I lay there listening to her in the bathroom again and I felt so generally melancholy that I couldn't swallow. She passed through the room in her yellow robe without looking at me. I got up and dressed and lit a cigarette and looked out the blinds at the street below. A French restaurant across the street and people getting dropped at the curb; a nasty place where I would be seated in a toilet stall and the food heaved over the top. We ate there with her parents and they were gentle and kind to me without condescension. Surprised me as her father was a broker in Atlanta and apparently didn't have to work. But they probably knew that she had been sleeping with blacks and I appeared as a perhaps obvious improvement. They seemed sad but then she was their only child and I supposed at the time that no matter how much money and power you have your children will bring you to grief over and over. My own parents were poor and I managed nicely to make them unhappy. Her father asked me what I was going to do with my life. Or do without it, I thought at the time, because we were on our fourth bottle of wine and had guzzled several martinis before dinner in the first nervousness of meeting. I announced that I planned a career in the United Nations. It simply came out of my mouth and the three of them looked at me strangely. Her father said that the UN would provide an interesting if not very profitable career while I ate a chocolate mousse with a fork which I bit uncontrollably with each mouthful. I wanted to tell them that their daughter had bought me the sport coat I was wearing that morning at Tripler's. I stood outside the store and waited for her. And I didn't have the guts to tell them I intended to write an epic parable on the decline of the West not to speak of the North and South, in fact the whole fucking world. Her mother was unspeakably elegant and showed no sign of the amount she had to drink. We parted affably outside after Barbara arranged to shop with her mother the next day and off they went to the Pierre while we went back to the apartment and dog-fucked in front of the hall mirror. The United Nations indeed and she asked me to give a sample speech. I pretended I was a giant and my cock was a microphone and I gave a speech about what the world needed was desegregated toilets. Never mind food. That would come naturally afterwards.
I went into the kitchen where we ate some scrambled eggs and bacon. We talked idly for a while then I went into the living room and picked up my jacket. At the door we kissed and she asked me to accept sixty dollars to fly home instead of hitchhike. I looked down at the three twenties and kissed her again with the choking sensation returning. I wanted to tell her that I still loved her but it was assumed and pointless. She walked me to the elevator and my last look was her yellow robe between the doors as they slid toward each other.
Enough wood gathered to keep a fire going all night and I wished that I had brought a sweatshirt along. I tore off dead twigs and branches from a pine tree for kindling. I had at least two more hours of daylight but I wanted to be completely ready. The moon was already over the tops of the trees at the far end of the lake and I could see through her as if she were a disc of tracing paper. My trotline moved and I grabbed for it but there was no pull at the end so I drew in the line and rebaited. Something out there hopefully not a minnow. I watched the line carefully—the prospect of sitting up all night on a totally empty stomach appalled me. Heard that lily pad roots were good food but the evening was cooling and I didn't want to go back in the water. I would spend the night watching the moon bury herself in the water and wish I were elsewhere, even on the moon in a space vehicle while she buried herself in the lake. Drowned on the waterless moon. I started the kindling and slowly added sticks and rotten but dry stump slabs until the fire roared and then I pushed on a huge piece of driftwood which I knew would burn all night. I began to think of venison chops and then a saddle of venison I had eaten at Lüchow's. Nearly destroyed the meal with their swarm of minstrels. I had hoped the huge Christmas tree would fall over on them. The line moved again but this time the hook caught and I had a small brook trout. It would take ten of them to make a decent meal but I took a green stick and shoved its pointed end through the trout lengthwise and began roasting it. Very clumsy and if I had taken some foil I would eat finely steamed rather than scorched fish. And if I had salt with me I would have eaten the fish raw; I had done so a number of times with a little vinegar and salt after the experience of eating in a Japanese restaurant. The herring we always ate on Saturdays and Sundays were raw in their soup of brine. My father ate sandwiches made of the roe with raw onion, and my