Love Me (28 page)

 

 

 

Two days later I looked at
The Lavender Muse: Gay Poetry from the Puritans to the Postmodernists,
and there, amid the homoerotic photography of dewy-eyed men with molded chests and damp golden tendrils, was a picture of my own great-great grandfather Emory King!—his handsome face was opposite Walt Whitman’s poem “As I Lay with My Head in Your Lap, Camerado.” I was so mad I could’ve spit. Emory King was a private in the First Minnesota Infantry who fought at Bull Run, came home, married, had nine children, and farmed near Windom. The clear inference was that Walt had lain his head in the lap of my ancestor and vice versa (“I stroke your fine hair, so delicious, it is the grass of the soul. I touch you in all the hairy places, O aficionado, O compeer! O mirror of my Better Self, my darling, my Other Inner!”) and the literal truth is that Emory King was nowhere near Whitman’s lap, he was wounded at Bull Run when Whitman was still lounging around Greenwich Village, and Emory took the train home to Minnesota and married and settled down. No heads in my family ever lay in Whitman’s lap, and yet there is Emory King, photographed in 1861 as he was about to go to war, looking pretty darned handsome, and the reader is left to assume that he was Walt’s main squeeze.

Frank answered the phone, and I burned right into him and told him what a liar he was and he gave me some hoo-ha about the dead losing their individualness and becoming part of the Whole and I sort of lost interest. I realized I only cared about Iris and getting her back somehow.

It was the end of 1999, and 2000 was coming, the new millennium, bringing chaos, computers shutting down, the electrical grid going dark all over the country, planes falling out of the sky, mass hysteria, so people stockpiled flashlight batteries, LP gas, brown rice, water, and Katherine wrote a Y2K poem:

Then it was New Year’s Day and nothing happened and nobody said any more about it.

I spent the holidays in my room, thinking.

The Humphries mansion was prairie style, staunch, proud, without any Pre-Raphaelite swirliness or Victorian gewgaws, and my apartment was their dining room, 25 x 25, green walls and wainscoting and a 13-foot ceiling and a fireplace, and above it, in faded gold letters on a black panel:

The bed was in the center of the room. I lay there and looked up at the brass ring in the ceiling where their chandelier had hung. Around the corner from here, Fitzgerald sat on Mrs. Porterfield’s boardinghouse porch smoking cigarettes on those 1919 summer nights mooning over his Southern girlfriend Zelda. He was 23. He had missed out on the Great War, had endured for a few months an office job in Manhattan. Zelda was in Birmingham, Alabama, dancing with other young men, and Fitzgerald was trying to stitch together
This Side of Paradise.
The Humphries family was rich—Mrs. Humphries was a Hampl, she came from beer money—and Emmaline was tall, with upswept hair and a patrician nose and keen eyes, and she was still in love with Scott that summer.

He was hanging out with his friends on the Porterfield porch not far away, smoking cigarettes and talking about becoming a great writer. The boy did not lack for confidence. She sat in this room eating dinner with her family on those summer 1919 evenings, and thinking about him.

She wrote in her diary: “The One whom Fate intended to be My Life’s Companion is mooning over a flighty southern deb who appeals to his weakness and can only do harm to his artistic soul. He needs a strong woman, not a moon maiden; a woman who can lend him some discipline even as she admires his gifts. Why is such a Man so incapable of looking out for Himself? Why so enslaved to lightning-bug sentiments that He goes off willy-nilly to seek out His own destruction? O my Dear if only you Knew—how little time there is in this bright world. Though you are ever in my heart—we are propelled onward by onrushing time and soon you will board the train and speed East to claim its Treasures and I will stand here at the window and look for the spark of your cigarette in the dark hollows of Mrs. Porterfield’s front porch.”

