Bubbles and I arrived under cover of darkness, so as to avoid the curiosity and coffee cake of neighbors. I brought my own supplies, saving me from the general store: everybody’s so palsy-walsy in there it makes you sick. Once a year these millionaires turn up and go feral in the countryside, getting in tune with nature. Most people can’t get away from nature fast enough—this is why we built cities, for chrissake—but these guys with their brand-new jogging shorts, and the women with their bijou, flower-printed wheelbarrows, think they have an in with the elements. Aw, get your asses back to New York before you do something unecological you’ll regret!
A woman came from Cold Spring Harbor once a month to keep an eye on the place, so the house was in good shape, and there was plenty of dry firewood on the porch. I set Bubbles up with a cushion in front of the woodstove in the living room, and she licked herself happily there, so plump now that her backside was half on, half off the cushion. I buried my face in her fur for a while.
I’d never intended to have a house on Long Island. Gertrude convinced me, and then dolled it up in so many rag rugs, colonial curios and free-floating hunks of fabric, I couldn’t bring myself to enter the place until I got the Cold Spring Harbor woman to come take it all away. Gertrude had even managed to give the kitchen table a paunch, shrouding it in a stiff shiny tablecloth that draped to the floor. Gertrude’s idea of decor is that if you can make it from one side of the room to the other without falling over, something’s wrong. Her and her sarongs and her stupid baskets of shells and $300 beach towels, on which she lay in torpor for hours and wanted me to do the same! I’d finish the New York Times and want to go home, but by then Gertrude would have oiled herself up for a day’s broiling and be too slippery to move. Her approximations of seaside contentment were truly dispiriting.
Now alone in the house, I was free to lie in bed all day if I wanted to. But Ant wasn’t happy in his bed. Is it good for a fitted sheet to be so tight that every stitch of the seams stretches and strains around you all night, begging for mercy? Insomnia and its attendant hypochondria ensued, including heart fluttering, abdominal pain, sore throat and general malaise. I thought I had prostate cancer for about an hour there, followed by the usual tinnitus scare. Me on my taut bed! Who’d I think I was, PROUST?
And still to me at twilight came horizontal thoughts leading nowhere. Mimì! Mimì! I wanted to call her, but as time went on it was getting harder and harder to imagine explaining things. And now I couldn’t eat or sleep or think (and was probably getting a cold). Why bother her? Mimi no longer trusted me, and I felt in no condition to assure anybody of my innate goodness: I was just a zhlub who let my sister languish and die (on foreign soil!), a work-shirking saw-bones, held in contempt by his colleagues. Some lover-boy.
The next morning, I stood in bare feet on my bare floorboards, and stared out at the windswept trees. I tried listening to Heifetz play the Bach solo partitas, but the music skinned me alive. It felt like bee in the raw, pleading for help! I hid from Bee, hid from everything. Even the sun seemed threatening. It skulked around outside, sneaking peeks at me from behind bushes, then would pop out unexpectedly and blind me. If I didn’t let it in the front, it crept around the side. Leave me alone, wouldja?
Just walk, I told myself, try to take in one sound, one color, before you go in. But all I heard were rabid gulls squabbling over some unspeakable delicacy, and all I saw was what I thought was a shark—it turned out to be a leaf fragment on my sunglasses. The ocean was a barroom brawl, with waves tripping over themselves to get in on the action. The shoreline was a series of mini-Niagaras. You’d think water would have worn away all opposition by now, but it seemed to like being thwarted, turning white with delight when it hit anything unerodible.
The wingnut waterfalls of the world.
Long tubular waves rolled in. The rhythm of it, the drama, as those tunnels curled, crested, and crashed. Hard to believe the sea wasn’t trying to tell me something, each wave like a line of words or music.
I searched the beach for a message in a bottle, something, anything! And did find a few geological wonders: tough blades of grass growing through sand and, in a secluded spot sheltered from millionaires, a Zen garden of evenly spaced round stones, all the same size and each sitting snugly in its own wind-worn cleft, with a miniature peak of sand behind: my melancholy meadow.
I puzzled over the colors of the Sound. They kept changing for no perceptible reason, from turquoise to gray to Venetian green. It didn’t seem to relate directly to the color of the sky; unpredictable factors were at play. But why should some schmuck, some schlemiel from the city be able to “predict” anything out here?
I didn’t know the names of most of the birds I saw, I couldn’t tell what the clouds were up to, or remember which kind they were. It was all a big mystery to me. I wasn’t even completely sure if there was quicksand on Long Island or not. But what’s a walk without a little danger?
