All she knew of the world was lost to her but this boy and her father’s good horse, her memories too wrenching to summon, the pain ebbing and then going numb from whiskey.  She took the bottle from her saddlebag and took a long draught.  She would need more soon.  They would have to find another town.  She drank the warmth of the whiskey and felt its false heat through her legs and her arms and the tips of her fingers, and when her head spun she drank more because she was seeking, seeking, seeking.  She felt no presence in her life that provided sanctuary or serenity but only a mild flitting, a bubble risen up into the water and burst, a rainbow she’d glimpse in a puddle that does not appear in the sky.

Bonnie Durham sensed that there was something good and unchanged in the world and she would find it if she kept riding.  She realized how impatient she had been for this moment.  As she felt these things, she looked often at the boy, the hair growing down his ear and the ear crusted brown with dust, and she saw that his arms were muscular and she did not recognize him as the boy who threw her the quilt and turned around bashfully the day before.  She rubbed her eyes and saw the smoke of a fired gun as Evy reared back, the boy from nowhere coming to her side on the white horse.

The body must have fallen to the ground and her hand must have been shaking and the smoke must have risen above her from her father’s gun.  But all of this she did not see or understand as the boy had reached down and yanked her off the ground, and as she stuck her foot in the stirrup the horse was off.  No other shots followed her, or if they did she could not hear them or see anything but a round bloody sun in the distance and her lover’s face.

The sky was a quilt of stars.  Bonnie looked at the sky for the first time in a long time without wondering where Billy was out there.  She didn’t wonder if he were looking at the same stars, at the same moon.  The stars were not lonely but bright, blindingly bright and Bonnie dipped her head and clasped her hands over her ears and bit her tongue and tasted the metal of blood.  She closed her eyes.  In her darkness, she smelled something clean, something badly clean and not at all like the the floor of the saloon after she washed it with soap and lemon.  Cold clean, hard clean.  Her body bucked suddenly and she opened her eyes to the boy lying on his back, his arm swung over his face, his small Adam’s apple relaxed, but undeniably there.

Bonnie wanted to touch him, to pet his hair like she would pet a cat, to circle her fingers around his eyes.  She heard Evy grunt and stood up and went toward the horse.  She rubbed his neck with long soft strokes and the horse looked at her.  She took the pick out of the satchel and bent down to offer her hand to the horse’s hoof.  The pain shot her up and the horse bucked and relaxed.  The boy would have to do it when he woke.  She took out the brush and moved along Evy’s hair with its grain and pieces of dirt and dust sprinkled to the ground.  She felt calm as she brushed the horse, but her mind was blank.  There was nothing for her to think about—not the future and the big white bed in Mexico and not the past that she would never recover.  Her hands were steady on the horse and moved with a grace that felt new to her.  She patted the horse’s rump so he would know she was going behind him and unstrapped the satchel and threw it to their side.  Evy grunted as she took the brush through his tail and rubbed his back with her palms.  She came around to his side and stretched her arms across his back and put her cheek to him.  She wanted to whisper a prayer into the horse but she never had any use for the Lord and couldn’t start now.  She breathed with the horse and felt his life within him and knew that the horse trusted her.

He was going away for ten days, and she was to watch the marmalade kitten he had found at a Cumberland Farms gas station upstate.

“You’ve packed the liquor?” she said from the fire escape.

“Red suitcase,” he said.  She heard the water running and smelled the finger of whiskey as he washed it down the drain.  The weight of the bottle was not worth taking.

He came over to the window and rubbed her back.  “What is it?”

“Just a bad stomach.” She dropped her head onto his neck and reached a hand back to touch his graying hair.  His hand found her stomach, and he held it there.

He packed slowly to prolong his leaving.  She remained on the fire escape, glancing up at the deflated balloon stuck in the tree.  He offered her coffee, pineapple, then rubbed his eyes and opened the cabinet of mismatched, tarnished spoons, the single scarred white pot, the stove-top espresso maker filled with coins.

At eight, she prepared to go out.  He held her face, pressed his thumbs under her eyes, and kissed her.  She tugged the bit of gray hair under his lip.

It happened when she got back, in the bathroom.  It lasted fifteen minutes, and felt no worse than the cramps she’d had during her first periods, when her mother would bring the heating pad and give her Tylenol and whiskey.

When it was over, she sat in the chair and looked at the apartment, walled with books, and felt its emptiness, pressing.  She looked at the fringes of the worn carpet and at the yellow trunk from the third marriage.  She looked at the forgotten red suitcase.

It will be after all of this that I will know things.

After the letters accumulate and are tied together by many yellow ribbons and put away in a drawer, after the the fountain pens all go dry and letters begin to go unanswered, I push you as far out of my mind as I can.  I don’t open the drawer, I don’t again read the letters.

After you arrive at my apartment unannounced, a little shy and still completely open, and after I say hello and open the window and sit on the fire escape for a very long time, after I come back in and we eat and drink and begin to talk of normal things, we begin to look into each other.

This is how to fool her:

Walk around the small apartment and look at every one of her books.  Open the ones that you also love, and read random pages.  Comment on them every once in a while.  Say little, so that she will say very little, and so that she will be calm and ward off the anxiety that usually buzzes between her ears.  Call her over and ask her to read a first paragraph of a book that she had read very long ago, before you and before so many things.  Tell her why you love it.

Smile at all of the right times.  Do not rush a thing.  When she lies down next to you, do not touch her yet, but remain very close.  Speak with her of God, if there is one, if it could be possible in the world in which you live.  Listen to her speak cautiously about this God and barely comment, because you know that it is something so difficult for her to describe, that it is almost painful for her to describe, but that she is doing it for you because you asked her to.

When she begins to rise and say good night, when you take her hand and she puts her lips on it, beg her with only your hand for her to lie down again, and draw her close.

