I meet her at a party. It’s a large room I first see her in. I was one of the first guests to arrive and I thought I was late. The host lives on the top floor. It’s a four-story building, small for what I know of most of the city but not for her neighborhood. Red brick, narrow width, low ceilings in all the apartments but the two on what was originally the parlor floor, with a steep stoop outside of about ten steps. It was raining. I took the subway down. I didn’t know what to wear. I haven’t many clothes. One pair of shoes I shined the previous night. A corduroy sports jacket, couple of wrinkled dress shirts, three ties—one a bow—which I never like to put on and are a bit stained and out of date. Really only one pair of what could be called dress pants if I don’t want to wear my good blue jeans. Good meaning the jeans that are still reasonably new and rough and dark blue instead of light and smooth from lots of washings and wear. Black corduroys. They needed a pressing. It was too late for that now. I had thought of it earlier. The day before. Then thought if I wear these pants I can’t the jacket, since the jacket’s a faded olive green and of a wider wale and wouldn’t go with the pants. To me if one wears corduroy pants and jacket together it has to be a suit. I also thought, more than a week before, of getting the shirts laundered and pants and jacket cleaned or pressed, so I’d have one or the other garment and either of the shirts ready for the party. I knew I was going to it, knew some interesting and successful people would be there and a few in my field or close and that most would be well dressed and some even in elegant clothes: skirts or gowns to the floor, dark wool suits with vests. I didn’t know she’d be there. Nobody had ever spoken of her to me even in passing. “Oh, maybe eighty or so,” the host had said a month ago when she phoned to invite me and I asked how many people would be there. And rather than meet her at the party I saw her there and later met her on the landing outside the host’s front door. Diana’s. One large smartly and no doubt—unless she inherited most of it, and judging from what she’s told me about her genealogy and bringing-up she probably did—expensively furnished living room and an adjoining room with only an enormous armoire and dresser and big brass bed and whose lights were usually off and louver doors closed. Both rooms overlooking a small square park with joggers running around it even at night and in the rain. Even till very late, Diana had told me and several others this summer when we were having drinks outdoors and watching the sun set over some mountains or hills of upstate New York. The setting sun reminded her of the sunrise or latter part of it she can see from her apartment during the winter and spring months, and that connection led to a number of other things she sees from her windows. That sometimes she’ll get up for something at three or four in the morning and see joggers and occasionally a cyclist doing several laps, or at least in the time she looks, and once even a unicyclist, though she only watched him till he reached the corner because it took him so long and she had become bored. I could see joggers and pedestrians from her windows at the party but no cyclists. It was mostly raining when I looked out her windows, raining when I left my building uptown. Black corduroys, I decided on—unpressed. Sweater instead of jacket, still smelling from the natural waterproof oils the manufacturer had left in the wool, and which I’d take off at the party when I took off my coat. I had no iron, though could have asked the landlady on the first floor to loan me one. She’s loaned me things like that before. Vacuum cleaner, dishes and candlesticks when I was having eight people for dinner once. That was a year ago. May was there, slept over, made the pastry and bread in my stove. But I didn’t want to go through the chore of pressing the pants without an ironing board or carrying the board up and down two flights if I also borrowed that, and thought the pants being black wouldn’t look too unpressed. Long-sleeved blue cotton shirt, in the rugby mode, with a tan collar that didn’t look quite right with the rest of the shirt or the pants. The shoes were the best-dressed part of me, only a month old so still with good heels and soles. I took an umbrella. Not the one someone had left behind several months ago. A woman I’d met at a PEN symposium on the rights of the translator and minimum rates he should receive, and who stayed the next night at my place. Came when it rained, left when it was sunny and mild. I cooked us dinner, made her breakfast, phoned the day after and she said she’d changed her mind and would rather not see me again if it was all right. I asked was it anything I did or didn’t and she said no, everything was great in every way. I said I’d call back in a couple of weeks and maybe she’ll have changed her mind. She said I shouldn’t bother to call, nor even bother her with my phone rings. I said then how can I get the umbrella back to her, since it wasn’t the contractible kind that were fairly simple to mail. She said she had plenty of umbrellas that people have left behind at her apartment so why don’t I keep it for a rainy day. Used those very words. What was my reply? I said goodbye, though wanted to say “You think I’d use an umbrella that has a gilded mermaid handle and a canopy that’s hot-pants pink?” Took my regular folding umbrella to Diana’s party. Looked out my window, saw there was rain. Couldn’t see how much rain because I live in back and all my windows face either an air shaft or alleyway and are two stories down from the roof. So I dialed Weather and a man said periods of heavy rain tonight and possible sleet and snow but no measurable accumulation. When I got outside it seemed as if the rain was coming down in printed periods. Hundreds of them every square foot per second. It rained buckets of periods except beneath the streetlamp where it poured cats and dogs of diagonals and double primes, and I was glad I’d also worn my fake fleece-lined raincoat. Not nippy enough yet for my muffler, I thought upstairs, or watchcap or double socks. I don’t have rubbers and the rubber boots I have don’t take shoes. I should get one or the other and will this week if I remember to and the price isn’t too high. In the meantime I applied, half an hour before I left, mink oil around the shoes’ stitching and seams and hoped they wouldn’t get too wet. I headed for the subway. The periods and diagonals drummed my umbrella homophonically. Theoretically, the party had started. “Eight,” Diana had said when she invited me and I said “Eight? Seems like an in-between hour to start a party: so soon after most people have just sat down to or finished their dinners.” “No, when I say eight, people will know I mean nine and that’s when they’ll start coming, only a little after because no one likes to be first, and to only eat a light supper beforehand because I’ll have lots of food there. Now if I had said nine, they’d begin coming at quarter to ten and then the party wouldn’t end at one when I want it to but around one forty-five, and I have to be at work noon Saturdays.” It was now half-past eight. Entire trip to her place shouldn’t take more than forty minutes if there isn’t an inordinately long subway station wait. There are good bookstores down there so if I get downtown too early to be late I’ll browse around in one and maybe even buy a book I’ve wanted a long time and was only recently remaindered to a dollar or two or turned into a moderately priced paperback. Insert my umbrella into one of those stands or leakproof cans by the door, for I worked part-time in a bookstore this year when I couldn’t, in spite of my various salaries, honoraria and advances, pay for both my rent and food, and know what damage a leaking umbrella and umbrella can can do to the books and floor and salesperson or customer who slides along it and maybe sprawls and then what that customer can do to the store. But finally outside, showered, shaved and brushed, perfectly hairless face except for the long graying sideburns and one or two hairs curling out of my nostrils and also the small clumps in my ears, which seem to get a bit thicker each year, stiff straight still-wet mostly ungraying side and top hair so right now not a filament or strand out of place. Raining tadpoles and diagonals, sheets and dogs. Three-block walk to the station, salute to the ornate neighborly Central Park West doorman who tips his hat to me with a white-gloved finger while he whistles with a whistle for a cab. Flower stall under a Sabrett’s frankfurter stand umbrella by the subway entrance and I think Why not? and ask how much and for two bucks no tax buy five chrysanthemums and a fern frond, which he wraps in paper and then staples the top and bottom of when I say I’m going to Jersey by way of Amtrak. Downstairs, get two tokens and change and give my thanks and get skeptical eye contact back, though most times I don’t. Second flight down, shaking the closed umbrella as I go and spattering the graffito on the tile wall that’s calling our attention to the forthcoming carnage and war in Puerto Rico and El Salvador and how we must drive out all Hispanics and Semitics and gigolos and whores from New York. Not many people on the platform so could be a good ten-minute wait. Space for a slim-hipped and almost no-buttocked person on the one bench there and I almost sit. But the young woman I’d be sitting next to on one side is cracking and snapping gum which I can’t stand the sound, smell and sight of and the man I’d be sitting thigh to thigh to seems asleep and the type who might take offense at our nearness if he suddenly awakes and thinks it’s because of my dripping flowers or umbrella or something libidinous I did. Farther along the platform a man walking a ten-speed bike to what will be the first car, woman pacing back and forth carrying a typewriter case with I suppose a typewriter inside judging by her shoulder slump from the weight, a midget or someone I think would be considered a midget with that kind of forehead, hairline, face and height and whom I know as the efficient but sometimes belligerent cook of a Columbus Avenue coffee shop I’ve gone to on chillier days for coffee and soup, leaning against a pillar reading a weekly newsmagazine. The last person on the platform alternately looking at her wristwatch and the continually pouring whiskey clock above the bench that’s about twenty minutes late, till she sees me stick the flowers to my nose for a sniff and smiles to herself and drops her watch hand. Nobody looking potentially menacing, a thought I’ve had here before since the night two years ago I was mugged for the first time in my life under the same squeaking clock. I start to pull a book out of my coat pocket, but with two cumbersome things I’m carrying and both wet, push it back, look to see if the train’s coming, with my foot break up the puddle my umbrella’s making till it takes on the shape of a dinosaur, walk along the platform reading some of the things scrawled on the wall ads: “Lenin is the tool of the Marxistplace—Free the Soviet Block 11!!”