Falconer (8 page)

“In remembering, my darling, I will try to avoid mentioning specific fucks or places or clothes or feats of mutual understanding. I can remember coming back to the Danieli on the Lido after a great day on the beach when we had both been solicited by practically everybody. It was at that hour when the terrible, the uniquely terrible band began to play terrible, terrible tangos and the beauties of the evening, the girls and boys in their handmade clothes, had begun to emerge. I can remember this but I don’t choose to. The landscapes that come to my mind are unpleasantly close to what one finds on greeting cards—the snowbound farmhouse is recurrent—but I would like to settle for something inconclusive. It is late in the day. We have spent the day on a beach. I can tell because we are burned from the sun and there is sand in my shoes. A taxi—some hired livery—has brought us to a provincial railroad station, an isolated place, and left us there. The station is locked and there is no town, no farmhouse, no sign of life around the place excepting a stray dog. When I look at the timetable nailed to the station house I realize that we are in Italy although I don’t know where. I’ve chosen this memory because there are few specifics. We have either missed the train
or there is no train or the train is late. I don’t remember. I can’t even remember laughter or a kiss or putting my arm around your shoulder as we sat on a hard bench in an empty provincial railroad station in some country where English was not spoken. The light was going, but going, as it so often does, with a fanfare. All I really remember is a sense of your company and a sense of physical contentment.

“I suppose I am dealing with romantic and erotic things, but I think I am dealing with much more. What I remember, tonight in this cell, is waiting in some living room for you to finish dressing. I hear the sound from the bedroom of you closing a drawer. I hear the sound of your heels—the floor, the carpet, the tile of the bathroom—as you go there to flush the toilet. Then I hear the sound of your heels again—a little swifter now—as you open and close another drawer and then come toward the door of the room where I wait, bringing with you the pleasures of the evening and the night and the life we have together, And I can remember wishing for dinner in an upstairs bedroom while you did the last thing before putting dinner on the table, while I heard you touch a china serving dish with a pot. That is what I remember.

“And I remember when we first met, and I am today and will be forever astonished at the perspicacity with which a man can, in a glimpse, judge the scope and beauty of a woman’s memory, her tastes in color, food, climate and language, the precise clinical dimensions of her visceral, cranial and reproductive tracts, the condition of her teeth, hair, skin, toenails, eyesight and bronchial tree, that he can, in a second, exalted by
the diagnostics of love, seize on the fact that she is meant for him or that they are meant for one another. I am speaking of a glimpse and the image seems to be transitory, although this is not so much romantic as it is practical since I am thinking of a stranger, seen by a stranger. There will be stairs, turnings, gangplanks, elevators, seaports, airports, someplace between somewhere and somewhere else and where I first saw you wearing blue and reaching for a passport or a cigarette. Then I pursued you across the street, across the country and around the world, absolutely and rightly informed of the fact that we belonged in one another’s arms as we did.

