Through a Glass Darkly

by Hugh Fox

  Silence, then once voice from up front.

  “Do you really think they’re gone?” David Mitalmann, lawyer, very successful, loaded, “I can’t believe they got everyone else but us.”

  “Maybe some left. I was out,” confessed Joshua.

  “So was I. Like sleeping during takeoff. Everyone else a nervous wreck, me always out.”

  “What were they all about anyhow?”

  Abraham suddenly very awake.

  “Yama, the Yama tribe, but they shouldn’t be here but close to Lake Titicaca in Bolivia, you know, Tiawanaku, the Home of the Gods,which is where we should have gotten our territory in the first place....”

  “What’s all that about, ‘the ‘home of the gods?” One God! Adonai! Mount Sinai....”

  “ You haven’t read The Home of the Gods?”

  “Afraid not.”

  “I’ll lend it to you on the flight to New York, if I can get back to my apartment and get it.”

  “What about Israel?”

  “You’ll be surprised, Brooklyn, Brooklyn Heights, Juniors, the best kosher Reuben in the world.”

  Walking out, fearfully, but pretending he’s not, pretending it’s not Apocalypse Now but just one insane attack, out on the street everything calm, you’d think the security forces would be there, but everything just Shabbat Shalom...an empty Shabbot Shalom...still lots of steps back to his apartment, then the airport if there were any more planes, Kaddish starting to come into his mind, not only for the already dead, but for himself too.

  ...O-seh shalom bimeromav, hu ya a seah shalom, aleinu ve al kol Yisrael, veimeru Amen/...let peace descend on us, on all Israel, and all the world and let us say Amen.

  The prayer for the dead not really for the dead, but merely praising God, for a moment his mind asking why the God who had passed them out of Egypt and stood behind them in another hundreds wars, hadn’t....and then that was gone too.

  IN EXCELSIUS

  They’d known each other for decades, what seemed like centuries. Poetry meetings, you know, the Somerville-Boston get-togethers, the Bards and their readings, and then afterward little chomp-chomp parties where he’d hang around with Doug Holder and Sam Cornish and Lo Gallucio, and she’d always manage to end up at another table with other writers, painters, singers...wangadi wang wang wang...bang them guitar boxes and twang them strings.

  Always reviewed her poetry books. Age 64, 43 books:

  Life for a wife,

  what am I, a fife

  to be blown at your whims,

  who swims away when

  there’s no where cash

  and I’m willing to take a bash

  now and then.

  Not that he’d ever met or even heard of her husband. Some retired anonymity who never left the house, but just ate her spaghetti and ravioli and baked squash and pancakes, oatmeal cookies food and drank loads of decaffeinated coffee? An M.D., n’est pas, hadn’t she mentioned that once. Mr. Irish exodus lost-everywhere anonymity.....

  Alone today in the Je Ne Sais Pas Gallery in Somerville, just the two of them, this little coffee clunk-out place that was stuck on the edge of a gallery of purely Boston-area (nowhere else!) art, all sorts of post-you-guess-what-it-is paintings, stick your fingers into the paint heaps and then scramble them all over the canvases...although there were some older paintings too, down by the Harvard river, or down by the sea, an old white-haired aristocrat from the just-settled-in-Massachusetts days. A place he loved. The way he loved her....and the owner of the place, Sam Niemandstein.

  Both of them with their decaf lattes and bingle-bang carrot-blueberry-chocolate chip muffins and Nagasaki mustard shrimp-wraps. He’d always finish his first and then she’d leave a scrap-piece for him, “You have more weight to keep up than me!,” ha, ha, ha, ha, ha...

  Although it was never a real-time, real-fang laugh, somewhere between amateur theater and desperation.