grandfather would often eat fried salt herring for breakfast. Strange how he lived to eighty-eight eating so much fried pork and side pork too, which is unsmoked bacon. And his cheek always filled with tobacco and steady quantities of cheap whiskey neat. A neighbor went blind over a bad batch of the homemade but then he already had a metal plate in his head from World War Two. Not much mourned—we suspected him of poisoning dogs and exposing himself to school children and screwing his Guernsey calves. I never had an urge for animals but I've read that it's not unusual. Urp. A nice sow. Pigs are so frantic and the boar shudders convulsively, kicking his pink legs when he's all done. A chunk of smoked ham would be nice now, chewing on it without cooking and snarling into the dark beyond the fire. Mine mine mine. My pigmeat. I've always liked pigs and wish the radicals would call cops sheep or zebra or robin redbreast. The first robin means a snowstorm within twenty-four hours. I eat my tiny fish even though it is only partially cooked. Take a caravan out for salt for Christ's sake. I move further back from the fire and lie down on the bed of ferns I'd gathered to protect myself from ground moisture. I want my sleeping bag and my rifle because I'm afraid of the dark and the moon is still almost full. Or maybe the Vogue model will walk out of the swamp and coolly ask where the hell she is. She'll think I'm a dark, incredibly romantic savage and we'll play wood nymph. A short doze then awake to some noise back in the brush, my knife open and outstretched before I'm fully conscious. No noise. I need a bodyguard. My body is sore and covered with bug bites and I need lotion and cigarettes and a night light. I stood up and stretched and checked my line again. The moon had moved fifteen feet and was under water again. This time I had a larger trout and cooked and devoured it with great haste. A plate of pasta with a garlic sauce and grated aged romano please. Not cool fish flesh tasting of smoke. I stirred my big driftwood log and propped it with another log to give it more air. I did a little dance around the fire and howled as loudly as I could. I howled and howled until I felt sure that all beasts in my area were adequately warned. Couldn't do this in New York City or the zebras would say we better haul this fucking howler up to Bellevue. Visited Cindy Blank (must protect her identity) after she had overdosed on downers. Seems she didn't want to live any longer which I understood. She was brilliant but very homely and kept trying to change her life style in order to get a permanent lover. I told her that when she got out I would make love to her for seven days and seven nights but I could only muster a single trip. I'm very selective and must have a Beatrice or a Juilet. Throw in an Anouk Aimee. I curled up again on my ferns in love with the warmth of fire.
I had a small room on Valentine Avenue in the Bronx for a few weeks—I was eighteen and had moved to New York City to live forever away from the vulgarities of the Midwest. It took only a few days for me to realize that the Bronx wasn't exactly the center of cosmopolitan activity. I only stuck out those few weeks because I lived three blocks from Edgar Allan Poe's cottage where he had lived with his thirteen-year-old bride. Besides I didn't have any money to move and I was waiting for a delayed pay check for some construction work in Michigan. And so I waited and it was July and miserably hot and I took the D train to Manhattan several times but no one would hire me because I didn't know how to do anything. The room was about seven by ten with a single chair, a dresser and an uncomfortable bed. The window looked out into an alley and another row of tenements precisely like my own. My food allotment was only a dollar a day and after I bought a quart of Rheingold which I would drink quickly for a buzz I had only enough money for a sandwich. I lost weight at an alarming speed e
ven though I spent most of my days lying in bed and sweating or walking over to the Botanical Gardens. Sex and power fantasies—King of the State, then the country, then the world. Or to be simply a financier like the one I had seen in a limousine on Wall Street talking on a phone in the back seat, giving no doubt global instructions before he returned to his penthouse to fuck a beautiful girl many years his junior. Sold my high school graduation suit for five dollars and pawned my watch in Philadelphia. I once had an honest-to-God pen pal in Davenport, Tasmania; we exchanged small photos and she was fairly pretty. I wanted her to be with me on Valentine Avenue but we had been out of touch for several years and Tasmania is further away than Mongolia where old men hunt wolves using golden eagles as falcons. I spent a lot of time with the lights out trying to get a peek at a naked woman across the alley but everyone's