Flying to America (9 page)

Spain is distant, Portugal wrapped in an impenetrable haze. These noble beans, glued by you, are mine. Thousand-pound sacks are off-loaded at the quai, against our future needs. The thieves are willing workers, the deans, straw bosses of extraordinary tact. I polish hares, dogs, Indian boys in the chill of early morning. Your weather reports have been splendid. The fall of figs you predicted did in fact occur. There is nothing like ham in fig sauce, or almost nothing. I am, at the moment, feeling very jolly. Hey hey, I say. It is remarkable how well human affairs can be managed, with care.

You Are as Brave as Vincent Van Gogh

Y
ou eavesdrop in three languages. Has no one ever told you not to pet a leashed dog? We wash your bloody hand with Scotch from the restaurant.

Children.
I want one,
you say, pointing to a mother pushing a pram. And there’s not much time. But the immense road-mending machine (yellow) cannot have children, even though it is a member of a family, it has siblings — the sheep’s-foot roller, the air hammer.

You ask: Will there be fireworks?

I would never pour lye in your eyes, you say.

Where do you draw the line? I ask. Top Job?

Shall we take a walk? Is there a trout stream? Can one rent a car? Is there dancing? Sailing? Dope? Do you know Saint-Exupéry? Wind? Sand? Stars? Night flights?

You don’t offer to cook dinner for me again today.

The air hammer with the miserable sweating workman hanging on to the handles. I assimilated the sexual significance of the air hammer long ago. It’s new to you. You are too young.

You move toward the pool in your black bikini, you will open people’s pop-top Pepsis for them, explicate the Torah, lave the brown shoulders of new acquaintances with Bain de Soleil.

You kick me in the backs of the legs while I sleep.

You are staring at James. James is staring back. There are six of us sitting on the floor around a low, glass-topped table. I become angry. Is there no end to it?

See, there is a boy opening a fire hydrant, you stand closer, see, he has a large wrench on top of the hydrant and he is turning the wrench, the water rushes from the hydrant, you bend to feel the water on your hand.

You are reading
From Ritual to Romance,
by Jessie L. Weston. But others have read it before you. Practically everyone has read it.

At the pool, you read Saint-Exupéry. But wait, there is a yellow nylon cord crossing the pool, yellow nylon supported by red-and-blue plastic floats, it divides the children’s part from the deeper part, you are in the pool investigating, flexing the nylon cord, pulling on it, yes, it is firmly attached to the side of the pool, to both sides of the pool. And in the kitchen you regard the salad chef, a handsome young Frenchman, he stares at you, at your tanned breasts, at your long dark (wet) hair, can one, would it be possible, at this hour, a cup of coffee, or perhaps tea . . .

Soon you will be thirty.

And the giant piece of yellow road-mending equipment enters the pool, silently, you are in the cab, manipulating the gears, levers, shove this one forward and the machine swims. Swims toward the man in the Day-Glo orange vest who is waving his Day-Glo orange flags in the air, this way, this way, here!

He’s a saint, you said. Did you ever try to live with a saint?

You telephone to tell me you love me before going out to do something I don’t want you to do.

If you are not asking for fireworks you are asking for Miles Davis bound hand and foot, or Iceland. You make no small plans.

See, there is a blue BOAC flight bag, open, on the floor, inside it is a folded newspaper, a towel, and something wrapped in silver foil. You bend over the flight bag (whose is it? you don’t know) and begin to unwrap the object wrapped in silver foil. Half a loaf of bread. Satisfied, you wrap it up again.

You return from California too late to vote. One minute too late. I went across the street to the school with you. They had locked the
doors. I remember your banging on the doors. No one came to open them. Tears.
What difference does one minute make?
you screamed, in the direction of the doors.

Your husband, you say, is a saint.

And did no one ever tell you that the staircase you climbed in your dream, carrying the long brown velvet skirt, in your dream is a very old staircase?

I remind myself to tell you that you are abnormally intelligent. You kick me in the backs of the legs again, while I sleep.

Parades, balloons, fêtes, horse races.

You feel your time is limited. Tomorrow, you think, there will be three deep creases in your forehead. You offer to quit your job, if that would please me. I say that you cannot quit your job, because you are abnormally intelligent. Your job needs you.

The salad chef moves in your direction, but you are lying on your back on the tennis court, parallel with and under the net, turning your head this way and that, applauding the players, one a tall man with a rump as big as his belly, which is huge, the other a fourteen-year-old girl, intent, lean stringy hair, sorry, good shot, nice one, your sunglasses stuck in your hair. You rush toward the mountain which is furnished with trees, ski lifts, power lines, deck chairs, wedding invitations, you invade the mountain as if it were a book, leaping into the middle, checking the ending, ignoring the beginning. And look there, a locked door! You try the handle, first lightly, then viciously.

You once left your open umbrella outside the A & P, tied to the store with a string. When you came out of the store with your packages, you were surprised to find it gone.

The three buildings across the street from my apartment — one red, one yellow, one brown — are like a Hopper in the slanting late-afternoon light. See? Like a Hopper.

Is that a rash on my chest? Between the breasts? Those little white marks? Look, those people at the next table, all have ordered escargots, seven dozen in garlic butter arriving all at once, eighty-four dead snails on a single surface, in garlic butter. And last night, when it was so hot, I opened the doors to the balcony, I couldn’t
sleep, I lay awake, I thought I heard something, I imagined someone climbing over the balcony, I got up to see but there was no one.

You are as beautiful as twelve Hoppers.

You are as brave as Vincent Van Gogh.

I make the fireworks for you:

* ! * !] * !! * [! * ! * and * % % * +&+&+ * % % *.

