Lucinella

by Lore Segal

  Logy with beer, our eyes tending to close on us, we totter back to dinner.

  In my poem Pavlovenka will giggle: “Everybody guess what we found in the garden!” After dinner, if they’re good, she says, we’ll show them. Betterwheatling will pick up Pavlovenka’s poor word “good” and play her like a ball on his fountain of words, not unkindly, but briefly. Tiring of her simplicity he’ll turn to ask Winterneet about his publisher, and Pavlovenka, glowing from the exhilaration of being teased, will fall to the ground and say very loudly, “After dinner, everybody! Meet outside the back door. Lucinella and I will show you we’re not telling what!”

  After dinner we move into the drawing room. From the great plate window, which gives onto the terrace, which overlooks the lawn, three orange Paisley carpets, placed end to end, reach to the far side of the drawing room, where a marble fountain tinkles day and night. In this Peaceable Kingdom we six poets sit on pink velvet couches under the full-length portrait of our Edwardian patroness, who, without hint of self-consciousness or irony, had herself framed in a half ton of gold leaf. Our inappropriateness, one to another, with respect to age, fame, and excellence, charms me, and I look with an equal fondness at Winterneet in his neat shoes and banker’s blue, like a minus quantity; at Bert’s hick suit of iridescent and too-light gray; at Betterwheatling wearing his trousers like an English duke of a Sunday morning, baggy and antique; at Meyers’s mod and faggy tights, the kind tapestry courtiers wear to hunt the unicorn, outlining his handsome sex, and it seems sweet to me, and friendly, how each carries his, some more useful than others but each appropriate to himself; and Pavlovenka in her red-and-white-striped socks, her skirts above her monumental polished knees, like twin worlds; and me, trying for chic.

  In the music room someone’s put Bach on the phonograph, which, with the superfluity of beer inside me, explains this tendency to tearfulness. It’s not playing fair, it isn’t done, it isn’t classical to reach around the outside of the music into one’s heart. (That’s what I want to do in my poem.) I say, “Good night. I have to go and write a line or two so I can go to bed.”

  Here’s Betterwheatling, in the scented darkness. He says, “Walk me round the lake before I go and do another page or two of my beastly book.” Some large, feathered thing panics and flaps in the bushes. Betterwheatling turns to it and says, “Go to sleep.” The trees are dense over our heads and shut out the paler black of the sky. “Where are you, Betterwheatling?” I ask him. Betterwheatling, who’s invented himself to fit himself, wears himself like an old slipper. What’s he hiding? “What are you hiding, Betterwheatling?” I ask him if he saw J. D. Winterneet behaving like an infant who’s lost a game of dominoes. But Betterwheatling mildly declines to join in my treachery. “It was a silly review,” he says. And he refuses to be wise or tragical. “But, Betterwheatling,” I say, “you know we’re set to blow ourselves to pieces. Mankind reeks to heaven!” “We’re noisy too,” he says. I say even he and I keep our heels on the necks of the oppressed and he agrees. He says he loathes bad manners. “Our best minds,” I say, “invent the hydrogen warhead.” “And the tea cozy,” he says. I love Betterwheatling. Intelligence turns me on.

  Betterwheatling has gone to his study to write another page or two, and I am on the way to mine when Winterneet easily dissuades me with the offer of a nightcap.

  “Just one,” I say. On the stairs we meet Pavlovenka cheering up Meyers, who’s feeling low on his last night, and they come too. We pile nightcap onto nightcap.

  A knock at the door.

  “Come in,” calls Winterneet.

  Watch out, Lucinella, I think. I’m ripe for what used to be the seduction scene on the next page but one, so whom shall I bring in the door? Not Bert—we don’t really like each other that much—and not Zeus, who arrived late this afternoon. He sat beside me at dinner. He’s very nice. And a poet on top of everything. It was simpleminded of me to assume he must be simple because of his size, oh, and his beauty! I kept looking into my plate—love’s tough enough without that too. How about someone I haven’t met yet? They’re always the best kind. Already the latch clicks; the door opens.

