Jack Kerouac is sitting on my left. Jean-Paul Sartre is to the right. Marshall Matthers is next to Jack and Cameron Crowe is seated next to Marcus Aurelius.
I stare at Marshall; it’s his turn to play and he is taking his sweet-ass time, deflecting my stare into his own at the corner of the room, which makes me think he is bluffing again. I just flopped top two pair, queens and tens. The other card showing is a nine of hearts.
A fine beginning.
We are playing with my mother’s Shakespearean deck. All of the face cards are characters from His plays. The Queen of Spades is Lady Macbeth; the King of Hearts is Lear; the Jack of Diamonds is that precocious Prince of Denmark, Hamlet. Each card has a character referencing quote as a border. Around Tybalt, the Jack of Spades, it reads: “More than Prince of Cats. O, he's the courageous Captain of Compliments.” The cards smell like the old oak liquor cupboard where they are kept.
Marshall speaks in verse and, as he does, I wistfully imagine how he would have fared against Mercutio: “I’m tired of back stabbin’ ass snakes with friendly grins. I’m tired of commitin’ so many sins. I’m tired of Benny and his never-endin’ pairs of tens. I’m tired of always throwin’ in and never havin’ any wins.” Apparently he thinks he can charm his way out of the bluff.
Jean-Paul usually wins our little games. He confuses you. He over analyzes the game. Big surprise. He makes you start wondering what, exactly, is a jack of diamonds?
He says, “Do you really have a pair? How is that pair connected? By saying that those two cards go together, you are assuming a phenomenon that isn’t intrinsic in the actual being of the cards.”
Eminem folds. Over to Cameron Crowe. He says, “Well Marshall, here I am looking for a dare to be in a great situation and you go and fold. But, don't worry, I'm not gonna do what you all think I'm gonna do, which is, you know, FLIP OUT! I’ll just see you all in the next hand, when we are both cats.”
Then Cameron folds too. His little explanations always amuse me. They’re why I invite him to play. He gets up and goes over to the bar where James Dean, Miss Monroe, good ole Bogie and Elvis are talking too loudly about eternal life – but you have to cut them a break because Buddy Holly is really getting into his little carried-away crescendo up on stage. Cameron tries in vain to get The King’s attention to order a milkshake.
Marcus ponders his calls too long, usually scribbling scratches down on scrap paper before coming to a consensus with whomever he is conferring. But this time he says demurely and not without a certain prophetic edge, “It is what it is.” He weakly tosses his cards into the middle.
I say, overly excited, “Did I ever tell you guys my theory about how people are not really living longer – time is just moving faster and faster? And, eventually, this acceleration of time will cause us all to live backwards lives again with no memories? And existence is in an ebbing and flowing, breathing vacillation like this for…well, I can’t really say eternity because time doesn’t exist outside of its own definition…”
Jean-Paul is amused. But (of course) he isn’t listening to me. He is transfixed on a few gentlemen struggling on the sofa next to the stage.
The room is like something from the basement of your grandfather’s Lions Club Saturday Breakfast in rural North Carolina: low white spray-painted composite ceilings, cheap linoleum floors, florescent lights, buffet of watery scrambled eggs and grits.
After unsuccessfully trying to pry his own attention from the charade, Sartre folds and gets up to help Nietzsche as he, in turn, helps Kurt Cobain and Ernest Hemingway reload their shared shotgun.
Meanwhile, I’m getting hungry. We’re supposed to have refreshments. Martha Stewart was baking Floating Island Cake and making tea sandwiches. But Sylvia Plath’s head was using the oven and delaying the party.
(This is what they call foreshadowing, I suppose.)
Only Jack and I remain in the hand. He calls me and we see another card. It’s a nine of spades. Pisses me off because now he could have a set of nines and I only have two pair. I have to go all in or check. I check. He checks. I’m looking for a queen – as always. We see another card. Bless her, it’s Isabel, Queen of France and of Hearts.
She barely whispers: I know no cause why I should welcome such guest of grief. But I have my full house, queens over tens.
Jack is very oral – orally fixated. After I check and the new card is flipped, he moves the cigarette from his mouth and dips it in the ashtray. He takes his bottle of port and chugs from it. He reaches in his jacket pocket and produces papers and tobacco. He begins to expertly roll a new cigarette and offers me one even though he knows perfectly well I don’t smoke. Salinger, watching with Capote from over my shoulder, says he will take a cigarette, to which Capote says in his kind shrill:
“Now listen, Jerome, I’ve told you more than once to let these boys play the game straight up. Every time someone comes to get you for dinner or to tell you it’s going to rain or deliver you a postcard up at that uni-bomber-imitation camp you call a reclusive cabin, you get to thinking he is coming just to sneak in and steal your galoshes. So, why don’t you just leave these boys alone?”
