Queenie (21 page)

So what the hell, my draw is perfect by now. And it’s one way to get through Central Park.

I end up kind of steamy at the zoo proper, and gazing at the largest chimp madonna, who is sitting with squeezed eyes and a smile, in a bowknot around her own child. Which has squeezed eyes and a smile. And is probably dreaming of being off somewhere, in its own bowknot.

Does it crave to explain itself to itself? How far down the line does spiritual experience stop?

…By the ache between my armpits, I’m about to have one. The best I can do is fold my arms around myself, in rough imitation of a lonely bowknot, and wait…

Oh, it’s spring, I think shivering; maybe I am suffering from parthenogenesis! Human beings are not supposed to. To reproduce themselves all by themselves in whole or in part. But in my chest cavity where only a few weeks ago a thumping world-soul filled it, something much less practical is surely forming. Much more lost and intense. Like if a poem is coming on and your protoplasm is not fitted for it. It’s nothing I could tell a zoo lab assistant. It’s the sort of thing you tell a chimp.

Or ask.

O chimp—how was it for you, when you first knew you were going to be alone forever and ever with your lyrical self?

Is it a pink sensation, like swallowing your own tongue and slowly savoring it? Is it like weeping for your future in a dream because you haven’t had it yet, and waking from the nightmare to find it’s still with you?

The wonderful thing about chimps is that you can find one in any capital city. And they will always give you the same reply.

So now can I limp on home and settle down to looking for a lover?

Once you choose a career that should be easy, providing it allows for both.

Maybe that was always my conflict; now maybe I’ve solved it. As Sam Newber says, if you’re a respectable candidate for suicide and murder both—what other road is open to you but art?

I can always choose which one later.

It would be nice to have a poet in the family, but I’ll never feel anything but prosy. Just put one foot after the other and limp home.

One big foot. Because Oomph’s shoes hurt….

When I get there, the air has that good deserted feeling. A note says Aurine and Oscar have gone to join the tycoon, in Palm Springs. His firm wants to buy the tenement block where L’Alouette is for an office tower, and rebuild the restaurant. “They’ll call it
Les
Alouettes,” Oscar’s note says. “They think big.”

Aurine is already doing it. She’s left five hundred bucks in bills in case I want to fly down. Or fly “anywhere the world is suitable for Easter.” And says please to look on the hall table for my mail.

I glide by without stopping. There’s only a thick letter that must have my midterm grades on it. This time of year, there should have been a postcard.

On Gran’s TV, I see the fifty bucks for the burglar has increased to sixty-five.

Inflation is everywhere, even in my aunt and uncle’s relationship.

What are those two doing, traveling with a third anyway? Catch me somebody, before my education is complete.

Up, up quick to the attic, where a young girl can still be naïve. You get what you can dream. You dream what you can get.

I spend the night pawing through my trunkful of adolescent drawings, composition, jingles, part-songs—including a requiem for several animals, to see if I can turn up a career there.

Even finding some lines On My Narcissism, an early
pensée:

I know the cold raptures of my own skin

Dark behind it is the room with no loves

In the gilding light my naked figure, a Braque violin.

I’ve done everything too young—except for what counts.

The whole trouble with living is you don’t start with a requisite knowledge of yourself. Ought to be given you at birth like a pedigree—or a horoscope in which you can believe. Like, “Fucking won’t really interest you. For you marriage with an old man—you haven’t enough energy for a career.” That’s not me, of course.

My trusty little tape recorder is there of course, in with all those cassettes. They’re not art, they’re me, but maybe some kind of a switch can be made. Hang your childhood on a limb, your mike around your neck, and start wandering.

Maybe family confession is best.

…Maybe if I sit quite still by the telly and tape nothing, somebody will come and burgle me….

Tell me a movie, Gran. In the studio of my heart.

Yes love. It’s called
She Dreams of Him.

She dreams of him. A
Green Mansions
bird boy? A
Cheri
? No, this is America. And not a belle epoque.

I suppose a man like any girl of today puts together, made of sneak dreaming and open viewing?

