Silently, day by day, he worked like a hermit drawing with his finger on a cave wall. Then, by night, he brought his head to the cave and spoke a wordless whisper. She pressed her forest lips to his in silent answer and they kissed softly. All night, hour after hour, he kissed her there, while she squirmed, kicking her legs, beating her hands upon the mattress. For a month she writhed, groaning, in and out of delightful anguish.
From the devil he had learned to take in his lips the tiny turned-out root that hung from the mouth of her sacred cave. Known to no one, guarded and carefully hidden by her through all her years, it was now in the man’s lips and he was humming on it. The tune was crazy, mad bees swarmed through her, but each time, just as she felt herself about to turn into sweetest honey, he stopped, leaving her hovering, dying, frantic.
They did not go out any longer. When he tried to lift his head away to bring food, she held him by the ears. The food grew cold and she grew hotter, running her fingers through his curly hair.
By day she followed him around the house, served him on her knees, washed his body, made his bed. He had enslaved her with his tongue. Her will was gone, sucked out in the night. Standing by the kitchen doorway, she moved aside to let him pass. His sleeping gown was loose and some devil played it open and she saw the outline of his manhood. He brushed past her and the hot organ touched her thigh.
Later in the day, as she bent over to pick up his slippers, he pressed it against her backside. Day after day then, she encountered it, and in her dreams she saw it standing on the throne inside the altar, shining, one-eyed, on fire.
Unable to resist any longer, she touched it, thinking he was asleep. He was not. He opened his eyes, fully awake.
“Please,” she said. It was the twelfth month and she stretched out on the bed and spread her legs like a courtesan. Her forest stream was flowing, she was made of liquid, her body was undone, the veils of her passion unknotted.
“Please,” she said, taking his member in her hand. He rose and knelt between her legs. Then he braced himself over her and slowly, like a man falling in a dream, lowered himself.
The night fell upon her. His thighs rested on hers and against her altar she felt the hot hard pressing, not of a fist or a finger, but of a finer thing, a more distinguished tool, of shape divine, like the shining thing in her dreams, and she longed to take it into herself. She pressed her forest crack against the fleshy head, feeling its wet eyedrop. She nibbled with her clumsy forest lips, dumbly trying to swallow the burning Godhead.
Each night for a week it played at her melting doorway, and just when she thought she could stand its presence, it entered the buttery folds and she gasped with amazement for she could not stand it, so painful and terrible was it, at last. She gave her hips just the slightest move, to appreciate her agony better.
“Don’t move,” he said in a dark voice beside her ear, and she didn’t.
They lay that way each night for a week, like trees fallen together in a storm. Her legs entangled his, locking at the ankles, and her tiny cave-root was engaged.
Pressing deeper each night, he soon reached the tiny red curtain across her virgin altar. He pressed harder, but the way was small, the pressure unbearable. The space is too tight, she thought, weeping. I can never fit this thing into me, it is unendurable, it . . . seems to be going in a little farther.
No longer a virgin, she howled, for the jewel of the moon was red with blood. The veil is burning, the veil is gone. God’s body slipped slowly into her.
Wheels of flame revolved in her brain and in the forest cave the Godhead reigned, solemn, still, supreme, and she felt the beat of his burning heart-shape.
All night they lay that way, he did not allow her to move, but surreptitiously she managed to, flexing the tiny muscles of her secret mouth. Each time she did lights appeared to her and her warm tears flowed. The dreams of mating danced round her, encircling her, and she was their center and her hair was entwined with his. There was a beat, it is slow, this coming of beauty, and their locked bodies brought it nearer, so that by dawn it had almost arrived.
The need for nourishment finally overtook them and that afternoon he withdrew the Godhead from her and her cave closed shut. This is reality, she thought, stumbling naked toward the kitchen. She fried them lunch, a festival of grains, and naked they ate, lightly.