I go all in; I’m half distracted by the beautiful Tristessa loping lasciviously; she tip-toes on memories like lily pads across a pond and moves towards us from the Jacuzzi. I should have been suspicious. I should have known Jack was back to his old tricks. There is no reason for Tristessa to be here right now.
Thoughts of thoughts of thoughts, I think.
Through the haze, my sister appears in the Jacuzzi. She is talking to the Italian girl I met in London. You remember: the one who loved Bon Jovi. Now the Italian stares into space as my little sister talks at her – as I talked at her when “Livin’ on a Payer” boomed into the bar.
We’re half way there.
Tristessa strips to her weathered bra and underwear and walks skinny through a sudden hot tub steam that envelopes her curves in an enchanting light. She stops. She bites her lip and looks at me, head down, eyes raised. If I could, I’d go all in again right now.
Jack smiles at me through his teeth and strikes a match that lights up his alcohol corroded face and grin much like he and Tim O’Brien he are half way to Ho Chi Minh, dispassionately watching a village burn.
Before he throws a pair of nines on the table and takes my money, and before Capote places a hand on my shoulder and says, “Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor,” and before I tell Capote to shut up, Jack says:
“Talk to me, Benny. Come with me to the south of Sicily in the winter, and paint memories of Arles—I’ll buy a piano and Mozart me that—I’ll write long sad tales about people in the legend of my life—This is my part of the movie, let’s hear yours”.
We don’t go to Sicily. I am…no…The room is shifted from Rural North Carolina to the 5th in Paris. Café des Amateurs. Hemingway remains and Scott Fitzgerald emerges out of his ass. All others vanish, including Sartre who is taxied to a local tourist joint a half mile away where the coffee, where le grand crème, can be puzzlingly traded for two North Carolina beers.
“I don’t like it, Ernie,” says Fitzgerald. “Your characters are all drunk and boorish. They have no real substance beyond embarrassing themselves in public and relying on that lack of control to win pity from the reader. And you,” he looks over at me, “You need to lighten up a bit. What, do you think it is ‘Manly’ with a capital M to kill yourself? Is that the noble way out?”
“No. Drowning yourself in alcohol is much more socially appropriate,” says Hemmingway.
“What does it matter what’s socially appropriate once you are dead?” I ask the table. Papa and Scott launch bemused stares my way. “I mean, if you, say, shoot yourself. At the point when the bullet splits your brain, you stop caring about what is socially appropriate, you stop concerning yourself with that because you can’t concern yourself with anything.”
“You two been smoking rice again when I was in the john?” asks E.
“You know I don’t smoke, Papa,” I say. “Smoking can kill you these days. These aren’t the Roaring Twenties anymore. They won’t make them like the do now.” Then to the waitress in my broken and grammatically dubious French: “Je vais prendre un grand crème et un Kronenbourg et une cognac.” She mumbles something in English, something about Americans, something like that pudgy-cheese-sniffing-pale-tight-hand-me-down-swim-suit Frenchie said after I swam up to the beach of Calais back in 2004. (Flahback to 2004: “English? But I am French and we are in France.”) Something to which I usually respond, “Well, if you want me to speak French, maybe you shouldn’t have sold fucking Louisiana.” I was born west of the Mississippi. So I try.
My father appears carrying a coffee with cream, a tall beer, a tilted glass of cognac over boiling water and an 1803 map of North America. “You see this? The line that divides the territories is the Mississippi River!” Dad still thinks I am 12-years-old and reading at a 7-year-old level.
I take the map and hold it over the glass candle on the table.
“Listen, this is my first time in Paris. You guys want to go see Jim Morrison’s grave?” I say to my so-called friends who, from where I sit, are placed on either side of a dying orange and white flame.
“Who’s Jim Morrison?”
“I knew a Tim Morrison once,” Fitzgerald almost corrects Hemmingway. “You see, he was a very winning fellow. Nicer than Christmas and all that…but he was camouflage. I mean metaphorically of course. He wouldn’t let you see him; he would very astutely and academically—as if he were studying to be some sorta social butterfly or chameleon—blend into any friendly setting. Just disappear. I mean you’d go to a party with this man and you’d know he was there, you’d see him the entire night, but he had no presence until the two of you were leaving. Nice as Christmas, though, really. And quite agreeable.”
