Loon Lake (12 page)

I didn’t know what he was talking about.

He struggled out of his chair and ran to his bookshelves, and not finding what he wanted, he disappeared into a closet from which came the sounds of crashing and falling things.

He stumbled out with a book in his hand. He blew the dust off. “I want you to have this,” he said, “my first published work, my first thin volume of verse”—he smiled unsmiled—
“The Flowers of the Sangre de Cristo.”
He did not hand me the book but examined it closely. “I printed it on a hand press and bound it myself in Nutley. It was my project for recovery, you see. The signatures in this one are out of order. But no matter, no matter.”

He pressed the volume on me now and looked in my eyes as if hoping to see the wisdom that would flow into them from the book.

“Just a minute,” he said. He ran back into the closet there was a terrible crash I jumped up but he came out coughing in a cloud of chalky dust waving his second published work. “This one too,” he said, slamming the closet door. He swallowed a great draught of wine and slumped back in his chair wheezing from the exertion.

I held the two slim volumes, the second included a Japanese woodprint as frontispiece. “Don’t read them now, don’t ask me to watch you as you read them,” he said.

I held the books, I could not help granting him the authority he craved
as profound commentator on his own life—he was an author! Never mind that he published his books himself, I was impressed, nobody I ever knew had written a book. I held them in my hand.

Apart from everything else and despite the shadows of the wishes in my mind the vaguest shadows of the implementation of the wishes, I am moved to be so set up in the world with such a distinguished friend. I know he is a posturing drunk, how could I not recognize the type, but he has made me his friend, this poet, and I have a presence in the world.

He tells me his one remaining belief.

“Who are you to doubt it,” he says angrily, “a follower of trains in the night!”

I don’t doubt it I don’t. I have listened to his life, heard it accounted indulged improved incanted and I believe it all. It is a life that goes past grief and sorrow into a realm, like the life of a famous gangster or an explorer, where sudden death is the ordinary condition. And somehow I’m invited to engage my instinct not to share his suffering but to marvel at it, a life farcically set in the path of historical and natural disaster it comes to me as entertainment—

The war before the war before the war
Before the rise of the Meiji emperor
Before the black ships—

his great accomplishment was his own private being the grandness and the depth of his failed affections each of his representations of himself at the critical moments of his past contributed to the finished man before me

Child Bride in a Zen Garden
by Warren Penfield
In a poem of plum blossoms and boats poled down a river
Behind a garden wall the sun lighting its pediment of red tile
A fourteen-year-old girl aches for her husband.
One bird whistles in the foliage of a tree that stands on crutches.
Small things are cherished, a comb a hand mirror a golden carp
in a pool no more than eight inches deep. Curved wooden foot
bridges of great age connect the banks of ponds. But everywhere
we know on the map are mountains with vertical faces
and thunderous waterfalls, escutcheons of burning houses
and suicidal armies, history clattering in contradistinction to
the sunlight melting itself in the bamboo grove.

Oh the fifty-three stations of the Tokaido. On the embankment
above the rice paddy travelers crouch under slants of rain.
Messengers run with their breechcloths flapping. Merchants
beat their donkeys. Boats with squared sails make
directly for shore. Paper lanterns slide down the waves.
Rain like the hammers of sculptors works the curved slopes
of water. When the sky clears at sunset fifty-three prefecture
officials arrive in the stations of the Tokaido. Fifty-three
women are prepared for them. Sunlit legends will be made tonight.
Beans are picked from the gardens, plump fowl slaughtered, and
in castles above the road unemployed warriors duel the firelight.
They weep they curse they raise wine cups to honor. Saints
of the wrong religion go unrecognized in the darkness beyond the
lighted windows of the inns. And at the end of the Tokaido
at the top of an inaccessible mountain sits the emperor himself,
a self-imperator, a self impersonating a self in splendor
in his empty room its walls painted with long-legged waterbirds,
its floor covered with ministers lying face down attending him.
The emperor is lacquered, his sword is set with suns, while
in another room doctors dispute the meaning of his stool.

