Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (20 page)

THE DEVIL IS A BUSY MAN

Three weeks ago, I did a nice thing for someone. I can not say more than this, or it will empty what I did of any of its true, ultimate value. I can only say: a nice thing. In a general context, it involved money. It was not a matter of out and out “giving money” to someone. But it was close. It was more classifiable as “diverting” money to someone in “need.” For me, this is as specific as I can be.

It was two weeks, six days, ago that the nice thing I did occurred. I can also mention that I was out of town—meaning, in other words, I was not where I live. Explaining why I was out of town, or where I was, or what the overall situation that was going on was, however, unfortunately, would endanger the value of what I did further. Thus, I was explicit with the lady that the person who would receive the money was to in no way know who had diverted it to them. Steps were explicitly taken so that my namelessness was structured into the arrangement which led to the diversion of the money. (Although the money was, technically, not mine, the secretive arrangement by which I diverted it was properly legal. This may lead one to wonder in what way the money was not “mine,” but, unfortunately, I am unable to explain in detail. It is, however, true.) This is the reason. A lack of namelessness on my part would destroy the ultimate value of the nice act. Meaning, it would infect the “motivation” for my nice gesture—meaning, in other words, that part of my motivation for it would be, not generosity, but desiring gratitude, affection, and approval towards me to result. Despairingly, this selfish motive would empty the nice gesture of any ultimate value, and cause me to once again fail in my efforts to be classifiable as a nice or “good” person.

Thus, I was very intransigent about the secrecy of my own name in the arrangement, and the lady, who was the only other person with any knowing part in the arrangement (she, because of her job, could be classified as “the instrument” of the diversion of the money) whatsoever, acquiesced, to the best of my knowledge, in full to this.

Two weeks, five days, later, one of the people I had done the nice thing for (the generous diversion of funds was to two people—more specifically, a common law married couple—but only one of them called) called, and said, “hello,” and that did I, by any possible chance, know anything about who was responsible for ________________, because he just wanted to tell that person, “thank you!,” and what a God-send this _______ dollars that came, seemingly, out of nowhere from the ___________________________ was, etc.

Instantly, having cautiously rehearsed for such a possibility at great lengths, already, I said, coolly, and without emotion, “no,” and that they were barking completely up the wrong tree for any knowledge on my part. Internally, however, I was almost dying with temptation. As everyone is well aware, it is so difficult to do something nice for someone and not want them, desperately, to know that the identity of the individual who did it for them was you, and to feel grateful and approving towards you, and to tell myriads of other people what you “did” for them, so that you can be widely acknowledged as a good person. Like the forces of darkness, evil, and hopelessness in the world at large itself, the temptation of this frequently can overwhelm resistance.

Therefore, impulsively, during the grateful, but inquisitive, call, unprescient of any danger, I said, after saying, very coolly, “no,” and “the wrong tree,” that, although I had no knowledge, I could well imagine that whoever, in fact,
was
, mysteriously responsible for ____________________ would be enthusiastic to know how the needed money, which they had received, was going to be utilized—meaning, for example, would they now plan to finally acquire health insurance for their new-born baby, or service the consumer debt in which they were deeply mired, or etc.?

My uttering this, however, was, in a fatal instant, interpreted by the person as an indirect hint from me that I was, despite my prior denials, indeed, the individual responsible for the generous, nice act, and he, throughout the remainder of the call, became lavish in his details on how the money would be applied to their specific needs, underlining what a God-send it was, with the tone of his voice’s emotion transmitting both gratitude, approval, and something else (more specifically, something almost hostile, or embarrassed, or both, yet I can not describe the specific tone which brought this emotion to my attention adequately). This flood of emotion, on his part, caused me, sickeningly, too late, to realize, that what I had just done, during the call, was to not only let him know that I was the individual who was responsible for the generous gesture, but to make me do so in a subtle, sly manner that appeared to be, insinuationally, euphemistic, meaning, employing the euphemism: “whoever was responsible for ____________________,” which, combined together with the interest I revealed in the money’s “uses” by them, could fool no one about its implying of me as ultimately responsible, and had the effect, insidiously, of insinuating that, not only was I the one who had done such a generous, nice thing, but also, that I was so “nice”—meaning, in other words, “modest,” “unselfish,” or, “untempted by a desire for their gratitude”—a person, that I did not even want them to know that I was who was responsible. And I had, despairingly, in addition, given off these insinuations so “slyly,” that not even I, until afterward—meaning, after the call was over—, knew what I had done. Thus, I showed an unconscious and, seemingly, natural, automatic ability to both deceive myself and other people, which, on the “motivational level,” not only completely emptied the generous thing I tried to do of any true value, and caused me to fail, again, in my attempts to sincerely be what someone would classify as truly a “nice” or “good” person, but, despairingly, cast me in a light to myself which could only be classified as “dark,” “evil,” or “beyond hope of ever sincerely becoming good.”

