Rushing out of there, I found myself on the Quai des Grands-Augustins, gazing into a bookstore window whose gold-stamped red and black leather merchandise gaped open to drypoints and aquatints. I remember a volume of Villon depicting an old man facing a noose, another Oeuvres of Villon open to a longhaired, gloomy medieval fellow gazing out of a dark casement, his hands on his knees; I also recall some NRF volumes of Malraux, whose spines bore luscious blue and orange inlays that reminded me of fungoid domes. Should I take up reading instead of love? But these printed adventures promised me no better happiness.
I walked for hours. Then like a grave there awaited me the empty bed, the rumpled bed, my loneliness a physical illness.
After that, my lovers got worse and worse. One night I found myself trying to pick up a sweetheart at Casa de las Mujeres, which was a closet in a hotel in a hot border town; but there was nothing inside except a yellow old skeleton with long black braids that the moths had been at.
Then there was a bronze woman who turned out to be malevolent; although I certainly have the fondest recollections of her cunt, which was dark, ornate and incense-fumed like the mouth of some Chinese temple encrusted with stone lions from which red balloons dangle like breasts. Slowly, slowly she lowered her head, grinning perpetually. Whenever she undid her chessboard skirt, it clanged on the floor. She liked to grip my upper lip between her rusty little serrated teeth. I suspected that it would end badly, so I started secreting a blowtorch in my pocket. One night, pale-mottled and — bellied but otherwise nearly stone-colored, she lay pretending to be sleeping, her snout upward as we lay together on our boulder. I knew that when the moment arrived, she would deny me any warning; so I felt almost sick with anxiety. Now my memories of Wenuke came back to me like the sky seen through insect-gnawings in a broadleafed jungle plant. Of course I had then been trapped in the analogous situation of waiting for her to strangle me with her green tendrils; but my distrust of Wenuke no longer felt real to me, being the habits which no longer served, and whose comforting instinctual run suddenly faltered into astonished sorrow. As for my bronze woman, however, when she opened her golden-green eyes and snapped her teeth at me, did she mean to sever my throat or was it merely in her mind to nuzzle me affectionately? I would not harm her on mere suspicion; after all, this was supposed to be a love match. And her cunt was so interesting; it was perfectly smooth and cold; she always oiled it for me.
She could not speak; she only roared. In the end I decided that she was harmless. But I never slept easily beside her. When I left her, tears hissed and squeaked down her mottled cheeks.
Back in the time when I used to pass my evenings in Wenuke’s house it sometimes took quite awhile for the sky to actually get black. When it was still a pale blue color, Wenuke would show me the first star, which was big and round and bright, and then the next two stars winked on quite suddenly, and often a firefly traversed a tree-silhouette, sometimes grey and blurry, and perhaps a bat came almost to my nose.
I remember the indefatigable screeching of insects, the gravelly voices of rivers and sometimes, when we climaxed, the clattering wings of disturbed birds.
Occasionally I considered writing a letter to Rileene, but inevitably concluded that she would think badly of me, or, worse yet, that she had conspired with her sister to kill me. But what if Wenuke had never meant me any harm?
Word came that my Greek corpse-bride had been resurrected, her skeleton-hands thrusting out of the ground like some Parisienne’s high-riding breasts. I received indisputable evidence that she was sucking children’s blood. That was low of her, but don’t we all decay? I remember for instance Wenuke, whose crotch became a deep weedy hole with black water shining across its depths.
Of all of them, that Greek corpse had loved me the most. But my grief at losing her had dissipated. It was gradually being revealed to me that Wenuke was the one I had been meant for. And we were parted.
If I could only avoid ever seeing Wenuke again, no matter how much I missed her, then I would not be forced to experience my new relationship to her, which must resemble the viewing of a lover’s corpse; she would still be there, but she could never be to me what she once had been. Each love has its habits, as I’ve said; and when that love breaks, the memories of those habits, or the attempted practice of them, comprise a skeleton of pain.
Meanwhile, there came a night event, a funeral, in fact; as you remember, I had met my Greek corpse at one of those; she knew that I would be at this new convocation, so I sent word to her by vampire bat to keep away; scanning the faces with a dread which would have erupted into anger had she been present in that cemetery of verdegrised urns on plinths, wilting marble mushrooms, I quickly began to feel her absence although I inspected each skull and mourner with an ever firmer despair; and when I saw that my ex-wife wasn’t there, I felt a patient ancient sadness.
The bronze woman was present, but I avoided her green frog’s grimace; later I heard that she had ripped a man’s heart out.
I went to California and stalked a high dark ocean-horizon from behind palms and bungalows; until one stormy night I spied a sea goddess whose garters were frilly white wave-tops and lacy sea-spittle. I especially remember a pointed brown-green breast gushing white froth. Swimming in her foamy white petticoats and her long green seaweed hair, she sang me the same melody she’d sung Ulysses, which made little impression on me; I’d heard it all before. Needless to say, I finally penetrated her, which was quite a trick, as you would know if you’d ever looked down through the foam, deep down into a green vulva. She had eyes like mirror-wet sand. Wringing out her dark sea-black skirt afterward, on her tiny lava-islet decorated with skulls, she offered me eternal life beneath the water; unfortunately, I was already diseased by that curse.
The elongated reflection of a seagull on wet sand kept me company once she swam away (she was hungry, she said). Then I was very much alone; and then, just as a dark wave rises suddenly out of the darkness, breaks open into spume and sprays you, longing for Mrs. Wenuke Lei McLeod came to me, and in my vision she was as humidly cool and perfect as jungleside sea air.
After that, there were slow late night sounds of heels on the just-shined tiles of hotel lobbies whose inset patterns now receded ever more vividly to ever greater distances. Beneath a potted plant, a longhaired slendernecked woman waited for midnight, her hands in her lap. I approached her, almost weeping. When she caressed my arm, her fingers reminded me of a crested iguana, slowly drawing itself along a branch.
And I thought, my God, my God, I am so weary of being a murderer; when can I find someone perfect enough to kill me? Who will she be? Will she first permit me to gorge my desires on her white-banded flesh and bluish face? And just before it happens, as her mouth suddenly tightens and for the very last time I stroke the preparatory pulsing of her tentacles, would it be hypocrisy or love if I asked her to remember me when it was over, and perhaps even put on widow’s weeds?
THE BANQUET OF DEATH