This was in 1948. A group of young people sitting on the darkened porch of a New Jersey summer cottage in a lake resort community. The host some Bernie wearing an Upsala College sweatshirt. The late June night so soft one can, in retrospect, forgive America for everything. There were perhaps eight or nine people there, two of them the people that this story sketches.

Bernie was talking about Sonny Stitt’s alto on “That’s Earl, Brother.” As good as Bird, he said. Arnie said, bullshit: he was a very hip young man from Washington Heights, wore mirrored sunglasses. A bop drummer in his senior year at the High School of Performing Arts. Our young man, nineteen at this time, listened only to Rebecca, a girl of fifteen, remarkable in her New Look clothes. A long full skirt, black, snug tailored shirt of blue and white stripes with a high white collar and black velvet string tie, black kid Capezios. It is no wonder that lesbians like women.

At some point during the evening he walked Rebecca home. She lived on Lake Shore Drive, a wide road that skirted the beach and ran parallel to the small river that flowed into Lake Minnehaha. Lake Ramapo? Lake Tomahawk. Lake O-shi-wa-noh? Lake Sunburst. Leaning against her father’s powder-blue Buick convertible, lost, in the indigo night, the creamy stars, sound of crickets, they kissed. They fell in love.

One of the songs that summer was “For Heaven’s Sake.” Another, “It’s Magic.” Who remembers the clarity of Claude Thornhill and Sarah Vaughan, their exquisite irrelevance? They are gone where the useless chrome doughnuts on the Buick’s hood have gone. That Valhalla of Amos ’n’ Andy and guinea fruit peddlers with golden earrings. “Pleasa No Squeeza Da Banana.” In 1948, the whole world seemed beautiful to young people of a certain milieu, or let me say, possible. Yes, it seemed a possible world. This idea persisted until 1950, at which time it died, along with many of the young people who had held it. In Korea, the Chinese played “Scrapple from the Apple” over loudspeakers pointed at the American lines. That savage and virile alto blue-clear on the subzero night. This is, of course, old news.

Rebecca was fair. She was fair. Lovely Jewish girl from the remote and exotic Bronx. To him that vast borough seemed a Cythera — that it could house such fantastic creatures as she! He wanted to be Jewish. He was, instead, a Roman Catholic, awash in sin and redemption. What loathing he had for the Irish girls who went to eleven o’clock Mass, legions of blushing pink and lavender spring coats, flat white straw hats, the crinkly veils over their open faces. Church clothes, under which their inviolate crotches sweetly nestled in soft hair.

She had white and perfect teeth. Wide mouth. Creamy stars, pale nights. Dusty black roads out past the beach. The sunlight on the raft, moonlight on the lake. Sprinkle of freckles on her shoulders. Aromatic breeze.

Ben and Clara Stein were made for each other. I won’t go so far as to say that they were meant for each other, but it all comes out the same way. It is impossible for me, even now, after these fifteen or so years since I first met them, to think of them as anything but “the Steins.”

I have no idea how and where they met, but it might have been at a party during the Christmas vacation — this would have been back in 1955 or thereabouts. Clara was a Bard student at the time, having gone there from Bennington, to which she had gone from Antioch, to which she had gone from Brooklyn College. All this moving about had something to do with art, i.e., she went where art was “possible.” All right, I don’t know what it means, either. She published some poems in various student magazines, and in one of them an essay on Salinger’s Nine Stories, which won her a prize of twenty-five dollars’ worth of books. She was a dark, slender, hyper-nervous girl, whose father thought that she was going to be a teacher. He comforted himself with this, although I assure you that he would have sent her to school no matter what he thought she wanted to be, for, to her father, school was good, it was sunshine and bananas with cream. He had plenty of money from his business, which had something to do with electronic hospital equipment, and Clara was denied nothing.

Ben was an English major at Brooklyn College when he met Clara at this party. I will put their meeting at this party since all college parties are essentially the same and I am saved the trouble of describing it. But they met, conversation in the corner, coffee at Riker’s, and so on. Ben wore blue work shirts, tweed jackets with leather elbow patches, long scarves wound around his neck and thrown over the shoulder. His father did something. Whatever your father does, that’s what he did: the years shuffling by, marked by decaying Chevys and fevered vacations, the World Series and Gelusil. Ben’s minor was French, and he read Apollinaire and Cocteau. His reading of French anglicized him in a Ronald Firbank kind of way, and he affected a weariness and sensitivity that, on Flatbush and Nostrand, was something to see. He had a darting, arcane mind, of a kind that made Clara forever obscure the fact that she had once admired Salinger. Somewhere they found a place to be alone, and in two months Clara was pregnant. Ben married her, after a long, serious talk with her father and mother, during which Ben shook his foot nervously, flashed his compulsive smile at them, and made bewildering jokes about W. H. Auden. Clara’s father shook Ben’s hand and they both stood there, in wordless misery, laughing cordially. The father couldn’t understand how Clara had allowed this silly boy into her slim, straight body.

I first met Ben in a class in classical civilization at Brooklyn College. At the time, I was attending school on the Korean War GI Bill, and my school friends were other ex-soldiers like myself, a penurious and shabby bunch indeed. Ben was the first non-veteran I had come across who seemed to have something to do with what I then thought of as reality. We sat in the back of the room, composing obscene sonnets, to which we wrote alternate lines, while the rest of the class relentlessly took notes. Why I was going to school I really can’t tell you in any clear way: let’s say that I wanted to learn Latin. All right.

Ben and I failed that course, but Ben, who was being supported by Clara’s father, panicked. He was afraid that their monthly stipend would be cut off and that he might have to drop out of school or go to work. The reader must know that in the fifties, Ben was a member of a large minority of young people that thought that life was somehow nonexistent outside of the academy, that is, life within the university was real life — outside were those strange folk who spoke ungrammatical English and worshiped the hydrogen bomb. God knows what has happened to those scholars; I know only what has happened to Ben and Clara. In any event, I myself didn’t care about my F, but it was interesting to see Ben’s reaction to the failing grade: he begged, he pleaded, he took a makeup exam and wound up with a C for the course. When I say it was interesting, I mean that I saw that Ben was not that romantic Byronesque figure I had taken him to be. He somehow had a goal, a — what shall I call it? — “stake in life.” On the other hand, I am more or less still searching for myself, if you can stomach that phrase. Well, let that be; this is the Steins’ story.

I suppose it was at about this time that I met Clara, Ben’s other half — the banality of that expression is, in this case, perfection itself. The scene: a hot day in June. Ben had received permission to take his makeup exam. I was invited to their apartment to have a drink and some supper and “see the baby,” Caleb. At the time, I was going with a girl who regularly contributed to the Brooklyn College literary magazine, and whose father was a shop steward in what used to be a Communist local. She read The Worker, and pressed on me the novels of Howard Fast. If she has followed the pattern of her generation, she has married a pharmacist and lives in Kips Bay — but in those days she was my mistress: or, let me write it, My Mistress. How flagrantly serious we were! Lona carried her diaphragm in her bag and we discovered that John Ford was a great artist. We went together to see the Steins in their apartment in Marine Park.

The most exquisite tumblers, tall and paper-thin, filled with icy Medaglia d’Oro topped with whipped cream. Hennessy Five Star. Sliced avocados with lime wedges. Crisp, salty rye and Brie. In my faded khaki shirt, the shoulder ripped where I had fumbled in removing the patch that had once identified me, I ate and drank and understood why Ben had been concerned with his grade. Clara made it clear that the Hennessy was a gift from her father, who apparently was good for little else. “In his freaking air-conditioned Cadillac!” she said. “What else?” Ben said. “De gustibus.” Lona was into her harangue on the symmetrical beauties of Barbary Shore, Ben was depleting the Cognac, the baby was crying. We spoke of Charles Olson, of whom I was then scarcely aware. Clara thought he was “pure shit,” a fake Ezra Pound: she knew him from Bard or Bennington or someplace. Norman Mailer was also “shit,” as was the Communist party, Adlai Stevenson, peace, war, and Ben. Ben would twitch slightly and say Cla-ra, Claa-ra, Claa-rr-aa? Lona and I soon left. At the door, Ben showed me a split in the sole of his shoe, to demonstrate his penury. I soon came to realize that Ben was always broke — I mean that was his mask. His life, financially speaking, was remarkably stable — but he was always broke. The attainment of this attitude was a talent of Ben’s class, which attitude has persisted, and even refined itself. At the time, I was naïve enough to think that one had to be without money to be broke.

Joe Doyle was born a bastard whose natural father’s name had been Lionni, or Leone. I have no idea what man owned the name Doyle. Let’s imagine his true sire to be a loudmouth who spent his days in a candy store in the Bronx, reading The Green Sheet and betting hopeless long shots. When one speaks of the People, one must remember that Joe’s father is always to be included among them. Whole novels, inexplicably, have been written exploring such characters. Perhaps these novels allow them to persist.

Along about the time that Joe decided that he would be a “writer,” his father’s name shifted in his head so that he came to think of it as Lee. In any event, he led everyone he knew to believe that he believed that the name was Lee. Ah, mystery. Why his father would have changed his name from Lee to Lionni was unexplained, but such a puzzle only served to make everything more hazily romantic. Once an aberration is seized upon, its possible variations are virtually limitless: consider advertising. Soon after this, Joe came to consider himself, I swear it, a descendant of Robert E. Lee, and the dear old shattered South, the grand old decayed plantations, the beautiful old smoldering mansions became part of his heritage. It might have been true if things had been a little this way, or a little that way, right? So Joe perhaps thought of it.

This spangled rubbish was useful to Joe’s life; with it, he could wrench his father out of roachy shotgun flats and busboy jobs in Horn and Hardart’s and fold him into pink clouds that glowed with the light of romance. He was no longer the man his mother had often bitterly and mockingly described to him, an unemployed lover in a Crawford suit-with-two-pairs-pants and Woolworth’s rose-oil pomade, shining his hair to oilcloth, but a quixotic, footloose hero whose rebel blood drove him to disappear from the verminous kitchens in which Joe had grown up. Joe, of course, had this same imaginary blood.

He kept all this glittering lost glory subtly in the background, exposing it discreetly when it could get him something, and functioned off its energy. It was indeed an engine of sorts, and did not at all interfere with his job, his social life, or his “writing.” Joe became what he called an artist — and how he loved that word; I can hear him now: “Well, as far as Flaherty being an artist … “—because to be an artist was to be the stubborn Reb in retreat. He began to write poems, actual words, count ‘em, words, on actual paper. It was “interesting,” and admitted him to a world that seemed to offer more than the world of, say, numismatics. That the poems were indeed accepted as art has little bearing on this story — although I suspect that it is not so much a story as a minor change upon a common fable. The world is filled with talented and intelligent people who produce arty bits and pieces by which other talented and intelligent people are somehow nourished; they get what they need for their ailments. Sometimes I think it is all nothing but Joes with their variants of sham honeysuckle and Alabama nights on the one hand, and on the other those who come within range of that nailed-together glamour. It is all exciting and everyone is very pleased.

The White Shirt

Some young man, Bill will do for a name, out of the Army for three months and tinged, if you will, all right, tinged with a gloom well short of despair, got a job. This was Bill’s first job, save for six months spent as a dishwasher and three years as an infantryman, neither of which are now considered actually to be jobs, but are thought of as burdens, or perhaps misfortunes. How wise and wonderful the world has become, filled to bursting with careers!

There he was, in the basement stockroom of Art Adventures, an art-supply store in midtown Manhattan. One of the somewhat shabby and unenthusiastic of Bill’s chores was to fill exceedingly small glass jars with glaringly bright poster paints “in all popular colors,” these paints having been mixed in hundredgallon vats in Art Adventures’ laboratory, you’ll pardon the word, affix identifying labels to these filled jars, and stack them, in neatest rows, on the steel shelves reserved for them and other sundries of the art business.

Bill’s immediate boss was an adenoidal schlepper from Ozone Park whose name was Stewie, a self-proclaimed hipster, drenched in mambo lore, who sang, hummed, and whistled, day in and day out — to employ a poster-paint phrase—“Rock Around the Clock.” Had Stewie’s name not been Stewie, it would have been Carl, Ernie, Cliffie, or Sheldon. Now you know who he is! Of course, Stewie took stern delight in telling Bill and his colleague, a Puerto Rican headbreaker, Felix, what to do and how to do it. Felix had been “given a break” and hired, freshly paroled, God only knows why, out of Coxsackie; he often quietly mused, when he and Bill took a smoke break, on the possibility of accidentally maybe stabbing Stewie to death. So the days of that sunny, crisp fall passed, a ragged dream of honest work’s rewards and the second chance.

One morning, Stewie told Bill and Felix that he wanted the jars of poster paint shelved so that the virtually unnecessary labels — which comically and redundantly described the startling red or sickly green paints within their jars as RED or green — faced forward, so that, Stewie wisely reasoned, you fuckin well know what you’re fuckin pickin when you fill a fuckin order. He was a logical sort, take him all in all. Bill suggested, gently, gently, that this seemed wasteful of time and effort, for a half-blind drunken idiot could tell the difference between colors, and in the dark, for Christ sake. But Stewie, with the sort of ravaged and tottering intelligence that might well have sent him to law school had he not been so ambitious, was not having any of this. Yizzel fuckin do what I say, he noted; or, perhaps, yizzel fuckin do it right; or yizzel fuckin well do it. Bill rejoined, weakly, that, hell, come on, there’s nobody who could mistake RED for YELLOW, etcetera. But this argument cut no ice with Stewie. Felix, attentive to this dialogue, fingered the switch-blade knife in his pocket, his eye on Stewie’s pallid neck, till the latter ended the conversation by arguing that Bill just thought he was a wise guy because he’d been in the fuckin Army. Bill fell silent, searching for the arcane meaning hidden in this observation, but gave up. What the hell. Felix, in a quiet aside, suggested to Bill that they might seriously injure Stewie’s sconce with a carelessly wielded gallon jug of India ink, the faggot punk jive motherfucker.

I have not yet mentioned Mr. Pearl, the stockroom supervisor, shipping (he preferred to call it “traffic”) coordinator, keeper of the inventory, and he who answered to Art Adventures’ purchasing agent. Mr. Pearl had a sad little desk, about as big as a minute, as simple people were wont to say in “a more innocent time” (see: Second World War, the Holocaust, Korean “police action,” etc.). On this lugubrious surface, he marshaled his inventory records, daily-order forms, back-order memoranda, pens, pencils (red, green, blue), erasers, and scarred wooden ruler. And off it he ate his lunch, a homely, unassuming, and pedestrian sandwich, a nice piece of fresh fruit, and a pint of milk, the last wrapped in wax paper in the superstitious belief — daily disproved — that this helped keep the milk cool. He was, one might say, a sap. And from the vantage of this handkerchief-sized desk, he looked kindly upon young Stewie, and why? As if you didn’t know! Because he had once been just like young Stewie. Yea, even unto his sweaty face and dingy cardigan.

Bill, poor Bill, then made the classic yet banal mistake, common enough among all lowly and callow employees, of appealing the irrational decisions of the corporal-mind to a higher, and supposedly saner authority. (May I digress for a moment? Ho! Ho! Ho!) Or, as Felix put it when Bill told him of his intentions, You must have shit for brains, coño. Cruel yet clear-eyed Felix. Mr. Pearl, seated at his toy desk, a partially destroyed baloney-and-American-cheese sandwich before him on a white handkerchief somewhat drearily adorned with a frayed, faded, embroidered “P” in an infirm pale green, his hands, shiny and grimy with charcoal dust from the drawing pencils he had personally unpacked that morning, resting on the Mirror, looked at Bill. Then he spoke:

Stewie is your boss just like I am, your boss, and when Stewie talks I, talk, it’s like I talk you unnastan, but, different but, like a, second boss so do as you’re told and you’ll you’ll, get along cause one hand washes, the other am I correct or, am I correct, you ain’t like the, other gazabo, the Spanish, Spanish boy from the reform, school you don’t want to be like, him, from Harlem, is he, Spanish, you’re not, Spanish are you, no offense, I get along, with all kinds of, all people, ask Stewie, Porto Rickans, the colored, ask Stewie, but you, you want to be, a real man, a mensch like they say in Jewish, like Stewie like, me, a man with a wife some day you can look up at a clean fine, American sort of a young lady, you’re a pretty clean-cut, fellow, clean-cut sort, a veteran if I’m right well, we can’t all be veterans, look at, me, look at, Stewie, I was believe it or, not, I was just, like, Stewie once upon a time, can you, believe it, can you believe it, can you, but that young fellow hasn’t found the girl of his dreams yet, but the girls, upstairs, in the office, they all, all, they like him, don’t, get, me, wrong, I’m not inferring that he don’t like the, girls, no, he just reminds, me, a lot, a lot of myself when I was first starting out on my first job as a messenger, in the garment, yes, the business, remnants, and now as you, see, as you can see, now I wear the white shirt, you see, what, I mean, the, white, shirt, the white shirt, if you wanna wear the white shirt you, gotta, I always say to Stewie, you got, to, and let me say it, to you, you got, to, keep your nose clean and get along, all kinds, I don’t care coloreds, Spanish persons, one hand, washes, you know, the other, Stewie knows this, oh yes, where his bread is buttered what, side it is, the hands washing, uh-huh, he’s got, his, eye on the white shirt, I tell him like a, son, I tell, Stewie you got your eye on, right, the white, right, ha ha, don’t you, and Stewie just, well, smiles, because I know his, plans, his, I was just like Stewie once can, you believe, believe it, can you, now, look at the desk, my personal desk, the pens and pencils, the white, shirt, the white, right, pens, pencils, my phone, look, you should know you, should unnastan, soon when I go, upstairs, upstairs, soon, Stewie will, be, Stewie will have, this, this will be, his desk, with the daily orders the white, yes, the white shirt, yes indeedy, the tie, the white, uh-huh, so keep your nose, clean, don’t be a wise-guy nobody, not nobody, likes a wise-guy vet, we can’t all be, no, or like that spick from the penitentiary, with a chip on, somebody will, oh yes, knock, it, off, we can’t all, for instance, you’re not Spanish, are you, no offense, we couldn’t all, all be, take Stewie who tried to join the Army, we can’t all be, or sit around in the penitentiary, living off, you know, the taxpayers, look at Stewie, who, tried, who tried to join, the Army the, Marines, but his asthma his, flat feet his, punctured ear, adenoids, some family, you know, problems out in Queens, astigmatic, an astigmatic condition, the National Guard, we’re not, all, so lucky, no, can’t all run away from obligations, join, the Army the, you know, jail, no, so you shelve the poster, the paints, like Stewie asks he’s, got, his, methods, they’re good, remember the white shirt if you got, sort of problems, am I right, am I right, am I or am I not, right, you bet your gosh-darn life I’m right, now go, take your lunch take, you got an extra, six, minutes, go ahead and, take my, advice, stay away from that shtarker, thug, that, Felix from up in Harlem, I hate, to, say it but, they’re all animals up, jabbering in Porto Rickan in, God knows what, language, like monkeys with the knives and, the guns, so keep your nose clean if you, want to get, to move up on, you know, the, ladder, like Stewie, he was nobody just, like, you a couple years, ago, a nothing you hear me.

Bill was fired a couple of weeks later for manifesting what the personnel director of Art Adventures termed “a negative attitude.” He disappeared soon after. Mr. Pearl “went upstairs,” to assist the purchasing agent of Art Adventures. Six years later, he died in the men’s room. Stewie took his desk when he left, wore the white shirt, and then he, too, “went upstairs,” leaving his job to one Carl Sheldon. He is still there, dumb as ever. Felix was last known to be working as an orderly at Flower Fifth Avenue Hospital. He is married with four daughters.

