Tales of the Out & the Gone (6 page)

Like what? I was pressing.

No, let me finish.

Go ahead!

I like that in men, she says. Mean and very physical.

Wow, Basil said. Wow. She said very physical, huh? You shoulda called White.

Shaddup, drunk. Go on, Norman.

You’re coming home with me, right? she says.

Hey, you ain’t even told us the woman’s name, I put in. It just occurred to me. Maybe this was the slip-up, I thought.

He don’t wanna tell us her name because he wants to keep a good thing secret, Domenick spoke for the first time, a little ironically and a trifle sour.

Shaddup, Domenick, Basil grinned. You didn’t tap nobody on the shoulder when that last fat ass floated by, either. Domenick was cooled out.

Monica. Monica Hess, Norman said straightforwardly.

Oh, a German babe. I came on with some academic shit.

Yeh, I guess, but she didn’t press it. She said she’d grown up in a small town in the Midwest—in Ohio, actually. In fact, she comes from a town called Hess, Ohio, named after her fuckin grandfather.

Wow, we howled. That this bastard scored was the general sentiment. A fuckin painter and a rich bitch.

A rich sexy …

Beautiful.

Yeh.

Bitch.

Smoke would get in Norman’s eyes and he’d squint. And you wouldn’t really know sometimes what kind of expression was on his face.

She told me a lot about herself, her childhood. All the different careers. She said she couldn’t find a man to satisfy her, either.

Wow, a general wow, came from us. And the anticipation hooked up together like a rope.

To satisfy her? White hunched Basil so sharply that Basil
ugghed
in drunken pantomime like it hurt. It did, but he was too drunk to care.

So you naturally volunteered for that gig, I chuckled.

Yeh. Norman was grinning now, a strange light in his eyes. Yeh, I volunteered alright. On the goddamn spot. My pecker was starting to rise like the fuckin flag on the 4th of July! So we get to her place, ya know? She lives on 4th Avenue.

Hey, you know they’re going to call that Park Avenue South in a little while?

Fuck them, White spat. It’s 4th Avenue, not no fuckin Park Avenue South!

Fuckin a tweety! Basil wet us with his affirmation.

Come on with the story, Norman. It was Domenick, maybe thinking Norman’s ending would be so weak it would give the whole thing up as bullshit. Norman never even looked at him. He rasped at John through the open end of his lips. Buy the loud guy a drink on me.

Where on 4th Ave.?

You know the building that looks like a convent or tourist attraction in an old European village?

Yeh.

By the bookstore, across from the post office.

Yeh. Hey, that’s a pretty heavy looking building. What’s the goddamn rent in there?

She says she pays 450 a month.

What? (And this was the early ’60s when that was even further out than it is today.)

Four-fifty?

Jeez, what’s in the goddamn place?

Hey, it’s worth it. The inside of the joint is no quaint shit. It’s super modern. (Norman used the French pronunciation so the whole effect was got.) And get this, there’s a goddamn doorman inside. But we go around to a back entrance on Broadway she’s got a key for. Go to an elevator, and get this— the elevator only stops at her floor.

Everybody was now sufficiently impressed. On the real side.

I pressed. You mean everybody in that joint got their own elevators?

I dunno. She says she dunno either. But she has.

Wow.

So we slide right in and up. The elevator door opens right into her apartment.

Yeh?

And it’s laid out gorgeous. Rugs everywhere. Not the wall-to-wall, but different Indian and Persian rugs. Oriental rugs in different parts of a hardwood floor. She’s got modern furniture in some rooms, old antiques in others. Glass and leather and plastic shit some places. Wood and easy-chairs other places. The living room is modern. She’s got paintings everywhere.

Any of yours?

Yeh, yeh. She had a big orange painting that Castelli sold last year. It’s called
Orange Laughter
. But she had a Kline, a Guston, a big De Kooning woman. A fuckin Larry Rivers naked woman.

Like the one he did of Frank with the dangling pecker?

No—it was more modest. Norman was being ironic. Hey, she had a Frankenthaler. A goddamn Rauschenberg. A Jasper Johns.

What the hell is this woman, a goddamn art buyer? Basil.

She’s just got money, fool. White.

Art buyers got money.

I said, She told you she
saved
money? Ho ho ho!

