LIVES
OF THE
POETS

Y LEFT THUMB is stiff, not particularly swollen although the veins at the base are prominent and I can’t move it backward or pick up something without pain. Have I had this before? It’s vaguely familiar to me and it may subside, but it feels, bulging veins and all, as if it won’t, it is either gout or arthritis unless, of course, death to the writer, it is that monstrous Lou Gehrig thing, God save us all.

Also I have a touch of pinched nerve in the neck. Does this relate to the thumb? What is happening here? I’m a true Capricorn, my destiny is to grind to death.

And then of course this subtle hearing impairment. Every once in a while I hear the voice but not the words. Is the cervical pinch constricting sound, pinching me into silence? What can I do about this? Why don’t I go to a doctor? Oh creeping ruin! Like that caved-in tenement I saw on East Sixth Street, the sky showing through the roof, whole trees growing up through the floors, weeds sprouting, vines cascading from the windows—a Manhattan Congo, an upriver interior of toucan-spattered darkness. Monkey screech, ohdee death! And in the moonoil murk of the basement a flatheaded croc eying me.

Where is that nimbleness I never had? Where is that mind and body harmonic, that dream life in which I thoughtfully chew my food and take little sips of spring water, and I move in the philosophically enlightened way, and I breathe from the diaphragm, a totally realized being in a serenity of pacific emotion, unself-censorious, without guilt, without shame, fulfilled in each moment of life and memory and loving anticipation as the leanest brownberry guru? I can’t even stand up straight without wincing.

I don’t smoke anymore, that’s something, I’ve cut down on beer and know clean air when I smell it, I know to eat bran, and acerola rose hips, and that sugar is bad and salt is bad and eggs and anything pickled, smoked, or cured. But it’s too much—all over the city everyone running shopping consulting, trying to get away from this white-bread life, in their running suits they run, with their vegetable juicers under their arms, I’ve got more important things to do. What I need is a master guide to the wisdom, an exclusive service in the ideal location of the world, say, where you give all your money and all you ever hope to have, and in return you receive a generosity of beneficent hygienically balanced natural unradiated lifelight and you get to live and write a minimum hundred and fifty years, give or take a decade, and the cock never fails you.

Which brings me to our major occupation.

The other night Brad walked into Elio’s with his friend and there was his wife, Moira, having dinner with her Women’s Political Caucus. Guess what happened to me? Brad said on the phone the next day. Your wife saw you at dinner with your friend, I said, because Angel, my wife, had already told me the story because Moira had confided it to her. I felt so humiliated, Moira told Angel. After all, I know the whole town knows about Brad’s affairs, he makes no effort to hide them. But this time here I am expounding to my colleagues on the specifically feminist thing and in walks my husband with this dollie on his arm.

What did you have? I said to Brad. The house pasta and a zinfandel, he said. I was expecting the end when I got home, but all Moira said was, Brad, I’m not giving up on this marriage, it’s been too good. He laughed wryly. Brad goes all over the world for his column and when he’s home he spends his time playing tennis. In fact, that’s how he met this lady.

Brad’s friend is not a dollie, I made the mistake of saying to Angel. She’s a jock. Oh, said Angel. What does she look like? I only saw her from the next court, I said. Comic-book pretty. The spunky-heroine type. And lo, Angel’s flinty look came upon her: You might be describing Moira, she said. That’s what always happens—they go for someone who looks like the wife.

Angel is gathering tales of male perfidy: Up in New Haven after Ralph broke up with his young woman, he had the insensitivity to bring home to Rachel the colored briefs he had acquired. I refuse anymore your underwear to wash, said Rachel, who’s Hungarian. Red was the color the girl had chosen for her professor poet, in some unfortunate and unnecessarily symbolic way the color had run in the washing machine and red dye got over all Rachel’s sheets, towels, and so forth. Ralph also brought home some records the girl gave him and when he listens to them Rachel runs upstairs and shuts her door, the music staining her brain as the dye did her lingerie.

Why are men so awful? Angel said. I agree. Ralph is disgustingly truthful, he has this rage to confess. He told Rachel of his affair almost from the moment of its inception. Of course, she found it far worse than his actually going out and fucking someone that he wanted to discuss it with her, as if he needed her approval in some odd, unhinged way.

But everyone talks too much—Rachel broadcasting all of this—the women, the wives, talk constantly and tell things to each other you’d think they’d have the sense to keep to themselves. They violate their own privacy and everything gets hung on the line as if we all live in some sort of marital tenement. Whatever happened to discretion? Where is pride? What has caused this decline in tact and duplicity?

And then of course I suffer for it. A couple we know will split and I am told by my wife what yet another defective man has done to the perfectly fine woman who had the bad sense years before to marry him. You look at any couple we know, Angel says. The woman is better put together, she has read more, she is more intelligent and far kinder than the man. We go to a dinner party and the woman’s conversation is far more interesting.

I notice this bump on my ankle seems to be getting bigger. The hell. And my throat is scratchy this morning. I just got over laryngitis, what is happening to me?

On the other hand, this is the Village, whatever can be tried to stem disaster is tried here, so I’m ready for action. A free paper found in the lobby tells all about it: I can begin with lessons in the Alexander technique, a proven method for attaining awareness and physical reeducation and postural alignment, and then I can go buy the Bach Flower Remedies, look in on the Breathing Center, stop awhile at the Center for Jewish Meditation and Healing, sign up for some t’ai chi exercise in flowing motion for vitality and health, and if things still don’t work out, I can submit myself to some deep-tissue manipulation by a qualified Rolfer. The Gurdjieff discussion group might come in handy, and if I need some companionship the Loving Brotherhood is there making “the planet a place where it is safe for people to love each other.” Can’t knock that. When I get some pots and pans I can do a little gourmet vegetarian cooking and, restored in my energy balance, go out then for a whack at some Functional Integration with the Feldenkrais Method. The Vedanta Society will bring all these things together for me, or else I can drop in to the local Tranquility Tank, where I can float in a body-temperature solution free from gravity. I feel better already.

But as I make my way along these various paths to fulfillment, maybe I ought to take some martial-arts training so I can kick the shit out of anyone who tries to stop me.

Another couple we are all watching are Llewellyn and Anne. Llewellyn has gone on a Zen retreat in Vermont that will last three months. When he gets home he’ll let his hair grow back in and then sometime next year he’ll shave his head again and go away for four months or five months, he is serious about this and so there’s no telling where this will lead, eventually they turn celibate, don’t they? And where will that leave Anne? Right now she has to drive to Vermont to see her husband. Llewellyn has been doing Zen for years and in fact has attained the rank of monk. That is something less than a sensei but it is serious stuff. This last time he left, Anne threw a party for him and she held up, all right, she was cheerful and steadfast, and we all drank and ate and laughed and had a good time, but Llewellyn was in a lousy mood. I felt he resented it that we weren’t trying to discourage him from going, so as to make him feel more heroic about the whole thing. But why do that? He’d shaved his head after all, poor prickly Llewellyn. He looks very good in his ascetic mode, he’s about five eight with a firm round belly, when he removes his horn-rims you see what might be Oriental facial planes, a saffron complexion; the more he has studied, the more his appearance has changed. I fully believe in his capacities as a Zen monk, I’m willing to forgive him anything because he’s a good poet. Also I like it that Zen monks are self-centered, snobbish, moody, that they blame their wives when things go wrong, grouse at their children and hate like hell to lose at games. Makes me feel I have a shot at being a Zen monk too someday.

But I’m talking about couples no longer entirely together, I’m talking about the infinite task of the human heart. That’s a Delmore Schwartz line. In the war between Angel and me we have reached the stage where we send in other marriages to do the fighting. Llewellyn is my heavy gun, he suggests some mysterious need not susceptible to clinical analysis, some wild dignity given to men our age that the behaviorists can’t account for. He sits up in some drafty farmhouse with his legs crossed twenty hours a day, I mean they really meditate in those Zen retreats, there is absolutely no fucking around. And all Angel has been able to muster by way of defense is to say that she’s always detected a selfishness in the Zen Buddhist idea, but there is probably an answer to this if I know my Zen which I don’t which means I do.

Oh oh, there’s another one, they make these forays, you can see they’re game, it’s not their fault that they crawl and are loathsome. I find if I sprinkle boric acid on them they’re easier to see, they plod right on like arctic explorers. Why do we revile them so? This fellow is nine stories over the street, he is colonizing an award-winning high-rise, he wants to bring roach civilization to the wilderness of strange hard highly lit surfaces, a mineral terrain, like the moon, where nothing grows. The other day I slapped the kitchen counter behind one of them to see what he would do and he didn’t scurry off down the side of the counter, he leapt into the canyon between the counter and the refrigerator, they do what they have to, like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, they surprise you, they surprise themselves, they’re unpredictable under stress, like us, maybe that’s why we revile them.

Actually I think they are what keep Angel from following me here. She’s afraid when I come home that I bring them with me in my luggage. When she comes to town and joins me for a drink she looks at the walls the ceiling the floor before she sits down. Maybe the more she sees of them the more accustomed she’ll become. Except I can’t believe that, Angel is the Princess Fastidious, the cleanest person in the world, when she is not doing anything she is cleaning tidying ordering throwing out, not even Nature is immune to her ruthless tidying, she will weed, prune, clip, she likes to cut off things that stick out, as I’ve told her many times, but in the house, her home, the cosmos is tidied before the disorder can even think of occurring, I’ve had to clutch at half-finished cups of coffee flying off the table, grab my dinner plate, pluck open unopened mail from the trash, clasp the morning newspaper to my bosom, lash myself to the newel post to withstand her gale wind of tidiness. Is it me she’s trying to blow away? One day last week she called, her voice happy, she was in a really good mood, the contractor had just finished installing the new septic tank. I wanted to share her joy. I said why not have a big party where everybody goes to the bathroom.

They have taken all morning to erect a scaffold in front of the United Thread Mills sign. From this distance they look like painters with their white caps, but they are hammering things into the building brick.

Last night Paul gave a birthday dinner for Brigitte, whom he loves but is slow to marry. Paul writes screenplays and loves Brigitte in part because she is not an actress, has no interest in the theater, and does not wish to write or direct films. He booked Texarkana because she’s from New Orleans. Brigitte is green-eyed and red-haired and used to hang out with the Democratic political crowd down there. Not much left to learn after a barbecue like that. She had a joke for us: Why do women have cunts? We waited. So that men will talk to them. Angel likes Brigitte a lot. We were three couples at the table, the third being Freddy and Pia. Freddy spends his days now trying to live down his Pulitzer in fiction. He adores Pia, who is a tiny beauty with a bright mind and a lovely laugh, and has a good job in advertising, but he is as slow to marry her as Paul is to marry Brigitte. Nevertheless both relationships seem to be secure, as I notice is the case when there is at least a twenty-year difference in ages between the man and the woman. Sometimes Freddy and Pia go out together with Freddy’s daughter by an early marriage, Kimberly. Pia and Kimberly really get along, as why not, since they are the same generation.

The most erotic dance I ever saw: a father and his daughter waltzing at a bar mitzvah at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. I’ve never seen ecstasy to match that, the slight thin girl in her black velvet jumper and white hose leaning her back into the hand of her handsome father as he twirled her about and they stared into each other’s eyes.

Sometimes I look at myself, Freddy once said, and I think I’ve got a big one. Other times, I don’t know, it looks small to me.

Brad once told me he did not take baths because he does not like to look at his body.

On the other hand, my friend Sascha bathes for hours, he writes his stories on a reading board that rests on the sides of the tub, and reads his students’ stories, and in fact conducts his entire intellectual life in water.

Sam told me he jumps into the lake behind his house after a sauna even in winter. That’s what makes movie stars. Sam, the best-looking, most famous actor in the world, once said to Freddy: I’m lonely, you know any girls?

I am not talking about divorced couples, you understand, but couples not entirely together. Let’s make some useful distinctions here. On the one side are the traditionally married, battling, shrieking, and occupying each other’s brains like some terrible tumor until one of them dies. My parents had a classic textbook marriage like that … On the other are those marriages that need to be severed instantly, after a few months, days, hours, marriages so clearly disastrous, unconsummatable, perhaps, that even the lawyers moving in to mop up forbear the long faces and dispatch the thing as efficiently as possible.

Swinging pendulously between these two archetypes, touching on both but wanting to be neither, are the marriages of my generation.

I see what they’re doing, they’re attaching the scaffold to the brick siding, story by story, putting the thing up as they go. They were at Thread Mills yesterday, today they’re six feet above at United. Like rock climbers, faces against the siding, they hammer away, four stories over West Houston Street. It’s peculiar that through all the rumbling truck traffic, sirens, horns, I can hear clearly up here the piccolo taps of their hammers.

And down below them, curling around the corner from Greene Street, little kids strung out behind the teacher’s outstretched arms, hand in tiny hand, fluttering and waving like patchwork pennants. She strains and leans forward, pulling them like an old monoplane dragging an advertisement through the sky.

