This work of enlarging the orb. I’ve spent my life at it.
As my farewell to the world I’ll compose an engaging little partita set in a minor mode. Composed while still scrabbing in the slow time of existence. As a tribute to those who have gone before me, to those who are no more. I’ve learned this much: to be human now is to partake of a cult existence.
Two drunks go by saying my name. Hello, you two, hello.
Don’t bother sketching in a past for me, the two-step to this final step. That’s sociology. Cause and effect. That’s all about redemption. I’ve become part of an equation that takes six billion particles to balance. In other words, I have my place. Call it betwixt. There’s a word—between two states. The twin pillars. The doorway to light guarded by two miserable hounds.
The last copies of Thunder Showers in Bangkok are stacked beside my bed. Buried treasure in a handful of words.
There’s a tour bus leaving every half hour from the station. You won’t want to miss it. Word has it that tonight the children will be violating the city. Some as young as eight, none older than fifteen. Several of their crowd are supposed to be hanged in Memorial Park. Something to do with a bushfire of bad feeling.
ALICE & STEIN
That first while Stein carried her bride around Paris in a white canvas bag. I will have the introductions slow, she said, only a few will meet her.
Those fortunate few would join them for dinner in the Louvre where a wooden table had been set up in the foyer beneath Michelangelo’s sculpture of David. Stein would heave the canvas bag onto the table. Inside was tiny Alice Toklas.
My bride, said Stein, my beautiful, beautiful bride, dark and gnarly as a walnut. She lifted Alice Toklas gently by the belly and placed her on a chair.
Don’t put me near the window, Alice screamed, you know how I hate a view!
*
Stein excelled at performing on stage. Any opportunity and she’d build a platform, often with boards and nails. She’d build one anywhere. Showing up at a former friend’s house, after years and years, she’d start building a platform in the backyard, hauling the two-byfours for the foundation herself, adding wide planks as needed. The friend’s children mistaking her for a stranger, this heavyset, short woman with the smooth, tanned skin and the hook nose, her hair cut like a man’s, like Caesar’s. No, you couldn’t call her handsome—intriguing perhaps, a little frightening. But what things she knew! What secrets she told from her stage!
*
Stein wrote for twenty minutes each day. You can write a lot of books if you do that, she said. She also said: No one cares if you don’t write.
But mostly Stein thought: About how to end the nineteenth century … How to pull the world of literature into the twentieth century … How to make a composition of language … How to make words stay on the page composed …
Everything I have done has been influenced by Cézanne and Flaubert, she said.
Tramping over the hills and roadways of southern France, wandering through the streets of Paris in search of building materials for her many platforms. Thinking: One human being is as important as another … a blade of grass has the same value as a tree … in composition, all words have the same value.
One or other of her dogs as companion, her two great Standard Poodles, Basket and Basket 2.
She said: I like a thing simple but it must be simple through complication.
She said: Biography is the true form of the twentieth century.
*
Things As They Are … Potomac … The Making of Americans …
*
Alice kept house. Her job: sweeping up the unknown. Not a leisurely sweeping, but a rushed, hurried sweeping. There’s only so much time! she’d cry, and so much dust!
The more she swept, the more she uncovered. She swept up bucketfuls of dirt, clumps of mud, dust as plentiful as sand. Once she unearthed an unpublished book of poems by Rimbaud. The first page, first sentence reading: Wants! Those gnarly fingers from Hell!
Stein dismissed the book saying: Too much passion, too many birds flying off the page.
*
One time Stein roped together some logs in a harbour, and then climbed aboard. Another platform. This was in Marseilles. When no one paid attention, she suspended a cable 100 feet from a bridge, attached the cable to the back of her suit jacket, and hung herself from the bridge like a spider. This scared Alice so much she immediately began publishing Stein’s work herself.
