George went and sat with her.
Hey, he said.
She looked at him.
You want me to leave? he said.
No, she said. I just wonder what you want.
I saw you and I was stirred, he said. I don’t like it—that we avoid each other. Feel we can’t talk.
Well then, she said. Let’s certainly end that. What else? I sense there’s more.
Okay, he said. I saw you and I wanted to kiss you. I want to touch you. We can entertain each other in this way.
He handed her the joint he’d brought over, fingertip over fingertip.
There are other kinds of entertainment, she said.
None as cheap or nearly as good, he said. Or none with that kind of cheap-to-good ratio, would be more accurate.
Not a pre-spring walk in the park? she said.
Surely you’re kidding.
Not in the least.
It’s certainly as cheap. I’d say only half as good. But yes. Fine.
He had the joint again, took a pull, offered it to her and she shook her head. He put it out and stored it with the weed and papers in his pocket. Let’s walk then, he said. He offered his hand, she took it, he pulled her up.
The temperature was in between.
They descended the steps and turned west toward Broadway, whence they descended farther, to Riverside and its long narrow park. He felt loose. This was the thing he’d become so familiar with about weed: that sense of mental and physical unbinding.
You’re going to be successful, he said to her. They were walking along. She looked at him. He stopped, they stared at each other until he began to laugh.
What? he said.
She had never looked so deep in him, penetrated so far. She was searching to see if it was true. Neither he nor she had realized, until that frozen moment, that the question was so important to her; that this prediction could change her. It changed her and then, seeing how important it really was—how the insistent, timid lack of success of her mother and father had maddened her as a child and teenager—feeling all that changed her again. While they stood there. He kissed her then, couldn’t not kiss her, and he felt her body yielding toward him, and his, hardening, pressing—and then she pulled away. She shook her head and they walked on.
* * *
LATE WINTER-SPRING, UNCERTAIN weather, fast-changing sky. The stuff of five hundred bad poems and three good ones. George had been with her, she had grappled with him, enjoyed him a little too, and now he was gone. What he had been proposing—what she had let him nearly enact—was some kind of open relationship. He liked the sex, he’d said. He’d wanted points for putting it plainly. Fact was, she’d liked the sex too—goddamn him.
He’d said to her, What does it mean, you don’t want to share me? I’m not a dish of ice cream. When I’m with you, you have all of me, and when I’m not with you, you don’t. You have memory, expectation, you have your own life. It doesn’t matter if I’m in the library or playing ball or fucking someone. I’m not here then, and you’re doing what you’re doing.
The question regarding George was, and she had asked him this: When did you become such a dick?
He turned his head like a bird to look at her, face crooked, conveying something like, Really? That’s how it is? But he didn’t say those things. He was going to say something and didn’t. Then he was going to again, opened his mouth to speak, and again didn’t. Then he said, in a low voice, I don’t know.
But Anna had realized when she asked the question that his answer might well be, When you broke my heart. She didn’t accept that she had broken his heart, she believed he had looked at it on its shelf and fingered it off the edge to the floor, that he’d made a choice about his heart, in relation to her—but she was susceptible to the guilt arising from his belief that she had broken it. Or perhaps he didn’t believe that at all. Someday perhaps she would ask him.
Now, she was sitting in her room on her bed, legs crossed and head bowed low, Hejira on the turntable with its mournful overdubbed guitar and straight roads dividing the desert. Her hair hung down. She could see herself: she was watching as if from above, transom-level, in the doorway; she was a sleeping monk. Unwashed hair and unwashed feet and a faint smell of musky body—she needed a shower but to take a shower you had to love yourself, or at least like yourself a little. A man could walk through that door now. What would he look like? Tall and lean or short and thick? God, she needed to get laid. Maybe George was right. Why not? Had she not been aroused? To feel a body against hers, pushing, pounding, insistent wanting, avid for her, needing to have her, to be in her and fucking her, and at this thought she stirred. Amelia, it was just a false alarm.