—shouted out of the mouth of a once-famous jockey who’s promoting smart betting at OTB; “This ad makes asses of women by exploiting their asses”—ballooning out of the behind of a young woman modeling skin-tight designer jeans. I hear the rumble, look up the tunnel, see the beam, step behind the pillar the cook’s leaning against on the other side. As the train pulls in, my mouth makes the motion of a hello to him while his fingers are in his ears and he acknowledges me with a vacant nod. We get on. Sleeping man’s awake but stays on the bench. I keep the closing door open for a man running downstairs yelling “Wait, important date, hold the doors.” Stand till the express stop and though there’s an express waiting, catch the time on the cook’s watch and sit rather than change since I’ll spend the extra minutes I can afford to waste on this slower train. Across from me a woman’s bawling out two young girls. Nothing they do is right. The older one puts her finger on her nose and tries to look at it cross-eyed: not right. Younger girl plays with her shoelaces without untying them: not right. Older girl skims her fingers over the woman’s knuckles and then twirls the woman’s pinky ring—slap, “Act your age, you’re so pitiful dumb!” I’m reading one of the books of the Japanese poet’s poems I’m to collect and translate from but with all that commotion I can’t concentrate. Then the woman orders the girls to stand and they hold her jacket pocket-flaps and all go to the door as the train pulls in at Thirty-fourth and the woman sticks her head past the door and yells “Red.” A man says “Way to go,” and runs to the door and jumps on just before it closes. The woman’s smiling, kids look sullen, man’s laughing and shaking his head. She presses two hands of fingertips to his lips, man says “You’re all looking good,” and points to some seats and they sit, girls perpendicular to the woman and man. She says “I thought I’d miss you.” He says “I told you I know how to work the subway. How the beauty queens been?” “Fine,” “Fine,” the girls say. “They been awful and don’t let them convince you different, but now that you’re here they’re really going to be fine. Isn’t that so, girls?” and they say to him “Yes,” “Yes.” She puts a hand on his knee, other hand holds his two, her thumb rubbing into his bottom palm. He laughs and says “I know, me too. What’s it been, a week?” “Three days,” she says. “Three? Shoo. Miss you so much, feels like three weeks.” “Don’t exaggerate.” The older girl’s looking at my flowers and says “Mommy, can I ask that man what he has in his paper?” “It’s flowers,” she says, still staring at the man. Train goes. “I know, but what kind—live or dead?” Woman looks at me. “No, honey, you don’t want to be disturbing him. He’s studying.” My book’s closed and in my lap. “Mister,” the girl says, “what’s in there, flowers or a plant?” “I told you,” the woman says. “Now be good and be quiet and sit up like a grown girl,” and looks back at the man and rubs his palm. “Six weeks,” he says. “It’s okay,” I say to the woman. “They’re cut chrysanthemums,” to the girl, “so I suppose you can say they’re dead though they’re still very fresh.” “I know that, but what color are they?” “Yellow and red.” “Can I see them?” “Can I see them?” the younger girl says. “Tell them no,” the woman says. “Those kids will hound you till you hand them over to them.” “It’s okay—And I’d like to show you the flowers,” and they leap up, oldest one first, and come over to me and sit on either side, “but I’m going to a party and they’re for the host and I want the paper to stay stapled so when she opens it she’ll be surprised.” “What’s a host?” the older girl says, touching the paper on top, and I say “The woman or man—” “You don’t have to explain to them,” the woman says. “Don’t worry, I like children—The woman or man, though a woman can also be called a hostess, who gives the party, such as the woman who’s giving the party tonight.” “Can I come?” the older girl says. “Can I?” the younger girl says. “No, but”—“Did you hear that? Can they come,” the woman says to the man—“maybe if I open the paper a little you can smell the flowers even if you can’t see them.” I tear open a hole on top and they put their noses in it and take deep breaths and the older girl says “It smells real good, just like yellow and red flowers would.” “They do,” the younger girl says, “—real good.” “Do something to get them back here,” the woman says to the man. “I have no control over them sometimes.” The man takes out a roll of mints and says “Look what I got here, girls.” The girls run to him and each takes a mint he’s unrolled, sticks it into her mouth and puts a hand out for another. “So soon?” he says and they smile and nod and he starts peeling some paper back on the roll and the older girl says “No, I want to do it for you. What kind are these?” as she peels the paper back. “Mints,” and she says “But what kind?” “Why why why, what what what,” the woman says. “You always want to know so much till you wear everyone out including that nice flower man. Just accept they have a flavor and a hole in them and that should be enough.” “But there’s lots of kinds. There’s kinds I don’t like.” “Do you like these?” “Yes.” “Then these aren’t the kind you don’t like.” “Manure mint,” the man says to the older girl. He seems annoyed. “What’s manure mint?” she says, giving the second mint she’s unrolled to the younger girl. The train’s pulling in to the Fourteenth Street stop. “No more questions,” the woman says. “We have to go.” She stands, grabs the girls’ hands, man says to her “I’ll shoot upstairs and look first. Wait for me at the bottom here.” “You’re the boss,” and kisses the back of his coat on the shoulder and the door opens and steps are right there and he runs upstairs. Doors close and train goes, girls staring after me as I move backwards. Must still be raining or was till a minute to a few ago, hats and hair wet of the passengers who just got on. Train stops between stations and starts, stops, lights flash off and on, goes slow. I’m glad I’m going to a party. Haven’t been to one in months. Eats, drinks, best place to meet women they’ve been, maybe elaborate canapés I’d get nowhere else. Maybe Russian canapés and Iranian caviar because lots of Diana’s friends are Russians traveling here from abroad or Eastern Europeans or recent émigrés or Americans of Russian descent, so various confabular and linguistic concoctions I also enjoy. But one quick final line to walk with, as the train pulls in and I open the book without knowing what page it’s to and read in instantly translated Japanese “Storm-colored God who laughs a great deal as in children’s games.” Not a poem I was thinking of including in my collection but I read some more and think I just might. Title’s “Supernal Underground,” which will stay and maybe in the translator’s forward or the introduction to the poet and his work I’ll say where, when and how I chose this poem. West 4th St. station, loitering train dawdling to a stop or tottering to a halt or a mixture of those and I put the book into my coat pocket, stand at the door with the cook who’s reading another newsweekly, other slipped into a briefcase on the floor where I quickly saw inside a clipboard, scissors, rolled-up pair of socks. “The Iffy Decade,” the article’s headline says, which doesn’t make me want to read more: too broad. We get off, I race upstairs, turn around, he’s reading while limping and I see his right foot has a four- to six-inch platform to even his height. I jot down those introductory notes into a memo book, forget what I thought after “dawdling to a halt,” though remember it rhymed with “jot” but it was “stop,” and write the word down followed by a question mark. I go through the revolving exit gate. Token booth’s boarded up, its exterior vandalized. Urine smells so bad in the passageway to the street staircase that I hold my breath. At the bottom of the steps a woman wrapped in towels and with a styrofoam cup with no coins in it by her feet says “Sir, I could use a dollar or two for a hot meal.” I’d stop to look for a dime if it weren’t for the smell. I shake my head, start upstairs, shoelaces on one shoe flick against the steps. I lean the flowers and umbrella against the stair wall, tie the laces, drops land on my head but not much, long as I’m in this position other loosely tied shoe could be untied and tied tight too. “Sir,” from below, twisted face, shaking hand with the cup reaching up to me. Maybe some of it’s an act. I feel in my pockets. I could say “Here, catch,” or walk down and drop it into the cup. All I turn up are two quarters and a subway token. “Sorry.” Her look says look some more. “I have to go—good luck,” and run up the rest of the steps. Rain’s nearly stopped. Cook puts something into her hand and says “All I can spare,” and she says “My babies bless you.” I open the umbrella, look at the library steeple clock. Twenty to eleven or ten to seven? What’d the optometrist say that trying-on day last month? “You want to see long distances, your eyes aren’t in your head anymore but on your nose.” I put them on. Five to nine, so still some time. I head for a bookstore around the block. Bank’s time and temperature clock says 9:12 and 43 degrees. More like it. Cleaning store clock says quarter past. So it’s so. Should’ve left sooner. Now I won’t get to talk much with Diana. Sidewalk so narrow and crowded with people, parking meters, trash-cans and trash that I walk in the street most