He also had an aura of health and frequent heterosexual need about him, in no way suggesting—as the ridiculous “Maestro” used to say of so many actors—that he’d been “touched” by the “Faery Queen.” Indeed, “I adore you,” the young man had said, “as I am committed to adore all women”—and it was probably true, but notice!—all women of beauty, wealth, power, position, family, talent—these being the stimulant for him, the essential erotic elements.
“True, I’m not a boy,” he had the grace to admit as he laid the foundation, then structured his impressive logic. “—That is, the boy of your memory and imagination, but a son is a son” (like a weary rose is a rose?) “whatever his age. In ten years, fifteen, Jamie would have been my age, and then what?”
He waited and was encouraged by her silence. He didn’t know that he had already succeeded; that she was ready not only to buy the vacuum but all its attachments, including the genuine, all-leather carrying case that housed the whole shebang.
“Would that,” Paulo-Raphael-Mario asked, referring to the twenty-odd-year-old Jamie he had just conjured up, “make him any less a son? Carma!” (astonishingly he was calling her that barely two hours after they’d met); “no—he would be more, more of a son—many years more.”
And no need to send his love . . . ?
Many kisses . . . ?
She also had the feeling, vague as it was, that Mr. Dzierlatka was applying for a job as her social secretary in order to arrange schedules and events, make sure she did the right things, rubbed (bruised) elbows with the people who mattered.
“Don’t you realize how much you need to get out?” asked Paulo with a devastating smile. “How long has it been—come now—since you’ve seen an opera or a ballet?”
“And what about concerts,” Raphael inquired, he being extremely fond of music, particularly classical and jazz.
“The supper clubs are fun,” interposed Mario, who loved good food, especially French and Italian, though he was a calorie counter and kept an unwavering eye on the twenty-nine inches that measured his waist.
“What about films?! There’s a Festival at Lincoln Center. And the theater! Think how many good shows there are in town!
“‘Getting out,’” Dr. Dzierlatka concluded, ready with a tongue depressor after feeling her pulse, “is the best prescription in the world for grief; real therapy.”
So? What did she say? How about it? Was it a deal? Were they en rapport in their thinking? Could they consider their liaison a fait accompli?
“Well . . . ”
She hesitated. “Let’s . . . let’s just say, for now—entente cordiale. Call me. We’ll see.”
The time had come for Mrs. Evans to acquire her monthly allotment of prescriptions. She needed valium, and would probably ask for librium, too, since there were subtle variations in her emotional reactions to drugs, and alternating one chemical with another seemed to increase the benefits of both.
She also wanted just two or three of those dark, evil green monsters, Placidyl 750, for use on those few occasions when her bouts with depression, panic, despair and grief became intolerable, so severe it was necessary to plunge into unconsciousness as quickly as possible.
Most important, the chloral hydrate, her nightly “sleeping draught,” was in short supply, virtually depleted, the last half inch of it beginning to form pink crystals at the bottom of the bottle, quite like the sticks of glittering rock candy she made as a child.
Her treasured assortment of seconal and nembutal remained intact, though she had nestled them together finally, in an old wide-mouthed perfume bottle with a tear-shaped stopper. In a moment of morbid humor, she had pasted a label on the outside inscribed with the words “Last Exit,” meticulously copying Old English script from the alphabet in her dictionary.
But about her prescriptions . . .
She couldn’t ask Dori or Rose to pick them up. Her sweet, sneaky friend and ex-(brief)lover, Dr. Robert Algood Jones would never permit it. Intent on extracting his blackmail first, he’d arrange his busy schedule to suit her, and then insist on seeing and talking to her face to face. So—she was required monthly to report on “how she felt,” “what she was up to,” and “how things were.” Confessedly, he found these commonplace idioms and others of their kind, valuable and comforting euphemisms for the usual psychiatric jargon, which most patients found esoteric, at least clinical and de-humanizing. He also invariably asked, “what’s new?” and “how do things look?” If the latter seemed ambiguous, it was not. It was the one question referring to the future and therefore suicide. It simply meant: are you still thinking (foolish woman!) about killing yourself?
