Search Party
Page 17
and stretch her utmost length against
my flank and let her heartbeat diminish until
she dozed. So long as she knew where
in that strange space I was, and up to what, she could
make it hers. When I stepped into
eclipse behind an opaque shower curtain, not
at all like the translucent booth she peers into
to watch the blur lather and rinse
himself at home, and when I turned a different
torrent loose, she must have leapt
to the lid of the toilet tank, and measured what next,
rocking back on her haunches,
then forward, and back again, and then the flying
hoyden launched herself at the rod the shower curtain's
strung along, landing, clank, only two
or three inches off, and hung there held up by her
forearms, if a cat has forearms,
like the least fit student in gym class quitting on
a chin-up. Her rear paws churned egg-
beater style. And then what? If I pulled her toward
me with wet, soapy hands, she'd thrash and slash herself
free, but free in a tub. Hung up
as she was, she had nothing to push off from, so
she'd have to let herself drop, clunk,
and turn to the torn curtain her I-meant-to-do-
that face, while, slick and pink, I called
out from the other side, "Sweet cat, are you OK?"
Truffle Pigs
None of these men, who all run truffle pigs,
compares a truffle to itself. "Fossil
testicles," says one. And another: "No.
Inky, tiny brains, smart only about
money." They like to say, "You get yourself
a pig like this, you've got a live pension."
The dowsing sows sweep their flat snouts across
the scat and leaf rot, scurf and duff, the slow
fires of decay. They know what to ignore;
these pigs are innocent of metaphor.
Tumor, fetus, truffle—all God's creatures
jubilate to grow. Even the diffident truffle
gives off a faint sweat from the joyful work
of burgeoning, and by that spoor the pigs
have learned to know them and to root them out.
Manners
"Sweetypants," Martha Mitchell (wife of John
Mitchell, soon to be Nixon's attorney general)
cried, "fetch me a glass of bubbin,
won't you?" Out of office, Nixon
had been warehoused in Leonard Garment's
New York law firm and had begun to clamber
his way back toward Washington.
The scent of his enemies' blood rose
hotly from the drinks that night.
Why was I there? A college class-
mate's mother had suggested he invite a few
friends; she called us "starving scholars."
It's hard to do good and not advertise
yourself, and not to need the needy
even if they don't need you. I'd grown used
to being accused of being somewhere else.
I plied my nose, that shrewd scout, into book
after book at home, and clattered downstairs
for dinner not late but tardy. I dwelt
as much as I could at that remove
from the needs of others we call "the self,"
that desert isle, that Alcatraz from which
none has escaped. I made a happy lifer.
There is no frigate like a book.
"Outside of a dog, a book is a man's
best friend," said Groucho Marx. "Inside of a dog,
it's too dark to read." So what if my friend's
mother was a fool. So what if Martha
Mitchell would later rat on her rat
of a husband when Nixon's paranoid
domain collapsed under its own venal
weight and it took Nixon all his gloomy
charisma to load his riven heart
onto a helicopter and yaw upward
from the White House lawn. He might have turned
to Pat and asked, like a child on a first
flight, "Are we getting smaller yet?"
I was too young to know how much I was,
simply by being born, a hostage
to history. My hostess's chill,
insulting grace I fended off with the same
bland good manners I used to stay upstairs
in my head until time had come for food.
A well-fed scholar, I sought out and brought
back a tall bubbin for the nice lady.
Yes, there's a cure for youth, but it's fatal.
And a cure for grace: you say what you mean,
but of course you have to know what that is.
Promiscuous
"Mixes easily," dictionaries
used to say, a straight shot from the Latin.
Chemists applied the term to matter's
amiability.
But the Random House Dictionary
(1980) gives as its prime meaning:
"characterized
by frequent and indiscriminate
changes of one's sexual partners." Sounds
like a long way
to say "slut," that glob of blame we once threw
equally at men and women, all who slurred,
slavered, slobbered,
slumped, slept or lapsed, slunk or relapsed, slackened
(loose lips sink ships) or slubbed, or slovened. But soon
a slut was female. A much-bedded male
got called a ladies' man; he never slept
with sluts. How sluts
got to be sluts is thus a mystery,
except the language knows what we may
have forgot. "Depression" began its career
in English in 1656, says
the OED,
and meant (science jargon) the opposite
of elevation—a hole or a rut,
perhaps, or, later, "the angular
distance of a celestial object
below the horizon,"
as Webster's Third (1963)
has it. There's ample record of our self-
deceit: language,
that furious river, carries on its foamed
and sinewed back all we thought we'd shucked off.
