by Jim Harrison
That incident started the first quarrel of our love affair. She hated cats because they were wanton killers while I rather liked them though I’ve never owned one. Our second quarrel was that she wanted to go to the Covent Garden Flower Show in England on our intended honeymoon while I wanted to spend a month in Barcelona and Seville, not to speak of Granada where I intended to visit the murder site of the great Federico García Lorca.
My nap’s dream had included brave Ralph dragging off the snake. While I dressed for dinner it occurred to me I could scarcely have expected the great leftist García Márquez to be impressed as he held my Bioprobe of Henry Kissinger. Afterward, it was hard to imagine dozens of poor Mexicans sitting in a park reading my Bioprobes in a foreign language. No, the problem while sitting there with the great man is that I hadn’t even been to Spain, and Mexico’s uncertain relationship to Spain had been nagging at me since I had arrived the day before. When I went to the Mexico City airport that afternoon I was quite literally trembling as I noted flights to Madrid and Barcelona. I was a free man, why didn’t I board one?
Thinking this over I lit my second cigarette of the day. At fifty-five I was still capable of living dangerously but not nearly as much so as your average Indiana opossum who hasn’t quite learned to recognize headlights.
We all met at Rico’s apartment in the East Village, a fearsome place when I had lived there from 1969 to 1972, soon after gaining my flight from the porch and my M.F.A., similar experiences in the long run. The M.F.A. replaced the B.A. in English as the zenith of valueless degrees. Now the East Village had been at least partially gentrified and when I got out of the cab on Avenue A and Third Street I recalled being told of the scandal about W. H. Auden’s poem “The Platonic Blow” which had been written locally in the sixties. It was a rather vivid poem about gay blow jobs and at the time the police were eager to prosecute but the mayor’s office held them in check. I was trying to think of another time when a poem had excited such interest in America.
Rico’s apartment is quite spacious and a little strange with nineteenth-century Italianate furniture he trucked over from his deceased parents’ house out in Queens. The kitchen, however, is as fabulous as my sister’s in Indiana. Rico is an Angelo Pellegrini—type traditional cook, always seeking out the roots of what he thinks as “genuine.” He collects nineteenth-century ethnic cookbooks and has allowed dozens of food fads to pass him by without apparent notice. Occasionally Rico has bursts of bad temper but of late they are mostly about Mayor Giuliani whom Rico claims is a third cousin. “Giuliani ho dempre ragivni,” Rico yells, reflecting the famous notion that Mussolini was always right.
The women were already there, both in their mid-to-late twenties. Gretchen, the secretary from the World Trade Center, was rather sturdy and half-Italian from Troy, New York. Donna, my date, was as unprepossessing as possible with thickish glasses and a rather dumpy corduroy suit under which you couldn’t detect the shape of her body. “I can’t stand anything touching my eyes so I don’t wear contacts,” she said, shaking my hand and anticipating the question I wasn’t going to voice. I was startled to learn that she was a second-year graduate student at the Union Theological Seminary up near Columbia where she had a “ratty” room on the edge of Harlem. It was the kind of announcement that made me nervous about money. I quickly learned that these were bright girls from relatively poor families whose fathers worked for the railroad. They had been friends since kindergarten, in fact, but were polite enough not to talk in the private language of longtime friends. And both had been divorced after brief marriages. They were amused when I topped them with my own nine-day wonder though I withheld the information that I was flying to see Cindy the next day. By magazine standards Gretchen and Donna were rather homely but on this particular evening that made them attractive indeed. My fetish for beautiful women, actresses and models, had exhausted itself by the time I hit fifty and had begun cringing when I touched a fake tit. I certainly didn’t blame women for having them, given our culture, but they made me uncomfortable. A feminist I met at Elaine’s once asked me how long the lines would be if men could buy a perfectly operable big dick? I am dark complexioned enough not to show my blushes.
