The rest of this story goes into the next summer when I was in the city just a week to flush out old mediocrities, and we were turning warm in mutual condolences, we less hopeful floggers, in the same tavern, when Elton, the creep, came in with the best-looking woman I had ever seen anywhere. He was unchanged, slumping, holding his mouth like a stunned halibut’s, less than zero to say. Nobody had ever known where, under what cold bricks he lived. He was always just abruptly there, parachuted it seemed — that sudden — out of some ghastly greasy aerial pollution, face like the cunt of a possum. But the woman, why, she was with him and not vomiting, not vomiting at all. I think she was Brazilian. Pecan-skinned, silver-heeled, high-breasted all-out for summer. The despair in the tavern you could dip with a cup, and I wet my pants in sorrow and desire. That poor beauty, bought outright by Elton as his wife, was so reamed and gouged within one minute by every straight male eye in the bar she’d have been sausage under a few rags and heels had thought taken action. Elton — I did catch it, didn’t I? — looked at me briefly and lifted one upper lip in what I think was an attempt at a smirk, although it was hard to tell with the dead eyes. All he did was stand there with her fifteen minutes. Neither one of them even had a drink. They said he was all sober now but he was such a creep nobody had ever known he was alcoholic, and if changed he looked worse now. Still, I believe I caught his smirk, which he did not have character enough to maintain. Then they strolled out, or she did, and he had his doughy oily palm on her crease, a whole other order of butt it was so good, and then I suffered the gnashing tragedy of never seeing her again, ever, in my life.
This I relay partially to explain I have not failed in only one place. No, I am cosmopolitan, tested. Also to assure you as in those fat bright books you might read that the truly wealthy are often true worms. But not so much this as to warn myself about the surgeon’s wife, especially waiting right now in the Audi for her special abuse, maybe, a different sort than Elton’s, but I’ve an edge of sickness about this too. Something in her leans over on me out of her soul, a quality of boiled spaghetti. She appears and sits and waits a bit too much. She has told me that her first child (she has another) was created by her hand from the condom of her husband, herself alone in the bathroom while he slept, in the slyness of determined motherhood. He did not want children now, in school. Why’d she tell me? Does she see it as adorable or valiant? Is it a testimony of slightly appalling urges in the womb or an ugly little act of deceit and control? I can’t tell, honestly. She appears and sits and waits a bit too much. There is, without my having possessed her yet, a bit too much preparation and dullish watchful stare about her, and a persistent slackening in her jaws, though she has a red marvelous mouth, as if she were sucking at me in bits and might become at her climacteric all mouth and vacuum, oral entirely, have me down the maw with only my poor shoes sticking out. I fear in short that she is a creep. But that’s not even the worst fear. As with Elton I know now I was frightened he wanted near me because I was a creep. Creeps go for creeps and the veterans know who they are instantly. Because a loser like me can have honor — as the used have honor and life even in their outrage, while the user has mere habit — and the creep none. Was evil ever this low, banal, and gaudy? Imagine Elton, who was indeed the picture of Mr. Trump without money, but more slumped and even oilier, but the same mouth and dead eyes. And Elton went directly to me. I knew the others he went to: they were at least latent creeps, without exception — the common denominator my friend from Maine left out.
I won’t tell Mary everything, but it’s necessary I listen to her, because I’m beginning to feel threatened, without consummation, only long preparation by our words, our merchandise, and our car wrecks. A certain song had come out I’d heard on the FM, and now I owned it. By Radiohead. The name of it exactly: “Creep.” It is a haunting thing, sung by a creep to a goddess oblivious to him. I think of Elton. “What am I doing here?” the creep pleads, and it hits me very deeply, a pain of perfect acknowledgment. Why do I like it so much? Why has Mary asked me to please quit playing it over and over, paying no attention to the other songs on the CD? What am I so tranced about? she demands. Why don’t you go out and just rake her down, the doctor’s ex-fox? Not all women are good. Some women have tragic pussies, she pushed on to get to my head. I’d never heard Mary use a bad word and I stopped the music.
“There’s something wrong with women who talk and wait and plan too much. My friend. Why you? There are certainly others more in her league. Why is she still in town, even?” she says.
Now I’m truly scared in my concupiscence, my ready loins, my thighs with some muscle definition all sightly from private squats with seventy pounds on my shoulders, my calves corded and well-tennised — these secret extraordinary gifts all for her waiting. But I frown at good Mary. Then comes the patient smile and the hooded eyes, taught by example by my own father in home combat. “I wish I was special! But I’m a creep!” the defeated tenor of Radiohead howls. “I don’t belong here!”
God what freedom in that statement. I just adore it and am terrified too.
Elton, at last confessed, at last! Elton! Forgive my abuse, little rich man!
Besides buying various rugs, mats, futons, pillows, and even sleeping bags for us to have our earnest postures on in different rooms together, Jane is planning her own home for the first time in her life, she says. Her dearly own. It will be a tour. I sense I am something of an agent of travel for her. The home is going up north of the city, near a lake, on a hill with big trees and hanging moss around it. She stands spread-legged like Marilyn over that grate in New York in the empty boarded air of her rooms, while I watch her high eloquent rump and tennis legs, just a slight burn of tan on them, and fine ankles into slung-back short heels. With her back to me I can almost bring back the Brazilian, Elton’s bride. She intends to be “courted” this time. She wants stages. She loves it that we met on the tennis courts, like college children. I’d been so long without a woman, I could wait and get excited only in the head for a while, as you can get unhungry by not eating long enough. I think I had not, until Jane, ever had dessert at a restaurant and stared slyly for two hours at every twitch of a woman’s eyebrows, blue in the groin. I go to bed alone. No, really, it is not disagreeable. My head language becomes cleaner, my instincts have a sudden balm, and I feel right tidy in this love, if that’s what I have.
A nun once told me she had been constantly in love all her life, a sweet mental love more superb and wider than any touching could supply.
“Impossible,” I said.
“Well damn you,” she added, “Mister.”
She too must have guessed I was a creep, because her voice had run out scarily as from another person sitting beside her on the airplane. And she was shocked. I was shot with cold.
I have lately thought about my birthplace, St. Louis, and what is wrong there. Eminent creeps have issued from there as by some necessity of the environment. T. S. Eliot and William Burroughs, maybe they are profound, but does anybody miss the sluggish dead-staring creep quality in them either? Jane is also from there. I could never quite decide about the hipster of my New York summer, the paragon, Miles Davis, who in his autobiography gave us the nice term country hip for bluesmen along the river. But sometimes there was a rancid flatness to him, even beyond his heroin glare. The surgeon’s wife — I call her that when I put her away a bit to study — loves the right clothes, I love the right clothes, and Miles Davis held them near sacred. I want to be country hip like Davis’s friends, smooth as a modest flower behind the counter of the parts store. Jane seems more born in the latest shift, her hair fluffed casually by some fag offstage, impeccable.