*
Geography and Plays … Ladies Voices … Pink Melon Joy … If You Had Three Husbands … Advertisements … Scenes, Actions and Dispositions of Relations and Positions … A Long Gay Book …
*
In the evenings Stein sat in their Paris studio beneath her portrait done by Picasso and talked to the artists, writers, and musicians who dropped by. The studio: one room in a four-room apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus. Paintings on every wall, each above another, all the way to the ceiling. Stein’s studio platform: a low chair, the fabric designed by Picasso, hand-stitched by Alice.
Everyone came by, especially writers. The French poet, Cocteau. The Americans—Fitzgerald, William Carlos Williams, Hemingway, Dos Passos. All wanted her acknowledgement, her blessing. She said to Hemingway: Remarks are not literature. Advised him to quit the newspaper business and get on with The Sun Also Rises. Later, she said he failed as a novelist because he couldn’t handle time; his training in journalism had ruined him for art.
The worst thing Stein could say to you was that she wasn’t interested in your work.
The worst thing Alice could do to you was not invite you back.
Everyone remembered Stein’s laugh: deep, rich, a contralto’s voice.
Alice never laughed; she was too busy tending guests, shopping at the market. Stein can laugh for us both, she once said in an interview: Laughing is Stein’s domain; silence and reverie are mine.
*
Tender Buttons … Susie Asado … A Movie … .A Saint In Seven … Portrait of Mabel Dodge …
*
Alice dusted the pictures. The Picassos, Matisses, Cézannes, Renoirs. The Grecos, Toulouse-Lautrecs, Daumiers, and a moderate-sized Gauguin.
She was small, exotically dark, wore gypsy rings and tapestry shawls. She was famous for her recipes; she had thousands of them—for eggs, for veal. Specializing in sauces made of butter, egg yolks, sugar, vermouth.
She said she had only met three real geniuses in her life: Picasso; Alfred North Whitehead; and Stein. She did not say how she knew they were geniuses.
The wives of geniuses, near-geniuses, and might-be-geniuses that I have sat with! she said.
In her kitchen the artists’ wives were served their tea.
Chinese tea, lightly fragranced.
*
Stein wrote in longhand. Alice organized and typed the manuscripts, first on a small French portable, then on a sturdy Smith Premier. She suppressed publication of a first novel because it was about a love affair Stein had had with another woman.
After this novel, Stein kept passion strictly out of art. It does not belong there directly, she said. But it’s there, oh yes, it’s there, early on, and later it’s there: anger, joy. She had her romantic moments. (“Lifting Belly” was a love song.) In fact, she had a “Romantic Period” during the twenties. This was after her “Spanish Period,” and before the later and more accessible “Elucidation Period.”
Alice’s periods were of a sensual nature: her “Egyptian Head Dress Period,” her “Blue Glass Bead Period,” her “White Wine With Breakfast Period.” And for the lonely twenty years she served as a widow after Stein’s death, her “Bleak Letter Writing Period.”
*
The summers in the south of France, the Paris studio. Stein’s Model T. The trips to Spain. Years of this. Stein and Alice living on an allowance from Stein’s brother Leo. Their ambulance work in France during the First World War. Their many friends amongst the GIs. Stein’s few supporters; her many platforms f
alling into disrepair. The sale of paintings to help pay the rent, publish the books.
*
Occasionally Stein would succumb to the public ridicule, the constant rejection of her work. Alice would find her, mid-afternoon, collapsed on the studio couch, lying fetally, uncomfortably on her side. For a heavy woman, looking very small.
Anything you create you want to exist, she told Alice. Being in print is how my creations live. They are trying to destroy my children.
Alice told her: There’s a vacant lot filled with wooden planks down on the rue de Christine and it’s a fine day for building a platform.
*
Summer, 1926, the south of France. Stein took Alice by the hand. Led her to a meadow where they made love. All afternoon they lay on the grass, hearing nothing but the wind, the murmur of bees, the rush of low flying birds. Alice was nervous lest they be found in so revealing a situation. But Stein was calm, smiling up at the wide blue sky, Alice’s head on her lap. My wife, Stein whispered, my beautiful, beautiful wife.
