The World Is the Home of Love and Death
Momma resists all force applied to herself. “No,” Momma says. “Absolutely no.” She is not breathing at all. Then she is breathing lightly. Then heavily. She says, gently scathing, “Eeeny, meeny, miney, mo, I caught a Lila by the toe—oh, Ida …” Then, leaning, straight-backed, at a slant away from Ida, a summing-up: “No one can count on you.”
Ida, in her momentum, makes flirtatious offers of obedience: “Everyone can count on me. I am your slave—Lilly—you know that.” Then, owlishly: “You know you can count on me lifelong.” Then: “Ly—fff(i)ff—longgg—” The length she drew the word to was roughly the span of attention before one blinks mentally and registers what is said—it was the equivalent of five or six syllables. Her voice is not torn by love and desire—i.e., by folly. Nothing is implied of any state of feeling other than a sophisticated one—i.e., one in which it is known that attachments come and go. Her promise is a parody of promises, it has no human ordinariness. It has intelligence and cruelty, though, and longing.
Momma straightens her head and does this and that, and then it emerges, as in a charade, that she is listening in an ordinary human way: she listens to the promise—now a memory in the air. She is smiling dimly, unreadably, beautifully.
In the haze of illusions and realisms, female lawlessness and its codes, and female parodies, and female truths give way apparently, and Momma turns her head and smilingly, tacitly listens with the calm maternal-innocent set of her face, which then alters into a lover’s wicked stare—accusing and reckless. This hint at the humiliation of the mother by the lying boarding-school seducer, Ida, is a parody, too; but her being a lover and challenging Ida, that part, is not parody, so it’s all different now: it’s physical and remorseless, like some affairs that kids have in high school.
That makes her vulgar—i.e., blunt and obvious—and sexual. This is rebellion on a giant scale, to be so local with Ida. Ma is claiming to be a more serious person than Ida by bringing in this real stuff in this championship way.
Ida is jocular about rebellion. Ida treats all claims to leadership as childish, even her own. Ida puts a small kiss—shyly—on Momma’s jaw.
A gust of feeling whirls Ma around. But she is not a mother, not a child—those are not sexual beings. In this assignation, Momma’s sense of what is to be done is real; Ida’s taste, and sense of things, prefers the symbolic: the summing-up.
Ma feels that if she is honest with herself, she is, as a person (a sexual body and a quick mind), very little better off, if at all, with Ida’s understanding than she is with S.L.’s.
Ma tugs at the tail of her bandanna. “S.L. may be in the house,” she says, with almost rabid sorrow: she holds up that hoop for Ida to go through.
Ida grimaces—it’s a snarl: that was stylish back then, for a stylish woman to mimic a gangster or something. See, Ma is punishing Ida by invoking “a law” that makes Ida behave. Ida grabs Lila by the elbows and says, “You Garbo!” Elusive woman. Garbo isn’t married. It is Garbo-minus, so to speak, that Momma is. This is in Ida’s face as she moves back to her chair, thwarted, probably enraged.
Lila feels somewhat lower-class, however. Momma says, “I never paid attention in school, so I’m easy to know.” She says, “You want another drink? You want another sandwich?”
Ida says, “Does S.L. drink?”
“He’ll be sober—when he comes around the mountain.” It is truly jolting when Momma breaks her own style open and imitates Daddy with all the depth of knowledge she has of him physically.
Ida stares at her.
Lila says, “I can read your mind. I know what you’re thinking.” She swings her foot.
“What am I thinking?”
“That’s for me to know and you to find out.” Momma says it seriously, in a musical voice. Ma does not know how small-town this is, but then—with gooseflesh and a sinking in her stomach and a light beading of sweat along her back—she can tell what a mistaken device it is in Ida’s opinion.
It is Homeric and not Tantric, the way the erotic and the spiritual merge in Ma; but if you use school ideas of things, the erotic is a matter of grasp and idea—that is, a demystification of feelings for the sake of excitement—and it is not spiritual at all: it is merely modern, then. Feelings reside in art and in sex but not in school, unless perceptions and illusions are counted as feelings, which is what Ida does and Ma wants to do—things coming out even, correct answers, being perfect: Ida wants those and the sense of those and the appetite for those to be counted as feelings. Ma is another type, but she has schoolish yearnings.