“He’s a singer,” I say, as if I am not listening to anything. Truly I’m not because I just spotted Zelda walking beneath the whittled oak door frame and I can’t decide if it is her face or the frame that is more burdened by years of drinking in this bar, in this city. But still, her eyes hold defiantly, almost screaming, onto youth—that youth that was, as Ernest once wrote of her in a journal, “fresh as a newly minted coin if they minted coins in smooth flesh with rain-freshened skin.” She does not have (and E. will also back me on this) the dilapidated, degenerate look of the poivrottes, though she fully shares their wisdom of a thousand sad nights. E. told me the other day as we were waiting outside this place for Scott that, here, “the women drunkards are called poivrottes which means female rummies.” I have since used the term to exhaustion.
The reason I am not listening is not because Zelda binds me like Tristessa, although I do enjoy her company in abundance. The reason I am not listening is because Zelda is in love with me.
“Singer? No. No. Not the Tim Morrison I knew. I believe he was a radish farmer. Ah hi-ya, Zelda.”
Scott and I both grew up around the Cities of Minnesota. And we both, curiously enough, place very strong Chicago A’s into our mouths. Cups becomes cops. Cops becomes caps. Caps must just sound like we are squeaking. “You look terrific, darling. Did you cut your hair again?” She nods yes and Scott adroitly reaches behind his body to swing a wicker chair to our table for her. She is always cutting her sandy curls and I am always imploring her to let it be.
Besides me, Zelda is love with one other man. His name is Pieter Something. I don’t know his last name and he lives in a place I’ve never been—somewhere in the south of Germany, near the Austrian border, she tells me. So, since I’ve not met him, as far as I can tell, Pieter loves Zelda back. And I sometimes wonder how this can be—how she can have this raging genius in Francis Scott Fitzgerald and be mad for a stationery salesman. I don’t wonder often though; usually those things don’t lead to explanations.
Zelda sits in the chair that Scott has moved for her. She doesn’t immediately join the conversation, but takes out a pack of American cigarettes, lights one and looks out a window onto the circle which is just breathing life again after a late-afternoon, early-evening nap. I keep looking at Zelda for maybe a moment too long, but not long enough, still, for anyone to notice. I glance over at Hemmingway before looking down in to my cognac and drinking the whole glass flat. He is looking at Zelda as well, seeming to write her in his mind as a stranger.
Scott has begun a story, a sort of tangent from radish farming. “…was a wheat farmer out in Western Kansas. Fairly successful. But that is an irrelevant point now, seeing as how success can’t really be considered success if you are not around to enjoy it. Anyway, I was living there for no reason in particular, other than I felt like I needed to get out of New York for a while and knew I couldn’t go back to St. Paul—nor did I want to. I was living there next to this man—Herb was his name—and his family. I’d taken to riding horses quite a bit. Zelda and I were out one day…Remember, darling? How warm the autumn was that year? Indian Summer I think they called it…It was around late-October and we were riding through these magnificent wheat fields and apple orchards along the river. I’d borrowed a pair of Friesians from a show in Kansas City and taken them out to the country. Zelda was uncomfortable given the size of the horses, but what amazing creatures they are! Very powerful and beautiful. All black, you know. Well, there we were riding and this farmer, Herb, comes down from his house and stops us. I’d seen him a couple times before outside of the church in town, but never spoken with him. Seemed like an all right guy, but at that time I wasn’t much in the mood to talk with anyone except Zelda. So Herb comes down and, polite as can be, asks us to ‘please don’t disturb none of the fruit trees.’ We had no intentions of doing such a thing and ended talking with Herb for a good twenty minutes. Then I said to Herb, ‘We’ve got to be going now, but would love you have you along for a ride.’ He took it quite to heart and said he’d ‘used to ride in the army’ and to ‘excuse him for just a minute.’
“So he leaves and I look over at Zelda and say, ‘My God, I believe the man’s coming. Doesn’t he know we are just being polite?’
“She shrugs and suggests that we just get on going and explain to him next time we see him that we were late and couldn’t wait. So we take off. I didn’t really give it thought at the time, but I feel pretty awful now because we never did see that man again.”
Papa moves from Zelda (who seems to be quite affected by the story) to Scott and says, “Come on. You were ruder than that to the waitress during lunch. I’m sure this man was just being polite by accepting your invitation anyway. Don’t dwell on it.” He pauses and reaches over near me, wraps his huge fingers around my beer and brings it to his mouth. He drinks and says, “Now, let’s get out of here. The drunks of the quarter are starting to wake from their afternoon bouts and I cannot stand the smell.”
“Fine,” says Scott. And then, to me: “But I’m going to need your help with something.”