That enormous presence with the dainty hands, the small neat head. Alice called her Baby.
*
An Acquaintance With Description … Four Saints in Three Acts … Lucy Church Amiably … A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson …
*
Each October, for forty years, they celebrated their anniversary by taking tea in Montmartre. Then a stroll through the Luxembourg Gardens.
Alice always gave Stein a gift, something she had made herself—a hat, gloves, silk-lined underwear. Or a brooch. Alice was fond of amber and things caught in glass—feathers, stones, lace.
On their anniversary, Stein presented Alice with a New Work, untyped: Wars I Have Seen … Everybody’s Autobiography … A Water-fall and A Piano … Written on the sly, without Alice’s knowledge. The weeks leading up to the presentation filled with excitement, anticipation, joy.
Stein’s pet name for Alice was Pussy.
*
Grant or Rutherford B. Hayes … Page IX … The Superstitions of Fred Anneday, Annday, Anday; A Novel of Real Life … Ida … Is Dead … The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas … How Writing is Written …
*
The triumphant American tour in 1934. Stein was famous now, after publishing The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in 1932. The headlines said: GERTY GERTY STEIN IS BACK HOME HOME BACK. She’d been away for thirty years. Travelling first class with her wife, Alice, aboard the SS Champlain; they had flowers in their cabin from the Duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre, were asked to dine at the Captain’s table but declined. A small child whom they met onboard is rumoured to have said that she liked the man, but why did the lady have a moustache? In New York they found themselves bombarded by reporters and cameramen. Stein loved the attention. When a reporter asked, Miss Stein, why don’t you write the way you talk?, Stein replied, Why don’t you read the way I write?
For the trip Alice made Stein a leather case in which to carry her lecture notes. Also a copy of a hat that belonged to Louis XIII. There’s a picture of them taken on the deck of the Champlain. Stein is wearing this hat, a somewhat unremarkable hat, close fitting with a small brim. In the picture, Alice is shown carrying both hers and Stein’s handbags; she has a defiant look on her face. And, yes, you can see her moustache.
*
I Came and Here I am … Answers to the Partisan Review … The New Hope in Our “Sad Young Men” … Off We All Went to See Germany … All About Money …
*
In the mornings, if it was summer, Alice gathered strawberries for Stein’s breakfast. From the market if they were in Paris, or from the garden beside their country home. (Stein never arose before noon.)
Then, together at the breakfast table: a bowl of berries followed by eggs Benedict, fresh bread and strong coffee. Sun through the window; rays of sunlight shining on the table, on their bent heads, like a still life. A vase of flowers, the morning papers. A breeze through the open window. And Stein and Alice talking quietly, their intimacy with words. The plans for the day. A walk, perhaps, a manuscript to type.
They spoke to each other in perfect tenses, abhorring adverbs, weaving their profound repetitions, never saying the same thing twice, a living speech.
About Stein’s perfect present, her friend, Bernard Fay, had said: Her life and her work are as pleasant as a cold bath in the heat of summer.
*
Stein said: Dead is dead. Anyone is living who has not come to be dead.
Alice said: Baby was my life.
KRISTMAS KRAFT
I heard about this cute Christmas gift idea that you can make at home—your own Kraft nativity scene, colourful too, and mmmmmm yummy.
First hollow out a three pound brick of your favourite luncheon meat so that it resembles a stable and so that you, looking down through its roof, look like an angel. Then put your stable onto a cookie sheet and surround it with shredded coconut. This is the hay. Next stick four tooth picks into four wieners and stand them up. Top each wiener with a Kraft green olive. These are the cattle. For Mary, top an upright cocktail wiener with a Mini-Mallow and use strands of coconut for her hair. A hollowed out Maxi-Mallow will do for the manger and the infant Jesus will be a cocktail wiener wrapped in a Kraft Cheese single. Surround the table and the hay with Miracle Whip and shredded Velveeta Cheese.
Take a picture.
