Fall and Rise (16 page)

I put away the notebook and look up. Something's doing on the next block. Take out the book, look at it, put it away. Car commotion, people in the street, but what was I looking for second time I opened the book? Did it so quick I forgot to look for what I started out to and now I forget what that was. Memo to someone—myself? An anagor—somewhere, whatever the word is? Realization, reclamation, recognition of my own situation, nature and character—something like that? I take out the book, look at what I wrote. Last stanza, include whatever you do, even to concluding with, etcet etcet, snow and rain, dinner at five tomor, pop in hosp, what the heck's hart smarting? and I cross it out with my pen till I can't read it. Here and now feelings, meeting Helene, just to be with someone tonight, etcet etcet—makes sense but's nothing new. I cross out all those too, worried someone one day might see what I wrote and wonder what was with him. I write “Anorisis or anagisis or some other an-isis or -asis—look it up. Word's in Web's 3rd.” First stumbled on it when? Was looking up anagoge not long back, fourth time it seemed in as many weeks. Some words are like that with me. Heuristic's another—why can't I remember what it means? “Anagoge & heuristic,” I write. “Lk em up & how to pronounc anagog again.” Pen runs dry on “n”. I unscrew it, squeeze the bladder, nothing inside. Ink's one of the only things one can't borrow from a passerby. Plenty of things, but I know what I mean. I put the pen away. Strapy wrapy legs—oh so po. My eyes already ache. Ruty souns aboun is abysmal, abominable—quick, which, if forced to make an instant deadline printing decision between those two, would read better and would I choose? I close the nobook—abandonable—and put it in my coat. Of course. What I wanted to do and was in that book was that love buzwax, marag, tot. Maybe then, with an adjective adjective woman, one who makes trenchant observations about me I've been unable to hit upon on my own, things would change for me somewhat. Woman who unscrews me, presses my bladder, I don't know if the latter act works, till I run dry. Who holds me and let me hold her while I sleep. No lets, we just do: hold each other going into and in sleep and when we wake up. To know when I've awakened that I've held her and am holding her. Of course I'd know I'm holding her because I'd have waked up. But that's what I want or something like: woman and bed simultaneously. Right now. This sec. I want to snap my fingers and open my eyes to it. I believe in miracles? Will if this one now comes true. I snap my fingers, close my eyes, say to myself, but maybe I should have first closed my eyes, snapped my fingers, said to myself, anyway I close my eyes again, snap my fingers, say to myself “Me with Helene in Helene's bed what I want right now, please.” Forget the please. Too much like when I used to pray to God out of fear every night before I fell asleep. God please this, please that, God please keep my mommy well, sister unsick, daddy making money and alive, God no awful war, enemy soldiers landing ashore, please God I beg, wish, swear I'll be a good boy from now on and pray to you as much as you like, and please if there's anything I'm doing or not doing you're not pleased with, please let me know. Close my eyes, snap my fingers, say to myself “Me with Helene in really any nice clean bed right now,” open them. I liked it when she used the word scoot. And way she moved. As well as what she didn't say and do. What do I mean “way she moved”? She moved normally, naturally, unaffectedly, but athletically, though not muscleboundly, as if as a girl she used to seriously tap dance or take some after-school classical or modern dance or early-on had exceptionally agile legs as if she'd run and won or second-placed in dashes and long-distance races in grade school and beat when they let her compete most boys her age, and also how she flew downstairs at Diana's so sure she didn't even think that flying down so fast she could have fallen on her face. Or just fallen, forget the face. Tripped but not gotten hurt. And “as well as what she didn't say and do”? So subdued. That's not the word. But something I liked. Not edgy, testy, overpeppy, sloppy, noisy, coarse, raucous, smoky, talky, scowly, mousy, so on. That she whacked the umbrella open: in notebook too. “Okay, Mr. Krin, now I must scoot.” “I've got to.” “Now I got to.” Or “have to.” But definitely “scoot.” This one I truly mustn't ruin. Meaning she: I shouldn't. Though with those phone calls? No, lots of apologies as I said. “Um, just joking, I was, but not the best jest-joking, no?” No, no more jesting in joking. “I didn't think my call would wreak so