Home to Bubbles and Glenn Gould. I once told Bee I thought Gould was playing one passage of The Well-Tempered Clavier too fast.
“Aw, leave him alone. The guy’s a genius! He can do what he wants,” she’d answered.
“Even the humming?”
“Even the humming.”
And she was right. I made him play The Well-Tempered Clavier to me again and again, until all I could hear were the harmonics.
I get up in the morning and think of women. Not about sex (that was very far from my mind) but about the many breakfasts women have made me, starting with my mom and moving through just about every female acquaintance I ever had. They all want to feed you! Bee used to make me the best scrambled eggs when we were kids, and she didn’t even like eggs.
I go downstairs and think of women, the many women I’ve drunk coffee with—and the many mornings I’ve drunk coffee alone, thinking about women.
I make toast for myself and think of women, in particular the problematic properties of my mother’s toastings. She never distributed the butter evenly, so you’d get this big glop of half-melted butter in the first bite, then none the next! She also cut my toast into squares, when all the cool moms were doing triangles. But then there was her jam, which none of the other moms could offer. Peach, plum, strawberry, rhubarb, strawberry-rhubarb, blueberry, blackberry, boysenberry, pear and cinnamon, apricot and almond, plum and cardamom, sweet cherry, sour cherry, dense dark marmalade, even tomato jam, green and red. (Mom and her ’maters!) And dilly beans. Nevermore, nevermore.
I do some laundry and think of women, my mom again, who did the laundry for fifty years until it finally killed her—falling down the stairs on her way to transfer stuff to the dryer. But how vigorous she was, plowing on all those years with my father panting and ranting at her heels, working his way through a million temper tantrums he always considered legitimate.
What was he so angry about? And where does all the female anger go? “Underground,” said Mimi once, “into all the slicing and sluicing and sieving and mashing.” (And of course the stitching.) There are also a lot of opportunities for destructiveness offered by gardening: digging, pruning, weeding, burning stuff, poisoning stuff, trimming stuff, tugging at stuff, hacking away for years at tree stumps. My mother’s anger went into the shaking-out of dishtowels. Seemingly peaceful mornings echoed with the slap and crackle of them, and then you knew not to go near Mom for a while.
I lounge on the porch and think of women, my woman: sitting canoe-style in my arms on the couch in my apartment, just before everything blew up in our faces. . .
Bubbles startled me out of my reverie by jumping vertically into a pine tree, six feet in the air! She was putting on a show for me, acting crazy, and I liked it—I even laughed, though my laughter sounded odd to me and out of place. I went to stand below her, in case she needed help getting down, and then I remembered my rowboat in the shed. I’d bought it when I got the house, to make up for that old canoe Dad preserved in amber in the garage at home.
So I dragged my boat down to the marshy pond behind the house and, with Bubbles in the bow, rowed towards the middle of the lake, where there’s an impenetrable little island. Then I just lay back and let the boat drift, with Bubbles walking back and forth on top of me, checking both sides for ducks. I closed my eyes and instantly remembered one of Bee’s Coziness Sculptures, called Creaky Boat in Maine. This consisted of the bare skeleton of an old wooden boat, lit by watery flashes of light, with a soundtrack of boat creaking, water lapping, breezes blowing, frogs croaking, birds chirping. . . Now I was free to listen to the gentle sounds of real breezes and real waves lapping against my fiberglass boat, and Bee wasn’t.
Not so gentle if you were a duck though. I gradually became aware of a big hullabaloo going on on the other side of the island. We rowed over to see what was happening, and it was duck rape on a grand scale! The drakes were chasing the females on land, on water, and in the air (a Churchillian assault). They fought with growing strength on the banks of the island. Whatever the cost may be, they would never surrender. . . When a male caught a female, he’d grab her by the neck with his beak and pin her down, practically drowning her during the actual coupling. It didn’t look very consensual to me. The females, if they were lucky, just had time to get their feathers back in order before another aggressor crash-landed and started chasing them. Sometimes the males worked as a part of a gang, tag-teaming. They raped them on the beaches, they raped them on the landing grounds, they raped them in the dunes and in the reeds, they raped them on the hillocks. . .
“Boys, boys! I came here to relax!” I said.
Who knew? Ducks must be an exception to Mimi’s rule—their main courtship tactic is brute force! But I really couldn’t see the evolutionary advantage in the males’ willingness to frighten, exhaust, and possibly injure the Egg-Layer. Such sharp dressers too, with that debonair white collar, the metallic blue or green or purple head, and the curlicues on the tail (all a bit undermined though by the joke-shop quack).
