So that one evening, sitting at my desk, a comforting pipe glowing near at hand, a hand that seemed to belong to someone else, as did my face, yes, some other face, or, perhaps, the face of the Other, I put the final touches on a letter to a friend, Pat Cunningham, to be precise, a woman who knew the meaning of trust, friendship, log-rolling, and the lunge for the main chance, when I noticed some impedimenta on the desk, impedimenta that I gazed at as if gazing at them for the first time. Slowly, I came to realize that if I could find a language that permitted these items representation, I could, perhaps, reach out and touch them in all their flesh and blood and flawed humanity. But I had to overcome the terror of the blank page, that famous blank page which all writers confront each and every day that they sit down to cover that blank page with love and laughter, brooding despair and so on and so forth. There is nothing as terrible as the blank page, and so I had informed Pat in my letter, a letter that lay, somewhat forgotten, near the blank page that, too, was slowly in danger of becoming somewhat forgotten. On the other hand, the blank canvas, the blank music paper, the blank notebook are all equally terrifying to the painter, the composer, the notebook-keeper, and there looms, too, the blank stage for the actor, the dancer, the monologist, the hilarious comic. Yet who was it who pointed out that “empty” in such instances would be more precise than “blank”? Good friends are rare, and even rarer are those who pop up just when things are going fairly well. You can count on it, or them.
Could a character be evoked who might evoke the items or disjecta on my desk? A simple noun for each, if properly “handled,” might do the job. And yet, what job was it that there was to be done? Lest confusion reign I decided on a handful of nouns, or, as the blank page demanded be uttered, the substantive. Should I show rather than tell, or, better yet, better yet infinitely more difficult, display rather than show? If I could succeed in displaying, or even showing the spondulicks on my desk, in context, in picture language, i.e., language that is like a picture, or pictures, lots of them, of course, colorful when needed, it goes without saying, perhaps the reader, ever hungry for actual experience, will be able to reach out and touch them in all their flesh and blood and interesting formal qualities, not to mention all the other things. I know, of course, that the awesome powers of revision may abrogate or defer or even occlude, occult, and abort such heady fantasies of literary perfection, yet I feel that I have no choice but to press on. Revision, as noted by Gide, Irving, Bly, Tough, and Lombardo is a harsh mistress, finally. Consider the work, the entire opus of the “vagabond prose master” of the Western reaches, or at least the reaches of Los Altos, the town whose motto wisely states, “Our Cars Are O.K.,” that wise yet warm penman, Wallace Stegner, of whom his various assistants have noted, as one, that even his first drafts were revisions, as were, doubtlessly, his ideas, of which there were plenty. Yet the hot, quick tears kept falling. This was what no-nonsense people called “writing, man.”
But how to handle items, memorabilia, flotsam, and the like? How to approach the unforgiving blank page with ideas about such a pasticciaccio, if you’ll pardon my French. For instance, is it enough to say “globe,” “pen,” “letters,” or is that not enough? These sound rather haphazard, at best. How about: “Lifting my eyes from the plebeian fastnesses of the worn carpet, I found myself gazing, as if for the first time, at the moon, sailing through the cloudy skies like a bark of yore, like a kind of globe, a globe that had been sketched on the heavens by a ghostly pen, one used not to the demands of art but to the humble task of writing letters.” The clock ticks quietly as the fly buzzes against the window globe, the sun warms my letters. All is but a dream.
But what wise man said that the dream is a rebus? And yet, what is the nature of a rebus? Is it flesh, blood, globe, or desk? Or all three? Joseph Cornell knew precisely what a rebus is, but who else knows, or even once knew? Must I return to the beginning, then? To the world of the empty page? Or the blank canvas? “The silent shit on my desk yearns for the dignity of representation.” Yearns and pines, its blood throbbing as it has throbbed, yes, for aeons and aeons of clanging time gone mad with despair!
