Last Bender

7.4

It was my day off and I had to meet my mother for lunch in the East Sixties. I had time to walk; I preferred it to watching Sally go to work on the Opus, which had swelled to 100 closely argued pages, half of the intended length. With only a month to go she had to generate 100 more closely argued pages on the first tetralogy, Merchant, Loves Labours Lost; oath taking, deeds, gages, pledges, honor and blood. I felt like a widow to these and a hundred other terms and categories. It was like being locked up in a tower of abstraction, some Blakean hell dimension laid out by Urizen in one of his rages. Only, the ultimate author of this labyrinth was Lacan. Lacan was an evil wizard who had used a ray to transport his victims into the realm of the Imaginary. And all I wanted was a little more of l’objet petite a.

Sally started to pace back and forth with her coffee. Some days she baked bread so she would have to get up from the typewriter and do something. She liked kneading the dough, it was clearly cathartic, but she was baking the bread of affliction. Lydia said, “OK, time to go. How do I look?” She had on a black leather jacket and black jeans. Her face was washed out and sad, and she had on this incredibly bright red lipstick. She was smiling.

Sally said, “You look fine. Very, bubbly for a trip to the hospital.”

“Huh? I dunno. I guess it sounds kind of fun. Old times, sit around the hospital. I’m gonna bring him some fruit.”

“Grapes,” I said.

“Tangerines,” said Sally.

“Later,” Mo said, pulling the bottom of her black sweater down as they walked out the door.

I kissed Sally goodbye and left to walk uptown.

I avoided Grand Central and the Oyster Bar by walking through Madison Park and over to Second and then up. I don’t know why it turned out that way, but I wasn’t looking at anything, I chugged along increasingly aware of some emotional irritant that would not show its face. With every step its presence grew more intense till it bubbled up, one thought at a time, beginning with Sally’s abstraction, her near total emotional removal from me when she was working. She could strut about a room speaking with her voice and her hands and not know I was there. Absorption and focus I could understand, but I missed her. And things would not get better. No. Over time she would more and more have to immerse herself in her studies if she were to continue, not less. And I didn’t see where that left me. If I too had an academic career it might be different. Then we would have commensurate islands, our alienation would be equal. But I didn’t. I was a counterman in a cafe by a habit of job osmosis.

By the time I crossed under the bridge at 59th I was angry. It seemed so willful. Her work occupied a place in her heart that I expected to inhabit. When she was in the room, there was no other focus for me. She was my lodestar, or so I thought, by 59th Street.

Oh, and then I thought of how she was always trying to improve things, subjecting the most trivial shit to scrutiny and analysis, her close readings of careless statements, insisting that their very unconsciousness was what made them compelling. She who denied any design or natural order in things had filled in all the arbitrary silences of life with meaning! Her intellectual obsessions shaped our private world. We were in danger of being modeled on principle, as opposed to necessity. Sally had even gone so far as to find a Lacanian therapist. There were actually two in Manhattan. Sessions typically lasted 20 minutes and cost 90 dollars.

I tried to shake it out and then I entered the restaurant, still arguing with her in my head, saying all of the things that I never say, even to myself, such that I started to feel sorry for her, as if I had attacked her in the flesh. My mother was seated at a window table. She was watching something outside of it that made her laugh, I could tell by the way her shoulders moved.

She was dressed in red stockings and some sort of a borderline schmatta of layered gold and olive cloth. A wide-brimmed, burgundy hat of felt was on her head. I sat down and she took my hands. “Hello.”

“Hi. Have you been waiting long?” I asked.

“No. I was just having this cup of tea and lemon and enjoying the day.”

We ordered bloody Maries, and they put down a basket of bread and breadsticks with butter. We hadn’t had lunch together in a while. She looked at me until I almost felt uncomfortable and she asked, “So how are you? How’s it going with Sally?”

For some reason, I blurted a piece of it out. “Sally always thinks something is wrong, but it’s always something wrong with me, never what I think is wrong with her. And I’d let it slide, but she’s either on me, or the rest of time, it’s like I don’t exist, she’s so absorbed in work. She’s seeing a Lacanian psychiatrist.”

“Those psychiatrists are the worst of the lot,” my mother said.

“When things are going right, she thinks that’s a sign that something’s terribly wrong.”

She laughed low and coughed. The sounds rolled out of her. There’s a picture of her at twenty standing in a sequined costume on the back of a white spangled circus pony juggling bowling pins. As a child she began to perform in circuses and eventually became a carnival dancer. When a horse kicked her in the head, she went a little deaf in one ear. It was hard but good work and it saved her from the fate of her mother and sisters. Her father sold bibles, preached at revival meetings and pimped his family out. Once, he was shot by a gambler, who caught him cheating at cards, but he survived. Her mother grew up in a whorehouse and worked as a barmaid. They all lived in a one-room tenement without running water. Now, she ate lunch on the Upper East Side and wore big hats and scarlet stockings, and dyed her hair red.

We watched the people. She said, “Look at those pants. They aren’t right on her. They make her legs look like pastry bags.” She smiled and took a gap-toothed bite out of her celery. “Most relationships don’t work out, son. It took me thirty years to find the right one. That chiropractor and I are all right. Herb Czischz is the man for me. But I bet if I had met him at twenty nothing would have come of it. He would have bored me to death. I would have laughed in his face. You aren’t made for it then. You’re both too young to know what you’re good for.”

I sipped my bloody and tried to butter a bread stick. “Of all people, you certainly should know.”

