by Rafi Zabor
The Bear went indoors, packed up his horn and began to pace, kak medved, like a bear, across his living room, back and forth.
ait) c'mon," said the Bear.
"No," Iris said.
"Ride on my back. I promise I'll watch out for overhanging branches. Come with me for a romp in the forest. You'll love it, I promise."
"I will not."
"It'll be a blast. Can't you see it? Let's go running."
"I decHne to be blasted," Iris told him, her face flushing sHghtly. "Thanks."
"You're missing something terrific."
"I'm not feeling sufficiently in my body to go riding on your back just now."
"Anything I can do to help you with that condition?" he wondered, winking lewdly.
"Not at the moment, thank you. Can't you just let me get settled in?"
Well, thought the Bear, that's the way she is. "Okay, sweetie," he said. "Me Bear, you Iris, it's okay, relax."
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The fact was, he was deHriously happy she was back. She'd been home— home!—for four days already, sweeping the floors, cleaning every surface and each tiny item in the kitchen, setting out some of her paintings and bits of ornamental glass, rearranging the furniture and just generally fluffing the place up. He had to admit she had wonderful taste: all these httle adjustments altered the house's subtle focus, pointed up its materials and dimensions and even seemed to improve the quaUty of the daylight coming in through the windows. The only thing he objected to was her insistence on replacing the porch windows with the screens this early in the year.
It's still pretty cool at night, he'd told her.
But it's lovely during the day, she'd objected, and I'd Hke a place to sit.
We can sit outside, hon.
And be seen?
The Bear decided, trying to avoid the more troubling conclusion, that she was looking out for his welfare, and was afraid of him being seen rather than of her being seen with him. . . . Can of worms, he'd thought, leave it unopened, hermetic even.
Okay sweets, he'd told her, let's get those dusty ol' screens up then.
We have to clean them first, she said.
Living together, in the full sense of the term, was very different from rooming in her apartment. The space betw^een them, all the space in the house in fact, was charged with new electricity^—he almost expected to see flares of minor lightning in the middle of the kitchen or sparks in a corner of the living room—and the territorial issues between them were measurably more complex.
One good thing, touching in its way, was the fact that they hadn't, either immediately upon her return or later that first evening, leapt into the sack slavering and afroth in the throes of mutual lust. The first night they got into bed together, the table lamp dim, neither of them wearing anything, they'd gotten into a quiet conversation, talked about simple, inconsequential things, enjoying the mundane texture of their talk, voices low, and the subtlety or tactfulness of its pacing, and had ended by holding each other until Iris twitched off to sleep and he listened to her breathe awhile before letting go of her, extricating a forepaw and heading off to sleep himself.
Why, it was as if they were, for all the world, two living beings who actually cared about each other in a multitude of ways, some of which did not invariably have to be expressed by means of plunge and shudder. Even better, once they did get going again, her third night back—strange, the Bear couldn't remember what had forestalled them the second night; had she gone
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to bed without him noticing and fallen asleep before he got there?—it had been amazing all over again. It was no exaggeration to say that the Bear had never before experienced anything like making love with Iris. Her lithe cool beauty, her small body—laughable how once he'd thought her too exquisite a vehicle to accommodate his strength—her subtlety and tenderness opening equivalent worlds in him in response, complex roses of perception unfolding, a series of descents into experience, realm after realm, beauty after beauty accepting him in when so much of his life had been composed of exile and exclusion; pleasure after pleasure, meaning after meaning: a host of new ways to be here, in a body and on earth; although the deUcacy of Iris' lovemaking tended to blur the distinction between in- and out-of-body experience. Things tended to refine their colors and waft upward into light.
