“What are you saying? Your title is a cover?”
He took out his handkerchief and blew his nose. As he did so, he wagged his head up and down. That was his way of telling me yes. What a hick. He had to be from the Drug Enforcement Administration.
“Do you believe in God?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Good. I knew we could have a conversation. Let’s have one soon. Get drunk and talk.”
“All right.”
“I want to serve God,” he said. “What people don’t comprehend is that if you want to serve, you have to grow balls big enough to take on His attributes. That includes the heavy responsibility of exercising vengeance.”
“We’ll talk,” I said.
“Good.” He stood up to leave. “Do you have a clue who this guy Wardley could be?”
“I assume it’s an old lover. Some rich, uptight country squire.”
“I like your acumen. Ha, ha. Ha, ha. Say I heard that name somewhere. It’s too unusual to forget. Somebody said the name Wardley just in passing. Could it have been your wife?”
“Ask her.”
“When I see her, I will ask her.” He took out his notebook and wrote down an item. “Where,” he said, “do you think this Jessica lady is?”
“Maybe she went back to California.”
“We’re checking that now.”
He put his arm around my shoulder as if to console me for I knew not what, and we walked together through the living room to the door. Given my height, I never have to think of myself as a small man, but he was certainly larger.
Now at the door he turned and said, “I have a regards for you. It’s from my wife.”
“Do I know your wife’s name?”
“It’s Madeleine.”
“Oh,” I said. “Madeleine Falco?”
“The same.”
What is the first maxim of the streets? If you want to die with a slug in your back, fool around with a cop’s wife. What did Regency know of her past?
“Yes,” I said, “once in a while she used to take a drink in a place where I did some bartending. Many years ago. But I do remember her. What a lovely girl she was, what a fine lady.”
“Thank you,” he said. “We have two lovely children.”
“That’s a surprise,” I said. “I didn’t know … you have children.” It was a near-miss. I had been about to say, “I didn’t know Madeleine could have children.”
“Oh, yes,” he said, fishing out his wallet, “here’s a picture of us.”
I looked at Regency and at Madeleine—it was certainly my Madeleine ten years older than the last time I saw her—and with two tow-headed boys who looked a little like him and not at all like her.
“Very nice,” I said. “Tell Madeleine hello.”
“Sayonara,” said Regency, and took off.
Now I could not begin to go to the Truro woods. I could not bring myself up to such concentration all over again. At this hour, I could not. My mind was yawing like a wind in the hills. I did not know whether to think about Lonnie Pangborn, Wardley, Jessica or Madeleine. Then sorrow came down on me. I had all the sorrow of thinking of a woman I had loved, and the love was gone, and it should never have been lost.
I brooded upon Madeleine. Perhaps an hour later I went to the top floor, and in my study unlocked a file drawer. There, out of a pile of old manuscript, I found the pages I was looking for and read them again. They were written almost twelve years ago—was I twenty-seven when I did them?—and done very much in the style of the cocky young man I tried to be then, but that was all right. If you are no longer one man, only a collection of fragments, each with its own manner, the act of looking back on writing done when one was full of identity (even phony identity) can put you together for a little while, and did while I was rereading these pages. As soon, however, as I concluded, I was bathed in an old woe. For I had made the mistake of showing the manuscript to Madeleine years ago, and it helped to break us up:
The best description of a pussy I ever came across was in a short piece by John Updike called “One’s Neighbor’s Wife”:
Each hair is precious and individual, serving a distinct rôle in the array: blonde to invisibility where the thigh and abdomen join, dark to opacity where the tender labia ask protection, hearty and ruddy as a forester’s beard beneath the swell of belly, dark and sparse as the whiskers of a Machiavel where the perineum sneaks backward to the anus. My pussy alters by the time of day and according to the mesh of underpants. It has its satellites: the whimsical line of hairs that ascend to my navel and into my tan, the kisses of fur on the inside of my thighs, the lambent fuzz that ornaments the cleavage of my fundament. Amber, ebony, auburn, bay, chestnut, cinnamon, hazel, fawn, snuff, henna, bronze, platinum, peach, ash, flame, and field mouse: these are but a few of the colors my pussy is.
