Boarded Windows (10 page)

I closed the book with miffed force, then roamed without purpose till I came across Wade standing shut-eyed and motionless in one of the store’s back corners. I watched him from two bookcases away for a long five or six minutes, during which I caught not one faint motion from him, though he seemed ever on the brink of movement, on the particular brink of raising his arms slowly in a spiritual gesture, perhaps Buddhistic, perhaps evangelical. His arms stayed at his sides, though. The unbroken calmness on his face was intense, if that’s not too cheaply paradoxical, and his smooth facial skin looked even more vitreous than usual. I saw that another customer, a young woman probably from the neighborhood’s tony private college, was watching Wade too. She gave me a collusive smirk. I made a subtly discouraging face and returned my full attention to Wade, who wasn’t, I decided, on the brink of movement after all, that on the contrary he’d hold his living-sculpture pose till Wanda, I, or one of the bookstore’s staffers spurred him. As if to refute this new prediction on cue, he opened his eyes like a magician’s curtain, alerted the rest of his face, and without transition walked briskly and purposively to the fictional L’s (I followed him unnoticed from several steps back), where he picked out a paperback (Antony Lamont’s
Fretwork,
it turned out) in the easy way one retrieves one’s bright plaid coat from a sparse rack. Next he talked the cashier into letting him exchange Baker’s book for the Lamont, though I’d bought Baker’s book elsewhere and hadn’t altogether peeled off the foreign sticker. He also bought
Asymptote
by D. Michael Tauber, who was browsing not far from the counter and soon in conversation with Wade. A few moments later I was spotted, called over, and introduced. “I was just telling D.,” Wade said, “—is that right? D.?” For some reason Wade was messing with the poet.

“My friends tend to call me Dan,” Tauber said.

“I was just telling Dan how I’ve been following his work for a long time now. All the way back to the
Crossbar
days, in fact.”

“Crossbar?
Wow, that does go back,” Tauber said.

“Dan was a serious bicyclist back then,” Wade said to me.

“Probably more serious about biking than poetry,” Tauber said. “Now I could probably stand more biking.” He patted his stomach.

“An old friend of mine had a copy of
Crossbar
and passed it on to me,” Wade said. “I don’t know, it just really got under my skin.”

“Thank you,” Tauber said tentatively. “It was juvenilia, but I guess something shone through.”

Wade held out Tauber’s new book, said, “Well listen, maybe you could sign this for my young friend here.”

Back in the car, Wade reached across Wanda to retrieve his ornate metal pipe, already packed, from the glove compartment. “What was all that about?” I said.
“Won’t you sign this for my young friend?”
Wade wiggled a transparent green lighter out of his tight jeans. “I just think it’s a book you might want to have,” he said, offering Wanda the first hit, their fingers touching for a second longer than needed when he handed her the pipe. I read the poet’s bland inscription (“Hope you enjoy. —Dan Tauber, winter, 1991”), put the book down. Since we were parked in front of the bookstore, I wondered aloud if we shouldn’t move to a more discreet spot. Wade started the engine but didn’t move the car, while I singed my bangs on a tall flame. Wade and Wanda rolled down their windows to diffuse the smell of burning hair, and I objected to this indiscretion too, since we’d soon be letting out smoke. “Relax!” Wade commanded, and I adjusted the lighter and took an exceptionally burning and potent hit, its effects nearly instantaneous. “You gotta cough to get off,” Wade said, taking the pipe from me and smiling. In ten minutes or so we were all pretty high, still sitting in the humming car, by then more redolent of the rich weed than of my hair. Wade turned up Bolling’s “Hot Flash” at the last bar of its second chorus, just as Pig Robbins’s circular clavinet solo trips through the door like some famous farceur you’ve never heard of. Wade sighed.

Later we were all in the living room, passing around a pint of gourmet ice cream, when Wade got a call. I handed him the phone and he and the caller started talking about Dylan bootlegs. A minute later Wade hung up, said he had to make a quick house call. “Can you also drop me off at Wilson?” Wanda asked. It was a bit late to go to the library, I thought. “What if you get shot in this guy’s apartment,” I said to Wade, “and then the guy comes out to shoot Wanda in case she saw something?”

“I’ll leave the keys in the car. She can just peel off when the gunman comes out.”

I looked at Wanda: “Why not just go tomorrow when you’ll have more time?” And less pleadingly: “Then we could all hang out here tonight.”

