It may well be that this fool wanted to say to this woman—let’s call her Ruth, too—“Be careful! It’s my heart.”
Later that night, he thought that it would have been a good idea to remind Ruth’s loudmouth belligerent yahoo husband that love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement.
His wife wasn’t home. Good news at last! He took a Tudor beer out of the refrigerator and got the bottle of Paul Jones down from the cupboard. The prince of beers, he said. The king of whiskeys. The new taste of modern luxury, old fellow! Then he sat down in the living room and lighted a cigarette. The bird of time has but a little way to flutter, Ruth, he said.
He could call Amelia. She used to wear a pearl choker with her black dress.
It has not been explained how this drunken fool got Ruth’s number, since he did not know her married name. It has, however, been commented on by an astute copy editor that neither Ruth nor her loudmouth belligerent yahoo husband asked, “How did you get this number?”
Epistolary associates
DEAREST BELOVED,
I DREAM OF YOU OFTEN, MOST RECENTLY,of the way you looked on that night when your loose gown fell from your shoulders and you embraced me with your gentle delicate arms and kissed me, so sweetly. I can still hear your lovely whispering voice, “Dear heart, how do you like this?” That was no dream, no, I lay wide awake, but now I have little more than dreams. Everything that we had together is gone, changed, because of my gentleness perhaps, a gentleness which led, curiously, to your forsaking me. And yet I still love you, for love is love for beggars as for kings, as the saying has it, and love doesn’t change because the circumstances that surround it change, no, it is like a fixed star. That is to say, my love is as it always was, even though your love has ceased to be, but, perhaps, perhaps, not ceased forever? You are my true love, you have my heart. Wake, love, to this fact, and please give yourself a moment to listen to the cheerful birds singing, singing, caroling of love! Don’t be as unkind as man’s ingratitude, or a proof that loving is mere folly. Where, where are you? And where is your heart roaming? Please come home to me.
Every wise man, and every wise man’s son, knows that love is for now, for the present, not for the hereafter. What is to come is unknown, and still unsure. When you were just twenty, and I used to say to you, “Come and kiss me, sweet,” wherever we were, at parties, the movies, in the park or on the street, anywhere, you’d blush and laugh, but you will surely recall that you always did kiss me, when I reminded you, lightly, to be sure, that youth is a quality that will not endure. I know that you remember this. You were made all of light in those days, and the pure beams of that light scorched me, I’m afraid, not that I didn’t welcome such sweet torture. I would welcome it still if you could tell me where all those past years are, where they went, those years so full of laughter and loving that are now as lost as a falling star. I still remember you as true and fair and honest, I still see the beauty of your face, like a heavenly paradise, and stupidly, often, all too often, I think that we might meet anywhere, just down the street, in the market, even next door! I thought that our love would never die, never decay, I thought that we were made, I confess it, that we were invented by such a love, I thought that our love somehow proved that we were—I don’t quite know how to put this—mysterious. Do you know what I mean?
Oh dearest, please come back to me, or, at least, please reply to this letter. Give me a little hope, allow yourself, once again, to be desired, let me tell you, once again, how sweet and fair you are. I will love you until the world ends, until it is destroyed by flood or fire, until the whole world turns to coal! But we don’t, now, have enough world, or enough time to see how, as you once said, “things will work out.” At our backs, every minute, every second, time hurries on and in front of us is eternity, like a vast desert of loneliness. So let’s devour this time, let’s put our strength and our sweetness together, as we used to do. Please write or call. As it is, I admit, openly, that your absence has displaced my mind so that it is quite hopelessly locked into endless dreams of you.
As ever, my Beloved, good night, with a soft lullaby,
Your devoted, enamored, and faithful friend.
