by Tim Bowling
“Black magic though it is,” sighed Delmore. This time he laid his heavy paw with a sparrow-lightness on my shoulder. “It’s almost over.”
“Over?” I turned, and the driver took my motion as encouragement to continue.
“Many, many people. And I must tell you, sir, this search that you’re making – it is for love that you do this. I can tell.”
No tears came, but that welling-up feeling intensified behind my eyes, and for a myriad of reasons. Delmore’s last words had turned my body ice cold.
“This is why,” the driver went on, “I cannot charge you the fare. It would not be right. In the eyes of my god.”
Keaton’s ghost stood directly in front of the cab, not moving, not blinking, his face wrinkled and woe-papery, like my father’s. I looked again. I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t my father standing there, gazing at me with all the sorrow he did not speak in life. My father, who I loved more than any man, and whose absence hurt me just as the absence of Chelsea’s father hurt her. Different situations. But as the poet says of pain, we call it many things, but it is pain.
“Thank you,” I said quietly as I put one coffee on the dashboard and opened the door.
“Sir?”
I waited.
“I drive all over. Many hours. Night and day. If I see this yellow Pinto, I can text you and let you know.”
“No cellphone,” I said. “No car either. I wouldn’t be able to act on the information. But thank you.” Retrieving the other coffee, I stepped out of the cab.
The warmth of the day surprised me. I had almost forgotten that it was summer, that the people walking along the sidewalks wore short sleeves and light jackets, that the sunlight on their faces was the same sunlight that gave every tall sunflower its final few hours of reaching. However, I couldn’t sustain the warmth. I began to tremble, chilled right through to the bone as my sweat dried. Once I’d found a garbage can and rid myself of one of the coffees – I kept the paper bag of food, just in case my luck changed and I suddenly came upon Chelsea – I focused on Delmore. What did he mean by “It’s almost over”? In a panic, I whirled around. Where was he? Did he even follow me out of the cab? And Keaton . . . I had lost sight of him, too.
My side and chest ached more than ever. My hands shook. For a long moment, I could not see to see. I felt the bodies of people flow past me; I felt their eyes on my face; but there was only wariness and indifferent curiosity, not concern. I tried to conjure up an image of the Pinto, to believe in and commit to some sixth sense that would lead me to a happy resolution. It was the kind of absorbed longing that I hadn’t experienced since childhood, and it was strange, like flensing all the dead cells that had coalesced around the heart.
At last, I opened my eyes slowly, and the colours of life flooded in. Keaton reappeared. However, he remained firmly black and white, as did the creature with him, whose presence horrified and appalled.
Calmly squatting on the stone-faced comedian’s right shoulder, no more than ten feet away along the sidewalk, was a monkey with a quizzical, baby-faced look. I knew the expression. I had known it in life, less than an hour before. Inquisitive, searing, almost human, the eyes fluttered and took me in. A chilling breeze blew along the avenue, but it didn’t stir anything to motion. It was the draft from the door closing between one world and another. I tried not to believe what I was seeing. After all, Keaton had worked with a trained monkey before, in The Cameraman. There was no reason to identify this little primate as Chelsea’s murdered pet.
There was every reason. And all of them tore at my nerve endings. My jaw unhinged. I looked at Keaton’s unblinking face, the monkey’s blinking face and sought some difference in the emotion they levelled on me. But there was no difference. The look was pitying. And the pity had in it the coldness of art, the coldness of the ocean’s sculpting of driftwood, the wind’s long commitment to the fluting of stone. But what was being created?
I felt Delmore’s breath before I heard or saw him; a warmth touched my neck and was all the warmer for the contrast it made with the pitying looks of Keaton and Greg Arious. I turned weak in the limbs. The remaining coffee cup slipped from my hand and landed with a splat on the pavement.
“Steady, now,” Delmore said. “Almost there.”
His great bear’s face was less furred than before, the snout not as long, the eyes more human than ever. And – thank God for small mercies – the tears in them were warm with sorrow and understanding. Still, I couldn’t fend off the chill. I stood in winter while summer strolled all around me. I waited for the terrible words that Delmore had uttered in the library: “It’s death. It’s death. I can smell it.” And every cell of me cried out in protest. Not now. It’s too soon. My children. The coffee pooled like blood around my shoes. My breath came fast and heavy. From a long way off, the sound of a siren slowly, steadily increased.
