A Moveable Famine (26 page)

Before I took the bus to New York, Jeanne thought it would be fun to go to the Back Room, where Creeley’s calisthenics had cleared the dance floor. As we approached, we saw the women who drank there all winter standing at the threshold while a bouncer examined their identification cards. One of the women looked at Jeanne and said, “They want three IDs.” The bouncer waved me in. I didn’t want to go to a place that didn’t want women now that the season was arriving, and neither did she.

“Maybe it’s time to leave after all,” I said.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-T
HREE

THE KIBBUTZ—PRIVATE LIVES—UNDER A SPELL—BARKHAUSEN COMES TO P’TOWN—ELMER DUGAN—DICK’S DICK

I
looked forward to Jeanne’s letters when I returned to my parents’ apartment after a day at the AP. She wrote me every week, reporting follies that took place in town, like the Fourth of July fireworks ignited despite heavy fog, unseen by twenty-five thousand tourists. Jeanne closed each letter, “That’s P’town.”

In September, Ronnie the bus driver dropped me at Jeanne’s, where Wayne answered. He didn’t care that we’d been seeing each other. Jeanne came out and walked me to the middle of the parking lot and said they had gotten together again. I had had a twinge that something might be wrong because she had always answered my letters by return mail but our correspondence lagged in the last weeks. I carried my suitcase and typewriter down Commercial Street to the Kibbutz, a two-story complex on the water where Kurt, who had taken Porter’s place as chair, had found me a one-bedroom apartment. The editor of
Mad
magazine owned the place and the nameplate on the doorbell said
Alfred E. Neuman.
It had leather furniture, a phone and a sweeping view of the bay. Moonlight jarred the water, the deck and the room. The next day I saw Porter at the Work Center. He gave me a copy of his new story, the one about Isaac Babel. He had also xeroxed Babel’s piece on Maupassant. I went to the food co-op coal bin with the perverse feeling of seeing Hester. She was weighing radishes, and blithely looked over the scale, saying, “I made use of your absence to remember you,” casting me again under the spell of her strange locution and her white languorousness, which seemed to have progressed even further, to a translucence.

“It was only a couple of months,” I said.

“Pepe asked about you the other day. You’re the only man he liked, you should say hello.”

“I will,” I said. “I’ll call. I have a phone.”

“Let’s go now,” she said. “Zoe can finish up.” She tossed her hair, sending a waft of fragrance across the coal bin. Porter had speculated that her presence could deodorize an airplane hangar, and now the air in that room with a twenty-foot-high ceiling swirled with her dizzying aroma. She grabbed her shopping bag and took my arm.

Pepe remembered me, jumping onto my knees as Hester made grilled cheese sandwiches.

“What happened to Jeanne?” she said.

“She’s back with Wayne.”

“Really? He must have a big one.” She said she had been working as Stanley’s helper, driving him and Elise to the store, typing and cooking. As soon as she mentioned Stanley, she used her Stanley voice, and said, “He says you have ‘a detective’s perception and a surrealist’s imagination,’ but you still haven’t become yourself.” Then Hester got a raving look in her eye as she sliced tomatoes. “He never said that about me. He just finds me interesting as a woman is all.”

“If he didn’t like your work you wouldn’t be here.”

“You’re always so moral. Like Christ with a hard-on.”

“Funny you’d say that,” I said. “That’s the title of my book.”

“You think I’m strange,” she said. She moved to the refrigerator. “What did you read this summer? Have you seen the book Stanley chose for the Yale prize? It’s terrible. He should have picked me.”

“Did you submit?”

“Can’t you find a better word than
submit?
And besides, what difference does it make? He could have
asked
me!” She put a pan on the stove.

“My mother had a book of Noel Coward’s plays and I read
Private Lives.
One line said, ‘I think very few people are completely normal, really, deep down in their private lives . . .’ ”

Her eyes moistened. “You and your memory,” she said. “Say it again.”

