Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked (13 page)

She arranged a meeting to discuss her novel. For the venue, she selected the sun roof outside her bedroom. On the appointed day she led him upstairs, naked under her soft white cashmere wrap. As they passed through the bedroom itself, the sight of the unmade bed seems to have stirred an awareness in Lawrence of the possible seriousness of the situation he was getting himself into. He hesitates, embarrassed, evidently realizing the moment has come to clarify his intentions—possibly as much to himself as to her. So once again we have the comical figure of the man in the bedroom, the boudoir, the roomette, being impinged on by the desires of a woman he is at least passingly attracted to, and making up his mind (perhaps a little culpably late in the proceedings) to keep her at arm’s length. Comical because, although we may commend him for being a good husband and model citizen, we find him a bit ridiculous as a man, because what kind of man other than a priest or a jihadi really cares, on his
own
account, about protecting his chastity?

Not being a fictional character, he doesn’t handle himself with quite the suaveness of Sir Gawain, but in his own way he seems, after all, to observe the same code of conduct as the virtuous knight:

“I don’t know how Frieda’s going to feel about this,” he mutters nervously.

Not exactly what you’d expect from the author of
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
or the excoriator of Christianity who blamed Jesus for the calamitous ascendancy of the mind over the senses.
I don’t know how Frieda’s going to feel about this
 … And yet one warms to him for it, or I do: a confused and conflicted human being like the rest of us. Future meetings are scheduled in his own quarters, with Frieda clumping noisily around close-by, and the collaboration soon fizzles out.

In the morning I head up into the San Cristobal mountains to the Kiowa Ranch. Mabel, evidently generous as well as a good sport, deeded this property to the Lawrences after she realized she wasn’t going to dislodge Frieda. The place, miles along a twisting red dirt road, is a jumble of modest wooden buildings with a disused corral below and Lawrence’s memorial chapel on a hill above. Two sparrows are building a nest in an elk skull nailed to the fence of an overgrown garden; otherwise there are no signs of life. Near the main house is an enormous pine, leaning toward the rickety porch in the strong, steady wind. A sign warns you not to steal any of the pinecones strewn on the ground below it, and I realize this must be the great Ponderosa pine Lawrence describes in the finale of
St. Mawr
, where the transfiguring description (his speciality was to describe something with vivid realism while at the same time transforming it into something else, basically whatever his argument at a given moment required it to be) turns the tree into an image of icy, swampy, pre-animal consciousness. I know the passage well: the tree standing like a demonish guardian, its pillar of flaky-ribbed copper rising in the shadows of the pre-sexual world, wind hissing in the needles, its cold sap surging and oozing gum, and the pinecones lying all over the yard, open in the sun like wooden roses.

There are hundreds of these “wooden roses” lying all over the grass now, golden and enormous, ten times the size of any pinecone I have ever seen. I’m not, by nature, a souvenir hunter or collector of relics, and probably if there weren’t the notice forbidding it, it wouldn’t cross my mind to take one. But under the circumstances it is irresistible, and I place one furtively in my canvas shoulder bag.

A woman appears, gray-haired and sunburned. She must have come out of one of the other buildings. In her hand is a raspberry-red ice cream. I nod at her and she nods back. I’m not sure if she saw me stealing the pinecone.

“Nice day,” I say, feeling awkward.

“Yep.”

“Are you the caretaker?”

“Yep.”

“Can I … go inside the house?”

“Nope.”

“Oh. I guess I’ll go see the chapel then.”

She says nothing. I walk up toward the chapel, feeling her eyes on me as I climb the zigzagging path up the hill.

The building is small and unpretentious, with a hand-hewn look that Lawrence would probably have approved of, the little rose window above the door just a truck wheel cemented into the whitewashed wall. A clunkily sculpted phoenix squats on the roof. Inside, on the gray-tiled floor, is an altar with Lawrence’s ashes mixed in the cement, also topped by a phoenix. The phoenix was Lawrence’s personal heraldic emblem, his equivalent of Gawain’s pentangle; fiery vitality being the principle he wished to live by, rather than Gawain’s Christian morality (though he seems to have been wearing a pentangle in Mabel’s bedroom). People have left small offerings on the altar—feathers, juniper berries, oak sprigs—which surprises me, imagining, as I somehow do, that I am the last living acolyte. I think of leaving the pinecone but find that I have already become too attached to the prospect of having it on my desk at home to contemplate sacrificing it.

