Beyond the Bedroom Wall

by Larry Woiwode

  "Have you read his other books?" "Some."

  "Are you interested in poetry?" "Yes, I guess."

  "Ah," the man said, and studied him with eyes that were ice-blue and had the possessed look of a ship captain's, somebody who'd stared in the same way over stretches of sea, intrepid, a look that impaled Charles's reason. The man was about fifty, with blue-gray hair trimmed in a neat crew cut, and a New Englandish, aristocratic face, tanned and weathered and imprinted with fine wrinkles around the eyes, as though to draw attention there. "Are you from New York?" he asked.

  “No."

  "I thought not. No, it's not in your face. And, anyway, nobody who lives in New York is from New York."

  "Oh?"

  "Perhaps I shouldn't have put it that way. I'm not demented, by the by, let's begin with that premise. What I should have said is that nobody who knows New York as one knows a woman was born here. Oh, natives have a good idea of its manholes and gridwork—Manhattan is such a small area, actually—and they have their emotional landmarks and sentimental tidbits, all the familiar sites they return to and feel unthreatened in, but only an outsider can feel and say what the city really is. 'Mannahatta, of tall masts, possessed by some strange fire!' Whitman. Was he born here?" he asked himself in sudden consternation. "I wonder. He lied so much.

  "Anyway, natives are like fish. A fish is born in water, water is its life, its medium, its 'milieu,' I'd say, if the word weren't so abused, and they go swimming through the city without seeing it, without any feeling for what they see, unless it's a mugging, and should they stray into an unfamiliar neighborhood, you'd think they were at the Antipodes! But," he said, and held up a forefinger, "but let a land animal step into it"—this finger he now stuck into his coffee—"'and he'll say, 'Aha! This is wet, this is water, indeed!' Really, really. How long have you been here?"

  "Six months."

  "Aha, just as I thought! A neophyte." He dried the finger on a napkin. "What do you do?"

  "Oh, I deliver—"

  "Ah! Which calls to mind a concrete example of this generalizing I've been at. The other day a delivery boy came to the place where I work— Did I say boy? He's a man of sixty-some years. An old man, then, came up to me, looking happy for the first time in ages, and said this was his last day. He was retiring. I began a conversation, surprised to be losing touch with this familiar, alcohol-ravaged face, and learned that he lived in Brooklyn— Do I sound like a schoolmarm to you?"

  "No."

  "I've been told that I do, perhaps because I overarticulate, can wax pedantic, and find myself entwined in sentences that could have come from a Restoration comedy. But these are only conversational quirks. Poetry is my medium, though I do like to talk."

  "Oh."

  "During the day I lead a life that's acceptable in the eyes of most of society—I work as a doorman—but at night, yes, I crawl out of that facade, turn clinically bonkers, and strive to write. I'm working on a poetic account of New York. I have been for several years." The brilliance of his eyes, enhanced by silver lashes, grew as he fixed on Charles. "You have inclinations to write, no?"

  "No."

  "You're sure?"

  "Yes."

  "That's peculiar. Your book there and then the face— it's in your eyes and lips—both bespeak a poet to me. But back to the Delivery Old Man. I learned from him, since I carry on a kind of underground research, that he was born in Brooklyn, married late, and had no children, and that the firm he worked for—some insurance outfit— carried on all of its business in lower Manhattan. 'I have no gripes!' he said to me. Perhaps he was a church-goer or loved dogs, but here is the point: I asked him about a glass-eyed building I'd seen going up in the East Sixties, and wondered how he, native as he was, felt about such blatant, commercial desecration. He shrugged his shoulders and confessed he couldn't say, because he'd never been above Forty-second Street in his life. I asked him how he accomplished this, why he'd do it, or not, and he said, 'It's the same thing up there, isn't it?'

  "Imagine the stultified curiosity, the insular bliss! No desire but to exist, unmolested, within the same piddly-poop world from day to day!" He leaned closer, apparently bothered by the stool between them, and whispered, "And there you have the character of three-quarters of your native New Yorkers." The part of him he'd mentioned as emerging when he wrote appeared in his eyes in a series of flittering surges. "Pardon me if I sound harsh, but this is my opinion. Do you mind if I have an opinion?"

