High Lonesome

Through Sunset into the Raccoon Night

YOU GET ON, AND ONE DAY IT OCCURS TO YOU YOU MIGHT BE doing something rather important for the last time. There is a bit of terror in this, but also an unexpected balm. Believe me, this thing can happen even when you still feel new as an eighteen-year-old.

Well she was long in the leg, well dressed, I mean a nice cut above what was called for in this small city. She was in her heels and silks even in the heart of July, waiting there in the bad air conditioning of her black Audi. I could see and feel her in her silk, with the sweat on her brow and her waist at panty-line, wearing her garter that said I WANT IT EVERY DAY. The city awaited her but she was waiting on me, hovering there against the curb in great patience. Because she said what I had was priceless. Her husband was a dumb mean doctor but she was splitting from him. Somehow I heard it that they had not touched each other in four years. Some interior decorator will charge in somebody’s house and tell them things like this where we live, although since there’s not a great deal to be gained hereabouts, the gossip tends to be more factual rather than vicious.

“So she’s a pretty little thing,” said Mary, a tiny woman, to me one day. But my woman was not little and off the point of pretty. “She’s one of those who’s been waiting too long for something, and doesn’t know what it is now. She’s a person who, I’ll bet, says no a lot.”

“You women are such experts on each other,” I said.

“Yes, well, men pretend not to know things because they think it’s manly. Raised in manly dumbness, even smart ones.”

“You’re just rude and hasty.”

“You’d like to get your piece of her, then judge her. I know you. You’ve never looked at me the same since you had some of me.”

“Nevertheless, she’s something different.”

“You mean a little difficult. Which really excites you.”

“I like the way she calls me a real man, compared to her former mate, the surgeon. Very much. Yes.”

“Oh boy, the double whammy. You get to go to bed with his fame and her body. You can’t fool me. You like the way she waits on you, I mean lingers for you, around different places. That’s important to you. I wouldn’t, and now you’ve got a volunteer.”

“No. You and I are just friends, big friends. Sometimes friends have to sleep together.”

“Friends. I recall you were more ravenous than that.”

“Ravished by loneliness at the time. That’s what I remember. And I thank you.”

“You were pathetic. Pretty good. But pathetic.”

I have, like every man, seen all through my life lovely women waiting for someone somewhere. I always get involved, I mean in my head. These women, each wonderful, have elicited fine raptures and dreams. Waiting women, each postured in a special way, each in her separate nook of perfect waiting, a gallery that does not belong to me. They are prepared, sharpened, in their dresses and heels — or in their jeans and sandals, their brave halter tops — all open to the great psychological moment of some man’s arrival. Negligence really is out of the question, with the right ones. And I have been that man over and over, besuiting myself for the expectant tastes of these lingering, watchful women. I imagine pleasing each one according to her most curious and valiant wants. The world for a few moments becomes wide and happy, not low and cramped. Even voluptuous. I bring extraordinary gifts to these patient women, thinking all day about them. So it is that I have made love to these women of my heady tableaux and been briefly a happier man for it. I hear the women speak softly, delighted by my presence. This is very good, since nobody else on the real earth truly needs me, not even the surgeon’s wife Jane in the Audi out there as my business closes, soon. For the world I am impertinent and a malingerer.

I’ve never found anything I was good at worthy to do here. I surely don’t blame the world for that. Through me runs an inveterate refractoriness, almost a will to lose. Really, a choice for the whining and pining, at ease in the infantry of unremarkable losers on the lower end of mobility. What I admire is anguish, casual faith, clothes, poise, and minor disaster, or the promise of it. I like the nose lifted a little. The pride of exemption, yet terror in solitude. This is a busy concept. Perhaps too busy.

“You drive her around as if she can’t drive, in her car. What does this mean, exactly?” asked Mary, who always chuckled a little when she was being sincere.

“Because …” I don’t know. “Because she is somewhat American YesterWorld, and I imagine it gives her the sense that fate now is out of her hands.”

“But you simply go buy things together, little and big and far and near, like every other dull American couple, like old marrieds already.”