It was not possible to find gathered together rarer specimens than these young flowers. Of course, as the phrase so often has it, there are flowers, and then there are flowers. Some commentators, as always, have vulgarly intruded remarks concerning “figural language,” if one can countenance such opinion without displaying some small degree, at the very least, of levity. At this moment, before my eyes, they were breaking the line of the sea with their slender hedge. “The line of the sea,” I admit, may be taking things just a little too seriously; but events, one hopes, will bear out its ultimate propriety. It should also be noted, and the earlier the better, that the sand was almost uncomfortably hot because of the meridional blaze of the sun, savagely brilliant in the usual white, cloudless sky. They were like a bower of Pennsylvania roses adorning a cliffside garden. In gardens such as these, small domestic animals tend to cavort, on any pretext. The question of why larger animals neglect to “follow suit,” if such an idiom may still be employed, is, at present, moot. Between their blooms is contained the whole tract of ocean, crossed by some streamer. This is an ocean “as you like it,” which is the message presented by this crumpled note. The note also contains the formula for making roast leg of lamb mavourneen, sometimes called — the formula, that is — a “recipe.” The steamer is slowly gliding along the blue, horizontal line. With the aid of a pair of good, not to say excellent binoculars, one can just make out the name of the ship — the SS Albertine. On the other hand, it may well be the humble forest cabin which we have seen before, albeit in dreams. The line stretches from one stem to the next. As we know, the rose is beautiful, and is often called the queen of the green world because of its cruel thorns. This sobriquet doesn’t seem precisely right or just, if I may, for a moment, interrupt the gardening with a gently puzzled remark, as I have, or so it would seem, just done! An idle butterfly is dawdling in the cup of a flower, one long since passed by the ship’s hull. Some of the more sensitive guests are leaving, including a few of the young flowers. There are barely concealed grimaces of disapproval, and some of the older gentlemen, placidly elegant in black tie, appear to be trying to sink the steamer before it reaches the buffet. The butterfly can wait before flying off in plenty of time to arrive before the ship. But according to a telegram carried by a sweating courier, “Nobody else can wait.” And there, once again, is the old, familiar sound of breaking glass! He can wait until the tiniest chink of blue still separates the prow from the first petals of the flower. Two of the women have nervously rushed into the gazebo, despite posted warnings. And, as one might easily have imagined, the “chink of blue”—actually aquamarine — has grown no smaller. The ship, of course, is steering toward the flower. There are cries and imprecations against Pennsylvania and what some call “salts,” whatever they may be. The blue, horizontal line is quite striking in contrast to the blank glare of the sky.

So can you predict the exact date on which the “pearly” rain will fall? Are you a slave to such quirks of clairvoyance? Is there a testament, if you don’t think that’s too strong a word, for or against behavior of that sort? Would red flowers or white, or pink for that matter, be any the less useless to you? Or their motions, such as they are, in the wind? Speaking of wind, do you remember those long-ago parades, held in gales of lilacs, so it seemed, or were they actually merely lilac butterflies? And do you recall how the children and their mothers aped the yokels who marched in those Midwestern uniforms and plumes? Weren’t they always the dead white of sails, or snow, of, in short, winter as you once experienced it? Do you think of the usual creaking boughs and bitter frosts when you hear that “music”? Wasn’t it on one of those festive days that you butchered the peacocks? Those you claimed lived behind the house of the girl with the out-of-tune guitar? Didn’t you tell me her name was Regina, Regina Lake, or Regina Star? Now that I think of it, weren’t you and she the closest of friends when she was still a virgin? And isn’t she now the Regina Lake or Star whose sex life is the subject of the monographs on perversion that you collect? She and you flew pigeons off the roof, didn’t you? I remember, do I not, you telling me that she asked you the meaning of “gobbet,” or was it the derivation of “radish”? You say that was April Starre? Why would you think of April Starre when Regina looked, not like her, but exactly like Ursula? Speaking of whom, why did you insist on calling her really beautiful buttocks ugly? And why did you persuade the other women to give her a box of candles and bananas? And why did Sheila Christian blush and crack her gum when you arrived? In the photograph you have of Sheila and Ursula, who is the blonde asleep or in a faint or perhaps even dead beneath the hydrangea? Why do women to whom you show this disconcerting photograph mysteriously call that position a “malady”? Why, for instance, do you say, “With a malady like that the only cure is Emperor Ointment”? And in the other photograph, isn’t that you doing the Tiger Hump? And why do all of you, you, Regina, April, Ursula, and Sheila, insist that Jesus was at the party? And then why do you agree that, despite all evidence to the contrary, he arrived wearing a sleeveless pink dress? Weren’t you wearing a sombrero like the sojourning Mexicans? Or were they really blackamoors whose curious taste for the fugue depressed all of you? And the turbans beneath their sombreros frightened you? But didn’t they kill the parakeets to assure you of their good intentions? Didn’t they appear the next morning in slippers and dressing gowns to tell you and anyone else who would listen of sunshine and cognac and the coconuts of Florida? Before we go on, would you like some chocolate? Or would you prefer to sit under a California umbrella and have a glass of orangeade and gin to chase the blues? Perhaps you’d like a free pass to the Bijou to see The Janitor’s Waltz? Seriously, as they say, why are you waiting this way, so hopelessly, really, for Ramón? Do you believe, despite all you’ve learned, that he’s different from other drummers? Didn’t he make you publicly “perform” on a bed covered with white carnations? Didn’t you have to eat cauliflower ice cream for him? Didn’t he make you sleep on bare porcelain tiles? Don’t you consider that being laced, day after day, into that tiny corset was an indication of his true feelings for you? And while you and the Mexicans acted those lewd roles for the camera, didn’t Ramón sit there blithely eating peas? You say that he sent you bouquets? But didn’t he give Ursula the pearl-and-ruby necklace he’d bought for you? Weren’t you bitterly hurt when he took April and Regina to Barbados on what he called a “double honeymoon”? Don’t you think that there’s a reason that he makes you live on Willow Way? Don’t you find it strange that a loathsome dwarf constantly spies on you? Didn’t your very blood sicken when you first realized that there wasn’t a crevice of your body that the little monstrosity hadn’t seen? Why do you pretend not to know that he’s always there, watching and masturbating? Why do you play those madrigals every night? Why do you threaten to call Connecticut, where you don’t know a soul, with the news? Why do you continue to believe that the cinnamon cantharides tablets and the sex toys that you get every month are from Ramón? Don’t you ever see the misshapen beast watching you in your bath? Why did you let Ursula hide in the family chapel? Didn’t you find it odd that Ramón asked Regina to pose for that “emperor” in nothing but pearls and high heels and carrying a tiny Japanese parasol? Didn’t she tell you that she was persuaded with hashish nougat? Were you the beautiful brunette rapt amid the flowering dogwood? Or were you naked in that copse of almonds? Why did Sheila name the sparrow that you gave her “Lesbia”? She was living then in the mauve-brick tenement you own, wasn’t she? Why did the milkman deliver free ice cream to you and to her every Saturday? Didn’t you say that his name was Bud or Billy Starr? Weren’t you, during your early days on Willow Way, playing the oboe with the Sapphic Apricot Romance Orchestra? Didn’t the leader affect a steel helmet and pretend an interest in antique gramophones in order to seduce you? Wasn’t she the woman who duped you with some absurd story about a lost canto of Don Juan? Why on earth did you buy her a football for Christmas? And didn’t you and Ursula buy her a blown-up color photograph of a plague of locusts? Do you still think that there was a certain “chemistry” between the two of you? Didn’t she give you a thousand dollars to “pose,” as she called it, in some expensive lingerie she’d bought for you? And didn’t you turn white as a ghost when a nude actor suddenly joined the two of you? Why did you, some few years later, regularly refer to the obscene exhibition that occurred that night as a “rendezvous”? And don’t you now term the photograph one of crickets, not locusts, as if it somehow mattered? And why do you maintain that the geraniums had a spicy smell? Why do you so dislike Sundays?

Is it because he claims that Ursula “simply adores” Sundays? Don’t you think that he carried off that geranium boutonniere very well, considering? Didn’t she write, by the way, a book of poems called The Red Cricket? Am I correct in recalling that she got a lot of unwanted, so she said, publicity over an obscene sonnet in it called “The Rendezvous”? He was then still what those stupid fags refer to as an “actor,” wasn’t he? Anyway, she never seemed to stop droning on and on about his “fucking ghosts,” isn’t that what she called his friends? Didn’t she sell his beloved Gilbert Chemistry Set for a dollar and a half? Isn’t it unbelievable, especially after that night, that she called him a locust? Didn’t she play football for a time with that lesbian team, the Canto Cunts? She’d tried to get Sheila up to her apartment to “see” that rusty old gramophone she picked out of the trash, didn’t she? But wasn’t he still living in the apartment then, trying to make a quick buck on those defective pith helmets? Ah, the romance of sophisticated fiction, eez eet not wondairful? Bud Starr, or was his name Buzz, came on the scene about that time with his apricot-orchard and antique-oboes scams, didn’t he? With that brain he should have been a milkman, or a congressman, right? Do you remember that he thought a tenement was a building that had ten apartments? But she’d listen to the idiocies coming out of that sparrow brain and love it all, no? Do you remember the almond-juice scheme he had going, and the whole demented routine he’d worked out to ship plastic dogwood blossoms to the Spanish Sahara? Didn’t she once make a, Christ help us, nougat stew so that he could enter some goddamned contest or other? Jesus, I think she was better off when she posed for Sex Chapel in nothing but pearls and high heels, holding that yellow paper parasol, don’t you? All she ever really wanted were her hot baths and her little wind-up toys and her cinnamon lozenges, right? Personally, I don’t think she ever gave a damn about that eighteenth-century farmhouse in Connecticut, do you? And then when he stuck her with that phone bill and liquor bill and the unpaid insurance and ran off with Emily Madrigal? Didn’t she have, by the way, the nickname of “the crevice,” as in, careful sport, you might not be able to climb out? And then if I’m not mistaken he came on with the me and Lorenzo routine, the old dark secret blood, right? She was being “courted,” so to speak, by that dwarf, what’s his name, by that time, wasn’t she? And she’d changed her name to Ruby Willow, right? Who was it who said he’d give a month’s pay to be a fly on the wall during that honeymoon? Do you remember the wedding presents she got from the groom’s friends, you’ll pardon the expression, the bouquet of pears, oranges, and boiled shrimp, that porcelain corset, the fifty-gallon drum of broccoli ice cream, and oh, what else, the case of Carnation evaporated milk? And the short-armed drummer with the band, Ramón Mastiachi, wasn’t he? Didn’t he say he’d played the part of Andrés Jones, the typing champion, in the road company production of The Janitor’s Waltz? Didn’t he keep calling it a “bijou” of a role, the fucking cretin, a “perfect bijou”? Anyway, when they returned, didn’t she say that they’d lived for the whole three weeks on Rumanian chocolates and coño, whatever that is, orangeade? And do you remember that huge blue umbrella she brought back? From Florida, she said, Florida? She wore absolutely nothing but evening gowns after that, didn’t she? While he, I can’t remember his name, took to wearing those pointed slippers, poulaines do they call them? And do you recall those unbelievable turbans he wore, with the parakeet-feather plumes? Didn’t she, probably in desperation, spend her allowance arranging for the première of Regina Lake’s “Blackamoor Fugue”? I’m almost certain that’s the same piece of pretentious crap that she originally wrote “for autoharp,” Christ be merciful, called “Sombreros of Rage,” wasn’t that it? She was a knockout in those tight dresses though, even the one that somebody called “rube pink,” wasn’t she? Wasn’t it right after the ringing silence that greeted her “masterwork fugue” that she claimed that Jesus had appeared to her in a tiger-skin loincloth? And right after that, right! she and Ursula, I should say Ruby, started that magazine, Emperor Sundae? Didn’t she, or they, publish Dennis MacMalady’s ridiculous story, “Ointment,” in the first issue? Isn’t that the chef-d’oeuvre in which he has the world-weary blonde, clutching her hydrangeas to her bosom, “look down on the traffic far below”? He said at a party that that was one of his Christian stories, didn’t he, the bastard? In contradistinction to what he called, the dumb bastard, the stories of his decadent phase, “Gumbananas” and “Who Can Hold a Candle to Her Buttocks”? Wasn’t that the party at which he insulted Ursula, Ruby, and Regina and locked himself in the bedroom with April June May? Didn’t he say he married her, as I recall, because she was the only woman he’d ever met who knew the meaning of “gobbet” and the derivation of “radish”? And, oh God, what about her sister, Stephanie, wasn’t she the one who advocated sex with pigeons? Didn’t she write that best-seller, Virgin Lakes and Pure Stars? And Dennis, oh yes, I’m remembering all this now, didn’t he seduce Regina by reading those treacly passages about guitars around the old campfire and the cry of the wild peacock and the frost on the boughs, the winter silence and snow and all the rest of that shit? Wasn’t he insufferable riding in that China-wagon with the madras sail? And when he wore that Tyrolean hat with the little orange plume and the button that read YOKEL? Didn’t he always say that if he could make the butterflies and the lilacs like him, the mothers and children would take care of themselves? It almost seemed a shame when Mastiachi shot him as he led that, what did he call it, “perpetual-motion parade”? Sheila was beautiful at the funeral, wearing those lavender feathers, wasn’t she? She, or at least the way she looked, was a tender testament, a beautiful and loving testament to MacMalady’s quirks, remember that’s what the drunken minister said in his eulogy? And wasn’t that moron put out when it started to pour rain on his Episcopalian toupee?

Then didn’t they all tramp through the rain and mud to get sloshed at Sunday’s Tavern? Did they actually think, I wonder, that that joint with its watered booze and shanty-Irish geraniums, would help them to suppress their quirks and neuroses? They drafted “Testament to the Crickets” that evening, didn’t they, all about eat, drink, and fuck, for tomorrow we die? Did that featherbrained bunch actually think they needed an “intellectual” foundation for their endless sexual rendezvous? At least Ursula, I should say Ruby, went through the motions for two minutes with that deadbeat actor, Briggs Jones, when they pretended to “rehearse” for Ghost Parades, wasn’t that the name of the turkey they were in? It closed in ten minutes and then they did Lilacs On My Lips, a dollar matinee if you brought your old crippled mother along, wasn’t that it? Do you remember that line at the curtain when they strip naked and say, in horrible unison as I recall, “The chemistry of love creates the butterfly of desire in the laboratory of the heart”? At that point Satan should have released the swarms of locusts and all the children of darkness, or am I being too harsh? Does anybody know, I wonder, that despite all their third-rate sophistication and dumb artistic pronunciamentos, they lived with their unbearable mothers and watched football? All yokels are the same, whether they’re out in the cornfields or playing shortstop naked for the Canto Cunts, am I right? Whether they’re clumping up Main Street on the Fourth of July in their garish patriotic plumes or selling junk gramophones on Bleecker Street, am I right again? Speaking of antiques, do you remember the time that Bud Starr and Ramón Mastiachi unloaded those “authentic” German helmets, made in Long Island City or Astoria, on Sol Sails, “the poet of the phallus”? That’s when they owned that antique store, if I recall, just after they’d given up the ski shop, Snow Use, cute as a button they were, which they had right after Romance Pants, their lingerie store, folded, no? Didn’t they, along with April and Sheila and Regina Lake too, I think, have some idea of spending the winter in, as Sol phrased it, “the paradise of apricot country”? They had some harebrained idea about a series of “surrealist” photographs that had to do with oboes on the boughs? Some sort of arty tableaux with pink-and-gold artificial frost on the buds and a dozen peacocks tethered to stakes while they all played horny milkman and lonely housewife, wasn’t that the scheme? Then they were going to have an interlude, that’s right, about a guitar genius who gets lost forever in a tenement, right? Another Orpheus routine, help! with Regina cast as the Eurydice figure, a rock singer called “The Ruby Sparrow” whom they gang-rape, artistically, of course, right? Wasn’t that about the time that they took to making long-distance calls to anybody about the timeless beauties of the nonexistent Almond Lakes? Didn’t they all begin stargazing in earnest and subsequently initiate that crypto-fascist ecology group, the Dogwood Conspiracy? Didn’t they even call you once about somebody named Nate Nogatz or Nougat, some nonentity who was involved in a land-development deal concerning a so-called virgin forest? With all those endlessly busy days and saving the magnificent cockroach and art and books and of course life, I wonder how they found the time to pose all those fourteen-year-old neighborhood girls in nothing but pearls and high heels with those toy parasols just barely covering their sex? Do you remember when April Snow wrote that little pamphlet, “Pigeons in the Chapel”? Wasn’t that when the money really started to roll in and they held weekly orgies in the communal bath using, as I recall, “The Gobbet” as a sex manual? Wouldn’t you say that the dwarf, what’s his name, had the right idea when he shipped them ten cases of marzipan radishes marked TOYS? They say that April became a cinnamon addict there, or am I wrong? And is there any truth to the story that Ursula went out there to “rescue” Sheila and Mastiachi hypnotized her, Bud Starr put a sign around her neck that said I DO THINGS, and they both put her naked on a train to Connecticut? Don’t they say, in fact, that that’s how Ursula got the idea for the famous coach scene in Madrigals and Buttocks? I wonder why they hid all those candle ends in the crevices? Do you remember when Briggs Jones went out there with blood in his eye and they turned him into a fucking banana in a week? The story goes that they sent him back, he immediately bought a thousand dollars’ worth of bubble gum and the next day took it over to the dwarf’s duplex, what’s his name? Didn’t they like to whip born-again Christians with willow switches, gently gently? Didn’t they come back when they got all that money from the blonde who sold those unbelievable rubies that the senile bishop gave her? Didn’t they say that she took the old lecher on a kind of honeymoon that she told the cardinal was a field trip to “spot hydrangeas”? They met them at the airport when they got back, His Eminence dazed but ecstatic, and she said that they’d failed with the hydrangea hunt but had found “God’s bouquets to salve life’s maladies,” wasn’t that the disgusting phrase she used? Didn’t they, I think it was Mastiachi and April, give her a jar of aphrodisiac ointment, the slightest dab of which, etcetera, that was made out of rotten pears? I think it was called The Emperor’s Fantasy and they suggested that she use it on the old bastard when the mood was one of “naughty corsets, sheerest silk, and daring thoughts,” isn’t that how the Coney Island copy read? Didn’t it go on to say that the product was guaranteed to make a raging tiger out of a porcelain pussycat? Didn’t they say that the blonde put some on the old priest’s ice cream and he said that Jesus started telling him off-color jokes? Well, they were all capable of anything, especially Mastiachi, who took to wearing a hat made of carnations, and Regina Lake, in that absolutely unbelievable pink sleeveless dress that made her look like a woman who found her cunt by accident, right? And, like all depraved people everywhere, they loved to make the drummers they hired wear black sombreros, wasn’t that the case? Do you remember the panic that ensued when April Snow and Ursula discovered that Ramón Ramónes was not a blackamoor but just your everyday Negro? They “plunged,” I think is the word they used, at least Ursula and April did, into their manic-fugue and crippled-waltz phase, right? They didn’t let all that culture stop them from having a few “interesting” evenings with that queer janitor with the turban, did they? Weren’t they all wild about roast parakeet for a time, that period when everything was “bijou” this and “bijou” that? They were really amazed, weren’t they, when the cadaverous dowager told them that the old cardinal liked nothing better than to put on his slippers and her chemise and drink orangeade? Didn’t that revelation propel them all, once again, out of town, the women in lacy Directoire gowns and the men sheltering under “Romance of Apricots” umbrellas? They say that everybody lives in Florida now, the living as well as the dead, but who was it who insisted that they were always but figures out of chocolate?

Sheew Gweatness

Although his buddies adored him, and candles nightly burned in each window and “makepiece” of every rude shack in Corsica against his victorious return, Berrigan’s adventures, or many of the more famous among them, may well have been optical illusions. One may consider the celebrated opossum story, for instance, as an example. Optical illusions occur when light strikes the subcutaneous fibroid tissues of the eye — actually, the cornea — in such a way as to make certain things look different from the way they look in actual life. This has to do with inverted images, a concept but barely understood in our subject’s day, or, perhaps, “heyday.”