So we have the phenomenon of the neither married nor divorced but no longer entirely together. There is a moving of husbands into their own digs, their own long days and nights. There is a casting off of establishment. How does it begin? After you’re married for several years you start waiting, and you don’t even realize it, you become alert to something at the edge of the forest, you look up from your grazing and it isn’t even there, the delicate sense behind all events all occasions of putting in time, marking time, killing time. Isn’t that so, compadre? I mean bear with me even though you think I’m taking strength from numbers: You notice younger men than you going off stunningly from coronaries, embolisms, aneurysms, sudden cancerous devastations, every manner of swift scything, the achievement of their lives still to come. From one moment to the next, all that feisty character is plaintive, all that intention and high design has turned to pathos, and the custom-tailored suits are specters in the closet. And what they did, these raucous, smartass go-getters, turns out to be shamefully modest, of little consequence, they were their own greatest publicists and all the shouting was their own. So my discovery at fifty is that this mortal rush to solitude is pandemic, that is the news I bring. It is not that everyone I know is fucked up, incomplete, unrealized. On the whole we are all quite game. It’s life itself that seems to be wanting.

After all, as I told my friend Sascha, who came over to have a drink and look around, I’ve achieved a body of work and recognition for it, I have money enough, I’ve got four children, whom I love and whom I hope soon to raise to reasonable levels of self-sufficiency. My wife is quick-witted and attractive. We own a house with a mortgage in the forest and a house with a mortgage at the seashore, I have reasonable opportunities to travel wherever I wish, and, insofar as Angel’s worst suspicions can be realized in this studio I’ve set up for myself in bohemia, I’m fairly sure I can summon any one of a half-dozen women who on little or no notice will be delighted to spend the night with me. That’s a modest estimate. They will get in their cars, fly in from other cities. Yet I call no one, I isolate myself, a man whose state of rest is inconsolability. I walk the streets feeling like a vagrant, I’ve got this stinging desolation in my eyes.

I’ve got this painful stitch in the kidney.

Jesus Christ, after a while you know you just don’t look up in New York when you hear the sirens. There was just a full-complement arrest right out the window nine stories down on Houston, three cop cars parked askew, couple of blue-and-white motor scooters, a dozen cops and plainclothesmen milling about at the Mobil gas station and one slender man, hands cuffed behind his back, being shoved into an unmarked car with a turning red light on the roof. And sitting with the last paragraph, I missed the whole thing.

Of course, this entire neighborhood brims with aspiration. Winos come into the street with their incredibly filthy greasy rags and wipe at the windshields of the cars waiting at the traffic lights and then they hold their hands out for the tip. They’re never threatening, they can be turned away except you won’t know that if you have a Jersey plate. They will go back to the sidewalk and smoke and strut and laugh till the next light. When it’s cold they’ll build a fire in an oil drum.

Downstairs Jake the doorman has his eye open for the main chance. He’s rooted in his place, what chance does he have? But he’s made of himself an entrepreneur, people come past him in and out every day in this high-rise, must be six hundred people living in this building. Jake smiles, delivers messages, holds packages, helps with bags, watches cars, children, accepts gratuities. He’s also the agent for cleaning women, window washers, car services, exterminators. Your doorman Jake is a good man, he says, but a poor man. Can he simonize your car? Can he chauffeur for you? You need your floors buffed, he will go out and rent a machine and take care of it after his shift. You need furniture moved, he’ll go out and find a truck somewhere. Fix your toaster. Paint your walls, he’s the universal job service, doorman division.

Your doorman Jake is a good man but a poor man. I have an alpaca coat. He eyes me one cold day. When you finish with it, he says, remember me. That’s the coat I want. A roguish smile, big teeth, he likes style, handsome black man with mustache. He has also admired my hat.

It would be terrifically convenient if things were great between my wife and me. Everything is in place, after all. She tells me we’ve done the hard stuff, the years that are left should be the good ones. So they should. I try to imagine the state of serene contentment in love, the coincidence of affections, a guileless generosity of soft lips, laughter and lust, and joy in the new day. Your dream is a warning, the frau doctor tells me. She is not terribly impressed by my theory of the slack marriage. You’re reaching the point at which either decision would be better than what you are doing to yourself now.

Which is what my friend Sascha said when he looked around this half-furnished space. Either move in or move out is what Sascha said.

So the other evening I meet Angel and we go to the Women’s Political Caucus benefit about which Moira had been having dinner with her colleagues that night Brad her husband walked in with his girlfriend. The benefit is held in this luxurious apartment on Beekman Place and consists of everyone standing around in the library getting a winebreath and then gathering in the living room for a program of songs by several women singers from Broadway shows each coming up and doing a turn with a piano accompaniment on the theme of women—how they are strong and steadfast and wonderful and can take anything but, on the other hand, how they should not be afraid to try their wings or dare to be butterflies and let their souls fly. Just before the singing starts I see Brad place his glass of wine carefully on an art-deco side table of burled wood and disappear in the direction of the front door. I by stupid comparison have been caught in the crush along the back wall behind rows of filled bridge chairs, no way I cannot hear the entire program. The pianist sets the tone with those lyrical arpeggios, those splashy chords and dramatic bass octaves of showbiz, and here is Feminism in the voice of detestable Broadway culture, her mouth open, her arms embracing air, her lepidopterous palms folding and unfolding, and a woman photographer jumping on a chair to shoot the action. But the last number is a good one, a classy little singer comes on and she’s got real style, she’s very modish in one of those crumpled tailored suits with an open-necked silk blouse, and standing with her hands in her jacket pockets she sings in French an American pop song with the passionate truculence of a Piaf, and then takes her hands out of her pockets and spits out the lyrics in English, that song the women love, she’s telling this man who’s returned who needs you who wants you, I’ll survive, I’ll survive, and she really raises the temperature of the place, cries of excitement, little gurgles all over the room as she tells the man in the song to get out, that she doesn’t want him back, that he’s not welcome anymore, that she will survive without him. And the house comes down as she walks off throwing away a curtain line all her own, not in the song—hey, wait, where are you going?

Where I’m going is down to the mailbox to see if I’ve heard from the Dark Lady of my sonnets.

Well, there’s always tomorrow. I console myself with the year-end appeals for tax-deductible contributions: Save the Whales, Save the Seal Pups, Save the Brazilian Jungle. The Brazilian jungle? See, we’re losing millions of square miles of it a year: The Brazilian jungle goes, and the whole planet’s ecosystem goes with it, the bottom drops out of the weather and we’re into another ice age. Christ, I didn’t think I’d have to worry about the Brazilian jungle. Save the Children, Save Your Alma Mater, send to the father who runs that Times Square shelter for the runaway kid hustlers, save the Bill of Rights, get rid of handguns, stop prayer in schools, save the Native Americans, save the blacks, save us from ourselves, Dios mío, save us from drink and herpes, save us from pissing in space, and from our smiling elected image, and from solemn Chernenko, and save us dear God from their thundersticks.

Most of this stuff isn’t even addressed to me, it’s to the occupant of 9E. Well, it’s nice to be welcome in the neighborhood. I see where members of a Chinese youth gang are the suspects in the murder of Kai-fan Cheng, age fourteen, they crashed a party for Oriental high-school students the other night. The Dancing Demons is the name of the gang, but there’s never just one gang, their archenemies are the Wind Phantoms. The Phantoms do the protection thing, bounce for the illegal gambling joints, deal maybe. The Demons run the same shit one block over. Every once in a while there’s a tong war and everyone’s income drops.

I am one of the few people of my acquaintance who know that an immigrant Chinese botanist from Szechuan province in 1926 crossed a Chinese orange with a Belgian orange and so invented the American citrus industry.

I see Chinese kids peddling Maoist tabloids at the Astor Place subway station. Mostly girls. They’ve got this little party going. All sorts of Chinese things going on.

When I ride the subway now I feel the real trip is down the steps, somewhere along the line everyone I knew got off and started taking taxis. I’m back in the immigrated universe, I see the phone-company ad telling us there’s now an edition of the Yellow Pages in Spanish, that’s interesting, and I see the shadow paintings on the station platforms, that’s interesting. And now I have with one glance solved a mystery, I will eventually provide explanations of all the Mysteries, the lines at Nazca, the stone heads of Easter Island, Stonehenge, vessels that sail with no crew, and so on, but now I’ll explain graffiti. Graffiti is the longing of the soot-choked urban heart for the sun life of the tropics. Tell the mayor if he’ll paint the subway cars in profusions of tropical colors no one’ll lay a spray can on them. And the earphones, that’s interesting. I do a survey in the car, one two three four sets of earphones hooked to the little tape players, and here’s something out of the quaint past, a man reading a book. When I rode the subways as a kid, I read books from the public library, I read big fat Les Misérables for weeks while I took the IRT to the doctor for my Wednesday allergy shots, I needed to know Jean Valjean lived a more miserable life than I did. But listening to music in the dragon’s throat? Who are these people listening their way back from literacy? Before we learned to write, the world worked in a different system of perception, voices were disembodied, tales were told, ghosts spoke through shamans, we were brother to the animals, am I right? God stopped talking to humans only when they wrote about it in the Bible. On the other hand, what’s different after all: you give the people little earphones, they put them on, show them a screen, they watch it, recite a spell, they go under, sing, they sing along. Hems go up go down, for a while all these idiots in bars wore cowboy hats, me I’ve never found a hat that looks right on me, never found a style of hat I felt right in, real in, fedora, homburg, Swiss Tirol, Irish tinker, deerhound, Russian lamb, baseball, ten-gallon, seaman watch, Greek fisher, garrison, pith or steel helmet, on me they’re all dunce caps. Not just hats but all clothes, nothing ever fits right or is quite perfect, or buttons properly or has no crease across the shoulder blades or goes with a tie or without a tie, my neck is too thick for turtlenecks, my eyes too close together for aviator glasses, if I have the right shirt the trousers are in the cleaner’s, I can’t wear vests running shorts chains medallions watches rings cravats black ties. I feel OK only in old sweaters and corduroys and scuffed ankle boots, no pretension there, my Einstein look, no threat there, world, amiable me—slightly distracted, absent-minded, sans sexual provocation—I lose change and misplace keys, I smile boyishly, invite proprietary attention from women, I am fond and gentle, my curious mind uncontaminated by rage.

The word on Jeanie and Nick is that they are OK, they are working things out, and I am glad for that, but Nick has done something odd, he is just fifty, and he has dug an enormous hole in his basement. They live in a town house in Philadelphia, four stories of totally planned tastefully designed luxury, and the top floor is completely given over to Nick’s studio, complete with word processor, Tunturi exercycle, and Everlast punching bag. Jeanie, who produces local TV news, is gone all day, their kid leaves early in the morning for Foxglove or wherever it is, but showing me around the other day, Nick said he felt impinged on, crowded, Jeanie was moving in too close, buying him things, surprises, track lighting for his office, the unabridged seventeen-volume OED, he was choking to death. And so, he said, leading me down to the basement and then another flight below that, he’d hired a contractor, and a half-dozen men with shovels had hand-dug the cold packed colonial dirt under the house and here in this subbasement they had built a study for him where there was no phone, it was totally soundproof and nobody was allowed in, not his kid not his wife. He opened a padlocked door with a key, turned on a light and ushered me in: Nick, it’s terrific, I said as he gazed at me in fierce triumph, really great, I said, standing in this chill catacomb admiring the beads of sweat on the wood paneling. For a present I’m sending him a cask of Amontillado.

The bell.

My bookcases have arrived, this is a very sacred joy.

Goddammit, they were unassembled. I consign to the nethermost shit-filled pits of hell the misanthrope who invented Do-It-Yourself. May he do it to himself till the end of time, I’ve got a bashed thumb, metal splinters in the soft flesh of my hands. Made in Yugoslavia … My friend Tasich is from Dubrovnik, I see him I’m going to kick his ass.

And here it is, the worst of hours, as drink in hand for my few days of freedom I stupidly make the call I shouldn’t make. She has her drink in hand too, I can tell. How are things at the seraglio? she says. Come on, Angel, don’t start. The other night at David and Nora’s I was really hurt when you told everyone I had visitation rights. It was a joke! Nobody laughed. I work here, Angel, it’s my retreat, like Llewellyn’s ashram or whatever the hell he calls it. It sounds fine when you explain it, Jonathan. But when I try to explain it people look at me as if I’m incredibly stupid. Families of inmates in prison have visitation rights, I say. I was suggesting writing is like a sentence—it’s a prison image. It’s an exclusionary image as far as I’m concerned. You’ve locked me out. Angel, we talked about this. I construe my having the only key as a sense of sole possession, a territory of my own, a place where I can be by myself and work. It’s not that I want to walk in on you, Jonathan. I don’t know what’s real when I’m not trusted by my own husband. There is a pause. I also think it’s bad that you’re the only one to have a key—it’s not safe. What do you think might happen? I said. I don’t know. What if you become ill? What if you’re incapacitated? What if you break your leg, have a heart attack, come down with a stroke? That’s very considerate of you, Angel.

Christ, she’s already staked out this place with her underwear which she left drying on the shower bar and her bathrobe hanging in the closet and her contact-lens lotion in the medicine cabinet. What does she want! Wherever I go she has to go. Sometimes we go out, she’ll dress in the colors I have on. She affects mannish style, linen jackets and slacks in the summer, a tie loosely knotted at the collar. It’s hard to see what’s happening because all of them are in drag this year. I only resent it on her. Sometimes when she talks seriously, thoughtfully she rubs her chin as I rub mine.