The rest of it must be slow and silent and very careful, because she will be as hesitant as you are.  Begin to touch her back and touch only her back for a very long time–and hour even, an hour.  She will surrender.  Allow her to forget everything else in her life, to feel only your hand on her back, and then in her hair, gently, gently.  Feel her face come closer to your face.  Know that she has no thoughts.  Know that she is present only here, with you, because she had given up on this feeling coming back after so long.

And after this prolonged prelude, kiss her softly and deeply, and only kiss her and touch her back and her hair.  Then begin to hold her very tight as if to say that it is a long moment in which your presence is her presence.  Know that she is not in the bed, or in the apartment, or under any roof.  Know that she is no place and that the fear has blown through the curtains that sway with the night breeze.

Above all, know that she is at last home.

Feel that it is as inevitable as the rising sun, as rain in spring.  It is the shiny trinkets in the nest of a magpie. When you both become conscious again, of the house, of the books, of the cats purring on the armchair, marvel that the sun has risen, and that time did not in fact stop, and that you still live in a world where you do not believe such things will last.

Hold her as she drifts into sleep.  Read the books that have published her work that sit in a slim section among the mountains of other books.  Let her see you reading these when she first lays eyes on you in the late morning.

When you say goodbye, do not let her go for a long time, and let her see how hazel your eyes are in the sun.  Do not say that you are definitely coming back.  When she says that it will be okay if you don’t, do not believe her.  Kiss her again and get in your car and drive away.  She will not allow herself to look back.

Do not answer any more letters.  She will somehow accept this and stop writing.  She will someday stop shrinking into long walks and longer letters that she never sends.  Let her carry the hope that it can happen again–someday, with someone who she has not yet met.

Still yours,

Erica

The Oil Baron woke up in a bed he never would have imagined sleeping in ten years ago.  He leaned forward and tried to touch his toes, as if bowing to the day before him.  His mild scoliosis and three slipped discs in his lower back were especially indignant with the cold weather.  His feet met the ermine carpet on the floor from thousands of ermines, now extinct.  He looked down at his toenails, which were still, after ten years of being the leading oil baron of the nation, encrusted with fungus.  Outside his pane of windows, he looked at the rustic beauty of the flatirons and wondered how long his assistant had been awake.  It was one in the afternoon.

His assistant, a still beautiful woman of 36, had indeed been awake since six, still writing the novel she had began twelve years ago when she met the Oil Baron.  She was mewing over a particular line within the first 35 pages, the first 35 pages she had had for three years until she met the Oil Baron.  The first 35 pages she had written when she was still hobbling from one bar to another in the then spectacular city of New Orleans, now a wasteland of nostalgic souls.  I think, she thought, that this tumbleweed line is still to cliché, although she wanted the tumbleweed to blow through the scene at the most inappropriate and un-cliché part of the scene, the climax, in fact, of the scene.  The phone rang again for the eleventh time since she had begun writing, and for the eleventh time her thoughts were interrupted when she was about to find the crucial line in her fingers before her mind registered it.

“Oil Baron, Incorporated,” she said into the phone.

“Darling,” the phone said, “put my little mensche on the line.”

“I believe,” she said, “that he has not yet risen.”

“Oh dear,” the Oil Baron’s mother said.  “Has he been taking his vitamins?”

“I’ve been grinding them up and putting them in his oatmeal,” the Assistant said.

“And has he proposed yet, dear?”

The Assistant sighed.  For ten long years she had been answering this question for the Oil Baron’s mother.

A woman wearing only a red apron walked into her office without knocking.  The Assistant held two fingers up to her and the woman disappeared.

“No Abby,” the Assistant said.  “I don’t believe it’s on his agenda for today.”

The mother sighed now.  “I always knew I wouldn’t live to see him happy.”

“He seems happier lately,” the Assistant said.  “He’s been singing like Joseph Spence again.  Always a good sign.”

“Is he still watching that dreaded documentary?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“And how about his attire?”

“I’m afraid, Abby, that he continues to do business in his robe.”

Abby signed again.  “Oh dear.  Well, please persuade him to call home today.”

“I’ll do my best, Abby.”

“Have you been doing any horseback riding, dear?”

“Not in the cold season,” she said, lighting a cigarette.

“Well your asthma isn’t going to get any better by smoking.”

“I know it,” she said, exhaling the smoke into the room.

“Well,” Abby said.

“Well,” the Assistant said.  And they hung up.

“Come,” the Assistant said to the woman waiting outside.  Barely a woman, in fact.  She was a new girl the Assistant had found selling scones at the Boulder farmer’s market two weeks ago.  Thin and buxom, with the long blonde-brown hair that the Assistant herself had as well.

“Yes, miss,” the girl said upon entering.

“How can I help you, Victoria?”

“I don’t mean to make demands,” Victoria said, “but it is quite chilly in the mansion, and the other girls and I can barely calculate the figures for our fingers are so cold.”

“Well Victoria,” the Assistant said, “you know that the Baron desires the temperature to be set at 74 degrees.  If I change it, he will surely seclude himself in his bedroom for the rest of the day, he won’t meet with his associates, who are flying in from Chicago, and things will be all around horrid for a week.”

“Yes, miss, I am aware of this plight,” the woman said, shivering.  “But perhaps we could be granted the great sacrifice of wearing leg warmers on our legs and arms, as I know the Baron has a penchant for.”

The Assistant sighed and faced her computer, scanning the life within her novel that would replace the life of her own.

“I suppose,” she said, “that you may do this.  But please wait for me to ask him.  He should be awake by now, and I will let you know within the hour.”

“Thank you ever so much, miss,” Victoria said, and hugging herself, left the room.

Whores, the Assistant thought, and stood up to greet the Baron.

In the West Wing, the Oil Baron stood on his head against the wall, participating in his usual afternoon routine of back therapy.  The Assistant walked into the room unannounced.  Following her was another girl of about nineteen, wearing the same red apron as Victoria and nothing else, and carrying a tray of tea and oatmeal with the vitamins ground up inside, as instructed.  She placed the tray on the bedside table and retreated.