In addition to the opossum story, a good example of the optical illusion is the homely one of the cantaloupe drawings in divers supermarket ads. Such drawings tend to prey on our minds and disturb certain ethical values, especially since the supermarkets that so advertise these melons sell a product that is inestimably larger than represented in the crude sketches. This phenomenon is defiantly an optical illusion, then, manifested both in the advertisement and as encouraged in the produce section of the oft-bustling market, probably. Of course, we cannot determine whether the market has, has had, or will ever have extremely small cantaloupes, such as those shown in the ads, or, on the other hand, if the ad draftsman will ever be moved to draw cantaloupes to that which is sneeringly called “normal” size. Or “standard.” Size. This is the hallmark of all optical illusions.

An adventure of Berrigan’s, undertaken some short time after the hilarious Italian campaign (the legendary “Teleuton fortnight”), had to do with citrus fruit, lemons, to be precise, and seems wholly, perhaps uncannily representative of the optical illusions that so tortured him and his friends and camerados. The adventure may be worth recounting. Brightly burns the hearth!

It has been reported, and there are painstakingly crafted mezzotints accompanying such reports, that Berrigan, or “Tod,” as he was sometimes called by his intimate friends, perhaps while in Egypt, quite comfortably situated himself amid several lemons of an enormous size, lemons so large that the famed acclimatizer found that he could quite easily hide behind or amid them. What a carnival it promptly became. Some of the lemons were whole, and some sliced in half, or “twain,” as “Tod” said, and as he turned from one to the other, first to one, then to the other, turn and turn about, so to speak, crouched in such a way that only his tricorn hat was visible, he trembled with pleasure as he realized that Wellington might never find him! At that moment, Berrigan loved the very paving “blocks” of the local public park, such a fellow had he become.

And yet, this idyll amid the lemons did not quite happen as remembered and reported, first remembered, then reported, like conversation at a table. Luckily we have mezzotints, which seem to prove that the citrus “imagery” depicted is an optical illusion. Nelson’s wanton destruction of French boats of almost every class could well have fallen into the same category as far as “Tod” was concerned.

There is also the bizarre possibility that the lemons of the adventure were of “standard” size, or that size at which they are usually picked and placed in cool, dark “lemon sheds,” or “chillers,” there to ripen slowly into the characteristic fruit of thin-skinned, yellow, and invigorating sour juiciness. If, however, this were the case, it would indicate that the beloved stroller had somehow shrunk to the size of a small creature, e.g., a mouse! In such instance, it seems safe to say that any sighting of “Tod” in such a state, and by unauthorized personnel, would most likely qualify as another optical illusion. The latter, in the innovator’s case, seem to be everywhere. Thus does history, by the legerdemain of apparent candor, hide its secrets.

To get his feet back on the ground, as it were, “Tod” quickly decided to engage the Mamelukes, to whom he read the riot act at the Battle of the Pyramids. Later that night, alone in his tent, and by the small light of a battle lantern, he wrote a detailed critique of the day’s engagement, replete with the witty mots and deadpan “cracks” for which he was, even then, becoming notorious, in, of course, a good way. In the act of writing, the restless fabricator began to nod, and, in a few moments, was asleep. Was he bored with entelechy? Was, finally, the morphology of the workshop reduced to the ultimate ennui? These things usually gave rise to verbal expressions of astounding felicity. Failure had no venue in his relaxed vocabulary! Perhaps it was the odd scent of prairie smoke that had caused his snooze. Whatever, he woke to plaudits and florabelles. Something, too, had addressed the reality of his beard. Ha! he said. He was the soul of wit in those happy days.

There were other engagements, between which “Tod” played quietly among his lemons, or what may have been only the “images” of his lemons, if such a word may be used among the furtive lagniappes of the marathon readings in celebration of the sentient beings then abounding. On the other hand, he had a surpassingly tenuous idea of life when at liberty, so to say, and when his chef created chicken Marengo, Berrigan realized, with what he would scoff to term “a start,” that the crawfish were much bigger than he, as were also the oeufs(?). But he fell to with a good appetite and finished everything on the platter, despite its or his apparent or real size. This incident was also optically questionable. It, too, must fall under the heading, if you will, of the “phenomenal.”

There is little need or desire to speak of the wanton destruction of the fleet by Nelson, the obsessed mariner and scourge of the waters, whose cry, “Put out my other eye, Hardy, for the to’gallants smell o’ death!” electrified all of Britain. His spectacular victory brought a ray of hope to citrus-suspicious Europe, which had been in the bleakest of dumps because of the madness and lust of the Jacobins and the publication of Wordsworth’s The Stamp Distributor. (“A whiff of the grape!” is probably what Nelson hallooed to his gunnery captain, Hardy, or, variantly, “Put out my other eye, Hardy, and give me a taste of the grape!”)

By this time, “Tod” had lost all sense of stability, so that when news of Nelson’s brave shout was brought to him in his tent and subsequently translated, the reference to “grape” sent him into concealment behind two or three large lemons he’d ordered from home. “Home!” he’d often think. The next morning, of course, the sad retreat from Moscow began, a dispiriting exodus that ended with the bitter tragedy of 18 Brumaire. “Had our restless and well-read bricoleur only known,” said many a grizzled veteran of the Big Army. The sunlight blazed and shattered off their medals in a curious manner, reminiscent of Apollinaire, one of the many poets whose work Berrigan had learned by heart.

They discovered a cache of old books, replications, wooden fences, a spangled gypon, assorted spheroids, and many other items, as yet unidentified. The Director, despite his unnerving obsession with luminous white dresses — and their ever-varying representations in his collection of Christian Fundamentalist pamphlets — was lucid enough to assert that some of the more common fabrics would forever remain mysterious as to their composition. “Dried grit,” “Leaves,” “Pebbles,” “Rifle,” “Fishing rod,” were but some of the names they tried attaching to some of the things, although it was clear that nothing quite fit. One of the group of assistants — actually, more than one — thought that certain of the larger umbrellas looked like navy-blue melton overcoats, admittedly an eccentric notion. Hub shards were quickly identified, as were metal brassiere caps, and, though grotesque enough, they were not as grotesque as many of the other “discoveries.” At about this time, the Director took to covering himself with mounds of his cherished gossamer evening gowns, the color of new snow, and neglecting, for days, his investigation of the woody perennials that were doubtlessly clues to the identification of the least familiar clumps.

One of the young women in the motivational group said that she’d seen one or two of the brightly colored biloxis in what she called “the better shops,” but her suddenly recovered memories put the kibosh on that assertion. In addition, the lost items of clothing obscured the logic, so to speak, of the biloxis’ arrangement. After one of the most beautifully delicate of the random crystals disintegrated, every puta bag in the area was seized by security, even though such bags had never been used for anything other than extramarital sexual powwows, or, as the bitch of an editor put it, “adventures.” “Security must consider puta bags vectors of blazing darkness, rather than the simple, filthy things they really are,” a lissome assistant remarked, her beautifully shod feet nonchalantly “parked” on the desk.

A few of the younger women, the “troops,” as they were jocularly called, suggested that a harmonics inspissator might reveal the true nature of the symmetrical devices, but they were, predictably, patronized, insulted, mocked, ogled, and ruthlessly complimented on their looks and attire by executive officers. A week later, beneath an economy-size Mammoth Nut Bar, the shipping-room mascot found yet another shocking photograph of the boss.

Amid the confusion and grumbling over the newly appointed Creative Person, another problem arose when Nan Hacktree, the author of tales based on her own warm yet mentally deranged family, stubbornly held that Wallace Wally’s novel, Over My Dead Body, had to be judged as something more, much more, than a book. “And I do not feature the word ‘deranged’ to describe my relatives,” Mrs. Hacktree liked to repeat. At this point, odds and ends as diverse as torn panties, obscure freak cartoons, and an aluminum soap dish were discovered in a collapsed family room. With this, the senior writers’ clique that championed redemptive dialogue became emboldened enough to denigrate such malign yet seductive imagery as garden walls, gnomons, Nazi moms in sheer nylons, and stardust. Other corrupt figures, e.g., battered work boots, crusted, sour pipes, and 1956 Chevrolets fared badly as well, especially during the waspish and misogynist lunches that were cynically thought of, by the clerical staff, as postmortems.

Within weeks, lipsticks, especially the shades Red Rider, Black Cloche, Glorious Bimbo, and Sunburn, became the preferred tools with which the more avid tyros surreptitiously polluted themselves during the demanding Creative Writing examinations. Mysteriously, the graffiti in the employees’ lounge read, in part, LES GRANDS JETS D’EAU SVELTES PARMI LES CHOSES. It may have been written by the staff comedian, whose most celebrated routine had to do with Philadelphia lawyers, silver bugles, and stupid waitresses — of course! The Collectors Association, already on the defensive because of a smutty joke told in mixed company by its Curator, pretended not to know anything about its holdings of pornographic bar mitzvah music and its recent purchase of the revolutionary artwork, “Money Talks.” It wasn’t long before the Meat Czar arrived at the Association offices with steaks, shoes, books, wind-up tin pigs, white ribs, cheese maps, nostalgia bastors, celebrity indices, etc., etc., more things, in fact, than you can shake a stick at.

As the weather worsened, the more serious sex workers — many of them fresh from the famous porches of the Deep South — spoke of their dreams of empty patios, cold twilights, distant voices, California sunshine, good-time Johnnies, and other crass selections too vile to enumerate. A crude wag was arrested and held overnight by the Sensitivity Committee for opining that what the ladies of the evening did “beats working.” Many psychologists attributed the young man’s cruel remark to his belief that heterosexuals are, when all is said and done, really homosexuals underneath.

At about the same time, the Board of Directors, with the assistance of the Bureau of Culture, ascertained that Wallace Wally’s sweeping saga of a man who lost his way on the prairies, Carnal Jitters, had discouraged twenty-two young writers from sending gifts to casual friends, although the latter were leading simple yet zesty lives! Many of these same writers had learned their manners from the old frauds who pretended an interest in inexpensive yet robust wines, translucent spheroids, pitiful tennis afternoons, The Journal of Virginia Woolf Journal Studies, aerobic mania, and movie stars with really good and, like, humanistic beliefs. The Stupefatto Poll, to everyone’s amazement, discovered that the “things” that had made these young people writers in the first place — blue uniforms, lovelorn fantasies, trees hard by the handball courts, girlish laughter from a small, wooded island, etc., etc., — were metonymic substitutes for the zeppelin, or, in Lacanian terms, the path of the zeppelin. “Who knew?” Rory Stupefatto mused.

And yet, the rigid instructors stubbornly refused to designate as Actual Things the Red Ball Express, the ill-fitting cap, the perfumed and ice-cold Persian lamb coat, the Jodie suit, and the good read. Apprised of this, one of the women, a Catholic Romantic, mentioned, blushingly, that a “baloney” seemed to be “in the feverish grip of dreamlike fingers,” an exercise in incoherence that had even Father O’Flaherty holding on to his Rosary for dear life. Others were unanimous in their opinion that secondhand cigarette smoke causes sexual harassment — including unwanted compliments! — and automobile exhaust. A certain Babs, who yearned to wear small black hats with dotted veils, sheer off-black stockings, black suede pumps, and flattering accessories, had to deny herself this pleasure since her husband was seeking tenure and that was that for couture. She wished that she might get up the nerve to roll the razor-edged mileage calculator back and forth over her husband’s multicolored overview notes which, as he had often told her, had to be judged, as more, much more, than just notes. Where had she heard such bullshit before? Or had she read it somewhere — under an umbrella, perhaps, amid coffee, cigars, and good ruby port? The sun is often hotter than it seems, or so Babs had learned in the awesome stillness of the mountains.

With the advent of the long winter nights, the black crayons and other gritty things in the Crakkerjax Factory began to look “mighty good” to the personnel of Wonderful Colleagues, Inc. Still, winter or not, Mrs. Hacktree swore that wrong-thinking applicants would be admitted to the snugly idyllic cottages “over [her] dead body” and, by implication, her dead mind as well. Given her ideas, certain of the more daring interlocutors thought it useful to save such models of the mundane life as Worcestershire-sauce constructs, salad-dressing displays, and lipstick multiliths, while others wanted to throw hot spinach at the iconic snowman, at the blinds, the victuals, at, really, every motherfucking thing in sight. They were, it was clear, wholly unimpressed by the fact that the “Beechwood Cabin” had once housed Sarah Orne Jewett’s mother-in-law, the author of “Fling My Snood to the Winds.”

Outside of the closed world of the motivational offices and research laboratories, private parks and the proscription of urination by the wrong sort of citizens were part of Palo Alto’s “Figures of White” program. City Council members, agog with the restoration of historic beer barns and other tasteful edifices, were anxious for the perfect jewel of a town to “Say No!” to poor taste. In the midst of its opening meeting on the subject of punishment for the transient, one member made it embarrassingly clear that he believed that the color of decay, disease, shit, piss, vomit, paralysis, and death is a color that one can’t help but see each and every day, right on the quiet, but rather sticky streets. The very idea was appropriated by the Council, and a local artiste was commissioned to paint, to actual scale, the mural “Pendejos de Oro,” which was already painted to actual scale. The original had, unfortunately, been vandalized by homoerotically inclined athletes, whom all the neighbors really related to.

As the true nature of the cache discoveries and subsequent experiments slowly became known, the Symptomatic Referent Equalizer proved to be one of the very few instruments capable of bringing about successful solutions to rebuses and puzzles. Pearl S. Buck’s personal copy of The Good Earth, for instance, was discovered to contain disguised representations of fur cloches, rice cakes, vinyl-covered chairs, large goldfish, and many other elements of a traditionally inscrutable Oriental nature. Critics note that this was the special hors de commerce edition that featured the peppery Madame Solange, a character who would rather straddle her horse, Ching Chow, than sojourn in the Plum Blossom Mountains of the Golden Jade. It was this text that led H.A. Zipp to his idiosyncratic belief that absolute silence, in combination with the other absolute phenomena, would eventually lead to what he gloomily termed “the crossing-over into numbing terror.”

Much of this lore was forgotten or diluted or revised when Professor Andouille asserted that she had just begun to recatalogue her collection of Brooklyniana when a leering man, described by the professor as a “Baptist,” entered her office, his trousers neatly folded over his forearm. This seemed an unlikely event, although if one believes that all things are interchangeable, in the Boolean sense, then Professor Andouille’s somewhat overheated story seems much like any common dark liquid. Far removed from this sex disturbance, on the edge of the compound’s croquet lawn, a solitary camper found it terribly unsettling to realize that the tightly corseted young woman in the sepia-tone photograph is not forever reaching for a hydrangea blossom, but for something that is forever, of course, beyond the edge of the picture. This young fellow had been somewhat Faustian at one time, and was thought to have had something disturbingly weird in mind when he asked Mrs. Walking, his high-school mileage instructor, for a garter of her love. And it was not to his benefit that Captain Theodore Rosa-Rose had, at just about the same time, discovered that the Color of Decay was one of the many forbidden novelties available via mail order, along with spicy short stories and small fallen trees, the latter guaranteed to symbolize things. Plain folks, so to speak, had very little use for his Oxford-gray suit, but liked the oddities they pulled out of his well when he was away on one of his investigations.

A newly hired nurse, Jenny, didn’t really like to stand, half-dressed, at the window, but it was, she claimed, “a feminist act, or like, statement,” much like a false moustache. As a response to these rampant attacks on sacred womanhood, religious folk of all stripes claimed that America needed good old reliable fetishes to make a reappearance in society, for instance, girdles, support hosiery, white plastic handbags, big corks, bobby pins, and serious but wholesome and humorous plays, with nice music. At least, the shipment of navy-blue melton overcoats and other worthwhile garments arrived in time for really hip writers to wear to the “Salute to Rupert Murdoch” celebration.

However, the liberal Jewish transvestites who lived in the lake house threw things like Greek salad around with imbecile abandon in their demented worship of filth, disorder, runaway government spending, and dead Christian babies. And the Physics Department, at one time the jewel of Corporate Entercon Corporation, Incorporated, was foundering amid the faddish hermeneutics of Zeppelino contravariant theory, the last thing that anyone would have imagined. The senior scientists’ attendant explorations of other entities of banal dimensions, e.g., cocktail-sauce bottles, snow photos, scale-model Packards, Wally pennants, etc., seemed almost frivolous after the new Motivational Therapist, a young lady from France, boarded the company bus in what seemed to be a semi-conscious state, or “trance.” The subsequent behavior of the passengers, conductor, and driver surprised and angered many citizens, especially those who believed that the glass ceiling had long since been cracked, if not shattered.

In the end, or, as the Frenchwoman’s report put it, the “final analysis,” madness, rage, and erotic fury presented themselves as the three most obvious states of being to hold sway over the entire group, each speckled, misleadingly, like a starling, as a New Formalist poet phrased it, yet again! “To write poetry that makes no sense is something like playing tennis,” as Chet Blanky once put it in conversation. And so, with work in various stages of completion or decay, and with loved ones whining of closure, the company agreed that although there may very well be more stars than anything else, this probability has absolutely no effect on the meaningless, which remains, stubbornly whole and unchanging. Religious beliefs, appallingly tawdry visions, and harsh legislation proscribing, denying, or outlawing this persistent state of affairs, this “reality,” if you will, have all proven useless.

A Desk

To make a narrative concerning a number of aspects of what we might agree to be life — a simple enough program, and one that will, perhaps, make us feel closer to the world that we inhabit, more or less, or would prefer to inhabit were things as they should be. By paying strict, even rapt attention to the false world that will deal with certain aspects of life, embroidered, as they must be embroidered, we may gain an understanding of, well, real things as they really are. This is how literature works, if “works” is the word. I do not describe narrative, or this narrative, as false so as to mock or denigrate it, but to differentiate it from the real world that exists, despite all, for all of us, outside the narrative. And that is so even if the narrative appears to represent a number of aspects of that real world in, as might be said, moving and well-written prose. This seeming fidelity to the actual, while the actual roars on, unalloyed and unaffected, is one of the gloomy mysteries of fiction, a mystery that remains unsolved to the present day, one, in fact, that deepens with each reader who attempts to order his or her life by means of what can be called fiction. Some also use this latter to educate themselves. There is no telling what a reader may do when alone with a book.

To the narrative, then, or parts of it, of the whole, of that which may ultimately “become” the whole. To that blessed narrative that may almost write itself. Then “control” would seem to be the word, although it is not the precise word, nor, for that matter, is “word.” No matter, of course, for all may be corrected, changed, polished, all made clear in revision, revision, the handmaid of “the writing process,” for which nobody is too good. Writers often insist that they revise, again and again, everything that they write, for writing must be heartbreakingly difficult to be authentic, heartbreakingly and exhaustingly demanding. Even this small item will be, and has been revised, or is in the process, even as I “speak,” revised to a fare-thee-well, an odd phrase, that, but one that comes to mind, another curious phenomenon of writing, the things that come to mind. That such things, or “phrases,” are mostly old and warm and as well-worn as an old shoe is part and parcel of that inevitable process, so dear to life, called, well, called something. Perhaps good writers don’t revise everything, but they do revise a good deal, a lot, actually, if they are to be believed. Even the lacerating yet redemptive personal memoir, chockablock with scenes of guilt-ridden incest and battered puppies must be revised, revised and “touched up” and, well, fucked with, so to speak.