The day collapses into late night. I lie on my back next to Sylvia Plath. Now it is sometime past 2am, but still seems very bright outside as the building’s exterior lights are reflecting large descending snowflakes. We are in an apartment bedroom in Paris just off of Boulevard St. Michel and near this old pagan church that Sylvia and I toured earlier in the day. Sylvia knew much about the church; she pointed out the water beneath a stone pillar meant to signify a tree and explained the way those who worshiped there used to share a bond with nature.
She explains all Paris to me as we go. Most of what she teaches me of the city, sadly, is what her husband, Ted Hughes, taught to her during talks in the park and so-called “Sunday walks” so popular in the City of Light. She shows me near the Embassy where she and Ted used to come and sit and talk for hours. That was before the children and the miscarriage. She has not yet discovered that Ted cheats on her and she does not yet know how her life will end.
I am completely awake and staring pensively at the ceiling. Sylvia rolls towards me. I can feel her eyes looking up at me and her nose and lips pressed against my shoulder.
“I want you to kiss me,” she says. I ignore her and she repeats her order. “Kiss me.”
“No,” I say.
She pulls her head back slightly from my arm to be able to see my eyes. The night is cold and all the windows are closed. There are no sounds in the apartment, save our own movements in the bed and the steam that occasionally knocks through a boxed-in radiator next to the wooden bed frame. My eyes move from the ceiling to the beveled oval mirror at the foot of the bed. And she continues to look at me. Then says, “Why not?”
This is not a conversation I want to be having and everything in my thoughts and hopes and fears flies over that mirror. I can’t answer. Nothing I say can be worth words now. The radiator kicks on and hisses to the right of me. Her left arm drifts from her side to my stomach. It feels cold even through my t-shirt.
She says, “I just haven’t kissed anyone in so long. Ted and I never kiss anymore. I don’t want to kiss him. I don’t love him. Even the thought of kissing him disgusts me.” (Shock therapy, cold vodka, I think I made you up inside my head.) “I’m not saying I love you. I just want to feel something again. I just want something to tell me I’m alive.”
I consider punching her in the nose with a tight snowball from the window sill.
“He doesn’t love me either,” she says.
I wonder for a moment if she knows about the woman he goes to see on 26th Street. I weakly turn my head to return her stare and to hopefully make her realize why I cannot kiss her.
Sylvia is gone; Zelda is looking up at me, crying. I wish fleetingly that she was Tristessa.
The room is blue. The light coming from the window behind Zelda’s glowing sandy blonde freshly cut curls reflects into the room and silhouettes her left cheek. I shake my head and kiss her lightly on the lips. Once on the corner of Hennepin and Lake Street in Minneapolis as I walked away, Zelda pouted and whispered after me: “But we kiss so well.” She could have been…she could have had a point, but I can’t kiss her anymore. I love her and Ted and Scott and Jack and Kafka and, you know, so on. So, I kiss her lightly like I would kiss the pope’s liver spotted hand and hold her closer to my chest. I can’t tell if she is crying anymore, but I almost hope she is; the night delirium has me thinking that the catharsis she wanted from a kiss might come from an emotional breakdown instead; though I am sure she has had those before.
She isn’t crying. I can barely feel her breathing as my arms are wrapping her shoulders. She lies on my left arm, her arms tucked into her chest; our feet are entangled down below as they might be if we’d just finished making love. She mumbles something into my t-shirt. I ask what it was she’s trying to say.
She pushes her head and body away with both arms and has a time of it because I am holding so tightly. Her blonde curls dye to a dark brown. Zelda slips away. Now, Sylvia’s eyes are full of water, but, no, she is not crying. She says, “Never get married, if you can help it.”
“Who can help it?” I mean to say it to myself and, when she doesn’t answer, I pretend I meant it for effect and begin to say something else. I start to tell her how Ted wanted my help with a poem he was working on; he wanted me to, while I was in Paris, go to the Louvre and ascertain the exact color of Mona Lisa’s eyes. But Sylvia interrupts.
“That’s an awful thing to say. You don’t know how it feels.”
“I know that no one can help it. It becomes something you want to do. Maybe for external reasons – shame, acknowledgement, approval – but still something you desire.”
She lowers her head onto the thin pillow.
I think about the Parisian milk rotting on the counter in the “American kitchen” and how I am probably going to put that into my coffee tomorrow morning.
Sylvia says “I want to leave him.” She wants to do a lot of things that she will never do. She likes to talk about doing these things. “I am going to do it very soon.”
“No, you’re not.” It’s almost a dare.
“Sometimes,” she says, “I think all I have to do is close my eyes and everything will just fade away – no kids, no Teddy, no London or New York. And when I wake up, I’ll be born again. There ought, I think, to be a ritual for being born twice. I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. I lift my lids and all is born again. I think I made you up inside my head.” She is no longer talking to me. I should probably leaver her alone. I shut my eyes and the world drops dead.
