They might well have been in Wilmington, Delaware, for that matter. How come you didn’t join the Navy if you, gee, don’t like the Army? He told her, in hesitant speech, of his noble brother, nobly killed in action aboard the U.S.S. Portland in the Coral Sea, and how he’d promised their mother—an invalid now—that he’d never, never … oh, he told her many things, many ingenious lovely things. He had his hand on her thigh and could feel, through her skirt, where her garter clasped her stocking. He did not tell her that he didn’t mind the Army at all, that it was a place wherein you were safe in your head, but he dutifully pushed his groin against her belly, and she smiled at him, the lights from the jukebox flashing off the lenses of her glasses. Ah, how nice it would be to fuck her, all of her, her dress, her hair, her garters, and her glasses. She said that she really had to be getting home for supper, it was really getting late. Ah, he said. OK.
Soldiers often attempt to seduce women with announcements of their imminent dispatch into the Jaws of Death. It is an old and respected con, wholly understood by both soldiers and women.
WELCOME. MEDICAL REPLACEMENT TRAINING CENTER 2ND ARMY. FORT MEADE, MARYLAND.
One of the soldiers in the saloon on that late September afternoon had his face and both arms blown off while in action with the 5th RCT on Hill 923, somewhere near Obong-ni Ridge, North Korea; another died of multiple myeloma, as a result of exposure to radiation during a nuclear exercise in White Sands, New Mexico, where he was sent, with other troops of the 2nd Army, to serve as part of a ground-forces reaction operation; the third returned to Germany, where he had been born to parents who were soon burned to crisps in an American incendiary raid in 1944; and our man, “the dancer,” after a short and unremarkable military career as a medical-aid man, moved to California, where he immediately felt, as an absolute stranger among strangers who are themselves absolute strangers among strangers, in a state not meant for human habitation, at home. One day, he saw a Jodie suit, in faded blue denim, in the window of a hip men’s boutique in San Francisco.
What about the girl in the blue dress? What was her name?
The Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) designation for Medical Aid Man is 3666. During the Korean War, their mortality rate was just slightly lower that that of second lieutenants of infantry.
Martinis are blue
HE LOOKS THROUGH THE WINDOW OF THE ground-floor sublet that she’s living in for the year. Bitter cold winds, edged and violent, crash down the street from the river. Inside, warm lights, she’s in a pale-blue knitted dress that shows her figure in softened detail. His head is partly under her skirt, his hands hold her upper thighs, she leans against a dresser and opens her legs. Flurries against the streetlamps. He opens the gate onto the small area before the apartment door, she’s in a pale-blue knitted dress in the warm room, he puts his hands on her waist, she leans against him, ah, she says. Your mouth, he says.
The martinis are blue, and so they should be, blue ruin. They’re in a bar that they like, but that nobody else does. Outside, cold, wet flowers are bright and glistening in the florist’s flat lights. He puts his hand under the table and touches her thigh, her dark eyes are glazed with gin and lust, she half-smiles.
He knocks at the door, and she opens it to the sublet, her pale-blue dress in the orange light from the shaded lamp is arresting and also familiar, a kind of blurred and shifting image, piquant. Piquant? What did you say? she says.
I’m not drunk yet, she says, and lights a cigarette. She puts her little jewel of a Dunhill lighter squarely on top of the cigarette pack. He doesn’t really remember when he first saw her, or where, but he remembers that it was sweet, sweet and what else? It was piquant, she says, you are hopeless! Pale-blue dress, her sweet warm flesh stretching the fabric, blue ruin. Men turn to look at her, secretly, offhandedly, as if trying to recall something forgotten, or they look at her and then try not to look at her: What’s the use? She crosses her legs and pulls the hem of her skirt down deftly. He lights her cigarette. Looking in your eyes is like looking at your you-know, he says. How dirty and filthy you are, she says, and now I’m drunk. The snow begins, slight, dusty, whispery, and the wind dies.
He knocks at the door and she opens it, her pale-blue knitted dress comes to mid-knee, nice dress, he says, I think I’m going to have to look right under it. I thought you had that filthy perverted gleam in your eye, she says. He wants her to take the dress off and leave it on, he wants her to be naked and half-naked, he wants, he wants, he wants. This is a really nice apartment, he says, and pretends to look carefully around. Come on and fuck me, she says, pulling her dress off over her head. What kind of a boyfriend are you?