They left. I sat awhile on the couch, scratching my head. My scratching was freeing a lot of dandruff and hair, and that interested me, so I picked up one of Wanda’s spiral notebooks and started scratching over the notebook. The notebook had a black cover, on which my dandruff looked like stars, stars joined by strands of my brown hair, which I took for comets, though they didn’t really look like that. As I went on scratching, the notebook got denser and denser with stars, and for a while I thought I’d be able to cover the black entirely. That proved difficult, however, so after fifteen minutes or so I used a subscription card to push the stars and hair-comets into a pile in the notebook’s center, and brushed them behind the sofa.

On the way to bed I tripped over and picked up a book Wanda had been struggling to finish. The night before, she’d thrown the book on the floor in frustration. When I asked her why she didn’t just move on to another book, she said something about the pleasures of intermittent brilliance, and told me that for a while as a girl she’d gone to the driving range every afternoon because, though she hated the game, she loved those rare times when it flew off the tee without sending any vibrations through her arms, when it seemed to shoot out of her. So I knew she’d carry on with the book, a recent work of critical theory whose author and title I’ve forgotten; Wanda preferred laborious, recondite, sometimes nonsensical books touched here and there by real intellectual fire to reader-hungry books of everyday smartness. I wasn’t intellectual enough for her, I worried, or my intellectualism was the sort requiring a humbling prefix.

I lay down, opened the book at random to one of the middle chapters, and may have lucked onto one of its brilliant passages, though I can’t recollect anything about it, and before long I started to drift, stalling for a half hour on two pages, one partially illustrated, getting no pleasure from the words but some from the type, first from the subtly decorative curve of the
j
’s, then from how the type blurred, doubled, and levitated when I forefingered round my half-shut eyes.

A few hours later, Wanda tiptoed into the bedroom, gently released the book from my fingers (their tips still oily from over-scratching my scalp), and helped me worm out of my twills. Or so she told me the next morning, when I didn’t remember any of her ministrations, and in fact had a hazy memory of setting the book on her bedstand and taking the pants off myself, and of later hearing soft voices from the living room in deep night.

W
ANDA AND I MET IN THE SPRING OF 1990, AFTER one of her rare gigs at a conventional comedy club. We had a friend in common who’d taken me to the club over my protests. I hated most stand-up comedians but admired Wanda’s set that night. Every so often it was amusingly uncomfortable, occasionally it was amusingly tedious, but never, a few moments excepted, was it funny or embarrassing, and I suppose it was that difficult negative combination that I admired. She went over poorly; when I tittered in those exceptional moments of funniness or embarrassment, my titters were heard. Afterwards, however, she didn’t seem to need consolation from the four or five of us standing around her in front of the stage. She was laughing, sipping rather than guzzling a bottle of green-bottled beer, touching some of our shoulders, still performing but not in an overpowering or giddily fragile way suggestive of deep insecurity or predictive of a crashing sadness to visit her room later than night. (I just learned that
boudoir,
a woman’s small, private room, literally and patronizingly means “a sulking place.”) Granted, I don’t know what she did or how she felt later that night. (There were times, however, when I felt she was … not by any means annoyingly happy, but perhaps insufficiently sad. During a fight much later I told her she was “not soulful,” which I meant to be somehow softer than “soulless,” though it was still a cruel, false thing to say. More or less the same thing has been said of me, so this might have been projectional criticism.) That night at the club she was wearing a fedora and a man’s suit, a baggy, broad-shouldered two-piece from the fifties that delayed my discovery of just how thin she was. (As a girl she’d been likened to Olive Oyl.) She did a funny impression of a local sportscaster for our little group of hangers-on, but she also listened carefully to me and the others, carefully enough at least to ask a few savvy follow-up questions—nothing too bland, nothing too intrusive, nothing too clever. She didn’t seem bored when the talk moved away from her or her performance and its dimwitted, mismatched audience. Her equanimity was impressive. When I wrote above that she’d gone over poorly, I was too tentative, just as I was when I called her “thin” instead of “skinny.” The crowd had hated her. About halfway through the set, a man up front had reached into one of the patch pockets of his long-in-the-tooth charcoal overcoat and thrown a pebble at Wanda, had continued to throw a pebble every half minute or so, stage-whispering “You suck,” stressing the word
you,
with each aggressively dainty throw. A command, then, more than a judgment. Viewed from the back, the pebbler looked old—stooped and with coarse gray hair—but when he turned and I got a better look at his face, I saw that he was only in his forties or early fifties. No one reprimanded him. Clearly the silent majority opposed Wanda even more than this pebbler, and it was as if they’d telepathically agreed that their silence, coupled with the prematurely gray man’s strange harassment, would be more punishing than conventional heckling, spitting, or belligerent coughing. My friend and I joined in the silence, save for my occasional titters. Later I regretted my passivity, though I doubt it was ever resented. Wanda, I came to think, wasn’t desperate to be loved, as most performers and artists are, nor did she thrive on a crowd’s animosity, as some performers and artists do, though she did, I think, genuinely fear a crowd’s indifference, a fear so many performers and artists assume, mimicking each other, while all the same giving performances and making art or art-related stuff to which indifference is the only reasonable response.