  Betterwheatling, of course! “Finished Chapter 5,” he says. Sit beside me, Betterwheatling, I yearn. The light reflecting off my spectacles catches the light from his. Betterwheatling has come and sat beside me, on the floor, and his arm inside the pea-green sleeve of his woolen sweater raises his glass beside mine through the long, talkative night. I keep telling Betterwheatling what to include and what to leave out of this book he is doing. It’s called A Decade of Poetry. He keeps asking me if I’ve read this, or this, and I don’t care if I haven’t. I keep gesticulating hilariously. Why does he keep bothering to argue me around his little finger? Zeus came in for a drink and left. Meyers has passed out on the chaise longue and Pavlovenka went to her room an hour ago. Now Winterneet offers us the continued freedom of his study and goes next door to bed.

  Betterwheatling sees me downstairs to my door, but his legs walk away from under him, so I see him upstairs to his. We go in for a nightcap. I embrace his chest of drawers, on which he keeps his bottles. Betterwheatling’s drunken, unspectacled moonface floats laughing before me. “You want to go to bed with me,” he says. “Of course!” I say laughing. I see what he means. “But I like my wife,” says Betterwheatling, looking apprehensively into my face. I laugh out at the unlikely passage between us of these truths. (I told you that’s what turns me on.) We have sat down on chairs that precisely front each other at some distance and from here on in you are to imagine our faces naked to each other—eyes wide, our mouths open with this propensity to laughter. “It’s not your problem,” I say, and he understands that I mean my wanting. “You can have it for a present. I’m drunk!” I say. “What will I do with it?” says Betterwheatling, frowning at my ankles. He says, “I’m a sensual man, but so bloody moral!” The juxtaposition moves me: I could choose to assume Betterwheatling is the kind who keeps a wife wrapped for safety around his own fake loins, but he’s more lovable if I believe him sexy and loyal, and isn’t that my own last, best hope? Betterwheatling stands up and walks toward me with his hand out for my glass. Betterwheatling brings me my drink. He perches on the arm of my chair. “Don’t worry, Betterwheatling,” I say. “This conversation isn’t about anything except our having this conversation, don’t you know that?” “I don’t know that,” he says. Betterwheatling is sliding into the seat beside me. There’s no room for both of us to sit. His wife writes him every day and I’m sure her letters are funny. And so I know Betterwheatling and I aren’t going to make love. I have stood up. It’s good, isn’t it, to be good? Or am I the faker? I stand leaning over Betterwheatling, and I tell him everything, and the hound of heaven could not stopper up the words falling out of my open mouth.

  Betterwheatling sees me downstairs to my door, and I know it’s not my doing, only because it hadn’t occurred to me to close upon each other with a violence that knocks a “good god” out of his throat, or it might be “good grief.” His teeth are in my mouth, so I take my mouth and hide it on his chest, saying, “Jesus!” or is it “gee whiz”? I’m kissing the pea-green sweater and now it is a problem of disengagement. I’m laughing because I’m sure I’ve never said “god bless you” to anyone before. I duck out under his arms.

  Alone in my room I compose a couplet to conclude my poem with an embrace like two severed human halves yearning to grow back together. Though I can’t stop the metaphor dripping blood, I can imagine it down to a trickle. What I can not, is let it alone. It is my credo that what can be felt can be translated into words, even this vacancy with which, for an incalculable period, my mind has been gaping can be written. I’m trying to correct this extreme sideways inclination of my waist before I fall out of the chair. What I must do is lie down. I carry paper and a sharpened pencil to bed. The world folds into sleep.

  Mornings at Yaddo I wake puzzled by the disembodied choir chanting a single sustained note of plainsong. I yearn for
the resolution and open my eyes and understand that on the superhighway beyond the rose garden, past the greenhouses, on the far side of the lilac hedge thick as the walls of a medieval citadel, a diesel truck is passing Paradise. Shreds of mist cling to the lake surface; below, black shoals of fish stand in suspension. “Like the Japanese fleet after Leyte,” says Winterneet.

  Bert and I walk into breakfast at the same moment. “So,” he says. “Am I going to make it into your bed?” The back of my head knows: Betterwheatling is walking into the room. “I shouldn’t suppose so,” I say. Bert says, “No, I suppose not.” I say, “I haven’t had a chance yet to look at your manuscript.” Bert says, “You don’t have to. I don’t give a damn.”

