When I reached the dock she was still sitting with her elbows propped on her knees with the book close to her chest. I stood in the shallow water, leaned a bit and impulsively put my head against the inside of her knee. She squirmed from the water trickling down her thigh then suddenly grasped my head between her knees.
—I've caught a sea serpent.
My ears hurt but I forgot them looking down her thighs to the small pubic bunch where they met in her swimsuit. At the moment I didn't even desire her. The antipathy of the horseback ride and the dance the night before was too fresh. And her apparent scorn or distance was difficult to understand, the way she mimicked my midwestern drawl. And the dance smelling of the polished hardwood floor and my awkward beery drunk self watching the others dance so gracefully. Later the decision to drive two hundred miles to New York City, sobriety setting in when someone puked in the back seat. The car seemed cold and it began to rain. One of the droplets trickled into her crotch. Then she released my head and I pulled myself up on the dock and let myself dry in the sun alongside of her with my eyes shielded by my forearm.
—Do you sleep with that guy?
—Where?
—I mean do you make love?
—It's none of your business.
I looked at her back, the gentle way her butt met the dock. She was fairly tall and wasp-waisted but otherwise seemed so ample for her age.
—I just wondered. Nothing personal.
—We're going to wait until I'm sixteen.
She turned and put the book down on my legs and took off her sunglasses.
—Do you have many girls?
—Quite a few, I lied.
—Do you respect them?
—Of course. What do you think they're for?
She turned back to the lake and lifted the book from my thighs. I quivered and felt my cock begin to enlarge, like her or not. She glanced at my bathing suit then put her hand directly on me.
—Men are made so funny.
She gathered her towel and book and walked up the dock to the path to the cottage.
After dinner we sat around, seven of us including her parents and brother and sister and my friend, and listened to Berlioz’ Requiem. I was bored and tired and said I had a headache and was going to get some fresh air. I walked down to the lake feeling strange about her. She seemed too young, unfinished; her charm was girlish and at seventeen I had only dreams and visions of plump heavy-breasted women that supposedly would shriek and moan with pleasure. Earth seemed so quiet and expectant that night. It was the summer the H-bomb was announced and I remember how the idea fascinated me, the speculation in my naïve New Testament brain that the earth would burn like a tuft of cotton soaked in kerosene, the universe would split apart and Jesus would appear for the Second Coming, self-brilliant with the light of His head which was like the sun. Our own sun would be a charred disc and the cold moon blood-red reflecting the fire in the universe. On the dock though I had not connected myself in anyway with this disaster. I would live on with my own particular expectancies and ambitions intact. My senses were those of a child, my ears flooded with frogs croaking, and there was still the smell of bathing suits drying. Someone far out in the lake was trolling for bass in the full moon. Their voices were inaudible but I could hear the creaking of the oarlocks. They lit a match and the small flare made them briefly visible in a small circle of light.
I heard steps behind me but didn't turn. I thought it was only my friend and didn't want to encourage conversation. But then there was a smooth hand on my neck and she asked me for a cigarette which surprised me. In my hometown it would have been scandalous for a girl of fifteen to smoke. She smoked the entire cigarette before saying anything then she said that they had been talking about me up in the cottage and how utterly rude I was. How I didn't wash in the morning and I bit my fork when I ate and said “huh” and “yah” and so on. And didn't help out. I told her that as a future great poet I was obligated to leave civilities to the civilized. She said I didn't look like a poet—my skin was the color of cocoa from working on construction and my hair close-cropped as a burdock. Her tone indicated that in her own mind my destiny was settled—I was a yokel, a clyde, as we teased those in high school who showed up with manure still on their boots.
—I think you're all a bunch of fuckheaded phony creeps.
—Why be impolite? I just said what they said.
—What do you think?
—I don't know.