of the way and every other store selling shoes and western boots. New books in the window I might want to borrow from the library. Then one I at first can’t believe I’m seeing. Same title, different cover, my name at the bottom, little dust already on it. New Asiatic Women Poets I collected and translated, or for the languages I didn’t know, put into verse other people’s interlinears, and which was published in hardcover last year but no one told me was coming out in paperback. The store’s door is locked. Manager I’ve talked to before and who asked me to sign one of the two clothbounds the store bought—“Don’t want to get stuck with more than one copy”—waves my hand away from the door handle and points to the clock I can’t see from here. I point to the book he can’t see at the window corner. He taps his watchband and says “Nine” and slashes his hand through the air. I hold the flowers out to him and say “Please” and he bows and smiles as he shakes his head and reaches under the cash register and must touch the switch that shuts off most of the store lights at once. I get down almost on my knees to see who the publisher is, but with the window lights off it’s too dark. Monday I’ll phone the hardcover editor of that anthology at half-past ten. She never gets in before that. Her assistant will answer and say she’s not in yet and who’s calling and I’ll have to explain who I am again and why I’m calling and he’ll ask for my phone number and spelling of my last name and say she’ll get my message when she comes in. I’ll call at eleven and she’ll be away from her desk her assistant will say and maybe she didn’t see the message he left and he’ll make sure she gets it when she returns. I’ll call at quarter to twelve and the assistant to the editor in the next office will say my editor and her assistant are away from their desks this moment and since both their coats are still there she’s sure they haven’t left for lunch and is there a message and name and phone number I’d like to leave? I’ll call a few minutes after noon and she’ll be out for lunch her assistant will say and she got my last message and in fact got all of them but she’s been extremely busy today, but he will tell her I called once more. I’ll call at two and she’ll be in an editors’ conference. At four she’ll still be in the conference. At five Dolores will pick up the phone and say she was about to call me. Didn’t the rights people contact me about the paperback sale? Didn’t the paperback people send me a questionnaire? Didn’t I even get her note about the sale? The mail these days. Worse than the subways. Check my contract with them, even if she’s sure we both have a good idea what it stipulates, translators getting the worst shake of anybody in publishing other than their senior editors, and that’s that I signed all my rights away to hardcover royalties or a paperback sale when I sold them the manuscript for one not-so-gainful flat fee. What about the movie rights to the book? I’ll say and she’ll say it’s always enjoyable and a rare experience indeed to talk to an author with a sense of humor about his livelihood and with so little bitterness about the treatment of his book, but to be serious, with my next manuscript I should get an agent to handle the contractual details. I’ll say all an agent’s ever told me is I can probably sell poetry anthologies better than any agent, probably because my heart’s really in it, they usually say, and that they don’t like handling translated poetry of individual poets or any poetry for that matter when the poet isn’t a novelist, because there just isn’t enough money in it for them for all the time spent. Anyway, I’ll say, who’s calling about possible royalties or paperback fees? All I want are a few contributor copies to help fill up my barren bookshelves. She’ll say I’m a lot more than just a contributor with that wise and important book and she thinks some comps can be squeezed out of the paper people and if they can’t she’ll send me one of her own. I’ll say does she think each of the contributing poets can get one too? and she’ll say with them she doesn’t know, since the poets will be getting paid again for their poems in the paperback but have nothing in their contracts about complimentary books. But they do owe her a favor for a very successful cookbook she sent them first and they bought, so she’ll look into it and get back to me soon. And then how much she’s looking forward to my next anthology of contemporary poets from remote regions like Outer and Inner Mongolia and Pago Pago and Tierra del Fuego and our own and Greenland’s and even Eastern Siberia’s Eskimos, but without an agent she can’t promise my contract will be any better with that book. As for the Japanese poet I keep raving about and whom she knows I’m plodding away and counting so hard on, no matter how great she and the Asiatic experts eventually say he is she only hopes her house will think he can sell well to universities and libraries, because they’ve just about given up trying to push a poet’s poems on chains and ordinary bookstores. And we’ll have lunch one of these days, she’ll say, when she’s not so bogged down with the spring list and already another dozen authors for next fall, and I head for Diana’s building, rain still thin, wondering what paperback house took my book, which should do me some good in placing future manuscripts, someone recumbent in an empty refrigerator carton in the entrance of a closed sandal shop, around the corner, up her stoop, bell at the top, voice says “Yes?” and I say “Dan Krin” and there’s a pause, static crack, “Excuse me, I’m not used to this elaborate set,” and I’m buzzed in. I keep the door open with my foot, shake out and close the umbrella, start unbuttoning my coat as I climb the first flight. Have to pee. Don’t run or think about it. “Hello.” Diana, staring down the stairwell. “Hi,” I say, putting my glasses into the holder inside my pants pocket and she says “Oh, it’s you. Ringer who rung you in said it was my niece Andy. She didn’t come in with you?” “No.” “You’re one of the first. Come on up. Of course come on up. And of course you’re coming up. Still, you, of all people, Daniel, excluding Andy, I thought would come sooner. Shame on you both and I hope we get time to talk.” “Funny, but that’s what I was thinking just before, though not about Andy,” as I round the landing and start up the next flight. “How you doing?” and she says “Unready, and you?” “Couldn’t be better. But guess what I just saw in the Eighth Street Bookshop window?” and she doesn’t say “What?” Maybe she didn’t hear me. I’m now on her floor. Her door’s open. People chatting inside. Coatrack with three coats and a hat. Pair of man’s work-boots on the other tenant’s doormat. “Same boots were there the last time I was here,” and she says “They’re there permanently to scare off undesirable trespassers, and extra extra-large. He’s petite.” “Strange.” Rubbers and rubber rainboots and umbrella by her door. She’s staring at me. Man in her apartment saying “Say it again, Jane, and this time I swear by what’s his name in heaven I’ll laugh.” Still staring at me. Nodding approvingly. Wry smile arising. She’s about to give me a compliment. I’m about to deflect and if possible squelch it. I look over my shoulder. “What are you looking at?” she says. “Nobody I guess. Thought maybe someone who you were, for what were those ‘my isn’t it nice oh boy’ nods and look for?” “You of course, if you have to ask.”
“Telephone, Dee,” a woman says from the door. Attractive, blackhaired, shiny black dress with several silver chains of various widths around her waist and neck. Bracelets, fingers full of rings.
“Is it an accent?”
“Pronouncedly Slavic.”
“Have him—no, I should take care of it.”
“You’re busy. I speak the lingua messenger. Have him what?”
“Cibette, this is Dan—Tell him the address and directions here right up to the fourth floor and where we’re situated in relation to the top step, and just to come, you hear—no excuses, but speak extra intelligibly and have him repeat everything back.” Cibette goes inside. “Some of the newer émigrés. So bright and talented. But the language is such a problem, they get lost or are spooked by our subways and have no money for cabs, besides getting cheated by them. I should have spoken to him. But you, that’s who. Marble of surprises, you look practically impeccable. Or does that sound incredibly mean? It does suddenly to me.”
“No. You mean, well, that you’ve never seen me out of my bathing suit, bathrobe, assorted worn-down T-shirts and jeans. But wait’ll I take off my coat. Almost the same old summer ho-hum clothes.”
“Now now, don’t be so unduly. Whatever. Been hitting this nutritious green wine a Hungarian friend sent over and I think too much. But that you wore shoes instead of sneakers is a positive sign of nattier garments to come.”
“How fancy,” touching the aluminum coatrack. “Yours?”
“Rented, as is the fur coat you see on it, to make the best impression on my very impressive guests, though I’m not impressed. Your umbrella isn’t that ratty to embarrass me, so leave it in the holder, though I can’t guarantee it’ll be there when you leave.”
“I’ll take another then.”
“Don’t you dare. Only the guests I don’t know or who can afford it are allowed to be thieves.”
I stick the umbrella into the holder, hang up my coat while she’s looking me over and nodding at my pants and shaking her head at my shirt, and hold out the flowers. “For you.”
“But I have no spare vases.”
“Hardly the gracious way of accepting.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sure they’re beautiful, few and smell nice too. But the person who plans to present them should think beforehand of the harried hostess and myriad problems she’s apt to have with her party and that all her vases and hands will probably be filled. But what are we indulging in all this small hallway talk for? Usually you just kiss and are quickly in the room for a drink and by now my time should be too occupied for even a lingering hello and I’m getting worried it’s not. Ah, there’s the bell. Give a kiss, then get in there and ring them in. First left in the kitchen, and before you get a drink. First press the button marked T. Ask who’s there. Then release that button and listen while you press the L-button and then ring the R-button to let whoever it is in.”
