stayed with a couple who had children of all ages, and now lived in the old Halvorson place, and he and Charles lived in the Sanderson house, whose back yard bordered on the Black Forest. Charles had changed, his friends had changed, he hadn't thought he'd ever see them again and now didn't know whether he wanted to, and he stayed home often from school, too lethargic and burdened to move. He began to play the baritone. In the fall his father took him to New Rockford on weekends and they had dinner and went to a movie or bowling together, but with the first bad blizzard the car wouldn't start and it sat along the road outside their house until the blinding, drifting snow covered its roof.
There was one bedroom, with one bed, a double bed, and he and his father slept in it together, his father gripping a rosary. A single heater for heat, a cookstove in the kitchen, where his father made their meals— And now Charles realized the hour he was waking in New York was the hour when he and his father had breakfast together. The marshy area of the Black Forest behind the house, a wood lot near the overgrown trellis there; his father splitting kindling, his forearms and back muscles bulging beneath his shirt, striking the splitting wedge so hard it shot through the chunk of cottonwood and stood upright in the chopping block. His father at the cookstove, staring ahead, his eyes omniscient, rolling a walnut between his palms and then the sound of a gunshot as it cracks in his hands. Had he come here to end his love? The silent meals in the tiny kitchen. The vacant, gray-hued, protracted days when Charles is at home, out of school, sitting in bed and playing his baritone to the empty rooms. The dampness of the bedclothes, the dampness of the furniture and rugs, and the corrosive feeling of dampness that rose through the floors of the old house. Wandering from room to room as though on an endless search for a missing essential. Wearing pajamas for the first time since childhood because he slept with his father—flannel pajamas that made him feel like a baby and that he left on all day. His wandering form reflected in the golden bell of the baritone. The unformed pastiness of his face in the mirror. The glory and terror, after years of youthful tingling and mere spasms, of erupting with semen—what to do with the stuff? Fantasies, a hope of promise that came from a feeling he and his mother shared here; melodies unremembered even now all along the flat and the vast grass plains of those low northlands.
And then at school, the altered faces from childhood, as though his friends wore masks, somehow distorted, that made the past seem a charade, and the embarrassment of having his father for a teacher—that new, unalterable relationship. Staring at the floor when his father read poetry aloud at a lectern or, even worse, pacing. Rattling off answers to him with irritation. Averting his eyes when he passed him in the halls. And then at a basketball game his father didn't attend, getting together with the Rimskys and Buddy Schonbeck and Ribs and giving their pooled money to a senior, an epileptic with a deeply seamed face who was able to pass for thirty. He bought them a fifth of whiskey and a half gallon of sweet wine and they drank it off quickly, in an unlocked car during the half, and then went back into the warm gymnasium. Ribs kept nodding off and finally passed out and vomited over the bleachers and had to be carried from the building. It was discovered that he was drunk, not ill, or ill from drunkenness, and the next day the county sheriff arrived at the high school and everybody involved in the drinking (Ribs gave names in his straightforward way) was summoned into the superintendent's office; Charles's father was the superintendent. The sheriff called them dopes and knuckleheads and said he could throw them all in jail, while Charles stared at the floor, feeling his father's eyes on him, and then heard the sheriff say he'd put them on a year's probation if they had a long talk with the superintendent and their parents and minister. The four Catholics went to see Father Schimmelpfennig, who was waiting for them in the confessional, and when it came Charles's turn, he drew aside the purple velvet curtain and knelt in darkness, praying for anonymity, and then the slide at his face shot back and Father said, "Charles, Charles, Charles, I don't believe you'll ever know how much you've hurt your father. It's even hard for me to forgive you."
Now in New York, with the numberless faces going past so relentlessly it could unhinge you if you tried to take in even a part of the press of them, he'd see a feature—a forehead, an eye, a mouth—that reminded him of his father and there'd be a catch in his stride and he'd slow, feeling his father had seen him but continued on, and sometimes he'd even stop in the street and turn to see.
"What's the time?"
"Seven-thirty," Charles said, and felt his chest constrict and the guitar music swell as though implanted there.
''Seven-thirty?” Jackie's hands fluttered down and the color left her lips. "Oh, Jesus." She grabbed her purse and went up the three steps in one leap.
"Is it?" Vi asked.
"Hell, it's lucky if it's five," Hap said.
