The word coffee was written in a dozen places on our route from The Chaparral to The Twentieth Century. Little men in hats and seersucker suits stood at counters tipping back their heads as they drank it like patients in a mental hospital upending little white cups of Thorazine. In the winter, these same people would frequent the same counters and drink from the same cups, only their bulky coats and felt hats would give them the air of European police inspectors, and when it is very cold in Chicago light comes in the station windows in huge luminous beams that flash upon the pigeons as they fly through the dusty air as if through a raft of glittering stars.
I confess that I grew optimistic as we drew toward New York. After all, New York was my home. It still is, though I hear that it has changed immeasurably. But I have it in my memory as it was, and I love it as you love someone who has died—with gentle resignation, insistent faith, and absolute certainty. I see it in silence, but I know that if I were strong enough, if I could will it as you will flight in a dream, I would suddenly hear all the sounds from within and I would enter the enlarged image to begin my search for the people whose addresses I still carry in my heart. If I found them I don't know what I would do (or if they would recognize me) but I would be so happy just to see them. I would, for example, seek out my father in 1910, when he was still a young man and I was six. I would follow him on the El, and perhaps I would catch his eye. He might think the kindness he sensed coming from an old white-haired Civil War veteran was part of the wisdom and benevolence of age. Have you never seen old coots like me who smile at you and look as if they know what's coming and who you are, precisely? Maybe they're your son, who, because he loved you, was able to wish himself back through time.
New York gave me strength. The Hudson gave me strength, being, as it was, my garden of Eden. I decided that my love for Constance would enable me to change, and that, seeing that I had, she would change as well, and we would repair our failing relations. There was almost nothing I wanted more than to walk with her through shady, anonymous summer streets, lost in time, still in love.
As if I myself had had coffee, my optimism swelled out of all proportion, and after the taxi dropped us at the house I ran in like a general who has just won a war. Everything was going to be possible in the new age that I would will. First, I dashed to the bathroom and made the towels crooked. I de-alphabetized Constance's many bottles of perfume (it drove her crazy when I insisted upon putting Ravishment behind Quantum Mechanique, because Ravishment was her favorite and hard to reach), and then took the elevator to the kitchen, where I de-alphabetized the cheese and even took some of it out of the dairy section, placing it recklessly with the fruit. Surrendering entirely to depravity, I took a piece of Stilton and set it asymmetrically among bottles of newly disorganized beer.
I cannot assert that these slovenly actions made me feel good, that they were easy to accomplish, or that they made sense, but I thought to change all of what I was for the sake of my heart, and I pushed forward.
My study was next. I cried when I disordered it, for it seemed that in mixing up categories of stamps, de-parallelizing paper clips, and tipping lamp shades by three or four degrees I was abandoning all the efforts I had made in my life—symbolically at least—to bring order to a disordered world, to defend what was sensible and good against what was nonsensical and evil, to lay out a sort of aerodrome ready to receive in good order a flight of planes that had long been lost.
When they would break out of the clouds, I wanted them to have a clear field on which to land. I wanted them to know that the ground crew had never abandoned the hope for their return, that I was waiting, that I had not let down my guard, that I believed. Suddenly to accept the idea of disorder, to surrender to it, to cease caring for the beauty and balance of all things, all things, was going against every lesson of my life and every struggle that I had successfully struggled.
Neatness is so deeply ingrained in me that even the first dismantling threatened to push me over the edge. But I have believed from almost the beginning—perhaps unwittingly, perhaps instinctively—that life and love are inseparable, that to honor one you must honor the other, that love can be many things and the cause of many exceptions, and that, as the greatest matter of exceptions, love can be God's permission—indeed, His command—to war against His order to which one is sworn, to war against other men, against nature, against God Himself. Only love can carry such a message, so strongly felt, so terribly laden, so right, so pure, and so perfect. Only love.
I decided to drink a cup of coffee, or at least to try.