I drew in my breath and felt as angry as I had ever been. The sort of anger that precedes a fist fight when your eyes tinge all outlines in red. I had felt the same way in football when a halfback had gotten past me on a quick-opener. The next time whether he had the ball or was simply blocking I would necktie him from my middle linebacker position out of simple generalized anger at being fooled. Or in Colorado when another busboy who turned out to be a NCAA boxer jabbed me fifty times before I could raise my hands and I grabbed him and ran his face along a stucco-walled building until much of the skin came off and he looked peeled.
—I'm leaving in the morning.
—Why?
I put my hand on her shoulder and turned her toward me and kissed her. She was stiff and didn't open her lips. Then we kissed again lying back on the dock, this time with her mouth open. We necked and embraced for about an hour until my lips felt bruised but she wouldn't let me take off her underpants. I rubbed my cock against them with her legs wrapped around me until I came off against her stomach. We separated then and I gave her my handkerchief and lit a cigarette for her and one for myself.
—I love you, I said.
—No you don't.
End of idyll. I could not continue to live without them. The three or four in my life have maintained my balance. We left at dawn the next morning. I slid a note under her bedroom door telling her again that I loved her. The door abruptly opened and she came into my arms in her pale blue summer nightie. We embraced and I let my hands slide under and across her bare back and lower to her thighs then in front to her sex and breasts not ceasing the kiss. Then I walked away through the screen door without looking back and got into the car. My friend drove a steady ninety miles an hour to New York City where we checked into a shabby hotel and wandered around the Village for two days until we had only enough money to drive home. The first night the elevator operator said he would bring us a whore. When she knocked we were a bit frightened but then we were eased by drinking most of a bottle of brandy. “French for five, full screw for ten.” The two of us reconnoitered in the bathroom while she chugged the brandy. We decided a combined twenty would cut too deeply into our funds so that we would have to settle for a blowjob. We flipped and I was to be first. I walked back into the bedroom and took off all my clothes except my socks and handed her five dollars. She said that I had a nice tan and that she often took a few days off and went out to Jones Beach. I lay back and imagined it was the girl, that each sliding and collapse of the lips was hers rather than the whore's which only accelerated the bargain. I felt mildly weepy and melancholy and dressed and went for a walk while my friend took his pleasure.
I walked over to Washington Square where a large crowd had gathered for a chamber music concert. I listened to a Telemann then a Monteverdi piece which only accentuated my melancholy. When I got back home to Michigan we wrote to each other for a year or so and when I moved to New York City at nineteen she came for a visit but never found me as I changed rooms often to avoid back rent. When a long letter from her was finally forwarded to me I wept. She said that she had taken a suitcase and wanted to stay with me a week or so before going off to school, that she had covered her activities through a friend and her parents wouldn't have known. On violet stationery with small flowers in the upper corner and scented with lavender. I read it dozens of times until it was stained with ale and coffee and sweat, rumpled from being stuffed in my billfold. I read it in bars, near fountains, in Central Park, in museums, in the grass on the bank of the Hudson near George Wash
ington Bridge, and most often in my room, over and over in my room. There was a terrible finality to it, something missed permanently. She would begin seeing her old friend and I was to have been some sort of interim, like sleeping with a gypsy. I didn't care. At nineteen a body is so total. What else is there? The gift of the body and aimless nights of love. I sent her my prized Gallimard Rimbaud as a parting gift, leather-bound, onionskin paper with a crabbed love note on the flyleaf. “Should you change your mind . . .” Final end of idyll.
A half dozen years later I heard she was married. Nine years later I passed her home in Worcester, Massachusetts. I went into a neighborhood grocery store for cigarettes hoping to meet her by mistake even if she was pushing a baby carriage with quadruplets in it. I was amazed at the trembling sensation I felt at being so close to her after so many years, a mere block away. But she didn't appear and I finally drove away.