Jackie came back down the steps in a stiff walk, her face less attractive and
her eyes blank, and stood at the table and stared at Charles. "You bastard," she said. "You just wrecked my high. You wrecked my high and my head and my whole goddamn day! You dirty lying bastard! What the fuck are you trying to do?" She turned and leaped up the stairs again.
"No Top of the Sex's for you, poopsie," Neil said, and wriggled his fingers in front of Charles's face.
"Why'd you do that?" Vi said. "She can't help the way she is. She's just a kid. She's hot for you."
"I didn't mean to," Charles said. He was afraid. The four of them had set this up to trap him, victimize him in some way, and were closing in for the kill. He felt his high shift, assume an anchorlike shape between his lungs, and believed it was leaving, so he could defend himself, but it returned with a more powerful surge and locked inside with wires and claws he couldn't escape.
"Oh, God," Vi said. "I didn't mean it that way. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to— Oh, shit, isn't this a lovely day?”
"Where did she go?" Charles asked.
"You're asking me?"
Charles slid out from the table, incredulous that his body could move so dreamily (but where was he?), and went up the steps; the brightness of the big-windowed room back-reeled within him—there was his face, misshapen, sliding along the shining espresso urns—and the colorfully clad people at his periphery were like hooks that could remove his vision, cut eyeballs on ice. A hand gripped his shoulder hard.
"Chuckle," Neil said. "Friend. I'm supposed to meet a broad later, she said, but if she doesn't show, could I flop at your place?"
The fringe was shaking. Charles was unsure of what he'd asked.
"Hey, hey, poopsie, don't worry, no sex. I'm wearin' the rag." He laughed, biting his lip, and his eyes went out of line. "May I stay at your place? Fuel's running low."
Charles saw that for all his debonair worldliness he could be easily hurt. "Sure," he said.
"It'll probably be late if she doesn't show and I can't hook up with anybody else, don't you see." He wrinkled his nose in a rabbity way.
"That's all right."
"Thanks, toots." Neil grabbed his hand and slapped something wrapped in tinfoil into it. "For the time you got burned. I got burned as bad." He punched Charles's shoulder and Charles felt himself shift into a different setting, while his body and face kept riding over a way of time like the roller coaster of the coffee urns.
"Later," Neil said.
"Hey." Charles pushed through to the air outside, hot and damp, tropical to him, and infused with a smell as of toads and snakes and boils. The buildings across the street, painted varying garish shades, reminded him of some moment from his past—the primary-colored cardboard houses he used to set in streets beneath the Christmas tree, or a glance into a book with gaudy, oversimplified pictures of Hometown, Everywhere—but in his state he couldn't place the image or instant it fit. Where, Charles?
He went down MacDougal, away from the Square toward Bleecker, crossed Bleecker, and turned east on it; the face of every passer-by knew he'd hurt Jackie and had to find her, and some smiled at him. His ass felt bigger than it was, which was too big to begin with, and wiggled funny when he walked, as if a wobbly fud were attached, and he felt himself giving off such an obvious aura that everybody on the street, everybody looking down from their apartment windows, could spot him as a mark and move in. A crowd of students was coming his way laughing. He stopped at a storefront and looked in a window until they'd passed. The store was being made into yet another coffeehouse; burlap and construction materials lay on the floor, along with round-topped tables turned upside down. There were wooden platforms at several levels, and around the edges of the platforms, running from the floor to eight feet into the air, were lengths of colored pipe— orange, red, blue, white—that had been fitted together randomly, in patterns that were right-angled hard bends, and that shone neonlike in light of all the days he'd stood in dream, and then he saw himself huffing and puffing on a toilet stool as he slid the needle in and then the black and molecular rush as blindness came and his mind went out.
He adjusted and saw the reflection of a man's face beside his—a distinguished, fine-lipped face, with the querulous and insinuating look of a detective. Tinfoil in his pocket. The face, which was also looking in the window, turned to study him several times, and then moved up.
"Could you give me a quarter or fifty cents?" A harp rasp.
Charles turned to a man of about fifty-five, with sandy-colored hair combed back from his domed forehead, a day's growth of copper-colored stubble, and a belligerent but apologetic seediness in his turquoise eyes.
"I haven't got fifty cents."
"Are we still on speaking terms?" His hoarse voice was a concerned uncle's at bay. "Huh? Have you been coming here a lot?"
"I don't know you."
"No, you probably don't. No, I've lived in this neighborhood longer than you've been alive, sir, and you probably don't even remember me. I saw—" His direct gaze veiled, as though he'd lost the connections inside his thought. "Is this place expensive?"
