All of Us (26 page)

In the empty

rooms each evening, he eats

alone, watches television, reads

the newspaper with a lust

that begins and ends in the fingertips.

There is no God,

and conversation is a dying art.

This foot’s giving me nothing

but trouble. The ball,

the arch, the ankle—I’m saying

it hurts to walk. But

mainly it’s these toes

I worry about. Those

“terminal digits” as they’re

otherwise called. How true!

For them no more delight

in going headfirst

into a hot bath, or

a cashmere sock. Cashmere socks,

no socks, slippers, shoes, Ace

bandage—it’s all one and the same

to these dumb toes.

They even looked zonked out

and depressed, as if

somebody’d pumped them full

of Thorazine. They hunch there

stunned and mute—drab, lifeless

things. What in hell is going on?

What kind of toes are these

that nothing matters any longer?

Are these really
my

toes? Have they forgotten

the old days, what it was like

being alive then? Always first

on line, first onto the dance floor

when the music started.

First to kick up their heels.

Look at them. No, don’t.

You don’t want to see them,

those slugs. It’s only with pain

and difficulty they can recall

the other times, the good times.

Maybe what they really want

is to sever all connection

with the old life, start over,

go underground, live alone

in a retirement manor

somewhere in the Yakima Valley.

But there was a time

they used to strain

with anticipation

simply

curl with pleasure

at the least provocation,

the smallest thing.

The feel of a silk dress

against the fingers, say.

A becoming voice, a touch

behind the neck, even

a passing glance. Any of it!

The sound of hooks being

unfastened, stays coming

undone, garments letting go

onto a cool, hardwood floor.

The moon, the landscape, the train.

We are moving steadily along the south shore

of the lake, past the spas and sanitoriums.

The conductor comes through the club car to tell us

that if we look to the left—there, where those

lights are shining—we will see a lighted tennis

court, and it’s probable, even at this hour, we’ll

find Franz Kafka on the court. He’s crazy about

tennis and can’t get enough of it. In a minute, sure

enough—there’s Kafka, dressed in whites,

playing doubles against a young man and woman.

An unidentified young woman is Kafka’s partner. Which

pair is ahead? Who is keeping score? The ball goes back

and forth, back and forth. Everyone seems to be playing perfectly,

intently. None of the players even bothers to look up

at the passing train. Suddenly the track curves

and begins to go through a woods. I turn in the seat

to look back, but either the lights on the court have been

extinguished suddenly, or the train car is in such

a position that everything behind us is darkness.

It is at this moment that all the patrons left in the club car

decide to order another drink, or something to snack on.

Well, and why not? Kafka was a vegetarian and a teetotaler

himself, but that shouldn’t crimp anyone’s style. Besides,

no one in the train car seems to show the slightest

interest in the game, or who was playing on the court under

the lights. I was going forward to a new and different

life, and I was really only half interested myself, my

thoughts being somewhere else. Nevertheless, I thought it

was something that was of some slight interest and should be

pointed out; and I was glad the conductor had done so.

    “So that was Kafka,” someone behind me spoke up.

    “So,” somebody else replied. “So what? I’m Perlmutter.

Pleased to meet you. Let’s have a drink.” And saying this, he

took a deck of cards out of his shirt pocket and began to shuffle

them back and forth on the table in front of him. His huge

hands were red and chapped; they seemed to want to

devour the cards whole. Once more the track curves

and begins to go through a woods.

They’re on a one-way flight, bound from LAX

to SFO, both of them drunk and strung-out

having just squirmed through the hearing,

their second bankruptcy in seven years.

And who knows what, if anything, was said

on the plane, or who said it?

It could have been accumulation

of the day’s events, or years on years

of failure and corruption that triggered violence.

Earlier, turned inside out, crucified and left

for dead, they’d been dropped like so much

garbage in front of the terminal. But

once inside they found their bearings,

took refuge in an airport lounge where they tossed

back doubles under a banner that read
Go Dodgers!

They were plastered, as usual, as they buckled

into their seats and, as always, ready to assume

it was the universal human condition, this battle

waged continually with forces past all reckoning,

forces beyond mere human understanding.

But she’s cracking. She can’t take any more

and soon, without a word, she turns

in her seat and drills him. Punches him and

punches him, and he takes it.

Knowing deep down he deserves it ten times over —

whatever she wants to dish out—he is being

deservedly beaten for something, there are

good reasons. All the while his head is pummeled,

buffeted back and forth, her fists falling

against his ear, his lips, his jaw, he protects

his whiskey. Grips that plastic glass as if, yes,

it’s the long-sought treasure right there

on the tray in front of him.