One female, who’d just endured a three-duck gang bang, seemed to have a broken wing. It looked awry: she kept flexing it, trying to stretch it out to get it working again, but it wasn’t helping. There was a big gap in that pretty bit of striping the females have on their wings, their one major embellishment. She must have been hurt during all this antagonistic mating, and now her disability made her the classic “sitting duck”! She couldn’t fly away from her pursuers, and didn’t seem able or willing to swim either. She was just stuck, barefoot and pregnant, on her little island.
As I watched, four more male ducks paddled over to her at top speed. She squawked frantically when she saw them, and ran this way and that, but there was nowhere to hide. I couldn’t reach her in time but yelled and clapped my hands and banged the oars together to try to scare the drakes off. They paid me no heed—I only succeeded in startling Bubbles. The drakes carried on marauding until another male duck turned up and grabbed one of the rapists by his neck, which worked: it drove him away. Then he saw the rest of them off the scene. This defender seemed to be the female duck’s real mate: he was the only male who companionably stuck around anyway, and she seemed calm with him. But by now, she was limping as well as dragging her wing.
I went home to get some bread for her, then rowed right out again. She was still there—no place else to go—and she ate hungrily. She seemed desperate for food. So they’d not only raped her but managed to starve her by their terror campaign: because of the broken wing, she couldn’t find food. I decided to feed her, to give her at least a fighting chance. With time, her wing might heal.
As I rowed away, one of the drakes who’d just molested her headed over to my boat, hoping for some bread for himself, and I felt like killing him—or throwing a stone at him anyway, to drive him away from her section of the pond. But what was I becoming? A guy who throws stones at ducks?! Bee had cured me early on of any interest in torturing animals, when she found me once trying to swing a neighbor’s cat around by its tail. It wasn’t what she said, it was her inability to speak that had quelled me.
I was losing my impartiality here—we’re all supposed to let nature take its course, red in tooth and claw (and beak and wing). I was like a reporter in the field, who stops writing and starts helping, changing from heartless bastard to mensch. But was it good to get so personally involved, with ducks? Aw, who was I kidding? Interfering with nature is my business!
I worried all night about my duck, out there alone and in pain. First thing in the morning, Bubbles and I were in the boat again. The duck seemed to recognize us and came right over for her breakfast. She seemed alert, which was a good sign, and had a good appetite. She wasn’t declining. But the wing was no better, and she was still being molested by every guy in town because she couldn’t get away. Sheesh!
In an effort to thwart one of the rapists, I lunged forward at one point, waving my hat (not my sickbed hat, my Sagaponack baseball cap), and accidentally stepped on a Coke can in the bottom of the boat. That’s how I discovered how much drakes hate the sound of a Coke can crumpling—it really messes with their heads. They lost con-centration, allowing the injured female to flee into the reeds. There she was often safe, since the drakes couldn’t be bothered searching too hard for her when there were plenty of other females to plague. From then on I brought all the empty cans I could find whenever I went to feed her, which was several times a day. But, like her partner, I couldn’t be there all the time—I had to go indoors sometimes and eat roast chicken with Bubbles (the paradox be damned).
A few nights later, lying sleepless on my taut bed, I decided I could at least get the poor duck some real duck food. Superior nutrition might just give her the edge over the drakes. Ducks weren’t supposed to eat bread all day. But I couldn’t remember where a pet store was. And was a wild duck a “pet”? In disobedience to Bee and her abhorrence for my perusal of phonebooks, I found an old Yellow Pages downstairs and spent the rest of the night searching through it for duck fodder.
This is when you realize how homocentric we all are. There was hardly a mention of anything for animals in there, or anything non-human. It’s as if the whole world is about us. It’s all zinc, zodiacs, yachts and yoga, xylophones, windows and wills, vacuum cleaners, ventriloquists, upholsterers, underwater ballet, timber merchants, tailors, surgical supplies, surfing, silicone implants, salsa, rubber, rope, restaurants, rehab, quilting bees, pianos, personal injury lawyers, perfume, pearls and passports, orchestras and obstetricians, nurses, notary publics, noodles, nail bars, motels, morticians, mannequins, log cabins, locksmiths, liquor stores, kites, kitchens, kiss-o-grams, karaoke, jukeboxes, jack-o’-lanterns, Italian lessons, ice skates, hydraulics, hypnotists, gyms, geriatrics and gemstones, fire alarms, fertility clinics, electrolysis, drainage consultants, chapels of rest, cane furniture, Botox, antiques, advertising, and ambulances. Animals might take more of an interest if we included them more! (Not big spenders though.)