One of the many reasons that the demanding heartbreak of revision is so necessary is its role in making the absolute falsity of the representation of reality more precise; that is, to enable the falsity of the narrative, by dint of laborious revision and the odd polished phrase, to gleam with what seems to be — and why not? — truth. Or at least something that may well be mistaken for it, gleam to a goddamned fucking fare-thee-well, for that matter. So to speak, as it were, after all, in sum, and finally. To insist that the perfection of the false is much closer to the imperfection of the something or other is awkward, yes, but natural and casual. The phrase may be corrected, or course, in revision, or it already has been. Writing takes many drafts, usually, to emerge victorious — well, not precisely victorious — unless the writer is Proust, who was satisfied with one draft, and that a rough one. And, too, there are Moby-Dick and Ellen Finds Out. Look at them! Book reviewers are often cognizant of such phenomena, but rarely give us the benefit of their profound knowledge, given space restrictions, the demands of commerce, and what readers prefer in the way of a good read. They know what makes a good read, else what’s a heaven for, and know, too, that good reads make them — and us, always us — feel as if they know the people within the reads and have spent time with them, for instance, Holden Caulfield and others, good pals all. They will not be duped by cheap falsifications of reality, two-dimensional characters lacking not only flesh but blood, and always insist on well-written representations of the real, representations that read as if seeing something or other for the first time. Craft! Well-written craft! That’s — or they’re — the ticket. Life that throbs is also a big winner in these serious purlieus. And what of characters who, while throbbing, are redeemed, brought to justice, and speak nothing but the crispest dialogue? Take Sarah Orne Jewett. Take Minister Handy. Authors who have made a world that one can reach out and touch, gingerly, to be sure, but touch nonetheless. Living, loving, lolling, losing, and hating. It’s not only as good as life, some argue, but better, at least in selected passages. Can the remarks on Dark Corridors of Wheat, pointedly made by Patricia Melton Cunningham, be easily forgotten? Huh? Well, this is what one may call, with little fear of contradiction, writing that matters on writing that matters. Consider The Paris Review, and other items, if you dare.

So that one evening, sitting at my desk, a comforting pipe glowing near at hand, a hand that seemed to belong to someone else, as did my face, yes, some other face, or, perhaps, the face of the Other, I put the final touches on a letter to a friend, Pat Cunningham, to be precise, a woman who knew the meaning of trust, friendship, log-rolling, and the lunge for the main chance, when I noticed some impedimenta on the desk, impedimenta that I gazed at as if gazing at them for the first time. Slowly, I came to realize that if I could find a language that permitted these items representation, I could, perhaps, reach out and touch them in all their flesh and blood and flawed humanity. But I had to overcome the terror of the blank page, that famous blank page which all writers confront each and every day that they sit down to cover that blank page with love and laughter, brooding despair and so on and so forth. There is nothing as terrible as the blank page, and so I had informed Pat in my letter, a letter that lay, somewhat forgotten, near the blank page that, too, was slowly in danger of becoming somewhat forgotten. On the other hand, the blank canvas, the blank music paper, the blank notebook are all equally terrifying to the painter, the composer, the notebook-keeper, and there looms, too, the blank stage for the actor, the dancer, the monologist, the hilarious comic. Yet who was it who pointed out that “empty” in such instances would be more precise than “blank”? Good friends are rare, and even rarer are those who pop up just when things are going fairly well. You can count on it, or them.

Could a character be evoked who might evoke the items or disjecta on my desk? A simple noun for each, if properly “handled,” might do the job. And yet, what job was it that there was to be done? Lest confusion reign I decided on a handful of nouns, or, as the blank page demanded be uttered, the substantive. Should I show rather than tell, or, better yet, better yet infinitely more difficult, display rather than show? If I could succeed in displaying, or even showing the spondulicks on my desk, in context, in picture language, i.e., language that is like a picture, or pictures, lots of them, of course, colorful when needed, it goes without saying, perhaps the reader, ever hungry for actual experience, will be able to reach out and touch them in all their flesh and blood and interesting formal qualities, not to mention all the other things. I know, of course, that the awesome powers of revision may abrogate or defer or even occlude, occult, and abort such heady fantasies of literary perfection, yet I feel that I have no choice but to press on. Revision, as noted by Gide, Irving, Bly, Tough, and Lombardo is a harsh mistress, finally. Consider the work, the entire opus of the “vagabond prose master” of the Western reaches, or at least the reaches of Los Altos, the town whose motto wisely states, “Our Cars Are O.K.,” that wise yet warm penman, Wallace Stegner, of whom his various assistants have noted, as one, that even his first drafts were revisions, as were, doubtlessly, his ideas, of which there were plenty. Yet the hot, quick tears kept falling. This was what no-nonsense people called “writing, man.”

But how to handle items, memorabilia, flotsam, and the like? How to approach the unforgiving blank page with ideas about such a pasticciaccio, if you’ll pardon my French. For instance, is it enough to say “globe,” “pen,” “letters,” or is that not enough? These sound rather haphazard, at best. How about: “Lifting my eyes from the plebeian fastnesses of the worn carpet, I found myself gazing, as if for the first time, at the moon, sailing through the cloudy skies like a bark of yore, like a kind of globe, a globe that had been sketched on the heavens by a ghostly pen, one used not to the demands of art but to the humble task of writing letters.” The clock ticks quietly as the fly buzzes against the window globe, the sun warms my letters. All is but a dream.

But what wise man said that the dream is a rebus? And yet, what is the nature of a rebus? Is it flesh, blood, globe, or desk? Or all three? Joseph Cornell knew precisely what a rebus is, but who else knows, or even once knew? Must I return to the beginning, then? To the world of the empty page? Or the blank canvas? “The silent shit on my desk yearns for the dignity of representation.” Yearns and pines, its blood throbbing as it has throbbed, yes, for aeons and aeons of clanging time gone mad with despair!

I rise and head for the window, gaze out at the winking lights far below on the valley floor. The night is cool, the wind sighs quietly, I feel as if I have walked into the kitchen to avail myself of a cold beverage. I feel as if I have lit a cigarette, filling myself and the house, filling all the crystal-clear air with death! Death that asks no quarter, that laughs with the wild laughter of unbridled love, that laughs and laughs and laughs as if laughing for the first time.

He rose and fumbled about in an escritoire until he found the clipping: “They stood in the dark in the driving rain underneath her umbrella.” Can all this have really taken place in America? Obviously, it was abnormal. Maybe not the men, who mostly go out to work, but the women, who are most inclined to talk and who have nothing to do.

He had a good job in advertising and they lived in Kew Gardens in a brick semi-detached house; certainly the reader will recall such shoddy incidents in his own life.

“Welcome to the scene of the extraordinary … outrage!”

Not even fake art or the wearisome tricks of movies can assist them. This was in 1948.

She said that she’d got on an uptown local at Canal Street, gone to sleep, and, waking, just fifteen minutes later, found herself in Brooklyn at the end of the line on Ninety-fifth Street, a weird miracle, she said. This is the same girl who got thrown out of Six Happiness on Mott Street a couple of nights earlier for knocking everything off the table and shouting “fuck the Communist bastards!” From Canal to Ninety-fifth Street in fifteen minutes while going the wrong way, dream on, sweetheart, and in the meantime straight, no chaser?

He doesn’t recall this, or pretends not to, but when he first met, many years ago now, the woman who would become his wife, she was wearing a cashmere polo coat, pale beige stockings and tan pumps, and a dark-red silk scarf. There was, or he pretended that there was, nothing odd or unusual about this, since he had forgotten, or pretended that he had forgotten, an incident in the past, an incident that would have made the woman’s dress notable. Interestingly enough, at the time, the incident, now, perhaps, forgotten, seemed overwhelmingly important, as a matter of fact, unforgettable.

Whatever remnants of stylistic eccentricity peculiar and unique to Clifford’s fiction had long since been leached out of it by a dogged series of accommodations, emendations, compromises, and authorial, shall I say, understandings. His current editor was a reasonable man, so Clifford believed, and the suggestions that he made substantive and intelligent. And he had stuck by Clifford, despite the disappointment of his last book, patiently waiting for “his” writer to achieve that perfect blend of the conventionally literary and the cannily specious that would announce a breakthrough.

Now, reading the proofs of his fourth novel, Clifford saw, not with anything so dramatic as a shock, but saw with a kind of sudden, pleased candor, that not only had he, at last, quite thoroughly assassinated the prose that was once his, with its errors and tics and flourishes, its obsessions and syntactical aberrations; but that the staid, clean, undemanding — he thought of it as functional — prose within which his characters now suffered their warm and imperfect, their wonderfully human, oh so human! travails, was not only not his, but was, quite remarkably, nobody’s. It was an excruciatingly polished, forward-march prose, with suitable, occasional filigrees of clever simile and analogy, and splashes of the contemporary demotic; a prose that seemed happily familiar, as if it had been there all the time, waiting to be read, but just once. And, too, his characters, his flawed and fascinating people, were deployed as neat packages, their histories and quirks economically posited well before their thrust-and-parry colloquies. They looked, so Clifford thought, as if they had decided on things by themselves, sans authorial interference. “They more or less started doing what they wanted to do,” he could imagine himself saying to an interviewer.

This latest novel, created to satisfy the desires of an audience, as Clifford’s editor had characterized it, “too hip to actually read a lot,” educated, so to say, and busy, so, so busy, was, he hoped, the very thing to interest those readers among the favored “target group” who had progressed from slop-and-ramshackle best-sellers to the sort of fiction admired by professional reviewers — well-written, with fully developed characters, a nicely turned plot, and something important to say. It was, that is to say, designed for a particular kind of success, a “literary” success, and one that was, God knows, long deserved. So Clifford thought in righteous irritation. His first three novels should have been better received than they were — as he often complained to his wife. She thought of him as “neglected,” not, as he was, ignored. The books had been painstakingly constructed, modern in their “sensibility,” whatever he meant by that, accessible and possessed of accessible, contemporary motifs, dialogue, and sex scenes. They were, to be blunt, absolute failures, and each got a handful of mostly snide, semi-literate reviews, featuring the self-satisfaction of the ignorant. These were, of course, the usual, but Clifford was astonished by their blithe savagery.

How did all this bad luck befall Clifford? He’d begun his dim career as a poet, one of minor, limited gifts. At unexpected moments, there had appeared to him (although “appeared” may be dramatizing such occasions) the notion of the poem that would invite him to venture beyond his given odds and ends of “talent,” that would invite him to give up his conception of the poem as a vector of sensitive thought concerning his own highly edited but sensitive life. But since he had a small reputation, a fear of the untried, and, most importantly, a terror of writing a poem that would not look like his poems (he had, he believed, a style), these realities conspired to keep him writing a constipated verse that was, at its best, as some friend cruelly said behind his back, “like Sylvia Plath without the rag on.” What to do?

Clifford wanted, not fame, he knew better than that, but some sort of recognition and respect, some applause, a little money! He wanted to know that his books of poems would be regularly reviewed in the Times Book Review, even if such reviews were by the Winchell Tremaines, Brooke Van Dolans, Samantha Gundersons, and the other haughty corporals of the racket. On a number of occasions, Clifford tried to write the poem that was, if you please, just out of his reach, a poem that refused his carefully “crafted” images (“blue gardenias, slices of a summer sky”), but by the second stanza or the twelfth line, he’d be nervously lost; the language that he read, in a nausea of dislocation, was one that he neither recognized nor had control over. He could not, to put it perhaps too simply, tolerate the evidence of his obliterated opinions. And so he “retired” from versifying, as one might quit a boring job, and decided to try his hand at fiction.

His first novel, rigorously and repeatedly reworked, was, nevertheless, somewhat shaggy and juvenile; yet it had phrases and even scenes in which Clifford seemed to overcome his minuscule talents, if I may be permitted a mystical turn. Perhaps it’s better to say that he surprised himself in that he permitted his prose to forgo, on occasion, its rigid professionalism, permitted it to break loose, a little, from the everyday world and its everyday people that the narrative drove relentlessly onward: A died, but B lived; C had a terrible accident, but D, her friend, had a baby by E, C’s former husband; and F’s son came home, addicted to heroin and suffering from AIDS, sullen and despairing, yet seeking love from G, his father, who, although compassionate, was emotionally distant, even from his second wife, the weaver, and her autistic daughter. And I’s alcoholism was destroying his sister, J’s life, even though she would not recognize this fact. These exhausted problems did not, I hope it goes without saying, present themselves as banalities of “mere” pop fiction, for Clifford, like any littérateur you can think of, knew how to disguise the sentimental as the poignant, even the tragic. Life! his novel said. Life! It was, of course, baloney.

Clifford’s editor at the time, who would be disappointed by Clifford, worried about the eruptions of, well, writing in the manuscript, and worked with Clifford to temper if not excise them. The book needed to be friendlier, more coherent, retaining its toughness and quirky insights, but not at the expense of a driving narrative. The book was about, was it not, the way we are now? Without a clear respect and compassion for the characters and their messy lives, just what is a novel? What, indeed? Look at Dickens, look at Hardy, look at Trollope, look at Bellow and Updike, look at them! The novel was published, got nine reviews, one of which called it “… carefully written and enjoyably quirky … somewhat difficult at times.. rich with compassion … characters who, by the book’s end, we feel we’ve … suffered with.” The book disappeared so completely that it never showed up on remainder tables or in catalogues.

There’s not much left to say. Clifford’s next two books were like dozens of others, literate if vulgar, “better than” kill-and-fuck trash, and of no account. They were much like the miles of thin, clankingly inadequate independent films that one can spend a lifetime watching blend into one another with an inevitability as depressing as it is foreseeable. Clifford, it must be said, did not “sell out,” for he had, as the old phrase puts it, “nothing that anybody wanted.” He wasn’t bad enough or smart enough to be a successful commercial hack, and he had absolutely none of the luck that would have enabled him to emerge from the slough of writhing literary hacks. Had he, when a poet, followed his Muse, as they say, into the brambles of language that were too formidable for him to contemplate, there is little doubt that he would have written bad poems; and it also seems clear that had he insisted on elaborating on the small eruptions of — art, let’s say, for want of a less generous word — in his first novel, it would have done nothing to ameliorate the zombielike qualities of the whole.

It’s a guess, one that pleases me, that as Clifford read the proofs of this fourth novel, as he battered his way through its dreary lines of prose, a prose that seemed manufactured by a language contraption with decorative abilities, he was relieved, even pleased. This is the McCoy! I’ll have him say, or something like it, Oh boy! perhaps. Maybe this book would do it. “Scintillating,” even “wise.” And with a pronounced “attention to scenes and their riveting details, not to mention their dialogue, that is almost cinematic.” You never know.

Some three or four years ago, Edward Krefitz published a story that, as is the case with many stories, contained elements of his past life, elements, of course, disguised, twisted, corrupted, embellished, romanticized, and wholly fanciful. A few people recognized themselves as models for characters in the story, and were, predictably, chagrined or flattered, depending on the quality of the fiction’s distortion of their being. They all wished, surely, to be accurately portrayed, certainly; but there is accuracy and then there is meanspiritedness. So they muttered.

Edward wasn’t interested in their scattered responses to his story when and if he got wind of them. However, the one person whom he had used as a model for a major character in the story, the one person he dearly wanted to read the story and be hurt by it, never acknowledged it, even though it had been published in a literary magazine that Edward knew this person deeply, even somewhat ridiculously admired — at least he had, years before. Edward was disappointed, since his fictional creation — vapid, obtuse, childishly cruel — was easily recognizable, and he so wanted him to be recognized by his ex-friend, if “friend” is not too exotic a word to use. Because of this disappointment, which he chafed into a kind of full-blown irritation, he made a mistake; that is, he sent the model a photocopy of the story, insincerely inscribed, and followed this, soon after, with a letter, thereby, quite perfectly, compounding his original error.

The story, entitled, rather obscurely, “The Birds Are Singing,” was a bitter, if frail, comedy of manners (bad manners, as Edward liked to think of it), driven by the wheezing engine of the “adulterous tale,” one that was neither particularly comic nor particularly sordid. Its hero, if you will, a young husband whose authorial aspirations are at best halfhearted, has a wife, pretty and possessed of a kind of floundering hedonism. She is content to be “his” because of his aspirations and the spidery talents he owns, as well as by the fact that his literary vocation has thrown the couple into contact with other young literary people, jittery, amoral, indifferently talented, if talented at all. These companions are drawn as rapt in a cheap and shabby, vaguely hysterical delusion, and too selfish or stupid to recognize it as such. At the center of this overdone clique of the pathetic, is the major character already mentioned. This man is presented, in the most patronizing as well as nastiest prose that Edward could knock together, as a vapid dilettante; a poet, of sorts, who is hard at work on a novel that will justify the shameful fact that he is the owner of a successful messenger service for which the husband works as a bookkeeper. The boss/novelist is given to the reader as a tedious lout who confuses his sociopolitical right-thinking with artistic talent, and he is stuffed with cretinous dialogue that even Wyndham Lewis might hesitate to put into his most contemptible characters’ mouths. The boss seduces the husband’s wife in an ugly scene that boils with loathing for the pair. The husband is aware of this, but has no clear proof, and so ignores it, much as if his wife’s probable seducer is no more than a living dildo and she a disembodied vagina. He is sure, however, that this amorous clod may one day be able to help him along in his career, or what he thinks of as his career. This was, then, the bones of Edward’s story, one that he came to admire more as it aged, so to speak. The notion that the cuckolded husband finds his betrayer pitifully absurd, and his wife a virtual specter, while he emerges as a genuine if eccentric and as-yet unrealized artist pleased him, even though the story had, he knew, a somewhat manufactured air about it.

The model for the boss was, of course, the man, Peter, whom Edward wanted to anger and wound. The cause of his dislike went back almost twenty years, when he and most especially his wife, Patricia, insisted on thinking of him and Peter as partners in a small restaurant in what was then, the early seventies, a just newly fashionable SoHo. Peter was, in actuality, Edward’s boss. There had been a falling out between them as the restaurant began to make money, or, as it is said, “real” money. At this point, the friends’ differences quickly surfaced and became unmanageable. Edward felt, on the strength, really, of no more than their joint literary, ah, proclivities, let’s say, that he was being deprived of his bonus: his loft apartment, his summers on the Island, his good clothes, his this, his that. And Patricia! It’s enough to say that she simply blamed Peter for everything, from her spoiled childhood to her sullen years at Hunter and the School of Visual Arts to her haphazard marriage to Edward — Edward, who had been cheated of his rightful partner’s place as entrepreneur and literary force. She hated Peter, even more, perhaps, than she hated Edward some few years later, at the time of their separation and divorce; hated Edward so cleanly and thoroughly for his varied failures, that in her last conversation with him she’d told him, rather sadly, understandingly, and even sweetly, that in their eight years of marriage he had never once made her come. He stood quietly before her news, looking, as an old phrase has it, like death chewing on a cracker.

After the dissolution of the friendship and “partnership,” Edward began teaching beginning creative-writing courses at coolie wages; writing reviews for Booklist, Library Journal, and the like; freelancing as a copy editor and proofreader; and, in general, living the shaky life of the barely published and virtually unknown author. Patricia worked as an editorial assistant for a small scholastic publisher, and they got by, seeing, if not the same friends they had been seeing, the same kinds of friends. It should be mentioned that, at this time, Patricia was somewhat admiring of Edward for insisting, at her urging, of course, on his rights and perquisites, and so she regularly told him, to his delight. She was convinced that Peter, “that bastard,” was much inferior in business acumen than her husband; and as the author of a wretched little book of poems, Table d’Hote—published by Peter himself as the Chambers Street Press — he had no right to think himself superior to anybody about anything! In sum, she maintained little but an offhand, careless disregard for Peter; who, in turn, vilified her, pointedly or subtly, to people whom he knew that Edward would run into. She was, in his creation, the scattered and selfish Zelda to Edward’s hapless Scott.

