Stone Mattress (13 page)

“You can’t be
in
a poem,” he’d said, crossly, because this infatuation of hers was worrying him. She was bound to cut herself on it: she was a clumsy girl, not skilful with edged tools. “Poems are made of words. They aren’t boxes. They aren’t houses. Nobody is
in
them, really.”

“Nitpicker. You know what I mean.”

Tin sighed, and at her insistence he sat down at his rickety third-hand pedestal table with the mug of tea he’d just made for himself and read the poems. “Jorrie,” he said. “These poems are not about you.”

Her face fell. “Yes, they are! They have to be! It’s definitely my …”

“They’re only about part of you.” The lower part, he did not say.

“What?”

He sighed again. “You’re more than this. You’re better than this.” How could he put it?
You’re not just a piece of cheap tail?
No, too hurtful. “He’s left out your, your … your mind.”

“It’s you who keeps on about
mens sana in corpore sano
,” she said. “Sane mind in a sound body, both together. I know what you’re thinking: that this is just about the sex. But that’s the
point
! I represent – I mean, she, the Dark Lady, she represents a healthy, down-to-earth rejection of the false, wispy, sentimental … It’s like D. H. Lawrence, that’s what he says. That’s what Gav
loves
about me!” And on she went.

“So,
in Venus veritas
?” said Tin.

“What?”

Oh, Jorrie, he thought. You don’t understand. Men like that get tired of you once they’ve had you. You’re in for a fall. Martial, VII: 76:
It’s only pleasure, it isn’t love
.

He was right about the fall. It was fast, and it was hard. Jorrie didn’t go into the details – she was too stunned – but what he pieced together at the time was that there was a live-in girlfriend, and she’d walked in on Jorrie and the Earthy Poet while they were disporting themselves on the sacrosanct domestic mattress.

“I shouldn’t have laughed,” said Jorrie. “That was rude. But it was such a farce! And she looked so shocked! It must have seemed really mean to her, me laughing. I just couldn’t help it.”

The girlfriend, whose name was Constance (“How prissy!” Jorrie snorted) and who was the embodiment of that very same wispiness and sentimentality so despised by the Poetaster – this Constance had gone white as a sheet, even whiter than she already was, and had said something about the rent money. Then she’d turned and walked out. Not even stomped: scuttled, like a mouse. Which just went to show how wispy she was. Jorrie herself would have done some hair-pulling and slapping at the very least, she claimed.

She had felt the departure of Constance ought to be a cause for celebration – the forces of vitality and life and the truths of the flesh had triumphed over those of abstractness and stagnation – but that had not been the outcome. No sooner had the Half-Rhymer been barred from the moon-maiden’s chamber than he began caterwauling to get back in: he yowled for his vaporous Truelove like an infant deprived of its nipple.

Jorrie was less than tactful about this excess of whimpering and regret – the words
pussy-whipped
and
limp prick
were thrown about by her with perhaps too much abandon – so her expulsion was inevitable. According to Mr. Poetaster, the imbroglio was suddenly all her fault. She’d tempted him. She’d seduced him. She was the viper in the orchard.

There was something to that, Tin supposed; Jorrie had been the huntress, not the hunted. But still, it takes two to tango. The Minor Minnesinger could have said no.

Short form, Jorrie had told him to shut up about Constance, and they’d had a fight about it, and Jorrie had been flung down onto the sewer grating of life like a used condom. No one had ever treated her like that before! His own heart wrenched with pity, Tin had tried to distract her – a movie, a drink, not that he could afford many of either – but she was not to be placated. There were no hysterics, no visible tears, but moping set in, followed by an ill-concealed, smouldering rage.

Would she step over the edge? Would she confront the poet in public, scream, hit? She was angry enough for that. A cruel joke had been played on her, since her Musehood, once a source of pride and joy, had become a torment: the Dark Lady non-sonnets were now enshrined in Gavin’s first thin collection,
Heavy Moonlight
, and they sneered at Jorrie from its pages, mockingly, reproachfully.