much harm.” Or truth: “I was a little high. Not a little. Let me tell the truth: a lot. But you also should know that's unusual for me to get so high. No it's not. Truth is, if I'm gonna tell it, or going to, cause that's, I mean because that's or those are just another language affectation or digression I use to direct attention to what I say and away from what I do: I get high. Don't want to but I do. No, truth, I do want to, because lots of times I've nothing else to do or think I don't or just don't want to think about doing anything else, so about once every three weeks I get high, but not as high as I got that night, is the truth. Usually by myself high. A solitary tippler mostly. I don't like it though do when I'm doing it or planning to. If things changed for me in ways I've gone over with myself, I'd probably change that drinking habit as well as stop drinking a little too much almost every night of the week while I read and often just to get to sleep, and that's also the truth. Doesn't interfere with my work though. Wake up, regular time, no alarm clock, exercise, coffee, newspaper, maybe a shower and in an hour I'm ready to go, or almost, though ten to fifteen times a year or so when I get high the previous night, mornings till around noon will be slow. And God knows why I feel compelled to tell all this in my first call to you when you certainly didn't want to hear it, right? Look: right, wrong, truth or not, and maybe half of that was, since I tend to distort as well as affect and digress—well, maybe not as well as, though I am a pretty effective distorter too—just see me, okay? You've no reason to even speak to me I guess, but what but an hour or less do you have to lose? Meet me I mean, not see, for coffee, tea or even a drink, because what I didn't want you to think before, and I swear I'm not trying now to affect, digress or distort, is that drink's any kind of problem with me. Those ten to fifteen mornings-after a year perhaps, but usually when I start work late I work later into the day than I usually do, and because I'm so tired from having worked late and maybe also from the evening before, that late day is usually one of the ten to fifteen days a year I don't drink or hardly at all. And meet not tonight if you don't like. Now that I think of it we can't, since tonight, and what I'm going to say isn't going to be said so you'll think something like how nice that he's such a good son, I'm going to visit my mother, but maybe in the coming week, so what do you say? Even a couple of drinks or dinner or both for two on me. You can't? You won't? You never will? You'll meet? Great. Time and date and see you at yours or you at mine or just at the meeting place.” I want to hold her face in my hands and bring it toward mine and lean over the two to three inches I think it'd take if what I'm remembering now is right about her height and if she doesn't raise herself on her toes to kiss. I want to. Yes. Very much. To open my eyes and find hers closed. Then open them again and find them open. Hers. Her to smile when I find her eyes open when I open mine. Her to take my face in her hands and bring it down to hers and kiss my lips. Want to. I. Lie my head on a pillow beside hers on a pillow or both ours on the same pillow and our lips almost touching but not speaking and then touching and our eyes closing, though I don't know why not speaking. Sure we can be speaking. Softly, moderately, I suppose any way but loudly, crudely, though even there too. So we're kissing and holding and possibly speaking and possibly crudely but not loudly and doing the rest. Doing the best. To have done the rest. To shut the light and her to turn over and face away from me or the light's already off and we've done the rest and her to turn over and I press up from behind while my nose is in her hair or lips are on her shoulder or neck and penis against her behind or between her thighs. I'm sure I can get out of that window scene and calls to her service some way. Lots of apologies. But not to act oafish on the phone. She's a bright woman. She'll probably respect the work I do. She looks like she likes poetry. Courses she gives. Plenty of poetry in there and that she'll respect what I do I didn't mean makes her bright. But all could be so nice. Live at her place if it's big enough if first we worked out. Two bedrooms, one for her to work in, I'd set up and tear down the living room table every day or some other unused day space. I'd mind but adapt. All I need's one drawer and a long shelf. Two incomes, not rents, how else can a representative couple like us afford to live in this city without a struggle, and 600 block of West Hundred-tenth could be along Riverside Drive or