  “The point being that everything has to begin at some time. Sperm and egg, cantaloupe seeds, mango seeds, storms, graveyards. But (pointing to the full-moon out in the sky, filling the already-nicely-lit up streets and time-to-time cars with a subtle overlayer of magic whiteness) OK, the universe has to begin. So god/the gods create it? But how does he-she/them begin. God/the gods have to begin too, but just think of the immensity of it all. You can travel millions of light-years, a hundred and eighty six thousand miles a second....millions of light-years and then you get to the ‘edge’ of the universe. But how can it have an edge, it has to be contained in SOMETHING? Or is it infinite? Only how can it be infinite, unending? And how can it begin. I can see a mango-tree beginning, but the universe....? And how can there be an Anything that can create infinities of matter and space...and us? And where is He-Her/Them NOW? All the talking to mankind in the biblical past....why no more appearances now? Silent Sinai! And an afterlife? Ghosts? Great inventions, but le realité? I’d like to have a heaven of hell or something, but all I see are graves, and the sun wearing out, the earth cracking apart. How much weight does the earth lose every minute, just with petroleum-use. Not that the sun is eternal,” turning to the empty table next to them, starting to talk to an empty chair, “Hello Henry the Eighty, how’s Anne Bowling do? Much bowling last night? Tudor...to DO...., I’d like to invite you over for the Fourth of July....”

  Starting to cry.

  “Come on.”

  Louie moving his chair over to her, putting his arm around her skinny shoulders, feeling all the right-wrong impulses-needs. Her pulling away from him.

  “Please! No! We’re just literary friends.”

  Louie feeling like getting up and just leaving. Three dead wives and kids everywhere all over the world but HERE....allein, allein, allein....but his inner butterflies whispering with their wings, “Stay, stay, stay, if you leave she’ll walk out in front of a car and kill herself!”

  So he pulled back, chomped on his muffin wishing that they just had plain chocolate or plain blueberry or plain anything instead of all this smorgasbordish gaming around.

  “So..ooooooo.....the answer is.....”

  “Is?”

  “I want you to drive me home. I’m.....I’m....j’ai peur....”

  “Jay Purr? What are you, a cat?”

  “I’m afraid of driving home. All those crazies out there.”

  “What about...?

  Trying to talk his way out of it, happy to just be, be there, be hair, be legs, be a kind of airborne copulation of two Rocky Mountain two eagles in the middle of a squint-eyed summer afternoon, refeathering the world in beak-peace.....

  “Forget it!”

  Getting up. Stalinishly grave-faced, walking out toward her car.

  “Wait! I’ll do it, for god’s sake......”

  Stopping, turning, almost Pax Eterna.

  “You don’t know how much I....”

  “No problem.”

  Her getting into the driver’s seat. No problem. Handed her his keys, getting in next to her. Some time both putting on their seat-belts, like an intermission between Bach and Barber, not asking her if she knew how to drive his kind of Chevy, not asking her about her car and how she was going to pick it up, how....when...not asking her about her husband at home, turning it on, Park, Reverse, Drive....as if she’d been driving it for a thousand years.....

  Sidestreeting it, into Somerville’s plushest areas, the Nineteenth/Late Eighteenth Century whispering from the houses through the trees and gardens, DuPontish, Rockerfellerish, “We we always be here, the rest of the world may be tectonic deplated, burned away by sun-blasts, atomic attacks, but we are here to forever stay, like the Great Wall of China, Mount Sinai, Tiawanaku, ici, ici, ici....”

  He wanted to say something about how impressed/surprised he was at her agility at the wheel, but said nothing, turned on the radio, a DVD of Samuel Barber’s concerto for violin, THE most calming, caressing, sanity-creating music ever written, although thinking that Barber should have made it the third instead of the first movement so that tha
t the concert-goers would walk out of the theater buddhified instead of massacred by Movement #3.

  And then they were there. Brownstone. Three storied. Peaked, peaked, peaked, maybe about 1875, right around there, a gigantic front porch, another back porch, and the whole place surrounded by oaks and lilacs and a primitive natural rock walk leading up to the front door.

  Her getting out and walking up the stairs. She wasn’t young but her legs said “Eighteen!,” even if the heels were a bit on the 50’s overdone stage, like contemporary sorority puta-party times.

  Standing at the top of the stairway looking hungry-dogishly impatiently down at him. Clearly messaged: “So are you coming up or not?”

  “So you want me to....?

  Thinking he ought to get a cab and go back and get her car, have the cab follow him, and then off into/back into his own Zzzzzzzzz-world. No word from her, just a COME ON! gesture....black gloves, pianist’s, harpist’s hands.

