Last Bender

3.

The door dinged and swung open decisively as Athol, the UPS guy, bumped his hand truck down the stairs. He was a ruddy, aggressively ugly man in that particularly English way that is almost beautiful, like a gnarl on an oak tree, with his bent nose, pockmarked skin, and blue, rhinoceros eyes.

“Back here,” I yelled and the woman with the double wide looked up from the Margaret Attwood she was thumbing through.

“Nice day, eh?” he asked.

“Hard to be indoors.”

“I might meet me mites and guy to Jines Beach for a sweim,” he said.

“Brrr. It’s got to be ninety in the shade for me, and late August.”

“You’ll be gruying meshrewems in yew eauhs, Elex.”

“Yeah, well. It’s an occupational hazard that all fallen Titans must waste away in caves. I but await a Cockney lad to write my epic.”

He loaded the hand truck and did what he does with his PDT (there were no deliveries) and left. I sat down at the computer and read a little about Sally’s book. The Charlie Rose episode was actually a panel discussion with Sally, Harold Bloom, Stephen Greenblatt, and Camille Paglia. Real high-wattage stuff, that. Well balanced anyway, between gender and viewpoint, with plenty of opportunities for irony. I skimmed an online review:

Every now and again an upstart crow breaks free from the ivory tower and lands on the lawns of popular nonfiction…

Dr. Babel’s lively wit keeps those readers brave enough to open its pages going through the house of mirrors she constructs out of a plethora of archival material, most important of all the letters, diaries and literary works produced both by and about the women of Elizabethan England, Mary Sydney, Penelope Devereaux, Francis Walsingham, and the infamous Russells, Elizabeth and Anne.

Dr. Babel’s thesis is that Queen Elizabeth was not just rhetorically, but actually worshipped as a divine monarch, the Goddess of ancient Britain, which provokes an unprecedented oedipal crisis in her courtiers and artists. Gynocracy and its Discontents describes their work as a descent into the realm of the Semiotic, a liminal psychic region best represented by Oberon and Titania’s Arcadian hideaway at the edge of stodgy old Theseus’s Athens, where opposites mutate into each other, unleashing a torrent of poetic language and metaphor.

She further complicates things by weaving in a narrative “history” of a subterranean women’s network, supposedly in existence for centuries, which served as Elizabeth’s power grid. At one point she describes Elizabeth and her maids as, “Bare-breasted Amazons, riding their men like horses.”

The final chapters are devoted to the discontents of her title, or what she refers to as, “the torrent of violent misogyny unleashed by the regime of James the First, which gave birth to a darker, more analytical drama such as that of Thomas Middleton.”

I wonder what our age will look like to the Sally Babel’s of four hundred years hence, if there are any. It is 100 degrees today and it’s mid September. Surely the world is ending. Surely it has been ending for a long time and yet, I can’t help but feel nostalgia for the old certainty of nuclear war. It’s a bit like yearning for the days of heroin dealers after crack hit. Nuclear war is comforting. It lends itself to operatic treatment in a way that the coming age of terrible woe does not. But no one seems to think about it anymore. Everyone’s on about other things, jack booted thugs, hurricanes, pestilence.

Thinking back to the autumn of 1980, I don’t remember a moment when I didn’t live in dread. Everyone did. Dread was like an appendage, or a little rat following you around wherever you went nibbling at the cuff of your jeans. It even affected the weather. There was a drought that summer and all through the fall, with endless sunny days, but I remember December as dark and frigid and full of doom. Ronald Reagan was going to be president, and then John Lennon was killed. His death transfigured the city as only blizzards and blackouts and terrorist attacks can do.

I despised my job. I could think of nothing but Sally. The radio was playing non-stop John Lennon music and interviews, intercut with news reports about the people who had gathered in front of the Dakota and in the park. To Imagine I shipped out special orders and opened the mail and looked for beautiful and expensive books, with fine color photographs, or obscenely weird atlases of skin diseases, humiliating outrages of ugly pain on stretches of anonymous flesh.

A bunch of unopened boxes lay in the hall; after those I’d have to go to the basement. Later in the day there would be shipments from Bookazine and Elliot. That would see me through the afternoon, with a long break at the end. I was reading Malory and wanted a half hour with him to get into the swing of Middle Englysshe.

The main thing was to lay low and out of the way of Norman and Leonard, the two managers of the department, for ours was a divided kingdom. Norman controlled the ordering. Leonard ran the floor. The one contested area was my department, Shipping and Receiving. On this, my department, their interests converged and crossed, and I was torn between the two men. Sometimes they made me their go-between. Others I functioned as the scapegoat. The best outcome was that of confidant, when I could play Yojimbo.    

Leonard and Norman despised each other so thoroughly it had sunk deeper into pathology than your average turf war. It is easy to forget that for many people work is the prime arena. The family romance materializes in your midst, and you must play spectator to a game that can at anytime consume you as a participant. The remote places draw near at such times, and the signs of unspoken combat are unmistakable. Changes in skin hue. Marked rapid increase in breathing. Enhanced state of competitive humor and missed meanings. A ‘take no prisoners’ attitude to all interaction.

