The Royal Family (42 page)

Tyler drove down to Capp Street, but there were no women on the corner. Maybe there’d been a sweep, or maybe it was merely too early.

He drove to the Tenderloin and thought he saw Domino, but she disappeared into a hotel too quickly to be sure.

He drove down to Mission Street and parked at Fifth. Then he began to stroll aimlessly. Inside the new Museum of Modern Art building, which was striped with smooth black and rough grey stone, there was a Frida Kahlo exhibit, and a bespectacled woman said rapidly to her companion: All of her portraits deal with her
pain
and
suffering.

This concept seemed to make the other woman very happy. —Go ahead, thought Tyler to himself. Go get empowered.

I guess she’s the patron saint of women, a sour man was saying to
his
buddy. In this show they relate to her through their menstruations or something.

Christ, he thought, I don’t know which of them is worse. Probably the guy, because he’s so obviously malicious, whereas Ms. Spectacles there is just a parrot. I guess I prefer parrots.

Then suddenly he recollected Domino on the bed in the Tenderloin hotel room. She’d complained about something and he’d sarcastically replied that this heart bled. —Of course, it always bleeds around now, he’d said. It’s that time of the month. —He began to sweat with shame when he remembered, admitting to himself that he was as boorish as anyone. But then defiance stung him and he thought: Well, she deserved it. She was so humorless and shrill. She kept asking me if I was a misogynist. She kept . . .

He went to the gift shop and bought his mother an exhibition catalogue.

The sour man was at the gift shop also. He wasn’t buying anything, anything. Tyler saw him spitefully fold down the page of a book, while the other man grimaced with mirth. He kept saying unpleasant things about women. Tyler started hating him. He wanted to feel tolerance or even compassion for the man, because hatred on such grounds really constituted hatred for himself. Tyler might not actually be, as Domino had labeled him in her catholic hostility, a misogynist, but he confessed his grey and nasty edges. The encounter with John had left him in a state of anxious irritation; he was not himself. He had a friend in Noe Valley who’d embarked on a program of self-improvement through meditation. Tyler asked whether meditation would in and of itself induce serenity (he had in mind the feeling he experienced when he sat inside the Roxie movie theater with its smell of stale popcorn, waiting for the commencement of some comfortingly ancient print of a European film about other people’s problems, with subtitles which would tersely recapitulate dialogue of a picturesque langorousness and sadness). The friend was of two minds about that. If one’s aim was to reach a higher spiritual level, the end result might be increased coherence, and thus perhaps decreased strain on the soul; but to get to that point, one would surely be required to rearrange oneself, which necessitated disequilibrium. It was obvious to Tyler that his relations with John were moving toward some permanent conclusion of honest mutual exposure. But what if that change were actually, as any superficial observer would conclude, a
regression
such as driving down the hill to Gough Street where it was low and dark with many weak stale lights? For that matter, one might propose as an example that same Roxie Theater, where he had once taken Irene to see “Queen of Hearts,” in hopes of holding her hand in the darkness. The movie had not yet begun. Tyler was already feeling serenity (mixed, to be sure, with pleasurable anticipation; he was hoping that Irene’s delicious palm might sweat against his at all the thrilling parts); however, some noisy boys with yarn in their long hair were sitting in the row ahead; and Irene, shocked, said to him: I’m
just looking at those four people in front of me and they’re drinking hard liquor! —She was a little prudish; she could not enjoy herself after that. —Tyler’s friend had proposed that a graphic representation of travel from one spiritual level to another might well require many more than two axes, so that one might simultaneously be rising on one plane and sinking on another. The Gospels said that a seed could not flower until it had fallen into the earth and died. Tyler could not remember exactly how the parable had gone. He wished to know more about Christ, even if only to struggle against Him and clarify his own allegiance, which, as Dan Smooth had jeeringly insisted, might well be to the Canaanite idols. If he was satanic or ungodly or merely unbrotherly, wasn’t it worse to fog over the fact, pretending that he was still trying to be good? Although he still felt wretched whenever he recalled that hot afternoon in his mother’s living room with the reddish-brown blinds drawn against the sun and his mother asking whether he and Irene had betrayed John, his anguish contained a tincture, however pale, of relief. He had not obfuscated. He had quite simply and bluntly refused to answer her charges. It’s too late for that, he had said. No matter what he might fear or yearn for, month by month his existence was clarifying itself. The issue of Irene, rather than dissolving with Irene’s dead flesh, continually took on a more evident and permanent materiality. Irene no longer lay but
stood,
no,
towered,
between himself and his mother, between himself and John. Well, let it be so. Irene was the seed of Christ. She had died, and now she rose up bearing leaves and fruit like the grand old tree in his mother’s front yard. Tyler had not and would not contest anything. He would let all aspersions be. He would wait, and live, until the change within him was complete; then he’d know what to do.