This was true. And another thing was, there are a number of drugs in this country that, the way we are pitched, make you go buy things. Speed and broncho-dilators, Valium and booze, even Sudafed, make you want to gallop down and get some suddenly urgent thing. Marijuana, they say, is the king. Weed people hit one A.M. bargain barns like battlefield jackals. Zombies who buy have promoted me to the middle class just by accident. I have simply memorized a fair number of automobiles and have the parts ready for them almost by the time five words are out of their mouth. Yet I keep buying myself back down toward the lower class, as if with unconscious nostalgia. Towns you pass through around here often exist only to supply automobiles parts and service for people who have absolutely nowhere to go. The people keep hoisting me back up to the great bourgeoisie, over and over. I can’t fail, my God, America! Show me some more oily jean cash, dirty pelt, warm lucre, young man! Put your hand in your pants and show me your dollars. Reach in your brassiere, O my sovereign nymphs and clayhill babushkas. This may be work but I doubt it.

And my word the wrecks the two of us see together in our hundred-mile radius. Wrecks and deaths for no reason at all. I’d guess three quarters of all wrecks are caused by people with no destination. They are caused by goons driving as with a heart attack in progress toward positively distinctly nowhere. Or fifteen miles at eighty per to get a couple Vidalia onions or a bowtie for some lowlife prom. I’m going on because those wrecks, wretched as the fact is, work as aphrodisiacs on both of us. Something about being alive next door to horror, then not and very hot. We stop and ask questions and then look at each other, shamed but blushing with need, a hard and troublesome thing for two who’ve yet to get in bed together. I’ve wondered if we owe now this strange duty to others in the future and must have our own pointless great wreck. From our jewel of a little city in southern Missouri, in this radius of want we get even through Memphis and down into northern Mississippi, where I saw a woman in an unknown rage drive repeatedly at high speed around the lot of a Sonic drive-in until she piled into a stone picnic table and killed herself.

I was almost sure I had witnessed the highest order of some kind of love, a love that put what the surgeon’s wife and I had to shame. I refused to read any newspaper account of the incident and could not bear the sordid history that might be attached, because I saw, well, what I saw. Jane and I were so full of the wild gift of adrenaline once we looked at each other again, we could have ripped each other apart.

So were we good people then, because we did not follow through? No. Lovers are the most hideously selfish aberrations in any given territory.They are not nice, and careless to the degree of blind metal-hided rhinoceroses run amok. Multitudes of them cause wrecks and die in them. Ask the locals how sweet the wreckage of damned near everybody was around that little pube-rioting Juliet and her moon-whelp Romeo. Tornado in a razor factory, that’s what sweetness. That poor woman with her neck broken over the steering wheel was in their league, don’t tell me different. Without the stone picnic table, she’d have taken out all the help inside, and you’d have had the local scribes going for a year. Even the sad baritones on the box, too, tireless.

Once years ago I walked into a country juke saloon with a pistol to my head, but it was only a gag about music. Country folks don’t ever get tired of the same song, they just want it maybe faster and deeper now and then. Or maybe it wasn’t a gag. I’m just forty-two but sometimes very very weary.

I drive us, but I still do not have the main handle on whether we are in for construction or destruction. She has a way of looking at the floor and whispering no, unconsciously, eyes awfully flat and grim. Mary was absolutely right. I’m terribly glad she is my friend still. I’ll hate to leave her behind, little prissy happy-bosomed gal from Joplin, the only near-beauty I’ve ever known who would hang around without liquor at a parts store.

As you can see, behind the counter of my casual anarchy at the store, where only I know where parts are, I’ve had time to think and come up with some high county epigrams of my own, because I have not found this life particularly pleasant and it’s for damned sure my customers, the wheeled doofuses bred with a bad carburetor in their genes, aren’t going to show me anything new. If I were greatly handsome or had promise I might kill myself, but I’m not giving wags the pleasure nor Mary the trouble. The wags have a bad enough time coping with internal combustion. What would they say about me anyway? I have no problems. I’m begging for minor disasters, like several wealthy people I’ve known. I couldn’t cope with the options of wealth. The five or six I have in my present condition sometimes paralyze me. Also, the wealthy like money and are often so paranoid they pay someone to be after them, just so they will know distinctly who it is. To the man, every wealthy shop owner around the town circle here has a spread middle, a permanent bent neck toward the sidewalk from counting and playing with themselves, and nervous shoulders as if expecting to be poleaxed by a stranger from behind.