I went to the kitchen to open a Lynch-Bages I had brought along as a treat and when I came back Rico was showing Donna and Gretchen his complete collection of my Bioprobes, and also my first book, the one I refer to as Murgatoyd in SOHO. I immediately burst with itchy sweat. Gretchen turned to me and said, “You must be a whiz.” Donna sensed that I was stricken and withheld comment as she fingered the bindings of William Paley and Warren Buffett but pulled Linus Pauling from the shelf. Gretchen read a back-cover quote: “Well written and beautifully researched. Take one on your next business trip.” Donna reached for Murgatoyd, which Rico had located at the Strand, a used-book emporium, right after we met ten years ago. She flipped to a page where the prose was interrupted by poetry and where my character’s feet become so heavy he can’t get them over a curb, but manages to get down the stairs at the Lionhead Tavern where he misses the barn swallows of an Indiana farm. “I actually prefer poetry to biography,” Donna said, dismissing my last thirty years. “I mean you’re doubtless an exception but I grow bored with all of this false sincerity, this lavishness toward famous people and the petty details of their lives. It’s really just an adjunct, or fertilizer for the Disney fascism of our time, don’t you think?”
“Fucking A,” Rico said, “politicians are mostly two hundred pounds of pus in ten-pound sacks. They leak all over the place.”
I poured the Lynch-Bages, affecting a pensive mood. No scintillating “bon mot” was in the offing. Rico was clearly trying to help but this wasn’t dollaring up as a fun evening.
“Of course my dad said you shouldn’t look down at a gandy dancer until you’ve laid down some track yourself. I’ve only lived in New York for a year and I’m already an expert carper. There are hundreds of thousands of brilliant folks here who can sum up their accomplishments each year by saying that they took a shower and read the Times every day.”
This said, Donna sat down rather snugly beside me on the sofa. She wasn’t quite as acerbic as my sister but close. She peeled a shrimp from a bowl Rico had set out. “Would you fuck Giuliani for a million dollars?” I lamely joked.
“Of course,” she fairly shrieked with laughter. “For you it would be exactly a dime but men never carry dimes. There’s no nature in New York and the closest you can get is an orgasm.” She popped the shrimp in her mouth and closed her eyes as she chewed with pleasure, her eyelids magnified by the glasses. My heart went out to her scuffed shoes. Rico and Gretchen were sitting on chairs and wondering if they should try to bail out the situation. I knew very well I didn’t have a dime in my pocket, as I habitually drop all my change on sidewalks for bums and children to find. Donna drank her wine rather quickly so I finished my own. The wall clock tick-tocked. Rico cleared his throat and announced that we better head out for dinner. When Donna got up she gave my thigh a friendly squeeze and offered her hand. “If you can’t stand me I can go home now.” I thought this over. “I adore you. And it’s my Christian duty to fill your tummy. I want you to go through life making it hot for assholes like myself,” I said.
“She always breaks the ice with a tank,” Gretchen said, squeezing Rico’s ass so hard he flinched.
At an Italian place on Delancey, Rico and I continued our “head motif” with a half calf’s head apiece roasted with garlic. The girls ate chicken and veal. I continued to be disturbed about Donna’s perilous neighborhood but limited myself to a passing remark which, nonetheless, lit a fuse. Donna looked up from swabbing a goodly amount of butter on her bread but not all that much more than I used on special occasions.
“You’re twenty times as likely to die from butter than be murdered,” she quipped. This again had an uncanny resemblance to the kind of information my sister collected. I looked down at my buttered bread, which had the specific charm of not resembling a gun. Her
comment started a brief quarrel with Rico who doubted her butter stats. A New Yorker always questions while I immediately believed, in the manner of rural Indiana which sees fibbing as a sin.
“Okay, I’ll throw in transfatty acids,” Donna said. She put down a roasted drumstick and began searching in her purse. “Dammit, I forgot to take my lithium earlier.”
The rest of us stared at the ceiling while Donna took her pill, then I signaled the waiter for a third bottle of the pricey old Barolo.
“We’re eating so much better than Dietrich Bonhoeffer did in a German prison,” I quipped. I had been searching for a name of a theologian, but not the obvious Paul Tillich whom some fans had garroted for womanizing along with Krishnamurti and nearly everyone else of prominence. After a couple of decades of being ignored adultery has become nearly as fascinating as money.