She keeps on until his nose begins to bleed

and it’s then he asks her to stop.
Please, baby
,

for Christ’s sake, stop.
It may be his plea

reaches her as a faint signal from another

galaxy, a dying star, for this is what it is,

a coded sign from some other time and place

needling her brain, reminding her of something

so lost it’s gone forever. In any event, she stops

hitting him, goes back to her drink. Why

does she stop? Because she remembers

the fat years preceding the lean? All that history

they’d shared, sticking it out together, the two

of them against the world? No way. If she’d truly

remembered everything and those years had dropped

smack into her lap all at once,

she would’ve killed him on the spot.

Maybe her arms are tired, that’s why she stops.

Say she’s tired then. So she stops. He picks up

his drink almost as if nothing’s happened

though it has, of course, and his head aches

and reels with it. She goes back to her whiskey

without a word, not even so much as the usual

“bastard” or “son of a bitch.” Dead quiet.

He’s silent as lice. Holds the drink

napkin under his nose to catch the blood,

turns his head slowly to look out.

Far below, the small steady lights in houses

up and down some coastal valley. It’s

the dinner hour down there. People pushing

up to a full table, grace being said,

hands joined together under roofs so solid

they will never blow off those houses—houses where,

he imagines, decent people live and eat, pray

and pull together. People who, if they left

their tables and looked up from the dining

room windows, could see a harvest moon and,

just below, like a lighted insect, the dim glow

of a jetliner. He strains to see over

the wing and beyond, to the myriad lights

of the city they are rapidly approaching,

the place where they live with others of their kind,

the place they call home.

He looks around the cabin. Other people,

that’s all. People like themselves

in a way, male or female, one sex

or the other, people not entirely unlike

themselves—hair, ears, eyes, nose, shoulders,

genitals—my God, even the clothes they wear

are similar, and there’s that identifying strap

around the middle. But he knows he and she

are not like those others though he’d like it,

and she too, if they were.

Blood soaks his napkin. His head rings and rings

but he can’t answer it. And what would he say

if he could?
I’m sorry they’re not in. They left

here, and there too, years ago.
They tear

through the thin night air, belted in, bloody husband

and wife, both so still and pale they could be

dead. But they’re not, and that’s part of

the miracle. All this is one more giant step

into the mysterious experience of their lives.

Who could have foretold any of it years back when,

their hands guiding the knife, they made

that first cut deep into the wedding cake?

Then the next. Who would have listened?

Anyone bringing such tidings of the future

would have been scourged from the gate.

The plane lifts, then banks sharply. He touches

her arm. She lets him. She even takes his hand.

They were made for each other, right? It’s fate.

They’ll survive. They’ll land and pull themselves

together, walk away from this awful fix —

they simply have to, they must.

There’s lots in store for them yet, so many fierce

surprises, such exquisite turnings. It’s now

they have to account for, the blood

on his collar, the dark smudge of it

staining her cuff.

My wife has disappeared along with her clothes.

She left behind two nylon stockings, and

a hairbrush overlooked behind the bed.

I should like to call your attention

to these shapely nylons, and to the strong

dark hair caught in the bristles of the brush.

I drop the nylons into the garbage sack; the brush

I’ll keep and use. It is only the bed

that seems strange and impossible to account for.

Reading a life of Alexander the Great, Alexander

whose rough father, Philip, hired Aristotle to tutor

the young scion and warrior, to put some polish

on his smooth shoulders. Alexander who, later

on the campaign trail into Persia, carried a copy of

The Iliad
in a velvet-lined box, he loved that book so

much. He loved to fight and drink, too.

I came to that place in the life where Alexander, after

a long night of carousing, a wine-drunk (the worst kind of drunk —

hangovers you don’t forget), threw the first brand

to start a fire that burned Persepolis, capital of the Persian Empire

(ancient even in Alexander’s day).

Razed it right to the ground. Later, of course,

next morning—maybe even while the fire roared—he was

remorseful. But nothing like the remorse felt

the next evening when, during a disagreement that turned ugly

and, on Alexander’s part, overbearing, his face flushed

from too many bowls of uncut wine, Alexander rose drunkenly to

his feet,

grabbed a spear and drove it through the breast

of his friend, Cletus, who’d saved his life at Granicus.

For three days Alexander mourned. Wept. Refused food. “Refused

to see to his bodily needs.” He even promised

to give up wine forever.

(I’ve heard such promises and the lamentations that go with them.)

Needless to say, life for the army came to a full stop

as Alexander gave himself over to his grief.

But at the end of those three days, the fearsome heat

beginning to take its toll on the body of his dead friend,

Alexander was persuaded to take action. Pulling himself together

and leaving his tent, he took out his copy of Homer, untied it,

began to turn the pages. Finally he gave orders that the funeral

rites described for Patroklos be followed to the letter:

he wanted Cletus to have the biggest possible send-off.

And when the pyre was burning and the bowls of wine were

passed his way during the ceremony? Of course, what do you

think? Alexander drank his fill and passed

out. He had to be carried to his tent. He had to be lifted, to be put

into his bed.