My eyes open and shut rapidly; the sun is terribly bright and has just cut above a shading tree. I am underneath the Brooklyn Bridge watching a turtle struggle to come ashore on the shipwreck black rock bank of the East River. I am not alone in my observations. Eleanor named the turtle; she named him Teddy after her uncle. Ayn Rand named the turtle Ayn. Amy Sedaris named the turtle Turtle. I combine the names and multiple personalities and we all sit watching Teddy Ayn Turtle float recklessly and randomly from rock to rock – or, as it must seem like to him, from bay to bay. Sometimes he gets stuck in a bay and it doesn’t look as though he will ever be able to get out. Then a water taxi pushes by and the wake rocks Teddy Ayn Turtle out of his inlet and back into the horrors of the East River.
I walk up to near the sidewalk and retrieve a large stick out of my dog’s mouth and break it in thirds and return to the water’s edge. My dog has recently had a tumor removed and his side above his right hind leg is shaved. I tell him he looks silly.
Amy screams as if she thinks I am going to hurt the turtle. I try to explain that I am just creating a ledge for the creature to crawl onto. She doesn’t believe me.
“Sir?” Amy inquires to a man walking past with what appears to be his family, “What is the current fine and or maximum prison sentence in the city of New York for sexually assaulting a turtle with a…well not with a deadly weapon…let’s say with a foreign object?” She doesn’t wait for the blankness to leave his face before continuing, “Back when I was in sixth grade it was just a stern gaze and maybe a finger wag, but that was in North Carolina and a long time ago. So, I really need to know the current rules, if you don’t mind.” The man looks at me standing stupidly with a broken stick and shakes his head. He walks away.
Amy walks away as well but in the other direction. I miss her already. I watch her walk for a moment, then turn to the river. I think and glace back at her when, for a moment, I believe I see not Amy but Tristessa.
Ayn and Eleanor don’t have much to say. The four of us had been dating since my first time back from Paris (it is almost summer now), but recently I was seeing more and more of Tristessa and now this: Amy left. She was my favorite. But it’s hard to leave a woman as good as Eleanor and impossible to rationalize leaving Ayn. So I go back to building a lovely contraption for Teddy Ayn Turtle in his sparkling lake of troubles.
Teddy Any Turtle grabs onto one of the twigs I’ve placed at a strategic angle, balanced between two rocks like a pull-up bar. He raises his half shell over a partly submerged obstacle and falls into a calm lagoon. I fight the urge to pick him up and place him on a high rock; I suspect that is what he desires, but I remember Amy’s objections and forbid myself from touching the squirming reptile.
“You should not deny your desires,” Ayn says from behind me. “You should never sacrifice your happiness for your duty or reject self-esteem for self-denial. Immolation is not the way to morality. You must live by a moral standard above that of those who hold you captive by your courage and love and innocence. Happiness is the one goal of life; and struggle is the one path to that happiness. Reason, not faith, is the means by which we must go down this path to accomplish our happiness—thinking is man’s one basic virtue. We must never sacrifice anything, for sacrifice is the capitulation of that which you value for that which you do not value. We say we value happiness above all else and will strive for that happiness through our great production and achievement—happiness being the highest form of life.”
Ayn can talk in circles like this for over 50 pages of small type.
“It’s a fucking turtle,” I cut her off.
Ayn gets up and begins to leave the park. After taking a few steps she turns and looks at me. I’ve never before seen her cry. She seems to read me her own epitaph, saying, “I swear – by my life and my love of it – that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”
I let it go; we had that “happiness” discussion in April, anyhow. We sat, not a half-mile from this place along the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights one evening, passing back and forth a bottle of 2001 California Pinot Grigio and staring at the space in Manhattan where two enormous buildings used to stand. That is when I pronounced to Amy, Ayn, and Eleanor (and at the time Charlotte Brontë as well) my theory that life was not the struggle for happiness, but the struggle for struggle.
Ayn didn’t give up as easily as Charlotte. Ayn planned on traveling across New England with an HD camera asking people what “made them Happy.” She’d make a Sundance-worthy documentary from those interviews and report to me, when finished, on the true meaning of life.
I suppose the turtle comment was a little harsh. Eleanor hopes I’ll be a little kinder eventually; she does not mind the anti-social behavior as Ayn did.
Teddy Ayn Turtle is still wallowing in his backdoor pool. A water taxi wave approaches, enters and places him up on the rock I assume is his goal – but only places him briefly. Try as he might, without thumbs or spider’s web, his panicking claws are unable to balance his body on such a precarious perch.