The cheap pup tent had begun to leak where I had scraped against it on the inside. Canvas does this. I was thinking of the expensive nylon tent I would buy someday, one piece with a floor, weighing only five pounds instead of twenty pounds of molding canvas. But the weather had turned warmer and the breeze had become soft and slight. Through the flaps I watched a doe, perhaps a hundred yards away, approach the creek for a drink in the twilight. Diurnal. Why no faun? She was plump and her summer coat was a deep reddish brown. Then she scented me and bounded soundlessly off into the brush the white underside of her tail flagging into the greenery. I got up when the rain stopped and boiled some pinto beans and chopped onion into which I dumped a tin of unhealthy-looking Argentine beef. Probably have to be shot for hoof and mouth disease. Buried by a bulldozer driven by God wearing bronzed sunglasses as in the movie Hud. Destroy this animal.
In the morning the sun was shining and it was warm so I decided to find the car and pack in the rest of my food. And resist driving fifty miles, one hundred miles round trip, for four fifths of whiskey, or five fifths, or even more. With whiskey I would become weeping and incompetent, perhaps chop off a toe with the hatchet or roll in some poison oak or get cramps and drown in the lake. I wanted to go back to the lake; on the other side, in the distance, I thought I saw what must be an osprey nest rising above the reeds on a gray pine stump. There are very few osprey left and I wanted to watch one at close range.
My second session in Boston came after an unsuccessful college career and two years of unemployment. Between jobs, you know. Looking for something better from a base of zero. Nowadays education is the ticket to the future. I don't scorn these clichés which express our fondest hopes and dreams. I've long realized that if in addition to a thousand or so song lyrics they composed my sole continuous vocabulary I would be famous and rich, rich and famous. Rather than being turned away at the Ritz for having bucked teeth, a single eye, and a butter-smeared face and lapel, I would be welcomed with cymbals and snare drum and Benny Goodman's clarinet. The butter was of course not real butter or even margarine, but a badge of identity. As long as I lived within the pages of a white-on-white comic book I needed some sort of identification. Butter it would be. Or a suspicious approximation gotten, the accusation goes, on muff-diving expeditions on Memorial Drive. Radcliffe girls were narcissistic and less than totally hygienic. Thus my other notorious badge. A galvanized pail of hot water laced with Duz or Fab and a sponge and Brillo Pads. Difficult but worthwhile to carry. I'm sure you'll understand. This was before the days of Raspberry or Champagne douche, before the halcyon days when mice were transfigured into ultra-violet pom-poms. So I was an unlicensed scrubwoman far from home on my knees without portfolio, a sponge in one hand, in the other an angry red fist holding the apple of uncontrollable peace.
Anyway, on this second trip when I was trying to make a new start, collect myself, get my head above water, I would sit every morning in a Hayes-Bickford cafeteria reading the want ads in the Globe. This situation is too familiar to be amusing. Bank teller trainee $333 per month. I read an article in the Boston Globe on how while the locally unemployed were “miserable” they were not “desperate” and made a notation on the back of an application blank to check the difference in the Oxford Unabridged when I passed the library again. I always had at least ten of these blanks on my person. They tended to get frayed after a while and when I discarded them, a great deal of time had to be spent transferring my notes. I admit that I spent more time making notes than filling out applications. I could write my name with a great flourish at the top, but then begin to hedge at the address, home and local, and by the time I reached the social security line my energy would be sapped. All before reaching previous job experience, spouse, mother-in-law's maiden name, references. I waited for a time somewhere in the future when in a gratuitous burst of energy I would fill them out by the dozens, get a job, and move to the top. Once I was twelve stories above ground in a personnel office waiting to be interviewed for a creative opening in direct mail advertising. I sat reading business magazines for an hour, secretively licking my hand in order to brush down my cowlick. My stealth was unnecessary, the receptionist seemed to have forgotten my presence. I noticed that my lapel bulged unattractively from all the blanks stuffed in the pocket. I looked for a wastebasket but realized that it must be on the other side of the receptionist's desk or concealed in the room as furniture. Beside me was a window and I stood feigning interest in the street below. I took the sheaf of application blanks out and nudged them off the sill letting them slide as a group to death in the streets. They clung together for several stories but then a gust of wind caught them and they spread, floating gently as paper airplanes. If only an astronaut had been passing in parade. Several people looked up including a policeman on the other side of the street. I hastily backed away from the window.
