by Carson, Tom
Posted by: Pamincetown
Naked or not, I can’t imagine what it’d be like to walk along Commercial Street today. Living up to its name must be a gaudy challenge. But in my day or my five of them, the fleecings of leisure took a distant back seat to practicality’s mutton. There was food and, even under Prohibition, drink, for which my mother’s friends blessed the wine-bibbing Portuguese fishermen whose forebears had added Catholic spires to Provincetown’s sea-scoured skyline well before Teddy Roosevelt turned up, appropriately escorted by the skirts of seven battleships, to lay the cornerstone of the Pilgrim Monument. The booming salutes of the ships’ guns blew out half the window glass in the harbor.
Yet even the rare restaurant with white tablecloths was roughly weathered. Whether olive-skinned or Whartonishly Yankeefied, culinary Provincetown still made it its business to fill customers’ stomachs, not their eyes, and without emptying their wallets either. Poets, playwrights, painters, and critics had been congregating there for over a decade; if they hadn’t, my mother wouldn’t have known the place from Rangoon. They still saw themselves as the décor’s fans, though, not its reason for being. Adults who see everything as the occasion for themselves make me shudder.
My mother would’ve been the last to understand that a seven-year-old child sometimes needs to. So during my five days, I was largely left to make all that up for myself: tugging the masted scrawl of scenery that broke blue infinity in half into a crescent that Pam-Hur’s Roman chariot could scoot along in shy triumph to the sea’s tame cheers, pressing my mother’s and the L.E.’s ambling sack-dressed backs into unwitting service as a pair of stallions. Picking my way alone along the breakwater, which was new then, to act the Little Mermaid to blackened fishing smacks, obligingly yodeling dorymen, and the occasional white quiff of a skiff.
When all else failed, I made sand castles: no mere beach pastime to a child, but the atypically concrete representation of a year-round endeavor. If you ever find yourself at the Art Institute of Chicago, you’ll naturally rush to American Gothic first. But not far from its place of honor, you’ll find Pam depicted in the act.
Despite his recent rediscovery—busy, busy, Ph.D.s, how I wonder what you see—I’m no admirer of Eldritch Weaver (b. here, d. there, who cares). As a measure of his powers of observation, the sky’s chartreuse makes me glad he was never a witness in a murder trial. In life, my mother’s profile was an albino salad, not a slab, and her costume has idiotically been given more presence than her limbs. While I get no joy from knowing it, the Lotus Eater, 1927 edition, was prettier than the gouached squash peering anxiously at Grant Wood’s masterpiece in the next room.
That this is said to be the earliest American painting in which anyone is wearing sunglasses gets no very awed ululations from me. Nonetheless, it may be I’m most hostile to the painting—on behalf of my violet but recognizable Pam-face, pale knees, and empty pail, included in the lower left-hand quadrant for balance with the lone blue (never!) sail keeling seaward in the upper right—because of its title: Two American Women on the Beach, Provincetown, 1927.
I’m sorry, Panama, because what you wrote on the back was funny: “Eldritch Weaver, gay deceiver.” But I didn’t keep the postcard.
Posted by: Pam
My mother’s Village friends were up on the Cape in force. As promised, that gave me my first look since a younger Pam’s quickly shuttered glimpse of Daisy’s lone attempt to Salvador Dali-ize East Egg, which had cost us our first Scandinavian, at the people she and the Lotus Eater had been madhatting it with in Lower Manhattan all summer. Minor painters, minor poets, minor don’t-get-the-wrong ideologues, they’ve all fallen out of the history books except for an occasional letter in which they promise to repay that five-spot to an eventually more famous friend. That the exception turned out to be Eldritch Weaver just proves immortality is a game of American roulette in which only one chamber isn’t loaded.
(No, don’t be jealous, Cadwaller’s gun. Despite being lighter and more manageable than I worried you’d be before I lifted you from the Paris footlocker’s still life of way-back-when rubbish, you’re no figure of speech. You’re every bit as real as my eighty-six-year-old lap.)