“Good morning,” the Assistant said, picking up the Baron’s strewn about clothing.  “How is your back?”

“My back,” the Baron said, “feels like it’s been trampled by many horses.”  He released himself from his pose and sat cross-legged on the floor.  The Assistant got on her knees on the floor and began to rub his back as she had learned to do over the past twelve years.

“Your mother just called,” she said.

“Oh?  And what news does mother report from the center of the universe?” he asked, absently.

“Just to say hello,” the Assistant said, “and to query about your latest habits.  Do you plan to wear your robe for the conference today?”

“The conference?” the Baron said.

“Yes, Mr. X and Mr. Y are flying in from Chicago in one hour.  You can expect them at three in Conference Room F.”

“You can take them,” the Baron said.  “I plan to lie on a plank for the afternoon and look at the mountains.”

“You must meet with them,” she said patiently.  “They represent Z company, and they expect your presence.”

“Oh dear,” said the Baron.

“I suggest you shower and dress.  Your suit is ready, and I’ll send a girl in to assist you.”

“Thank you,” he said.  “You know,” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

“Nevermind,” he said.

She stood and left the room.

The Assistant and the Baron met in Brooklyn.  At this time she was a college composition adjunct professor who had no time to write her novel, and he was jobless, penniless, and very lonely.  She was the prom queen of the local Alcoholics Anonymous chapter, and he came in two years into her sobriety: a broken man at 37, his hair already turning silver strand by strand.  She was, as he had said repeatedly then, always the most beautiful woman in the room.  She had fallen in love with him on an unusually bright February day.  They had seen a film in Manhattan the night before, and she had made him tear up her phone number after an argument he had started and she had no interest in pursuing.  The following morning he woke her up—after calling three people to retrieve her number—to invite her to the public library to do research on her novel.  She conceded, and, dressed in her cutest school girl outfit—plaid gray skirt, wool stockings, a tight pink sweater, a pair of shiny Mary Janes, and a pair of pink leg warmers, which began his penchant—set off to meet him at an AA meeting in Union Square.  She disclosed the information that she was a tap dancer, and he demanded that she tap dance everywhere—on the subway, across Broadway, down the stairs at the public library on 42^nd Street.  This information, he had said, would make him consider the parameters of their relationship completely.  At the time, he had 34 days clean from heroin and alcohol.  He had already seduced her once.

The Assistant came back into the room.  “I almost forgot,” she said.  “The girls are asking to wear leg warmers on their legs and arms.  Unless, of course, you would like to turn up the heat.”

“The heat,” he said, “will be turned up to 76 degrees during the time of my bath.  But they must still wear the leg warmers.”

The idea of her assistanceship to the broken Oil Baron had come not long after he seduced her.  They had been playing Scrabble and reading the newspaper at a local coffeehouse before an AA meeting, and he has read about Mr. R, who was making millions in oil.  As they walked up 20^th Street, she clung to his arm.  She took out two cigarettes and lit both; then handed one to the broken man.

“What I need,” he had said, “is an assistant to my life.  You should quit your job and work for me.”  At the time, of course, he was unemployed.

“If you mean that I will clean your apartment, I will do so gladly, for never have I seen a place of such squalor.”

“Squalor, squalor,” he had said.  “My life is a tomb of squalor.”  He linked his arm in hers.  “I am not a good person,” he said.  “I could never teach forty year olds to put the “s” on the end of a verb for forty hours a week.  I will become an oil baron like Mr. R.  We will move to the mountains.  You will write your novel and take care of my affairs as I become very wealthy.”

“Your affairs being?”

“Dry cleaning, answering the phone when I don’t feel like it, writing Hanukah cards to my family.  You will have all the time in the world to write, and you will never have to answer the question of the your age with the response, ‘Two degrees old.’”  Since she had joined AA, she had not written a word since.

“And why select me, among all of the experienced assistants in oil baronry in the world?”

“Because,” he said, facing her.  “This way I will always have you in my life, and I will never have to admit that I love you.”

How she despised this memory now.

In her room in the West Wing, the Assistant readied herself to accept the arriving guests.  Among the many rooms in the West Wing, she had always stayed in this one, down the hall from the Baron, the windows facing the flatirons, the red curtains she had picked out years before framing the view.  She stood at her dressing table and brushed her hair, which was long and lustrous and hung down her back.  She had stopped wearing make-up years before, when she realized she had no reason to impress anyone while living with the Oil Baron.  She was still pretty—perhaps not beautiful, perhaps—but pretty.  When she had met the Oil Baron, she was a beauty.  Although she had a poor complexion and even poorer posture, she was radiant, her energy only exceeded by the size of her heart.  She was hitting an emotional bottom and had cried at a meeting.  The Baron approached her and, smiling, handed her a tiny bar of exotic soap.  “Someone gave me this in SoHo yesterday afternoon, and I’ve had it in my pocket ever since for you.”  He walked her home.  In those sunny winter days, he had a habit of breaking into song.

  Pumpkin pie, pumpkin pie

                                                I’ll eat you till the day I die.

                                                Carved you up and ate your guts

                                                Used you as an ashtray for cigarette butts. 

Later, he had said, “I’ve never known anyone so comfortable with her perversities.”

“What’s so perverse about wanting to stand on a fire escape naked?”

“Everything.”

Now, she put on a white silk blouse that she found on her bed that morning, wrapped in tissue, sealed with a sticker.  She chose a modest crème strait skirt, panty hose, low white pumps.  She added some blush to her face after some deliberation.  She was thinking about the gypsy scene in her novel, when her heroine was to reveal the identity of the third man she had murdered, when she heard the Baron bellowing down the hall.

“Away with you, wench!  I’d rather wear a lead vest than those trousers!”

The Assistant walked slowly down the hall.

One of the girls was crying outside the Baron’s room.  The Assistant patted her on the shoulder and entered.

