I Love Dick (27 page)

I checked out
Bliss
and another book of Katherine's
Collected Stories
around 3 p.m. I had to try and eat, so I drove to 50th and Figueroa, a green and orange stucco restaurant, Chico's Mexican Taquitos. Waiting for the soup I opened
Bliss
at random to
page 71
, the opening of a story called “Je Ne Parle Pas Français.” Chico's only other customers were two guys named Vito and Jose, as thin as me and both fresh out of “rehab” (four days of tranquilized withdrawal) at a nearby public hospital. A woman sitting, reading all alone will always be a receptacle for passersby to rant on. Vito sat down next to me. “Heroin's sooo good,” he said. “But, you see, it's very bad.” Now that he was clean, he thought he'd try his luck in Laughlin. He'd heard there were plenty of good jobs in the casinos. He'd save some money, try and join his wife and baby girl. “I don't know why I have such a fancy for this little cafe. It's dirty, sad.”
Page 71
of
Bliss
found Katherine sitting by herself one afternoon at the close of World War I in a French cafe.

“Don't talk so much,” Jose told Vito. I was sitting like a school-teacher with all my library books, offering advice on kicking. When Vito left he said “God bless.” And at that moment I was overwhelmed with love for Katherine, whose letters from this time (Paris, Spring, 1918) had been suppressed after her death by her husband because they were “too painful.”

“I don't believe in the human soul, I believe that people are like portmanteaux,” she writes at the opening of this story, as if anybody cared. “
Bliss
was so brilliant…,” Katherine's friend Virginia Woolf wrote to Janet Case, “…and so hard, and so shallow, and so sentimental that I had to rush to the bookcase for something to drink.”

Katherine, Queen of the Biscuit Box School of Writing, the brave colonial girl, determined to live in London, even though the checks sent by her bank-director father from Wellington, New Zealand didn't take her very far. Wellington, the capital of New Zealand, was a city of unpaved roads and horses. Men wrote heroic verse about the land. But there she was in Paris: 28 years old, alone, tubercular and hemoraging for the first time; willing to take a crack at it, at being “right” and making the most absolute of statements.

Katherine, who capitalized words like Life and wrote themes on love and rhubarb, indulged by D.H. Lawrence and lots of other men because she was sincere and pretty. Katherine the utopian space cadet, whose entire literary project was to capture heightened states of adolescent feeling (“bliss”). Katherine, who tried so hard in London to be best-friends with Virginia Woolf, who hated her, because Katherine was the kind of naif-imbecile that the literary men adored and championed at her expense.

“My God, I love to think of you, Virginia,” Katherine wrote in 1917, “as my friend…we have got the same job and it is really very curious & thrilling that we should both be after so nearly the same thing…” even though she later wrote John Murray that she found Virginia's writing “intellectually snobbish, long and tiresome.” In 1911, her first year in London, Katherine posed uncomfortably for a portrait. Thick eyebrows, pointed nose, neck craned forward…in this photo she was not a pretty girl. Her life there was one big flourish of bravado, her impetuosity, “pores and vapours” which (according to Virginia Woolf) “sicken or bewilder most of our friends.”

Yet seven years after Katherine's death, Virginia admitted she still dreamed of Katherine, who had a quality she “adored and needed,” so in a sense she loved her too. This afternoon the thought of Katherine trying to be “right” in London made me get all clutchy, and Dick, that isn't all:

No matter where you go, someone else has been before.

Because like me, Katherine Mansfield fell in love with Dick.

On
page 85
of “Je Ne Parle Pas Français,” she writes:

“It was impossible not to notice Dick. What a catch! He was the
only Englishman present
(italics mine), reserved and serious, making a special study of literature and instead of circulating gracefully round the room he stayed in one place leaning against the wall, that dreamy half smile on his lips and replying in his low soft voice to anybody who spoke to him.”

