I CALLED BENNET, MY ACCOUNTANT, AND ASKED HIM WHAT HE thought my annual living expenses would be if I had little or no income. I also asked him what I would get in social security payments if I began to take them now.
I called Greg, my lawyer, and asked him what the statute of limitations was on bank robbery.
My accountant responded by saying it all depended on which Nick I was taking about: the Nick who had once lavished away eighty grand in a week, or the Nick who had calculated that he was now spending eight grand a year on coffee and cigarettes, and reacted with the shocked resolution that measures must be taken to reduce this sum. The fact that both Nicks always stopped to stoop and pick up pennies in the street—not only, as I saw it, a habit of perspicacious economic prudence, but also damned good physical exercise as well—signified nothing to him.
My lawyer said: five years, if no killing was involved. He also advised me not to get any ideas.
Of course, I had already considered several possibilities. I could live lavishly for a year or so, then sell my apartment for a million bucks or so and be the wealthiest homeless guy around. I could take what I had, less a few hundred grand for a private plane to London, and try to double it at the blackjack tables at the Ritz Club. But every time I pondered this particular idea, I saw myself sitting weeping on the edge of a bed in a three-grand-a-night hotel suite. And there was always the prospect of selling my apartment, getting that imagined little place with a hammock in the sticks for a quarter of what I would get for my place, and pocketing the rest for living out the rest of my allotted days at a far lower cost, but in comfort. But this would mean cutting the umbilical cord without any period of acclimation to new surroundings, which I might end up hating, and which in any case would seem to irrevocably seal the fate of solitude and loneliness. I couldn’t see, in such a place, the occasional nine stone of sweet young gal-meat on nights of need, let alone love that might be mine to have and to hold, in my small town in the sticks.
For some years, a certain middlebrow magazine paid what amounted to my monthly bills for the privilege of using my name on its masthead. Then, when hard times hit, this stipend was annulled. I guess the alter rebbe of whose Philistine empire the magazine was a part felt the economic squeeze. It must be a terrible thing to be in one’s eighties and have only ten or twenty billion dollars left to live on for the remainder of one’s life. Perhaps the next time I ran into him, I should ask him if he needed a few bucks.
I had my name removed from the masthead. Without the few grand each month for doing nothing, I surely did not want to be incriminated, no matter how fancifully, as a contributing editor of a rag that now encouraged, or at least condoned, language such as “adorkable” and “tweepulsive” on its website. It had never been a literary magazine, but it had been minimally literate. Now it was merely another celebrity-gossip rag for housewives on the racks at supermarket checkout lines.
I have here, in fine ink, a handwritten letter from a dozen years ago and more, from the rebbe’s lapdog, saying of one of the pieces I wrote: “It is, quite simply, a masterpiece. The best thing I will ever have published, in fact. I cannot thank you enough.”
And these hollow men were indistinguishable from so many other dishonorable hollow men who had come to define this fallen, shoddy racket.
There were mornings when I wondered whose death would bring a sweeter smile of fleeting pleasure: the monkey-faced one or the pig-faced other; this lying dolt or that one. Oh, the ways of idle musing. Oh, the ways of this world.
In the same box of correspondence where this letter lay, I also came across many letters from a young lady whom I had known and cherished:
“Because of you, joints loosen,” began one of these, then went on:
“I want leather shoes with high high heels. I want patent leather gloves that go past my elbows. I’m kneeling over you, lying on your back. Your neck is exposed. Your head is tilted back off the edge of the bed. The hairs of my cunt graze your neck. My left fist is in your mouth. My right hand is in your hair, pulling. Give me your neck. You feel my cunt on your chin. I feel your hand on the back of my thigh, through my stockings. Ultra ultra sheers.
“I take my fist from your mouth, leaving one finger in to pull your mouth to my tit. I leave it in while you suck and bite. My finger and your tongue roll around each other. My knuckle pushes hard against your teeth.”—I had real ones then.—“The ones in the back. Hard. My right hand stops pulling your hair to hold your neck so you can fuck my tit (I think this is possible) with your mouth without distraction. Suck, baby. Suck. Bite. Draw milk.