Daisy and the L.E. got through five days on the Cape without hopping it back to Manhattan to replenish their supply of M, haunting me with a belated guess that someone in that rollicking crew of Village transplants was their dope supplier. Sentimentally, I hope it wasn’t St. Clair Sinclair—or was it Sinclair St. Clair?—who was my favorite among those uncommonly promising future has-beens. Big as a condor’s idea of an egghead, he was likely after three glasses of dago red to start calling himself Poët Chandon. One mollusky restaurant dinner, he made me giggle with an improvised rhyme, accompanied by eager and then chastened demo, that I still think of when I’m having seafood and occasionally, in the right company, recite:
To eat an oyster
You crack it foister.
This part is moister!
Oh, drat, I—loyst her.
Judging from his brushwork, Eldritch Weaver would’ve spilled the morphine before pocketing the money, so he’s out. But the face that leaps to mind as the best candidate, tricked out with all the right diabolic attributes, is trailing no name-tag. Nor is face strictly accurate as regards my definitive image of Morphisto. The back of a head, one alarmingly red ear, a wristwatch—still something of a badge of modernity then for men. Its Pam-seeking flash was having an angry argument with the sun.
One bulge of large male shoulder, one determined bare male heinie. Two dune-grinding knees above smart duck trousers turned into tangled accordions by his having rolled them up to his shins before yanking them down past his thighs. One oyster turned jellyfish underneath, who saw me.
Perhaps he wasn’t the one who sold M to my mother. Gerson would say it’s Hollywood carpentry taking over again, combining my terror of what I didn’t quite know yet were drugs with my terror of what I didn’t quite know yet was sex by blaming the same konging and chowing red dragon on both counts. The main reason I favor that anonymous, brawn-nuggeted, amorphously morphine-fleshed male for the dealer’s job is that I happen to know the dope addict I caught him fucking, fucking, fucking, fucking behind a dune was a fucking dope addict.
Posted by: Pam
My guess, Panama, is that you wouldn’t have been unduly perturbed if you’d been the one to come across the wristwatch and the jellyfish in flagrante. Agreed, I couldn’t blame that pair if they’d been made restless, as I had, by St. Clair Sinclair’s monologue down the beach. Defying the gulls in a striped bathing outfit that gave him a comedy bank robber’s masked second nose below the waist, he was running down Eliot to praise cummings. Knowing neither man’s work, I was under the impression he was comparing a prim hotel clerk who’d annoyed him to our local bootlegger, making my attention and then Pam-containing swimsuit wander.
Still, even at seven, goggling but not threatened, Panama Cadwaller would probably just’ve been Margaret Meadishly impressed by her discovery that men and women try to make the same unmanageable, awkward meals of each other in three dimensions that you’d seen them do countless times on cable. And put it out of your mind by nightfall, not seen it loom as sleep neared all through Chignonne’s and then Purcey’s. If so, well! I envy you. Being able to say “Bring it on” to everything as I hook my thumbs in my cut-offs’ front belt loops would make me happy as a clam.
I know you giggled on the phone last summer. You were tickled that your salty Gramela had finally outed herself as repressed, despite all her fucking this and fucking that at meals and her crusty assessments of actresses’ charms when we’ve watched TV together—though never Kirsten’s, since that Dunst cap is one I only wear with Andy. And I’m sorry, kiddo, but you’d just turned fifteen. I couldn’t help getting agitated by your grandpa’s pictures of you during last year’s Cadwaller-papered Provincetown romp.
In spite o
f boasting that it came from new york fuckin’ city, the T-shirt you were wearing with a big scream of a Panamanic smile at the dinner table and in some of the beach shots was a relief. Under it, no doubt, you still had on the twin scraps of bikini top, pennants stolen from some lad’s quite small toy sailboat, that earlier the same day were fighting for dear life to cling to the newly round breasts, as perfect as Christmas ornaments and so visibly tender that the mimsy borogoves were restrained only by Pam’s fat lunettes from leaping half out of my head to protect them from harm, in the ravishing image of you with your arms raised to recascade your Goya-dark hair.
At least you’re still wearing the cut-offs in that one, though God knows why you bothered. Above their useless but hookable belt loops, your teenage hips’ turnstiles show off concavities to either side of the ovalized discus of muscle your bare navel bullseyes. While I hope they’re just tricks of shadow, I fear I’m seeing delvable crevices where Panamanic skin meets no denim.