They have a fourth martini, what the hell. Look at the snow, she says, I think we better get drunk. And go to a drunk bar, he says, a drunker bar, you know. The bartender looks at her breasts move under the knitted fabric. The place has the soft, warm glow of hope, faint hope, to be sure, but hope nonetheless. Or we can go to my place, she says, my beautiful furnished sublet, conveniently located near subway and bus stops, where you can do things to me all night long, even though you don’t really love me or even care? She’s right, but he smiles.
The pale-blue dress into which this young woman—let’s call her Margie—has been placed, probably against her better judgment, somehow reminds a musician, trudging through the snow past Margie’s ground-floor apartment, of Sonny Rollins’s supreme “Blue Seven,” which, or so the musician notes, “derives much of its uncanny beauty through the use of the Lydian scale.”
“And the Lydian scale has to do with Margie’s dress … how?”
The reader is always in my thoughts, especially when she is in the Lydian mode, which is often blue, as in knitted dress.
Oh clement, oh loving, oh sweet!
Pitie them that weepe
SHE TURNS AWAY FROM THE WINDOW THAT looks over the courtyard into which snow, the first storm of the winter, is heavily falling, then smiles at him and pulls her slip off over her head. He’s pleased to see that she’s wearing white underclothes. This would seem to be or perhaps he’d like it to be the late afternoon or early evening of their wedding day. They are well-fed and slightly drunk. There’s a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc in the small, frost-choked refrigerator and a half-quart of vodka in the cupboard. Plenty of cigarettes. Hotcha! She keeps her lingerie in an old metal breadbox, white with a motif of tiny yellow flowers, that she bought for a dime at a sidewalk sale outside the dairy-and-egg store. She walks to the window and looks at the snow falling heavily in the courtyard and he looks at her body and smiles. They’ve been in this apartment for six months, and some of their books and records and clothes and dishes have not yet been unpacked, a bad sign, perhaps, if you believe in signs. She walks toward the bathroom, her slip immaculately flowing, that’s the word, from her hand. What whiteness will you add to this whiteness, what candor? “What whiteness will you add to this whiteness, what candor?” he says, and she looks over her shoulder at him and shakes her white slip. He sits on the couch, waiting for her to finish her shower, drinking Scotch and smoking. There’s plenty of Scotch left. Once, she threw what he remembers as a pale-blue dress on the battered studio couch and pulled her slip off over her head in a perfect sexual silence. He’d never seen her even partially undressed, and now, here she was. The radio was playing softly, some WBAI Mozart chestnut, the January wind battering the drafty old frame house. She opened the lingerie box and removed white things: soft luster, lace. He sat back and watched her. Wedding bells are breaking up that old gang of mine, and so? He touched a small, pale scar on his thigh, a souvenir of a scratch her cat had given him the first night they’d slept together. Some years before, he’d had a dream in which he’d pushed a woman out of the bed and she fell on the floor, her nightgown up around her waist. “What a fucking jerk,” the woman laughed, “I might have known.” One of the cartons had the letter “K” for “kitchen” on its side, or for “strikeout.” “Strikeout?” she’d said. When he went out to buy cigare
ttes and cash his ridiculous paycheck he expected her to be asleep when he returned, but she was ironing his shirts in black cotton underpants and a torn Sarah Lawrence T-shirt. She had his worn rubber zoris on. He held up the two bottles of cheap Bordeaux he’d also bought, and she lifted the iron in a toast to penury. He would have preferred it had she been wearing the pale-blue dress that she’d worn the night they first made love in his new apartment. Or was that another night? Or was it a pale-blue blouse or slip? It’s draped carelessly over the back of a kitchen chair, and she reaches for it and says that she had better get home before the shabby cheap son of a bitch who shares the rent with her steals her television set. They spent most of the early morning lying on the couch in somebody else’s apartment, listening to unfamiliar records. “One of these days I’ll get a place,” he says. “Uh-huh,” she says. The snow falls at a sharp angle past the window and into the early morning silence of Avenue A. She keeps a change of clothes in a plastic Key Food bag. After they dress, he looks at