luv,
ben
LAND OF COTTON
Joe Doyle was born a bastard whose natural father’s name had been Lionni, or Leone. I have no idea what man owned the name Doyle. Let’s imagine his true sire to be a loudmouth who spent his days in a candy store in the Bronx, reading The Green Sheet and betting hopeless long shots. When one speaks of the People, one must remember that Joe’s father is always to be included among them. Whole novels, inexplicably, have been written exploring such characters. Perhaps these novels allow them to persist.
Along about the time that Joe decided that he would be a “writer,” his father’s name shifted in his head so that he came to think of it as Lee. In any event, he led everyone he knew to believe that he believed that the name was Lee. Ah, mystery. Why his father would have changed his name from Lee to Lionni was unexplained, but such a puzzle only served to make everything more hazily romantic. Once an aberration is seized upon, its possible variations are virtually limitless: consider advertising. Soon after this, Joe came to consider himself, I swear it, a descendant of Robert E. Lee, and the dear old shattered South, the grand old decayed plantations, the beautiful old smoldering mansions became part of his heritage. It might have been true if things had been a little this way, or a little that way, right? So Joe perhaps thought of it.
This spangled rubbish was useful to Joe’s life; with it, he could wrench his father out of roachy shotgun flats and busboy jobs in Horn and Hardart’s and fold him into pink clouds that glowed with the light of romance. He was no longer the man his mother had often bitterly and mockingly described to him, an unemployed lover in a Crawford suit-with-two-pairs-pants and Woolworth’s rose-oil pomade, shining his hair to oilcloth, but a quixotic, footloose hero whose rebel blood drove him to disappear from the verminous kitchens in which Joe had grown up. Joe, of course, had this same imaginary blood.
He kept all this glittering lost glory subtly in the background, exposing it discreetly when it could get him something, and functioned off its energy. It was indeed an engine of sorts, and did not at all interfere with his job, his social life, or his “writing.” Joe became what he called an artist—and how he loved that word; I can hear him now: “Well, as far as Flaherty being an artist … “—because to be an artist was to be the stubborn Reb in retreat. He began to write poems, actual words, count ‘em, words, on actual paper. It was “interesting,” and admitted him to a world that seemed to offer more than the world of, say, numismatics. That the poems were indeed accepted as art has little bearing on this story—although I suspect that it is not so much a story as a minor change upon a common fable. The world is filled with talented and intelligent people who produce arty bits and pieces by which other talented and intelligent people are somehow nourished; they get what they need for their ailments. Sometimes I think it is all nothing but Joes with their variants of sham honeysuckle and Alabama nights on the one hand, and on the other those who come within range of that nailed-together glamour. It is all exciting and everyone is very pleased.
Joe first met Helen Ingersoll in 1965, some five years after he manufactured his paper-magnolia legend. He and a friend, Ed Manx, had gone to a poetry reading at a grim, creaking little theater downtown, just off Second Avenue. I believe the theater is now a macrobiotic restaurant or a “head shop”—it is not my fault that the generation’s nomenclature is spectacularly ugly. The poet was a smudgy friend from the fifties who had been living in the Southwest for years and had returned for a month or so to attend to some family matter. His current poems were about freedom and adobe and white sand, mesas and mountains, in the way that Robert Frost’s poems are about America—that is, these concepts were laid on like high-gloss enamel. One can imagine the scarred little table behind which the bard sat, his can of beer and black spring binders at his elbow, reading, oddly enough, from a book of verse he had published almost ten years earlier, at a time when he had entertained a powerfully unreal conception of his gifts. He read these old poems as if they were examples of youthful aberration. Which is to say that he laughed at what he now considered to be their “boudoir sentiments”—his term. When Joe asked him about New Mexico or Colorado or some other chic wasteland, he said, “I never knew what a long line could be, baby, till I saw those mountains.” You get the idea. Joe and Ed drank from a pint of Dant that Ed had in his raincoat, their faces fixed in a blank, intense look behind which boredom crawled and scuffled. At the intermission, they went across the street to a bar and never got back to the reading.