Mouse-click, and you stand with one shoulder hiked and its matching foot planted higher on a dune than the other. The femoral griffins whose twin indents guard the inner tops of your thighs openly boast that here the leg business ends and something else happens. Between them, the silver-gray mottling of the snippet of Lycra that alone holds the fort between you and complete lower nudity damn near yells to the world that this part is moister.
I know Chris snaps away with a love of beauty that’s most ardent once it turns two-dimensional. I remember how he stupefied Amherst when his first local show after joining the faculty included a dozen images of your future grandmother nude, already ample but gorgeous as custard, and I got through that in one piece. Having a fully dressed, quite matter-of-fact Renée strolling beside me made the whole thing at once stylized and comical.
One reason your self-exposure is different is that it was on display in the flesh not only to Chris but to anyone: male or female, oldster or teen, friend or stranger. So I suppose I should just be grateful he spared me a view of how much of what you sit on you were baring to all, Tim and sundry. At any rate, I’ve spent a year praying that the quite comely tushy halved by no more than a thin string of licorice in the background of one shot—its owner’s head and torso casually Black Dahlia-ized by the frame, since Chris’s focus is Renée, ampler than ever in a grandmotherly white one-piece—belongs to some anonymous, older, more experienced, unimportant non-Panama.
Believe me, bikini girl: I loathe being the person this plaint has so helplessly exposed. I despise it more than you can imagine. Set it down if you like to a no longer tasty pretzel’s envy, since when I look at those photos I feel on thin ice claiming we belong to the same species. I know which of us Darwin would have put his chips on to flower and prosper even when I was your age. (Good luck finding the teenaged Pam’s skull, archeologists. Purcey’s Girls’ Academy met the wrecking ball in 1966. Posing as a women’s prison, its exterior is preserved on film behind the opening titles of Paspartu’s unmemorable Thirties crime melodrama The Fall Girl. Thank you for your attention to this utterly irrelevant matter.)
While I doubt he’s likely to, even granting that with him you never know, your grandpa Chris could tell you I’m neither shy nor easily flustered. He was still a wiry sixteen when his new stepmother went to fetch aspirin from Hopsie’s and my unlockable Paris bathroom. She left empty-handed with a mild “Oh, forgive me” after being greeted by the sight of his gripped goslingam as it threatened—you’re welcome, Chris—to go Vesuvius at unclad visualizations not of underendowed, too brisk Pamela but hot, remote, Paris Match’ed Brigitte Bardot.
My standing vis-à-vis his real mom went up when my unruffled later hello and Hopsie’s obliviousness told him that, to Pam’s way of thinking, I hadn’t caught him at anything. (Honestly, Chris: would I have told your father if I’d “caught” you playing with toy soldiers?) Almost thirty years later, seeing me emerge from another bathroom with a vial of Bayer, he gave an unannotated bark of friendly laughter, pleased that I’d finally gotten what I’d gone in for. That was near the end of Cadwaller’s long dying, making us both sensitive to time’s unsuspected symmetries.
Anyhow, the point is that the rant most of you have just scrolled past in your pained search for dialogue isn’t particularly what I’m like. After many gloriously normal innings of the old buck and wing with one man or another over five or six decades, plenty of them happy or at least entertaining even before I met your great-grandfather, I’m disgusted by Pam’s reawakened hysteria. She sounds more like a crazed and dotty spinster. Or worse, one of those pathetic women who had a single dotty fling in her youth and never had the courage or plain good sense to grasp that there are lots more fish in the sea.
Even if I weren’t getting ready to kill myself, bikini girl, you can see how this might not make me such a grand addition to this year’s Cape Cod reunion. I’d blow my cover as your uninhibited old Gramela in under an hour when I gave up on just mulishly shifting my dentition as you pranced by and started screaming at you to put some goddam clothes on. Then I’d go bucketing along the beach in my hated wheelchair, screaming at all the other bikini girls to cover themselves up before I went mad.
Posted by: Pam
Mind you, at seven, the budding pudding that was Pam could’ve built her sand castles all week without a stitch on and my mother wouldn’t have been more than mistily the wiser. Not that I did, since I was a good little girl. Adaptable, too: I soon got used to my little bed on the ottoman, the tiny algae-perfumed kitchen, the bathroom whose weather-warped door was reluctant to close unless we tugged hard. “Oh, who are you people?” that door groaned every time one of us used it.