I see what they’re doing now, they’re breaking through the brick, making a window. They’ve knocked out half the U, the left edge of the N, they’re destroying United Thread Mills, how do you like that, these guys are tottering on a scaffold four stories up, risking their skulls so some invert can have light in his loft. They won’t be able to get down except by knocking out the brick and going in. It’s cold too, the mast on the World Trade Center frozen to the sky.

So I pull jury duty. I am empaneled for a suit brought by a young woman against the conglomerate owners of a string of resort hotels specializing in singles-fun management. The young woman, Deirdre X, went by herself to one of these hotels in the Caribbean, named Captain Kiss’s Island or something equally appalling, where, as advertised, the hotel staff took steps to maximize her social opportunities. One day, for instance, she and several guests were bused to a lovely and remote beach and there plied with rum and wine punch and set about various fun games and exercises. Eventually they were advised that these games and exercises were best done in the buff. Deirdre X deposes that she shed her inhibitions and leaped about bare-assed in the sun. She found herself attracted to a particular bare-assed young man. Others were pairing off and disappearing behind the dunes and so did they, gigglingly, hie themselves to a quiet glade in the tall beach grass. The wind whispering gently, the blue Caribbean rollers washing the shore, Deirdre X engaged in oral sex upon the young man. This was narrated as delicately as possible in high-tech Latin by her lawyer, a Bobby Kennedy look-alike who wore a brown suit with a vest. The panel of potential jurors was enraptured. Never has a lawyer had a more attentive audience. His client was thus engaged, he said, when three island natives jumped out of the grass, beat up the poor suckee, and dragged off Deirdre X and raped her.

The criminals were not apprehended. Deirdre X’s suit maintains that the Captain Kiss’s Island Hotel and its conglomerate parent should have made the beach secure for the activities which led to the outrage of her person.

The Robert Redford look-alike who introduced himself as counsel for the defense also wore a brown suit with a vest: We will argue, he said, that this incident never happened, but that if it did, the Captain Kiss’s Island Hotel in no way bears responsibility for the consequences of Deirdre X’s life-style.

Both lawyers shamelessly argued their case to the potential jurors under the guise of providing the background we needed to determine our degree of objectivity. No judge was present, only a court officer with a little bingo drum who picked out the names of the panel members for their turn in the juror chairs. I was desperate to be called. The turnover was heavy. A single woman of the plaintiff’s generation did not stand a chance of getting past the Kiss Island lawyer. None of the black men sitting could hope to pass the challenge of Dierdre X’s lawyer. Nor could any women Deirdre X’s mother’s age. One by one, two by two, the chairs were emptied and refilled. If this case actually got into the courtroom, it would be a corker. It interested me that community standards had shifted to the degree that a woman would take the witness stand and testify to her intimate life and erotic inclinations in order to find justice. Also that a multinational conglomerate in the business of selling sex would defend itself by impugning the character of anyone who bought it. That was very interesting, I liked that a lot.

Alas, my number was not called. I took the trouble to memorize the names of the lawyers and will phone one or the other to see how things turned out. Meanwhile Deirdre X sits waiting in my mind. She is dressed in a dark business suit and a chaste white shirtwaist with a ruffled collar. Her face is scrubbed, her lips unpainted, her gaze is proud and steadfast. The sadness of her story is that she was lonely enough to be seduced by a corporation. She was debased to bare herself in the packaged sunshine of the Captain Kiss’s Island Hotel. The triumph of her story is that she has found the courage to go bare-assed again, in a court of law, if that’s what it takes to get justice, or at least a fair settlement, from this treacherous fantasy-husband, this advertising oversoul of a money-making machine turned rapist.

Maybe next time Deirdre will get involved with an individual, as most people do, and not expect to testify again as to her sexual nature until, having married, she sues for divorce.

A drink last night with my friend Mattingly, the rugged desert painter, who’s in town for a show. It’s good to be back in my own generation. He tells me he and his third wife, Mariko, are separated. Not, as I might have thought, because he has finally found the woman for his life, having searched arduously and with looming mythological stature in the gossip of artists living and dead, curators, collectors, critics, and other joyous witnesses of the prodigious; and not, as I might have suspected, because Mariko has finally given up on him, cast him out for the Faustian fornicator he has proven to be—indeed, as enamoratum of female art students across America from Big Sur to Boston, he must have tried even her uncomplaining soul, this loyal little nisei woman with her solemn gaze and quietly elegant manner—but because she, Mariko, has undertaken an affair. She!

Mattingly is not given to wonder how uncharacteristic it may have been for his wife to do this kind of thing. He tells me it is not the affair per se that so disturbs him, but that the fellow Mariko has fallen in with is an idiot, Mattingly knows him and thinks he’s an incredible fool, and that is what cannot be forgiven. So my friend has moved out of his desert home and is living in Santa Fe. In fact Mariko now wants them to get back together, but as far as he’s concerned it’s over. He has been irrevocably, unforgivably defamed by the poor quality of his wife’s choice of lover. What does it say about one, after all, to be cuckolded by a contemptible schmuck.

Of course this is not the diction he used. Mattingly is a Western monosyllabic, which is one aspect of his great dignity. His chest is enormous from a longstanding emphysema that would by now have killed an ordinary man. The creases in his spatulate fingers are black, his nails show the dirt of the palette, and like many painters and sculptors he’s essentially illiterate. You can’t help but admire that. And he has done incredibly fine work, it’s as if he finds the ghosts inside the people he paints, or that the rocks and mountains he likes for his subjects are broken open into some kind of elemental inner light. His paintings stand. I like and envy Mattingly, and have in the past wanted to be like him, brave in the world, daring, asking nothing of others, embracing the torments of the sojourner, living in the desert in winter, climbing the rock cliffs of one’s independence. But it is ironic, he and his wife breaking up because of something she’s done. Migod! when they lived for a spell in SoHo I remember Mariko running down the dark wooden stairs beyond the light of a loft party crying out Mattingry! Mattingry! as if seeking with her monogamous spirit to save him from the depths of his anarchies, calling out not like a jealous wife but like a guiding spirit trying to save him from his hellish plunges into self-destruction—all from her love for this man.

So we are sitting in this mock Victorian bar on Third Avenue and when he hears about my new digs he makes the same assumption everyone makes. Don’t wait until you’re fifty-five, he says of married men who split, do it now. I’m fifty, are there such gradations to middle age? He coughs, puts out his cigarette, and speaks in his gravelly voice of the discouragement, the despair, of being renewed through serious love, the difficulty of mounting a new life. Mariko was his third wife, and he’s made children with all three, and he works like hell teaching, painting, hustling his work, just to pay his child support and his rent, he wears jeans and a frayed shirt with a string tie and a corduroy jacket and scuffed hide shoes, and he’s stopped drinking, and some of that ruggedness has turned fleshy, and between the artist and simple dereliction there is a very thin line, I know that. Dereliction is the state of mind given to middle-aged men alone, not to women. Middle-aged women alone turn feisty and keep busy and become admirable characters and achieve things. They find young boyfriends. They stay clean and neat and change their hairstyle from time to time.

Would Angel ever do what Mariko did, fall in love with a man not her husband? She threatens to. Last night, my birthday, she came in with the children, and while they were out roaming the neighborhood she told me that a couple of nights before she was so desperate she actually considered going to a bar. Of course, she said after a moment, I wouldn’t think of the sleazy places up where we are. It would have to be a kind of Greenwich bar, with a name like Waffle’s or Titmouse’s or T. S. Eliot’s. While I was laughing at that, she gave me a present, a small white plastic wastebasket for my bathroom—a gift from someone who’s being thrown out, is what I think she said. Oh my great troubled heart: and at night, after they had all left to go back to Connecticut, I dreamt I was in a big bedroom of many occupied beds and on the far side of the room looking at me was Angel. Then the image changed and another Angel, Angel S., the publisher’s wife who has been ill lately, was being affixed, nude, in some sort of orthopedic frame, preparatory to an operation on her heart. Her husband was the surgeon and I next saw him doing the operation, examining with some large drill-press kind of microscope the screwtight mechanism being implanted in her heart. And then the image turned again and I was in the bathroom of a logging camp with many urinals and it was crowded, and there in the open field beyond when I tried to leave, I was menaced by psychopaths who seemed to get in my way, threaten me, attack me. No matter which way I turned I was in for punishment by these grotesque bullying looming crazies whom I didn’t understand and could not placate. And then later I was seducing some young girl in my own bed, a very erotic love scene, and there was no guilt at all.

What I did on my birthday: I cleaned this place, I’m into housewifing, vacuuming, washing the bathroom floor. No one will believe that I do this.

I heard from the Dark Lady with her astute timing telling me she will leave Athens in a day or so and go on to Egypt. I am pitted against the world.

I received a call from my mother in which she wished she was as young as I.

I received a call from the tall Icelander who with the encouragement of her covetous and luscious friend has been negotiating in some incredible upper-class way to adore me as an Eskimo slowly, patiently, endlessly tracks the giant white bear.

I entertained my wife and children, loving them all and taking them for good Mexican food down the block. Nobody said, and everybody felt, how odd this husband and father is in his own apartment. Imagine—his having gone ahead and done this thing without any warning or announcement. I wanted them to ask me about it. I wanted to tell them: I am doing this to find out why I’m doing it. I wanted to assure them: after all, you kids could be visiting me in a prison, or a hospital, isn’t this better, this working retreat I’ve made for myself in the middle of the electric city? I speak to the journey we each must make, I give you the lesson of courage in selfhood, I pray that I am in good health, I pray for us all that God grant us long life in excellent good health.

That prayer part is from something I made up one night years ago when I was unable to sleep from my good fortune. I composed this placation, this fervent invocation not to be punished for my happiness: Dear God, keep the blessings flowing, grant us all great good health and long life, with no illness, no sickness, no disease, no affliction of any kind, mental or physical. Spare us from all disasters, human or natural, and from all accidents, and spare us from violence, whether organized and official or spontaneous and haphazard. Let there be no breakdown or deterioration of any of our internal systems or organs, no loss of acuity of our senses, no diminution of our abilities and capacities. Keep our reflexes sharp. Let us live in a world of peace and social justice. Let us breathe clean air and drink pure water. Let us live in love and joy and creativity, knowing courage and finding wisdom and having a shot at enlightenment. I think that about covers everything, except extend this terrific grant to everyone I know and whoever they may have an affection for and so on, amen.

I see I left out food, you could starve to death under that grant.

I am really tired this morning. Am I on my right path or is this my ultimate act of self-hatred? When am I being true to myself and when am I only doing penance? Here’s a birthday card from the MGP Capital Corporation. They shouldn’t have. I see where some off-Broadway group is celebrating the Kafka centennial. Kafka would break out in a big sepulchral smile if he knew he was having a centennial. I ask the question again: Would Angel do what Mariko Mattingly did? I think yes in the event she decided or underwent the conviction that I had been unfaithful to her. Then she would be unfaithful to me. It would be an act in the interest of symmetry, like so much of what she does, a means of redressing imbalance or injustice, which is the same thing. She would do it in imitation, she would do it to be me.

Perhaps Angel’s primeval urge to siamate, to speak with my voice, to think my thoughts, to use my gestures, to mingle our souls like some gloppy finger painting, is not an instinct given to all women. Catholic women? Angel is an Irish Catholic married, if tenuously, to a New York Jew. Maybe we are talking of assimilation here. Mariko, a Japanese Catholic, is married to Mattingly, a Western animist. Moira, an Irish Protestant from Chicago, is ignored by Brad, a Presbyterian columnist from Minneapolis. Jeanie, a Methodist TV producer from Asheville, wonders why she remains married to Nick, a Greek Orthodox from Philly. Rachel, a Hungarian refugee, is tormented by the red underwear of Ralph, an Ashkenazi from Brooklyn. Llewellyn, a Buddhist Welshman, is in retreat from Anne, a Quaker from Swarthmore, PA. When I walk into the Bluebird Diner on lower Broadway the counterman gives me the gold-tooth grin. Hey, compadre, he says. He tosses me the laminated menu that you hold like choir music. The plates slap through the slot, oh chili, soup of chicken, oh pigs’ feet, oh lamb stew, lasagna (homemade), fried steak and souvlaki. The food of diners is organic history, like tree rings, it is like the sea wrack of waves of migrations, the detritus of vast tidal movements of impassive populations. Shivering all night by the bronze doors of the embassy, saving their dinars, their rupees, their cruzeiros, wrapping their treasures in gray handkerchiefs, tying ropes around the brittle cane of the suitcase, jamming the buses, clambering to the rooftops of the streetcars. Infants are squeezed to death in their mothers’ arms, old men give up the grasp of their bluebone hands on the gunwales and are gulped in the briny swell, young men crawl under the excoriating barbs, they ford the rivers, all of us trying to get away with the clothes on our backs, the flapping clothes on our whipped backs.

Maybe I’m right, maybe I’m wrong, maybe I’m weak, maybe I’m strong …

Migod, I have just found a little bump on the scrotum. No, that’s not possible, I wouldn’t do that to myself, would I?