Days, well, they went by pretty leisurely in these parts—he declined to notice what was happening to his bank balance, and let time pass as the advancing spring suggested, with no more than hasty, sidelong reference to what it might be costing him. Late mornings Iris Hked to drive the eight-year-old bright orange Volvo wagon they'd finally agreed to split the price of into town, where she'd stroll through shops, come back with an armful of books and the makings of one more remarkable dinner. (Siege, no longer doing the shopping, had only been by once since they'd bought the car—in the early evening, with two teenage girls who looked like they might fancy being models; photolights had flashed on the windowshades down there awhile, and then there had been a longer stretch with almost no light at all. The Bear found it morally offensive and knew that it could lead to trouble— outraged parents, charges of statutory rape, police. He wasn't about to barge in there, but he made a mental note to have a serious talk with the man the next time he found him alone.)
In any event he had plenty of time for music and an occasional canter through the forest, although he felt he was on a short leash now—when would Iris be back from town? Would she miss him if he wasn't home? Would she go out again if he was out? He enjoyed the woods, of course, but thoughts of Iris fogged his mind, blurred the details of treebark, windscents, the nuances of birdcalls. . . . Wait a minute, wasn't there something wrong with this loss of free perception? . . . Maybe, yeah . . . but isn't it, Hke, time to be getting back?
"Iris," he asked her one night, in the middle of a heretofore unimaginable domestic scene—if he told her how much pleasure he took in the simpHcity of evenings like this, after dinner. Iris with her legs tucked beneath her on the sofa, browsing through three new books to find the one she would read, him in the armchair, the saxophone resting on its case nearby and a Mozart violin
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concerto on the stereo ... if he told her what a crazed and muffled ecstasy was born in his heart from these simpHcities she'd think he was an idiot for sure, "don't you want to come out with me for a ramble tomorrow?"
Iris looked up from her book and that alone thrilled him, even if she said no it wouldn't matter. "No," she said. It didn't matter. He checked to make sure and it didn't matter.
"Let me tell you what happened while I was out there. It was a very, um, it was a YQYyjazz day."
"Yes, dear," she said, put a bookmark in her novel and shut it. "Tell."
He'd been saving it. "I went west over toward Willow," what a country locution; the place was getting to him, "and I was up this one hill and heard some music. I have an ear for music."
"Do you."
"Yup. Heard someone pounding out some complex damn tangled chords on a piano and came downhill following the sound. There was this big modern angled house, slate, pale wood, high triangular windows. I circled it. The music was coming from the basement. Someone was working through a sequence of these really dense ten-fingered chords—one chord, another, then a third, didn't like it, tried it another way, then another, then back, thrash thrash thrash, really beating the shit out of the music. It took me awhile to recognize the style and figure out that it was Carla Bley."
"Did you meet her?" Iris asked him, and the Bear was pleased to hear what might have been a note of jealousy in the music of her voice.
"Not today, but I did meet her one time when I was a cub and Jones took me down to Birdland on a leash. She was the cigarette girl at the time. I don't know if she remembers me from then, but recently I heard through Jones she'd like me in her band. I had to say no, of course."
"Why didn't you go in and introduce yourself?"
"Tod
ay? Naw. I just hstened to her thrashing these chords out and thought, hey, if it's this much work for her maybe it's okay it's hard for me sometimes. That's intelHgent, right?"
"In a touching, rudimentary way," Iris said.
"How I was finally sure it was Carla Bley's house, there were long tufts of frizzy blond hair tied to the chickenwire all around the garden—"
"That's strange."
"I think it's supposed to keep the deer from eating her vegetables. It doesn't work on bears unless they have a sense of honor. I didn't take ani:hing but get this." He was conflating the events of tuo rambles on two distinct days but what the hell. "I ran into Jack Dejohnette."
"The drummer you're afraid of"
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"I was chewing on some flowers alongside a dirt road up a hill and I heard a motorbike coming up from below, so I hunkered down in the shrubbery to let it pass, but when the bike came into view I could see it was Dejohnette. He wasn't wearing a helmet or anything. It was definitely Jack Dejohnette. The guy intimidates me but I thought the best thing to do was stand up and introduce myself. Which was fine, only I didn't calibrate the effect."
"You don't know your own strength, do you?"
"Are you laughing at me or with me?"
"I'm laughing quite impartially. Did he get hurt?"
