2
THE SILVER ROOFS extended from my window in a fractured line under a sky which displayed a small but ineffably shiny cloud to the west. The radio was playing “Volare” by Dean Martin, the notorious companion of Frank Sinatra.
Catherine, bless her heart maybe, Catherine pried me from the door and put me in the guest room. Then she had Doctor Proctor come over and load me good on some intravenous downer. At first I thought I had passed into the great beyond. I thought quite objectively about the dead. They are given so much credit; when, in fact, they don’t know much of anything. And why should they? They have enough to do.
I’m busy too. I’m still alive and I’m not ashamed of it. I’m proud of this raiment. Bring on the ghosts. I’ll pack them through the streets. Let the ones who have ringed the city, who have made our lives an encampment, let them whiten the air, the sea. I happen to have enough to do already. Let the dead run a grocery store or build an airplane. I am not impressed with them, with the possible exception of my brother Jim. And having to argue as to whether my father is actually dead deprives the whole question of its dignity.
In the photograph of my mother’s funeral party, I am the third mourner from the left. I am wearing a Countess Mara tie, older than me, whose blue flowers arise like ghosts toward my throat. It is widely presumed that the expression on my face is a raffish grin; whereas it is plainly the grimace of gastric distress.
In the foreground of the picture, my aunts carry on their bulbous flirtation with the photographer. The picture is covered with the somnolent stains of handling by interested parties who believed me to have been grinning.
By noontime, Catherine had not come home and I had suffered a whiteout, a silence, a space between the echoes of the dead I had trifled with; and I felt prefigured in the vacancy, as though my future inhered there.
My hand was bandaged, I had evidently passed out and hung from the nail until discovered. The muscles in my arm were sore and stretched. From dangling.
I was falling asleep again when I heard Catherine arrive with someone, unloading groceries in front. Then she and the other person, another young woman, came and sat on the bed and looked at me. I pretended to be asleep.
“He’s still out of it,” said the other woman.
“This is Marcelline,” said Catherine.
“How did you know I was awake?”
“I can read you like a Dell comic.”
“How do you do, Marcelline.”
“Marcelline has just had an abortion.”
“I wasn’t making a pass at her, Catherine.”
Marcelline said, “If I roll a J will you all smoke on it with me?” I told her that stuff was cluttering up the drug scene and that I was opposed to its use.
“Who gave you the abortion?” I asked. All I wanted was to talk to Catherine.
“A laughing nurse in New Orleans. A real card. I had to change planes in Tampa.”
“Marcelline loves Tampa,” Catherine said.
“They make a nice cigar there,” I offered.
“How’s your hand?”
“Hurts a lot.”
“You had a nail in it,” said Catherine.
Marcelline said, “A little crucifixion. What a droll guy. I hear you can’t remember anything. You’re full of little tricks.”
“Used to be he just talked funny,” said Catherine, “now he’s commenced acting it out.”
Marcelline said, “Tampa is full of elderly nice persons who know they could eat it any minute. So they don’t talk nuts to get laughs. My, it hurts. That nurse just got in there and rambled.”
I looked at Catherine with her berserk mass of kinks and curls. I thought, it didn’t matter about men; but when push came to shove, these Southern girls only wanted to see each other. I didn’t know what I was, not a Southerner certainly. A Floridian. Drugs, alligators, macadam, the sea, sticky sex, laughter, and sudden death. Catherine initiated the idea that I was a misfit. I took to the idea like a duck to water.
I felt sleepy again. I heard a sprinkler start up, the first drops of water falling on the ground with distinct thuds. I heard the voice of my odious grandfather twenty years ago, “There’s a nigger fishing the canal and he’s got one on!” My hands were knit together and I was wonderfully happy and comfortable drifting away with the two pretty women chatting on the end of the bed, about Tampa, about the difficulty of getting nice cotton things any more, about Wallace Stevens in Key West.
When I woke up a few minutes later, Marcelline was kissing Catherine. One of Catherine’s little breasts was outside her shirt and her panties were stretched between her knees. Marcelline slid the green skirt over Catherine’s stomach and bottom, then put it up under her. Catherine lifted one leg free of the panties in a gesture that put her leg out of the shadow the bed was in, into the sunlight. Marcelline slipped away and stayed until I heard the familiar tremolo of Catherine.
When Marcelline stood up, tucking a yellow forties washdress around her good Cajun body, she laughed suddenly. “He’s awake!” Then leaned over and pinched my cheek. “I bet he jerked off the whole while!”
When Marcelline left, I said, “So that’s it, eating pussy all day.”
“Oh, God,” she said, getting up. “I’m going to the beach. And when your hand is better, you’re leaving too.”
“Why did you take me in?”
“I was embarrassed to have you nailed on the door.”
“Oh, Catherine. — Why am I itching?”
“My apartment’s got a cistern under it and the mosquitoes are coming up through the floor.”
“Have you turned queer?”
“Don’t talk to me like that, you.”
“Can I read my old love letters?”
“Burned them.”
“Burned them! They’re worth a fortune.”
“To who? Other depraved perverts?”
“I just don’t like that phrase. It’s not a clever phrase. It’s a dreary phrase and everybody’s calling me it. I’m sick of it. You hurt with those hand-me-down phrases. They suggest indifference. Will you get in here with me?”
“No.”
“You committed a crime against nature with Marcelline. What’s wrong with me?”
“That’s not the point, my dear. You’ll forget we did.”
“What’s Marcelline do?”
“She’s blackmailing a judge in Toronto.”
“I still love you.”
“Fuck off.”
“With my whole heart.”
“Why did you tell the magazines you regretted every minute with me?”
“Because you’d hurt me by disappearing without explanation, by leaving me flat. You can’t do that to a psychotic.”
“You told them that I was a nouveau Hitler maiden. Why?”
“Oh, did I do that?”
“That’s why I call you a depraved pervert.”
“Slip in here with me.”
“No, I’m a big bull dike. I only like eating pussy. You called me deep-dish Southern plastic in a national publication.”
“Catherine, don’t ridicule me. I suspect your motives, doing that at the foot of my bed anyway.”
“Come on, Chet, be the fun guy we knew you to be.”
“Eat it.”
“Not if it’s a shlong.”
“God, Catherine, I can’t have this smut.”
“Tell it to the dead elephant. Tell it to the creeps who said you’re God. Tell it to the mayor of New York.”
I stared at her, loving her hauteur, admiring that she was probably not going to buy it ever again. I wanted her. I was not down on sex, though some of my youthful flamboyance was no longer there.
She went to the wicker dresser and started raking idly through costume jewelry in a tray. She held the pretty junk to the light for an instant. Then her hands disappeared and her skirt fell. She turned and pulled the blouse over her head, then the little turned-in-knee two-step to get rid of the panties. She said, “Apologize.”