High Lonesome

by Barry Hannah

  “You said I was priceless. That I had something priceless. But what is it? Why am I special?” The fear was creeping. I was hard bothered all over again.

  She thought too long, as if it weren’t really that big a question and she’d forgotten.

  “Well … I saw that painting of yours you didn’t want me to see, under your bed in your townhouse apartment, about a year ago. I really like it. It’s very great art. I loved you even more for thinking it was no good. Your very high standards, all private like that.”

  But it was wretched and derivative and never got much past simple meanness, like much of my work. The only reason it had any merit was I’d done a fair cartoon in the Thomas Hart Benton mode showing ghouls—my customers—with long arms and grief-stricken faces pulling out automobile parts from their bodies—you saw the outlines where they’d been ripped out, bloody—and demanding replacements. All of this with a hideous backdrop, too yellow. I kept it as a reminder, sleeping over it, that it was as far as I would ever push in creation. It was only a milestone. I had no vanity about it.

  “You made those people out the real Frankensteins they are, like those people around those wrecks we saw. Thank God we’re not like them at all, what a world. You cutey.”

  “But we were there. They made us hot, Jane, remember?”

  “I got hot loving that I wasn’t them. It still gets me hot knowing you’re not my ex-husband. He was so dumb and dull. Never once did he say my cunnie was the best in the world, like you do. I’m so so really happy you’re not him, baby. He was good, he was successful,” she began tearing up, and I was amazed, “but let me tell you this: he never had high standards. He accepted just about anything the way it was and just had these tired grunts every now and then.”

  It’s impossible to overdeclare my disdain for dying a wise old man, knowing every salient point, sitting there in my last room as with a multistory library in a cone over my ears. I was hugely sorry I’d asked about my pricelessness, having learned only what I was not. That our love was going along so well out of spite, like how many other loves?—the same, no different. “Living well is the best revenge.” “Prepare to make the memories,” say the beer and camera ads. All you need is beer, camera, and revenge and you’re a player.

  I walked out of the house down the hill toward the lake. I needed to talk to Mary, but then I found a gift by accident. I was sitting on the dam getting bit by chiggers and mosquitoes and deer flies but refusing to move or get in the water, which I needed to do.

  An animal came up next to me, which I believed to be an apparition in my periphery. It was about the size of a big house cat. It kept moving slowly towards me the two hours, it must have been. But I looked ahead, not even a weed in my mouth, nothing in front but a blind thousand yards. I finally felt it so close that I looked around. It was a large and handsome raccoon, regarding me and not moving now as I stared straight at it. Its hair was so deep and rich, brown and black, it seemed beyond real, so prosperous out here on the beaches of the encroaching shore lots with their moody houses on the hill. I stood, and after retreating only inches to gather itself back, it took stock of me without nervousness then eased up closer and closer—a yard away—and decided I was no threat. It was without the ordinary panic of these careful beasts. Did it know me? Was I something like a body washed up out of a deep lake, the odor of a sunburned slug? He looked to be truly working me for a few minutes. I got uncomfortable and started walking around the lake. This lover of marine carrion fell in step just a little to my right on the water side.

  Lovers, even middle-aged lovers I guess, may not be good people, but if they were like me just now, after the physical ardor of two months after a wait of over a year, they do have innocence. They’re so worn out there is hardly anything left but the sleepy wonder of infants. I was stumbling along as if on the ground of the moon, reading everything with intense color in a doubled hurtful light, near the result of those drugs I took just a few of at Columbia, but with more suspense because I was clean. The raccoon paced along. When I knew it did not want to eat me, I think we became chums. We walked around the lake and back to where I was, and this thing we repeated three or four times a week in the last of the winter, which was mild.

  Everybody knows raccoons are graceful. I regard them as so refined in beauty they are almost like a work of art let out to eat, especially this big sleek friend who wouldn’t seem to mind going back and watching television with me when Jane was out of the house. I felt better, going around the shore, sometimes watching the animal freeze, poke, and snatch when it wanted something tasty out of the water.

