“What is that?” I asked.
“It is a sense of desolation.”
“It is a state. It is virtue in desolation.”
“Consider that, my priest. Could you live there in that state as I do? Could you live there alone?”
“No, I could not,” I said. “I’m a priest.”
Again, we were on the back porch. Earlie was wearing his black hat and he had bought me a borsalino as a gift, so there we were, two men sitting side by side on a back porch, sitting under two old elm trees wearing our hats. And he was playing his flute. A simple melody, a pure pleasure to hear, a song he’d heard in the hills outside Daruvar.
I asked him if I could give him a gift, if I could make a blessing, a sign of the cross over him?
He said, “No, not over me. If you want to bless the garden, be my guest.”
I did.
Then, putting down the flute and after a silence, he said, “My father told me that memories are a ladder and if you walk back and forth under a bad memory you get bad luck. Some men, he said, live under a ladder all their lives. I killed those ten people, I make no bones about it. I am not sorry. I live under the ladder of their deaths. I regret nothing.
“Every day I draw a deep breath, take off my hat, and look into it.
“My beautiful borsalino hat.
“I bring the hat up to my face.
“Eyes open, I cover my face with darkness.
“I smell my smell.
‘“Yes, that’s me,’ I say, as I say to you now.
“Then I go to the kitchen,
momma cooked a chicken
he thought he was a duck
set him on the table
with his legs cocked up
“And I eat ice from the refrigerator.
“Ice is good for the soul, it brings down the swelling.”
DÉJÀ VU
I wonder what I’ll do now that I have seen the room where I was born in several black-and-white B-movies where there is a hotel room in the east end of town by the railroad station and there is a single iron cot against the wall, and on the floor, an old leather suitcase made up into my child’s bed, and outside, a hotel sign that flashes on and off, which, after my mother, a brunette with high cheekbones has gone downstairs to the bar, turns out later in the movie to be the Hotel Rex. The bartender, a retired light heavyweight boxer with a moon face and a bent nose, has always favoured my mother for her beautiful skin. She smiles at him. “Peaches and cream,” she says, touching his hand, and then touching her cheek, “Peaches and cream. That’s how life should be.” She smokes a Camel, tapping her ash into a heavy glass ashtray, and she blows a smoke ring and turns on her barstool, crossing her legs, and says, looking me dead in the eye, “Don’t you worry, boy, when the world ends, the world’s gonna end on B-flat.”
CROW JANE’S BLUES
Crow Jane, who was a singer in the local after-hours clubs, was walking down Spadina Avenue, her hands in her pockets. There were chrome studs on the lapels and cuffs of her jean jacket. It was nearly midnight but there were five bandy-legged boys playing stickball on the sidewalk in front of the Silver Dollar Show Bar and across the street, in the doorway beside the Crescent Lunch, some immigrant women, probably cleaning-women, were huddled around a homeland newspaper. Their warm laughter touched the loneliness that Crow Jane had felt all week, a loneliness that left her with a listless sense of loss, but she wasn’t sure about loss of what, and that was why she was out walking around her old haunts, looking into the show bars from the old days, threading her way through the late-night street hustlers who were standing half out in the street between the parked cars, and for a moment she felt good, seeing herself years ago the way she used to slow-walk down the street knowing where everything was – the upstairs bootlegger who kept the beautiful Chinese twin-sister hookers who put on a show every midnight, and over on Augusta Street, behind the fruit stalls, there was heavy-jowled Lambchops, the Polish-Jewish giant who hired himself out as muscle to the after-hours clubs. But then, watching a tall white girl in front of a hat shop, the way she primped her hair with pleasure as she caught her reflection in the glass, Crow Jane hunched up and put her head down, suddenly disconsolate. When she looked up, the girl was gone.
