Honeymooners A Cautionary Tale (53 page)

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Later that night in Iowa
City, back in the motel room (just the two of them, old Ralph and
Jim, for there was no romance in store for them that night, not
that either of them was really serious about getting any in the
first place, which if the truth be told had been simply old
salty-dog talk), Ralph had put in a call to the woman he loved, and
whom he would marry only weeks before he died. Jim put in a call to
Lindsay, but the line was busy. Fuck, Jim had said to Ralph, I just
hope Lindsay ain’t gabbing with one of my girlfriends. Ralph said,
How’s the boy, by the way? Jim said, Boy’s doing okay, I reckon.
Rolf’s a good kid. He’s eating me out of house and home. His grades
are real good. He’s just this big goofy, dreamy, basically good
kid. I tried to teach him how to hot-wire a car the other day, but
he ain’t got no mechanical abilities.

Ralph and Jim passed joints
back and forth between their beds and lay there in the darkened
room more or less watching television. At one point Jim said, So
what do you hear from Alice Ann, by the way? Ralph said, I only
mostly hear about her these days. From the kids mostly, on those
occasions when they call to hit me up for cash. Alice Ann used the
money I setded on her to buy the old farmhouse her mom and real dad
had supposedly met at during a dance back in the Stone Age.
Apparently she hired a bunch of hippie long-hairs who claimed they
were master Zen carpenters to restore it so that she could
establish some sort of karmic community center or something,
something like that, some sort of Eastern Dumb-Nut Ideas Institute
for those dropouts and drugheads and other blissed-out dopes who
called themselves Zen-nicks, but the hippie board-bangers just
generally ripped her off, sat around smoking dooby all day and
digging their navels. So Alice Ann went belly up yet again, and now
the last Ralph had heard she was back to slinging hash in some
roadside truckers’ diner in the Northwest somewhere, married to
some mechanic or something; something like that, anyway. Who really
knew. Who really knew anything at all.

Several weeks after Ralph’s
untimely death from lung cancer not a year after their last trip
together, Jim returned home from campus one afternoon to find
Lindsay working as usual in their back-yard garden she loved so.
Who knew where Rolf was out running around. Probably at the library
caressing the covers of books. Or sitting on a rock down by the
river. The boy seemed to understand intuitively that every day it
was both the same and a new river. The boy spent a great amount of
time on his butt in the grass of hillsides considering the passage
of clouds. Rolf was a big woolly-headed smart boy whose capacity
for gentleness and empathy and foodstuffs astonished Jim
daily.

Jim and Lindsay had bought a
turn-of-the-century, yellow- brick barn of a house on a hillside in
the Eastern city where Jim taught, which they called the Norman
Bates Boardinghouse because it looked so spooky and haunted that
neighborhood kids trembled deliciously when they skulked up the
twisty, crumbly- concrete steps to trick-or-treat on Halloween. In
the back-yard garden that day Lindsay was on her knees weeding
among some delicate blue flowers. Jim pulled up a chair to the
table on the back deck. It was the same round glass-topped table
they had had on the deck back in their old North Beach days. On the
table, beside a gin-and-tonic in which the ice had melted, lay a
copy of Ralph’s final collection of poems. Jim picked up Ralph’s
book of poems and thumbed through them, stopping here and there to
read, while he sipped at Lindsay’s watery leftover gin-and-tonic.
At one point Lindsay stood up and stretched, while rubbing the base
of her back. She spotted Jim and gave a little wave. For a few
moments they simply gazed at each other across the garden. Finally
Jim raised the glass as though making a toast, then polished its
watery contents off. Jim said, How about I throw some dogs on the
grill tonight? Lindsay said, That would be good. And then Lindsay
knelt back down to weed among those delicate blue flowers whose
name Jim couldn’t recall on a bet.

What Jim had thought about
as he watched his wife weed among those blue flowers was what if
Alice Ann had been right all along and their lives were all locked
in some crazy karmic conjunction. And in that ageless soup of
seeds and ancient eggs they had, sure enough, shared countless
incarnations jam-packed with lust and love and loss. And so maybe
they could all carry forth the hope that they would, indeed, have
other chances in other lifetimes to do better by one
another.

