The Fool's Progress

  “I can walk, you don’t have to pull me.”

  “You’ll love the old store,” he says. “One huge room. Will make a great studio for your work. A fine gallery. We’ll have every collector in the country dropping in here before you know it. Myra Mishkin’s atelier, you’ll be as famous as O’Keeffe inside two years.”

  “I like Tenth Street better.” She looks back at the dogs, now pissing on the wheels of Henry’s pickup, taking territorial possession. “Red Hook is friendlier than this.”

  “But first,” he goes on, “you must see our living quarters.” They climb three steps to the porch. Avoiding the gaps in the veranda floor, he leads her to the main entrance, tries both keys, undoes the padlock, pushes at the massive pinewood door. Jammed in its off-plumb frame, the door will not budge. Henry leans his shoulder against it, shoves manfully, and the door yields, grating inward with a groan, retracing a groove in the earthen floor.

  Dark in there.

  “Well…?”

  “It’s all right, just a minute.” Henry steps aside, rips the boarding from the nearest window frame, revealing the depth of the great wall, the broken panes of glass.

  “It’s broken.”

  “We’ll fix it.”

  “Today? Sunday? How?”

  “Don’t worry. Tonight we’ll hang a blanket over it. Tomorrow…. Come on, Myra, step inside.” Proud but anxious, Henry stands at the entrance.

  Doubtfully she looks inside. “You first. I smell spiders.”

  “Not in January, honey.” But he goes in first. She follows. They halt inside the doorway. Myra looks at the room. Henry looks at Myra, his eyes shining with pleasure. And hope.

  Molecules of dust float on the shaft of sunlight slanting through the window. The light falls on a double bed in the center of the room. Henry’s bed—he made it: an inch-thick slab of plywood resting on cinder blocks, on the plywood a mattress, on the mattress two worn humble sleeping bags zipped together as one.

  “You brought the bed down here.”

  “Of course.”

  “Oh no….” She looks further. Beside the bed is an apple box standing on end, on top of the box a candle planted in the neck of a wax-coated wine bottle. (Chianti, ’51.) Inside the box are books: the Kama Sutra, the I Ching, The Prophet, 3000 Years of Hebrew Wit and Wisdom, collected poems of Emily Dickinson, Elinor Wylie, Muriel Rukeyser and Edna St. Vincent Millay, The Golden Bough, The Interpretation of Dreams, The Dream of the Red Chamber, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Journals of Delacroix, Psyche and Symbol, et cetera.

  “My old books,” she says in wonder.

  “Mine are over there.” Henry points into the shadows along the wall where stacks of apple boxes, mounted on bricks, bear the philosophy student’s basic library, from Heraclitus’s Fragments to Diogenes Laërtius to Zorba the Greek and L’Homme Révolté.

  “You surely didn’t bring everything.”

  “Look at the fireplace, honey.” He indicates the dome-shaped adobe fireplace in one corner of the room. “Look. You ever see anything so goddamn picturesque.” The fire is laid: crumpled paper for tinder, topped with kindling, pinyon and juniper logs.

  “That’s supposed to keep us warm?” She looks around. “There’s not even a stove in here? Not even a gas heater? Good God, Henry….”

  “This is New Mexico, Myra. I’ll put some kind of space heater in if we need it. Maybe we can run a stovepipe up the fireplace chimney. There’s a big potbellied stove in your studio.”

  “My studio?”

  “The store, honey. You’ll see in a minute. But first—” Smiling slyly, Henry pulls a bulging paper sack from his pocket, then a corkscrew.

  “Where’s the kitchen?”

  “The kitchen? Well, you won’t much like the kitchen. But we’ll get it fixed up.”

  “Where’s the bathroom?”

  Henry has drawn a bottle from the paper sack; he sinks the corkscrew into the cork. “And now I think a little celebration is in order. For your return. For our first night together in El Culito.”

  “Where’s the bathroom, Henry?”

  He shrugs, twisting the screw. “Outside.” He sits on the bed, pats a place for her at his side. “Come here, honey. Rest that sweet bottom on Daddy’s bed.”

  “What do you mean, outside?”

