The Moon In Its Flight (14 page)

Could a character be evoked who might evoke the items or disjecta on my desk? A simple noun for each, if properly “handled,” might do the job. And yet, what job was it that there was to be done? Lest confusion reign I decided on a handful of nouns, or, as the blank page demanded be uttered, the substantive. Should I show rather than tell, or, better yet, better yet infinitely more difficult, display rather than show? If I could succeed in displaying, or even showing the spondulicks on my desk,
in context,
in picture language, i.e., language that is like a picture, or pictures, lots of them, of course, colorful when needed, it goes without saying, perhaps the reader, ever hungry for actual experience, will be able to reach out and touch them in all their flesh and blood and interesting formal qualities, not to mention all the other things. I know, of course, that the awesome powers of revision may abrogate or defer or even occlude, occult, and abort such heady fantasies of literary perfection, yet I feel that I have no choice but to press on. Revision, as noted by Gide, Irving, Bly, Tough, and Lombardo is a harsh mistress, finally. Consider the work, the entire opus of the “vagabond prose master” of the Western reaches, or at least the reaches of Los Altos, the town whose motto wisely states, “Our Cars Are
O.K.
,” that wise yet warm penman, Wallace Stegner, of whom his various assistants have noted,
as one,
that even his first drafts were revisions, as were, doubtlessly, his ideas, of which there were plenty. Yet the hot, quick tears kept falling. This was what no-nonsense people called “writing, man.”

But how to handle items, memorabilia, flotsam, and the like? How to approach the unforgiving blank page with ideas about such a
pasticciaccio,
if you’ll pardon my French. For instance, is it enough to say “globe,” “pen,” “letters,” or is that not enough? These sound rather haphazard, at best. How about: “Lifting my eyes from the plebeian fastnesses of the worn carpet, I found myself gazing, as if for the first time, at the moon, sailing through the cloudy skies like a bark of yore, like a kind of globe, a globe that had been sketched on the heavens by a ghostly pen, one used not to the demands of art but to the humble task of writing letters.” The clock ticks quietly as the fly buzzes against the window globe, the sun warms my letters. All is but a dream.

But what wise man said that the dream is a rebus? And yet, what is the nature of a rebus? Is it flesh, blood, globe, or desk? Or all three? Joseph Cornell knew precisely what a rebus is, but who else knows, or even once knew? Must I return to the beginning, then? To the world of the empty page? Or the blank canvas? “The silent shit on my desk yearns for the dignity of representation.” Yearns and pines, its blood throbbing as it has throbbed, yes, for aeons and aeons of clanging time gone mad with despair!

I rise and head for the window, gaze out at the winking lights far below on the valley floor. The night is cool, the wind sighs quietly, I feel as if I have walked into the kitchen to avail myself of a cold beverage. I feel as if I have lit a cigarette, filling myself and the house, filling all the crystal-clear air with death! Death that asks no quarter, that laughs with the wild laughter of unbridled love, that laughs and laughs and laughs as if laughing for the first time.

A Joke

A Jewish matron on a jet from New York to Miami Beach introduces herself to her charming seat companion as Mrs. Moskowitz. After a drink and some light banter about the intrinsic problems of the aporia as it relates to
cutting velvet,
the charming companion comments on the clarity, brilliance, size, and cut of the enormous diamond ring on Mrs. Moskowitz’s finger. This might have been Mrs. Cohen, by the by, but that’s neither here nor there. And is that the glint of cupidity in the charming seat companion’s eye? Mrs. Moskowitz sighs and reports, in a whisper freighted with the sort of fear that suggests the ineffable rebus of life itself that the ring, despite its beauty and obvious worth, has a curse on it, the—Moskowitz curse! The Moskowitz curse? queries the charming seat companion, who has, incidentally, beautiful legs, of the kind highly prized by any number of leering men, many of whom have subjected this young woman to a male gaze, gazing and gazing at her legs as if seeing legs for the first time. Their hot, quick tears fall fast as they chide themselves for such crudity. The Moskowitz curse? the seat companion queries again, looking up quickly from her copy of
Dark Corridors of Wheat.
What, in heaven’s name, is the Moskowitz curse?

Mr. Moskowitz, is the reply.

Or it could be Mr. Cohen, were this another joke. And it had better come out with numbers on it. What are you selling this year, cancer? Everybody’s gotta be someplace, yingle, yingle. Max, carry me?

Maurice Bucks, the entertainment
bigwig,
is so rich, confides Mrs. Moskowitz, that he hires people to count the people who count his money. Ha ha. Or, perhaps, Bucks is so rich that he can find himself in a lather. Has everyone taken note of the fact that he is always immaculately dressed, even on the slopes at Moskowitz Pass? There is, too, that certain Kafkaesque something that he has about him, and even, some say, in him, like bacteria. Many are the nights when Maurice has stared at the blank walls and thought that he might be better off were he still that young actor who wanted nothing more than to direct, nothing more than to be surrounded by the sparkling conversation of the stars. Well, he often sighed.

Schultz is always dead in every joke he’s ever lost his virile member in. The charming companion considers this and blushes deeply, rummaging for her biography of Sarah Orne Jewett by Wallace Stegner, the “Prairie Edition,” of course.

“Not only is this joke anti-Semitic, misogynistic, and contributory to stereotypes about air travel, it is also, in some as-yet-undefined way, not very nice about the regular family kind of feeling right here in Miami Beach.”