It’s nothing. This leathery sac, this string pouch, these lungs of sex suffering all manner of emotions, they should show some signs of wear, no? It’s nothing, an arc of vein, I’ll check it out from time to time. Cheggidout man, the street peddlers pointing to the gloves scarves calculators spread out on the sidewalk. Cheggidout.

So the other night we’re at the Gordons’, the table set for twelve, and Ginny calls us in and makes up the seating while we stand there. Why I love her: This is the crowd that buys Garland ranges for its kitchens, I mean they toss off a salmon mousse the way I heat water for coffee, well-known chefs are their weekend guests in the Hamptons. Dinner tonight is a gray water with chunks of unnameable matter floating in it. Ginny distributes it in a state of terrified hope, her beautiful eyes blinking rapidly.

Mmm, someone says, oh Ginny, someone else says, and forks are quietly laid down and the conversation becomes animated. Lloyd the cardiologist is panicked into attacking his profession: Bypass operations are epidemic, like tonsillectomies in the thirties, he says, for some reason pointing at his plate, perhaps it seems to him a tonsil lies there. Then Raoul, little Raoul, holds the table with a routine he’s taking to Vegas. Raoul is beside himself trying to be brave. He goes for the wine, finds no solace: Jack Gordon, an editor for the Times, tonight pours a Chilean red. I look at Raoul’s face and recall a dinner at his penthouse on Fifty-seventh Street, everything in shades of white, the pickled floors, the furniture. But on the walls, large color fields beautifully lit. The rooms stocked with opera stars, writers, directors, and painters of the paintings on the walls, everything and everyone a glittering marvel of Raoul’s perfectionist soul, and the little host himself, running happily toward the kitchen calling Jean-Pierre! Jean-Pierre! I think we’re ready now for the choucroute!

Raoul slumps back in his seat. Sitting here at Ginny’s left, I kiss her cheek and sacrifice myself for the good of the community. I ask for seconds. I receive a flashing look of gratitude from Angel. I try to sop up the mess with a chunk of stale baguette. Jean-Pierre! Jean-Pierre! I think we’re ready for the canned creamed corn!

At this moment, everyone assiduously not looking at his plate, a despair settles over the company. Before I know what is happening people have begun to tell stories of their muggings.

Andrea Dintenfass was hailing a taxi at the corner of Central Park West and Seventy-fourth Street in broad daylight and as the cab pulled up this tall young black man sprang to the door and held it open for her. She was somewhat startled but reasoned that he had recognized her—Andrea is a dancer with the New York City Ballet. Her husband, Moshe, is the architect. She smiled and thanked the young man; as she bent forward to enter the cab he put his hand on the middle of her back and shoved her sprawling, facedown, across the seat. He slammed the door behind her pounded the taxicab roof with the flat of his hand and shouted Move Motherfucker! And only as she struggled to a sitting position, aided by the quick acceleration of the cab, did she realize her shoulder bag was gone. He must have cut the strap, she said. It all happened so quickly, it was so brazen, done with such elegance, she said, smiling almost wistfully, not a wasted movement.

George, the wavy-haired labor lawyer, tells an ever better one: His Mercedes 300D turbo diesel is bumped from behind one Thursday night in July on the Long Island Expressway. George pulls to the side. The car behind him pulls over too, a nondescript Chevy, and several Hispanic males get out and join him in inspecting the damage. George and the Hispanics are all hunkering down between the two cars, the heavy traffic is going by, a tunnel of flared light and blue exhaust, and only his car is damaged, a dent, a broken light, and he is expressing his irritation and they are nodding sympathetically, and then he notices one of them holding a small snub-nosed pistol in the palm of his hand. George finishes what he has to say. He is politely relieved of his wallet, his watch, his tie clip, and while he hunkers there as he’s been instructed, one of the men has gotten in behind the wheel of his Mercedes and another has walked up to the window where George’s wife, Judy, is sitting, and together they persuade her to turn over her jewelry her purse her cosmetic case. They grab the stereo tapes, they take the luggage from the trunk of the car, pocket the turbo diesel’s keys, get back into their Chevrolet, whose license plate is caked with mud, and, with one of them standing in the slow lane to hold up traffic, they indolently pull back on the road and moments later they’re nothing but a pair of red lights in the great expressway light show.

Today on the subway: Efecto seguro! No más suciedad; no más fastidio; no más cucarachas! Johnson’s No Roach—efecto rápido, un tratamiento dura varios meses. The good Don tipping his lance in Johnson’s No Roach, mounting his knacker and setting off to the fray. The impassive heads sitting in line shaking in unison as the express rocks through the tunnel. The impassive inundation at Fourteenth Street. We are each aloof in our private beings, our cilia wigglingly alert to those closest to us because they may without warning do us harm. My skin is my border. I may read a newspaper, but I can’t think, I’m conscious of them, they flow through me, the presence of impassive strangers flows through me and shoulder to shoulder, bottom halves carefully untouching, we form in the thirty seconds between stations momentary grudging community, all dissolved and reformed as the doors open, some of us jam out and new impassivities jam in.

I grew up underground, why do I feel out of place? Cheggidout man, white dude, glasses, face too soft, in these years under your stationary flight path great migrations breasted the sea, dug through the mountains, rode the tectonic plates. You thought refugees meant Jews but it never stopped, the doors fly open, new generations of impassivities tumble in, and I am as strangled in history as this little old lady in her fur hat and blond wig and delicate white skin, this Jewish grandma with prim distaste stomping the people in front of her to get to the door.

The car empties. Now we are idlers in a café on a slow evening, I find a seat a moment later, a young black man, I look up from my reading, he holds the strap with one hand with the other holds under my face a fedora filled with coins and bills. What is he saying? His right pants leg is rolled above the knee, the leg is prosthetic, he displays for my pleasure his manikin leg, give him money quick, a medal pinned to the hat brim, I’ll pay I’ll pay, he twists on the strap, topples to the other side of the car, grabs the strap there, an aerialist, not a coin has spilled, the back of his knee is open I see the steel shaft and socket, this is no scam, this is a legitimate hustle. He works the car one stop, two, it crowds up again and he gets off.

And what is this: poised at the open door to the platform unable to make up his mind for the express, a gringo in a black car coat, prison-gray trousers, space shoes. What the hell, he says, they’s too many, I’ll never make it, I’ll fall on the tracks, you think they care, you think they give a good goddamn? No one in this world gives a doodlyfuck, am I right? He asks this of no one, he needs no one, migod, now I feel at home on the subway, an audible brain, a mind wired for broadcast, I move up behind him, his scrawny neck is pitted with black shot, tufts of black hair sprout from his ears. The express roars in, the impassive crowd bunches on the platform ready to spring. He says in the door of the local, You gotta be fucking crazy to fight that mob! But, why not, what the hell, I’m as good as them … He saunters out. Follow that man! You know how valuable he is? He’s as old as the dragonfly, he was here before the caves of Lascaux. This antediluvian artist is my ancestor, he invented me.

A hurled rain, coming in gusts at a slant, like flung seed. Shows you what the wind looks like. Hits the adjoining high-rise and plunges like a cataract. The swings flinging about in the playground. The sky over Houston is white-gray, and something’s missing, the World Trade Center, it’s gone, erased. The skyline now is no higher than the 1930’s, the era of my birth, this gets any heavier we’ll be back in the last century with Melville’s ironfronts. Cobblestones. Mayan reservoirs. I’ve opened the sliding window a crack to give it a voice. I can barely hear the churchbell in this roar. But wait, splashing across the street, bowed but, just as it says over the portals of the main post office on Eighth Avenue, undeterred by rain, sleet or any other shit, here he comes, the big shoulder bag looking like a humpback under his poncho.

Well let’s see what I have for his labor: Would I sign a letter protesting the coming Polish show trials against Solidarity activists? I would. Would I put my name down as a sponsor for the upcoming nuclear freeze poetry reading? Sure. And Christ, look at this, Hubbard’s Cave in Warren County Tennessee the most important bat cave in North America according to Dr. Merlin Tuttle, international authority on these flying mammals: Unless the Conservancy finds twenty thousand bucks to ensure the protection of the cave, a hibernating colony of one hundred and fifty thousand rare gray bats could be wiped out.

Shrieky little things. Teeth like glazier points. Gummy eyes. White bellies. Wing skin. Shit a lot. Doc, let me think about it, O.K.?

And here, one drop of the rainstorm like a splashed tear running the lavender ink, a picture card from Egypt. A huge stepped temple on the Nile. This is the size of the feeling, it says in her hand, and this is the specific location of the heart.

Gulp.

We communicate intimately over great distances. We warrant ourselves. I feel a calm resolution of being, I feel as if I’m holding her in my arms.

But of course happiness is intolerable for more than two seconds. What if I’m too old for her? We’ll no sooner move in together than I’ll come down with Alzheimer’s disease. You think that’s funny? The other day those Willie and Joe strips of World War II came to my mind, those beautifully drawn panels of GI life. I couldn’t remember the name of the artist. I even knew that after the war he drew political cartoons for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Bill something. Then it came to me as slow as a pinball bumping its way down to the slot, or like an ancient computer byte blinking through a thousand weak glimmering tubes. Mauldin. That’s not funny at all. The other day I poured a drink, put the glass on the bar, and sat down on the sofa with the bottle. The shower head fools me every time—I no sooner step under it than I hear the phone ringing. I see the moon through the trees and it turns out to be a street lamp. I’m flaking away. Christ. If you can’t name, you’re not human. The simplest thing, which corner to turn two blocks from home, can leave you as eerily as a hundred fifty thousand gray bats flooping out of Hubbard’s Cave.

I’ve got to do some heavy working out, I’ve got to get in shape, plan a regimen for myself, heavy cardiovascular stuff. You keep the arteries supple, and everything else takes care of itself, am I right? I’ll slow my growing old until she catches up to me, until we’re running right along together. I’ll be her age for her, that’s what my love can do. Starting tomorrow.

And now I have to think of what happened to Riordan when he fell in love. I did a reading at his campus and stayed at his home. In the early hours of the morning, after the party, we had one last drink and he told me. Riordan has published a half-dozen novels. None of them have made money but he’s doing all right, he’s gotten his grants and manages to keep going. A few years ago he was on track for tenure at a good little school down south. He was married, happily, if calmly, and didn’t expect it or look for it, but all at once he was in love with a woman he had met a few times at parties, the wife of a dean or director of admissions. And she fell in love with him. So there they were, a total of five young kids between them, his three, her two, and they couldn’t get enough of each other. He portrayed her as a tremblingly sensual woman, a kind of head-tossing being not born for the conventions of middle class. She was a sculptor given to pieces showing the heads of birds on human bodies. Or vice versa. He never described her but I imagined her as somewhat full-hipped, with big boobs, real shifters. He met her in the afternoons, and it didn’t go away, the more they saw of each other the more intense it became. He rented a small room miles from the campus and he would read to her in bed the work she had inspired—the best he’d ever done before or since, he insisted, a rhythmic, energetic prose, the voice of his courage, is the way he put it. She in her turn realized in her love for him that she had been asleep most of her life. She was fervent in her feeling. She called his love her redemption.

Finally it became apparent to them that there was nothing else to do but for each of them honorably to announce their relationship, make full confession to their spouses, give up custody of their children and leave town. He would resign his job and they would make a new life together in some other part of the country. If he could swing an advance from his publisher they might even live abroad. There was nothing they could not do.

And so at the end of the semester the day came. He posted his letter of resignation and sat his poor wife down in the living room of their home. He told her everything except his lover’s name. She was shocked, stunned, devastated—she had had no idea. She was a good simple girl, he said, quite pretty in her own frail way, a loyal loving wife, actually, he said, except that before he could get out of the house she had turned insane and, as he ran, clipped him on the back of the head with a heavy pot of pompons he didn’t know she had the strength to lift, let alone heave.

Somewhat woozy, probably suffering a mild concussion, Riordan drove off to his rendezvous. The lovers had surreptitiously packed bags for themselves days before, and all the belongings they wanted were already in the trunk of the car—even some of his books, even a couple of her smaller pieces. He waited for her in the appointed place, the parking lot behind a supermarket.

He waited and waited. She was late but this was characteristic of her and he didn’t worry although his head was aching. A pickup truck drove into the lot and pulled up alongside him. A student got out and asked him if he was Professor Riordan, and when he nodded the student handed him a letter, said, Have a nice day, Professor, and drove off. He opened the letter. He had immediately recognized her hand, her large romantic scrawl, in the same green ink and on the same gray vellum that had given him revelation of life’s wild fulfillments: I cannot tell my husband, the letter said. I can’t bear to leave my children. I will love you always. I hope someday you will forgive me.

Riordan told this story quietly. He smoked cigarettes and mashed them out in the ashtray. He was married again—to neither of the women in the story, but a pleasant-enough person, I thought, who said when we were introduced how much she liked my work. She looks a lot like Riordan—slender, fair, light-haired, with pink-rimmed eyes. Freckles. No children.

On the other hand, what could be more dangerous than twenty years of marriage, where she has the same thought a few seconds after you have it, or before; or that you tell her one day how fragile your ego is, how you keep drifting in and out of yourself and don’t remember who you are supposed to be, and she tells you she has the same experience, disappearing into herself, and so the two of you have been living together all these years not sure of who you are or what you’re supposed to feel, but known to one and all as the same clear couple they’ve always known and recognized, a flowerpot on the back of the skull may be preferable.

