Love Me (31 page)

“It’s me. Your husband. I’d like an hour. How about lunch tomorrow?
”

So she met me for lunch at a Vietnamese café. We ordered spring rolls and chicken soup and I asked her how she was and she said, “Never better.”

She said she had gradually come to realize, as an Advocate for Moral Action, that in politics it’s easy to come to dislike people a lot, especially good people. She liked massage therapy, as an antidote to grand pronouncements. You didn’t have to talk. You stood in the dark and put your hands on the stranger on the table and felt her force and summoned up your own and got yourself grounded and then went to work in a ritual that never varied—head, back, legs, arms, front, neck and shoulders, head—and if she talked you talked and if she didn’t you didn’t and meanwhile you did a small miraculous thing for one person per hour and for now this felt like it was good enough.

“What happened to you in New York?” she said.

What happened was, I had a big novel and everybody was clam oring for me to do something for them. The kiss of fame. Something happened in my inner ear, a sort of ringing set in and waves of nausea. It was hard to keep my balance. I just plain went beyond my limits and tried to live a fantasy and life had to grab hold of my ankles and pull me back. And then I lost that story in the Portland train depot. And I went into a steep dive. I drank an awful lot of whiskey and gin. Face it. A lot of New Yorkers sit in dim rooms discussing their existential problems and the plain fact is: you drink too much and don’t get outside enough. So do something about it, okay? Take the stone out of your shoe and walk straight. Duh! But I didn’t. I spun my wheels, trying to live the Republican life. Upward mobility. You follow
Amber Waves of Grain,
a megahit, with
Purple Mountain Majesty and Fruited Plains,
and you work your way up to the top and wave your hanky to the peons down below.

Just like my daddy. He started out in the district managership that Grandpa gave him, moved up to regional manager, to vice president, while keeping the peons in line and doing reprehensible things that his liberal arts degree didn’t prepare him for, and was given plush perks, an excellent parking spot, travel on the company jet, a key to the platinum bathroom, where nobody peed except men as good as he or better—and then became CEO and was chauffeured to work and had a bathroom all his own and lived in Golden Valley with Mother and me, and thence to a gated community, Versailles View, in a seventeen-room château with a staff of three that prepared a dinner of medallions of beef with the tips of young asparagi and a fine muscular red wine and a masterful meringue, and at 70 Daddy moved up to chairman of the board and at 75 he sat down and wrote his memoirs via a PR man, which he paid to have published
(A Life of Quality)
and now he putt-putts around the golf course and waits to go to Republican heaven, where there is no pain, no grief, no taxes, and no goddamned liberals.

It doesn’t work that way for most people.

In real life, you succeed and earn some money and then life kicks you in the pants and you learn about life, enough so that you figure out how to be happy, and then it’s about time for the lights to come up and the credits to roll.

 

 

 

It was a magnificent fall. Trees golden in the soft dusk, the blue sky spotted with clouds. The sensuous and poignant hour of afternoon. Smoke in the air and the smell of apples and wet grass. Piles of leaves. The oaks turned maroon and ocher, the maples yellow.

The maple trees stood blazing yellow, crying out for music and romance, and then the wind blows and they’re gone. Mr. Ziegler next door died in September. He told Iris he was going to learning to play the mandolin. He said, “I’ve decided to do the things I like while I’m young enough to do them.” A week later he fell down from a brutal stroke, the executioner’s ax fell on his forehead. And on Halloween, a child dressed as the Grim Reaper, holding the sickle, knocked on the door and asked for candy. A fire truck came screaming up Sturgis Avenue to a house where a child had left a doll in the oven and her mother put in pizza to bake at 425 degrees.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Feeling, You and the Fish Man are in the courtship stage, a sweet period of life, and if he cannot be friendly and attentive and endearing now, then he is a bad bet. The guy is behaving like a lout. Cold and grumpy and irritable are not good indicators. Making crucial discoveries like this is what an engagement period is for. Don’t ignore what you learn. At the moment, I am in a courtship period with my wife, and I know enough not to go grumping around the house kicking furniture.