I turn to look at Eleanor for advice, but my eyes focus beyond her on a young Mexican woman floating towards me on in-line skates and wearing frayed jean shorts with a teal bikini top. Her hair is dark brown and long, her legs skinny, her eyes shaded by glasses and still reflecting the sun, her brown complexion is like waking on your wedding day morning in every breath. I recognize Tristessa. Almost as soon, she vanishes.
“She’s not entirely right, you know,” Eleanor’s words break my focus from Tristessa. I am converted to Ellie’s plainness. “Sacrifice is important, but not as important as the reason or reasons you make that sacrifice. And, were a sacrifice to remain as such forever, it would never be any good.”
I try to keep the moments at which I argue with Eleanor about the utility of “good” to a minimum and to when we are also accompanied by Jack; he has a judicious penchant for having my back.
“Come on,” I say. “Let’s go get some ice cream at that place on the pier you love and then go see Shakespeare – I think he’s in the park.”
I am in a play by some famous writer. The writer doesn’t like what we are doing, but it is only what he wrote. The story is writing itself, he claims. If there is predestination and if there is a “God,” this must be what it feels like to have god mad at you.
He tries to blame the characters because he has no control. I try to blame him because I keep seeing fucking Tristessa everywhere, in every woman I pass. She is killing everything; when I think I’ve finally found her and have her, I turn out to be wrong. I wake up next to Queen Victoria or Zadie Smith or, I don’t know, Arthur Rimbuad – who, every time, vehemently screams that he’s not “into dudes” – and I feel like this captious fool. Like I have some sort of disease that causes me to look over and say: her nose is too big or her eyes are too close together or she has a mustache and her toes are webbed or she has a huge cock. Something is wrong with everything and I cannot get beyond it.
My only hope is that I awake one morning to find that Tristessa hasn’t fled in the loss of dreams. Seductive vampire goddess succubus. I think she is messing with me. Someone is.
If god doesn’t exist and this writer fellow isn’t in control and Jack Kerouac promises he isn’t running things, then what, in the name of all the women I am tired of sleeping with, is going on here?
I am falling asleep. I reminisce for a moment before sleep comes: I spent a week with Jack and Ernie and Eleanor over the Fourth of July a month or so ago. We talked about a number of things, but mostly we focused on how awkward we all felt when Eleanor and Zelda met for the first time at a bar on Lake Minnetonka.
The ice had barely thawed at the time, so swimming was no good, but the air was warm. Scott, E. Jack and I were taking the larger of Scott’s two boats for its inaugural dust-off tour about the lower lake. Lord Fletcher’s had just opened their patio bar (the “Wharf” they called it) and the night, I could tell, was going to smell like olive tree blossoms and lilac and charcoal grills. I couldn’t think of anything better than a cold Leinenkugel on the Wharf. I told Eleanor to meet us at Fletcher’s that evening. Zelda popped up on the bed in the underbelly of the boat – a part of the boat I was sure was called the cabin or cockpit or whatever. She was just lying there like someone had laid her there all along. Someone did. And the boat, it grazed past Big Island and Arcola Bridge and Lafayette to a small inlet filled with docks and medium-sized yachts.
Jack was the first off. I allowed him that pleasure since I knew I wasn’t going to be able to make it through the night without his help. (In fact, I wasn’t able to make it through most of the spring and summer without his help – not to mention the very parenthetical note that, when I would share a bed with Eleanor, I had, more likely than not, previously been engaged in a conversation with Jack that’d endured past a few hours.) Last to alight was Zelda. She was already moping and had said she didn’t feel like moving from bed tonight. The skin around her eyes was a bit purple and the rest of her face had grown pale since I saw her in Paris. I dismissed this as either a reflecting deep velvet blue of the evening sky or a hazard of winter life above the thirtieth latitude.
We walked up the slanted planks to the deck set with inflated tree lights and a tent covered bar like you might find in a mirage on Seven Mile Beach. Eleanor was already at the bar. Her hand was wrapped around a giant plastic Dixie cup of Stella or Harp—I never tasted it. She looked at me and kind of tilted her head and kissed me hello. She greeted the others. I introduced her to Scott and Zelda.
“It is amazing to meet both of you,” Ellie told the couple. “Benny can’t stop talking about what fun he has with you and Ernie in Paris and all the amazing things you write and let him read.”
Zelda looked past us as if she wished to order a drink. But when she spoke, almost without moving her dry lips, it was not to the bartender: “I think light beer might be a good idea.”
The memory wakes me. It always wakes me. And I’m happy if I’m alone.
