by John Skoyles
“The pie!” she said, pointing.
“That’s a pie?” I said.
Arturo and his wife arrived. Nancy wore a pageboy like Phyllis’s. Arturo’s hair flew in many directions.
“You need a haircut, Arturo,” Phyllis said, kissing him.
“I told him to get a haircut or get a cello,” Nancy said, looking over the booze.
Harrell, thin as a string of bones, shook my hand but focused on the rug. I made martinis and poured wine while Phyllis sat with her guests and criticized Princess Nina Georgievna’s house in Wellfleet. She asked me for the bowl of peanuts on the counter. I joined them with a Scotch, and tried to draw Harrell into a conversation about Lorca, but he put me off. After drinks, Phyllis served kale soup with bread and salad. Harrell hardly touched his food and I hardly spoke, having nothing to add to the discussion of pond algae and the architecture of the new police station. I followed Phyllis’s orders and asked everyone to go back to the living room while I cleared the table and she brought pie and coffee to the guests who seemed accustomed to frugal dinners.
Harrell left, and Arturo told me in his soft voice that Harrell and Phyllis had just ended an affair, and he was jealous of me. Arturo, looking for an excuse to get to Provincetown, asked if I would like a ride. I didn’t want to impose on him so I said I didn’t need a ride. His eyes widened. He thought I was spending the night with Phyllis, and I wondered if he was right.
When we were alone, Phyllis escorted me to an armchair by the fire. My houseboy role had ended and I again became a guest. She tossed the newspaper and The Heirs of Stalin on a brocade-covered footstool and went to do the few dishes.
I leafed through her book again. “The title’s from Yevtushenko,” she said, arriving with two glasses of brandy.
“I know,” I said. “The translation I have says, Stalin’s Sperm.”
“Well, I couldn’t call it that, could I?” she said, and shifted in her chair. She placed her feet on the stool, and her dress ran up her legs.
“You read a lot of poetry?” she asked.
“That’s almost all I read,” I said.
“Do you know Leger Leger?”
I said I didn’t.
“Oh, that’s right, only his friends call him that. You probably know him as Saint John Perse. He used to visit here. He wrote wonderful poems, but some awful lines. I recall ‘the vulva smell of low waters,’ about Blackfish Creek.” She closed her eyes while she spoke, opening them at the end of each monologue. It was like watching a canoe that had capsized, and I wondered if it would ever right itself again.
She poured more brandy, and nodded to the door behind me. “That would be your room,” she said. “Take a look.” I opened the door onto a single bed, dresser and rolltop desk. The white wooden floor had been stippled with red and orange paint.
“My new book’s a memoir about my first marriage to a satyr,” she said. “But it involves all the people we knew in the sixties who have now became famous. I need fact-checking, that kind of thing.” The shutting and opening of her eyes added tension to our conversation.
“I’m sure I could do that,” I said.
“Too bad we didn’t have any time today to see if you liked the work.”
“I think I understand. Editorial and research.”
“That’s right, but more. Like helping with dinner and driving me around.” A breeze kept opening and nudging shut the bedroom door.
“I wish you had brought your pajamas,” she said. “Then tomorrow you could see if you liked the work.”
“I didn’t expect to stay,” I said.
“But you can. And tomorrow you can get an idea of what I do.”
“But even if I liked the work, I’m not sure this would be the right thing for me.”
“I think you might like it,” she said.
“Maybe another time,” I said.
“Well, down the hatch,” she said, tossing off the brandy.
Phyllis chattered nervously in the car, pointing out the houses of writers and painters I would meet. All the while, I hoped her eyes weren’t continuing to close. She dropped me at the Bull Ring, and we said good-bye like those who leave a failed date. Jeanne didn’t answer her door, so I walked downtown. I sat at the bar of the Governor Bradford, wondering about “the work,” and unhappy to be returning to my parents’ apartment, when I heard a voice from a table behind me.
“Ask me if he’s a doctor!”