I clutched at Delmore’s huge sinew-thick shoulder. I could feel the bone and the tremble deep inside it. “If she’s killed,” I gasped, “I’ll see her. Won’t I? I’m going to see her.”
The fur had almost gone from the face; it was down to heavy shadow. Fleshy jowls sagged beneath the black eyes, which grew larger, deeper, more piercing. “Look at your watch. There’s time. You can just make it.”
“Time?” I glanced at my wrist. Three forty-five. “Time for what?”
“You need to go. There’s nothing more I can do.”
“What are you talking about?” I looked back to Keaton and Greg Arious, but they had vanished. When I returned my attention to Delmore, he was also gone. Not for long, however. I saw him at the intersection fifty feet away. He waited, down on all fours, the grizzled brown of his massive bulk no longer thick. I walked towards him, my shadow long among the swirl of leaves on the cracked sidewalk. When I got to within ten feet, he vanished again, only to reappear to the north, about a block away. Desperate, my side throbbing, my face warm and prickly but my body still frozen, I followed. My shadow lengthened with each step, the first snowflakes sticking, making my progress visible behind me, though I did not turn for fear of losing sight of Delmore. Like a sunspot, he appeared and disappeared, leading me slowly, inevitably, towards the grey factory towers of the university campus. Each time he vanished, I was afraid he’d be gone for good. Or, worse, that I’d see Chelsea with him, that she’d have joined the dead troupe of vaudevillians along with Keaton and Greg Arious.
By the time I reached campus, sweating and breathless, hardly able to lift my head to the faint constellations high over the towers, I forced myself into the nearest building. Throngs of young faces drifted past, laughing, intense, unseeing. Blossoms in winter. I gazed wildly into every passing female student’s face with a mixture of fear and hope. If Chelsea were here, did it mean she was alive or dead? How could I negotiate the slippery interstice between the worlds of this hard age I had come to?
The young women did not return my searching gaze. A man of fifty, I was as invisible to them as Delmore. And yet, given the provincial statistics – no, the statistics of the race – I could have been at least one girl’s delinquent father, returned at last to help with tuition, returned like a blunt needle along the selvedge of her frayed past, perhaps only to complicate and further tear the pattern.
The wintry sun still trickled through the falling snow. Blinking the flakes off my lashes, I followed the weak light along a narrowing corridor. My shadow reached the length of it. The students vanished. Ahead of me, at the open door to a classroom, Delmore waited. He was no longer a bear, but a fifty-five-year-old, puff-faced manic-depressive in a stained and baggy brown suit. Both his parents were long dead. He had divorced three wives. His fame was old news. Beside him, incongruous as a wooden-box beehive, sat a full trash can, spilling trash like guts from beneath its crammed-on lid. The truth rushed in with the ferocity of a steam engine, and I stood shivering on the tracks.
He smiled apologetically. “I told you this wasn’t a Jimmy Stewart movie. It always happens this way.”
/> Terrified, I said, “You’re going to die, aren’t you?”
He shrugged, and his once-young, Apollo-like face regained a little of its vigour. “Sure. But it won’t kill me.”
When I didn’t laugh, he sighed, and with more tenderness than I deserved, explained. “It’s the price of admission. But don’t feel bad for me. When it happens now, I don’t lie unclaimed in a morgue for three days. Think of it. Every time I die, a poet is right there, dropping tears on my cold face. And those tears are the tickets to the next show.” He nodded at the open doorway. “You never can tell, you might have to perform for one of the kids in there someday.”
By now, I was shaking so hard that I didn’t feel I could hold myself up. I understood that what was about to happen would happen regardless of my presence. I needed to be strong, though I sensed that more than the death of Delmore Schwartz was in the air.
