Love Me (2 page)

She almost divorced me again after I shot the publisher of
The New Yorker
(an accident, sort of). He lay on the floor of the Oak Room at the Algonquin Hotel, quietly discoloring the carpet, and said, quietly, “You’ll never write for my magazine again, Larry Wyler,” and expired. I left New York the next day and returned to St. Paul, to a studio apartment on Ramsey Hill, and cooled my heels there until Iris was willing to take me back.

So I am basically okay. When people ask me, that’s what I tell them. “You’re sure looking good,” they say, which they never said twenty years ago when I did look good, but never mind. I’m sixty. Brown hair, low medium IQ, big feet and sloping shoulders, the face of a ladies’ shoe salesman, about a quart low in the charm department, and nothing to be done about it. Boo hoo for me. Hurray for monogamy.

Shortly, I’ll take coffee and the
Times
up to Iris, the mistress of the house, as she soaks in a hot bath, suds up to her neck, a rolled-up towel behind her head, listening to
Morning Edition
from NPR. And an hour later, she’ll appear downstairs good and pissed off at the Republicans for their treacheries. This bodes well for the day. We’ll eat our bran flakes and bananas and she’ll say something short and sharp about our shallow doctrinaire president and pick up her battered briefcase and hike to work downtown. Meanwhile, I stay home and write my column for the lovelorn.
Dear Mr. Blue, He used to be a young stallion taking me to heights of wild passion and then he turned into Eeyore, all moody and needy.
In the afternoon, I take a nap and scribble on a legal pad what I hope will become this book and I chop vegetables for supper. Iris comes home at 6. We eat. We go for our nightly constitutional, a two-mile circuit along West 7th past the old Czech lodge hall and the Day By Day Café, the porn shop and the magic store and the funeral parlor, and the half-mile trek across the High Bridge over the Mississippi to Cherokee Heights and back. Even on the bitterest cold nights when the arctic blast bites you in the shorts, she insists we do the Death March over the frozen Father of Waters—“It’s good for you,” she mutters through her ski mask, and I guess it is. It seems to settle the meal and pacify our minds and we arrive at some tender if inconclusive understanding of each other and come home and read ourselves into a pleasant drowsy state and so to bed.

Perchance to some nobility or else straight to sleep and the nobility of dreams. And then it’s 6 A.M. again.

 

 

 

Today Mr. Blue has a letter from
Lonely
asking how a woman who hates the bar scene can find a good man. And there’s
Frustrated,
who asks if he should stick with his programmer job or fly to Stockholm and pursue the woman he met at her farewell party two weeks ago. The Swedish girl. She didn’t say she loved him but there definitely was something between them and he can’t get her out of his mind. And then there is
Uncertain,
who responded to a personals ad
(Seek sex buddy. No grief artists, drama queens, memoir writers, Dylan fans, or people in recovery. I am a fattycakes & two-fisted drinker & UB2. Acne a plus.)
and met a large lonely man who came into her life like a bad case of psoriasis. He wants to borrow money so he can go back to technical college. Should she lend it to him? Surely not, but I am in no position to scorn her, or
Frustrated
either. I have my own flaws.

I go to fetch the
Times
from the front step and there is fresh snow, so I grab a broom and sweep the steps and the front walk. I like January. Christmas is put away and the cold air wakes a man up and kills off delusions of grandeur. I am sober this morning. It has been two and a half years.

Dark figures stumble through the dark toward the bus stop on West 7th, an old man in a beat-up denim jacket.
Dear Mr. Blue, I want to quit my custodial job and move to Florida but Mother needs me here. She is 95 and I am 72. What to do? I am freezing to death.
And a young couple not holding hands, her shivering violently in a cheap leather jacket, hands in her pockets, him solemn-faced, sleepy, earrings, head shaved. I’m guessing they live together and she is angry about the three years she’s invested in him.
Dear Mr. Blue, My girlfriend is mad because I’m not all that thrilled about the idea of us buying a house. I like things the way they are. She keeps saying, “What if I get pregnant?” As if this were an option. I’m 28 and don’t know what I want to do except buy a new guitar and write more songs. Why the sudden rush to buy a house? And silverware patterns? I don’t get it. Confused.
Hey, it’s only life, son. It can crowd in on a guy fast. Don’t buy the house if you don’t want to. Pray for clarification. I say a prayer for you now as you walk past me. Pray for me in return.