close. Maybe she overlooks the Hudson. Tugs would pass. Summertime Circle Line trippers. Columbia area may be near as she can safely live to City College did Diana say? If so my alma I'll tell her next time we speak. Pre-med, then pre-dent, but I'd frequently feel queasy when I entered the bio and chem buildings because of the formaldehyde and rotten eggs smells and couldn't learn the formulas and laws or dissect the baby pig or earthworms. Wasn't a smart student—I can get part of this into the phone call some way, maybe just to say I thought she taught at City but then remembered it was a college upstate. Now makes me wonder why she lives around Columbia: went there or to City for her postgraduate work and got a cheap flat and stayed? Someone cut them up and labeled the parts for me and in exchange I took the requisite swimming test for him in gym under his name. Never got a post-B. A. I'll say. Not boasting of course. They wouldn't believe him when he said he sinks when he jumps in. Got interested in Japanese language and lit through a deeply moving Japanese movie about Japanese prisoners of war when I was nearly thirty and waiting tables at a beach resort. But more from the book it was based on that I later read and took a quick Berlitz thinking that would be it and then private lessons from an elderly Japanese businessman I taught English to and cooked dinner for in return. He also taught me the sake and tea ceremonies and how to disembowel myself and make paper insects and birds. Started translating poetry on my own and for a while brought my literal translations to this man. “Hasenai,” he once said, pushing my other poets aside. “I buried his grandfather's sister. He be the one you should assist and do. What if I say without saying why or when of then, if you'll allow me, that I owe his grandaunt a grave favor,” and by heart he recited in Japanese the end of one of Jun's earliest poems and first I ever heard: “Juvenile, goose-fed, young junk, halfcocked bloom. Pardon me, exceedable fathers, but I've got to make rot and humor and doom.” She might appreciate some of that. An ill-mannered autodidact. Hardworking, a bit self-deprecating, humble origins, funny-boned. Had enough of her stuffed pedants, pedagogues and preppies and might be drawn to a literary roughneck. But I'm not that ill-mannered or much of a roughneck and her men friends probably aren't pedantic or stuffy and I'd love to get a pedagogical job. I want to say goodnight to her from behind while she lies on her side and she to turn her face toward mine and barely be able to reach my lips and turn away from me again and my face in one of those places I mentioned and hand on her breast, hip or thigh and other arm under a pillow or holding her shoulder or hand and to fall asleep like that, penis pressed, legs and chest. Sure there'd be problems but. Two bedrooms, not two beds. Two of us working in the same apartment. Two typewriters going at the same time but a door or two closed between them to shut out the noise. Two pens or minds or pairs of eyes going at the same time and the doors to shut out the quietness. Only one living room and bedroom and when she passes me on her way to the kitchen for coffee or tea, what? To brush her hand across my shoulder or head or back of my chair. For the phone to ring and both of us to go for it. Door or doors to her bedroom suddenly opened to get the phone in the living room. Or if it's in the bedroom her phone, for her to say “It's for you, Dan” or “Sweetie, it sounds like Dick or Jane—the phone,” and for me to go to the bedroom and touch or brush up against her or her chair and smile at her when she hands me the receiver if she didn't leave it on the bed. Or she might have a long extension cord and bring the phone to me from the bedroom or even past the living room to the kitchen where I could be boiling water for coffee or tea. Or it could ring and I could answer it and it's for her, her mother or last lover, her colleague or student or friend, and I'd bring the phone into the bedroom where she's working. Or just for her to be in the kitchen around noon and say “I'm toasting a roll, want me to toast one for you too?” Or come in crunching a carrot and say “Want me to peel you one too?” Or hold a carrot or roll up and say “You want one too?” Or hold both up and say “You want these two too?” Or to hear her chewing or crunching a carrot or radish or celery stick in the kitchen. She's in the kitchen, I'm in the living room. I want it to disturb my work enough for me to say “You make a hell of a racket with your crunching” or “chewing,” and she could say “Why, does it bother
