Last Bender

ENDANGERED SPECIES

By Jon Frankel

 

What is the use of talking, and there is no end of talking,

There is no end of things in the heart.

-Ezra Pound Exile’s Letter

1.

Were it not for Dr. Porlach, I would not have answered the call. He was trying to sell me some books (as if I needed more of those). Still, there were some intriguing titles on his list, books I could turn around and sell for good money, so the time had come to speak in person and take the full measure of his collection. He knew I was after the newspapers, but he also knew he was going to have to make it worth my while, for we both loved the newspapers, and at this point, neither of us cared about the books. So I said, “Hello,” doing my best to sound both shrewd and awake, hard for a man in pajamas and a bathrobe.

 “Hello? Alex?” It was a woman’s voice, and I became so confused I didn’t recognize it.

“Yes?” I spooned coffee into a battered Neopolitan espresso pot and lit the stove, burning my finger on the match.

“I’m looking for Alex Ploomis. This is Sally Babel.” Her voice was bright; there was a pop to it. Sally Babel and I had not spoken in 25 years. I stared at the grime and crud on the windows and sat down to watch the pigeon across the airshaft brood her eggs, as I have watched all of her ancestors. Life, after all, is the exploration of limits.

“Hello Sally Babel,” I said.

“So it is you. This is a little odd.”

“I never answer the phone.”

“I didn’t think you would. But I hoped–”

“That I might,” I said. “How are you?”

“I’m coming to town. Did you want to have dinner?”

. I looked around at the four walls, eight if you count the bathroom. I didn’t have much to show for myself, other than the listing stacks of books on the floor and my friend Simon Knight’s paintings of the sky. The espresso pot hissed and bubbled and the air smelled a little like burnt rubber, as the seal was corroded. I poured its contents into a diner mug and took a good sip. The pigeon wuffled. The coffee was strong, no crema, just black and bitter.

Did I want to have dinner. What I did not want was Sally disturbing the leaden dust of this apartment, where I have been quietly immured for most of my life. And, if I agreed to dinner it meant also I had accepted the terms of her bizarre question, which she had managed to phrase in such a way as to make me believe that it was something we’d been discussing for hours if not days. “I did want to have dinner,” I said, not meaning to say anything at all, but a little intrigued that I could make fun of her still.

“Are you making fun of me?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll be there end of July.”

“There’s that damned Thomas Hardy Society conference in Sussex and the Blake in Tobago.”

She laughed. “Your enthusiasm is infectious.”

“Mostly I’m surprised. Shocked, actually.” I had stopped waiting for her call a long time ago.

“I’ll bet. A shock like this could make a man’s nose bleed.”

“Let me check my book.” I have no book and she knew it. The pigeon fluffed and abruptly took off. I became aware of the screen between us. And then, that here was nothing in the window across the airshaft.

“Well, when’s not all that important,” she said.

“I see. How’s the Lacan going?”

“I’m more historically minded these days.”

“New Hystericism.”

“It’s good to know you still need to be smarter than me.”

Fuck.

“Have you seen my book?”

“Did someone pick up, Phallus Coup–Lacan and the Early Comedies?”

She yiped and said, “Now wait a minute. I haven’t written like that in years. I work on Middleton. I’m just nuts about him. And I got him in at the end. Last chapter. It ends with Middleton.”

“Does it begin with Skelton, then? Didn’t you meet the world’s foremost Middletonian?”

“Foremost Marxist Middletonian. We slept together after like eight years. I don’t really remember. The man was a drunk. Probably gay. Sylvio never forgave me.”

It was impossible, despite the fact that he was obviously impotent, not to view Sylvio Argento as a lothario. A charlatan certainly, with his Venn/Lacan diagrams and mapped jokes. “What do you mean Sylvio never forgave you?”

“We were married, Alex! If I hadn’t been drinking, it wouldn’t have happened.”

“You actually married him? You didn’t tell me that at Christopher’s funeral.” I stared into the empty coffee cup and scratched my nose, trying to think of what to do with my outrage.

She became defensive. “It’s not like you were around. And you wouldn’t even look at me at the funeral. I would have told you, if I could have found you, but you snuck in and ran out as soon as you saw me and never answered the phone. Anyway, I loved Sylvio’s work. I still do. The man is brilliant. You never saw it, but how could you? Sylvio’s mind works completely differently than yours.”

“What way is that?”

“Oh, well, you’re a compiler, he’s a synthesizer.”

“I see. Is he coming to the city too?”

She said nothing. Then, “No, we divorced. It was stupid. You were right about him. I got sober and saw a few things. I mean, I slept with the Marxist Middletonian because there was not a whole lot happening with Sylvio in that department. It was an inane relationship. I wanted children. He didn’t. So, without telling me, he went out and got a vasectomy. It was,” her voice shrank to a dot, “indescribable. I felt like nothing.”

I thought about that for a second and shifted in my chair. “Well, what about the book?”

“Oh, the book. Haven’t you seen it at Barnes and Noble? I was on Book TV, I was on Charlie Rose.”

“What did you do on him?”

“It’s called Gynocracy and its Discontents. Look, I’ll tell you over dinner. After I settle in.”

“What do you mean settle in.”

“But I told you, I got a job at NYU. I’m their Early Modern person. It’s tenured. Everything is settled.”

