Authors: Hugh Fox
Reunion (20 page)
“You can't ⦠?”
“I thought I knew him. It's hard to imagine how people will become,” he said, looking at her, tiny, compact, very careful about her diet, self-regulating to the point of fanaticism, thinking too bad they hadn't had any children, although they'd tried, and for a long time everything had been functioning fine sexwise, but the kids just hadn't come, and he had been (was still) willing to go to one of those fertilization miracle-places and masturbate into a bottle and build up a huge frozen reservoir of sperms, take androgyne, whatever it took, go on a pilgrimage to the Heart of Darkness and fight with the King of Demons, but she wasn't interested ⦠looking at her, feeling a tweak of sex, “except for you ⦠you're going to be one of those sexy old ladies I always used to see in New York. They'd be seventy-five, for god's sake, a thousand surgeries and âIf it sounds like rejuvenating, I'll try it.' Workouts and diets, vitamins, hormones, salves, oils, mudbaths, whatever it took. I don't know what it is that turns me on about viejas verdes ⦠”
“V ⦠?”
“Literally âgreen old women.' All that experience, WILL ⦠I think that maybe that's the thing, WILL ⦠all these young chicks with the trashy asses, one, two, three, oo, la, la ⦠who cares ⦠instead of a descent into DESIRE, it becomes THE WORKOUT HOUR ⦠you know what I mean?”
Always honest.
“Not really ⦠”
As the waitress came back again with two baskets of Italian sausage sandwiches and fries.
“How we doing on those beers?”
“Great,” he said, hoping-praying that she wouldn't question the meat-content of the sausages. To pork or not to pork. He would have taken the pork-prohibition as some kind of special divine punishment against the Semites if he hadn't known the whole story about the pig as sacred animal, some sort of Paleolithic carryover of pig as a symbol of the Great Goddess Herself ⦠But she didn't say anything. Too starved for that. Just opened wide and took a crocodilian bite, sat back and trancelike chewed.
“Beautiful!” she said, “what a beautiful sandwich. And even the bread,” inspecting it, a hard almost claylike patina and then inside spongy without being gooey.
“Yeah, the perfect sandwich,” he agreed as he took a big bite and then restrained himself, slowed down, didn't want the sandwich, beer, the day itself, life itself, to ever end. An eternity like this would have been fine for him, an infinity of beers and sandwiches and young faces and ⦠the fries all rough-cut with the skins still on, perfect too.
“And the fries are really great,” her words echoing his thoughts.
Beginning to hear The Ticking now. A glance at the wall-clock. 2:05, just jerking up to 2:06 ⦠they'd have to get a cab/train/something by, say, 4:00 â¦
Closing his eyes, letting the juices flow, spicy but not too spicy, the sausage skin crisp but the insides bursting with juice, and the fries with a little “burn” on the outside, but white as apples inside, sprinkled with garlic, fried in, it must have been sesame oil. Slowly finishing up the sandwiches. Another round of non-alcoholic beers, a break in the clouds outside, sunlight suddenly flooding the streets, like searchlights on white sequins, like being a mite inside of a giant vanilla-on-vanilla sundae.
“OK ⦠we've got just a little more time ⦠”
Paid, a quick visit to the john, the waitress happy with the ample tip, Buzz thinking to himself âWhat the fuck, she's probably a student at Loyola or the Art Institute, remember how it wassssssss' ⦠like Hamlet's father's ghostâremember meeee.
Out into blast furnace brightness. Hardly feeling the cold. The secret was in the light. Hailing another cab.
“Fourteen eleven North State!” he told the driver.
“Where are we going now?” asked Malinche, “We have to get to the airport ⦠”
“Just one short visit⦠”
“OK.”
Resigned.
And even if they missed their plane, so ⦠? They'd stay overnight somewhere and go back in the morning. Wishing he could miss the plane permanently as they drove north on Clark,
the stores, old buildings, fire escapes, new hotels, once in a while a sign “Condominium for sale,” imagining himself there, walking downstairs to some coffee shop every morning for breakfast, instead of (the way he did it now) coming down and taking out the dog, eating a single banana while the dog did his things, then coming in and drinking half a glass of milk, Malinche always at work, no one else around, just this hundred year old house and lunar silence. Great for work and/or visions. But he really was a street person, an elbow rubber, a worm in Wormsville. You'd have thought, being an only child all his life, he would have gotten used to aloneness. But not so ⦠pictures all over the walls of his wives and children ⦠worlds that had been but were no more. As if the Final Phase were to be some sort of wrathful punishment by isolation, exactly the opposite of Job who lived on and on surrounded by generations of his children. As if the Divine Hand itself had plucked them all away, and all he would ever have was Malinche, no pork, no alcohol and the endless blather of CNN Headline News trying to make distant policings and abstract budgetings somehow relevant for himâwhich they never were.