If he is a saint, why did you marry him? It makes no sense. Outside in the street, some men with a cherry picker are placing new high-intensity bulbs in all the street lights, so that our criminals will be scalded, transfigured with light.

Yesterday you asked me for the Princeton University Press.

The Princeton University Press is not a toy, I said.

It’s not?

And then: Can we go to a
movie
in which there are fireworks?

But there are fireworks in all movies, that is what movies are for — what they do for us.

You should not have left the baby on the lawn. In a hailstorm. When we brought him inside, he was covered with dime-size blue bruises.

The Agreement

W
here is my daughter?

Why is she there? What crucial error did I make? Was there more than one?

Why have I assigned myself a task that is beyond my abilities?

Having assigned myself a task that is beyond my abilities, why do I then pursue it with all of the enthusiasm of one who believes himself capable of completing the task?

Having assigned myself a task that is beyond my abilities, why do I then do that which is most certain to preclude my completing the task? To ensure failure? To excuse failure? Ordinary fear of failure?

When I characterize the task as beyond my abilities, do I secretly believe that it is within my powers?

Was there only one crucial error, or was there a still more serious error earlier, one that I did not recognize as such at the time?

Was there a series of errors?

Are they in any sense forgivable? If so, who is empowered to forgive me?

If I fail in the task that is beyond my abilities, will my lover laugh?

Will the mailman laugh? The butcher?

When will the mailman bring me a letter from my daughter?

Why do I think my daughter might be dead or injured when I know that she is almost certainly well and happy? If I fail in the task that is beyond my abilities, will my daughter’s mother laugh?

But what if the bell rings and I go down the stairs and answer the door and find there an old woman with white hair wearing a bright-red dress, and when I open the door she immediately begins spitting blood, a darker red down the front of her bright-red dress?

If I fail in the task that is beyond my abilities, will my doctor laugh?

Why do I conceal from my doctor what it is necessary for him to know?

Is my lover’s lover a man or a woman?

Will my father and mother laugh? Are they already laughing, secretly, behind their hands?

If I succeeded in the task that is beyond my abilities, will I win the approval of society? If I win the approval of society, does this mean that the (probable) series of errors already mentioned will be forgiven, or, if not forgiven, viewed in a more sympathetic light? Will my daughter then be returned to me?

Will I deceive myself about the task that is beyond my abilities, telling myself that I have successfully completed it when I have not?

Will others aid in the deception?

Will others unveil the deception?

But what if the bell rings and I go down the stairs and answer the door and find there an old man with white hair wearing a bright-red dress, and when I open the door he immediately begins spitting blood, a darker red down the front of his bright-red dress?

Why did I assign myself the task that is beyond my abilities?

Did I invent my lover’s lover or is he or she real? Ought I to care?

But what if the bell rings and I go down the stairs again and instead of the white-haired woman or man in the bright-red dress
my lover’s lover is standing there? And what if I bring my lover’s lover into the house and sit him or her down in the brown leather club chair and provide him or her with a drink and begin to explain that the task I have undertaken is hopelessly, hopelessly beyond my abilities? And what if my lover’s lover listens with the utmost consideration, nodding and smiling and patting my wrist at intervals as one does with a nervous client, if one is a lawyer or doctor, and then abruptly offers me a new strategy: Why not do
this?
And what if, thinking over the new strategy proposed by my lover’s lover, I recognize that yes,
this
is the solution which has evaded me for these many months? And what if, recognizing that my lover’s lover has found the solution which has evaded me for these many months, I suddenly begin spitting blood, dark red against the blue of my blue work shirt? What then?

For is it not the case that even with the solution in hand, the task will remain beyond my abilities?

And where is my daughter? What is my daughter thinking at this moment? Is my daughter, at this moment, being knocked off her bicycle by a truck with the words
HACHARD
&
CIE
painted on its sides? Or is she, rather, in a photographer’s studio, sitting for a portrait I have requested? Or has she already done so, and will, today, the bell ring and the mailman bring a large stiff brown envelope stamped
PHOTO DO NOT BEND
?

HACHARD & CIE
?

PHOTO DO NOT BEND
?

If I am outraged and there is no basis in law or equity for my outrage nor redress in law or equity for my outrage, am I to decide that my outrage is wholly inappropriate? If I observe myself carefully, using the techniques of introspection most favored by society, and decide, after such observation, that my outrage is not wholly inappropriate but perhaps partially inappropriate, what can I do with my (partially appropriate) outrage? What is there to do with it but deliver it to my lover or my lover’s lover or to the task that is beyond
my abilities, or to embrace instead the proposition that, after all, things are not so bad? Which is not true?

If I embrace the proposition that, after all, things are not so bad, which is not true, then have I not also embraced a hundred other propositions, kin to the first in that they are also not true? That the Lord is my shepherd, for example?

But what if I decide not to be outraged but to be, instead, calm and sensible? Calm and sensible and adult? And mature? What if I decide to send my daughter stamps for her stamp collection and funny postcards and birthday and Christmas packages and to visit her at the times stated in the agreement? And what if I assign myself simpler, easier tasks, tasks which are well within my powers? And what if I decide that my lover has no other lover (disregarding the matchbooks, the explanations that do not explain, the discrepancies of time and place), and what if I inform my doctor fully and precisely about my case, supplying all relevant details (especially the shameful)? And what if I am able to redefine my errors as positive adjustments to a state of affairs requiring positive adjustments? And what if the operator does
not
break into my telephone conversation, any conversation, and say, “I’m sorry, this is the operator, I have an emergency message for 679-9819”?