dessert, his credit card: dinner: I was tired enough to die. Hours
more of the canon, my heart. Except that we had reached the
end hours before, but still he went on.
We walked out, I wanted to go, off on my own, back to
myself, alone, apart, noiseless, no drone of text and interpretation, no more writers to love together as only (by now it was established) we could: just the dread silence of me alone,
with my own heart. On cement, in rain, wet.
I left him on a corner. Asked him which way he was going.
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Would have gone the opposite. Extended my hand, kind but
formal, serious and sober, ladylike and gentlemanly, quiet but
taut, firm and final. He took it and he pulled me into his lips
so hard that I would have had to make both of us fall to get
away: and I didn’t scream: and he said he loved me and would
publish my book. Oh, I said, wet.
*
We left the restaurant and walked down a wide street full of
shops, cards, clothes, coffeehouses, restaurants, some trees
even, brick buildings, light from the moon on the rain. We
talked nervous clips, half sentences, fatigue and coffee, wet.
We crossed a small street. We stood in front of a blooming
garden, all colored and leafy, where a prison used to be, I had
been in it, a tall brick building, twelve floors of women, locked
up, a building where they took you and spread your legs and
tried to hurt you by tearing you apart inside. A building where
they put you in cells and locked that door and then locked a
thicker door and then locked a thicker door, and you could
look out the window and see us standing on that corner below,
looking like a man and a woman kissing under the moon in
the rain, wet. You could see the lights and the hookers on the
street corners and the literati fucking around too. You could
see a Howard Johnson’s when it was still there and gaggles of
pimps right across a huge intersection and you could hear a
buzz, a hum, that sounded like music from up there, up on one
of those floors inside that brick. You could see the people
underneath, down below, and you could wonder who they
were, especially the boys and the girls kissing, you could see
everything and everyone but you couldn’t get at them, even if
you screamed, and inside they spread you on a table and they
tore you up and they left you bleeding. And they tore me up.
And now it was a garden, very pretty really, and my honey the
publisher who I had just met was right there, in the moonlight,
wet: and the blood was flowing: he grabbed me and pulled me
and kissed me hard and held me so I couldn’t move and it was
all fast and hard and he said he loved me.
*
I am bleeding again on this corner; where there was a prison;
where a man has kissed me against my will; and will publish
my book, oh my love; and it is wet; and the cement glistens;
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and the moon lights up the rain; and I am wet. I turn away
and go home.
*
The windows were open, as always. The cold no longer
streamed in as it had the first few months when the windows
first had to stay open day and night: winter, fall, summer,
spring: wind, rain, ice, fire. Now the cold was a tired old resident, always there, bored and heavy, lazy and indifferently spinning webs tinged with ice, stagnant, ever so content to stay
put. Even when the wind was blowing through the apartment,
blowing like in some classic Hollywood storm, the cold just
sat there, not making a sound. It had permeated the plaster. It
had sunk into the splintered red floors. It was wedged into the
finest cracks in pipes, stone, and brick. It sat stupidly on the
linoleum. It rested impressively on my desk. It embraced my
books. It slept in my bed. It was like a great haze of light, a
spectacular aura, around the coffeepot. It lay like a corpse in
a bathtub. The cats hunched up in it, their coats wild and
thick and standing on end, their eyes a little prehistoric and
haunted. They tumbled together in it, touching it sometimes
gingerly with humbly uplifted paws to see if it was real.
Prowling or crouched and filled with disbelief, they sought to
stumble on a pocket of air slightly heated by breath or accidental friction. There was no refuge of more than a few seconds’ duration.
The fumes that polluted the apartment came through the
walls like death might, transparent, spreading out, persistent,
inescapable. A half mile down, five long flights, immigrants
cooked greasy hamburgers for junkies, native-born. Each
hamburger spit out particles of grease, smoke, oil, dirt, and
each particle sprang wings and flew up toward heaven, where
we tenement angels were. The carbon monoxide from incomplete combustion was a gaseous visitation that blurred vision, caused acute, incomprehensible pain inside the head,
and made the stomach cringe in waiting vomit. The gas could
pass through anything, and did: a clenched fist; layers of human
fat; the porous walls of this particular slum dwelling; the
human heart and brain and especially the abdomen, where it
turned spikelike and tore into the lower intestine with sharp
bitter thrusts. Molecules whirled in the walclass="underline" were the wall
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itself whirling: wondrous: each molecule providing elaborate
occasion for generous invasion: dizzying space for wandering
stink and stench and poison. The wall simply ceased to be
solid and instead moved like atoms under a microscope. I
expected to be able to put my hand, gently, softly, kindly,
through it. It would fade and part like wisps of cotton candy,
not clinging even that much, or it would be like a film ghost: I
would be able to move through it, it not me being unreal. The
wall had become an illusion, a mere hallucination of the solid,
a phantom, a chimera, an oasis born of delirium for the poor
fool who thirsted for a home, shelter, a place inside not outside,
a place distinctly different from the cold streets of displacement
and dispossession, a place barricaded from weather and wind
and wet.
Each day— each and every day— I walked, six hours, eight
hours, so as not to be poisoned and die. Each day there was no
way to stay inside and also to breathe because the wind did
not move the fumes any more than it moved the cold: both
were permanent and penetrating, staining the lungs, bruising
the eyes. Each day, no matter how cold or wet or ugly or dusty