Lost Chapters and Lost Love Letters

purloined love letters

Dearest L –

How are you keeping? Listen, I haven’t writ
but a handful of love letters in my life and those years ago. Let
me say I miss you enormously and keep thinking of you even when I’m
supposed to be going through the motions of something else down
here. I keep remembering your face, your body, your conversation,
your silences – you – as well as those wordless moments when all I
wanted or felt like was simply to be with you and keep quiet, and
watch you move as you fixed breakfast, drew the bath or padded
around the bedroom, lovely lady. Looking back I see how strung-out
I was, terribly nervous, not able to really trust in the way I
wanted to trust, concerned about your feelings for and trust in me,
hungover part of the time, and simply zonked out with such a find –
that’s you, baby. What did we get ourselves into? Or me anyway,
anyway, did you quit smoking? Did you eat the rest of that fine
omelette? Sorry I couldn’t do justice to that breakfast, my stomach
sending me strange fright messages, mind awash with imminent loss.
I still want to make love to you in that bathtub, and in the
shower, and in the sea, everywhere, if you are willing. Those few
days, Lindsey, were splendid, absolutely splendid and, whether you
like it or not, you went right into my bloodstream. But I promise
not to pester you with letters and suchlike, unless you want me to.
I mean, until you tell me otherwise. Wow, I guess that sounds
insecure on my part. So be it. Rough days right now, in any case.
At best. But, no fooling, I intend not only to survive but thrive.
What else? I fell for you, you know, but I won’t complicate your
life unless you want it so. Anyway, Gary and I drove all that
Friday and Friday night and arrived in Sacramento – his home –
around nine o’clock Sat. morning. Had a terrible blowout in the
Datsum at 80mph that about finished us off – that about two hours
before I called you. Otherwise no incidents. Both of us flat broke.
We each gambled a dollar in nickels at Harold’s Club in Reno at six
in the morning. In Menlo Park, that home town of mine, I told Alice
Ann that Saturday afternoon about what had happened in Missoula.
Not all the details, of course, only that I felt I needed to change
my life, that I’d gotten in over my head, that I was fond to
distraction of someone up there. And the incredible thing, as I was
the first to admit, and she kept reminding me, it all happened in
such a short time. I can’t go into all the details of what has
transpired here since Saturday, day and night, eternal dialog, but
I can say I’d like us to be very careful, very honest, in what we
do and say from here on. Example: don’t say you’d like me to come
up, unless, wow, you mean it, else you might find me one morning on
our doorstep with a suitcase and a box of mss. But tell me what
you’d think of my coming up for a week anyway at the end of Sept.
I’m absolutely, hopelessly broke and with no prospects for any
money until Sept. 25 when I collect my first Stanford fellowship
check. If you are agreeable maybe we can find a few days to spend
together, absolutely some time alone, eat together, sleep together,
and talk, talk. But let me know, love. Maybe I’m coming on too
strong, that heart on the sleeve too visible. I haven’t heard from
you. But write me, if you can. And by the way, did you get that
bundle of stuff, printed and in ms? I mailed it yesterday. At least
I left it at a dept store, had them wrap it, postage it, address
it, even (my handwriting is so bad, even shaky these days my gawd).
Don’t know if it’s a very broad selection, a little of this and a
little of that, mostly magazines, most things printed or accepted,
the poems from a new book out next spring, no anthologies included,
the heavy package too heavy anyway. And for heaven’s sake, don’t
feel obliged to comment on any of it, & read it, or some of it,
only when you feel like it. Okay?

Love to you, Lindsey,

R.

Dearest L –

This is just the quickest of shots – I drove
over the hills to UC last night an picked up your letter (by the
bye, now that I’m no longer teaching a class there I won’t have
mailbox privileges much longer, but more about that later), and I
carried it, unopened, to an all-night café where I took a booth and
there I read it, slowly, and read it, and drank coffee, and got
weepy, jaysas, I do believe I’m in love. Wanted to see you so bad.
Should have called I guess but don’t know if I could have done much
more htan babble madly, or blubber, or something, it two in the
morning here and I thinking of your little body under light covers
there, three a.m., the window open, cool air. Wow, but I’m missing
you hard, right now, then. Great, great letter, letters, keep them
coming, love, little fish. I dig every word. What else to say re.
what you said in the letter? Goddamn I’ve read it ten times and
just stopped right here to do it again, and I love it, little fish,
love it, hear?