shades were drawn and most of the women I had seen on the streets I didn't want to see naked. I created varied lives for myself to take place in Argentina or Florence or, and this was the best one, Thessalonica, though I knew nothing of the place but was attracted by the name. I would have tended goats or sheep or juniper trees or spent ten hours a day casting out nets and drawing them in laden with the fruits of the sea. Fish are unmistakable and if you fish all day your continuous sanity is assured. Or even in northern Michigan for which I felt the acute pain of homesickness: I would have dogs and cats and horses and children in a big dilapidated farmhouse. I would have a yard covered with tangled laurel and lilacs and quince and flowering almond but behind the house the ground would be scratched bare by the chickens. I would like a barn with a fat rich manure pile and cows and near the manure pile the grass would be a richer and darker green. Some of the boards on the barn would be rotten and the red paint would be faded flaking off in small red bits at touch. There would be a small orchard which I would prune each February and I would prune my grapes back late in the fall, each brown corded vine being limited to seven shoots for maximum health. In the orchard there would be goldenrod and Queen Anne's lace and brake which smells like thyme. Next to the granary there would be a small pigpen because I like to watch pigs eat, the way their powerful jaws strip the kernels from a hardened ear of corn and chew the corn with crunching smacking noises: they root in the mud and when their snouts get covered with mud they blow out their noses to loosen the mud clogged there. My wife would be a buxom hundred and sixty-six pounds and laugh all the time. I would be lazy and giggle much of the day and night and only cut enough hay for the horses, plant a few acres of oats and few acres of corn for the hogs, plant a small garden which my wife would tend—sweet corn, string beans, peas, tomatoes, radishes, potatoes, cucumbers, leaf lettuce, cabbage and some turnips. I would spend most of my time walking around smelling the lilacs and watching the swallows swoop, drift and float and flutter around in the barn, ride my horse around the edge of a lake always in about a foot of water so the horse could bury his feet in the cool mud. I would watch the nests of birds and when I walked through the woods among the ferns and wet matted leaves the scream of a blue jay would follow me and I would wade knee deep in cedar swamps and watch the water snakes glide and wiggle over the green skin of algae. There would be a single cow for milk and each fall a hog would be slaughtered and most of it hickory-smoked by a neighbor. And fifty gallons of apple wine: to the juice in a wooden charcoal-lined barrel add twenty-five pounds of sugar and five pounds of raisins. Wait three months and drink in large quantities. Very nice but such dreams are long ago. Speaks of softness, is dulcet and umbrous and I'm suffocating in geometry. Soft ripe grapes, sweet scent of rotting pine on the bottom of the wood pile, soft yellow belly of the garter snake, the flank of a horse sweating and corseted with muscle, the green moss wavering in the current of a creek and the sound of ten million bees in the lilacs and in the field of flowering buckwheat across the fence. Though I know this life I always leave it and where do I live when I leave home over and over on small and brutally stupid voyages.
I spoke to the landlord daily and he reminded me that I had “kitchen privileges” but I had nothing to cook, didn't know how to cook and had no utensils to cook with. He was Italian but most of the tenants were Jews. He warned me of the Irish girl next door who though only fifteen had showed him her breasts when he painted the apartment. He giggled and told me to tell no one. With whom would I share this secret? I told him that I had got a note from one of the occupants saying that I had used his frying pan and if I did so again I would be sorry. I collected a handful of dead roaches and went into the kitchen and sprinkled them in his frying pan. The common toilet is always unoccupied and I suspected that most of the tenants, at least the ones I saw, were too old to use it. I felt that they had ceased to function as complicated biological organisms and that they were aged dolls. If they tripped and fell on the sidewalk they would break revealing either cotton stuffing or a rubberish-smelling dust. I was enfeebled too. At absolute zero where the body is likely to crystallize and shatter. Flakes of bowels and iced splinters of throat. I thought I could descend no further and had the constant image in mind that I was pelagic and would one day soon rise up through the water from the depths at tremendous speed disemboweling whales or sharks or any other creature that blocked my inevitable ascent.