Of course it's all
pell-mell, head over heels, snickers and grief,
love notes and libel, fire and ice. In short:
promiscuous.
Sooey Generous
Saint Anthony, patron of sausage makers,
guide my pen and unkink my tongue. Of swine
I sing, and of those who tend and slaughter them,
of slops and wallows and fodder, of piglets
doddering on their stilty legs, and sows
splayed to offer burgeoned teats to sucklers,
and the four to five tons of manure
a pig (that ambling buffet) reinvests
in the soil each year; of truffle dowsers
and crunchers of chestnuts and acorns I sing.
In medieval Naples, each household
kept a pig on a twenty-four-foot tether,
rope enough that the hooved Hoover could
scour the domain, whereas in Rome
pigs foraged the streets haunted today by
rat-thin cats, tendons with fur. In Paris
in those years the langueyers, the "tonguers,"
or meat inspectors, lifted a pig's tongue
to look for white ulcers, since the comely
pig in spoiled condition could poison
a family. Indeed the Buddha died
from eating spoiled pork, vegetarians
I know like to insist, raising the stakes
from wrong to fatal, gleefully. Perhaps
you've
read the bumper sticker too: A Heart
Attack Is God's Revenge for Eating His
Little Friends. Two major religions
prohibit eating pork. Both creeds were forged
in deserts, and the site-specific pig,
who detests dry mud, has never mixed well
with nomads or vice versa. Since a pig
eats everything, just as the cuisines that
sanctify the pig discard no fragment
of it, it makes sense to eat it whole hog
or shun it altogether, since to eat
or not to eat is sacral, if there's a choice
in the matter. To fast is not to starve.
The thirteen ravenous, sea-queasy pigs
Hernando de Soto loosed near Tampa
in 1542 ate whatever
they liked. How glad they must have been to hoove
some soil after skidding in the slick hold
week after dark week: a pig without sun
on its sullied back grows skittish and glum.
Pigs and pioneers would build America.
Cincinnati was called Porkopolis
in the 1830s; the hogs arrived,
as the hunger for them had, by river,
from which a short forced march led to slaughter.
A new country travels on its belly,
and manufacture starts in the barnyard:
hide for leather and stomach for pepsin.
In France, a farm family calls its pig
"Monsieur." According to a CIA
tally early in 1978,
the Chinese kept 280 million
of the world's 400 million pigs;
perhaps all of them were called "The Chairman."
Emmaeus, swineherd to Odysseus,
guarded 600 sows and their litters
(the males slept outside), and no doubt each sow
and piglet had its own name in that rich
matriarchal mire. And I like to think
that in that mild hospice future pork roasts
fattened toward oblivion with all
the love and dignity that husbandry
has given up to be an industry,
and that the meat of Emmaeus's coddled
porkers tasted a little sweeter for
the graces of affection and a name.
Oxymorons
Summer school, and jumbo shrimp, of course.
Friendly fire, famous poet, common sense,
and, until very recently, safe sex.
Blind date, sure thing, amicable divorce.
Also there's loyal opposition,
social security, deliberate speed.
How about dysfunctional family?
Eyes blackened, hearts crushed, the damn thing functions.
Some things we say should coat our tongues with ash.
Drug-Free School Zone? No way: it's our money
our children toke, snort and shoot up while we
vote against higher property taxes.
Want a one-word oxymoron? Prepay.
Money's—forgive me—rich in such mischief:
trust officer, debt service, common thief—
these phrases all want to have it both ways
and sag at the middle like decrepit beds.
Religious freedom—doesn't that sound good?
And some assisted living when we're old
and in our cryptic dreams the many dead
swirl like a fitful snow. We'll wake and not
think of our living wills or property.
We'll want some breakfast. Our memories
will be our real estate, all that we've got.
