“Sure you don’t want a real drink now?” she asks. Her first, on top of the wine before, has gotten to her. She has boozy confidence. It enables her to slouch, speak in low tones, and stare.
“I’m sure.”
“A bohemian who doesn’t drink — what’s that?”
“Why am I a bohemian?”
“Well, you sure ain’t a lawyer. I know them. I’ve got one.”
I wonder if she leaves her paintings out to torture him, the assistant DA. I only shared selected paragraphs with Claire, complete with contextual introductions, and I always read them to her. I picture her husband in the coffee shop, beaky, dark bearded, and thin, ashamed when seeing me, shocked when I say hello. I see her paintings hanging in their house, her sketches and doodles beside the telephone and on the fridge along with their son’s. I wonder how he exhales in the galleries of her depicted flesh.
The video is ending. The panzer drives off into the sunset with the dancers. Now a blonde tart on a jet ski zips along the coast of the Riviera. She’s wearing a Stetson hat and wielding a boomerang.
“Oh, that bitch is so dry,” she hisses. My mother used to call white girls tarts and hussies. If I were in the video, and if she were drunk, I’d walk the jet-ski tart home. Jane or Judy closes her eyes and leans back. She opens her mouth in the shape of a small circle and exhales. Black girls, as I remember being told, were fast. She will have to be walked home, too.
“That was harder than I thought.”
“What was?”
“Finishing the work for that show.” She leans forward, exhaling heavily. She puts her elbows on the table and her head in her hands. Her radii and ulnae are mantislike, longer than her humeri. No bone in her arm can be thicker than a chopstick. With all the soft, bright colors on and around her she almost looks like a child except her face is showing signs of age. She has two deep creases running alongside her nose and another across her forehead. Her age and her fatigue against the creamsicle backdrop make her look out of place, and because of this, I imagine her to be lonely. She smiles at me again, broadly, and her eyelids droop.
I had always put girls to sleep. It was a gift. Whenever I was broke and hungry, I would go to a bar or a party, meet a girl, and listen to her talk about her parents, her job, her last or current boyfriend, about her dissatisfaction with her life, and her theories on how life could be different. I’d listen and that alone would be enough — a great enough act of heroism — to be invited home with them, where I would then talk about pretty much anything until they couldn’t listen anymore. They’d drift off. In the morning I’d make breakfast and they’d look at me strangely, no longer a hero, just a symbol of their great dissatisfaction. I’d leave them wherever it was they believed themselves stranded — hero-less — two eggs and a slice of toast short. They all fell asleep. All except Claire. I’d lain beside her, hand in the air, not touching her. I talked and talked until she told me to put my hand down on her hip. I did.
“How’s writing going?”
“Fine.”
“What are you working on?”
“A book.”
“Who’s your agent?”
“I don’t have one now.”
She finds the energy to raise her eyebrows. My last agent had told me that I needed to do some serious editing, that it didn’t seem urban enough, but that mostly, somewhere in the philosophy, I’d lost the story and, therefore, the emotional core. It had reminded me of what William Lloyd Garrison said to Frederick Douglass, that Douglass should tell the story and leave the philosophy to him. Which would mean, if Garrison was correct, then there was nothing beyond the simple narrative — no context. Or that everyone understood the context, that the context was available for all to decipher and that they all had the scope and the willingness to do so. Perhaps it was me. Perhaps I had only disconnected thoughts and anecdotes flaring up in me like bouts of gastritis. “By the rivers of Babylon. .” Perhaps I have no narrative. Perhaps I have no song.
“Tell me a story.”
“Why?”
“You’re a storyteller.”
“About what?”
“You’re a storyteller.”
She smiles — too sexually for her to be interested in art or arcs. She seems to have a great deal invested in my story, as though if it was good enough she could get naked for me without guilt or reservation. That was what a good narrative was supposed to do, be naked and make naked.
The tart’s boomerang flies at the camera and the screen goes white. There’s an aerial shot of a dusty road. Someone strikes a chord on an acoustic guitar. The camera moves and pushes in on a crossroads tableau. The camera levels out, parallel with the ground. Someone’s sitting on a tree stump. It’s a white kid wearing a porkpie hat. He’s strumming an old Cherry Sunburst jumbo. It’s too big for him. He plays awkwardly on the clichéd Rubenesque form. He looks like he’s trying to choke a chicken-necked fat girl with one hand and caress her with the other.
A pedal steel slides in, but it sounds more Hawaii than Mississippi. In the music track he’s already singing, but in the video I’m watching the camera pan across a field and into the sky. Now he’s singing, walking along a railroad line. The following frames are filled by sorrowful images: black and white faces; toothless, broken men; hardened women; and filthy children. A drum program marks the beat. If the sound and image were in sync, it would tap out his cadence in the gravel along the tracks. He opens his mouth and sings. His voice is somewhere between tenor and baritone and sounds like he’s in some adolescent purgatory bemoaning his stasis.
“White boy blues.” She shakes her head. “Greg likes this shit. Do you?”
“I haven’t heard this.”
“But do you like it?” She’s fully alert now.
“I had this friend in high school. .”
“Yeah?”
“Well, I went to school just west of Boston — Newton.”
“I knew you came from money.”
“No, I wasn’t wealthy. Sometime before then Massachusetts passed legislation that made it mandatory for all cities and towns to have public housing.”
“Suburban projects? Ridiculous.”
“Well, kind of. Anyway, my mother got on the waiting list and moved us in.”
“Single mom?”
“Yeah.”
“She must be something.”
“Yes, well, she’s dead. Anyway, Gavin and me are seniors and we’re at a party. Do you know Boston?”
“A little bit.”
“Do you know Commonwealth Avenue?”
“No.”
“It runs west out of downtown. Anyway, Gavin and I are at a party at one of the mansions, in the side yard, sitting up high on the crossbar of a swing set. We are beer-less and broke. He’s got a black eye, a quick jab from his old man earlier. He’s been telling me about the marathon. How at this point, near where we were sitting, on the other side of the hedge in ’72, the pack had caught his dad. He finished as the fifth American and missed qualifying for Munich.”
I look up. She’s still awake — involved even.
“’Heartbreak Hill. Oh, well.’ He kind of sings it with a quavering voice. He wipes his nose with his hand. His right pupil is red with hemorrhaged blood. His sinus looks swollen. Inside the big house our classmates are talking about their college choices. Some are celebrating; others have already begun the process of burnishing the reputation of their safety school. My ex-girlfriend Sally is inside as well. I can see her.”
“She white?”
“Yeah. I can see her in the window — moon face, freckles, and blue pie-eyes — a concoction of German Berger and hardscrabble Irish. I can see her, the sensible part of her acquiescing to the moment’s demands. Gavin points at her. ‘That’s your true love. Hah.’ He elbows me. ‘I’m kidding, man. I’d love her, too.’ Gavin always wore an old corduroy coat as his top layer. He opens it, reaches into the torn lining and produces two tall boys. He’s like, ‘After a hard day’s work.’ He hands me a can. I give him a cigarette. He’s like, ‘Symbiosis. Good show.’ So we open the beers and toast.