A Moveable Famine (21 page)

“I’m feeling great!” Eddie said. He had returned from New York, where he met Jackie Onassis who was editing his book of stories,
The Wine Cellar.
He described her gardenia-filled office at Viking Press and how she praised his prose, telling him that a lot of writers write with their wrists, but he wrote with his whole body.

“She whispers,” Eddie said. “She never raises her voice so it’s rude to disagree. If she shouted, well, then we could have gone at it!” He made two fists and ducked a shoulder forward.

“A pug like you with a lady like that,” Vince wondered. “I heard the compound in Hyannis Port has heated towel racks.”

“And her favorite dish is unborn calf,” Post-Elliot said.

“I was on my best behavior,” Eddie said. “Though a big guy at the reception desk gave me some guff when I asked for Mrs. O. But I knew I could take him.” He stood up, pointing at his thick thighs. “The guy had spindly legs. You should have seen his face when we left for La Grenouille. By the way, Mrs. O never says hello, just smiles.” Eddie’s deeply turned-down mouth tried to imitate Jackie’s greeting, a twitch that lifted his lips slightly upward from their usual frown.

“Did you fuck her?” Vince asked.

Eddie didn’t answer. He was registering the question.

“Eddie,
did you fuck her?” Vince asked again.

Eddie continued thinking and I wondered if he’d get violent but instead he turned indignant, then gallant, raising his chin in the posture of someone who had escorted the wife of a president.

“Of course
not.
She’s a
nice woman,
Vince. A
nice
woman.”

Hester walked past in the other direction and I was the only one who noticed. She carried a brown paper bag, a loaf of French bread sticking out of it along with the
New York Times.

Vince bought a round, then Post-Elliot and then it was my turn. At the bar I crammed a bag of pretzels into my mouth. Porter walked out of the library across the street and joined us. It was getting dark and I was drunk. The jukebox played “Best Thing That Ever Happened To Me,” and a man at the bar began singing along, “If anyone should ever write my life story . . .” He was smiling, but his eyes were watery and my eyes got watery watching his. Vince said that if his life were made into a movie, Anthony Quinn would be a good choice. The sad singer at the bar continued with a keening mew, “For whatever reason there might be . . .”

Post-Elliot chose Steve McQueen. Bonetti said his life couldn’t be portrayed by an actor, but only by someone who had endured real pain. Like Rocky Graziano, the middleweight champion.

Porter was not interested in the game, so Vince said, “Ichabod Crane would play your life.” He paused. “If you had a life!”

Porter just smiled. He enjoyed the atmosphere, the company, even the insults. He was memorizing their words to record verbatim in a book of monologues called
On the Cod
.

Vince turned to me. My forehead felt numb, and my body paralyzed, encased in a block of ice, ice that was beginning to melt onto the ragged floorboards. When I announced the man who would play my life, I meant it with all my heart and with all my soul.

“Dean Martin.”

Vince, Eddie, and Post-Elliot all repeated the name at once. Everyone in the bar turned around and shut up. There was one second of silence before a thunderclap of laughter stormed around me and over the puddle I had become. I was smiling a dumb smile, the smile I hated in myself when I did something stupid, or found someone doing something stupid and was afraid to call it stupid. But no one was afraid to call me stupid, and amidst the horselaughs, which reached me as if I were underwater, Porter helped me from the bench.

“Let’s get something to eat,” he said.

I kept smiling, but I knew I’d made a fool of myself before the author of fourteen books and Mailer’s cohort edited by Jackie O.

Over fishwiches at The Post Office Café, I remembered the letter in my back pocket. It was wrinkled and smudged and looked like it had been mailed, received, and remailed. I put it by my plate and told Porter about my plans for the long poem. He said he was writing a short story about Isaac Babel, in the way Babel had written about Maupassant. Porter’s literary talk and the sandwich almost snapped me to my senses. He paid. He always did. And I stumbled to the Bull Ring, past the Fo’c’sle’s continuous roar, holding the letter outlining my plans.

