“You want me to make a little pile of money and burn it right here on the floor? There’s enough money around. Take it easy. Wait until you find something you want.”
“We’re concubines.”
“You can make everything sound as terrible as you want,” Simon says. “I’m going to bed.”
“Who with?”
Simon’s wife’s lawyer’s letter arrives and outlines her demands: She wants full custody of the child, the Pine Street house, both cars, sixty-five thousand dollars a year in alimony, child support at a level consonant with the child’s previous style of life, fifty percent of all retirement funds, IRA, Keogh and the firm’s, fifty percent of his partnership interest in the firm in perpetuity, and fifty percent of all odds and ends of stocks, bonds, cash and real property not subsumable under one of the previous rubrics. The client has been severely damaged in all ways by Simon’s desertion and the years of fiendish abuse that had preceded it, the letter suggests.
“What are you going to do?” Veronica asks.
“Give it to her, I guess.”
“Were you really that bad?”
“He may be overstating it a bit.”
“We are pure skin.”
Simon meets the poet at the International Arrivals Building, holding one hand behind him. The nine-hour Finnair flight from Helsinki has been exhausting, but she has met A, B, C, and D — Russian poets so fabulously gifted that none of them has been allowed to publish so much as a weather report. “That’s terrific,” he says. “You look beautiful.” “They all speak English,” she says, “this half-misunderstood English which is three times as good as regular English.” She notices that he is holding something behind his back. “What’s that?” He produces a large, naked steak, a steak big as a Sunday Times. She is embarrassed and pops the steak into her canvas carryall. “I don’t get your metaphor,” she says in the cab. “Is it hunger?”
She’s right, it is hunger. Don’t tell her.
They sit in her kitchen. “The burning barns in your poems,” he says, “why so many? Isn’t that a little… repetitive?” “My burning barns,” she says, “my splendid burning barns, I’ll burn as many barns as I damn please, Pappy.” He is older than she is, by ten years, and she has given him this not altogether welcome nickname. She looks absolutely stunning, a black three-quarter-length skirt embossed with black bird figures, a knitted sleeveless jacket, a yellow long-sleeved blouse, a red ascot. “Seriously, do you think there are too many? Barns?” It’s the first time she has asked his opinion about anything connected with her work. “I was half teasing,” he says. “But they did burn,” she says. “Every one I’ve ever known.” “Simon says,” Simon says, “Simon needs a beer.” She rises and moves to fetch a St. Pauli Girl from the refrigerator.
The poet lives in the country, in an old Putnam County farmhouse that she has not touched except to paint the walls pale blue. She has painted over the old wallpaper, and the walls puff and wrinkle in places. The furniture is junk golden oak, one piece to a room except in the kitchen, where there is a table and two mismatched chairs. “This one is Biedermeier,” the poet says, “from my mother, and the other, the potato-chip jobbie, is Eames, from my father. That tell you anything?”
Simon takes the train from Grand Central to Putnam County. He doesn’t like the train, almost always in miserable repair and without air conditioning, and he hates changing at Croton, the rush from one train to another more like a stampede than anything else, but the views of the stately Hudson from the discolored windows are wonderful, and when he alights at Garrison at the end of this trip she is sitting on the hood of her circus-red Toyota pickup, drinking apple juice from a paper cup.
The poet sings to him:
Row, row, row your bed
Gently down the stream…
The professional whistler’s wife calls and says that if the resident bitches and tarts don’t keep their hands off her husband she will cause a tragic happenstance.
“Sounded a little pissed,” Anne says.
“These housewives,” says Veronica, “I guess you can’t blame them they don’t have the latitude.”
Dore says, “Let her come around, her ass is grass.”
“Simon is passive.”
“I don’t think he’s so passive he grasps you very tightly. I think the quality of the embrace is important.”
“I think he’s more active than passive. I’m still sore. I don’t call that passive.”
“He’s at a strange place in his life.”
“You’re like one of those people who have tiny little insights of no consequence.”
“The hell you say.”
“You’re like one of those people who have weird figurative growths on their minds that come out in dismal exfoliations.”
“You’re funnin’ me.”
“You’re like one of those people who don’t know their ass from their elbow.”
“Well there’s no need to be vulgar.”
“Yes there is.”
“Who says?”
“I say.”
“Well there’s no need to be vulgar.”
“You want one?”
“One what?”
“Bang.”
“What’s it got on it?”
“Sprinkles.”
“Naw I’m not decadent.”
“He’s slender.”
“You call that slender?”
“I except the paunch.”
“He can go maybe eighteen times in a good month.”
“That’s depressing.”
“I think it’s depressing.”
“I really want to be more vulgar than I am at present being.”
“Well who the fuck’s stopping you?”
“I guess nobody.”
“I guess we could dance cheek-to-cheek.”
“I guess we could tear up some little bunches of violets.”
“Well there’s no need to be destructive.”
“We pretend to be okay.”
“I’m fine. I’m really fine.”
“I was fine. Spent a lot of time on it, buffing the heels with one of those rocks they sell in the drugstore, oiling the carcass with precious oils — Then I found out. How they exploit us and reduce us to nothing. Mere knitters.”
“How’d you find out?”
“Read it in a feminist text.”
“I heard they’re not gonna let us read any more books.”
“Where’d you hear that?”
“Just around. On the Rialto.”
“Maybe it would be better for us so we wouldn’t be so exacerbated.”
“You’re like one of those people who lay down the flag in the dirt before it’s time.”
“Well that’s what you say you fool.”
“I want the car of my dreams.”
“What is it?”
“Camaro.”
“You’re like one of those people who have really shitty dreams, know what I mean? Really shitty dreams.”
“How can you say that?”
“I played in a band once.”
“What was your instrument?”
“Tambourine.”
“Can’t get a union card for tambourine.”
“My knee all black and blue, I banged my tambourine on it. First the elbow, then the knee.”
“I saw a beautiful ass. In a picture. It was white and was walking away from the camera. She was holding hands with a man. He was naked too it was a beautiful picture.”
“How’d that make you feel?”
“Inferior.”
“Well that’s what you say you idiot.”
“I’d like to light up a child’s life. I apologize I was wrong.”
“Yes you were wrong.”
“But I still think what I think.”
“It’s hard to get a scrape when you want to light up a child’s life.”
“I’ve done it three times.”
“Leaves you heavy of heart.”’
“It does.”