The bait worked. Donna launched a disquisition on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, also Barth and Simone Weil. Rico and Gretchen started their own conversation. We had two grappas with our coffee and were all quite suddenly well oiled and tired. I asked the waiter to call us a cab and he said his “cousin” in the bar at the front of the restaurant had his town car free. Why not. I went out in front, paid the bill, and complimented the chef who, done for the night, was sitting there all sweaty with a monstrous glass of whiskey. I’ve often thought of starting a restaurant that would only seat four people at a time. The cousin didn’t really want to drive way up near Columbia so we settled on a hundred bucks which I figure was less than each of the bottles of Barolo. I’ve always used inane comparisons when I’m being economical.
Dropping off Rico and Gretchen was the easy part, then I decided to make the long ride with Donna and be dropped off last. A gentleman walks a lady to the door. That sort of thing. I began to doze off in reaction to the startling midnight speed of the driver, but at several traffic lights on the West Side there was the shattering sound of car alarms which must equal butter as a cause of Manhattan coronaries. Donna was still babbling about Bonhoeffer and Weil, but at a slightly slower pace as if the lithium might have kicked in. Given the theological nature of her chat I was doubly surprised when she gave my wiener a tweak to see if I was awake, or so she said. I put my arm around her and she snuggled close. Wine was creating its own questionable magic, not to speak of the grappa. My sister likes to tell me I’m only a prosperous wino but then I’ve easily learned to accept this character flaw.
Disaster struck quickly when we reached Donna’s room, though the word is a bit strong for a mediocre pratfall. After walking up two improbably shabby flights of stairs and watching Donna unlock three locks on her metal door with three keys, I thought I heard a shout from the street. I went to the window of the room just in time to watch my driver speeding off. Perhaps he’d return but probably not. Two young black men were kicking a soccer ball back and forth, doubtless the threat that sent the driver packing. He had already pocketed my hundred so he had nothing to lose.
“Don’t worry, I’ll carry you home,” Donna joked. The grappa rose in my gorge. Oh fuck, I want to be home in my own bed. The room was larger than I expected with a full wall of books, a two-burner hot plate, posters and prints and some hanging fabrics, a chair and a desk piled with folders. In short, strenuously bleak unless you are in your twenties. The bathroom was across the hall and when I peed I heard moans. Back in the room Donna laughed and said the moans came from a diminutive gay man who hankered after large blacks. This seemed graphic enough so that I sensed my modest hemorrhoids. The gay man, also a theological student, was a close friend of hers. She poured me peppermint schnapps and plopped down her cell phone to help me sort out my problem. I still hadn’t quite taken in the room and my breath drew in sharply when I saw the Seville bullfighter poster above her narrow bed. Oh Jesus, but I thought everyone had long since abandoned these posters from my college years.
Donna picked up a robe and nightie and went out to the bathroom, leaving the door open so I might be entertained by the moans just down the hall. What is to become of this fifty-five-year-old child with feet of ice and the uncertain power of a calf’s head in his stomach, a slightly wacko theological student at her hygiene across the hall? My editor Don would have given the driver fifty bucks down payment and fifty on delivery. Mordant thoughts of midwestern simplemindedness arose with the grappa. This wasn’t exactly Kosovo so I drew up my courage and stared at the Seville poster.
At nineteen my youthful, intended year in Spain was to be split evenly between Seville and Barcelona. I even planned on talking my way into spending a night in Miguel Hernandez’s jail cell, wherever that was. The grim walls would inculcate me with the spirit of his poetry. The most viable research of my life had been devoted to these two cities and it gradually became apparent to me sitting in Donna’s spartan quarters that I had owned the selfsame Seville bullfighter poster. I had fully intended to walk the banks of the Guadalquivir from Seville to Córdoba, not quite leading a friendly donkey, the idea of which was pushing it even in the sixties. I would have inevitably lived in the Triana neighborhood of Seville, probably with a beautiful gypsy girl. On warm spring afternoons she would sleep naked wrapped lightly in her mantilla with a pink rose in her hair. I recall devouring Théophile Gautier’s A Romantic in Spain and believing every word, though a professor of Spanish had told me it was largely nonsense. I tortured my graduate school roommates silly with playing both Spanish classical and flamenco music. By a vote of two to one my musical taste was exiled to my room rather than our living and dining area.