I finally located an animal feed merchant (maybe I should have started with the As) in Sag Harbor, and drove straight over there. I’d only been a recluse for a few days but already felt like a wild man from the woods. Any minute now I’d get out the faded overalls and start constructing microscopic sailboats inside light bulbs. I’d forgotten that women wear earrings, for chrissake! I’d forgotten the effort they put into their skin and their hair and their nails, and why.
I walked down the street behind a “waif wife,” as Mimi would have called her, a frail, drained gal bobbing along in six-inch heels beside a repellent fellow who seemed to be still in his pj’s and talking on his cell phone, ignoring her entirely. How much had the poor duck blown on that fancy blouse, the tight skirt, and the tiny shiny red purse to go with the shiny red shoes, all to hang out with old PJ there?! The woman was dressed for a cocktail party, and it wasn’t even noon. Later, I saw them buying potatoes.
The feed store only had a small sample bag of duck pellets, but they promised to get some more in. I also bought a book on duck care, with surprising information on the duck’s alimentary canal: they’ve got no teeth, so they grind grain with these rock-like structures in their gullet. The book also said broken wings don’t heal without human intervention. I could have done a splint myself, but she wouldn’t let me catch her! Even if I invented the perfect trap, it would probably only frighten her off, or injure her more.
I reached the car just before a storm hit. The whole town turned a gloomy yellow, and the sunlit trees waving against black clouds looked electric, as if they were about to blast off. In that low light, the scene seemed staged for an opera.
OVERTURE
Every sound magnified.
Bikes rattle by.
Lawnmower moans.
Trees sizzle.
Birdsong.
Airplane.
ACT ONE
Soprano raindrops on water.
People start to walk faster, crouching over, adjusting clothing to form makeshift hats.
Tenor (a cop) strikes nonchalant pose, as if ready for worse threats than rain.
Alto and contralto chorus of umbrellas blossoms.
Amusing variety, no two the same.
Black common, polka dots popular.
But shapes differ, and the number of spokes.
Some are classical, with spikes on the end.
Others fold; these are never fully erect.
Like dogs meeting, a small black-and-white umbrella encounters a big yellow one: they circle around each other.
Renoir poppy-field umbrella arrives, unfurling.
Coloratura star of the show: red umbrella, under which shelters a woman in a pale pink dress and dusty-brown short jacket (unexpectedly good color combo).
People calling out, “We’re almost there!”
ACT TWO
Children fill the stage (nothing better in an opera, unless you’ve got a donkey).
Kids don’t carry umbrellas—that would impede play and eating ice cream.
They don’t mind the rain, don’t cease to function when they get wet.
They stamp in puddles.
They slip and slide.
They sail trash in the gutter.
Scene ends with bass baritone rain, now falling fast and noisily on boats in the harbor.
ACT THREE
Driving home, I stop at a flower-stand on the highway that I disdained earlier, coldly depriving myself of lilies of the valley (my mother’s favorite flower).
Now I buy bundle after bundle of them: I keep wanting more than I picked up already.
Chorus of wide dark-green leaves and tiny cupped white flowers.
My duck liked the fancy duck pellets, as did her husband (though he tended to eat too many at once and then choke). I continued to row out and feed her several times a day. I loved that duck! Her dark head, encircled by that black band that ran right across the eyes and all the way around the back of the head—her wild streak. I’d never noticed before how beautiful female ducks are. Her face was a perfect Serpentine Line, that matched the intertwining reeds around her. Her tawny breast gleamed in the sun when she took a nap.
What I really wanted to do was capture her, fix the wing, and keep her safe and cozy in my yard. Maybe get her a big washtub to swim in. Returning her later to the wild in some complicated, disinterested way. But it was not to be. Any extreme efforts to help her would only freak her out. So I contented myself with feeding her, and foiling the plans of some of her stalkers when I could, by crumpling Coke cans.
FINALE
Bubbles and me in a boat.
Sample bag of duck pellets.
Five empty Coke cans.
Five-pound note.
