Safer than trust too far.
Let me still take away the harms I fear,
not fear still to be taken. I know his heart.
Her sister’s boyfriend was going away and he let Jane stay in his penthouse overlooking Central Park, alone, the way she or her sister couldn’t be in her sister’s apartment. The penthouse was two rooms sitting on a roof, like a doll’s house with a panoramic view of the city. Jane walked into the apartment, shut the door behind her, and phoned Jimmy and asked him to come over. He said he was busy. She thought of calling Maria, but worried that Maria would think she’s a sissy. Jimmy said we had to give up everything and quoted Meister Eckhart: “For verily thy comforts are thy foes.”
He hadn’t phoned the way he said he would. But it hadn’t been that long. He must be busy. The play. Maria is a cynic. Her father left her mother when she was two and they weren’t married and her mother was left with Maria and two other kids. Boys. Maria didn’t like men, anyway. I bet I’m the first bastard you’ve ever met, she said to Jane. Jane smiled, remembering. It’s better not to have slept with him. And two more weeks passed with his absence as felt as his presence. Jane wanted to tell Larry what had happened but didn’t know how. Maybe she’d find him and kill him. Blood revenge. She didn’t tell Jimmy.
Jane turned on the radio. “Sally, go round the roses. Roses they can’t hurt you.” Unless you press your finger on a thorn. She turned on the television and turned off the sound. She placed a book in her lap and watched the news turn into a commercial. “Sally baby cry, let your hair hang down.” Jane looked at herself in the mirror over the couch. She couldn’t read. “They won’t tell your secret.” The refrigerator was just a kiss away and she walked to it and opened the door. “saddest thing in the whole wide world. See your baby with another girl.” At least she hadn’t. Jane looked again in the mirror, then walked out onto the terrace. It was late. Jane felt old. There were views of indifferent buildings that looked solid. From other angles they looked flat, as if they were nothing but surfaces pretending to be more. Actors of a sort. Some people were still awake. Their lights were on. Maybe they’d fallen asleep with the TV on, maybe they were making love, or smoking a cigarette. Someone might be crying. Statistics let you know that anything is possible. A jet flew overhead. Someone is deceiving a husband, a wife. They’re walked in on. The woman pulls the sheet to her naked breasts, the man grabs for his pants. Or a fight over money. Someone pulls a knife. Jane sees the scenes as set pieces with all the actors knowing their parts. Someone pulls a knife out of a kitchen drawer. Someone you would never think capable. A quiet boy. A good student. He never made trouble. Most murders, Jane had read, occur within the family or between people who know each other. A murder. A knife plunged into the naked woman’s body, over and over, the way it would be reported in the paper the next morning, with her picture on page three. She’s smiling. It’s her high school graduation picture, the one she never wanted anyone to see. She put up a struggle and his skin is under her fingernails. Maria thought Jane was morbid. Jane told her it was just because she saw too many movies and read too many mysteries. One of the lights went off and Jane turned from the view.
Jimmy’s mother was with him, but he didn’t want Jane to know that. The lazy way out or the cowardly way. His mother would say that he lacked motivation. She had come to the city to bring him towels, new pants, and underwear. Don’t buy me underwear anymore, he told her, his ass naked under his jeans. The flesh around her eyes quivered like Jell-O when you touch it with a spoon. He couldn’t stand it. “I don’t wear underwear,” he said. And she asked, “Even in the winter?” Then, a moment later, “Don’t your pants smell?” She made him laugh and his laughing made her laugh and suddenly it was easy to be with her. She even took off her jacket. Well, Kerouac loved his mother, and he was okay.
Alone, in this little house, safe, out of the world, isolated from it or so it seemed, Jane took off all her clothes and walked naked in the two rooms. She rarely was naked. In her family the girls covered up because of their father. Her sisters wore robes over their bras and underpants, everything taken off out of their father’s sight. When she was little Jane wondered when she would have to cover up. Or stop going to the bathroom with him and watching him piss. Urinate, he said. Jane did stop doing it at a certain age. She covered up and didn’t walk around naked anymore, but she can’t remember when or how it happened. It came about naturally. Something must have happened. Something was said. Something that got lost. Jane stood in the middle of the living room, her arms crossed over her breasts. She might have been standing and talking to someone else, someone other than herself. When Jane was naked she felt that someone else was present, looking at her.
The King would speak with Cornwall; the dear father would with his daughter speak; commands their service.
Maria was saying that she didn’t mean that Goneril and Regan were heroes, just that they had gotten a raw deal. And Cordelia was too good. But she disobeyed him, they didn’t, Jane argued. But she disobeys and gets cut off from everything. Punished for her high principles. The other sisters get what they want. A kingdom to rule and power. Jane’s coffee cake stuck to her fingers and she avoided Maria’s eyes. “I’m going to title my paper ‘On Being a Bastard,’” Maria said. “Or maybe I should call it ‘The Firmament Tinkled On My Bastardizing.’” Maria’s idea was that King Lear was about power and who gets it and why. You can lie to get it, kill for it, or be born to it” Whenever Maria mentioned power Jane felt sleepy.
He never wore a robe. He came to the breakfast table in his pajamas, loose and floppy, and he would hold the fly of the bottoms in his hand, to keep his penis from falling out. All of us never said a word and waited for it to happen. What would have been a terrible and expected accident. Part of our fate. She’d never see the actor naked. She’d never seen Jimmy naked. Felix had put his cock in her hand and said, This is for you, or something like that. He said that not too long ago when it sounded generous, and now it sounded like a lie. She supposed he didn’t mean it, or meant it only for a moment, or only as an image that a poet might use. No one goes around pledging his penis, except poets and actors, she decided. She went to the refrigerator and ate some more. Maurice had been talking to Jimmy about Gertrude Stein and Jimmy thought Jane might like The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas because it’s like a diary and has a lot of food in it. Jane wondered if Gertrude Stein felt bad about being fat. Jimmy would laugh in her face for that. But just because she’s a great writer doesn’t mean she loved being fat. Jane had gained back all the weight she’d lost before she met the actor. Her thin period was how she referred to it, and Jimmy called it her blue period, after Picasso.