A few weeks after that performance, in what must have been mid- or late May, Wanda and I ran into each other at a party. The party was in one of the second-story units of an old brick fourplex, but the whole building seemed to be participating. We first saw each other near midnight, on the front steps. She was walking in, I was walking out, as in the Bruce Springsteen song, except that I wasn’t planning to leave for good; I was just going out for a soda and a candy bar or one of those depressing convenience-store hot dogs. There were probably twenty people standing in front of the fourplex, on its porch and small lawn. Cigarette tips were darting around like fireflies. Wanda was with a friend, a woman, but not a lover, I found out later. When Wanda said hello, I walked slowly backwards away from her and said, “I’m going to get a pop and a candy bar or a hot dog or something.” The relevance of my announcement was unclear, and she answered with a silence I took to be curious. “You wanna come?” I said. “I just got here,” she said. “But j’you wanna come?” For punctuation of some sort, I casually picked up and Chinooked two maple samaras and made peripheral note of their perfect descent.

On the warm and breezy walk to the store Wanda and I slipped easily into talking, first about candy bars, then about music, comedy, North Dakota, the hosts of the party (schmucks, Wanda said). I wasn’t walking with absolute straightness, and a few times our shoulders brushed. Later that night she said I was “astonishingly good-looking, like Wittgenstein, except it’s not him you look like.” (Immodest of me, having already established my handsomeness, to report this compliment. I’ll contritely add that I’m not aging well.) “Who’s that?” I said. Now I pretend to more erudition than I really have, but in those days I aimed for downy-cheeked humility. I was bookshy, but not actively anti-intellectual. Wanda explained who Wittgenstein was, and, nodding at my homespun model, admitted to not understanding much of his work. The elliptical expansions on and refutations of Frege’s and Russell’s logic gave her toothache, she said, albeit in another woman’s mouth, and the mystical stuff she’d already half-learned from pop songs and the Bible, though she hated to say such a dopey thing. “But about which we can’t talk, we must shut our tater traps,” she said in a goofily sultry Southern accent, and we kissed without tongues, then with. I’d never kissed anyone with such besieged skin, and she had a touch of b.o., something I have a double standard on in terms of gender. But it was easy enough to look past those errors of nature and grooming; she had an enticing, before-picture kind of beauty, and I fell in love with her quickly.

People sometimes say that the pain of a breakup should last about half as long as the relationship. By that measure I should have gotten over Wanda around Thanksgiving of ’92, even sooner if the end of our relationship coincided more with Wade’s arrival than with his departure. But twenty years on I still picture her face all the time, still want to fall asleep with her reading next to me, still picture the troubling last time I saw her naked, still listen to her favorite music with pangs of longing, still feel her breath on my face, still hope with a restless stomach to run into her, and will sometimes, with no other incentive, go to a play or concert that raises hopes for another such encounter, though the encounters are frequently wordless. Of course it’s hard for me to untangle my feelings for Wanda from everything that happened during our last months together, and doubtless my current loneliness has made my old loves seem deeper than they really were. I’m sorry to be such a lugubrious Narcissus. I woke up sad today and got anxious and colicky after a cup of coffee, began to obsess over a seemingly cutting email I got a few days ago from a not-close friend. It doesn’t take much coffee to make me anxious these days; I’m about to give it up. My increasing abstemiousness might be a symptom of my neurosis, however, so for a while I’ll probably continue to drink a cup in the late afternoon, which seems to focus me with less pronounced psychological and intestinal side effects.