MIMI DREAM: Long Island. Twilight. I’m running through shallow water, trying to catch up with Mimi, who’s a bit ahead of me. The sky is turquoise. We’re about to board a boat lying further out to sea but I’m dawdling on this sandbar, because there are some little silver fish wriggling there, caught by the outgoing tide, and I want to show them to Mimi. Lights sparkle all around us from small boats and houses near the shore, sending wavy snakes of light towards me across the water, and I feel utterly happy, following in Mimi’s wake.
Oh, Mimi, come! We will step nimbly through the sedge grass and never grow old!
“For those of you having trouble waking up this morning, here’s some Brahms for you,” says the radio announcer. brahms? Brahms was a sweetheart, but he had trouble tying his own shoelaces! Next, some Wolfgang They-Can’t-All-Be-Gems Mozart (would he get outta here with that glass armonica of his?). I usually seemed to tune in just in time for a big dose of Berlioz or Mahler, or Wagner for godsake, “Now that your ears are attuned to the key of C major.” My ears aren’t attuned to anything but Bach, you idiot!
Then the piquant biographical details would start to flow, all that fake poignancy of chronology. Before I can reach the radio, I know all about César Franck’s love affair with some chick in his fifties, that pissed off his wife and Saint-Saëns. How is this my business? The news grates throughout Franck’s Reflections on Love, ruining any romance and eroticism the announcer had promised.
How about Satie? Satie was a saddo. Thanks. Finally they play some more Mozart—it’s fantastic—and they interrupt it! “Well, we’ve had about as much Mozart as time will allow,” says the announcer—so slowly he could have fit a few more bars of Mozart in if he’d just shut up! Any classical station worth its interminable fund-raising drives would have allowed time for Mozart. But even when they do, they wreck it by talking about his debts and his early demise—until you’re too upset to listen to the music! Mozart’s “debts” indeed. What about what we owe him?
I turn the radio off and go downstairs to play some Bach for myself: his second French Suite in C minor is like watching the planes of a landscape unfurl as you walk. An avenue opens up, a valley, the ridge of a hill, something always emerging before you.
Later, I go for a walk in the dunes, where more paths unfurl, winds whirl, clouds form and deform, and sunlight lands on the earth like a bomb. Gulls sleepily patrol the shoreline. Life and death are allowed to pursue their modest course in the country. In cities you’re at the mercy of everybody’s ego, and that gets tiring. We create criminality wherever we go. Birds just do their job, uncomplaining, content merely to survive (ducks excepted).
But I am not a bird.
I go feed my duck but she isn’t there. Drowned by rapist ducks while I was off duty? Or just eaten by some predator? Nature ain’t pretty, it’s just the only game in town. I watch some ducklings instead. They’re trying to catch bugs by parachuting off rocks. “Ee-ee-ee-ee!” they cry. A mother duck is trying to organize her brood to sleep under her, enclosing them in her wings. How cosy they must be! But one of the ducklings doesn’t want a nap and won’t stay put. All he wants to do is nuzzle his mother’s soft brown neck. So do I. I thought of Bee’s theory that pleasure is the purpose of existence. She was right. Animals aren’t in pain all the time. Pain is an aberration, a sign of trouble. There’s nothing irresponsible or dishonorable about seeking pleasure. It’s what we’re here for! Even bees look like they’re having a ball.
Later, I searched for my absent duck again. I kept thinking I saw her lifeless carcass just beneath the surface of the pond, but it turned out to be water weeds. I would never know if she survived and escaped or, more likely, got eaten by some creature because she couldn’t fly away. Had she hoped I might come help her? The recurrent idea chilled me.
I headed home, luckless and duckless, climbed the porch steps and there was a letter from Chevron High, forwarded by Deedee. A fearful woman with the letters, that Deedee. Chevron wanted confirmation that I was doing the speech on June 15th, now only a few weeks away—but I wanted confirmation from Mimi that she was going to help me!
Speech panic descends, excuses form—excuses I’m pretty sure I already used in high school:
sunburn
spontaneous combustion
anaphylactic shock
TB
cholera
stubbed my toe
under arrest
Pavarotti’s final concert
busy making bouillabaisse
jury duty
tomato harvest time
dry cleaning mix-up
volcanic ash problem
under-reported military skirmish in my area
just lazy
deer tick
enslavement to dominatrix
got a duck to take care of
Foreign Accent syndrome
so depressed about Mimi I can’t eat or think. . .
Oh, for godsake, I’d do it. I’d already bought the tickets. Bee’s memorial party at the gallery was the day before the speech, so I’d have to go back to New York by then anyway. I could pick up my notes (for various half-begun speeches) at my apartment, and go straight to the airport from the memorial. What the hell, I’d give them a speech if it killed me. I owed it to Mimi.
