But in that booth, in that smoke-filled, not-American, crowded bar, she’d hit what was supposed to be the zenith of her career, and she felt. . more empty than a shell casing. Having reached the only voice in the universe she ever loved — even just her voice-mail recording — all she could think was, What a voice. Even knowing there was no category for her love, or might never be back home in America, land of coupling, land of sanctioned marriage and two-person twined knots, land of tireless good-citizen living, land of the happy family, land of the free and the brave and the locked imagination, land of ignorant homeowner masses lined up in twos. Why can’t I just be gay, her head went, or why can’t we just live with the people we love and not worry about the sex, or why is sex such a big deal when it’s so cluster-fucked anyway, her head tumbling thoughts until she was cross-eyed.
“I’m sorry,” she said into the phone, and rang off.
As she moved back to her table of colleagues she thought, They will give her this. They will allow her this one night to act out. But tomorrow she will need the pumps and the black skirt and a crisp button-down white shirt, French or Italian, and her vinyl black hair captured in a tight ponytail. Because The New Yorker will be interviewing her by phone tomorrow. Because Vanity Fair will. All because of this award. The award.
I don’t feel anything.
Remember what Virginia Woolf said: Give back the awards, should you be cleverly tricked into believing they mean something. Do not forget that the door you are being ushered through has a false reality on the other side. Do not forget that the door is opening only on someone else’s terms, someone else’s definition of open.
Then someone pulled her cheek and the whole table seemed to burst into whooping laughter, so she released her mind, these endless thoughts, and slid back into the booth.
This drunk successful woman making her choices.
She wanted to take her clothes off. She wanted to start a revolution. She wanted to give the prize back. Instead, she wiped her mouth to the recognition and celebration and alcohol, and with a great, swollen swagger she raised her glass and offered a wrong-mouthed toast:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled mazzes. . yearning to breathe free,
The wrejjed refffff. . use of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tozzedome,
I lift my lamp be(burp)zide the golden door.
There she was, a towering woman with people looking up at her, toasting her, a woman who had peed upright, a woman falling back into applause and laughter and adulation and dessert. Would it end there? Or would her momentum do what it does with drunk successful women, catapult her toward some man who would come inside her, an American six-footer maybe, between her legs as if her legs were meant for that opening up, her pussy meant for that entering, and all night inside her would he maybe say, You are so great, oh baby, god baby, you are greatness itself, yeah baby, let me give it to you, and would he? Give it to her? As if that’s what she was made for, as if her body itself was brought to full height by the sexed-up flattery and hard prize of an American man?
Keep drinking.
The Poet
The poet is emerging from a dream. Her head on her desk, her eyes catching glimpses of things in retinal flashes, the crouch of unwritten words in her fingers.
She sees the world on its side, blurry and colored like waking is. She sees what must be the hairs of her own arm foresting up in front of her. She takes a deep breath, holds it, squints; the ordinary objects of the room keep their secrets a few seconds longer. She wets her lips with her tongue, which pulls her fully from sleep and activates the nerve-twine and vertebrae of her neck. She muscles up her biceps and pop she’s awake.
She is in Prague. Her poet self brought her here. Prague: the way history stays alive in some cities: Art. Architecture. Absinthe. Sunflowers. Roads made from stones. She gazes out the frame of her window, sees the steeple of an eight-hundred-year-old church, mouths the word psalm. Pages of her own work rest under her arms, on the table, in view, urgent. She fingers through them. The sound of the paper is something like petrified wings.
She is in Prague working with another, more famous poet. In some older world, time, place, this would mean apprenticeship, would fall into an order, well placed. She has left America to position herself in a line with Eastern Europe, amid others trying to revive the buzz of history. World wars and hidden jars of honey. Night skies filled with sirens or people trying not to let their breathing sound. Sex under cover of bridges. The voices of writers exiled and humming like electricity.
But she stops being nostalgic. She knows she lives in this world, not some other, no matter how old and beautiful European cities are. She’s an American poet in Prague.
She can afford to be. Capitalist pig.
She looks at the pieces of paper strewn around her: lines, scribbles, some words and pages barely decipherable. She picks up a half-eaten sandwich. Fuck it. She reaches over and pours an ounce of absinthe into a Pontarlier reservoir glass. The bulbous bottom swells with wet. Then she lays the flat, silver, perforated spoon across the rim and places a single cube of sugar on its face. She drips ice-cold purified water over the sugar until the color rises, until the gradual louche.
She lights a fire in the little room, sits in a hundred-year-old velvet chair. The heat brings on a dreamy glow of amber light. She drinks. Her hand moves to her other mouth, beginning the rhythmic throb. Because there is this: she’d rather live in the dreamy blur of everything she knows is dead than face the stark realism of an ordinary hand at the turn of this stupid-ass century. What a dull turning it’s turning into.
With her want she makes a decision: tonight she will abandon the prestigious workshops and seek out live porn. It is easy to make a clean exit when you are unburdened by relationships.
In the not-American night she is partly her poet self and partly her id. She passes a man near a bar who says something ludicrous to her. She doesn’t respond. Most of the time she’s either in her mind or in her body — thinking or acting. She doesn’t talk much. Never has.
She is aware of three things: the bruise-black effect of the night in the corridors of this city; her feet and their syncopated physicality; and the street itself.
A pounding between her legs.
She drains a flask from the inside pocket of a black leather jacket. She has been given the address to a place where a woman might mouth the mouths of other women.
What she wants first is to watch. To watch two women, not American, bring themselves to the brink of animal. The cum, the piss, the shit. Blood and sweat and mouths and salt. Skin reddened or scraped or bleeding or bitten or bruised. Shoved.
That violence.
Then she wants to dominate the scene.
If the scene fails, the writing will.
Of course she finds what she wants.
She purchases what she wants, gives herself exactly what she wants. She gives it and gives it until the having of it becomes the word mine, and beyond that even, until her thinking and her physical responses obliterate each other.
The poet watches from a velvet chair. A Moroccan, her skin black as oil, is fisting a Pole. The Pole is blindfolded, and her arms are bound to her sides with heavy white hang-yourself rope. She is on the marble floor of a large, high-ceilinged flat. Her legs are spread so wide she looks as if she might dislocate at the hips.