Women: A Novel

  “I’m sure they’ll be leaving soon,” she said.

  The others were talking. The conversation drifted and I stopped listening. Sara looked good to me. When she spoke it was with wit and incisiveness. She had a good mind. Pearl and Jack left first. Then Jean John. Then Pat the poet. Ron sat on one side of Sara and I sat on the other. Just the 3 of us. Ron poured himself a glass of wine. I couldn’t blame him, he was her roommate. I had no hope of outwaiting him. He was already there. I poured Sara a wine and then one for myself. After I finished drinking it I said to Sara and Ron, “Well, I guess I’ll be going.”

  “Oh no,” said Sara, “not so soon. I haven’t had a chance to talk to you. I’d like to talk to you.”

  She looked at Ron. “You understand, don’t you, Ron?”

  “Sure.”

  He got up and walked to the back of the house. “Hey,” I said, “I don’t want to start any shit.”

  “What shit?”

  “Between you and your roommate.”

  “Oh, there’s nothing between us. No sex, nothing. He rents the room in the back of the house.”

  “Oh.”

  I heard the sound of a guitar. Then loud singing. “That’s Ron,” said Sara.

  He just bellowed and called the hogs. His voice was so bad that no comment was needed.

  Ron sang on for an hour. Sara and I drank some more wine. She lit some candles. “Here, have a beedie.”

  I tried one. A beedie is a small brown cigarette from India. It had a good tart taste. I turned to Sara and we had our first kiss. She kissed well. The evening was looking up.

  The screen door swung open and a young man walked into the room.

  “Barry,” said Sara, “I’m not having any more visitors.”

  The screen door banged and Barry was gone. I foresaw future problems: as a recluse I couldn’t bear traffic. It had nothing to do with jealousy, I simply disliked people, crowds, anywhere, except at my readings. People diminished me, they sucked me dry.

  “Humanity, you never had it from the beginning.” That was my motto.

  Sara and I kissed again. We both had drunk too much. Sara opened another bottle. She held her wine well. I have no idea what we talked about. The best thing about Sara was that she made very few references to my writing. When the last bottle was empty I told Sara that I was too drunk to drive home.

  “Oh, you can sleep in my bed, but no sex.”

  “Why?”

  “One doesn’t have sex without marriage.”

  “One doesn’t?”

  “Drayer Baba doesn’t believe in it.”

  “Sometimes God can be mistaken.”

  “Never.”

  “All right, let’s go to bed.”

  We kissed in the dark. I was a kiss freak anyway, and Sara was one of the best kissers I had ever met. I’d have to go all the way back to Lydia to find anyone comparable. Yet each woman was different, each kissed in her own way. Lydia was probably kissing some son of a bitch right now, or worse, kissing his parts. Katherine was asleep in Austin.

  Sara had my cock in her hand, petting it, rubbing it. Then she pressed it against her cunt. She rubbed it up and down, up and down against her cunt. She was obeying her God, Drayer Baba. I didn’t play with her cunt because I felt that would offend Drayer. We just kissed and she kept rubbing my cock against her cunt, or maybe against the clit, I didn’t know. I waited for her to put my cock in her cunt. But she just kept rubbing. The hairs began to burn my cock. I pulled away.

  “Good night, baby,” I said. And then I turned, rolled over and put my back up against her. Drayer Baby, I thought, you’ve got one helluva believer in this bed.

  In the morning we began the rubbing bit again with the same end result. I decided, to hell with it, I don’t need this kind of non-action.

  “You want to take a bath?” Sara asked.

  “Sure.”

  I walked into the bathroom and let the water run. Sometime during the night I had mentioned to Sara that one of my insanities was to take 3 or 4 steaming hot baths a day. The old water therapy.

  Sara’s tub held more water than mine and the water was hotter. I was five feet, eleven and ¾ inches and yet I could stretch out in the tub. In the old days they made bathtubs for emperors, not for 5 foot bank clerks.