I felt tingles in the back of my head. “My god. Congratulations. You’re a made guy now. That’s why you sound so, so, good, like that pop in your voice.”

“I’m looking for a place out in Brooklyn. So what are you reading?”

“Aurelius and Burton on alternate mornings; and Simon’s books. They’re piled up all over the place.”

“Simon! How is he?”

“Dead.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You mean you haven’t seen You Can Kiss My Gay Black Ass on YouTube?”

She laughed. “I must’ve missed that.”

“He was on some AIDS and The Arts panel at CUNY. The moderator asked him what the impact of AIDS had been on him as a gay, black artist. And Simon said he didn’t consider himself to be a gay, black artist. He was just an artist. And it goes on like that for a while, and finally, Simon gets pissed off and says, ‘Well you can kiss my gay black ass!’”

 She laughed. “What was today’s meditation, or did I interrupt it?”

“No, you caught me just as the second cup of coffee was ready. The Meditation was, Death is repose from sense response, from the stimulus of impulse, from intellectual analysis and the service of the flesh.”

“So you still live in that apartment? Your number’s the same.”

“I was priced out of the market ten years ago.”

“But that building must be worth a fortune.”

“I’m too crowded here to consider moving.”

“How much shit can you fit into that studio?”

“It’s not a studio.”

“One room.”

“But it was two, until I knocked the wall down.”

She cleared her throat and said, “I’m starting to think a lot about the late romances.” It was like swallowing a bone. Neither of us could speak for the longest time. Finally she said, “It’s funny, I had always planned to work on the problem plays first.”

“Late romances?”

“I’m always afraid that for some reason you hate me, or think I hate you. I can’t live with these kinds of feelings anymore. Not coming home like this.”

“Feelings? Is that why you’re calling? Who can say what happened now?”

“It’s all very vivid to me,” she said.

It was not at all vivid to me now. I had done very little over the years but try to forget. “I have to go to work.”

“Oh.” She sounded disappointed. But I had to get off the phone and think. “Will you be around later?”

“Yeah, after work.”

“Will you pick up the phone?”

“I can’t promise I won’t screen, but if it’s you, yes.” I hung up. The silence of the room filled in slowly with the hum of the refrigerator, like a hole in the sand.

I didn’t hate her. She was a spectre, and by spectre, I don’t mean a ghostly wave, but a ghostly particle, a speck. A light that dances before your eyes. It made my mind race on the rails of repulsion and desire, which I had worked so hard to still. The box had been secure! Past and future wedded in a sepulcher. I made another cup of coffee. Work would have to wait.

I had to admit that things were not as they had seemed. Without knowing it I had desiccated her down to a brute essence. Dogmatic, dismissive, strident. And I had been hiding some of my own thoughts in her voice. She was a mind puppet. The walls vibrated a little. I looked at the clock. It was past time to open the shop. But first I would have to get dressed and process some of the Scottish order:  Two hundred boxes down in 2B, the contents of a small private library I had divvied up with an ad hoc alliance of dealers. Somewhere in those two hundred boxes was the Collected Middleton, Bullen’s 1894 edition. The thought of this edition excited me. I would dig it up, wrap it and send it to her as a peace offering.

I dressed quickly, grabbed the packing list and a flashlight and headed out the door. The hallway lights were dim, the walls cracked and dirty. From the floor to about four feet up, the stucco had been slathered with grey paint, and above that, a color that had once looked like mayonnaise but had patinated so that it looked like embalmed flesh with the makeup flaking off. The hallways to the back apartments were blackened with shadow as if by fire. It was just as well. I didn’t need to be reminded of the filth. And the apartments themselves were clean. There were no more hidden warrens of garbage. I had finally exterminated the last of the roaches. A man willing to dedicate himself to the task can eliminate roaches from a building, if he will be diligent.

I squeezed into 2B. The boxes were stacked all the way back to the windows and only a few feet shy of the ceiling. Were they to fall, I’d be crushed. Yellow sunlight lit up the cracks between boxes, shining through the motes. I turned on the overhead light, a caged cfl crackling and buzzing. It was hard to figure out where to start. All I had was separate packing slips for each box. Methodically then I began to slit open cartons of books and sort them out onto two sheets of particleboard up on sawhorses.

I put on the radio, WBAI, and pretended for a while socialism was still alive. The blade of the mat knife slid quickly through the tape. I tried not to think about Sally, but it was no good, she kept coming back. The flaps popped up and I freed the books from the packing of wadded newsprint.  

I couldn’t remember her face. It was the strangest thing. There were only a few faces I knew better, yet all I saw when I tried to picture her was black. And I couldn’t tell anymore what I had thought two hours earlier. Did I think about her every day? I think about my brother Roy every day, and Simon, my mother, the psychiatrist. When did it stop? When did I stop fucking her in my mind? When did her voice leave my head? I could not find the ending any more than the beginning. Every waking minute had been full of her, and yet that had been gone so long it was unimaginable that such insane devotion could exist. It was aberrant, a disorder of the mind. And I don’t mean devotion to the beloved either; I mean the devotion it takes to blow on the coal constantly, never to let it die, though it kills you. I didn’t even remember how I had met her! But I did, absolutely, know how I had met her, and where. I was living in this apartment and going to Hunter College. Roy introduced us at Puffy’s, a neighborhood bar in Tribeca.