I rise and head for the window, gaze out at the winking lights far below on the valley floor. The night is cool, the wind sighs quietly, I feel as if I have walked into the kitchen to avail myself of a cold beverage. I feel as if I have lit a cigarette, filling myself and the house, filling all the crystal-clear air with death! Death that asks no quarter, that laughs with the wild laughter of unbridled love, that laughs and laughs and laughs as if laughing for the first time.
A Joke
A Jewish matron on a jet from New York to Miami Beach introduces herself to her charming seat companion as Mrs. Moskowitz. After a drink and some light banter about the intrinsic problems of the aporia as it relates to cutting velvet, the charming companion comments on the clarity, brilliance, size, and cut of the enormous diamond ring on Mrs. Moskowitz’s finger. This might have been Mrs. Cohen, by the by, but that’s neither here nor there. And is that the glint of cupidity in the charming seat companion’s eye? Mrs. Moskowitz sighs and reports, in a whisper freighted with the sort of fear that suggests the ineffable rebus of life itself that the ring, despite its beauty and obvious worth, has a curse on it, the—Moskowitz curse! The Moskowitz curse? queries the charming seat companion, who has, incidentally, beautiful legs, of the kind highly prized by any number of leering men, many of whom have subjected this young woman to a male gaze, gazing and gazing at her legs as if seeing legs for the first time. Their hot, quick tears fall fast as they chide themselves for such crudity. The Moskowitz curse? the seat companion queries again, looking up quickly from her copy of Dark Corridors of Wheat. What, in heaven’s name, is the Moskowitz curse?
Mr. Moskowitz, is the reply.
Or it could be Mr. Cohen, were this another joke. And it had better come out with numbers on it. What are you selling this year, cancer? Everybody’s gotta be someplace, yingle, yingle. Max, carry me?
Maurice Bucks, the entertainment bigwig, is so rich, confides Mrs. Moskowitz, that he hires people to count the people who count his money. Ha ha. Or, perhaps, Bucks is so rich that he can find himself in a lather. Has everyone taken note of the fact that he is always immaculately dressed, even on the slopes at Moskowitz Pass? There is, too, that certain Kafkaesque something that he has about him, and even, some say, in him, like bacteria. Many are the nights when Maurice has stared at the blank walls and thought that he might be better off were he still that young actor who wanted nothing more than to direct, nothing more than to be surrounded by the sparkling conversation of the stars. Well, he often sighed.
Schultz is always dead in every joke he’s ever lost his virile member in. The charming companion considers this and blushes deeply, rummaging for her biography of Sarah Orne Jewett by Wallace Stegner, the “Prairie Edition,” of course.
“Not only is this joke anti-Semitic, misogynistic, and contributory to stereotypes about air travel, it is also, in some as-yet-undefined way, not very nice about the regular family kind of feeling right here in Miami Beach.”
Speaking of Miami Beach, I am reminded of a joke, or is it more like a story? It is hard to know what with time, plodding time, clanging outside the window as I write—yet write—what? A man, hired by a rich contractor—a friend, by the way, of Maurice’s—as a chauffeur, companion, gin-rummy partner, fellow-bettor at divers tracks, both equine and canine, strongarm, and occasional gunman, finds himself appointed, during those periods when the contractor is away on business, and by the contractor’s alcoholic wife, as a dogwalker. The boss’s wife, Handy Sarah, a lifelong admirer of diamonds and other precious gemstones, is regularly soused by noon. The dogs, two prize boxers named Scotch and Soda, sorely try this rather refined thug’s patience, for they demand to be walked at times that are highly inconvenient to his gaming instincts and erotic impulses. Speaking of the latter, he once contracted gonorrhea from a fille de joie whose stroll took in some two blocks of Collins Avenue.
Encountering the same woman the next year, he remarked, “What are you sellin’ this year, cancer?” This man’s name was Patsy Buonocore. “Looks like another eyetalian joke, with numbers on it! Some more spaghetti with meatballs, sir?”