  I got into the tub and stretched. It was great. Then I stood up and looked at my poor raw cunt-hair-rubbed cock. Rough time, old boy, but close, I guess is better than nothing? I sat back down in the tub and stretched out again. The phone rang. There was a pause.

  Then Sara knocked.

  “Come in!”

  “Hank, it’s Debra.”

  “Debra? How’d she know I was here?”

  “She’s been calling everywhere. Should I tell her to phone back?”

  “No, tell her to wait.”

  I found a large towel and wrapped it about my waist. I walked into the other room. Sara was talking to Debra on the phone. “Oh, here he is….”

  Sara handed me the phone. “Hello, Debra?”

  “Hank, where have you been?”

  “In the bathtub.”

  “The bathtub?”

  “Yes.”

  “You just got out?”

  “Yes.”

  “What are you wearing?”

  “I have a towel around my middle.”

  “How can you keep the towel around your middle and talk on the phone?”

  “I’m doing it.”

  “Did anything happen?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “I mean, why didn’t you fuck her?”

  “Look, do you think I go around doing things like that? Do you think that’s all there is to me?”

  “Then nothing happened?”

  “Yes.”

  “What?”

  “Yes, nothing.”

  “Where are you going after you leave there?”

  “My place.”

  “Come here.”

  “What about your legal business?”

  “We’re almost caught up. Tessie can handle it.”

  “All right.”

  I hung up.

  “What are you going to do?” Sara asked. “I’m going to Debra’s. I said I’d be there in 45 minutes.”

  “But I thought we’d have lunch together. I know this Mexican place.”

  “Look, she’s concerned. How can we sit around and chat over lunch?”

  “I have my mind set on lunch with you.”

  “Hell, when do you feed your people?”

  “I open at eleven. It’s only ten now.”

  “All right, let’s go eat….”

  It was a Mexican place in a snide hippie district of Hermosa Beach. Bland, indifferent types. Death on the shore. Just phase out, breathe in, wear sandals and pretend it’s a fine world.

  While we were waiting for our order Sara reached out and dipped her finger into a bowl of hot sauce, and then sucked her finger. Then she dipped again. She bent her head over the bowl. Strands of her straight hair poked at me. She kept sticking her finger into the bowl and sucking.

  “Look,” I told her, “other people want to use that sauce. You’re making me sick! Stop it.”

  “No, they refill it each time.”

  I hoped they did refill it each time. Then the food arrived and Sara bent and attacked it like an animal, just as Lydia used to do. We finished eating and then we went out and she got into her van and drove to her health food place, and I got in my Volks and started out toward Playa del Rey. I had been given careful directions. The directions were confusing, but I followed them and had no trouble. It was almost disappointing because it seemed when stress and madness were eliminated from my daily life there wasn’t much left you could depend on.

  I drove into Debra’s yard. I saw a movement behind the blinds. She’d been watching for me. I got out of the Volks and made sure that both doors were locked since my auto insurance had expired.

  I walked up and bin
g-bonged Debra’s bell. She opened the door and seemed glad to see me. That was all right, but it was things like that which kept a writer from getting his work done.

  92

  I didn’t do much the rest of the week. The Oaktree meet was on. I went to the track 2 or 3 times, broke even. I wrote a dirty story for a sex mag, wrote 10 or 12 poems, masturbated, and phoned Sara and Debra each night. One night I phoned Cassie and a man answered. Goodbye, Cassie.

  I thought about breakups, how difficult they were, but then usually it was only after you broke up with one woman that you met another. I had to taste women in order to really know them, to get inside of them. I could invent men in my mind because I was one, but women, for me, were almost impossible to fictionalize without first knowing them. So I explored them as best I could and I found human beings inside. The writing would be forgotten. The writing would become much less than the episode itself until the episode ended. The writing was only the residue. A man didn’t have to have a woman in order to feel as real as he could feel, but it was good if he knew a few. Then when the affair went wrong he’d feel what it was like to be truly lonely and crazed, and thus know what he must face, finally, when his own end came.