 

 

 

 

This morning, as I have for two and a half years, I stepped out of the shower and felt lucky. Stepped on the scale. 195. Brushed my teeth and toweled my thatch of thin hair and anointed myself with Tango deodorant and put on jeans and black T-shirt and asked God to forget my transgressions and give me a cheerful and attentive heart and headed for the kitchen to make coffee.

Let us speak about the importance of separate bathrooms. The wise old couple cherish their individual rights and one is the right not to be crowded. I am a man who awakens in a convivial mood, apt to shuffle off to Buffalo and sing about the red, red robin who comes bob-bob-bobbin’ along. Her Ladyship does not. She rises as if from open-heart surgery. She should not be jostled or spoken to until she gathers her faculties. This requires the
Times
and a cup of strong coffee. She sits in her bath, eyes closed, tendrils of brown hair trailing into the water, freckled arms folded over dappled breasts, organizing the world—the Holy Trinity, the Four Points of the Compass, the Seven Cardinal Virtues, the schools of the Western Collegiate Hockey Association, the avenues of Minneapolis,
Aldrich, Bryant, Colfax, Dupont, Emerson, Fremont, Girard.
When I tiptoe in, she reaches up for the paper and the cup of coffee and says, “Thank you. Good morning, ” and I am dismissed.

I am loathe to write about her, our life, my sins. I dislike revealing what must be revealed here. I love secrecy. I would love to live invisibly with Iris and let the dust settle on us until we are hauled off to the glue factory.

Communication is an injurious thing in marriage. A person should never ever discuss the marriage if it can be avoided. Sometimes in a weak moment you blurt out something—“You never understood me!” for example—and it becomes your albatross. “What did you mean when you said she has never understood you,” says the therapist, who hopes you will say more and throw some more sand in the pistons, all the more work for him at $150 an hour. Don’t answer the question. Keep all dark thoughts to yourself. Be cheerful. Tell the therapist to peddle his papers somewhere else. You can deal with your own problems by the time-tried method of shutting up and letting them pass.

One thing that kept our marriage together was a mutual distaste for Republicans. Nixon fuming about the Jews and Reagan weaving his little MGM fables and the Ivy rednecks George I and George II and their servitude to the obscenely rich. Without this gallery of rogues, we might’ve been history a long time ago.

It also helps that I’m not drunk.

I don’t want to but I will tell the truth to the best of my ability as a step toward sobriety. I sincerely apologize if this offends you, dear reader.

I met Iris O‘Blennis in choir when I was twenty. We were juniors at the University of Minnesota, 1963. She was in social work, I was an English major. Choir met MTW 3-4:30 in the musty basement of Northrop Auditorium. I took my place among the baritones and stood behind a pale shining alto with short brown hair and long neck and that was her.
Dear Mr. Blue, I am too shy to talk to girls.
Sing to them then. Join a choir. Pick out the girl you want and stand behind her and blend your voice with hers, gently, reverently, in tune, as if lifting her by the waist, and this will excite her and also create trust. Animals mate by ear, so do people. People mate in choir all the time in Minnesota. We are a choral state. Our director, Bruno Phillips, was rehearsing us in
The Passion According to St. Matthew,
and I leaned forward and looked down the front of her silk blouse and saw her pale freckled breasts resting in their white hammock and my baritone heart swoll up, as did my baritone pants.

I was thrilled to stand within inches of her and smell her and brush against her bare arms as we swung off together in
“O Mensch, bewein dein’ Sünde gross,”
breathing in unison, my voice a buttress and sounding board.

I followed her like a dog. She ran with a crowd of poets and literati who camped in the corner of the Shevlin Hall cafeteria and said airy things about jazz and sex and revolution and I sat studying her and entertaining lustful thoughts, working up the courage to ask her to come with me to a movie—
O Mr. Blue, how do you do that?
You do it by doing it, sir.—and then one day in May, I was witness to a horrible traffic accident (CAR JUMPS CURB, SLAYS FAMILY OF 4) and an hour later I stood dumbly in choir, weeping, as the apostles cried out for the soldiers to let Jesus go—
“Lasst ihn! Haltet! Bindet nicht!”
and I swayed forward and put my right hand on her bare shoulder and she turned and smiled up at me. And afterward asked me what was wrong. And I told her.

