The woman I love is much smarter than me, therefore my life with her is one long lookout. Where will she turn up next? I never know.
You sometimes see me peering deep into my binoculars, scanning the horizon. And then she will be there, tapping my shoulder from behind.
You would think I would learn, but I don't. Idiotically, I still walk down the street whistling a tune or kicking a can, imagining I weren't under constant surveillance. Imaging every eye behind every drape was not hers.
Sometimes I congratulate myself, saying I did it, I made good my escape. And I run to a place that she will never in a hundred years find.
But when I get there the signs are everywhere -- the bedsheets twisted just so, the dried drop of wine on the floor. I warn the natives she is coming and they smile and nod at me. Everyone knows her name.
She says I'll never learn. I say I will when I'm good and ready.
That one time, in the delta, I was ready, poised to exterminate, but I weakened at the last second and felt pity, and put two bits in her tin cup. I figured, she's blind. She's got a monkey to feed.
And with that accordion playing of hers she could not be grossing much.
And she whipped off her black glasses and I tumbled down into her eyes, screaming and waving my arms, falling like a stone, like a bucket down a well.
When I righted myself I still saw her eyes. Laughing, she bit me on the wrist and took off after me, chasing me up and down the French Quarter, over and through the cast iron rails. At the last possible moment I was able to disguise myself as a bishop in an innocent game of chess.
I nearly burst with laughter as she dashed by, teeth dripping with desire. Otherwise, she would be mine today.
You see, though she is insanely clever, I am no slouch myself.
When I was just a boy and she was my teacher I fooled her routinely. The other nine year olds hated me -- the mustache, I think -- and because I got special favors from teacher.
One day she demanded I stay after and wash her blackboard and I soaked and rubbed, smeared and stroked. She said don't stop but I stopped.
The look on that schoolmarm face! When I told her I had to "go," I had to tear the corridor pass from her clutching fingers. I gave her the slip and fled through the swingsets.
There was a supermarket in the Sandwich Islands. Everyone wore grass skirts -- checkouts, boxboys, men with cleavers and bloodied aprons.
I filled my cart with a sense of being stricken. Behind a jam jar I saw a seething eyelid. I uncovered another eye, a flaring nostril, an iron ring, a single horn of matted hair extruding from a troubled brow.
She bellowed!
Customers spilled milk and burst into tears. The holy cow of Kauai bolted from the bins. There was a terrible rustling of skirts.
I hid in the grass for forever, and when the moment was right melted into the crowd.
No need to explain it. This is not an allegory. It's her. She changes. I wasn't surpised in 1936 in Berlin when I looked behind me and she was there. I was Jesse Owen and she was Frau Cosima, an ideological gleam in her eye. She reached for my baton but I broke for the finish.
All this time I was madly in love. Here was a woman who knew about a man. The things he needs. The things he needs to need. How delicate we are like pale flowers struggling in a soft breeze. How when we say no we mean yes, yes.
You appreciate that when you are up the Amazon without a paddle.
She was so gentle. I was in a tree, with a sloth and a parrot.
I was yellow and had little sharp teeth and black spots. She was very white and very tall and had a Mauser rifle and two trained crocodiles.
How my jeweled eyes lit up the night. And the pounding of my heart found its place between her cross-hairs.
But she knew I was not ready and let me off easy. The bullet only grazed me. I was up all night, yowling and licking the soft wound.
I am at a party high over New York. It's George Plimpton's house.
He says he is writing a book about what it is like, just for a day, to impersonate a human being.
Someone says something, four score of eyebrows arch.
Across a battery of stemware I spot her. Escape, escape, and there is no escape. Then I remembered. The Empire State Building is like the moon -- its dark side has never been seen. I look out the window -- one hundred floors of continuous fire escape.
Closing my eyes I begin my descent. Luck is with me -- I beat the elevator down.
She chases me across the Yukon carrying a sling of baby sons in one hand, a foreclosed mortgage in the other. Tweaking my sinister mustache, I weep.
When I look over my shoulder she has become a ravening wolf, bounding after me, snapping at my heels.
I hippity hop across Alaska and dive into the Bering Sea. She is equally vivid as a shark. Crawling onto dry land I take cover as she strafes me as a fighter plane from unbelievably low altitudes.
I make my way across the Sahara, panting. A dozen dunes away I hear the drone of the jeep of the woman I love. But when I peek she isn't a jeep at all. She's a mosquito the size of a jeep, something completely different.
I turn into a billiard ball and burrow into the desert sand. Foiled, she buzzes off.
I spend forty days in the desert. I am religious as cactus, pared down to the least, holiest thing. Then I hear it.
One thousand saxophones bopping martially under the midday sun!
Climbing my outpost I look down as legion upon legion pass below me blowing hot jazz.
And at their head is Octavian, and this time she means business.
Fortunately my disciples had prepared for such an eventuality. I climb through a trap door in the desert and emerge at the corner of Fifth and Wabasha in downtown St. Paul. It is never far from St. Paul to the desert.
I brush the sand from my jeans and board the 21A. The driver's eyes meet mine in the mirror, but I am exhausted, I collapse in the last seat. Those eyes, I wonder, where have I seen those eyes before, like happy dragons, ready to dine, and me a porkchop pooling in its fat.
I know what will happen. She will strip me bare, and lay me open. I will be the meat braised by her fire, flayed and fulfilled, seared through to the marrow.
And my flesh will be her flesh forever.
January, 1977
"A masterpiece of explanatory journalism!" - New Orleans Picayune |
| ||||