One year, someone had the bizarre idea of holding a staff party at her parents’ house in rural New Jersey. The word rural ought to give some indication of the great distance from Manhattan we were forced to travel in order to eat hot dogs and hamburgers and potato chips. There was a garbage can full of beer and a couple of jugs of red wine.

Leonard sat at the kitchen table all night long, slowly destroying Norman. The two bottles of wine stood between them. In each hand was a plastic cup. Leonard poured him two-for-one for hours. Once Norman was a little drunk, Leonard made like he really liked him. The drunker Norman got the more Leonard poured it on, till Norman hugged him and told him how much he had always liked him. He explained how he was afraid that Leonard hated him, and wanted his job. But now he knew that Leonard was really his friend, his partner in business. Then Norman loosened his tie. A guy like that should never do anything new. There is no reason to upset careful arrangements. Maybe I hated him, but I have to admit, I admired Norman’s capacity; he could contain everything but alcohol in his system. And he took such evident pride in its construction. He was like a person who thinks their ability at crossword puzzles is a sign of intelligence.

He had squeezed so much of his life up into that bearded head of his that, when he took off his tie, it surged back into his body and the first thing he had to do was take a piss. There was someone in the bathroom so he lurched out onto the porch and stumbled down the steps into the yard, shouting, “I’ll be right back.” Everyone followed Leonard out onto the porch, myself included.

Norman made it to the bushes all right but he was so drunk he peed on his feet.  

“Way to go Norm. Very uh, dignified,” Leonard chuckled. Norman swung around and fell backwards, spraying an arc of piss onto his chest and face. Leonard clapped his hands. Norman stood and fell forward, onto his hands and knees. Leonard whooped and screamed, “Way to go Norm!” Then Norman started to cry. Slowly at first, then copiously, as he vomited on the lawn.

Leonard drove a black Trans Am in from Queens every day, blasting Billy Joel tapes. He wore a gold medallion, had a beard and poufy styled hair that came down over his ears. Duplicity was his forte, but he did want to get the job done, and there was at least a human bustle and a recognizable evil at work in him. He felt his way through life, even if it was through his belly. The excuse of bellicose stupidity was always available to him.

Norman’s on the other hand was a diseased mind, prey to a willful borderline autism. He confined this mind to a structure resembling a scaffold. He had memorized the entire inventory, and knew the location of every book. He knew who published it, who carried it, and what its list price was, had been, would be. It was his memory palace. It would have done The Nolan proud. But if a detail in Norman’s world deviated from the charts and tables, he got tense and pumped his gills.

Any opportunity to get rid of Leonard, he would take.

And vice versa. Leonard spent a part of each day thwarting Norman’s schemes in small ways, below the level of detection: a stack of books moved, a price changed by two cents, a special order misplaced; small, yes, but sufficient to make him a little madder, the hope being to topple him completely one day and perform both jobs. 

Norman struck back whenever possible, belittling Leonard by making him feel stupid. He called him Lenny. He would intentionally not tell him crucial information and then pretend as if he had, or he’d adjust the price of something and yell at him in front of the staff for not changing it.

So I played mouse to the dinosaurs. I opened a few boxes of bright green books to replenish the floor displays and shrink-wrapped them in the basement. I liked shrink wrapping. It was a chance to operate a machine.

Back in the stockroom I set about pricing the book truck full of warm, freshly shrink wrapped books. I listened to John Lennon interviews and thought about Sally. It had been months since I had left her on the sidewalk after the party. Since then we had had hurried encounters on the stairs, rushing in or out of the building with a bag of laundry, shouldering a backpack. They were curiously awkward, fraught meetings, avoided completely if Christopher was there. But somehow, in a handful of moments spent staring at shoelaces, I had become the rival for Sally’s affection, and everyone knew it. It was in her eyes, how they awoke meeting mine beneath the dirty hallway light and it was in Christopher’s distance, the tensing of his jaw. Christopher had never expected to be involved in a triangle of passion; he was above such things.    

It was the phone call that had me slapping on the prices with unusual, rhythmic vehemence. Bursts of machine gun-like clamor, the wild bandoleer of tape flashing as it falls in great loops; books smelling faintly of hot plastic, dropping to the wayside, priced.

I had called to tell her that I had enjoyed the small cocktail party she and Christopher threw for old friends from Dalton in apartment 10. It wasn’t an out and out lie. The other guests, who did most of the talking, or whatever it was, were fascinating to watch. In addition to Christopher, Sally, Joseph and his girlfriend Jayda there were two others. It was a more civilized gathering, not bifurcated as on the previous occasion.    

Christopher’s apartment was as small as mine, but of a different lay out, and tastefully decorated. The entrance was in the middle, and a small bedroom lay to the right, the bathroom straight ahead, and to the left were the kitchen and living room. The brick on the exterior walls was exposed and lit by track lights. The other walls were newly sheet-rocked and painted a dark grey. It had hardwood floors, and there were lampshades on every light.

