Someday they will find the sun’s secret sleeping place. Vines will reach out and branches lock in an intricate embrace. The sun will be caught and bound to the ground. In time, a great new mountain will form. And only the trees and plants silently rustling and nodding their shadowy mongoloid heads will be able to see in the forever darkness to come.
There is night, the final season of the canals. The night is laced with sea salts. The air stings. The night is a terrible season, even when it is wrapped in a luminous grayish fog thick as the breath of condemned men.
Night is a kind of metal. Nothing stirs, not even shadows. The ducks grow quiet. One can’t see the bottles that float in the water, the tossed-away pieces of old tires, the gray clutter of newspapers and plastic wrappers that stay on the surface for days like a species of mutant flower. Dogs begin to bark. It is time to wait for Jason.
Sometimes Jason will cross the Grand Canal bridge and then the bridge over Carroll Canal and Linnie Canal and Howland Canal and finally, the bridge near my house on Eastern Canal. Sometimes I watch Jason zigzagging toward me, kicking beer cans from the eroded sidewalks into the blackening water. Sometimes Jason will come to me in his yellow paddle boat. I can hear him humming as he ties the boat to the wooden spoke he drove into the side of the canal in front of my house, the pillar he insists on calling a dock. Sometimes I will weave my way across the bridges to Jason’s house. And sometimes we don’t see each other at all.
I might wake up with Jason, at my house or his house. Sometimes I wake alone or with another man. The men are interchangeable and mean nothing. In Los Angeles no one is who he appears to be. Everyone will claim to be really something or someone else, aspiring, in transition, headed toward some all-encompassing vision. And they pass through my life like water, not even leaving an impression.
When I wake up it is the first or second season of the canals then, the pale mirrory unsubstantial silver of early morning or the thick yellow of noon.
My job consists of keeping Jason’s books for him and collecting the rents from his various properties. Jason is too pure to do this himself. He must keep himself free from the tedium of ordinary reality, of calling plumbers and electricians, of keeping numbers in neat rows and making trivial decisions. Jason is too busy creating, planning his new canvases, sawing and nailing the boards together, sketching the canvases, arranging painting sessions with his models and sitting alone in dark rooms, thinking of women and their pink and yellow and peach-colored flesh.
Jason is also afraid to collect his rents. The pensioners with their gray streaked windows and canes, their cataracts and coughing, terrify him. The hippies call him a capitalist pig. The bikers threaten to beat him up and burn the house down if he bothers them again.
Oddly, no one threatens me. I step out of a fog bank, wave gray, a piece of the beach inching up to doors, peripheral. Ebb and flow and I am gone, shadow.
I lay down in my bedroom, the bedroom in the Woman’s House, and waited for Jason to call me. Jason, making his eyes dazzle, dance and sparkle. Jason, making his eyes black tunnels, black torpedoes hurtling across rooms. Jason, making his voice a sea filled with small harbor waves. Jason, making his words promise, hard as spines. Jason making his words snap manic and red. Jason, my sorcerer.
I had enough cocaine for one more shot. I took it.
5
Jason and I live precisely nine hundred and twenty paces from each other; I’ve counted. But distance is always an illusion, relative. Jason and I live with an unspeakable gulf between us, a black space that might be filled with rows of stainless-steel spikes.
I think of my life with Jason in terms of eras, distinct blocks of time marked by unique characteristics. I look at our life the way geologists look at rocks. Still, a certain amount of dust settles, a fine layer of silt and sediment obscuring and graying. There is a loss of clarity. It becomes difficult to remember.
“I’ll never get married,” Jason said.
It was the beginning, the first era, when I lived in the Westwood duplex where Francine had installed me, wingless and hopeless. What was she going to do with me? I not only wasn’t ascending; I looked as if I might be leaning in that other direction, toward burial. I had divorced Gerald. I had returned to flat Los Angeles plan-less and futile. It was the reign of Richard Nixon. I waxed my new floors. The war went on. I stared out windows, watching the tops of palm trees sway like greasy strips of confetti. I kept waiting for something to happen.
“I must be free,” Jason informed me.
It was toward the end of my life in Westwood. I was edging into something new. He came to my apartment without calling. Sometimes he simply opened my refrigerator, made a sandwich and disappeared again for days. Sometimes he stayed for a week. I wandered through my apartment feeling like a guest, a newly arrived lodger waiting for my room key in a downstairs lobby.
“I’ll make you walk on eggshells. I do it to everybody. I’ll make the world a minefield for you. Help me,” Jason implored.
I opened my arms and rocked him and cooed softly. Jason was like a skittish horse. I was afraid that the first time I looked him directly in the eye and said no he would bolt. I learned to take small noiseless steps. My mouth felt glued shut.
I wanted to nest with him, to cuddle him and cushion myself by lying secure in the warm dark center of his life. In his absence I was a somnambulist. I pressed the shirt he chanced to leave against my face and filled my lungs with his smell, his shaving lotion and sweat, sunlight and the undefinable, duck squawks and sunsets and honeysuckle coating a high wire fence. I rocked his shirt against my breast like a child. At this time, in that distant and blank era, I envisioned washing his morning breakfast dishes as a holy task, a profound purification ritual. I wanted to merge our lives.
“Swallow me, you mean,” Jason has often accused. “You wanted to stuff and mount me, hang me on a wall.”
Perhaps he is right. I know I longed for him, leaped and lunged for him, needed him as I needed to breathe. When Jason talked to me I thought cherries in summer, a slow swaying hammock, mint juleps and yes, you are master, take curry and just-baked bread and love me, love me.
If my words offend you now or ever, then forget them. They are lies, confusions. You know women. I was unwell. Does my body please? I’ll change it for you. I’ll thin down or fatten. Look, my skin will tan and firm simply by your command. I am yours, yours. I’ll do anything. I’ll grow new memories for you, cell by cell. I’ll invent a new history with more laughter and more bells, more sunlight and sails. Watch me dream of drawers fat with socks that always match. I will be Scheherazade at five A.M. I am yours, yours.
“You’re a romantic and I’m a sensualist,” Jason explained. “That’s the whole problem.”
Jason had dropped by. I had been waiting all evening, sitting in a chair facing the front door, naked with a white feather boa draped around my neck and rings on my fingers, bracelets on my trembling arms, hands wrapped around the same melted-down Scotch in the same hot glass, waiting, waiting. We made love near the door standing up. We made love in bed. I was the shore and he was the ocean and I was eroding. My hidden parts opened glistening, a collection of starsides, a whirlpool, a phenomenon, girl, girl, girl.
At the end of our first year, after that initial period of probation, I moved into my house on Eastern Canal. Jason’s second house. The Woman’s House, he called it. The house where all Jason’s women have lived during the past twelve years.
It would be almost like living together, Jason explained, but better. There would be no domestic quarrels, none of the trivia of an ordinary marriage, the dull predictable routines and all that goddamned bourgeois gray. We would stay viable human beings in our separate but equal ways, identities intact, free to come and go as we pleased.