“They’re all insane.  When did I come up with this idea?  Why do these women live here?”

“Your wishes,” the Assistant said, “have always been granted.”

“My wishes,” he said, one leg in the pair of trousers and one dangling to the floor, “my wishes!  Where have my wishes gotten me?  This mansion?  These whores?  These mountains?  What does this all amount to?  I ask you that.”

“Will we be receiving your clients with smoked salmon, as usual?”

“Listen to me,” he said, his silver hair shaking.  “You are not happy.  Why do you stay here?  Why don’t you go write your novel?  Why have you stayed her, entrapped by this life?”

She softened her voice.  “N.,” she said.  “What is going on?”  She sat down on the bed next to him helped his other leg into his trousers.

“Going on, going on.  I’m old.”

“I grow old, I grow old.”

“I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.  You used to send me a line of poetry a day.  Why did you stop that?”

“Let’s be frank,” she said.  “We stopped doing everything years ago.  You know how we are.”

“We exist in a mutual space, but in disparate worlds.  You take care of my life, and I, I take care of nothing.”  He began to roll a cigarette.

“Nothing needs to last this long,” she said.  “You could move, you could go to Europe or something, go back to New York.  You have enough money to live like a pig for the rest of your life.  You make the decision each day to live here.”

He handed her the cigarette, his eyes filled with tears.

“Let’s fire the girls and hire some male students from one of the universities.”

“And that,” she said, “is what will make you happy?”

“You’re so young,” he said, “to think that happiness is an option for me.”

She got up.  “They should be here within ten minutes.  I suggest you shave and meet me downstairs in the lobby in five.”

The Assistant had always balked at the “you’re so young” lectures the Baron delivered to her.  Even when they first met, when he claimed he would only disappoint her, when she hadn’t believe that he ever could, he would pat the seat beside him and say, “K.  Let’s have a little talk.”  How she hated being treated like a child.  It was when her father—a great man, a poor but great man—had passed the year before that she began understanding why she fell in love with the Baron in the first place.  He was just as chiding and emotionally unavailable as her father had been, and she had sought the pattern out since she was thirteen and lost her virginity to her Algebra teacher in the deserted gym locker room.  She was still seeking him in her novel—the heroine’s father, in fact, had her father’s first and middle name.  “How disgustingly Freudian,” the Baron had said when she told him.  You’re smarter than that.”

But was she?  She had, after all, given up her whole life to devote herself to him.  Her family in the East, her cozy Brooklyn life and the students who taught her patience and brought her joy.  She had left New York with a small suitcase of letters and photographs, her two cats, now dead, and her boxes of books which were shipped immediately into her own library in the mansion in Colorado.  She would maintain her literary contacts in the East.  She would complete her novel.  Her small list of publications would grow slowly.  She did not care if anyone read her work in her lifetime.  She had always wanted to write books that would endure the test of time, even if she never lived to see them read.  But what little satisfaction this life held for her.  The doorbell rang she quickened her pace down the stairs to the lobby.

Misters X and Y were robust gentlemen.  “Smell that mountain air!” Mister Y said as he stepped into the mansion, a cigar clenched between his teeth.

“How wonderful to meet you,” the Assistant said, extending both hands in greeting.  “Let me take your coats, gentlemen.  The Baron has started a fire in the conference room.  How do you like your coffee?”

She charmed them for fifteen minutes, and the Baron did not appear.  Misters X and Y came to Boulder to present a stunning proposal to the Baron.  From what the Assistant had gathered, they wanted to buy his shares at one-hundred-fifty percent—all of them in Countries J and K, and some on the Q Coast.  This would leave the Baron with hardly anything to manage, and he would basically be retired.  Where this would leave her relationship with the Baron—and indeed her life—she did not know.

She lied that the Baron was in his office observing his daily meditation and excused herself.  She found him staring at himself in the bathroom mirror, his face half shaven.

“They’re downstairs,” she said, taking the razor from him and dragging it along his face.

“I can’t see them,” he said.

“You must.”

He sighed.

“They’re ready to buy you out.  And why the hell not?  You’re not even an Oil Baron.  You’re a sound recorder,” she said.  He used to record their conversations and splice them together into hilarious footage.  They had been on NPR.

“But I like being called a Baron.”

She patted his face with a towelette and ran her fingers through his silver hair to make it appear half manageable.  She straightened his tie very slowly, and very gracefully, kissed him on the temple.  “Just go do it,” she said.

“And you?”

“I’ll do what I’ve always done.”

“Which is write.”

“Which is to find the joy in the moment.”

“Which is to ease the pain of living.”

“Please go downstairs.”

“Only if you’ll let me pay for you to adopt a baby from Africa.”

Her heart swelled.  She had been saying this since they had met.  If a girl: Minnow.  If a boy: Shad.  But what had held her back was the adoption agencies; they would not allow a single woman to adopt a child.

The Baron smiled at her with much kindness and exited the room.

“Conference room F,” she reminded him.  He raised a hand in understanding.

She went back to her study and sat before the glaring machine.  Once, she used a typewriter, not that typewriters were ever in fashion in her lifetime.  She had always liked old things.  She went to work on the gypsy scene, got into that space where time is irrelevant, where she is placeless and light and above all, very happy.  Her fingers moved fast as her mind, fast as her characters could guide her, as they could catch her heart on a line and tug, tug, tug it to the surface of her prose. She finished the scene and felt that same ancient desire to drink a glass of whiskey.

She rose and walked into Conference Room F.  It still smelled of cigars.  The carpet felt warm on her still-stockinged feet, the air was fresh, it was storming outside, and she felt as she always she had during a storm, that everyone she loved was inside somewhere, safe and warm and content.  In the cabinet, she opened a drawer and found cigarettes, matches.  Then she removed a bottle of scotch and a glass that felt so heavy she nearly dropped it.  She filled the glass and sat on the sofa.  She felt that she deserved at least that much.

