Saints and Sinners (14 page)

Graffiti, graffiti, graffiti. They seem to be done by the same unseen hating hand. Parables of rage. On walls, on vans, even on the torn leatherette of the backseat of a taxi. The driver was angry. His photo staring out of a hanging tag showed a disappointed, no longer young man. Suddenly he was shouting to another driver who cut in on us. Then he railed against the horse-drawn carriages, cars, crap on the street, their pissing artificial flowers clipped to the side of their carriages.

When they drank a toast to you at Penelope's dinner party, I could see that you were nervous, your face flushed from the blaze of candle flame. We were not at the same table, but in the same archipelago, as you said. You were talking to a woman, and I knew by your hesi-tance that you knew she desired you and that you could not return her ardor. She spilt red wine on her thigh and pleaded for sundry advice. Someone suggested white wine to neutralize the red; someone else suggested salt and handed you a dainty silver cruet, with which to minister to her. It was then you looked across at me; it was then you caught my eye through the spaces between the trellises of branching candelabra. You gazed, indifferent to the red and white wine that flowed in an estuary on the woman's thighs. In that milieu ofhigh society, and brittleness, we fell. Later, when we had all stood up to repair to the salon for coffee, you saw me link a man, both to be friendly and marginally to nettle you. Quite testily you nudged me, "Am I taking you home or have you better fish to fry?"

I wish you were only torso, only cock. No pensive eyes to welcome me in or send me packing. No mind to conjure up those qualms that clandestine lovers are prone to. No holdall of incumbents—mother, father, wife, child, children, all, all calling you back, calling you home. I wish I were only torso in order to meet you unencumbered. I recall an image on a postcard from the seventh century, that of a headless woman, a queen, leaning a fraction to one side, her robe torn, breasts like persimmons, one arm missing, yet pregnant with her own musks.

I have been to our wall, to pay my respects. You would think it was the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, where I once was and stuck a petition written on a piece of paper, in between the cracks. People see me standing by our shrine but make nothing of it, for they are just loitering. It is a city of nomads. You see a man or a woman, with carrier bags or without carrier bags, walk up to a corner, cogitate, and walk back in the direction from which they came. Everyone eats on the street, discarded hollows of bread, stumps of pickled cucumber, noodles phosphorescent in the sunlight, fodder for the pigeons. People sit on steps or sit at empty outdoor tables and stare. The place is teeming with the lonely and the homeless, both. One such woman, who sits by a fountain for hours each day, was, or so I was told by another woman, a bridesmaid at Grace Kelly's wedding, but came down in the world and went cuckoo. Cuckoo is a word they use a lot. Why is the cuckoo always a she? Treachery perhaps. Woman's treachery, different to man's. A mutual woman friend said your name, said it several times in my hearing, to unnerve me. Her eyes glittered like paste jewelry, that pale unchanging glitter, which palls. The canker of jealousy, jealousies. "I don't want to see you get hurt," Paul said, having observed us slip away from the party. Waspishly, he then mentioned how slender your wife was.

A tall red-bearded figure, a Finn McCumhal of the pavement, with green eyes, is enfolded in a tartan rug, which he wears togawise. He sells things—cheap abstract prints, black and white cubes, and the wounded orchids of Georgia O'Keeffe that appear both spent and fertile. I give him a coffee in the mornings, since he is stationed outside the deli. I asked him if he ever felt down in the dumps. He looked surprised. Said never. He was a mountain man and a Green Beret man. "Plus, I have God." Yes, that was his reply— "Plus, I have God."

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I could scarcely eat. I had gone downtown to do some chanting, to chant the taste, the smell, the touch, the aftertouch, and the permeability of you out of my mind. I thought I knew the building from a previous excursion, but found myself in wrong hallways, talking to janitors, who were surprisingly friendly, the old homeland and so forth. I went back into the street to telephone information. The kiosk looked to have been someone's abode—a dirty baseball cap, punched cans, orange rinds, and a cassette tape in such a tangle that it looked as if it might presently scream. On the wall there was a card with neat lettering—"Word Perfect in ten hours: Lotus." Word perfect in what? Further up the street were two pugilistic women, denouncing pornography. They held up photographs of sliced breasts hanging off, their voices rasping above the roar of traffic and sirens.

