Claire’s Sentimental Education
Poundian; sonnet sequence; extended metaphor; hypallage; great poem; James’s villanelle in the Hudson Review, marvelous; negative capability; Justin’s color sense; Howl?; Westian; Proustian; Kafkaesque; Williams?; Ark II Moby I; the New Criticism; Rothko and Kline; Pollock and Guston; Jack Kerouac?; Dave Brubeck; objective correlative; Four Quartets; Dylan Thomas; pantoum, sestina, ballade, canzone, triolet; show don’t tell; O’Connor and Cheever; Herb Gold; timbre; Paul Desmond; Warne Marsh; Brecht; Ransom and Blackmuir and Jarrell; the Wake; the mind like a dying flame or something; epiphany; daubs; organic form; the Golden Triangle; existentialism; surrealism; Dada; Lowell and Viereck and Eberhart and Wilbur; Poetry; Le Sacre du Printemps; Lotte Lenya; structurally calligraphic; the San Remo; Gino and Carlo’s; the Place; the Cedar; The ABC of Reading; Jacques Brel; Edith Piaf; Dan’s smoky tone; Whitmanesque; The City’s Mediterranean quality; Kenneth Rexroth; City Lights; bop prosody?; Sonny Rollins?; Herbert Huncke; Naked Lunch; horse, H, smack, schmeck, shit; pot, grass, gage, weed, maryjane; the Magic Workshop; “The Venice Poem”; Don Allen; Projective Verse; Black Mountain; Blind Lemon; Robert Johnson; Gerry Mulligan; Sonny Boy Williamson; Snooks Eaglin; Chet Baker, quidditas; fuck me, James; fuck me, Bob; fuck me, Si; the Ninth; fuck me, Jack; fuck me, Bruce; fuck me, Eddie; Three Places in New England; fuck me, Richard; fuck me, Ron; fuck me, Bill; Transfigured Night; fuck me, Jon; fuck me, Charlie; fuck me, Sam; Clancy Sigal; fuck me, Joe; fuck me, Michael; fuck me, Dick; Lee Konitz; fuck me, Whitey; fuck me, Harry; fuck me, LeRoy; Laura Riding; fuck me, Al; fuck me, Boris; fuck me, Brad; The White Goddess; fuck me, Jerry. Please, Dan! I’m trying to read.
That Dan began an affair soon after Claire had begun to capitalize on her sexual chances, let’s call them, is predictable enough to make grown men howl and rend their garments. To call it an “affair,” however, is to distinguish it with a modicum of glamour and adventure that it did not possess. Then he had another, and then another, all of them the same in their dismal contours. They were mostly drunken, partially satisfactory stabs at abandoned carnality, amateurish, if the word has any sexual meaning, so much so that they seemed as if inflicted on Dan and his what-the-hell partners, most of whom were unhappy wives caught in marriages to men somewhat like Dan, although he would have been insulted to know this. He, it will not surprise you, thought that none of these women were good enough for him, and his gluey, sweaty spasms with them in divers motels did not soften his contempt for them. They were, my God, unaware of the “scene” all around them in the new Florence, and wished, more often than not, for their husbands to make enough money so that they could move to a house in Belmont and spend a few weeks each summer near the Russian River. They were, that is to say, just folks.
Claire found out about one of these affairs, threatened to leave the apartment, leave The City, take Justin away, to do all those things that she should do to be free, did Dan not stop seeing the bitch, bimbo, whore, slut, tramp. Suicide was threatened once or twice. This was all a play that humanity has acted in for centuries, of course, but it was no less painful for being so sublimely banal. So Dan broke off the arrangement, as he thought of it, and was faithful for a month or so; then it was back to the adultery follies. Claire, rescued from emotional collapse, briskly punished Dan by taking up with a marvelous painter, a friend of a friend of her last lover’s wife. He painted the crystalline exhalations of the Bay and sky and so on and so forth, and suggested to Claire that James Fremont was, well, how to put it? unimportant. As was Dan, his bad poems and his bad job and his drunken crap about his trumpet, Jesus, that trumpet. After a month with the adoring Claire, the painter told her that he “found it difficult” for him to work and continue to see her; he was “into” a collage tryptych that was, well, “draining.” Claire cried and cried and, two nights later, bashed Dan on the head with a Revere Ware pot. “You!” she yelled. “You! You! You!”
I don’t know what happened over the next few years, but Dan and Claire must have reached some sort of accommodation, a grim marital dance of necessary exchanges, with no questions asked about late nights out, unexplained absences, missing articles of clothing, whispered telephone conversations, and the like. Occasionally, there must have occurred a vicious and mean-spirited quarrel over a lover who appeared to exist, for one or the other of them, on a plane slightly higher than the merely sexual, or, to put it in Dan’s polished words, “I know the fuck is more than just a quick fuck to you!” But by and large they just grew older.
Claire made occasional trips back to Brooklyn to see Dot, her “mommy,” and her two brothers, both of whom still lived with “mommy,” and, it pleases me to think, were still virgins. There they are, coming out of eleven o’clock Mass. “Lookit her,” Brian says to Mickey, of a comely young woman, “what a fuckin’ dog.” “A dog is right,” Mickey snarls. So they diluted their rabid lusts. Let’s imagine that on one of these trips Claire ran into “Swede,” and after a night of joyous dancing and drinking in a little joint in Bayside, the two old pals went to bed together. “Swede” confessed that he was married, but that he thought of Claire all the time. None of this probably happened, for I understand that “Swede” had fallen off a roof about a year after he and Claire had indulged in their initial dalliance. He had been trying to adjust a television antenna so that he wouldn’t have to watch the Yankees play in blurry snowstorms. Of course he was a Yankee fan.
In time, the accommodation mentioned became too boring, too burdensome, so Claire took Justin, by now an NCO in the army of sociopaths forever garrisoned in the Republic, and they went to — oh, I don’t know. Lawton, perhaps, or St. Louis. No, Seattle! That’s where they went, Seattle. Even then, a great place to live. It was just great. Or maybe Dan left Claire after another sour argument, complete with tears and rage as decorations to his insistence that neither Claire nor anybody else would keep him from seeing Justin, by Jesus Christ! Of course, Dan would have been pleased never to look upon his berserk son’s face again. In any event, they separated. Some thought it touching that Dan took his trumpet with him, along with his NYSM scales book. Others, infected with reality, laughed.
Five or six years after Dan and Claire had divorced, we discover, as they say, Dan in a Greenwich Village bar. He’s in town to bury his mother, and has accepted an old neighborhood friend’s invitation to have a drink on the last night of the wake. He is dressed in a gray sharkskin suit, white shirt, dark-blue tie whose Windsor knot is too big for his shirt collar, a gray raincoat with raglan sleeves, and a dark-brown porkpie hat. He looks, not to be harsh, the perfect rube. He lives in Vacaville, which may account for the figure he cuts.