his watch and discovers that it’s only 8:30. For some reason, this day reminds him of their wedding day. He is pleased that she’s wearing a white brassiere, and he tells her so. Actually, he says, “Hotcha! Wotta pair!” and leers at her. She’s irritated and hurt by this and they begin to quarrel and she packs her few things together and leaves. He watches her walk across the snowy park and then he opens the window and throws his wristwatch out onto the avenue, the fucking idiot. He poured her a glass of cheap Bordeaux and they ate Chinese food, smiling at each other in the new daze of new love. When he came back with the wine she was wearing white ankle-strap heels, the very shoes she’d worn the day they got married. “Aha, fuck-me shoes, she hinted,” he said. She hit him with a pillow on which was embroidered Handsome Is As Handsome Does. She sat across from him in the early September light that touched her sweet, sad face, and he began to laugh from sheerest love, O love. She sits back in the bleached-out Adirondack chair in a white T-shirt and pleated white shorts, her feet bare, and he gets up and kneels in front of her and puts his face between her thighs. She strokes his hair, soon they’ll be married, or so he thinks. He says something about it. He lifted his head to see her looking at the snow falling past the window. She stands up, her warm thighs touch his upturned face, and she pulls her white slip off over her head. She is wearing white underclothes. He watches her take a breadbox down from a closet shelf. A breadbox? He hasn’t seen a breadbox since the Depression. This was the early evening of their wedding day? Maybe. She lights a cigarette and puts the pack down on top of her pale-blue dress, thrown carelessly on the bookcase. “So what are your lewd plans for me this evening, you dirty filthy thing?” she says. O gay sweet careless love.
The congruences of life are as relentless as they are poignant. Love, O love, O careless love.
“That this man, or one of them, is pleased that this woman, or one of them, is wearing white underclothes, would seem to strongly suggest that he is easily pleased.”
I was under the impression that we were more or less done with that pale-blue dress. Not that I mind!
“A man delighted with his beloved’s dress is a man who is, one might argue, easily delighted.”
Is this woman, or women, or whatever the hell is going on here, Dolores?
“Dolores asserts herself again in this memoir, although I use the word ‘memoir’ as a figure of speech, of course.”
“Memoir” or not, Dolores and her lady friends are heartbreakers all.
Harke, all you ladies that do sleep:
the fayry queen Proserpina
Bids you awake and pitie them that weepe;
you may doe in the darke
What the day doth forbid:
feare not the dogs that barke,
Night will have all hid.
“With the golden crown, Aphrodite,
Cypri munimenta sortita est.”
“Thou with dark eyelids.”
The Christmas tree
SHE IS ON HER KNEES, NEXT TO THE Christmas tree, her forearms on the edge of the worn couch. Her posture is reverential, even pious, although her skirt is up around her waist and her panties are down to the middle of her thighs, so that her buttocks are invitingly prominent between the torn white-lace trim of her slip and the dark tops of her stockings. He fucks her slowly and with fixed determination, by the living Christ he’ll prove to her that she loves him, no matter what she thinks she feels. He knows, though, that she doesn’t love him anymore, which is why he is fucking her so seriously. It would be nice if there were some goddamn heat in the dump of an apartment! He hates his stupid life, and hates hers even more. But he’ll show the bitch what a real fuck is. It is an intensely and violently erotic moment.
The couple so flagrantly and vulgarly spied upon for the voyeuristic pleasure of the reader (who is always in my thoughts) has been married for almost eleven years.
The magnificent “Blue Seven,” by Sonny Rollins, is playing on the phonograph during what I think should be called—and why not?—this “erotic moment.”
The Christmas tree! It could well have become, had this erotic moment been turned into a story, an image, crisp with irony, yet poignant with shared memory. Perhaps the reader once engaged in lovemaking under or next to a Christmas tree, and so can relate, and relate well, to the truth of the scene.
There are very few stories that we have not heard, popular opinion notwithstanding, very few indeed.
Writing, such as it is, that doesn’t quite become story, is often described, even condemned, as self-indulgent. And so it is. And no! The meaning of “such as it is” is not clear. It seems, somehow, crisp with irony.