The Baron’s door was closed, which was not unusual.  She heard his voice through the door, animated, its tone even and rhythmic.  She opened the door.

He was sitting at his desk, which she had asked one of the girls to dust the week before—it was so neglected.  His old recorder hulked next to him, the thick cord of the microphone.  His back was turned to her, and he did not hear her enter.  She stood there and listened to his voice, the old voice that would sing songs in the cold, that would speak of the future, that would count time as she tap danced down subway steps.  Before him, the flatirons flashed with lightening.  He was telling jokes, recording them, and then he said,

“So that’s all you get tonight, folks.  My shriveled present, my adorable past, and my future, in Italy, with my wife.  So long.”

He let the tape run for several seconds before he stopped the machine, put down the microphone, and lit a cigarette.  His back was straight, as it had not been in years.  The Assistant could tell that he was smiling.  She smiled, too.

When the Former Oil Baron awoke the next morning, the rain had stopped.  He pressed the button that rang the Assistant’s study.  She did not answer, she was probably out on a walk.  He picked up the phone and dialed his mother.

“My darling,” she said, “you are up quite early.”

“Abby.”

“My child, I spoke to K. yesterday, and we all are quite worried about you.  She says you are still indulging in your habits, dear, and we wish for you to come to New York at once.”

“Abby, I have purchased two plane tickets already.”

“Oh splendid darling!  Your father will be delighted!  I can hear a ring in your voice, my dear.  JKF or LaGuardia?  Oh I do hope JFK.  The runways are longer and much more safe.”

“We will be arriving in Italy next Sunday.  I have sold the business and the mansion both.”

The line was silent.

“Abby?” he said.

“Yes, darling.  Of course.  You have been working so hard for years and deserve a vacation, and K. has been so devoted to you that I can’t bear to wonder what she has missed in her life time.  But you can stop over in New York on your way there?”

“One-way tickets, mother.  We will marry in the Sistine Chapel in Rome.”

“Marry!  Finally!  The Sistine Chapel?  Do they even have weddings there?  And my goodness.  We are Jewish!”

“I have a connection in the Vatican who will make it possible. We are ethnically Jewish, Abby, and have never been religious.  You know this.”

“Well did you give her a ring? And what did she say?  Tell me, darling.”

“I have not asked yet.  I shall rise, bathe, and take her to dine, and there I shall ask.  I sent a girl out for the ring yesterday while K. was writing.”

“Let me get your father on the line.”

“I must rise now, Abby.  We will be in touch before we leave the country.”

He sat up and stretched, and his back felt better than it had in many years.  He fetched his toe nail clippers and stooped to pedicure.  He brushed his teeth and bathed and shaved again.  He slowly stepped into a suit that K. had bought him last holiday.  He hummed as he dressed.  He splashed a mild cologne on his neck.  He called out for a girl to help him with his tie.

A pretty red head came in and began to choose one from the rack.

“No, I will choose today.  This one.”  It was golden and showed the golden flecks in his irises.

She gently began with the tie, as if he were made out of glass.  When he finally looked at her face, he found it flushed, her eyes red and swollen.

“You have been with us for some time, yes?” he said.

“Yes sir. It will be three years next April.”  Her voice trembled.

“What is your name?”

She pulled the knot into place and looked at him.

“I am sorry,” he said.  “I am no good with names.  I don’t mean to offend you.  I should know your name.”  He blushed.

“It is not that, sir.”  She looked around the room and behind her into the hall.  Three girls were huddled around the door.

“What is going on?” he said slowly and quietly.

“It’s Ms. K,” she said.  “She has gone.  Permanently.”

We were healthy then, and the days were spread out before us like yellow bricks.  We lived in a place where people didn’t grow ill, or go mad, and nobody imagined herself on the Manhattan Bridge with a suitcase full of books, a rope, the cold steel of the railing against her calf.

It is a strange feeling when you look back at a time that preceded something of great change: illness, grief, disaster, or even—you’ll hear—immeasurable joy.  The time before the change was as stagnant and death seeking as fly paper.  But later, when you look back, when the woman is lost to you and the place is corrupt and the people are degenerate and you picture it with tumbleweed blowing across the road and live wires taking long, balletic leaps, then, then the period is charged, sizzling with the erotics of time and distance.

We worked in a restaurant: Pepper, Dean Neely, and me.  At the end of the night we stepped outside stinking and sweating into the thick, green haze.  We got in my truck and drove downtown.  The truck was black, with a sweeping tan stripe on across each side, like feathers.  A hawk of a truck.  I’ll never love another.

We drove fast down Claiborne Avenue and they sang in the bed behind me, holding their open beers like torches of plenty. I’d go into the darkest bars, into the farthest bathroom stalls with the worst men and I’d come out with the powder or the pills.  Pepper and Dean would huddle around me, guilty for what I had accomplished, crouching around my cupped hands, as if I were making a fire for them to warm near.

We met disastrous souls.  We danced and fought and cried and wandered off in our separate agonies.  We’d find each other as the blue horror the day came crashing down.  We’d meet at the dirty river by the pier, the sunlight raining upon us.  We’d meet as if it had been years.  We’d meet with black eyes and bruised arms, with hundreds of dollars from the casino, with inklings of a new wisdom we’d found during the night, lost now, pebbles thrown into the river.

Other times we sat at the Brothers Three.  It was the kind of place most girls would hate to go in just to use the john.  When you walked by on Magazine Street you heard alcoholic love songs.  You saw a row of geezers staring down the long necks of the their last dollars and into the yellowed pools of their old dreams, and you saw old Babs in full cabaret attire poised at the video poker machine, smoking.  You saw a bartender with one breast and jack o’lantern teeth.  You pulled open the heavy door of history and fate, and stepped in.

In the one bathroom, there was trough glistening with piss-gold ice.  A poster of little known facts: cat urine glows under a black light, and a cockroach can live for nine days without its head.

