American Purgatorio (3 page)

Patty, a neighbor who ran the community garden, was standing on the front stoop with her two black dogs, talking either to the dogs or to the woman standing slightly behind her. When I opened the door (and the dogs began sniffing) she asked if I wanted to participate in the neighborhood garden tour. They were looking for volunteer gardens to put on the list but I said I couldn't, that I was too busy. But Patty wanted to show her friend, a sturdy, older European woman, the backyard. “He has a beautiful camellia,” she said, and without any invitation from me she stepped inside. She knew the way, and so she led her friend through the house, out the back door, and down the steps into my small plot of garden.

It was early spring and as the two women named and commented on the various species of plants, the dogs played in the bulbs that were just coming up, trampling on and chewing slightly the hyacinths and daffodils and tulips. Thomas Jefferson said something to the effect that tending a garden makes a person grow younger, and maybe I was getting younger in some poetic way, but I wasn't
feeling
any younger, and in fact I was feeling tired. I watched the dogs and heard Patty calling the dogs, telling them to stop it and to sit, but I didn't really mind. I told her,
“No problema.”

“What?”

“No problem,” I said, and began asking the two women questions I'd had about tending a garden, and especially how to prune. I was in the mood for pruning, and it's possible that I heard what I wanted to hear because basically their lesson, as I heard it, was
prune with abandon.
They told me that plants enjoy being cut, that it's beneficial to their health, that it spurs their growth, and I probably wanted some control over something, and one way to have control is to cut things off. So that's what I did.

I waited until Patty had gone and then I kneeled alone in the dappled afternoon shade of the maple tree, examining the various botanical structures that were starting to appear in the garden around me. I looked at my rhododendron, standing against the fence, its buds preparing to flower. Despite the dogs, the daffodils and tulips were breaking through the porous earth. Green tips were sprouting on a pair of blueberry bushes. And because I loved the garden, and because the solace it brought was, in my mind, contrasted to the non-solace in my body, I held the pruning clippers in my hand, not like a surgeon, but I
felt
like a surgeon, examining a patient for signs of morbidity, looking to cure all forms of disease and death.

This is what I'm calling pride. I believed, along with a million other things, that I could control what the world was doing, and in my garden the world was beginning to grow. And it wasn't that I didn't want growth, I did, I wanted it, I wanted my garden to live and prosper, and that's why I held the clippers. To save something. To be rid of pain and fear, which was
my
pain and
my
fear, and although I anthropomorphized the dumb green garden, it was my own dull gnawing that was gnawing me. That was what I wanted to cut. But since I couldn't cut that, I turned to my plants, first the obviously dead branches, the ones that snapped because the life was gone, and then the partially dead, and then the ones that were alive now but that, at some point later, would be dead. And since everything, at some point later, would be dead, I had my work cut out.

And I'm calling it pride because I believed, not only that the eradication of the bad could happen, but that I could
make
it happen. That I could fit the world into my particular need, which, at the moment, was a need to cleanse some thing in me, some emotion in me, and yes, I was willing to adjust to the world, but I also wanted the world to adjust to
me.
I wanted the reality of that moment to leave my body, to float away like a breeze-blown vapor.

That's when I started cutting. And in this effort to soothe myself and rid myself of what I thought I needed to be rid of, I got carried away. The garden was my world, and to save it I began cutting, and the cutting led to more cutting, and I got lost in the cutting, bud after bud, leaf and twig and blossom falling—not like seeds, because they were dead now—but falling on the ground as I moved from rose to hydrangea to lilac, mindlessly and frantically cutting, so completely involved in the act of cutting, so absorbed in the belief in the beneficence of cutting, that I pruned to death every plant I ever cared about.

I was oddly methodical as I strode from plant to plant, from peony to camellia to forsythia, so numbed by the frenzy that was whirling around inside of me that I didn't notice what I was doing. Until afterward. That's when I saw that my carefully nurtured garden had been reduced in a matter of minutes to unliving stalks. That's when, exhausted and sweating, I sat on a step leading down from the deck and rolled for myself a thin tobacco cigarette. Because I wasn't a smoker, after about the second puff I got lightheaded, and was just rubbing the butt in the dirt when the telephone rang. I'd been letting the phone ring since Anne had gone, but this time—something about the combination of dizziness and exhaustion and surprise—I forgot to let it keep ringing. I ran into the house to answer, and the next thing I knew I was holding the phone. Mike See, an old hockey buddy who'd apparently called before, was calling now, telling me about this car that was for sale.