Oh compact foreign devils flesh of rice
Everywhere we are smaller than the landscape.
I sit on the wood promenade overlooking my garden and I
am the real emperor. The small twisted tree is very old and has a
name. The rocks like islands in the sea of raked
gravel have names. The gravel waves break upon the rocks.
wall. I run across the gravel sea
and spy on her through the gate. Her blue-black hair is
undressed, like a child’s. She sits on a bed of moss, her
bowed neck as long as a lady’s of the court. The words rise
and fall in my throat growling and humming and making tunes.
I am breaking the laws of my religion. She is alert now to
the aviary of our language and stares at me with her wet mournful
eyes, the track of one tear surmounting the pout of her lip
and disappearing in the corner of her mouth. I speak and she
shifts to her knees, deferentially places her hands flat upon
her thighs. The soles of her feet are pale. She listens.
She is as still as the fieldmouse in the talons of the hawk.

Oh the fifty-three stages of the Tokaido. The old monk and the girl
clamber up on the rock path. Along the path falls a stream
so vertically on rocks that the water, broken into millions of
drops, bounces pachinko pachinko like pellets of steel.
We find a ledge overlooking the ocean. I aspire to goodness.
I aspire to the endless serenity of the realized Buddha.
In the sun on the rock ledge I remove her clothing. I
remove my clothing she averts her eyes. We hunker in the
hairless sallow integument of our kind. Her haunches are
small and muscular. Her thighs are slender. Her backbone
is as ordered as the stones of a Zen garden. I see reflected
in the polished gray rock under her the entrance to her life.
It is like the etching of a fig.
Raising my hand in the gesture of tenderness, I see her chin
lift in trust and at that moment I fling myself at her
and she falls into the sea.
She falls in a slow spiral, wobbling like a spent arrow.
I feel her heart beating in my chest.
I feel all she is, her flesh and bone, her terror in the sky.

T
he field of his accomplishment was his own private being, the grandness and depth of his failed affections. Each of his representations of himself at the critical moments of this past contributed to the finished man before me. He proved everything by his self-deprecation, his sighs, his lachrymose pauses, his prodigious thirst for wine, and he proved it in the scene or two with Clara, when, at an hour he somehow always knew, he would get me to help him over to her cottage not five minutes since she had come in herself, her make-up and hair and dress all showing the use of the evening, and she in some sort of sodden rage. What excited Mr. Penfield was the idea of rescue. He wanted to save her, take her away, carry her off. It was the pulsating center of his passion. And she seemed now not to understand, as if they spoke different languages, hers being Realism.

“War-rin,” she would say, “do I have to spell it out?”

“Oh God,” he’d cry, lifting his eyes, “oh God who made this girl, give her to me this time to hold, let me sink into the complacencies of fulfilled love, let us lose our memories together and let me die from the ordinary insubstantial results of having lived!”

“Goddamnit,” Clara shouted, and then, appealing to me, the audience, a role I embraced as I would any she chose, “what does he want from me? Oh Jesus! Joe,” she’d say when, invariably, he broke down, “why did you bring him? Take him home. Get this fucking drunk out of here.”

A
nother night or the one after, I went over to her cottage alone. I supposed it was midnight. No light on. It didn’t matter. I sat in the shadow of her porch and I folded my arms and waited. A strong wind blowing over the mountains and sounding in the trees around the cottage. The trunks of the pine trees swayed and creaked. I sat with my back to the door and drew up my knees. I might be hearing her in her rut, singing somewhere with the wind going past an open window. That was all right. That was all right. If the poet could have her on her terms and the rich man on his, I could have her on mine. My revelation. Maybe she traveled like a princess on a private train, maybe poets thought they recognized her, but I knew her accent, she was an Eastern industrial child, she had come off streets like my streets she was born of the infinite class of nameless workers my very own exclusive class. Jesus, I had pressed against girls like her in the hallways, I had bent them backward on the banister, I had pulled their hair I had lifted their skirts I had rubbed them till they creamed through their underpants.