Fifties update!

Ralph of the red underwear is still not sleeping with his wife, Rachel, although his affair is over. He knows from his analysis, to which he has submitted himself five days a week, that Rachel strongly resembles his dead mother. We walk the streets as he tells me this, he stares at the ground, he holds his hands behind his back as he walks, we are two good and gentle burghers on our Spaziergang while youths amble by with their ghetto blasters and women blowing bubble gum sway past us on white roller skates. It’s not Rachel’s fault, Ralph says. How can I tell her, my wife, a survivor of the Holocaust, that she symbolizes death?

And stern Sascha, who told me to get in or get out, has left his wife, Mary. It comes as no surprise. Last winter Angel and I went with them to Barbados. I’m not crazy about the Caribbean but the two women had conspired—Mary wanted to be alone with Sascha for a few days but she had no hope of getting him down there on her own. We settled into a pleasant routine, reading on the beach, bathing, tennis in the late afternoon, a good dinner at night. But a few days into it Mary began to come unstrung. If my husband doesn’t make love to me soon I’m going to walk into the ocean, she told Angel. So one night after the ladies had retired I had a brandy with Sascha at the hotel bar. We had started on rum at about five and had polished off a couple of bottles of good wine at dinner, and we were both fairly well along. Sosh, I said, there’s an implicit agreement in a Caribbean holiday, you can’t bring a woman to a place like this and not fuck her. Even your wife. He rose to his feet with such drunken resolution that the chair he’d been sitting in fell over backward. Of course you’re right, Jonathan, he said, and hitching up his trousers, he staggered off.

But the scandalous news is Brad: First night back in town after his trip to the Middle East, Brad was seen at Elio’s with his wife, Moira. I feel the ground sliding from under me.

Angel’s incessant theme, that I never relax, relent, go with something, that it’s always a matter of principle, it’s always a big urgent issue, nothing is forgiven, forgotten, nothing is small or unimportant. That is correct. She on the other hand has no pride and would not think of turning down an invitation no matter how surely loathsome the company. She has been doing this to me for years. I simply won’t go. She is intimidated by the most casual social demands, God will strike her dead if she says no. If she feels she is accepted, she will crawl on the rocks in the sun in the dust of the desiccated shit of armadillos.

My father rode the subway. I remember once walking him to the subway station, he went to work ten, eleven in the morning, catching the D train to get downtown to his accounts: Be nice to your mother, try to cooperate, don’t do anything to upset her. How I loved him. The man who disappointed millions. Make promises, fail to keep them. Give your assurances, forget them. Give you his raging wife. I am maybe thirteen. They have had a battle and he’s leaving me behind to cool her out. All day I will dread the night. She will make dinner in silence, serve three plates, and she and I will dine. My father’s dinner will sit there. She will not touch it. I do my homework, go to sleep. In the early morning I awaken to another engagement: Where has he been, what has he done? The curses, the accusations, the physical attack. He will defend himself and hurt her and she will cry and I will be there in my pajamas trying to make the peace between them, screaming at them both at three A.M.

I would wake up to these terrible sounds of struggle, blows, cries, I didn’t know whom to believe, whom to love, whom to defend, whom to attack, I felt this sick pleasure not knowing what I felt, hearing these sounds.

Today my mother is eighty-six, bent, arthritic, with evidence in scars of three or four heart attacks which she was too strong to feel when she had them. She has had an operation for cancer. She has mottled old woman’s skin, she has trouble walking, she has arteriosclerosis, a herniated esophagus, and glaucoma. And all her marbles. I didn’t understand your father, she says now. He was a wonderful man, he had a fine mind. He did not think like anyone else. I didn’t understand that, I tried to make him like everyone else.

My father’s been dead thirty years. Had he lived longer, he might have seen the dawn of that beneficent judgment.

I met him when I was sixteen, my mother will tell me. We went ice skating at Crotona Park. He was so dashing, so handsome. He wouldn’t let me go out with another boy. In the spring he brought me flowers. We played tennis. He was a wonderful tennis player. Mama didn’t want me to marry him.

That’s the fellow. Made things happen, my pop. He could get through police lines, talk his way past any stage doorman on Broadway. Come up with tickets to the sold-out concert at Carnegie Hall. Get us into the game. He made occasions of the simplest things—a walk in the park, a picnic outing. He had ideas, he gave us books to read, brought home movie cameras, electric trains, pulled things out of his hat. He got us through the Depression! Yet his life is said to have been a failure. There is a mythology of his failure. His wrong business decisions, and errors of judgment continue to obsess us more than twenty-five years after his death. That’s why my brother finds it so hard to part with money, why my mother has no one to her house, why I always rush to pay the bills, my share, more than my share, a penance for my success, the impertinence of it.

As a young bank teller, it is said, he was extremely handsome, and so caught the eye one day of a man who arrived at the polished marble counter wearing a beret, and a pince-nez. This was a film director, it is said, a European then putting together a series of motion pictures about a daring female beauty who each week at the nickelodeon would be left in some terrible precarious position from which only next week’s installment would rescue her. Her name was Pearl White and an appropriately heroic good-looking young man was needed to play her rescuer and chaste companion. My father thought it over and said no. He thought he had a good career ahead of him in banking. My Jewish father. As an aspiring ensign he trained for his commission at the Webb Naval Academy on the Harlem River, but the Great War ended before his training did. I have on my wall his browned photograph, he leans on a mop handle, one of a line of swabbies with mops and pails. Gradually he accumulated wrong decisions, frustrated intentions. He went into the record business in the early thirties, the days of 78rpm shellac records, and he really knew music and his stock reflected this, and many of the reigning artists of the day ordered their records from him; but his partner pulled a fast one or two, and the business went down and my father lost his store. It was in the old Hippodrome Building on Sixth Avenue between Forty-third and Forty-fourth streets. He made a few dollars during the war, importing this and that, little business schemes, inventions by crazy Swiss tinkerers, a new kind of soap dish to keep the soap from turning gloppy, to extend its life. Soap was hard to come by in World War II, but by the time my father marketed these little devices the war was over, soap and everything else was plentiful, people wanted to waste it, the idea was to make up for the years of austerity and go through everything as fast as you could. A man wanted my father to be partners in a new venture in the record business in anticipation of the long-playing record. This time my father saw the possibilities, made the right decision, but couldn’t raise the ten thousand or so he needed to buy in. You get the picture? He lost money at cards because he thought he was a good card player and he wasn’t. He was always late, late going to work as a salesman for an appliance jobber, late coming home. He was a philanderer, my brother said to me one day. He had a girlfriend. Only one? The one my brother thinks of was a singer, some light soprano who had an album and wrote on the cover: To Jack, Always. But why would he bring it home if Always meant anytime? Perhaps he had no other place to bring it. He had nothing. Toward the end of his life he took to washing the dishes, cleaning the kitchen, shopping for the week’s groceries. He didn’t want to work anymore. When he died he was king of a three-room apartment in the Bronx where he had sat in the bathroom and read the newspapers to escape life’s incremental judgments. He owned a few suits, a watch or two that didn’t work, a garnet ring, an insurance policy the entire value of which he’d borrowed on. He left some white-on-white shirts, a few Sulka ties of which he was proud, an old wood tennis racket.

I turn away to the window. Downstairs, on the roof of the university sports center, the joggers in their shorts over sweatpants in their separate rhythms around the track. All over the city they run, little headphones on their ears. Once I thought they were in training for the time when there would be nothing left but to run, but that is too logical an idea. They not only run but stop in the park, lay down their briefcases, and wave their arms and kick their feet in the air. They ride unicycles with their earphones on their heads, they dance on roller skates on the abandoned highway, and in studios all over the city they attach themselves at great expense to machines that move their limbs for them. We could be picking tubers from the fields, stomping grapes, we could be running rickshas, carrying loads of faggots gathered from the forest floor.

A call from my mother: What’s the matter, did you forget I exist?

That’s the lady. Mystical, isn’t it? I was just thinking of you, I say. She tells me the story of her latest triumph at the senior citizens’ center. How she put some woman in her place. She is a good storyteller. She thinks narratively and comes to judgment through stories. When she talks about Angel, whom she likes and admires, I see Angel more appreciatively. My mother is connoisseur of the characters of women. The universe in her mind is women. These days her most intense relationship is with the young woman we hired to come in and take care of her six days a week. Periodically, she asks me to fire this woman, Toinette is her name, a Brazilian in her twenties, but when I say O.K. she tells me not to. What difference does it make, they’re all alike, she explains. She has gotten Toinette to keep the house, cook things the way she likes them, wash her clothes, her hair. Every day if the weather is right they go to lunch together at some sandwich place in the neighborhood. Upper West Side. She is very regal-looking, my mother, with white hair, blue half-blind eyes, and she plays verbal games with the counterman, who asks her for dates, that sort of thing. Toinette endures this stony-faced, she endures it all, but sometimes gives expression to the feeling that comes of being in my mother’s presence thirty-five hours a week. Do you know what Toinette did the other day? my mother asks me, laughing happily: She started to dance around me and make obscene gestures. I said that’s really good, Toinette, you could go to Las Vegas with an act like that. Once, apparently, Toinette withdrew an ice pick from her bag, removed the wood sheath and showed it to her. She carries it in case she’s attacked, at least that’s what she said—I didn’t let on how frightened I was, I said to her: Toinette, that’s a lethal weapon, if the police find that in your possession you’ll be arrested. Toinette tells my mother stories of friends of hers in the custodial health business who get so mad at the inmates in their care in the old people’s homes that they step on their toes and break them. But she won’t tell me the names of the homes, my mother says. I’m wise to you, she says, you’ll call up and get them fired.

All this has made my mother healthier and happier than she’s been in years. Ever since this woman came to work for her, she’s stopped going to the doctor.

It’s her mother who had spells, we never had another name for it, my grandma with her spells, a frail little woman too, not a sturdy sort like my mother, she’d hug the good little boy one day, give him a penny and bless his head and kiss him, and curse him out the next, hose him down with a stream of vile curses in Yiddish. My grandma would come down the front steps in her black lace-up shoes and I’d be playing with my friends in front of my house and she’d shake her fist at me. Walk down the block and come back to shake it some more. Finally she’d disappear around the corner, still ranting. She ran away all the time, the cops would have to find her and bring her back.

And look at this coming down Eighth Street: his black garrison cap blocked like the old SS, his black leather jacket with raised chrome studs, his black jeans and boots. Hopping to keep up with him is a skinny androgyne, with a gold ring in his ear and a lime-green jumpsuit. Stroll theater, people cruise for the impact of themselves, it’s their art form. Raster blasting, mincing, prancing, slinking the display of themselves. I go to a Mexican restaurant the other night, no one there is over twenty-five, at one table a boy and girl have identical skeezix haircuts, they sit with their arms on the table and point their hair at each other. It may be passing me by, it may all be passing me by. On the BMT the other day a young Korean comes into the car and he’s carrying a chair, some sort of upholstered dining-room chair, and it’s covered in polyurethane wrap, he’s using the subway for haulage, a very Oriental solution somehow redolent of baskets balanced on poles over the shoulders, of ten thousand people with shovels, of the hand-digging of bomb shelters—but the kicker is the car being full, the Korean looks around, plants his chair in the middle of the floor and sits down on it. That making do, that inevitable logic of life’s teeming struggle, of simple squatting accommodation.

And Hispanic young girls wheeling their babies in strollers into the subway cars, whole families piling in bag and baggage everything they own in the world, the doors can’t close, this car is so packed with compañeros.

Down Broadway at night the feeling quite different, gangs of prepubescents holding their combs as crucifixes, or lighting each other’s cigarettes importantly as they wait under the marquees for the opening of the new dismemberment movie. Knots of Nordic tourists, big doughy families, moving along too stunned to talk. Glossy girlies from the 1930’s still willing to dance one flight up, the hot winds of the pizza oven gust up the trash on the sidewalks, a cop in his powder-blue plastic helmet posting as his horse trots in that sidelong way of police horses, this is the historic city of yellow cabfleets, my father knew these precincts, their flashing windows of porno, the corner hot-dog stands where whores and hustlers have their coffee break, the triple-X movie stills with the nipples and cunts blacked out, camera shops, shoe stores, the little paper umbrellas and lead Statues of Liberty, the arcades now wired for videoblast sound effects, it’s war in there, but you can still buy a front page with your name in the headline. Broadway has always been a sump, nothing new here, the boopedoop sirens, the fast frisk against the wall, the cop dressed worse than the guy whose arm he has twisted up behind him as far as it’ll go. The moving computer-graphic signs, the giant pantyhosed girl in the sky, the young god in briefs, the archetypes of the Great White Way. That’s not what I mean.