Donna came back into the room interrupting my reverie and I impulsively picked up her cellular phone. I intended to call Sean or Michael, old-time bellhops at the Carlyle Hotel, and have them send a car. I had stayed there over the years before acquiring my apartment, and had spent a month there the year before when my apartment had been redecorated. Fatefully enough Donna’s cellular needed recharging.
“Have you been to Spain?’ I asked, gesturing at the poster.
“Of course. Everybody’s been to Spain. I was stationed there in the WACs.” She massaged my shoulders and neck, which relaxed me somewhat, then ran her hand through my hair, pronouncing it “flossy wossy,” which tightened my neck up again. “With your sort of person nothing is supposed to go awry and now it has,” she accurately commented.
“I’ve never been to Spain,” I said plaintively.
“Then go tomorrow.” She resumed her massage.
“I have to go to Wisconsin tomorrow.”
“They’re definitely not the same place.” She led me to the bed. “You go to sleep. I’m going to read for a while.”
I felt embarrassed and childish taking off my sport coat and tie and shoes. I slumped back on the bed as she sat down at her desk and began reading. She poured herself a schnapps and said that she felt too woozy to read epistemology. She turned off the desk light and now there was only a smallish night-light over near the hot plate. She lay down beside me and pushed at me to move closer to the wall.
“You’re becoming less fun than an average corpse. I didn’t run off with the fucking car either. Either be amusing or go to sleep.”
“You could nurse me,” I suggested, only half in jest.
“You’re fucking kidding,” she shrieked with laughter. “How many times have you used that line?”
“Never,” I said honestly. She was up on her elbow looking down at me, then unloosed her robe and nightie and put a breast in my mouth. How sensitive of her. There was a startling smoothness to her skin. She had said she was Irish-Czech and one wondered because the much used “satiny” was a euphemism. I was abruptly excited and went down on her with an energy I normally reserve for a fine French meal. This woman had my ears flying off and hers too. What man is not proud who quickly brings a woman to thumping orgasm by whatever means, with chafed chin and bruised nose, versatile tongue, even forehead in play. I couldn’t remember being so utterly thrilled until she turned and moved down, pulling at my trousers.
“Have you be
en fucking pine trees?” She sniffed.
“Argh,” I said, remembering my salve. “That’s pine-pitch salve I use for eczema.” I bolted out of the bed and door and opened the closed door of the bathroom in a rush. I was not alone. A very tall and muscular black man and a very short and thin white man were looking at themselves in the mirror. At least they were wearing colored bikini skivvies. I covered my erection with my hand.
“I’m with Donna,” I said. “Pardon me.”
“Are you? Not now. Donna, is he with you?” he called out.
“In a way,” she called back and they left me to soap off my salve. It was all too much to bear. She made a diffident attempt at raising my now thoroughly limp noodle, then gave up and promptly went to sleep with a purling little snore. As a light sleeper who keeps a notebook ready on his nightstand for important ditties like “Over the years Castro has diminished his cigar smoking,” I dreaded a long night of consciousness but quickly passed out.
It was half past three on the clock near the night-light when someone tested our door. “Beat it, fuckhead!” I roared with a voice swollen by instant adrenaline.
“My hero,” Donna whispered and then we were at it with a quiet rapture. It wasn’t a fuck equivalent to a fifteen-round fight that Norman Mailer had written about back when I was in college, but sort of a three-round Golden Gloves struggle toward fruition. My face stretched tight in the broadest smile I could remember. Down the street a beautiful car alarm joined our mutual end. For some reason I murmured “Oomgawah” from an ancient cartoon.
I awoke to Donna saying “A priori” and then a German phrase. She and the gay-blade neighbor, Bob by name, were at the desk fast at their books. Bob saw my open eyes and saluted. He brought me coffee and a glazed donut which is what my face felt like.