  So he came up, she buzzed open the door with a little buzzer she had in her what-looked-life-vulture-feathered purse, and in they went, him expecting her husband to be waiting there with a rifle, that was the plot, wasn’t it, the Marquesa de Sade following through on her inner needs.

  Couldn’t believe the living room he walked into. Over the obviously never used for a couple of centuries fireplaces, a huge mountains-in-the-background, forests-in-the-foreground painting, all kinds of other paintings all over the walls.

  Styles, ways-of-being/-becoming that he recognized, names starting to dice-throw around in his brain, his whole childhood, after all, spent soaking in The Arts, his frustrated ballerina-singer mother, his frustrated violinist-composer father living out their frustrations by turning their only son into the culturally histrionic artiste that they (M.D. father, secretary mother) had never become.

  “Over here!” she said, pointing to the plush leather sofa in front of the fireplace, her sitting down in an obviously eighteenth century English oak chair that was screaming to be placed in the Chicago Art Institute furniture museum, “I’ll be giving you some Greco di Tufo in a moment, but first I want to ....without tears....confess to you that Angelo is morto, morto, morto....you know, the usual, prostate cancer, esophageal cancer, heart-rupture.....and my daughter Angela out in the Dakotas, went over a cliff skiing in the winter, right down on top of her head, a couple of thousand feet. Instant death. All I’ve got left is Goosebumps Jerry in Somerville, Mass, and he’s talking about moving out to the Cape. I only see him once a year, if that, Mr. Ingrown Toenail Introvert...you’re all I’ve got, really.....”

  “So now it’s sex time?” he mockingly smiled, getting up and walking toward the bedroom.

  Her getting up, going over to the fireplace and getting a little brass ashes-shovel that had obviously never been (another anglo-antique) used even once, brandishing it over his head, him grabbing it and delicately putting it back on the brass hook where it belonged, going toward the door.

  “Wait...I haven’t....”

  “I’m not going to wait around until you do. I’m castrated for prostate cancer. And it seems to be working viz a viz cancer, but sex.....? Sometimes I’ll see some little girl’s or old lady’s legs -- like yours! -- and a cloud of sexuality will blow over me, but my dingy-wingy is about the size of a week-old carrot...”

  “Vulgar! My sexuality. It’s like an erased blackboard that had been filled with algebra kill-alls, logarithms, The Book of Genesis inked on ox-skin....”

  “OK, so how much is in it in for me? You want me to move in or you want to move in with me?”

  “I don’t even think about crass cash or crash cashouts.....I mainly want to just use the few moments I have left before cremation to be The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady.....”

  “One of my favorite films too....”

  “We both like the same grass and hills and boats and mansions, egrets, crows, river banks, a little wine, some nice sedatives, sleep, hoping this is the last night, and when it isn’t it’s anti-cholesterol oatmeal time and mega-cafe coffee....so.....”

  Going over to the huge cabinet next to the fireplace, taking out a tall, thin bottle of...he didn’t know or care, damn his almost-ulcer...sitting down and accepting a great big glass of (thinking of Napoleon being slowly poisoned with arsenic) WHO CARES wine

  “So where is this going?” he asked after his first delicious slurp.

  Her not answering, just sitting on the sofa next to him, bending her head down, closing her eyes, a little slurp to match his, and then silence, clicking a little controller of some kind that he’d never seen the likes of before, and the room filled with soft, distant piano music. It was Lili Boulanger, wasn’t it, the title not coming to him, his head filling with all sorts of titles, “Gaspard de la Nuitm” “La Fille Avec Les Chevaux de Lin,” “Menuet Antique...,” Der Mond, Der Mond, Der Mond....damned aging brain.... buddhaifying it, cancel it out, fill the world with a wire-statue of the Great Goddess, then Nothingness, that was all he wanted, wasn’t it.....Glo’s kind of high-as-a-blade-of-grass highness, her highness, your highness, a condensed, tearful (Nadie dead at age 24) for-how long? NOW.

