Autumn, with its bright days, endearing in their brevity, quickly took leave, and what seemed like winter came crashing down early in late October. Snow made the sidewalks impassible, and snow shrouded the parked cars like rows of frozen baby white whales. Silence, whiteness, more snow. They had to close the university. I was housebound, the fridge empty as usual. I ate the last of the huge pot of lentil soup I had made three days earlier, and by four, when it was black outside, I trudged to the bar, its window lights mellow, like a monk’s snowbound hut in the Alps.
Halfway to the bar and knee-deep in snow, I looked for a Saint Bernard with his little barrel of brandy sent to rescue me but saw only a sparrow drunk with cold and reeling on a tree branch far overhead.
I walked into the bar like a snowman minus the pipe and the porkpie hat.
“Shake off the snow before you come in,” Malcolm, the barman, said. I removed my coat and flounced it like a matador’s cape. I was shivering. I had been to the bar several times for a quiet beer but had not gone often enough to be counted as a regular; nonetheless, Malcolm brought me, without my asking, a snifter of brandy. Had he read my thoughts? He had become to me what my grandmother had been to the freezing sparrows. I felt a warming glow from the brandy and a surge of affection for him.
“Hungry?”
“Very,” I said.
He disappeared and came back a minute later with a soggy liverwurst sandwich.
Malcolm was bearded like a romantic pirate captain in B films; his whiskers masked his age, which I guessed was near forty. He spoke little and moved with studied care, positioning himself aloofly at the end of the bar, away from the action. But he was the action. He was famous. Married women were his specialty, and he theirs. Rebellious undergraduates with a poetical bent also flocked to him. He was their ideal of the outsider. It was said he wrote poetry, and the rumor alone made girls’ heads spin. Only jazz musicians had more cachet than a poet.
I nursed my brandy, wondering how I would get back home. For economy’s sake, I had left my lights off, and now I childishly imagined I would never be able to see my house in the dark and in the falling wall of snow. How could anyone ever leave his home to travel to faraway jungles and deserts and vast arctic wastes? How could I? Maybe, in spite of my adventurous dreams, marriage, home, and adoring children suited me after all.
There were only two patrons in the bar: a young woman in her twenties who was nursing a tall drink, and Collins, a fellow graduate student with whom I had exchanged only a few words and had never wished to go further. He was a negative being; even his hellos sounded like a fuck-you. He nodded to me and sank into his beer. The young woman gave me a look of no meaning.
Collins suddenly took the stool beside me and went right to it.
“This town is shit. The school, too.”
“So why are you here?”
“It’s this or being a cop like my father.”
“Your father’s a cop?”
“My brothers, too.”
“That’s great.”
“You think so? You should try it. You wouldn’t last a day.”
“Probably so.”
“Anyway, it’s not the kind of job for a Jew. And you’re a Jew, right? I nailed you from the start.”
“What gave me away?”
“You read all the time and always have something to say in class, like you want everyone to know how smart you are, like a smart Jewish cookie.”
Malcolm was chatting up the woman. She was not smiling. He said, “If you read Dylan Thomas, you wouldn’t feel that way about poetry.”
I thought not to answer and went to the door to leave but changed my mind and returned to the bar and to Collins. “I’m not Jewish, Collins, but now I wish I were.”
“The fancy conditional. Why couldn’t you say ‘was’ like everyone else?”
“It’s the subjunctive,” she called out, not looking at anyone.
She was in a hacking jacket and gray flannel trousers. Her face was a lion’s, her hair its tawny mane. Malcolm brought her another tall glass even though she had not finished the first. He whispered as if he were praying.
“Do you have anything else to eat?” I asked.
“I can give you a can of tomato soup to take home,” Malcolm said.
“What about me?” Collins called out.
“I only have one.”
I lingered too long. Couldn’t bear to stay, couldn’t bear to leave. An old story.
The young woman came over and, without looking at Collins, said, “I’ll drive you home.”
“Bad idea, Sandra,” Malcolm said. “You’ll never get beyond ten feet. I’ll fix up a cot for you upstairs.”
She led me by the hand out into the snow, then a few feet farther to her car, where we slept side by side with the motor running and the heat on, the window opened just a sliver for air. I slept in fits and starts.
The snow trucks had cleared some of the road by morning. We dug our way out of the car, and finally she was able to pull away in second gear. She waved and left me to negotiate the snow-clogged streets.
No sooner had I opened my door than the phone rang. It was Eva.
“I’m married,” she said.
I laughed. “When did we get the license?”
“I married Mark, from City, the guy you never liked.”
“Stop kidding.”
“You knew I always wanted children,” she said, “and you don’t, and you’ll never have any money.” She was right. I had long ago said to Money: You walk on your side of the street. I’ll walk on mine, with your rival, Time.
“I wish you great happiness.” Of course, I didn’t, even though she was right in deciding for a life that she wanted rather than waiting for one that might never happen. That she was right didn’t matter and did not soothe my heart.