  “The wineglasses are in that box by the door. Grab us a couple.” He pops the cork, sticks one nostril then the other into the opening of the bottle, sniffing vigorously. “Not bad. Not half bad. Them Gallo boys will get the knack of it yet. The glasses are in the box, Myra.”

  “God I wish you wouldn’t do that.”

  “Do what?” He holds the Hearty Burgundy up to the light. “Good legs too.”

  “Stick your nose in the wine.”

  Henry runs a finger under the business end of his large bent hawk’s beak. “My nose is clean. Glasses, please.”

  “What you mean is there is no bathroom in this dungeon, right? This mud tomb. That’s what you mean, isn’t it, Henry? You bastard. You get me all the way out here, three thousand miles, to live in a mud icebox in the middle of a Mexican slum.”

  “They’re good people.” Tired of waiting, Henry takes a swig straight from the bottle. “They have deep rich Latino traditions.” He takes a second drink. “They understand life.”

  “Poverty, you mean. This is one of your economy moves, isn’t it.”

  “Voluntary simplicity, Myra. Many professors of philosophy but no philosophers. I want to be a philosopher, goddamnit, a fucking goddamn bona fide philosophe. There’s two ways to be rich: (1) sweat and scheme and grovel for money and never get it anyhow; or (2) live the simple life. Sit down.”

  “No.”

  “Lie down.”

  “No.”

  “Then shut up.” Henry rises from the bed, goes to the cardboard box by the door, fishes among the plates, cups, tumblers wrapped in newspaper and finds two dusty wineglasses. He wipes them out with his hip-pocket bandana, returns to the bed (there are no chairs in the room), fills both glasses, offers one to Myra. Still standing, rigid with anger, wrapped tightly in coat, skirt, stockings and her folded arms, she shakes her head. Henry drinks, empties his glass, refills it. “Please Myra. Come here. Sit down and relax.”

  “Take me back to the station.”

  “Can’t. Muffler fell off the exhaust.”

  “Fix it.”

  “I will, first thing in the morning. Honest. We’ll need some wire, tin snips…”

  “Oh God, if you’d get a job like other men—”

  He grins at her, the vulpine grin beneath the raptor’s nose, and strokes the bulging fly of his pants. “I’ve got a job for you, honey-suckle.”

  “Don’t be gross. We could have a decent car, not that junkyard truck. We could live in a real house with a real bathroom yet. A kitchen. Windows with glass. We could go to Europe.”

  “Yeah, the cold puddle of Europe. As somebody said. Lawrence? I’ve been there twice. Once was enough.” He rises again, walks wide-legged to the fireplace, takes a kitchen match from the box on the mantel and strikes it with his thumbnail. He touches the burning match to the crumpled Albuquerque Journal under the sticks. A cheery yellow flame stands up. He lights the candle, slips an arm around his wife’s waist. “It’s been a grim month, honey.” He nuzzles her delicious neck. “A month of celibate agony.”

  “I’ll bet. I know you better than that.”

  “Nothing but anguish and an aching throbbing palpitate longing deep in the heart of me.”

  “I know where your heart is.” The first tears leave snail trails down her cheeks. But on her lips appears the faint glimmer of a smile. “Palpitate?”

  “Feel for yourself.” He embraces her with both arms now, drawing her close, one hand on the back of her neck, the other on the small of her back, creeping south. He kisses her. She resists but without energy. He kisses her again and her mouth opens slightly, her eyes close, her tongue seeks his. They try to exchange tongues. That doesn’t work but they
always try. He leads her to the bed, sits her down, puts her wineglass in her hand. His woman. His first and final wife.

  “You could at least shut the door.”

  He does that, pushing and kicking it back in place, and lowers the wooden bar. A twilight darkness fills the room but the candle glows, the pinewood kindling sparks and crackles in the fireplace, the pinyon logs begin to flame. A trace of woodsmoke graces the air. The room is cold but looks warm. Sitting close beside her, forgetting his wine, he encircles her waist with one arm, permits his free hand to rest on her knee.

  “You didn’t really rent this place, Henry?”

  He grins through the gloom. “Rent? Me? On a T.A.’s wages?” His grin grows broader, revealing a mouthful of strong wholesome omnivorous teeth. “We’re the caretakers, honeypot.”

  “The what? You what?”

