“I am a congestion of storage batteries. I’m wired in series. I’ve left some fundamental components on the beach, and await recharging, bombardment, implanting, something, shall we say, very close to the bone. I do want to go on; but having given up, I can’t be expected to be very sympathetic.”
“That’s all very pretty,” Catherine Clay said. “But I don’t care. Now may I go?”
“There’s more.”
“I don’t care. And above all, I don’t want you stalking me like this in the supermarket. I can’t have you lurking in the aisles.”
“It’s still the same.”
“It’s not, you liar, you flop!”
Slapping me, crying, yelling, oh God, clerks peering. I said, “You’re prettiest like this.” She chunks a good one into my jaw. The groceries were on the floor. Someone was saying, “Ma’am? Ma’am?” My tortoiseshell glasses from Optique Boutique were askew and some blood was in evidence. My lust for escape was complete. Palm fronds beat against the air-conditioned thermopane windows like my own hands.
Two clerks were helping Catherine to the door. I think they knew. Mrs. Fernandez, the store manager, stood by me.
“Can I use the crapper?” I asked.
She stared at me coolly and said, “First aisle past poultry.”
I stood on the toilet and looked out at my nation through the ventilator fan. Any minute now, and Catherine Clay, the beautiful South Carolina wild child, would appear shortcutting her way home with her groceries.
I heard her before I could see her. She wasn’t breathing right. That scene in the aisles had been too much for her and her esophagus was constricted. She came into my view and in a very deep and penetrating voice I told her that I still loved her, terrifying myself that it might not be a sham, that quite apart from my ability to abandon myself to any given moment, I might in fact still be in love with this crafty, amazing woman who looked up in astonishment. I let her catch no more than a glimpse of me in the ventilator hole before pulling the bead chain so that I vanished behind the dusty accelerating blades, a very effective slow dissolve.
I put my sunglasses back on and stood in front of the sink, staring at my blank reflection, scrutinizing it futilely for any expression at all and committing self-abuse. The sunglasses looked silvery and pure in the mirror, showing twins of me, and I watched them until everything was silvery and I turned off the fan, tidied up with a paper towel, and went back out through poultry toward the electric doors. Mrs. Fernandez, the store manager, smiled weakly and I said, “Bigger even than I had feared.” The heat hit me in the street and I started … I think I started home. It was to feed the dog but I was thinking of Catherine and I had heartaches by the million.
* * *
My father was a store detective who was killed in the Boston subway fire, having gone to that city in connection with the Bicentennial. He had just left Boston Common, where we have kin buried. Everything I say about my father is disputed by everyone. My family have been shipwrights and ship’s chandlers, except for him and me. I have been as you know in the Svengali business; I saw a few things and raved for money. I had a very successful show called The Dog Ate The Part We Didn’t Like. I have from time to time scared myself. Even at the height of my powers, I was not in good health. But a furious metabolism preserves my physique and I am considered a tribute to evil living.
Those who have cared for me, friends, uncles, lovers, think I’m a lost soul or a lost cause. When I’m tired and harmless, I pack a gun, a five-shot Smith and Wesson.38. It’s the only.38 not in a six-shot configuration I know of. How the sacrifice of that one last shot makes the gun so flat and concealable, so deadlier than the others. Just by giving up a little!
As to my mother, she was a flash act of the early fifties, a bankrolled B-girl who caught cancer like a bug that was going around; and died at fifty-six pounds. There you have it. The long and the short of it. And I had a brother Jim.
The money began in a modest way in the 1840’s. A grandfather of minor social bearing, who had fought a successful duel, married a beautiful girl from the Canary Islands with two brothers who were ship’s carpenters. They built coasters, trading smacks, sharpie mailboats, and a pioneer lightship for the St. Lucie inlet. The Civil War came and they built two blockade runners for the rebellion, the Red Dog and the Rattlesnake; went broke, jumped the line to Key West again while Stephen Mallory left town to become Secretary of the Confederate Navy. At what is now the foot of Ann Street, they built a series of deadly blockade boats, light, fast, and armed. They were rich by then, had houses with pecan wood dining-room tables, crazy chandeliers, and dogwood joists pinned like the ribs of ships. Soon they were all dead; but the next gang were solid and functional and some of them I remember. Before our shipyard went broke in the Depression, they had built every kind of seagoing conveyance that could run to Cuba and home; the prettiest, a turtle schooner, the Hillary B. Cates, was seen last winter off Cap Haitien with a black crew, no masts, and a tractor engine for power, afloat for a century. She had been a yacht and a blockade runner, and her first master, a child Confederate officer from the Virginia Military Institute, was stabbed to death by her engineer, Noah Card, who defected to the North and raised oranges at Zephyrhills, Florida, until 1931. He owed my grandfather money; but I forget why.
My grandfather was a dull, stupid drunk; and the white oak and cedar and longleaf pine rotted and the floor fell out of the mold loft while he filed patents on automobiles and comic cigarette utensils. I recall only his rheumy stupor and his routine adoration of children.
Let me try Catherine again.
“One more and I go to the police for a restraining order.”
No sense pursuing that for the moment.
* * *
My stepmother had a suitor. He was an attorney-at-law and affected argyle socks and low blue automobiles. He screamed when he laughed. What I think he knew was that the shipyard was a world of waterfront property and that when the Holiday Inn moved in where the blockade boats and coasters had been built, Roxy got all the money. His name was Curtis Peavey and he was on her case like a man possessed, running at the house morning noon and night with clouds of cheap flowers. Roxy had been known to fuck anything; and I couldn’t say she ever so much as formed an opinion of Peavey. I noticed though that she didn’t throw the flowers away, she pushed them into the trash, blossoms forward, as if they’d been involved in an accident. In this, I pretended to see disgust. I myself didn’t like Peavey. His eyes were full of clocks, machinery, and numbers. The curly head of hair tightened around his scalp when he talked to me and his lips stuck on his teeth. But he had a devoted practice. He represented Catherine. No sense concealing that. If Peavey could, he’d throw the book at me. He said I was depraved and licentious; he said that to Roxy. Whenever I saw him, he was always about to motivate in one of the low blue cars. Certain people thought of him as a higher type; he donated Sandburg’s life of Lincoln to the county library with his cornball bookplate in every volume, a horrific woodcut of a sturdy New England tree; with those dismal words: Curtis G. Peavey. As disgusting as Roxy was, I didn’t like to see her gypped; which is what Peavey clearly meant to do. I didn’t care about the money at all. I have put that shipyard up my nose ten times over.