Dear friend:
Thanks for your recent letter. I enjoyed it, and think that the writing is wonderful, just as writing. But you don’t quite engage that crucial faculty of response in me that must be engaged in order for me to respond as I feel I should respond to wonderful writing. You seem sure of yourself, but you’re not getting it across to me, you don’t manage to “jolt” me into taking a fresh view of our relationship. You, as always, have a good, though perhaps obsessive, sense of the past, and you often manage to convey marvelous emotional effect, but in the end your recollection of what we “had” together seems, I’m afraid, rather flat. I’m sorry.
In addition, your letter seems much too long, and I could not, for the life of me, unravel its real purpose, which is, perhaps, my failing. You seem, as always, obsessed with repetitions and, to be blunt, “fancy phrases,” which are not really what I’m looking for right now, verbally speaking. Despite these objections, it’s clear that what you do well you do really well, but my question, in the last analysis, is: Why did you write this? You’ve always had a talent for conversation, the “gift of gab,” as an old, wise editor I once knew liked to say—she was a spark plug of a woman, indeed, in what was a man’s world!—but I just did not feel this letter, chatty though it is. It seems full of repetitions, and for what you have to say, or plead, the letter’s inordinate length really can’t be justified. In a word, it is much too long.
I won’t go into any unwanted song and dance concerning my view of our past relationship and your obsessions with the past and my physical person—I always told you these things, but you never listened to me. I can only say, as objectively as possible, that your letter, much like the last unfortunate months of our relationship, is neither engaging nor exhilarating. Indeed, I found myself struggling to read it all the way through, given its inordinately “poetic” language and its needless repetitions. In a way, it’s an amazing letter, because you occasionally manage to make pain and paranoia funny as hell, but, finally, I just got bored. I’m sorry. Somehow, the gist, the real “heart” of your message cannot survive the irony of its presentation, I’m sorry to say. Perhaps it’s the repetitiveness of the themes that damages your sincerity. I believe you, I do, really, when you say that you love me, but a letter that wishes to convey such a sentiment, such a passion, should do more than just say so. It should be a virtually perfect stunner. As it is, some of your phrases tickled my somewhat perverse and perhaps even “vulgar” sense of humor, an effect that I strongly doubt you intended. But then I may be wrong, since I could not figure out the purpose of your letter: Why, why did he do this? I kept asking myself, to the point of almost obsessive repetition. You are quite successful at conveying certain emotional states, if that was your intention, but you never allowed me to take a fresh “look” at our relationship, which is presented as rather flat and tame from its very inception, although I—and you—know better. You can, however, when you wish, convey strong emotional effects, repetitious though they may be.
I’m disappointed not to be coming back to you with an offer to touch base again with you. You know that I’ve always been a big “fan” of yours, even during those times when you were obsessed with lists of “fancy phrases.” I know that I was supposed to like, or at least admire, those lists, but I was never really able to get into them. They were, of course, occasionally powerful and intriguing, but they were also somewhat paranoid and compulsive. I regret to say that I am not at all comfortable at the thought of reviving our friendship, relationship, what have you. I feel, strongly, that a decision to do so would be a disservice to both of us. Your letter, despite its length and, if I may be forgiven for saying so, its obsessive repetitiousness, has its poignant beauties, but it is also dark and claustrophobic and extremely narrow in scope. I might even go so far as to s
ay that I found it full of a kind of disguised, benign unpleasantness. I don’t think, really, my old friend, that you desire a resumption of what you call “strengthened sweetness,” when such a relationship does not suit my particular needs at the present time.
As you will recall, I’m sure, I did all that I could for our relationship for nearly a decade, only to see it dwindle into a charade of unpleasantness on your part. Our separation, at the end of that experience, left much to be desired. I may be dead wrong, but the emotional effect of that separation was one that only a person with a perverse sense of the comic aspects of life would want to experience again. And that does not describe me, as you know. I did feel a twinge reading your letter, for although it is repetitiously obsessive and darkly paranoid, it is ashine, here and there, with your talent for expression and the mot juste. And although I am, more often than not, befuddled by your poetic phrases, they occasioned a number of emotionally wrenching memories. I have, as you know, great admiration for you still, and for your courage in writing. I regret to say, however, that I do not wish to see you again. I’m sorry. Please do not write again, unless you feel that you have something fresh and interesting to convey, a “new and different” offer, so to speak.