Naturally, I couldn't just go out, walk into a restaurant or one of the many other disgusting dens where such things are accomplished, ask for a cup of coffee, and drink it. Constance saw my hesitancy as a license for debauchery, and during the six or seven weeks in which I put off my confrontation and conversion, she began to associate with obvious coffee users. And then, as she sank deeper into the corruption, she surrounded herself with coffee sympathizers, apologists, hacks, flacks, and drones. She would come home flushed, nervous, and arrhythmic. I smelled it on her breath from across the dining room table, and the dining room table was twenty feet wide.
At the end of July, several S. S. Pierce trucks arrived with supplies for a fiendish apparatus that had been delivered from Italy—a machine constructed to force live steam through ground-up coffee beans. I had seen these on the Continent and kept a healthy distance. Now one sat upon the main preparation table in the dessert kitchen. It had a bronze gargoyle at the peak of its bell-jar-shaped copper boiler. Clearly, the artisan who made it knew of what he made. I could not stare at the horrible visage: the bronze eyes seemed alive, the smile forced by the drug.
The director of one of the museums that Constance had endowed was talking with her in the reception room one Saturday morning when I came in from my run around the park. We always kept the reception room so full of flowers that one of the servants was employed as a full time bee guard, with a cheesecloth net that had been specially designed by Frank Buck.
This room was a paradise. Even in winter, with a hickory fire consuming itself amid cliffs of warm white marble, the flowers were full and fresh. As I was passing, I looked in. Everything seemed as it had been. Constance had had her teeth cleaned. Once more they were glacially white, free of the corrupt stains of the beverage that looks like the distillation of a cesspool. She was dressed in her tennis whites: she was irresistible in any kind of athletic clothing, even a catcher's outfit.
The museum director sat on the edge of his seat, bent forward, laughing too hard at the things she said that were just vaguely amusing. I heard Constance, her voice changed, earnestly, stupidly, saying, "On Saturdays I like to play tennis, wash my hair, and go to Jefferson Market to buy coffee."
When she said the part about buying coffee it was as if she were talking about a man with whom she was ecstatically in love. She filled with a softness and warmth I recalled from when first we met. And then there was a terrific crunch as I side-kicked the throat of her tennis racquet leaning against one of the Egyptian marble lions at the reception room door.
All right, I told myself as I ran upstairs (Constance didn't like anyone breaking her tennis racquets), if I'm going to do this, I have to do it.
First, I made a testament. As the joint owner of several billion dollars' worth of companies, real estate, art, and monetary instruments, I had, of course, a rather complicated will. It was in a Morocco leather folder that I used to smell for fun, and it had been drawn up by Grandfather Faber's old firm. The algorithm part took up the first twenty pages, and the inventory, duly updated every quarter, then ran to [>].
But this will said nothing of emotions, regrets, and aspirations. Yes, aspirations even after the last aspiration.
My testament, which I drew up myself, without lawyers, had nothing in it about money. It was about how I knew I would be forced to leave this world and the people I loved, and it was a way to talk to them, even those who had gone before me.
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In this document, I spoke to Constance. I spoke to her a lot. And I did not shy from addressing the subject that had caused our downfall. I did not shy from condemnation. I did not shy from a cautionary tale, illustrated by my own death. "I died because you allowed your woman's heart to fasten upon an object. I died because you were possessed by the bronze-colored gargoyle leering over the dessert table. I died because you allowed your beautiful soul to mechanize around a crystal of caffeine," I wrote. "Adieu."
Then I went to see a doctor. My regular physician was in the Hamptons, so I let the concierge find the best internist left on the island of Manhattan. This was a Doctor Xavier Gruffy of New York Hospital. I knew he had to be good, because he charged as much as a lawyer.
"Doctor Gruffy," I said. "I'm going to drink a cup of coffee."
"I beg your pardon?" Dr. Gruffy asked.
"What would you recommend in the way of preparation, stabilization, prophylaxis, and recovery?"
"From what condition do you suffer?"
"I beg your pardon?" I asked him, not having heard well, cupping my right hand to my right ear like a veteran of Antietam.
"What's your disease?" he shouted.
"I'm perfectly healthy."
"Then what do you mean?"
"I'm going to drink a cup of coffee."
"Oh," he said, thinking that perhaps he had been rude in not offering me some coffee. "Would you like some coffee?"