  The élan of the Indian tennis players occurred to me as I looked forward to the European tournaments on the big-screen Toshiba. I hoped there were some Indian tennis players left to watch, with their sweet moves, their gentlemanship, a power beyond victory and defeat to me, much in rebuke to our wearisome national jocks and deranged narcissists like McEnroe. I didn’t give the raccoon a name even as he became nearly a walking roommate. You should not name something more elegant than you, I thought. I didn’t even know its sex. Maybe it was a newly mated older boy like me taking a couple hours off from the little woman back at the castle.

  I was near broke again, with all my buying for the house, back to the lower class. I’d never taken money from Jane and didn’t intend to. Our house felt like a rented thing to me, with none of my purchased future in it. I’d built a muscadine arbor one morning out of heavy stakes with lattice board for a roof. We would see it from our rear bay window on the slope into the lake. It was my first yard idea ever. I wanted a grape bower with a love couch underneath—somehow an all-weather one, if they made them. I wanted the raccoon to visit and eat the grapes, maybe even bring his family over. I expected the thing, in fact, to one day give up his beastly quietness and begin chatting with me. Or I would become a whole new animal, enough to chat in its language. Jane and I could ravish each other on the couch even into old age. I was sad, but so what? This was my only marriage and I didn’t intend to retreat from it. Maybe I was copying the decorator, the old granny with his erotic room ideas, or competing with him. I was proud.

  But when Jane looked down in the yard at it she didn’t show delight. I could sense there was something wrong with it now. It wasn’t on television.

  Then I got back from a trip to Kansas City one afternoon. Jane embraced me at the door, all bright, and said she had a surprise for us. I spied down toward my old arbor construct. It had been torn down and replaced by one in green metal exactly the shade of the trees. The granny had told her where she could get one, the whole outfit, and his men had put it up for her. I went almost insane. It was our first large fight—nearly all one-sided by me—but I felt eternity in it. I almost struck her, there with her eyes seeming dead and glib to me all of a sudden. I told her the raccoon wouldn’t likely come near that thing.

  “The raccoon? The what raccoon?!”

  “My raccoon. For the grapes.”

  “What, have you invited him? What’s this raccoon? You’re sick!”

  She slammed away to her retreat in the plump covers of our king-size bedroom where more Japanese television was.

  Yes, I was sick, and it continued. I was not the same, maybe am still not. I’ve got myself in trouble, a minor disaster I rather like—not a well man. I neglected my raccoon friend and imagined that it cared.

  In the early spring I began playing more tennis, but not with Jane, who cared less now for the game. I played with little Mary. Not in spite, either. There was no special reason to tell Jane, and Mary’s now careful friendship was too precious to lose.

  One day I went down to the courts with too much beer in me. I knew I could not drink over two beers without going straight into depression, more a desert than an abyss for me, longer and no abrupt way out with great effort. See here, I have sought help professional and amateur for myself. I’ve tried to heal myself, always a bit sick that the cluttered mentocracy of self-study that afflicts this fat nation had
enrolled me too. I agreed with the last food doctor entirely on the beer and had been much better for it. I’d never been a real drinker anyway, just a medicator of joylessness.

  Mary keeps running and trying, dear heart, even without a great deal of strength, but with the advantage of growing up on a family court in Memphis with a mother who was a tour player. I’m just a bit better, without a single formal lesson. I watch a good player—the Indians—and try to absorb their spirit. There is a dullish way of playing perfect tennis, by all the percentages, that causes tennis burnout to the young even in their twenties—the young of a certain sensitivity. They get tired of the geometry and the predictions, their coaches and families. I’ve been close to that just by the repetition of a few weeks of near-perfect play. Maybe I’d drunk the beer to make the match more even between Mary and me. She was winning and I was not slacking.

  One of those body men of the same pair—who played beside me ranting about their exercise and food regimen months ago—came over as I was beginning to serve.

