“Yes,” replied the one in the bonnet, “isn’t it pretty to think so.”
“Now,” said the former, “I’m heading home to put things by.”
* * *
“Want to hear some poetry, Catherine?”
“Like what?”
“Sappho or Dylan Thomas?”
“You don’t know any Sappho unless Marcelline told you.”
“The fuck I don’t.”
“She better not be reading your ass poems.”
I gave her my favorite Sappho. “Someone, I tell you, will remember us. We are oppressed by fears of oblivion, yet are always saved by the judgment of good men.”
“I didn’t think you knew one.”
“I don’t love Sappho as an excuse for eating pussy,” I said. “Now, let me tell you the Dylan Thomas poem I like.”
“None of the drunken slobber poems,” she said.
“I’ll tell you one that means the most to me: A process blows the moon into the sun, pulls down the shabby curtains of the skin; and the heart gives up its dead.”
“Why is that one important to you?”
“I read it at my father’s funeral.”
“Your father didn’t die, fuckface.”
“Don’t tell me that an event I know by heart didn’t happen. I was the third mourner from the left in the funeral party and don’t call me fuckface.”
“That was your mother’s funeral. You showed me the picture. She did die.”
“My father died in the Boston subway fire!”
“Your father has never been in Boston! I asked him!”
We went into Fitzgerald’s for a drink. The waitresses were stuffing rugs under the lid of the piano. When one came we ordered Stolichnaya and limes. My ears were ringing.
“What are you doing to that piano?”
“The guy we hired is good but he’s too loud. He’s a spade.”
“That makes him too loud?”
“No, he happens to be an Afro-American person. I thought I’d mention that.”
When she came back with the drinks, I said, “Those rugs are going to keep it from playing at all.”
“It’s worth a try.”
“I think you’re showing real aggression toward this musician.”
“Leave her alone, Chet,” said Catherine.
“We love him. He teaches all the ofay waitresses how to get down, and we do his charts and balance his aura.”
“I see.”
“Three dollars.”
Catherine paid. I was on the humble, having mislaid my wallet. People were staring into the bar from outside. I let no one catch my eye. All they want are loans.
“Let’s take a sink or swim approach,” said Catherine.
“A little idle laughter or something?”
“Yeah, or something. We’re getting morbid or something.”
“Or something.”
“How do you feel you’re doing on your memory?”
“I’m avoiding that gumshoe like the plague. He’s been dogging my heels, following me into restaurants with his shitsucker showdowns.”
“I just wish out of respect for my investment you’d take the time to let him tell you what you’ve been doing.”
“Catherine, why do we have to talk about him now?”
“He’s looking at you.”
I glanced up and sure as hell.
“What are you trying to do to my mind?” I inquired.
“Restore the original luster.”
“Well, don’t.”
A member of Jorge Cruz’s orchestra sat at the bar with an uncased yellow saxophone propped next to him, reminding me of my commitment at the Casa Marina. He ordered two shots of Mount Gay Eclipse and began to hum a nervous salsa tune while spying on me in the mirror. With everyone watching me, I began to think of the writer, the one who quit everything to go home so Joe Cain’s widow could show him what was what. I could have gone with him and made a cowboy of myself or merely lived in a way that Jesse James would have understood, or even my grandfather with a cane in his scabbard and his Lucky Strikes and his board-and-batten barn in Excelsior Springs with its lunatic memories of upside-down border fighters.
I could, in any case, restore myself in the glades I’d loved as a boy, hunting turtles and smelling gunpowder from my.22 instead of trotting the burnt-out nerves of the nation like an adenoidal Basenji. I could stop lying and try to improve my memory without being an utter fool about it.
Catherine took me to a house on Lopez Lane to carry a lamp home for her. We entered in back beside the cistern under the dogwood lintel and found ten people concluding a coke deal. “It’s only me,” sang Catherine and the deal went on, with a young scientist on a three-beam scale trying to break a little boulder into quarter ounces. I commenced feeling the strain. The subject of the deal was a normal-looking young businessman given away only by half-mast eyes. There was a very tiny girl at the table and she chopped one little nugget on a piece of marble. The businessman rolled a crisp fifty-dollar bill and the girl separated the blow into rails. Ceremoniously the marble slab went round the table, the businessman first, passing his rolled bill, and when it came back to him, the fifty had turned into a one. When Catherine came back into the room with her standing lamp, the businessman was on his feet shouting, “Fuck this noise the deal is off!” At which point the tiny girl produced the fifty and indignantly demanded to know where her one went to. “It’s interest on my fifty,” said the businessman. I put the lamp over my shoulder, swallowed my spit, and headed for Catherine’s house.
“I was shocked when we went in there and saw what was going on,” said Catherine. “But you stood tall in the face of all that coke.” She was proud of me.
Once inside Catherine’s house, she reached out, taking me by the front of my shirt. “Let me help you with your little things,” she said and pulled the shirt violently open, shooting buttons around the room. I reached up and pulled the bead chain and saw the shadows of the fan race against the walls. Star holes appeared in my brain pan. I looked down the front of her Cuban blouse and saw a nipple aiming in space with agonizing delicacy. I realized that the crew of the cucumber boat at Mallory dock had been in a position to spot these glands when we had walked — see, I can remember this — and discussed without raving our own lives together in the rooms and corridors of big-city hotels.
From the bedroom I heard a gruff voice, “Oral love, not that! I’m no shootist!” Catherine jerked open the door and there was Marcelline with the agent, that sight, engaged in a blur of manual intercourse. She shut the door again.
“Your place,” she said. When we opened the door to go out, there was an intelligent-looking young man poising his hand to knock. “Go to it,” said Catherine to him, “they’ve got the jump on you though.” I had to race to keep up. The breeze poured into my buttonless shirt. “That was the grave robber,” said Catherine. “He had a synthesizer fellowship at Juilliard.”
“He looks it.”
“Give me any other century,” she replied. She insisted on making two stops: one to buy an album called Great Waltzes of the World and another for six bottles of Evian mineral water. When we got to my place, we put on the record and danced until we polished off the mineral water. The dog watched the prom from the sunny patio. Playing cards of afternoon light from the kitchen window crawled across the floor until my father’s picture lit up on the wall and I screamed holy murder.
“I’m getting out of here.”
“Sit down,” said Catherine.
“Bugger that, my ears are ringing.”
“Just calm down, Chet, please.”
“My father led a long and heroic life at sea and died ironically in a tunnel under the city of Boston instead of at the helm of a schooner as he should have. It upsets me to see his likeness.”