“Besides,” he said, “in death my death is never exactly the same.” His breathing came harder. “It changes with the circum . . . circum . . .” He reached his doughy, long-fingered hand out snail-slow to the handle of the trash can. With a great effort, he hoisted the can up in front of him and staggered forward, as he had done that last day in the Bronx in 1963, with no one looking on. His face stiffened, the eyes flared and rolled, and the trash can dropped to the ground, the lid rolling away, the garbage spilling out like the contents of some rotted horn of plenty. Everything happened slowly and in complete silence. I waited several seconds before approaching Delmore’s collapsed human form. Then I knelt beside it and gave the only benediction I could to that torn moon of a face, all that I was meant to give.
At last, when I rose, and saw my own body there beside the poet’s corpse, I backed away from it, bemusedly almost, the way the boy-projectionist steps away from his sleeping self to become a new man in a new reality, that was only and always an unreality, as life is an unreality, rolling away in the magical dark with all of us chasing, performing our own dangerous stunts. The corporeal form of all the time I had lived, the green time – vaudeville, youth, the first excited productions of the blood – lay without comfort or mourners. Nor did I seek to comfort or mourn. The death Delmore had referred to at the end was never meant to be his. Or Keaton’s. They had had their deaths.
Even so, after a brief time, when both bodies had vanished, I didn’t feel a resolution so much as a kind of chapter break in an ancient holy book, the monk nodding off in candlelight. Exhausted, in pain and bewildered with newness, I decided I could not face the young. Not now. At least not for long.
I stepped into the classroom and two dozen pairs of eyes looked up from their phones and laptops. I had no strength to lecture, but I wanted to say, “Never mind the comma splices. Listen to me. Don’t buy the lies you’ll be sold. It isn’t easy, and it was never meant to be. It’s hard and it’s dark and it’s cold. But not unredeemed by beauty. Never unredeemed.” Two dozen pairs of eyes looked up, like the eyes of old French women clacking knitting needles at the guillotine. But the execution had already occurred. Time in its black cloak was cleaning the blade. The eyes were blank in the rolled head. The young simply couldn’t live in the age of my suffering, and it wasn’t their fault; it was, in fact, their salvation. I couldn’t face their ordinary and bracing reality. I cancelled the class, claiming illness.
Now there was only one thing left to do. Outside again, in the late summer sun, I felt lighter but not much warmer. After all, life – for poets and everyone else – must be lived to the end. Delmore Schwartz, despite whatever deep knowledge his suffering had given him, had had to leave his cheap room in a fleabag hotel to take out the trash. I was lucky. Even blessed. For no such banal continuation lay ahead of me. Not yet. For most of my life, I had been a son with a son’s approach to the world. Then I had been a father to my own children. Now I had come to the border of a strange, new land, and, with the grizzle on my cheeks heavier, I had to find my way home.
Chelsea wasn’t dead. The fact washed over me like an ocean breeze as I began walking away from campus to the southwest, into the almost-continual siren cry of urban life that heralded some new crisis. She wasn’t dead, but she suffered. Greatly. My invigorated blood, I knew, had a purpose that could not exclude or forget her.
But all days must end, and I was, despite the change, in grief. The heavy bear no longer walked with me, and I missed him already, so much so that I scanned the streets as I advanced, not only for him, but for our silent companion.
Keaton did not disappoint. About a block before my destination, he appeared on the sidewalk a few yards ahead, and I fell into step behind him. Chelsea’s little monkey remained on his shoulder, looking back at me with glee, chattering though no sound could be heard. Our pace was much slower, but I suddenly realized that Keaton’s ghost and I were re-enacting the trailing scene from Sherlock Jr. Keaton didn’t look back and my concentration increased with every step. It had occurred to me, when I first caught sight of him, that I might have to witness his physical death as I had witnessed Delmore’s. The thought was disturbing. According to his biographers, Keaton’s death was a particularly restless one. In pain and confusion, he had risen from his bed and walked in endless circles, as if trying to restart the creative energy deep inside him. The vital, athletic vaudevillian did not relinquish this world of gags without a fight. Keaton had referred to Arbuckle’s rape scandal as “The Day the Laughter Stopped,” but this was the real lowering of the curtain.