The reason school is the way it is is that in a classroom there is only one teacher, one power: a tyranny …
In life, there are always at least two people, or you can’t call it life.
“If I said now Ida is my friend, you’d agree, but if I acted on it, woe is me, and that’s where the trouble starts.” Ma says this hastily, as if S.L. might walk in any moment, but then she slows down and finishes saying it in a stately, melodious way. But her mouth and eyes are sultry—are gusty with feeling; she is so complicated now that no scientific theory can be as hard to unravel as her mood is. She is epically grownup in this way.
Ida, with a curious thwacking gesture of her knees against each other, matches Momma in complexity: she may now be the most grownup person in the world. “Let’s not go into what’s wrong. I don’t believe in diagrams,” Ida says. Lightly.
Ma says, “If we were a friend to one another, I could take you for granted and you wouldn’t put up with that for one second.”
Ida does not dawdle when she thinks. She takes the hurdle. “That’s brilliant. Your seeing that. Listen: You can take me for granted.”
“Now?”Now that I am brilliant. Ma thinks Ida ought to, and will, love her better after today.
Ida already “loves” her—that’s all been settled. Ida says in a dignified, faintly disgusted way, “I am your friend.”
Momma says, “Then I have no say in it—” Now she sees the trap clearly.
“Lilly—”
“I say someone is my friend when I say so. If you mean one word of it, tell me—you went to Switzerland with Colleen Butterson—that was the word that went out—what was that all about? Tell me if we’re good friends now.”
“Lilly—” Ida says, in a whole other voice. Don’t be silly. Don’t break the law (of discretion).
Ma bursts into an angry laugh—angry because she doesn’t want to be sidestepped. “You want me to sign a blank check. We have rules around here—and no one makes them up.” She makes them up, is what that means.
Ma knows from experience that the truth now between her and Ida (the atmosphere of rich equality) is that Momma is a fool for trying to impose her own sense of truth on a woman as firm-hearted as Ida.
Ida says, in an intelligently threatening (and wanly disillusioned) voice, “We don’t give pledges, Lilly. We trust each other.” A different law. A notion of law different from Lila’s. Then: “Are we mad?” Ida says, summing up and taking over. “No. Yes.” A witty joke. A party atmosphere. It is clear that in some ways Ida is a nicer person than Lila is. Than my mother.
Momma laughs. “I like the rain,” she says naughtily—it’s an intentionally clumsy imitation of Ida.
Ida doesn’t laugh right away. Momma starts to breathe defiantly; and she says meaningfully (her way), “It makes my pioneer hair frizzy.”
“Oh, Lila,” Ida says, relieved. Then she laughs.
Lila’s self-satisfaction begins to glow again. “I can’t keep up with you,” she complains. A touch of wit, maybe.
Neither has the sought-for command of the erotic at this juncture, but that works out in Ma’s favor, since Ma can live in erotic chaos and Ida can’t.
Momma’s momentum carries her along: “I’ve lived my life in small towns. You have Paris and St. Louis.”
Ida stares for a small second, locating what is meant, getting the point. Ida says, “What is wanting in Alton is naughtiness—madness—but there’s not much more in St. Louis. You’d find it dull, Lila.”
Lila thinks of Ida’s excitements and naughtiness as being open to her now as soon as she learns the passwords If I bother. Momma smiles faintly—maternally. Ma pants: It is an effort to keep up with Ida—she’s a real flier. “I’m not a dreamer,” Momma says aloud, almost idly, commenting on the contest.
Ida says, “It must be terrible to be without daydreams. We would die in this town without our—don’t repeat this—wickedness.”
Momma suddenly blows Ida a kiss. Everyone knows that Ida always gets even. Then Momma rises: a swirl of heat—the thin, finely curved legs, the pale, night-framed face, the paled, used lipstick (from drinking and smoking), the extreme prettiness of the woman—gusts around the porch. Ma hears a thump like that of a car door—she lifts her head toward the porch roof—then she swiftly bends over and kisses Ida on the mouth: light, quick, and real. A real kiss which can break the heart of the one who receives it and of anyone who sees it. “You are a hero, Lila,” Ida says.
With a swish of her skirt, Ma turns and walks back to the glider and sits down. She says, “Well, there, I don’t feel inferior now, no matter how smart you are, Ida.”