  ICE CREAM / I SCREAM TIME

  Owosso, next to the summer river, too (almost) hot, but there’s still a little river-wind and Popeye’s Eye-Screamplay is right next to the water, a little fence so kids don’t jump/fall in, rain-weeks it’s gets pretty wild, but it’s dry-time for the last two weeks, I sit down next to these two women, alone, solitary, in the prison of my own self-isolation, “Howya doin?,” this little Chinese girl eating her chocolate ice-cream, about six or seven, “So your husband’s Chinese?” I ask,“No, I never married, adopted her when she was born and no one wanted her,”“You wanted me!” she perks in, no touch of accent, “Me too, I’m her grandma,”says Ms. Old, still looking farm-good, “So you’re...?” “I work for a management company...corporate organization...,” and Ms. More Antique, “I’m a farm-widow, but I still live on the farm, rent it out to GreenGrowth, you’ve heard of them...,” “Afraid not...,” feeling like jumping in the river, pretending I’m a kayak, I’m good at just floating, who knows what other solitary souls I may find (like myself) at the end of the line.

  JEAN ANNE

  1.

  Why, around the Fourth of July, did he start obsessing about her and her hair and slim long legs, 50 years since he’d seen her, started going into the closet and taking out old photo albums, his first marriage, second marriage, the funeral photos of wife number two, his years in Slovenia, Slovakia teaching English, part of the poet gangs in The Village in Manhattan, or out in San Francisco/Berkeley, photos of Carol Bergé, Richard Morris, Curt Johnson, Harry Smith, Blythe Ayne....the old write-it-up days, starting to cry...calling his daughter, Alexandra, down in Columbus, Ohio with her husband’s family. One, two...and surprisingly, she answered.

  “So howya doin’? How come you went down to Sam’s family’s place and left me alone on the fourth....”

  “That’s true, most of your old pals are dead or moved, right? I’ll come next week when we get back to Ann Arbor. A day and overnight....OK?”

  “OK. Love ya...”

  “Love you too....”

  And then just him and the huge, empty house again. If he was twenty instead of eighty and it was Chicago or L.A. or Paris, instead of East Lansing, Michigan.

  Back to the albums again, amazed at how much granddaughter Beatrice and he looked alike (when he was three like here), and how horrible his mother looked as she got older, turning from Vamp to Vampire in her final days at Mount San Francis Oldster Heaven in Paradise, California, those staring, killer eyes and the huge dark rimmed glasses that emphasized their killerness......

  Almost time to eat. His usual almond-butter sandwich and guava juice filled with pulverized pineapple? Or should he just drive over to McDonald’s and buy a chicken-wrap, maybe see someone from the old days... no... no one else around, his best pal Dick Thomas down in Santa Fe now, and all the others... Rest in Anxiety!

/>   Then a sudden impulse, limped over to the phone next to the sofa and dialed 1-517-555-1212, the phone-info system that usually/always worked for him.

  “What city?”

  “Chicago. Chicago area. I want anyone with the name Kappell, that K-A-P-P-E-L-L....”

  “I have two Kappells, Tom and Frank, here’s the numbers....”

  And he grabbed his sketch notebook on the table in front of the TV, a pen out of his shirt pocket and wrote down the numbers with feverish alacrity. Of course her daughters and she herself would have changed their names when they got married, but the sons.....

  Tried Frank first. Last always first, Chinese luck-tricks. A woman’s voice on the other end. Fifty or twenty, he couldn’t be sure.

  “Hello.....”

  “Hi, this is Kevin Garrity, I’d like to talk to Frank Kappell....”

  “What about?”

  “I was an old friend of his mother’s, back in the old days and I wanted to find out what’s going on with her. I couldn’t find her name in the phone Helper, so I thought....

  “KG...my mother-in-law, Jean Anne never called you Kevin Garrity, but always KG...sometimes she’d say it meant Knight of Garrulousness....”

  “Knight of what?”

  “Blathering...,” a suspiciously long pause, then a solemn retort, “You seem so solemn....”

  “Old age equals solemnity. Just look at the old faces, all they can think about is the next step and the next spoonful, the next temperature, blanket, toilet-time....”