I always wake up early on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean because it is quiet. However, this time my cell phone is ringing…ringing…I check the caller ID…ringing…it is Sylvia…ringing…I answer. But, before I do, I realize how it is strange that she is calling me; I am at her house.
“Hello?” I feign identification ignorance. She hellos me back and tells me that she is calling to see if I would like anything from the coffee shop. I know that is a lie; I was what she likes to call “inattentive” last night – meaning I was remiss in my duties as a lover or, more appropriately, a partner. So, she asks me if I want anything: a coffee (which I want), a bagel (which I want with lox and tomato and cream cheese), a big box of powered sugar doughnut holes (which I want, but only to throw at the seagulls).
“No, I’m fine,” I say. I was told by her never to say fine. Girls do not like it when you say fine. But I am guessing that rule only applies to questions like: How do I look? or Will you go pick up my mom from the airport? or Is she prettier than me?
Eleanor gets on the line and asks if I am sure that I am fine. I am. I look around the room with the cell phone still on my ear. Neither one of us is speaking, but we stay on the line.
The shade lifts and I can see the Atlantic Ocean. Suddenly the waters and beach accelerate northward like the earth is a big round Rubik’s…well…Rubik’s Sphere and I am right on the edge of one of the colored boxes as God (or that fucking petulant writer) spins the puzzle.
I wonder for a moment why God would be trying to solve this puzzle. Wouldn’t he just know the answers without having to shift everything around? Or, better yet, wouldn’t he just imagine the puzzle as solved and it would be so? God, I nod in approval, must be very bored. I consider him meandering around Heaven looking for something to do on a Sunday and growing angrier by the week with the irony that Sunday was supposed to be his goddam day of rest and yet it turned out to be the day that the greatest portion of his little humans (what a fucking mistake that sixth day turn out being) go to their stone buildings with their wooden crosses and ask him for shit. He’s insanely jealous of Buddha. And don’t even mention his twin brother, Allah; ever since they pulled a job together in Jerusalem some 1,400 years ago, things haven’t been the same. God thinks Zeus had it right all along: scare the crap out of them. God picks up a mystery novel, but quickly tosses it aside after realizing that he already knows who done it. He peaks over a cloud and watches bombs over Bagdad for a few minutes and then looks in on the Bachelor in Paris, but neither is as good as last season. Bored, he decides to cause another flood. He will call this one Rita.
My mind comes back to the beach, which is no longer Massachusetts, but North Carolina.
Eleanor passes the phone to a woman I met over a year ago when I worked for a celebrity booking company: This woman, at the time I met her, had recently published her second book. The book was about fat girls and how we should all be comfortable with our bodies and, say-pretend-imagine you were fat, then there is nothing wrong with fat. Other than the health risks, I mention to her – but only in my head. The book is called Starving for Life or something less poetically cute and more personal. This woman says she knew she had to change her life and try to help others do the same when she was crying in a bathroom stall in college. She looked up through sobs at the back of the stall door. Written in pen and marker and etched were brief confessionals and pleas for help from girls who’d gone to that stall to sacrifice their freshly consumed fried chicken or snickers or egg foo yung or chili-rubbed flank steak with cabbage salad and polenta rounds. They read like this: I AM SLOWLY KILLING MYSELF. SOMETIMES I THINK I SHOULD JUST DO IT QUICKLY. That is when this woman who wrote the book decided to kill herself as well.
“How would you have done it?” I ask into the cell phone as I look at a photo of Eleanor’s parents over bed’s headboard.
“What?” she says, but not incredulously because she thinks I am talking about something else.
“How would you have killed yourself?” I annunciate.
“I…know…break up.” she says.
“What? You’re breaking up, too. I can’t hear you. I think it’s this plane going over me right now. Hold on.” There is an airport behind the house. Mostly they service private prop planes, but every once in a while the house will be torn by some visiting rock group’s Gulfstream jet. The plane passes. “Can you hear me? Or are we still breaking up?”
“Still breaking up,” she answers.
I don’t even know who I am talking to anymore.
“How could we still be breaking up? I understand you perfectly.”
“No you don’t. You’ve never understood me. And…is something…cannot wait…wasting my time.”
“There you go!” I exclaim, almost giddy that her voice only comes in meaningless sentence fragments. “Now you’re doing it! Now we’re breaking up!”
“You’re awful.”
“What?! Why do you say that? What did I do now?” I am standing beside the bed, screaming through the bay window at the people on the beach.
Directly in front of the window, a seven-year-old Jesus Christ is turning tidal pools into a pungent vintage 2005 Cabernet Sauvignon. I realize too late that I am screaming while we stare directly at each other. I must have put the fear of God in that boy.