Ida moistens her lips for the first time. She smiles dimly—her eyes are filmed or curtained.
“You look Jewish like that,” Ma says.
Ida smiles more widely, complicatedly. Her eyes are in focus.
Ma says, “Let’s wait and see if the house shakes.” She means from S.L.’s footsteps on the wooden floors. She finds the noises men make menacing: they twang at her nerves.
The rain falls weightily.
Ma says, “We have another minute or two to be friends in.”
SPRING FUGUE
The first orchestral realization that something is up: Playing Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” on a spavined CD player. It was a gray day in early February and the sun came out; and I was thinking, “The Dry Cleaners, The Dry Cleaners, The Dry Cleaners, The Dry Cleaners.”
The first crocus: The Sunflower Market, Thai Vegetables and Seeds, 2809 Broadway, February 14th. Spindly and snow-flecked.
First cold, March 19th – April 2nd. My wife and I are on our way to our accountant’s. On the way I see two drunks fighting in front of the OTB on Broadway at Ninety-first; April is the duelists’ month. Tacitly flirting with my wife, I carry two small packets of Kleenex in my pockets—one for her, because of her allergies: she makes a small nifty nasal piccolo announcement of the annual change in her life. I make the second really bad pun of the season: We sound like Bruce Springsteen and accompanist doing Bach’s “The Cold Bug Variations.”
First episode of spring nosiness not having to do with allergies or nose-blowing: I don’t know why the soul’s primary mechanics should consider spying or snooping a natural attribute of renewed life, but in the office icebox I see a small gold-colored can, shaped like a shoe-polish can, of caviar, and I wonder, jealously, who is so happy and so bent on celebration (or self-indulgence), but when I open it, it is empty, and written on the bottom of the can, in pencil, is the phrase Hard Cheese.
First philosophical guess: My guess is that spring is a natural way of suggesting adolescence as something one should start to go through again: genetic duty and genetic activity are romance. Hmm.… Nature is as tricky as any politician.
The thought of George Bush leads to The First Depression of the Season.
First emotional detail: More light on the windowsill.
First piece of strange advice to one’s self: Lighten up.
First symptom of intellectual confusion (on waking after dreams of fair women and of various unspeakable acts with them; memory, those astonishing chambers of lost realities, becomes overactive, leaving a broad sensation of gambling.… Roué-lette): The enumeration of the bedroom furnishings—a nightstand, one-night stand, two-night stands, three-night stands.…
No, no.
In the bathroom, first session practicing smile.
First impulse of active love: A sloppy kiss while my wife is putting on her shoes.
She gazes at me. “Oh, it’s spring,” she says.
Shopping list for first three-day weekend in the country to rent a house for the summer: Contac, Kleenex, Beatles tape, citronella candles (to leave in the rented house if we find it), jump rope (for losing weight), walking shoes, jeans one size too small (to force oneself to diet), a handful of short-lived cut lilac to carry in the car as an aide-mémoire.…
First equinoctial death shudder and racial memory of human sacrifice for the sake of warmth and the return of summer: A roadkill on 32A outside of Saugerties—a no longer hibernating but probably still torpid, thin woodchuck.
Second such event after returning home: Cutting my thumb while using a new, Belgian, serrated-edge slicing knife that slipped on a small Israeli tomato, while I was thinking about Super Tuesday two years ago and whistling Dixie.
Am I unconsciously Angry?
First hysterical delusion: Advertised medicines that come to mind when seeing in a moment of stress spring flowers in the mind—Nuprin-yellow jonquils, tetracycline-colored tulips (red-and-yellow ones). Tylenol-colored clouds (Tylenol is Lonely T spelled backward). Advil-colored dirt. Theragran-M-colored drying blood.
With my hand betoweled and my soul a little mad with pessimism about the current ways we live, and with gaiety, heroism, and the spring wound, I phone my wife at her office. She makes more money than I do.
Advice, sympathy, information from my wife’s assistant while I am waiting for my wife to end a meeting. It is possible that even the assistant makes more money than I do. (I am a schoolteacher.) She says that in the stores is a helping-the-blood-clot-and-disinfectant-and-anesthetic spray; and there are clutch bandages. But: “Beware,” she says, “the spray depletes the ozone layer, and the clutch bandage harms circulation.” The finger may turn Nuprin-yellow, crocus-yellow, coward’s yellow.