In my brief mournful summer in New York City years ago, I was attempting to get myself across as something I’m unwilling to discuss. All right, painting. Hustling my plain local stuff during the height of Warholism, inviting half smiles of almost Martian disdain from gallery owners, and with nobody else between me and them as I could guess they were begging there to be, since I was using precious seconds of their eyesight on my “work.” I had at this time the almost mystic confidence of the autoanointed third-rater and must have sounded very much like Harry Truman.

I met a boy my age who had inherited vast wealth and seemed to like me. He had no job, did nothing but wander about, and I saw him exit one or two parties with his head down, looking run-over, with people gazing at his back. I had never met a true creep — a slug — although we used the item handily all through high school and college in Columbia (Missouri). But here was your real specie at last, a young man who could buy anything and had omitted to buy (possible, of course) a personality. He just hung around. I became his favorite and he would show up at bar dates uninvited, somehow finding out about my appointment with another person around Charles Street in the Village. He would appear, then stare at me, then at the floor; now with his face to me, turned again, after an unsettling hungry look. He wasn’t gay as I suspected. He was nothing, just some sort of thing seeking my shade.

I had got to New York somehow without being conscious of Thomas Hart Benton, an artist from practically my own backyard — a real artist whose work, had I known it, would have discouraged me from New York entirely. But certain other artists loved the fact I’d never heard of him, and with them I was promoted in esteem. We were drinking a lot of cheap drinks in a cheap tavern and talking over my possibilities as a new savage (dream on), when this slug person, this creep, appeared again, looking at me, then down. I was drunk and angry over my treatment by the galleries, so I let him have it, very unlike myself. But he really was too much. I charged: What do you want? What are you after? Why are you here? Why aren’t you dead? His narrow shoulders, the cocked-over head with chubby face — I can still see it — the small burned dirty eyes. I watched real pain and a faint smile come over him, such a hopeless and yet triumphant look as I’d never seen. He turned around, and after saying “I’m so sorry” with his back to me, he left and I didn’t see him for a year.

I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was my artist pal, a boy from Maine not as drunk as I was. “You’re the fourth one this summer. He stays and comes and interlopes and then an eruption from somebody like you he’s been begging for, and he goes out whipped. I think he loves it, I know he does. He works you for abuse, gets it, and now he might be off stroking himself. Then he moves to another person.”

I was staggered and instantly sober. My feel for the whole city was different now. I knew I was a loser too, but I was almost sick and very angry at what a fellow with every option like the creep could bring himself to. I thought I could even still smell his stale white oily body in here, like old margarine.

The rest of this story goes into the next summer when I was in the city just a week to flush out old mediocrities, and we were turning warm in mutual condolences, we less hopeful floggers, in the same tavern, when Elton, the creep, came in with the best-looking woman I had ever seen anywhere. He was unchanged, slumping, holding his mouth like a stunned halibut’s, less than zero to say. Nobody had ever known where, under what cold bricks he lived. He was always just abruptly there, parachuted it seemed — that sudden — out of some ghastly greasy aerial pollution, face like the cunt of a possum. But the woman, why, she was with him and not vomiting, not vomiting at all. I think she was Brazilian. Pecan-skinned, silver-heeled, high-breasted all-out for summer. The despair in the tavern you could dip with a cup, and I wet my pants in sorrow and desire. That poor beauty, bought outright by Elton as his wife, was so reamed and gouged within one minute by every straight male eye in the bar she’d have been sausage under a few rags and heels had thought taken action. Elton — I did catch it, didn’t I? — looked at me briefly and lifted one upper lip in what I think was an attempt at a smirk, although it was hard to tell with the dead eyes. All he did was stand there with her fifteen minutes. Neither one of them even had a drink. They said he was all sober now but he was such a creep nobody had ever known he was alcoholic, and if changed he looked worse now. Still, I believe I caught his smirk, which he did not have character enough to maintain. Then they strolled out, or she did, and he had his doughy oily palm on her crease, a whole other order of butt it was so good, and then I suffered the gnashing tragedy of never seeing her again, ever, in my life.