As they drove along Buzz's spirit went into a hundred shops and bought a hundred CD's, the latest
Paris Match
, a pound of the greasiest, hardest salami and a couple of baguettes of just plain breadâbread, like the bread of their Italian sausage sandwich, some little Belgian shell chocolates and a double cap to go ⦠go up to their little flat (his and Malinche's) ⦠oopsâcondominium ⦠which they'd never own, to eat a little salami and bread, bread-pudding, that they'd never eat, in a life they'd never have. Feeling like he was in the middle of a suicide right
now, the blood draining out of a drain in a vein, always a countdown, never ever, there in some sort of expanded Bayeux tapestry Now, but always on the way Toward or the way Away From, reaching over and holding on to Malinche. Even missing the porn stores, whatever had happened to Candy Samples and Sulka and Annette Craven, in Grand Junction everything swept under carpets, exiled. Not that it was pure and shining, but just empty and dull, the absence of (depending on who's defining it) Evil, not Good, but merely Absence â¦
A Walgreen's looked like the City of God, a grocery with mangos and fresh figs in the window, remembering in Spain how he'd go to the market in mid-winter and buy blood-red oranges and fresh figs â¦
Suddenly thinking of his last visit to his oldest daughter (Conchita) in New York. Her little daughter, Maria Elena, one and a half years old. No room for him in her apartment so he'd stayed in the Hotel Wentworth on the edge of Little Brazil in Times Square, and he'd spent long hours with the little girl with her bright blue eyes and blonde hair, somehow whatever blue-eyes and blonde-hair genes there were in Conchita's and Sean's (her husband's) gene banks, combining to produce this cherubic child, full of laughs, curiosities, banging on the TV screen during “Sesame Street,” like she wanted to be let inside the set, Buzz talking to her in Spanish, French, Hebrew, Arabic, buying her books she wouldn't be able to read for years on the lost mosques of Muslim Spain and the excavations at Jericho, shamans and magic mushrooms, Teonanacatl, the flesh of the Gods, the real Gods of Here and Now, the walls and the sunlight speaking
“There is no place else to go, no need ⦠you are Here and Now ⦠bathed forever in divinity ⦠”
Trying to tell the little girl, “I'm your grandfather, pal, and I love you,” Maria Elena laughing at/with him, going out for ice cream and a visit to the Museum of Natural History to look at the stuffed bears and armadillos, him telling her, “In Bolivia they have hairy armadillos that they make ukuleles out of that they call charangas, and they dance dances called huinos,” dancing around for her, her laughing, really, gut-level enjoying him ⦠but he knew he wasn't going to be around for much longer, heart, prostate, who could tell what would snap, rupture, go sour ⦠wild â¦
And he could just imagine her mother talking to her when she (Maria Elena) was twenty, “What do you mean you don't remember your grandfather, he spent hours playing with you, you were crazy about him, I've never seen him have so much fun in his whole life.”
Never had so much fun.
But (age one and a half, visits every six months) she wouldn't remember. The same way he didn't/couldn't (as much as he tried) remember his own grandfathers who had died when he was just a couple years old.
Sliding into the brownstone area now, sedate, elegant, lots of steps and balustrades and peaked roofs. When he'd pick up Petra for a date he'd come an hour early and just walk around the block, go down to the little park (the beginning of Lincoln Park) at the end of her street, calm down his nerves.
It was like walking into the world of Aldous Huxley's
Point Counter Point
, Londonish. They knew who to effectively imitate.
Looking at the driver's name on his I.D.âJoão Pessoa.
“Too much snow, no?”
“For me too much,” he answered.
Just four words, but for Buzz it was enough. He knew exactly where he was from, could almost see the house where he was born, see his mother and father and the neighbors â¦
“Bem diferente de Minas Gerais, naã e? / Very different from Minas Gerais, isn't it?”