The conversation with my wife is out of a melodramatic domestic novel, except that at work she is Nietzschean. I refer to her being possessed by the will-to-power.
My wife says, “How deep is the cut?”
“I think I see the bone.”
She says, “Do you see any white?”
“Yes.”
“That’s the tendon. Bones aren’t white while you’re still alive. They’re not white until you clean them after you rob them from a grave. You may have cut the tendon. Can you move it?”
“No. Yes. It looks like a bone.”
“It isn’t the bone. But there are nerves in there—”
“Is that true? That’s not just hypochondria?”
“You should be able to see only one nerve, unless it’s a really big cut—do you see it?”
“See the nerve?”
“It’s a thing, it’s visible.”
“What does it look like?”
“A thread. Does it make you sick to look at the wound?”
“No. What makes you think that?”
“Well, take a look and tell me what you see.”
There is a silence and then she calls out, “Hey, hey, hey.”
“I fainted a little. I’m sort of on my knees here. Hold on, let me get up. Whoo, that was stupid. What I saw was gray-white; there’s quite a lot of gray-white. I suppose I saw blood but it looked gray-white and blood isn’t gray-white, it’s bluish, I remember, I—”
“You’re in shock. Is there anyone with you?”
“I was cutting a tomato.”
“Yes?”
“Someone is coming over—someone will be here soon. You. But you can’t come home. You’re at work. Should I go get a clotting spray?”
“Go to the emergency room at the hospital. You did this call?”
“I don’t remember,” I say miserably.
“You cut your thumb?”
“Yes. I guess so. Unless this is all a dream,” I say hopefully.
“Did you dial with your left hand?”
“I wrapped my hand in a towel and I squeezed the towel with the other hand. I dialed with my little finger. It’s touch-tone, the phone is.… I think.”
“I forget if there are large numbers on the touch-tone phone or small ones.”
“Tiny, really.”
“Are they stubborn or easy?”
“Stubborn.”
“Then if you dialed and didn’t bleed all over the phone you’re probably O.K.”
“Would you say you were showing sympathy?”
“You may quiver with madness and shock at my saying this, but I promise that if you stay overnight at the hospital I will bring you volumes of Kundera, Solzhenitsyn, Havel, so you can see what horror and suffering truly are.”
“Shit.”
“On the other hand, our Maltese doorman’s sister-in-law died of sepsis after a knife cut in her hand which she got chopping beets when she was visiting her mother-in-law in Valletta. Wait for me. I’m coming home.”
My wife is a Spring Goddess. A Nietzschean Nightingale (Florence). “Here,” she says. “Let me look.… A kiss won’t make that well. Let’s go.” A kiss or two later, as we pass a homeless guy who at first I think is me in the third person hailing a taxi, and as my shock begins to lift, I say to her, sadly, “When I was a child, I had a Swiss barometer with a wooden house on it. The house had two doors. Out of one came a boy in shorts and with a Tyrolean hat on, and I think a girl in a dirndl came out of the other. They went inside if it was going to rain.” Nowadays I suppose you might have a homeless person carved in wood and sleeping on a subway grating to indicate good weather and going into an arcade or a subway to indicate rain.
Some prose written after the third kiss from her (and after the doctor took three stitches in my thumb). I sit at her desk in her office looking out her large window: Give me the huge actual clouds of the Republic and not the meager udders of water vapor painted on the old backdrops the Republic Studios used in John Wayne’s day. We like the actual big baggy clouds of a New York spring. One doesn’t want to flog a transiting cloud to death, but if we are to have sentimental light, let us have it at least in its obvious local form—dry, white, sere, and, I guess, provincial. The spiritual splendor of our drizzly and slaphappy spring weather, our streets jammed with sneezing pedestrians, our skies loony with bluster are our local equivalents of lilac hedges and meadows.
Blustery, raw, and rare—and more wind-of-the-sea-scoured than half-melted St. Petersburg. Yuck to cities that have an immersed-in-swamp-and-lagoon moist-air light. They are for watercolorists. Where water laps at the edges of the stones and bricks of somewhat wavery real estate is not home. Home is New York, stony and tall: its real estate is real.
So is its spring.