“What should I L for?”
“Just if someone says it’s Harry, David or Andrei. If he says he’s a crazed razor-blade wielder who’s going to slice up us all, don’t ring him in. But go. Quick. Kiss. They’re ringing again. And find anything but an empty applesauce jar for your beautiful flowers,” and she gives them to me and I kiss her cheek and go inside. Bell’s ringing. I press the T-button and say “Hello?” and release it and listen and don’t hear anything and bell rings and Diana yells “What are you doing, Dan?” and I press the button and say “Yes?” and release it and press the L-button and a man says “Velchetski and friend,” and I ring him in. I take my sweater off, put it on top of the coatrack and see Diana leaning over the banister. “Grisha, how are you?—up here,” and I suppose it’s Grisha who says “I can’t see you but can only imagine your loveliness face from below and I feel simply great. Send me the elevator.”
“For two short flights?”
“These are not short. Only my legs and breath are, which make the stairs long. But you have no elevator car, don’t lie to me,” and something in Russian, “but I will still walk upstairs.”
“Dan,” Diana says, “you must meet this madman, but first plant those.” I didn’t know I still held them. Maybe I put them down, picked them up when I came out here. I go into the kitchen. Bell rings. I press it, put the wrapped flowers in a tall glass of water, get a glass of green wine at the bar, go to the cheese table and slice a piece of brie and introduce myself. Phil and his wife Jane. Bell rings. “Translate,” I say. “I’ll get it,” someone says near the kitchen. “Sculptors,” Phil says. “That so? What do you sculpt, or what with?” “Rubber,” Jane says. “Plastic,” Phil says, “but I really hate those questions, for my own idiosyncratic reasons, but understand why people ask them.” “Because they’re interested I guess,” I say. “But you actually sculpt with those materials?” Bell rings. “Oh no,” Jane says. “Molding, twisting—you know.” “Something like that for me too, but it’s too difficult—and again excuse my idiosyncrasies—for me to explain.” “Some art forms are tougher that way I suppose,” I say.
Someone uncorks and passes around a bottle of green wine. First glass I drank too fast. Doesn’t taste much different than the cheap American chablis I buy for myself by the jug. Room’s crowding up quickly. Coughing, smoking, phone and intercom ringing, somewhere a glass breaking, most people seem to know one another and a few exchange big hellos and hugs. “Yes, top floor, you just had to follow the noise,” Diana says on the phone, forefinger in her other ear. “Excuse me,” I say to Phil and Jane, “but I’ve done something wrong.” I go into the kitchen, unwrap the flowers and bring them in their glass to the cheese table. “You brought them for Diana?” Jane says. “How nice. Not even three months since summer and you really begin to miss them,” and she puts her nose into one of the corollas, closes her eyes and breathes. “Smell them, hon. Remind you of something?” Man at the table says to me “And what school do you teach at?” and I say “Me? No place. Would if I could but not much room for what I do. Except if you count junior high school here on a per diem basis, and in some subjects I know as much of as my kids,” and he says “For some reason I thought you said you taught in New York,” and he puts some cheese on a cucumber slice and leaves and I look around the table for a vegetable tray, don’t see any and say to Jane “I could really go for a carrot or celery stick,” and she looks at the table and says “I don’t think she’d mind much if you raided the icebox.” “Alan,” Diana shouts to a man walking in. I recognize him from his book jacket I’ve home. I think he’s wearing the same book jacket jacket and the same or similarly designed striped tie. Does very well. Front-page reviews, interviews on TV and in magazines and the news. Recently in the photocopy shop down my block I saw him on the cover of the free TV Shopper and read the article about him inside and learned what neighborhood restaurants and stores this “famous Westsider” likes to go to. Diana quickly introduces him to a few people and he says hello and waves to several others he knows and she leads him over to us. “I want you to meet two very dear old friends of mine, Jane and Philip Bender. They’re both incredible sculptors.” “I know their work, you don’t have to tell me,” Alan says. “Fact is I almost owned one of them.”
“Which one of us did you almost own?” Jane says, shaking his hand.
“I’m sorry. I just came from another party and my communication processes got bottled up. Which one of you works in plastic?”
“Didn’t he just say he knew our work well?” Phill says to me and I shrug and look to the side. Someone’s cigarette smoke’s coming my way. I hold my breath and look back. It’s broken by my head, a little of it goes in Jane’s face.
“…didn’t say ‘well.’ And if your wife or you hadn’t adopted the other’s surname, I’d know which one of you works in what much better.”
“Excuse me, sir, I didn’t—I hope you don’t think I was saying it aggressively. Just my sick sense of whatever you call humor again, which likes to work against me.”
“Same here—unaggressive, though no one could ever accuse me of humor. And whichever of those two media you do work in, let me say I admire it tremendously.”
“Thanks. And I think I can say the same for us for your work too—in all your literary forms.”
“Even the porno novels?”
“You don’t write those that I know of.”
“See? Told you I had no sense of humor.” They all laugh. I smile.
“And this is Daniel Krin, Alan,” Diana says, “before you get into an endless trialogue about art buying and inflated reputations and phalli and pornography. But if you are thinking of buying someone, you’d be wise to scoop up these two soon. Value of some of their older work has quadrupled.”
“She’ll say anything for a friend,” Jane says, “and because she knows we’re dying to go to Machu-Picchu.”
“Will she?—Hello, Mr. Krin.”
“How are you?” We shake hands.
“I’m fine thanks I guess, and you?” and laughs.
“Just an expression. ‘How goes, adios, I’m well, thank the Lord, by jove and gum.’”
“Of course. My bottled-up processes—this time the incoming. Seriously now,” to Phil and Jane, Diana nipping my elbow and slipping away, “and all pornography and priapic testimonials to the rear for the time being unless you’re lusting to discuss them, which one of you works in rubber?”
Diana’s greeting some people at the door or maybe they’re leaving. That can’t be her. She’s at the other side of the cheese table, behind a tall unused samovar, brushing crumbs off the cloth into her palm, taking my bouquet to the bar, dumping the crumbs into an ashtray and accepting a sip of wine from a man and sticking one of the flowers minus most of its stem into his lapel. Diana have a twin? I put on my glasses. Woman who doesn’t look like her much. Hair the same though. Graying, snipped short, shampooed sheen, and an almost duplicate purple turtleneck jersey. I listen for another minute, say “Pardon me, folks, I think I see over there my long lost brother,” and walk off. “What was his name again?” Alan says and Jane knows but Phil forgets. I meet her, though not yet. She was standing in the center of the room where I am now. I don’t know when she came in. I doubt she was here yet. Room’s very noisy and crowded now and was probably like that when she got here. I think I would have spotted her right away or soon after. My glasses were back in my pocket but she wasn’t that far away when she did come nearer where I needed them to see her. White coarse blouse buttoned to the neck, Russian-type blouse’s stiff inch-high collar, lace where the cuffs end and as a collar fringe, large unobscured forehead, lots of fine kind of copper-colored hair knotted on top of her head, long neck, bony cheeks, big wide-awake eyes that later turned out to be a sea-green, taller than most of the women there, long skirt, so I couldn’t see what sort of shoes she wore, but around five-nine. I suddenly get the call and set my glass on the bar and make my way to the bathroom, saying as I go “Personal emergency, please, in a rush,” relieved to find it free, also combed my hair in there and splashed water on my face and dried it, for it had become uncomfortably warm in the living room, won’t be too long now before I see her. Maybe she was at this moment approaching the stoop or climbing the steps. I didn’t ring her in. Didn’t ring in anyone since the beginning of the party. She must have rung the downstairs bell though. Or someone leaving or entering opened the door as she was coming up the stoop or about to ring and let her in or maybe the door had been left open intentionally, forgetfully or because of some door-check failure. By then there must have been too many umbrellas in the hall for the one holder. I wonder what Diana thought when she took my bouquet off the table and put it at the back of the bar away from the bottles and glasses. Glass he stuck them in is okay and more than enough if maybe too much water. But why’d he place it where hands on all four sides reaching every which way could easily spill it? Coatrack must be filled by now. Rubbers and boots lined up or strewn around the hallway floor and wall. Probably around this time that someone wrapped a woman’s coat around mine and my sweater got knocked to the floor or put some other place, which could be what helped me forget when I left that I’d come with one, being quite high by then and not automatically seeing it on the shelf above my covered coat. Don’t know why remembering I had an umbrella presented no problem, though probably because the holder was right outside the door. Bell rings. One every minute from the time I got to the party it seemed. Just about now I said to a man by the bar something like “You know, these recurrent bell-rings remind me of a Japanese play I recently read where the single principal in it is from start-to-finish answering ten different doors for hundreds of imaginary guests and talking to himself about who’s probably ringing and what person and group and then troop he just let in and found an unoccupied space for. And whom, if he sees her at the door, he’s going to do everything short of shooting to keep out.” The man I said this to, after relighting his pipe and looking as if he thought over what I said, says “I saw a play like that once. A short one, on a long double bill, and both by the same famous Rumanian, who I think became famous because of that play. But this one had two characters in it who talked to each other continuously.”