Joe began talking to Ed about Hope, his wife, how terrific she was, how lovely, how understanding and intelligent, what a son of a bitch he had been to her, and yet, and yet, what good friends they were now that they were separated. I’m certain that he even did a few time steps to the old tune that goes, “We see more of each other than when we were together.” He could be a master of nausea without half trying. She was doing well, working as a secretary-receptionist-girl Friday in an uptown gallery devoted to the What’s Selling School. She really had great taste, Joe said; she felt useful now, truly involved with the art world she had always just touched the edges of. I can almost see Hope’s lacquered face placid among the wares on display; I can almost hear her telling some broke painter, desperate in his wrinkled tie, to bring in a selection of color slides. They drank some more, silent in the contemplation of Hope’s splendor. Then, just for the ride, and because he was a little drunk, Joe went uptown with Ed to see Helen.
She had asked Ed up to advise her on the right mat and frame for a small ink drawing that she had been given as a gift, and while Ed and she talked things over, Joe walked around the apartment, looking at her small and somewhat precious collection of pictures and books. He was, one might say, zeroing in on his intentions regarding this attractive woman. She was mature—another word that Joe liked; she was the Sarah Lawrence or Barnard alumna who had been around. Life had used her, as she had used life, and so on. Joe felt as if he were strolling into a relevant movie, all pained faces and swallowed dialogue and blurred focus. He helped himself to another vodka and caught Helen’s eye. She seemed delicately faded to him; there was something irrevocably broken about her. He slouched against the wall, gallant and aristocratic; against the tattered and streaming gray sky of his mind the Stars and Bars cracked in the wind.
On the way downtown, Ed told him that she was forty-two and undergoing chemotherapy treatments for leukemia. To Joe, this was an unexpected perfection—how could she resist, her tragedy upon her, the gift of himself that he would offer? Joe’s opinion of himself was based solidly on his being a product of that solipsistic aristocracy that clumps itself about the nucleus of art—which latter gives it breath and rationale. He was, in his sham individuality, a dime a dozen. So was Helen.
Joe didn’t know this about Helen—nor did he know it about himself, certainly. Helen, in fact, qualified for him as representative of that breeding and careless grace with which his fabulous past was suffused, and she took her place in that misty locale where Joe’s father sipped juleps and played croquet on emerald lawns, the sun dazzling off his white flannels and linen cap. There was a patina he felt he could scrape and strip off her very person and place on his own in mellow and lustrous layers. For Helen, Joe was young enough to be interesting, but not so young as to be gauche and trite in his desire. So they became lovers. I don’t know how to say this without seeming either cold or vulgar, but Helen thought of Joe as a last fling. Joe’s feelings concerning Helen were, as you will have guessed, cold and vulgar.
Concerning Helen’s past, there isn’t much to say. She had hacked and hewn out a lopsided icon that passed for taste, had achieved an arresting face, and had been twice married to vaguely creative men who were moderately successful in vaguely creative jobs—the sort of men who wore ascots and smoked little Dutch cigars. In her thirties she had painted a little and clumped through a few parts in off-off-off-Broadway theater; a modern-dance class and a poetry workshop were also buried in the sludge. Y
ou will understand that she was a female counterpart to Joe. The one element that totally differentiated her from him was the fact of her critical illness: death and disease are impenetrable masks behind which the pettiness and shabbiness of personality are absolutely obscured. That we tend to forgive or overlook the flaws of the doomed probably saves us all from total monstrosity. But it must be borne in mind, however ungenerously, that Helen was a shambles of half-baked ideas, insistent on her thin skin yet an opportunistic traitor to her husbands and children, the latter now grown into drugs and therapy, sickened by the mother who embraced the “idea” of, for instance, Mick Jagger as Prophet with a moronic fervor. Young, young, she was forever young as she slid toward her death, brandishing a copy of the Village Voice.