I repeated the sentence. She kissed me very hard, banging her teeth against mine. “I love you,” she said. “No matter what you think of me.” She slapped the spatula against her thigh. I repeated something Stanley said—“The impossible is sometimes easier to achieve than the difficult.” And it came out of my mouth in his voice.

She said, “Want to try again? So I can forget all others?”

“Even Claire Fontaine?” I said.

“A bagatelle, ill bestowed upon me.”

When we woke toward evening, Hester said, “I don’t want to play house with you. You have to know who I am.”

“I think I know,” I said.

“But who are
you
? Did you fuck Phyllis Sherwood? Everyone says you did.”

“Hester, she’s sixty.”

“You might go for that.”

“Please,” I said.

“That’s the difference between us. I use my imagination off the page.” She went to the bottom drawer of her dresser, took out a shoebox marked
Herman Survivors
and brought it to the bed. I sat up next to her. She placed it on her lap, lifted a long curved purple dildo, and shook it at me. Another was ribbed. A long feather. Leather fly swatter. Restraints. A monster hand from a costume store. Then she dumped out the whole contents. “Mostly from Toys of Eros, and some from The Pink Pussycat,” she said. “Don’t you love the word
eros
? It’s so muscular and sleek.” She lifted a harness and said, “I’ll fuck you sometime. You’ll like it. I know just how. And you can use the double-headed one on me.” She rocked it through the air like a scythe.

“Let’s go downtown,” I said.

We passed the Bull Ring and I saw Jeanne’s light on. Hester noticed me looking and pulled my elbow in the other direction. She was right, I missed Jeanne, the steady one, not the one with the box of tricks. As we passed the Fo’c’sle window, I caught Vince’s eye and he made the sign of the cross. One spring night, I had drunkenly expressed my disenchantment with Hester to my drunken friends, and here I was with her to start the fall. She chose a table in the Bradford where passersby could see us from the street. It was a display Hester heightened by holding my hand as if we were about to arm wrestle.

Barkhausen knocked on my door before the opening committee meeting. I was exhausted by my night with Hester and still asleep.

“Rise and shine!” he said. “I got your address from Porter. What a view!”

I made coffee while he rattled on about the beauty of the sea and bay. He shook a paper cup of sand. “I just had to look at it closely,” he said.

“Where are you living?”

“Right on the premises. Number 11.”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “That’s a good one, with the fireplace.”

“It’s perfect. Two little bedrooms and a counter, like a bar.” He trembled in his seat and pulled scallop shells from his pocket, laying them on the table. “Do you know they sell dried sea cucumbers at Marine Specialties? I bought one, and a batfish.” He was picking up speed, his words running together and jumping off his sentences in different directions. He quoted a poem:

Cold are the crabs that crawl on yonder hills,

Colder the cucumbers that grow beneath . . .

but in his unstoppable haste, in his urgency to name the author, no period could halt his sentence and an additional noun ran right through the stop sign. He had called the poet “Edward Lear Jet.” We talked about Kim, and he said she had married the policeman and they lived in Fort Dodge. I mentioned Wendy.

“Wendy! Wendy! Oh, man, to a grad school kid she looked like a woman, married and all, but guess what? She asked me, ‘Don’t you ever get tired of reading?’ She thought poets made money, that I’d sell a book and buy a new car. She belongs with a breadwinner like Pryor. She joined him in Texas.”

“There aren’t too many women in this town,” I said.

“Porter said you have two.”

“One. I’m going out with Hester, a fellow for the past two years.”

“I’ve seen her, she’s beautiful, but there’s something weird.”

“I know, but I like even what’s weird. She’s erotic.”

“Always Eros,” he said. “Backward, it’s Sore!”

As before, Stanley embraced the fellows and Dugan smoked. There was confusion about one new fellow, Millie Harari, who had changed her name to Allison Stone. She said, “I divorced my husband in Seattle, and sold our farm. I wanted to get rid of everything.” Someone suggested her new name was too stylized, and others agreed, but Dugan calmed the room, saying he changed his name too.

“I didn’t know that, Alan. Tell us your real name,” Stanley sang.