 

 

 

One February morning, Iris called me to say she’d gotten up at six, and the radio said it was five above but her thermometer said eleven—“Is it warmer on the south side of a house, do you think?
”
she asked. “Or maybe I need a new thermometer.” We talked about the weather forecast and suddenly I felt that I really had come home. For her birthday, March 8, I gave her a sparkly burgundy colored dress with spaghetti straps and a daring low-cut neckline with rhinestones, like a marquee. She put it on for me and then she took it off. I stayed the night. Ash Wednesday we went up to the cathedral to get black smudges on our foreheads from the thumb of an old priest who didn’t ask if we were Catholic, he just told us we had come from dust, and I knelt on the cold floor and put my forehead against a Catholic pew and prayed for God to save me from arrogance and the easy disdain for things I know nothing about and all stylish angst and also to protect my intention to not drink and to make me ever thankful to be occupying this space, living in this skin, especially if Iris’s skin is next to it. And in that spirit, I entered into Lent, the forty days before Easter, and the next week was our annual late March heartbreaker blizzard, fourteen inches of snow, icy roads, schools closed in Renville, Bird Island, Wabasso, Sacred Heart, Tracy, Walnut Grove. The blizzard made it onto national television.
Midwest lashed by winter storm—
film footage of snow blowing sideways. The next day she called to say, “There’s a guy offering to shovel the roof for thirty dollars. Should I let him do it?” Sure, I said. It can’t hurt. “You never used to shovel it off.” That’s because I knew that if I did, I’d fall and break my neck and have to go around in an electric wheelchair with a steering device between my teeth. But if he wants to, that’s fine. A cold week, molecules slowing to a crawl, and then she called me one morning to help her start her car, and I did: got in the old Cougar and pumped the gas pedal three times, turned the key and gave it a jolt, waited ten seconds, second jolt, fifteen seconds, then turned the key and finessed the gas and resurrection occurred, the engine roared to life. She thanked me. “No problem,” I said. She was in a hurry, otherwise she’d have gone to bed with me, I just knew it.

The snow melted. Roofs dripped. Patches of mud appeared, the flotsam of spring, a child’s mitten, a chunk of blue plastic, a soap bubble ring, a Frisbee, a brown dog dish, ten thousand dog droppings. Formations of geese heading north. A lake formed on Sturgis Avenue and a car raced through it and kicked up a sheet of brown water. Kites flew from the school playground, red and yellow and green ones, sedate kites with long tails, upwardly mobile, striving, and a couple berserk ones, leaping and diving, self-destructive, ground obsessed. Little green shoots popped out of the ground. Iris asked me to get rid of the spiders in her kitchen. And the next week buds appeared on the lilac bushes, a light haze of green in the tops of trees. The mead owlark was heard, and the killdeer singing, “Killdeer, killdeer” and the song sparrow singing, “Sweet sweet sweet,” and the robins singing, “Cheer up, cheer up, cheer up.” The air was sweet and mulchy. Iris called to say that the toilet was plugged and she couldn’t unplug it with the plunger, so I went over and did it for her, which I felt was a particularly intimate moment and a sign of great trust.

Crocuses arose through the debris of dead leaves. In the flower shop on Selby Avenue, a flood of Easter flowers, lilies and tropical flowers, flowers in the colors of ladies’ lingerie. Jesus came to Jerusalem and was welcomed as the Savior but before the week was out, he was no longer welcome, which was okay by him because he’d come to die for the sins of the world, so that we might believe in his Resurrection and enter into his paradise. This happened on Friday. And on Sunday, his disheartened followers came to his tomb and found the stone rolled away—one defeat after another! Jesus murdered and his body desecrated. Then he appeared in disguise to two disciples walking to Emmaus who were talking about the crucifixion, and Jesus said, “What crucifixion? Who? Anyone I knew?” Little girls in bright spring coats and Easter bonnets and white gloves appeared, attended by their drab parents. Iris called to ask if I believe in the Resurrection and I said, Yes, I think I do. She does not but will wait before making up her mind. It was warm. A long string of sunny days. The air full of pheromones and goldenrod. People walked outside in shirtsleeves who were not accustomed to this. A great burgeoning of dandelions; the whine of the lawn mower was heard. A few more warm days and all of nature opened up, leafed out, prospered, just as I hoped my own life might, that I wouldn’t always be this little naked scared person crashing through the woods. In the western sky just after sunset, Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, Venus, and Mercury, all five, aligned on the horizon. Iris called to tell me that the word “planet” comes from the Greek word for “wanderer,” the Greeks believing that the planets move freely in the sky, unaware that they obey strict rules, like everybody else. We wish we were free but actually we’re in orbits determined by various factors, none of them our choice. “I didn’t know the Greeks thought that,” I said. “Interesting.” In the yard next door, a naked young woman glistening with oil lay on the grass, not quite naked—there were three teeny scraps of cloth and five strands of translucent fishing line and a few beads of perspiration and that was all. She wasn’t beautiful so much as vulnerable: a meal for coyotes. Iris called to ask if I had seen the story in the paper about the survey that shows that one out of seven adult Americans cannot locate the United States on a map of the world. I had. “It’s like not being able to locate your own hind end using both hands,” she said. “What is wrong with people?” So we talked about that for a while. There were two days of soaking rain. Daffodils and tulips came in bloom, and a crab apple tree in back of the Snow Bird Café. Goldfinches came to the feeder. A mole appeared in Iris’s backyard and I flooded him out with the garden hose and helped her plant tomatoes in the rock garden, the Big Boys and the Paradiso, the Crimson Defender, the Pride of the Prairie. A dozen little interlocking terraces shored up with stones, and tulips there and now tomatoes. On the street someone had parked a purplish van with rusted fender skirts and a flat tire and a sign in the window, $800 OR BEST OFFER.