you?” or “Why does it bother you?” but she'd say “I'm sorry, does it bother you?” and I'd say yes and take the carrot or what's left of the radish or celery out of her hand and even out of her mouth if the carrot or celery's sticking out of it and bite into it loudly or take all three if she's holding them and bite into each loudly and chew more loudly than she and she could take back the carrot, radish or celery stick, though I doubt anything would be left of the radish by then, or even the toasted roll or a toasted or three-day-old bagel and bite into it or two of those three and we could chew loudly simultaneously. I've done things like that. Or I want to have egg salad on my lips after taking a forkful from a bowl of egg salad she just made and to look at her and suddenly want to kiss her and she could say “This is a childhood fear I once had—to have a boy with egg salad on his lips try to kiss me.” Something like that happened to May with chicken salad I think, but I want something like that to happen to Helene with me. That's silly but true but I want much much more to. To go to France with her for a month to drink, eat, serious sightseeing and sleep and especially for a week the prehistoric caves. To go back to my roots—wrong. To return, at least in my mind—skip it. Or to spend, if we didn't have the loot for France, a couple of summer months in a remote bay area of Gaspé let's say. Way up. Northern lights and deep in woods. Fireplace going every night. Fog, some days I want plenty of fog and most nights sky swarming with stars clear as whatever simile and for a while during that time not only northern lights but meteorites clear as that same simile too. And even if I heard and saw them all before I want her to tell me which star is which and when combined their constellations or parts and yarns. She looks a lot like a woman I knew who knew a lot about stars and sailed. Also with a cheery bright face, long full frame, long white neck, straight bright teeth, long light hair, but wavy and blond, not red and I think straight, long strong legs and little feet, which with Helene's long skirt I couldn't see, little to no makeup around the eyes and on the lips and cheeks, and who nuzzled and made love only when it was most expedient to and it seemed had little to do with me and wrote poem after poem on beach after beach, but shortly after I last saw her on one wrote she's turning me loose and giving up writing poetry and living off her family to just write critically for the time being and study, read and teach. But this time with Helene or someone much like, meaning with a bright full mind, hard worker, no snob, someone I'm sexually drawn to and who's similarly drawn to me, and with substantially a cheerful disposition and strong sense of fairness and constancy, I want it to be much different than the rest and to start happening soon. I want to love and be loved and be called my love and beloved and make love with my beloved and call out love love love while we do. To take long beach walks and bike rides and go berry-picking along country roads. All that and then some I want unabashedly. Berries. Together. To pick. Rasp-, straw-, black-, blue- and even cran- and goose- in a mutual quart-basket or two, one for me, with the black-, straw-, rasp- and blue-, two for it, gibt here ein kiss, fourth for you, something I once did too. Was when? Eight or so years ago with a woman where? Coastal Maine and someone other than May or that star-and-sail woman whose name I can't recall and did that for a week and fell ears over heels for her for several days and she a little with me she said, though we both later said it could only have been because of the sea, fog, stars, fresh vegs and berry pickings and knew beforehand I was only bussing up to escape the hot city and make lots of love with someone and she at the time was the one woman I knew who, just as she'd said on the phone she'd been alone too long with her foxgloves and Muscovy ducks and wanted someone to bike, beach, pick and make love with too, “So come come come, it's a long trip but not much fare and I'll go in half on it and if this is any inducement, I'm as sticky as your city and as needy to be relieved.” I want to rowboat out with her or canoe which I did with that Maine woman too. Her name was Lale, star-and-sail woman Sue. Want her to catch a fish from the boat's aft with last night's fish as bait while I paddle or row. Want her to troll. Want to get blisters on my hands first time I row and for her to say next day “You've blisters, I'll row, you troll,” or “I'll paddle, you fish,” but this is too ridic. Even if it is. What I want. To sit facing her in the boat and look at her tightened thighs spread apart in her swim bottoms or jeans and that bulge where's the vulv as she struggles against