He calmly mouths to me, “Come, follow me and I will make you a fisher of men.”
I shake my head and mouth silently back, “I’m not hungry.”
Immediately, his mother walks down from their next door patio and stands over her son. I crack the window to greet Mary and to tell her that I am looking forward to the dinner party tonight. But I second guess myself. The window stays cracked. Mary looks disapprovingly at the tidal pools and leads Jesus back into the house. As she goes, I catch pieces of her words lost into the air: “I thought I said Shiraz…lamb with curried cauliflower and yogurt sauce…am I supposed to do with cabernet?...twenty-six gallons for godssake... on top of that, your step-father thought it’d be cute…a live lamb…yard…blood all over the front door…married a man gullible enough to believe –” The door shuts.
“Hello?!” It’s that girl in my ear.
“Sorry, I was distracted. So, what did I do wrong this time?”
“It’s always wrong. You don’t have to sound happy about it. You never cared. You never listened to me.”
Why is she talking in past tense?
“I can’t hear you.” I protest and fall backwards into a pool of 2005 Cabernet. I drift calmly downward. I lose my patience. From the bottom I see Tristessa’s bloody dancing figure on the diving board.
“I don’t know, but I think we should break up,” I say.
“What? You’re breaking up.”
The phone floats out of my hand. The wine is warm and motionless and blocks all of my senses – the best feeling next to death.
Although winter is warm this year, the leaves on my block died and fell early. I am in Chelsea, Manhattan back stage in the green room at the Martha Stewart Talk Show with Dominick Dunne, John Legend, Truman Capote and Mya Harrison. This part is true. No. That’s a lie. This part is slightly literal. Every word of this is true.
Zelda recently sent me this message from Godknowswhere over the ticker on CNN. It said:
“I hate you.”
I don’t know what to think of it.
My sister and Fred Nietzsche are sitting at a bar with their backs to us. The bartender is wiping lipstick off wine glasses with a white rag from the Everyday Collection of K-Mart. My sister appeals to her dark reflection in her glass of wine as Nietzsche tells her in perfect English: “Into every hole they had put their illusion, their stop-gap, which they called God.” She kisses Fred and shakes her head in some unknown emotion. The bartender dutifully wipes the lipstick from Nietzsche’s face.
I have worked up enough courage to approach Mya and tell her she did a great job on the program today. She and John Legend stunned the crowd with a medley that shifted from a duet of John’s “Ordinary People” to an unforgettable, nod-your-head-rock-your-body-like-you’re-autistic, piano spiced version of Mya’s “Free.” If only I could play John’s chorus rifts in my words…
Sylvia Plath walks by directing Will Shakespeare to his dressing room. “All you ever say to the guests is ‘Good Job,’” she laughs at me.
Truman and Dominick are arguing over who was the first to have some idea for a celebrity masked ball at the Rockefeller Center skating rink.
“I told you that idea over a year ago at Bogart’s Halloween party.” Dunne admonishes Truman. “I remember because you suggested that we give everyone masks without eye holes.”
It is Dunne’s 80th birthday today. Truman is long dead. Dunne looks dead, if that is any consolation to his cohort. His hair is deep silver and thin like it might float away if you cough in his direction. His fingernails haven’t been properly trimmed in a year. But he answers questions and fences with Capote like we were all actually back at Bogart’s place in the 1960s or whenever.
“Well, I think, Mr. Dunne, that you oughtn’t go telling me you told me again or I’m likely to go using that story as well and soon people will think I’ve been arguing with myself this whole time. They’ll start to believe they’ve simply imagined you.”
Truman patronizes Dunne but truly loves him.
Martha floats by the greenroom like the stiff fat ghost of Genghis Khan. Two walls of the room are glass, allowing her to see in as she walks out to the set. Everyone in the room goes silent as she passes, except, of course, for Jack Kerouac who says, “Practice charity without holding in mind any conceptions about charity, for charity after all is just a word.”
I follow Martha out to the set. I am hand-in-hand with Jack and Mya. I am incredibly happy for a moment; Tristessa is no where. We pass a production office overflowed with stacks of cue cards. We pass the craft area that has been miraculously transformed into a Minnesota Winter Wonderland. We pass Lord Fletchers from where my sister looks back at me and holds up a ruddy face and a glass of scotch in gratitude. We pass through large double doors and then a second set of smaller doors.
I step out onto the set alone and look up into the audience. Their mouths are closed. They are motionless like I can’t tell the difference from a wax museum. No light shows the room, save an unnamed glow above the audience and a very soft spot on me. We all stare at each other – not in expectation or revelation – merely in recognition. My breathing becomes slow and steady. And I start laughing.