The rub was that although Edward broke off his friendship or relationship or association with Peter in a swirl of hurt feelings and envy, still, oh yes, still, he wondered if he might have been right about Patricia. About her “interference,” her “malicious interference,” as he had put it, in his work and career. That Edward’s work and career were, to be extremely kind, negligible, is neither here nor there: he thought it was work; he thought it a career. Or, to gloss that particular text, it’s the rare mediocre writer who knows how mediocre he is. When Patricia left him, soon after it was apparent to her, or so he figured it, that his dissociating himself from Peter would in no way allow his star ever to grow bright enough to have a chance at dimming, left him with her peroration on his sexual limitations, he thought, he knew that Peter was right and had been right. He was ashamed of himself, he was what an earlier generation called mortified. Why had he listened to his bitch of a wife? Why had she so despised Peter?

Over the next several years, as Edward established himself as a reliable contributor of short fiction and reviews to a myriad of magazines, he vacillated in his feelings about both Peter and Patricia. He heard many stories of Peter’s financial success, and of his mockery of him and his work, of him and his contemptible third-rate literary niche, of Patricia. And concerning her, concerning her … although Edward’s thoughts of her were tinged with pain and embarrassment, he yet felt, in some unbalanced way, protective of her — even more absurd, he felt loyal to her. And so he began, again, to blame Peter for this and for that and for, well, for everything. It is simple to understand, then, why “The Birds Are Singing” was written, why it was important to Edward that Peter read it, why it was important that he respond to it with, at the very least, irritation. Edward wanted to demonstrate things to Peter, salient among which was that he had, indeed, become a writer, by Christ, and that his writer’s eye had been sharp enough all those many years ago to see Peter for what he had been: he’d not been fooled, for a moment, by him! — who had been crude and grasping and filled with contempt for him and Patricia, whom he’d hurt and somehow embittered. Edward wanted, simply, to get even with Peter. And so strong was his desire, perhaps his need, to knife Peter, to shock him with a view of himself as a vulgar, cheap, mean poseur, that, as already noted, he sent a copy of the story to him, followed, a week or so later, by a letter.

In 1953, or early 1954, Dan Burke was seeing, as they used to say, Claire Walsh, who was pregnant by another man, a lummox known as “Swede” to his lummox friends. Dan had recently been discharged from the Navy, and while he and Claire had been amorous companions during his rare shore leaves, she was far from averse to impromptu sexual adventures with congenial civilians while Dan was at sea. Thus, her dalliance with “Swede,” who was, incidentally, a reinsurance clerk on Maiden Lane: this permitted him to tell the occasional citizen who asked about his job that he was “on Wall Street.” He enters our story as a catalyst.

Dan didn’t know that Claire was pregnant, but since he and she had never engaged in anything more than what was called — and still may be, for all I know—“heavy petting,” he assumed that she was a virgin. Who knows why? When she told Dan that she was going to have a baby, he was, sequentially, astonished, hurt, disgusted, and angry. Then he asked her to “go down on” him, which she did. He felt, in some clouded, blurred way, even with “Swede,” whom he did not know at all. Then he asked her to marry him and she consented, with much blubbering, snots, and tears. He didn’t love her, nor she him, and nothing that they did at the outset of their marriage allowed love to establish itself and stagger free of the grim truth of their situation, as love, despite the long odds, may occasionally do. So their marriage began, not utterly bleak, but surely not aglow. It should be said immediately, I believe, that their marriage did not succeed, and was over some eight or nine years later. Not bad, considering.

Dan began working at a bookstore in the Village, Marboro, to be precise, on Eighth Street, home of the authentic bullfight poster from colorful Méjico! (It gives me pause — what a comfortable phrase — when I recall that the bullfight poster was once virtually epidemic in the apartments of the hip and chosen, and then the latter and the posters suddenly vanished.) One of Dan’s co-workers was a man by the name of James Fremont, a poet who had been published in Zero, Neurotica, and Prairie Schooner, and had a handwritten rejection note from an editor, or somebody, at Poetry, suggesting that he “try us again.” Which he did and did again, never managing to make further human contact, however contemptuous, with the famous magazine. In the meantime, Claire had begun to read this and that and have opinions on this and that as well. The plot, as you may discern, is not truly thickening, but it might be jelling a little. These people seem as if they’re about to “take a step,” probably into disaster.

The serendipitous conjunction of the well-read, and, in the best tradition of the Village of those days, slightly shaggy, tweedy, and insufferably superior published poet, and the unhappy, directionless Dan and Claire, created the perfect climate for emotional calamities of many sorts and sizes. Dan began to write poetry (“of course!” I hear you say) under the condescending tutelage of James, and Claire began to go to bed with him on those evenings when she was supposed to be seeing old “girlfriends,” attending suddenly fashionable poetry readings at any number of bohemian traps, or going to see “films” at the New Yorker or Thalia. Dan would stay home in their one-bedroom apartment on Blake Avenue in East New York — at that time, not yet the sister neighborhood of 1945 Stalingrad — and dream his old dream of playing jazz trumpet, another enthusiasm that had hysterically played itself out at the New York School of Music (Sunset Park branch), over a little less than eight months.

There had been another “student of trumpet” whose lessons were scheduled on Dan’s night, a nervous forty-year-old homosexual virgin, who often talked of Charlie Spivak’s “golden horn,” and of a photograph — which he would soon bring in — of Joan Crawford “eating pussy,” as he put it, his eyes crazed and shining and unfocused, as if he were the “pussy” to which Miss Crawford addressed her perverse attentions. Dan got bored by the scale book and spooked by his fellow student, who began alternating his tales of Joan Crawford’s adventures with questions as to Dan’s toilet-paper preferences. And his lips hurt after a half-hour or so of practice: this would not do. He wanted to play and show them what he was made of, what was in his heart. Oh well.

But soon, literature, as noted, became his passion, and James guided him into the strange world of Eliot and Pound and Stevens, Dylan Thomas and Robert Lowell and W.H. Auden, the world of art and life! And life! So he and Claire had found a way to be. The trumpet was one thing, but this was quite another. And where James guided Dan, so, too, he guided Claire. She slowly acquired a slight lisp and a choppy laugh that was meant to be cold and worldly, as in: “Dan and James actually working at the Marboro supermarket (hak hak hak)! It’s too much!”

Where, you may ask, was the child in this turmoil of art and love and life? As well you might. Growing up as best he could, which, as it turned out, was none too good. He became dyslexic — known in those days as “dumb,” hyperactive — known in those days as “dumb,” truant and antisocial—“dumb” and “bad.” It’s of sad moment, perhaps, to note that he would one day murder rhythm guitar and sing spectacularly off-key in a dreadful rock band, the Unbearables, before leaving for someplace Sunny and Sunny, to be with others of his kind. Heavy! But this is incidental to the story, so-called, and I add it because I know, courtesy of my magical authorial powers, what the kid’s future will be, or in this case, was. I could, as I don’t have to tell you, have made him into a solid citizen rather than a lout. Since his status is peripheral to everything, I offer him as a bonus, an embellishment, a fillip. A tip.

People are, for the most part, locked into their minds, and their professions of belief in various ideologies or faiths, their opinions and scattered absurdities are but the knowable aspects of the lives they move through as best they can. This may be because of the regularity with which language pretends a simplification, a clear categorization of the particularized darkness that is the mind’s. And so religions and credos and their stupefying shibboleths are often spectacularly successful in duping and soothing us, their creaking yet elaborate language systems shamelessly representing themselves as the contraptions of God or his long-dead confidants. This is comforting folly, and we know that the most reprehensibly smug creeping Jesus lives, much of the time, despite his rigid beliefs, in the midnight of his brain, lost therein like the rest of us.

Consider the young, reasonably well-mannered men who killed so many people on September 11th. There they are, as unremarkably, as sadly ordinary as any representative American one can conjure up: anonymous, with their 5.75 haircuts and Timex “Explorer” watches, GAP T-shirts and overpriced running shoes, Hanes briefs and white athletic socks, and their Dockers khakis. They may well be full of Domino’s cardboard pizza or Big Macs, turning, despite their love of Allah, into chemical-laced excrement in their bowels. They might as well be American, citizens of Big Faucet, South Dakota, or Willow Lake, New Jersey. Insofar as their linguistic commerce goes, they are surely the salt of the earth: “I like very much to learn fly big jet plane nice, O.K., good buddy?” Of spiritual matters large and small, they have no doubts, they have no qualms, their relationship with their morose and irritable God is one that would make the most dedicated Bible-thumper, yea, with snakes and timbrels, screaming and writhing, white roses and accordions, and thunder and lightning, wild with envy. Their stern yet loving Father has certainly spoken to these men in thus wise: “Kill, my young stalwarts, this is my inscrutable message to you, oh, don’t ask why. And know that paradise awaits for all eternity, with its dark-eyed virgins anxious to make your acquaintance.”

These young men know that Allah is pleased that thousands of infidels will soon be slaughtered, and since they are unbelievers, there will be no virgins for them. No halvah or falafel or lamb with rice either. Who knows what becomes of infidel dogs? On the other hand, there may be a shock in store for those soldiers of jihad, if, by some unutterable metaphysical quirk, they are made aware, in the smallest fraction of time, before oblivion, that can still be thought of as time, that “Allah” is a congeries of letters, a linguistic notion, if you will, like “flogiston” or “aporia” or “quark,” and that their deaths are — not to put too fine a point on it — meaningless. Oh, oh. Peace be upon them.

Regard this salesman, a meat-cutting-machine salesman, standing at an ice-crusted window in a room of a so-so hotel in Ohio or Pennsylvania, perhaps somewhere in the Poconos, the land, for so many years, of ga-ga honeymooners delirious in their heart-shaped bathtubs. He is looking out on the semicircular gravel drive that leads to Mohawk Boulevard and thence to the interstate; where, even now, as he smokes and tries to ignore the fact of his appalling boredom and small, regular failures, his petty defeats and debts, his emptiness and dismay, overpriced cars slam down this suicide alley, their drivers — let me be blunt — wholly uncaring about God in any of his disguises or costumes. They want to get home alive, just once more, peace be upon them. God can look after himself.

The salesman puts out his cigarette, his mind turning over darkly and heavily, and, with Barney Miller playing soundlessly and in washes of anemic color on the Korean swivel television in the corner, he takes off his pants and Hanes briefs, removes from his worn bag a pair of black sateen panties with nylon lace trim at the leg openings, pulls them on, and begins to masturbate. He is careful to keep his erect penis confined, the feel of the sateen on his throbbing phallus always does the trick for him. His shadowed mind with its sketchy and occulted thoughts of love and success, of his wife and the women at the branch office in Philadelphia, is concentrated in this solitary act; his secret self finds some succor in the physical world in which he tries his best to live and live each day. And he may thus soothe, for a quarter hour, his persistent malaise, he may find some small fugitive peace.

This act, tawdry as it is, may be thought of as strange and even perverse behavior, but only because, perhaps, I point it out to you, so that you may realize that you know, casually, this salesman. You both buy the paper every morning at the same store, the paper and Tic Tacs and cigarettes. “’Morning,” you both say. I agree that it’s hard to think of this man, with his balding head and scuffed L.L. Bean moccasins, whacking off, far from home, in a pair of cheap black panties. All secrets are dark.

The salesman, for whatever reason, has told himself that his wife has permitted him to use her panties for this cloistered act, whereas he bought them, of course, a few days earlier in a Wal-Mart outside Wilkes-Barre. Oddly, he is thinking of Mickey Rooney in the film My Name Is Aram, at the moment of his orgasm, which arrives blissfully but unexpectedly. As he surrenders completely to the weirdly thrilling and bridelike feelings that overwhelm him, gouts of semen spurt through the panties and onto the coarse bedspread.

The salesman lights a cigarette, and after depositing the soaked panties in the bathroom sink and cleaning himself off with toilet paper and a hand towel, he begins to scrub, nervously, at the soiled bedspread with tap water, the towel, and, for reasons beyond his comprehension, one of his worn, unfashionable ties. He is horrified at the possibility of the maid discovering his onanism when she comes in to make up the bed in the morning. The fucking maid, Oh Jesus, the fucking maid, he says to himself, and then suffers a massive coronary infarction and falls dead, bashing his head on the little writing desk that holds his wallet, keys, change, notebook, cigarettes, lighter, all the now useless junk of his life. Later in the week, his wife, faced with the fact of the semen-clotted panties in the sink, prefers to think that her dead husband was cruelly and disturbingly unfaithful to her with a perverted slut of a whore tramp of the Ohio or Pennsylvania evening. Otherwise — what to think? Peace be upon her.

It is quite possible, perhaps even probable, that one of the dedicated martyrs-to-be performed precisely the same hidden act — Allah notwithstanding — that the dead infidel salesman did, save, of course, for the heart attack. Let’s place the intense youth in a Great Western motel during, oh, his fifth or sixth week in the land of the Great Satan. He is standing in front of the mirror in his black sateen panties. Black panties! Evil and foul and cursed underwear made for depraved American women who, half-naked, are everywhere before one’s eyes. This young warrior had never even seen a picture of these sinful garments before he arrived in Duluth, he could not even imagine them, and here they were, by the hundreds, the thousands, in black, white, and colors, colors. They hang in plain view in Target and Sears, Penney’s and Wal-Mart, Macy’s and Ward’s, there, right there, so that anyone, even this young unsmiling zealot may buy them. Even this gloomy, rigid, sincere man, purified of all desire save the desire for a martyr’s death, may buy them. He thinks that he might buy a pair or two so as to have before his eyes a proof of American corruption and evil. His mind goes black, the truth of his apostate lust is therein buried, and, flushed, holding two pairs of these impossible wisps before him, he says to the salesgirl: “I like to buy this pretty things for my wife now please.” He takes the plastic bag, turns and leaves, burning, his closeted scenario forming in his mind, dark and silent and obscure, hidden from the decrees of the stern faithful, peace be upon them. The flesh is weak, weak, the mind a sequestered vault, airless and without light.

The young man is standing in front of the mirror in his degenerate garment, dizzy with pleasure, trembling, half-mad with fear of God’s wrath; but God, in whatever mournful guise, is, as always, nowhere to be discovered.

I knew some of the minor details of the following narrative — if I may so distinguish the somewhat rickety account that follows — but its basic elements were told me, casually and indifferently, by three or four people, no one of whom knew the whole story. This did not prevent them from attempting to fill in its sudden blanks, so as to make the story cohere, so to say, or, at any rate, achieve a sort of balance — despite the fact that there seems little balance to its particulars. And although its meanderings, its often sad climaxes and anticlimaxes, are often banal, there is a pathos, I think, at the story’s center, that attracted me, so much so that I found myself also manipulating its events by elaborating its lapses, clarifying its obscurities. I flatter myself that I have somewhat improved the tale, which may be another way of saying that I think I have made it representatively “American,” although I’d be hard put to define what I mean by that. There are scenes in this account that may strike the reader as fantastic or melodramatic, or, more often, absurdly convenient to the unfolding needs or desires of the people involved. These incidents are sometimes, but by no means always, my inventions; many are details given me by my “witnesses.” Which is not to say that they are not their inventions. At one point, I considered employing a simple gimmick whereby I could differentiate, for the reader, those elements of the story given me by others from those I invented or adorned. But this, or so I thought, would needlessly clutter the narrative with literary impedimenta.

It may be useful to remark that these events occurred in 1960, and while the specific nuances of feeling manifested by the “characters,” let me call them, might well manifest themselves in our postmodern era of knowingness, of amateurish license, it’s unlikely. Our time seems too overtly self-congratulatory, righteous and fretful and worriedly concerned not only that “hip” things must be known, but that the responses to knowing these “hip” things be the correct ones. So: 1960, March, to be precise.

Let’s put the center of events in a publishing house or advertising agency or public-relations company. Some business on the East Side in the Forties or Fifties. We have, working in this business, two young men, Campbell and Nick. Both are just short of thirty, both married about five or six years (although Nick and his wife are newly separated), both waiting, although they of course do not know this, for the sixties to take up and complete the bloody job begun in 1936 in Spain. They were living, that is, in the odd social somnambulism that was later thought, perhaps predictably, to be a cultural “ferment.”

Nick worked for Campbell in a small but important department of the firm, but after a time, since they were both given to and comfortable with collaboration, they began to function as equals, and so they thought of themselves. They were wholly different — in family, background, education, upbringing, class, and in their tastes in music and clothes, in their speech, in everything that is established by family and background and class, etc., etc., or by opposition — of the right sort — to them. Campbell was a “child of privilege,” a faded phrase, of course, much like the genteel but spent “man of slender means,” which latter he also nicely was. That is to say that Campbell’s family at this point had little of the wealth it had once enjoyed, and that their name was its gallant but inadequate substitute. Things had become even harder when his mother and father divorced, soon after Campbell’s twelfth birthday, for his apparently scatterbrain mother had no money of her own, and his father’s generous settlement on her had been squandered on clothes and jewelry and many ga-ga trips to God knows where; and his alimony payments were far less than what his mother needed to live as she wished — or, as she thought of it, deserved — to live. Campbell’s expenses had been “taken care of,” he’d gone from Andover to Princeton, after which his father’s finances became unaccountably arcane and subterranean, almost, so his attorney argued, nonexistent. Soon after Princeton, Campbell had married a young Englishwoman, Faith, who was, supposedly, an heiress to a huge ale-and-stout fortune, that of a company old and profitable enough to have had presented to its founding Welsh family the trappings, raiment, and decorations of the elite. This fortune turned out to be a fable, but at the time of the story I relate, Campbell didn’t know this; nor, for that matter, did Faith. How hopeful and wistful they must have been in their fresh young marriage, thinking but not daring to think of the wonderfully corrupting fortune that awaited them. It occurs to me that these fantasy monies might have influenced, in some tangential, “mysterious” way, Campbell’s — and perhaps Faith’s — behavior in the events that were soon to develop; but there’s no way of knowing, of course.

Perhaps the best way to present Nick is to comment on his wonderment, an amused wonderment, at Campbell’s elegant shabbiness, which Nick originally took as a sign of what one might call sartorial dumbness. Campbell’s jackets, for instance, were out of style, as Nick thought of style, threadbare, battered, rumpled, and none too clean; and his beautiful oxford shirts, ten years old at least, although perfectly laundered, were faded and frayed at the cuffs. His English shoes, repaired and repaired again, and polished innumerable times to a glovelike hand, were as strange to Nick as was his hair, always shaggy and seemingly combed in great haste; and his ties were carelessly knotted and slightly askew. Nick, of course, had no notion or experience of these persistent prep-school affectations, in place so long that they no longer seemed affectations but laws, cultural truths, the regulations of an Episcopalian God. Nick, nobody’s fool, as they say, quickly came to realize that Campbell had chosen this “look,” which made him, to Nick, an eccentric, or perhaps an exotic.

There’s little point in giving much of Nick’s background; we may assume that it was the opposite of Campbell’s, i.e.; what Campbell was, Nick was not. And yet, as I’ve said, they worked well together, they began to like each other, and their daily discoveries of each other’s quirks and oddities and cultural opinions served to strengthen their growing camaraderie. The marginalized niche in the department wherein they worked became truly theirs, their work flourished, their work was, in fact, extraordinarily good. Rather quickly, their daily labors became pleasures to which they looked forward.