Yesterday was a long good day, highlighted,
what a dumb word, by our tele conversation & yr letter, hours
and hours later, that letter, but I thought about it and looked
forward to it the rest of the day. On the literary and job front
here some good, some great news of one sort and another. The
O.Henry Prize Stories editor picked that Esq. Story, “Are These
Actual Miles?” for inclusion in PRIZE’S STORIES due out next
spring. Also was offered the spring quarter at Berkeley, in
addition to the winter quarter. That was the reason I was in
Berkeley yesterday to see Jordan, the chairman of the dept. Then
we, Alice Ann and I, went to an elegant Berkeley hotel cocktail
lounge and met with these FICTION mag editor-types, where I saw the
blues for issue #2 out in Sept. And then saw the galleys for my
story, issue #3, out in Nov., hard on the heels of #2, and a hell
of a line-up there as well, and money besides. So I sat there all
afternoon while everybody was being properly literary and sipping
their drinks slowly and I drank double Smirnoff 100 proof and
grapefruit juice, all afternoon, and everytime the conversation
would slow or change gears or whatever, all I could think about was
you and get dizzy with the mystery of it, the caring. And Alice
Ann, who was keeping up with me on scotch, singles, she would look
at me, like look at me, you know, and know what I was thinking,
knowing each other so well, and altogether it’s a sonofabitch. I’m
trying to tell you I love you and that we are going to get it on,
you and I, but it is not going to be easy, but we are, you and I.
Here I am getting jut a message from the moon here, little fish a
lunar beam, mainly to tell you how moved I was, how struck I was by
your letter, and to tell you I end my love, my love,

Listen, I’ll write to Buffalo Bill myself,
maybe a note when I sign off here, or else tomorrow – but if I
can’t get to it for a day or two, and if you see or talk with him,
would you ask him to please hold onto that $50 check made out for
Sept. 1 until Oct. 1, that’s important. And I know you won’t, you
said you wouldn’t, but don’t show any of my letters to or tell
Bill, or Kathy, how often we are writing one another. Let’s keep
them guessing.

All love, little fish

R.

Dearest L –

This is just a little note, little fish. Got
your wonderful letter yesterday. Sometimes I think your letters are
the only things that keep me going. But I’m all right, going to get
better. Things are settling down a bit, gaining some sort of
control and perspective on things. No, no, you have nothing to do
with all the crazy business that has been going on down around here
of late. Kids have just become incredibly impudent, sassy,
bummer-outers in general. My daughter suspended from school for one
thing and another. Her grades have hit rock bottom. The boy is on
his own trip. Both of them unable to accept any responsibility for
their own actions and looking for the nearest scapegoat (s) and
that happens to be their parents. Just about ready to let one or
both of them go to the slammer (juvey) for a three day stay as has
been suggested by a couple of school authorities. Item: the dean of
women at my daughter’s school up to talk to her last week, and it
ended with my daughter calling the dean an old bitch, then my dear
daughter threw the telephone at Alice Ann, giving her a lump on the
forehead the size of a golf ball. Whew. Would ship them both out of
here off to private schools, out of the country, if there was any
money. Have had some powwows lately and have told them they simply
can’t take us down with them, that they’ve got our backs against
the wall, that we have to survive and have lives to lead, etc.,
blah, blah, & so on ad nauseum. Anyway, seems to have made a
little dent or impression in their collective selfishness. But it’s
been a hairy month or six weeks, improving a bit now. Adolescence,
ugh.

And how are you, little fish? You always
sound good, in fine fettle, when I talk to you on the telephone.
Me, I’m afraid lately I’ve been down when we’ve talked, trust it
isn’t contagious. Feeling better now, though, as I said, feel
closer to my self today than I have in a long time. For a long
while, too long, have just gotten by living on my nerves and I had
the distinct impression they were simply wearing out. Long to have
you come down to Berkeley. Meanwhile I must get back to myself and
my work or I’m not worth anything to anybody.