"I stood up, cleared my throat and sort of extended a forepaw to wave. Dejohnette's feet came off the bike and he opened his mouth about as wide as Joe E. Brown—I didn't know his face could stretch like that. He let out this holler, I ended up hollering too, and so as not to give offense I backed off. He was wheeling the bike around and falling down and there we were, the two of us, hollering like lunatics, waving our arms and trying to get away from each other. Finally I tried to tell him I was sorry but he started yelling louder and waving his arms more. It wasn't a normal encounter between musicians. What could I do? I pretended to be scared off. Come on. It's not that fanny, Irish."
"Oh yes it is," Iris said.
"Well, see? If you'd come out on a ramble with me you'd enjoy yourself. It's great value for your entertainment dollar."
"Perhaps next week. Did he get hurt, though?"
"Barked a shin, tops."
"So the woods are fall of jazz musicians."
"Painters too," said the Bear, but when Iris looked at him he did not elaborate.
Of course the Bear wouldn't tell her about his third significant encounter in the wild. Last week he'd been lolling on his back in the middle of an upland pasture, sniffing violets and looking up at tall grass waving its seed against the sky, when he heard a woman's voice coming his way: a woman's whiskey voice and footsteps coming to him through the high grass, and she was talking, he gathered, to the local poison ivy devas or whatever. Now I know there's poison ivy here, she said, and I acknowledge your presence, but I'm walking barefoot and asking you as a favor not to infect me, okay? The Bear wished her luck, which he thought she might need; the only problem was that she was coming precisely to where he lay concealed in the grass, and he was certainly going to give her a scare. He decided that the right thing was to sit up while she was still about fifteen feet off and try to look placid.
Oh my Gaahd, she said when she saw him, but you had to hand it to her,
26o Rafi Zabor
she held her ground. She happened to be a beauty too, a saucer-eyed black-Irish colleen about five foot seven in a skimpy bandeau top, cutoff jeans and a loose silk overshirt worn open, and once she got her breath back she started talking to him too: Now I know you're a bear but you don't have to attack me, I'm I'm not going to hurt you or anything, I acknowledge your absolute right to be here, and in fact I think you're just beautiful really. Yipe.
I'm the genius of this part of the forest, the Bear told her, and when she looked puzzled he added: in the resident spirit sense of the term. Don't worry, relax.
That got her back to Oh my God and a general announcement to the sky and the surrounding countryside that He talked to me! but she calmed down and in about five minutes she sat five feet away from him in the grass, hugging her bare knees. They got to talking and her color started going back to normal.
He learned that she'd recently left her longtime boyfriend, a medium-big-time coke dealer—all her fi-iends thought she was nuts to leave such a great relationship but she had to get away from that scene, and since she'd stopped doing drugs for the first time in about a dozen years it had been hard but amazing things had begun to happen to her, although nothing as amazing as this, as talking to you. Are you really a resident spirit? she asked him. You seem so physical to me. And it sounded like you were putting me on.
I was, a httle, he told her. You were talking to the poison ivy spirits and it seemed the best thing to say. Actually, I'm new to the neighborhood. And what I am really . . .
And it seemed so easy: they were lying in the long grass in the sun, she had taken off her overshirt and was toying with a blade of grass in her white, even teeth, her big eyes were bright as brand-new days, and it would have been so easy just to reach out and gather her in, and he knew she might be ready to just let this amazing new thing happen to her . . . and the Bear didn't make his move; he felt he would have been taking unfair advantage of the situation, and besides, although life with Iris had turned him on to women and all the forms of nature in general he was still a faithful kind of bear.
And in fact Colleen, for that was her name, looked a bit relieved when she realized they weren't going to do anything. For awhile she grew increasingly flirtatious, batting her eyes and stretching her limbs, but the Bear figured that was because she knew she was safe.
You could come over to my house sometime, she told him. I'd love to paint your portrait.
Maybe sometime, he said.
All in all he'd behaved rather well, considering, but he still wasn't going to
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tell Iris about it, no, and he'd learned that in a pinch a talking bear could do okay, in this neck of the woods.