This I relay partially to explain I have not failed in only one place. No, I am cosmopolitan, tested. Also to assure you as in those fat bright books you might read that the truly wealthy are often true worms. But not so much this as to warn myself about the surgeon’s wife, especially waiting right now in the Audi for her special abuse, maybe, a different sort than Elton’s, but I’ve an edge of sickness about this too. Something in her leans over on me out of her soul, a quality of boiled spaghetti. She appears and sits and waits a bit too much. She has told me that her first child (she has another) was created by her hand from the condom of her husband, herself alone in the bathroom while he slept, in the slyness of determined motherhood. He did not want children now, in school. Why’d she tell me? Does she see it as adorable or valiant? Is it a testimony of slightly appalling urges in the womb or an ugly little act of deceit and control? I can’t tell, honestly. She appears and sits and waits a bit too much. There is, without my having possessed her yet, a bit too much preparation and dullish watchful stare about her, and a persistent slackening in her jaws, though she has a red marvelous mouth, as if she were sucking at me in bits and might become at her climacteric all mouth and vacuum, oral entirely, have me down the maw with only my poor shoes sticking out. I fear in short that she is a creep. But that’s not even the worst fear. As with Elton I know now I was frightened he wanted near me because I was a creep. Creeps go for creeps and the veterans know who they are instantly. Because a loser like me can have honor — as the used have honor and life even in their outrage, while the user has mere habit — and the creep none. Was evil ever this low, banal, and gaudy? Imagine Elton, who was indeed the picture of Mr. Trump without money, but more slumped and even oilier, but the same mouth and dead eyes. And Elton went directly to me. I knew the others he went to: they were at least latent creeps, without exception — the common denominator my friend from Maine left out.

I won’t tell Mary everything, but it’s necessary I listen to her, because I’m beginning to feel threatened, without consummation, only long preparation by our words, our merchandise, and our car wrecks. A certain song had come out I’d heard on the FM, and now I owned it. By Radiohead. The name of it exactly: “Creep.” It is a haunting thing, sung by a creep to a goddess oblivious to him. I think of Elton. “What am I doing here?” the creep pleads, and it hits me very deeply, a pain of perfect acknowledgment. Why do I like it so much? Why has Mary asked me to please quit playing it over and over, paying no attention to the other songs on the CD? What am I so tranced about? she demands. Why don’t you go out and just rake her down, the doctor’s ex-fox? Not all women are good. Some women have tragic pussies, she pushed on to get to my head. I’d never heard Mary use a bad word and I stopped the music.

“There’s something wrong with women who talk and wait and plan too much. My friend. Why you? There are certainly others more in her league. Why is she still in town, even?” she says.

Now I’m truly scared in my concupiscence, my ready loins, my thighs with some muscle definition all sightly from private squats with seventy pounds on my shoulders, my calves corded and well-tennised — these secret extraordinary gifts all for her waiting. But I frown at good Mary. Then comes the patient smile and the hooded eyes, taught by example by my own father in home combat. “I wish I was special! But I’m a creep!” the defeated tenor of Radiohead howls. “I don’t belong here!”

God what freedom in that statement. I just adore it and am terrified too.

Elton, at last confessed, at last! Elton! Forgive my abuse, little rich man!

Besides buying various rugs, mats, futons, pillows, and even sleeping bags for us to have our earnest postures on in different rooms together, Jane is planning her own home for the first time in her life, she says. Her dearly own. It will be a tour. I sense I am something of an agent of travel for her. The home is going up north of the city, near a lake, on a hill with big trees and hanging moss around it. She stands spread-legged like Marilyn over that grate in New York in the empty boarded air of her rooms, while I watch her high eloquent rump and tennis legs, just a slight burn of tan on them, and fine ankles into slung-back short heels. With her back to me I can almost bring back the Brazilian, Elton’s bride. She intends to be “courted” this time. She wants stages. She loves it that we met on the tennis courts, like college children. I’d been so long without a woman, I could wait and get excited only in the head for a while, as you can get unhungry by not eating long enough. I think I had not, until Jane, ever had dessert at a restaurant and stared slyly for two hours at every twitch of a woman’s eyebrows, blue in the groin. I go to bed alone. No, really, it is not disagreeable. My head language becomes cleaner, my instincts have a sudden balm, and I feel right tidy in this love, if that’s what I have.