It became apparent to Nick, in the first month or two of their acquaintance — apparent and almost unbelievable — that Campbell had never been in an Automat, and had to be instructed in these restaurants’ ways. He’d never eaten 15¢ hamburgers at Grant’s: bloody rare miniatures topped with rings of delectably half-fried onions, nor drunk their extraordinary birch beer on tap. He’d never eaten a hot dog with mustard and onions in tomato sauce from a Sabrett cart. The 2 FOR 35¢ blended whiskey specials at Blarney Stone and White Rose saloons were a revelation to him — as indeed were the proletarian brands of booze like Kinsey Silver Label, Three Feathers, Four Roses, Fleischman’s, Wilson “That’s All,” and Paul Jones — and he had no notion that these saloons’ spreads of sliced cheese, baloney, spiced ham, cherry peppers, pickles, raw onions, coleslaw, pickled beets, crackers, bread, and mustard were free — they were free—to anyone who had a beer or two at the bar. What a world this was! Campbell, that is to say, evidently had no knowledge whatsoever of Manhattan west of Fifth Avenue and south of Fortieth Street. Or so Nick said as he charged Campbell with this extraordinary ignorance. He was an innocent, deposited each morning at Grand Central, to which he returned each evening to be taken back to Connecticut, or some other barely imaginable place. This is surely something of an exaggeration, and yet it is true that Nick took a consistently surprised, even charmed Campbell to the shoddy remainder bookstores and back-date magazine emporiums in and around Times Square, to Toffenetti’s and Marco Polo’s (“Ham ’n’ Eggs Are My Game”), to the Forty-second Street Tad’s Flame Steak ($1.69!!), and to God knows how many lost, dark bars in the Forties off Broadway or Seventh Avenue, where they sat with their Rheingold drafts and talked fitfully with the battered whores and bust-out horse-players waiting for The New Day A-Comin’ Tomorrow. For Campbell, these mundane comings and goings that he and Nick shared at lunch hour or after five, became romantic adventures, and Nick a knowing guide possessed of the most profoundly arcane knowledge of the city, the actual city.

It was no doubt true that Campbell knew little of this New York, unremarkable and workaday New York. Campbell’s city was the nighttime metropolis of taxis from Grand Central or Penn Station for choreographed evenings with girls from Wellesley or Smith or Mount Holyoke, of silly rendezvous at the Plaza and the Pierre and the Biltmore for Old Fashioneds, or tables at the Blue Angel or the Le Ruban Bleu, of petrifying string quartets at Carnegie Recital Hall; and then taxis back to Grand Central or Penn Station. The specifics of such evenings may have differed from these, but the general spirit of such entertainments was unvarying. There was no other New York for Campbell, certainly not an actual New York; the boroughs, for instance, with their millions, did not quite exist. It might not be too ridiculous to guess that Campbell’s city was a kind of theatrical or cinematic “event.”

Campbell, then, apparently looked upon Nick as someone who would soon reveal to him the knowledge of all the wondrously, beautifully commonplace, essential things he had missed in his vapid life. That Nick knew how to transfer from, say, the Lex to the Fourth Avenue Local at Fourteenth Street was the commonest sort of knowledge, but to Campbell it made Nick a hero of the street. This was, it goes without saying, daft, but no more so than the awe of those who wonder at the sophistication of the man who understands and appreciates wine or polo or bridge or antiques or baroque music. All trifling expertise, as Nick might have said had he thought or cared to say it, is as one. Campbell was even more impressed because Nick had no curiosity concerning Campbell’s world. If such a world was one made manifest, so Nick seemed to make clear, by Campbell’s dopey clothes and annoying accent and the chilly stories he told of “swotting” for exams and smuggling beer into dormitories, Nick was content to remain ignorant of and distant from it. He never said this to Campbell, but his polite yet fixed smile of attention was more candid than any remark might have been: a drink at the Plaza, ice cream at Rumpelmayer’s, blinis and caviar at the Russian Tea Room with its ghastly pink napkins, none of these things were of any interest or concern to Nick. They were for other people, those who were intent on being something. Nick, in his stiff Crawford suits, Flagg Brothers shoes, Tie City polyester repp stripes, under his gleaming Brylcreem hair, was somehow aristocratically self-contained. This, true or not, enthralled, awed, delighted, and charmed Campbell. So their unlikely friendship developed, neither of them knowing one important thing about the other. This turned out to be a serious matter, indeed; although deeper knowledge may not have changed a single impending act or decision of theirs.

One day, after lunch, Campbell told Nick that he’d been telling Faith about him, and their lunchtime and after-work “adventures,” as he had taken to calling their peregrinations, self-consciously yet delightedly. Well, they were adventures, at least for him, and he had made that clear to Faith. In any event, she’d very much love to have him as a guest up in Connecticut, and as for Campbell, it went without saying that he would be so pleased, and so on. In sum, Nick was invited for a weekend at any time, at his leisure: it was up to him to set a date. At this point, things, for Nick, become a little awkward; not only was the invitation sudden and unexpected, but Nick felt, obscurely, that he was being steered into something. Yet he and Campbell got along, did they not? they worked well together, they were compatible: and Faith was probably terrific. So what was wrong? Nick’s immediate response, had he articulated it, would have been a polite “no.” For somehow behind or beneath the odd bonhomie that easily existed between the two men, was something that nagged at Nick, that made him feel uneasily like — what? A sap, maybe? He had thought, uncertainly, for some time, that Campbell’s innocence and enthusiasm were manufactured, and that his astonished reactions to the mundane this and that to which Nick introduced him were spurious, that he was “putting on an act.” He felt that Campbell was maybe playing him — or playing with him — for some hidden reason of his own. And now, suddenly, Faith was supposedly in a state of eager curiosity about him. “Maybe,” he said. “I’ll let you know — thanks.”

About a week or so later, Nick had decided, despite his subtle discomfort, to accept the invitation, his objections — although they weren’t really that — laid aside. That morning, by peculiar coincidence, Campbell thrust at Nick a handful of color photographs of himself and Faith on an almost empty beach. He had about him a faintly proud, uxorious air, as if he had said, “How do you like my beautiful wife?” Nick, nodding and smiling, as people will, looked through the photographs of the couple, both in swimsuits, both smiling disarming smiles. There were photos of the two of them together, embracing, mugging, wading in the surf; and shots of Campbell and Faith, each alone. She was very lovely, precisely the sort of young wife who would live, or so Nick thought, in some old New England house, no doubt one that her family had bought the young couple as a wedding gift. She was tall and slender, with a nicely formed, lithe body, long straight hair, glossy rich in the rich sun of the rich beach on which they were relaxing or “cavorting,” was the odd word that came to Nick unbidden. But in one photograph, which made Nick, in quick reaction, pull his head sharply back and raise his eyes to Campbell’s, then look down again, Faith stood, unsmiling, looking directly at the camera with what seemed an almost painful sexual intensity. Her hands were cupped beneath her breasts, which were half-out of her bra, in an offering. She was, Nick thought, Nick knew, offering him her breasts, and herself. This glaringly erotic image had been specifically made for him, of course it had. It had been posed by her and by Campbell for him! As he looked up again, Campbell, blushing to his hairline, was reaching for the pack of photographs, embarrassed, nervously laughing, reaching and saying something, saying, “Oh, hell, Nick, I didn’t mean for that one to be — it’s, you know, it’s, I’m sorry. It’s personal.” And he took the photographs back.

All right, so Nick thought, perhaps, it’s “personal,” but it was in the pack, part of the group, not removed for their own pleasures or uses. He was meant to see it. Campbell’s wife was audaciously offering him her body, he was meant to see her breasts, her sensual frown, he was meant to want her. He saw again the soft shadows that were the areolas of her nipples, she might as well have bared herself, for God’s sake. Nick knew, for certain, that Campbell wanted him to fuck his wife. And what would he do? Watch? Nick saw her slender fingers cradling her breasts. This is what Campbell wanted, but did Nick? He decided to wait and see if a weekend visit would come up again.

It did come up again, within a day or two, accompanied by a squeeze of his arm and a kind of maudlin testimonial to Faith’s expectations of his visit: Campbell was “afraid” he’d been “giving her an earful” about Nick. “Anyway,” he said, “I think we could have a hell of a lot of fun.” The photograph was not mentioned. Tomorrow, Nick thought, he’s more than likely to bring in a picture of his wife naked. He didn’t really believe this, nor did he by now believe that Campbell wanted him as a partner in a sexual adventure; he had come to accept Campbell’s assertion that the beach picture was indeed meant to be private and to stay private. He was, or so he told himself, getting a little weird. So he decided to tell Campbell that he’d try to get up to visit on the next weekend or the one after that. On that very day, as if scripted, Campbell brought in another photograph of Faith, this one taken, he was clear on this, especially for Nick. There she stood, sweet and obscene, pouting, in flower-print panties and white high heels, at the side of a king-size bed, an iced drink in one hand and the other curved lightly into her crotch. Behind her was a Boston Museum of Fine Arts poster of an Odilon Redon flower painting that echoed her insubstantial underwear. “Faith wanted me to give you this,” Campbell said. “Even though I wasn’t sure, you know … about it.” He colored slightly. “You, right? understand?”

Nick was nonplussed, to say the very least, by this, nonplussed and silenced, but aroused and tempted as well. Still, the new image of Faith, rather than pushing Nick into inviting himself to their house, pushed him back into procrastination. He was, as remarked, tempted, but repelled as well — it was all too eager and sweaty. And to complicate and blur matters, there was no way for him to know whether Faith had any notion of Campbell’s use of the photograph — of either of them. One might cynically say that Nick, at this point, could not or would not believe that this glorious woman knew that her husband was pimping her face and body, since he was half in love with this discreetly exhibitionistic phantom. It doesn’t really need to be said, but the very things that aroused and inflamed Nick were those that made him apprehensive and uneasy. He was no sexual innocent, and had his fair share, as it is said, of amorous adventures. But there was something just slightly off with this particular situation, something that lay just out of sight. And yet — there was Faith, or at least her image, waiting. Am I crazy about this woman I’ve never seen? Yes. Is she being offered to me like a whore? Yes. Why? I don’t know. Does she know or is she ignorant of her role? Who cares? So he simmered and stalled, half-witted with desire.

Campbell somewhat melodramatically pretended exasperation at Nick’s delay, but he was, in truth, deeply annoyed. Nick imagined him wondering “what else can I do?” But within a day or two, Nick proposed a tentative date, subject to change, oh yes, for his visit. From that very moment, Campbell said nothing more about Faith, nor did he bring in any more photographs. It is, by the way, to be noted that Nick had simply kept what he thought of as the “flower girl” photograph, and it joined the beach picture — which Campbell had silently left under Nick’s blotter pad — in his desk drawer. Neither of them mentioned this. Nick would, now and again, and against his better judgment, slyly look at the images that he had by now laid imaginative claim to, but Campbell pretended not to notice this. At any rate, he made no comments. As an indication of Nick’s shaky state of mind at this time, it’s pertinent to remark that he would not permit himself to take the photographs home, for that, he tortuously believed, would suggest the perverse. On the other hand, it had occurred to him to ask his estranged wife to accompany him on his suburban visit; or to tell her that he was in love again; or to send her copies of the photographs with an enclosed message of vile triumph. After these chimeras passed, he was half-certain that Campbell had turned him into an idiot.

Campbell, to repeat, did not mention Faith or the weekend or how lovely the cool evenings were on the lawn that looked down across dense woods to the river. He stopped “selling” the visit, and was careful not to say anything that might unsettle Nick. He had his plans, although they were more like hopes, as we’ll see. He did not know, however, the extent to which Nick was by now enthralled — besotted — by the images that he had memorized. As far as Campbell knew, the photos were erotically promising to Nick, suggestive of Faith’s “enlightenment,” as he might have said. But Nick, following the sad, trite script that is known by heart to half the world, felt a vast, contemptuous resentment of Campbell, who not only knew the breathless delight of sleeping with this Aphrodite, he had certainly and lasciviously subjected her — this adoring and trusting woman! — to his, to Nick’s gaze. This blithe contradiction held that Faith had bravely offered her body to the unknown yet noble Nick because she knew that she would immediately love him; but also that she was the unwilling subject of a lewd experiment that forced her modest self to be ogled and sullied by a stranger, the depraved Nick. He almost, but not quite, thought of Faith as the victim of “a terrible fate.” You see how addled he’d become. That Campbell had been changed into a rival for his own wife’s affections, her imagined sexual enthusiasms, was a notion that Nick never allowed fully to assert itself. It was — he knew this — absurd even to think of this woman whom he “knew” by means of two stiffly posed photographs, taken and revealed for reasons that were still obscure, and perhaps specious. Yet he could feel her breasts in his hands.

About a week or so before Nick’s promised visit, Campbell’s manner subtly changed. Perhaps that’s putting it too decisively; it’s enough to say that Nick caught him, on a half-dozen occasions, staring at the wall, an expression of wretchedness, a kind of bereft gloom, on his face. Nick stifled his anger: how dare he mope around with the beautiful and gentle Faith awaiting him on the beach, at their bedside, half-naked and shamed in the role of sexual victim that had been dishonorably urged upon her? But the coming weekend visit would remedy all, and if love had to be painfully extruded from the vulgarity that Campbell had created, that’s what would, what must be done. It’s quite probable that Nick, certainly, and Campbell as well, were on the edge of an imbecile eroticism. As for Faith, no one knows, or knew, with any certainty, just what she was doing — if anything — in this shabby drama. She waited, did she not?

One afternoon, glum Campbell told Nick that he and Faith had quarreled “hurtfully” a week earlier, over something that was petty and inconsequential, but which served to awaken the hidden angers and, well, disappointments in their marriage. He’d left the house, bought a pint of vodka, and driven to a little pebble beach on the river. He sat on the hood of the car, drinking and smoking, hating Faith and his marriage, his “fucking charity house,” as he put it, envying Nick’s separation and freedom. The rest of his story was rushed, fragmented, elliptical, and told with his face partly averted. A young man had driven up in an old coupe and parked next to Campbell’s car. He looked like a college student — maybe high school. They’d talked about women and shared the vodka, and Campbell told him of the quarrel with Faith, to which the young man said that he’d just broken up with his girl, who was nothing but a fucking whore bitch. He opened Campbell’s fly and his own, and they kissed and fondled each other, and then the young man knelt in front of Campbell and sucked him off, although Campbell said, in a whisper, “he mouthed me,” while masturbating himself to climax. Then he said good-bye and smiled in the darkness — Campbell could see his teeth — and drove off. When he got in, Faith was asleep, just as well, God! What was wrong with him? He’d never tell Faith, never, he didn’t think, some things just can’t be told. He looked at Nick with a fake rueful grin that said “but I can tell you, can’t I?” Nick shook his head in what could have been disapproval or chagrin or both.

Well. There it surely was. Campbell was letting him know, with a glancing candor, why he wanted Nick to visit. His convenient, halting tale — true or not — was a confession of his desire for Nick, who thought, with scorn, that Campbell didn’t have the nerve to make a straightforward pass at him, but had to use his wife as a lure. All right, you son of a bitch! He’d go up to their house, he wanted Faith, didn’t he? he was beginning to dream about her. So he thought then; but later in the day, it became clear to him that Campbell would get what he had schemed to get from the beginning if he visited. That would never do! Rather than fend off Campbell, or worse, listen to him speak of his desire and devotion, for an entire weekend, he would give up Faith. So crazed was he that he actually thought this — that he would “give up”—give up! — a woman who existed only in Campbell’s occasional remarks and two small images. He wasn’t so demented, though, as to think that she would be crushed by his sacrifice.

On that Friday, he said that he’d have to cancel the weekend, something about his goddamned wife and her shyster lawyer and a division of things that they’d bought and been given for their apartment, they had to meet and talk and do this and that and this and that; on and on he blathered hysterically, while Campbell listened in silence.

Now that this crisis, if it may be called that, had been temporarily resolved, or shelved, a hint of normality was restored to their relationship. It was not as it had been, and they most often ate lunch separately, while their after-five strolls and drinks became rare. All references to a weekend in Connecticut disappeared from their conversation, and Faith may as well have never lived. In the careful politeness of mutual embarrassment, they silently conspired to pretend that no invitation had ever been made to “the Campbells’,” or, if one had, that it could not have been “seriously entertained,” as they say. For that matter, there were no photographs of Faith in existence, certainly not in Nick’s desk drawer. Perhaps there was no Faith, no wife at all. Their friendship, of course, was over, and though they still worked well together, they had few conversations that were not professional or centered on public events. So the late spring and summer passed.

In late September, Nick told Campbell, in his capacity as Nick’s superior, that he’d received a job offer from a firm in Chicago, and that he’d accepted. His divorce was almost settled, the final decree a week or so away, and, well, he was giving his two weeks’ notice. There may truly have been a job in Chicago, but it’s not important. It’s possible that Campbell began to say, “What job?!” but that, too, is unimportant. His face, despite a castor-oil smile so false as to be grotesque, went bone-white, so that he looked, for a few seconds, like a corpse, or, more hideously, like a theatrical version of a corpse. When there was but a week left until Nick’s departure, they managed to have a celebratory farewell lunch at a little bar that served sandwiches and hamburgers to the midday office drunks. It was, not surprisingly, a disaster, unleavened by office gossip or old jokes. Just as they were leaving, Campbell, riding on three martinis and a few beers, demanded that Nick return the “very very personal” photographs of his wife. He seemed angrily humiliated, as if Nick had inveigled him into showing him the photographs, as if he had been blackmailed. In the office, Nick gave him the pictures and Campbell roughly folded them in two and stuck them into the pages of a paperback on his desk. “This is a stupid rotten novel!” he said, belligerent and put upon.

On Nick’s last day, he packed up his few things and said that he’d be leaving a little early, what the hell. Campbell got up from his desk as if drunk — perhaps he was drunk — his face pulled into a sneer, and half-lurched, half-lunged at Nick to hold him by the forearms, the shoebox with its odds and ends held in Nick’s hands awkwardly between them. He didn’t look at Nick but stiffly bent forward and tried to kiss his mouth, missing but wetting his chin. His eyes were wide and slightly out of focus. Nick stepped away from him and said something like “Come on, Campbell!” and walked out of the office and to the elevators. Campbell was a few steps behind him and when he reached Nick he motioned to the stairwell. “Please,” he said. “Just a … please?” Nick, absurdly, looked at his watch, then followed Campbell into the stairwell, where he had slouched against a wall, looking at his shoes. Then, as if he had rehearsed, which he may well have done, Campbell begged Nick not to leave just yet, to come and stay with him — and with Faith — and with this articulation of his wife’s name he looked into Nick’s face and grinned. He knew, he said, he knew that Nick liked, well, was attracted to Faith, the photos, he said, those pictures of her. Then he stopped, simply defeated. “I love you,” he said. “I love you.” He began to wail very quietly, his hands folded high on his chest in a classic yet ridiculous pose of misery and loss. Nick’s face was flushed with anger and pity and, who can tell, perhaps with desire. “I love you, I love you!” Campbell said, blubbering now, and he put his arms clumsily around Nick’s waist just as the door opened and a janitor, carrying a bucket and mop, stepped onto the landing. Momentarily taken aback by the sight of these two flustered young men, he stood uncertainly, then, as they pulled apart, realized what he was seeing, and smiled a knowing smile, a smile that said he understood and that it was all right with him.

Invisible Door

I once had a friend, a dear friend, who, I believed, or was led to believe, had betrayed me, profoundly and completely. Even now, years later, I can’t bring myself to make known the circumstances, the facts, as I then perceived them to be, of this betrayal. That these circumstances, these facts, were, I discovered, malicious inventions created by another man for his own mysterious reasons, did not remedy or ameliorate the estrangement and bad feeling they — no matter how preposterous — created between me and my friend; his putative betrayal, that is, might as well have been actual. The notion that time heals or erases such aberrations and their dolorous effects has not, in my experience, been the case; on the contrary, time makes concrete and salient all initial agonies, missteps, misunderstandings, and bitterness. It takes a spectacularly willful, almost herculean courage to destroy, even to soften these ugly petrifactions, after which, and at best, there is nothing left of feeling but rubble. It is better to interiorize the waste and regret than to attempt its amelioration. But I don’t want to get ahead of myself.