We liked talking to the regulars, who we called The Folks.  Spider who always told you his real name and then begged you to remind him.  Canadian Chuck who made the sign of the cross and pointed to the ceiling and uttered four words: Waste Not, Want Not.  The poet, Cowboy, who threatened to get a new leg in Texas.  Cowboy would tell the same joke over and over again, something about a horse.  It’s one of those things that gets me now, on the long nights.  Something to do with the horse’s hair, but what was the joke?  Sometimes I think I have it, like stamping my foot down on an escaping coin.  I peel up my shoe and there’s nothing.  Can you tell it to me?  Can you tell me the smell of Dean Neely’s skin?

Dean and I waited the lunch shift, Pepper making pizzas before the great, brick oven.  This afternoon, Pepper ate too many pills.  He couldn’t stop singing.  I tried to warn him, but it was too funny.  I had been drinking since ten.  Dean and I had a system of hoarding beers in the vanity of the employee restroom.

“I know too many songs not to be singing em!” Pepper said, leaning into a back band.  He was rubber band.  The restaurant was full, the pizza orders came out of the machine and he plucked them up like they were winning lottery tickets and shoved them into his pants.

“You better right your ship, kid,” Dean Neely said, limping to the bathroom with a beer in his sock.

I went into the kitchen and patted Pepper down.

“Trying to make love with me?” he said, his Mississippi accent and his glazed blue eyes.

“Shut up.”  I found the bottle of pills in his pocket.  It was empty.  “Pepper!” I said, horrified.

He ran into the corner by the oven and doubled over, head hanging heavy.

Pepper was young and light.  He filled his dead father’s pain medications and tranquillizers.  I’d take him to a clinic on the other side of the river.  The neighborhood crawled with degenerates.  Some hootenanny, Dean would say was we waited in the truck for Pepper to appear out of the dirty white building.

Pepper was the kind of person whose bare feet made you feel sad.  A buzz cut, and side burns—I loved sideburns.  His eyes were the Southern sky stuffed with cotton.  He had a way of looking at you, like you were the only one who could save him.  He didn’t stand up straight, he wavered.  Because he was a diabetic, everyone took pity on him.  “Apple juice!” he’d yell from behind the line as the pizzas burned in the oven.  “I need apple juice!  I’m goin’.  Help me.”  I’d rush over and he’d slip me a few lorries or a couple percs.

And Dean Neely wasn’t getting any younger.  At thirty-eight, he talked about getting a quick degree at the community college and teaching public school.  “Youngsters,” he called them, “but I won’t wear no tie.”  He had a way of talking that came right at you, right down under you and lifted you off the ground.

These were my friends.  True, I endured a long time of abuse and dishonor from bother of them separately, first Pepper, then Dean.  I had tricked them both into impregnating me.  But there were no babies.  What I remember is this: Pepper saying, “Smells like jasmine.  Reminds me of my grandmother” and looking off in a way that begged me save him.  And of Dean: standing on a balcony over the avenue during a gracious rain, smoking cigarettes naked, my breasts pressed against him and the raining pooling, when he said, “I should have met you a long time ago.”

The next time I turned around Pepper was behind the bar, hands in the register.  Dean was crouched below him, drinking from a bottle of vodka.

“That’s it!” Harold, the malevolent Nicaraguan kitchen manager said.  “I can’t take it no more.  Go home.  Both of you.”

“Can I go too?” I asked.

A mound of pizza dough came hurtling toward me.

Freedom!  We loaded in.  Dean sat up front with me.  Pepper lay in the bed.  The afternoon downpour commenced.  Pepper sang, “Ain’t No Sunshine When She’s Gone.”  Our minds teemed with the possibility of drink.  The afternoon off, the night free, and I felt the old sadness of Dean’s hand on my inner thigh.

“Let’s take the ferry across the river to Historic Algiers,” I said.

“That’s the worst idea I ever heard,” Dean said.

“You once loved all of my ideas.”

“Come on baby, let’s drop this kid off and drive to Texas.  Check into a hotel.  Let’s drive to New Mexico.  We can go all the way to California.”

The windshield wipers were old, of course, the rubber flapping back and forth against the glass.

“Fuck it,” Dean said.  “Let’s go to the Brothers Three.”

All the regulars were there, nodding into their chests.  We put Pepper on a bar stool.  His head found the cool of the wooden bar.  No other bartender would have served him but Cherokee with the one breast.  Her voice sounded exactly like Marilyn Monroe’s.  She produced a can of Milwaukee’s Best and fed Pepper little sips from a straw until he started mumbling in a language she seemed to understand.  Dean patted his cheeks and said, “See?  See?  He’s almost back with us.”  Dean laughed, and I’d tell you what that sounded like if I could only remember.

When it was just Dean and I, we would play pool until dawn and talk our way through everything.  Back then, we imagined building a time machine and getting me back to him at twenty two—my age—living in the strange, hot metallic world of the eighties.  I’d get back there and find him.  Because you see, it was too late for us, they had needed me before they needed anyone else, and I had missed them.  I arrived once their roads petered off into the swamp.  They were like hitchhikers to me.  Precious.

Dean fed quarters into the pool table, a cigarette dangling in his lips.  He racked the balls and looked at me like we could have this time together, like it used to be.  It was in his face.

Then the power cut, somebody said, “Call the police.”  Babs said, “Ain’t nobody gonna help this mother fucker.”  Even as Cherokee lit candles and brought everyone a round of drinks, even as the children danced by the bar screaming and we heard the unmistakable joy of a second line parade born out of this great surprise of the blackout, and even as Pepper slid off the bar stool and onto the floor and I whispered Hail Marys to him as I pulled him up, even then, Dean Neely didn’t break.  He posed there with the balls racked, the triangle swinging on its hook below the table, the stick in his chalked hands, the darkness surrounding us and pressing us and exploding with trumpets and trombones.  He stood there and he looked back.