“Mine’s got to be derivative then, since its world premiere was last year. I know the play you mean, unless there are two famous Rumanian-born Frenchmen who wrote very similar plays. In mine there are no chairs in it. The setting’s one empty room eventually packed so tight with guests that by the end of the play many of them are sitting on ceiling crossbeams and hanging from wall hooks, while the doors are still being opened by this one principal on stage.”
“The actor.”
“Or actress. Because in the book of this playwright’s selected plays the role of ‘principal performer’—as she called it—is supposed to be played by an old man and young woman at alternate performances, though the sex and age of the person he or she wants to keep out stays the same.”
“I’m sure my play didn’t have those instructions. But what did you mean before by ‘imaginary guests’?”
“Actually, it’s the ringing that’s imaginary, the guests only conceivably. The audience sees them or at least sees what the principal performer thinks he or she’s seeing.”
“I think I heard about that play. Is it the one where the actor or actress finally asks the audience to get out of their seats and then out of the theater so the guests who are pouring in can have somewhere to sit and stand?”
“Not in my playwright’s play, though it’d be a better ending. And now I’ve lost what I was originally saying.”
“The intercom ringing. Leading to the absurdity of most modern dramaturgy. But there’s another one. You heard it. I know I did, if I’m not imagining us at this wonderful party and the bell ringing repeatedly. No, we’re both here and the bells are real and the party’s wonderful. You know Alan Merson there?”
“I know his work.”
“Fine fellow, fine work.”
“I don’t want to say anything. Undoubtedly he’s a fine fellow.”
“But you are saying something. Excuse me, I see someone I know.”
He goes over to a well-known painter, they clap backs and begin talking. The Times Sunday magazine did an article on the painter not long ago. I like a lot of his work but don’t consider it art. I consider it what? Illustrations. I said that to a couple of people at this party and before it. Nobody agreed with me. One person bristled and said “Where do you come to say that?” and I said “This might sound mindless and maybe makes no sense, but I like what I know.” She said “It makes no sense or not enough for me to want to think any more about it,” and the conversation stopped for a minute while we both, when we weren’t looking at the other looking at our feet, looked at our feet. Diana has several of his works on her walls. All inscribed to her, one from thirty years ago. It says “Sleep sheepishly Dee,” which could mean a number of things but has no connection from what I can see to the illustration, which is more like a child’s cartoon, and with its colors from play crayons, of the Staten Island skyline during the daytime and about ten ocean liners lined up to go out to sea. He’s taller than his photographs. Could that be correct? Taller if his photographs were lifesize and he was standing in them erect. Balder also I notice passing him on my way to the couch, with what seemed to be real hair in his photographs being real hair combed over his head from the back.
I sit and take a carrot stick off an end table plate. Diana sits beside me and says before I can put the carrot into my mouth “You can’t sit on a couch at one of my parties or even in one of the easy chairs so early. If you were elderly, lame or a single to multiple amputee and one of those amputated parts was a leg or foot or even recently one to so many toes, yes, but now I want you to move around and mix. Or stand in one place and have more cheese. What’s wrong? You’re not having fun.”
“If I don’t I won’t be invited to the next one, that it?”
“Don’t be silly. To me you’re practically an honored guest.”
“Honored guests rarely get the same honor twice.”
“I can honor them once and practically honor them another time and then invite them when others are actually and practically honored. But now you can honor me by getting up and socially enmeshed.”
“I just want to sit here and draw attention to myself and look around. You’ve a very interesting attractive group and Jane’s a doll though Phil’s a bit too driven, ass-kissing and affected to become a real artistic success.”
“Phil has every right to want what he hasn’t quite won but has long earned. The rest are everything you say but don’t want to be looked at just yet by someone sitting on a couch. Timing’s very important for a good party. Someone sits and stares before the right time comes, he makes people uncomfortable or close to it. Also, the right person or couple must usually be the first to sit. A stranger sits, particularly one who doesn’t come with a big rep or hasn’t yet made a terrific hit, the more frequent guests get the impression he’s not enjoying himself, which makes them doubly uncomfortable: his staring and apparent discomfort. Right now everyone here—if he’s to be stared at—wants it to be done by someone standing up and, allowing for variations of shyness or boldness and height, face to face. I wouldn’t expect you to know this, being part social animal but mostly hermit.”
“Hey, take it easy, for what am I doing that’s so wrong? You said someone will have to sit on the couch sooner or later, so why not me? Some people are the first in space. Others in the hearts of their partymen. Someone might be the first to get drunk tonight, another to break a valuable plate. I don’t want to be any of these, and even if I did want to I couldn’t be the first in space. So isn’t it better if I’m to be the first in anything—”
“You’ve a smooth protective and circumventive sense of humor, which could be a first-rate unctuous one if you did more to thwart people from detecting how protective it is. I’ll be back in two minutes. If you’re not off the couch by then or joined on it by anyone more than my cat, I’m moving it into the hallway and you can sit out there for as long as you like.”
“Deal.” I hold out my palm for her to slap. She looks at it and leaves. I bite off half the carrot stick. Someone sits on the couch’s other end. An actor I’ve seen in lead roles on public TV. He’s also worked in theater and movies. I smile and say hello. He nods, sets his glass down on the cocktail table, spills a little of it, “Shit!” He gets up for what I suppose is a napkin. “Here, use this,” taking out my bandanna handkerchief.
“I have one of my own, thanks very much.”
“I didn’t mean I’d think you’d use yours. Excuse me,” removing a scrap of chewed carrot off my lip, “the carrot. Because believe me, I’ll have to wash it some time after I get home, since I already wiped something up with it tonight, and wine leaves a nice smell.”
“Does it? Wouldn’t think so. What it does leave is a gorgeous stain, at least the piss I usually drink. I’ll get a paper towel,” and leaves.
He’s a good actor though I’ve never seen him in a movie or on the stage. He goes to the bar, gets a fresh glass of wine and a napkin for the bottom of the glass. Movies and TV have to be different than theater: many takes and the entire part doesn’t have to be memorized. I don’t see him anymore. Maybe they’re tougher than theater just because of those many takes and that the scenes aren’t filmed and taped in sequence. I don’t know much about those fields really, but can surmise. Accessible to so many women, but all those casting calls and waits. Bell rings. Cat weaves around lots of feet as he heads for the bedroom. I put on my glasses. Can’t see the cat but bedroom door crack widens an inch when nobody’s that close to it, so must be him going in or a draft. More people. Four to five greeted by Diana at the door. Just popping by, I overhear, on their way to wherever it is people go these days in evening dress, one saying “Rain’s frozen me stiff—what I need’s a drink,” and makes for the bar, tapping shoulders, poking triceps, startling some people when they see him in a tux. Maybe now she’s somewhere around. Coat hung up, umbrella snugged beside mine in the holder perhaps. It was, so there had to be some room left in it, and seeing her take out hers when she left is another reason I didn’t leave mine behind, or maybe only she tried squeezing her umbrella into the holder or someone leaving had just taken out his. Actor hasn’t come back. If they’d met, which they might have, and arranged to meet another time, they’d make a very handsome couple, though I doubt she’d enjoy knowing him after a week. That And-who-might-you-be? look and no smile given back, though could be he thought I was gay and he’s demonstrably or questionably not. I hear him from across the room. “‘It’s outrageous,’ he said, ‘and I simply won’t stand for it,”’ and a moment later everyone around him laughs. I don’t know why. Wasn’t an impersonation of a notable politico let’s say. Maybe he made a motion to sit. That’s an old slapstick shtick that could always do it, though I might be underrating his intelligence and overestimating his age, and I didn’t hear his entire remark. My glass is empty. I bring it down from my lips. Frozen man’s reaching below the bar where I suppose he knows or assumes the hard stuff is. I don’t remember emptying my glass. When I watched the crowd around the actor laugh or frozen man poke his way to the bar? I put the actor’s glass on the end table, wipe up the mess he left with my handkerchief and smell it. He’s right. Don’t know why I said it’d make a nice smell. Stupid, but something more. Policemen and performing celebrities as well as psychiatrists at parties and maybe even brain surgeons or all doctors and also scientists doing encephalic research make me uneasy at times and overeager to please. What else can I do for you, like your shoes and socks shined? Wine’s left a white cloud on the wood that won’t wipe off. Not my fault but someone who had only watched me when I wiped it might think it was, but I’m sure Diana or her cleaning women will know how to get it out. Should I tell her? I look at my lap. No matter how large in the crotch I buy my pants or how dark they are, my genitals still show through. Maybe I wear the wrong kind of underpants. This isn’t much fun. Should I get up and if up go to the door or bar? But I don’t want to go so soon. A woman might still come in whom I’ll want to meet and what do I have cooking at home? Bell rings. And drink his. In the Himalayas maybe one can still get a liver-eating amoebic disease. I pour his wine into my glass.
