Last Bender

11.2

And so when the time came to visit some of these places I had worked out plans. I didn’t go to Penn since I saw no reason to move to Philly. It was close enough to at least test the waters of commuting. Ditto New Haven. That left Baltimore, Ithaca and Providence.

“You wouldn’t move to Philadelphia? Not even to be with me.” She shook her head. “We’ll see about that if I get in and go.”

“Well, I could always hang around the mint. That’s where we went on a class trip. And the liberty bell. I’ve been to Philly.”

“Then let’s take the train next weekend to Providence.”

“Where will we stay?”

“I have a friend there who lives in Fox Point. We can walk from there to Brown. She’ll pick us up. Her boyfriend drives.”

“She doesn’t drive? She’s a New Yorker?”

“But that’s not why. You’ll see. She’s kind of out there. I met her at a loft event in maybe ‘77? and became friends. One of those extended circumstances, her sister knew Christopher’s sister. I was a senior in high school? A junior? It was down in Soho. They had a performance called The Grapes of Rash in a garage and after we went up to their loft with these ancient dark and greasy kitchen shelves full of potions and stuff. There were cockroaches everywhere. We sat drinking wine. There was a big, lopsided wooden bowl full of spotted bananas and apples and pears and a swarm of fruit flies that hovered in the Netherlandische light. She was living down on Mott Street with this friend of hers, a lighting designer, terrified of her shadow. I loved her paintings. I used to go down to her place after school and we’d drink Cafe Bustello and look at pictures and talk about art. Then she moved to Providence to go to RISD, and hasn’t been back since, not even to see her family. She lives there now with a piano tuner and three dogs.”

I stopped to stare at her. “Three dogs?”

“Big ones. Mutts, with slather coming off of their lips.”

“Good lord. I’ll die.”

The ride up was bleak but painterly with light slanting through the girders of dying bridges, abandoned trestles, warehouses and water tanks, and there was the accelerating tick of anticipation as the train crossed into Queens and raced in a long arc away from the city.

Penn Station was barbaric. A sea of irritable, lost, demented, drug addicted, psychotic homeless drunks, who wandered among the zombies of circumstance, the terrified, bored, predacious, opportunistic, sadomasochistic citizens who milled, stumbled and cruised about the exhausted people with tickets waiting on or by their bags, adding to the garbage and the smell of bad food and cigarettes.

But now we were gone on the train, standing on line in the snack car, which rocked and clacked along while they nuked hot dogs and pretzels in bags, with mustard. We got two cans of beer and sat down to watch people. By New Haven we were slumped in our seats reading.

The boyfriend was a big man in coveralls and boots with prodigious hair erupting from his enormous face and head. Hair popped out of his cheeks, out of his nostrils and ears. He smiled and shook my hand. “Eugene,” he said.

We were on the platform. It was windy and chilly, raw. You could smell the bay over the diesel soot. She shook my hand and said, “Robin.” Robin also was buried under hair; it came off of her head like a fountain. She had a glow in her face, a soft, round nose and cheeks and big brown eyes. She smiled and when I said hello and introduced myself she laughed.

We got to their car, an old sixties station wagon. In the way back were three dogs hard to discern in the dark. When we opened the doors of the car two stood up and jumped into the backseat to greet us, wagging their tails and falling all over each other. The third, for whom there was no room (there was no room for two) started to bark and growl. Robin continued to laugh. “Come on boys,” she said in a commanding voice, a tail whacking her face. And every time the tail whacked her, she laughed some more.

Eugene chuckled along. “Look at all that hair,” he said, tugging two handfuls of his beard.

She laughed even harder now and grabbed one fistful of fur off the dog’s back and one off her head and said, “We’re hairy!”

Robin pushed the dogs till they retreated and we got in. One of the dogs poked my neck with his cold wet nose. I could feel the mucus drying on my skin. He decided he liked me, so he lowered his head down alongside mine and panted onto my chest contentedly, the slobber ropes slowly distending towards my lap. I tried to look at Sally but its head was so big that the ears blocked my view.

