She told me one afternoon the only other man she had loved since her husband was a man dying of cancer whose intensity in life and lovemaking was so beautiful it made her cry, and she knew I’d do that for her too. I could almost feel myself at that moment writhing in her arms like a dolphin on dry land.
I worry that I’ve buried and denied the fact there were so few truly admirable adults during my upbringing in St. Louis. Were they there and I was such a creep I missed them all? Did they all become just a little less vicious as they aged, more reconciled and easy, simply because they had no more teeth and were horrified that they’d be ignored and scorned? These men and women became softer and kinder, with infinite patience too, especially with their grandchildren. But I did not trust them. It has been said about a successful painting acquaintance of mine — by quick Mary — an only child rather clubby in his friendships with “real” men like hunters and other painters of the hard-angled quotidian, that once he had got all he could out of unkindness, he turned to kindness. Then I regard the spacial grace of Indian tennis players. Places do make people. There was a family in St. Louis I lived with, sleeping with their divorced mother. Only her son, the more Southern one for some reason, with his easy strength, his quiet voice, his hesitation to judge, was bearable. The daughter, every day on the backseat of the car as she was taken to school, said, demanding: “Turn on the radio, please.” The please just an irony in her mouth, in a flat, mean voice. The mother obliged as if hypnotized, never pausing to find that rock-and-roll button for the brat. One day I couldn’t bear it any longer, but when she was out of the car to school I did not attack. Rather I started weeping because of the sadness of being around this hugely indulged vixen, and I knew love would die soon because I couldn’t stand the home life that made her possible.
The long study that idiots give themselves, the endless excuses of the weak and vicious. The willingness to go public with hideous disease as if that were the primary goal in life. Why else am I writing? Two men were playing beside me on the next tennis court last spring. They were, as they hit the ball, yelling to each other about their exercises, their protein intake, their reps, their lats, their pecs, their squats. Screaming their charts at one another. Later on one of them smiled at me in a café as if we were close buddies, since I had been there to listen, nothing amiss here, hands out my kindred. I had a hard time frowning him off, this monster. His body looked to me like something foul and bought, a meat suit.
Now the house is done, Thanksgiving has passed, and I have had Jane in all her rooms with the ardor of long dreamers, and the wait proves all worth it, an instance where the flesh has really gone into more pleasures than even the dreams. But I knew she was wonderful, and that begging for minor disaster seemed artificial, like something I had cultivated from a book by a French existentialist in college, just in order to seem properly grave.
Not especially Sartre or Camus, but much of college now anyway seems like an endless qualification and rebuke to pleasure by the same kind of middle-aged people I grew up with, so that the bean of the reasonable and moderate would grow to the size of a tree in the head you could barely see out of by the time you became an adult yourself, thus to sit in your room and review the world, choked by moderation in all things. I did not see happy middle-aged men until I began going to roadhouses to hear and watch, more, rhythm-and-blues musicians, some of them with white hair and bellies, having a fine time on what must have been sub-minimum wages. I hold no brief for the universal holiness of African-Americans that goes down as commandment in much of the press today. But I was overwhelmed by the sight of dark older Americans having fun. Most, I loved them for their bellies. They’d been having it a long time, on much good collards, fatback, and cheap whiskey.
Jane was five years older than me. I’m not sure whether we were jaded eccentrics or new discoverers of the body electric. In different rooms decorated in subtle “rhythm and hue” changes — some help from the St. Louis granny of an interior decorator she had in the wings, a naughty queer I liked too — I delivered myself unto Jane, at her shy suggestions, as French, Greek/African (where the bottoms are of more interest), Italian, then just straight-on Missouri missionary, always talking while making love the way she said her ex, no real man, never did. Jane had a girl’s voice I found highly arousing, and I hope I did not sound too silly like Harry Truman as a mad poet, because Jane could sing, I mean around the house she sang anything well, on key and with luxury. I asked her one day, laughing, why we didn’t sometimes just get on an airplane and visit some of the countries, since I was so busy enacting the United Nations. I’d be glad to pay for it all. Then she shocked me, and I began looking down at the lake below her house, a beautiful but saddening view through the hanging moss.
“I never traveled. I never intend to travel. I don’t like far parts. We traveled enough getting our things for this house. We’ve got the big-screen TV and all the good stations. What more is there to see?”
She’d got a handsome divorce settlement and had her own money anyway, and a doctor father who’d given her this place as a gift. This luck of mine, well I quit boasting inside about it just then. The garter I gave her with I WANT IT EVERY DAY printed on, which she had worn until we got married — I asked her about it. She said wearing it nude with hose on had always made her feel foolish. Now I felt like a pressing creep without much to give from my world.
In my world I had straightened and ordered my supplies and parts in the showroom and taken down the posters of half-naked girls leaning across the hoods of Maseratis and Lotuses, things that pleased me and made my customers buy something expensive for the sheer hell of it, a ticket to half-brassieres in foreign towns. Mary helped me. In our days of intimacy she’d never said anything about the poster women, and now made no fun of me when they came down at Jane’s request.
Mary and I could never have made it as lovers. I don’t like to sleep with women who are smarter than me. But I’d never had a real friendship with a woman until Mary, and I was enjoying the pleasant wonder of it very much, when I was not suicidal. Now the rare times Jane came in the store, if Mary was there Jane looked through her with such frozen smiling malice that Mary offered to never come around again. She had plenty to do, with her own painting, which she could have sold even more of at good fees if she’d cared. But I begged her not to leave. I don’t believe I could have stood it.
On Jane’s idea of having the world on our big-screen television: The very next day I had some trouble with the boy who works my stockroom. I knew he was on something, but he didn’t steal and he did a fair job. I was amused by his old-man’s miseries at age twenty-three, compounded by the fact he couldn’t read and thought I didn’t know that. That afternoon he came in bleary and in a rage and asked me if I kept a pistol. He needed to kill somebody who had just insulted him for the last time.
“Why no, Byron. My God, fool. You’ll go to prison. Think this out.”