"I don't know. It's not open yet."
"There you go again. I can see that. I've lived in this neighborhood all my life and I ain't ever seen it. Teddy Cummins and I were altar boys over at St. Anthony's for old Father McKeough—that's how far back I go. Do you serve there now?"
"I'm not from here."
"Sure, sonny. Don't you remember?"
Was this one of the alkies Charles gave money to? He often gave them the last quarter he was carrying, out of compassion, he imagined.
"I saw you just the other day," the man said. "You're a painter. You were carrying one of those—" He outlined several shapes with boxy hands and from his gestures it was clear that he wasn't drunk (although Charles could smell booze on him), but he also wasn't drawing anything definite. "What do you call those?"
"An easel?"
"No, no, no. It's all covered up with something. Real big. You know. You were carrying the whole big deal."
"A canvas?"
"No, no, no. You painters have a name for it."
"I'm not a painter and I wasn't ever carrying anything like that around here, as far as I know."
"Then it was one of your friends. They all look like you, those guys. How's your daddy?"
"What?"
"You're daddy. I haven't seen him for a while, either. How is the old guy?"
"I don't know."
"You don't know! Doesn't he live right over there on Sullivan Street?"
"No. Illinois."
"Well, naturally. But I like to come back once in a while and look the old place over and he should, too. Tell him. I've got to get on down to the Bowery now." He stared up the street and his eyes, overhung by golden eyebrows that glinted in the light, filled with a tentative homeward look that was familiar to Charles; he wasn't sure he didn't know this man, although he was positive he'd never met him before, and then the wires and claws closed in a clasp again.
"The Bowery! Shit! That place stinks! I only— Well, when the old man needs a drink . . . You don't remember your daddy, huh? Well, damn you, you should! Wasn't he there when you wanted the guy?"
"I guess."
"You're damn right he was! You were little then. Sure. Now I remember. And then the next thing I knew you were carrying that what-you-may-call-it around. What's that painter's thing you had, did you say?"
"I didn't."
"Then it was three years ago I saw you with that and I haven't seen you since, have I, Michael?"
"I think you—"
"You're right, it wasn't just the other day, it was three years ago I saw you with that. Now I remember, son, or—"
He stared beyond Charles, uncertain of where they stood, and then his eyes altered, as though he'd seen through to a moment too transfiguring to comprehend, and Charles saw himself in the man's tapered slacks and highly polished shoes, in his well-kept shirt with creases from the laundry cardboard still showing in it, vomit on the collar, and then the man turned and walked away from him an
d went around the corner, heading south, and Charles took the tinfoil from his pocket and dropped it to the street. But what about Neil? And what if he was there tonight? Charles picked up the packet and took it to his rented room and carefully doled it out to himself over a long while.
41
THE VILLAGE POET
Nine at night in January, that month of introspection and regret, with snow descending slowly between buildings from the overdark sky, past lighted windows and patches of brick, to the shoes he watched as he walked. Trench-coat night. Would all of the facets of him ever be fulfilled, without this feeling of one or another leading him astray? Dear Lord, I— His I interfered and didn't know what to ask or why, or how to talk. Where were the words of the one inside him since birth? Loss of the lost. He went into a Ukrainian restaurant on Avenue A, his regular eating place, and the humid air and the smells of cooked cabbage and fatty food made him want to resign from the race. He hadn't eaten for two days, but what was the real cause?
A crowd of elderly men in clothes that looked outdated and European were seated around a U-shaped counter whose pink Formica surface had white whorls worn in it; their overcoats were unbuttoned and their hats lay on the countertop. There were glasses of tea beside their plates. They could have been on a bus tour from another country, for their similar Slavic look, but the compact way they sat, the way they ate with unfazed concentration, put them on home ground. Three or four winos were scattered among them, more mummified and misplaced than ever in this atmosphere, gaunt and unshaven, wearing thrift-shop jackets over fouled shirts and warming themselves with coffee that the waiters, old Ukrainians who spoke little English and affected a facade of belligerence (had they fled during the Revolution and for a time had to live off others, Charles wondered), always served to winos, often with a bowl of barley soup, for free.
He sat at a vacant stool, placing a collection of poetry on the counter in front of him, and a gray-haired man with a military bearing a couple of stools down, who, like Charles and the winos, looked out of place here, glanced up from a notebook he was writing in, saw the collection of poems, saw Charles, and then slammed his notebook shut.
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