Going to Connecticut there’s, invariably, a reentry problem. I return with amnesia and a hopeful resolve, I smell the wet leaves, I see the stand of white birch in the woods behind the house, I take a deep breath of self-purification, and I get waylaid. Angel can practice civility with the deadliness of an Englishman. But that’s just one of the ways. I cannot bring anything, flowers, bread from a real New York bakery, because it symbolizes the situation as she sees it. This last time she told me after the children went upstairs and we were drinking our Swiss-water-process decaffeinated coffee, how the night before she’d been to dinner down the road at the Millays’: All the husbands were there except mine. I felt like a charity case. Everyone in these woods is a writer, but you’re the only one who can’t work here. That’s right, I said. How can any of these guys get any thinking done? What do they do when they want to go for a walk? She looked at me. I’ve got nobody to talk to. I’m lonely. Even when you’re here I’m lonely, even when you’re here. You live inside your neurosis. I’m tired of not being precious to anybody. Nobody ever wonders what’s doing with me!

And then the beautiful eyes brimmed over and she was gone from the room.

I think of cities on the water, mossy Venice with its canals of cold murk, the first Disneyland. I think of London, the wide river, the flat anarchic landscape, looming industrial white sky; or Hamburg with its estuary coming right up to the flag-decked square with the clean park, the tourist launches, my fine hotel with its bowed windows, Germans in crowds as usual; or I think of Stockholm, every foot of the archipelago channeled in stone, the palace hedged in scaffolds, construction cranes swinging about like royal attendants; or filthy overdone Paris, the water in the Seine overfished, over-pissed, now something else besides water, the air too, overbreathed, something else now not air, this ultimate metro transmuted in its own density to something else, something stopped and monumental.

I will tell Angel simply that it may not be in my nature to be married and she’ll look at me, my wife of two decades, the father of her children, and I’ll say there is an evolved being and eventually it declares itself. And not just to me but to you too, I am saying we must make the whole journey, it is the only justification for any of us, after the imperatives have been met—to let go, take the risk, it is the only honor and the only redemption of the last free years. And true, I have a particular hope in mind but I know what a wild hope it is, I cannot compete for her forever. And I know that. I see the stunned Mattingly wandering around trying to find a woman he can talk to, I see my friend Leonard, whose wife of fifteen years left him for a woman—he has his colleagues in for drinks in his dark new little apartment—and I see the small spaces men end up with for their lives, and there is terror, and the disgusted reproach of children, and the lapse into dereliction of men who have taken down their establishments, and I know I risk all that. I risk the drab common fate. But look, I’ll tell her, if we do this right we can save of ourselves and our relationship what is good about it, we can be colleagues, we are still partners in parenthood, we can help each other, relate as real human beings, share our thoughts, maintain our regard for each other, maybe we can even go to bed from time to time.

A call from a new El Salvadoran benefit group: Would I come to hear an American doctor who works with the rebels? That interests me—the doctor flew bombing missions in Vietnam.

Hi, says my neighbor just now, meeting me at the incinerator. I heard your typewriter going this morning, you were on a real roll, weren’t you?

When dusk comes this time of year the lights are already on in all of the apartments and I see several floors of action simultaneously. He is playing the piano while one floor below in the identical spot she waters a potted plant. People when talking on the phone gesticulate as if the person at the other end were right there, perhaps the body movement is necessary for the inflection. One young girl has just lifted her skirt and looked into her underpants. Children, I notice, have rooms filled with primary colors, they are said to need cheerful enameled toys, little kid there stands on the windowsill, his body pressed up against the window, arms over his head, he’s looking for his dad to come home. Get down, kid. And all over the complex the TV sets shine their colors synchronously, this is a popular program, the light shifts, colors flick everywhere on every floor, a news program, look how the scenes change, the light shading, brightening, darkening, some war in green hills, people running, colors shifting.

Today was one of those unaccountably warm winter days, a teasing of spring, and everyone was out, the streets were filled, people carrying their coats, everyone popping up in the street like crocuses. A whole Dixieland band on Sixth Avenue, a black ventriloquist with a black dummy holding down a good crowd at Columbus Circle, peddlers of pistachio nuts and dried fruit everywhere, side by side with the carts of chestnuts on pans of coal. Brisk business at the boards of chess hustlers and three-card montetistas. On University Place I see a crowd, I come up to the edge, straining my neck, and it’s some guy sawing a board of number-one pine, he’s concentrating on his job, sawing a piece of wood for a job he’s doing on a storefront, and oh my great and wonderful city a crowd has gathered to watch this man saw this board.

In the mail a letter from Seattle—my friend, the poet Rosen. Would I write some recommendations for his son who’s applying to college? Incidentally, he says, whatever happened to Lives of the Poets? I’ve been promising it for a long time. Rosen hasn’t published anything new lately, he feels neglected, he feels someone should be doing something to celebrate him. Oh what a stolidly irrefutable sense of himself has the good Roze, he even breathes like a king, each breath a prolonged sigh of tragic resignation, a long sorrowful expiration of hope, if breathing were poetry he would be preeminent, the Shakespeare of our age. He’s short, powerfully built, very aggressive in games, proud of his tennis and his chess. And it’s true his problems are monumental: For years he suffered a neck-to-toes case of psoriasis that forced him to live, Marat-like, in the bathtub. He could not endure consciousness without bathing in a potion several hours a day. Red and crusty, splitting open like baked rock, he looked like the planet Mars. Among poets he was as famous for his skin as for his work. Then he learned that at the University Medical Center, a very avant-garde research hospital, they had conceived of a new cure. So he offered himself as a pilot study. They had him swallow some sort of chemical and put him under ultraviolet light and they cleared him up. He began to have hope for his life. He went to another department where they were working on how to put together broken eardrums—he had been deaf in one ear ever since the sixties, when he’d lost the eardrum in a riot. He’d been a passionate contentious activist poet, always getting in trouble with the authorities, getting busted for actions, clubbed on the street. Those were the days he dressed in dashikis and peace medals and wore his black bushy hair in an Isro. The doctors injected some sort of foam into the inner ear which linked the broken pieces of eardrum and hardened into a whole. By this means Rosen’s hearing was restored. Little by little he was putting himself back together.

Rosen was married to Remini, an herbalist and a mystic, which was all right in the sixties but around the time he was regaining his health she became a disciple of a man who was the Earth Delegate to the Council of the Cosmos, an organization of intergalactic deities intent on teaching mankind the error of its ways. Rosen was not sympathetic to deities. By the time his epidermis and eardrum were back in one piece his marriage was flying apart in all directions, like the cosmos. I liked Remini. She was an extremely tall woman with straight blond hair, pale blue eyes, the haunches of a starving mongrel dog, and the sweetest smile in the world. She moved into a downstairs room in their house and slept on a mattress on the floor. She had a Japanese lantern in there and wall hangings from Nepal and incense candles. There was also living in the house a parolee from the local state prison. Rosen had been teaching a poetry-writing course on the inside, and recognizing this convict’s literary gifts, he’d worked an early release for him and enrolled him in college. While Rosen was off teaching, Remini and this fellow lit incense together and meditated in her room. I met him once, a sly-looking fellow, body lean and sinewy, like hers, and a clear pride in him for having worked the little ten-cent device, metaphor, that had sprung him from the slammer.

Today Rosen’s hair is nearly gone and what is left he cuts close. He wears blue blazers and ties. He shares his life with a lovely lady his own height. Their children get along. He coaches the Little League team his younger son plays on, he wants to win, he wants to do things right and win, but though he’s done some translating, he hasn’t written anything of his own that satisfies him in many years now, his skin is clear, his tennis is good, he beats his computer at chess but he hasn’t written much to speak of.

And what have we here, an urgent communication from my phone company: Estimado Cliente, si no paga la cantidad completa, y nos es necesario interrumpir su servicio, no tendremos otra alternativa que cancelar su cuenta. You stupid spick computer, I paid my bill!

What I want for my life now is for it to be simple, without secrets, I want to be who I really am with everyone, all the time. I want the person I love to be the person I make love to. I experience love, or love of her, as a state of clarity, of coming into being. There is a coincidence of who I am and who I ought to be. And I told her this once, I told her I thought of her as my natural wife because I had never felt this with anyone, this sense of having arrived finally in my life. And of course you find silly romantic signs, but it is true that I draw a good deal, have always drawn—faces usually, animals, cars, planes, sometimes my own hand, but over the years one face, in profile, since I was a boy I’ve drawn that face and it turned out to be hers. I proved this to her one day by drawing it without looking at her and it was she, the same forehead, nose, the same serene brow, raised exquisite lips, strong chin, large clear eye. And surely I didn’t do this to her, that you can read my phone number on the license plate of her car. I didn’t invent that. But the willingness to find these things is love.

I have the courage to give up everything for her. I’m not making it a condition of our relationship that you leave your wife, she said once in a panic. She may lack daring. She may not love danger. Yet why not say what happened? Lowell’s line. All right, I know I’m in trouble, I’ve had to force this affair, she does not naturally take to it. Once she said by way of justifying her doubts: For the longest time I didn’t feel I was specific enough to you. I protested. No, she said, I think you wanted to be in love.

She is not jealous or possessive yet I read in this remark a reference to the unfortunate beginning of our relationship. I was instantly, enormously overwhelmed by her, dazzled beyond belief, yet I went off with her friend—an impulsive jock move of the moment, I later said by way of explanation when months afterward I finally called her. I had met them together one summer weekend. I wanted you, I said, and thought you couldn’t possibly be free. I sent my arrow as close as I could get it.

And the intensity of feeling misdirects us, I know this to be so, Rilke fell in love with two women who were friends. He married one and continued to love the other. It is said of our own Moira, passionately sufferingly married to Brad, that just before she eloped with him she told her old boyfriend that she would marry him if he still wanted her. There is such radiance in us when we love—our gyro careens, wobbles, threatens to dump us right out of the universe. It seems to me not unusual that, in the wild blare of absolute ecstatic conviction of love for a woman, in your jumped vivacity, you could just as easily reach for the woman standing next to her.

Yet here she is roaming the world, taking the time to think about us and think about what she wants to do. Greece, Egypt, India … Christ, how much time does she need, I haven’t got all day. She’s already told me she loves me and is terrified. They fear being claimed, this generation. How ridiculous. She’s got her own career, she’s got her Dickens, her Hardy, her James, she teaches dead writers, such an appalling profession that I would despair of doing anything about it. What terrifies me is that she will want us to be friends. This has always been her instinct. And it’s easy and blessed enough, I know, I understand Ruskin, I understand all the chaste nineteenth-century passions of the drawing room, those triumphs of unceasing love of spinsters for curates, of scholars for their cousins, and it’s true, it can be sustained without sticking a stumpy polyp of yourself into the gap of someone else. The love conducted by platonists is safer and less troubled, it never stands corrected, you are fixed in the firmament and nothing can shake you, you exist in the shining orb of each other’s moral regard and whatever each of you does with your body, and with whom, is of no consequence. And it may be in her nature to love only that way, she never married, she’s what, thirty, thirty-one, she’s had the men she’s wanted one way or another since she was fifteen, one of the last of the flower children, she rode on their motorcycles, she did mescaline on the beach with them, she lived once with a dealer, once even with another writer, and it has always broken up in a matter of months—six months, I think she said, was the longest she was ever with anyone.

Eighteen years is the longest I’ve ever been with anyone.

And I admit I’m not possessive in my feelings, I am persuaded to sophistication by her independent life. I like to make you come, I said to her one night. But that’s my responsibility, she said. She is remarkably lovely. She has the body I’ve given to heroines in my work: small-breasted, narrow-waisted, a big behind. She is not a woman who cries easily. She is calm, her voice is beautiful, without complaint in it, without a self-demeaning note. I give to her a serenity, a poise in the world which she insists she doesn’t have. But what does she know? She has been matter-of-factly promiscuous all her life yet thinks of herself as a lonely spinsterish drab who works all day lecturing and marking papers and sits down alone with a ritual martini in the evening to watch a movie on television.

What’s going on on Houston Street? It’s raining, and lit by the amber street lamp in front of the Mobil gas station are four eight twelve parked taxicabs, one half of them on the sidewalk. Their lights are off but the drivers sit inside, every once in a while a match flares. More yellow cabs pull up behind, alongside, and now the headlights of two suddenly go on and the motors start and they drive away, tires squealing and the cabs behind them move up and wait, in their turn, to take off. I get my binoculars. The amber raindrops falling past my eyes. The cab doors are all the same escutcheon, one company. Cabs parked in the rain with their lights out on a big-money night? It’s cops. Three of them pull out now and race east down Houston. I know they use these dummy cabs to bust car rings. Car thieves are organized, they can get an automobile into the shop and take it apart in five minutes, or down to the docks and in the ship’s hold and it’s halfway across the ocean the next morning. The cops can’t get near them in patrol cars, even unmarked cars, they use cabs to get the jump. So that’s what I’m seeing. But this operation in the rain looks more like heavy surveillance, something big, a big-money crop in SoHo. They hang a right at Broadway.

I don’t know. Duplicity in individuals is, of course, the basis of civilization, but the double life of state agencies, cops as cabdrivers, cops as bag ladies, cops as tourists—that is schizy, it’s tribal theater, it taps into existential energies, it releases hot mysterious powers. I like my cops in uniforms with badge numbers I can read, I like police departments with budgets argued at public hearings. Officers, detectives, should be neatly dressed and easily identified. I don’t want them in fantasy drag, with their cover stories and secret files. Who knows what they believe as they mole among us?

