Last Bender

Endangered Species 2.3

That night I believe I stood at her door for five minutes listening to the pounding bass, feeling tweeters ripple through the cinder block and wood. After this momentary hiatus from reality, I turned tail and pushed the elevator button. I had not been detected. There would be no loss of face. I would not go in. I would make some sort of excuse the next day and arrange to meet her another time. If there was a next day. We had not exchanged phone numbers. It would be the luck of the draw, catching her retreat from the gay boyfriend’s apartment with her hickeys and wet chin. I didn’t like parties anyway. Drugs and drink and blather blather blather. It’s like Lou Reed says, Take off your pants, don’t you know that it’s a party? What did I know about parties and people. People everywhere. She wouldn’t speak to me; no one would. I didn’t need to watch them dance, or listen to them shout about television shows and celebrities.

     I pushed the button and descended in the lift to G. But I could not make myself go out the front door. So I reascended, but again, could not bring myself to enter her apartment. I can’t estimate the number of round trips I took on that elevator, though I note in passing that the compulsion to repeat is neither alarming nor dangerous to me. What finally broke my cyclical rise and fall was the opening of her door at the very moment I stepped off the elevator, into a large, purple cauliflower of smoke. The door discharged two women who squeezed past. Satisfaction was blasting on the stereo. Sally stood in the doorway smiling while I read her curved silhouette and answered the call.

     The loft had twenty-foot ceilings and was a little darker than the hall had been. Instead of the pulsing mass of trendy New York moneymakers I had anticipated, there were five glum looking intellectuals seated on two couches and preposterous seventies chairs, arranged in a rectangle around two candles on a modish glass and steel coffee table. They each had their own personal ashtray and no one looked at anyone else. From an unseen room came loud drunken laughter.

     I marveled at the contrast for a moment–their silence shrouded in music and disembodied merriment. Here was a party of people who hated parties. I decided to dive right into their melancholy midst. Let the goats have their revels. We will dip their good feelings in acid. I awaited coruscating bon mots.

     All heads swung towards me, and then one by one each chin dropped.

     How bright Sally was compared to that dreary company, in her low-cut black dress, stockings and high heels, face incredibly white after an amiably lurid application of lipstick and eyeliner. “Alex,” she said, “Come and meet my friends. Everyone, this is my friend Alex. This is Christopher Gold.” The boyfriend was dressed in tan corduroy and worn ankle-high suede shoes, his foot resting stiffly on his knee. He had round glasses. A swath of hair hung in his eyes. Christopher Gold, the boyfriend. The gay boyfriend, the Crisco kid, with his prominent jaw and shy look. He took my hand and smiled uncomfortably. “Alex lives in your building, isn’t that uncanny?”

     “Oh. Oh!” he said, a bead of sweat rolling down his high forehead. He was probably worried I’d stop by to watch football!

     Next to Christopher on the couch was Sylvio Argento, a post doc dressed for a funeral, with a round, pasty face and unruly black hair. His eyes were extremely animated, and he engaged me with a playful look, but he was barely able to squeeze out a hello, which came in like an oboe with a broken reed. “Sylvio is the moderator of our Lacan Studies Group. We were just discussing a newsletter. Sylvio has a really brilliant idea for a series of articles on humor.

     “Anyway, this is Powell,” she continued, indicating with a sweep of her hand the opposed couch and the two women seated upon it. Powell was trying for all the world to look bad, with fishnet stockings, bustier and cat glasses. Her hair was so heavily bleached it took on the color of the ambient light. Powell, I was informed, was a poet-critic. It was at this point that Sally announced, “Alex loves Wordsworth!”

     Seated next to Powell was her girlfriend Antonia: bowl-cut red hair, black leather pants and a white T-shirt that said BOY. Her face twitched once and then she looked away.

     “And finally, this charming fellow is Dean.” Dean’s charm held up even while doing battle with the seventies chair. Sally ran her fingers through his hair and he craned his head around to look at me.