On the wall is a framed official document from the U.S. Consulate in Marseille certifying that the ashes are those of David Herbert Lawrence, shipped to America aboard the SS
Conte di Savoia
along with the death certificate and cremation paperwork from the mayor’s office in Vence, where Lawrence died of TB. Something about the display of this document, right here in the chapel, strikes me as overemphatic. The effect is to raise doubts where none might have existed otherwise. And as I read it I remember a story I had forgotten, which is that these are possibly not Lawrence’s ashes in the altar here at all.

Frieda had a lover, an Italian infantry officer, Captain Ravagli, whom she married soon after Lawrence’s death and sent to Europe to bring back the remains. But Ravagli, so the story goes, managed to leave the urn behind on a station platform, and brought home a substitute, filled with God knows what rubbish.

I am trying to enter into a properly receptive state of mind as I stand here in the chapel, but it is hard with the cruel comedy of this little fiasco echoing in the background of my thoughts. There is an amazing photograph of Frieda later on in her widowhood, ample and gray, with a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth, flanked by Mabel Dodge Luhan and Dorothy Brett, all three of them laughing. Brett was an English artist who lived here at the ranch with the Lawrences. It wasn’t a ménage à trois, but she revered him and once, elsewhere, he did consent to go to bed with her, but couldn’t get an erection (Brett remembers him shouting childishly, “Your pubes are all wrong”), and I find myself thinking of that too, the photograph of the women who outlived their idol, joyous cackling survivor-laughs on their wrinkled faces, all of them no doubt glad, at some level, to be rid of this consumptive prophet with his spit and sputum and his everlasting exhortations and injunctions. Captain Ravagli probably would have suited them all much better: a robust, extrovert type, like the panther who takes the place of the tormented man starving himself to death in Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist.” Ravagli tried to read
Sons and Lovers
once, but didn’t care for it: “We don’t need literature to know what to do” was his comment.

All of which, jostling in my head, is proving a considerable distraction. Here I am in the chapel, the holy of holies, braced for some kind of momentous reckoning with the great man, my own bearded giant (though he was physically small and went by Bert rather than Bertilak), but allowing myself to be sidetracked by these demeaning, unsubstantiated stories. I am singularly failing to rise to the occasion. Not only that, but in entertaining these slurs I have become complicit, it seems to me, in the general mockery that these days habitually greets Lawrence’s name, even when there is a grudging acknowledgment of the acid brilliance of his prose. I, of all people, who unfailingly answer
St. Mawr
when asked my favorite novel, and even once taught a class on it, proposing it as the only book ever written that convincingly imagines a state of happiness based on the real conditions of life, in all its destructiveness as well as its wild energy (the class wasn’t a great success). And it hasn’t escaped me either that these gossipy stories have in common the theme of emasculation, or, shall we say, betailing, as if there is something about the very presumption of a man trying to imagine, without irony, the condition of total fulfillment, emotional as well as sexual, that incites a jeering desire to see him impotent, cuckolded, cheated even of his own ashes. And here I am, his last disciple, with my own hand, as it were, on the gelding knife! I leave the chapel, dissatisfied with myself. As the line goes in the poem where Lawrence berates himself for throwing a log at a snake instead of seizing a rare opportunity to watch such a creature close up: “I missed my chance with one of the lords of life.”

The caretaker is nowhere in sight as I drive off, and I take consolation in the thought that at least I have my wooden rose, my pinecone. Back on the train—a different train with different passengers but an identical roomette—I open my bag to gloat on it, thinking perhaps its talismanic powers will succeed where the chapel failed. Quite what form “success” might take, I am not sure. A surge of creativity perhaps; inspiration for a poem or story, or just some phoenix magic to burn off the heavy vapors of Ahriman from my shoulders. Perhaps also I am half remembering the little pinecone hand grenades we used to hurl into one another’s encampments at school, in which case there is possibly some idea of superior explosiveness attached to the object, of having got my hands on something incendiary enough to satisfy, once and for all, my desire to experience the pleasurable violence I have always felt to be present in the true creative act.