  "Of course not."

  "And I believe in man!" he cried, and struck the counter so close to his water glass that ice jiggled and sloshed in it. Was he juiced? "For instance." He laid his hand on Charles's coatsleeve. "Look at these men around us. They're perhaps not natives— Of course not." He blinked as if he'd just noticed them. "They're foreigners. And what do these fellows so regular in appearance feel of the city? Where are their roots? This restaurant here? A street-corner bar? What do they have but their rowdies and their railroad flats, which most likely smell of borscht, have a smelly cat in them, piles of St. Cyrillic newspapers, some few— Don't you see?"

  Charles felt uneasy inside the man's stare and the intimacy he'd been assumed into, and felt that the talk was turning on him; when he came to New York, he vowed not to fall into a pattern, as others in the city seemed to him to do, but had, gradually, giving up the vow as his money diminished and hope for a change in himself gave out, and finally set up a pattern of his own, which made him feel settled in the city and somewhat different from everybody else. "So who's at home here?"

  "Ah!" the man cried, and from the way his finger went up, it seemed about to go into the coffee again. "There you have one of the facets of the character of the true New York!" He smiled with his lips so compressed they turned white, while his eyes wandered and widened until he had the look of a child on a potty-chair, nostrils wide.

  "I'm from Oregon, a solitary dissatisfied with pat answers to the truth, myself, the city, the whole kit and caboodle, plus booze!" He put his fingers over the notebook. "Even with my poetry. Yes, yes, there are some jottings in here, but I couldn't permit you to see them, and you know perfectly well why not."

  "Why?"

  "That face of someone who'd be interested in poetry, and might even write it, a face I might—"'

  "You said that."

  "You could steal some of my lines!"

  "What?"

  "Who knows what sort would filch poetry, or why? For fame, money, to make a woman, or just to go whole-hog apeshit for a while. I've been writing since I was your age and haven't ever trusted my poetry with editors, agents, publishers, other poets—no one, you hear! Even at my place of employment— Do you know the Delacroix?"

  "No."

  "It used to be fancy, but it's not any more, with the spirit of the neighborhood deteriorating, and the building, too, going to pot. I work as a doorman, as I said, to keep myself in scratch that I might poetize nightly, and I carry out my duties with as much dignity as I can summon. But can I be expected to repair clanging radiators and patch cracked shower walls, reweave carpets, banish decades-old stinks in the goddamn cans— Do I have to be expected to do that, too?"

  "Certainly not," Charles said, afraid of the fierceness that had come over the man.

  "Well, I should hope not, and I hope everybody is happy with my predicament, life and morals on the fly, too." The white-lipped smile disfigured his face again. "I must confess, however, to doing one shameful thing there. Would you like to hear it?"

  Charles wasn't sure.

  "I often jot down lines while on the job. Ha, you thought it was worse, didn't you! Today, for instance, I wrote something down. Would you like to hear it?"

  "I thought you said—"

  "Oh, I could read something. Reading is different from showing; that's giving it away, this is giving to. How about it?"

  "Sure."

  He scooted over onto the stool next to Charles, laid the notebook down on the counter, ran his hand over its worn, bespattered cover
, and began leafing through pages smudged, dog-eared, stained with coffee, ink, wine (blood?), and other substances. He bent over a page and sighed, and Charles looked across his crew cut and saw that the page was covered from top to bottom and edge to edge with a multitude of entries, some in pencil, in ballpoint, in ink of several different colors; and all the entries marked with stars, asterisks, and personal symbols— horses, half-moons, diamonds, a sketch of a nose, a doorknob, a shoe. But what largely held Charles's attention, and also sent an uneasy feeling cross-circuiting over him, was that every entry bore the mannerisms of a single hand, yet every one was in a different size and variety of handwriting, as though it changed each hour.

  "Ah. Here. This is the one I wrote this afternoon. I have trouble keeping them straight sometimes." He cleared his throat and then checked to make sure nobody but Charles was within hearing distance, and read, "A shimmy-ass woman shivered my mind, crowned my passage pace after pace this demi-vierge Wednesday. O, jeweled woman — women! — passing under lamplight through blue snow, I with my eye canonize you, a blue eye, a golden-eye, an eye in a prow of jewels, big boobs."