“What do you want to do first?” Iris said from the chopping block.  She was making something she called gumbo, which seemed to involve the tails and heads of various bottom crawlers.  A big pot of beans and rice simmered on the stove.

“Eat,” I said, grabbing her from behind and digging my face into her neck.

“You’re in luck, Buddy,” she said and turned to kiss me.  She kissed like a butterfly.

The gumbo surprised me.  The girl could cook.  It was hot in both of the ways and thick and tasted like swamp chowder.  When we were done we made off to the bedroom, and I tasted her and tasted the gumbo, and I tasted like the gumbo too, and we sexed like that, spicy and thick, drooling.  She was just the way I remembered her: wet and ravaged, calling out “I’m dying!  I’m dying!” like a happy victim on her way to sudden death.  Iris was lush and full as the country she imagined she lived in.

After the second time, Iris lay on her back smoking a cigarette, swooning.  I’m no braggart, but I knew what Iris liked.  When she popped up and stood on her knees, I thought she might want me again, but instead she said, “Want to see my gun?”

“Your gun?” I said, thinking she meant something kinky.

“Uh huh,” she said, and lunged to the corner of the room, reached inside a hat box.  She drew a .48 out and pointed it at me.

“Pow,” she said and laughed.

“Dammit Iris, don’t fuck around with that thing.  Where the hell’d you get it?”

“Bought it,” she said and threw her head back, still laughing.  “Scared you, didn’t I?”

“Actually, you did.  Let me see it.”

It was a real gun my Iris had.  Smooth and sleek and cold.

“You wanna shoot it?” she said.

I cocked it and checked for bullets.  Bitch was loaded.  “Yeah.”

She brought me out back where blouses and panties blew on a clothesline and the air itself hung like wet clothes from the trees.  She brought out a six pack and we sat on the stoop drinking beers and looking out at the white fence.

“You rent this place, Iris?”

“Bought it.”

“Well now,” I said.  “So you’re pretty well planted down here.”

Iris shrugged.  “Who knows?” she said.  “I could leave tomorrow if I had to.”

Had to?  She finished her beer and patted me on the knee.  “Let’s go.”

Iris strode to the fence and stood her can on a post.  She backed up about thirty feet, drew her arm out and brought it up close to her eye.  She was so deliberate in these movements that it shocked me when she abruptly brought the gun to her waist and fired.  The can went flying.  I hopped up and ran to her.

“Damn, Iris, you took that thing clear off the post.”

“Takes a bit of practice,” Iris said, and she handed it to me.

Now this is a tough situation.  I’m not a violent man.  Sure, I had had a BB gun as a kid but this was a whole new thing.

“Now hold it like this,” Iris said, adjusting my hand on the weapon.  “Now don’t think about the gun.  Think about the can on the fence.  Look at that can.  Say that can is mine, motherfucker.  Say it.”

“That can is mine, motherfucker,” I said.

“Good.  Now hold it here, at your hip.”  She backed away.

I missed and hit the fence, but it wasn’t too far from the target.  I tossed the gun into the weeds and said, “What kind of man am I?”

She smiled.  “Well you’re gonna learn to use it.”

Iris and I had gun practice every day.  She said it was part of making me into the perfect man.  She said I was just this close to it.  Within five days I was firing cans off the fence too.

One thing I thought was strange about Iris.  She never wanted to leave the house.  We stayed home and cooked and had sex and put an endless number of bullets through beer cans.  She went out to a corner store for food.  When I’d suggest we’d go out dancing or to a restaurant she’d say, “Why baby?  We got everything we need right here.”  Then she’d start to take off my clothes and lead me into the bedroom.

Good as it was, it didn’t sit right.

She was an old friend of my brother in law’s family, so when we started seeing each other, she asked me to keep it quiet.  Besides, she was living down around Lafayette, Louisiana, and I was living where I’d always lived—in New Fairfield, Connecticut, where Iris is from.  She’d fly home for holidays to visit her parents and I’d be waiting for her above the funeral parlor where I lived, the room full of roses, a Marty Robbins album on, Tomorrow You’ll Be Gone. 

First time I saw Iris was at my sister’s wedding.  I was sitting at the bar in this dumb tuxedo, drinking beer with my cousin Lefty whose left-side was paralyzed in an accident.  Lefty was telling me the story of the accident, again, and he had just gotten to the part where the motorcycle tire is wedged in his armpit, when the door swung open.  Her laughter came first.  I put down my beer and turned around and she was there in the doorway in a red wool coat, her arm hooked in the elbow of a long-haired man.  She wore black fishnet stockings and high-heeled shoes, and under the coat she wore a string of pearls and a skinny black dress—no bra.  She had a figure like a rubber band you make into the perfect profile: long legs, a wide but firm ass, a waist next to nothing, and breasts like round, hard apples.

“Who is she?” I asked Lefty.

“I don’t know,” he said, “but I think I’m in love.”

It wasn’t until another two years that I finally worked up the nerve to ask her out.  I took her to the big flea market in Brookfield on Sunday morning and she bought me a stuffed raccoon, insisted that I name it Roger.  It was the ugliest thing I ever saw.  It was posed in a position of mid-pounce, its yellow teeth and claws bared menacingly, beady black eyes.  Iris was so excited by the thing, I couldn’t let on that old Roger frightened me.  Then she insisted I keep it on the dashboard of my truck, glue it down like an ornament.  I promised I would.  Then we ate burgers at Delmo’s and hung around the lake all day, spent the night together and the next day she left again for Louisiana.