During this visit, she managed rather quickly to satisfy his concern and curiosity on all counts except the “what’s new” and “what have you been up to?”
Clearly, Angel, Bruno and Martin were new and she might soon be up to (her neck? ears? in) relationships with all of them; at least two. With sweet, disarming Bruno she could only be “up to” her hip bone, or at the very most, her waist.
The small, private joke was shameful but irresistible, and truly quite good-natured and humorously loving, but when Robert asked why she was smiling, she couldn’t confess, and answered with a lie.
She lied a good deal that day—at least colored the truth but in areas that didn’t matter. Certainly it was impossible to tell him about her ad in the Voice.
Well then, where had she found Martin? At a matinee. A friend had taken her backstage and he was there, among others, congratulating the actors.
“Bruno?” The barest hesitation. At a second-hand bookstore—“both of us browsing; he was so cute, and curious . . . those beautiful eyes lifting each time I picked up a book—so interested to see what I’d found, that soon we were talking and, before I left, I invited him to tea.”
“Angel?” How resourceful she was! Instantly—“he was playing in Washington Square Park and his spinning what-is-it-now—frisbee—hit me square on the cheekbone.” She showed Robert a non-existent bruise, tossing her head away with “well, perhaps it’s gone by now. Anyway—about Angel . . .”
She’d saved his name for last because she wanted to talk about him first. He was, of the three, the only one who had really touched her deeply. Somehow, in his own strange way (she said) “he’s important to us; we think he’s right.”
The doctor stared at her so long and peculiarly she began to feel uncomfortable. “Did I say something—wrong?”
“Well, the emphasis was on different words, but you said ‘he’s important to us, we think he’s right.”
She was baffled. A bit of coldness touched the back of her head. “Did I?” . . . wonderingly. In the next moment, she was irritated. “Oh Robert! Always picking, picking. Words, nuances! Yes—us, we! If Jamie were . . . with us” (she couldn’t manage the word “alive” with the implication that he wasn’t) “you’d not even have noticed! It’s a habit, that’s all. We did so many things together, it became second nature to say us, we. He said it, too. Surely you remember!”
The doctor nodded. “Yes, I suppose I do. Not that I ever considered it exactly healthy.”
How he spoiled everything, this man! No wonder she hadn’t married him! But seeing his sweet concern, the lines of worry on his forehead, the selfless look of love in his eyes, she knew in the next instant why she almost had.
But the time, the desire to talk about Angel, was over. She moved on casually.
Bruno? She’d probably never see him again, despite her promise. Or maybe she would. A decision of this kind was difficult. He was so disarming . . . and immensely entertaining—with his grand manners, and even grander vocabulary! She pitied him, of course, and he broke her heart. But—
The “but—” and the long silence that followed it seemed sufficient explanation. At least for the doctor who, after sighing, shrugged a small shrug and smiled a small smile.
“You don’t have a drug,” she asked, “that makes tiny men tall, and straightens twisted bones,
and takes the bitterness out of fatally wounded hearts?”
Her question was sentimental and, yes, playfully cruel, and self-indulgent. It angered the doctor.
“Yes, we do,” he replied coldly. “Not a drug, exactly, but something that works equally well. It’s a human emotion. It’s called charity.”
She was stunned. Then—”Oh, Robert! You know I didn’t mean it that way! And if I did, I’m sorry. You forget how confused I am, and how . . . how brave I try to be . . . about everything. What illusions I must create! How I must smile, smile, smile until I think my jaw will break—just because I am so considerate of others. I had to eat . . .” beginning to cry “eat one of those dreadful petit fours of his—so dense, so thick with sugar I nearly strangled to death . . . all because he brought them. Charity, yes, but surely within the disciplines of one’s own natural or sorely acquired nature.”
He had no idea what she was talking about.
“Carma. All you want to do is escape with your sundry prescriptions. You’ve made a verbal shambles of the afternoon, and told me nothing—either as doctor or friend.”