That night I dreamed my duck got very big and vanquished all her assailants. She was about the size of an elephant! But when she still hadn’t appeared the next day, I called the Sag Harbor store to cancel my order for more duck pellets. They didn’t seem to care—they hadn’t been impressed with my order in the first place—and their indifference hurt.
When I got home, I took Bee’s book on Matisse out onto the porch, the only thing I’d brought back with me from England (besides Bee’s ashes and the bird’s nest). I’d intended to read it on the plane but some kid behind me kept saying “Ronaldo” and I couldn’t concentrate. But that was no place to think about Matisse anyway. It wasn’t a metaphysical plane.
Bubbles immediately claimed my lap and started licking herself, and then my hand, in an overspill of affection. She had a way of looking at me with such love it made me want to laugh—or cry. Bubbles was good at love, good at being happy; these are creditable skills.
As for Matisse—now there’s a guy who liked his pajamas! He’s in his pj’s, the models are in pantaloons, and he tries to share in their joie de vivre by painting them. These women aren’t overly concerned about how they look to him—they’re in their own world, a zone of pleasure that Matisse envies. The perpetually anxious, heat-seeking, peace-loving Matisse longed to please with those odalisques of his, to please himself and us. Like Puccini, Matisse really came to terms with the fact that women EXIST. Matisse looks at women the way a lover does, not like a dad. Fathers only disapprove of their wives and daughters. The role of the lover is to approve and applaud them, appease them, please them. Even idealize them a bit, what the hell?
What have most men done for women’s joie de vivre? All we’ve done is bore women to death, bore them into compliance with our idiocies. When we aren’t beating them up, or burning them as witches, we deafen them with our noise—VROOM VROOM, BANG BANG, POW-WOW, RAT-A-TAT-TAT! We’ve filled the earth with radioactive waste. And all our kvetching, our pontificating, the prevaricating, the listless, unimaginative fornicating. No wonder women always seem on the verge of insanity!
I thought of what Bee went through, yelled at by our imperious (murderous) dad, battered by that lawman of a husband, and finally extinguished, brutally and for no reason, by a dope with a gripe against women. I lay on that porch and thought of the whole world of women wronged, burned, beaten, badgered, and bereft; ignored from birth. They trailed past me in a half-sleep. Was there a single woman alive who hadn’t been mistreated by some maniac, simply because he knew he could get away with it? Was there a single woman who hadn’t suffered injustices because she was a woman, a single one? For many it was worse than that: stoned to death in the street, beheaded in a grocery store, thrown overboard off a yacht. We all look the other way, we’ve seen it all before, yeah, yeah, you can’t change human nature. . .
Half the women I knew were scared to walk through the countryside alone (and the other half probably should have been). Half the women I knew had been bashed up by some worthless guy. They’d all had to watch a million disrespectful movies about blonde bombshells, and then there was all the porn; and the News, the daily briefings on the ways in which women’s lives can be scuppered by rapists, serial killers, or guys like Tiger Woods who can’t keep his putz in his pants. They’d all watched a million male maestri conduct a million all-male orchestras, playing pieces only by men (okay, there’s a little Clara Schumann once in a while—big deal). And all the women I knew (and treated) tried too hard to be good, to look good, be nice, be sweet, be patient—tried so hard, when they were all fine in the first place!
I looked down at the sage plant I’d saved. I’d bought it in Sag Harbor, outside the animal feed store, bought it because it was dying, and planted it at the bottom of the porch steps, and now it was thriving, twice the size. The unvoiced sufferings of plants could make you a nervous wreck! I looked at that sage I’d saved with the contentment that comes from freeing something that needs freeing.
Far away across the lawn, my neighbor was hanging up wet clothes on the line, with the thwacks and wallops that procedure always seems to entail. Yes, those wrinkles had to go! She arranged her wash in strict order: paired socks, pants, shirts, towels, pillowcases—how big was this washing machine? Finally, out came an old patchwork quilt, and this too she carefully spread out on the line to dry. Was it because it was wet that it looked so great, or because I was seeing it against the sun? The battered old thing glowed like a stained-glass window! This was the way museums should show off their quilts (I had to tell Mimi some time): get them wet and light them from behind.