During my third week my luck changed a trifle. A woman down the hall asked me to take care of her child for several evenings and to take her over to the park in the morning so that the woman could sleep. She was blond and frowsy and chain-smoked. She called me “kid” which vaguely offended me but the baby-sitting money allowed me to eat better and wander around Manhattan during the summer afternoons. The child was a little girl of three named Sharon and was easy to care for. It took me several days to realize that her mother was turning tricks rather than acting as a hostess in a restaurant. One night she returned late and very drunk and offered to lay me for ten bucks. I tried to explain that I didn't have ten dollars to spend but she kept on saying blearily, “What are you, queer?” until I walked down the hall to my room. I lay in bed depressed at being called a queer but wishing I had the money to go back down and bang her. I had seen her nearly nude several times when I would pick up Sharon in the morning to take her to the park. She would unlock the door and flop back into bed while I gave the child some cereal and dressed her. By the time we would leave the apartment, perhaps within fifteen minutes, Carla would be snoring. One especially hot morning I studied her pink dimpled ass from a range of three feet while Sharon ate breakfast. Too many puckers on it. How many men have plumbed there for how much money. I carried Sharon piggy-back to the gardens pondering the dimples and patch I had seen. We found a deserted well-shaded place which was easy on weekdays, almost like not being in New York. It was beginning to get hot and I was already hotter than a two-peckered goat as my dad used to say from seeing Carla's ass. I dozed on the blanket while Sharon picked dandelions; she picked them until the blanket was covered and her hands were yellow from yellow stains. Rub them under your nose and see if you eat butter. Down the hill on a sidewalk a girl was pulling a small boy in a red wagon. She turned onto the grass and started to pull up the hill but she had sneakers on and her feet kept slipping on the grass. Sharon was near them so I walked down to get her out of the way. When I reached them I saw that the girl was pretty and that she wouldn't make it up the hill without dropping from exhaustion so I grabbed the handle and pulled the wagon, nearly running, up to the shade tree where our blanket lay covered with dandelions. She kept saying no, no, no as I ran and I turned around to bawl the kid out when I saw that his legs were withered and short, protruding weakly from his hips. He smiled at me and shrugged. I was embarrassed and turned to her to apologize but she smiled too so we sat and talked and shared a Coke I had brought along. Sharon began filling the wagon with the dandelions from the blanket and the little boy said thank you with each new handful.
Cold fog. Awake and damp and cold. The fire was nearly out, faintly smoldering and hissing, the log devoured. I heard a loon, the cry muffled by the fog from the far
end of the lake. I was curled and shivering but accepted the loon as a good omen for the day. I got up and then noticed three deer at the lake's edge not a hundred yards away. We stared at each other for a moment and then they disappeared soundlessly into the brush. I threw some kindling and sticks onto what was left of the fire and then hopped around to get warm. Get your knees higher, said the coach. When my blood warmed up I checked my line. Nothing. No breakfast for the poor wayfaring stranger. Shit. The Indian needs food for his hike back to the tent at least ten miles to the southeast. I felt giddy from hunger, a slight headache just above the eyes. Oh for a cigarette. When I got back to camp I intended to smoke ten in a row until I fell into a terminal fit of coughing and nicotine poisoning. Trade many dollars and shoes and shirt for tobacco. I took off my shirt and waved it over the fire to dry and stood close enough to nearly scorch my pants. Then I scooped sand over the fire to make sure it was out and set off for my long, hungry walk back to the tent. First a hot pan of refried beans into which I would dump a tin of beef and chop some onion over the whole mess and pig it down in minutes. I reached the edge of the swamp where I had entered the day before and took a compass reading. I trotted the first mile with my pantlegs wet and flapping from the dew and my lungs heaving for air. I had stupidly forgotten to fill my canteen before leaving the lake and was already thirsty from exertion. Short prayer for a creek and a permanently healed brain.