But unlike you, this Dick had no “previous engagements.” Straight off, he invited Katherine out to dinner. And they spent the night at his hotel,

“Talking—but not only of literature. I discovered to my relief that it wasn't necessary to keep to the tendency of the modern novel… Now and again, as if by accident, I threw in a card that seemed to have nothing to do with the game, just to see how he'd take it. But each time he gathered it into his hands
with his dreamy look
(my emphasis) and smile unchanged. Perhaps he murmured: ‘That's curious.' But not as if it were curious at all.”

Dick was Katherine's perfect schizophrenic listener. As Géza Róheim wrote, Dick was dreamily empathic because “a lack of ego boundaries makes it impossible for him to set limits to the process of identification.” And Katherine flipped:

“Dick's calm acceptance went to my head at last. It fascinated me. It led me on and on 'til I threw every card I possessed at him and sat back and watched him arrange them in his hand.”

By that time both of them were very drunk. Dick didn't judge. He just said, “Very interesting.” And she was overwhelmed,

“…quite breathless at the thought of what I'd done. I had shown somebody both sides of my life. Told him everything as sincerely and truthfully as I could. Taken immense pains to explain things about my submerged life that really were disgusting and never could possibly see the light of day.”

Have we talked enough about the schizophrenic phenomena of coincidence?

Last week at school Pam Strugar wondered why the brilliant girls all die. Both Katherine Mansfield and the philosopher Simone Weil lived lives of passionate intensity. Both died alone of tubercular starvation in rooms attached to flakey “institutes,” dreaming in their notebooks about childhood happiness and comfort at the age of 34.

It moved me so that tears came into my eyes.

For weeks they had been talking about Butterfly Creek. “Let's go to But-ter-fly Creek!” Eric Johnson intoned, mimicking the plummy baritone of his father, the Reverend Cyril Johnson.

All January long there'd been record heat in Wellington. Miraculously still and cloudless days, sunlight glinting off the cars on Taranaki Street. That January all the offices shut down at 3 p.m. Clerks and typists mobbed the sandy crescent beach at Oriental Bay.

High up on The Terrace overlooking Willis Street, even the fieldstone stucco'd walls and lead-glass windows of the Vicarage gave no protection from the heat. But the Vicar and his wife, Vita-Fleur, who'd emigrated here from England after Cyril'd finished university and seminary school, were prepared for this colonial eventuality. All summer long Vita-Fleur made ginger-beer for her children. The recipe'd been handed down by her mother, an Anglican missionary's wife who'd spent 16 hellish years in Barbados. Five great stone jugs of ginger-beer sat outside the kitchen-garden on The Terrace: enough to last at least that many New Zealand summers. Mother to Laura, Eric, Josephine and Isabel, Vita-Fleur was a large, conservatively-dressed, pigeon-breasted woman who'd married well. No more trundling round the globe to dark-skinned colonies. Cyril was acerbic, brilliant and everybody knew that he'd eventually be made a bishop. And Vita-Fleur's mission was to set a good example of wifely domesticity at St. Stephen's, the largest Anglican church in Wellington. Wellington is the capital of New Zealand. New Zealand is the cultural center of the whole Pacific Rim. Therefore, Vita-Fleur was a a role model to at least one third of the world.

(All rise, hats off, for the singing of the National Anthem at the 8 p.m. show on Saturday night at the Paramount on Courtney Place. Jaffas rolling down the aisles… Because the Paramount shows “popular” films, the audience is often mixed with Maoris…)

It was 2 p.m. that January Sunday afternoon at the Vicarage and the dinner plates had just been cleared away. Eric Johnson and Constance Green sat on the floor beside the window seat in the living room playing records. Both were in their teens. They had an ongoing debate about the merits of English folk-rock versus American rock & roll. Eric played Lydia Pence and Fairport Convention; Constance countered with Janis Joplin and Frank Zappa. Every 15 minutes the grownups (Cyril, Vita-Fleur and Constance's parents, Louise and Jaspar Green) hollered from the bloated depth of armchairs to “
TURN THE RECORD DOWN!
” Eric's sisters were reading
Elle
and English
Vogue
in their rooms upstairs, and Carla, Constance's little sister, was outside playing in the garden. Dull-dull-dull. But for Eric and Constance, the promise of this summer afternoon was still not killed.

