Bird

by Sophie Cunningham

  A break now? Tape finishing. Okay. Don’t worry, I’m coming back in a minute!

  Az

  You understand, there is no proof / this actually occurred

  I don’t know why I was so nervous. Perhaps because Gabriel was a legend. Not a whitewashed government sanctified one, despite his awards, but a real Beat poet, a true Bohemian, and a total pain in the ass. People like him were a dying breed.

  Gabriel seemed like one of the few people who ever really knew Anna well, and for years I’d toyed with the idea of trying to meet him. When the Endowment for the Arts gave him a National Medal I was asked to the announcement and realised the party was the perfect opportunity.

  I ran late, as usual, which meant I got there after the speeches. After I arrived I stood by the bar and watched him for a while, trying to summon up the courage to say something. Despite being the guest of honour, Gabriel stood alone with a drink in one hand, running his fingers through his thick, tangled grey-brown mane of curls with the other. His face was full of crevices so deep that age alone could not explain them and he rocked from foot to foot with a manic intensity. People ferried him drinks and nodded as they passed, but no one actually seemed prepared to speak to him.

  Finally I went and stood in front of him and smiled to get his attention. Gabriel just glanced at me, and looked in the other direction. ‘Hi,’ I said, and he turned to me, but then didn’t say a word. Instead he stared.

  I tried to ignore the fact he was looking intensely at my cleavage, not my face. ‘I wanted to introduce myself because you were a friend of my mother’s.’

  He lifted his big brown eyes to mine and arched his unruly, old-man eyebrows. ‘Name?’ he asked.

  ‘Anna,’ I said. ‘Anna Davidoff.’

  The name transformed him. He whooped and flung his drink in the air, spattering the two of us with champagne. Flustered waiters converged upon us and dabbed with napkins. Gabriel waved them away.

  ‘Fan-fucking-tastic,’ he beamed. Then he began to rock back and forth again, muttering ‘fuck me’ to himself a few times before he calmed down enough to offer me his hand. ‘Man,’ he said. ‘Your mother was a great fuck. A great fuck, a great dancer, a great-fucking-esoteric mind.’

  ‘Zip it,’ I said, trying not to laugh.

  ‘Okay. Yes, you’re right. Ve-ry in-ap-prop-riate,’ he stretched the word as far as it would go, fidgeting all the while and looking anxiously around the room like a reprimanded child.

  ‘You want another drink?’ I asked, wanting to get away and compose myself for a moment. ‘I’ll get you another drink. I’ll get us both a drink.’

  He stood and waited, meek and patient, then smiled at me when I brought him back a red wine. ‘The way she died!’ he said. ‘Amazing. The full fucking trip. She always liked to do things before everyone else. She’s a goddess your mother. Crazy auto-destruct autodidact mother-fucking goddess.’

  ‘You think?’ I asked, uncertain of what to say next.

  He nodded, suddenly earnestly. ‘Oh yeah,’ he said. ‘She was the real deal.’

  I threw back my drink.

  ‘Let me take you to dinner after this,’ I said. ‘I want you to tell me everything you know about her. Unless, that is, the Foundation is taking you out.’

  ‘They’ll be pleased to see the back of me,’ Gabriel said, and I suspected he was right. ‘Allen never got this award,’ he drew me closer. ‘Usually he got all the awards. Frankly, I was a bit sick of it. But, you know? It’s all very well to carry on with this shit. But where is the money?’ He raised his voice, a maniacal grin appearing on his once-beautiful skull-like face. He stood up and began to clap his hands together above his head as he chanted. ‘Show me the money. Show me the money. Show me the, show me the, show me the fucking money!’

  People, presumably Foundation administrators, looked anxiously across at him, hurriedly finding things to do in other rooms. Gabriel burst out laughing at his own joke before returning his attention to me. ‘I’ll tell you an Anna story,’ he paused for a moment. ‘Our last night in Paris together was at Harold’s launch. His ink angels. He had them sticking out of the wall on wire, just like they were flying, man. Burroughs wrote an introduction to the show. “Poetry is a Place,” he said. I liked that shit. Anyway, we were all there that night. Me, Allen, Peter. Anna called us her guardian angels,’ he paused for a moment. ‘So, that’s me. Her Gabriel, her angel of death, that’s the story. Any chance of something in return?’