Sincerely,
Your friend
Although these stiff, even stilted and wooden letters are supposed to evoke a modern world that is at once badoom as well as baraboom, it may be noted, in objection, that among the fancy phrases sorely missed are “I’ll never smile again,” “Shoot if you must this old gray head,” and “I saw a groundhog lying dead, Dead lay he.” Devoted Friend forgot to add, or, perhaps, insert them.
“Harry, how about another coffee over here, OK?”
What if it were to be revealed that these stiff, stilted, and wooden letters were exchanged between Donald and Dolores?
“Here’s your coffee, friend,” Harry says, carefully noting that the friend so addressed is not Donald, who has long since moved out of the neighborhood—as has Dolores.
“I am putting a pound to win on Small Advance in the fourth at Gulf Stream,” Harry says. “Do you want to come in for another pound? At eight to five, it is a nice, comfortable price.”
Would Dolores of the dark eyes and deep-golden skin and the face of Tibullus’s Delia ever have written such a caitiff, whorish letter? Even to Donald?
NB: “These letters can only be thought of as the most elementary exercises in the epistolary. They are, even at best, stiff, stilted, and wooden. Their author, student though he or she may be, would do well to consider a career in handicapping, under the able tutelage of Harry the waiter.”
Clarity, neatness, and thoroughness
HE WAS RAISED A ROMAN CATHOLIC, AND while not relentlessly devout, was a good Catholic, heard mass every Sunday and on all Holy Days of Obligation, went to Confession and received the Eucharist a few times a year, regularly performed his Easter Duty, and had been an excellent catechism student as a boy, receiving a Commendation of Scholarship certificate from Monsignor Patrick J. O’Hara of Our Lady of Angels R.C. Church. He went on at least four retreats, ultimately joined the Knights of Columbus, and never, or at least rarely, took the name of the Lord in vain. At Brooklyn Technical High School, he excelled in his studies, and showed a special gift for organic chemistry. His laboratory notebooks were exemplary for their clarity, neatness, and thoroughness, and were, as a matter of fact, famous throughout the school. He was a Boy Scout, joining Troop 93 and becoming a member of the Eagle Patrol. He became, in time, a Junior Assistant Scoutmaster, then an Assistant Scoutmaster, and progressed rapidly from Tenderfoot to Eagle Scout with two Silver Palms, earning, finally, thirty-seven merit badges, a record for the troop. He was a dishwasher and then an assistant counselor and then a counselor at Ten Mile River Scout Camp, where he won the tmr badge, qualifying for additional awards in aquatics, crafts, nature studies, and woodsmanship. In his third summer at Ten Mile River, he was selected for the Order of the Arrow, a secret honor society based upon Indian lore and practices. He attended at least eight camporees and jamborees, and at the age of sixteen became an Explorer Scout. He went to Brooklyn College for a year as a full-time day student, then switched to night college because of the necessity of earning a living in order to assist his mother and father, both of whom were drunks. It took him seven years to earn a B.S. in Chemistry. He was drafted into the Army and became a Military Policeman, stationed, in that capacity, at Fort Dix, Fort Lee, and Fort Leonard Wood. After being discharged from the Army in 1955, he fell in love with a beautiful neighborhood girl, Isabelle Piro, who was beginning to develop a very successful career as a high-fashion model. She was killed in an automobile crash on the Gowanus Expressway at 4:30 on a Sunday morning, and it was generally known that she had been blind drunk, driving at well over eighty, and completely naked under her dress, with her underwear, some of it semen-stained, in her handbag. He began to drink heavily after quarreling wildly with her parents over a nonexistent letter that he insisted she’d left for him. He joined the Lions, the American Legion, the Book of the Month Club, and the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, all the while working as