C
HAPTER
N
INETEEN

HESTER’S BRUNCH—STATUES AND STATUETTES—COCKS AND COCKERELS—ONE POTATO—A MOUSE-LIKE DOG—DON’T BE A RAT—A NEW START FOR STAVRULA

A
stairway on the side of the Flagship restaurant led to Hester’s second-floor apartment overlooking the bay. Robert Creeley sat at the kitchen table surrounded by the writing fellows. Dugan’s wife, Judy, cracked eggs into a bowl and beat them with a whisk. Hester came toward me wearing an apron. A tumult of hair sprung from her head, hidden the day before by her hat. Her breasts, tightly checked, rode high on her body. She wore no makeup, eyeliner or lipstick. Her pale skin made the streak of flour on her cheek seem gray.

“I’m Hester,” she drawled, offering her hand. I was so struck by her that it took me a moment to notice the Chihuahua under her arm. “Would you like a Bloody Mary or a bullshot? Heretofore, I served only beer, but Porter brought vodka. This is Pepe.” Pepe’s eyes bulged as if overinflated.

It was eleven
A.M
., the appointed time, but everyone was drunk except Judy and Stanley. I learned that Creeley had arrived the night before and asked to meet the fellows right away. Porter herded them to the Fo’c’sle and then to his place after the bar closed. Many left, but this group had not yet gone to bed. Hester said that she and I missed it because we didn’t live at the complex. Dugan downed a glass of vodka. Porter had told me that Dugan drank in the morning and through the day until, as he put it, “the curtain dropped,” around eight o’clock, and all communication ended.

Hester poured a Bloody Mary for me from a silver pitcher. I couldn’t come up with anything to say to her, my pulse had raced all the way there and was still pounding. Kurt waved from a white wicker armchair where he wrote on a paper plate, printing along its circumference. Hester brought me to the table, which was cluttered with glasses and lit candles. “We’re having a conversation of interest to some. We’re naming our five favorite sea foods.” She raised her eyebrows to show it was not of interest to her.

I said hello to Ted and Gail, Jeanne and Wayne. Creeley was not wearing an eye patch. His black hair fell over his forehead like a wing. Creeley said to me, “In reverse order! You have to name your favorite sea foods
in reverse order
!” He stared at the table as he spoke, and tapped it with the heel of his fist, as if he had made a significant point.

Gail counted on her fingers, saying, “Scallops, squid, shrimp . . .” Dugan tallied her choices on his legal pad.

Judy interrupted from the kitchen. “Squid? Before shrimp? Are you crazy?”

“Well, I like squid . . .” Gail said shyly. “I never had it until last week.”

“Ridiculous!” Judy said, leaving the stove. “I’ll serve you some rubber bands!”

Stanley said, “At Ciro’s they do it right. Sautéed lightly, they turn it out on your plate.”

Gail looked at him thankfully. “We should try Ciro’s,” she said to Ted who closed his eyes, nodding off.

Stanley made the motion of a spoon above a dish, and said again, and with such feeling, you could see the squid being served. “They turn it out on your plate . . .”

Dugan drank from the vodka bottle at his right hand. “I’ll go for smelts, cod, oysters, clams and lobster.” He said it again as he wrote.

“Smelts first?” Ted said.

“No,” Dugan said very deliberately. “Number one: lobster! Number two: clams!”

“Dugan,” Judy yelled, “You said smelts first!”

“Okaaay,” he said, pressing down on the pen, saying, “Number one: smelts!”

Creeley asked him, “How many had lobster first?”

As Dugan flipped the page, he flipped his glass over as well and everyone tried to lean out of the way, but no one moved. A puddle formed on the pad, which Dugan bent into a crease, pouring the alcohol into his glass. He took a swig of the now blue vodka and smoothed the blotted pages. Kurt stumbled over and showed him the poems on paper plates. They had written circle poems that could start anywhere in the sentence. Porter showed me Dugan’s:

You do what you can do and I’ll do what I can do

Dugan turned Kurt’s plate in front of his eyes like a steering wheel and read:

I was giving blood to soldiers who were giving blood

“Nice work, Kurt,” he said and lit a cigarette. “Hester, do you have any buttermilk?”