Six months later, I drove west on the I-10 toward Lafayette and over the Atchafalya Bridge.  When she called me, I sensed a real need in her voice for my presence.  Besides, I needed a vacation, and she said we could drive over the New Orleans for the weekend.  When I pulled off the exit it was just past noon.  I had driven through the night, slept a couple hours outside a Waffle House in Georgia.  Louisiana was hotter than I ever expected.  It felt as if there wasn’t enough air to breathe, like it got sucked out of my mouth before it reached my lungs.  On the highway, the air above the pavement shimmered and my head buzzed.  I was so nervous I thought I’d puke so I pulled off after her exit and had a couple hits of a joint to calm down.  Iris lived right outside Lafayette in a town called Cecelia, and as I followed her directions down a long highway bordered by farmlands and fields, I wondered how well I knew Iris.  I never figured her to be such a country girl.  She said the driving to Cecelia was like crossing over into a universe of calm and certainty—of silos and shanties and big country houses, where everyone knows their place and live in beautiful simplicity, without great want.  But I saw a run-down town of tattered houses and children who looked dull from hunger as they got off of their school buses.  Of porches with sinking bellies where old women sat for eternity, waiting for something to come along and take them away, where people live on the possibilities of their dreams, banking always on the future, or let the rest be damned.  Big lottery billboards, chain link fences that stop and start randomly along the road, every few miles a gas station selling fireworks.  What was Iris doing here?  I followed a dirt road down to a beat-up blue truck where an old guy sold watermelons and bouquets of flowers.  I bought one of each.  He looked at the license plate on my Dodge and said, “You come a long way, sonny.  Hope she’s worth it.”

Houses were spaced far apart and many didn’t have numbers.  I feared I wouldn’t find her, that she’d mislead me somehow, that I’d come all this way for nothing.  And then there she was, standing in the doorway of a little white house, barefoot in a yellow dress.  She had cut her hair short, and her brown curls stuck up everywhere.  I pulled up, my windshield smeared with dead insects, Hank Williams on the radio.  I swung out the door and she ran to me.  “Welcome to Cajun country, baby,” she said.  I lifted her off the ground, spun her around, smelled her hair.  It smelled the same: muddy, like rain, springtime—maybe it was the shampoo she used, women have such tricks—but it drove me wild.  I breathed her into me and kissed her.

“Iris, Iris, Iris,” I said.

Gowanus Canal at Union Street

Gowanus Dredgers Oath

We will never bring disgrace to this, our estuary, by any act of dishonesty or cowardice, nor ever our suffering comrade in the ranks.

We will fight for the ideals and sacred things of the waterfront, both alone and with many.

We will revere and obey the waterfront’s laws and do our best to include a like respect and reverence in those above us who are prone to annul or set them at naught.

We will strive unceasingly to quicken the public’s sense of civic duty.

Thus, in all these ways, we will transmit this estuary, not only less, but greater, better and more beautiful than it was transmitted to us.

Adaptation of the Oath of the Athenian Youth

Visit The Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club homepage here.

I am not a Dredger, though I wish that I had an oath.  Something moral and noble—I will never submit myself to harmful or impulsive actions, nor will I defame my family name, nor will I disgrace my profession, my community… you get the idea.

I have found that solemn oaths are rarely kept, for me at least.

For in their solemnity, there is always farce.  I do not doubt that the Dredgers of the Gowanus Canal, for example, take their oath lightly.  But my own have been made to prove something to someone—sometimes myself—and everything I vow not to do is something that I do almost immediately.

But I take comfort in the Gowanus Dredgers Oath.  The Canal is small—about two miles.  It is lined by abandoned factories that made it what it is today—polluted, gangrenous, the water stagnant.  They say it has Gonorrhea, but that may be just a Brooklyn  legend.

It is named for an Indian chief.  An Algonquin.  Hudson and Verrazanno explored its waters, the Battle of Brooklyn was fought nearby.  The Dutch harvested briny oysters with gem-like shells.

And now, I walk around the Canal’s neighborhood—my neighborhood—with my camera, in my little life.  I take comfort in rust, in graffiti, in the bright colors of old paint that seem to splash up against the gritty grey city.  In the ever-present Kentile Floors sign.  The sky looks nicer over the Canal, and I feel that there are a million stories to tell about it.

I am going to start telling them.  This is my oath.

She hadn’t done anything to me.  She had had the Mean Boy in her grips for years–cheated on him, lied to him, abused him–and he had finally escaped her, to me.  Then I broke the heart I was supposed to save, and the Mean Boy went back to the Big Girl.

When the Big Girl saw me, she had murder in those dark eyes.  She threw her purse onto the sidewalk and said, “Let’s go.” The Big Girl pushed me hard and I didn’t say a thing, but I thought, Look at her, Mean Boy.  Look what you’ve done.  What you’ve chosen.

The Big Girl came at me and called me Ugly, even called me Fat.  She called me a lot of things.  What was I thinking?  Look at me.  Look at me.  Look at me.  Look at how much bigger she is than me.   Look at how little I am here on the sidewalk in the night.

And then:

It felt like a falling dream, that sudden, breathless, terrible flailing that comes from nowhere and everywhere at once.  But this wasn’t a dream.  This was the Big Girl hitting me.

Then I was on my back on the sidewalk and the Mean Boy had the Big Girl and she was yelling.  The other Mean Boys were yelling at her, too, and I reached up and felt the raw place where my cigarette burned my skin, right next to my left eye, when I fell.  I still wasn’t scared.  I was thinking that I was glad I had just painted my toenails since I was only wearing sandals.  The Big Girl was thrashing in the Mean Boy’s grip like wild, screaming for all of Brooklyn to hear, all the worst words to call another woman.  The Mean Boy could barely hold her back.  “I’ll kill you,” the Big Girl said to me.  “I’ll kill you, I swear it.”

And then I did the meanest thing of all to the Big Girl.  I got up, and I laughed.  It came out of me like someone went fishing for it and caught it good.  I laughed so hard at that Big Girl that the Mean Boy had to push her to the ground and hold her there, she wanted at me so badly.  I walked back across the street.  A neighbor threatened to call the cops if the Big Girl didn’t shut up.  I walked home.

When I got to my gate, I looked back.  The last thing I saw was the Mean Boy hugging the Big Girl, holding her strong with all that hatred they have for one another, all that love.