No, she’s loaded. It’s maybe an eight-room apartment. A couple bedrooms, guest room, full kitchen. Books. Records. Big Fisher components. Speakers in all the rooms. She pushed a button and there’s a goddamn Morty Feldman piano concerto on.

Fat-ass Morty!

So what happens, man? Shaddup, you guys!

We listen to Morty. We listen to Earl Brown. John Tudor and John Cage. Monk. We drink. We talk. The view is great—great! We lay in front of her goddamn fireplace. She even played some Basie and we danced. We talked and talked. And then we got undressed on the floor. What a body!

Everybody was pushed forward now, heads thrust at Norman like they could see the big pretty breasts and round peachlike behind. The long blond hair draped around her when she let it down, cushioning her head and neck and back, and the downstairs hair yellow too, and the odor coming out of her. Norman almost sung about her like some goose-pimpling eau de cologne called Fuck Me Now Immediately Daddy Do Not Dally Any Further!

So we did it first on the floor. She undressed like her clothes were burning her. But it was sexy, mate, I tell you. And there she was. And in a few seconds—

There were you, I shot in.

Yeh.

Laughter.

And what is there to say about big thighs pulling open of their own accord? And eyes hot as a weird blue stove?

Wow.

A couple hours later, we go again. She’s quieter now, but clings real tight. She even dug her nails in my back just a little when the whistle blew.

Yeh, yeh, yeh! We whistled and beat on the chairs.

Yeh, Norman. Tell it. White wobbled.

And then just before we go to sleep—it’s about 2 now— she tells me a little saying her mother told her. It went: No matter how much you might get hurt, there’s love that can heal you.

Was it good, Norman? Basil smirked.

It was very, very good. Exquisite body. And she knew what she was doing. She knew all the right spots.

No matter how much you might hurt, I repeated, there’s love that can heal you.

Yeh, I felt good. Hey, it was heavenly. Heavenly. And then she sang a little song. Some kind of folk tune. Maybe it was European, I dunno. I thought it was Mother Goose or something. No words, just humming and a kind of refrain she repeated.

Hey, man, that sounds great. White had stood up straight to speak. Getting as sober as he could for the official congratulations.

Heavy stuff, young Norman, I added.

Hooray for Norman! Basil sputtered. Not only do people buy his paintings, but he gets to fuck beautiful girls that sing, for Christ’s sake! This tickled Domenick.

But then Norman looked at us with another thing in his face and voice. Yeh, it was good. I thought it was beautiful, the fire and all. I even picked her up and carried her and laid her in the big bed.

Hey, that’s a line from Frank Yerby, I kibitzed him, admiringly so. Frank Yerby.

Yeh. Norman puffed and puffed on the cigarette now. And John had a big smile, pulling his head up and down slowly, affirming the reality of the tale.

But then I went to the window, finished another bourbon and smoked a Gauloise, and looked down at 4th Avenue.

It was that cool, huh?

Yeh. And after that, I went and lay down beside her. In the little night light, I could still see how beautiful she was, and I thought, Shit, it’s my fuckin lucky period. Goddamn. So I lay out. I was painting pretty good. Another show in a couple months. A couple bucks in my pocket. And this fantastic sweet thing next to me in the half-dark.

Wow.

Norman got another drink and pulled himself straight.

Wow.

Yeh, wow, he said, his eyes clouding over like a windshield without a defroster on a suddenly frosty day. And then, about an hour or so later, I guess—I was sleeping—and I dunno, I just felt … Something just got in me. Something woke me up.

Uh-huh.

And I open my eyes, raise up a little in bed. My eyes had to get used to the half-dark. But I notice too that Monica is also raised up in bed. Full up. My eyes focus and I can suddenly see her. She’s sitting there, man, straight up in bed … And she’s got a pair of scissors held up in the air! And now she can see that I see her, and our eyes meet.

What? It came from all of us at once, and the word just hung a second in the whistling smoke, half-crumpled and half-floated to the floor.

But I could tell—I could see—that Norman wasn’t lying. He wasn’t. And now he was repeating the last part again, so it could really penetrate.

Yeh, she was sitting there in the dark with a pair of fuckin scissors.

Why? Basil finally asked, almost sober now.

We looked at each other and at Norman.