One day, upon returning to his employer’s mansion on Biscayne Bay, Patsy, sobbing bitterly, reveals that the two dogs have drowned. “It seems that Scotch leaped into the drink to retrieve a little boy’s beloved wind chimes, their yingle-yingle poignant on the wind, and Soda, seeing that Scotch was encountering some aquatic difficulties, followed. In jig time, both were swept out to sea.” Some few months later, both dogs were fished out of a landfill, their brains scattered by .38 caliber slugs.
This is not actually a joke, but an anti-dog story, as mean-spirited as the one about the professors’ wives working in the local brothel on their husbands’ poker nights. One must admit to problems before one can be helped by those who have already admitted to problems. Look at the recovering alcoholics who can never top off a meal with cherries jubilee, rum baba, or sfogliatelle à la Proust. And yet rarely is there anything less than a wan smile and a chin up! A thousand drinks are never, ever enough, whatever that might mean. “Well, if you won’t gimme another fuckin’ drink, how about a haircut?”
Max, carry me to the bar? Who does Mrs. Moskowitz have to fuck to get out of this job?
Surely, is one of the most beautifullest rings ever found of a desk, is it not so? And no more lip about Miami Beach, all right? “I’m not certain about that jig time. What kinda phrase is that, an aporia?”
“Come see me at the Fountain Blue, dolling.”
A Tomato
Bill came out of the kitchen, an anxious look on his face.
“Say, Charlie, how about a tomato with supper? What do you say?”
I knew that when Bill mentioned supper this early in the evening—it was barely late afternoon—that he had made plans to go downtown to the Jewel Theater to moon over Dolly Rae, the strange, pretty girl who did the cleaning up after the last show. He was trying, I knew, although I wouldn’t let on that I knew, to ask her, once again, about her reasons for trying to raise the gleaming white bicycle from the bottom of the swimming pool over at the other motel in town. Dolly Rae Jewett was a determined girl, and her cooking, as the old phrase has it, had won Bill’s heart. Well, it was terrific cooking, and her guaglio, matarazzo, and other robust dishes were something to talk about indeed. Bill would have been much better off concentrating on Dolly Rae and her great food and her sweet, pretty face, and forgetting all about the gleaming white bicycle that lay so mysteriously, so silently and symbolically, at the bottom of the deep end of that damn pool.
I looked over at him, my mind moving unwillingly to a picture of the two drowned dogs that an old neighbor of mine, Mrs. Moskowitz, used to own. I was twelve at the time, and I’ll never forget those dogs being trundled home in a baby carriage, the water leaking out of its sides and bottom. It had been, that memory, a major problem for me for many years, but I’d worked my way through it with the help of a very fine and strong lay therapist, who’d made me realize that I had to admit to the problem before I could even begin to deal with it. “One drink is a lot and a thousand drinks are not too many,” she’d say, enigmatically, at the end of each informal session. And sometimes, she’d tell me of her mentor, Schultz, now dead these many years, and mourned, or so I came to understand, by scores of his students, many of them aspiring poets.
I admired Bill, but it was in his best interest, or so I felt, never to say so, at least not to him. It was better to mention my admiration for him to other people whom I didn’t admire at all, but who, or so I learned, admired Bill. He liked to repair cars and trucks and with the money he saved over and above his living expenses he planned on buying a very large, green canvas patio umbrella for his favorite table near the pool in our motel’s courtyard. “Let me tell you about another great umbrella I saw in Monkey Ward’s yesterday,” he’d chuckle.
“Tomato sounds good, Bill,” I muttered quietly, looking out at the chipped enamel table by the pool as if seeing it for the first time. “Fresh basil O.K.?” Bill nodded but it was a distracted nod. He was thinking, I knew, of Dolly Rae and the bicycle that both obsessed and, in some dark, strange way, frightened her. Then he was gone in a swirl of cigarette smoke, and I wondered how many minutes had been taken off my life this time.