Sidney, the agent, who is a black belt and said to have run arms for the Irgun many years ago, once said to me: It’s Jews like me who watch over Jews like you.

But I claim you have the means here of cross-wiring reality—a sputter, a high-voltage sponk, and the neurons blow. My friend Gary, age fifty, runs his own public-relations firm and prominently contributes to Democratic Party campaigns. When I was close to him he was married to Abigail, it was a second marriage for both. This is pertinent. They each had a child from the previous marriage and had together produced three. After the third, Abigail requested of Gary that he submit himself to a vasectomy. He was reluctant to do this, being testosterone-proud like all of us, but in the interest of their relationship he put himself in the hospital and had it done. That relaxed the tension between them and everything was fine except that some months afterward he found in Abigail’s purse a plastic case molded like a sea shell and you know what comes in those things. But this would be of no more consequence than any other sad song of love except for Gary’s view of the matter, which he confided in a lowered voice at the bar of Wally’s a few months after his divorce: It was when I saw her diaphragm, he said, that I knew Abigail was CIA.

I thought he was insane. I remember treating him somewhat rudely. Come on, Gary, I said, what makes you think the CIA would want you for a husband? But now I think his remark among the most prophetic it has ever been my privilege to hear uttered. To discover your wife fucking someone else is one thing, but to be betrayed by the United States government is quite another. Think of it as a metaphor and it will begin to work for you as it has worked for me. Think of Gary as a poet. In one brief moment of tortured inspiration he pulled in the Zeitgeist as a sail fills with the wind. I know guys writing all their lives who will never come close to it.

At Josie’s dinner last night: She tells us her younger child came home with a mimeographed letter from the headmaster, a sort of psychological alert, advising the parents of Mulberry School that on the sidewalk in front of the main entrance, that morning, some of their children may have had the experience of seeing a dead man who happened to be lying there. We all laugh merrily. Paul, who was a city reporter in his younger days, explains you see stiffs now on the street because the cops won’t investigate if they find them there. Which is not the case if they find a body inside a building. They become detectives then. So the joker OD’s, his friends and relatives take his wallet, cut the labels off his rags, and carry him out at night and lay him down with the ash cans. No problem.

Before realizing it we are going around the table with dead-man stories and that would be all right except one of the guests, Marvin, the wealthy publishing heir and bachelor, is terminal, he’s got maybe six months. In fact that’s probably why we’re having this conversation—you know, it comes out one way or another. Marvin listens resolutely, a fixed smile on his face. His cane is beside him, his neck sticks out of his collar like a dried carrot, but he wears a red flannel jacket and plaid vest, cheerful as Christmas. The awareness comes over us, a collective decision, and everyone begins to talk privately to his dinner partner.

This is the latest thing, people with cancer going out for the evening. What an appalling trend, not being afraid! Is Death just another evening out?

Climbing up the subway steps at Astor Place I came upon a sidewalk market: bootleg tapes, clothes with the labels cut, handbags, wallets, newly published books spread on plastic sheets on the pavement. Smiling young men in watch caps and torn fatigue jackets stood behind these values. I saw them just last year in Lima. I saw them afterward in Mexico City. The wave is lapping at our shore. There are many Iranians now living in Los Angeles. Vietnamese distributed along the West Coast. Laotian men suffering sudden-death syndrome in their tract homes in the Rockies, Haitians wading ashore in Florida, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, streaming over the river into Texas. Dear God, let them migrate, let my country be the last best hope. But let us make some distinctions here: The Irish, the Italians, the Jews of Eastern Europe, came here because they wanted a new life. They worked for the money to bring over their families. They said good riddance to the old country and were glad to be gone. They did not come here because of something we had done to them. The new immigrants are here because we have made their lands unlivable. They have come here to save themselves from us. They have brought their hot politics with them. They have set up their paramilitary camps. They’re murdering each other. The secret police of their own countries are flying here to murder them. Bombs from the repúblicas explode on Connecticut Avenue. My President embraces sociopaths wearing medals of murder on their chests. Beggars scrounge in the garbage. The eyes of the barrio stare at me. In October last year, going to a Halloween party in Mexico City at the residence of an American cultural attaché, a house protected like all of them by iron gates, I pushed through a cluster of mestizos, leather-skin people of indeterminate age, some carrying infants in colored bindings slung from their shoulders, and they were holding out their fedoras, saying something in their soft toothless diction, and I figured it out, trick or treat, trick or treat, a murmur, no anger in it, trick or treat, like the sound of a gentle flock of ground birds.

It is possible something really serious has happened to me. It is possible I’ve become estranged from my calling. But how can that be? I have followed it in fidelity, step by step, I have tracked it in its logic, I have never wavered, I have been steadfast, and it has led me to this desert, this flat horizon. I turn around and around and I’m alone. Is there a specific doom that comes of commitment? You cross some invisible limit, in logic and in faith, and a nameless universe blows through your eyes. It is possible I have crossed. I once wanted to write a novel about Bishop Pike. I see now why, I see the connection, I must have recognized the eye-rolling worship, the white-knuckled faith that takes you right through it, that punches through the magma. The good bishop, still wearing his collar, followed his love of God where it took him, into the occultist camp. His son had died of an overdose and there was this medium who could put him in touch with his dead son. Oh what grief, what grief. The Book of Common Prayer falls from the fingers. If you truly believe in God, how can you not crave the supernatural? If He can be prayed to why can’t He come off a Ouija board, in a darkened parlor, on the choked voice of a con man? The bishop never thought he’d left the see, poor mad fuck, disappearing into the Negev with a bottle of Coke.

Once, years ago, my friend Arlington came to our house in Connecticut and stayed over. We heard him moaning in his sleep. But in the morning I found him sitting with my children at the breakfast table. Big man, built like a nose tackle, sitting there in his ribbed undershirt, a Pall Mall in one hand, a full tumbler of bourbon in the other. Arlington had a photographic memory and his idea of conversation was to recite poems. He’d ad-lib whole anthologies of things he’s read and loved. So there were my kids, quite small at the time, sitting in front of their Rice Krispies, spoons in their fists, and they were staring at him and forgetting to eat. And there was Angel in her bathrobe at the kitchen counter making peanut-butter sandwiches for the lunch bags and shaking her head in disbelief. And there was I clutching my coffee cup and trying to bring my eyes to focus. And James Arlington coming off Green Groweth the Holly, dragged on his cigarette, pulled on his bourbon, and went into a poem of Trakl’s about German fascist decadence. And it wasn’t yet eight o’clock in the morning.

Ah this poet, just to show you what a memory he had: We were classmates at Kenyon. There were lots of poets on campus, poetry was what we did at Kenyon, the way at Ohio State they played football. And three or four of the collegiate poets were good and promising, like Arlington, but there were bad poets too, and poetasters, and precious aesthetes, and we liked to make fun of them, the rarefied sensibility of them. One autumn day, walking with Jim, I jumped into a pile of leaves, and threw and kicked them into the air, and as they fell around my head, fluttering and spinning, I held up one limp wrist and lifted my chin and cried out in trembling appreciation, The leaves are falling, the leaves are falling! Arlington loved that, he laughed his loud brassy helpless laugh, this true poet who loved to listen to records of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf singing lieder but also liked to sing “Sam Sam the Shithouse Man” as he walked down the middle path—this central Ohio farmhand among the fraternity boys in their gray flannels and white bucks. And for weeks afterward he would regale me, The leaves are falling, look look, the leaves are falling! It became part of his repertoire of total recall, he remembered our lines for us all—we were the misfits, the outcasts, the pariahs of that campus, and he gathered us around him and gave us our pride, our edge—he remembered for us the lines and routines by which we sought his appreciation. All right, and thirty years go by, and he is a famous poet, he lives with the helpless intensity, and raging submission to poetry, of the doomed. And he is a prodigious drinker, a monstrous drinker, and finally, age fifty, he decides to dry out, and that becomes the struggle, the torment, staying sober. And he’s working on it and keeping away from it, looking thinner now, that derelict pallor they get, and in this state comes down with the sore throat that turns out to be cancer. And I visit him one day in the hospital and by now he can’t speak, they’ve packed his mouth with some sort of medicated batting, and he has a grommet sewn in the neck to keep open a tracheotomy so he can breathe, and he motions to his wife, Molly, for the clipboard and he writes on it and hands it to me and in the same farmboy scrawl of thirty years ago it says: The Leaves Are Falling.

Of course she lives in the Berkshires. I say of course. As a child I spent summers there and it hasn’t changed. It is a home of the spirit for me. All it took was one walk in the hushed umber wood. My footfall on the pine-needle floor. The hovering dragonfly turning slowly in a column of clear light. I came upon a gorge with its waterspill striking sound from the white boulders. Melville lived there, and Hawthorne, who taught me Romance, and even William Cullen Bryant. And she lives there. Once, in winter, we went to an inn thirty miles from her town. Though she is single she’s the more discreet of us, she’s suffered gossip, she paid for her Ph.D. by teaching grade school, but whatever she’s accomplished there has always been someone to say her looks are what did it, she is sensitive about this. So we had best not be seen together. All right with me. She wore a dark fitted coat and under it a lovely high-waisted white dress with blue fleurs-de-lis. We had a drink in the bar and went to our room. There was a chenille spread on the four-poster. I pulled the shades behind the white curtains. There were two of those small upholstered wing chairs you can’t really sit in. A clawfoot tub in the bath. We took off our clothes and made love.

No matter how you’ve thought about what it would be like, what rage of tumescence you bring to it, when she removes her clothes it becomes very humanly specific, a body with an odd line here, a roundness there, a thickness in the thighs or a touching narrowness of the shoulders, breasts not as large as she would like, or some misproportion, long hair too full and long for the body, there is some triumph or tyranny of ordinary life, a female protest against ideal form, and you, of course, in your own specific fate, take her in your arms and all your lust turns pure and curiously calm and you laugh to find yourself simply and innocently making love with another person.

Late at night the hour came to take her home. We drove the thirty miles to her town. It was late and very cold. The road curved between banks of snow, dark woods rose on the hills on either side of us. She pointed out the few stars that could be seen on this black night. I turned off the headlights. She laughed in terror. I coasted without lights down the curving hills. With both her hands she held on to my arm, her fingers squeezed my arm and she laughed and shivered as we hurtled along, a dark shape in the dark road under the stars.

She always scrupulously refused presents except if they were of the smallest value. And she gave me things all the time—flowers, ornamental spoons, antique postcards, a bud vase, little offerings of moments of her thought, always beautiful and well chosen.

I left her at the edge of her hill town where she had parked her car. The river was ice. A wind blew up snow along the streets. At river’s edge, a boarded-up mill of red brick.

Yet here is her pretty card of foreign mountains, distant passes. The Himalayas. I have met some people and am going on with them. Forgive me. She has met some people and is going on with them. She has turned herself into a pretty postcard of foreign mountains, distant skies. I trace her ink with my finger. Once she said to me: Language is something that almost isn’t there.

In the sciences too, not just religion: Linus Pauling with the Nobel in Chemistry going on to make these claims for the curative powers of vitamin C in megadoses, going on in logic, in faith, till they take his research money away, fault his data. Pauling, a genial man in his seventies, absolutely imperturbable, reeling off the discouragements matter-of-factly, without complaint, telling what he knows to black-tie dinners. Science is now some walled city he’s been put out of, he stands there at the gates with the other peddlers, he has followed his calling where it took him.

And of course the classic case of Wilhelm Reich. There was a moment there when Freud thought he was the best of them. Made great contributions to the psychoanalytic literature. Went marching on, in logic, and in faith, to the idea of curing all of society. Went marching, in his doom of commitment, smack into the orgone box. Walked out of it somewhere in New Hampshire to end his life shooting down UFO’s with a tin ray gun of his own design.

A call from my mother: I saw your friend Norman’s name in the newspaper, I see him all the time on television, why don’t I ever see you on television? I don’t know, Mom, I value my privacy. Why, she says, what are you hiding?

He says a lot of them are sick from malnutrition, they eat only tortillas and beans so he teaches them about nourishment in the leaves of yucca trees, or papaya. He says a great medical aid is the common nail, which, when left in their water for a few days, supplies them with the iron they need to cure their anemia. He says there is no aspirin so he teaches them to make tea from willow-tree bark, which is an analgesic. A brew of eucalyptus leaves is a cough suppressant. He says if the National Guard catches someone with medical supplies, a few bars of soap, some vials of tetanus antitoxin, they take him in as a subversive.

I am trying to remember everything he said. We listened in a loft on Spring Street, grown men and women sitting on the floor like children while this pale young doctor stood by the pillars and spoke. It’s not jungle where you can hide. It’s farmland, hills and valleys, and every bit of it is lived on, so the guerrillas have to depend on the people. Each zone of control is run by general assembly elected from the community. Each zone plants its own crops, but they warehouse the harvests collectively. Some of the zones specialize in poultry breeding or raising pigs or goats. They have just a few primitive hospitals. They train paramedicals called brigadistas to help the few doctors and med students. They hold reading and writing classes under the trees.

I am sitting and listening to the young doctor. I have chosen to put my back to the wall. My knees are drawn up. I open my eyes and see out the big dusty loft window to my own building a few blocks to the north. I count up nine stories and see my own lights. I think of myself standing in the window looking back at me. It comes to me why I took this apartment. I took it for her. I took it for our New York place.