  I was sentimental about many things: a woman’s shoes under the bed; one hairpin left behind on the dresser; the way they said, “I’m going to pee …;” hair ribbons; walking down the boulevard with them at 1:30 in the afternoon, just two people walking together; the long nights of drinking and smoking, talking; the arguments; thinking of suicide; eating together and feeling good; the jokes, the laughter out of nowhere; feeling miracles in the air; being in a parked car together; comparing past loves at 3 AM; being told you snore, hearing her snore; mothers, daughters, sons, cats, dogs; sometimes death and sometimes divorce, but always carrying on, always seeing it through; reading a newspaper alone in a sandwich joint and feeling nausea because she’s now married to a dentist with an I.Q. of 95; racetracks, parks, park picnics; even jails; her dull friends, your dull friends; your drinking, her dancing; your flirting, her flirting; her pills, your fucking on the side, and her doing the same; sleeping together….

  There were no judgments to be made, yet out of necessity one had to select. Beyond good and evil was all right in theory, but to go on living one had to select: some were kinder than others, some were simply more interested in you, and sometimes the outwardly beautiful and inwardly cold were necessary, just for bloody, shitty kicks, like a bloody, shitty movie. The kinder ones fucked better, really, and after you were around them a while they seemed beautiful because they were. I thought of Sara, she had that something extra. If only there was no Drayer Baba holding up that damned STOP sign.

  Then it was Sara’s birthday, November 11th, Veterans’ Day. We had met twice again, once at her place, once at mine. There had been a high sense of fun and expectancy. She was strange but individual and inventive; there had been happiness … except in bed … it was flaming … but Drayer Baba kept us apart. I was losing the battle to God.

  “Fucking is not that important,” she told me.

  I went to an exotic food place at Hollywood Boulevard and Fountain Avenue, Aunt Bessie’s. The clerks were hateful people—young black boys and young white boys of high intelligence that had turned into high snobbery. They pranced about and ignored and insulted the customers. The women who worked there were heavy, dreamy, they wore large loose blouses and hung their heads as if in some sleepy state of shame. And the customers were grey wisps who endured the insults and came back for more. The clerks didn’t lay any shit on me, so they were allowed to live another day….

  I bought Sara her birthday present, the main bit being bee secretion, which is the brains of many bees drained out of their collective domes by a needle. I had a wicker basket and in it, along with the bee secretion, were some chop sticks, sea salt, two pomegranates (organic), two apples (organic), and some sunflower seeds. The bee secretion was the main thing, and it cost plenty. Sara had talked about it quite a bit, about wanting it. But she said she couldn’t afford it.

  I drove to Sara’s. I also had several bottles of wine with me. In fact, I had polished off one of them while shaving. I seldom shaved but I shaved for Sara’s birthday, and Veterans’ night. She was a good woman. Her mind was charming and, strangely, her celibacy was understandable. I mean, the way she looked at it, it should be saved for a good man. Not that I was a good man, exactly, but her obvious class would look good sitting next to my obvious class at a cafe table in Paris after I finally became famous. She was endearing, calmly intellectual, and best of all, there was that crazy admixture of red in the gold of her hair. It was almost as if I had been looking for that color hair for decades … maybe longer.

  I stopped off at a bar on Pacific Coast Highway and had a double vodka-7. I was worried about Sara. She said sex meant marriage. And I believed she meant it. There was definitely something celibate about her. Yet I could also imagine that she got off in a lot of ways, and that I was hardly the first to have his cock rubbed raw against her cunt. My guess was that she was as confused as everybody else. Why I was agreeing to her ways was a mystery to me. I didn’t even particularly want to wear her down. I didn’t agree with her ideas but I liked her anyway. Maybe I was getting lazy. Maybe I was tired of sex. Maybe I was finally getting old. Happy birthday, Sara.

  I drove up to her house and took in my basket of health. She was in the kitchen. I sat down with the wine and the basket.

  “I’m here, Sara!”