“No, Dugan, she doesn’t,” Judy answered.

Hester spun the dial on a large radio, bending close to read the numbers and soon the room filled with Souza’s marching music.

“I know the DJ,” she said. “He’s very well-spoken.” She took my hand and pressed my palm to the polished mahogany. “It was my father’s,” she said. “A Jackson Bell from the thirties.”

“It has a warm sound,” I said.

There was a break in the music, and the disc jockey read copy, inviting listeners to a benefit for the Drop-In Center. He said, “Come on, come all!”

“Shouldn’t that be ‘come
one
?’ ” I said. Hester might not have heard me, because she raced over to the pan where linguica fried.

Creeley asked Wayne what he did, and Wayne said he was a carpenter.

“You sure picked a poor place to stack sticks,” Creeley said.

Jeanne tried to change the subject, and found a baseball on the floor and rolled it at Pepe, but she threw it hard and the dog yelped. She said to Kurt, “I’d like a big dog like yours.”

“Why do you want a dog?” Dugan asked.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Jeanne said. “For protection, and a big furry thing’s nice to hug on cold nights . . .” She smiled crookedly and wrapped her arms around herself.

“Isn’t that why you got married?” Creeley asked, and then he began a story about his friend Bill Glover who lived in Clarksville, and his friend, Jack Clark, who lived in Gloversville.

I stood near the kitchen with Judy and Hester. Ted rose from his chair with difficulty. He cupped his hand to my ear and said, “I saw Creeley’s missing eye. I saw under his eyelid when he turned toward the bay. There’s a tiny black dot in there.” He raised his forefinger to his thumb. “A dark marble!”

Hester was saying to Judy, “It is not the oath that makes us believe the man, but the man the oath,” as she sprinkled powdered sugar over a tray of beignets.

Dugan called to Judy, “Is there any buttermilk?”

“No, Dugan. There is no buttermilk. Shut up!”

Page said to Stanley, “Have you read
What’s O’Clock
?”

Stanley said, “Okay, just one more,” and held out his glass.

Creeley tilted a candle, pouring hot wax into his palm. “Statues and statuettes,” he said as the wax solidified and we watched the gathering tallow. Jeanne leaned toward his hand, closer and closer to the flame until it snaked up and caught her hair, spurred on by hairspray and perfume. Kurt leapt from his chair, paper plates flying, and slapped his palm against the side of Jeanne’s head as she laughed drunkenly, hysterically and, when the fire was out, she was bald at the temple but not burned.

Stanley said, “You’re lucky. You’re very, very lucky,” and his words were echoed by Kurt, Gail and Ted, who all chimed in about her good fortune.

From the kitchen, Hester said, “True love is friendship caught afire.”

Creeley spoke about how much Provincetown meant to him, that he had lived here with his first wife. He motioned toward Pearl Street and said the first poem in
For Love
is dedicated to Slater Brown, a friend of Hart Crane. He said he sat in Brown’s studio, now part of the Work Center, and listened to his stories about poets. Then Creeley grimaced about his marriage, working the wax and getting tearful. He sipped his Bloody Mary and composed himself.

“Did something happen to your wife, Bob?” Stanley asked. We sat in wonder, guessing illness or death.

Creeley squinted. “It was terrible,” he said. “Munchies, pasta, chocolate, day and night. She gained fifty pounds.”

Hester set the tray of her specialty on the table. “My mother used to say, eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside.”

“Easy for a skinny malink like you,” Creeley said, looking Hester over and at the same moment each of us stared, admiring her shape under the apron.

She pointed at me and said, “I need help in the kitchen.”

“Look!” Creeley said. On his palm stood a horse he had sculpted out of wax. He combed its neck with a toothpick, making a mane. “Funny how it looks more real without eyes or mouth,” he said, and placed it on the table.

Judy served eggs and everyone praised the beignets. Hester did not seem interested in the food. I was hungry but hungrier to be alone with the strange hostess who spoke strangely. She opened a slider onto the bay, and we stood on a small deck looking at the lighthouse on Long Point.

Judy was scolding Dugan for drinking so much.