I sat down on a black foam chair before a solid grey box. On it was a bowl of mixed nuts and some red cocktail napkins. Next to me were two men in black suits with black hair, seated side by side, against the brick wall, on the futon folded into a couch. Christopher served me a martini off a cork-lined cocktail tray. He wore a white tuxedo jacket over a black T-shirt. The radio was tuned to an all-Muzak, Christmas carol station. Most choices were so painfully ironic for him that he avoided doing anything at all, and when he did, it had the feel of over-calculation.

Joseph wore a silver suit and white shirt with pearl buttons and silver points on the collar and a bolo tie. He occupied a matching foam chair, on the other side of the table. Between us sat Jayda, looking very beatnik in black ski pants and a black turtleneck, with a white beret, her puffballs of facial hair oddly attractive. Sally wore a black smoking jacket with shoulder pads, a pink and grey striped shirt and black leggings.

All that remains of the men on the couch now is their pallor, an afterimage on the eyelid, eclipsed by time. The one on the left was thin and rather cold but talkative. He had arched eyebrows and strong, but clipped features and his expression conveyed a pained insincerity. A Japanophile and Dadaist, I guess you could say his was a case of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny. The man on the right fancied himself to be Marlon Brando but looked more like a Blues Brother. He did wear a jaunty hat, but his good nature was confined to it. After three drinks he broke his silence to editorialize.   

I observed them closely throughout the night. There was a routine of conversation among them that left half of what they said out, filling in with seemingly random, conceptually driven one-liners, delivered in affected voices. The giddy drone was punctuated by Joseph’s spirited laughter which welled up and broke out at each new level of absurdity.  

At one point Christopher stood up and said, “Would anyone like something to eat?” There was a sudden and total silence. And then they all started laughing. Jayda and the man on the left in short bursts of calculated chuckles; Joseph brightly; the man on the right in a soft hiss; Christopher like, Orr orr orr. Sally didn’t laugh at all; she just looked at me from across the room. When she got up to go to the bathroom I contrived a trip to the kitchen for a drink of water. I listened to her pee and watched her wash her hands in the kitchen sink, then I managed to detain her long enough to ask her what she was reading. “Fielding.”

“Fielding’s not bad.”

“No, not till Amelia. He beats the pants off of Swift any day.”

“I don’t think I agree with that, no. So who are the guys on the couch?”

She put her lips to my ears and whispered, “You mean Batman and Robin? Christopher’s best friends from high school. The one on the left is one of the founding members of IA’PS.”

“Is that how does Joseph knows them?”

“No, they were in a band. Christopher was the singer.”

I looked at Christopher. It was hard to imagine, he was so reserved. But maybe he was one of those singers who wore suits and stood there singing badly. There was rock and roll music that scorned movement.

“I thought you met him at Columbia.”

“It’s the other way around,” she smiled. “Don’t you go to parties you want to invite me to?”

“My friends don’t have parties. We encounter each other on street corners, or in bars. It’s a consequence of Platonic serial monogamy.”

“Is that a group?”

“Of people inherently incapable of recognizing the existence of more than one other person at a time. It’s a problem forming a group of such people.”

“Who’s the other member now?”

“Simon. But I’m here.”

Neither of us said anything. Then she asked, “Simon?”

“We work together. He’s a painter.”

“I like to watch people.”

Christopher, who was seated in Sally’s chair, craned around and saw us leaning against the stove, which was warm from the pilot lights and smelled faintly of gas and mice. He stood and said, “I’ve stolen your seat.”

“No you haven’t,” she said. “You’re just keeping it warm.”

Yes, keeping it warm for me.

So I called to say thank you and instead of getting the machine, or Christopher, I got her. We talked for an hour, and when we stopped my lips were numb and ear hurt. Now I could not get her voice out of my head. Now I began to hate my rival, Christopher. And the double doubts of immanent nuclear war and the ultimate fate of my heart, and grief for John Lennon, tormented me.

Simon walked into the stock room. I’m just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round… I was replaying the part of the conversation where Sally asked me, “Which of your fathers feels like a real father?”

“But I have only one father.”

“I found Bela Szep’s book.”

“The Pound book?”

“Yes. In the library. I read the introduction. The thesis is provocative.”

“It fits the Cantos doesn’t it? How does a man set out to discover the causes of war with the intent of ending it and wind up writing a poem full of violence and ugliness?”

“The beauty spots are fascist to the core.”

“The psychiatrist loves the poem because of the beauty spots.”

“I like his reading of aestheticized violence as sublimated trauma.”

Clackety-clackety-clackety. As soon as you’re born they make you feel small/ By giving you no time instead of it all…

“Are you ready for lunch?” Simon asked.

I jumped. “Sure, I just gotta do these.” There were two shelves of shrink-wrapped lawn to go, and teetering piles of them walled me in.

He took his hands out of the jacket pockets and fixed his tie. “I’m not waiting for you to do all these, I’ll come back.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Let’s go.”

We took the elevator down to the basement and walked the painted grey floors to the locker room. Then we hit the street. I loved bursting out of those revolving doors and into the air. Even when the sky blinds with grey sleet it comes as a great relief. It is something in the smell of the sidewalks, of dry cleaner vents on a cold day, swift and warm on the wind, wet shoes and umbrellas and the air alive with light.