A nun once told me she had been constantly in love all her life, a sweet mental love more superb and wider than any touching could supply.

“Impossible,” I said.

“Well damn you,” she added, “Mister.”

She too must have guessed I was a creep, because her voice had run out scarily as from another person sitting beside her on the airplane. And she was shocked. I was shot with cold.

I have lately thought about my birthplace, St. Louis, and what is wrong there. Eminent creeps have issued from there as by some necessity of the environment. T. S. Eliot and William Burroughs, maybe they are profound, but does anybody miss the sluggish dead-staring creep quality in them either? Jane is also from there. I could never quite decide about the hipster of my New York summer, the paragon, Miles Davis, who in his autobiography gave us the nice term country hip for bluesmen along the river. But sometimes there was a rancid flatness to him, even beyond his heroin glare. The surgeon’s wife — I call her that when I put her away a bit to study — loves the right clothes, I love the right clothes, and Miles Davis held them near sacred. I want to be country hip like Davis’s friends, smooth as a modest flower behind the counter of the parts store. Jane seems more born in the latest shift, her hair fluffed casually by some fag offstage, impeccable.

She told me one afternoon the only other man she had loved since her husband was a man dying of cancer whose intensity in life and lovemaking was so beautiful it made her cry, and she knew I’d do that for her too. I could almost feel myself at that moment writhing in her arms like a dolphin on dry land.

I worry that I’ve buried and denied the fact there were so few truly admirable adults during my upbringing in St. Louis. Were they there and I was such a creep I missed them all? Did they all become just a little less vicious as they aged, more reconciled and easy, simply because they had no more teeth and were horrified that they’d be ignored and scorned? These men and women became softer and kinder, with infinite patience too, especially with their grandchildren. But I did not trust them. It has been said about a successful painting acquaintance of mine — by quick Mary — an only child rather clubby in his friendships with “real” men like hunters and other painters of the hard-angled quotidian, that once he had got all he could out of unkindness, he turned to kindness. Then I regard the spacial grace of Indian tennis players. Places do make people. There was a family in St. Louis I lived with, sleeping with their divorced mother. Only her son, the more Southern one for some reason, with his easy strength, his quiet voice, his hesitation to judge, was bearable. The daughter, every day on the backseat of the car as she was taken to school, said, demanding: “Turn on the radio, please.” The please just an irony in her mouth, in a flat, mean voice. The mother obliged as if hypnotized, never pausing to find that rock-and-roll button for the brat. One day I couldn’t bear it any longer, but when she was out of the car to school I did not attack. Rather I started weeping because of the sadness of being around this hugely indulged vixen, and I knew love would die soon because I couldn’t stand the home life that made her possible.

The long study that idiots give themselves, the endless excuses of the weak and vicious. The willingness to go public with hideous disease as if that were the primary goal in life. Why else am I writing? Two men were playing beside me on the next tennis court last spring. They were, as they hit the ball, yelling to each other about their exercises, their protein intake, their reps, their lats, their pecs, their squats. Screaming their charts at one another. Later on one of them smiled at me in a café as if we were close buddies, since I had been there to listen, nothing amiss here, hands out my kindred. I had a hard time frowning him off, this monster. His body looked to me like something foul and bought, a meat suit.

Now the house is done, Thanksgiving has passed, and I have had Jane in all her rooms with the ardor of long dreamers, and the wait proves all worth it, an instance where the flesh has really gone into more pleasures than even the dreams. But I knew she was wonderful, and that begging for minor disaster seemed artificial, like something I had cultivated from a book by a French existentialist in college, just in order to seem properly grave.

Not especially Sartre or Camus, but much of college now anyway seems like an endless qualification and rebuke to pleasure by the same kind of middle-aged people I grew up with, so that the bean of the reasonable and moderate would grow to the size of a tree in the head you could barely see out of by the time you became an adult yourself, thus to sit in your room and review the world, choked by moderation in all things. I did not see happy middle-aged men until I began going to roadhouses to hear and watch, more, rhythm-and-blues musicians, some of them with white hair and bellies, having a fine time on what must have been sub-minimum wages. I hold no brief for the universal holiness of African-Americans that goes down as commandment in much of the press today. But I was overwhelmed by the sight of dark older Americans having fun. Most, I loved them for their bellies. They’d been having it a long time, on much good collards, fatback, and cheap whiskey.