4.

I didn't need a car. I already had a car, and I told Mike I had a car, a maroon car, but he kept going on about what a deal this car was and how cheap it was, and as he kept talking I began to realize that in fact, at the moment, I
didn't
have a car. I didn't think I wanted a car but I asked him, as a courtesy, what the price was. He evaded the question of money, and emphasized instead the motivation of the seller, that the car just needed a little attention, and that he and I hadn't seen each other in a million years. In the course of the conversation I went from uninterested in owning another car to curious about this particular car, and when he said he'd get me a good deal, for friendship's sake, I told him I might be interested. And so we agreed to meet.

The next day I rode my bicycle to the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, down near the water, to an address I'd written on a piece of envelope. It was a moderately well maintained brick row house and in front of the house a faded red sports car, or quasi-sports car, a Honda or Nissan, was parked on the street. Mike appeared from under the stoop looking as he had years ago—a little heavier and a little slower—jangling the keys. “Let's go for a cruise,” he said, throwing me the keys. I got in, adjusted the seat and the mirror, and began driving around the warehouse streets, and all the time I was driving Mike was talking, not about the car, but about the girl who was selling the car. She was a nurse, he said, and very friendly. “I've told her all about you,” he said. “She wants to meet you,” he said. And I assumed she wanted to meet because she wanted to sell her car, but the way he said it, or the way he
kept
saying it, made me wonder. We drove around in the cold sunlight and it was pleasant to be driving, and the car itself seemed a fine enough car, nothing exceptional, until Mike mentioned the owner's breast augmentation.

The expression “breast augmentation” sounded artificial coming from Mike, but even with its note of false sophistication the idea piqued my interest. I'd never knowingly met a person who'd changed herself in such an obvious and prominent way, and who, because of that change, was probably feeling optimistic about the future. I thought at the very least I should talk with her, about the car, and I wanted to talk with her. But when we got back from our drive she wasn't home, and so it was in my imagination that I envisioned her in her nurse's uniform. But because I had never seen this girl, the images in my mind were images of Anne. The breasts I imagined, naturally enough, were Anne's breasts. And as I rode my bike up Union Street, thinking about Anne and the car, if it hadn't already, the idea of Anne and the idea of the car became conflated. A desire was created for the thing that was Anne-and-the-car. And not only was the idea of Anne conjoined to the idea of car, but they both were connected in my mind to the general idea of breast augmentation. Although I was only dimly aware of the intricate psychological machinations it took to make that connection, it didn't matter. She'd left me the map because she wanted me to find her. She wasn't kidnapped. She was safe and alive, and there'd been some miscommunication or misunderstanding, something we could talk about. I needed to talk with her. If I could just talk with her, I thought, then maybe this whole thing didn't need to be happening.

From that point on I was a man on a mission, and like a man on a mission I put my life in order. I shaved and showered and brushed my teeth. Like a man on a possible suicide mission I went to the bank and took out all my money. Whatever the car cost—Mike guessed about seven hundred dollars—I was prepared to pay, in cash, and the next day I took a bus to her house. When I arrived, Mike, waiting on her front step, informed me that his friend was in the shower, that she had to work at the hospital, and that I should give the money to him. “She wants me to be her agent,” he said. And as I signed the various transfers of title, I tried to postpone the moment of payment as long as possible, talking with Mike about his thirty-two-year-old 1970 Cadillac Coupe de Ville, waiting for her to emerge from the house, not bikini-clad, but somehow revealing her transformation. But she didn't emerge. And yes, I was slightly disappointed, but only slightly. I realized that it didn't matter anymore about the person who
had
owned the car. It was my car now, and with it I had the ability to move forward.