  He sat with his eyes on the notebook. He'd read at a slow rate, pursing his lips around the words as though forming sculptures of their sound, prolonging vowels and ticking at consonants the way classical actors do, and his musical voice reminded Charles of a recording (of Borodin?) that he'd heard one summer night, a minor melody that seemed to rise from the stretches of a desert, strings conferring, woodwinds mourning even on the higher notes, a French horn unfurling it all like a simple chansonette, while finger cymbals clashed in the background, their thin sound ringing through the meek theme (as when the poet said women!) like stars piercing the night sky. He couldn't separate the words from the voice he'd heard.

  The poet lifted his eyes, the possessed look gone from them, troubled and vulnerable, and somehow ashamed, and now that he was so close Charles could see broken blood vessels, coiled like spirochetes, in his corneas, wedge-shaped pink areas where his lids didn't shield his eyes, and a milky liquid lying along his reddened lower lids. Would Tim end up like this?

  "Did you like it?" he asked.

  "Yes."

  "It's sort of a joke, I suppose, but did you hear the words and how they make fables of sound alone, the way the preternatural can seem real, and how, in certain spots, it gives way to a common phrase so you can see what you feel?"

  "I guess."

  "You have the face of someone who would," he said, and once more made a close study of Charles's face. "I felt the words go along a straight line, through a common channel, and into your mind. They've been communicated!

  Here, let's try another. Ah, but I don't know if I should read this openly, with so many ears about. I trust you but not these other creeps. Do you have a place we could go?”

  "Not really."

  "Oh, I see. I understand. Well, then, I'll read another one in this rathole." He started pulling through the pages, and said, "By the way, I'm not a faggot."

  "It's not that, it's—"

  "That fellow, for instance," he said, pointing his chin toward Charles's book. "Roetlike. Wasn't he a fruit?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "Always whining on about his daddy and those flowers of his."

  "So what?"

  "Didn't he kill himself trying to prove his masculinity?”

  "Not that I know of," Charles said, and remembered reading that Roetlike had died in a swimming pool.

  "Not that I hold that against him. His pure lines aren't m any way touched by the uncomfortableness of that I just wanted you to know that what I think of as his particular problem doesn't happen to be mine."

  "It wasn't a problem. It was his experience."

  "Sure, sure, I've heard that one before. Well, here Now here is a ditty I feel is important, not just a daily jotting ott on a dime. This is part of the long intermeshed account of the city. I'm planning to have it published soon, but refuse to let It go. It's not perfect. The feel has to be of a finely wrought jewel, how they stand alone, inviolate, and sparkle. I'm constantly cutting, inserting, adding on other facets, and then trimming away until it's down to a small shape with sharp edges. Do you know how a poem should feel if you held it between your fingers—like this —do you know, guy?"

  "I guess."

  "Like a jewel. Otherwise it's corrupt. It's not poetry but crap. Mishmash! A real poem can't follow the configuration of days, can it? No, it has to take its shape out of them unattachable to time, with its own attractive shape which IS the shape of poetry over life. For instance, a real diamond, a jewel, instead of a ball park; or those swimming pools people have—I understand all the rich have them in their back yards or on their rooftops now, damn their hides—one of those pools in a poem would be an aquamarine, oblong and cool, a construct of syllables the senses could bathe in and come out refreshed. Do you see?"

  "I'm not sure I'm awake yet."

  "Well, here, let me cheer you up! I'll— Are you sure you don't understand?"

  "I guess so."

  "I don't know whether you do or not, or whether you say that to humor me, but let's forge on. I've been working on this for nine years now, and you perhaps can't relate it to the auxiliary parts—this is one of the final sections; the others are in nineteen other notebooks (no, I'm not the guy The New Yorker wrote about)—but still it should be able to stand as it is, on its own lapidarylike feet."

  He elevated his hand as if in blessing, looked confused, let it drop, and paged backward, then stopped and fished a tangled hair out of the spiral binder and turned on.