wind, current or tide. Want her to wear a sun hat out there and her hair to hang salty and loose. Want to make afternoon love. On a sunny porch or on top of a sleeping bag beside the fired-up fireplace with all our clothes but her socks and watch off if there's rain or cold fog. Want to make love before breakfast on a quilted bedspread just after we get up and start to dress. Want it to come to us like that. Slap-bang, I want to, you do, down again. Want to take the hook out of a fish's mouth first time for me and maybe gut the fish with her instructions and fry my fish whole with its eye looking up at me adverbially first time for that too. I don't know why I want all those but I do. Watch because it's racy. Want to lie there after with my ear unwittingly near her wrist and listen to its tick. Want to nudge those socks off with my big toes. Want the crazy colors and cushiness of the quilt. Sleeping bag so we can be sloppy. Fishing line out of stick and string because it's simple. Want us to drift in the boat or canoe and catch another half hour of sunset. Want us to suddenly get fogged or rained on but close to shore and dripping wet. Want us to dry off in the house, cottage or bungalow and start to make love by that fired-up fireplace again while, just as we were, or something, about to put our clothes or robes on. Want us one dusk to plan out our lives together in that drifting boat with the sun half-past setting and mackerel or some other fish jumping and things in the air buzzing and loons crooning or wooing or whatever they're doing in the water and maybe a lobsterman's boat from far off motoring and a buoy from not so far off bonging, but other than those and some other unimposing sea and sky things I can't think of right now like cormorants diving, nothing. Want the water to be clear, don't want any biting bugs out there. No water skiers, moving or moored speedboats or low-flying planes. No planes. No beer cans, oil slicks, human feces, toilet paper, cigarette butts or filters from filtertips floating past. Want perfection in a setting other than in one with just clouds and sun or as close to one as I can get. Then I want to row or be rowed back and beach the boat and tie the line to a shore rope with a lobsterman's knot and walk up to the house, cottage or bungalow though no tent, don't want no matter how roomy, protective and complex a tent, and the house, cottage or bungalow not to be more than a few hundred feet from the beach and the path to it if it's uphill not too steep and this structure should be wooded outside and in and shielded by tall shading undiseased trees and in the bedroom a little breeze and I want us to make love on top of or underneath a bedspread or quilt or just to throw the covers off and do it on a clean bottom sheet. Want her to later say she wants to have my baby. “I know you do or at least want to have one too,” and I can then say, could, could, and I would “Very much so, and maybe this'll sound silly when I say it, though in some other way how could it? only with you.” First time it'd be for me too if something like that happened, other than with—but with her I was never sure it was true. Believed she conceived for sure but not for sure from me. Some woman other than May, Lale or Sue who said she was having and then had had mine but who was living with her husband and year-old child at the time and said he knew but because he'd become involved with two other people and one she intimated a man, even encouraged her to, but of course not to have another man's child. So both he and I wanted it aborted but she'd always wanted two and close enough in age where they'd play together almost like twins which she said would take some of the drudgery of motherhood off her hands, and after she gave birth to the first her husband couldn't get erect whenever he did join her in bed. In fact, saw them all together, and only time I met him, at a party when she was visibly pregnant supposedly from me and I was still seeing her once a week, something I regret now and would never do again with any man's lover or wife no matter what the circumstances between them, unless let's say they got married just so he could get U.S. citizenship or a work permit and weren't living together as husband and wife, simply because, well, life's tough enough, that sort of stuff, don't want to hurt the other guy when he for certain doesn't deserve it and I can so easily avoid it, and having no cohabitational sex for weeks or even months doesn't mean as much to me as it once did. But he said after he'd said “I think we should have a little chat about the burps and beats,” and taken my arm and clapping me hard on the back though by his face to anyone else it must have