“I love you and will always love you,” she said before ringing off.
I was sure she believed that. So did I, who still looked up for the little boy in the moon. Eva and I were taking separate trains. I imagined that one day, having forgotten by what means we had gotten there, we would meet again at the same station. And we would be the same: young, hopeful—and as in love as when we were first together. There is nothing so wishful and credulous as youth. Even a baby amoeba has more savvy.
For days I was at war. Half of me was angry at Eva and her betrayal: Had she been cuckolding me behind my back in cozy Manhattan while I was suffering for literature in the intellectual Siberia of Syracuse? The other half of me regretted not winning her when she had wanted to be won. What kind of man was I to run from what most men desired: a wife and a family, a home? I answered: the hero of independence, the lonely loner for Art, the soon-to-be World Traveler, that’s who! But for the moment the hero was a confused, self-deluding, aging young man.
I knocked on Rebecca’s door and remembered she had taken a week off to be with her husband in New York. I was sad, but somewhere I felt a strange relief that Eva had made the decision for me.
This mood carried me again to the bar, where I planted myself at the window booth for the next days and weeks. My teaching and seminars ended by midday, and my twice-a-week evening composition class started at eight and ended by ten, so there was much time in the day for nursing a few beers and watching snow-drowned trees, dreaming of the sun. And time to reread Under the Volcano and live again in Mexico alongside the drunken consul, whose self-destruction I understood: he was a broken man and a failed writer, his head in a tequila bottle, his soul drifting among the stars. What could be more noble?
I was drawn to failure, so much more worthy and dignified than a success earned by mere uninspired hard work and dogged application, or by the sheer chicanery and unscrupulousness that sometimes was needed to achieve it. All great literature was the literature of rebels and failures—Ahab, Raskolnikov, Don Quixote, Milton’s Satan. There was a beauty in defiance, a dignity in lost causes. Was I not one of those pure of heart, choosing failure rather than conformity, mediocrity
, and success?
I wanted to write my master’s thesis on Under the Volcano, and by some strange miracle I found Lowry’s widow’s address in the American Northwest and wrote her. No answer. Then, toward the final weeks of the semester, when I had almost forgotten that I had written her, a letter came from Margerie saying that the plane carrying my mail had crashed and burned and that only a fragment of my letter and the envelope with my return address had survived. Why, she asked, had I written her?
The fate of my letter jibed with Lowry and his misfortunes: his cabin in Vancouver burning down along with his manuscripts; his alcoholism. The real thing, not just heavy drinking but the kind of drinking that has no end except tremors and a painful death.
I did not answer Margerie immediately because by that time I was removed from Lowry and all thoughts of my thesis. My life was being lived in a woman’s bed.
Ulysses and Riding Crops
New York, Syracuse University, 1961
One bleak afternoon at three, I was in the bar reading.
“That’s a very boring book,” Sandra said. She was standing over me in the same riding habit in which I had last seen her, but now she was wearing a fierce red lipstick.
“Sometimes what seems boring isn’t.”
“Maybe, but I doubt it in this case. People read it or pretend to because they’re told it is important, special, and they want to be thought special,” she said.
“Maybe. Have you read it?”
“I threw up on the first page.”
“Threw up?”
“I mean threw it away.”
“Thanks for the car ride in the snow.”
“Aren’t you going to ask me to sit down? It’s impolite to keep a woman standing while you sit.”
“Yes, I’ve heard that.”
She took a stool at the bar. It was a different bartender, one who took her order without flirting.
I returned to Ulysses and to Leopold Bloom’s voyeuristic adventure on the beach. He was besotted by the sight of a girl’s bare ankle as she lifted her skirt against an incoming wave. Bloom was masturbating at the sight and about to explode into a fireworks-scale orgasm when Sandra slid in beside me. She looked at the page and read some lines aloud.
“That’s a good passage,” she said. “One of the few.”
“I thought you threw the book away.”
“So? I picked it up again. Anyway, don’t be so serious.”
“I’m not,” I said, like a kid.
“Anyway, what’s the difference? Let’s go.”
She lived in a two-story Victorian house, thirty minutes from the bar. We went directly to her bedroom. A giant iron four-poster bed stood in the center; the windows were shuttered and shaded, the walls bare except for a whip and a riding crop hanging on wooden pegs. She undressed to her bra and panties, black. She had been wearing a garter belt and stockings under her trousers.
“Have you ever had a slave before?”
“No.”
“Do you know what to do with one?”
I did not answer because for the moment I was dizzy, like Leopold Bloom at the sight of a girl’s ankle. Sandra had hidden her beautiful body under the armor of horsey riding clothes, and I now could see she was from another sphere of womanhood, the one from the soft-porn films I had shamefully devoured in Broadway’s dumpy movie houses—the one where women undressed to their underwear and left me to ride the subway home in a haze of longing and fantasy.
“I’m sure I do,” I said, not sure of anything but my crazy excitement.