“You are not the most beautiful woman I have ever known, but four of the great beauties I have known died by their own hand and while this does not mean that all the great beauties I have known have killed themselves, four is a number to consider. I may be trying to explain the fact that while your beauty is not great, it is very practical. You have no nostalgia. I think nostalgia a primary female characteristic and you have it not at all. You have a marked lack of sentimental profoundness, but you have a brightness, a quality of light, that I have never seen equaled. Everyone knows this, everyone sees this, everyone responds. I can’t imagine this being eclipsed. Your physical coordination in athletics can be very depressing. You have to throw me a tennis game and you can even beat me at horseshoes, but what I remember is that you were never aggressive. I remember fishing with you in Ireland. Remember? We stayed in that beautiful manor with an international crowd including several German barons
with monocles. Maids with caps served tea. Remember? My gillie was sick that day and we went up the stream alone—it was called the Dillon—to a bend where there was a little sign that said you couldn’t take more than one large salmon a day out of the pool. Above the bend in the stream there was a hill and on the hill there was a ruined castle with a big tree sticking out of the highest tower and in the ruin of the great hall swarms and swarms of bumblebees taking the nectar out of a vine that was covered with white flowers. We didn’t go into the manor hall because we didn’t want to get stung, but I remember walking away from the castle and smelling the heavy scent of the white flowers and the loud, loud noise the bees made—it was like the drone of some old-fashioned engine with a leather traveling belt—and it reached all the way down the hill to the edge of the stream and I remember looking at the greenness of the hills and your brightness and the romantic ruin and hearing the drone of the bees and tying my leader and thanking God that this hadn’t happened to me earlier in life because it would have been the end. I mean I would have become one of those jugheads who sit around cafés with faraway looks in their eyes because they have heard the music of the spheres. So I placed my line, knowing all the time that with your coordination you could place a line much better than I, while you sat on the banks with your hands folded in your lap as if you wished you had brought your embroidery although you can’t, so far as I know, sew on a button. So then I hooked and landed a big salmon and then there was a thunderstorm and we got soaked and then we stripped and
swam in the stream, which was warmer than the rain, and then they served the salmon that night at the manor with a lemon in its mouth but what I intended to say is that you weren’t aggressive and as I recall we never quarreled. I remember once looking at you in some hotel room and thinking that if I love her so absolutely we must quarrel and if I didn’t dare to quarrel perhaps I didn’t dare to love. But I loved you and we didn’t quarrel and I can’t ever remember our quarreling, never, never, not even when I was about to shoot all my guns and you took your tongue out of my mouth and said that I still hadn’t told you whether you should wear a long dress or a short dress to the Pinhams’ birthday party. Never.

“And I remember some mountainous place in the winter on the eve of a holiday where thousands of people had gathered to ski and where thousands more were expected on the late planes and trains. And I remember ski places, those overheated rooms and the books that people leave behind them and the galvanic excitement of physicalness. We were in bed then, when there was, around midnight, a sudden rise in temperature. The thawing snow on the roof made a dripping sound—a water torture for the innkeeper and killjoy music for everyone else. So in the morning it was very warm by whatever standards or measures used in whatever country it was. The snow was sticky enough for snowballs and I formed one and fired it at a tree, hitting or missing I don’t remember, but beyond the snowball we saw the warm blue sky and the snow melting everywhere. But it would be colder on the mountains whose white slopes and summits surrounded
us. We took the funicular up, but even on the summit the snow was warm, the day was disastrous, spiritually, financially, we were the prisoners of our environment although if we had enough money we could have flown to some other, colder part of the world. Even on the summit of the mountain the snow was sticky, the day was like spring, and I skied half-naked, but the wet trails were perilous, swift in the shade, retarded in the sun, and in lower altitudes there was an inch of water in every declivity. Then at about eleven the wind changed and I had to get back into my underwear, my shirt, whatever else I had, and just as suddenly the trails turned to ice and one by one the rangers put up the
CLOSED
signs in seven languages at the beginnings of the trails and there was first the rumor and then the fact that the Italian prime minister had been killed taking a last run down the Glokenschuss. Then no one was coming up the lift, there was a line waiting to descend, and while the lower trails were still not frozen and were negotiable that day, that holiday, that climax of the year was ruined. But then, exactly as the sun reached the zenith, snow began to fall. It was a very heavy and beautiful snow that, like some juxtaposition of gravity, seemed to set the mountain range free of the planet. We drank some coffee or schnapps in a hut—waited twenty minutes or half an hour—and then there was perfect cover on the lower trails and after an hour there was perfect cover everywhere, perhaps four inches that fanned like spume when we turned, a gift, an epiphany, an unaccountable improvement on our mastery of those snow-buried slopes and falls. Then we went up and down, up and
down, our strength inexhaustible, our turns snug and accomplished. The clinicians would say that we were skiing down every slope of our lives back to the instant of our birth; and men of good will and common sense would claim that we were skiing in every possible direction toward some understanding of the triumph of our beginnings and our ends. So when you ski you walk on beaches, you swim, you sail, you carry the groceries up the steps to a lighted house, you drop your pants on a large anatomical incongruity, you kiss a rose. We skied that day—those slopes were unlighted—until the valley telephoned the summit to close the lifts and then, reestablishing our terrestrial equilibrium as one does after a long sail, a hockey game—as tightrope artists must—we swaggered into the bar, where our cups and everything else were brimming. I can remember this and I can remember the sailboat race too, but it is getting dark here now, it is too dark for me to write anymore.”

