by Rafi Zabor
"Pooh was in love with you," the Bear told one of her paintings.
6o Rafi Zabor
"And they wanted to know why I didn't go away with him."
"You know anyplace we could have gone?"
Iris cleared her throat. "I used to tell them, 'So 1 could have you guys.' Anyhow, when I left Herb I rented an apartment, packed up everything I would need the day before and put myself and the kids into a cab after he left for the office the next morning. At the last minute I grabbed the book and took it with me."
"He shouldn't have been able to get custody," said the Bear.
"I was messed up. Bear. Some bad things happened. I was panicky. I couldn't handle myself well. I had a few bad years. He had the career and had married himself a wonderful, loving and accomplished woman. It wasn't hard for him to get Tracy and Amy away from me." She paused. Iris was speaking of deep uncertainty and pain, but she looked happy and her voice remained pleasant. Her eyes were bright. "Bear," she said, "I'm not what I used to be. I don't have the strength. I've been damaged. I am very easily hurt, and I can't fight back."
"You seem together."
"Oh, I'm good enough at seeming. I practice all the time. And you were always taken in by appearances. But I can't do very much. I can handle the lab job. Beyond that I manage to cook for myself, get the phone bill paid and have apparently social conversations, but in here," she pounded her chest with a small vehement fist, "it's broken up, it doesn't fit together anymore, I don't have the energy, I'm not anyone at all."
"Oh baby," the Bear said. He couldn't help it, but to him the fact that someone as exquisite as Iris could have gotten damaged was an indictment of the world in general. He felt something in himself, part protectiveness and part desire, move in her direction across the couch.
She may have sensed something of this, because she got up quickly and walked across the room to needlessly check the blinds. "You must be pretty happy now that you're in the open playing music," she said, attempting a change of subject.
"Oh I don't know," said the Bear, resisting a moment before giving in. "I don't know. Maybe it was better the other way. I don't know."
Iris sat down again and it was the Bear's turn to walk around the room. "What do you mean you don't know?" Iris asked him, and he could hear the relief in her voice now that she was talking about him. "You know. Tell me about it."
"I don't want to complain," the Bear protested, waving his arms a little.
"You love to complain," Iris told him. "You're a terrific complainer. Fate has singled me out, et cetera. You're one of the best."
The Bear Comes Home 6l
The Bear cocked an unsporting eye at her.
"Did I step on a sensitive toe? I'm sorry. Go on."
Gradually, the Bear removed his eye from her and resumed. "I don't know. I mean, it's all new to me. I don't like being seen. I don't like people thinking they know who I am. Utter strangers, you know? Do they think they know my insides because they've heard me play a couple of choruses on a horn? Where do they come off, where do they think they get the right? I feel violated. Sometimes I get actual spasms, I flinch, I double up, I can't do anything about it. I can feel their eyes working on me. It hurts. I know it's terribly immature of me or something, but there it is and I can't help it. A subconscious is a terrible thing to have."
"But Bear," said Iris, "you always used to talk about how you wanted to get your music heard. There were all these things you wanted to express, to get across, to give."
"Express?" said the Bear. "Give? That must have been a long time ago. I was a kid back when you knew me."
"You were a sweet, romantic bear," Iris said.
"I'm still a sweet, romantic bear," the Bear growled back at her. "I'm the sweetest, most romantic bear in the whole wide world, but life was a lot easier when what I did had nothing to do with who I am."
"You don't really beheve that."
"Everybody's at me all the time. Everybody knows what's good for me, everybody's an authority on me but me, everyone's got a piece of advice. Like I'm some dink without a brain." Encountering Iris' subtlety and finesse, he felt the root stupidity and coarseness of his responses. It had been so long since he had seen her, or been with anyone remotely like her. There was a blunt, undetailed quality to him, but he could not change it now. Given time perhaps. Or more of her influence. In her absence he had grown crude. He had forgotten so much.
"You're not some dink without a brain," Iris told him.
"I'm getting close, though. And I see you've got your piece of advice for me too. Very therapeutic I'm sure, but. . . Iris, I'm," it was very hard for the Bear to say the word, "hurt. Something's getting to me and I can't fix it in the middle of the tour and everything. There isn't a pause." He pounded lightly at his chest to indicate the location of the problem. "The one thing I need is privacy, not people peeking in. Now that I can talk to someone about it I see how bad I feel. And I'm supposed to make a record in this condition. This is nuts."
"But if that's how it really is," Iris said sensibly, "why shouldn't a record be made of it?"
62 Rafi Zabor
"Uh-uh. No way." The Bear shuddered a Httle. "The race belongs not to the addled but the swift."
"Forgive me for saying so, Bear, but you sound petulant."
"I know,^^ he said, and worried his chestftir with a paw. "This way madness lies. I can't live like this."
"Bear, I hate to tell you this, but this is what life is like. You go along for awhile until you've had more than you can deal with and then you go the rest of the way in pieces. It's not the worst thing in the world, and you're not the Lone Ranger, either."
"That's not the way it is," the Bear insisted, standing over Iris and gesturing with his arms. "That's the crap that gets in the way. Perfection exists. Don't be hustled into partial solutions. This is accident, garbage, delusion."