CHURCH NOT MADE WITH HANDS

(for E. Shofstahl, 1977–1987)

A
RT

Drawn lids one screen of skin, dreampaintings move across Day’s colored dark. Tonight, in a lapse unfluttered by time, he travels what seems to be back. Shrinking, smoother, loses his belly and faint acne scars. Bird-boned gangle; bowl haircut and cup-handle ears; skin sucks hair, nose recedes into face; he swaddles in his pants and then curls, pink and mute and smaller until he feels himself split into something that wriggles and something that spins. Nothing stretches tight across everything else. A black point rotates. The point breaks open, jagged. His soul sails toward one color.

Birds, gray light. Day opens one eye. He is lying half off the bed Sarah breathes in. He sees the windows parallelograms, from the angle.

Day stands at a square window with a cup of something hot. A dead Cezanne does this August sunrise in any-angled smears of clouded red, a blue that darkles. A Berkshire’s shadow retreats toward one blunt nipple: fire.

Sarah comes awake at the slightest touch. They lie open-eyed and silent, brightening under a sheet. Doves work the morning, sound from the belly. The sheet’s printed pattern fades from Sarah’s skin.

Sarah pins her hair for morning mass. Day packs another case for Esther. Dresses himself. He fails to find a shoe. On the big bed’s edge, one shoe on, he watches cotton dust rotate through the butteryellow columns of a morning that gets later.

B
LACK
A
RT

That day he buys them a janitor’s broom. He sweeps rainwater off the tarp over Sarah’s pool.

That night Sarah stays with Esther. Touches metal all night. Day sleeps alone.

Day stands at a black window in Sarah’s bedroom. Over Massachusetts the sky is smeared with stars. The stars move slowly across the glass.

That day he goes to Esther with Sarah. Esther’s bed’s steel gleams in the bright room. Esther smiles dully as Day reads about giants.

“I am a giant,” he reads: “I am a giant, a mountain, a planet. Everything else is far off below. My footprints are counties, my shadow a time zone. I watch from high windows. I wash in high clouds.”

“I am a giant,” Esther tries to say.

Sarah, allergic, sneezes.

Day: “Yes.”

B
LACK AND
W
HITE

‘All true art is music’ (a different teacher). ‘The visual arts are but one corner of true music’s allcomprising room’ (ibid.)

Music discloses itself as a relation between one key and two notes locked by the key in dance. Rhythm. And in Day’s blown predreams, too, music consumes all law: what is most solid discloses itself here as rhythms, nothing but. Rhythms are relations between what you believe and what you believed before.

The cleric appears tonight in monochrome and collar.

Bless me

Do you take this woman Sarah

To be my

How long

For I have

since your last confession to a body with the power to absolve. Confession need

As I those who have swimmed against me

not entail absolution, lay bare, confession in the absence of awareness of sin,

Bless me father for there can be no awareness of sin without awareness of transgression without awareness of limit

Full of Grace

no such animal. Pray together for a revelation of limit

Red clouds in Warhol’s coffee

arrange in yourself an awareness of.

O
NE
C
OLOR

That day he is back at work’s first week. Sunlight reverses HEALTH pink through the windshield’s sticker. Day drives the county car past a factory.

“Habla Espanol?” Eric Yang asks from the passenger’s side.

Smoke from a smokestack hangs jagged as Day nods his head.

“You wanted to be shown ropes,” Yang says. His eyes are closed as he rotates. “I’ll show you a rope. Habla?”

“Yes,” Day says. “Hablo.”

They drive past homes.

Eric Yang’s special talent is the mental rotation of three-dimensional objects.

“This case speaks only Spanish,” Yang says. “Lady’s son got himself killed last month. In their apartment. Nasty. Sixteen. Gang thing, drug thing. Big area of the kid’s blood on her kitchen floor.”

They drive past hard hats and jackhammers.

“She says it’s all she’s got left of him!” Yang shouts. “She won’t let us clean it up. She says it’s him,” he says.

Mental rotation is Yang’s hobby. He is a certified counselor and caseworker.

“Your job today,” Yang twirls an imaginary rope, lassoes something mental on the dashboard, “is to get her to draw him. Even just the blood. Ndiawar said he didn’t care which. Just so she has a picture he said. So we can maybe clean up the blood.”