     “That noise you hear,” she said, wiping her fingers off on her dress, “in the kitchen, is my brother Joseph and his friends. There were only supposed to be a few them, but word got out.” Now all five of them rolled their eyes, shook their heads and sighed. There was an explosion of laughter and two wrestling bodies crashed into the stereo, which sent the tone arm flying across the record, making a sound like ripped canvas. Powell hid her face. Christopher gritted his teeth. Dean rolled his eyes and head back. Sylvio and Antonia endured.

     As the wrestlers fought about the music, Powell said, “As I was trying to say–” and she was trying to say it, but the wrestlers were out-vying each other over the word shit, “–in Dean’s poem, would you say the tightrope walker is an instance of the spectacle?”     “Because of the danger?” Antonia asked.

     “Shit!”

     “Isn’t that voyeurism then? The gaze through the peephole?”

     Powell lit a cigarette and looked at the coal. “Is tailgating voyeurism then?” Sally followed them intently. “Or is it spectacle?”

     “SHIT!”

     Dean raised his voice against the whispers and the shit: “It’s definitely not voyeurism!” Well, it was his poem, he oughta know.

     “Why?” Powell asked. “Foucault, in The Order of Things–”

     “Foucault didn’t write the poem. The moment of danger is the moment of exchange. The death of the subject is a logical impossibility,” he asserted, impatiently lighting a cigarette.

     I drifted towards the windows. The two wrestlers left for the other end of the loft where they continued to fight and banged at an upright piano. I looked at the street below and then at the kitchen, which was separated from the rest of the space by some Japanese paper screens with blond wooden frames. Indistinct shadows stretched against and crossed the white squares. Occasionally one left the screen to collapse in the bright yellow light of the doorway.

     Against the back wall was a painting ten feet high by twenty wide of figures seated in a boat, painted in thick, rough swirls of pink, green and red. They had embryonic heads on tiny bodies with shrunken arms and legs and umbilical cords dangling as from an unplugged phone. Above floated celestial signs, or so they appeared, star bursts and brooding suns done in the same circular strokes as the heads.

     I decided to plumb the depths of the party and made for the kitchen. The lights were so bright I had to blink away the flashes. Here were gathered Joseph and his friends, still reacting to the claret sipping Stilton eaters Pound described harumphing on the decks of steamers. So the sons and daughters of the world’s greatest wealth slouched and leaned, gaunt and pale, with the bad skin and strident hair and cheap clothing of the Boho rake.

     I entered their ranks boldly and made for the fridge, where I deposited my warm six-pack of Bud and took a cold Rolling Rock. Desiring above all to escape this melee alive, I resolved not to have more than the one beer. It would last an hour. Then I would go.

     The paper screen divided two worlds. In the living room they mumbled like subdued psychotics. Here, in the kitchen, they spoke all at once like a bunch of children playing dress up. I could understand nothing of what they said; it was all of the same emphasis. They appeared to be quite drunk. There was a near constant, exaggerated laughter. With some reluctance I returned to the dark, again blinking, and headed back to the painting, which had taken on the aura of a friend.

     Christopher sidled up, lit a cigarette and asked, “What do you think of the painting?”

     Blinking a lot and choking on the smoke, all I could manage was, “It’s very big indeed.”

     “So you work at Gaylords?”

     “Yes.”

     “Sally mentioned that you like Wordsworth.”

     “Yes.” He seemed to require something more of me. I pushed hard against my throat and forced such words as I could find up through the fistula. “Yes, Wordsworth. I’ve been reading the Two Part Prelude of 1798. It’s really amazing,” I said, beginning to relax a little, as I recalled the creeping pleasure I felt reading the poem over the course of many days and peanut butter sandwiches at work. “I used to think Wordsworth was a bore, until I could hear the beauty of his language. He’s very sly with that. And then, once I abandoned myself to its rhythms, I could feel it flowing like a river out of Eden.”

     “You don’t really think that do you?”

     “What do you mean?”

     “Well, it’s just so naive. Presence is an ideological construct. Wordsworth is desperate for metaphysical certainty.” I drained the beer. “The Prelude as spiritual biography. Right. It allows the newly constituted modern self to experience its origins as natural and timeless. But the anxiety of the modern self constantly disrupts that.” Sweat rolled down both of our foreheads.