I paid Mike and agreed to let him get the car, a Nissan Pulsar, “ready for the road.” I would soon be taking a trip in which I would find Anne and bring her back, and for all I knew, it would be a long trip and I wanted the car in good condition. As I followed Mike to his garage I imagined Anne sitting in the front seat next to me. Like an amputee with a lost limb, I felt her and wanted her reconnected. And because desire breeds hope, I was optimistic. Anne was my object and my direction (my future) and I would use the car to find her. She was the woman who'd been separated from me, the woman I loved. And I say thank god for pride because pride was the soil out of which my belief was growing. Not only did I
want
to find her, but I
would
find her. Somewhere along the way the seed had been planted that this was the car in which what I wanted to happen (my belief) would become reality.

5.

I'm thinking of a specific moment, six months earlier. It's a cloudless September morning. Light comes from the upstairs windows and we're lying in bed, still partly asleep. We open our eyes, reach out, and we find each other, warm and naked. We stretch our legs, untangling ourselves from the sheets, and in this way the day begins. You (the responsible one) get up first. You throw off the comforter and as you crawl over me I try to spank you. I hear you peeing in the bathroom. You wrap yourself in a robe and announce that we're going to have breakfast in bed. I can hear your steps on the stairs and I can smell the coffee brewing and the toast toasting and I arrange the pillows. I transform them into backrests so that when you bring up the wooden tray with the cups of coffee and plates of buttered and honeyed toast there's a space for you under the covers. And there we sit, looking out at the trees and beyond them to other trees, and talking. In the distance, dark smoke rises into the sky, but because we're talking—I forget what about—nothing matters except the two of us. We're talking about nothing and everything, letting our words, warmed by the coffee, come up from inside us. After the coffee comes the kissing. I kiss you and you kiss me, and in our kissing we release the memories of all our accumulated kisses. And like happy rats in a maze the kissing brings up more than memories. I glide down along your body, warm and forgiving, full of sensation and blood, and I do what I do and you do things, and our embrace just happens. Seemingly. We
do
nothing, wrapping ourselves around each other and through each other, both inside and outside, following and leading, bringing each other to the metaphorical precipice of pleasure, balancing on that delicate ledge as long as possible, moving back and forth from the edge of that ledge, then falling off. And after another sip of coffee we silently pull the comforter back up over our bodies. Usually you put your head into the crook of my arm but today is different. Today I curl up and rest my head on your slightly damp stomach. Actually a little lower than your stomach. I want you to breathe easily so I place my head partially on your belly and partially on your pubic bone. I close my eyes and I can feel your breath, rising and falling under me. Maybe we fall asleep, I don't remember, but we lie like this until, after a while, I feel you sliding out from under my head. You get up, get dressed, and start your day. But I don't move. I don't want to. I'm still feeling your belly, rising and falling. Although I've put my head on a pillow, what I'm feeling is you, your breath under my head. This is the moment I'm talking about, the moment I'm remembering. Although you're gone I'm still feeling you. And because I want to keep feeling you, I think that I will, forever.

6.

When I say that desire breeds hope, what I mean is that desire contains within itself the seed of its possible attainment. As I sat on a wooden bench, waiting for Mike to finish fixing the car, I had the hope, but the problem with hope is its fragility, and because of this fragility, after a while my hope began to mutate into something else, something more substantial and secure. Where hope had been, now belief existed. The achievement of my desire became, not only possible, but certain. I believed my connection with Anne had been real and would continue to be real, and while this was a kind of pride, it wasn't necessarily bad. Without it, and without its attendant optimism, why would I think a high-mileage used car was anything other than a mass of sheet metal and rubber. I wanted to transcend its prosaic nature, and so I transformed the car from something prosaic into something transcendent, into a car that would find my wife. She would be like a beacon, and I would use the car to follow that beacon. And to mark my ownership of the car I took from my wallet a photograph of Anne, a shot of her in perfect focus, during a snowstorm, turning to the camera, the world behind her completely blurred. I borrowed some electrician's tape and taped the photo to the middle of the dashboard. At first it fell off, but I added more tape and eventually got it to stick on a suitable surface just above the radio.