An empty bus pulled away from the curb and she turned and wandered back up the street, into the Silver Dollar Show Bar where a lithe black girl wearing a silver sequin halter dress was on the stand. Crow Jane sat in a darkened corner drawing circles on the tabletop in the dampness from ice-cold beer bottles, and as she sat listening, the revolving coloured lights made the singer look like several women at once, all of them afloat in a wash of light, and Crow Jane thought, She’s light, lighter than me, and I bet some slicker salesman gave her momma an old black and white TV to see those black breasts and this here’s the daughter of that old black and white TV, singing with her head back, eyes shut, opening memories up inside Crow Jane, the night long ago when she wore a dust-rose shirt and had gone up the two flights of stairs on College Street to the small dance hall where two big old women wearing sweatbands and bloated by bad food took tickets at the door. She’d danced with a narrow-hipped, long-legged white girl called EveLynn, and in the lingering light the white girl had said after they’d gone home and Crow Jane had sung for her in a moaning whisper just like this girl singing here in the Show Bar, And yes, she’d said, in the lingering light is where I do like to touch, touch you, ten years ago almost, lying back on the white sheets of the big cannonball bed, her nipples small, the pinky-brown of white women, and yours are plum-coloured, she’d said, lying in that bed every night, with her legs spread like a wishbone and, Baby, I said, I got sweetening’, I mean in my time I’ve sung the song, I been lying up with the shades down just holding on to holding on, but you come high-heel sneaking in your sling-backs into my life and now I got high on sunshine, and the singer on the stand was isolated in a small spotlight, just her face, a black face on a white moon suspended for a moment in the noisy room, But sunshine don’t get it all the time ’cause a long time ago it was that I was with you, my little sweetenings, an’ we got to always come home to the cabbage, which is why I always to this day every night sing the song how you were my love who brought me the cherry that had no stone, ’cause stones and cabbage is how I most remember my old beat-up hand-me-down days, when I be a little girl pedalling my fool self on my tricycle along the long hallway, dead end, man, I learned early to make the tight turn when you come to the end, so I see this girl so sharp up there in her spotlight of silver sequins looks like me in all the places I already been and turned back from, ’cause you see even my mind got hallways, I mean sometimes I lean back singing a song or lying up with another woman, all the good womens in this world, or poppin’ pills, and them pills look like lemon-yellow bowling balls rolling down inside my head, an’ sometimes when I get scared, when some sucker comes at me leering with the big hard-on in his eyes, I just sit there talking baby talk we used to talk, me an’ EveLynn looking at each other side by side, studying on each other, real close, that blond hair of yours on my shoulder an’ ever since then I got all the cabbages and none of the kings, an’ I been down along the long hallway, pedalling on my tricycle with the bell on the handlebar that don’t work, just goes fhzz fhzz like my daddy’s old Ronson lighter that got no flint, railroad halls we called ’em, but nobody knows that no more ’cause nobody rides them trains, which is why I like the mouth harp sound, harmonica you called it, white words for black birds, lonesome trains and pain, that was my daddy since back then the onliest work a black man bagged was Pullman porter which my daddy was for a while till insomnia set him down, the clickity-clack inside his head he said, an’ I mean he had the light on the whole time, he put pennies on his eyes when he went to sleep an’ said I ain’t dead, the light jess don’t go out, and Crow Jane, listening to the voice on the stand in the small room of the Show Bar, was reminded so much of herself that she decided she wanted to talk to the younger singer, thinking she’d b
uy the girl a drink, hold her hand a little like she was holding hands with herself, and scribbled a note inviting her to the table. Crow Jane gave it to the waiter. The singer read the note and with a shrug flicked it back behind the piano, and that too is cabbage, boiled cabbage heads, the state of shredded stink, which is bigger than big, all the cabbage-stinking long halls of the world with a Raggedy-Ann kid on a tricycle going fhzz fhzz at the dead-end dirty window that don’t look out on nothing but back alleys, mean mealy living, man, like daddy drinking whisky, which kept his eyeballs on all the time, bulbed outta his headbone before he died, looking on the lookout for what never was, only him always sitting on an afternoon with his hair conked to get it straight, looking at me he’d say, Sweet Thing, when you’re black stay back an’ if you’re brown stick aroun’ but if you’re white you’re right, all that sour self-laughter of his, an’ sometimes when I was with that white girl, I think he did tell it true ’cause I loved her an’ black weren’t beautiful then, baby, nigger heaven was nowhere, there was just my old daddy sitting on his rusty dusty listening to the “Salt Pork Blues” on the old 78s, his hair straight with lye under the stocking cap and even then, me only being a little girl on the downside of ten, I saw that a grown man sitting with a woman’s ugly rolled stocking like a circle of surgical tube on his head was weird, trying to dude himself into the land of seersucker soul, arctic power, whitener was what he was up to an’ drove himself stone blind on booze an’ left me, little girl sucking wind the day he died, gone down like the light comes up, always the lights come up, ole young girl up there singing so pretty, I got a baby way ’cross town who’s good to me, and then she stepped down, taking the hand of a lean black man wearing a knitted wool cap, strutting a silver-handled cane and a T-shirt that said SPADE POWER. Crow Jane liked that. I can dig it, I can dig it, and she laughed, wishing that she knew them but it was closing time and people rose and straggled out and Crow Jane suddenly had the feeling that all her past was emptying out of her head, leaving her alone at her table in the corner, staring at the rough ceiling painted black, the water pipes and heating ducts all exposed in the light, And that one time, I don’t know why me, but they put my picture in the paper, big, full-face, singing at a festival over on the island, an’ I felt good an’ I said, Daddy, you may be dead and down but there I be, I is, big as lightning on the page for all to see who I am ’cause I am, Crow Jane has sung the song, the fhzz, fhzz is finished an’ I took that clipping from the paper, an’ I said to myself, EveLynn, wherever you are hiding in this here old city with your kids or whatever, I’m looking you in the eyeball, big, and I am the queen of darktown and I may not be having a ball but I’m still strutting, an’ I wanted it bigger, so I scissored out that head of myself and took it down to one of them blow-up-yourself picture places an’ I say, man, I want this big for framing, hang myself over my head in my bed, two feet by three I said an’ he shrugs, and when I come back there I am, mounted on cardboard, an’ I can’t find myself for the looking, my whole face just gone to great big grey and dark dots an’ I say, where’d I go, man, I don’t see myself at all, an’ he says that’s what happens when you blow yourself up outta some newspaper, you disappear into dots, ’cause if you look close that’s all you was in the first place, and so the only thing to do was go home, still wanting to take the singer’s hand and hold it to her cheek, sweat and perfume on the woman’s neck, and to look into the other woman’s eyes, but when Crow Jane went by, walking slowly, it was like the singer looked right through her, leaving Crow Jane suddenly alone in the doorway, facing the darkness of the street in the cool early morning air. She walked up Spadina. A big milk transport truck rumbled by. She went past a closed restaurant in which a fat-bellied man was all alone swabbing the floors, wearing a stringy undershirt and torn pants, and he waved a grubby hand and when she shrugged with disdain he mouthed a curse at her through the glass. Fog had come in off the lake and she could hear her own footsteps in the empty street.