In November 2000, I moved back to Sturgis Avenue for good. We spent the month at home suffering over the Florida voter fraud and the long grim slide toward the Bush presidency, watching the dreary little shtoonk as he minced past the TV cameras, fawning courtiers in tow, smirking toadlike at the glorious free country whose handsome house, the mansion of Adams and Jefferson and Lincoln and the Roosevelts, he would soon occupy, appointed by five Republicans on the Supreme Court, and thus this narrow-minded tongue-tied frat boy and casual executioner would win four years’ opportunity to inflict what damage he could on our decent society.

Iris and I camped at the dining room table, the Times spread out before us, soaking up the tragedy, drinking coffee by the quart, as the Republicans stole the election, simple as pie.

“This is just unbelievable,” she said for the 1000th time.

The tragedy is that a man who personified the worst about America was elevated to leadership. A small man became president. Meanwhile, a procession of disheartened Democrats presented themselves at the door. Bob and Sandy were in and out, with fresh grim details. Bob was hitting the sauce hard; he looked rather low and rugged. Sandy was on the verge of hysteria. Eirdhru was having a hard time. He told his parents he wished he had never been born. He wandered around our house performing random acts of vandalism, telephoning Uzbekistan, tearing up my
Duino Elegies
into tiny shreds and clogging the toilet with it. A wretched child.

And yet in the midst of so much misery, Iris and I became sweet lovers again, just as my parents did on the Day of Infamy. We found comfort in each other. That is what George W. Bush did for us. He made us a couple again. Disaster is an opportunity to change direction. If some tinhorn tyrant closes off the streets and declares martial law, then it’s time to become country people and learn to plant tomatoes. Don’t beat your head on the Wailing Wall. Let the Mongols win and we shall bury our dead and go sing a New Song unto the Lord and make a new life that is jazzier and ballsier and more delicious than these bushers can imagine. Give us Calvin Coolidge and we will bring forth Louis and Bix and Ernest and Scott and Josephine Baker. Give us Richard M. Nixon and we will give you Dylan and the Dead and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Thanksgiving arrived, the celebration of the survival of the fat-test, and I offered a toast (ginger ale) to George W. Bush, the patron of our meal. Iris’s mother, who serves a fifty-pound turkey injected with six pounds of liquid butter, had been informed that we weren’t coming and, great martyr that she is, the Queen Mother said, in a small wounded voice, “That’s fine. You do as you think best.” So we did. We sat in our pajamas eating Chinese barbecue ribs and sushi from little white boxes and watching
Citizen Kane
and
The Caine Mutiny
and
Mondo Cane
on The Movie Channel.

The first Sunday of Advent, and the minister said to make a place for Jesus in our lives and the choir sang, “Wake, oh, wake to tidings thrilling, the watchmen all the air are filling, Arise, Jerusalem, arise.” St. Paul got all twinkly and friendly.

We celebrated my conception day, December 7, and that evening the air was full of snowflakes as if God picked up the globe and turned it upside down. Cars slowed. People stopped. The great hushed moment.
Look, it’s snowing.

The other day, I was telling Iris a story about when I was a kid and worked for truck farms in the summer and I couldn’t think of the word for that thing you carry the dirt in, the thing with the box and the little balloon tire and the two handles. I could not, could not, could not think of the word
wheelbarrow.

Though I don’t think Johnson was his name. It was some Polish name. He was a swarthy guy with tinted glasses and he drew blood, had me piss in a cup, banged on my knees and ankles, squinched my knuckles and kneaded my neck as if sizing it for the noose, had me stand naked with eyes shut and watched me sway, listened to my poor pounding heart, thrust his hand up my hinder and examined my adenoids, and all whilst he did these things his flinty green eye was locked on me, squinty, drawing a bead, and he said, finally, “You’ve got Pedersen’s.” Premature Pedersen’s syndrome. Memory loss, loss of motor, dementia, death.

“Of course it’s always premature,” he said dryly. “It always comes earlier than we think it should.”

“Never heard of it,” says me.