—I saw you do that, the receptionist said.
I thought of shooting myself when the food ran out but immediately recognized the thought as literary. I would stick around until 2000 if only to tell my grandchildren I was right in 1970. The country by then totally denatured, lacking even the warmth of a pigpen, the humanity of a cow stanchion. Barns would be shrines and their gray leatherish boards would be licked and prayed to. I'm signing my body over to a medical school and using the cash, I think a hundred dollars, for dynamite. I can't though redress that grizzly shot while taking a nap or the Cripple Creek or the Sand Creek massacre. I dreamed of the latter once but the Sioux women had become flour-white and danced around a fire with black and green flames. For punishment the country of course has become Germany with the Mississippi our Ruhr, the Ohio the Rhine, My father who was a conservationist told me so twenty years back but that was his profession. It is good that he died in ‘63 before the extremity of the damage became apparent, before the bandwagon would appear with its load of politicians farting and bleating out slogans and obtusities. A sonic boom crushes a baby mink's skull. We know that. Isn't it enough? If I were to shoot myself I would be obligated to burn or bury my clothes and equipment, perhaps dig a deep hole like a garbage pit in which to fall or a hole in which, naked, I could drop the rifle with my last movement. Flesh is reasonably good fertilizer, or even better, predator food. A family of coyotes would live off the carcass for a few days. Then the grass and ferns would grow up through the skeleton until the porcupines had gnawed it away for its salt content. That is why you find few deer antlers in the woods. But this is largely romance. I like French restaurants. This is reason enough not to kill myself; a mousse of pike, noisettes de veau, Alsatian snails, fish soups. Or my own Mexican cooking, crepes stuffed with chicken with a hot chilli sauce and sour cream to assuage the bite of the red peppers. Or wine. Or gallons of amber whiskey. Or my old remedy for colds used in New York, Boston, San Francisco and home: first a quart of freshly squeezed grapefruit juice, then a half gallon of lukewarm water to further cleanse the system. After two hours’ rest in a dark room broil a two-to-three-pound porterhouse rare and eat it with your hands with no salt. After this with your stomach swollen, distended, an extremely hot bath in t
he dark in which you slowly sip the best bourbon you can afford, at least a fifth, until the bottle is empty. This might take four hours depending on your capacity. Then you sleep for twenty-four hours and when you awake the world will be new and you won't have a cold. Some people with weak systems will have hangovers but that is not my fault. I'm not a doctor. Go to your own doctor. You can go through this whole process even if you don't have a cold and it's equally pleasurable. I sometimes add a Havana cigar to the bath section but they are very expensive now and hard to come by. This prescription also cures melancholy and makes you a mad fucker for days afterwards. Oysters don't. When flush I once ate four dozen oysters in a Union Oyster House in Boston and then went over to Edward's Western Bar and was unable to drink anything because I knew some of the oysters were still alive, if vaguely, swishing around in my stomach with every movement. Made for a bad evening at a nudie movie with my Bostonian neighbors jacking off under newspapers. Rattle rattle crinkle went the newspapers in the dark theater. Besides I've had bad shellfish and vomited in complete, gymnastically exact somersaults on the streets of Gloucester. A moderately large crowd gathered. And I held a friend's hand in a hospital as he died from hepatitis and complications. He kept whispering, “Spread the word to artists everywhere, even on the Continent and South America. No shellfish and dirty needles. Take your speed orally. No oysters if they're peeking and no clams in months without an r.” His hand loosened in mine. Our tears had fallen with metronomic steadiness but now his stopped. I wailed while he grew to stone within his body, his liver yellow and bald, an encephalitic head spewing poison even after death. I drew the sheet over his face and buzzed for a nurse. The protuberance of his liver under the muslin made it appear that he died with a football on his stomach, appropriate, as he used to love touch football in Central Park. Then the nursed entered.