  “Say, did you know you were always late with your backhand, just a little late? You should step up to the ball more, get to the height of its arc, and be in front of it.”

  Hardly without a pause, I dropped my racket and slapped him in the face. I’d never hit a man with a full fist, and in this case the result would have been even sillier if I had. He popped me so fast with the ham of his forearms, twice, I was out cold for a time. I woke up sitting, with his face over me and into mine, now with more concern than anger. He was smiling. Then he must have smelled the beer on me. Mary was up by me, amazed on her little legs.

  “You shouldn’t come out here drinking, pal. I’m sorry, but you’re very lucky I’m a belt. I only told you you were late with your backhand,” the man said.

  “I’ve been late with my backhand for thirty years. It’s the way I play, it’s fun that way. You fucking loudmouth pig.”

  Mary moved down to get between him and me as he took a step, saying no to both of us. He wore athletic sports glasses. In his horror over my infirmity, he cut into me with a high-beamed glass stare that reminded me of every imperious monster of life that had ever hounded me. I almost fainted with hatred, overcome by all my failures at once, and proud of them too.

  Afterwards Mary and I drank even more beer in my closed store together. I took out a new Jaguar poster with an even nuder woman poised in a diaper on the hood, her toes stretched out as just then in the moment of sexual crisis. I tacked her up. She was more Ford than Jaguar.

  “Yes, and I think I’m separating from Jane. This antiseptic thing is coming on too strong. We’re going to just be a laboratory with the right wallpaper soon. She even asked me if I thought we’d still make love after age fifty. My God, fifty. That’s probably gotten dirty too. Or unkempt. That’s what it is about those St. Louis Midwestern people. Their fear of soil, wood, anything that could leave a stain—that’s why they’re creeps. Want to pave the world, they’re paving the goddamn beaches, they want designer nursing homes for resorts.” And so on. “She doesn’t even like sex, I’ll bet. She just wants a picture of it.”

  I thought I’d get some agreement from Mary. But now she scolded me, and I quit the beer.

  “You’re not separating. No you are not. Separating is all you’ve done since I’ve known you. And you will work with Jane, you will compromise. At your age it’s just indecent, you, to always want to be a social nigger. You won’t get along without her. You’ll get worse.”

  “We might strike up something again, you and me,” I said.

  “Not a prayer. You’re had. You worked for it hard to be had, and you’re not stepping out now! You’re married, Royce! You’re so absolutist. You think heaven’s supposed to feel like heaven. If you quit this, I know this: you’ll get old and tired instantly, with all your little principles intact. Just old and tired.”

  Now she was wet in her eyes.

  But my raccoon, my arbor, my self! “A house should be a boat on this planet, riding nature. She wants a high-profile mausoleum, a monolith with a lawn like a pool table around it.” This felt original to me, and I was in rare beer eloquence, with my face good and bruised by that fiend on the court. I felt good and brave.

  Mary simply left, on her little legs, and I had the shop alone.

  So now our love life is getting worse, although the raccoon came right up for the muscadines when they were out two years later. It didn’t care if the poles were green metal. I fixed a couch under the vines that Jane seemed to like, but easing her toward long talks—we had nothing left to say—and pleasures under the moon will be a job. Sometimes on the television we’ll see a number of people, peasants, driven off into a chasm in the desert by charioteers with great-looking helmets in pursuit, and she’ll get a little warm. Sometimes there’s a sort of new kindness about her. I saw her feeding the raccoon with a can of premium King Oscar sardines once, out there by herself with it. I don’t think she knew I could see through the vines from the house.

  She got bored and the granny decorator, with his delicious whip of a tongue, wanted her to work with him, since she was educated to his home touches. I imagine he’s seen with her at very good restaurants where they eat in St. Louis. She eats with him a lot more than with me, and that’s fine, really, since we can’t talk very much. One week there was a sort of scandal, rather pathetic, when the old granny was lying in his own bed playing with himself in easy view of several straight young workmen busy at his house. Jane took his side. I was surprised how this desperation endeared him to me too, sad fellow. Because I’m on his team. The coach has sent me in whether I wanted to play the last losing quarter or not. I look at my lean face in the mirror and see less a younger man than a thing in progress to a remarkable death’s head.