a laboratory assistant for IBM, a job that demanded virtually nothing from him. He then abruptly fell in love with the wife of one of his boyhood friends, and although she performed fellatio on him on an irregular basis, she would not go to bed with him, nor even consider leaving her husband. He asked her once to meet him, naked underneath her clothes but with her underwear in her handbag, and she told him that he was beginning to scare her and not to call anymore. He joined A.A., although, as a Catholic snob, he despised what he thought of as their humble, regular-guy God. He succeeded in his attempt at sobriety, but gave the organization no credit, since he never went to meetings after his fabricated tales of drunken degradation were accepted without question. As he began to dry out, he, oddly enough, was fired, and got another job, much like the first, in a lab in Long Island City. He became the Scoutmaster of a newly formed troop, and was soon adulterously involved with the absurdly thin wife of the pastor of the Norwegian Lutheran Church in whose basement the troop met every Friday evening. One night, after the boys had been dismissed and sent home, he was fucking Mrs. Ingebretsen, whom he sometimes called, with vague affection, “Bones,” on the desk in the tiny closet of a room that had been designated the “troop library,” because of the single shelf of unread books behind the desk, when one of the new members of the troop, a gawky boy who had not yet procured a uniform, opened the door, his Handbook for Boys in his hand, and a question, never asked, poised behind his open mouth. That was that, and he left the troop, began to drink again, and flirted with Zen, just before joining the War Resisters League and a pornographic video club, i.e. Pussie Video Sales. For a time, he became an obsessive masturbator, but then grew bored with orgasms. At a rally in Union Square against hate and violence, etc., he fell in love with Joan Baez, or someone who looked and sounded like her, who was singing of peace and fellowship and against most, but not all, rich people. He left the square, humming some old Pete Seeger warhorse, and composing, in his mind, the perfect letter to Miss Baez, when, just as he was completing his witty postscript, he was hit by a Checker cab at Tenth Street and Broadway, directly in front of Grace Church, and died on his way to St. Vincent’s.
Obviously missing from this “sketch” (not my word, I assure you!) is anything that this man may have said, at any time, to anybody. It would have been interesting to know, for instance, the content of his remarks, if any, to Mrs. Ingebretsen and Donald Fritjofsen (the gawky boy), on the occasion of their common embarrassment, and, too, his comments on the matter to Pastor Ingebretsen.
It is to be hoped that this man practiced safe sex in “the age of AIDS,” shared responsibility for birth control whenever he “got lucky,” eschewed cigarettes and all other tobacco products, knowing, as he did, that they are far, far deadlier than massive carpet-bombings and low-level napalm strikes, avoided red meat, salt, refined sugar, and saturated fats, and got ple
nty of exercise, despite the weeping that regularly convulsed him.
Modern Business English; The Life of the Spider; Mark, the Match Boy; Fables in Slang; Dave Dawson with the Air Corps; Penrod Jashber; Selections from the Homilies of Pastor Pietsch; The Boy Ranchers in the Desert; A Mother’s Prayer; Tom Sawyer; Best Loved Poems of the American People; The Curse of Darwin; The Ordeal of Harriet Marwood, Governess; Letters for All Occasions; A Heap o’ Livin’; A Pocket History of England; The Adventures of Ulysses.
Joan Baez, or the singer who looked like her, could not hold a candle to Isabelle Piro insofar as feminine beauty is concerned; an indication, perhaps, of this unfortunate man’s mental decline.
“Checker cabs are gone, you know? And if we play our cards right we can get rid of the age of AIDS, too, you know? If we talk to the Checker cab guys who got them out, I mean, who got rid of them, the cabs, you know what I mean?”
“Talks like a guy with a paper asshole,” Tommy Azzerini remarks.