  He takes the wineglass from her hand and gently firmly eases her down upon the bed. Her coat falls open, the narrow skirt rucked high. He unbuttons her blouse down to and below the Star of David nestled between her ample Russian mammaries. Slavic breasts, nut-brown Semite nipples, with cute little hairs in the corolla. Hesitates—which one to kiss first? Always such a tender touching teasing dilemma. Nosing between her breasts, back and forth like a hungry child, he insinuates a hand between her knees, between her thighs, into the warm nude flesh above the stocking tops. Meanwhile slipping the panties down to her shins.

  The fire snaps and pops in its smoking den; a fragment of brick falls down the flue, crashing into the fire. A chunk of burning wood rolls onto the adobe hearth. They look at it, then at each other. Henry smiles down at his woman, his wife, an easy friendly smile, but the gleam in his eyes reflects the urgency of the fire. That yearning burning every-which-way-turning, all-consuming need.

  She unbuttons his jeans. “Why don’t you ever wear any underwear?”

  “Forgot….” Grateful as a dog, he drags his slavering tongue down from her lips to the base of her throat, through the deep channel between her breasts, down to the nicely rounded stomach, fruitful as a sheaf of wheat.

  “Forgot? Forgot where you left your underwear? I’ll bet. I’ll bet you forgot.” Fingers tangled in his tumbled hair, she clutches his head to her groin. “Keep going,” she orders.

  He whines in delirium, one eager hound dog you bet your life, and sinks chin-first through the musky thicket of her pubic curls, down like a diver to the little sea-salt slot below and finds her key, kleitoris to a woman’s heartland, Kyrie eleison! His mind’s screen whirls with visions: a girl’s rose-pink lace-trimmed panties flying like a pennant from the aerial of his pickup truck; wind in the willows; D’Indy’s Symphony on a French Mountain Air; cross-hatched ripples in a rippling brook; a rose with dewy petals; his nostrils deep in the fine bouquet of a good rare rosé…

  She utters her little modulated scream, Kyrie! oh Lord have mercy, like the cry of a baby redtail at morning. He lunges up and forward, pinning her knees to her armpits, and rams his bolt into the snug hot clasp of the firing chamber, all the way for Harry and St. George. Takes a bead on the left ovary. Hesitates. Turns to the right. Hesitates again. Impaled, impatient now, she rakes his spine with sharp fingernails and squeezes once, twice, three times, with everything she’s got—and trips Henry’s trigger.

  He comes like a smoking load of rocks tumbling under the tailgate of a forty-ton dump truck, and so forth.

  Closing her eyes, fading into sleep, she says, “So there really is no bathroom in this house?”

  “Out back,” he says, “like I told you. A clean airy old one-holer near the well.”

  “How do we bathe?”

  “We’ll find a big washtub, heat water on the kitchen stove, clean up like us country folk always done, steeped in tradition.”

  “Oh God….” She opens her heavy blue eyelids one last time, murmurs, “Who’s that looking in the window?”

  “You’ll love it here.”

  “You think so?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t think so. Please, Henry, there’s someone at the window.”

  Henry gets off the bed, pulls on his jeans, removes a blanket from the trunk by the bed and goes to the window. The two little boys look in with round brown solemn mestizo faces. “You wanna buy some chili pepper, meester?” says the older boy.

  Henry hangs the blanket to spikes in the lintel of the window and goes back to bed. The candle flickers, the fire hums nicely in its fireplace flue, sucking the warm air out of the room, drawing it through ceiling and loft and sheet-metal roof to the winter evening of El Culito de San Pedro Mártir, Nuevo Mexico, USA.

  Myra is asleep. He eases off her coat, blouse and stockings but leaves the skirt where it is, bunched in a roll around her waist. On second thought he lowers the hem to a modest point not far below the junction of her thighs.

  Henry, like many sexual maniacs, has a fetish for skirts. The word itself—skirt!—excites him instantly. There’s something about that airy garment, he feels, that delectable ambiguity of concealment and accessibility that makes it, of all feminine accessories, the most maddening device for torturing men ever invented.