     “What exactly is the modern self?”

     “Uh, false consciousness? The bourgeois self: autonomous, private, inward, individual, cut off. Date of birth, 1787.”

     “Then Socrates was a cat. I need a beer. Can I get you one?”

     He mopped his forehead and looked relieved. “No thank you, I’m fine.”

     Of course he was not fine, he had just murdered Wordsworth.

     As I headed for the glowing doorway I was waylaid by Dean, the poet whose tightrope walker had proved so stimulating. Dean wore tan chinos, a pressed Oxford shirt   and loafers without socks. He was slack to the point of lassitude. “Alex,” he said. “We didn’t get a chance to talk over there. Dean.”

     “Dean,” I replied. “Just getting a beer. Alex.” He blocked the way.

     “I know how you feel. I hate going in there myself. Those East Village snots think they are so cool.”

     “Where do you live?”

     “On Hudson Street, and I love my studio, I love my pull-out couch and I even love the hot plate. There’s nothing about my studio I don’t love. And you?”

     “East Village.”

     “Oh. Ha ha! I’m such a jerk sometimes!” He smiled, and I sensed a discreet packet of irony exploding under my nose. Sally joined us.

     “Did you tell him about Wordsworth?” she asked.

     “Oh, Wordsworth. Truth and beauty and all that.”

     She punched Dean’s arm and said, “That’s Keats.”

     “I love his train of thought,” I said.

     “Well, I derail trains of thought.”

     Sally took my arm and uttered a false, barking laugh. “Dean’s a L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet.”

     “Stop it Sally, I am not.”

     “Don’t be modest. He’s totally cutting edge. Nowhere near the academy. I mean, not even in the same neighborhood.”

     “I don’t buy into that marketing crap,” he said. “It’s just that I’m tired of this strenuous, ‘Romantic Authenticity’, in quotes, with a capital A. I want a blak eatmosphere of noncognition.”

     “Can you believe it, Alex?”

     “My beer.”

     “I’ll come with, guide you through Joseph’s friends.”

     “That’s right Virgil, thread the needle with Dante’s dick.”

     She affected a purr. “Then who will play Beatrice, my dear?” We turned around and she put her hand on my arm again, leading me along. “Some of these people are from the anarchist collective. Joseph writes music for their shows and plays in their space on 1^st Street sometimes.”

     Joseph slouched by the dishwasher, tallboy in hand. He laughed beerily, flicking ashes onto the floor. A very small, round head bobbed at the end of his long neck. He was all bones. The clothes hung off his shoulders and waist. Between puffs off his cigarette and gulps of beer he talked baby talk to a tiny woman in a black and white checked forties dress. She had short, curly hair, very dark, and was almost bearded. That is to say, on each jaw and on her chin, little balls of coarse black hair grew. Every time he minced or quacked or made a mawkish noise through his nose she laughed louder.

     Someone yelled, “Everything is crap!” There was a brief silence, followed by random laughter. The man who made this pronouncement walked up to us, swigged from a bottle of Popov vodka, smiled and wheeled in the other direction.

     “He’s a poet too, and resident playwright at the space.”   

     Sally introduced me to Joseph. He tried to kiss me. “Come here so I can kiss you.” I struggled away from him but he planted a wet, beery kiss on my cheek, which I wiped off. “Now I will kiss Jayda too.” He kissed the bearded woman. “See?”

     “That’s because she’s his girlfriend,” Sally said to me, offering me a napkin.

     “You are so mean. If you keep on being so mean I’ll have to call Lydia and she will beat you up.”

     “She’s probably getting paid to beat someone up. Are you willing to pay her?”

     Joseph turned around and shook his ass at her.

     “Did he do it?” boomed an English voice. A slightly rotund, prosperous looking man walked up to us. Perhaps he was a kindred spirit. “Put it away Joseph,” he said, grabbing two meager fistfuls of Joseph’s ass and knocking him flat out on the floor into spilled beer.

