Emperor of the Air (10 page)

“I’ll take a cranberry roll,” I say. He flicks the cloth and turns back to the counter.

This is what:

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?

Through the magnifier glass the words come forward, huge, two by two. With spectacles, everything is twice enlarged. Still, though, I am slow to read it. In a half-hour I am finished, could not read more, even if I bought another roll. The boy at the register greets me, smiles when I reach him. “What are you reading today?” he asks, counting out the change.

The books themselves are small and fit in the inside pockets of my coat. I put one in front of each breast, then walk back to see the fish some more. These are the fish I know: the gafftopsail pompano, sixgill shark, the starry flounder with its upturned eyes, queerly migrated. He rests half-submerged in sand. His scales are platey and flat-hued. Of everything upward he is wary, of the silvery seabass and the bluefin tuna that pass above him in the region of light and open water. For a life he lies on the bottom of the tank. I look at him. His eyes are dull. They are ugly and an aberration. Above us the bony fishes wheel at the tank’s corners. I lean forward to the glass. “
Platichthys stellatus
” I say to him. The caudal fin stirs. Sand moves and resettles, and I see the black and yellow stripes. “Flatfish,” I whisper, “we are, you and I, observers of this life.”

“A man on our lawn,” I say a few nights later in bed.

“Not just that.”

I breathe in, breathe out, look up at the ceiling. “What else?”

“When you were out last night he came back.”

“He came back.”

“Yes.”

“What did he do?”

“Looked in at me.”

Later, in the early night, when the lights of cars are still passing and the walked dogs still jingle their collar chains out front, I get up quickly from bed and step into the hall. I move fast because this is still possible in short bursts and with concentration. The bed sinks once, then rises. I am on the landing and then downstairs without Francine waking. I stay close to the staircase joists.

In the kitchen I take out my almost blank sheets and set them on the counter. I write standing up because I want to take more than an animal’s pose. For me this is futile, but I stand anyway. The page will be blank when I finish. This I know. The dreams I compose are the dreams of others, remembered bits of verse. Songs of greater men than I. In months I have written few more than a hundred words. The pages are stacked, sheets of different sizes.

If I could

one says.

It has never seemed

says another. I stand and shift them in and out. They are mostly blank, sheets from months of nights. But this doesn’t bother me. What I have is patience.

Francine knows nothing of the poetry. She’s a simple girl, toast and butter. I myself am hardly the man for it: forty years selling (anything—steel piping, heater elements, dried bananas). Didn’t read a book except one on sales. Think victory, the book said. Think
sale
. It’s a young man’s bag of apples, though; young men in pants that nip at the waist. Ten years ago I left the Buick in the company lot and walked home, dye in my hair, cotton rectangles in the shoulders of my coat. Francine was in the house that afternoon also, the way she is now. When I retired we bought a camper and went on a trip. A traveling salesman retires, so he goes on a trip. Forty miles out of town the folly appeared to me, big as a balloon. To Francine, too. “Frank,” she said in the middle of a bend, a prophet turning to me, the camper pushing sixty and rocking in the wind, trucks to our left and right big as trains—“Frank,” she said, “these roads must be familiar to you.”

So we sold the camper at a loss and a man who’d spent forty years at highway speed looked around for something to do before he died. The first poem I read was in a book on a table in a waiting room. My eyeglasses made half-sense of things.

T
HESE

are the desolate, dark weeks

I read

when nature in its barrenness

equals the stupidity of man.

Gloom, I thought, and nothing more, but then I reread the words, and suddenly there I was, hunched and wheezing, bald as a trout, and tears were in my eye. I don’t know where they came from.

In the morning an officer visits. He has muscles, mustache, skin red from the cold. He leans against the door frame.

“Can you describe him?” he says.

“It’s always dark,” says Francine.

“Anything about him?”

“I’m an old woman. I can see that he wears glasses.”

“What kind of glasses?”

“Black.”

“Dark glasses?”

“Black glasses.”

“At a particular time?”

“Always when Frank is away.”

“Your husband has never been here when he’s come?”

“Never.”

“I see.” He looks at me. This look can mean several things, perhaps that he thinks Francine is imagining. “But never at a particular time?”

“No.”

“Well,” he says. Outside on the porch his partner is stamping his feet. “Well,” he says again. “We’ll have a look.” He turns, replaces his cap, heads out to the snowy steps. The door closes. I hear him say something outside.

“Last night—” Francine says. She speaks in the dark. “Last night I heard him on the side of the house.”

We are in bed. Outside, on the sill, snow has been building since morning.

“You heard the wind.”

“Frank.” She sits up, switches on the lamp, tilts her head toward the window. Through a ceiling and two walls I can hear the ticking of our kitchen clock.

“I heard him climbing,” she says. She has wrapped her arms about her own waist. “He was on the house. I heard him. He went up the drainpipe.” She shivers as she says this. “There was no wind. He went up the drainpipe and then I heard him on the porch roof.”

“Houses make noise.”

“I heard him. There’s gravel there.”

I imagine the sounds, amplified by hollow walls, rubber heels on timber. I don’t say anything. There is an arm’s length between us, cold sheet, a space uncrossed since I can remember.

“I have made the mistake in my life of not being interested in enough people,” she says then. “If I’d been interested in more people, I wouldn’t be alone now.”

“Nobody’s alone,” I say.

“I mean that if I’d made more of an effort with people I would have friends now. I would know the postman and the Giffords and the Kohlers, and we’d be together in this, all of us. We’d sit in each other’s living rooms on rainy days and talk about the children. Instead we’ve kept to ourselves. Now I’m alone.”

“You’re not alone,” I say.