Speaking of Miami Beach, I am reminded of a joke, or is it more like a story? It is hard to know what with time, plodding time, clanging outside the window as I write—yet write—what? A man, hired by a rich contractor—a friend, by the way, of Maurice’s—as a chauffeur, companion, gin-rummy partner, fellow-bettor at divers tracks, both equine and canine, strongarm, and occasional gunman, finds himself appointed, during those periods when the contractor is away on business, and by the contractor’s alcoholic wife, as a dogwalker. The boss’s wife, Handy Sarah, a lifelong admirer of diamonds and other precious gemstones, is regularly soused by noon. The dogs, two prize boxers named Scotch and Soda, sorely try this rather refined thug’s patience, for they demand to be walked at times that are highly inconvenient to his gaming instincts and erotic impulses. Speaking of the latter, he once contracted gonorrhea from a
fille de joie
whose stroll took in some two blocks of Collins Avenue. Encountering the same woman the next year, he remarked, “What are you sellin’ this year, cancer?” This man’s name was Patsy Buonocore. “Looks like another eyetalian joke, with numbers on it! Some more spaghetti with meatballs, sir?”

One day, upon returning to his employer’s mansion on Biscayne Bay, Patsy, sobbing bitterly, reveals that the two dogs have drowned. “It seems that Scotch leaped into the drink to retrieve a little boy’s beloved wind chimes, their
yingle-yingle
poignant on the wind, and Soda, seeing that Scotch was encountering some aquatic difficulties, followed. In jig time, both were swept out to sea.” Some few months later, both dogs were fished out of a landfill, their brains scattered by .38 caliber slugs.

This is not actually a joke, but an anti-dog story, as mean-spirited as the one about the professors’ wives working in the local brothel on their husbands’ poker nights. One must admit to problems before one can be helped by those who have already admitted to problems. Look at the recovering alcoholics who can never top off a meal with cherries jubilee, rum baba, or sfogliatelle à la Proust. And yet rarely is there anything less than a wan smile and a chin up! A thousand drinks are never, ever enough, whatever that might mean. “Well, if you won’t gimme another fuckin’ drink, how about a haircut?”

Max, carry me to the bar? Who does Mrs. Moskowitz have to fuck to get
out
of this job?

Surely, is one of the most beautifullest rings ever found of a desk, is it not so? And no more lip about Miami Beach, all right? “I’m not certain about that
jig time.
What kinda phrase is that, an aporia?”

“Come see me at the Fountain Blue, dolling.”

A Tomato

Bill came out of the kitchen, an anxious look on his face.

“Say, Charlie, how about a tomato with supper? What do you say?”

I knew that when Bill mentioned supper this early in the evening—it was barely late afternoon—that he had made plans to go downtown to the Jewel Theater to moon over Dolly Rae, the strange, pretty girl who did the cleaning up after the last show. He was trying, I knew, although I wouldn’t let on that I knew, to ask her, once again, about her reasons for trying to raise the gleaming white bicycle from the bottom of the swimming pool over at the other motel in town. Dolly Rae Jewett was a determined girl, and her cooking, as the old phrase has it, had won Bill’s heart. Well, it
was
terrific cooking, and her
guaglio, matarazzo,
and other robust dishes were something to talk about indeed. Bill would have been much better off concentrating on Dolly Rae and her great food and her sweet, pretty face, and forgetting all about the gleaming white bicycle that lay so mysteriously, so silently and symbolically, at the bottom of the deep end of that damn pool.

I looked over at him, my mind moving unwillingly to a picture of the two drowned dogs that an old neighbor of mine, Mrs. Moskowitz, used to own. I was twelve at the time, and I’ll never forget those dogs being trundled home in a baby carriage, the water leaking out of its sides and bottom. It had been, that memory, a major problem for me for many years, but I’d worked my way through it with the help of a very fine and strong lay therapist, who’d made me realize that I had to admit to the problem before I could even begin to deal with it. “One drink is a lot and a thousand drinks are not too many,” she’d say, enigmatically, at the end of each informal session. And sometimes, she’d tell me of her mentor, Schultz, now dead these many years, and mourned, or so I came to understand, by scores of his students, many of them aspiring poets.

I admired Bill, but it was in his best interest, or so I felt, never to say so, at least not to him. It was better to mention my admiration for him to other people whom I didn’t admire at all, but who, or so I learned, admired Bill. He liked to repair cars and trucks and with the money he saved over and above his living expenses he planned on buying a very large, green canvas patio umbrella for his favorite table near the pool in our motel’s courtyard. “Let me tell you about another great umbrella I saw in Monkey Ward’s yesterday,” he’d chuckle.

“Tomato sounds good, Bill,” I muttered quietly, looking out at the chipped enamel table by the pool as if seeing it for the first time. “Fresh basil
O.K.
?” Bill nodded but it was a distracted nod. He was thinking, I knew, of Dolly Rae and the bicycle that both obsessed and, in some dark, strange way, frightened her. Then he was gone in a swirl of cigarette smoke, and I wondered how many minutes had been taken off my life
this
time.

Six months earlier, when I’d left school to work for a man who made authentic Shaker furniture for people who loved it for its spirit and its subtle hint of the last Shaker colony on Biscayne Bay, I’d met Bill at the Jewel, the only movie house in town. The Jewel showed the kind of offbeat films that you’d never see at the Octiplex out at the Big River Mall, and had a reputation for being cutting edge. It was run by a man called “Chet,” who made up in loud brio what he lacked in subtle verve. Bill had been carrying a bag of what turned out to be ripe tomatoes, and we struck up a conversation almost instantly, although I can’t recall a word of it. All I do know is that somehow our shared delight in tomatoes led to an arrangement whereby we moved into the Red Wagon Motel together and split all expenses. So far, it had worked out wonderfully well, but I was beginning to worry about his growing anxiety concerning Dolly Rae and the bicycle. But our first few months together were idyllic, and Bill’s pleasure in imagining the green umbrella that would highlight the pool area was my pleasure as well.