Presence: Stories

  “Now, you be nice to Clement, Mama,” Lena said, and went and sat on the glider beside her mother.

  “Oh, he knows not to be upset. I just say things.” But she had pinned inadequacy to his nature. She pushed her heel against the floor and made the glider swing.

  Nobody spoke. The glider squeaked intimately. Beyond the porch the street was silent. Mrs. Vanetzki finally turned to Clement. “The main thing that puts people’s lives to ruin is sex.”

  “Oh, come on—even if you love somebody? I love this crazy girl,” Clement said.

  “Ah, love.”

  Lena nervously giggled through her cigarette smoke.

  “Isn’t there such a thing?” Clement asked.

  “Whoever is not realistic, America kills,” Mrs. Vanetzki said. “You are an educated young man. You are handsome. My daughter is a mixed-up person. She will never change. Nobody changes. Only more and more is let out, that’s all, the way a ball of string unwinds. Do yourself a favor—forget about her, or be friends, but don’t marry. You should find a smart woman with a practical mind and clear thoughts. Marriage is a thing forever, but a wife is only good if she is practical. This girl has no idea of practical. She is a dreamer, like her poor father. The man comes to this country expecting some respect, at least for his name. Nobody respects a Polack. What did they know of Vanetzkis, who go back to the Lithuanian dukes? He went crazy for a little respect, a man with engineer training. They kept wanting to make friends with him, the kind of people he wouldn’t have spoken to in the old country, except maybe to get his shoes shined. So he comes to Akron and Detroit and then here looking for a cultured circle. This is the nature of Lena’s father. He didn’t know that here you are either a failure or a success, not a human being with a name. So he went raving to his grave. Don’t talk about marriage. Please, for both your sakes, leave her to herself. Our Patsy, yes—she should be married. Only marriage can save her, and even that I doubt. But not this one.” She turned now to look at her elder daughter, who had giggled in loving embarrassment through all her remarks. “Have you told him how lost you are?”

  “Yes,” Lena said, uncomfortably. “He knows.”

  Mrs. Vanetzki sighed, pressed a hand against her own perspiring cheek, and rocked slightly from side to side. She was in touch with what time was to bring to her, Clement thought, and he was moved by this transcendency in her nature, even if it was excessively tragic for his taste.

  “What are you going to do for a living? Because I can tell you now she will never amount to anything financially.”

  “Mama!” Lena protested, delighted by the implied female revolt in her mother’s candor. “Oh, Mama, I’m not that bad!”

  “Oh, you’re getting there,” Mrs. Vanetzki said. She repeated her question to Clement. “What are you going to live on?”

  “Well, I don’t know yet.”

  “Yet? Don’t you know that every day costs money? ‘Yet’? Economics does not wait for ‘yet.’ You have to know what you are going to live on. But I see you are like her—the world is not real to you, either. Isn’t there something in Shakespeare about this?”

  “Shakespeare?” Clement asked.

  “You tell me everything is in Shakespeare. Tell me how a hopeless beautiful girl’s supposed to marry a poet who hasn’t got a job. My God, you are regular children!” And she laughed, shaking her head helplessly. Clement and Lena, relieved that she was no longer judging them, joined her, delighted that she was sharing their dilemma in this crazy life.

  “But it’s not going to happen right away, Mother. I’ve got to graduate first, and then if I can get a job . . .”

  “She’ll get a job—she’s got perfect grades,” Clement said, with complete confidence.

  “What about you? Is there a job for poets? Why don’t you try to be famous? Is there a famous poet in America?”

  “Sure, there are famous American poets, but you probably wouldn’t have heard of them.”

  “That’s what you call famous, people that nobody’s ever heard of?”

  “They’re famous among other poets and people interested in poetry.”

  “Write some kind of story—then you’ll be famous. Not this poetry. Then maybe they’d make a moving picture out of your story.”

  “That’s not the kind of writing he does, Mama.”

  “I know, you don’t have to tell me that.”