“That was smart, taking two with you when you sat,” woman sitting down on the couch says.
“This? It was someone else’s and I didn’t want to waste it.”
“Someone you know I hope.”
“No, but I trust him. I figured—one of Diana’s friends? How contagious could he be?”
“What if, and this is just a what-if, it happened to be a friend of her friend’s—someone he just picked up at a bar? I don’t mean that, since I’m sure everyone here is more than all right, but only as an example to be more cautious other times?” and drinks from a mug of beer.
“Oh, beer. That’s what I should’ve got. I didn’t see any.”
“In the refridge. Mugs in the cabinet above. Like some of mine?”
“Sure you’d want to drink from it after I took a swig?”
“You’re an actual friend of Diana’s, aren’t you? Or at least not someone she picked up at a seedy bar minutes before she put this whole thing together, and naturally I don’t mean it, and you look clean.”
“Very clean. And hand-invited, that’s me. But shower a day. Obsessively clean. Believe me, I change my teeth at the very minimum once a week.”
“Maybe we ought to drop the subject.”
“Right. Sometimes I never know where my mouth’s going to go.”
“That doesn’t have to be a bad thing. And if you want some beer you’ll get your own then, not that I’m worried I’ll catch anything from you.”
“No, tainted wine suits me fine and the alcohol in it kills the—but I should stop that. Honestly, thanks for the offer.” I turn to the party, figuring she no longer wants to talk and not being that interested in the conversation either.
“Who are you,” she says, “besides Diana’s friend if you are?”
“I am. From summer camp.”
“From hundreds of years ago when you were both counselors or campers there?”
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have assumed everyone knew that reference. An artist colony upstate.”
“That place. With the signed Tiffany windows and where she went this summer. You must be a painter. You look like one.”
“Nope, a translator. And before you ask—you were going to?”
“I’ll have to now.”
“For the present a not, in English, very well known contemporary Japanese poet. Name’s Jun Hasenai.”
“Never heard of him. But I’m not familiar with most poetry. My husband’s the one.”
“That so? What’s he do?”
“Forget about him. I always talk about him when I sit on couches at parties. I want to know about your work. Your poet’s very good?”
“Believe me. But most translators, when they choose what they’re going to translate out of love or whatever you want to call it—”
“Certainly not money.”
“Money? Money? What’s that? Some new form of currency? No, that’s not funny. Anyway, they think all the previous translations of it aren’t good enough, though with Hasenai I’ve been lucky since there’s almost been nothing in English and not one book.”
“I’m excited, a terrific new writer I’ve never heard of. Can you quote some of it?”
“In English or Japanese?”
“You speak Japanese too?”
“Now who’s kidding whom?”
“I’m not. I thought it might be one of those transliteral or what do you translators call those translations—where you translate from the less meticulous and poetic translations of the originals?”
“That’s close enough. Now don’t call me a chauvinist, at least the malevolent kind, for I could give you a list of my kindred and unconsanguineous sisters who’ll swear I’m not, but I bet you picked that up from your husband who I bet is a lit professor who I bet has writ tomes of published poems.”
“He is and has.”
“Well, that’s a good profession. No, I do the entire thing. I even write the poems for Hasenai in the original and let him take all the credit.” I take off my glasses. “I have to take these off and put them in their holder and the holder into my pocket or someplace safe so I know they won’t fly off my face and break or holder flop out of my pocket and get stepped on, when I recite one of Hasenai’s peppier poems. ‘Night is a moon and then it’s cigarette-yellow and done. Christ, I can’t go on. The evening’s reached its peak and the coyote is gone.’”
“That’s good. And the whole poem I wager. And who would have thought they have coyotes in Japan, or is that your word for a similar animal there that has no exact counterpart in English? Of course the poem’s probably better in the original.”
“I just now made it up.”
“Translated it?”
“No, it’s my own.”
“That’s mean. You fooled me.”
“Or maybe I’m a good spontaneous poet, how about that?”
“You’re not being very nice.”
“Why? Suppose I now said it was Hasenai’s and I worked days on it and had only said it was mine to momentarily fool you? I don’t usually do that and wouldn’t know why I would, but I’m capable of it.”
“No, you’re smart enough to know what your motives are. As for the poem, I’m no hypocrite. To my uncultivated ears—hubby’s poems or not, and I plead guilt to not reading them all and those I do I mostly don’t understand, a problem no one else seems to have—what you recited seemed quite good.”
“Thanks. And I was being too playful—maybe prematurely playful—with you. You already admitted you didn’t know or care much for poetry, so where’d I come off trying to fool you? And it was my poem alone. I don’t know if it was whole. I’ve even forgotten what I spontaneously wrote, but since I didn’t put it on paper or memorize it—you don’t remember it, do you?”
“Except for a coyote in it, no.”
“Anyway, I can’t say it was written. And probably everything I’d spontaneously compose is influenced by modern Japanese writing and these days especially, Hasenai’s, so you’re right if you also thought it sounded somewhat Japanese.”
“Since it had no Japanese references in it, it didn’t particularly sound like anything to me.”
“Okay. Just don’t if you don’t mind tell Diana about this or she’ll never invite me back and then we’ll never meet again.”
“I’ve a big mouth too sometimes so I can’t guarantee what will happen.” She gets up. “Excuse me. I’m not going to the powder room or to take a breath of fresh exercise or anything. Enjoy yourself.”
“Please. No apologies necessary. Just mine.” She leaves. I get up for more cheese. I also don’t want to be sitting here when she starts talking to someone about me. “That man there. On the couch, to the left. I don’t want to turn around but he—there’s nobody there? I’m referring to his left. He’s sort of disinterestedly dressed, hair gushing out of his chest, a varicose nose? There he is. Well him. Talk about a man being mixed up?”
Jane and Phil are talking to each other at the cheese table. Now there are hard sausages on it, creamed herrings, sliced vegetables, an egg and chicken salad mold with a dollop of caviar on top, pâtés and dips. I dip a zucchini stick into a dip, bite it while I slice off some pâté, put the pâté on a cracker, add a piece of cheese to it, put the rest of the zucchini into my mouth, cheese falls to the table, while I reach for it the pâté drops to the floor. I pick the cheese up and put it into my mouth, pick up the pâté with a paper napkin, can’t find a used plate or ashtray to put the napkin in so I put it into my back pants pocket, but I might sit on it by the time I get rid of it so I put it into my side pocket, eat the cracker and look at Jane and Phil. They’ve been watching me, resume talking. “I’m not so sure,” Jane says. “You’re not so sure? Good God, if Shakespeare could mix metaphors and get away with it—”
“So what did Alan have to say?” I say and Jane says “Wuh?” and Phil looks at me curiously, skeptically, some way that way that makes me feel I shouldn’t have interrupted or that I might have said something before that should have discouraged me from speaking so openly to them now. I think. Jane was nice, Phil not so much. “Nothing really,” waving them back to their conversation and I take a glass of wine off the table and am about to drink it.
“That’s my wine,” Jane says.
“I’m sorry, I thought it was mine.” I hold it out to her.
“I don’t want it now. I’d just rather not have anyone else drink from it.”
“I can understand that.” I put the glass down, see a full glass of wine at the other end of the table, look at the people near it and they all seem to be holding a glass of something. “There’s mine.” I reach over and grab it. “Same kind of glass and green and full, just like yours. And don’t worry, I’m not drunk,” I say, drinking. “Just a little uncomfortable. All these big makers here and everyone knowing one another and all that or whatever it is making me uneasy. I’m also not in any kind of therapy as that must—that remark must—those last remarks must make me sound like.”
“What?”
“Why do you say that?” Phil says.
“You referring to her ‘what?’ or to my being uncomfortable?”
“Since I was looking right at you, I think I meant you. And about your thinking you’re sounding as if you’re in therapy.”
“Really, I know nothing about therapy.”
“Come on…what’s your name: Scott?”
“Dan,” Jane says.