“Yes, I am.” She turns the light off and we are in the dark again. “You’re alone, too.”

My health has gotten worse. It’s slow to set in at this age, not the violent shaking grip of death; instead—a slow leak, nothing more. A bicycle tire: rimless, thready, worn treadless already and now losing its fatness. A war of attrition. The tall camels of the spirit steering for the desert. One morning I realized I hadn’t been warm in a year.

And there are other things that go, too. For instance, I recall with certainty that it was on the 23rd of April, 1945, that, despite German counteroffensives in the Ardennes, Eisenhower’s men reached the Elbe; but I cannot remember whether I have visited the savings and loan this week. Also, I am unable to produce the name of my neighbor, though I greeted him yesterday in the street. And take, for example, this: I am at a loss to explain whole decades of my life. We have children and photographs, and there is an understanding between Francine and me that bears the weight of nothing less than half a century, but when I gather my memories they seem to fill no more than an hour. Where has my life gone?

It has gone partway to shoddy accumulations. In my wallet are credit cards, a license ten years expired, twenty-three dollars in cash. There is a photograph but it depresses me to look at it, and a poem, half-copied and folded into the billfold. The leather is pocked and has taken on the curve of my thigh. The poem is from Walt Whitman. I copy only what I need.

But of all things to do last, poetry is a barren choice. Deciphering other men’s riddles while the world is full of procreation and war. A man should go out swinging an axe. Instead, I shall go out in a coffee shop.

But how can any man leave this world with honor? Despite anything he does, it grows corrupt around him. It fills with locks and sirens. A man walks into a store now and the microwaves announce his entry; when he leaves, they make electronic peeks into his coat pockets, his trousers. Who doesn’t feel like a thief? I see a policeman now, any policeman, and I feel a fright. And the things I’ve done wrong in my life haven’t been crimes. Crimes of the heart perhaps, but nothing against the state. My soul may turn black but I can wear white trousers at any meeting of men. Have I loved my wife? At one time, yes—in rages and torrents. I’ve been covered by the pimples of ecstasy and have rooted in the mud of despair; and I’ve lived for months, for whole years now, as mindless of Francine as a tree of its mosses.

And this is what kills us, this mindlessness. We sit across the tablecloth now with our medicines between us, little balls and oblongs. We sit, sit. This has become our view of each other, a tableboard apart. We sit.

“Again?” I say.

“Last night.”

We are at the table. Francine is making a twisting motion with her fingers. She coughs, brushes her cheek with her forearm, stands suddenly so that the table bumps and my medicines move in the cup.

“Francine,” I say.

The half-light of dawn is showing me things outside the window: silhouettes, our maple, the eaves of our neighbor’s garage. Francine moves and stands against the glass, hugging her shoulders.

“You’re not telling me something,” I say.

She sits and makes her pills into a circle again, then into a line. Then she is crying.

I come around the table, but she gets up before I reach her and leaves the kitchen. I stand there. In a moment I hear a drawer open in the living room. She moves things around, then shuts it again. When she returns she sits at the other side of the table. “Sit down,” she says. She puts two folded sheets of paper onto the table. “I wasn’t hiding them,” she says.

“What weren’t you hiding?”

“These,” she says. “He leaves them.”

“He leaves them?”

“They say he loves me.”

“Francine.”

“They’re inside the windows in the morning.” She picks one up, unfolds it. Then she reads:

Ah, I remember well (and how can I

But evermore remember well) when first

She pauses, squint-eyed, working her lips. It is a pause of only faint understanding. Then she continues:

Our flame began, when scarce we knew what was

The flame we felt.

When she finishes she refolds the paper precisely. “That’s it,” she says. “That’s one of them.”

At the aquarium I sit, circled by glass and, behind it, the senseless eyes of fish. I have never written a word of my own poetry but can recite the verse of others. This is the culmination of a life.
Coryphaena hippurus
, says the plaque on the dolphin’s tank, words more beautiful than any of my own. The dolphin circles, circles, approaches with alarming speed, but takes no notice of, if he even sees, my hands. I wave them in front of his tank. What must he think has become of the sea? He turns and his slippery proboscis nudges the glass. I am every part sore from life.

Ah, silver shrine, here will I take my rest

After so many hours of toil and quest
,

A famished pilgrim—saved by miracle.

There is nothing noble for either of us here, nothing between us, and no miracles. I am better off drinking coffee. Any fluid refills the blood. The counter boy knows me and later at the cafe he pours the cup, most of a dollar’s worth. Refills are free but my heart hurts if I drink more than one. It hurts no different from a bone, bruised or cracked. This amazes me.

Francine is amazed by other things. She is mystified, thrown beam ends by the romance. She reads me the poems now at breakfast, one by one. I sit. I roll my pills. “Another came last night,” she says, and I see her eyebrows rise. “Another this morning.” She reads them as if every word is a surprise. Her tongue touches teeth, shows between lips. These lips are dry. She reads:

Kiss me as if you made believe

You were not sure, this eve,

How my face, your flower, had pursed

Its petals up

That night she shows me the windowsill, second story, rimmed with snow, where she finds the poems. We open the glass. We lean into the air. There is ice below us, sheets of it on the trellis, needles hanging from the drainwork.

“Where do you find them?”

“Outside,” she says. “Folded, on the lip.”

“In the morning?”

“Always in the morning.”

“The police should know about this.”

“What will they be able to do?”

I step away from the sill. She leans out again, surveying her lands, which are the yard’s width spit of crusted ice along our neighbor’s chain link and the three maples out front, now lost their leaves. She peers as if she expects this man to appear. An icy wind comes inside. “Think,” she says. “Think. He could come from anywhere.”