The third party I’ve mentioned, the malign, the famous meddler who stalks through so many shabby stories, had been a partner of mine and my friend in a small, ultimately unsuccessful specialty-printing business we had begun together — although the failure of the business was not, I’m fairly sure, a factor in the creation of his elaborate system of lies, painstakingly developed to convince me of my friend’s perfidy. It’s enough to say that he did his work well, and had, I suppose, the pleasure of seeing my friend and me sundered, quite wrenchingly disjointed in mutual anger and bewilderment. Friendships that collapse in this way attain to a kind of mean perfection, a hateful balance of irreconcilable integers, each of which is, or most certainly becomes, a treasured wound. I was hurt, surprised, and puzzled by the enormity of my friend’s acts; he was astonished by my abrupt decision to end our friendship. My action and his reaction were gestures sadly predicated on a corrupt syllogism, the major premise of which might have been phrased: “If a man I have no reason to trust tells me that a friend has betrayed me, I’ll sever all ties with the friend.”

The facts, as I have called them, or what I then thought to be the facts, and the subtle variations of this betrayal, were made available to me over a period of perhaps a month and a half by my indefatigable guide to — to what? Cleanliness, let’s say, an ethical, even moral cleanliness. “Look at this evidence,” he might as well have said, “look at these dispiriting, tawdry documents. Soon all will be revealed! And afterward, you’ll rid yourself of this false friend, and be clean!” He said, of course, nothing like this, but I’m afraid that I said something very like it to myself. With each piece of evidence, of proof, that my altruistic “assistant” brought me, I became more deliciously righteous, more insulted, more put upon and victimized. It’s now obvious that my need, my desire, perhaps, to be an object of perverse and malicious acts was the base reason for my hunger for more and more documentation of my friend’s cruel schemes. There was, if truth be told (I use the phrase in full awareness of its pitiful irony), plenty of damning material, early on, for me to accuse and then judge my friend, but I began to enjoy the accumulation of his misdeeds, the sweet pang of the badly used, the moral eroticism of a vast self-pity.

I at last decided that I had enough information (I have no recollection of how I came to this conclusion), and I’d already poked and rubbed at my ego’s scratch until it was red and swollen. It so turned out that at about the same time that I’d decided to confront my friend, my false, treacherous, vile friend! he and his wife had just separated. That is, his wife had left him for a man whom she, and, to a lesser extent, her husband, had known in college, I believe. These events occurred some forty years ago, so my memory is not wholly to be trusted. This man had re-entered their lives so as to “learn how to live,” or so I understand him to have phrased it. Learn how to live! There’s nothing to say to that. He had apparently known of the couple’s marriage, its stability, love, mutual kindness, its happy child — its composure, I suppose, will cover it nicely. And so he sidled into their lives, as old peripheral acquaintances will do, as an unhappy, even miserable supplicant. Yes, he wanted them to teach him “how to live.” Nice work, as the old song says, if you can get it. I know that all of this sounds absurd, much too good to be true, as they say, too maudlin, too Hollywood, if it is not affected to say so. I heard this story, with its tellers’ predictable variations, over the years, not that any of it mattered to me. It hadn’t mattered to me when it first happened, when the loving couple decided to help the sad old pal. That my friend was soon cuckolded by this wheedling incubus and then deserted by his true-blue wife, who would later make his visitation rights anent the child a grinding humiliation, so I understand, was fine by me, fine. Just when he came to me for succor, I suppose I might call it, I was all ready with my dossier. I seem to recall, in fact, that I was somewhat annoyed that his wife was unfaithful to him with only this one man. On the other hand, he was a perfectly shameful choice. So that was fine.

It was painful to me for a long time to think of my friend’s specific reaction to my charges, and so I slowly forgot what it was like. It’s simply gone from my mind, lying in fragments among all the other repressed and doubly repressed and wholly distorted junk of my life. The schism affected me, I’ve come to admit, in the most thorough way, setting me on a course which has demanded (if that’s not too strong a word) that I have neither wife nor children, that I be a neglectful son, a distant, sullen, cold man with no friends worthy of the name, without even the ephemeral human connections that pass for friendships here in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I’ve lived alone for some twenty years. It’s the ideally blank place for me, with its grinning populace and its idiot sense of privilege, its lush flowers, dead grass, and year-round air pollution — the worst of which is happily called “save the air days”—and its “communities” with no sidewalks or visible populations. And then there are the millions and millions of cars, blessed cars that allow us all to avoid each other completely as we go and return, go and return, over and over. It is my country, indeed.

I don’t recall precisely when I discovered that the proofs of my friend’s betrayal were, in essence, distortions, manufactures, subtle as well as crude lies. This is not to say that my “informant” was a genius of deception. Sadly enough, although sadly is hardly the word — perhaps monstrously is more to the point — the shoddiness of the materials were virtually apparent to me all the time I was collecting them. So that I was not surprised to be brought face to face with the irrefutable fact of their falsity. It’s the cheapest psychology to say that it is obvious that I wanted to hurt my friend and to smash our friendship, but that I did so with such devious ruthlessness astounds me even now. I find it, perhaps oddly, somewhat admirable.

I have not, as I think I’ve implied, attempted to “patch things up” with my friend. What would be the point? And what would I say? “I was wrong, and I was always wrong, and I knew that I was wrong. However!” And then there is the fact that I was exasperated, furious, even, with my friend, when I had incontrovertible proof that all my allegations against him were false. He seemed to me, then, as he still does, I’m afraid, so weak, so pitiful, so inconsequential, unable to have committed the sins I’d accused him of. Good Christ! He’d had no courage at all, he’d done nothing, not one thing that I’d — I don’t know how to say this — that I’d wanted him to have done, perhaps. How could I ask him to forgive me, when I couldn’t forgive his intolerable innocence, his insufferable friendship? He was much, oh much less than the perfidious monster I’d longed for him to be. It was too much to ask of me that I invite him into my life, such as it is, again; or that I ask to enter his. It is too much, for that matter, to ask anything of me.

Recently, I have come to see that I had been waiting, all those many years ago, waiting for I really don’t know how long, for an invisible door I’d yearned to discover, to open, so that I could walk through it and away from life, for good and all.

I have attempted to tell this story many times over the past years, the past decades, for that matter. I’ve not been able to bring it off, for I’ve never been able to invent — inhabit, perhaps — the proper narrational attitude. I begin to invent plausible situations that soon falsify everything, or unlikely situations that, just as soon, parody everything. I have even, at times, tried to tell the undecorated truth, which attempts virtually clang with mendacity, a callow sort of mendacity that wishes to be recognized as such, and so forgiven. I might call it the mendacity of youth, although I’m not at all certain how youth is currently defined.

At that time, my wife and I were living behind a barber shop, in a small studio apartment that was reached by means of a long, narrow corridor that seemed to belong to the barber shop, I don’t quite know how. The apartment, too, seemed more like an adjunct to the shop than it did an entity unto itself, and, perhaps because of this, I hated it. My wife was a very small woman, I might say a tiny woman, but her body was arrestingly erotic. It should have looked, given her size, like a child’s body, but it did not: she was a kind of aphrodisiacal miniature, a striking doll. Whenever she, alone, approached the corridor entranceway from the street, the scum congregated on the sidewalk, in a crass parody of the manly chorus boys in the musical comedies of the era, would ogle her, fondle themselves, make sucking and kissing noises, and proclaim what they’d like to do to her. She invariably insisted that they never offended her and I chose to believe her. I really didn’t care one way or another: those fools had no sense of her actuality, and I suspect that her calm, dispassionate gaze forced them to see themselves for the curious filth it suggested they were.

Our bed dominated the apartment, and was what, I later discovered, is called queen-sized, a term that almost shines with poignancy. This bed had a presence beyond its fact, probably because of something so mundane as its size relative to the total floor space of the room. It served my purposes, such as they were then, to think of the bed as having some special quality, as more than it was, as a symbol, in fact. As a symbol for what, I had no idea. But I wanted to write, more precisely, I wanted to be thought of as a writer, and I had started many stories having to do with the power that the bed exerted over various darkly tragic sagas, whose whining narrators were more unhappy and misunderstood, more irrevocably doomed than is, even melodramatically, possible. The desire to add some more stupid clutter to the clutter of the vacuous world is virtually unquenchable. Our marriage was, at this point, in the early stages of irreversible decay. My wife and I often talked for hours about our problems, our refined problems, sure that we were facing them honestly — a favorite word — sure that although they were unique, they were certainly solvable. We wasted a great deal of time in these thoughtful, respectful, futile colloquies. “Irreversible decay” is a phrase that I permit to stand as a reminder of its use in the first sentence of one of my early stories, “The Bower of Bliss.” The sentence read, “Although Amanda and I did not know it, the mutually ecstatic shudder that put period to our lovemaking on that breathless midsummer night, was the first subtle tremor of the irreversible decay that had infected our perhaps too bright union.” “Ecstatic shudder,” “subtle tremor,” “too bright union”! Even “Amanda” proceeds from the abyss of machine fiction. I couldn’t write because I so wanted to impress people with the fact that my writing revealed a knowledge of writing. I was, I think, unaware of this.

Our marriage was, indeed, falling apart, for many reasons, none of which is worth commenting on, that is to say, any reason might do. We had been married for almost five years, and my wife was allowing, or helping, perhaps, her boredom and restlessness to surface when and how it pleased. Had she been anything other than glumly dissatisfied, I might have been disturbed. As it was, her quiet and dazed contempt, her wayward anomie, passed right by me, as the phrase has it. I had no way of combating it, or her, anyway, assuming that I noticed. I had no idea what to do — assuming that I noticed. All this took place in the benighted days before husbands were sensitive to their wives’ needs, as they are now. In any event, I began dreading the walk down the corridor, the sight of my wife sprawled on the bed — the symbolic bed — reading, it seemed to me, always, The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain. That can’t be so, but since the title has, so to speak, declared itself, let it stand. I hated to see her there, her perfect little body, her small feet, her blond hair in a carelessly provocative upsweep, her toreador pants defining her thighs and buttocks and softly bulging pudenda. It was a kind of shabby ordeal.

She was too complete and complacent in her tiny model of a body, reading, or not reading, or just there, doing anything, I don’t know. Occasionally, I’d find her naked, or half-naked, after a shower, and this was worse: her womanly parts looked as if they’d been supplied her, as if she’d rented them at a costume shop. It was always hard for me to believe that her breasts were teacup-size, that her dirty-blond wedge of pubic hair was not even the size of a business card. Who was this woman?

We had been married almost five years earlier, after knowing each other for fifteen months. At the time we met, she was the best friend of a woman that I had been planning to marry, but who had been seduced, a week before we were to have been engaged, by my best friend, whom she was, eventually, to marry. This is neither here nor there, although I believe that their marriage is quite successful. I realize, as I write this, that I have no way of knowing this: the last I heard from them, via a pretentious Christmas card, was that they were living in one of the smug, self-congratulatory towns of the San Francisco Bay Area.

All I clearly remember of my earlier love is that she often liked to be fully dressed when we fucked — she had what may be characterized as a masculine pornographic imagination. I draw no moral from this penchant, but do think of it, from time to time, with a pang of lewd nostalgia, as perfectly befits the dirty old man I have all but become. Sometimes she even, marvelously, wore a hat. It was, she said, like being fucked by somebody she’d bumped into on the street or the subway. And so it was. I say, “all I clearly remember,” but that is, of course, only an expression. I remember many, oh, many things about her, for instance, the oddly asymmetrical v of her pubic hair. She was extremely attractive, and I can’t really blame my old friend for his loss of control. I blame her, of course, because a woman is more than just — more than just what? I know nothing about women. I remember things like hats.

Perhaps my wife and I were propelled or pushed or excited into marriage because of her mishap, the accident that she suffered shortly prior to our wedding: she somehow slipped and then fell down a flight of subway stairs, cutting, bruising, and very badly abrading one side of her face. I can’t clarify what I mean when I say “excited into marriage,” but the accident had the effect of making us agree to move the wedding date up by about a month, as if, somehow, we had to marry while she bore this painful blazon. I later considered writing about this injury and the huge scab that asserted itself as its astonishing manifestation, for it seemed — it still seems — a symbol of our disastrous marriage. It was not, any more than the bed was, but the idea that I might force it into one made me feel like a writer. That I even considered a narrative flowering from the fact of her wound was, finally, enough. I never wrote a word.

Her scab covered the left side of her face from jaw to hairline in a grim parody of deformation. There was about it, at once, a sense of the overwhelmingly repulsive and the breathlessly desirable, much in the same way that the human sex organs are hideously attractive. I can’t say that I thought this at the time, but I do seem to recall becoming aroused during the ceremony — so much so that my vows came in troubled quaverings. When we kissed to seal our compact, I thought that I might burst into ragged, tense laughter. She smiled at me, one side of her mouth held immobile by the thick scab: I wanted to fuck us into hysteria, there, in the minister’s study, before the wedding guests. Later, at the small reception given for us at her mother’s house, we found ourselves together in the kitchen, and I vulgarly put her hand on the hard lump in my trousers and then bent to lick her scabbed face. She rubbed me, flushed and quivering, and then, immediately, she was, at a sound from the doorway, in front of the refrigerator, into which she stared. I could see her legs trembling from her thighs to the doll-sized white heels she had on. I leaned against a table and smiled brilliantly at the doorway, amazed at the ruttishness that possessed me. It was her — and my — bitch friend, who looked at us and raised her eyebrows. As if she knew what we knew! As if she could. We glared insanely at her.

But it is not my intention to tell the story of our wedding and the twisted, dreamlike interlude of our honeymoon and first months together. It may well be that the fact of this period has, in the past, asserted itself so strongly that I’ve lost, again and again, the impetus to tell the real story, if you will. Or perhaps I have been distracted by my wife’s injury, by my accumulative reimaginings of its reality, its domination of her fine-drawn face, the way I touched it. My consistent, predictable arousal when clutched by these drifting memories and half-memories, these semi-fantasies, always seemed to point toward the necessity of the “wedding story” or the “honeymoon story.” This, or these, stories will never be told, but their seeming demands always precluded my telling any story: this story.

I should, however, put the phenomenon of my wife’s injury — and the oddly perverse timing of the accident that caused it — to rest, of a sort, by speaking, candidly, of my feelings, as I now construe them to have been, at the time. This can, admittedly, be a supremely inexact business, but I see no way of ignoring it. It is quite possible that my past failures to complete this story have had to do with my avoidance of the centrality of this compelling wound, this fabulous wound. It has always been an assertive image, one that threatens all the other elements of my tale. But to avoid it has always meant to be driven into the faltering discourse that ends in silence.

My wife’s scab was the result, as I’ve said, of a terrible fall down the stairs of the local subway station, although I never quite believed that the fall was accidental. For a long time, I thought that she had thrown herself down the stairs in a seizure of misery, or even despair, at the prospect of our impending marriage. I took, as may well be imagined, little pleasure in thinking this. Later, I began to believe, groundlessly, that her fall was the unexpected and unintended outcome of a subtle sadomasochistic adventure gone awry. I was possessed of an unshakable sense of the truth of this fancy, of its actuality, and spent many hours, many many hours, trying to picture the partner with whom she had been so thrillingly involved.

This spectacularly disfiguring scab that thickly encrusted the left side of her face from hairline to eyebrow, thence from cheekbone to lower jaw, had the uncanny effect, although I have vacillated and hedged concerning this for years, of making me doubt my wife’s identity. Not in any melodramatic or mystical or metaphysical sense, reverberant with implications of mystery and anima, but in the simplest and most pedestrian sense, so to speak: the scab was for me a mask that concealed half of her face, a half whose contours I could no longer bring to mind. This mask was all the more efficacious since the part of her fact not affected wore precisely the innocently wanton expression that was habitual to her, a misleading expression, and one that often duped me into humiliating behavior.

The other aspect of the scab, one that I have already adumbrated, was its sexuality: it possessed an erotic component strong enough to make me virtually stupid with desire. Its surface glistened in the way my wife’s nylon stockings glistened, and as, too, did her labia. Over and again I was moved by the perverse desire to use the small and perfect architecture of her broken face as I did her sex. To put it crudely, I wanted, for as long as she wore that crusted domino, to fuck it. I remember that my terrific desire made me weak with wonderful fear, and placed a cold, stone-like nausea just below my breastbone. Yet as my desire increased, my nausea lessened, my intoxicated self-disgust and sexual terror were smoothly transcended by what I thought of as the sacramental purity of my undeviating lust. I even felt, and this was indeed so, complacently proud of myself for finding my damaged bride still desirable, for overlooking this egregious flaw in her beauty, for being so understanding. And all the while that I blithely misled myself, my genitals ached with desire: I could not wait to marry this imperfect Venus so that I could have her with me day and night. What did I tell her, what could I have told her? I can’t believe that I told her of my distorted lust, but I know that I did. I waited, however, until her scab had been replaced by new, creamy skin, and until our marriage had been pushed, as marriages are, now here and now there, by whatever we took love to be. My confession was an act of meaningless courage that, perhaps, disgusted her.

After our honeymoon, I got a job, not worth describing, as a clerk in a midtown office, and we moved from our gloomy first apartment to the one behind the barber shop. I began to write at night and on the weekends, and to publish occasionally in little magazines. I soon met, as one might expect, other young writers or would-be writers, those who could be writers had they the time, husbands and wives and lovers of these people, and many others. They began — we began — hesitantly at first and then with increasing confidence, to use our apartment as a gathering place, and hardly a weekend, and then hardly an evening passed that did not discover one or more people at our table or bedded down on the floor, trading small-time literary gossip and tales of academic backbiting for beef stew or spaghetti or bean soup and a few cans of beer. It is emotionally numbing for me to acknowledge, to admit, that I never thought of these perpetual visitors as anything other than legitimate, as the cream of the tottering fifties. We made fun, we actually, good Christ, made fun of other people! How we waited for things to happen, successful things, adventures and journeys and relocations to exotic locales, events that would soon metamorphose us into the glittering figures that we knew we were beneath our unfashionable and superior shabbiness. We were, certainly, but deadbeats, impotent, arrogant, lazy, and headed toward peripherally creative jobs in public relations and advertising and publishing, we were perfect American clichés, too good for mere work. Some, assuredly, would become hip assistant professors, bored and jaded and ticketed for the limbo of a hundred committees and MLA meetings. My wife and I were willing members of this clique, as I have suggested.

A few years passed, the scene, ramshackle and unimportant, barely changed, save for the fact that my wife and I permitted ourselves occasional adulteries, I with women I met in the jobs I felt myself much too talented for, she with one or another of our stream of guests and visitors. I did not then know of her adventures but was aware of the longing glances given her by the shifting cast that streamed through our apartment. With true delight, trite but true delight, I was proud of her ability to enflame these freeloaders. I once, perhaps more than once, jokingly, as I recall, asked someone if he’d like to watch her undress so that her lilliputian perfections might be seen rather than merely imagined: her adolescently rosy breasts, her toy vagina with its reticent screen of silky hair, her perfectly round doll’s buttocks. She was always furious and embarrassed by these crudities, yet I believed that she would have been more than pleased to exhibit herself. I often, in that period of our marriage, masturbated, fantasizing myself as a guest, and my wife as a willing partner: I would, so to say, cuckold myself, with pleasure. When our wretched apartment was ours alone for a day or so, I would ask her to fuck me with her face partially covered by a scarf or kerchief. I pretended that she was a whore whom I had hired to play my wife. She seemed to like this game, and I remember how her face would flush, loose with pleasure, her lips swollen and slightly parted as she entered the role.

My writing, if I may use such a word for the sporadic affectation in which I was fitfully engaged, had more or less ceased, save for a review or two, once or twice a year, in some ruthlessly mediocre magazine or the pitiful book-review section of a newspaper’s Sunday arts page. Thankfully, I can recall nothing of these reviews, except that I’m pretty certain that I usually would take an author to task for such grave sins against the body politic as cynicism, and lack of belief in the redemptive powers of art and the wisdom of the common man. One of my boilerplate remarks, I think, was to the effect that this blight on good letters was self-indulgent, and that it is never enough for fiction to point out the failings of a terrible world for the pleasure of literary voyeurs. These reviews were as insubstantial as they were insufferable. In the meantime, our marriage collapsed a little more each day.