It would be wrong to think she wanted love. She wanted flames. To be consumed. One of her friends, Tracy, was busy converting to Catholicism, enraptured (Anna suspected) as much by the forceful young campus priest as by notions of Trinity and sacrament and Incarnation, though Anna would not say this to her. She’d asked her, nonconfrontationally, Do you have a crush on him? and Tracy had said, No, I really admire him. Tracy was smart not to go on from there, to object too much, to overdefine. That would give it the lie. What was to be envied in Tracy’s conversion was the unifying engagement she was experiencing, of mind and spirit—the soul’s swoon and lift with the beauty of an idea, an idea you believe entirely is potent and true. Not half man, half god, Tracy had said to her in one discussion. All man and all god. Anna could sense the electricity coming off her friend’s skin. What a beautiful thing, faith and grace. But really, who could believe that shit? Just how close to the bone and the skin and the eyes and the lips you can get—and still feel so alone.
There was Recent-Alex. That’s what she called him to her friends: Recent-Alex. Recent-Alex was beautiful, he was a drummer in a jazz fusion band playing on campus and a few gigs downtown and as with all drummers it would require a dozen drumsticks and some surgical tools if you ever wanted to drive an idea into his head. He smoked weed and sat around with no shirt on, long arms topographed and sinewy as the village smithy’s and his skin tasted of salt and sweat and she could just fuck him all day, especially if she was on top. However, always a however: his mouth on her was one of the worst sexual experiences she’d ever known, slack, distracted, a wet thing without the least want in it, like a small unintelligent animal between her legs—a horror. Yet he kept doing it. The less he did, the better: with his pot and the music flowing in his head he was too calm a presence when above and fucking her—but lying there with his reliable and sizable cock pointing skyward and that beautiful chest to grab on to… just do nothing, she’d whispered to him, let me do it… Once he consented to having his hands and feet tied to the bed frame with three scarves and a pillowcase, and that was the pinnacle of her pleasure with him, he was a living cock doll. Of course it turned out that—life being so difficult and all—she couldn’t fuck him all day, the days proved too long and so did the nights and without a kit around him he was a creature of little interest. Nice enough, but not so he’d notice what you said or needed. He was Recent-Alex.
What happened to men like that? The passion when he was soloing on the drums: the sweat and the hair flying and the choreography of his arms, that lightning-fast, coordinated wildness. There he seemed to have a vision of himself against the backdrop of the world. Outside that context, even using cattle prods, you could not have elicited this wildness or purpose from him. It was clear that he wasn’t going to make it through life as a drummer, he wasn’t quite at that level of good and he didn’t seem to have the ambition to become so. Big beautiful stupid men. Like cattle in a field. They stand close together under a tree when it rains. She knew the female versions: like that but they had to be smarter, just to survive the assaults. From age ten, attracting the wrong attention, and some learned to trade it because they needed to, because they needed the affection or the protection or the affirmation or the salvation or the material reward, which is to say, finally, the money. Once they were gr
own, the more fortunate ones, the economics of their looks was turned to the capturing of the earner-husbands; many found this exciting, a fulfillment of white-lace expectations. Some knew better. Either way it turned into a job. And then the efforts as they aged to remain socially and sexually viable, the civic clubs and diet pills, the spas and seasonal wardrobe overhauls. The good-looking children. Except when they didn’t and the children weren’t and it all went to hell—that was an ugly scene. In her world growing up in Central Pennsylvania the money was disappearing not from their own accounts necessarily but from the ground beneath them, opening up social sinkholes where the underlying sense of community had been slow-burned away. The uncertainty undid some of them. And, always, alcohol took a place somewhere on the stage. Gin and vodka: these gals hardly ever went for the brown stuff. The diet pills took them up and the alcohol evened it out and the sleeping pills brought them down and after forty you could see it in their faces. She had seen them all in Hershey and later in Harrisburg, serving them at the hotel restaurant where she waitressed and hostessed for two summers and Friday and Saturday nights in the school year. These aging vixens were up against the high-energy WASPy wives who kept it together—never even close to being as erotically compelling, these women were competent, certain, and strong—frequently they were a little… boyish would be the polite term, with short haircuts and square Bermuda shorts, with pastel loafers and nicknames like Andie and Tommi and Bobbi. The kids were athletes and the husbands, not showing it much, drank a fifth a day. Andie and Tommi and Bobbi hated the former queens of lovely tits and good sex who, loosed from first marriages but still about, were a lure to their husbands. Perhaps their older sons as well. It was tennis-club Altamont.
What was she to be? (The pills and powders. The passion play. She could hardly wait for the fucking passion play.) Was she to be a poet? Fucking laugh. Suicide poet-girls with their long brown hair and big eyes and sweaters with breasts aching beneath, sexual hunger you could use to fuel a convoy of eighteen-wheelers, the real thing, nothing fake in it but always—always—misunderstood. Tide in, surf rising. Parched ribs of sand. A man and a woman sitting on a rock. She sat up on the rock. She wanted to run into the sea. The cold, cold sea. Across your upper thighs and crotch and your arms and belly the probing salt tongue of the sea. Like a stranger’s touch, full of intention. She was trembling.