F
arragut was still limping, but his hair had begun to grow back, when he was asked to cut a ditto sheet for an announcement that read:
THE FIDUCIARY UNIVERSITY OF BANKING WILL OFFER A COURSE IN THE ESSENCE OF BANKING FOR ANY QUALIFIED INMATE. SEE YOUR CELLBLOCK OFFICER FOR FURTHER INFORMATION.
That night Farragut asked Tiny about the news. Tiny told him that the class was going to be limited to thirty-six. Classes would be on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Anyone could apply, but the class would be chosen on the strength of an intelligence quotient test furnished by the university. That’s all Tiny knew.
Toledo mimeographed the announcement and they were stuck into the cells along with the evening mail. Toledo should have mimeographed two thousand, but he seemed to have run off another two thousand because the fliers were all over the place. Farragut couldn’t figure out where they came from, but when a wind sprang up in the yard you could see the Fiduciary University announcements circling on the air, not by the tens but by the hundreds. A few days after the announcements were circulated, Farragut had to ditto an announcement for the bulletin board.
ANY MAN FOUND USING FIDUCIARY UNIVERSITY ANNOUNCEMENT FOR TOILET PAPER WILL BE GIVEN THREE DAYS CELL LOCK. THEY CLOG THE PLUMBING.
Paper was always in short supply and this snow of fliers was a bounty. They were used for handkerchiefs, airplanes and scrap paper. The jailhouse lawyers used them for drafting petitions to the Pope, the President, the governor, the Congress and the Legal Aid Society. They were used for poems, prayers and illustrated solicitations. The greenhouse crew picked them up with nailed sticks, but for some time the flow of fliers seemed mysterious and inexhaustible.

This was in the autumn, and mixed with the Fiduciary University announcements were the autumn leaves. The three swamp maples within the wall had turned red and dropped their leaves early in the fall, but there were many trees beyond the wall and among the Fiduciary announcements Farragut saw the leaves of beech trees, oaks, tulips, ash, walnut and many varieties of maple. The leaves had the power to remind
Farragut, an hour or so after methadone, of the enormous and absurd pleasure he had, as a free man, taken in his environment. He liked to walk on the earth, swim in the oceans, climb the mountains and, in the autumn, watch the leaves fall. The simple phenomenon of light—brightness angling across the air—struck him as a transcendent piece of good news. He thought it fortunate that as the leaves fell, they turned and spun, presenting an illusion of facets to the light. He could remember a trustees meeting in the city over a matter of several million dollars. The meeting was on the lower floor of a new office building. Some ginkgo trees had been planted in the street. The meeting was in October when the ginkgos turn a strikingly pure and uniform yellow, and during the meeting he had, while watching these leaves fall across the air, found his vitality and his intelligence suddenly stimulated and had been able to make a substantial contribution to the meeting founded foursquare on the brightness of leaves.

Above the leaves and the fliers and the walls were the birds. Farragut was a little wary about the birds since the legend of cruelly confined men loving the birds of the air had never moved him. He tried to bring a practical and informed tone to his interest in birds, but he had very little information. He became interested in a flock of red-winged blackbirds. They lived in swamps, he knew, so there must have been a swamp near Falconer. They fed at dusk in some stagnant water other than the swamp where they lived. Night after night, all through the summer and deep into the
fall, Farragut stood at his window and watched the black birds cross the blue sky above the walls. There would be one or two in the beginning, and while they must have been leaders, there was nothing adventurous about their flight. They all had the choppy flight of caged birds. After the leaders came a flock of two or three hundred, all of them flying clumsily but given by their numbers a sense of power—the magnetic stamina of the planet—drawn through the air like embers on a strong draft. After the first flock there were more laggards, more adventurers, and then another flock of hundreds or thousands and then a third. They made their trip back to their home in the swamp after dark and Farragut could not see this. He stood at the window waiting to hear the sound of their passage, but it never happened. So in the autumn he watched the birds, the leaves and the Fiduciary University announcements moving as the air moved, like dust, like pollen, like ashes, like any sign of the invincible potency of nature.