The Greens had only just arrived in New Zealand in December, emigrating from a Connecticut suburb about 20 miles northeast of Westport/Greenwich, Episcopal nirvana. The Johnson's knowledge of geography did not extend to all the differences contained within the twenty miles between Bridgeport and Old Greenwich. Jaspar and Louise, both Anglophiles, were both still thrilled with their move to Wellington, which compared to Bridgeport was an epicenter of English-speaking culture. Meanwhile Eric and Constance circled round each other like two strange animals. Neither had met anyone like the other before.

That summer, Eric was permanently “home” from Wanganui Boy's Collegiate. He'd been expelled. After putting up with six years of torture—beatings from school prefects, classmates, even younger boys; being picked last for every team; weeping in the toilets, the School decided Eric “lacked character.” That is, he wasn't using queerness as a means of negotiating power in Wanganui Boy's Collegiate hierarchy. He was a full-time queer. The very sight of him—blonde tousled hair, gray shirt tails, pale and thin as a pre-Raphaelite Ophelia—became disruptive to the school. “Sent down” (from Wanganui back to Wellington, New Zealand) at 17, Eric wanted to go straight to university. His parents refused. He was socially “not ready.” They insisted he attend the new, optional seventh-form, created for future math and science majors. Eric rebelled. In desperation, Cyril agreed to let Eric choose from any school in Wellington.

At 14, Constance was a jumble of orange polyester miniskirts, plastic earrings, dirty words. Louise and Jaspar, hoping to raise her shabby self-esteem, also decided to let Constance choose a school. She'd be going into Sixth Form. Constance and Eric's first revelation to each other was that they'd both enrolled at Wellington Trades and Tech. It was a decision they'd each made separately and perversely and to the horror of their parents so of course they bonded instantly.

Located at the edges of the city's only slum, Wellington Trades and Tech had an impressive Latin motto carved above the door:
Qui Servum Magnum
. But no one there could read it since the school had not taught Latin for at least 20 years. “He Who Serves Is Greatest.” Well, the future was no secret: lifetimes spent in auto body shops and typing pools. So everybody made the most of those last three years of school, getting stoned and fingerfucking each other in Biology and Study Hall.

Unlike his parents, who were impressed by the Green's Connecticut credentials, Eric knew straight off that Constance's cultural pretensions were strictly trailer-park. Tough-talking Constance became Eric's creature, his Pygmalion. Their first job was to get rid of her hideous American accent, replace it with the educated Yorkshire intonations he'd picked up from his Dad. Eric told Constance what to read and what to listen to. Sometimes they reviewed scenes from her past life for Eric's judicious editing. Eric approved of Constance's political transgressions—suspended from elementary school for reading Lenny Bruce and leafletting for the Black Panthers. But all the rest would have to go—the shoplifting, the biker gangs and blowjobs, the arrests for drug possession, breaking and entry—were just too tacky.

All summer long Eric and Constance had the most fabulous adventures, unfolding like the pages of an Enid Blyton storybook. Nights, they hung out at the Chez Paree. Afternoons they caught the trolleybus and rode out around the bays, scaling volcanic rocks to watch the sunset. One day they packed a picnic lunch and went hiking in the hills above Karaka Beach, scene of Katherine Mansfield's famous story “At The Bay.” Eric did a wicked impersonation of Mansfield's alter-ego, Kezia, and they laughed so hard they didn't notice when a Tasman fog came rolling in. Cyril himself drove out to find them. He looked so Midlands-serious with his torch and oilskin parka, like the man in the Gorton's Fishcake ads, that Eric and Constance punched each other in the ribs to keep from laughing on the long ride home. “What a Dag!” (New Zealand slang for laugh or sheepshit), Constance learned to say. Eric had a color photo of a hippie-gypsy couple hitch-hiking beside a wheatfield, torn out of one of Laura's
Vogues
. Could this be him and Constance?