WHAT I DO FOR MONEY
At dawn, in the suffusion of light and return of visibility, in the woods where I camped out on my red-and-blue air mattress in a nylon shed-tent, open in front and partly at the sides and with a now luminous rooflet tied overhead to two guardian trees, I woke. The light and mist among the tree trunks, the near silence of the birds, the biological, organic clutter around me on the ground softened my mood.
I have a streak of biological piety. These are my woods, set high in the northern Catskill Mountains, not very high mountains. They are not very old woods, any more than are the woods in the adjacent state park. All this territory was lumbered over twice in the last two hundred years. In this glade, only two trees are particularly large, and one is a sycamore planted a hundred years ago and one is a pine about the same age.
The light makes the blue nylon a holy color, like a tone in a Bellini painting, like the color of a cloak of the Madonna; it is a glowing, Bellini blue, and it fills me with awe. The side of the mountain that descends, that falls, is on my right. Behind the descending columns of trunks of trees—saplings, and older, bigger trees—is a vast space of now luminous, as-if-new air.… In a harsh world, this silent, glowing beauty, this ordinary, momentary prettiness, is, as I said, a speechless, pagan piety.
Suddenly fully wakeful, straightening my clothes, lighting my spirit stove, I contemplate my situation. I light a cigarette; I am a dying man. I have an inoperable brain tumor. The process of finding this out took nearly two months. And I am being let go at work, in a harsh process—the company has been sold and is losing money or not making enough; the errors have been those of top management, some of whom are being let go as well. I am one step down from top management, and my work on this level has been successful—in the general debacle this has aroused jealousy, rage really, even hatred. I may have been too distracted by the headaches I was having to handle things well. Was I arrogant? No. I was rather meek and apologetic. But I went on being right, and lo, a vicious war.
I am thirty-five years old, divorced, not estranged from my children, but they are turning into people very like my wife, whom I don’t miss. It is a kind of programmatic, thought-out, mind-filled selfishness, a self-willed sort, not shallow, not stupid, not even cold: more like an intelligent Episcopalian tantrum among theories of selflessness and God knows what all. I mean it is this in my ex-wife and children that isolates me.
I don’t know how bad any of this makes me feel. I have a brain tumor. I have sliding films of headache and sporadic interferences with vision. I suppose I have despised my bosses for a long time now, thought them amateur and self-loving, hardly honest in relation to the work of running a large company. I suppose I have despised—and forgiven—my ex-wife for as long. I don’t think I have been disloyal to any of them, not very much, not very often. But I’m not on the whole a careful man, and I become frantic inwardly—it is a moral uproar—when I am, I suppose, conceitedly convinced that I can see the wastage, the extent of the bad decisions, the crude wrecking of lives and possibilities in others—which they are egoistically, obstinately set on causing … that corporate and suburban selfishness.
I am said to be lucky, but the work I do—product design, but at the point where such design is redone to become industrially and commercially practicable—and its quality, the things I’m after, are insulting to some people.… Or perhaps it’s just competition. I have been aware of this, told about this since college. And in college. And long before that, in grade school. I have been able to adjust and to protect myself to some extent until now, but last year I began to slip. The tumor. Destiny melting my mind, maybe. Probably.
Anyway, I am being treated shabbily, filthily by former allies and colleagues. They sweat and tremble, but they say, “We want you to leave.… We don’t think this last idea of yours is any good.” Then they take it back and say, “It’s good, but you’ll have to work with Martin.…” I have never worked with Martin Jones: he’s an ambitious little madman, a cheap thief—of ideas, of office supplies, of money, when he can manage it. He’s the keeper of the little escort book—he’s the upper-echelon pimp. With the bribes he offers and the inside information he gets and his tirelessness and the pity he purposefully arouses—he is always either ill or suffering a domestic tragedy—he is irresistible on a certain level. He is pudgy and pretentious, clever and whiny, repulsive, even loathsome. But he makes even that work in his favor. He himself boasts that he is tirelessly rotten—violent.… That’s his way of saying: Fear me. Everyone in the office does fear him except for the two operating officers at the top. Martin became obsessed with me just before the collapse of profits. He is determined to gain control of my working life—this is the man I have to deal with now. Surely they know this is forcing me out. Does everyone eat shit who earns a salary? Does everyone who eats shit insist that everyone else eat more shit?