In a cafe, a newly married woman at a table next to me gave a dissertation to her friend on marriage, said "Yes ... it's good to be married ...he's a great anchor, Frank ...I wouldn't have said that six months ago, but I do now ... not overnight do you trust a husband, but it comes . ..it comes." Then she dilated on their getting a dog. Her husband wanted a large dog, a Labrador. She wanted no dog. Eventually they settled on a small pedigree poodle as being a compromise between no dog at all and a large dog. They have named her Gloria, after Gloria Swanson.

Clarissa called very early. There was something she needed to tell me. She has had female lovers as well as male. It is not that she is promiscuous, her needs change. I asked her what it was like. She said it was a hunger for a ghost, a hunger not altered by man or woman and not altered by marriage. Then she said something poignant. She said the reason that love is so painful is that it always amounts to two people wanting more than two people can give.

My room is a rose pink with gilded mirrors and a chaste white bureau, which looks like a theater prop. The center drawer does not open, the side ones do. On the white lining paper of one, I wrote "Remember." I wrote it with the expensive pen you gave me, as we were parting, asking me to send you a word, words. Even though you hadn't come up that first night, I knew you wanted to, and I stood in my bedroom doorway, watching as the lift door was opened each time and people were disgorged, some boisterous, one couple gallingly amorous, and others weary from the day's hassle.

One young creature yesterday, on her throne of rubbish, wept. It was in front of a very select jewelers. I asked why she was weeping so. A man had played a dirty trick on her. He had put a hundred-dollar bill in her white plastic cup and then taken it back. There had been an altercation. In the window behind her, a ruby necklace blazed on a dainty velvet cushion and a note simply said, "circa 18oo," but no price. Yes, a man had played a dirty trick on her. The word dirty set me thinking. Had there been a proposition of some kind? Further along, a man dangled his empty cap and urgently said the same thing, again and again—"I'm broke I'm homeless I'm broke I'm homeless" —scratched his bald head, saying he had traveled hundreds of miles from Georgia. Across the street came a more vociferous voice, shouting, calling it a city of abuse, a shithole, a hellhole, and saying that everyone sucked. The cart, which he must have taken from a supermarket, was lined with magazine covers featuring the latest movie stars. On the wall above him, someone had written, "You're dead."

I have never felt so alive, so ravenously alive. I walk for miles and miles. Yesterday evening the sky darkened and thunder began to rumble as if marching in from the backwoods, from Georgia itself, marching in on the city and on the elect in limousines, stately as hearses, impervious to the plight of wretchedness. I saw the fiend urinate on the roped muscles of the movie stars and laugh wildly. His cart was a swamp. Outside a restaurant a man was bent over a refuse bag. What struck me was his hair. A short boucle crop of it, Titian-colored. He had the stealth of a hunter. What he hauled out was a loin bone, with shreds of meat half cooked and dripping. Without ado he began to gnaw. His eyes were incomparably placid. I thought to approach him to give him some coins but did not dare. The pupils of his eyes were too proud and full of distance. Moreover, his orgy with the bone was utter.

Stella, a friend from long ago, invited me to a hen party at her sister's house. It was out of town. Down in the dark cavern of an underground I could not find a single human being who might direct me towards the right track. A mass of people in mindless urgency hurtling through the turnstiles and with no time to speak. I came up and hailed a taxi. Passing row after row of identical tall blocks of flats, and occasionally from a billboard sighting a glamorous face, male or female, peddling cosmetics or running shoes or a television station, I had this impatience to get to Stella's sister's house and leave presently, because I was convinced that you were returning to this city in search of me. I even imagined you sitting in an armchair in the undistinguished lobby, watching the swing doors for my return. Stella's sister's house was a white clapboard, identical houses all along the street, and mown lawns, and a sense of everything being neat and hunky-dory. The women guests were of two kinds—those who were slightly shy, wore long skirts and sandals, and the go-getters in very short skirts and slashed hairdos, all blond. "What hat de clock," one woman said, remarking on the fact that the root of the English language had originated in her part of Saxony. Her husband had but recently left her for a younger woman. Stella wore a stricken look. She stood in the dining room, her small child clinging to her, holding a handful of cutlery and trying by her expression to tell me that much had happened since we last met. "In a moment, pet," she kept saying to her second daughter, who had a silvered paper crown, which she needed to be clipped to her hair. Stella's sister Paula was an altogether more assertive type, and looking through the French windows into the garden, she complained about the table being unlaid.