The tomato episode
HE HAD BEEN, FOR MANY YEARS, INTRUSIVE, selfish, callous, controlling, petty, and childish, and given to prevarication, forgetfulness, and maddening self-justification. An almost intolerable clod of a husband, whose smug egotism made him a good target for his wife’s occasional, unexpected, and thoroughly justified countermeasures. One night, when his wife asked him to slice a tomato for their supper, he took a large, ripe tomato out of the refrigerator, and noticed that there was a half-tomato there as well, covered tightly in shrink wrap. He took that out, too. He had sliced this half-tomato and was beginning to slice the whole tomato, when his wife asked him why, why he’d sliced the half-tomato when she had expressly asked him to slice a tomato, a whole tomato. With the counterfeit, smug patience that often causes brutal assaults and even murders to be committed upon those who pretend its possession, he explained that he’d sliced the half-tomato and would now slice half of the whole tomato, so that they could “use up,” was his phrase, the older, so to speak, half-tomato, and save half of the newer, so to speak, whole tomato. He indeed employed the phrase, “so to speak,” in itself a maddened attacker’s defensible justification for battery. He quietly noted that if it was her heart’s desire, he would slice the entire whole tomato, should she feel that a tomato and a half would not be too much for supper, considering, no, knowing of the wonderful meal that she was certainly preparing. She asked him why he thought, why in Christ’s name did he think, what gave him the goddamned idea that she wanted him to slice the goddamned half-tomato to begin with. Huh? He said, almost bloated with reasonableness, that it seemed a perfectly reasonable “operation to perform,” yes, he said that, that is: to “use up” the half a tomato that had been in the refrigerator since the day before yesterday, losing flavor and juiciness and vitamins and fucking minerals, whatever the hell they have, to eat the thing, made perfect sense to him. Did he ever, ever, ever, she asked, stop to think that maybe she was saving that half a tomato for something, that she had plans for it? Plans?, he said. Plans? Plans? He said that if she indeed had, ah, plans, big plans for the fucking half a fucking tomato, could she not use the half-tomato that would be left after he finished slicing the whole tomato? Couldn’t she? She told him that it wasn’t his business to decide for her which half a tomato she wanted to use. To use, he said, to implement your big plans. She said that her decisions were her decisions and that if she wanted to take all the miserable goddamned tomatoes and throw them out the window, it was her business! He said that he hadn’t intended to make decisions for her, God forbid, he simply thought that blah blah and sensible blah, that he thought that it was something that she herself would do, blah. You have no idea, you have no idea, you don’t have any idea what I’d do about it, you have no idea what I’d do about anything, that’s the trouble, that’s always been the trouble, and wasn’t, she added, wasn’t it about time that he seriously started looking for a job?, with his Master’s in sociology? And did it ever occur to him while he watched the ball game that she didn’t feel like eating a stale tomato, a dried-out tomato, that she wanted a fresh tomato? Or was the ball game too intellectually demanding? She said that when she asked him to do something she wished that he would, just once, do it, and not do something else and then spend three hours trying to convince her that that’s what he thought she wanted him to do. I ask you to cut a tomato, cut a tomato! At which, with a small, hapless smile, he asked her, whining, whether she wanted him to continue slicing the whole tomato, or just half of it, and what about the sliced half-tomato now? He stood, slightly slumped, as if crushed in spirit, unmanned, impotent, a posture which his arrogant sneer belied. She said that he could do what he wanted to do, the king of the kitchen, the reader of minds, the weaver of dreams, he could slice, not slice, stick the tomatoes up his ass slice by slice, send them to the goddamned stupid millionaire bastard Pittsburgh Cubs. As for her, she didn’t want any tomatoes or any supper, for that matter! She washed and dried her hands and walked out of the kitchen. What about the chicken? he asked. What about the chicken? I said, what about the chicken? And the rice? The sliced tomato on the cutting board had the placid look of all blameless objects that have been swiftly carried across time so as to bewilder and confound.
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