“Elmer,” Dugan said, and everyone laughed. “And my nickname was Bud. Everyone in my family had a sexual nickname.” Kurt tried to call the meeting to order but Dugan continued, “I had an Uncle Dick and an Aunt Tittie.” When Dugan said this, the cracks and crevices on his face disappeared, and he smiled, reversing gravity. I had seen this happen on other occasions—when a group of children ran through the common room, and the time he found a piece of quartz on the dunes and said it would fracture nicely.

We made our visitors’ list: John Ashbery, Grace Paley and Tomas Tranströmer. When business was over, everyone left for the Fo’c’sle, but at Pearl Street I continued to my room because of a problem. A tiny fern protruded from the opening of my penis, like a small and irritating pine tree. I didn’t want to go to the Drop-In Center, because I knew the doctor. He wrote poetry, and I had given him and his nurse a tour of the Work Center. I made an appointment with a urologist in Brewster.

Hester didn’t answer her phone. I kept dialing. To distract myself, I read Babel’s story on Maupassant. On page two, I found an almost perfect description of Hester, “The high-breasted maid moved smoothly and majestically. She had an excellent figure, was nearsighted and rather haughty. In her open gray eyes one saw a petrified lewdness.” Lewdness! Yes, lewdness, hers and mine, which is what had given me this fern! Maupassant went mad from syphilis, enduring headaches, blindness and fits of hypochondria, dying in an insane asylum eating his own shit. My hands twitched as I put down the pages. Maybe the tiny fern came from hypochondria: maybe I had, like Hester, carried my imagination off the page and onto my penis. Checking again proved it was not imagination but reality that stuck out like the last Christmas tree on the lot. Or was it the first! Suppose there were more! I kept looking and dialing.

Barkhausen came over in the evening after drinking all day with the writing committee, but he seemed sober. What McPeak said about him was true: he seemed drunk when sober and sober when drunk. “The Fo’c’sle’s a weird place, full of hangers-on and artists manqué,” he said.

“Was Vince there, and Post-Elliot?”

“Oh yeah,” he said.

“Vince is a writer,” I said.

“Yeah, books on varnish and yard sales. And the other guy doesn’t write at all.”

“You figured that out quicker than me,” I said.

Barkhausen was on his way to the breakwater to meet a few fellows to get periwinkles for dinner. He invited me, but I declined, hoping to reach Hester.

“Cook them in garlic and white wine, then pluck the snail out with a bent pin!” he said, trying to tempt me. He left, but lingered on the deck, looking at the beam from Long Point’s lighthouse. Abby Swan, who owned the windsurfing shop, came out of her apartment next door. Barkhausen struck up a conversation. I never had the nerve. Her name alone froze my heart. She was muscular and blonde and tan all winter. I met her in the building’s laundry room but she flung her underwear out of the dryer with such abandon that I decided to come back later, which she didn’t notice.

Hester was at her desk when I entered, her phone off the hook. I told her my problem and she asked to see it. “It’s like an arrowhead,” she said. “Are you sure you didn’t fuck that Indian squaw Phyllis Sherwood?”

“It’s not funny,” I said.

“Does it hurt?”

“It feels strange.”

“You know what I like about you, your dick has a dick!”

“I made an appointment with a urologist in Brewster.”

“Why not the Drop-In Center?”

“I’m embarrassed. I know the doctor.”

“I wonder if I have anything like that,” she said. We went into the bedroom and she got a flashlight. “Do you see anything unusual?” she said to the ceiling.

“Everything looks unusual,” I said.

She sighed and got a mirror. “I don’t see anything like what you have,” she said, but feel this. She put out her hand and smeared my fingers. “After all, you are a doctor,” she said. “A bad doctor, but a doctor,” and she pulled me on top of her and I fucked her with my dick and my dick’s dick.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-F
OUR

A STRANGE COURAGE—DUGAN STRANGLES A WRITING FELLOW AND TRIPS ON A SEAGULL—I’M NOBODY, WHO ARE YOU?—SECRET STORIES—SELF-SWINDLER—GAL-ALLELUIA