It was on the West River Road. I was sitting on the grass, reading
Dubliners,
and a car jumped the curb and mowed down the four picnickers. Bodies strewn like dolls on the grass and the Buick Dynaflow smashed into an elm tree and the driver was wandering around, an old man, confused, needing to “get to Dorothy‘s” and pleading with the dead to get out of his way. The bodies covered with picnic blankets. The crowd of relentless gawkers. The Elvis lookalike priest giving last rites. Fresh gawkers arriving by the minute.
What happened?
Car went out of control.
Anybody hurt?
No, they’re all dead. Four people gone, evaporated like a song.

We lay side by side on the grass in front of Northrop looking up at the white clouds and I told her all about it.

She took my hand and pressed it to her cheek.

“I am glad you’re alive,” she said. “Life is so precious, we have to savor every moment.” And she scootched over and kissed me on the mouth, a sisterly kiss that lasted longer than intended and sort of flared up into something passionate and noble, her tongue searching my mouth, and then she touched my pants and I about passed out for joy.

Odd fish that I am, I didn’t speak to her for a couple weeks. I skipped the kaffeeklatsch. Too much to say and no idea how to say it. So I made as if we’d never met. And my disregard paid off.

After the big performance in May of the
Passion,
I emerged from Northrop Auditorium and there she was, waiting, and said, “When are we going to make love?” We headed for her apartment on 8th Street SE above the Rexall drugstore and I followed her up the stairs. Why not? Two magnificent things in one day. The apartment was tidy, spare, a white kitchen table and two chairs, a row of clay pots, a sheaf of dry milkweed in a vase, a pine bookcase, a poster of Uncle Sam pointing his finger (I WANT YOU TO WORK FOR PEACE & JUSTICE), a big bed with a blue chenille cover. She lit a dozen candles on the windowsill and put the Bach cello suites on the record player. I sat on the bed. “The bathroom is down the hall if you need to use it,” she said. What would I use it for? I didn’t know. Was it my job to get a condom out of the medicine cabinet? I went into the bathroom, rinsed my face, stared at it in the mirror. Tried to look handsomer. No condoms in the cabinet. She lay on the bed. She said, “I honestly believe that people who love Bach are good people.” We kissed. She tasted of blackberries. I took off my shoes and socks. She lay my hand against her tremoring breast and I unbuttoned her shirt and she slipped out of her jeans and I took off mine. I kissed the pale slope of her belly with the little indentations from the elastic like the ghostly skyline of an alabaster city. The lush valley below. The birthplace of civilization.

The doorbell rang a nasty ring and she jumped up. “It’s the land-lord! He said he was going to check the toilet!” So I pulled on my pants and tried to look businesslike, went to the door, and it was a hollow-eyed man who wanted to discuss prophecies in Scripture. His handshake was damp. Perspiration shone on his brow. No easy matter getting rid of him, he was so jazzed on the idea that I stood at the threshold of a great spiritual turning point, and I hemmed and hawed about being busy and then I told him the truth: “I can’t talk to you now, I am about to get laid, sir.” He didn’t understand get laid. “I am about to fornicate with a young woman.” He backed away, quite mournful but promising to pray for me, and I returned to the bedroom feeling oddly depleted. The imminence of the Last Judgment and all. Fornication did not seem like a good idea, with those avenging angels poised to descend, the Antichrist, Armageddon, the seven-headed beast, the whore of Babylon and so forth. I put a Sinatra record on to get me in a secular mood. I thought, Oh boy, what if I can‘t—and that was a fatal thought to have right at that point. My penis shrank to the size of a tassel. It hung down like a defeated flag, like Florida. It forgot what it was there for. The minutemen lay down their rifles, the redcoats took Concord and Lexington. Meade turned tail in the face of Pickett’s charge and Gettysburg went gray and Lincoln fled Washington, disguised as a washerwoman. The U.S. Marines surrendered Iwo Jima. The Washington Monument melted like wax. I went to the bathroom and tried some little twirling and stretching exercises.
Fourscore and seven inches long, our forefathers brought forth on this continent a great rebirth of the penis, for the penis, by the penis.
Finally, I lay on Iris’s bed and turned my face to the wall. After years of gigantic involuntary erections in high school hallways whenever a girl came within three feet, now on this historic occasion when I am naked with a naked woman, God takes the lead out of my pencil.