Worse, these poems accumulated gravitas as Gavin clambered
up the ladder of acclaim, collecting the first in what was to be a string of minor but nonetheless career-enhancing prizes. Those early poems had been augmented by others, different in tenor: the lover recognized the mere fleshliness, indeed the grossness and fickleness of the Dark Lady, and returned to the pursuit of his pallidly glowing Truelove. But that ice-eyed paragon had declined to forgive the heartbroken lover, despite his overcrafted and bathos-heavy and subsequently published pleas.

These later poems did not reflect well on Jorrie. She’d had to look up the word
trull
in Tin’s
Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English
. It was wounding.

Jorrie went on a retaliatory stud-gathering riff, plucking lovers like daisies from every wayside ditch and parking lot, then casting them carelessly aside. Not that such behaviour ever has any effect on the one who’s spurned you, as Tin knows from his own experience: if it’s gone as far as that, they don’t care how much you debase yourself to get back at them. You could fuck a headless goat and it would make no earthly difference.

But then the wheels of the seasons turned, and tender-fingered Dawn chalked up three hundred and sixty-two pink morning entrances, and then another year’s worth of them, and another; and the moon of desire rose and set and rose again, and so on and so forth; and the Poet of the Sprightly Prick receded into the dim and misty distance. Or so Tin hoped, for Jorrie’s sake.

Though it seems he has not receded. All you have to do is kick the bucket and you’re right back in the memory spotlight, thinks Tin. He hopes the lingering shade of Gavin Putnam will prove a friendly one, supposing it is indeed lingering.

Now he says, “Right, the Dark Lady sonnets. I remember them. Absinthe makes the tart grow fonder, but verse is cheaper: it certainly hooked
you
. You used to stagger into my barbershop enclave reeking of gutter sex, you stank like a week-old whitefish. You were cross-eyed over that dickhead the whole summer. I never could see it, myself.”

“Because he never would show it to you,” says Jorrie. She laughs at her own joke. “It was well worth the sight. You’d have been jealous!”

“Just don’t claim you were in love with him,” says Tin. “It was low, sordid lust. You were out of your mind on hormones.” He understands that kind of thing, he’s gone through similar infatuations. They’re always comic in the eyes of others.

Jorrie sighs. “He had a great body,” she says. “While it lasted.”

“Never mind,” says Tin. “It can’t be much of a great body any more, since it’s a corpse.” The two of them snicker.

“Will you come with me?” says Jorrie. “To the memorial service? Have a gawk?” She’s putting on a jaunty air, but she fools neither of them.

“I don’t think you should go. It would be bad for you,” says Tin.

“Why? I’m curious. Maybe a few of his wives will be there.”

“You’re too competitive,” says Tin. “You still can’t believe some other woman elbowed you out and you didn’t win the prize pig. Face it, you two were never meant for each other.”

“Oh, I know
that
,” says Jorrie. “We burnt out. Too hot to last. I just want to see the double chins on the wives. And maybe What’s-her-name will be there. Wouldn’t that be a hoot?”

Oh please, thinks Tin. Not What’s-her-name! Jorrie’s still so knotted up over Constance, the live-in girlfriend whose mattress she’d defiled, that she won’t even pronounce her name.

Unfortunately Constance W. Starr has not faded into obscurity as her wispiness ought to have dictated. Instead she’s become obscenely famous, though for a ludicrous reason: as C. W. Starr, she’s the author of a brain-damaged fantasy series called Alphinland. Alphinland has made such a vast shitload of money that Gavin the Relatively Penurious Poet must have been revolving in his grave decades before he actually died. He must have cursed the day he allowed himself to be led astray by Jorrie’s overheated estrogens.

As the Starr star has risen, so has Jorrie’s own star faded: she no longer twinkles, she no longer monkey-shines. The C. W. Starr feeding frenzy generates long and clamorous lineups in bookstores on the publication days of new books, with children and adults both male and female dressed up like the villainous Milzreth of the Red Hand, or the blank-faced Skinkrot the Time-Swallower, or Frenosia of the Fragrant Antennae, the insect-eyed goddess with her entourage of indigo and emerald magic bees. All of this hoopla must get right up Jorrie’s nose, though she’s never confessed to having noticed.