  Patsy appeared behind the screen door in her bra and panties. “Ma, you seen my other bra?” She sounded persecuted.

  “Hangin’ up in the bathroom. Why don’t you look sometime instead of ‘Ma, Ma, Ma’?”

  “I did look.”

  “Well, look again with your eyes open. And when you goin’ to wash your own stuff?”

  Patsy opened the screen door and came out barefoot on the porch, her arms crossed over her big breasts in deference to Clement. A towel was wrapped like a turban over her wet hair. In the fading daylight, he saw grandeur in her powerful thighs and her broad back and deep chest. On an impulse Patsy grasped her mother’s face between her hands and kissed her. “I love you, Mama!”

  “There’s a man here and you walking around naked like that? Go inside, you crazy thing!”

  “It’s only Clement. Clement don’t mind!” She turned her back on her mother and sister and faced Clement, whose heart swelled at the sight of her outthrust breasts, barely cupped by the undersized bra. With her taunting whine of a laugh, she asked, “You mind me, Clement?”

  “No, I don’t mind.”

  Mrs. Vanetzki leaned forward and smacked her daughter’s ass hard with the flat of her hand and then laughed.

  “Ow! You hurt me!” Patsy ran into the house, gripping her buttock.

  It was almost dark now. A freight train clanked along in the near distance. Lena lit a cigarette and leaned back into the glider cushion.

  “He’s going to write a play for the stage, Ma.”

  “Him?”

  “He can do it.”

  “That’s good,” Mrs. Vanetzki said, as if it were a joke. Before her black mood of disbelief, everyone fell silent.

  Later, they went for a walk. It was a neighborhood of bungalows and four-story wooden apartment houses, workers’ homes.

  “She’s right, I guess,” Clement said, hoping Lena would contradict him.

  “About getting married?”

  “It’d be silly for us.”

  “Probably,” she agreed, relieved. A decision decisively put off was as comforting as one that had been made, and she grasped his hand, lifted by this concretizing of the indefinite.

  • • •

  He could not get up the courage to place the ad. He was beginning to wonder if it might be thought perverse. But it gradually loomed like a duty to himself. One day, he picked up a copy of the Village Voice and stood on the corner of Prince and Broadway perusing the personal columns: page after page of randy invitations, pleas for a companion, offers of psychic discovery and physical improvement—like an ice field, he thought, with human voices calling for rescue from deep crevasses. Dante. He took the paper home to his barren desk, trying to think of some strategy, and finally decided on a direct approach: “Large woman wanted for harmless experiment, age immaterial but skin must be firm. Photos.”

  After five false starts—immensely blubbery nude women photographed from either end—he knew the moment he saw the photo that Carol Mundt was perfect: head thrown back as if in a laughing fit. When she appeared at his door—in her yellow miniskirt and white beret and black blouse, six inches taller than he, and touching in a corny way with that shy, brave grin—he wanted to throw his arms around her, instantly certain that she was going to validate his concept. At last he had done something about his emptiness.

  Snuggling into his armchair, she made a desultory attempt to draw down her skirt while trying to look skeptically game, as if they were strange
rs at a bar. She jingled the heavy bracelets and chains around her neck, and neighed—horse laughter, irritating his sensitive hearing. In fact, there was something virginal about her that she might be working to cover up, maybe extra-virginal, like the best olive oil, a line he resolved to remember to use sometime. “So what’s this about? Or am I wide enough?” she asked.

  “It’s very simple. I’m a novelist.”

  “Ah-huh.” She nodded doubtfully.

  He took down one of his books from the shelf and handed it to her. She glanced at his photo on the dust jacket, and her suspicions collapsed. “Well, now, say . . .”

  “You will have to be naked, of course.”

  “Ah-huh.” She seemed excited, as if steeling herself for the challenge.