Jane was five years older than me. I’m not sure whether we were jaded eccentrics or new discoverers of the body electric. In different rooms decorated in subtle “rhythm and hue” changes — some help from the St. Louis granny of an interior decorator she had in the wings, a naughty queer I liked too — I delivered myself unto Jane, at her shy suggestions, as French, Greek/African (where the bottoms are of more interest), Italian, then just straight-on Missouri missionary, always talking while making love the way she said her ex, no real man, never did. Jane had a girl’s voice I found highly arousing, and I hope I did not sound too silly like Harry Truman as a mad poet, because Jane could sing, I mean around the house she sang anything well, on key and with luxury. I asked her one day, laughing, why we didn’t sometimes just get on an airplane and visit some of the countries, since I was so busy enacting the United Nations. I’d be glad to pay for it all. Then she shocked me, and I began looking down at the lake below her house, a beautiful but saddening view through the hanging moss.

“I never traveled. I never intend to travel. I don’t like far parts. We traveled enough getting our things for this house. We’ve got the big-screen TV and all the good stations. What more is there to see?”

She’d got a handsome divorce settlement and had her own money anyway, and a doctor father who’d given her this place as a gift. This luck of mine, well I quit boasting inside about it just then. The garter I gave her with I WANT IT EVERY DAY printed on, which she had worn until we got married — I asked her about it. She said wearing it nude with hose on had always made her feel foolish. Now I felt like a pressing creep without much to give from my world.

In my world I had straightened and ordered my supplies and parts in the showroom and taken down the posters of half-naked girls leaning across the hoods of Maseratis and Lotuses, things that pleased me and made my customers buy something expensive for the sheer hell of it, a ticket to half-brassieres in foreign towns. Mary helped me. In our days of intimacy she’d never said anything about the poster women, and now made no fun of me when they came down at Jane’s request.

Mary and I could never have made it as lovers. I don’t like to sleep with women who are smarter than me. But I’d never had a real friendship with a woman until Mary, and I was enjoying the pleasant wonder of it very much, when I was not suicidal. Now the rare times Jane came in the store, if Mary was there Jane looked through her with such frozen smiling malice that Mary offered to never come around again. She had plenty to do, with her own painting, which she could have sold even more of at good fees if she’d cared. But I begged her not to leave. I don’t believe I could have stood it.

On Jane’s idea of having the world on our big-screen television: The very next day I had some trouble with the boy who works my stockroom. I knew he was on something, but he didn’t steal and he did a fair job. I was amused by his old-man’s miseries at age twenty-three, compounded by the fact he couldn’t read and thought I didn’t know that. That afternoon he came in bleary and in a rage and asked me if I kept a pistol. He needed to kill somebody who had just insulted him for the last time.

“Why no, Byron. My God, fool. You’ll go to prison. Think this out.”

“I have. They got color TV in prison.”

He was high on something, but he had never been more serious. He was ready for his life to be over and resign himself, with relish, to the high-gloss realm of somebody else’s vision from now on. I could barely reply. I’d never known how he hated himself and his life so much. Even in my worst depressions I was still snob enough to know I would take out myself in my own act, in my own show, never by the congealed vision of others who need you half-dead in a chair to own the world. Then I asked Jane something that had bothered me and I was afraid to know.

“You said I was priceless. That I had something priceless. But what is it? Why am I special?” The fear was creeping. I was hard bothered all over again.

She thought too long, as if it weren’t really that big a question and she’d forgotten.

“Well … I saw that painting of yours you didn’t want me to see, under your bed in your townhouse apartment, about a year ago. I really like it. It’s very great art. I loved you even more for thinking it was no good. Your very high standards, all private like that.”

But it was wretched and derivative and never got much past simple meanness, like much of my work. The only reason it had any merit was I’d done a fair cartoon in the Thomas Hart Benton mode showing ghouls — my customers — with long arms and grief-stricken faces pulling out automobile parts from their bodies — you saw the outlines where they’d been ripped out, bloody — and demanding replacements. All of this with a hideous backdrop, too yellow. I kept it as a reminder, sleeping over it, that it was as far as I would ever push in creation. It was only a milestone. I had no vanity about it.