“Quem e o senhor? / Who are you?” the driver asked, like he had been stabbed.
“Sou un ango. / I'm an angel.”
The driver suddenly swerving over to the curb, turning around, looking microscopically at Buzz, fine tuning, staring, staring, staring.
“O que esta fazendo o senhor aqui? / What are you doing here?”
“Espiando un pouco. A gente mais além esta un pouco preocupada con voce. / A little bit of spying. The people up there are a little preoccupied with you ⦠”
The driver reaching back and opening the back door, nodding as if to say, “please get out, I don't want you in here any moreâplease ⦠please get out ⦠please ⦠”
Buzz, an amused, bemused, quizzical look on his face, getting out, Malinche right behind him, pulling another twenty dollar bill out of his pocket and tossing it into the back of the cab, slamming the door, a big tree, the Grandfather of All Oaks, right in front of them, grabbing Malinche and jumping behind it as the driver reached back to get the money, but couldn't reach
it, got out of the cab, Buzz's hand over Malinche's mouth so she wouldn't come out with one of her usuals.
A long silence, the driver obviously standing there and looking for them, but not looking too hard and long. Buzz could just see his anxious, terrified face ⦠3, 2, 1 ⦠the cab door banging shut and WHOOSH ⦠AWAY WE GO â¦
Malinche starting to move.
“Just another second,” he said.
Waited. Could just imagine the driver still looking in his rear view mirror, trying to see them, Buzz moving back to the south side of the tree so that when the driver did look back, he/they still wouldn't be there.
Malinche finally just stepping out on to the sidewalk.
“What was all that about?”
“I don't know,” he said feeling like he was an angel and he had been sent from Up There to keep an eye on the cab-driver, a Catcher in the Snow, keeping them all from falling off the edge of the cliff called Cynicism, forgetting who and what they were, the sacred, magic mists they had emerged from â¦
“So what are we doing now?” she asked, “it's so bright. I can hardly see.”
Reaching into his pocket. Two, three pairs of sunglasses. One for himself, one for her, little wet edges around the patches of snow that were left after the snowplows and the shovels. Already everything beginning to melt.
“It's just a block down to where Petra Rossini used to live,” he said.
“Oh, that old girlfriend of yours?!? I don't want to see her. It's embarrassing,” she said.
“She doesn't live there any more. They're all dispersed now. Shattered. Scattered. No one ever stays around anywhere any more ⦠”
Walking proprietarily down the sidewalk, feeling more and more like an angel, imagining he lived here, you walk in and the outside world disappears behind the thick stone walls and double-double windows.
There wouldn't be a house here under a million, a million and a half.
And he couldn't sell anything. No one wanted his visions. Even the New Age was on very well-defined New Age tracks. No one wanted visions-visions, but only prepackaged, like Chinese noodles, rip open the plastic and toss them in boiling water. Instant Kung Fu. Instant Samhedhi â¦
Feeling like taking his coat off, but resisting the impulse.
Feeling like taking off all his clothes and bathing in the sunlight of God.
This was his world, his hunting-dreaming ground, sacred territory, the sun coming back down, the moment of mating between Father Sky and Mother Earth. And it all flows free, dew falls on the Holy Flower of the North Star and the Buddha enters Nirvana.
“I love you so much,” he said, putting his arm around her.
“It is so beautiful around here,” she said, “it's all like palaces.”
“Wouldn't you love to live here? And go have an Italian sausage sandwich every day with a fake beer!”
Suddenly stopping and enclosing her in his arms.
She had come inside his vision. She was a great holy person herself. To be able to come inside his vision and make it her own.
“You're so wonderful, really,” he said, starting to cry in earnest now, thinking it all shreds and crumbles so fast, you're just born and bingo, it's time to die, you just barely get used to this Earth, barely figure out how things work, barely take off your hat and sit down, and it's all over, into the eternal gas chambers â¦
“You too,” she said as they stood in front of the Rossini mansion, thick, heavy brown stone, floor after floor after floor. He'd walk up to the front door and ring the bell and Mrs. Rossini would usher him in like he was royalty, milk and cookies and a short wait in the waiting room, and then Petra would come in, always in a flurry, rush, a grand entrance, classic black pumps and classic black dresses, carrying centuries of snobbery on her back with the utmost ease, someone letting him instantly inside the whole vision of her whole world, so that if she was an immortal, her touch immortalized him too.