“I’ve told you everything—from the time I was here last until this very moment.”
“What about this Martin Dzier . . . ”
“ . . . latka.”
“Yes.”
“You mean—you approve?”
“Of what? Is there something to approve?”
“Of my . . . seeing so young a young man.”
“Seeing, seeing . . . what is that word?”
He with his “what’s new!” and “how do thinks look!”
“Seeing,” she repeated, “going out with . . . being, being with.”
His surprise couldn’t have been genuine; he faked it, exaggerating, to make his point emphatic.
“Of course I approve, if my approval has any meaning at all. It’s part of your recovery. I approve of your . . . being with . . . someone, anyone . . . preferably me, but if not, then Angel, Bruno, Martin . . .” He’d exhausted the list.
“Anyone,” she said, pushing his prescription pad toward him, “except Jamie.”
The infamous tiger cages of South Vietnam were probably larger than the room in which Bruno David Carlson-Wade lived. Or, fond of hyperbole, so he imagined it when hating it the most.
Actually, it was adequate, and had been so all along.
The grossly-fat superintendent, strangled for breath after they’d initially climbed the five flights of stairs, hadn’t been able to resist a little joke: looking at the small room and his tiny prospective tenant, he remarked slyly, “Just your size. You don’t want to rattle around like the last pea in a Green Giant peapod.”
There was no window at all, but since the room was under a slanted roof and contained a large skylight, it was, in the daytime flooded with light. At night, through hazy glass, though he washed it often and tried to keep it clean, Bruno could make out a few faint stars.
It was early fall when he took the room, and since he was not to live out the winter, he had no knowledge or warning of the unbearable bite of the summer sun through the skylight, the insufferable build-up of heat that throbbed in the room, making it literally, unliveable without air-conditioning, even at night.
After the Y, where he had lived so publicly for months, having to shower and shave in a kind of dormitory or army-type lavatory with many others, the room was at first a heaven of seclusion and privacy. True, it had no bathroom, but that wasn’t so bad, since he used the one in the hall on the floor below, and that, at least was private, and had a stout lock on the door.
The room itself was badly furnished, but contained the essentials’, a small, studio-style bed which opened to accommodate two (should that miracle ever occur!), an electric stove with a pint-size oven, and a sink. In addition to these, there was a kitchen-type table with a stained, cigarette-burned formica top and two single straight-back chairs,
No TV, but a radio for a time-check and the news, and his typewriter, plus ten (ten!) reams of manila paper—awaiting the transposition of his novel from longhand. Little more. Oddly, no closet at all, the few clothes he owned simply hanging on a make-do pole along one wall.
Meager. Spartan. But for a writer it was, for a while, entirely sufficient for his bodily needs.
He had no body for this world anyway. Only a head and a heart. And talent; yes, great talent he was sure. If it wasn’t for his belief in that, he would have killed himself long ago, or, not finding the kind of courage suicide required, surrendered: becoming a clown in a circus, jumping and tumbling in the sawdust every night, and in the daytime cleaning out the animal cages, carrying endlessly all that slop and stink.
So nothing hurt, really, until he looked into a full-length mirror. And this he managed never to do, unless one happened to catch him unawares. Then, the full impact of what he saw almost felled him.
However, late one night, soon after his tete-a-tete, rendezvous, tryst, divine dialogue with the fantastic Mrs. Evans, something else, something more and much different began to hurt—though he didn’t know for a day or two quite what it was, or why.
But suddenly the aspiring, hopeful, functioning writer became the dazed, day-dreaming, plodding writer, and nights that used to produce pages of manuscript, now turned out only short paragraphs, sometimes a mere sentence or two.
Ultimately Bruno knew why, and, of course, the answer was extremely simple. No mystery at all to the lovely, growing, bittersweet ache of his emotions. If, along with this, went an occasional dizzying shock of feeling in (like his head and his hands) his full-size, man-size genitals, his unconscious wouldn’t give birth to its meaning, allowing it to escape only in the mystery of dreams, and the flood of sweetness against a hugged-to-his-heart midnight pillow.