"No," I said, shaking my head and looking at the sky through the girders of the 59th Street Bridge. A long silence ensued.
"Well, what can I do for you?" he began, hopefully.
"Help me," I said.
"Of course, of course. Tell me what's wrong."
"I'm going to drink a cup of coffee."
"I'll have some sent in right away."
"Not now!" I said.
"All right. Anytime you'd like." He was polite and puzzled. "Are you well?" he asked.
"I'm fine," I said. "For a man my age, I'm athletic and trim, if I do say so myself. I was in the Army Air Force. I flew P-51's, and vowed never to lose air-crew fitness as long as I could help it."
"Then what's ailing you?" "Nothing. I'm in excellent shape."
"Oh, I see," the doctor said. "You'd like an ounce of prevention."
"Prevention, stabilization, prophylaxis, and recovery." He tossed his head like an owl, and then blinked like one, too.
"I'm going to drink a cup of coffee," I said.
"Now?" he asked.?
"No, later."
"Fine. Anytime you'd like. Or would you like tea instead?"
"No."
"Then coffee it will be."
"Yes."
"I can have it brought in whenever you'd like."
"You mean here?" I asked.
"My secretary makes excellent coffee."
"You mean right now?"
"If you want."
"Do you have the proper equipment?" I inquired.
"I have a Melitta."
"What's that?"
"A filtration apparatus."
"Yes, and stomach pumps, atropine, antithyroidal prophylaxis, sea-salt enemas, cleaners, mints, and tooth polish."
"I really don't understand you," he said. "I really don't."
"Look," I told him. "I've come to you because you are a doctor."
"Yes, I am a doctor..."
"I want your advice in regard to prevention, stabilization, prophylaxis, and recovery."
"All right," he said. "You tell me the disease, the illness, the trauma, the congenital condition, and I'll recommend a course of prevention, stabilization, et cetera."
"I," I said, pointing at myself with my left index finger. "I am," I said, "going," I said, pausing, "to..."
"To?"
"To drink," I said, pretending to pour liquid down my throat from a bota, which I now realize he had never seen, "a cup." Here I made movements that pantomimed a potter at his wheel, "of coffee."
"Jeanie," he said to his intercom, "bring in some coffee, now."
"No!" I shouted, jumping to the bread-box-sized intercom and depressing the lever. "Don't bring in any coffee."
"Doctor Gruffy ?" the intercom said. "Shall I bring in coffee?"
"No," Dr. Gruffy said. "Cancel that." He released the Bakelite lever. "I never wanted to be a physician anyway," he said. "I wanted to be a Rough Rider. Who knows? Maybe I'll be reincarnated."
I couldn't get any medical advice from him, so I was left to do the deed on my own. At home, I found no privacy. We had only three kitchens, and Constance or a servant might have wandered into any one of them, breaking my concentration. Can you imagine a maid or gardener coming into my presence at the moment the fetid cup was lifted to my lips? Despite their instructions not to make, drink, possess, import, or speak of coffee within the precincts of our house, they probably debauched themselves on the outside two or three times a day—in their tenements, in front of their own children—and would not even have noticed what I was about to accomplish. Perhaps just as I reached the midpoint of my tightrope over Niagara they would start some mindless chatter, or, worse, utter one of the satanic phrases, such as Enjoy your coffee, that occupy the hearts of the possessed like writhing worms. 'My coffee,' indeed.
I thought to lock myself in, but what if, at the moment upon which all my life was about to divide, the door rattled because Maise wanted to extract her egg salad sandwich from the refrigerator?
Constance was taking an oxygen treatment for her hair, and the house smelled fresh and sweet. She had been told by Lawrence of Arabia—not T. E. Lawrence, but her hairdresser—that, to be beautiful, hair required oxygen and cold temperatures. Sparing no expense, Constance arranged for a box-car-sized installation to be placed in the garbage yard. At the end of a long pipe from this chemical works was something that looked remarkably like what we would know much later as an astronaut's helmet. Placing the helmet on her head and pushing a green button on what looked like an overhead winch director brought Constance's hair a stream of chilled high pressure oxygen. Stenciled in red letters on the front, sides, and top of the helmet were the words NO SMOKING, to which I had added, in black china marker, AND NO COFFEE DRINKING!