Then place your Kraft nativity scene in a three hundred and seventy-five degree oven for forty-five minutes. Serve when friends drop over on Boxing Day or use as a festive centrepiece, a Merry Christmas gift from Mom in the kitchen, that happy lady, that wise shopper.
ON HOLIDAY WITH GIANTS
Our children are larger than us. They carry us about on their huge backs like packsacks, you on the boy, I on the girl. Riding them through the city streets in search of playmates it’s evident that other parents are being carried about in a similar way; some are even slung on their children’s hips like bags of groceries, some ride anxiously on fat shoulders. Then we are set down in designated areas for drink and conversation, dozens of parents gathered together for worried viewing of the park across the way; the children are playing their fearsome games there with baseballs the size of pumpkins, and bats sturdy enough to support a house. Grandparents, no bigger than dolls, sit amongst us nodding quietly to one another: Ah, the wisdom of the world!
At night it’s back to the hotel room. You and I in a corner of the room sharing a single mattress on the floor. The children each with a king-sized bed arranged before the TV set where they watch game shows and eat peanuts—the shells rising in mountains from the floor. The room growing smaller by the minute. The children growing larger and larger.
During the night the room heats up like an incubator. But the children don’t notice. They sleep with massive fists thrust in their pink gaping mouths. When our daughter laughs and tosses in her sleep her roundness bruises the hotel walls. At three A.M. our son cries out in a man’s voice: Barricade the door, the troops are coming! His size twelve feet flailing against the hotel quilt.
We, on the floor, sweat and lose moisture, shrivel a little more, dry out. Our lotions of little help. Our lovemaking of little help. We keep reducing in volume. Peanut shells spill onto our mattress. On the way to the bathroom we wade through a clutter of pop cans and pizza cartons, track shoes, comics.
Regarding these sleeping giants, we realize it’s too late not to have had them. The die has been cast. Inexplicably, our pride in them remains.
GREEN PLASTIC BUDDHA
How to keep going considering the arbitrary nature of the world. That’s my problem. I look for signs. Yesterday I found a pen on Beacon Avenue outside Cornish’s Book and Stationery. A white Bic pen taped over with Dennison Pres-A-Ply. The writing on it said, “My Science Project Sucks Shit.” Surely, a message from the spheres.
I’m always bargaining with chance. It’s an addiction like teenage masturbation, you’re always promising yourself that this is the last time. If I empty the sink of water before the k
ettle boils … If I make it to the stop sign before that man crosses the street … Grovelling for trivial favours. I can’t help fiddling with the inevitable.
That time I traded Christmas crackers with my aunt, it was a mix-up, she sat at my place so I sat at hers. Then we opened the crackers. She got the skull and crossbones key chain, I got the green plastic Buddha, though both our paper hats were blue. Eight months later she died. It didn’t matter that she was an old woman. What mattered was that she got the sign, not me.
Today we talked about renewing the mortgage on the house and you said it depresses you to think of a twenty-five year amortization rate because in twenty-five years you’ll be dead. You’re sure of it while with each birthday I’ve come to place my age at exactly half of what I’ll be when I die and I keep on dying older and older. When I wait for our daughter after school I count the seconds until I see her come out of the portable. I make myself count slowly, calculating how many years I’ve got left. If it’s a good day I make it to forty-six but most days I cheat, pretend I haven’t seen her running behind a group of kids at count fifteen or twenty-three. Eternity is not something I’m after.
I use the Bic pen I found on Beacon Avenue to do accounting. It’s not by chance that when I’m not working with words, I work with numbers. There’s something solemn about movement in a closed system. Those rows and columns of quiet black numbers have a beauty all their own. I’m always surprised at which numbers dominate the day. Sometimes it’s fours and sixes, sometimes it’s eights, nines and twos, running like pure, emotionless currents through the page. Each story, each piece of fiction I write is an attempt to defer eternity and we all know what eternity is: it’s the silence beyond time, it’s that place where we have nothing to cling to.
Down the Road to Eternity Page 8