I turned to see Hester, very drunk, with three women, one of them Zoe. I also recognized beautiful blonde Claire Fontaine, slayer of men and women. They were laughing. I smiled and turned back to the bar, my receding hairline in the mirror above the bottles.
“Go ahead,” Hester continued. “Ask me if he’s a doctor!”
“Is he a doctor?” someone said.
“No!” Hester said, and burst with laughter, the table joining in. A momentary silence occurred as they sipped their drinks, and Hester said again, “No, really, ask me if he’s a doctor.”
“Cut it out, Hester,” Zoe said.
“Please,” she said. “Ask me.”
“Is he a doctor?” Claire Fontaine said.
“No!” Hester yelled, and the table roared.
I faced them once more, and Hester said, “This time, I’m serious. I’ll tell you the truth. Ask me, go ahead. Ask me if he’s a doctor.”
“No way,” Claire Fontaine said, and the others muttered they were through with the game. Hester pleaded, and finally someone whispered, “Is he a doctor?”
“No!” Hester shouted. Against their wills but pushed forward by alcohol, they laughed all over again. I finished my bourbon and turned to leave, when Hester rose from the table and came toward me. Too drunk to walk, she tried to steady herself by leaning against a wooden column. She put her hands against it to move forward, but slid very gently, almost gracefully, to the floor where she came to rest on her beautiful rear end, twisting off one pink shoe.
Before I took the bus to New York, Jeanne thought it would be fun to go to the Back Room, where Creeley’s calisthenics had cleared the dance floor. As we approached, we saw the women who drank there all winter standing at the threshold while a bouncer examined their identification cards. One of the women looked at Jeanne and said, “They want three IDs.” The bouncer waved me in. I didn’t want to go to a place that didn’t want women now that the season was arriving, and neither did she.
“Maybe it’s time to leave after all,” I said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
THE KIBBUTZ—PRIVATE LIVES—UNDER A SPELL—BARKHAUSEN COMES TO P’TOWN—ELMER DUGAN—DICK’S DICK
I looked forward to Jeanne’s letters when I returned to my parents’ apartment after a day at the AP. She wrote me every week, reporting follies that took place in town, like the Fourth of July fireworks ignited despite heavy fog, unseen by twenty-five thousand tourists. Jeanne closed each letter, “That’s P’town.”
In September, Ronnie the bus driver dropped me at Jeanne’s, where Wayne answered. He didn’t care that we’d been seeing each other. Jeanne came out and walked me to the middle of the parking lot and said they had gotten together again. I had had a twinge that something might be wrong because she had always answered my letters by return mail but our correspondence lagged in the last weeks. I carried my suitcase and typewriter down Commercial Street to the Kibbutz, a two-story complex on the water where Kurt, who had taken Porter’s place as chair, had found me a one-bedroom apartment. The editor of Mad magazine owned the place and the nameplate on the doorbell said Alfred E. Neuman. It had leather furniture, a phone and a sweeping view of the bay. Moonlight jarred the water, the deck and the room. The next day I saw Porter at the Work Center. He gave me a copy of his new story, the one about Isaac Babel. He had also xeroxed Babel’s piece on Maupassant. I went to the food co-op coal bin with the perverse feeling of seeing Hester. She was weighing radishes, and blithely looked over the scale, saying, “I made use of your absence to remember you,” casting me again
under the spell of her strange locution and her white languorousness, which seemed to have progressed even further, to a translucence.
“It was only a couple of months,” I said.
“Pepe asked about you the other day. You’re the only man he liked, you should say hello.”
“I will,” I said. “I’ll call. I have a phone.”
“Let’s go now,” she said. “Zoe can finish up.” She tossed her hair, sending a waft of fragrance across the coal bin. Porter had speculated that her presence could deodorize an airplane hangar, and now the air in that room with a twenty-foot-high ceiling swirled with her dizzying aroma. She grabbed her shopping bag and took my arm.
Pepe remembered me, jumping onto my knees as Hester made grilled cheese sandwiches.
“What happened to Jeanne?” she said.
“She’s back with Wayne.”