  ‘Like I said, I’ll buy us dinner.’ But Gabriel just waved his hand at me in irritation. Clearly he was the kind of alcoholic who wasn’t so interested in food.

  ‘Are you using my mother as some kind of platform to beg from?’ I raised my voice, not because I was angry but because I wondered if it was the best way of managing him.

  ‘Whoah, slow up. Not money, that’s not what I’m after.’

  ‘What do you want then?’

  ‘A publisher!’

  I had no idea how he knew what I did. Maybe he had been keeping tabs on me, as well. ‘I am a publisher,’ I said, ‘but I don’t publish poetry’—though I relished, for a moment, the idea of trying to pitch a volume of poetry at the next publishing meeting, just to see the look of horror on my colleagues’ faces. ‘Anyway, you don’t need me. You just received a medal. You’re officially a legend in your own lifetime.’

  ‘Don’t bullshit me, baby. No one gives a fuck about poetry, and you know it.’

  I nodded. He was right.

  Then he shrugged; it was the Anna shrug. ‘No problem,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

  Gabriel told me he wanted to eat Mexican, so I got us a taxi down to Mi Cocina in the West Village. He looked at the menu for about two seconds before tossing it aside and ordering tequila.

  ‘I’m not hungry,’ he said.

  When the waitress asked if I wanted tequila as well I shook my head and ordered a glass of wine. That was when Gabriel clutched onto my wrist with fingers that must once have been long and tapered, and were now like claws. ‘No tequila, no stories,’ he said.

  I gave the waitress a wan smile. ‘Forget about the wine,’ I said, ‘but get me a chicken enchilada to go with the tequila.’

  Gabriel downed his first shot and ordered a second before he began. ‘Did your mother ever tell you about the time she was fucking some guy at one of these Baudrillard things,’ he paused, seeing my incomprehension. ‘You know, like an orgy. Anyway, she looked up and saw Burroughs, dressed in his suit—he was the only one wearing clothes, I can tell you—with a hat on his head, offering her a human skull full of punch.’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Allen had this theory of universal love consciousness. He turned up, we all turned up, maybe the summer of ’57. I’d been staying with Paul in Morocco until he booted me out. That’s when we all started hanging out. You can draw on the well of this great love you have experienced—what a privilege to actually experience, you dig? You can transform it.’ His withered hands cut through the air rapidly, at sharp angles. ‘But it was me that introduced Anna to chanting, you know. I played her a recording of Antonin Artaud’s recording of Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu—To have done with the judgment of God. Told her the Tibetans chant like that. Allen says it was him, but it was me.’

  He called for the waitress and ordered his third shot.

  ‘Where were we, baby?’

  I shook my head. I’d lost track.

  ‘That’s right. She astral travelled. Or said she could. She even wrote dirty books for Maurice. We all did, it was good money. Baby, your mother was a wild fucking chick.’

  He threw back another shot. I was becoming worried he’d pass out before I learned a thing. ‘Is there any chance,’ I was practically pleading, ‘that you could begin at the beginning?’

  ‘Define the beginning,’ he said. ‘A circle…’

  I put a hand to his mouth to quiet him. ‘Why don’t you tell me about your first night in Paris. With her.’ He took one of my fing
ers and sucked on it for a moment, as if considering.

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘You want the chronological, white-bread realist, totally-fucking-boring narrative of your mother’s adventures in Paris as relayed by me, the poet, Gabriel Pazzi-Geniali, in this, the month of September, the year of 2002. That what you want?’

  I laughed. I was starting to feel very drunk. ‘That,’ I said, ‘is exactly what I want.’

  Gabriel talks. I close my eyes and I see them, Gabriel and Anna, arriving, in Paris, close to fifty years ago. A younger, more beautiful Gabriel strides ahead taking two stairs at a time. ‘What do you think?’ He yells down to her from the doorway of their rented room.

  ‘I smell piss,’ Anna puts down her suitcase and walks up to him. ‘You must carry it for me, the rest of the way.’ Gabriel doesn’t like being told what to do, but goes back on down just the same. When he returns he dumps the case.

  ‘I do shit for you that I would do for no one else,’ he says. ‘Not even my mother.’