I lay on my lounger on the porch and thought about women, all the crazy stuff they do. The painted bowls of Brittany, plaited Russian loaves, all the knitted baby jackets, flower-embroidered handkerchiefs and pillowcases, the smocking, the snacking, the puddings and baked goods and preserves. The freezing and the thawing too, the wrapping and unwrapping, the cleaning and sorting and folding and smoothing—all the pooh-poohed peaceful arts of women, of odalisques. Women invented coziness! They could see humanity was never going to get very far without some comfort, some sense of stability. People don’t thrive on harshness and indifference. I thought of my own lunging odalisque, who’d come to me distrustful but then miraculously blossomed. Blood and bone, blood and bone, that’s what women are. They’re REAL.
The laundress had gone inside. I was all alone out there and everything was quiet. I moved the lounger onto the grass but the sun was so blinding, I shut my eyes and just listened to the swaying, swishing trees for a while—and when I opened my eyes, everything was aglow. Not just the sky and the clouds: every blade of grass, every different type of leaf, every petal glowed. The white shirts on the line were dazzling, soaking up the ultraviolet. Stones were sparkling. The whole world seemed devoted to the sun, begging for it and basking in it. Whether absorbing light (the dirt) or reflecting it (a puddle), everything was responding to light in some way. The thinnest leaves no longer seemed flimsy and vulnerable but intentionally diaphanous, so as to be filled with light. Everything out there wanted light and needed to glow. Bubbles too! Fur, hair, and feathers glow. Water glows, collecting and transmitting, no, playing with light. Everything seeks and leaks light.
This is what Matisse discovered in the South of France, eyeing up those odalisques. all artists know this (Bee was always talking about light but I never knew why until now). For a long time I’d had it in for fire, I didn’t think we really needed it. Only earth, air, and water interested me. But that day I accepted that the sun wins. I was finally reconciled to fire.
The earth is pretty flat, just a bas-relief—you see this on Long Island. To get three-dimensional, you have to look up: at the clouds, the sky. Only the sky is really 3-D—that’s all it is! Air, space, and light. A skein of geese flew overhead, not in a V-shape, but in the shape of a breast, with a nipple. The shape changed and several different types of breast were offered. But all of them were good.
Bubs and I took the boat out for one last voyage on the pond that evening, and scattered Bee’s ashes there: my sage sister, goddess of rivers and springs, who loved Bach, Dickens, and Matisse, loved me (and hated Ant and Bee), and thought Ben Jonson much better than Shakespeare.
It is not growing like a tree
In bulke, doth make man better bee;
Or, standing long an Oake, three hundred yeare,
To fall a logge, at last, dry, bald, and seare:
A Lillie of a Day
Is fairer farre, in May,
Although it fall, and die that night;
It was the Plant, and flowre of light.
In small proportions, we just beauties see:
And in short measures, life may perfect bee.
With one day left, I went to the beach. I didn’t want to leave Sagaponack, I didn’t want to go to Bee’s memorial, I didn’t even want to go to the beach. In despair, I stumped along. The water wasn’t moving: it looked weird, like ice, or the desert. Everything was so quiet I could hear my shirtsleeves rustle against my ribcage as I walked, and it irritated me. I could hear my breath. And then, in quick succession, a boat, a car, a motorbike, a plane. Only one of each, but still annoying. Every bird call grated, every mild wave bubbling against the shore gave me a start.
It reminded me of summer days when you’re a kid, and you just don’t know if you’re going to make it through three months of this. When the sight of a cloud, or the Good Humor Man, is a major event—even though he came every day and handed me an ice-cream sandwich, and a popsicle for Bee. Our biggest hope was that a tornado would hit, blowing the roof of our house off, the sky suddenly darkening and your bed twirling up and up. Apocalypse fantasies.
I searched for my melancholy meadow of rounded stones, but couldn’t find it. So I sat down and made my own sculpture, a miniature barbecue, with jagged little red rocks for steaks, and yellow oval pebbles for baked potatoes. Inside some tiny open clam shells I put lentil-like orange pebbles = scallops! Must have been hungry. An ant marched by carrying a huge seed. Never eat anything bigger than your head, man.