Norman coughed from the smoke in his face, the cigarette still dangling. His eyes playing over us, convincing us without the least opposition. What you mean,
Why?
he was saying. How the fuck would I know? I sure as hell wasn’t staying around to find out.

We all finally let it go, the caged-up air—the surrogate terror in it, and even an inch of curious delight. Norman’s eyes glowed a little and he grinned the grin of the escaped hunter.

A cold glaze replaced his living eyes, and the ice of death came into his face. The cigarette should have dropped, but it was stuck to his bottom lip, even with his mouth hung open.

What’s happening? I, the rest of us, looked at Norman, then turned to look over our shoulders. There was a blond woman now standing just inside the bar’s entrance.

She began to walk toward us. I thought, Hey, now Nor-man’s slip-up is coming right straight out with the lying shit. But Norman looked ashen. I didn’t think a mere lie could do that. We were all starting to grin. I guess it had also occurred to the others too that what Norman had told us was a really well-told lie. And now, here was the chick in person to uncover the lie.

But before our smiles could tumble into place and replace our quizzical stares, Norman’s ashen silence transmitted a howl of deep fear to us all. Not lightweight bullshit. So when we looked at the woman striding straight toward us, unnoticed by the rest of the raucous barflies, what we saw made us all believers. Believers forever in all the unknown spaces of terror, the blankness between the stars.

The bitch still had a pair of scissors in her hand. And as she came toward us, she held them up and waved them slowly back and forth, like a wand. But they were covered, even dripping, with very fresh blood.

1981–82
(Originally published in
Playboy,
July 1983)

FROM WAR STORIES

B
ack before the jogging thing got to be a “craze,” during the late ’60s or so, I used to go out every couple of days and run around the half-mile track at Wake-wake Park. In those days, and to my mind, the body was what the mind was, and so I was out all the time, flying around the track. Also, I’d take off at least once a week and go zooming around the lake itself, about three miles or so. It brought back my high school cross country days. The wind in your face, talking to yourself, and thinking great, out of breath, slightly agonized thoughts.

The funny part of this regimen was that at the time I weighed about 120 pounds, soaked in lead allegory. I ate no meat—the result of a bout with the Air Force in which I was served bleeding chicken on Sunday afternoons. From then on, I used to trade my chicken, a weekly affair, for salad or dessert or just straight-out gave it away. It carried over into real life, life after the error farce, so that now even in my thirtieth year, I still shudderingly refrained from eating meat.

So early mornings I’d dash around Wake-wake, named after Indians who’d been bested in a land deal. Its name seemed to be both a command and a solemn gathering.

I was also a member of a political action committee in Noah at the time. Noah, New Jersey, population 300,000, mostly colored. Quite a few Negroes, a few black people, plus significant numbers of Italians, Puerto Ricans, and Portuguese. I’m telling you this not only to help accurately portray my general state of mind, but to tell you that at least one day a week, usually Saturday, a whole bunch of us in the PAC would be running, staying in shape. A few of us believed that democracy for the assorted groups of colored, Negroes, and blacks could be won by refraining from eating meat and jogging, plus karate. An even smaller group of us thought that it might take more than that—maybe a little Malcolm, a little Che, a little Mao, some Ron Karenga, Carmichael, and pinches of some other folk, living and dead. Hey, there was even a smaller group that didn’t care at all. And you know, I later found out that there was a group larger than all of the above who figured it would take even more than that.

At any rate, running through the park, not during the Saturday mass sessions but alone, with the leaves’ shadows visibly crossing your hands and arms; the sun streaming through the green overgrowth to get to you; the air thin and delicious, being sucked in desperately as you came up that series of dead man’s hills before the long downhill straightaway that brought you in past the school stadium and to the finish—that was something else. You felt strong and somehow motivated. You had to succeed because you were succeeding already. Running free, so to speak.

The Saturday sessions were regulated mass affairs. We might run—not might,
did
run—around the same lake. And that was great: catching up to people, being passed by the jocks and a few sworn killers who had to win to prove their absolute sincerity to the cause of the people. The camaraderie and exchanged strength of that was alone worth the whole experience. Afterwards, we might play ringaleerio or touch-football or basketball or baseball. It was full-out physicality we wanted on those Saturdays. The women went out together while we were doing this—a group of young men, mostly single, but many like myself were married, already with children, and some growing sense of ourselves.