ALL THE LONELY PEOPLE
1
They met at an Inuit sculpture gallery. She started talking to him as if they were casual old friends. Her name was Helen. As they walked around a whalebone bird with two heads, he said, “Don’t you see? They were after the spirit already there inside the bone. What emerges is in the bones.” When they went for coffee she sat very straight in her chair and several times she opened her pocket mirror and looked at herself, touching her lipstick with her little finger, as if she were never sure of herself. But after their first week together, meeting in the late afternoons at his small bookshop and walking in the speckled light of the heavily treed parks close by her big old family home, she suddenly disappeared without warning, phoning first from Boston and then from Palm Springs, where she had old school friends. “Don’t worry about me, Gene,” she said. “Now that my parents are dead, the one thing I know how to do is look after myself.” She had been married to a scholar, a specialist in Anglo-Saxon riddles. “And he said I made him feel like he’d done something wrong. He was quite unfair, saying that. We just didn’t agree anymore.”
One afternoon, on her return, she came and sat in Gene’s long narrow bookshop, staring at the walls lined with books, some of them old and rare and locked behind glass doors. “It’s a little like a tunnel in here,” she said, smiling, but she didn’t ask to see anything and didn’t open a book. Later, while they were in the upstairs sitting room of her house listening to Ravel, she said, “Does it bother you that we haven’t made love?”
“No,” he said, taking her hand.
“I think we should make love. I’ve chilled some white wine.”
Her large bedroom at the back of the house was filled with light. There was a polar-bear skin on the floor and panel mirrors on the wall beside the brass bed. “Do the mirrors embarrass you?” she asked.
“Why should they?” he said shyly.
Later, when they were resting in bed, she said, “You know, my husband made up a riddle about me.”
“What was it?” Gene asked.
“I don’t know. It was in Anglo-Saxon. No one knows Anglo-Saxon. Anyway, was I good?”
“Yes,” he said.
She had been silent while they made love, watching herself in the mirror.
“What else could you say?” She closed her eyes, touching the inside of her thighs.
“I could say no.”
“No, you couldn’t,” she said, pulling the sheet up to her breasts, which were smaller than he had imagined. “What do you think about women’s lib?”
“I don’t think about it at all.”
“I think it’s awful. What was quiet desperation is now noisy desperation. By the way, could I have a photograph of you, a nice one?”
“Sure,” he said, pleased.
“Did you look?” she said, sipping her wine.
“Once.”
“I love to look. Sometimes I feel I’m watching someone who’s not me with her legs up in the air.”
She smoothed her hair away from her face.
“What did you see?” she said.
“I don’t know.”
“Come on. Don’t be shy.”
“You’ve got just that little bit of blond hair between your legs, like no hair at all.”
“No, I mean in the mirror.”
“I was surprised at how big I looked, when I was going into you.”
The following week, Helen said she didn’t want to make love. “I could tell you I have the curse,” she said, “but the truth is I want us to know each other better before we make love again.” She led him through the house, opening up small formal sitting rooms, the breakfast room and the library, and china cabinets filled with figurines and albums that had pages of photographs of her father. “I don’t use most of the rooms but I like to keep them like they look as if they’re lived in.” She had become a collector of things and one night she got undressed slowly at the bottom of the stairs so he could watch her walk up the stairs wearing black lace underwear and a bla
ck garter belt. She said she’d bought them at an auction in Palm Springs because they had belonged to the famous preacher Aimee Semple McPherson. Then, in the bedroom, she made love to him, telling him to stand with his back to the mirrors. He felt a warm unsettling surge, as if he could throttle her as he stood with his hands on her shoulders. He wanted to see her face but could only see the flood of her auburn hair and the small of her back and buttocks.
They lay in bed listening to music and she said, “Did your father ever tell you anything? I mean, we all remember something our fathers told us after they’re dead.”
“Sure.”
“What?”
“Get a good lawyer.”
“Why in the world would he say that?” she said, laughing.
“He was an honest man who liked life.”
“So?”
“So, he was foolish about himself but not about other men.”
“Anything else?”
“Anything else what?”
“Did he tell you anything else?”
“Always keep a clear head.”
All the Lonely People Page 12