  ‘Darling.’ Anna gestures at the mould on the walls. The room is small and shabby.

  ‘It’s cool, isn’t it?’ Gabriel misreads Anna’s mood. ‘It’s fucking bardo man.’

  Anna stands there. ‘Bardo?’

  ‘The place between death and rebirth. Where we find our demons, embrace them, reject them.’

  Anna looks at him. She has no idea what she is doing here, in Paris. With a mad poet. She thinks: I have really fucked things up.

  Gabriel is oblivious, is already working on his next fix. He looks as if he’s lived in this place a lifetime. Anna puts down her bag and sits next to him on the bed. She tries to compose herself, tries to feel hopeful.

  Suddenly, she smiles. ‘Freddie Freeloader!’ The notes are tinny and insubstantial. ‘The music, where does it come from?’ Gabriel points at the stained sink against the wall. Anna walks over to it and puts her ear close to the plug hole, pinching her nose against the stench. The music jives up the pipes from the room below.

  Anna goes over to the small window, looks out across pretty roofs and chimneys that are already deep in shadow. It is twilight and the dim blurs everything, killing perspective. She can barely see to the end of the street, where the booksellers line the Quai and there is the dull glow of lamps along the Seine.

  ‘Come here,’ Gabriel beckons. ‘Parisian horse is good, take my word for it. Straight from Morocco. Better than New York, better than Mexico.’

  Anna walks back over to the bed, plumps up the yellowing lumpy pillows that sit, uncovered, upon it and leans back on them. ‘You do it,’ she says to him, offering up the blue vein that marbles her pale white inner thigh.

  Gabriel injects her, muttering to himself: ‘Long legs open snatch mouth ready to eat.’ He is turning her into a poem again.

  Anna starts to doze off almost immediately. Gabriel is still wired, despite the drugs. ‘Can I read to you?’ And before Anna can answer he is performing a poem about war.

  Will this man ever shut up? Anna wonders. ‘Bombs,’ she tries to rouse herself, ‘there are worse things to die of.’

  ‘What the fuck would you know?’ Gabriel expects applause.

  Anna can feel her eyelids drooping. ‘You are not the only one here who’s suffered.’

  ‘But I’m pretty fucking certain I’m the only poet in the room. Very fucking certain of that fact. We see with our mind. Who gives a fuck about being there? Anyone can fucking be there.’ Gabriel is raving now, he doesn’t need her audience. Anna’s head falls back against the pillow. When she wakes it is midday the next day and she is still dressed. A quilt has been thrown over her and a poem Gabriel must have written the night before is lying, like a present, on her pillow.

  She moves across oceans

  swims through trails of tears

  strikes ground with Indian palms

  beats earth with jazzy feet

  ‘Gabriel? Hello? Darling?’ she tries to shake him awake.

  ‘Where are the toilets?’

  He mumbles and snorts, flinging his arm in the direction of the basin.

  ‘It is too disgusting,’ Anna says, to herself it seems, for he is asleep again already.

  She splashes water on her face, picks up her still-packed bag and kisses Gabriel, ‘Bye bye angel boy,’ she whispers gently, pressing her cheek against his stubble.

  A few weeks later Anna and a man are leaning against a low wall along the Seine, savouring ice-cream cones, when Gabriel races past. He glances at Anna, registers it is her, then stops so suddenly that she half expects him to keep on skidding by, like a car that slams on its brakes too hard in the wet.

  ‘Princess! Babe! Where you been?’

  ‘Hello, darling,’ Anna stiffens slightly, as if nervous that Gabriel might revert to his old-fashioned American-Italian mores.

  ‘Still unbelievably fucking beautiful,’ he grins at her lecherously, then turns to her man. The new guy is short and stocky. He has sandy blond hair, grey-blue eyes and round steel-rimmed glasses. They make him look slightly owlish. It seems to Gabriel that this man is not nearly as good looking as he is so he relaxes and holds out his hand.

  ‘Gabriel,’ he says.

  ‘Nick,’ Anna’s friend greets him with a formal nod of the head. The look on his face suggests that it is his jealousy, not Gabriel’s, that might be a problem.