As their weeks together progressed, the home fires burned just fine thank you, perhaps even too brightly. Was that possible? The Bear didn't know for sure.
Although they hadn't leapt blazing into the sack at once upon Iris' return, once they did get that look and start moving across the bed toward each other on a regular basis, they learned new and more comfortable ways to couple and discovered some unexpected things to do: one the Bear really loved was doing it upright face to face, the Bear on his knees in the bed and Iris riding him up and down—carefully, because his far could rub her nipples raw on the upswing. The spice, the kick, the whammy of the posture was that even though he was way up inside her and she was giving her G-spot an ultimate good time, the posture was essentially conversational. Which meant— which made it all the more transgressive and daring—that later, when they were facing each other clothed anytime over a table or whatever, this amazingly intimate image of the two of them going at it fike this, her gone face rising and falling before him in the semidark, interposed itself to devastate the quotidian day with something that belonged to another realm entirely. . . .
Another new^ trick he also did on his knees, he picked her body up in his arms, swung her crotch to him, let her lay her back and shoulders along the length of his arms, cradled her head in his paws and then would lower her onto his mouth, her legs wrapped around his head, then later letting them fall back over his shoulders; using his arm strength to hold her in place, he'd lap her through a series of climaxes, pausing after each so she could just stand the resumption, before lowering her to the mattress, checking his heterotopic baculum for the appropriate angle of insertion, and entering her the regular way. Sometimes she was almost too weak to move. Although most of their lovemaking was a music made between equals, he knew that Iris got off on this demonstration of his strength—so did he—and whenever they did it that way she lay there afterward as if almost lethally extinguished. Him, he tended to croon to himself in a low sweet growl and on
ly after awhile would wonder if there was something faintly creepy and atavistic about the scene.
But the fact that he, and probably they, were growing so centered on sex showed him something he hadn't anticipated at all. Entrance to Iris had been supposed to mean entrance to worlds of unforeseen sensibility and beauty, and their interpenetration had promised all kinds of parallel spiritual fusion. But the way things were working out, as their finesse with each other increased it was getting more and more purely physical between them, wasn't
262 Rafi Zabor
it? and he had to admit that a certain greed was creeping into the proceedings, from both sides of the conjugation he was sure: the way they went at each other, hungrily, progressively more expert, each of them increasingly sure how to procure this particular pleasure or that, whether for oneself or the other or both. It was fine, it was wonderful, it was mindblowing most of the time, but was not a certain selfishness, even cynicism, creeping in?
He was sure she was feeling it too. He could tell by the way she took her pleasures. As for him, even though much of his attention was devoted to her serial gratification, he was taking too: it was less mystically mutual, the borders bet^^een them were less blurred than they had been. Meanwhile the frequency of their lovemaking increased. Instead of waiting for the rising of a mutual inner tide or the fall of some subtle cadence and refraining when neither appeared, they had begun to go at it at least once every night, dependably and on schedule. Neither of them mentioned the suspicion that sex was beginning to consume all other intercourse between them, nor did they even allude to it obliquely, but he worried that they were clinging so tightly to their sex Hfe because it was becoming the most important thing they had.
At least—and wasn't this in part a result of their lovemaking too?—he was getting less bored by music, and could sometimes bring to it a less smudged and wear^ interest than he had been capable of for ages. Yes, whatever the deficits, hadn't life with Iris begun to reanimate his music? It hadn't gotten there yet but it was on the way. Their life was full of subtle ebbs and flows and he could not chart them all. One wave rose, another fell, and it was impossible to sum up their motion or say where it was going. The texture of his hfe was changing all the time in a w^ay it never had when he'd been on his own or with Jones; then it had been simple enough to confine hfe to a version, a stableness, a fixity, and factor up a self to five in it. Now it was increasingly sweet to let go, to lapse into the rhythm and the rise and fall, and when some detail wasn't worrying him tr' to fable out the deepest music of the motion.