  Charles had a vision of a book: it would be a journal written by his mother, beginning the day Jerome was born, and would move through her years in Hyatt in an earth-colored, unbroken line, and then begin to explore her past, tentatively at first, as though stalactites were forming below the line, and suddenly drop and move back toward her birth, while the narrative grew thinner and thinner, until, at the journal's end, you'd feel left on paper-thin footing, looking down a sheer cliff. That would be her death. Then a series of multicolored pieces about North Dakota and Illinois, like large rocks in a stratum at the edge of her journal, each piece complete in itself, whole and unshakable, bearing no outward relationship to any other piece, implying that it's impossible to relate experience or contiguous periods of time in terms of continuity in our time (each moment, each year sealed off because it's escaped destruction and has to buttress the chaos battering at it), so that an incident from childhood might have more temporal value than ten years of adulthood, and this particular incident—set off and explored to its limits (this harked back to her journal)—would be more mature than the man carrying it; or it might be seen as outside him, a luminous omnipresence, a portion of his past that lay ahead and was a goal to be achieved if he was to grow— This wasn't entirely clear yet. But the pieces themselves, the rocks of the stratum, would lie where they were, so you'd bump your head or wedge the lines apart if they weren't entered on their own terms, and then as more were added (but not so the book was like shaking a puzzle box), pressure would be put on earlier ones, and then at a certain point the first piece would shift. Then, as another was added, several would shift at the same time; and then a continual rearrangement, a giving way begins (somewhere in here would go all the trouble he'd had with women), and suddenly there's a feeling of an earthquake, and an abyss opens in the book. On this side of it, Charles's journal, the actor's journal, Karl's journal, begins in New York, where the desolation, the bleakness and anonymity are identical to that of the plain, but more pernicious: man's constructed the city and chosen to live in it; the plain is a natural phenomenon he can always leave; swarms of people shoulder past more swarms in the city without touching another life; people move over unpopulated spaces of the plain to have a specific effect on a particular person—so the city makes him more conscious than ever of the plain. In his journal the actor discovers attributes that belong to his mother instead of him, and so, fearfully a
t first, begins to explore his past as his mother has, hoping to follow it backward to hers, and sees everywhere in the city parallels to an earlier life (these winos would be in it; like the Plains Indians, caricatures of their former selves from the time their homes, their spiritual roots, had been usurped; more committed to illusions than others to reality, and determined to sustain the illusions by continuing to drink —fire-water, the Indian's name for it; how could the two elements mix?—and remaining rootless), and after a month's work it occurs to him that he's constructing, as the city's been constructed, his own reality, artificial or not, and making room for himself to operate within it (his generation acting what hers actually felt?), whereas his past lies outside him in a state as natural as the plain, and he begins to long for an early love affair (here he'd use Jill), but realizes that the affair began as early as memory, or more. And then he sees his mother signaling to him from the other side of the book and they reach for one another across the abyss. (And now it had a title. The End of Flesh, which would tie these two themes together.) The edge of her journal is like the border of North Dakota and he wants to return there, not just metaphorically, and is planning a trip when one afternoon in the New York Public Library he finds in a history volume (like the one his father found; that would have to be in earlier) a paragraph about his great-great-grandfather, on his mother's side, who disappeared from the plain without a trace during a buffalo hunt. He's electrified. He then begins to act out his prose instead of writing it (he'll say that without the voice, without the limbs and their movement through space, his spirit—his flesh?— turns stale) and then the prose begins to act on him; it hangs from him like ropes and chains and unopened padlocks and replicas of all his joyful days gone hard as brass. And then it works inward. He can't eat and it's hard for him to breathe. He puts pieces of it down on pages, finally, like scattering paper over paper in straight lines, and finds himself becoming unburdened, fragile and airlike, and then glances at his hand and sees that he can read his manuscript beneath it; his hand is transparent. This doesn't bother him, he's expected it, he makes a note of it and goes on writing, and at the end of the book his completed journal is discovered by a cleaning lady in an empty room with a mound of hair piled over its top. Maybe then an introduction by somebody who's known him (an editor? his brother?), telling how his family has instituted a search for him that's lasted several years, with Emil involved in it, but found no trace? Or a final paragraph of the actor knocking on the lines of his prose from behind to get out? Or into the world of his family? No, he'd remain motionless, flat on the page, like the plain. The plain, the plain, and each page a reminder of the cycle of the book, of course!