Surviving Romance

The world swelters, even at twilight on this August Sunday. My great love naps, her hair lank and humid across her forehead. The blunt protrusion of an empty wine bottle from last night’s party, which all day we have forgotten to clear away, bobs above the scratched rim of a bucket, its ice long gone liquid. How tempting it is for me to laze here too in the dank present. 

It must be jelly, ‘cause jam don’t shake like that. Big Joe Turner’s figuration from my ancient turntable, the volume low, recalls not some erotic encounter but a dawn from years and years ago, which might seem to urge, Hurry back. I remember mornings then, the streets’ tar not yet burst into novas of heat. Our family was passing two weeks in a rented seaside cottage.

Just a little boy, I’d race every day to the tide-washed beach to gather jellyfish, which lay bright as jewels in the sand– perfect, intact. I’d carry them home in a bucket, store them down-cellar until dark, then haul them up at about this very hour, stashing them under my bed. It made no sense, except that it did, to me.

Just under my bedroom’s floor, each night I’d hear my father rocking my mother in the bamboo glider. Soon, suddenly and mysteriously, their lively chatter subsided to indecipherable whispers. My crisp sheets wilted; cicadas droned; headlights circuited the walls. 

While I slept, those parents drained my treasures into a canal beside the house. I wouldn’t learn they had done that until much later. It seems –and why not?– that the stench from the pail grew nearly unbearable by ten o’clock. They’d fill it with water from that rank canal, explaining, mendaciously, how jellyfish dissolve once they’re out of the sea.  

Every day, the same dreary routine: dissolution, vanished particularity. It seemed tragic but unavoidable. And since then, experience has leached the glitter from other ruses as well. I have at times responded to all that with naked disenchantment, as if most of what we men and women value will always trickle back to a native, general ocean. One assembles hopes or objects or affections or memories, but they’re all deliquescent.

Yet some things are not so fugitive after all.  I note the gray in my wife’s full hair, the slack of her jaw as she slumbers– and each appears a feature of the most beautiful creature I’ve ever imagined. Her length of limb and neck strike me as nigh miraculous. 

My senses stir: a breeze comes in, stiffening from northwest now, and the haze visibly lifts. Outdoors, there is no odor of mudflat, teeming canal, old fish; I hear no soporific swish-swish of tires on pavement; there rises a tang of evergreen, the deeper aroma of dark earth; the comical twang of a bullfrog sounds from the pond. 

I’d felt as though my very flesh were melting. Now, as that gathering wind caresses the curtains and my sweat dries, I stand and put a match to a candle on the table. Its slight flame leans inward. My love’s ring-gems glitter in the subtle light, as drops might on a window screen after cooling rain. I imagine sharp stars. She seems a girl in such illumination; her eyes have the same glitter, familiar and dear, as she wakes and smiles.

 

Lame and Sound

Whatever the ailment, he wasn’t right.  You could tell that just by observation, however subtle and oblique I tried to make my own. I already knew of his infirmity, to be sure. He didn’t live in our town, but I’d seen him before in that bigger one, where I go now and then to do errands. The least attentive person on earth wouldn’t miss him, with his home-made walking stick, his filthy parka, the oddly fringed bandana he wears around his head, and above all the way he moves. 

That morning, his cloth-wrapped head was conspicuous, precisely, in his tortured movement. Glancing sidelong, I could watch the bandanna’s flapping as he performed a series of frenzied nods, staggering away from the magazine stand where he’d just bought some sort of porn magazine, maybe only Playboy, maybe something even more witless. In any case, he appeared desperate to vanish, to make for home, whatever home might amount to.   

As for me, I’d just bought a copy of the New York Times in the little convenience shop. The place was crowded, but any who noticed him looked quickly away, as I say. No one wanted to behold him as he lurched to the hissing door, then through, humping himself along like some shot beast. No one wanted to imagine what he’d ever done, what he did now, what he might do once gone from our view.

For my part, while a fall rain hard as a sledge kept thumping the roof, I imagined the pouts of the magazine’s back-cover models. I’d barely glimpsed the colorful advertisement before the lame man vanished, yet for some reason its glamorous couple, in their sleek, red, hide-seated convertible, regarding each other with smoldering eyes, had seared my brain.  

The woman’s expression was obviously designed to seem sexual, but to me– although, no, I wasn’t able to look at it for much longer than a second– her expression crazily resembled that of the reeling cripple himself: painful, even anguished. 

As for the man in the picture, we were to understand that he could speed away at will, as some lithe, wild creature might, the sort of creature a car like his would be named for. 

 

Smelly Socks: Revision

9/11/2002

If you’re an author, some people seem to assume you instinctively know more than other people, even if a given subject involves things you don’t have any answers for. The premise is absurd, of course, and yet –given the disruption to our national life in 2001– I figured some would be asking me, How has this changed your life and work? Or more simply: What are your thoughts on the catastrophe?

Indeed, some have asked me and still do, but these quick-fire twelve months later, I insist on answering, I don’t know. Nor do I trust anyone who claims to. We’ll all need time. In fact, probably what remains of any contemporary’s life won’t be adequate. 

My thoughts, I suspect, are inconsequential at all events. But then so are those of the self-appointed sages, who believe, whatever the enormity, they can step right through it to the proper moral stance. I wonder how their phone calls, full of griefs and angers, might have sounded from an upper floor, while the jumpers jumped and some who had authority deed not word– searched the Hadean stairwells, not looking for morals but mortals. How would the pundits sound right now if their native language were Arabic? 

What actually strikes me at the moment is the smell of these socks I’m putting on for a hike, which should be washed but may never be, except by rain and the flow of the good brooks where I ramble. That ammoniac odor calls to mind the one from my high school locker after football practice, which came at me as strong as furnace blast. Yet the stink somehow made me feel proud: it told me I was tough. I had survived. 

At 8:36 this morning, the national Moment of Silence, at the exact spot on route 5 where I was driving at that hour last year, having dropped our daughter at school, a child for whom I’d have laid down all my lives were I a cat, and would somewhere have found nine more for each of her sisters and brothers at 8:36 I recalled how the girl had dressed herself in red, white, and blue that morning, a patriot by accident. She was fixed, thank God, on how she looked and not on what any big event could mean. She was ten. I did not ask her how her world had changed, though surely it had done so for her as much as for me, perhaps more. 

This morning, I did not sob, or not quite, on hearing the names of victims recited over the air. I did suddenly feel American, however, far more than I had at the time of actual calamity, though I wonder what I mean by that. The feeling had to do with the north-country landscape, which has written itself all over me; it had something to do with my late father, a World War II veteran; something to do with the college roommate lost in Vietnam. It had something to do as well with the volunteer firemen who gathered silently at attention in my tiny town, wide spot in the road. I was almost home by then. How they moved me, pathetic creatures, people I knew one and all, and of course no more pathetic than you or I, than all of us in our feckless urge to do or utter whatever it is we’d give our souls for–or so we say. 

And now, the hour of catastrophe marked and gone by, the names all read for the year, I pull on the smelly socks, take my staff in hand, and head out to storm the woods and hills in a fury of rage or love or something else, or many things. It’s many things, no doubt. 

I’m not tough. An odor merely recalls a time when I dreamed of being. 

The first chill wind of fall comes crashing hard against me, trees’ debris in the air, thick woods ablaze, my need today again evident, more so than ever, to revise and revise what I once thought I was and thought I’d be, and thought life amounted to, and nation. That need had always been there, of course, as it should be, and again will be, and surely again will be.