Or maybe some lost grocery boy of infancy, with homburg-ribbon father-image bound round him like black sticking tape?

Along with whatever NBC daytime can tell me about that lost platonic half of ourselves we want to go to bed with.

…Is it a twin she wants, you viewers? A not impossible American male who is not a virgin at heart?

Not a roué—they always have bad breath. And are not really intelligent.

Not an Oscar—he’s a husband. Though a good uncle. Bad husbands, that’s what the weak protectors are. And the good ones are tyrants, beating you with their money belts. They don’t know about love—that’s what they keep you for.

Go, go, Granny, what if it should be love she’s dreaming of?

I look down at my tapes all neat in their bag. The Piranesi Tape. The Father Detwiler one. The Monsignor. The Werner one.

O Channel Two, let
me
tell you…

Then the bottom drops out of unreality.

Above the telly, one of the ikons is gone! One of the St. Georges—that old tycoon. So the two of them are paying their own way down there after all. Or could the ikon have gone sometime back, toward a silly girl’s education?

That hits me, like a
pensée
.

Doesn’t seem to be anything left to do but look at my grades.

Which now I have my contacts in, I see the postmark is from Brazil, or the Argentine, or the Philippines. Somewhere on the Spanish Main. But I’m not one to stop to smell a letter to see what disease it brings, before I open it.

Out falls his card. With that half-yearly scrawl you can spend a year deciphering.

What makes the envelope thick is the poem. Which is typed in the same red, but this time is signed. So I can read it easy, and all over again. “Down here in youth, our abattoir——”

So that louse has poems like this in his psyche. I’ll bet he can beat any guys he meets in the ring.

But it’s the card that I cry over.

That door at the grieve-in has traveled so far. That sincere door, with my name very small on it, and what I wrote. Turning up for him to read, across all the waving pampas, and the Roll-on-thou-deep-dark Byronic seas.

How was I to know what world concern could bring me personally?

And that I too am a cause going down the drain of history? I can read it in my own words, copied right there on the card. “Oh why don’t people remember that they for-get?”

Isn’t that poignant?

I can’t cry with contacts in. Besides, if you’re crying for just everybody, it doesn’t last long.

Also the return address on the envelope is illegible.

So I have to phone Palm Springs.

Aurine comes on suspiciously full of fancy nonchalance, like the mother of the bride. But it’s Oscar who reads me that envelope. He always knows where those two are; he’s Tekla’s executor. His voice comes over just the same—full of aphorisms for me to quote later. “Old people are each other’s executors, Queenie. They have to keep in touch.”

The tycoon is real enough, I hear, though he’s no longer down there. They’ve discovered what he really wants is this house.

I’ve been spared one thing though that hit me the minute I smelled setup—he’s not Giorgio.

But the two of them can tell that romance is what I’ve come down to. And that I intend to be practical about it.

“It’s as hard a place to get to as Cuba,” Oscar says. “You have to be hijacked there too.” But he has faith in me. He tells me from where.

I say, “Aurine—I’m taking my diamond along.”

She says, “Of course, dear. You may need it someday. For Giorgio.”

I almost start to cry again.

“Aurine,” I whisper, “have you any suggestions for carrying it? I’ve hit on one, but it’s kind of
obvious
.”

“Darling——” she crisps back, “but of course!” Asking them for recipes always energizes them. “Look in my lingerie drawer, to the left of the sachets. Next to my medals.” Holy ones. “You’ll find two bras Alba once brought me back from Paris; they should fit you now. Two gives you a change. Look carefully for the wee pockets—pity the diamond isn’t
two
of them.” How charming her laughter is when it’s mercenary!—Oscar is laughing too. We are for his amusement again.

Oh it’s good to come from people unconcerned with world welfare, with nerves built on love and wine without guilt, and money just a little tainted with joy!

“Get off the line a minute, Oscar,” says Aurine.

She says there’s a little silver-wire-and-mesh gadget I’m to take along too. In case I ever want to
show
the diamond to him. “It’s called a
cache-nombril
.”

Oscar’s still on the line, breathing omnisciently. “Life repeats itself,” he always says, “but it takes a smart customer to catch the echoes.”