It is a beautiful description of a forest, and makes you ponder the mysteries of scale. Somebody once wrote that Cézanne shifted our perception of magnitude until a white towel on a table was like the blue-shadowed snows in the ravines of a mountain, and the treatment of a patch of skin became a desert valley. An interesting idea. I always saw more in Cézanne after that, just as I realized I had never looked at a pussy properly until I read Updike. For that alone, John would be one of my favorite writers.
They say Updike used to be a painter, and you can see it in his style. Nobody studies surfaces so closely as he does, and he uses adjectives with more discrimination than anybody who’s writing in the English language today. Hemingway said not to use them, and Hemingway was right. The adjective is the author’s opinion of what’s going on, no more. If I write, “A strong man came into the room,” that only means he is strong in relation to me. Unless I’ve established myself for the reader, I might be the only fellow in the bar who is impressed by the guy who just came in. It is better to say: “A man entered. He was holding a walking stick, and for some reason, he now broke it in two like a twig.” Of course, this takes more time to narrate. So adjectives bring on quick tell-you-how-to-live writing. Advertising thrives on it. “A superefficient, silent, sensuous five-speed shift.” Put twenty adjectives before the noun and no one will know you are describing a turd. The adjectives are the cruise.
Therefore, let me underline it. Updike is one of the few writers who can enhance his work with adjectives rather than abuse it. He has a rare talent. Yet he irks me. Even his description of a pussy. It could as easily be a tree. (The velveteen of moss in the ingathered crotch of my limbs, the investiture of algae on the terraces of my bark, etc.) Just once I would like to have him guide me through the inside of a cunt.
Right now, for instance, my mind is pondering the difference between Updike’s description of a pussy and a real cunt, that is, the one I am thinking of at this instant. It belongs to Madeleine Falco, and since she is sitting next to me, I need only reach over with my right hand to feel the objective correlative on my fingertips. Still, I would rather remain in the simpler state of a writer in reverie. Being nothing if not competitive—as which unheralded writer is not?—I am trying to put the manifest of her cunt into well-chosen words, and so implant a small standard of prose on the great beachhead of literature. Therefore, I will not dwell on her pussy hair. It is black, so black against the cemetery-white of her skin that my bowels and balls resound against one another like cymbals whenever her bush is displayed. But then, she loves to display it. She has a little pink mouth within the larger one (like Governor Nelson Rockefeller) and it is a true flower that pants in the dew of her heats. When aroused, however, Madeleine’s cunt seems to grow right out of her buttocks, and this little mouth always remains pink no matter how wide she spreads her thighs, whereas the outer meat of her vagina—the larger mouth—reveals a sullen grease-works, and the perineum (which we boys out on Long Island used to call the Taint—’tain’t vagina, ’tain’t anus, ho, ho) is a gleaming plantation. You don’t know whether to eat her, devour her, revere her or root about. I used to whisper, “Don’t mov
e, don’t move, I’ll kill you, I’m about to come.” How her cooze would pullulate in reply.
Whenever I was inside of Madeleine, the other girl she usually was, the dear brunette on my arm that I walked with down the street, ceased to exist. Her belly and her womb became all of her—all that fatty, saponaceous, sebaceous, unctional, unguinous quiver of lubricious worldly delights. Let me not claim I can do without adjectives when it comes to meditating on cunt. Fucking her, I would be afloat with all the belly dancers and dark-haired harlots of the world—their lust, their greed, their purchase on the swarthier ambitions of the cosmos, all now in me. God knows through which designs of karma was my come pulled by her belly. Her cunt was more real to me than her face.
After she read this much, Madeleine said, “How could you write such things about me?” and wept in a way I could not bear.
