Last Bender

7.1

It didn’t take long for me to settle into the afternoon shift at Pain et Poisson. The two heavy rushes were at breakfast and lunch, and a diligent, pigtailed waitress worked them both. On a good day she could make 80 bucks in tips. I filled in the afternoon and evening hole, a long, tedious shift.

Dorothy’s and my shifts overlapped for a few hours each day. Between counting up the bank, taking inventory, and ordering supplies and receiving them, as I emptied the dishwasher, cut lemons, filled milk pitchers and crammed packs of sugar and Sweet’n’Low into bowls (which didn’t quite hold them right), we would talk and watch shit happening out on the street. We were both reading the Jonathan Schell Fate of the Earth articles in The New Yorker. We joked about being terrified, but I for one was terrified. The Kingdom of Grass and Insects was upon us. Church bells meant the bomb had dropped. He churned my stomach with his words, and so I read on. I had mastered the art of side-work. There was all the time in the world to dwell on it.

One day Dorothy mentioned that she had a brother living in Brooklyn with a Vietnamese guy who only spoke German. Even after two months of working there I had been bugged by this feeling that I knew her, but I couldn’t place her face. When I came into the cafe that second time and she had said that she knew me, I had assumed that she had meant that we had met the day before. When she mentioned her brother in Brooklyn and the Vietnamese man who spoke German, I knew she was talking about Hong and that back in October I had met her, briefly, at Odeon and a place called Lucky Strike.

All through September it never stopped raining. I was still working at McGans and Sally was trying to write her senior thesis. Each week she toyed with expanding one or another A paper she had written over the years. Her work was a fertile hunting ground, but sooner or later she would have to bring one down, otherwise it would never end. And it never does. When I was working on a particularly grueling paper once and complained of it to a professor’s wife she told me without irony and with considerable scorn, that her husband was always working on a dissertation. The man was a wonder of production. I asked him once where he had written his thesis. “Oh, have you heard of Santorini? It’s one of Kyklades. Great Minoan frescoes, just tremendous. And the sunsets are spectacular, with the white washed buildings and all.” Yes, and where half of Monolithos takes place.

A life of speculation followed by diligent work and schmoozing was Sally’s lot and this was her training. Until her senior year she was just an enthusiastic undergrad. Now she was a star in her world, and her sense of obligation began to crush the words out of her. She knew how it was done. But what she had to go through to get there was only known by a few.

Sally composed pointillistically. No word went down without a thorough interrogation of its relations to those about it, and her sentences neither read nor sounded like real Englische sentences. Maybe on Santorini they’d have made sense, written as they were in fine, patriarchal Greek.

Part of her compositional method was to consult often and in person with   Christopher and Sylvio with whom she worked late into the night. I began to wonder if Sylvio was living with us when I found him napping one afternoon with the Times spread open across his paunch. There was a mostly empty mug of coffee at the foot of his chair. Here was a man who could drink six ounces of coffee and fall asleep. In any state Sylvio was like a pool of dead air in a room; I called him Silent Syl. Yet he insisted on interacting with frequent eye contact.

Sally only had to be on campus one morning a week. Some days she could spend the entire day at home, though she preferred to head up to the library. I worked four eight-hour days a week and often my third day off and her free day coincided. But on my third day I liked to wake up late and spend the day in a chair reading. It was something we used to do often but now with her crew of consultants it was hard. I was trying to read Batsard’s Principles of Bibliographical Description and not experiencing any real enthusiasm for his project. It was hard to even wish him luck. But I had not yet conceded that my curiosity about librarianship would be better encouraged with less technical matter at first.

And so I sat on this perfectly gorgeous late October day trying to read at the big table set up between the door and Lydia’s nest. We were all seated at one end of the table, in a space lit only by lamps, except for Sylvio, who was seated at the other end and murmured into a piece of toast with butter and grapefruit marmalade. Every time I looked up from Batsard to gaze at the windows I saw his pasty twitching face and steady eyes, flanked by Sally and Christopher, several piles of books like an ante between us. Sally had a portable Olivetti in front of her and a dictionary and thesaurus open on the table. I once objected to the thesaurus and heard nothing but grief about it for a week on end; I had privileged a masculinist romantic conception of inner self as locus of authority and subjectivity. Oh, but what’s the fun if you have to go rooting about for synonyms? Not that she was ever at a loss for words, no. She had chops in that department. It was purely an academic affair, the substitution of a Latinate for an Anglo-Saxon vocabulary. As for syntax…it is impossible for me to consider the matter of syntax in academic writing with equanimity. The worst crimes are not necessarily crimes of thought but of style. Style should not be despised! What have I without my style? It is what separates me from a base, scurrilous naive of function, a soul killing, tinker-toying with words and definitions, and contentions of excrements.