I assumed, or pretended to assume, in my decrepit role in the marriage, that the reason I became aroused when my wife was openly desired by other men, and why my masturbatory daydreams were only of her — as somebody else, perhaps, but always of her — and why I was swiftly carried into erotic dementia when she played her roles, especially those that required her to be someone else pretending to be her — once she was a young man, once my mother, once her mother — was because for some time my wife had, for me, little to do with the woman I married. She was, day after day, for many months, a sort of descendant of the scab-faced woman, the innocent yet somehow disturbingly soiled girl I had wed, the lusciously disfigured victim who had, recklessly and suddenly, asserted her lascivious self to suck me off in the cab that took us from the drunken chaos of our reception to that first grim, brown apartment. As her shining blond head moved ravenously between my thighs in the panels of light that slid, dreamlike, through the dark cab, I heard the slight whispering sound that her scab made as it scraped against my disheveled shirt. When I ejaculated, I had a momentary vision of my semen oozing thickly from the bright fragile surface of her face.

I may be elaborating this scene. I don’t truly recall a “whispering sound,” and suspect that the word “shirt” has called this fevered description up, for after I came, my wife spat a mouthful of semen into the shirttails that she’d pulled from my trousers for that purpose. At that very point, while we were in the cab, and certainly before we had begun our married life, my wife seemed not to be precisely the woman I had just married. I was stunned and delighted by her sexual savoir faire, her carnal flourish, I suppose such daring can be called. I can still see, with unsettling clarity, her sly childish face as she looked up from my lap, her slick, wet mouth, her eyes cloudy with lewdness, her visage at once hers and somebody else’s. I put my hand, tenderly, on her wondrous mask, and she looked directly into my eyes and shook her head, no. As I now understand things, which is not to say that I understand anything, a different woman looked up at me, and it was she who shook her head: no. So that after the affirmation of her surprising act of fellatio, there was a puzzling negation. And in this way our marriage began.

Which takes me, at last, to the night I wish to speak of, but before I place myself, as a young man, in that dark hallway leading to our terrible apartment, I should correct an earlier misstatement. During our marriage, I did not involve myself with other women, and I have no reason to believe that my wife had to do with other men. She had many opportunities, that is to say, I gave her many opportunities, but I don’t believe that she took advantage of them, if advantage is not too frivolous a word. I used to believe that she had fucked, everywhere and anywhere, all the men that she met, but now it seems to me that those who suggested these spectacular infidelities to me were simply adding their small donation to the general squalor.

I walked out of a bitter-cold night of wind and snow flurries, the exhausted linoleum of the corridor popping and crackling as I trod upon its crazed and faded roses. From behind the door I heard jazz, elbowing its way through the grit and scratches of an old record. I thought it likely that my wife was alone, for she often listened to jazz while preparing supper, and yet there was no reason for me to assume that, for she often played records while guests were in the apartment. Perhaps, since we were so rarely alone, I blinded myself with optimism: I was still guileless enough then to wish for simple things, to wish for miraculous change. Or for that matter, any change at all. I opened the door to see Charlie Poor on our bed, his back against the headboard, a glass of whiskey and water in one hand and a cigarette in the other. My wife stood next to the bed in an old sweater, a pair of boy’s shorts that were much too small for her, and dirty white sneakers. She was gesturing with her cigarette. Everything was calm and still, transfixed peacefully within the perfections of Thelonious Monk.

Now that I have begun the narrative that with any luck at all will lead me, rapidly and cleanly, to its conclusion, I apologize for the fact that I must interrupt one last time to say that this is the point at which, in all my previous attempts to tell this story, I’ve stopped. At this point, approach this scene however, this moment during which I hesitate at the open door, grateful for the soft light and the warmth, I have been unable to continue. There is, perhaps, nothing, really, to tell, and yet that nothing demands release. I have lied in many ways, lied so as to prevent the truth from escaping, even partially, fragmented and deformed, from the duplicitous narrative in which I have hitherto encased it. For instance, Charlie Poor was certainly drinking my whiskey, and my wife, although I would prefer to clothe her in a loose, full skirt, was certainly wearing boy’s shorts that were so provocatively tight that her mons veneris was perfectly defined. “Blue Monk” was on the phonograph, yes. But Charlie Poor was not stretched out on the bed — it has always been, in the past, his place on the bed that has made the narrative waver and then stagger to a dead end. This time, I hope, the truth may, by itself, be competent to tell the story, to make its incoherence somewhat lucid, perhaps even to make its incoherence somewhat coherent.

Charlie Poor was a man made out of cardboard, surely not what, even then, I would call a friend, but then again he was not much flimsier than anyone else we knew. There was an almost grandiosely specious quality about his casual facade because of the tense and worried personality that it barely concealed. He had been, quite recently, one of my employers, the part-owner of a small specialty-jobs printing shop for which I’d worked as a general office assistant for about six months. Charlie, when he discovered that I was a published writer, so to speak, so to speak, very much wanted to be my friendly boss, my colleague, my buddy. He had some idea, not that it was, or is rare, that I had some special knowledge of and entrée to the literary world, to magazines and editors and agents, to fashion and glamour. It’s too good to be true, but Charlie wrote poetry, oh yes. That my wife had taken to writing poetry is, perhaps, even more remarkable, another indication, as if one were needed, to prove that life insists on the wearisome banal. Charlie slowly became peripheral to my life, to our lives, and I’m fairly certain that within a month of my going to work for him at Midtown Artistic Print he had been to at least one weekend party at our apartment.

Charlie fired me after six months or so. Of course, he didn’t want to fire me, not my colleague and friend, Charlie. He was devastatingly, ruinously compassionate, almost parodically concerned with the dignity of existence and the wonders of nature, perpetually simmering with anger over injustices done to all sentient beings — he often used these phrases verbatim. Charlie did not want to fire me, no, it was his older partner, who, like, wore suits, man, and, like, ties, and who didn’t know what was happening, who really fired me. But of course Charlie had to do the dirty work. I am probably imagining that he wore a hurt look as he told me the bad news, how sad he was, how somber. He said that he hoped there would be no hard feelings, no reason for us to stop seeing each other socially. Of course not, dear Charlie! What understanding scum we were.

I don’t recall how Charlie insinuated himself into our lives after that, but he certainly did. It may have been the result of my craven response to his crude act, that is, Charlie responded to what he correctly took to be weakness. With the passage of time, however, I have come to realize that I was possessed of the same bogus emotions and shredded ethics as Charlie, and that I could just as easily, had our roles been reversed, have fired Charlie, my face dark with fake anger and embarrassment, crocodile tears standing nobly in my eyes, the stone-cold world too much for my sensitive spirit. Charlie knew this, I think. I’m pretty sure that Charlie knew this. It was a question of, well, the breaks.

I closed the door and my wife turned toward me, smiling, welcoming me, cordially and politely, into my own house, into the circumstances of my own life. I was greeted, that is, as a friend who had dropped by to say hello to my wife and to me, treated as, for example, Charlie Poor. The apartment was dimly lit by night-table lamps on either side of the bed, and by a larger lamp that sat in the center of a small maple-veneer table flanked by two battered armchairs. Everything was, or should have been, instantly visible as I closed the door and blew on my cold hands. My wife turned toward me, smiling. She was smoking a cigarette and drinking whiskey and water, her skintight shorts wedged into her crotch. “Blue Monk.” The bed was empty and perfectly made, tight and without a wrinkle. She turned to me, she put her drink down, or picked it up, she mimed a kiss, she gestured familiarly with her cigarette toward me, toward this old friend come to tell her thrilling stories of the fabled world. Tell me! her gesture said, sit down, dear old friend, and tell me!

For a long time this scene persisted in my memory, until I forced myself to face the fact that it was but fabrication. My wife with a cigarette, my wife in the soft light, my wife chatting with somebody, with Charlie Poor, relaxed on the bed, my wife turning toward me, smiling, relieved to see me home, safe from the bitter night, home again, home at last: this was all gauze.

When I opened the door, she was at the kitchen sink, washing salad greens, from which task she looked up to greet me. She smiled over her shoulder, she said something, probably, hi or hello or cold? I might add here that before her accident, my wife disliked salad, had always disliked it, so she told me, but that afterward, she ate it daily, sometimes twice a day, she, as they say, couldn’t get enough of it. I’d completely forgotten about this, and it is only the representation of her at the sink, washing greens, that has brought it to mind. So it would seem that my wife’s accident, her ecstatically disfigured face, will insist on intruding, despite my best intentions. Apparently there is no way for me to consider our marriage without admitting how powerfully our lives were affected by her damaged reality, her damaged self. As I have said, too often, I fear, I was morbidly attracted by her scab, and found ways to — use it. I would, for instance, watch my wife dressing, and compare the textures and colors of her smashed face to those of her underclothes and stockings, her skirts and blouses and dresses, her shoes. Gazing wanly, she would watch me watching her in the mirror. Her face would there appear even more strangely hurt, since her wound would be, of needs, on the wrong side. Looking at her reflection, I would feel faint, off-balance, urgently lustful. If, on our wedding night, it had seemed insane for me to imagine that my sweet bride had been substituted for by a sexually sophisticated changeling, who had arrived beneath the veil of a timely injury, this changeling, hooking her brassiere or putting in her earrings, had been, in turn, replaced by the woman in the mirror. I would beg this woman to touch me, satisfy me, while I stared at the reflected pornography of my delusion. I would not believe, should she accede to my desires, that I was not being seduced by a stranger, or by one or another stranger, someone I had met anywhere, at, for instance, our wedding. After my exquisitely shameful ejaculation, I would lie or stand, trembling, next to her, silent within her silence. I think that we were afraid to speak and so, perhaps, define the luxury of disgust we both loved. It was what we really loved.

I walked to my wife and put my hands on her waist, then bent and kissed the back of her neck, smelled her damp, clean hair. I touched my tongue to her flesh and she squirmed, turning her head voluptuously one way and then another, as if in sexual pleasure, but her movements were, and so I understood them to be, theatrical and exaggerated. She opened her thighs slightly and pushed her buttocks against my groin in an ironic, bawdy gesture of invitation. In a gesture equally cynical, I roughly cupped her breasts in my hands and ground my crotch against her, laughing until she, too, laughed, and then we bucked and jerked in a grotesque masque of licentious abandon. My smile must have been that of a corpse, the flesh of her young breasts was dead in my hands, our hearts were frozen. I stepped back from her to end the maniacal scene, then turned to face the phonograph so as to have a pretext to release her breasts.

In the armchair at the far side of the small table, close to the meticulously made bed, there, smiling, I sat, looking directly into my eyes. I felt as if some terrible, clammy liquid, cold and thick, was traveling up my spine, thence spreading into my chest and heart, which, surely, stopped beating. I sat, looking at me standing looking at me sitting. All occurred on a timeless plane, or, perhaps, an atemporal plane, one on which time had never existed and had no possibility of existing. The event hung suspended, removed from the diachronic, yet with no synchronic relation to anything else existent. It was as if death had abruptly usurped life’s province, everything around my replica and me continued, but we had stopped, we had slid off the edge of the real. The feeling that overwhelmed me, if I may analogize this uncanny rent in the mundane, was much like the one I remember when, at twelve, I first saw a pornographic picture. It was at lunchtime, down the street from the schoolyard, and the picture, a photograph of two women and a man in sexual congress for which I had neither language nor image, made me dizzy, then nauseated, and then, although my skin was filmed over with cold oily sweat, it scorched my heart: I had become ill, sick with sex, the dreamy corruption of its lustful actuality had beckoned to include me. The creased photograph opened to me the insane adult world: beyond dances, popular songs, dates, marriages, beyond friendships and handholding and parents, school and books, movies and relatives. I saw directly into the sexual cauldron, into its neurosis and pain and obsession, its bestiality, its hairy, sweaty stench, its delirium and darkness and joy. I felt as if raised off the concrete, and then I fainted, although I stood firmly on my feet, my eyes open, fixed on the static record of that trio of happy animals which had been pushed into my hands. I looked at their white, flawed bodies, their entranced smiles, their glazed eyes looking into the secret places of selfish pleasure: I could almost hear them grunting and snuffling in their rapturous absence. Adults, these were adults. That their joy frightened and sickened me did not prevent me from recognizing their banality: they could have been, they were, anybody. The few articles of clothing that they had not removed testified to their pathetic humanity. They were vulnerable, ordinary, common, I knew all three of them, they were the neighbors.

The figure in the armchair, the I, was dressed in my overcoat, scarf, and tweed cap, and had on an old pair of my horn-rimmed glasses. He sat unmoving, expressionless, his eyes on my face, which, even now, I cannot imagine. His legs were crossed the way I cross my legs, his cigarette held as I hold mine. He was Charlie Poor, and although I must have realized this almost instantly, as I stood in shock at the apparition, I knew that this simulacrum had stolen my very self. It was all, of course, meant to be a joke, a tremendous joke cooked up by Charlie and my wife to amuse me after my long day at work. I fell, oh, with perfect aplomb, into the spirit of the charade, even as I knew that the two of them had spent the afternoon in the carefully made bed. This bizarre mime was the confession of their betrayal, a confession designed to be cruel and insulting and contemptuous.

My wife joined Charlie and me in the laughter we managed to produce: What an astonishing likeness! What a surprise! Look at the angle of the cap it’s marvelous! And the cigarette! How mercilessly casual we were. I have no recollection of my feelings at that moment of joviality, but flatter myself that they were murderous. I suspect, though, that did I experience the violence of pain, I also must have had the sense that I had no right to such feeling, that I was, indeed, the guest in the apartment, and that the authentic I sat in my chair, relaxed, after a blissful day in which this legitimate husband had fucked and fucked again, the woman who was my wife but not, somehow, the woman I had fallen in love with and married.

What else could these two lovers have done but confess their lustful acts, a confession emblematized in such a way as to reveal to me my unreality, my meaninglessness as both a husband and a man? It was not quite enough for them to cuckold me, it was necessary to occlude me and by their revelation, to make me into a cipher, to turn my betrayer into me. I have often wondered how far they went that day in their masquerade. Did Charlie Poor wear my overcoat and my cap as he mounted my wife? Did she cry my name into his bespectacled blank face in the same parody of ecstasy with which she equipped the spurious orgasms she fashioned for me, and by which I pretended to be thrilled?

A long time after, I came to think that Charlie Poor had never quite possessed any actuality prior to that day and its sad events. At the moment at which my wife, for it would have had to be my wife who thought of it, created Charlie as me, when he was ordered to assert himself, so to speak, as me, his always tentative and flickering self slipped away, shed whatever tenuous presence it had. In the quiet of that dim, gray afternoon, he must have absented his precarious self in the sexual act: I believe, that is, that he was able to perform this act only as I, so that I had been with my wife that afternoon, as Charlie Poor. I had entered her familiar flesh, as Charlie first became nothing and then became me. This is too dark for me to understand, or even want to understand, but Charlie Poor was not only the agent of my erasure but of his own as well. By becoming me he obliterated himself and became nobody. I wonder, though, if he had been, for a flash, himself completely, that is, did he have the pleasure of knowing that he was fucking my wife?

There is little more to be said. My life went on, as did theirs, although after my wife and I separated, I lost touch with both of them. All for the best. I might end, though, by noting that this recording of tangled events has brought to mind an old friend of mine, a suicide dead now for more than thirty years, whose wife, at a particularly difficult time in their marriage, when he was in a mental hospital suffering from the blackest self-destructive depression, began an intense affair with the man who was her husband’s partner in the small business they had started together. This man appeared with my friend’s wife at parties, bars, restaurants, at, in short, all those places that she and her husband frequented. He even went with her, doggedly, to the sanitarium on Sundays. On all these occasions, his role was that of the faithful support for the worried and uncertain wife, the strong and selfless escort and close family confidant. It was, as may well be guessed, extravagantly obvious to everyone that he was hopelessly, embarrassingly in love with his partner’s wife, so much so that he seemed, in her presence, to be little more than yearning incarnate. Unsurprisingly, he attempted, with her halfhearted assistance, to disguise his desire as hearty bonhomie: he was the good pal, so to speak. No one cared, one way or another, and in the curious way of shifting groups of shifting alliances, wives, husbands, lovers, and friends, the man had no identity for anyone beyond that of the business partner of their familiar friend. He was transparent and weightless, insubstantial. He was, additionally, afflicted with two names, that is, he had two different given names and two different surnames, one set of which, for some private, grimly comic reason, had been given him by his partner, had literally been conferred upon him. And it was by this name that he, despite ineffectual protestations, had been introduced, by my friend, socially, and it was by this name that everyone, including my friend’s wife, initially knew him. After her husband had been hospitalized, his partner’s insistent revelation of his true name had little effect: he remained the persona known to all.

I’ve wondered, more than once, if my friend’s widow, who married her lover soon after her husband’s suicide, accepted — I was about to say knew — her lover’s real name. Of course, she must have, yet consider how strange it must have been for her to gasp and whisper her beloved’s ersatz name during their first fornications, and then to discover that this name, cried out in passion, was one that had been forced upon him by her mad husband. It might then be thought that the early sexual acts between the adulterers were, in effect, acts performed by the wife with a total stranger, sexual gestures of a doubled infidelity. Perhaps my dead friend, in uncanny vengeful prescience, obliterated his partner’s self so that his faithless wife would be unfaithful to his successor as well as to him, despite the presence of that successor’s flesh.

Reality, or, if you will, that which we constrain ourselves to believe, is, beyond all philosophies, also that which we make of what happened. Unexpected connections do, of course, sometimes make for unexpected forms. For instance, I see that this story is, essentially, about a set of disappearances. I had not intended that to be its burden, although any further attempt to say what I meant to say is out of the question.

Since Ben Stern’s death, I’ve come to admit that Clara always brought out the worst in me. This is not to say that her husband’s death caused this admission; nor do I mean to imply that had I never known Clara I would have been, as the nauseating cant has it, a better person who learned to like myself. I suppose I don’t quite know what I mean to say. When I think of the years during which the three of us abraded each other, and of Ben’s melodramatic deathbed farewell, a ghastly seriocomic scene in which I participated with a kind of distant passive elation, I feel compelled to get at, or into, or, most likely, to slink around the banal triangle of desire, lust, and expediency that we constructed, again and again. Simply put, we met, became intimates, and relentlessly poisoned each other. With our eyes wide open, to paraphrase the old song. I never really much liked this essentially spoiled couple, and “spoiled” is the word. Somebody once remarked that “spoiled” means precisely what it says, and that spoiled people cannot be repaired; they rot. And Ben and Clara were decidedly rotten. I was no less rotten, although “flimsy” might be a better word, and one could argue that I brought out the worst in Clara. As for Ben, well, he was absolutely necessary for Clara and me to dance our dance. I was sure, almost from the beginning — a portentous phrase, indeed — that Ben was well aware of Clara’s “playing around,” if you will, with me and with all the other men with whom she regularly had a few laughs, as she liked so robustly, and somehow innocently, to put it. She could act the real American-girl sport, Clara could, a master of the disingenuous: My goodness! I can hear her saying, just what am I doing in bed with this stranger? There was, to speak in figures, a kind of heuristic script to which the three of us had limited access, so that each of us could add to, delete from, and revise this script in the preposterous belief that the others would act according to these changes. What actually happened, as they say, was that over the years, each one of us was continually subject to the whims, betrayals, neuroses, and general vileness of the other two. We pretended otherwise, which pretense thoroughly subverted any possibility of our living lives that were even slightly authentic. I confess that my hope, really more of a velleity than a hope, now that these thirty-five years are good and dead, is that Clara is good and dead as well. Perhaps she is. That I don’t know, one way or another, is dismally perfect.