  He gazes with fond pleasure on his sleeping wife, notices the goose bumps on her skin and slowly, reluctantly, while the firelight flickers around them, covers her to the neck with the flannel-lined folds of the zipped-together sleeping bags. He adds more wood to the fire, takes a slug of wine from the bottle, blows out the candle and slips himself in behind Myra, hands on her haunches, cradling her warm bottom in the husbandly comfort of his lap. He closes his eyes, falls half asleep….

  Oh damn. Not again.

  “Henry,” she murmurs in her dreams.

  “Don’t you pay us no mind, sweetheart,” he mumbles in her nearest ear, “you just keep right on a-sleepin’. We’ll do all the work this time…me and ol’ Slim Jim here….”

  II

  There was considerable work to do. In the morning after breakfast (in bed) he patched up the windows, covering the broken panes with good-quality cardboard from their many boxes of household goods. Ad hoc improviso, he assured her; we’ll get a professional glazier down here as soon as I get my first paycheck. (Teaching assistant, philosophy department, he would be paid $150 a month. Plus free tuition. And the academic prestige. And other privileges pertaining, like a shared office and textbooks at discount and departmental coffee.)

  You call that a paycheck?

  It’s all we got, honey. If I get it.

  You might get a real job.

  So might you.

  I have my work to do.

  True. He had no answer for that. They inspected the cold vacancy of the general store. There was the cast-iron stove in the center of the room, its belly cracked, damper unhinged and grate broken, but still usable, as he proved at once by building a fire. The lengthy stovepipe, meandering upward through cobwebs and darkness, suspended from the roof by strands of baling wire, leaked smoke and soot at the joints but seemed to work; the iron belly glowed a cheerful cherry red.

  Myra took heart from the warmth and began dusting the many shelves, found a broom and swept the tongue-in-groove pinewood floor. She even cleaned out the meat display cases, dusty and barren except for two lengths of greenish baloney and a half loaf of longhorn cheese covered with a blue velvet mold. No other merchandise remained except a few pouches of Bill Durham tobacco under glass near the 1898 cash register—a functioning antique—and two used horse collars pegged high on the wall.

  Horses wear collars? she said.

  They used to. You know, Victorian dandyism. Like women in corsets.

  You’d never get me in one of those, buster.

  You’d prefer it if you were pulling a plow. You’re not throwing out that perfectly good horsecock? Not that cheese?

  I mean a corset, wisenheimer. You mean this? This garbage is a century old.

  That’s food, Myra. Kosher, man. Scrape off the mold, for godsake, we’ll eat it.

  She threw it out. You’ll be s
orry. I’d rather starve. We might need it. You might—I’ll be gone. She threw the relics, wrapped daintily in the Albuquerque Daily Tribune (a fitting envelope) onto the dump behind the store where even the village dogs disdained to touch it. Even the flies were not much interested—and these were El Culito flies. Chicano flies.

  They set up her easel, set out her jars of brushes, her palette and palette knives, her fifty-five squeezed and mangled tubes of Grumbacher oils—those vivid pigments with the fervid names: cadmium red, madder orange, cobalt blue, raw umber, burnt sienna, scarlet vermillion…

  There’s no electricity in here, I suppose.

  Power’s off but the wiring is here somewhere. I’ll sneak an extension cord across the plaza tonight. We’ll tap into St. Peter Mártir.

  But those refrigerators…?

  They run on gas. Propane, butane. There’s a tank out back. I’ll have it filled one of these days.

  One of these days.

  One of these days. Soon as I get paid or you sell a painting.

  Eager to be of service, flush with good intentions, Henry helped her stretch and size a half dozen canvases though he secretly loathed the chore. He unpacked her splotched Pollockian-spattered smock—she was of course an action painter—found her a chair to relax in between attacks on the canvas and set a coffeepot on the stove.

  The coffee burbled. The good aromatic smell rode the currents of the air. He found her cup, her special coffee cup. Life took on a plausible tone once again, even for Myra. He loved to see the sparkle return to her eyes, the rose to her cheeks. He admired the authority and severity of her stance before the easel. Attention: Artist at Work: DANGER. If only she could draw a picture, he thought, keeping the furtive, traitorous idea deep inside his mind. If only she could sketch a reasonable likeness of a cow, say, if only a sort of Buffet or Dubuffet parody of a cow, or delineate in recognizable terms the structure of the quaint sun-silvered shithouse in the backyard. By the well.