It is important to know that Joe thought, in the first weeks of their relationship, that it was his “art” that had seduced her; it had always been his “art” that had brought him his platoons of rutting young women—it was a subtle hook that he used to snare them and then lift their skirts. And if “art” failed, Dixie would materialize out of thin—very thin, indeed—air. When Joe discovered that this was not the case with Helen he was nonplussed, then hurt, then angered. She simply took Joe to be another charming and aesthetically intense young man—much like her husbands and previous lovers. She was right, but no one had ever before so squarely confronted Joe with the fakery of his life and its picayune products. He moved in a world of fakes like himself, so that their mutual interest lay in interdependent lying. Joe thought of himself as a “coterie” poet of carefully controlled output—and so did his friends. Now, suddenly, here was Helen, who with unfeigned equanimity treated him as the amateur dilettante—in Joe’s case the phrase is not tautological—he was and always would be. It never occurred to her that Joe thought of his fabrications as poems. One night she said a poem of his reminded her somehow of saltwater taffy. That’s not bad at all. Joe wasn’t used to this sort of comment on his work; he had never got anything like it from Hope, who thought of him as a serious and neglected artist, although she would not have recognized art if it fractured her skull.
Joe and Hope had dinner together once a week—they were civilized and understanding and good friends and so on. How they rang and rang again each boring modern change. Hope was aware that Joe and Helen were having an affair; Ed Manx had told her about Helen, and Joe had corroborated the tale—and how. In her mind it was a “friendly” affair, and somehow good for Joe: a good, mature woman to discuss art with her husband—oh, once in a while they discovered themselves in bed together, but that was almost an accident, or the price one pays for the nurture of beauty. Over her shrimp cocktail she was reliably bright and engaging. Peck and Peck all the way, with plenty of small talk about some up-to-the-minute painter “into some wild things.” Her eyes were blank with that flat stare peculiar to natives of Southern California, the ocular equivalent, one might say, of a slack mouth. She had practiced for years to achieve it, God knows why: I suspect she confused it with sang-froid. Ah, she still had something for Joe; he looked at her with false warmth and affection and she looked back, laboring to emulate his falsity. What moments divine, what rapture serene.
“It’s nice and transparent,” Helen said one night of a new poem that Joe modestly represented as a “breakthrough.” Joe had been writing for five or six years and each year had one of these breakthroughs. His poems neither changed nor improved, but there was, in his insistence on aesthetic discovery, an illusion for him of amelioration in his jottings. Joe was one of those “writers” of whom one constantly thinks as a tyro; then one day the realization that the person has been pottering around for ten years or so crystallizes. It is enough to make one a yahoo. “I mean it’s very—clear, yes, right. Transparent.” Joe, in a rage, but silent, reclining on the couch under the ink drawing whose mat and frame had brought out its weakness, allowed her to unbuckle his belt and open his trousers. It was she who was controlling him! What a bitch he thought her. He watched her face disappear in the lace of her slip, her arms above her head graceful and quick. A horny old bitch. He might as well have been a truck driver or a plumber or a goddamned teacher the way she so casually used him. A journalist or editorial assistant who wanted to write a novel! God! At that moment, he began to hate her, his spurious heritage stirring him to combat, gallant. She gently pushed him back on the couch and reached behind to unhook her brassiere. Old raunchy dumb bitch.
So Joe began to speak of her, vulgarly and openly, at the bar in which he was something of a figure. It was a mean and poisonous place of third-rate painters, hangers-on, dedicated filmgoers, and arty idiots, pots and looms in every pocket, who were just passing through. The controlled and amused voice came forth from his expertly hirsute face, his Italian leather jacket was creased—so—in soft, elegant folds. He joked of her tremendous passion for him, her raging and almost “embarrassing” sexual hungers, the luscious nightgowns and intriguing underwear she bought to excite him. It was pathetic. He felt it almost his duty. Her tears. Her moans of gratitude. Where did they think he got this leather jacket? Nothing like an old broad! He and his auditors shuffled and chuckled, a bunch of regular guys that la vie d’art would never change. His words punctuated the long tale of malice and vindictiveness and failure that the bar spun out endlessly.
As Helen got sicker, she made herself progressively more ridiculous by trying to be vivacious and girlish for Joe—who rarely went out with her anymore. She played right into the hands of his shabby stories about her, so that when they did meet someone that Joe knew, her behavior was such that Joe all but snickered and winked. He was contemptuous toward her, rude and arrogant—he assaulted her, getting even and getting even again for that “saltwater taffy,” that “transparent,” her sexual aggressiveness, the Italian leather jacket. Those ragged cavalrymen of his fantasy rode their broken nags out of the morning mists, bent on slaughter.
