“Aw, shit! I went out in the damn street to pimp the fuckin’ John—”
“Look, shut up!” I told them. “Listen.” Then I described what had happened back in the park. I thought it was funny. But they both thought it was pretty serious, while we talked about it.
We talked about it a long time too.
Three conversations in which Lanya took part her last few days here. (Stayed overnight; which I liked. Maybe I’m ready to go spend some time at her place? The nesting instinct is not the same as the homing one. Which pales first?) She was talking with Gladis when I came into the yard:
“Oh—!” and ran up to me, blocked me halfway down the steps.
I focused on her, as on a memory of mountain rain, autumn light, sea fizz.
(She has green eyes!)
The most natural thing, she turned me around on the steps and led me back to the porch—when I realized I was being led, she pulled a little harder; urged, “Come on,” and took me into the loft room:
“Where’s your notebook? Or your new poems, anyway.”
“Huh? I thought you wanted to fuck.”
“Oh, if you want—” imitating another kind of girl, then she laughed at the imitation’s success—“here!” The notebook corner stuck over the loft’s edge; she pulled it down. Two loose pages fell.
She picked them up. “Can I have these to take home?”
“Sure,” I said, “—no; not that one,” and took back the sheet of blue paper (from the package of stationery Raven brought home).
She folded the page I’d left her and put it in her shirt pocket. I put the other inside the cover and slid the notebook back up on the bed. “Why do you want these?”
“Why do you write them?”
“I don’t know…anymore.”
“Ditto,” she said, disturbed; which disturbed.
“Hey,” I asked. “You haven’t seen Mr. Calkins again recently, have you?”
“No…?” in a way that asked why I’d asked.
“I mean this isn’t his idea…to get my new poems from me? You’re not just keeping them for somebody else?”
“Of course not. I just thought I had less chance of losing them than you did.”
“Mr. Calkins talked to me about stealing them. I thought he was joking—you haven’t showed them to anybody?”
“Of course not…” Then she said: “Would it be so awful if I had? I did read one—a few to Madame Brown. And a friend of hers who came over that night to visit.”
“It wouldn’t be awful.”
“You look unhappy about it, though.”
“I don’t know. I’m just confused. Why did you read them? You just liked them?”
“Very much. Everett Forest—Madame Brown’s friend—asked me to, actually. We were talking about you, one night when he had dropped over. It came up that I had some of your unpublished work; he was very anxious to see it. So I read three or four of my favorites. I suppose—” she said and sat down on the motorcycle’s seat “—this is the part I shouldn’t tell you: He wanted to copy them. But I didn’t think he should…Kid?”
“What?”
“There’s a lot of people in Bellona who are very interested in practically any and everything about you.”
“There aren’t a lot of people in Bellona,” I said. “Everybody keeps telling me this; what are they interested in me for?”
“They think you’re important, interesting…maybe some combination of the two. Make copies of your poems? I know people who, if I gave them your laundry list, would type careful reproductions as if they were some university library or something.”
“I don’t have a fucking laundry list. I don’t even have any laundry,” I said. “Who?”
“Well, Everett for one. When I told him you sometimes left your notebook over at my place he practically had a fit. He begged me to let him know next time you left it so he could look through it and maybe make a—”
“I’d break your head.”
“I wouldn’t do that.” She moved on the seat. “I wouldn’t.”
“There’s just not enough else for people to be interested in in this city.”
“I think,” she said, “you’ve got it. But even though I wouldn’t let him go snooping in your journal, I still think your writing this down bores me; no, it makes me angry. It didn’t make me angry when she and I were talking about it, it was flattering. Its rehearsal, however, is maddening. I enjoy having fantasies about these things, thinking about them—but as a game. (Haven’t I?) There’s no reason not to enjoy them that way anymore. But since the publication of Brass Orchids I sometimes find myself saying to myself: “All right. I want to stop playing this game and go try another one for a while. Lord, let me think about something else!” And I can’t. That’s a much meaner version of the terrifying morning beneath the tree. But the truth is, most of the poems in the book were written before I came to the scorpions. (Which ones were actually written afterward?) The other irony is that the one time I really was their leader was when I made them help me get June’s and Tarzan’s brother out of the shaft. Everything since has been the concretizing of some fantasy begun then—and in their minds, not mine. Have I lost by the realization? For (arbitrarily?) precious sanity’s sake I have to think at least I’ve learned.
My sensibilities have grown inflamed as our giant sun. I am writing poems now because there is nothing else to read except the newspaper, discussing for pages the rumors and epehemera that fume through the city. How can this go on when such moons rise and such suns set? I am living this way because the horror here seems preferable to life in Tarzan’s family.
Bullshit! Only I felt like that when I wrote it—no: I felt something, and thought those words the proper ashes of the feeling as I searched the smoldering. But they were only smoke. Now I cannot tell whether the feeling itself was misperceived or merely its record inaccurate!
When you get water from either the kitchen or the bathroom or the service-porch tap, bubbles form around the sides of the glass, but not evenly about the whole surface. They make a band with a definite bottom edge, but peter out up the side. Have noticed, over the last several days, the line starts higher and higher. Must ask Tak if this means something.
To the next conversation, then; maybe better luck:
I stopped outside the kitchen door because I heard them talking inside. Through the screening I saw Lanya sitting on the table, her back against the wall, Gladis and pretty much all the apes (no Tarzan); also D-t leaning against the icebox and Glass standing in the living-room doorway; and Spitt just behind him, to the other side. A loud discussion; and Lanya’s voice cut over (she leaned forward, looking around): “I have never—no, wait a minute! Wait. I have never seen a bunch less interested in sex than you guys! No, listen! I mean for guys who don’t have anything else to do. Really, I’m not kidding. When I was in college, or practically any place, any job I’ve ever had; or guys I’ve just known—seen a bunch who were less interested in getting laid—”