The real world to Sally was concealed. Our waking life was one of denial and repression, was in fact made possible by denial and repression. We wounded the world into shape, into order. That was the Oedipus Complex, our castration of the chaotic and tumultuous semiotic, its truncation into grammar and sense and I and Thou. But this sundering, this division initiates a self-perpetuating political order that has the power to define reality. Any contradiction becomes unknowable since knowing itself was conditional on not knowing. The only remedy was a ceaseless questioning, a constant disturbing of the rules of order without ever instituting a counter order.

And so it went and Batsard and I had soon parted ways. I tried to read Donne.

“A sort of vanishing signifier you mean?” Christopher asked.

“Signal Fire,” I mumbled.

“I’m sorry, what did you say Alex?” Christopher asked.

“Nothing. I said Signal Fire. Like for Agamemnon’s return.”

“What about them?”

“Nothing. It was a pun,” I said.

Sylvio spoke, in his pinched-nose voice “He means like a joke.”

Sally said, “What about In the end, critics frustrated by the lack of resolution supplied their own comic ending by insisting on the spectral existence of a lost Loves Labours Won. But as this play affords no ending, so does this other text never exist.”

Christopher shifted around in his seat and intertwined his fingers into a fist which he turned around on the table. “The first part’s no good, but I like the bit about Loves Labours Won. I think the first part of what you say there is too developmental, ‘In the end’ is meaningless, there is no end, explicitly, and the idea of a sequence of critics developing an unproblematic canonical authority in response to each other, culminating in a false proposition–it’s–oh, now I lost my train of thought.”

Sally read aloud from the play: “An oath of one year’s abstinence. I need to pay more attention to the word deed. The play initiates and absorbs discourses about deeds, both as doings and rights to ownership.”

I shut my book and picked up one of the copies of the play sitting on the table, and flipped around and read, “A jest’s prosperity lies in the ear/Of him that hears it, never in the tongue/Of him that makes it. He had to think about his audience. It mattered to him if they laughed.”

“So,” Christopher said, “the word deed contains the two meanings being opposed by the text.”

I stood abruptly and said, “Harsh, after the songs of Apollo. Please excuse me. I have to go.” I put on a jean jacket and black Converse high tops and ran out the door and onto the street. It was a pumpkin day. All the colors were in full pop against the blue sky and the buildings twinkled in the sun. After a few blocks I had to take the jacket off and walked with it over my shoulder, huffing air. The leaves on the trees at St. Mark’s Church were spinning down and circling around the benches and the cobblestones. The fruit stand at 7th and First had fresh apples and gourds and Indian corn. Getting out felt good. I hadn’t done it in a while. I was looking forward to the cool plaster walls and the old tenement smell; to lying around on my bed in my bedroom all alone, reading and drinking coffee and looking out the window, which I would keep open late, past the rush hour traffic, and the sounds of the world would come up in the dark. Some nights are like that, quiet. You can hear a bike clicking along, people talking on the street.

I opened the door. Roy was sitting in the kitchen watching the woman next door march back and forth naked. She had a poster taped to the window but it didn’t quite fit; there was a frame of glass around it so as she walked about, all you could see were her nipples and her pubic hair. It was like a cartoon, as across this narrow gap a nipple bounced, and across that one down there, a triangle of pubic hair went by. It was Sally who first noticed this, but you only had to sit in the chair at certain times of day to see. A New York Post was laid out on the table.

“Have you ever seen her face?” he asked, without turning around.

“The naked lady? No.”

He laughed. “She’s a dog. Nice nipples though. Let’s go.”

“What are you doing here? How did you get in?”

“I said let’s go.” He stood and put his hands on his hips. He kept sliding a pair of aviator sunglasses up his nose.

“I’ve got things to do,” I said.

“It can wait.” I ran after him down the stairs. We got into a blue Mustang convertible.

“I didn’t know they rented out muscle cars.”

“Don’t be an ass. Look at the paint job. This is a ‘66.” It was the color of a robin’s egg. I fell back into the black bucket seats and found the seat belt. He peeled away from the curb and into traffic and we headed up the Avenue and over to the FDR. My teeth chattered and my cheeks were numb. “I got a deal on it from this guy out on the Island, in Belmore. The chiropractor put me on him, a dentist. He rents a bunch of storage spaces and keeps cars in them. I bought one of these plus a couple of beaters for parts. It’s great. For like nothing a month I can rent those garages out there, and just keep this one here in town. Beaters. What do you think?”

“Why do you want to drive around in this thing?”

The car thundered out of its tailpipe, careening along the East River. It was probably pointless, but I felt I had to ask where we were going.

“For a ride,” he said, weaving between packs of racing traffic. Roy didn’t use the brake. He said to me once, when we were in high school, “A brake is like praying when you’re in trouble.”

“For a ride where?” The wind was hard and cold and the sun was bright. I squinted and looked at the floor, until we crossed over on the Willis Avenue Bridge and drove down into shadow, past a warehouse selling surgical supporters and adult diapers. I looked up at the buildings and the overpassing ramps. And at the men on corners, and that hard hopeless look they had, of warriors in a land without honor.