And before your three minutes are up.

“Oh darlings——” I say. Education chokes me up. I want to tell them the truth, but lovingly. “You’ve been the best background ever. How could you help it’s a fucking world outside!”

He’s
not going to be the first to speak. Standing there, taking off his helmet, why should he? In that white silk suit I mistook the back of for a pilot’s uniform, his huge shoulders look as if they’re shrugging; he’ll never again be narrow enough for a tailor’s dream. Oh I have such respect for him, he looks at least twenty-five! Burned black as his face is now, he still looks North American, and his nose isn’t really broken, it’s only more there. He has on one of those dark blue shirts men up home still declare their manual labor with, but I’ll soon learn he’ll just as soon wear any mild pink or howling purple that takes his eye at a stall; he’ll tell me that a shirt can’t express your idea of the world. Neither can an art collection, or a model factory, he says. Or even a small, choice guerrilla airforce where every man in it has cut his disc or two in rock.

He’ll tell me they’re only his ways of expressing himself. He’ll say, “Queenie, the one sure way to express your view of the world—is to state your view of it.” But just now, he’s not going to be the first to speak.

And I’m not.

I can already tell this lagoon we’ve landed on will be so right for me, especially in an orange bathing suit. The wooden dock we’re on has that dark green barnacle slime which can’t be faked, wet and salt and full of integrity. And creaking slowly. Fish are down there, mauve and Matisse. The U.S. plane stands on the beach like a housefly on a travel folder. Oh the natural world is so full of natural metaphor—maybe I’ll never need to talk again. Beachcombing the language nits out of my hair, oiling my skin with the silence here—maybe making just a few dolphin squeaks in bed. Night after night.

I don’t know yet we’ll be spending only one here. Restlessness is the real riches, when you’re rich enough. Meanwhile, looking along the dock, I feel like a macaw in a monastery. Aren’t there any women here? No prejudice. But when you dream, a nearby woman can help check on what you’re getting.

On the plane, there was nobody but those same two melon faces, any-country color, with south-of-the-border smiles but no chitchat, even in the airpockets. I tried a rapport, saying, “I don’t share the American contempt for tropical sugar republics,” but they didn’t answer.

They are now scuffing up the plane’s metal with a sander, and painting out the number with a name. They’re treating that plane like a girl. I have to smile when I think that, and when I see the name they’re putting on her, in words I know from the subway notices:
EL TREN
. Don’t leave
el tren
if it stops between the
stationes.
Inquire of the guard, or the
polizia.

When I smile, Giorgio’s face flies open.

When I laugh, he lets out the South American for ho-ho. Underneath, I can hear he hasn’t forgotten his English.

We end up shaking with laughter at each other—may be he can tell I haven’t forgotten
anything
. But neither one of us is going to be the kind of crap artist that puts feeling into words. Or not the first.

I don’t want any more interlocutors, not down here.

Right now, I’m out of the whole electronic, apostolic situation up there.

I’ve got my tapes in my bag, a whole dowry of them; if the need arises, I’ll play them back for him. Now and then maybe, between squeaks. He doesn’t look as if he needs diamonds.

But now I’m all talked-out and tentative. I just want to make my move.

I mean I want him to.

Later on, I’ll know that’s all he ever does, with women or the universe. Or bean and sugar cooperatives.

He says most men go from ideas to action; he goes the other way. If you can’t think what to do, he says, act! Your muscles will teach you your philosophy. The brain is the biggest muscle of all. And the realpolitik of love is the simplest. It’s just doing it.

Later, he’ll say what stops him, there on the beach, is that I am still an idea. And not only his idea. This is what has him cocking his head at me now, those eyes of his every time wider, like a dog that doesn’t know it’s a movie star. And compressing his mustache like a man who does.

He’s seeing I am my own idea. In fact I look like a whole bloody bunch of ideas, ready to go into action. He shrugs his shoulders, but I see he knows he’s not going to get by on his reflexes. He’s going to have to use his brain.

I just want him to show me how not to.

I have that quote On My Narcissism in my bag—but that’s just to remind me.