Dire Cure
"First, do no harm," the Hippocratic
Oath begins, but before she might enjoy
such balm, the docs had to harm her tumor.
It was large, rare and so anomalous
in its behavior that at first they mis-
diagnosed it. "Your wife will die of it
within a year." But in ten days or so
I sat beside her bed with hot and sour
soup and heard an intern congratulate
her on her new diagnosis: a children's
cancer (doesn't that possessive break
your heart?) had possessed her. I couldn't stop
personifying it. Devious, dour,
it had a clouded heart, like Iago's.
It loved disguise. It was a garrison
in a captured city, a bad horror film
(The Blob), a stowaway, an inside job.
If I could make it be like something else,
I wouldn't have to think of it as what,
in fact, it was: part of my lovely wife.
Next, then, chemotherapy. Her hair fell
out in tufts, her color dulled, she sat laced
to bags of poison she endured somewhat
better than her cancer cells could, though not
by much. And indeed, the cancer cells waned
more slowly than the chemical "cocktails"
(one the bright color of Campari), as the chemo
nurses called them, dripped into her. There were
three hundred days of this: a week inside
the hospital and two weeks out, the fierce
elixirs percolating all the while.
She did five weeks of radiation, too,
Monday to Friday like a stupid job.
She wouldn't eat the food the hospital
wheeled in. "Puréed fish" and "minced fish" were worth,
I thought, a sharp surge of food snobbery,
but she'd grown averse to it all—the nurses'
crepe soles' muffled squeaks along the hall,
the filtered air, the smothered urge to read,
the fear, the perky visitors, flowers
she'd not been sent when she was well, the room-
mate (what do "semi-private" and "extra
virgin" have in common?) who died, the nights
she wept and sweated faster than the tubes
could moisten her with pretty poison.
One chemotherapy veteran, six
years in remission, chanced on her former
chemo nurse at a bus stop and threw up.
My wife's tumor has not come back.
I like to think of it in Tumor Hell,
strapped to a dray, flat as a deflated
football, bleak and nubbled like a poorly
ironed truffle. There's one tense in Tumor Hell,
forever, or what we call the present.
For that long the flaccid tumor marinates
in lurid toxins. Tumor Hell Clinic
is, it turns out, a teaching hospital.
Every century or so, the way
we'd measure it, a chief doc brings a pack
of students round. They run some simple tests:
surge current through the tumor, batter it
with mallets, push a woodplane across its
pebbled hide and watch a scurf of tumor-
pelt kink loose from it, impale it, strafe it
with lye and napalm. There might be nothing
left in there but a still space surrounded
by a carapace. "This one is nearly
dead," the lead doc says. "What's the cure for that?"
The students know: "Kill it slower, of course."
They sprinkle it with rock salt and move on.
Here on the aging earth the tumor's gone:
my wife is hale, though wary, and why not?
Once you've had cancer, you don't get headaches
anymore, you get brain tumors, at least
until the aspirin kicks in. Her hair's back,
her weight, her appetite. "And what about you?"
friends ask me. First the fear felt like sudden
weightlessness: I couldn't steer and couldn't stay.
I couldn't concentrate: surely my spit would
dry before I could slather a stamp.
before I went to bed, slept like a cork,
woke to no more memory of last night's
list than smoke has of fire, made a new list,
began to do the things on it, wept, paced,
berated myself, drove to the hospital
and brought my wife food from the take-out joints
that ring a hospital as surely as
brothels surround a gold strike. I drove home
rancid with anger at her luck and mine—
anger that filled me the same way nature
hates a vacuum. "This must be hell for you,"
some said. Hell's not other people: Sartre
was wrong about that, too. L'enfer, c'est moi?
I've not got the ego for it. There'd be
no hell if Dante hadn't built a model
of his rage so well, and he contrived to
get exiled from it, for it was Florence.
Why would I live in hell? I love New York.
Some even said the tumor and fierce cure
were harder on the caregiver—yes, they
said "caregiver"—than on the "sick person."
They were wrong who said those things. Of course
I hated it, but some of "it" was me—
the self-pity I allowed myself,
the brave poses I struck. The rest was dire
threat my wife met with moral stubbornness,
terror, rude jokes, nausea, you name it.
No, let her think of its name and never