“Everyone knows something about therapy. Either we’ve been in it or have read scores of books about it or know scores who’ve done one or both. But forgetting that if you don’t want to talk about it, why do you feel especially uncomfortable here?”
“Not ‘especially.’ A little, and because I’ve made a couple of people uncomfortable. If I also made you two uncomfortable, then more than a couple. Perhaps three or four. Definitely three or four if I’ve made you both uncomfortable, but now that I think of that pipe-smoking man over there I talked theater to before, it’s more like five. But really. I’m being silly. A bore. I can tell when I’m being a bore. Been a bore before for sure and a boor to boot. A boor-bore or bore-boor. You see? Still a bore but not necessarily a boor-bore or one to boot. Too much to eat, that’s the problem, and possibly too much wine rushing too suddenly to my head or wherever wine rushes to, and green, for whoever heard of green wine even on Saint Paddy’s Day? Beer, sure, but—I should go.”
“Why? Calm down. Let’s talk.”
“I’m calm. And thanks. That’s very nice.”
“Why’s it so nice? If we’re here for anything on this gosh-darn globe, which is just what Jane and I were having it out about before—”
“Time out,” a man says to us, holding his hands up to make a T. “This is a joke.”
“We know,” Jane says.
“Good, you know, you love jokes. But this one is not intentionally meant to offend any ethnic or national group and any similarity to such is purely coincidental. The Polish army purchased ten thousand dilapidated bathtubs from an Italian scrapman—”
“You told us it.”
“How they refurbished the tubs and used them as tanks to invade Russia?”
“And I told you it wasn’t a very appropriate joke for this party and as far as jokes go, not at all droll.”
“Play ball,” he says, dropping his hands and walking away.
“Who let that guy in?” Phil says.
“I kind of liked it,” I say. “Not the joke so much but the ‘Time in, play ball.’ Takes a certain amount of guts and it’s something I might do—the preambular apology.”
“It takes stupidity, not guts. I think he’s an idiot. You know Milikin?”
“Seen his illustrations all over the place but never met him.”
“Genius, man, genius, and where I come from you’d get strung up for using that word for his work. I wanted to find someone to introduce us. Diana’s busy.”
“Just go over to him, say ‘Hello, how’s by you, what’s new, the family, and I wanted to meet you.’ He’ll like the attention, especially from an artist.”
“That’s what I told him,” Jane says. “I’m in no rush to meet him myself, although I do admire the regard and prices he gets. I’ll speak to him of course, but first I want Phil to introduce himself. Do it, Phil. Everyone has to humble himself to someone at times, and he has thirty years on you, so you have nothing to feel competitive about.”
“It’s not that. There are people talking to him.”
“You want a few more drinks first? Because you know you’re going to go over before the night’s over. But then you’ll be too sloshed to make any sense to him and for him to appreciate your going over to want to do anything to help push your work.”
“You know that’s not why I want to talk to him.”
“Hey baby, this is the itsy old art lady you sleep with, so don’t be giving me that shit.” “Then speak like a lady, act like a lady,” and he gives more reasons why he can’t, shouldn’t, won’t introduce himself to Milikin and when she tells him to stop being a child and particularly with a voice so loud the whole world can hear, he says much lower that he’s not a child which she should know by now if she sleeps with him as she says and if she hasn’t been then he’s been having one hell of a ball with someone else the last ten years. But all kidding aside. If she has anything like that to say to him, say it at home. Then I see Helene. Of course I didn’t know her name at the time. Looking at me when I first looked at her. I’d lifted my head. First I turned my head away from Jane and Phil while they caviled about what each had just said, looked around the room, saw the woman from the couch, man with the pipe, Alan making a point, Milikin nowhere about, Cylette I think her name was being offered a light, looked at the rug, raised myself an inch or two on the balls of my soles, raised myself an inch or two on my heels, seesawed back and forth a few times like this, sipped some wine, set the glass down without looking away from it, then lifted my head while Phil told Jane how in many ways he’s more honest than she despite anything she might say, but none of it loud enough it seemed for anyone else to hear, and found myself looking at Helene looking at me. Well what do you know I told myself—hello, hello. She was standing between the food table and bar, about seven feet from the bar and seven from me. A crowd stood behind her, crowded around the bar, and there was an opening between us a foot or so wide and while we looked at one another people moved past it but nobody blocked it. She was being spoken to by a man whose whole body her whole body faced, but her face was turned sideways to me. She held a wineglass with two hands. Only the stem and lip of it showed, so I couldn’t tell what color wine she drank. We looked at each other for about ten seconds. Then I turned my head back to Jane and Phil while she was still looking at me. That’s when I said to myself Well what do you know, hello hello. I don’t know why I turned back to Jane and Phil. The position—body facing one way, head the other—could have been making me physically uncomfortable, but I don’t think that was it. If it was and I’d corrected it by turning more of my body to her, she might have construed that move as too open and provoking. I suppose I also didn’t think it right to look too long at someone looking at me whom I didn’t know, though she did to me. Jane said something to Phil about iguanas and sausages. Phil said “What do you think about that, Dan?” I said “About what?” “Damn lf he wasn’t even listening when we figured out the key to his past and present and all his future configurations but swore on our children’s heads to say it only once to him and never again. Tough luck, fella.” “He’s better off,” Jane says, “and you’re an awfully slick liar. Now let’s drop the subject, darling, okay?” “J’agrée, mon queen—to any sing.” She grabs his hand and yanks him closer to kiss him. I turn my head and more of my body this time to this woman. She’s facing the man with her body and face, listening to him engrossedly it seems. “We’ll saunter up to him en duo,” Jane says. “It can’t hurt. Speak to you later, Dan, unless you want to join us,” and I say “No thanks, I’ll save your place,” and turn back to the woman. She’s still listening. He’s using the words “quiddity,” “tendentious” and “rhetoric” in one sentence. If I look at her long and hard enough without looking away I bet she looks at me. Seconds after I think this she turns her head to me. It never worked before. It didn’t work now. She just turned to me again, or turned this way, not realizing I was still here, and last time I tried that trick I was probably in high school. We look at each other. She starts to smile, sort of smiles, then smiles because I smile or maybe I smiled because I felt her full smile about to appear and we smile at each other like this and I bob my head once and she blinks her eyes once, more a reflex than a signal I’d say, and turns to the man who has stopped talking to her and might have been looking at us looking at each other since she turned to me but is now looking at her, and raises her empty glass and he says “Not yet but it could stand some filling up,” and they go to the bar.
Blouse, neck, hair, breasts, forehead, cheek, collar, cuffs, skirt, can’t see her shoes. She squeezes through the crowd that came together behind the man who squeezed through first. Her back’s to me. She seems to have a large round rear and small waist. I picture her ironing one of those cuffs and me moving flush up against her rear, arm around her waist, other hand cupping her breast, fiddling with her nipple, neither of us in clothes. She’s behind some people now and all I see is her hair, then what seems her hand pouring wine from a bottle into a man’s glass. Go over, say hello or if she’s still with the man then stay close to say hello when he momentarily looks away or talks to someone else and maybe even leaves her. I head for the bar, turn to the food table, I wouldn’t know what to say. “Hello, how’s by you, the family?” Might be original enough to tickle her but I doubt it. A funnyman she might think, one who isn’t afraid to make a fool of himself, but I doubt it. Earnest approach then. “I wanted to meet you, plain as that, what can I say?” She looks earnest herself but the approach might what? Put her ill at ease or touch her in some not too positive way and then she could silently blame me for her sudden awkwardness or whatever it might come to when before she was feeling so good. Just go over. Say and do nothing. Or say nothing but do something. Pretend to want more wine. Just want more wine, since when do you have to pretend, and while there look at her and if she’s not looking at you continue to look at her and if she then looks at you, maybe then you can make one of a number of moves. But finish your wine first. Or go over with it. She’ll know the real reason you’re coming over, but if she’s interested, and for an intermittent minute she seemed to be, she won’t care what’s the excuse.
I drink up and start for the bar. “Excuse me, excuse me.” She’s still talking to that man. What did I expect? And if she was talking to anyone, what did I tell myself to do? I look for Jane and Phil. Nowhere around. I told myself to get near her and at the right time strike. I go to the food table, put my glass down, slice some cheese, but too much cheese tonight, too much food for now. Sit down. I head for the couch. “Excuse me, excuse me.” It’s filled. Look for a chair. All filled. Diana’s talking to someone. Seeing me she lifts her eyebrows as if saying still not having a good time? You look lost her eyebrows say. I smile, holdup my hand, thumb and index finger joined, indicating the obvious. She smiles. I turn to the bar. Woman’s not there. Good. Could mean she’s by herself somewhere where I could get to meet her. Good also means I can go to the bar now because she’s not there. I need to? Not that I’m high but I might be slightly. No, I need something to hold. Some people smoke. Others jingle change. I go over, “Excuse me, excuse me,” and pour a glass of red wine. Woman at the bar’s pouring a thick liquid from a decanter into what looks like a silver thimble the size of a double-shot glass. “Vodka? Is it for someone special or can anyone have it?”