  He pressed on. “And I want to be able to write anywhere on you, because, you see, the story I have in mind will need all your space. Although I could be overestimating. I’m not sure yet, but it might be the first chapter of a novel.” Then he explained about his block and his hope that writing on her skin would deliver him from its grip. Her eyes widened with fascination and sympathy, and he saw that she was proud to be his confidante. “It may not work—I don’t know . . .”

  “Well, it’s worth a try, right? I mean, if you don’t try you don’t fly.”

  Vamping for time, he moved a small box of paper clips off his desk and a leather-bordered blotter, a long-ago Christmas present from Lena. How to tell her to undress? The madness of the scheme came roaring at him like a wave, threatening to fling him back into his impotence. Scrambling, he said, “Undress, please?”—something he had never actually dared say to a woman, at least not standing up. With what seemed a mere shrug and a wriggle, she was standing before him naked but for her white panties. His eye went down to them and she asked, “Panties?”

  “Well, if you don’t mind, could you? It’s kind of less—I don’t know—stimulating with them off, you know? And I want to use that area.”

  She slid out of her panties and sat on the desk. “Which way?” she asked. Clearly, she had been having compunctions and now in overcoming them had been left in uncertainty, a mental state he practically owned. And so their familiarity deepened.

  “On your stomach first. Would you like a sheet?”

  “This is all right,” she said, and lowered herself onto the desktop. The broad expanse of her tanned back and global white buttocks was in violent contrast, it seemed now, to his desk’s former devastated dryness. An engraved silver urn, one of his old prizes, held a dozen felt-tipped pens, one of which he now took in hand. Something in him was quivering with fear. What was he doing? Had he finally lost his mind?

  “You okay?” she asked.

  “Yes! I’m just thinking.”

  There had been a story—it was months ago now, maybe a year—which he had begun several times. Then, suddenly and simply, it occurred to him that he had outlived his gift and he had no belief in himself any more. And now, with this waiting flesh under his hand, he had committed himself to believe again.

  “You sure you’re okay?” she repeated.

  It hadn’t been a great story, or even a very good one, but it held the image of how he had first met his wife, under a wave that had knocked them both down and sent them tumbling together toward the beach. As he got to his feet, yanking up his nearly stripped-away trunks while she staggered up as well, pulling her tank suit up over a breast that had popped out in the churning water, he saw them as fated, like Greeks rising from the ocean in some myth of drowning and being reborn.

  He was a naïve poet then, and she worshiped Emily Dickinson and burning the candle at both ends. “The sea tried to strip you,” he said. “The Minotaur.” Her eyes, he saw, were glazed, which pleased him, for he was reassured by vague people, as it soon turned out that she was. Disgorged by the sea—as he saw the scene for years afterward—they instinctively glimpsed in each other the same anguish, the same desire to escape the definite. “Death by the Definite,” he would write, a paean to the fog as creative force.

  Now, holding the black felt-tipped pen in his right hand, he lowered his left onto Carol’s shoulder. The warmth of her firm skin was a shock. Not often had his fantasy turned real, and that she was willing to do this for him, a stranger, threatened tears. The goodness of humanity. He had sensed that she had needed all her courage to respond to his ad, but something kept him from inquiring too deeply about her life. As long as she wasn’t crazy. A little weird, maybe, but who wasn’t? “Thank you, Carol.”

  “It’s okay. Take your time.”

  He felt himself beginning to swell. The way it used to happen long, long ago when he wrote. A man wrote with it, his aptly named organ, and a gallon of extra blood seemed to expand his veins. He leaned over Carol’s back, his left hand pressing down more confidently on her shoulder now, and slowly wrote: “The wave gathered itself higher and higher far out where the sand shelf dropped down into the depths as the man and the woman tried to swim against the undertow that was sweeping them, strangers to each other, out toward their fate.” Astonished, he saw with clarity fragments of days of his youth and young manhood, and, arcing over them like a rainbow, his unquestioning faith in life and its all but forgotten promise. He could smell Carol’s flesh as she responded to the pressure of his hand, a green-tinted fecund sea scent that somehow taunted him with his desiccated strength. How to describe the sheer aching he felt in his heart?