  Thanks deeply for listening as I wind down this scratchy log. I’ve gone back to the Presbyterian church of my youth a few times, alone and secretly. White church music is still awful and middle-aged everybody still appalls me, especially the sudden careful holiness they’re given over to, having bought a ticket to a proverb convention—I judge.

  Yet the very few graceful, profound, and bewildering words of Our Saviour do get through to me more and more, so different from this loser’s, lost like a two-headed snake in jabber at itself, condemned to my own story like somebody already in an Italian hell. I am slow, I am windy. I have so little vision, engaged in this discourtesy of length and interminable excuse, but seeing bits of light here and there ahead. The Indian tennis players aren’t winning much anymore, but I hope they’re still around.

  Tell me. Did Our Saviour die because he was right, or is it that he simply was right and then he died? Tell me, let’s chat. I’ll be mostly in the shop.

  The Agony of T. Bandini

  TIGER BANDINI WAS A SHORT SORT OF PROWLING FELLOW WITH plump red lips and black ashy cheeks. He came from sports people but even to other hard-bitten fans he was over the line. He knew intimately about all the quick and larger hitters in American football. Above all he liked the linebackers and other violent crushers. He worshiped the violent crush. His eyes would close as if in a dream when he talked about Lawrence Taylor, for instance. He would begin screaming and white liquid would form at the corners of his lips. Giants fans in the bars who had begun in agreement with him would edge away and huddle together to avoid him. But Bandini was in a zone of screaming delight and was not conscious of this. One day after a Giants game on the television he went into a tirade of celebration and lost consciousness. They let him lie there on the floor, and in a few minutes he was back up on the bar, his eyes gone to slits and a vicious grin wrapped around another whiskey. He was whispering, “Taylor. Taylor.” He had been there since morning and when he left he got in his car and killed another man in a bad head-on accident.

  He was forbidden a driver’s license in perpetuity by the judge. His family had struggled in measures grievous to them to keep Bandini out of prison and Bandini advised himself that he could no longer exist in his own town in
upper New York state under the burden of shame and guilt.

  Before his college experience was interrupted by the accident Bandini had met a pair of Southern boys who were crazed for the work of William Faulkner, and even more crazed as their homesickness grew. They could quote long passages from Faulkner that sounded to Bandini like a black preacher schooled on an enormous dictionary. Bandini sided with blacks, especially now that he was in disgrace and felt shunned. The Southern boys, like Faulkner, had elaborate reasons for doing almost anything. Bandini was impressed by this. He felt he was in the world of pain and ruin now after the wreck, but he saw there were elaborate reasons for it, and he relished this, as he drank only beer now at the end of the bar, only sometimes shouting. Ruin talked to him.

  For instance, their college was not a very good college and was even falling apart physically. The buildings were erected by inferior contractors supported by the New York Mafia. Around the campus, interior and exterior walls fell down in chalky gravel that the students walked over daily. Sections of ceiling were apt to drop out, especially after a big snow or rain. Bandini liked to expatiate on the complexities of this in a patient beered-up review of the history of the New York Mafia. The Southern boys agreed nothing worthy was as plain as it seemed. The only worthy subjects were coiled up and crossed like nylon fishing line. Like them, Bandini began to speak much of destiny and twists of fate. This comforted him. Much was inevitable and bound to the blind dice-thrower fate. Fishing line left overnight would coil of its own.

  So he thought it was in the dice and natural that he wind up way down south in a rental home in the precincts of the great author Faulkner himself. The town was storied and cozy, filled with shady lanes under great oaks. Around even his poor house in the student section was a bank of weeping willows.