The reader is always in my thoughts, as I think I’ve admitted.
4th of July
THEY REMEMBERED, FOR YEARS, THE BAR becue they went to in East Orange, in somebody’s car. It was a lovely 4th of July, cool and sunny and dry, with a steady, fresh breeze off the Atlantic. In any event, that’s where death began or, perhaps, asserted itself. When questioned about it a few months later, everyone agreed, separately, that it began to become clear somewhere toward late afternoon, just before they got back in the car to return to the city. It wasn’t the day itself, certainly. The day was relaxed and cheerful, there were people everywhere, music and dancing, and no one got terribly drunk. A lot of people brought their children, as a matter of fact. It seemed to be the sort of 4th of July that is proffered as the American small-town norm, celebrant with bands and parades and picnics on the town mall or under the trees next to the Grange Hall. And yet there is no denying the fact that something happened, ribs, hot dogs, hamburgers, corn on the cob, kegs of beer, and the Stars and Stripes notwithstanding. Not even “The Washington Post March” could have overwhelmed it. There is a photograph to prove it.
Darkness and oblivion are often recognized by means of the small, tentative steps taken toward the “realm of silence,” and at the most unlikely times in the most unlikely places.
The driver of the car reportedly cried out, spitting out partly chewed kernels of sweet (butter-and-cream) corn, “Angels and ministers of grace defend us!” This should count as a rumor. Many years later, on his deathbed, he said, “Five minutes more?” as if his nurse could grant this request.
A regiment, its battalions under their snapping flags and guidons, wheeling, company by company, at the far end of a parade grounds so as to pass in review, often marches to John Philip Sousa, the “semper fidelis maniac,” as Edward Dorn calls him in one of the great poems of the century. Such a regiment on parade is something to see.
Incidentally, “Five minutes more?” is, essentially, what Dr. Faustus cried out when his time came.
John Philip Sousa knew all of Hamlet and Dr. Faustus by heart. Or so the driver of the car said.
Gallant improvisation
HE MORE OR LESS INTENDED TO MAKE A fool of himself. That’s what he wanted to do, wanted to be, a fool. He got drunk in a rather casual way, not so as to be able to make a fool of himself, but so as to be able to den
y to himself that he wanted to do this. A subtle drunk, oh yes, and a subtle fool. It might be useful to remember that the woman he called up was a woman he hadn’t seen in many years. He had, as the serviceable locution puts it, gotten over her almost immediately after she had broken off their relationship, or whatever she called it. Relationship sounds like her kind of word. He had, as a matter of fact, not even thought of her for eleven years, and here he was, in a saloon’s phone booth, calling her up. People are, for the most part, utterly absurd. This is proven over and over again.
After she realized who it was on the line, she expressed a kind of bored surprise, then an equally bored irritation, and then he confessed, lying wildly, in a kind of gallant improvisation, that he still loved her, he had always and always loved her, he was crazy abouther still, he thought of her constantly. He had, he said, built a sort of a shrine to her in his memory. That’s what he said. Oh, brother!
Her husband got on the line then and shouted at him and he surprised himself by suddenly sobbing. He hung up, got out of the booth, and sat at the bar. He’d be late for supper again, and when he got home his wife would be angry and silent and the food would be in the refrigerator already. Why go home? Maybe there was somebody else he could call. He used to know a lot of girls. How about Amelia, in the black dress, he knew her! And then there were all the other ones, the other girls he knew once.
The bartender dropped a coaster in front of him and he ordered a Fleischmann’s with beer back. The bartender paid no attention to the fact that he was still sniffling. I made some goddamn fool of myself, he said to the bartender, some goddamn fool! He banged his fist on the bar. The bartender poured a hooker of whiskey and drew a beer. You’re not gonna give me any grief, are you, champ? He shook his head. No grief, he said. He threw the whiskey down and took a sip of beer. Did you ever happen to know if a girl called Ruth ever used to come in here some time ago? he asked. Ruth? the bartender said. I don’t even know you, champ. Drink up and take a walk, ok? You’ve had plenty.
Little Casino Page 7