To make ends meet, though they never did, Martin Dizerlatka had a roommate, Grover Davis, a licensed cab-driver, but also an actor when he managed to find a job: twenty-four years of age, long-haired, homely, lazy, generous and loving.
He was apt to be found at home at odd hours, day or night, since he cruised the streets when taxis were most in demand, his life regulated to the flow of human traffic, not the tick of a clock.
He was also a dedicated pot-head, and when Martin came in was greedily nursing the last quarter-inch of a glowing joint on a toothpick.
“How’d it go?” he asked, crosseyed to keep his mouth from a burn.
“Oh—” the elation and confidence Martin had felt as he bounded down the steps of the Evans home had disappeared, “I’m not sure. I behaved like an idiot for the first ten minutes but—” he shrugged “—at least I didn’t get thrown out.”
“A cold reading is tough,” Grover squeaked, sucking down air, treating the subject as he would have a report on an audition. “Will you get a callback?”
Without removing his topcoat, Martin threw himself into a chair. “The other way around. That’s what worries me. I’m supposed to call her.”
“Well man!? What more do you want? You got it made. Tell me, what was the feel of it? Talking to her; what’s she like?”
“Fabulous. Everything you’ve ever heard.”
“I never heard nothing’”—enjoying the two negatives. “Only what you said; I don’t read no society page. Come on, love, is she ass or not, and when do we start dividing the bread? One for you, one for me, one for you . . . ”
Martin had a clean mouth but was suddenly so angry at Grover, he said, “Fuck off, will you! I’m sick of your dirty talk. And that stink in here.” He glanced about the living room—at scattered pages of the Daily News, empty coke cans, a half-eaten restaurant sandwich with balled wax-paper next to it, the slice of pickle and curled apple skin on the floor. “When you’re here, the place always looks like a shithouse. If you have to fuck up like this, why don’t you do it in your own room!” And with that, Martin rose, walked straight to his bedroom and slammed the door.
“Wow!”—from Grover; softly, underbreath. He went to Martin’s room, knocked softly.
He tried the door but found it locked.
And after a few minutes silence, gently: “Hey man! I’ll clean up. And use a whole goddamn can of that new air-spray shit we bought. Room’ll smell like a rose. You’ll see.”
Martin no longer much cared. In the Spartan order and obsessive cleanliness of his own small quarters, he had forgotten Grover—with more important things to worry about.
He stepped out of his clothes, showered quickly, then, without drying off, just a towel across a shoulder, stood by an open window. The early evening had cooled the air considerably and a faint easterly breeze evaporating the wetness on his skin was almost icy, helping to improve his temper, though not much.
The awkward events of the afternoon kept nagging at him.
Had he behaved like an idiot?—a smart-assed, obnoxious bore? If anyone, ever, had said to him, seriously, “Shall we consider our liaison a fait accompli?” he would have thrown up on the spot.
Shit!
On the other hand . . . There had been a kind of lazy, bored amusement in her eyes. After all, the words hadn’t been serious although the question certainly was, and surely she hadn’t taken them so, else she wouldn’t have matched his nonsense with a transparently coy and vaguely seductive—”entente cordiale.”
Well . . . L’espirit d’escalier, and fuck it!
He’d have this woman. He wanted her. He needed her. He deserved her.
They deserved each other.
The leaves were golden—those caught by the sun: all the colors of fire—like he’d never seen before. Oh, he was aware of the changes late summer brought to the trees of Central Park, and Riverside, and Morningside Heights, but never, ever like this.
Maybe it was the car, too, as it sped along in the clarity and immense hush of the after-dawn light at ninety, ninety-two, ninety-four miles an hour.
Angel’s eyes kept moving from the speedometer—with secret urging glances at Dori’s impassive face, hoping, praying to see the needle touch one hundred—to the burning whirlwind of the world outside: arched masses, curling tunnels of flame.
Bereavements Page 11