When the government attacks a particular zone the guerrillas evacuate the civilians at the same time they fight back. They carry the wounded with them. They hide the livestock. They leave at night. It’s all very well organized, he says. When the incursion is over the civilians are brought back. Most of the guerrillas are under eighteen. They hold reading and writing classes under the trees.

She has met some people? What people! Who are these friends of hers! How does she get to all these countries, no visible means of support?

CIA cunt.

Who’s around, someone’s got to pay. The heart, breaking, gives the taste of blood. Who’s around? You were supposed to be a girl, my mother said to me when I was five, I wanted a daughter for my old age. He gave me some time, she told her friends one day on some mountain porch at dusk, nineteen-thirty-what?—I playing on the wooden steps, my eyes level with the monumental feminine calves and knees, thighs spread on the wicker chairs, skirts pulled back to find the breeze of this hot mountain twilight a breech birth, I thought he’d kill me. Rilke had it worse, who had everything worse, his mother named him Renee and dressed him in girl’s clothes and wouldn’t cut his hair. Rainer is what he changed it to when he grew up. Rainer Maria Rilke. Why didn’t he do something about the Maria while he was at it? Here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life. Yes, Renee/Rainer. Seek transfiguration. Deliver the wet shining soul. For Death will make a story of you. It will say you have done the right thing. That you’ve added to the stock of blessed beings and made a modest run. Oh Love, I don’t like the word on me, this drift through the blood of my obsolescence. That my biological time is over. That I’ve used up the world. That I’m no longer incredibly good-looking.

Theodora S. is around, I met her at the Grand Union the other day. She told me her husband had left her for another woman: And for his sake I gave up a meaningful affair, she said. No, not Theodora.

The tall Icelander? Last time we talked she had found a wonderful new diet and taken off several pounds. She said she was looking for an exercise to keep them off. Why not sex, I suggested. You burn two hundred calories each time out. Surely not if you just lie there, she said. No, not the tall Icelander.

And as his brain was just lying there, his bloodshot open eye understood it was perceiving, restless on the floor, while the saintly doctor spoke, so restless she couldn’t get her legs under herself comfortably, skirt riding up, lot of leg showing, good God, his, my, old actress friend Brenda. Brenda was for five minutes some years ago my hot muse. We hit it off because she knew so much more than I about illness and disease. Not just vivacious and sexy, who isn’t these days, but a great authority on physical misfortune. There she is. We are staring across the room smiling at each other, hearing of them holding reading and writing classes under the trees.

Brenda miraculously pulled through brain surgery a few years ago and told me when we met she could expect a severe palsy in old age as a kind of delayed aftereffect. If she lived that long. She still took Atabrine for the malaria she’d picked up in Bangladesh and when I knew her she suffered from pelvic inflammatory disease although I thought it was me doing that to her, I thought it was me. Fine, spooky actress, and a good kisser, too. With that poetic gift they have in the theater to feel harder and more desperately than anyone else. We’ll go away somewhere and live poor, she said in the flush of our friendship, I can make you so happy! Her leg is scarred from a time a crazy Vietnam vet beat her up at a rally, kicked her and broke the tibia, which the doctor then didn’t set properly. Or was it a car accident, I don’t remember. She’d broken a lot of bones and I could see how. One night, at a benefit reading a bunch of us gave in Southampton, she was afterward assailed by some fans, and to get away she did this astonishing thing, backed up to the porch railing and true, it was not more than eight or ten steps off the ground, but she back-flipped right over the rail and disappeared in a flounce of petticoats, strap shoes kicking, we all stood there looking at each other too stunned to do anything, listening to Brenda thrashing about in the privet hedge.

I became wary when I began to add up all the stories she told me of directors who’d beat on her, stars who’d tried to rape her, deathly illnesses she’d survived, political intrigues in which she had put her life in danger. It would have been all right if she were some kind of mythomaniac, but she was telling the absolute truth. Unthinkable. You don’t get a cold in that league, you get pneumonia. You go on a vacation somewhere and a revolution breaks out. You’re a lightning rod for life, you turn white-hot, you burn up. I want to live a long time, I don’t want to live poor, I don’t want seven different but simultaneous diseases fighting over me.

But here we were talking again after the American Doctor-Saint’s talk in the Spring Street loft of the faithful and I was remembering how good and warm she was to hold, tall long-waisted woman, she once actually got me to dance, why I even promised to write a play for her, and here she is again talking, laughing, her eyes going wide with wonder, like a child’s, and I am thinking heaven sent, heaven sent, with several drinks in me I may begin to hope I have not been devastated. I may hope I am a comedian and my fate is of no consequence.

So checks are written for their medical supplies and I shake hands with the speaker and Brenda and I go along to a café and we talk, and then to a bar on Prince Street, and we talk some more, she tells me what she’s doing these days, what she’s into. Oh Jonathan, she says, I’m so afraid of going back down there. But how can I not? Oh God, you know what they do to rebel women? She shivers and drinks. We sit close, I put my arm around her, warm sweet thing. We drink. Oh Jonathan, there’s so much to do, she says. She’s in New York for just a couple of days, she’s staying with a friend. I tell her no need for that, she can spend the night with me. Perhaps I should have paid attention. She looks into my eyes. She takes my hand and by and by, don’t ask me how, we are in a church vestry on the Upper West Side and I am shaking hands with a red-bearded rector in a clerical collar, and he says in the way they use that verb he wants to share something with me, and, indeed generously, he lays his weird cabalistic lore on me, he tells me how many of them are living illegally in the various church sanctuary programs, or passing through to Canada like the old underground railroad, and it is quite a few, we look in his office, we look in the church library, we look in the basement meeting room, and everywhere in the nightlit shadows are rows of beds and the dark shapes of people sleeping like my days in summer camp on those little iron cots. We return to light and I see Brenda hanging on his arm and looking at his mouth as he speaks, gazing in his clear handsome young countenance.

Sometime in the last five years things became serious. I hadn’t noticed. No wonder they’re all getting the better of me.

What will I do with these postcards of love, this ornamental spoon, this vase, this cut-glass bowl? Her womby vessels. See if I can drop them cleanly nine stories down the incinerator without touching the sides.

Feeling this wretched, I decided after all to go last night to Crenshaw’s publication party at the Dakota. I wanted to take comfort and remember what it is we do. My esteemed colleague has somehow worked it out that by writing a weak but circumlocutious novel every three or four years and having parties thrown for him at famous salons, he maintains a legendary literary status. It’s a wonderful thing, he expects to be honored, and so he is. Every writer who’s in town is there, Norman and Kurt, Joyce, Angel has driven down from Connecticut with Bill and Rose—Angel looking terrific, where’d she get that dress? Jonathan, she says, laughing, how nice to see you—I wave to Phil, there’s Bernie, John, John A., Peter and Maria in from the Island … We are all here save for a few of Crenshaw’s enemies and we’re all deferring in our own separate manners, not the least me, to this effigy of ourselves, the Great Success, whom we would worship and send up in flames simultaneously.

Starry night! Difficult to talk, we’re being mobbed out. I’m introduced to a young woman. How do you do, I say. I thought you were cleverer than that, she says. The apartment a dozen or so rooms of high ceilings, a Balthus here, a de Kooning Woman there, elegant antique rugs, the backing worn through, lots of polished floor and bare window. The place is jammed, flashbulbs pop, a crowd around Boy George, what’s he/she doing here? This season the fellows wearing their hair short, with arrow-sharp sideburns. Black suits over white undershirts. The girls with Detroit cuts, or porcupines, big red lips, long box coats and ankle warmers.

I start drinking. My dear colleague Leo holds the high ground just to the side and slightly to the rear of a bar table so he can get his refills without standing in the three-deep mob in front. He is a deeply serious drinker and the bartender understands this and respects it. Leo’s a large unkempt being, tie loose, shirt half pulled out of his pants, uncombed hair fallen in a shock over one eye, he sweats so, he looks as if he’s in meltdown, he’s always looked this way. Writing for Leo is absolute and irremediable torture, a chronic degenerative disease, a book comes from him not more than once in ten years, he’s quite brilliant and has never made a dime, and he’s of an age when the grants and fellowships are yokes around his neck. Tell me, he says, looking me in the eye, is there a writer here who really believes in what he’s doing? Does any one of us have a true conviction for what he’s writing? Do I? Do you?

Just what I needed. Tearful eyes of umbrage await my answer. Oh Leo, I think, when you make a little money from your work you’ll see what trouble is. His wife, glamorous in a kind of draped dress, plucks from his tie a crumb of taco chip. He looks at her hand and watches it rise past his nose: she combs the shock of hair back from his forehead. Woman, you trouble me, he says, and walks into the crowd.

Oh Leo, I wanted to say, each book has taken me further and further out so that the occasion itself is extenuated, no more than a weak distant signal from the home station, and even that may be fading.

A call from Ron, my lawyer. He puts one of his partners on the conference line who’s a specialist in immigration and naturalization cases. It is a definitely illegal act. The federal law provides for a fine as high as two thousand dollars and/or a jail sentence to a maximum of five years. You sure they’re undocumented? Ron asks. There are a lot of them here legally who are just down and out. No, no, the real thing, I tell him. It may be just for a few days. Till they find a safe place for them. I feel heroic. Daring. Well, the partner says, to date the INS has done nothing about these programs. They haven’t raided the churches or anything like that. But as this thing grows they’ll have to come down on it, try a test case or two, make an example. In any event we have to advise you not to engage in activities that are criminal under the law.

I call the church. The good father of the clear countenance says I thought we were together in this. Christ, give these people an inch. Well, look, I say, I want to help out but I have to confess I had in mind a less fervent participation, something along the lines of a modest good deed. What do you want me to do, the father who is younger than I am says, we’re up against it, we’re overextended, their beds are already taken. This is what it means to bear witness.

Hands me that theological shit.

How do I feel? I don’t care anymore. Maybe like that poet in Yeats who lies down to die on the king’s doorstep because he’s been kicked out of the ruling circle. Yeah, that’s what this place is, that’s what I’m doing here, and if I die, let the curse be on their heads. What else can this mean except I’ve been deprived of my ancient right to matter? Yes, you mothers, I of the Untitled Thread Mills, a mere man of words, will sit once more in the councils of state or a dire desolation will erupt from the sky, drift like a fire-filled fog over the World Trade Center, glut the streets of SoHo with its sulfurous effulgence, shriek through every cracked window, stop the singing voice of every living soul, and make of your diversified investment portfolio a useless thing.

A call to Angel. She has trouble understanding. Another tricky surprise, something else I’m doing to her? She makes me doubt myself. Don’t ask me these questions, I say. I, least of anyone, know what I’m capable of. Think about yourself, I tell her in the frau doctor’s head lingo, we’re separate people, you decide for yourself what you want to do. You can sleep on it. No, Jonathan, she says, I’m trying to tell you I’m pleased to be asked.

And so, mis amigos, there he was early one morning on the IRT. The way we travel now. Graffiti car empty except for the family sitting across from him, Father Mother Three Kids staring at me eyes big and dark as plums, fold-up stroller several suitcases wrapped in clothesline to keep from springing open, one squirming infant on the lap. He can’t breathe too well, little snot bubble forms and breaks on each and every exhalation. They are neat, trim people, dressed in clean church donations. The ad overhead. I am reading, practicing my Spanish, I see now why: El estar sentado todo el día es malo para mis hemorroides. Quiero una medicina que ayude a reducir la hinchazón. Oh yes I’ll need a lot of that, a whole case for the case I’ve got now.

And this morning I’m writing, here it is a new day of the late winter, the Mrs. is cooking up some gruel in the kitchen, they have brought their own tortilla mix and dried beans, the kids are well behaved but beginning to explore the apartment, something just broke in the bathroom, there is an exhortation, a head pokes in, apologias, baby diapers are not the best-smelling things in the world, it serves me right, wait’ll the boys hear about this, I have to get lots of things in here that I never needed before, pots pans, more dishes, soap for the basement clothes washer, quarters, I have to make sure they remember we come in and out through the basement. My friend the Señor is miserable, awfully thin, high cheekbones, black mustache, that black straight mestizo hair they have, he stands at the picture window in the finest digs he’s ever seen in his life and stares at the skyline thinking what has happened to my life.

What has happened to my life!

I’ll need sheets for cots, I’ll need cots, I haven’t got that much time today, I’m waiting for Angel in the 245DL, does this mean I’ll have to live in Connecticut? Let’s not get carried away. Maybe they’ll really only stay a day or two, maybe they’ll get arrested. Look, my country, what you’ve done to me, what I have to do to live with myself.

And on the news on the radio they think they’ve discovered a new planet system orbiting around the star Vega, they’re not sure yet, a big dust cloud, an infant system, the first ever seen going around anything besides our sun, yes, and just in time too, it’ll be close in any event.

Little kid here wants to type. OK, I hold his finger, we’re typing now, I lightly press his tiny index finger, the key, striking, delights him, each letter suddenly struck vvv he likes the v, hey who’s writing this? every good boy needs a toy boat, maybe we’ll go to the bottom of the page get my daily quota done come on, kid, you can do three more lousy lines