     “Ouch,” Joseph said, suddenly serious, his face angry and pink. “You hurt me.”

     The Englishman looked at me. “What’s this?” he demanded.

     “Lou, this is my friend Alex,” Sally said.

     He shook my hand and said, in a grotesquely insincere voice, “Glad to meet you.”

     “I just actually need a beer,” I said.

     “Oh, me too. What a fackin’ coincidence. Cam on.” He dragged me to the fridge, Sally chasing along, as she had all night long, in zigs and zags from couch to kitchen to painting to kitchen, always two steps behind or ahead, saying Wordsworth. Wordsworth made me a marked man. I could not rid myself of the albatross.

     Lou dragged me to the fridge. Once this very Englysshe Lou and I had gotten our beers, while Sally worked us open into a triangle, I said to Lou, as if the penance for loving Wordsworth was to relate the event to strangers, “You know, Sally came over today and saw that I read Wordsworth. Now she introduces me to everyone here as a lover of Wordsworth and they feel compelled to insult me on that account.”

     He made a face. “Wordsworth? Bloody Wordsworth? He’s great! I love him. Where is it now, the glory and the dream…I bloody love it. That’s poetry. Not like this modern crap, Eliot with his Waste Land and Pound’s faces in the crowd, and Williams with his stupid wheelbarrow. But of all the Romantics, Byron’s my man. Lord bleeding Byron. That’s the proper meat there. I will go no more a neighing. Did you see that Ken Russell film? What’s it bloody called. Deb!” A woman in a black leather jacket turned around. “Deb, what’s that fucking movie we saw with Shelley and Byron, you know, the Ken Russell movie.”

     “I dunno,” she said through a very peppy, wasted smile.

     Lou scowled. “It doesn’t fucking matter.” He revived and shouted, “These people are Philistines. I went to Harrow. Know what that is? A bleeding British public school, that’s what. They don’t fuck around. Rugby, Byron and buggery. We learned something. Deb! Oh never fucking mind.” Deb joined us. “Deb, Alex. Alex, Deb. Alex here likes Wordsworth.”

     “Oh, is he here?” she asked.

     He whooped sort of like a cowboy. “Shut up you stupid cunt. Is he here. No he isn’t fucking here, he’s in England, dead!” He cleared his throat and sang: And did those feet in ancient times. “My god, wasn’t I just saying last night what Philistines you people are? Before I took a piss on you.”

     She snarled. “I can’t believe you did that. From now on I’m locking the door.”

     He touched my shoulder. “It was so funny,” he snickered, two inches from my face. “She was taking a shower, right? And I go into the bathroom, like I was gonna take a fucking leak, right? But instead of pissing in the can, I rip open the shower and piss all over Deb!”

     I smiled weakly. Sally turned very red.

     “You’re such a jerk sometimes,” Deb said.

     “Oh c’mon, it was funny. Admit it.”

     Sally took my arm. “I’m sorry,” she said.

     I put down the beer. “I gotta go Sally. I was up early for work.”

     She followed me to the elevator and down into the street. My ears were pounding, I could hardly breathe. Once outside I sucked in the cool air.

     “I’m sorry,” she said again. She put her hand on my shoulder. My back stiffened. I wanted to push her away and I wanted to kiss her.

     “Why Sally? Why are you sorry?”

     “Please don’t leave. Look, it’s early. Come sit with us. Me even. You–”

     “No, I don’t think so, I’m tired,” I lied. I wanted to stay almost as badly as I wanted to run away.

     “Lou is repellent. I’m used to him so I forget,” she muttered.

     “That’s not why I want to leave.” She took her hand off my shoulder and looked into my eyes. I said, “It’s quite late for me.” I was afraid if I told her the truth she’d never want to see me again.

     “Another time then?”

     I felt like an idiot. “I feel like an idiot,” I said.

     “Why?”

     “Never mind.” I turned and walked away into the night and didn’t feel normal till I had gone ten blocks and the streets were dark and I was alone. And then I started to miss her.