The Blue Buick
Page 10
of time. And the sun and moon will never rest
from the boring grind of dark and light:
subway tokens glittering the ground,
dogs in their habits, the hours soon or late,
nuns and assassins in their daily round.
The divorcée coming from the laundromat
knows the cycles of laundry and despair:
back then, the towels they shared, but now a basket
filled with someone else’s underwear.
Eichmann lies in bed and reads a novel;
a Holocaust survivor sets himself on fire.
The thief’s in church, the priest is in the brothel;
the sky is clear, the weatherman’s a liar.
God shakes His fists eternally to say,
we’re having more of yesterday today.
The Second Annual Wizard of Oz Reunion in Liberal, Kansas
They have come once more, the small ones.
They crowd around my mother and her friends
at the F. Nightingale Retirement Home
and sing Wizard of Oz songs like hymns
and let themselves be called “munchkins”
by the palsied, ancient ones who cling
to that memory and Dorothy taken
through the Kansas air but cannot recall
the green city or the yellow road that leads there.
Mrs. Beaudry, who owned the coffee shop,
cannot find her hands, and Mr. MacIntyre
is searching for his long-dead wife and is happy,
finally, when she calls. For these the actors
sing their tunes, and for the wheelchair aged
and the ones on metal walkers that clump
like awkward giants through the halls.
For these the rayon flowers, and the Bible
opened to a text they cannot read. For these
a trip to Oz Land, and a photo sent
with a letter in which my mother writes,
Some children came today. They seemed so grown
and fine and reminded me of you back when.
This, to a man with neither courage, brain,
nor heart to find his way back home again.
The Blue Buick
I read the Classics in an English edition; but I would also relax by unrolling a map of the sky on a big table and covering each constellation with precious stones from our coffers, marking the largest stars with the most beautiful diamonds, finishing out these designs with the most colorful gems, filling the spaces between with a stream of the most beautiful pearls from Léouba’s collection, . . . They were all beautiful! And I recited to myself that immortal, and for me unforgettable, page by Marbode on the symbolism of precious stones which I had just discovered in Le Latin mystique by Rémy de Gourmont, a gem of a book, a compilation, a translation, an anthology, which turned me upside-down and, in short, baptized me, or at the very least, converted me to Poetry, initiated me into the Word, catechized me.
—BLAISE CENDRARS, “LA CHAMBER NOIR DE L’IMAGINATION,” IN LE LOTISSEMENT DU CIEL
My imagination goes some years backward, and I remember a beautiful young girl singing at the edge of the sea in Normandy words and music of her own composition. She thought herself alone, stood barefooted between sea and sand; sang with lifted head of the civilisations that there had come and gone, ending every verse with the cry:
“O Lord, let something remain”
—WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, A VISION
A boy standing on a rig deck looks across the plains.
A woman walks from a trailer to watch the setting sun.
A man stands beside a lathe, lighting a cigar.
Imagined or remembered, a girl in Normandy
sings across a sea, that something may remain:
A blue Buick Dynaflow, sleek, fat, grand, useless
for dragging Main, gunning off the stoplight sluggish
as a cow, but on the highway light and smooth as flight,
the Louvre’s Winged Samothrace that Roy kept
a postcard of above his lathe, for he had been
to Paris, where he first met his wife, Maria.
I knew him those last years in Kansas before
they left for California, from the summer
of the last great dust storm when I crawled home from school
because I could not see the sidewalk beneath my feet,
the silence hanging, too, in air, the whole town drowning
under dust like Pompeii or Herculaneum,
and I imagined its history now left to me,
and I could tell, then, of the loneliness that fell
across the plains, across the town, looking out
on bald horizons undisturbed by tree lines,
and the gunmetal gray of winter sky brutal
in its placid, constant stare, like the hit man
in Macbeth, let it come down, and if there is an Eye
of God, the seer and the seen, it is that sky:
vast, merciless, and bored. Too bored to tell again
the old story of housewives gone mad, farmers standing
alone by the back fence of the back forty weeping
in desperation, the Mexican girl walking nude
out of a wheat field and offering herself
to an entire rig crew for a dollar each, boys
outside the Haymow Club beating each other
unconscious for nothing better to do . . .
The music: an old Reinhardt and Grappelli record
that Roy and Maria brought from Paris,
the sweet, frail voice of an unknown woman
singing “Don’t Worry ’Bout Me.” It hovers over
and around them, aurora-like, the frayed light
of a blanched photograph, it pursues them always
and everywhere, sailing down Highway 54
in that big boat under a star-strewn sky, parked
under cottonwoods along the Cimarron River,
watching a late-game home run lift into the lights,
and it was there full-volume when Roy came home
from work and they began to dance, martinis in hand,
and soon you were there in the Hot Club in Paris
rather than a tiny Airstream trailer parked
along the southern outskirts of Liberal, Kansas,
where a boy, amazed, sat at a yellow formica
breakfast table watching something that might be,
he wondered, some form, some rare, lucky version,
of human happiness.