“It’s only writing,” I said. “It’s not what I feel about you. I’m not a good enough writer to say what I really feel.” I hated her, however, for making me disavow my writing. But then, we were in trouble in any event. She read those pages just a week before we decided to get into a wife-swapping sort of half-orgy (I know no quicker way to describe it) that I talked Madeleine into attending with me, and the use of the word “attend” must come from my Exeter French, since we had to drive all the way from New York to North Carolina to get there, and didn’t know the people. All we had was an ad in Screw magazine with a post office box for an address:
Young but mature white couple, male a gynecologist, are seeking fun weekend. No water sports, golden showers, S&M or B&D. Send photograph and SASE. You must be married.
I answered the letter without telling Madeleine, and sent a photo of us nicely dressed and standing on the street. Their Polaroid came back. They were in bathing suits. The man was tall and half bald with a long sad nose, knobby knees, a small potbelly and a sallow look.
Madeleine said, on looking at the picture, “He must have the longest prick in Christendom.”
“Why do you say that?”
“There’s no other explanation for him.”
The wife was young and wearing a flouncy bathing suit. She looked saucy. Something about her spoke to me right out of the photograph. On an impulse I said, “Let’s visit.”
Madeleine nodded. She had large dark eyes that were luminous and full of tragic knowledge—her family were not without rank in the Mafia and had put a few curses on her head when she left home (which was Queens) for Manhattan. She wore those wounds of departure like a velvet cloak. She had gravity, and to counterbalance it, I would go through great pains to make her laugh, even trying to walk on my hands around our furnished room. A moment of merriment from her gave a bouquet to my mood that could last for hours. That was why I had fallen in love. She had a tender marrow within her depths that I found with no other woman.
But we were too close. She began to pall on me. How harsh and Irish I must have come to seem. After we’d been together for two years, we were in the season when one marries or one parts. We talked about dating other people. I cheated on her from time to time and she had all the night for choosing to do the same to me since I worked the bar four times a week from five to five, and much love can be made in twelve hours.
Therefore, when she nodded her agreement to the trip down South, I needed no more confirmation to proceed. One of her gifts was to be able to convey it all by one wry humorous dip of the head. “Now tell me the bad news,” she said.
So we went to North Carolina. We assured each other that we would probably not like the other couple, and get out fast. Then we could enjoy an extra night or two on the drive back. “We’ll stop in Chincoteague,” I said to her, “we’ll try to sneak up on a Chincoteague pony,” and explained how they were the last wild horses, just about, east of the Mississippi.
“Chincoteague,” she said. “I would like that.” She had a rich husky voice, whose timbre would resonate in my chest, and she let me rock on every syllable in Chincoteague. Thereby, we laid salve on each other against the incision we had just made on the nature of our future flesh. And went.
That was where I first encountered Patty Lareine. (It was long before she met Wardley.) She turned out to be the wife of Big Stoop (as she called him) and Big Stoop turned out to be (1) possessor of a truly long dick and (2) a liar, for he was not the most successful gynecologist in the county, but a chiropractor. He was also a prodigious lover of pussy. Could you conceive of how deep he dived into Madeleine’s treasure chest?
In the adjoining bedroom (for he was hygienic about these wife-swapping sports—no threesies or foursies!) Patty Erleen—who had not yet renamed herself Patty Lareine—and I began our own weekend. I may yet bring myself to describe it, but for now, suffice it to say that I thought of her on the ride back to New York, and Madeleine and I never stopped off in Chincoteague. Nor was I smoking in those days. It was my first attempt to kick the addiction. So I had gone through some quick rises and free falls of the ego, passing through two days and a night of mate-switching (Big Stoop never knew that Madeleine and I were not married, although, truth to tell, for the damage it did, we were) and never a cigarette for the moments I felt impaled—that is the word for listening to my woman give voice to pleasure (and how Madeleine could moan) while another man was in her. No male ego is the same after hearing the same ongoing female cry of pleasure given to a strange new (very long) dick. “It is better to be a masochist than a faggot,” I said to myself more than once during those two days, but then I spent hours that had their own glory for me, since the chiropractor’s wife, formerly his nurse, this Patty Erleen, had a body as pneumatic as a nineteen-year-old model in Playboy standing unbelievably before you in life, and we had one hot high school push-on romance, that is, I kept pushing her to put her mouth into places she swore she had never put it before, which kept us in each other’s pits, we had such hooks for each other, so mean and intimate and nasty and super-pleasureful (as Californians say) for being nasty. God, Patty Erleen was nice, you could fuck her till you died. Even now, twelve years later, I was close to that first night again, and did not want to be, as if to think well of Patty would betray Madeleine once more.