Like a good little girl, I trundled along on my two swimsuited legs with four-legged SooSoo after my mother and the L.E. as they straggled down to the beach from our dormouse of a rental. The scuffs and scruffs of the uncomprehending surf—it doesn’t understand what we’re talking about either, the reason you can’t argue with it—muttered in near Scandinavian as it served up chipped light. I snatched back my hand from door handles arsonized by noon’s blaze when the car took us to Truro or Wellfleet, learned in restaurants to chirp “scrod” and “quahog” as I’d once chirped “chen-chen,” “chow,” and “pong.” Waited for Eldritch Weaver to spring me from his canvas jail, wandered from each crowded night’s table of contents to its suddenly gnomic index in dense rooms where grownups roared, wine flowed, and the inevitable piano player had found a salt-warped upright.
If they meant to tire me out, it worked. When I was redeposited on the ottoman made up as Pam’s bunk, the bedroom door closing on murmurs as SooSoo vainly scratched at it, I couldn’t get through two pages of The Patchwork Girl of Oz—it wasn’t all Henry James at seven, even for precocious me—before my eyes turned grainy. Exhaustion’s deep sleep spared me all but the early stages of the gasps, sheet fights, and groans that signaled the onset of my mother’s nightly nightmares, along with the less audible whimpers and protests of the L.E.’s less interesting ones.
Hophead or no hophead, my mother still had her fastidious side. Even at its wildest, her tossing and turning must have been unpleasantly quasi-coffined by the Lotus Eater’s new penchant, discovered by me the morning an open door revealed a browned back—half a gluteus, too—between two rifts of bedclothes, for sleeping in the nude.
In daytime, the L.E. was often morose, perhaps because her nightly courtship had been frustrated yet again. Still, I have a hard time believing she’d have dared to try so much as a Charybdean cuddle, even in the “There, there” guise of femininity’s so transportable gift of motherhood. The L.E. wouldn’t have been convincing as a “There, there” type, and by all accounts was a dismal mother to the red-faced little crap factory she eventually coughed up.
And for my own mother’s memory’s sake, I won’t tolerate—just won’t!—my mind’s unwelcome pencil sketches, all too reminiscent of something Nan Finn’s cartoonist
son Sean would dream up, of a crafty Lotus Eater faking her own shot of M so as to have her red-mouthed, nudely bobbling, dottily idyllic, arse-hiked crouching way with her comatose bedmate’s unwittingly acquiescent form. They’re both dead now and I shall be shortly.
No doubt that unwelcome pencil sketch’s true origin is the open-air sex act Pammie did witness, whose only pornographers were its participants. It may have happened behind the same dune you’re standing on in that last pic, Panama, or at least one scooped from the identical Eve’s rib of Cape Cod. Assuming you’ve never witnessed sex, I hope your eyes’ loss of their virginity involves pleasanter performers.
Sinclair St. Clair is fading out behind me, foghorning in his striped bathing outfit that he for one will be Prufrocked if a wilted pleonast (wonderful word) like T.S. has anything to teach his e.e. Her profile now his exclusive concern, my mother’s still posing for Eldritch Weaver. Pammie’s sand castle in that painting—Two American Women on the Beach, Provincetown, 1927, delightfully credited “On loan from the Garment Foundation” the time I saw it in Chicago—is about to be washed away.
He was a wristwatch wagging a man, and the Lotus Eater was the one he was fucking, fucking, fucking, fucking. Inside the crook of his hefty arm, one barely rounded breast’s flat peak gleamed, a coin from Ali Baba’s cave. Her legs were swung up as if she were trying to hoist them onto the display hooks in a butcher shop.
Breathing like a sawmill, the L.E.’s mouth was slobbery, her wet lips yanked back from her wet teeth as if protesting they didn’t even know anyone in that cemetery. Her eyes were open—some lay he must’ve been—even before she turned her head my way.
They grew confounded as the L.E. understood she was staring at someone other than herself, the true object of their delirious search. A blink turned me from generic Other into someone she could recognize.