  She came out of the kitchen. Ron was gone but she had his stereo on full blast. I had always hated stereos. When you lived in poor neighborhoods you continually heard other people’s sounds, including their fucking, but the most obnoxious thing was to be forced to listen to their music at full volume, the total vomit of it for hours. In addition they usually left their windows open, confident that you too would enjoy what they enjoyed.

  Sara had Judy Garland on. I liked Judy Garland, a little, especially her appearance at the New York Met. But suddenly she seemed very loud, screaming her sentimental horseshit.

  “For Christ’s sake, Sara, turn it down!”

  She did, but not very much. She opened one of the bottles of wine and we sat down at the table across from each other. I felt strangely irritable.

  Sara reached into the basket and found the bee secretion. She was excited. She took the lid off and tasted it. “This is so powerful,” she said. “It’s the essence…. Care for some?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “I’m making us dinner.”

  “Good. But I should take you out.”

  “I’ve already got it started.”

  “All right then.”

  “But I need some butter. I’ll have to go out and get some. Also I’m going to need cucumbers and tomatoes for the store tomorrow.”

  “I’ll get them. It’s your birthday.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to try some bee secretion?”

  “No, thanks, it’s all right.”

  “You can’t imagine how many bees it took to fill this jar.”

  “Happy birthday. I’ll get the butter and things.”

  I had another wine, got in the Volks and drove to a small grocery. I found the butter, but the tomatoes and cucumbers looked old and shriveled. I paid for the butter and drove about looking for a larger market. I found one, got some tomatoes and cucumbers then drove back. As I walked up the driveway to her place I heard it. She had the stereo on full volume again. As I walked closer and closer I began to sicken; my nerves were stretched to the breaking point, then snapped. I walked into the house with just the bag of butter in my hand; I had left the tomatoes and cucumbers in the car. I don’t know what she was playing; it was so loud that I couldn’t distinguish one sound from another.

  Sara walked out of the kitchen. “GOD DAMN YOU!” I screamed.

  “What is it?” Sara asked. “I CAN’T HEAR!”

  “What?”

  “YOU’RE PLAYING THAT FUCKING STEREO TOO LOU
D! DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND?”

  “What?”

  “I’M LEAVING!”

  “No!”

  I turned and banged out of the screen door. I walked out to the Volks and saw the bag of tomatoes and cucumbers I had forgotten. I picked them up and walked back up the driveway. We met.

  I pushed the bag at her. “Here.”

  Then I turned and walked off. “You rotten rotten rotten son-of-a-bitch!” she screamed.

  She threw the bag at me. It hit me in the middle of the back. She turned and ran off into her house. I looked at the tomatoes and cucumbers scattered on the ground in the moonlight. For a moment I thought of picking them up. Then I turned and walked away.

  93

  The reading in Vancouver went through, $500 plus air fare and lodging. The sponsor, Bart Mcintosh, was nervous about crossing the border. I was to fly to Seattle, he’d meet me there and we’d drive over the border, then after the reading I’d fly from Vancouver to L.A. I didn’t quite understand what it all meant but I said all right.

  So there I was in the air again, drinking a double vodka-7. I was in with the salesmen and businessmen. I had my small suitcase with extra shirts, underwear, stockings, 3 or 4 books of poems, plus typescripts of ten or twelve new poems. And a toothbrush and toothpaste. It was ridiculous to be going off somewhere to get paid for reading poetry. I didn’t like it and I could never get over how silly it seemed. To work like a mule until you were fifty at meaningless, low jobs, and then suddenly to be flitting about the country, a gadfly with drink in hand.

  Mcintosh was waiting at Seattle and we got in his car. It was a nice drive because neither us said too much. The reading was privately sponsored, which I preferred to university-sponsored readings. The universities were frightened; among other things, they were frightened of low-life poets, but on the other hand they were too curious to pass one up.

  There was a long wait at the border, with a hundred cars backed up. The border guards simply took their time. Now and then they pulled an old car out of line, but usually they only asked one or two questions and waved the people on. I couldn’t understand Mcintosh’s panic over the whole procedure.