At sundown she lay down again and parted her legs. We are on the mountain of pleasure. It goes into me again. I am reassured of its constancy. I am . . . quite full, dearest, come closer.
When it was fully lodged in her, she spread her legs into a wide V, and raising them into the air, kicked them about, laughing madly, with elephants dancing, serpents too, and she walked in her brain, room by room, through waking dreams, down the road of joy, tossing, turning, coming closer, to the mysterious presence. Panting, sweating, she held his buttocks, tried to make him move, to take them closer.
Not until the thirteenth month did he move, but that movement was definitive, marking a farther outpost of bliss. To feel his tool run in and out of me, that is the deep truth. Could there be more? She suspected another door.
Each night he stroked her once, so slowly, the entire night was needed for the length of his thousand-armed shaft to move in and out. At times she thought it was not moving at all, but it was, and in the extremities of slowness she saw concealed worlds.
Time changed; in a single second she saw great lengths of his organ. Breathless, afire, stupefied, she too learned to move slowly. Here the moment opens. In it are contained like tiny seeds a million more divisions. And she grew smaller.
It was the end of the thirteenth month. She loved him but wanted to reach their plateau, the resting spot. I am so hot. He is boiling me. Still they went more slowly. She fell through enormous canyons of time, down the deep pocket of pleasure, swooning ever more slowly into the depths of delight. She heard dragons roaring, such a slow grinding noise, such a slow turning.
They ate only liquids, some ethereal force seeming to sustain them now, for they lost no weight, but grew light as lamps. His countenance became magical. In his face she saw blue God-masks, jewels, crowns. The sound, the sound of their divine grinding surrounded them. No longer human, they lived outside of time.
The beautiful presence came, as he touched her in the womb, and like spring burst forth. I am creation. From her came the universe, that was the roar. From her came worlds, she was their door. Spread across the galaxies, she moved her body slowly, coming everywhere, at once, very wise.
In the beat of moons, not seconds, he stroked her, so say the Scriptures.
Postcard Found in a Trunk
“Tha’s the jail,” said the cab driver as we entered San Francisco. “You don’ wanta spend any time there.”
The cab moved on through the Tenderloin section, where something other than tenderness, but certainly involving loins, was for sale. The driver took us to the wrong hotel, then backed up around the corner and dropped us off. I collapsed in our room, but my companion, the lovely Monica, wanted to go out, at once.
Somnambulistically, I followed her, back to the elevator and out into Chinatown. It was the New Year and I stepped on a firecracker, which blew a hole in the sole of my shoe, stimulating acupressure points 5 through 42.
“You can buy a pair of Tai Chi slippers,” said Monica.
We started up one of those ominous hills, famous in story and song for giving you knotted balls in your calf. In Tai Chi slippers it was all the worse, but we reached the top and there was the town below, struck by the late afternoon sun, firecrackers resounding in its canyons.
Had Lao Tzu felt this way as he went through the Pass at Chou?
The hilltop had many gardens, exotic foliage neatly trimmed. Turning, I saw a street sign marked Vallejo. “I know a guy who lives on this street,” I said, and we followed numbers, as the sun went down. We were now able to look into windows, observing the intimate life-style of San Franciscans.
“Look at that chandelier,” said M
onica.
And paper lanterns, half-hidden behind ornate screens. We got to my friend’s house, but he’d moved.
Then it was dark and Tiffany lamps provided the warm colors of astral worlds, with an antique motorcycle in a saloon window, shining. There were elegant figures in the lamplight, glasses in hand, smiling, chatting about life in the local dream. We had dropped from the sky, Monica and I, and caused the angles of the night to change, just slightly; the saloon shifted, disturbed by our gaze, and rotated out of sight. After all, there were already too many tourists in this town.
“Lemme look in a phone book, I’ll find his new address.”
Monica had a map torn from the hotel magazine, the streets drawn comically, the kind of map that destroys equilibrium, and we followed it.