“Really? He must have a big one.” She said she had been working as Stanley’s helper, driving him and Elise to the store, typing and cooking. As soon as she mentioned Stanley, she used her Stanley voice, and said, “He says you have ‘a detective’s perception and a surrealist’s imagination,’ but you still haven’t become yourself.” Then Hester got a raving look in her eye as she sliced tomatoes. “He never said that about me. He just finds me interesting as a woman is all.”
“If he didn’t like your work you wouldn’t be here.”
“You’re always so moral. Like Christ with a hard-on.”
“Funny you’d say that,” I said. “That’s the title of my book.”
“You think I’m strange,” she said. She moved to the refrigerator. “What did you read this summer? Have you seen the book Stanley chose for the Yale prize? It’s terrible. He should have picked me.”
“Did you submit?”
“Can’t you find a better word than submit? And besides, what difference does it make? He could have asked me!” She put a pan on the stove.
“My mother had a book of Noel Coward’s plays and I read Private Lives. One line said, ‘I think very few people are completely normal, really, deep down in their private lives . . .’ ”
Her eyes moistened. “You and your memory,” she said. “Say it again.”
I repeated the sentence. She kissed me very hard, banging her teeth against mine. “I love you,” she said. “No matter what you think of me.” She slapped the spatula against her thigh. I repeated something Stanley said—“The impossible is sometimes easier to achieve than the difficult.” And it came out of my mouth in his voice.
She said, “Want to try again? So I can forget all others?”
“Even Claire Fontaine?” I said.
“A bagatelle, ill bestowed upon me.”
When we woke toward evening, Hester said, “I don’t want to play house with you. You have to know who I am.”
“I think I know,” I said.
“But who are you? Did you fuck Phyllis Sherwood? Everyone says you did.”
“Hester, she’s sixty.”
“You might go for that.”
“Please,” I said.
“That’s the difference between us. I use my imagination off the page.” She went to the bottom drawer of her dresser, took out a shoebox marked Herman Survivors and brought it to the bed. I sat up next to her. She placed it on her lap, lifted a long curved purple dildo, and shook it at me. Another was ribbed. A long feather. Leather fly swatter. Restraints. A monster hand from a costume store. Then she dumped out the whole contents. “Mostly from Toys of Eros, and some from The Pink Pussycat,” she said. “Don’t you love the word eros? It’s so muscular and sleek.” She lifted a harness and said, “I’ll fuck you sometime. You’ll like it. I know just how. And you can use the double-headed one on me.” She rocked it through the air like a scythe.
“Let’s go downtown,” I said.
We passed the Bull Ring and I saw Jeanne’s light on. Hester noticed me looking and pulled my elbow in the other direction. She was right, I missed Jeanne, the steady one, not the one with the box of tricks. As we passed the Fo’c’sle window, I caught Vince’s eye and he made the sign of the cross. One spring night, I had drunkenly expressed my disenchantment with Hester to my drunken friends, and here I was with her to start the fall. She chose a table in the Bradford where passersby could see us from the street. It was a display Hester heightened by holding my hand as if we were about to arm wrestle.
Barkhausen knocked on my door before the opening committee meeting. I was exhausted by my night with Hester and still asleep.
“Rise and shine!” he said. “I got your address from Porter. What a view!”
I made coffee while he rattled on about the beauty of the sea and bay. He shook a paper cup of sand. “I just had to look at it closely,” he said.
“Where are you living?”
“Right on the premises. Number 11.”
“Oh yeah,” I said. “That’s a good one, with the fireplace.”
“It’s perfect. Two little bedrooms and a counter, like a bar.” He trembled in his seat and pulled scallop shells from his pocket, laying them on the table. “Do you know they sell dried sea cucumbers at Marine Specialties? I bought one, and a batfish.” He was picking up speed, his words running together and jumping off his sentences in different directions. He quoted a poem:
Cold are the crabs that crawl on yonder hills,
Colder the cucumbers that grow beneath . . .
but in his unstoppable haste, in his urgency to name the author, no period could halt his sentence and an additional noun ran right through the stop sign. He had called the poet “Edward Lear Jet.” We talked about Kim, and he said she had married the policeman and they lived in Fort Dodge. I mentioned Wendy.