“Why do you care?”

“I’m cold. It was such a nice day,” I shouted.

He fiddled with the radio and said, “Put something on, I don’t care what. Pick a tape. They’re in the glove compartment.” He got on the Hutch.

“Are we going to The Larchmont Tavern for lunch? Sal’s?”

“Westchester Airport. I rented a plane. We’re gonna buzz dad’s house.”

I put on Ziggy Stardust and said, “I don’t understand why we would do that.”

“Well, two reasons really. One,” he raised a finger off the steering wheel and bent his head with the turns in the road, “It pisses him off. And two,” he raised his head and lifted a second finger off the wheel, “it would be really funny. I feel like having some fun today. I’m glad you came. I was going to come by and get you. Great minds think alike.”

“I didn’t think you would be there.”

“Yeah, so, it’s a coincidence. That’s just what I meant. Two things happening for different reasons but they coincide.”

I stood around outside watching the prop planes take off and land. There was a strong wind and the windsocks were erect; the sky was clear in all directions. He came out of the office clutching some paperwork and striding mightily along, as he did when he was excited and things were going his way. We boarded a single engine two-seater, slammed the doors shut and next thing I knew we were in the air. I became very afraid, as the houses skimmed along beneath us and he took us up and out. I could feel gravity and the air around us and the wind and the light became the only solid things. “You’re not going to try anything crazy, are you? Buzzing a house isn’t dangerous is it?”

“I worked as a bush pilot on piece of shit planes, where even if you survive the crash, you ain’t coming out alive. I’ll tell you what–Wait! Let’s head over there.” He flew out over Long Island Sound and took the plane down to get a look at a regatta of sailboats. The white caps were orderly and sharp on the dark blue water and the sails were gravid and taut, brightly colored spinnakers like puffins. Roy flew in broad arcs and circles, then he headed up the Hudson to Rockland County. “After dad’s you’re coming back to my place. I got the whole day planned. We’re going to One Fifth for cocktails at 8.”

“What’s at One Fifth?”

“Larry Rivers party.”

Was he joking? “A Larry Rivers party? I don’t know Larry Rivers.”

“The painter. The painter the person I want you to meet wants to meet. Now shut up and pay attention. Look down there. See it?”

We got to an area of homes with large wooded lots. I don’t know how he knew it was our father’s neighborhood, but it sure was his house, with the kidney shaped pool and putting green. He took the plane into a nearly vertical nosedive. The engines roared and started to hyperventilate. “Oh my god! Roy, what are you doing?”

“Remember that summer I worked as a crop duster?” he shouted, looking at me through the dark lenses. He strafed the house, pulling the nose up at the last moment, giving the roof a close shave. “Most dangerous job in the world. You know, I never used to fuck around in an airplane. But the fucking Amazon! It goes to your head, something about it. Ahh!” He started to itch the back of his head. “They’re like fucking lice.”

“What?”

“Nerves! My nerves are like fucking lice. Where are we? O.K. Again.” He circled back and headed towards the house. “Come on you bastard, get out on the deck!” he shouted, spraying the windshield with spit. There were cars in the driveway, he had to be home. Finally he came out dressed in a bathrobe that made him look like an emaciated old man. “There he is! Like a scrawny fucking raven. An Auschwitzian raven!” He swooped in close and my in went faster than my out. I bucked against the seat belt, organs first and pushed my feet into the floor. Our father shook his fist and screamed. Roy rolled down the window. Air rushed through the tight cabin. “You bastard!” he roared. “I’m richer than you are! Ha!” He flew off laughing. “If I didn’t remind him now and then whose father he was he’d forget. God! I could do this every day. Hey, I got an idea. Tell me, what would you do if I jumped out of this plane right now.”

I was weary. He had eroded my defenses. “I’d probably shit myself and then die.”

“You wouldn’t try to fly it?”

“Of course I would try to fly it. But since I can’t fly a plane, I am assuming it would crash and I would die.”

He was still looking at me. I was trying to guide the plane by will and sight but it wasn’t working. Apparently my access to the zero point field wasn’t robust enough for an emergency. He laughed and said, “That’s what’s wrong with you.” He looked out the windshield and turned us around.

“What’s wrong with you is you telling me what is wrong with me.”

“No my brother, you must buy it.”

“Well I’m not joking. Isn’t there some law about flying over Manhattan?”

“Not that I know of, but I’m not really conversant, you know. What I got instead is a number I can call if there’s trouble. Don’t be afraid. You’re with me now.” He pretended to laugh maniacally and bulged his eyes out till he looked like Marty Feldman. “See that building? See the penthouse? It’s mine. I bought it today. That and a share in a new restaurant, with some Hollywood guys who live in the city. Hey, I’m not supposed to say their names, but I’m hanging out with some people who can get things done.”