“I let your head down gently. I take my finger from your mouth. I turn around and now you feel my tits and patent leather around your dick. My nipples brush your balls. Your fingers are in my cunt, moving in and out in the same rhythm my hands move up and down, tighter and tighter around your dick. I place the tip of my heel between your lips. Your left hand grabs my hair. It’s in a ponytail, high and tight. Grab it. Pull. Wrap it around your wrist. I arch my back. My nipples are so hard. I pull against you. I want your cock down my throat. As I lower my mouth, as you slide down my tongue, my heel slides down yours. Suck, baby. Suck. Bite. Draw blood.
“Don’t let go of my hair. Keep pulling. Harder. Harder. Push my head down. Harder. Harder. Don’t stop fucking me with those fingers. Don’t stop. Fuck. Fuck. Don’t stop coming, baby, don’t stop…”
That letter is dated October 20, 1996. Another letter from her, this one handwritten on lined yellow paper, from a few weeks later:
“Oh Nick, I love you more than I have ever loved. You, Nick, you. Not an image of ‘man’ or of ‘Nick’ but small shards you let out that I glimpsed—Oh Nick, I love you so and your love”—and here there is a verb that I have trouble reading; it begins with an h, almost surely ends with a t, but, I told myself, it cannot be “hurt,” it must be something else—“deep.”
I should have looked further, to see what the next letter from her was like, to see if there was a next letter. All I know is that we were together again about six or so years later, but I don’t know for how long.
Did what she described in her letter of October 20, 1996, ever happen? I do not know. I can’t even remember having received a letter like this from her. I know we had a lot of wondrous strange nights together. She was, somewhere in me and under these stars, one of the loves of my life.
There was an accordion file and five thick archival boxes of correspondence in my bedroom closet, all of which, along with the rest of my papers and notebooks and manuscripts, were set to be sold later this year to a university library. If I had forgotten this letter, as I had, I could surely forget anything. Maybe I should cull some of this stuff before it got hauled away.
The letter made me miss her and want her again very badly. It even made me think of calling her. If only I could hear her voice saying what she said in that letter.
Talk about change.
From praise for “a masterpiece” that was “the best thing I will ever have published,” and for which I could not be thanked enough, to being treated like a nigger slave. It was, as his website might have it, downright “tweepulsive.” People told me that I should be careful, that I should not burn my bridges behind me. I told them all the same thing, which was the truth: I’ve always loved the smell of gasoline.
From the love and wanton luscious desires of a lithe young beauty who walked and talked like a poem to nothing, to staring at a piece of paper and trying to remember.
Change. Yes, things had changed. And, yes, there was no way out. I could not step into that same river again. How many rivers had I stepped into, feeling it all to be the same river?
“Suck, baby. Suck. Bite. Draw blood.”
I got up, went to the drawer that held Melissa’s hosiery and shoes, took it all my arms, brought it to the garbage chute in the hall, and dumped it.
“I cannot thank you enough.”
I tore the fatuous flattering letter to shreds and flushed them down the toilet, where such words belonged.
Who was on a thousand-dollar bill?
“Draw blood.”
Grover Cleveland.
Was it she with her rosy golden youth who had put this blood quest into my mind?
The only president to serve two nonconsecutive terms.
Could it be that I had drawn her blood, then forgotten about it?
And the ten-grand note? What about the ten-grand note?
Impossible. I would have remembered.
Chase. Samuel P. Chase. He was on the ten-grand note. They stopped making them both, the grand and the ten grand—and the five hundred and the five grand—all of them; they stopped making them all in 1946.
But how I wished she were here now.
No, not Samuel. I always got that wrong, his first name. Then again, what did it matter?
She mattered.