"I ironed the cloth," Stella said feebly. It was only half ironed. The creases on it were a mimicry of tiny waves upon water. It had begun to drizzle. The glasses in which the drinks were going to be served had incrustations of fruit. Pineapple and melon in ungainly wedges. Each woman arrived bearing a gift. It was a birthday for an elderly aunt, who was sitting in an armchair, dazed. As she was handed a bunch of white roses, her eyes filled up with tears and she held them to her chest as if she was holding an infant. The woman who brought the roses wanted bourbon and inveighed against iced tea, which was being passed around. Another, who had that morning arrived from Europe, said she had found the perfect cure for jet lag. Wherever you are, or happen to be, you simply alter the time on your clock and get on with things. She was of the thin brigade, the hem of the red skirt level with her crotch. "What hat de clock." I ground a biscuit out of irritation. Stella got down on her knees to pick up the crumbs and by mistake overturned a glass. She asked if I remembered Mrs. Dalloway, how much we both loved Mrs. Dalloway, who threw a shilling in the Serpentine, bought flowers in Bond Street, and wished that she could live her life all over again, live itdifferently, as we assumed. The rain by now was coming down in buckets and loneliness seeping into me. I thought I wanted to think only of you and to think of you I would have to be alone. Paula, who was making a raspberry salad dressing, said I could not leave so abruptly, but I did. I was given a present on the way out, and in the street I opened the red crepe wrapping. It was a ladle onto which the rain fell in fat spatters, and standing there in that leafy suburban limbo, I thought of you with every pore of my being, drew you into me as if you were sun, moon, and rain, praying that nothing would cancel those journeys to cities around the world.

I went to Penelope's town house near the river, where we had met. So many quickening memories. It looked ghostly, black-veined creeper over the brick wall and no sign of life within and no coffee cup by the foot scraper. In the little walkway, by the railings, were the invalids and their nurses. Nurses in starched uniforms standing rigid, behind the wheelchairs. It was the invalids that unsettled me most. The spleen in their expressions was quite shocking and quite pitiless. It was like a sickroom there, although we were out of doors. Somehow, the sight of them recalled those sad, studious, forgotten misfits in some of Rembrandt's haunted interiors. Their eyes frightened me most. Eyes onto which pennies would soon be pressed. Their lives, their youth, even their wealth, was already dead to them, and I thought, I am alive, you are alive, and remembered in detail the night of our simmer, your throwing me against the wall in an urgency, as if you intended to smash my bones.

Mercedes cleans the room. She is from Colombia. We have got into the habit of chatting. Frequently she cries; her tears are torrents. Some months ago her man failed to come home, he who had shared her bed for over a year. Only next day at work did she learn why. He had had a massive heart attack while holding the car door open for his boss and had died in an ambulance on the way to the hospital. Neither the boss nor any of the people in the apartment building knew of the man's relationship with her, because of their not being married. It was discovered by a note in his pocket, on which was written her name and address. His funeral, which she had to arrange, was a bleak affair— only a lawyer, herself, and one wreath. Chrysanthemums, she thinks, with eucalyptus leaves. His wife, from Jamaica, is strenuously making her claims. First it was his satin waistcoat, then his watch, then his engraved cuff links, and then the one valuable water-color that he possessed. She dreads that his wife will come and occupy the apartment. She has had to bring her brother from Colombia to stay indoors all day and keep guard. He plays the guitar and eats incessantly. Every day she says the same prayer, asks God to help her to bear it, and embraces me as if I had some influence in that quarter. She says he was the kindest man that ever lived, washed her feet, pared her corns, indulged her. She also says that if I can get a photograph of you or a sample of your handwriting, she can have a friend do a voodoo spell. It involves the blood of cockerels, but she assures me that it is not sinister.