“Experience in marriage. Pardon me for trying. But it always starts with love. They should have money but I don’t marry them if I don’t love them. Now your father–” she shook her head. “I wanted to kill him I loved him so much. It just seemed so unfair that I should love someone like that. Love like that makes you a slave. We had some good times. And some couples just aren’t meant to settle down. That’s what killed us.”

The waiter put down an overgrown salad in front of her and a reuben in front of me. I smacked Ketchup onto the fries. “So Roy and I ruined your first marriage.”

She laughed. “Your father wasn’t exactly flexible. I didn’t expect him to change his work, but I just had no idea what raising two boys alone would be like. Used to be, when we weren’t on the road, and we were broke, we’d lie around the apartment, the studio on Irving Place, drinking beer and listening to the Giants on the radio. We couldn’t get enough of each other in those days. I never met anyone who talked like that.”

“You mean like a blood sport?”

“Don’t think I hadn’t already met my share of men who talked a line bullshit, starting with my father. The people I knew had notions, or a mind to do something, the poorest dumbest sons of bitches you ever met. Don’t let anyone tell you different cause they ain’t been there. Oh, they’re nice all right, ten minutes before they string you up. And they’ll be reading the bible at you the whole time. I’ve seen it happen. Yes sir. Huh. Izzie had ideas. And I’d just get so angry on the road. And angry as I was I’d find myself saying, ‘Izzie, you just don’t talk to people like that around here.’ You learn your whole life to be a certain way, sanity seems to be impolite.

“Your brother was born on the road halfway between Jackson and New Orleans, which was where we were trying to get. We drove home to the city with the baby. I rode in the back with Roy in my lap, that’s how I started to nurse him. That’s why he’s got the road in him so bad.

“For three months Roy cried and cried and cried. Your father was in Montgomery on the boycott. And there I was with a screaming infant and a bunch of Stuy Town mothers. They like to bore me to death in that courtyard. I’d sit by them on the bench with my pram and they’d start to talk, lord, I could feel myself crash between my feet.” She yawned and lowered her face down into her open hands, then started laugh. “Then you came and I got so tired, that when he wanted to get romantic he had to roll me over and do it in my sleep. God, I was so mad all the time. We did not treat each other right. But, oh, how I loved that man. And he loved me. I know it. You can feel that in the way someone holds you. We were just always frustrated. I didn’t understand.

“You were just 2 when he went to Washington, but I had to work. I was losing my mind. So I hired Ireni to watch you during the day. Without all that mess to clean up, the diapers, and the toys, and the food stuck to plates, and the chaos, and the screaming, I started to think again. One morning, I woke up and saw your father as a man. And for the first time in my life, I wanted a man. I wanted back what I had been putting out for years, since I was thirteen and that busboy got me drunk on bourbon and left me for dead on mama’s stoop.

“Your father stabbed me right in the heart with a piece of ice when I caught him with her that afternoon. I couldn’t get him to look at me anymore. But that twenty year old girl? When I walked in on them, buck-naked on the bed, do you know what he said? ‘Allisoun, get the fuck out of here!’ I mean really.”

“Do you still wish you had a gun that day?”

She smiled. “Sometimes I do.”

“Isn’t it ever over?”

“No! We’re human aren’t we? But I gave as good as I got. I mean, I walked in on them four years before we moved up to Larchmont. Everything changed when he went to work in Washington. When he came home he didn’t shave, he didn’t get out of his pajamas practically. Some days he’d spend three hours in the tub and the rest napping and drinking scotch on the rocks. I don’t think he once stopped looking at the TV, except to read the papers. Then he’d go back to DC for two, three, four weeks. You can’t live like that. It’s no wonder I married the psychiatrist. I was forty years old, I looked pretty good for two kids. And life with that psychiatrist was grand. Drinks out on the veranda around the pool? Are you kidding? I knew just what to do. I played the good little southern hostess. I decorated his house, I paid the bills, took care of everything. All that psychiatrist cared about was his work. I figured it was a trade, and for a while it worked out. I collected art, and went to parties, and I raised you and kept track of Roy best as anyone could.

“He was the vainest man I have ever met. 58 years old and he still wanted to be a man of twenty. He cashed me in.” She looked for the waiter and pushed her salad bowl away, drank some water, her eyes on me all the time, and lit up a cigarette. “The fact is, it’s always something that ends it. Men and women just aren’t suited to each other till they get about fifty, fifty-five. We just aren’t in sync. Our rhythms are opposed. The man gets horny and the woman feels nothing. Then it’s the other way around. It’s like the Yin and the Yang are chasing each other around and never catching up. But you want them to curl up around each other, see? The man who can’t get past beauty will never get anywhere, I can tell you that.”

After lunch I decided to take the subway home and got the RR to 14th Street and walked up to the loft. Christopher sat on the couch with Joseph watching Live at Five. Sally was pacing back and forth (as she had been when I left) in a knitted skullcap speaking Portia’s words: “So is the will of a living daughter curbed by the will of a dead father. Oh, hi.” She put the book down. I took off my jean jacket. I kissed her. “Cold hands,” she said, lifting one up and placing it against her warm, fully blooded cheek. Christopher and Joseph chuckled and then laughed. The door opened and Lydia and Maureen came in, as if in a great hurry. It almost appeared that Maureen was running after Lydia, as she rushed into the kitchen and sat down at the table gulping for air, tears surging into her eyes. “They said it was pneumonia, they didn’t say he was wasting away into nothing!” She groaned and rubbed her head and said slowly, as if in agony, “He is so sick. They tried to give him a shot but there was no muscle left, it made his skin bubble up.” Lydia grabbed her hair and started to gag. She stood and screamed, “I gotta get fucked up.” We watched her go out the door.