Eugene owned a triple decker on a run down street with clumps of grass around broken asphalt and poles stuck in uprooted concrete, chains hanging towards the ground, and dumpsters alongside boarded-up houses. He had his shop on the first floor, with garage doors so he could roll pianos in and out, and the second floor he rented out to artists and crafts people. He and Robin lived on the third, which he had gutted and finished as one big space. When they told me what they paid in rent, my interest in Providence was piqued.

They slept in a loft bed at one end, and she had her studio at the other, by a wall of floor to ceiling windows. There was an old paint covered radio, an Italian tuna can, with a red label, and a green and blue painting of a fish, full of hand rolled cigarette butts, and a Sherlock Holmes pipe and a pouch of borkum riff. In the middle area was the kitchen. There were open shelves painted a dark red over a million other layers of paint, crammed with spices and grains and beans. Bunches of herbs and strings of hot peppers were tied up drying. There was a dirty old stove and tiny sink and a refrigerator covered in junk. They were boiling cabbage with hot peppers and garlic and vinegar and the raw smell of vinegar filled the air.

There was a kitchen table with a bottle of wine and four glasses and a plate full of muffins. Robin laughed and said, “Yeah, I baked them. They’re pumpkin muffins. Oh, they’re really good. Have one.”

We ate muffins and drank wine. Robin lit up a clove cigarette and Sally had one too. Eugene told me about piano tuning and Providence and I told him about library work. We had both reached the point of instinctual caution when it came to discussing our trades, so it was a little slow. Sally and I slept on a futon on the floor, between Robin’s studio and the kitchen. There was heat; it was a cozy place. It smelled like paintings and food.

The next day, while Sally toured the Brown campus, Eugene and Robin showed me around town. It was grimy and depressing, a place of adversity. But I liked that it was stubbornly, defiantly so. They showed me the flood lines marked on the sides of buildings. It still had a 1950s feel, old bars with Narragansett signs in the windows, and dark lounges. Life had assumed a certain shape here long ago. But somewhere in their past lurked the epic impulse, in their monumental response to tragedy, in the Colossus of Rhode Island, the iron doors they built to keep out hurricane storm surges. I saw a Ray Harryhausen Giant Striding up through the water and pounding them off their hinges and laying waste to the town.

We returned on the train and snoozed the whole way back. It was 11:30 when we arrived home, Sunday night. Everyone was there, Christopher, Joseph, Sylvio, Jayda, Lou. I had to go to bed. I wanted her to come with me, but I didn’t know how to ask. So I went to bed alone and soon fell into an uneasy sleep. I was trying not to think about the ottomans. If they were going to wake me up at four or five, then I’d not be able to go back to sleep. And when I thought of this early in the night, then I could not go to sleep thinking about not being able to go to sleep. Since I didn’t want that to happen I had to try not to think of it, any of it. But it was impossible to ignore. The ottomans had become organizing principles.

They sounded like bowling balls. Inexplicably there were nights when Joseph and his friends came home and rolled about, the rumble of the wheels forming a bass drone for the compulsive ho ho hos, and the shrieks and yelps and yips of delight and cackling and cawing that went along with it, waking both Sally and me. The rolling of the ottomans was the final event of the night. I was became a solitary scold, a Timon. Sally didn’t care. She was on a one year vacation. She could always fall back to sleep and even if she tossed and turned, she could sleep when the sun had come up and it was quiet. She never said a thing about it. I would pad out into their midst and demand angrily that they cease. It got so as all I had to do was open the door and they would look like guilty children and apologize.

The night that we returned from Providence I awoke at 4:30 with a start of terror and stumbled half asleep out into the main room in the loft. They had cleared the furniture away and in each corner of the room was an ottoman. The big painting was like a portraict in heaven of the action below, or maybe it was the shadow cast on the screen. Lou in one corner, Joseph in another, and Jayda in the third and there in the fourth was Sally, lying on her belly facing the room and kicking her legs up and down. They were launching themselves towards the middle of the room and crashing into each other like bumper cars. The most insinuating, high-pitched snicker was Sally’s, as well as her more guttural ha! when she was dislodged from her ottoman and sent flying. It is an error of youth to subject oneself needlessly to others. I was a damned idiot, standing there in my underwear while they laughed, and I should have known it then, but instead I felt a jealous rage, such as I had experienced intermittently over the summer.