Instead, I suffered the memory of the long return of Madeleine Falco and myself to New York. It was a very long return. We quarreled, and Madeleine shrieked at me (which was most out of character for her) when I went too fast around a few turns, and finally—I blame it on trying to go cold turkey without cigarettes—I lost the car on an unexpectedly sharp turn. It was a big boat of a Dodge, or a Buick or a Mercury—who can remember? They all acted like sponge rubber on a hard curve, and we squeaked and squeegeed over a hundred yards of hardtop before we slammed into a tree.
My body felt equal to the car. Part was crunched, part was stretched, and a fearful racket like a trailing muffler knocked inside my ears. Without, a silence. One of those country silences when the unrest of insects vibrates through the fields.
Madeleine was in worse shape. She never told me, but I learned that her womb was injured. And, indeed, there was a frightful scar on her belly when she came out of the hospital.
We lasted for another year, cutting ourselves away from each other over the months that followed. We got into cocaine. It filled the rift. Then the habit froze, and the rock of our relation was cracked by the habit, and the rift was larger. It was after we broke up that I got busted for selling cocaine.
Now I sat in my study in my home in Provincetown sipping my bourbon neat. Could it be that these pains of the past in conjunction with a little bourbon were proving a sedative for three days of shocks and starts and turns and absolute dislocations of all I understood? Sitting in that armchair, I began to feel sleep coming on like a blessing. The murmur of what was gone rose over me, an infusion, and the colors of the past grew deeper than the present. Was sleep the entrance to a cave?
In the next instant I was plucked back from sleep. What could I do when even my simplest metaphor saw an entrance to a cave? That was not calculated to
keep one’s mind away from the burrow in the Truro woods.
All the same, I kept sipping at the bourbon, and a few resources returned. Was I beginning to digest the impact of Mr. Pangborn’s suicide? For now it seemed not improbable that Pangborn could be the maniac who did it. Certainly the letter might be seen as the anticipation of a crime. “If someone tried to take my blonde lady away, I would kill.” But whom? The new lover or the lady?
This, which offered a working premise, became, when added to the bourbon, the sedative I needed, and I fell at last into a deep sleep, as bruised about as if I were still playing wide receiver for that Exeter team which could not throw a pass, and went down to such a depth in sleep that the voices of Hell-Town were not even with me when I awakened. Instead, I came back to a clear recollection that three nights ago—yes, for certain!—Jessica and Lonnie and I had stepped out of The Widow’s Walk about the same time, they from the Dining Room, I from the Lounge, and there, in the parking lot, had resumed—much against Pangborn’s will and much to her taste—our conversation, and Jessica and I laughed so much and so quickly that it was soon decided we must go to my house for a nightcap.
Then began a discussion about the car. Did we go in two or one? Jessica was for two cars, Lonnie in his rented sedan, and she and I in my Porsche, but he could read ahead and had no desire to be sent packing, so he solved it all by getting in the passenger seat of my Porsche, whereupon she was obliged to fit herself in and all around him, and managed to do this only by laying her legs across my lap so that I could shift gears only by maneuvering my hand in and around her knees and under her thighs, but then, it was only two miles and a little to my house, and once there, we talked for a long time about property values in Provincetown and why Patty’s and my old ramble was worth so much when it consisted only of two salt-boxes and two sheds and a tower we had built ourselves for my third-floor study, but frontage, I told them, was the factor. We had one hundred feet of bay frontage, and the length of our house ran parallel to the shore, rare in our town. “Yes,” said Jessica, “that’s wonderful,” and I swear her knees parted a little further.