Travel the breadth of those extremities, baby.
There’s comfort in melancholy. An opposite of hope that becomes hope, hope in the lack of hope, the hope that says there is no chance—no chance—so just make the best of it and carry on and maybe somehow you won’t feel so humiliated and repulsive and as if you barely existed. That would be nice, right?
I’ll walk green pastures by and by.
10
What George noticed first in the devil-owned summer of 1977, before the true depths of the heat wave, before Son of Sam, were guys on the subway platform, one or two dancing while another guy played wild beats on upturned joint-compound buckets, the dancing guys taking running starts and landing on one hand or shoulder, sometimes getting up onto their heads, using flattened cardboard boxes as matting, spinning, flipping, bending, all to the beat. The kids did breathtaking moves: you could imagine it as a perilous Olympic event. And a few times he encountered similar beats on the subway, a group of guys, with standard ’fro and one pant leg rolled, sitting across from each other maybe three on one side, four on the other, doing a kind of scat singing, made up rhythms and rhymes. Somebody keeping that new beat on the edge of the bench. He saw this three times that spring and early summer. The lyrics were always amusing but the only line that stuck with him, he would repeat it for years after, was We from the streets of Brooklyn and you know we good-lookin’.
As summer went on, the nights became darker somehow. Perhaps the financial crisis—fewer streetlights, or dimmer ones, maybe they were living in a constant brown-out no one had been informed of. Because of the heat that had come in and seemed determined to stay with them, the heat, the heat, the heat. He came out of the consciousness-obliterating helicopter-loud air-conditioning of Tom’s Restaurant early one afternoon—breakfast at one o’clock, life of leisure—and the heat hit him, or he it, as if it were a solid mass that he walked into like a garage wall. Blinding glare; no actual direct sunlight, just TV-screen white. Two bedraggled older men were arguing on Broadway’s median, moving around each other, loud and angry. What made the scene particularly galvanizing was that one of the men held a primitive-looking handgun. Four other men—colleagues in bedragglement—waited on the benches, watching, a little too close for comfort it seemed to George, but none of them was getting up to run away. The man with the gun was yelling, the other man yelling back, you couldn’t tell what—after a minute or less the angrier man, who stood farther away and was facing George, shot the other man, whose back was to George, in the leg, just shot him, pop pop: two shots. The wounded man went down yelling and screaming. And within twenty additional seconds, it couldn’t have been more, three Checker cabs pulled up, two from the uptown side of the median, one over in the downtown lanes, each with two plainclothes cops riding in front (he’d seen these cars many times before, a police strategy that seemed reasonable on its face except that no Checker cab had two white guys riding in the front seat, off-duty lights on, except the cops, so how undercover were they exactly, but here they were and a good thing. Somebody must have seen the gun and called it in. Out the cops leaped, guns aimed at the shooter. George was amazed, so many, so fast. He filed the observation that should any of the cops shoot and miss, the bullets would be sailing across the sidewalks on either side. But they didn’t have to shoot; the man gave up, they cuffed him, two of the cops working over the guy with the bullets in his leg. It amazed George to consider it, how little journalistic desire he had left—nothing seemed less appealing than the prospect of talking to these strangers about another in the city’s endless supply of moments of psychic breakdown and violence and possible death. He walked the two blocks down to 110th—he was staying in a sublet there, working fifteen hours a week as a shipping clerk, the only one, for a small European book import company run by an old German and his wife near Lincoln Center, most of their business in the Langenscheidt language dictionaries with their bright yellow covers. The rest of his time he spent reading Carlos Castaneda alternated with some Hammett and Chandler. There—that was a mix to reflect his state of semi-depression and spiritual flux. For weeks women had been avoiding him. Perhaps they could bio-sense the sluggish sperm such a man as he would put out, ambivalent and self-hating. Nights at the West End bar, at least for an hour or two, nothing; and watching old movies at the New Yorker and the Thalia. He walked downtown, slowly. The hot evening streets smelled of rotting garbage and piss. At the Thalia they had a punch card; if he went ten times, the eleventh was free.
Crazy Sorrow Page 8