From the few times he’d accompanied Jorrie to the Riverboat, Tin has a vague memory of Alphinland’s unlikely genesis. The saga began as a clutch of ersatz fairy tales of the sword-and-sorcery variety, published in two-bit magazines of the kind featuring semi-naked girls on the covers being leered at by Lizard Men. The Riverboat hangers-on – especially the poets – used to make fun of Constance, but he guesses they don’t do that much any more. Money fishes with a golden hook.

Of course he’s read the Alphinland series, or parts of it: he felt he owed it to Jorrie. In case she ever asks for his critical opinion, he can loyally tell her how bad it is. And of course Jorrie has read it too. She’d have been overcome by jealous curiosity, she
wouldn’t have been able to restrain herself. But neither of them has admitted to having so much as cracked a spine.

Happily, thinks Tin, Constance W. Starr is said to be somewhat of a recluse; more so since her husband died, a newspaper obituary Jorrie had passed over in silence. In a perfect world, C. W. Starr won’t turn up at the funeral.

Odds of a perfect world? One in a million.

“If this Putnam funeral is going to be all about Constance W. Starr,” says Tin, “I am definitely vetoing it. Because it will not be, as you say, a hoot. It will be very destructive for you.” What he doesn’t say:
You’ll lose, Jorrie. The same way you lost the last time. She’s got the high ground
.

“It isn’t about her, I promise!” says Jorrie. “That was more than fifty years ago! How could it be about her when I can’t even remember her
name
? Anyway, she was so wispy! She was such a
pipsqueak
! I could have blown her over with a
sneeze
!” She gasps with laughter.

Tin considers. Such bluster, in Jorrie, is a sign of vulnerability; therefore, she needs his support. “Very well. I’ll go,” he says, with unfeigned reluctance. “But I’m not having a happy feeling about this.”

“Shake on it like a man,” says Jorrie. The phrase is from a Western matinee movie routine they used to do when they were kids.

“Where is the dreaded affair?” Tin asks on the morning of the memorial service. It’s a Sunday, the one day Jorrie is permitted to cook. Mostly her cooking is a matter of opening takeout
containers, but when she gets ambitious there will be smashed crockery, swearing, and incinerations. Today is a bagel day, praise the lord. And the coffee’s perfect because Tin made it himself.

“The Enoch Turner Schoolhouse,” says Jorrie. “It offers a gracious atmosphere reminiscent of a bygone era.”

“Who wrote that?” says Tin. “Charles Dickens?”

“I did,” says Jorrie. “Years ago. Right after I went freelance. They wanted an archaic tone.” She hadn’t exactly gone freelance, as Tin recalls: there had been a civil war at the advertising company and she’d been on the defeated side, having unfortunately told her antagonists what she really thought of them. However, she’d collected a reasonable parachute, which had enabled her to go into real-estate speculation. That had kept her in designer foot-fetish objects and vulgar, overpriced winter vacations until one of her menopause-era lovers made off with her savings. Then she was overleveraged, had to sell in a down market, and lost a crock of gold, so what could Tin do but offer her a refuge? His house is big enough for the two of them, just barely: Jorrie takes up a lot of space.

“I hope this schoolhouse venue isn’t a hotbed of kitsch,” says Tin.

“Do we have a choice?”

After ferreting through her closet, Jorrie holds up three of her outfits on hangers so Tin can evaluate them. It’s one of his demands – one of his requests – on the days when he agrees to attend events with her. “What’s the verdict?” she says.

“Not the shocking pink.”

“But it’s Chanel – an original!” Both of them frequent vintage clothing stores, though only the upmarket end. They’ve kept their figures, at least: Tin can still wear the elegant three-piece ’30s ensembles he’s sported for some decades. He even has a lacquer cane.

“That doesn’t matter,” he says. “No one’s going to read the label, and you are not Jackie Kennedy. Shocking pink would draw undue attention.”