I reached over my head and tried the doorknob. Open. I decided to wait
low ceiling. The hearth was cold. I put in some paper and kindling and got a fire going and stood with my back to the fire.

The green livery had as little regard for her as they did for Penfield. The place was a mess. I saw traces of our first party. Dirty dishes in the little alcove kitchen. Not that she’d care. I looked in her bedroom. Her clothes everywhere, stockings twisted and curled like strips of bacon, step-ins in two perfect circles on the floor as if disengaged in a meditative moment, or flung across a lampshade as if drop-kicked.

Poor Mr. Penfield. I knew what he couldn’t possibly know. I knew what made his sympathies obsolete. Clara and Bennett had had breakfast together on the morning after he arrived. I managed to be raking leaves at the foot of the terrace wall under their line of sight. It was a bright windy morning and the clouds actually were below us over the lake and drifting through the trees on the mountains. “I think clouds should stay in the sky where they belong,” Clara said, “don’t you?” And Bennett had laughed.

Clara held a relentless view of the world. There were no visible principles. Every one of her moods and feelings was intense and true to itself—if not to the one before or the one after. She lightened and darkened like the times of the day.

I smoked a cigarette from the monogrammed cigarette box. Clearly, in my aspiration it was FWB I would have to contend with. FWB, the man who was paying for everything. Conceivably this gave him an advantage.

I mashed out the cigarette, stretched out on my back before the fire, put my hands under my head and closed my eyes.

I slept in that position for several hours. I remember coming awake with the fire out and sunlight glowing on the windows. The silhouettes of branches and leaves wavered on the log wall and a reddish gold light filled the room. I heard the sound of an airplane. It grew louder and then with a rise in pitch it receded and grew faint. I lay there and it got louder again and finally so close and thunderous that the cups rattled in the sink. Then the sound receded once more, the pitch of the engine rising. I went to the window: a single-engine plane with pontoons was banking over the mountain on the other side of the lake. I watched it, a seaplane with a
cowled engine and an overhead wing. As it banked, its dimensions flared and I saw a smartly painted green-and-white craft zooming over the water and then lifting its nose and banking off again, the sun flashing on its wings. It was very beautiful to see. Again it was coming around. I ran outside. I watched several runs, each one was different in speed or angle of descent, it looked as if the pilot was practicing or doing tests. You didn’t often see airplanes this close.

And then as the show continued here was Clara Lukaés coming through the woods from the main house. She wore a white evening gown. She carried her shoes in her hand. She peered up through the trees, she turned, she walked backward, she stopped, she stood on her toes. She moved through patches of light and shade, and reaching the little clearing in front of the cabin, she took me in with a glance and turned to see the plane in its run.

It was very low this time. It drifted down the length of the lake and then dropped below the tree line.

“Are
you
here?” Clara said. She passed into the house and I followed. She stood in the middle of the room with her hands on her hips, and realizing she still held her shoes, she flung them away. At this moment the phone rang. It was in the bedroom and she ran in as if she was going to attack it.

“What!” I heard her shout by way of greeting. A pause. “Yeah, well, I wouldn’t count on it!” she said and slammed the phone down.

I waited a minute. When she didn’t come out, I moved to the doorway. She was sitting on the edge of her bed in some distraction slipping off one shoulder strap, then the other, shrugging her gown to her waist. Losing all volition, she dropped her hands in her lap and sat hunched over without glamour or grace. Her hair was matted and tears streamed down her cheeks.

She had no degrees of response, she lived hard, and the effect of her crying on my heart was calamitous. Her eyes were swollen almost immediately, her breasts were wet with her tears. Her looks collapsed as if they were a pretense.

“Hey,” I said. “Come on. Come on.”

After a while she stood up and let the gown fall to her ankles. She had
nothing on underneath. She was big-breasted for such a thin narrow shouldered girl. She stepped out of the gown and went into the bathroom and a moment later I heard the shower running. Her behind was small and firm, if a bit on the flat side. The prominence of her backbone made me smile. It made me think of the scrawny backs on sunburned little girls who came to the carnival in their bathing suits and convened at the cotton candy.