  Betterwheatling comes and stands beside me at the sideboard, where I’m waiting for my toast to pop. He smiles with an odd black cast I have not seen in his eyes before. “You look terrible!” I say. Betterwheatling says, “The trouble with dissipation is it ruins the next morning’s work.” I say, “By the way, don’t worry, you know.” He says, “Worry about what?” And I understand that if we’re not going to be playing together, neither are we going to talk it up. “Betterwheatling, that’s not fair,” I say. “A man your size and sophistication, a New Yorker! If you’re going to be honorable, that will really turn me on.” From behind his glasses, Betterwheatling regards me with this new black smile.

  This morning everybody lingers over breakfast. We keep pouring coffee into our cold cups: no one can bear to say goodbye. “We won’t say goodbye, Meyers,” we say. “We will see you before you leave.” But when he comes down with his typewriter and bags, there’s only Betterwheatling reading The New York Times and I, taking my lunch from the shelf. A car horn bleeps. The two men shake hands. I taste the male softness of Meyers’s cheek. By the time we unembrace, he’s already grown transparent. Betterwheatling is asking me for drinks in his study at 5:15, he’ll leave a note for Winterneet and Zeus, he says, so we don’t see Meyers walk out the door, climb into his taxi, and drive off between the giant pines and around the blue spruce, where he drops out of this world. By dinnertime, they’ll have removed his chair. We won’t mention his name. Tomorrow, when they put a new poet in his room, his memory will stir and we’ll resent the new man for a night and a day—by then he will have grown into his place. In another week it will be me phoning for the cab to drive me around the giant pines, out onto the superhighway, through the village to my train. At the end of the rainbow is Grand Central Station, and by that time they will have removed my chair and be sitting down to dinner.

  Betterwheatling and I saunter along the drive together. I look down at the quarter inch of chill white morning air which he deliberately keeps between his arm and mine and understand. It is all a matter of the light. By the thunder in my pulse I know: the Muse has struck, and in the blinding shock of the illumination I see how everything fits, the application of what I know, the relevance of anything that anybody says today, tomorrow, and for days to come. And so I do not see Betterwheatling turn down the path. I go into my study and write:

  After dinner, in my poem, Pavlovenka stops the general movement into the drawing room by saying, “Aren’t we going in the garden to see the surprise?” Betterwheatling and Winterneet, who are talking, change direction and follow her out of the door, drawing Bert behind them. He keeps saying, “What is this?” Lucinella is full of foreboding. The sun’s gone in, and the mosquitoes have come out and make a straight line for the blood of the red-haired poet. Pavlovenka, distressed by the slowness of their progress through the wet evening grass, keeps saying, “Come on! We’re not telling what! Lucinella and I cleared away the leaves,” she says. “There! Put your head way in.” Winterneet and Betterwheatling duck and look in briefly at the irregular mounds of dirt, some potting shards. Only Lucinella knows: It’s a matter of the light. Bert bends, looks in, says, “Jesus H.… ” and, beating at the retinue of insects that attends his head, turns after the others, who are already walking back in the direction of the house. Betterwheatling, let me catch your eye! A man who knows a tea cozy when he sees one will understand what’s happened here. But Betterwheatling is asking Winterneet about his English publisher. Bert lifts his eyes first to the heavens, then to me, and says, “What the shit is this? I mean, what is this?”

  The sparkling scene outside my window and all persons, affections, libido, arrogance and abjection, and every credo, even the passion to be read, have folded away. The staid, middle-aged housemaid in white linens leans her ear to my door, hears a pencil moving across paper, and steals away on plimsolled feet. She will return later to make my bed.

  II

  The bell rings. Outside my door stands the man I have never met before, in a jacket and tie, skinny, glasses, with a briefcase. He says he is William.

  “Who?” I say.

  “William,” he says, “from Yaddo! I came the evening before you left, don’t you remember, we sat on the pink couch and talked about Margery Kempe?”

  “Margery who? Oh! Are you the one who got Meyers’s old room?”

  He doesn’t remember.

  “I’m sorry about all the mess and my clothes on the floor,” I say. Maybe he won’t notice my panties by his foot—and anyway, aren’t we all siblings in our underwear?

  He says he’s come down from Yaddo to research the financing of a pilgrimage and his bus doesn’t leave till midnight. He’s taking his jacket off. The back of his neck is skinny.