Happiness. And surely
it was there from the beginning, she a dancer,
he a Rotary scholar from Texas escaping Cambridge
to join the excitement of Paris in the early fifties
where he knew Baldwin, even the old man Cendrars,
hung out at jazz clubs along boulevard Saint Germain,
and wrote for two years before returning home
and a season with the Class A Lubbock Hubbers.
After that, seven failed years in Hollywood
(failed, though he would quote with pride the lines he wrote
for Trumbo’s Lonely Are the Brave), then vanishing
in the oil fields of Bakersfield, trying still to write,
lugging a trailer full of books and landing, finally,
in southwest Kansas in a machine shop managed
by my father, where Roy believed that he was
on the edge of something, something rare, something more,
even, than Paris, though to my mind it was just
the northern edge of the Oklahoma Panhandle,
known as No Man’s Land in the days when horse thieves
and rustlers called it home, and what Roy found there
I still try to understand. Absence. Mystery.
Roy worshiped it, called it negative capability
and quoted Keats, said in poetry and lathework,
both arts of precision, it was what lay
beyond
the mot juste, the closest tolerance, the finest cut,
it was where it all, finally, ended.
Roy Garcia
was the only man my father hired again
after he showed up drunk. Because he’s brilliant,
the best machinist I’ve ever seen, and he had seen
a few. And he’s an educated man, he said,
with that distant, almost spiritual admiration
of someone who had never finished high school.
And he has a good excuse. He meant of course
the seizures, which came on rarely but each time
seemed to happen twice, for Roy would turn to drink—
out of shame, Maria said—and he could handle
one drink, maybe two, but the drunkenness brought on
by shame—not immediate, but lingering, a sense
of being doomed or damned, as if he blamed himself—
would cause another seizure, and Maria
and my father would have to treat him like a child:
confine him to his trailer, put him back on
Tegretol, and make him pull himself together
before he came back on the job. But with “good excuse,”
I knew my father, too, was thinking of his brother,
Mike, who had the same disease. And so he made me
Roy’s apprentice, to learn from him but also
to look out for him. Roy could tell when one
was coming on—a void, a tension, in his stomach—
and would lie down on the wooden ramp beside his lathe,
and I would shout for help, someone to keep him
from swallowing his tongue. The shame of it, she said,
but if there was shame, there was the other thing as well,
the brief spell before the fit came on that made it
all, he said, almost worthwhile: the rush of light,
his body looking down upon his other body.
At college later, reading Brutus’s line, He hath
the falling sickness, I would think of this
and wonder: the going hence, the coming hither,
all of it, a confusion and a mystery in those days.
From Roy’s Journal: The marriage of heaven and hell. If the aura is a state of grace, then what is the seizure? If in the aura I lose my body, what do I lose in the other? The old woman on the steps of St. Eustache weeping, terrified that she had lost her soul.
About one thing, though, I can be exact: that Buick,
baby blue with a white ragtop, double-wide
white sidewalls and about two tons of chrome grillwork
navigating Main Street all fat-assed, gas-guzzling,
and antienvironmental as they come. A dream,
I thought, a big blue dream that summer driving back
from Amarillo with my girl nuzzling against me
and Roy and Maria in the backseat singing
“Crazy” or “I Fall to Pieces” into the stars,
and sometimes on a familiar stretch of blacktop
with no curves or dips and a moon to light the way,
the cathedral dome of night sky turned upside-down
in the blue laminations of the hood, I would
turn off the headlights for a while and fly miles
and miles from earth, more alone and yet not alone
than I have ever been, and just as we reached home,
crossing No Man’s Land, the rim of the world would begin
to blaze, and with the rising sun we would drift slowly
back to earth, back to Kansas.
Since Paris, Roy
and Maria had been apart just once, when he ran off
to Bakersfield and she chose to stay behind, working
in L.A. with Bronislava Nijinska at her studio
in Hollywood, trying hard to breathe new life
into a ballet career that had never grown beyond
the corps of the smallest company in Paris.