In the rearview, past himself, Day can see his case of supplies on the back seat. It’s not supposed to be in the sun.

“Make her draw him,” Yang says, releasing a rope Day can’t see. Yang closes his eyes again. “I’m going to try to rotate this month’s phone bill.”

Day passes a white van. Its windows are tinted. Saucers of rust on the side.

“Today we see the poor lady who loves blood and the rich man who begs for time.”

“Old teacher of mine. I told Ndiawar.” Day checks his left. “Art teacher in a former life.”

“The nuisance in the public, Ndiawar calls him,” Yang says. He furrows, concentrating. “I’m rotating the duty log. We’re going to go right by him. He’s right on the way. But he’s not first on the log.” “He was a teacher of mine,” Day says again. “I had him in school.” “We go by the log.” “He influenced me. My work.”

They pass a dry lot.

A
RT

Tonight, at the window, under stars that refuse to move, Day nearly makes it and dreampaints awake.

He paints it so that he’s standing on the pool’s baggy tarpaulin when he rises into the lunchtime sky. He ascends without weight, neither pulled from above nor pushed from below, one perfect line to a point in the sky overhead. Mountains sit blunt, humidity curls in the valleys like gauze. Holyoke and then Springfield and Chicopee and Longmeadow and Hadley are dull misshapen coins.

Day rises into the sky. The air gets more and more blue. Something in the sky blinks, and he’s gone.

“Colors,” he says to the screen’s black lattice.

The screen breathes mint.

“She complains I turn colors in my sleep,” Day says.

“Something understands,” breathes the screen, “surely.”

Knees sore, Day jangles pockets with his hands. So many coins.

T
WO
C
OLORS

Blue-eyed behind his County Mental Health Director’s desk, Dr. Ndiawar is a darkly bald man of vague alien status. He likes to make a steeple with his hands and to look at it while he speaks.

“You paint,” he says. “As a student, there was sculpture. You took psychology.” He looks up. “In large amounts? You speak languages?”

Day’s slow nod produces a dot of reflected office light on Ndiawar’s scalp. Day births the dot and kills it. The Director’s desk is large and strangely clean. Day’s c.v. looks tiny against its expanse.

“There are doubts,” Ndiawar says, “which I have in my mind.” He broadens the hands’ angle slightly. “There is not money in it.”

Day gives the dot two brief lives.

“However you state there are independent means, through marriage, for you.”

“And shows,” Day says quietly. “Sales.” A scarlet lie.

“You sell art you make in the past, you have stated,” Ndiawar says. Eric Yang is tall, late twenties, with long hair and muddy eyes that close and open instead of blink.

Day shakes Yang’s hand. “How do you do.”

“Surprisingly well.”

Ndiawar is bent to an open drawer. “Your new art therapy person,” he says to Yang.

Yang looks Day in the eye. “Look, man,” he says. “I rotate three-dimension objects. Mentally.”

“You and you, part-time, become a field team who travel crossward throughout the county and environs,” Ndiawar reads to Day from something prepared. Both hands hold the page. “Yang is senior as, together, you visit the shut-ins. The very badly off. The no room for them here.”

“It’s a talent I have,” Yang says, combing his bangs with four fingers. “I close my eyes and form a perfect detailed image of any object. From any angle. Then I rotate it.”

“You visit the prepared log’s schedule of shut-ins,” Ndiawar reads. “Yang, who is senior, counsels these badly off people, while you encourage, through skill, them to express disordered feelings through artistic acts.”

“I can see textures and imperfections and the play of light and shadow on the objects I rotate, too,” Yang says. He is making small hand gestures that do not seem to signify anything in particular. “It’s a very private talent.” He looks to Ndiawar. “I just want to be up front with the guy.”

Dr. Ndiawar ignores Yang. “Influencing them to direct aberrant or dysfunctioning affect onto things which they artistically make,” he reads in a monotone. “On objects which cannot be harmed. This is a fieldmodel of intervention. Such as clay, which as an object is good.”

“I’m practically an MD,” Yang says, tamping a cigarette on his knuckle.

The steeple reappears as Ndiawar leans back. “Yang is a caseworker who consumes medication. However he is cheap, and has in that chest of his a good heart…”

Yang stares at the Director. “What medication?”

“… which goes out toward others.”

Day stands. “I need to know when I start.”

Ndiawar extends both hands. “Buy clay.”