There I was in a rented room on Ramsey Hill, the neighborhood Iris didn’t approve of, not a hill so much as a ledge, from which people on the heights look down upon the floodplain and feel exalted and grateful. Streets of old monumental homes, Romanesque and Greek Revival and Queen Anne, built by the barons of the 1880s with their lumber and railroad and brewing and dry goods loot, then left to molder in the Depression and postwar years, then snapped up in the antisuburban backlash of the seventies by young liberal couples who slaved to restore them to their original grandeur. Having accomplished this, they went and got divorced. After you’ve spent four years stripping and sanding and painting and restoring wainscoting, you need someone to blame and you choose whoever’s nearest to hand. They sold the house and split the cash and went off to condos in Tampa and Tucson with new partners, who they soon came to realize were all wrong for them, having never gone through a renovation, but then it was too late.

The new buyers settled in to enjoy the genteel life. They hired people to tend their children and clean their houses and other people to listen to their problems. Iris did not want to live that life.

She asked me one night, “Are you in treatment?” I shook my head. “I notice you don’t drink anymore. Are you sick?”

No, I don’t drink, that’s all. For me, drinking is Dionysian. It’s wildness. There is no moderation in wildness. The purpose is not to wash down the risotto or get a pleasant buzz; it is to dance all night and show the petit bourgeoisie our bare buttocks. But Dionysianism takes a terrible toll and a man should heed that still small voice that says: if you don’t wish to go to Chicago, then don’t get on this train.

I have had enough. Time to put it away and see what else there is to do.

 

 

 

 

The scarlet tanagers arrived, yellow-throated warblers, vireos, gros beaks, and the indigo bunting. Fishing season opened on Mother’s Day. Iris found a wood tick in her hair, and I offered to conduct a body search for more, which she declined, but I sensed some interest. The bushes grew lush, and the trees: a long canopy of green boughs overspread the street. Long white limos cruised by, hauling girls in pink formals and boys in white tuxes to the prom, and a few weeks later, they graduated to the strains of “Pomp and Circumstance” and the next morning there were streamers of toilet paper in the trees. A daylong rain washed the paper out. A good soaking rain. Iris and I lay in my bed in the Humphries house and listened to the hush of rain in the bushes. We arrived in this bed by way of a dinner at Zander’s on Selby, mussels and beet salad and a bowl of black bean gumbo, and a long loving conversation about old choral days. The New York bus trip remembered, Holy Trinity, the mighty St. Matthew, the chorus of
Bless yous,
the park in the dark. From there it was not far to go to spend the night together. We lay content in the clean air and had breakfast at noon, scrambled eggs and hash browns with pork sausage and hot salsa, rain coursing in the gutters and pouring out the waterspout and a great long rolling clap of thunder like somebody dropped a pile of lumber. She asked me if I had read
Anna Karenina.
I had not. Nor
The Brothers Karamazov
or
Jane Eyre.
So much to look forward to.