  And Lena’s face rose before him as she had looked more than twenty years before, her eyes slightly bloodshot from the salt water, her swirling blond hair plastered across her laughing face, the fullness of her young body as she stepped upward across the sand and collapsed breathlessly laughing, and himself already in love with her form and both of them somehow familiar and unwary after their shared battering. It seemed that these were the first images he’d experienced in many years, and his pen moved down Carol’s back to her buttocks and then down her left thigh and then the right, and, turning her over, it continued onto her chest and belly and then back down her thighs and onto her ankle, where, miraculously, the story, barely disguised, of his first betrayal of his wife came to its graceful end. He felt he had miraculously committed truth to this woman’s flesh. But was it a story or the beginning of a novel? Oddly, it didn’t matter, but he must show it to his editor right away.

  “I finished on your ankle!” he called, surprised by a boyishness in the tone of his voice.

  “Isn’t that great! Now what?” She sat up, hands childishly spread out in the air so as not to smudge herself.

  It struck him how strange it was that she was as ignorant of what had been written on her as a sheet of paper. “I could get you scanned, but I don’t have a scanner. Otherwise, I could copy it on my laptop, but it’ll take a while—I’m not a fast typist. I just hadn’t thought of this . . . unless I put you in a cab to my publisher,” he joked. “But I’m only kidding. He might want some cuts.”

  They solved the problem by him standing behind her reading her back aloud while she sat typing on his laptop. They burst into laughter at the procedure from time to time. For the text on her front, she thought of having a full-length mirror to read from, but it would all be reversed. So he sat down in front of her and typed while she held the machine on her lap. When he had read down to her thighs, she had to stand so he could continue—until he was on the floor reading her calves and ankles.

  Then he stood up and they looked deeply into each other’s eyes for the first time. Then, possibly because they had done something so intimate, and so unthought-of, they had no idea what to do next, and started to giggle and then collapsed from laughing, an infectious hysteria heaving their diaphragms until they had to lean their foreheads on the edge of the desk and not look at one another. Finally, he was able to say, “You’re welcome to shower, if you like.” And this for some reason rendered them screeching again, falling around with delicious helplessness.


  Gasping, they slid to the floor and their laughter subsided. They lay side by side, filled with some unexpected childish knowledge of one another. Now they were quiet, still panting, lying face-to-face on his Oriental carpet.

  “I guess I’ll go, right?” she asked.

  “How will you wash it off?” he asked, feeling an incomprehensible anxiety.

  “Take a bath, I guess.”

  “But your back . . .”

  “I know somebody who’ll wash it.”

  “Who, a man?”

  “No, a girl down the hall.”

  “But I’d rather nobody read it yet. I’m not really sure it’s ready to publish, you know? Or for somebody to read it. I mean . . .” He was lurching about, looking for some reason to fend off the curiosity of this unknown back-washing girlfriend; or perhaps it was to preserve the privacy of his creation—God knew why, but he felt her body was still too personal for any stranger to look at. He raised himself up on one elbow. Her hair had spread out over the carpet. It was almost as if they had made love. “I can’t let you out this way,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” There was a hopeful note in her voice.

  “People who know us will recognize things about my wife in it. I’m not ready for that.”

  “Why’d you write it, then?”

  “I just put it down raw and then I’d change some of it later. You can’t go this way. I’ll take a shower with you and scrub your back, okay?”

  “Okay, sure. But I didn’t intend for anybody to read it,” she said.

  “I know, but I’ll feel better if it’s gone.”

  In the small metal shower stall, she seemed so immense that he started to tire after scrubbing her for a few minutes with his back brush. Carol washed her front, but he did the backs of her thighs, calves, and ankles. And when she was clean, the water coursing down over her shoulders, he drew her to him. There was solid power in her body.

  “Feeling better now?” she asked. He went abstract before this woman, the last vestiges of his brain slipping out of his skull and down into his groin.