We found my friend’s house and rang the buzzer. Turning the first landing, I saw his door open. He didn’t recognize me until I called his name. It had been fifteen years.
“Come on in,” he said. He was the editor of a literary magazine. “I can’t work for anybody anymore,” he said.
“I know how you feel.”
“So I started the magazine and I’m living on food stamps.”
I’d been dreaming about him, off and on, for fifteen years, as someone I’d probably never see again, and here we were visiting; he said he had to go to the movies. Could we meet him at the magazine offices in the morning?
Monica and I, back in the dark street: “He looks good.”
“His hair has gone gray.”
We climbed the high hills, and now the lights of the city were twinkling below.
* * *
“Come on in,” he said in the morning. “Take a chair.”
“This office is alright.”
“The rent’s high, but I try not to pay it.”
“I saw a nice café on the corner.”
“The landlord owns it, we can’t go there.”
The shelves were filled with heavy volumes; the walls carried posters of bygone literary periods. “I’m borrowed up to the eyeballs,” he said.
Beside a picture of Joyce was an enlarged photostat of a government check for $12,000 given to the magazine. He saw my gaze and said, “I spent it in an afternoon.”
In the other room were three young people, working for the magazine, for nothing, he said, to gain experience in publishing. “Of course, since there are no publishing houses out here, it won’t do them any good.”
We departed, going back into the bright day. He led us up a little alleyway. “That’s where Lennie Bruce fell out of the window and broke both legs.”
I felt the comedian’s vertigo, and other pieces of legend, floating in the sunshine. The ferns in a doorway had long memories, and what of the bricks? Monica said something about shanghaied sailors. The white walls radiated more than sunlight back at us.
“That’s my landlord’s place, we cross here.”
We passed the Café Trieste, where Jack Kerouac had hung out, in a time that had once been the only time there was; if you like Chinese puzzles, the twisted nail, contemplate that elusive moment in which travelers celebrated the new era in American letters.
I took a footstep and felt it sinking, endlessly, in San Francisco.
“The values out here—” said our friend. “Some people I know gave their child a pet chicken to teach him responsibility.”
“That is odd.”
“I tried to borrow money from them.”
We walked to the top of a great hill. “And there’s Columbus.” He pointed to a statue overlooking the bay. In one hand of the statue was a chiseled piece of paper, which, our guide said, contained an order for one pizza to go, with anchovies. I gazed with Columbus across the water.
A mild breeze moved on the heights, Monica’s hair blown by it, and I tried to live in the moment, though there is always the tendency to say to oneself that the experience will only become meaningful later on, in retrospect.
“There was an interesting robbery recently,” said our friend. “A Latino stuck up a grocery store with a banana.”
We descended, into Chinatown again, and I bought a size 57 worker’s cap from Peking.
“I’d like to go to Williams-Sonoma,” said Monica.
“What’s that?” asked our friend.
“A gourmet cookery shop.”
He shook our hands goodbye, and we watched him walk off, into the memory from which he’d come; I knew that we were being filed in the same way in his mind, beside debts, book reviews, and a man armed with a banana. He grew smaller, turned a corner, vanished without a ripple. Do either of us exist, I wondered? If Kerouac and Bruce are gone, along with ancient Chinese emperors? Only the city lives on, a shocking thought, each of us particles of its dream, bright particles, fading particles, dead suns of San Francisco.
We were heading toward Williams-Sonoma, entering into a cheerful banquet, with pretty tablecloths and a wicker picnic basket for the boot of your Bentley. I sat down, exhausted, while Monica shopped. My size 57 hat from Peking was giving me a headache. I closed my eyes, and historic meals of the city came before my eyes, attended by women in velvet gowns and men in silk hats; they were whirled away on a great gleaming disc, and became dolls in miniature, moving stiffly, then ceasing to move, then gone.
“You’re angry at me for taking so long,” said Monica.