Love and loneliness, loneliness and love. How many times had these dice been cast throughout my life? How many testaments of endless love, how many vagrancies of the heart, lay forgotten in those boxes in my closet? When would I come to see that these things were, like breath itself, merely the inhalations and exhalations of my life, and, like breath, not to be dwelt on.
But I had seen it. I had seen it and forgotten it. A memory came to me.
Club de l’Aviation, avenue des Champs Elysées, Paris, December 2002, the middle of black night. I sit at the blackjack table with my beloved friend Héloïse because my hotel room is haunted, the hotel is haunted, all of Paris is haunted, as my heart is broken. Love has sly-rapped me yet again.
But you would never know this. For I have lived long enough to learn that all things pass, and that after every suffering, the gods have blest me with a happiness that I had never known. And so I smile and I laugh and I speak like a holy fool.
An elderly woman at the table begins to cough her brains out. She seems to go into apoplexy. She seems about to croak.
With a raised arm, the floor man in his tuxedo who has paused at our table calmly calls out with a smile: “Cigarettes pour madame!”
A fresh pack of cigarettes arrives. The floor man opens the pack with alacrity and graciously offers it to madame, who, with what seems like her final act in life, places one of them between her lips and extends it to the waiting flame of the floor man’s lighter. She draws deeply. The coughing and hacking of what seemed to be her death throes cease with a spasmodic breath of resuscitation.
It is good to know that madame is well.
The game resumes. Madame is dealt two aces, splits them, draws two face cards.
The floor man congratulates her and moves on.
It is good to smoke. It is good to drink. It is good to gamble. It is good to laugh. It is good to hold a kindred spirit close, in suffering or happiness, in the middle of the night. It is good to live.
How could I have forgotten, until now, the memory of that long-ago night and its dissolute magic?
Love and loneliness, loneliness and love. Flush times and lean times, lean times and flush times. Where would the dice upon their final toss come to rest?
As the demon barker said: “Ev’rybody wins at Skill-o!” The parting words of the god who fled.
It was getting late. Not just this night. All of it. There was no moon, and the ever-flowing, ever-changing river lay in darkness. I had little time to linger. Fuck lost love and fuck all those who would trespass against me. Maybe there was to be no more money. Maybe there was to be no more love. What was it all anyway? The one nothing more than ever more devalued paper scrip, the other just a temporary calmative for desperation.
And yet I craved them. But what I craved above all in this world of lies, this world of strife, as the old spook called it, was repose. If I could not summon gold from the maw of the Devil; if I could not summon her who had taken my cock into the exquisite passioning of her warm, wet mouth—and, yes, the sweetest girls always gave the best head—her who implored me to clutch and to bite; I could at least leave behind me all that was done and forever gone, and summon the strength to embrace change as I had embraced her.
Let there be no more lamentations, self-mourning, and woe. Enough of hollow or treacherous praise, of words of love, or of this bitch or that bitch crying that I drank too much.
It was all the same, and it meant nothing. I could give myself all the praise, love, and reproach that I needed. There was no need to seek it elsewhere. If it came, it came. If I chose to take it, I would take it with a laugh, and I would not take it as praise or as blandishment, as love or as desperation, as reproach or as madness.
This memory, the feeling evoked by this memory, by all memory, echoed through me.
It was good to drink; it was good to gamble, good to laugh; good to hold close a kindred spirit, even if it was yourself, in suffering or happiness, in the middle of the night or fulgent day. It was good to live.
I need not seek. I would simply take what came; take it as a breeze of change that might, if only for a breath, bring repose.
After all, as I had told myself, I was to die very soon. Old leopards, I liked to say, doddered on because they never really knew how old they were. But it was a good thing that I was not a leopard, because, even if unknown to them, their lives in fact rarely lasted more than seventeen years.
Christ, I had barely got going by the time I hit seventeen. Beautiful to behold, the leopards, and to sense, or to imagine sensing, their spirit within. But, no, I was not one of them, and I was damned glad that I was not. They didn’t have a name for cats like me.