I left the house, and I wandered. It was August, so I went toward the Bronx. I have heard that the Bronx is dangerous now, but at that time the most perilous thing about it was the Jewish grandmothers who zoomed up and down the Grand Concourse like bumper cars. These women had what we knew in the AAF as tricycle landing gear, and their tail wheels were shopping carts. My first sight of them after the war reminded me of hundreds of B-29's taxiing in a windstorm.
I didn't know where I was going. I could hardly see in a straight line. I walked to put off the moment, hoping that I could make the same sort of arrangement with the facts of life that a donkey has with the carrot suspended from the stick tied to his harness. I wanted my moment of reckoning to be bright, immediate, and always receding.
Though we had visited some of Constance's distant relatives in Riverdale and Fieldston, and I had worked one summer as an orderly in the fecal analysis hut of Montefiore Hospital, I did not really know the Bronx. Near Yankee Stadium, I hailed a taxi. "Take me to the interior," I commanded.
"The interior of what?" the driver asked.
"The Bronx. Deep inside the Bronx. Drop me into the dark well of infinity."
He drove for twenty minutes and let me off at the intersection of two lines of elevated track. In the summer shadows of steel platforms that held speeding trains were neon signs blazing at midday, phalanxes of jelly donuts on frosted glass, and lines of middle-aged women in beauty parlors having their hair lacquered lady-bug close to their skulls as if their dream were to return to the wombs of their husbands' bowling-ball bags. Then there was the meat delicatessen, where hot cuts of boiled beef sweated in a jungle of sauerkraut, and penile knockwursts revolved eternally on rollers of stainless steel. You could get coffee there, but I forswore it in such a circumstance. To drink the stuff was bad e
nough, but to do so surrounded by calves' feet, beef tongues, livers....
Nor did I dare go into the bakery, fearing that the coffee would make me crazy and cause me to eat three dozen jelly donuts. Even without coffee I was good for at least a dozen, as they had been invented in my town. I used to try to bring a bag of them home from time to time, from the bakery where they had originated, but the walk was four miles and, especially when it was cold and the moon was full, I would arrive with an empty white bag, my loden coat dusted with powdered sugar. Even these days I can eat ten or twelve of those pastries that, at the bakery in Niterói, the children call pusatas, and that have a prune filling shaped to resemble the Crown of Thorns.
I walked for several hours on the residential streets, always returning to the shady nexus of subway platforms—only in New York does the 'subway' run mainly above ground. It grew darker and darker, hotter and hotter. Though it was only the middle of the afternoon, the world seemed black, and the red neon signs flashed like little wriggly eels at the bottom of the ocean. I was in the fog of combat that, in combat, my rage had always dispelled. I knew I could do it again, for just beyond the walls of fear is a blue sky where heart and mind are one.
"Take hold of yourself," I said gently. A few minutes later, I saw a pizza bakery tucked into a corner deep in the August shadows of the El. There was coffee there. Getting inside, closing in on the target, was like racing to Berlin through flak and wind. The closer you get to your objective, the more scared, the more focused, the more elated, and the less afraid you become. It's a paradox. As the world sharpens and gleams so intensely that even fighting at the greatest speed seems like slow motion, the growth of fear becomes the lessening of fear.
My courage firmed up as I entered, heart beating in the presence of a coffee maker. A number of silver ovens were on full blast, and inside the shop the temperature was no less than 160 degrees Fahrenheit, worse than Mexico in July. A girl emerged from the back, the sole employee. She was a blonde, almost my height. The great heat showed on her body, which glistened with water. To stay alive, she had to drink gallons and gallons throughout the day, which made her sexually insatiable, hair-triggered. But this was not apparent to me even as she devoured me with her blue eyes, for I was concentrating upon my mission. I stared at the coffee maker. It had come to this, finally. The trains thundered above. My heart was wild and I dripped with sweat. I was going to do it.