“Discovered in Norway in the eighties. Older guys who everyone assumed acted like that because they always had been ‘that way’ and besides they were drunk—forgetting their keys, forgetting names, not conversing or responding to questions—they discovered it’s a syndrome. Named it for the first proven case.”

“Huh. Isn’t that something?”

Bad news comes to us in beige rooms, carpeted in brown, with bad art on the walls.

He asked if there were anything he could do for me.

“Find my car. I forget where I parked it.”

He looked at me with real concern for a moment before he realized I was joking. A piss poor sense of humor, if you ask me.

I grew up in the forties and fifties and now in the double aughts my mind put out to sea.

I came home, shaken to the core. The secretary on the 79th floor of the South Tower, she was lucky in a way, she died quickly and escaped this sour morbidity. She was on the phone with her mom, talking about her cat and her date with Bret, and when she swiveled around to reach for the cup of cappuccino on the credenza, there was the silver airliner heading straight toward her at 543 mph and half a second later she wasn’t.

What mind?

I am losing words. Looking for my glasses—the little monkeys—after a while I say, Bag it! And stay home and forget about it. The rathskeller, the benefits, the frangipan. Who cares? Songs are gone. Yes, we have no bananas. What we lack in our heads we must make up for with our feet.

She comes home for the meal of the evening. My wife. The woman in the blue skirt. She is mad at me. Finally she explains that she got a haircut and a makeover and dyed her hair red and I didn’t notice. Well, I had other things on my mind. Do I want to go to a movie? No. I want to think.

This is sad. Surely it constitutes some sort of travesty.

I don’t know what to think. In two years, I could be completely gerflossed, helpless, needing somebody. I won’t remember where I live or where my bed is or the toilet and I will require a saint to care for me.

I thought of writing to Mr. Blue myself for a word of advice, but I knew what he’d say. Be thankful. Life is a gift. Every day is a gift.

I sit enjoying my coffee and looking at the mail. I look at the newspaper. War going on in the Middle East. Nothing new there. I don’t do the crossword anymore. Too hard. Emu I can get or Mimi from
La Bohème
or Ike’s Mamie or Auntie Mame. The simple ones. They are writing those things for geniuses now, of which I am not one. I clip photos out of the paper and study them for familiar faces. Is this a bad thing? Once I saw a picture of Mr. Shawn. He was fishing with Jack Nicholson, two guys wearing shades and sitting bare chested on swivel seats and drinking beer, grinning, looking good. Looking good, Mr. Shawn. I loved that man. I read
The New Yorker
a little but I don’t remember much. Guess my brain is full. A curious organism. Billions of little neurons, more than there are stars in the cosmos, they say. Of course I have no idea who they are. Or who you are, for that matter. Years ago, this would have troubled me, but no more. Now I’m quite content with my little corner of the living room. I can see the copulo, or whatever it is, atop the cathedral, and hear the cars go by on Sturgis Avenue. I let the phone ring. Iris handles all of that. Bob and Sandy come by to visit and I try to be pleasant. Don’t hear from Katherine or Frank anymore and I don’t ask why. Ours just to do and die. I sit and look at the patch of sunlight on the carpet, the pattern of the carpet full of minarets and crenellated lines and filigree. I’m happy. I must write down that word,
crenellated.
You never know. For lunch, we have BLTs today. That stands for bacon, lettuce, tomato. Probably it stands for other things, but today, here, to me, it represents a sandwich. The name of the tomato genus is
lycopersicon lycopersicum
—the description in the seed catalog is rather poetic: “They grow in heavy clusters like rich jewels—rosy red, marbled in gold, with broad shoulders, free of blemishes with meltingly smooth mild-tasting sun-warmed sweet flesh. You’ll revel in the incredible flash of tomato flavor.” This, along with fried pig fat, green iceberg lettuce, and mayonnaise on a kaiser roll. What a thing to look forward to. Then the nap. A fine idea. Take off your shoes and lie on the couch with a comforter pulled up over you and away you go like Wynken, Blynken, and Nod.