Nijinska finally, of course, with a sense of guilt
almost maternal had to make Maria face
reality, but oddly—since they had grown so close,
because Maria was, as Nijinska often said,
the very echo of her famous protégée,
Maria Tallchief, because it was that tragic case
of desire, self-sacrifice, and even talent
devoured by the accident of failure—gave her
the Buick, a gift from a rich patron, as a kind
of tacit consolation. Seeing this as a sign
and wonder—the end of one life, the beginning
of another—Maria then drove straight to Roy
in Bakersfield, and they had been together
ever since. In her L.A. days, while Roy
was reviving dying screenplays, Maria—
like most dancers, I suppose—also dreamed of acting,
and sometimes we would drive to old Arkalon,
the ghost town on the Cimarron, and there among
the ruins, broken walls, and traces of foundations,
while we drank Pearl beer from quart bottles and gazed
at scraps of night sky sliding down the contours
of the car, she recited lines from parts that she
had almost won: Blanche Dubois, or Laura
from Glass Menagerie, and Roy would lean back
and look up into the trees and dark beyond, watching
smoke from his cigar rise like small dirigibles
that bore the words of a once aspiring actress
and almost famous dancer named Maria Patterson.
What did I know? I was a blank slate—a phrase,
by the way, I only learned from Roy (read Locke,
then Blake)—and all I knew is that I had to know.
To know, in a town with a one-room storefront
library where Durant’s The Story of Philosophy
was the raft I was floating on, though slowly sinking,
too, in an endless cycle of work/eat/sleep, haunting
the only bookstore within two hundred miles
in Amarillo, when I could get there, and watching
cars pass through to exotic California
with those bright orange plates that seemed to say, life
is somewhere else. Sometimes I would drive aimlessly
through No Man’s Land, and if I stopped at a little town
called Slapout and asked the lady at the Quick Stop
for the population, she would say, Seven,
but the eighth is on its way, and point to her belly.
For God’s sake.
There were, on the other hand, the movies.
I remember one, especially: The Country Girl.
Grace Kelly played the wife of an ex-Broadway star,
an aging alcoholic who’s been out of work
but straight for years. The director, William Holden,
needs him badly for his new play, and when he visits
their little drab apartment, Kelly talks across
an ironing board where clothes are piled, her graying hair
lies lank and damp against her neck, but books fill the room,
and Holden picks one up: Montaigne, I find him
too polite. Wonderful, I thought, stupidly,
but then Holden understands, these books are hers,
and he begins to see that she’s the strong one here,
the wise one, she’s the one to pull her husband up.
And I saw it, too, or rather saw Grace Kelly,
golden, rising like Athena in a field of books
to make her husband rise, reborn, as an actor
once again, and of course Holden falls in love with her,
but she in turn then falls in love with the new man
she has half-created and everyone gets exactly
what they deserve, and walking home that evening
with a half-moon lifti
ng over the machine shop
where I had just spent one more day, I thought
in my pathetic, redneck way, That must be what folks
call “art.”
Art. What did I know? Nothing, until
Roy and Maria came to town. Enough Grappelli,
she would say, and put on a symphony, Mozart,
maybe, or Dvořák’s New World, which made me
swallow hard and turn my face away because, well,
it was beautiful, a word I wasn’t easy with back then,
and because, I know now, it seemed to be about the plains
which in their endless silence had no music until
that moment, when I saw my father, his four brothers,
a scrabble farm and three-room house against an empty
landscape and barren future. Sometimes, returning from
a drive to nowhere in particular, she sang fragments
of “Caro Nome,” and I would think, how strange,
a song like that here, now, among grazing cattle,
barbed wire, mesquite, endless rows of maize,
and pumping units bobbing up and down like insane,
gigantic blackbirds. And stranger still, Roy
might speak grandly into the wind and waiting fields:
In my craft or sullen art,
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms . . .
or Keats or Shakespeare or the new one by Lowell
he loved, “The Fat Man in the Mirror,” from Werfel:
Only a fat man with his beaver on his eye
Only a fat man,
Only a fat man
Bursts the mirror. O, it is not I!
which I never understood, though I do now,
perhaps. So they were teachers, I suppose, though
messengers is more the word, messengers, travelers
from another world—as Eluard said, the world
that is inside this one—and they came bearing
the messages, the anthology, that would change
my life: St. Augustine’s Confessions, The Brothers
Karamazov, Conrad, A Little Treasury
of Modern Poetry, Gombrich’s survey, Hart Crane,
Dickinson’s Collected, Ring Lardner, Salinger,
Flannery O’Connor, a Chekhov story called
“The Student,” Winesburg, Ohio, Joyce’s “The Dead,”
a little book on Kierkegaard by Auden, “The Snows
of Kilimanjaro,” a signed copy of Baldwin’s
Go Tell It on the Mountain, and what must have been