“Hell, no,” I said, getting up. We had supper and night fell and then we were whirling on the disc, little old figures imagined by some future traveler with a backward glance. I woke the next morning, with Monica opening the distortion map on the bed. “The cable car will take us all the way to the waterfront.”
We rode the bizarre vehicle in the postcard, and suddenly we were staring across the water at Alcatraz. The tour boat was loading to go; for a couple of dollars you can visit. I put a quarter in a telescope, as close as I cared to get, but it wouldn’t focus.
“On this very spot . . .” said a taped voice.
The ghosts of old criminals could not help shaking their heads at people paying for the ride.
“I’m going to visit the Chocolate Factory,” said Monica.
“I’ll be on the pier.” I boarded a Scottish merchant, built in 1886. The smells in the gallery remained, of biscuits and pies and various stews absorbed into the woodwork. A skeleton crew remains too, you can see them gliding silently past the lanterns.
Monica found me in the hold, staring at a shaft of sunlight, down which numerous spirits could easily come, up which others could go.
“Look in there,” I said, pointing to a shadowy chamber, where a seaman with a lamp once guided the anchor chain into place.
The world is filled with ghosts, tour guides for the traveler. Inside the chain locker is a ladder, aslant in the streaming light, the wood dark, suggestive . . .
Monica dragged us on to other things; but you have already gotten the point, if there is one—what you see isn’t so important, and you must not ignore the dead. We rode the number 30 bus, and the 28, a long ways, all around the edges of the city. I saved the wrinkled transfer, for like every thoughtful dog I know there is a secret path through these parks and pavilions. Ask the driver for any stop at all, the ghostly guides are with you; the wheels of the bus are the wheels of chance.
Spinning, spinning . . .
In that saloon, beneath those bright lamps, a gentleman raises his glass.
A young woman climbs a flight of stairs toward a Victorian house.
Any of these sights will be the center of the world.
The stones have remarked you. The ferns have remembered. A comedian is falling backward from his window.
Sun, Moon, and Storm
“Antonio, please open the shutters,” said the whore.
Antonio Allegri da Correggio sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the floor. His body ached from fever, and he had no strength. He had slept again in his clothes, too weary to remove them. It had come again to gnaw at him, the rat of Mantua.
The whore rose up
on one elbow and stroked the back of his neck. “Are you feeling alright?”
He walked to the window and opened the shutters. The light was pale rose cast on high clouds. In the distance was the Cathedral of Parma, and within its high graceful tower was the vision, waiting to devour what was left of him.
The prostitute bathed and then slowly toweled herself dry, for she knew he liked to study her that way, with the towel draped around her. The room was hers, the walls covered with sketches he’d made of her, the woman in them a creature created by a man’s hand, and it troubled her, and pleased her, and finally left her with an inexplicable feeling concerning this Antonio Allegri. It was not a simple situation, having one’s soul mirrored like that, the part a prostitute never gives. But in the end, she supposed, to someone somewhere, one finally surrenders all, and he was at least a gentleman. “I’m in love with you,” she said, making a joke of it, and throwing the towel at him.
“That’s because I stay with you and can’t pay you anything.” He too tried to joke, but the five hundred gold ducats he’d received from the Canon were gone now and so were the last three years he’d spent working on the Canon’s cathedral, and it was no joke. “I must finish it,” he said, staring out the window at the dome of the cathedral, while she dressed. “Once, you know, when I first discovered my talent, I thought I would be rich.”
“Once,” said the whore, putting on her cloak and joining him at the door, “before I discovered my talent, I thought I would live in a villa with a husband and children and flowers.”
They descended to the street, where the heat of summer radiated off the hard-packed earth. His footsteps were slow, and his tall body bent at the shoulders, huddled inside ragged clothes.
“It was in Mantua,” he said. They turned into a shady courtyard, where massive vines were entwined around an old tree. A group of young people had gathered there, singing to the viol and guitars. “I was ruined by the plague.” He stopped, to listen to the music.