Wallace has stopped reciting his poem. Now he’s defending Pound to the Dutchwoman. She must be completely uninterested. He’s whistling on about T.S. Eliot, being fierce as usual about Pound, about whom he’s ambivalent. Whatever sympathy he has for Pound was aroused because he — Wallace — and Pound are both considered traitors by some of their countrymen. I think Pound’s support of Fascism was a type of temporary psychosis, to which Wallace is no stranger either, I might add. Wallace is more paranoid than I could ever be; and he is rabidly heterosexual. Though, again, I can’t see why any woman would want to sleep with him.
I’ve often noticed that even the most unpleasant men attract reasonable and kind women; these women put up with and serve these men for ages. They cook and clean for them, tidy up their social messes. And what for? The love of genius. It’s not likely that genius could be attached to so many miscreants. Sometimes the women are masochistic, but then so am I, I should think, in some ways, and I’d never want a man like Wallace. He’s unbearable.
He seems to think he saw Pound in St. Elizabeth’s, insisting that he did visit him and even hid behind a tree to watch him after he was supposed to have left the hospital grounds. I hope Wallace was sane when he did so, although it doesn’t sound as if he was. Imagine how Pound must have felt being incarcerated in a mental hospital, locked up with and surrounded by manic depressives and schizophrenics, and then to have an ambulatory lunatic like Wallace pop up, scot-free, raving as wildly as any in there with him! I don’t believe Pound was truly insane. He was an arrogant and disagreeable man but an important poet, nonetheless. In this I agree with Wallace. T.S. Eliot was playing possum, Wallace now declares. Wallace has dropped to the ground to imitate a possum, and his girlfriend is urging him to stand up or sit down. This is tiresome.
I look away. Helen has returned and is now on her terrace. The sun has almost entirely set, leaving behind glorious slashes of red and purple in the darkening sky. She’s turned one light on; it’s hanging above her head but she’s not reading. Drawn to the light as I am, Wallace looks in Helen’s direction and says that he met “that young woman”—he knows her name — at the market and asked her if she ever intended to marry and would she consider him if she did. Wallace says that he dropped to one knee to ask her for her hand and that Helen laughed and told him to get up and relax. Wallace’s girlfriend is not amused. What is her name? Something guttural — Brechje, I think. Wallace explains that he asked Helen to marry him only to make her feel better, for surely a woman on her own is lonely. The life of a spinster is barren, he warned Helen. I can just picture Wallace doing that and imagine Helen’s disgust. He seems to have a penchant for dropping to the ground.
Once, when he was in Paris, Wallace trotted about the city wearing a pith helmet and dunked his head under the cascading waters of several stone fountains. He filled his pith helmet with water to throw over himself. It was a hot summer. He showered in the street and lay on the ground next to Notre Dame until the gendarmes removed him. That was the summer his mother came to Paris to see him, to rescue him from the Beats and so forth. But Wallace was not for rescuing. He enjoyed the bohemian life and also enjoyed throwing himself at his mother’s feet, accusing her in a loud moan of driving him crazy. When he tells this story he always notes: My mother shook and so did her gold jewelry. Wallace loves making a scene.
Roger is approaching, affecting his usual manly gait, and I spy a peculiar little smirk on his lips that I’d like to rub off. Or rub out, rub him out. I must be drunk or Helen is right and I hate him. He kisses the Dutchwoman’s hand elegantly and Wallace sits up, like a well-trained dog, to pay attention to him, as if to a teacher. To my eye Roger is in no way commanding. He can be pedantic, though. They all chatter together aimlessly for a bit and Roger asks how my book is going and if I didn’t finish a big chunk the other night. My work is progressing, I lie, and yours, dear? I’m past the hurdle, he says. I act as if I believed him. Then he goes on to talk about his novel, its structure, as if all one wanted to hear about were his artistic trials and tribulations. It is one thing to discuss a literary subject, it is quite another to complain endlessly about the difficulty of writing. These things, I believe, ought never be the topic of discussion. Would a carpenter take up the dinner hour telling all assembled how hard it was to finish this or that job? No, he’d get on with it. If he were intelligent he might talk about an aspect of carpentry from which all assembled might learn something. Carpentry affords many metaphors.
You’re airing your clean laundry again, I say to Roger. In this you and I have no meeting of the mind. Unhappy with my castoff, he responds and points to Yannis, who’s dying of boredom, I assume, at another table. Oh Roger, I retort, in mock horror, you strain credulity. You are tres transparent. And you, Horace, he answers, are in no position to talk. I am sure Yannis has heard Roger’s remark; this bodes ill for the rest of the evening.
The evening ends as most do. It blurs into a watery mass of colors, amorphous moments and words, the night’s palette. Helen’s light is still on but she is no longer on her terrace. Her curtains are drawn. I wonder if she is making love. I want to make love, though that is not what Yannis and I often do. He sometimes permits me to love him and occasionally he responds to or services me. I content myself with the past. There was a love of my life, years and years ago. He and I shared a bed and a home for fifteen years, and it ended finally and suddenly, broken off mysteriously and mutually after a petty quarrel, and I’ve never understood it. That was many years ago, and he’s been dead for ten, and I never again truly shared my life and lived with anyone that way, so profoundly, not after him. I was involved with a few, but none like him.
Yannis is no grand passion, not even a small one. He’s a comfort to me, and sometimes he is not, as when I am irritable from drink and he is sulking about some wound that is probably self-inflicted. I do have a sharp tongue and say things I don’t mean, most of which I’m sure he doesn’t understand, but the boy has a terrific capacity for dark moods, which sometimes frighten me. I try to cheer him up with gifts and small trips. I don’t understand him and he certainly doesn’t understand me. He thinks I putter about and just type, for example, and I think — I don’t know what I think. I am too old to expect more. I am ridiculous. My body is decaying, the flesh literally weakens and drops from the bone, gravity is pulling at me. I grow old, I grow old. Alicia says it’s the drink and perhaps she is right.
T.S. Eliot understood decay, I’ve often said that was his métier. But need and lust, in me they have not weakened and from me they have not fled, even though my body shrinks, grows tired, and my flesh loses its hold, its grip on life. It doesn’t matter — matter’s not the matter — and more’s the pity, because my thoughts are the same, and if I allow myself these — primitive, primordial, and ageless — they make me young again, in my mind, and I feel a blast of lust, of full-bodied, young desire rising up from my darkest self. Furiously it rushes into my mouth and then to my genitals where it settles, only to become cold and solid and still. I can taste it, my desire and lust, like Proust’s madeleine. I can become terribly sad, despondent. I want to rage against this inevitable fate, to rage like so many men before me. Sometimes I want to die.