“Since it isn’t hidden, I think everyone.” She gives me another silver glass off a tray. Hieroglyph-like characters scratched into it that are probably Cyrillic. “You don’t think a problem mixing spirits and wine?”
“My first,” setting the wineglass down. “Never even tasted it.”
“Then pour it back if it can be done without spilling.”
“I don’t know—won’t people mind? And judging by the wine bottle neck, I think I’d need a funnel.”
“Funnel and people indeed. Take chances.” Holding the decanter and her glass in one hand, she pours my wine into the bottle with the other. A drop runs down the neck but never reaches the bar. “Hold ready. It’s real Russian and ice-cold,” and she starts filling up my silver glass.
“Half will be fine.”
“The custom in Russia is to pour all the way up. But you want to stop half with such beautiful vodka, you must be much better man than I.”
“You can say I’m a man at least. Ah, pour all the way.”
“Please, you have to excuse me, but try as I have I can’t be my equal in English.” She fills my glass and holds up hers. “To the Western Wind. May it blow and blow.” We clink and drink. “Pretty good, yes? We never saw this good there in all my years. You’ll forgive me?” As part of the crowd breaks for her I see that woman by the food table, alone it seems and looking at me and then at her fork coming off her plate. Wait a moment so the woman I just spoke to doesn’t think I’m following her and then go over, say prosit or how goes it or nas zdorovie if I can remember how to pronounce it or just hello and after her hello show her the glass and ask if she knows what the Cyrillic letters mean or if she thinks the snowy troika and onion dome scene also tooled-in is just for foreign consumerism. No, no plotted approach and she might be married, in love, living with the man she’s married to and in love with and who’s here or coming later. But if so why’d she look at me way she did?
I finish my drink. Another? One more like that and I’ll be slurring through my nose. Maybe she just wants to have something extra to talk about later with her husband, lover, whatever, on their way home or just home if he didn’t come with her and won’t be here or on the phone if he’s out of town or lives alone and phones her at home later. I pour a quarter of a glass and will just sip. “Did you talk to anyone interesting?” she could say. “Not really,” he could say if he’s here or on the way, “you?” “A translator. Daniel Krin—ever hear of him? But whoever hears of translators or remembers their names, except for what’s-his-name again who does the famous German with the shaggy mustache and the other who only does prize-winning Latin-American novelists who if they haven’t received a prize yet get one soon after he translates them. He came over, for a while prior was flashing his eyes. I couldn’t just walk away, mouth filled with my fork and all those eatable edibles still on the table. Besides, he looked fairly interesting and I wanted to have something unusual but juicy to talk about with you other than those exotic foods. And he was fairly interesting, simplifying the supposedly inexplicable difficulties of translating this intricately simple Japanese poetical work. Then because I wanted a long uninterrupted answer from him so I could dish out more food for myself and chew it slowly, I asked if he also wrote poetry and if not what was stopping him and if it was a block what was he doing to break it and so forth. He said he used to but gave it up when he found he was short one minor gift and that was the real raw talent for apparent intelligence and cleverness to make up for the major one, or something with that twist. But because he still loved poetry, which he said most poets suddenly don’t once they give up writing it, he decided to do the next best thing to creating poetry which was translating it.”
I put my glass down and excuse myself through the crowd to the food table. She’s not there. I look around. Still. Maybe in the bedroom. I open the door. No light’s on and only the cat’s there lying on the dresser and eating what looks like a sock. Maybe she left. I close the bedroom door and see her coming out the front door. Her coat’s on. Her fur hat. She’s going over to Diana. As she goes she glances at me. She’s alone, though her companion could be in the hallway, struggling with his rubbers. I’ll keep my eyes on her from this ten-foot distance. After she says goodbye to Diana and maybe others I’ll catch up with her on the stairs. I’ll say “Wait.” She’ll say “What?” I’ll say “I’m sorry I waited so long to speak to you, to introduce myself to you, those are what I’m sorry for. You can’t believe the number of excuses I gave myself for not going over and speaking to you and the conversations I imagined we had here and you’ll later have about me, even one where you’d now say something to me like ‘I’ve no idea what you mean.”’ No. I’ll say “Wait.” She’ll say “What?” I’ll say “You’re obviously going, that’s obvious, and I only wish I’d spoken to you sooner.” “Same here,” she might say. That’d be great. Or “Excuse me, sir, but do l know you? Because when I saw you staring at me before I thought maybe I did from some time back or that you were just putting on the make.” I move to them. Diana says to her “Oh no, not so soon.” “What can I do? I told you about the other party.” “Delay it.” “Wish I could.” “But this one’s really just starting. People’ll see you leave, they all might go. You speak to any old friends? But you haven’t time to talk. I’ll call tomorrow.” “If you don’t, I’ll get in touch with you.” “Actually, do that, since I’ll probably forget by the end of tonight everyone I promised to call tomorrow. Goodnight, Helene. I’m sorry you couldn’t stay.” She called her Helene. They kiss cheeks and Helene turns to the door without seeing me. I start over to her. She walks to the door. I continue after her. We’re going at the same pace. Someone says “Dan.” I turn around. It was to another Dan. I continue. She’s out the door and heading for the stairs. I’m about ten feet behind her. “You’re not going also, Dan,” Diana says. Helene, snapping her fingers, steps back and reaches for the umbrella and sees me. I turn to Diana. “No, excuse me,” and then to Helene “Hold it, please wait.” “Me?” she says, pulling out an umbrella. “Yes, don’t move, at least not off this floor. I want to speak to you. It’s important. Someone we both know.”
“I’m a bit in a rush.”
“It’ll only take a second.” I turn back to Diana. “No, I was only going to speak to Helene.”
“You know her?”
“No.”
“But you know her name.”
“I overheard it.”
“Want to be introduced?”
“Um, I don’t know. Yes, could you? No, it’s okay.” I look past the door. She’s holding an umbrella, eyebrows raised as Diana’s were before but hers wanting to know how long she must wait and what for. “Listen, Diana, I’ll be right back.”
“That’s good. I don’t want all my guests leaving so soon after the party began, even though I know Helene has to.”
I walk into the hallway. “Excuse me. I was looking at you before.”
“And I was looking at you. You’re apparently a good friend of Diana’s.”
“Probably not as good as you two are. I met her this summer.”
“At Yaddo?”
“How’d you know?”
“I knew she went and Diana always meets two to three new people there who become her good friends. Half the people inside are from there.”
“That so? You too?”
“Maybe half’s an exaggeration, but quite a number of them.”
“And you?”
“They don’t take people in my work.”
“Oh yes? What’s that?”
“Whatever it is, what did you want to speak to me about? Someone you said we both know?”
“That was a lie or fib.”
“I thought it was.” She’s taken her gloves out of her coat pocket and is putting one on.
“You’re in a hurry.”
“A hurry hurry. As a matter of fact I’m already late. I wish I hadn’t had this engagement from so far back. But I did, so I really went out of my way to spend an hour here.”
“That’s how long you’ve been here?”
“About. But I’m really in a hurry. I don’t mean to sound curt, but was there something in particular you wanted to say?”
“No, nothing. I just thought it’d be nice to speak to you. I have since I first saw you.”
“Thank you. I’m not sure, but, well, I have to admit I thought something along the same lines about you.”
“Good. Where are you off to now?”
“A wedding reception. A very dear friend’s.”
“That’s nice. I like weddings and receptions.”
“I don’t especially. Are you married?”
“Never been.”
“At your age? How’d you escape it? But I just don’t like those big catered and structured affairs like that and this one seems especially unnecessary, since they were married last summer and have already gone on two honeymoons. I was the matron of honor or as close to that title as a woman with my marital history can get, and the whole dopey idea of it makes me question my friendship with her somewhat and just a little sick. But she wants me there tonight and so I have to be going. It’s only right. There’s a special seat for me.”
“May I speak to you another time?”
“If you want to phone me you can. I’m in the Manhattan book. My name’s Helene Winiker with an i-k-e-r. I’m the only Helene in it, and my service will be home if I’m not. Your name is what?”
“Daniel Krin.”
“Okay, Mr. Krin—pleased to meet you.” She takes a glove off and shakes my hand. “Now I have to scoot,” and she goes downstairs.