Six months earlier, when I’d left school to work for a man who made authentic Shaker furniture for people who loved it for its spirit and its subtle hint of the last Shaker colony on Biscayne Bay, I’d met Bill at the Jewel, the only movie house in town. The Jewel showed the kind of offbeat films that you’d never see at the Octiplex out at the Big River Mall, and had a reputation for being cutting edge. It was run by a man called “Chet,” who made up in loud brio what he lacked in subtle verve. Bill had been carrying a bag of what turned out to be ripe tomatoes, and we struck up a conversation almost instantly, although I can’t recall a word of it. All I do know is that somehow our shared delight in tomatoes led to an arrangement whereby we moved into the Red Wagon Motel together and split all expenses. So far, it had worked out wonderfully well, but I was beginning to worry about his growing anxiety concerning Dolly Rae and the bicycle. But our first few months together were idyllic, and Bill’s pleasure in imagining the green umbrella that would highlight the pool area was my pleasure as well.
As soon as he became aware of Dolly Rae, everything began to change, subtly at first, and then, quite overtly. Dolly Rae, it turned out, not only understood more, much more about Bill’s umbrella dream than I ever could, but she had innumerable stories about bicycles and the role that they’d played in the settling—she’d called it “the gentling”—of the hard-bitten Wheat Corridor back in her home state. Her favorite bicycle color was tomato red, and when Bill discovered this, he was a goner. He’d do anything to impress Dolly Rae, and began making up stories about crawdaddies and drinking bouts and God knows what. And then, one day, Dolly Rae took him over to her motel and showed him, shimmering and blurred at the bottom of their pool, a white bicycle that seemed to glow in the water. He stood and looked at it in silence, and then, suddenly, at the instigation of her little brother, Carver, she jumped into the pool and swam to the bottom. She had her hands on the bicycle and was hauling it to the surface, but although she broke the water with it, it was impossible for her to get it out of the pool. And Bill knew, he just knew, that his help wasn’t wanted. As she relinquished her grip on what Bill had decided to call a “symbol,” and let it sink, dreamily, to the bottom, Carver whispered to Bill that she’d never get it out, she’d been trying for days, it wasn’t going to be pulled out of that darn water!
Each day, often more than once, before her stint at the Jewel or after it, Dolly Rae would plunge fiercely into the pool and wrestle with the white bicycle. And each day, Bill, sullen with despair, would ask her why she needed to do this. She would look at him coolly, the kind of look that said that she wished she was looking at him for the first time, and asked him to explain, again, what a “symbol” is. It was more and more obvious to me, if not to Bill in his agony of wonder, that life simply goes on and on until, one sad day, it stops.
Sometime after that, so Bill told me one night, looking up suddenly from a patio-furniture catalogue, Dolly Rae began calling people on the phone at random, baiting them, misrepresenting herself, telling jokes about Schultz and Moskowitz and, afterward, crying bitterly. Bill told me that he thought the calls humanized her, softened her somehow—his phrase was “gentled her,” much to my bitter amusement—but that Dolly Rae maintained that they were just as frustrating as trying to haul that bicycle out of the pool. He began to see less of her, and as he grew quieter, I noticed that he had stopped mentioning the green umbrella. It had become, at least for me, a symbol to set against the symbol that he had created for Dolly Rae.
“Be back soon?” I asked, staring into the space above the pool. He nodded, and said, “Sure, where else would I be?�
��
I smiled and made the gesture of slicing a tomato, then mimed swimming up, through dark, cold water, with a bicycle cradled in my arms, a bicycle that would not, that could not ever reveal its secrets. He laughed, ruefully, and as the sun moved behind the outer cottages, I said, quietly, “Schultz is dead.”
“And tomatoes are cheaper,” Bill replied.
* * *
NOTES
A Desk
1. The actual, whatever it may look like, does not “roar on.”
The Moon In Its Flight Page 10