She took the whip from the wall and handed it to me. The crop she tossed on the bed.
“All right,” she said, her voice at once defiant and humble. She slowly took off her bra and went down to her hands and knees on the bed, spreading her legs wide. “Let’s start with this.”
We met every three days, enough time to build up the appetite and the desire and, for me, the stamina. I would have shortened the interval, but our time together exhausted us both. So small a stage, so few props, but the theater lived large in my thoughts: images of what we had done, images of what we would do next. Tying her blindfolded to a chair for a half hour grew to forty-five minutes or until she begged to be released and whipped. An afternoon of a few hours turned into an evening and then into a night.
The belt, the crop, her back, her ass, the narrow braided whip, and the spread-open thighs. Her standing in the chilly room spread-eagle against the bare wall until she begged to lie down. Each new episode became longer, darker, more cruel.
She lived in my morning coffee and all the hours after. She lived in my sleep. She lived deep in my guts, where no reason sounded. I had no idea where or if at all I lived in her or was an occasional, necessary visitor who embodied, enacted her fantasies. I did not care. I worried only that I had sometimes gone too far and hurt her so much that she would rebel and leave me and I would dissolve. Where would I ever find her again? Who would grant me this wild, consuming, uncivilized power again? One evening, before she was to drive me home, she spoke flatly, as if in answer to a question she had supposed I was about to ask.
“It’s not pain I want,” she said, “it’s the humiliation. And it always needs to escalate. Tu voir? Do you have the imagination for that?”
One afternoon I was in the bar at my usual booth by the window, glancing up into the sky, which was gray with threat. I was reading Norman Mailer’s Barbary Shore, but I stopped every few pages to think of the thin welts on Sandra’s back and ass, of her open mouth. The sky was suggesting a snowstorm. After all this time in Syracuse, I could forecast the weather: the gray cold, the gray sky, the gray silence threatening a snowstorm. What if I were snowed in? How long could I stand without her?
“I see you’re hanging out with Sandra,” Malcolm said, putting a stein of an unasked-for beer on my table. He had been buying me drinks and making small talk, which I tried to keep as small as possible because, for all of his reserved, strong, silent-man posturing, he was a run-of-the-mill gossip.
“We run into each other sometimes,” I said.
He waited a long time before saying, “Sure.”
“Thanks for the drink,” I said, opening my book and hoping he could take the hint.
“She’s a bitch, you know. A crazy bitch.” He stroked his beard, the man who had navigated the world solo in a rowboat with a spoon for an oar.
“I wouldn’t know.”
The bar was empty. It smelled of sawdust, brine, beer, and undistinguished failure.
“And she’s rich, too. Her parents own half the buildings around here.”
“You sound angry with her, Malcolm. Did she take a pass?”
He laughed. “I wouldn’t touch her. She’s a cock teaser.”
“Then why do you flirt with her?”
“For the game of it.” Then he got cagey and said, “You’re not in love with her or anything, are you?”
“Not anything, just an acquaintance.”
I went back to my book, but it was a pretense—for Malcolm, for me. I was seeing her blindfolded on her knees, waiting and wondering what would come next.
I wondered, who was the slave? She who crawled to me with my belt between her teeth and begged to be punished, or was it me, whose every minute was tied to her without a single string?
Sometimes Sandra and I sat in the bar facing each other without speaking. What was the point of conversation when no words could penetrate as deeply as a few simple commands? Sometimes, after our erotic theatrics were over, if we cared to eat at all, we drove to some local joint for burgers and fries and ice-choked Cokes or we went to a formal French restaurant, where she took charge and ordered cold lobster and a vintage Montrachet. She ordered in French. I finally understood why people raved about the greatness of this or that wine.
“Remind me to buy a case of this,” Sandra said. “And one for you, too.”
She always signed the bill, never writing a check or producing a credit card. But she would leave cash for a tip, so
metimes half the cost of the meal. I loved her for that, for the excess and the politely arrogant show of power, which at other times she thrillingly yielded to me.
Food, drink, work—these were the dreams I walked through. The vivid, the vibrant, the only real life was with her. There was only her, until one morning I opened my eyes and it was spring, my last semester of teaching and taking classes, and the road had opened to summer.
Waterfalls and Rubbers
New York, Syracuse University, Spring 1961
Sandra picked me up in her red MG with the top down, although it was still chilly in the bright May sun. Large sunglasses and a red silk scarf covered her head, and a black sweater was wrapped about her shoulders. She looked like a teenager with a graduation car; she looked like the first light of day.
She took the curves easily and then sped away so fast that I saw a blur of trees and clouds above. She smiled and caressed my face, her eyes never off the road.
“What are your plans for the summer?”
“To stay here in Syracuse with you and make up my incompletes,” I said as she took a turn to a side road that led to a waterfall.
We kissed. “I like you,” she said. “I wish you were crueler, more indifferent.”
“That can be managed.”
“It’s not in your nature.”
My Young Life Page 21