That death happened in 1965, however. The year after he’d crossed Canada on a motorized railway handcart and come within a mile of my sleeping infant self. How strange that, over fifty years later, I’d be trailing him into the darkening west, the world silent all around us, black and white, and the waiting streetcar older than the demolished Pantages Theatre he’d once performed in.
Keaton climbed on and, from the doorway, turned. Except it wasn’t Keaton at all. I wondered, then, if it had ever been him. The resemblance was, as my mother said, striking. On my lips I formed the word that Oedipus formed, and Hamlet, that Chelsea formed out of tears and longing and the warm clay of first things.
I might have said Delmore or Buster. I might have spoken my own name.
I found a spot on a wicker seat right behind the conductor. The streetcar, almost empty, rattled into motion. The silent camera whirred. Offstage, the great sun applied its red powder for the final performance. All around my life and its ghosts, the clamorous age raged on, “the scrimmage of appetite everywhere,” as Delmore once wrote. The current rushed that I would soon rejoin, jumping in like Keaton at the end of Our Hospitality, all urgency and drama, to effect the rescue of others, which was the only rescue of the self. Sitting calmly as the streetcar crept out onto one of the highest streetcar crossings in the world, the river nearly two hundred feet below, I stepped out of the straitjacket of lived time, freed to the rest of my redeemable life.
— Epilogue —
I NEVER SAW Chelsea again. She didn’t attend my class that term, nor did she return to work at the New York Fries in the food court near Churchill Square. Despite my disappointment, I understood. She had revealed too much, and the pattern of self-protection she’d had to create from childhood was not completed. Even so, I searched for her with great effort, and not without a selfish motive. After all, she had the valuable mechanical bank, and I simply could not be cavalier about so many thousands of dollars. When I phoned the owner of the antiques shop that next morning to find out if Chelsea had returned to make the sale, he was dismayed.
“You do not have the bank?”
I admitted that I did not.
The silence was long and I couldn’t interpret it. But there was some amusement in the elderly voice when it resumed. “And the monkey? Do you still have that?”
I considered telling the whole truth, but the idea of making the effort fatigued me. So I just said no.
“Ah, well. You certainly ruffled the feathers of my unesteemed colleague next door. I must admit that I’ve been
enjoying his discomfort.”
The owner, with some passion, urged me to call him if the bank ever returned to me, and then our conversation was over.
My other investigations proved equally fruitless. Chelsea had vanished without a trace. I was sorry, in part because of the money, but more so because I felt that I could be a friend to her, even in some small way – not as a replacement father (I was never so foolish or vain to believe that), but just as a fellow human being who had shared an uncommon and memorable experience. Besides, the knowledge of her pain and loss continued to hurt me. Even as the weeks went by, I felt the grief of her absence, though it dulled, as all grief does. At least I had the unusual pleasure of keeping my eye out for a lemon-yellow Pinto every time I left my house, just like in American Graffiti, when Richard Dreyfuss keeps looking for Suzanne Somers behind the wheel of that white Thunderbird. It was a small pleasure, but remarkably regenerative. I consoled myself by thinking of that elusive seventies car as Chelsea’s partial payment for the mechanical bank.
About six weeks later, when the summer had also vanished into the first snowstorms of the long northern winter and I was deep into correcting run-on sentences and vague pronoun use, I checked my mailbox in the English department. What I found there surprised me at first, but then, when I thought of the tall, angular Pippi Longstocking girl with the quick laughter, I wasn’t surprised at all. I took the grimy transparent horse into my trembling left hand as I held open the scrawled letter in my right:
Hey Professor,
I guess you’re wondering why I ditched you like that. It was just something I had to do. I was pretty tore up about the monkey and I wanted to get that guy back. (I never did. I wanted to but I couldn’t.) Anyway sorry. I’ll bet you’ve been pissed about the bank. I don’t blame you. I would too. So here’s some cash. Not half but almost. I figured you would of gave that homeless dude half anyways. I sold it to a dealer on eBay for about what we were told it was worth. Drove it down to the States in person. My mom got some of the money for rent and stuff and I needed some. I hope this is OK. I dropped out of school but maybe I’ll come back. If I do I’ll for sure take your course. Your a great prof.