seemed good naturedly escorted me into an empty room, that I mustn't think unhighly of him despite anything Penny might have said, that he's always had a very high opinion of me from everything she's said including some of the things she said she dislikes about me, though she was only twenty-six he urged her to have this pioneer amniotic fluid test but only to see if anything was amiss with my genes, and he's pleased as probably I should be to report I'm a hundred percent clean, that finally they've decided they never want the child to know its genetic father was anyone but him and hoped I wouldn't do anything in my life, or help anything from happening after it like putting my paternity into possibly publishable poetry or fiction or journals I might keep, to crimp their plans. “I wouldn't, why would I?” I said and that I think he's a fine fellow and Penny's never said anything but the nicest things about him and I've never written nor do I ever intend to write poetry, fiction, journals, plays or an autobiography of any kind so along those lines he has nothing to fear too. Then we shook hands, I think he asked what had been in my glass and got me another drink, called it a night for both of them though Penny wasn't in the room, and I never saw her again though she did call a few months later to say she'd had a healthy baby in the last five days and that Marc, that's right, Marc, as much as he liked me didn't want her to see me again or at least for the next ten years if they stayed married that long. When I asked what sex the baby was she said “If you have to know, it rhymes with whirl,” and when I asked what name they gave her she said something like, well, it's all something like, “I'm sure you'll hate it and mock us for such a floricultural name so I'm not saying, goodbye.” For a few years after that I'd write and this except when forced to in grade school was the only time in my life and only when I was lonely and drunk some nights, long lonely drunken nighttime paragraphs I then called poems and later threw away in one trash bag because they were so stilted, formless, derivative, just bad, and I don't write poetry, about my weanling I'd never hold nor see and who'd never know nor unknowingly pee on me…my year-old, two-year-old, three-year-old child who could resemble but would never tremble at my paternity…my little no-good nudnick kid whose folks should know my folks are prone to neurofibromatosis and diabetes…my young alloy, whose gender rhymes with ploy, whose name might be Troy or Roy, whom I'll never live to enjoy or destroy, noy woy I knoy whether it ever reseeds my soy…my mine me moans thy mind I phones thine line chimes drones…all starts or parts of some of my “Me my poems.” Penny had the girl around eleven years ago, they emigrated to New Zealand the next year, one of their friends I bumped into a couple-years back said he'd heard Marc had drowned in the Pacific but wasn't sure where or when and didn't know anyone who was and even forgot where he got the information from or what when I asked were the children's names. And Penny? I said and he said for all he or anyone else she knew knows she was still living somewhere in the South Seas with her girls, but she cut everyone off when they left and no one if anyone was going to the Pacific and wanted to look her up remembers where in Canada Marc was born and her parents were long dead. Some nights, when the drink's gone to my head and I'm feeling sentimental and a bit self-pitying, I think this girl's going to ring my doorbell one day and say something like “I just wanted to see how your nose and earlobes stacked up against mine.” Also thought if I ever wrote another poetical paragraph or paragraphless poem it'd be about a man who falls in love with this daughter without knowing who the genetic father is and maybe even gets her pregnant, even if the theme's been done and done and for millenniums before. But Helene or whoever it might be though for now she seems my best remote hope. Want her to get pregnant on the bedspread, quilt or sheet or if we do it in front of the fired-up fireplace then on the floor. To teach school while she's pregnant if it is Helene with me that summer and whatever summer that'll be though I hope some summer soon. This one, at least the next one. Want my mother to visit us for a week that summer wherever it'll be though I hope someplace uncrowded and Northeast and near but not on a secluded but unhumid shore. Her parents or mother or sibling to come for a week if she wants or friend or student if it's Helene and she has favorite students and if it isn't then if this woman's also a college teacher, and to have the time for all this she'd almost have to be or a self-supporting