  Gabriel, always sensitive to his audience’s mood, decides to be discreet. ‘This chick is my best fucking friend in Paris,’ he says. ‘She’s a saint. It seems to me you might be a lucky man.’

  ‘Very lucky,’ Nick allows. Gabriel notices his accent is like Anna’s, but even thicker.

  ‘Hey, I’m heading to Spain, heading to Rome. Heading wherever. Not sure when I’ll be back. Not sure if I’ll be back. Let’s get a drink. You want a drink?’

  Nick looks at Anna and, to her relief, smiles. ‘Sure,’ he says.

  Gabriel strides off in the direction of Notre Dame, leaving Nick and Anna to dash after him.

  ‘Hey,’ Nick calls after her. ‘That is a waste.’ Then he bolts the rest of his cone and follows her.

  ‘Where are we going, darling?’ Anna asks, when she gets alongside Gabriel.

  ‘The Pergola.’ This is a test Gabriel often lays before people. How easily can they be shocked?

  Nick, as it turns out, can’t be shocked easily. More to the point, he’s a real hit. Despite his ordinary looks he has a charisma that makes him extremely attractive. Within minutes several men, some of them wearing lipstick, have sent drinks across to him. Anna, who Gabriel has no doubt is known at this bar already, has received a total of four drinks from women wearing suits. Gabriel has used his charms to get free drinks once too often around these parts—from men, from women, he’s not fussy—and is not so lucky; he quickly becomes distracted by the lack of alcohol heading in his direction and begins to fidget uncontrollably. Nick passes one of his drinks to Gabriel. ‘It is true I am more handsome than you,’ he smiles, ‘but still, you deserve a drink.’

  Gabriel slaps Nick on the back in appreciation. ‘You’re a good man, my friend. How did my Anna get so lucky?’ And that is when he hears about what Anna and Nick call their reunion.

  ‘Since I last…last saw you,’ Anna says to Gabriel, ‘I have been staying in the Marais, and Mary—I have told you about her, darling—rang me from Los Angeles to offer me work in a kind of “is she isn’t she” thriller.’

  ‘Is she or isn’t she what?’ Gabriel asks

  ‘You must know the story. Is she a Romanoff? A princess?’

  ‘Anastasia,’ Nick interrupts. ‘The story of Anna Anderson the woman who claimed to be Anastasia. The story is not so pretty. The girl is either dead, with her family; or mad, without them.’

  ‘But the story is happier, of course, when make believe. This is Hollywood,’ Anna reminds them. ‘Well, the interesting little bits of Hollywood that have been driven to Europe by Senator McCarthy. Not that I like communists, darling. But Miss Bergman plays Anastasia. I love her! My f
irst scene is where Anastasia goes to jump into the Seine. It is late at night, you know, it is no problem for the crew to take over the streets. And I am standing near the catering table, with my coffee, when I notice one of the cameramen is staring at me.’

  Before she describes what happened next she leans across the bar and touches Nick’s cheek for a moment, in a gesture that Gabriel finds indescribably tender.

  ‘He is strong looking, sexy. You know?’ Anna says, and Gabriel flinches, ever so slightly. ‘I was sure he must be Russian; half the crew was from eastern Europe. So anyway, I did my scene, and then, just as dawn is breaking, this sexy man comes up to me.’

  ‘Would you like a coffee?’

  Anna is suddenly shy. ‘Yes.’

  The man presumes intimacy. He takes her hand and leads her to a tiny cafe that is just pulling up its awnings to start the day. They sit down and order a bowl of coffee each. The man sits and looks at Anna, grinning, but not saying a word.

  ‘Do I know you?’ she finally asks.

  ‘Do you find me changed?’ He speaks English with a heavy accent. ‘You are much changed.’ He gives Anna another broad smile.

  In a heartbeat Anna leans across the table and kisses him full on the lips. ‘Where did you go?’

  ‘Not far. Just to Valiesky Island.’

  ‘You just seemed to disappear and then…’

  ‘I went to stay with my aunt,’ Nick said. ‘After that first winter—well you probably know—so many people had died that there is more food to go round. The power was restored so at least we did not freeze to death. I saw your friend Saskia in the street once and she told me that your father returned from the war and then disappeared. This was around the time evacuees were returning, so I guessed…’