"I don't think you reahze," Iris told him, "how much of hfe is made up of failure."
"Human life maybe, but not me. W^at pisses me off is that I should be able to handle it, just knock it flat the way I used to do."
"If that's how it's been for you, then you've been very strong or very lucky."
"Yeah. I'm all over luck ... I should be able to do this though. I'm not like you. You human people, you have emotional lives your bodies can't support, you lack the strength to keep things from getting to you, so naturally you crap out and get exhausted halfway through. ..." The Bear stopped himself. Iris' head seemed to have raised and stiffened atop her graceful neck. "Aw, Christ I'm sorry. ..."
"Bear? Is that you in there? I've heard you angry before, but I've never heard you speak like this. You have changed."
"I haven't said any of this to anyone, Irish." One of his old nicknames for her. "A little, maybe, but not like this. Is there any room here for how I really am?"
Iris raised her arm and held out her hand to him.
He came around the coffee table and sat down beside her. She let him draw her to him and they held each other, comfortably for a moment, but then they stiffened awkwardly. Iris first, the Bear responding after. All the same, it felt so good to the Bear. It was as if he had not touched another living creature in an eternity, as if he were slowly being welcomed back into the warm community of flesh. As if there were a place for tenderness in the world yet.
"Do you remember," Iris asked him, "way back when, before I met you for the first time, I had dreams about a talking bear for a week and then Jones called me up?"
The Bear Comes Home 63
"Do you remember when we started hearing each other think?"
"The first time I heard your voice out loud in my head," said Iris, "I nearly jumped across the room."
"We belong with each other," said the Bear. "Isn't it obvious?"
Iris pulled away from him so she could have a look at him. "Listen, I know you've got a big drama built up and I'm the next act," she said. "But I'm not that, I'm not the answer to that, I'm not a frinction of that. At least,
don't jump to any conclusions. A lot of time has passed and in some ways you're a stranger to me. There may be a connection between us, but we've both changed. It may be that we've changed a lot."
"Funny," said the Bear. "I feel as if no time has passed and nothing has changed."
"You're wrong on both counts." She was straightening herself up and smoothing down the hem of her dress so that its edge just covered her knees.
"Nothing essential has changed," the Bear said.
"No? I've heard you talk tonight."
Good Lord, the Bear realized, it was a mistake to have said anything.
"There's something I want to show you." Iris got up from the sofa without looking at him, and as she walked across the living room she kept her face averted. She rummaged in a pile of magazines on top of a bureau and came away with a copy oi Rolling Stone.
"Oh no," said the Bear, and put a pair of troubled paws to his head. "Did I get written up in the Stone too? I can't stand it. I feel like I'm being opened up, being destroyed, like my insides are being pulled out."
"Funny you should say that," said Iris, who had found her page. "And no, you didn't get written up in the Sto?ie. It's a quote from a book review. 'If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.'"
"Heavy," said the Bear. "What's it from?"
"77?^ Gnostic Gospels^
"So you got God on your side, huh?"
"Doesn't everyone?" Iris asked.
"Aw, you're probably right, kid. I've just become a crumb, that's all. I used to love you so pure and true, now I spend half my time thinking how much time it might take to seduce you."
"That seems natural enough," said Iris, looking him in the eye without blinking.
"It does?" asked the Bear. "God, I'm such a stranger in this world."
"Well, good luck," she said.
64 Rafi Zabor
He walked home alone under the pylons and girders of the FDR Drive, smelling the fetid night and watching the colored Hghts shimmer on the black surface of the river. Waiting for Godzilla, like the rest of the city. The Bear had already begun to successfully argue Iris down in his mind. There was too big a pileup in his life. Worse, he had been living with a dumb, unre-gal automatism, his nose glued to the iron rail of events, stupefied by sequence, rapt, somnambulous, unalert. He had been stupid enough to hope for something from people and events. The gigs, the music, Iris—he had stood in front of them like a man at a cafeteria counter, expecting to be fed. It didn't work that way. You didn't walk through the world with your hand out, begging your meaning from whatever happened along. A truck rolled past him under the highway, braying on its horn, and he pulled up on his coatcol-lar and down on his hat. The only way to live was to be fi*ee of what happened to you, and he had lost that. He was stuck. He had lost everything! The Bear heard the unreal melodramatic note in his voice but continued nonetheless. The recording session in two days meant nothing. And Iris. More bondage. Vulnerability! Give and take! The whole crock of shit! Letting her tell him that all this garbage was good for him when he knew he was being destroyed!
The Bear scanned the river before heading inland to the apartment. Godzilla might not be coming up to chomp the city down to size, but some monstrous ambiguity or other was rising through other waters. It was threatening all the hip ironic accommodations he'd made with the world to keep his fear of it at bay and a coherent self alive. Godzilla in the river, and who knows what in me. I should never have come out of the cave. I should have stayed with the shadow play. The world is unremitting. On your own, you can keep things cozy.
This is what I wanted.