Then I headed home to find that Bubbles, who never bit or scratched or stole food, but instead licked me with love, Bubbles, who would stand outside on the porch and look at me so hopefully, waiting to be let in, Bubbles, who followed me around the house and the yard, and had come with me in the boat every time to feed the duck, Bubbles, who sat on my lap at the piano, at the kitchen table, on the lounger, in the car, Bubbles, who warmed herself so happily by the woodstove, and drank the milk I gave her and ate too much Fancy Feast (my fault, not hers), Bubbles, who knew and tolerated with true aplomb my every mood, Bubbles, who had found her way into my bedroom that first night in New York and poked her head around the door so inquiringly, so comically, Bubbles, who definitely had a sense of humor, Bubbles, who greeted me gently whenever I struggled downstairs all wrung out and hungover, Bubbles, who did stretches and jumps just as good as Kit Smart’s cat Jeoffry, Bubbles, who could leap vertically, six feet in one bound, Bubbles, who, when lying on her side on a chair, could twist herself backward in a complete circle so you saw both her face and her ass at the same time, Bubbles, who played exuberantly with string (whenever I remembered that’s what cats like and dangled some for her), Bubbles, with her inquisitiveness about all things, especially cupboards and boxes, Bubbles, with her great concentration powers, staring at stuff for minutes at a time, displaying greater intelligence and gifts of perception than any other cat (and some people) I’d known, Bubbles, who had spread herself out on my bed every night, wherever we were, taking up as much room as Gertrude ever had, but much more invitingly, Bubbles, who was also more fun as a movie companion, Bubbles, who hated Gertrude but took to Mimi instantly, Bubbles, who, when first released from her igloo death-trap on New Year’s Eve, had gratefully rubbed against my leg and settled herself on my shoulder without a moment’s hesitation, Bubbles, who loved me, yes, loved me, and looked at me with love, Bubbles, so beautiful, so warm and soft and funny, with her white, orange and black coloring like Hallowe’en candy, Bubbles, so full of beans, so appreciative of anything I did for her, Bubbles, with her supreme knack for coziness and contentment, flopping half off her cushion by the woodstove like the odalisque she was, Bubbles, who could intone, who had rhetoric. . . Bubbles got run over.
I heard miaowing coming from the shed as soon as I got near the house, and hoped, not so much selfishly as instinctively, that it was some other cat. But when I peered in, there she was, crouching in the darkest corner, among all the spiderwebs and snail shells and chipmunk shit. I couldn’t reach her very easily, so I tried to lure her out with some Fancy Feast, but she wouldn’t come. Then I knew something was up. So I slid over to her and gently pulled her poor crushed body to me, got her wrapped in a towel, and rushed her to the vet on Goodfriend Road in Easthampton. Once she was in the car, she was ominously silent.
They put her on a drip to get her temperature up before they could x-ray her—she was in shock. The x-rays confirmed that she’d been run over: the injuries couldn’t have happened any other way. Somebody had run her over and left her to die. But the prognosis was good. The great Bubbles! She’d have to stay at the animal hospital for a few weeks to have surgery on her back leg, and a paw, but they thought she would walk normally again in the end.
“And jump?” I asked.
“And jump,” the vet said.
“And no pain? She’ll be pain-free?”
“Well, it’s always hard to tell with animals. You know. They’re good at resignation. They often don’t show pain. But there’s no reason that she should be in pain once we’ve fixed her up, Dr. Hanafan. Don’t worry, she’s going to be fine.”
Bubbles, who’d been hit by some asshole of a millionaire and left to crawl away and die, crawl away and die, would be fine. She would be fine.
I went home and finished all the booze in the house. Then I went out on the porch and looked at the sage I’d saved.
Sunset in Sagaponack is when nature begins to regain some control and us homocentric humans don’t seem so such much. Things settle and dampen. The dim blue sky still glows but night is forming in the shadows. I wanted to freeze time, hold on to that sky, that color. And then the smell of the moist earth hit me, the best smell in the world! I realized this was the smell I should have been smelling all my life—I should go out at dawn and dusk to smell it.
I watched as a lone bug rose up toward the sky. Nobody has ever helped her, I thought, she has always been alone. But that wasn’t true. The sun had helped her. She flew toward it now.
Huge flocks of starlings molded and remolded themselves into one big undulating cloud, as if to celebrate surviving another day. We are free! they squealed. Free to live and mate and feed our young, and all is forgiven (the day’s squabbling over food, the day’s dangers). A grace of starlings, a murmuration? I once heard it’s called a wedding.
The moon hovered low in the sky, not a perfect circle yet but big and sassy, friendly-looking, reflected brokenly in puddles—doing that staring act she’s done a million times. She’s been taking a very good look at us for years, the earth’s long-suffering waif wife.
Saftly, saftly, through the mirk
The müne walks a’ hersel’:
Ayont the brae; abüne the kirk;
And owre the dunnlin bell.
I wudna be the müne at nicht
For a’ her gowd and a’ her licht.