  “It’s just the floor scrapers coming in the morning, early,” I say. “I’ve got to clear everything away. What time is it?”

  “I will help you,” he says. He follows me into the kitchen.

  “I’m sorry about all the dishes out, I’m reorganizing my shelves from scratch … where did I put the liquor?”

  “Did you know you had to bring enough wine, cheese, and chickens to last you all the way to Jaffa, also your own frying pan?” he says, walking behind me round my narrow New York kitchen. We keep bumping and saying, “Sorry!”

  “I’m sorry I keep wobbling,” I say. “I’ve been up since seven, stopping the painter from putting burnt sienna in my white to give it body which I want pure, but he said it wouldn’t cover and besides, nobody could tell the difference, which only makes it worse!” I say in the hope of an imminent grammatical solution. I tend to chatter with people I’ve just met. “One couldn’t bear,” I add, “to wake mornings knowing there was something in one’s white!”

  “Exactly!” he says. “After Margery’s husband finally agreed to take the oath of chastity with her, God told her to wear white, quite against medieval custom for a married woman, and Margery’d had fourteen babies.” His voice echoes in my living room, bare except for the inoffensive if undistinguished rectangle of my studio couch, which will do to sleep on, till I find my true bed. I eat and write on a drawing table whose unvarnished pine and honest cranking mechanism I can respect.

  “I don’t have a chair, I’m sorry. Sit on the couch. Dump the papers on the floor. I’ll file them away.”

  “Sit here a moment,” he says, patting the bedspread beside him, but I say I like sitting on the floor. “What time is it?”

  Did I know pilgrims had to bring their own beds, he asks. “While they were laying in supplies in Venice, poor Margery got horribly on her fellowship’s nerves, sitting there in her white clothes, abstaining from meat, while they were tucking in—any reference to Christ’s passion made her roll around the floor ‘crying and roaring boisterously.’ What they wanted, in the worst way, was to lose her. Come embarkation day, they creep out of the inn, way before dawn, and bring their paraphernalia on board, and there, with her chickens and her mattress and her frying pan, on her knees, praying Jesus to forgive them, is Margery Kempe! She must be the pain in the ass in all of English literature. Mind if I get myself another drink?”

  “Me too,” I say. “One more and then I’ll start clearing away.”

  “I wish,” he says, coming back and sitting down beside me on the floor, “tha
t I were a playwright, so I could have Margery’s voice going as the curtain rises, never stopping throughout the first act, coming over the public-address system all during intermission, still yakking as she takes her final curtain call.”

  “Hey, that’s funny, William! That’s nice!” I really like that. I get up and pick my underpants, a shirt, a woolen cap, two pairs of socks off the floor. I perch on the edge of the couch. William is telling me about the time Arundel himself summoned Margery, accused of Lollardy, “for which, as you know,” he says, “you could get your ass burned at the stake, and she scolds him, if you please, because his soldiers are using dirty language in the courtyard!”

  I’ve learned how to keep my mouth shut in a curve of intelligent attention, though if I knew who Arundel was, my head, I think, would be slightly less cocked. I adjust the angle. I set my underpants, shirt, etc., back on the floor because there is no other place to put them. William has gone to get us another round of drinks. I curl on the couch, but now he sits down on the floor and tells me stories of medieval churchmen and politicos on the assumption they’re acquaintances of mine as well, which is sweet of him.

  “And Margery!” he says. “A middle-class mystic and hysteric of mediocre mind and vulgar imagination with a genuine passion for a probably nonexistent God, making lifelong public relations out of the genuine persecution suffered for his sake. Don’t you love paradox!”

  “I do!” I say. “I love it!” I’m trying to control my eyes’ tendency to pitch and roll in their sockets by focusing upon the yellow of the chevron on the ankle of William’s navy-blue sock. I lean over the couch to bend closer and closer and I know: I am in the presence of Beauty.

  William says, “My wife killed herself a year ago,” and sobs briefly, not the way I do, into myself, but with his neck stretched like a dog’s, so I slide down to the floor. My shoulder thrills at the touch of the shoulder of this man acquainted with grief, but he has pulled away and stands up. “Did I perform that little act,” he says, “to make you come and sit beside me?”