He had a sneaky feeling that, somewhere unattended, he was dreaming up a catastrophe to wreck the set so he wouldn't have to go on evolving. If that's what he was doing.
As they carried me away, I was overheard to say: but I was cool.
He got home without incident before first light, went upstairs and despite his agitation fell asleep almost at once. He had a dream that purported to part the veil and reveal to him the secret perfection of his life. Not only were the events of his life, some of them fine, others correspondingly awful, rendered perfect by the beauty of the overall design, but each individual event itself was perfect. He was handed a large flower on whose petals his life's individual events, past present and future, were displayed in a beautiful arrangement and harmonious form: there was not one wrong note in the composition. In
The Bear Comes Home 65
the middle of the dream, the woman with the dyed red hair and the laundry basket walked up to him and kissed him full on the mouth.
When he woke up on the day of the recording session it was midafternoon and Jones had gone out for lunch with Sybil, leaving a note behind. The Bear grumbled around the apartment practicing and wondering whether or not to be nervous about the date. Cummins phoned around sundown to ask how things were going. The Bear told him they were going dynamite.
Night came too quickly, and too quickly after it Jones showed up with a vapid, eager expression on his face and the van downstairs. "This is it, eh Bear? The night of nights. You ready for posterity?"
"No," said the Bear. "And I ain't dressed yet either."
"Don't know which pair of baggy pants to put on? Whether to button the raincoat or belt it? Stage fright? Is that what's troubling you, bucky?"
"Jones," the Bear told him, dusting off the raincoat and wishing he had a black one instead, "try not to be such a pain in the ass."
They went down the stairs with the Bear in the lead, Jones behind him trying out an Edward G. Robinson impression to the tune of I made you and I can break you so don't doublecross me tonight or you'll be sorry, see? The ride down to the Tin Palace passed too quickly, and when the Bear entered the club he knew without possibility of error that nothing was going to work out. Maybe he would lay out a lot and the rhythm section could put out a trio record. They'd been playing well, so why not?
Some people were drifting into the club, but what for? Ordering dinner. That's rational. That makes sense. My being here does not.
A little while before the first set he phoned Iris.
"Are you sure you don't want me to come down and watch?" she asked.
"You'd only make me nervous. Or I'd forget about everyone else and only play for you."
Her voice softened. "That's sweet," she said.
"No it's not, it's stupid and it'll fuck the music up. Look, I'd love to see you. If a couple of sets go well maybe I'll call you and you can come down later."
She made a goodbye kiss into the phone, and he hung up the receiver.
The rhythm section showed and the Bear yakked and laughed with them and felt completely alone in the world, without an answering echo. This of course was an illusion, but that's how tight and apprehensive he was.
Cummins set up the tape machine and the microphones, the Bear worked his way distractedly through a conversation with the bartender about his first visit to the establishment a few months earlier, and gradually more people came in and assembled themselves over drinks from the bar and dinner from
66 Rafi Zabor
the kitchen in the rear. Too quickly it was time for the first set. He told Cummins not to run the tape machines, and Cummins only pretended to obey him—he could see the tops of the reels turning. The Bear played feeling only half present, beginning with "Au Privave" and a couple of standards and playing short, perfunctory versions of two originals he wanted to record later. The rhythm section sounded okay, but they were trying to goose him, and they got a little twitchy in the face of his nonresponse. After the set everyone told him he was doing fine, but he could tell they were lying and his inquietude deepened. By the time he went up for the second set he was ready to call it a night. The club had filled rather suddenly, but he hardly noticed it. Where was he going to get the music from?
He looked out at the people in the club, but he wasn't notici
ng detail. There was something unreal about the night. Something provisional. Something, it occurred to him, not yet made clear.
Then, after playing a furious blues he hoped would open him up but didn't—all he heard in the noise of his playing was the rage of discontent— the Bear had a new experience. It came to him, so that he was not able to doubt it, that whatever battle he had been trying to fight in his life, it was over and he had lost it. Everything he had tried to accomplish was gone, and his efforts were shot. WTiatever it was he had been trying to store up inside himself was, if not gone, a dead issue. A sense of his true and undeniable desolation entered him and he waved the band away from the Monk tune he had meant to call and began playing alone. Some distance ahead he would meet up with the nettlesome ballad he had written for Billy in the van coming down fi*om Boston, but for now he wanted to play by himself.
What an empty fife I've always had. I tried to fill it up with passions and objects and other stray bits of stuff but I never really succeeded. Because I could not. Because the thing could not be done. He could see it clearly and it was empty for good now. Something had given way and left things bare of striving and illusions, and the music came out of him ordered and dispassionate, according to an unfamiliar principle and feeling less like a language of emotion than one of fact. So this is how I'm going to be for awhile, he thought. I'm not sure I like it but it's not going to go away. It has too much gravity. He sensed himself as a large dark space in which everything had calmed down and settled into position. He didn't know if it was good or bad and he didn't think it was the end or the goal of all perception, but after he had played alone for five minutes or so and then taken the band through the body of the tune he felt that he had gotten some unsuspected portion of himself into music for the first time and that it would have to stand. It wasn't particularly pleasant but it was true.
