I have kept myself in transit ever since I left home at eighteen. I studied metallurgy at one college and Chinese at another, moving from hotel to hotel while I studied. My Aunt Myra in New York left me eighty thousand dollars when I was fourteen. I put it into forests at a good time, and by college I could afford a suite at any hotel I fancied and a secretary to type my term papers. I’ve never stayed in a plain hotel room; I always take suites. I think I fear being stuck in a single room like my father.
I realize as I write this—as I dictate it—that I am living now in a single room, as I did at Isabel’s. I am the sole resident of this moonwood shack, or cabin, the only piece of architecture on the planet Belson. There are no forget-me-nots on the walls, which are the matte silver of moonwood itself, that charming mineral. Still, the thought that I have become the inhabitant of one room and that my condition therefore resembles my father’s makes me uneasy. Like him, I spend hours at my desk, reading. Like him, I smoke cigars endlessly. Like him, I speak to no one.
I need to mine more moonwood and build on another room. I need a companion. I need Isabel.
I’ve lived here four months now, with my little morphine factory and my red computer and with the garden outside. There could hardly be a way of being more alone, except that the planet itself is my friend and lover. When I get morose I can water my garden or shoot up or do as I am doing this very moment: dictate these reflections into the red box that types them up and never makes a spelling error. My fractured life comes rising from a slot, in crisp Bodoni Bold on an endless sheet of Hammermill Bond; there’s enough of it now to paper this moonwood cabin, to give me a celestial womb lined with the print reflections of my life.
Since the ship left, there has been no sound but my own voice and the rare singing of the grass. Sometimes the planet shows me its rings. Her rings. His rings. They are seldom visible from here below, although I don’t know why. One night last month I was awakened by the grass singing and, mirabile dictu, had my first orgasm in years, lying there alone hearing that powerful wordless song and picturing Isabel and the warmth in her Scottish face. That one ejaculation undid a coil deep in my spirit and blew fresh air into my musty soul; I went for three days afterward without morphine. Isabel, I send you my love. I want to marry you if I ever come back to the Earth.
I’ve known Isabel for ten years and lived with her for five agonizing months, and only now am I coming to realize how much she means to me. Wouldn’t you know I’d put twenty-three light-years between us before I would see that? Maybe the distance is necessary to see beyond the fights we had. During our last month together my impotence turned me into a godawful nag; I worked on her case endlessly, nagging her about whatever came to mind, inwardly tearing myself apart with thoughts about all the potent lovers she must have had in her life. I would imagine stupid-looking young men who mounted Isabel’s slight body with the aplomb of jockeys. My stomach ached at such thoughts. Yet Isabel gave no justification for them. She was faithful to my forced celibacy while I lived with her, and there were no mementoes of other men around her place. I know because I looked.
I nagged her about her career. I told her she should try for bigger parts in plays, or quit the theater. I would complain about the time she spent shopping for clothes and about the way she seemed to fill that small apartment with shoes and dresses so there was no place for my corduroys and jeans and lumberjack shirts. And yet I knew during all this that I secretly approved, because Isabel looked splendid in her clothes.
I wasn’t always that way with her. I could be pleasant enough at times, and Isabel liked my sense of humor and my general disdain for the pretense of the business world. We were also both serious lovers of New York and of New York food. And Isabel knew, as women do, that I genuinely appreciated her good looks. There must have been something about me that she liked or I’d have been kicked out, if only for the messes I made on the floor with my cigar ashes. Isabel’s floor was painted white; she had done the job herself not long before I moved in. Six layers, and each one rubbed down with steel wool. I managed to spill a lot of ashes from my Gueveras on that floor and then grind them in later by pacing. Hostility, I suppose. One cold Monday after her play had closed, Isabel spent the day on her knees scrubbing the floor and then giving it another coat of paint. She did this in black panties and socks, bare-breasted, with a coal fire blazing in the grate. I tried to ignore her from behind my Wall Street Journals and my stock reports and prospectuses, but I couldn’t keep my eyes off that undulant ass and those lovely breasts that hung down and gently swung from side to side as she scrubbed with a Kiwi brush and then rubbed and then painted. But I kept my hands off her, knowing all too well I had no follow-through available. It was agonizing, and I felt guilty about having made the floor a mess in the first place. There was a big scratch in it where I had thrown and broken a coffee cup in one of my rages over not getting it up. She filled the scratch with plastic wood, sanded it and then painted over it. Bless her heart. And then that evening she bundled herself up and went off to the Morosco Theatre to try for a part in a revival of Hamlet. She came home to our paint-fumed apartment and announced she was going to be Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother, that it was a terrific chance. Here was Isabel, forty-three years old, as happy as an ingenue with her first part. I should have married her on the spot and started having children. God what a healthy brood we could be making! But instead, I was dismayed by it all and began to think of leaving. We had lived together five months, without sexual intercourse. And I didn’t want to get that beautiful floor dirty again. I didn’t want to watch Isabel struggle to learn all that blank verse. I remembered Hamlet from college; it was a big part.
Eventually I got a suite at the Pierre. It was four rooms and a kitchen on the fourth floor for three thousand a day, plus tax and service. It was warm, since the management had good connections. I took up cooking in earnest.
My best success was pot roast. I got a real pleasure—maybe my only pleasure in those sexually bleak days—from peeling carrots and potatoes and onions, weeping through a dozen onions at a time, standing over my stainless-steel sink and blinking tearily out the window at the empty shell of the General Motors building. I browned the meat in safflower oil, the only oil Isabel would touch, after coating it with durum flour and drenching it in Java pepper. Java pepper was another of Isabel’s fetishes. I had to admit she was right too. And I wasn’t cooking all those roasts for her either. She never came up to that suite, with its big beige sofas and its oriental rugs; I never invited her.
Oh Isabel! What a pervert I turned out to be, when push came to shove! It’s all too clear now as I speak this on Belson: I didn’t move out of your place because of the cold or because you were memorizing blank verse. I moved out because I had fallen in love with you. There I would stand in that high-ceilinged old kitchen with its white walls and its wooden counter-tops, and all the sexual energy that your body had inspired in me—that waist, those hips, those sweet breasts—went into my doleful midafternoon peeling of carrots, my weeping over stacks of shiny brown onions! My analyst, the Great Orbach, would call it sublimation; I call it a fraud and a cheat. I should have been arrested for gross and illicit orality. (Officer, do you see that big man over there, with the glasses and the lumberjack shirt, the one with the stack of vegetables at his elbow? I want him taken into custody and charged with criminal avoidance of manhood.)