As it would happen, Helen, with the predictability of melodrama, fell in love with Joe. He was so delicate, so vulnerable, yet so proud. At the moment that Joe realized that, he lied that he and Hope were thinking of “trying it again together.” He was precisely if not subtly cruel.
He visited her almost daily at the hospital during her final confinement, bringing her flowers, magazines, books—once, quite unbelievably, he brought her a copy of As I Lay Dying: he had turned almost recklessly mean. What was there to lose? He occasionally held her hand and felt generous and forgiving. I like to think that Joe considered these small attentions instances of a refined sense of noblesse oblige.
He of course went to the funeral in a new midnight-blue suit: nothing could have kept him out of the first rank of mourners. What is surprising is that Hope went with him. Joe stood there in the calm morning, his face a marvel of abstraction, Hope beside him, her flat stare finding useful employment, in a strikingly severe black-and-silver dress that she had bought a month earlier for an important opening. They were so anxious for each other that they kissed and clutched and fumbled in the taxi home from Queens. Perhaps it was the first step to trying it again together.
THE DIGNITY OF LABOR
The White Shirt
Some young man, Bill will do for a name, out of the Army for three months and tinged, if you will, all right, tinged with a gloom well short of despair, got a job. This was Bill’s first job, save for six months spent as a dishwasher and three years as an infantryman, neither of which are now considered actually to be jobs, but are thought of as burdens, or perhaps misfortunes. How wise and wonderful the world has become, filled to bursting with careers!
There he was, in the basement stockroom of Art Adventures, an art-supply store in midtown Manhattan. One of the somewhat shabby and unenthusiastic of Bill’s chores was to fill exceedingly small glass jars with glaringly bright poster paints “in all popular colors,” these paints having been mixed in hundredgallon vats in Art Adventures’ laboratory, you’ll pardon the word, affix identifying labels to these filled jars, and stack them, in neatest
rows, on the steel shelves reserved for them and other sundries of the art business.
Bill’s immediate boss was an adenoidal schlepper from Ozone Park whose name was Stewie, a self-proclaimed hipster, drenched in mambo lore, who sang, hummed, and whistled, day in and day out—to employ a poster-paint phrase—“Rock Around the Clock.” Had Stewie’s name not been Stewie, it would have been Carl, Ernie, Cliffie, or Sheldon. Now you know who he is! Of course, Stewie took stern delight in telling Bill and his colleague, a Puerto Rican headbreaker, Felix, what to do and how to do it. Felix had been “given a break” and hired, freshly paroled, God only knows why, out of Coxsackie; he often quietly mused, when he and Bill took a smoke break, on the possibility of accidentally maybe stabbing Stewie to death. So the days of that sunny, crisp fall passed, a ragged dream of honest work’s rewards and the second chance.
One morning, Stewie told Bill and Felix that he wanted the jars of poster paint shelved so that the virtually unnecessary labels—which comically and redundantly described the startling red or sickly green paints within their jars as RED or green—faced forward, so that, Stewie wisely reasoned, you fuckin well know what you’re fuckin pickin when you fill a fuckin order. He was a logical sort, take him all in all. Bill suggested, gently, gently, that this seemed wasteful of time and effort, for a half-blind drunken idiot could tell the difference between colors, and in the dark, for Christ sake. But Stewie, with the sort of ravaged and tottering intelligence that might well have sent him to law school had he not been so ambitious, was not having any of this. Yizzel fuckin do what I say, he noted; or, perhaps, yizzel fuckin do it right; or yizzel fuckin well do it. Bill rejoined, weakly, that, hell, come on, there’s nobody who could mistake RED for YELLOW, etcetera. But this argument cut no ice with Stewie. Felix, attentive to this dialogue, fingered the switch-blade knife in his pocket, his eye on Stewie’s pallid neck, till the latter ended the conversation by arguing that Bill just thought he was a wise guy because he’d been in the fuckin Army. Bill fell silent, searching for the arcane meaning hidden in this observation, but gave up. What the hell. Felix, in a quiet aside, suggested to Bill that they might seriously injure Stewie’s sconce with a carelessly wielded gallon jug of India ink, the faggot punk jive motherfucker.
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