But whatever it may be I am not destined to find out. The pinecone isn’t there. It appears to have fallen out of my bag somewhere en route.

Not a serious loss, I tell myself; not like losing a phone or a wallet. But I feel upset, even a bit crushed, as if I have been judged—or rather have somehow judged myself—unworthy of having it in my possession.

*   *   *

Somewhere after Albuquerque I go into the Observation Lounge. There aren’t many free seats and without thinking I squeeze in next to a youngish guy, white, but dressed gangsta style in a filmy black do-rag, with a thin stirrup of beard around his jaw and chin. He mutters unpleasantly as I sit down, pointedly not moving his sprawled knee out of the space belonging to my seat. I try to ignore him but it is hard to concentrate on anything else in the presence of such open hostility. After a while he takes out a cell phone. I listen in while he arranges for a friend to wire him forty bucks to a Western Union in Los Angeles. In a quieter voice he jokes about having just got money out of a chick on the train who was hanging with him earlier.

He moves off after this but I see him again a few hours later at the bar, during a long wait at a station. He is talking with a girl who I noticed boarding the train just a few minutes ago. She looks about eighteen: denim forage cap on her dyed black hair, heavily mascaraed blue eyes, close-fitting belly shirt. They appear to be flirting and I can’t help feeling stunned at the speed with which he has moved in on her. While I watch them a voice comes over the PA: Would Michelle somebody or other please come down to the platform, where her dad would like to say goodbye to her? The girl gives a sour grin: “Shit.” “That you?” the guy asks her. “Yeah.” “You gonna go say goodbye?” “No fuckin’ way.” They laugh and go back to what they were talking about. After a couple more minutes the voice comes again: Would Michelle so-and-so please come down to the platform right away; her dad would really, really like to say goodbye to her. The girl rolls her eyes but again stands her ground, while the guy chuckles. I look at her, wanting to say something. She catches my eye. The guy turns, recognizing me. He juts his chin as if to ask what the fuck am I looking at. I give a silent snort to show that I am not intimidated, but he has already turned back to the girl.

As I go back to my roomette the train pulls out and I wonder which of the three or four solitary men standing on the platform is the girl’s father and what he could have done to deserve his daughter’s treatment. My own daughter is ten, still entirely sweet-natured, and I dread even the most amicable distance opening between us, so I was feeling an instinctive solidarity with the girl’s father and was wanting to urge her to say goodbye to him. Also as a father, I was feeling protective toward her, thinking I should warn her off this character who is apparently in the habit of fleecing unsuspecting girls on trains. But I was also—such is the riven nature of the psyche, or the male psyche, or anyway mine—looking at her with desires of my own, the soft clashing effect of nubile breasts aloft above a skeletal rib cage sharply alluring, and now, as I sit here back in my roomette, the awareness of this, mingling with the adrenaline still coursing through me from the man’s aggression, and the attendant contradictory feelings of relief at having evaded violence and frustration at having been too well behaved or cowardly to inflict it, together have brought me into a place of familiar jangling confusion.

We are in the desert now. Vast pink-and-white-striped rock formations rise out of the cactus scrub like nature’s own McMansions. I eat a solitary dinner, then turn in for the night. It takes me some time to fall asleep, and I sleep badly when I do.

On the third morning the mood shifts, ripening and sweetening, with a faint, premonitory sickliness about it: sin coming to fruition. She enters at dawn, naked under a fur robe, gems braided into her hair. Lying beside him in the curtained chamber, “hir brest bare,” she kisses him twice, bringing him into that state of arousal in which reason organizes itself on a new basis and the arguments against consummation become harder and harder to remember. Here is a beautiful woman who wants you to make love to her. To refuse, to offend her as well as deny yourself the pleasure, strikes you as perverse, doltish, “crathayn.” The ethical basis, the biblical idea of sin, asserts itself weakly in his mind, like the memory of a memory. She presses her advantage, gently twisting the moralistic language of his thoughts to promote her own gospel of love: “Blame ye disserve, yif ye luf not that lyf that ye lye nexte.” Shame on you if you love not the living body by your side. He is perilously close to capitulation. And yet, contrary to expectation, he holds out once again. And this time the lady, planting a final kiss on his lips, ruefully concedes defeat.