Sarah walks Day to the pool on the night before Esther gets hurt. She asks Day to touch water that’s lit from below by lamps in the tile. He can see the center drain and what it does to the water around it. The water is so blue it even feels blue, he says.

She asks him to immerse himself in the shallow end.

Day and Sarah have sex in the shallow end of Sarah’s childhood home’s blue pool. Sarah around him is warm water in cold water. Day has his orgasm inside her. The drain outlet slaps and gurgles. Sarah begins to have her orgasm, her lids flutter, Day tries with wet fingers to hold her lids open, she hanging on to him, back ramming against the tiled side with a rhythmic lisping sound, whispering, “Oh.”

F
OUR
C
OLORS

“I don’t know who Soutine is,” Yang says as they drive away from the home of the lady who speaks only Spanish. “You thought it looked like Soutine?”

The car’s color is a noncolor, neither brown nor green. Day’s seen nothing like it. He wipes sweat from his face. “It did.” His supply case is in the back under a steel bucket. A mophandle rattles against the bucket. Sarah paid for the case and supplies.

Yang hits the dashboard’s top. The air conditioner grinds out a smell of must. The car’s heat is intense.

“Do the phone bill,” Day says, falling in behind a city bus hairy with spraypaint. The bus’s fumes are sweet.

Yang rolls down his window and lights a cigarette. The sunlight makes his exhalation pale.

“Ndiawar told me about your wife’s little girl. I’m sorry about that crack about a vacation your first week here. I’m sorry I didn’t know.”

Day can see Yang’s profile out of the corner. “I’ve always liked the blue of a phone bill.”

The air conditioner begins to work against its own smell.

Yang has very black hair and a thin wool tie and eyes the color of trout. He closes them. “Now I’ve got the phone bill folded into a triangle. But one side doesn’t quite come down and meet the base. But it’s still a triangle. An order-in-chaos type of thing.”

Day sees something yellow by the road.

“Eric?”

“The bill’s got a tiny rip in the right leg of the triangle,” Yang says, “and it’s for sixty dollars. The rip is tiny and white and sort of hairy. That must be the paper’s fibers or something.”

Day guns to pass a pickup full of chickens. A spray of corn and feathers.

“I’m rotating the rip out of sight,” Yang whispers. The side of his face breaks into crescents. “Now there’s nothing but phone-bill blue.”

There’s a horn and the tug of a swerve.

Yang opens his eyes. “Whoa.”

“Sorry.”

They drive past some dark buildings with no glass in the windows. A dirty boy throws a tennis ball at a wall.

“I hope they,” Yang is saying.

“What?”

“Catch the drunk driver.”

Day looks over at Yang.

Yang looks at him. “The one who hit your little girl.”

“What driver?”

“I just hope they catch the bastard.”

Day looks at the windshield. “Esther had an accident in the pool.”

“You guys have a pool?”

“My wife does. There was an accident. Esther got hurt.”

“Ndiawar told me she got hit.”

“The drain outlet got blocked. The drain’s suction sucked her under.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“She was under a long time.”

“Am I sorry.”

“I can’t swim.”

“Jesus.”

“I could see her very clearly. The pool’s very clear.”

“Ndiawar said you said the driver was drunk.”

“She’s still in the hospital. There’s going to be brain damage.”

Yang is looking at him. “Should you even be here today?”

Day cranes to see street signs. They’re stopped at a light. “Which way.”

Yang looks at the log book attached to the visor. Its rubber band was once green. Points.

V
ERY
H
IGH

The brushstrokes of the best-dreamt work, too, are visible as rhythms. This day’s painting discloses its rhythms against a terrain in which light is susceptible to the influences of the wind. This is a wind that blows hard and inconstant across the school’s campus, whistles against the De Chirico belltower from which it has scoured all shadow. This is a terrain in which there are alternating lulls and gusts of light. In which open spaces flash like diseased nerves and bent trees hang with a viscous aura that settles to set the grass on willemite fire, in which windrows of light pile up against fencebottoms, walls, and undulate and glow. The belltower’s sharp edges shiver gusts into spectra. Tall boys in blazers move knifelike through a parting shine with sketchbooks held eye-level; their shadows flee before them. The scintillant winds lull and gather, seem to coil, then brawl and whistle and strobe and strike to break faint pink through the Hall of Art’s rose window. Day’s sketched notes light up. On the machinelit screens at the front, two slides of the same thing project the frail and palmate shadow of the art professor at the podium, a dry old Jesuit hissing his s’s into the illwired mike, reading a lecture to a hall half full of boys. His shadow is insectile against Vermeer’s colored Delft as he feels at his eyes.