But he was afraid. And his was one of those natures which do not cower, but bristle at a threat. He scorned to reply to his mother or argue with John, but he could not help feeling an aching resentment which narrowed his eyes and ground tooth against tooth within his mouth. The sour man at the gift shop, who probably was unafflicted by awareness of Tyler’s very presence, was flipping through the catalogue now, calling Frida Kahlo a man-hater, a vagina-centered mediocrity, a once-a-month artist. To the sour man, it seemed, no woman had a brain, and Frida Kahlo’s paintbrush was one with the tongues of the ice-cream-licking girls in the bright bay window of Rory’s Twisted Scoop. And Tyler was incensed. The reason, of course, was that the whole world incensed him just then, but seeing that would have entailed seeing his own absurdity, so it merely seemed to him at that moment that any slighting nastiness directed toward femininity must insult Irene’s memory. He craved Irene. Closing his eyes, he saw her once again. She had lost a little weight since her marriage and her skin was stretched tight over her cheekbones so that she resembled a pale, debauched skull. Round and round, round and round. He had nowhere to go.

I see you’re actually buying that catalogue, the sour man said to him.

I’m a misogynist, Tyler said. I’m just buying it to jerk off to.

The sour man, uncertain whether Tyler was on his side or instead a sarcastic enemy, remained silent. The sour man’s friend, more astute, glared.

The salesgirl took the catalogue out of Tyler’s hand to scan it through the red laser eye-beam beside the register and said: I heard what you said.

I’m evil, Tyler replied. But I do have enough money to pay for that. Yep, I’m a paying customer. I’m an
American.

I think you’re disgusting.

Tyler could hear the sniggers of the two diabolical men beside him. He had struck a blow against feminism. He had come out on the side of Satan. They were sure that he was one of them now.

He turned around and said to them: I bear the Mark of Cain.

Then again they fell into a baffled silence.

You’re sick, said the salesgirl.

It was a clammy summer’s night in the Marina, lights frozen at the bases of harbor-masts. He went up Buchanan Street, and across from the Safeway met a bright window offering row upon row of massage chairs in an empty room. Near a dessert shop—yes, almost within reach of the fragrance of chocolate and steamed milk—he spied another parking garage, now closed, and peered down a long curvy greasy tunnel of light which passed beneath a round mirror, different only in scale from what the dentist always put in his mouth; then a right turn put an end to his seeing. The Queen could be there now; she could be anywhere. But no—why would she be here? This place was too far from the humid commerce she fed on. He sighed and trudged on, a little cold. Farther up the street, at Bay, a store of telescopes on tripods and binoculars in narrow glass shelves on the wall caught his attention; it had probably been closed for a good four or five hours now. Did John ever shop here? Tyler turned onto Bay and stood beneath the greenish foggy sky, on his left white flowers so bright and lovely and uncruel.

Oh, what a lovely catalogue! his mother said. Thank you, Henry. It looks as if it does full justice to the original. The colors are beautiful. What do you think of Frida Kahlo’s work?

I think it’s pretty good, but not as good as Diego Rivera’s, he said. I respect her.

It’s really quite moving, don’t you think?

Yes, I do, he said.

That was really thoughtful of you, his mother said. What a treasure.

Well, I’m glad you like it. How are you feeling?

A little weak, but not so . . . Henry, where’s John? I was under the impression that you were coming up with John . . .

And meanwhile John worked late at the office, beneath and among those great plaid and pulsing mirrors called skyscrapers. One time Chocolate, high on crystal meth, got chased out of the Tenderloin by the police, and when she came into the financial district it was rush hour with summer’s blue and gold peach-fuzz light on the skyscrapers, and a businessman in a multitude of businessmen marched crushingly toward her; Chocolate’s eyes could not let go of his face. —That man’s a skyscraper! she thought crazily. —He’s so tall and wide and rectangular! He’s shouting something about smoking cigars with his friends . . . —And indeed at that hour all the skyscrapers were moving like chessmen, so it seemed to her. Twenty-one storeys above her, chessmaster John moved his queen’s knight’s pawn on the tobacco brief, while in Pacific Heights lonely Celia sat smoking cigarettes, waiting for him to telephone.

Do say something clever for us, John, said Mr. Rapp.

I don’t feel like it.

You’re not going to disappoint us, now, are you, John? Because that just wouldn’t be good enough.

I am afraid that we are going to find pleasures in some cases opposite to pleasures,
John snarled. —Plato,
Philebus,
13a.

Well said! cried Mr. Rapp, clapping his hands. But is that perhaps a comment on the present proceedings? You see, everybody, how clever our new full partner is? Roland, could you top that? And, by the way, what’s your impression of Plato, John? I dip into the
Laws
from time to time . . .

Just another egghead, Mr. Rapp, said John. There are too many eggheads in the world.

Now, John. I need to ask you something. With your legal bent, and your gift for recitation, aren’t you yourself, perhaps (dare I say it),
an egghead?

No, Mr. Rapp. I’m a performing animal. I perform under duress, or for a reward.

Ouch,
John, that was cruel! It may be true, but sometimes it’s better not to say those things.

•

Until women can attain not only a genuine independence in relation to men but also a new way of conceiving themselves and their role in sexual relations, the sexual question will remain full of unhealthy characteristics and caution must be exercised in proposals for new legislation. Every crisis brought about by unilateral coercion in the sexual field unleashes a “romantic” reaction which could be aggravated by the abolition of organized legal prostitution.

 

G
RAMSCI
, prison notebooks (
ca.
1930)

•

Sunflower died, and Beatrice said: You know those candle with the color? It’s better to buy them than to make them. Otherwise the dead people, they doan accept.