And there was still a heavy thread of guilt in me; I may have cut the thread but it was in there. It still is. So my own duplicitie fueled my suspicyons. But it was also entrapped by her silence. I was condemned in mine own eyes, and had no right to question her. And so I hid from her and she hid from me. I had no idea how it was I had come to such a pass. As I went along it all made sense. There was no point of evident absurdity to cause me to see where I had gone too far. There was no bounding; my increments were true, but the end was a wreck. For here we were ebbing and flowing in and out of each other and in and out of rooms and all the barriers were in the air between us. We had started to check each other; the emotions and their arguments had taken over. We were a transmorphic form of semi-discreet individuals, interdependent for purposes of reproduction.

I felt like a fool and retired and tried to sleep. In the morning Sally got up early and sat over her coffee, eyes swollen, skin puffy and pink, lips half open and beaded with saliva. The paper shades were closed but even this diffuse light made her blink.

“What were you doing last night?”

She stared at me and said, “Huh?”

“Last night you were doing what?”

“I don’t know. You tell me.”

“It looked like you were rolling on the ottomans. You know how I hate those damn things. It’s like you betrayed me.”

“Betrayed!”

“Yes. That’s what it feels like.”

“In what way is rolling on the ottomans a betrayal?”

“Can you not see it?”

“See it? No I cannot. I can’t see it, no.”

“We’ll it’s right there for you to see if you’d only look.”

“As usual your powers of description fail you. Show me how I’ve betrayed you with my brother and his friends? Let’s see now, you’re jealous of a homosexual–”

“One you slept with.”

“Hardly. I did a lot of swallowing.”

“Please.”

“And then there’s Sylvio who’s like a 40 year old man!”

“He’s 40?”

“Maybe 35, no one knows. We keep trying to figure out. He was in Paris in ‘68. So he has to be about that old or older. But he was also in the Joyce Seminar. That was early seventies. So I don’t know.”

“Don’t you all discuss such things as birthdays?”

“Pretend you’re not there,” she said, making a weary face for me.

“Who’s listening. Who the fuck cares.”

“What is wrong with you!”

“You know, you can just apply alone to schools if you want. Tell me now.”

“You! What!”

“It’s what you want.”

“Not want. That’s you.”

“Not me, you.”

“This is your brother talking. You say you aren’t under his thumb but here it goes. He doesn’t want you to leave. You’re part of his entourage his tribe his clan. And he’s got something on you. What did he tell you?”

“I don’t want to fight about Roy.”

“Yeah he’s getting us to fight, so let’s talk about Roy. He’s totally out of control, and always has been. He’s going to suck you into his life.”

“It’s not that! And I am my own person. I don’t know him. I want to go. But you are more interested in your work and your friends than you are in me.”

“Oh for god’s sake, do you get up early to secretly drink or something?”

I was undone by ordinary anger then. She was making fun of me. “Well, if you’re going to stay up all night rolling around on those things.”

“Oh, is it really just those things again?”

“I have to get up and work in the morning.”

“Yes of course I know that. We all know that. That you suffer so to work. You could work other hours.”

“I’d like to work your hours.”

“You can work them any time you want and you know that.”

“But why.”

“We’d just gotten back. They wanted to hear about the trip. I was up and it looked like fun.” She smiled. “It was fun.”

“Do you want more coffee?”

She looked at me with her bloodshot eyes and pouted.

“I’m sorry then,” I said.

She blinked a few times. “I’ll take one more cup. Are you going to shower?”

“I think so. I’m becoming soft. Now I look forward to your parents’ shower. I remember when I felt I was too tough to care about such things. That was when I had the rubber hose between the showerhead and the faucet, and it would heat up and fall off in the middle of the shower. And the hose would wiggle around spouting water. It was very dramatic. Like Lacanian analysis.”

“Mind if I join you?”

“Mind?

“Yes.”

“No.”

The next half hour was either all mind or all body and the rest of the day was like nothing at all.