“Wendy! Wendy! Oh, man, to a grad school kid she looked like a woman, married and all, but guess what? She asked me, ‘Don’t you ever get tired of reading?’ She thought poets made money, that I’d sell a book and buy a new car. She belongs with a breadwinner like Pryor. She joined him in Texas.”
“There aren’t too many women in this town,” I said.
“Porter said you have two.”
“One. I’m going out with Hester, a fellow for the past two years.”
“I’ve seen her, she’s beautiful, but there’s something weird.”
“I know, but I like even what’s weird. She’s erotic.”
“Always Eros,” he said. “Backward, it’s Sore!”
As before, Stanley embraced the fellows and Dugan smoked. There was confusion about one new fellow, Millie Harari, who had changed her name to Allison Stone. She said, “I divorced my husband in Seattle, and sold our farm. I wanted to get rid of everything.” Someone suggested her new name was too stylized, and others agreed, but Dugan calmed the room, saying he changed his name too.
“I didn’t know that, Alan. Tell us your real name,” Stanley sang.
“Elmer,” Dugan said, and everyone laughed. “And my nickname was Bud. Everyone in my family had a sexual nickname.” Kurt tried to call the meeting to order but Dugan continued, “I had an Uncle Dick and an Aunt Tittie.” When Dugan said this, the cracks and crevices on his face disappeared, and he smiled, reversing gravity. I had seen this happen on other occasions—when a group of children ran through the common room, and the time he found a piece of quartz on the dunes and said it would fracture nicely.
We made our visitors’ list: John Ashbery, Grace Paley and Tomas Tranströmer. When business was over, everyone left for the Fo’c’sle, but at Pearl Street I continued to my room because of a problem. A tiny fern protruded from the opening of my penis, like a small and irritating pine tree. I didn’t want to go to the Drop-In Center, because I knew the doctor. He wrote poetry, and I had given him and his nurse a tour of the Work Center. I made an appointment with a urologist in Brewster.
Hester didn’t answer her phone. I kept dialing. To distract myself, I read Babel’s story on Maupassant. On page two, I found an almost perfect description of Hester, “The high-breasted maid moved smoothly and majesti
cally. She had an excellent figure, was nearsighted and rather haughty. In her open gray eyes one saw a petrified lewdness.” Lewdness! Yes, lewdness, hers and mine, which is what had given me this fern! Maupassant went mad from syphilis, enduring headaches, blindness and fits of hypochondria, dying in an insane asylum eating his own shit. My hands twitched as I put down the pages. Maybe the tiny fern came from hypochondria: maybe I had, like Hester, carried my imagination off the page and onto my penis. Checking again proved it was not imagination but reality that stuck out like the last Christmas tree on the lot. Or was it the first! Suppose there were more! I kept looking and dialing.
Barkhausen came over in the evening after drinking all day with the writing committee, but he seemed sober. What McPeak said about him was true: he seemed drunk when sober and sober when drunk. “The Fo’c’sle’s a weird place, full of hangers-on and artists manqué,” he said.
“Was Vince there, and Post-Elliot?”
“Oh yeah,” he said.
“Vince is a writer,” I said.
“Yeah, books on varnish and yard sales. And the other guy doesn’t write at all.”
“You figured that out quicker than me,” I said.
Barkhausen was on his way to the breakwater to meet a few fellows to get periwinkles for dinner. He invited me, but I declined, hoping to reach Hester.
“Cook them in garlic and white wine, then pluck the snail out with a bent pin!” he said, trying to tempt me. He left, but lingered on the deck, looking at the beam from Long Point’s lighthouse. Abby Swan, who owned the windsurfing shop, came out of her apartment next door. Barkhausen struck up a conversation. I never had the nerve. Her name alone froze my heart. She was muscular and blonde and tan all winter. I met her in the building’s laundry room but she flung her underwear out of the dryer with such abandon that I decided to come back later, which she didn’t notice.