A: I’ve crossed both major oceans by ship, the Pacific twice, on troopships, the Atlantic once, on a passenger liner. You stand out there, at the rail, at dusk, and the sea is limitless, water in every direction, never-ending, you think water forever, the movement of the ship seems slow but also seems inexorable, you feel you will be moving, this way forever, the Pacific is about seventy million square miles, about one-third of the earth’s surface, the ship might be making twenty knots, I’m eating oranges because that’s all I can keep down, twelve days of it with young soldiers all around, half of them seasick — On the Queen Mary, in tourist class, we got rather good food, there was a guy assigned to our table who had known Paderewski, the great pianist who was also Prime Minister of Poland, he talked about Paderewski for four days, an ocean of anecdotes —
Q: I was tempted to become a shrink. But then I decided it wasn’t science.
A: But what if she stabs me in the ear with the scissors?
Q: Haven’t you realized that she is not going to stab you in the ear with the scissors?
A: A lot of people go along assuming that. And then they get stabbed in the ear with the scissors.
Q: You saw yourself, in relation to the three women, as an artist working in fat.
A: No no no.
Q: I’m a doctor. You can tell me. I’m used to hearing terrible things.
A: I felt blessed.
Q: Your hands are trembling.
A: That happens in the mornings sometimes.
Q: Which one was the best?
A: All lovely, all.
Q: I don’t have a clear idea of what these women looked like.
A: Dore had a scar. Right on the cheekbone, parallel to it. A good inch-and-a-half. About as thick as a pencil line, but white. Her hair was what they call ash-blond; she had black eyebrows. Veronica was blond too, a blonder blond. Very good forehead. Wore a ponytail a lot of the time. Anne had dark hair, very long. She had the longest hair.
Q: Did you feel, when you went out on the street with one of them, or to the market, that you looked strange together?
A: Never occurred to me.
Q: You do wear young clothes, youngish wretched clothes, garb of the youth culture slightly misunderstood —
A: Nothing the matter with my clothes. I’ve always worn these clothes.
Q: You see clients in those clothes?
A: Of course not. I put on a jacket and tie and —
Q: Harris tweed, a blue chambray shirt, dark-red tie of rough wool —
A: It’s a uniform, yes.
Q: I’m greatly comforted. I don’t like to think of people not wearing their uniforms, out of uniform.
A: Nor do the clients.
Q: Bellies. I’ve always been greatly drawn to the female belly, as a more subtle, less overt, sculptural representation of all the other tactile values we associate with —
A: All sculpture is about women, if you care to look at it that way. Buildings are about women, cars are about women, landscape is about women, and tombs are about women. If you care to look at it that way. The Grand Canyon.
Q: The Eiffel Tower?
A: About women in the sense of being addressed to women.
Q: Who speaks for the male?
A: Monks.
Q: Is the bicycle about women?
A: Speeds us toward women as twilight time descends and the lamplighters go about their slow incendiary tasks.
Q: What about coveting your neighbor’s wife?
A: Well on one side, in Philadelphia, there were no wives, strictly speaking, there were two floors and two male couples, all very nice people. On the other side, Bill and Rachel had the whole house. I like Rachel but I don’t covet her. I could covet her, she’s covetable, quite lovely and spirited, but in point of fact our relationship is that of neighborliness. I jump-start her car when her battery is dead, she gives me basil from her garden, she’s got acres of basil, not literally acres but — Anyhow, I don’t think that’s much of a problem, coveting your neighbor’s wife. Just speaking administratively, I don’t see why there’s an entire Commandment devoted to it. It’s a mental exercise, coveting. To covet is not necessarily to take action.
Q: I covet my neighbor’s leaf blower. It has this neat Vari-Flo deal that lets you —
A: I obey the Commandments, the sensible ones. Where they don’t know what they’re talking about I ignore them. I keep thinking about the story of the two old women in church listening to the priest discoursing on the dynamics of the married state. At the end of the sermon one turns to the other and says, “I wish I knew as little about it as he does.”
Q: God critiques us, we critique Him. Does Carol also engage in dalliance?
A: How quaint you are. I think she has friends whom she sees now and again.
Q: How does that make you feel?
A: I wish her well.
Q: What’s in your wallet?
A: The usual. Credit cards, pictures of Sarah, driver’s license, forty dollars in cash, Amex receipts —
Q: It seems to me that we have quite a great deal to worry about. Does the radish worry about itself in this way? Yet the radish is a living thing. Until it’s cooked.
A: Carol is mad for radishes, can’t get enough. Rachel gave us radishes, too.
Q: I am feverishly interested in these questions. Ethics has always been where my heart is. Moral precepting stings the dull mind into attentiveness.
A: I’m only a bit depressed, only a bit.
Q: A new arrangement of ideas, based upon the best thinking, would produce a more humane moral order, which we need. Apple honey, disposed upon the sexual parts, is not an index of decadence. Decadence itself is not as bad as it’s been painted. As for myself, I am content with too little, I know this about myself and I do not commend myself for it and perhaps one day I shall be able to change myself into a hungrier being, one who acts decisively to grasp —
A: The leaf blower, for example.
The poet gives him a picture of herself posed naked as a Maja on a couch. The Polaroid is ill-lit, badly composed, unflattering to her stomach, and she is shiny of nose. Furthermore, the couch is ugly, done in inch-square black-and-white hound’s-tooth check. “Who took the picture?” Simon asks. “Someone,” she says, and snatches it away from him.
He is a layman, not a figure in her world. “You’re not a poet, you’re a real person,” she says. “Of course poets are funnier than real people.” She names for his entertainment the second, third, fourth, and fifth most beautiful male poets in the country. “But who’s the first?” the layman asks. “We keep the position open so that the guys will have something to aspire to,” she says. Does she know all of these beautiful poets? Are they all present or former lovers? Simon has no idea how poets behave. Outrageously would be his best guess, but what does that mean in practice? The poet’s long red hair strays out over the pale-blue pillowcase; her right foot taps time to a Pointer Sisters record. “The dust in your poems,” Simon asks, “is it always the same dust? Does it always mean the same thing? Or does it mean one thing in one poem and another thing in another poem?” The poet places a hand under a bare breast, as if to weigh it. “My dust,” she says, “my excellent dust. You’re a layman, Simon, shut up about my dust.”
She was raised in Kansas, where her father is a wholesale grocer. “He gave me this,” she says. She opens a book and removes a twenty-thousand-dollar bond. “It was supposed to put me through medical school. I didn’t want to go to medical school.” The bond is pretty and blue with some kind of noble statuary on it. “Shouldn’t this be in a money-market fund or something?” asks the layman. “I guess so,” she says. “If you’re not from Kansas, people in Kansas ask you: What do you think about Kansas? What do you think about our sky? What do you think about people in Kansas? Are we dumb?” She replaces the bond in the book. “You find a high degree of sadness in Kansas’.”