“You made those people out the real Frankensteins they are, like those people around those wrecks we saw. Thank God we’re not like them at all, what a world. You cutey.”

“But we were there. They made us hot, Jane, remember?”

“I got hot loving that I wasn’t them. It still gets me hot knowing you’re not my ex-husband. He was so dumb and dull. Never once did he say my cunnie was the best in the world, like you do. I’m so so really happy you’re not him, baby. He was good, he was successful,” she began tearing up, and I was amazed, “but let me tell you this: he never had high standards. He accepted just about anything the way it was and just had these tired grunts every now and then.”

It’s impossible to overdeclare my disdain for dying a wise old man, knowing every salient point, sitting there in my last room as with a multistory library in a cone over my ears. I was hugely sorry I’d asked about my pricelessness, having learned only what I was not. That our love was going along so well out of spite, like how many other loves? — the same, no different. “Living well is the best revenge.” “Prepare to make the memories,” say the beer and camera ads. All you need is beer, camera, and revenge and you’re a player.

I walked out of the house down the hill toward the lake. I needed to talk to Mary, but then I found a gift by accident. I was sitting on the dam getting bit by chiggers and mosquitoes and deer flies but refusing to move or get in the water, which I needed to do.

An animal came up next to me, which I believed to be an apparition in my periphery. It was about the size of a big house cat. It kept moving slowly towards me the two hours, it must have been. But I looked ahead, not even a weed in my mouth, nothing in front but a blind thousand yards. I finally felt it so close that I looked around. It was a large and handsome raccoon, regarding me and not moving now as I stared straight at it. Its hair was so deep and rich, brown and black, it seemed beyond real, so prosperous out here on the beaches of the encroaching shore lots with their moody houses on the hill. I stood, and after retreating only inches to gather itself back, it took stock of me without nervousness then eased up closer and closer — a yard away — and decided I was no threat. It was without the ordinary panic of these careful beasts. Did it know me? Was I something like a body washed up out of a deep lake, the odor of a sunburned slug? He looked to be truly working me for a few minutes. I got uncomfortable and started walking around the lake. This lover of marine carrion fell in step just a little to my right on the water side.

Lovers, even middle-aged lovers I guess, may not be good people, but if they were like me just now, after the physical ardor of two months after a wait of over a year, they do have innocence. They’re so worn out there is hardly anything left but the sleepy wonder of infants. I was stumbling along as if on the ground of the moon, reading everything with intense color in a doubled hurtful light, near the result of those drugs I took just a few of at Columbia, but with more suspense because I was clean. The raccoon paced along. When I knew it did not want to eat me, I think we became chums. We walked around the lake and back to where I was, and this thing we repeated three or four times a week in the last of the winter, which was mild.

Everybody knows raccoons are graceful. I regard them as so refined in beauty they are almost like a work of art let out to eat, especially this big sleek friend who wouldn’t seem to mind going back and watching television with me when Jane was out of the house. I felt better, going around the shore, sometimes watching the animal freeze, poke, and snatch when it wanted something tasty out of the water.

The élan of the Indian tennis players occurred to me as I looked forward to the European tournaments on the big-screen Toshiba. I hoped there were some Indian tennis players left to watch, with their sweet moves, their gentlemanship, a power beyond victory and defeat to me, much in rebuke to our wearisome national jocks and deranged narcissists like McEnroe. I didn’t give the raccoon a name even as he became nearly a walking roommate. You should not name something more elegant than you, I thought. I didn’t even know its sex. Maybe it was a newly mated older boy like me taking a couple hours off from the little woman back at the castle.

I was near broke again, with all my buying for the house, back to the lower class. I’d never taken money from Jane and didn’t intend to. Our house felt like a rented thing to me, with none of my purchased future in it. I’d built a muscadine arbor one morning out of heavy stakes with lattice board for a roof. We would see it from our rear bay window on the slope into the lake. It was my first yard idea ever. I wanted a grape bower with a love couch underneath — somehow an all-weather one, if they made them. I wanted the raccoon to visit and eat the grapes, maybe even bring his family over. I expected the thing, in fact, to one day give up his beastly quietness and begin chatting with me. Or I would become a whole new animal, enough to chat in its language. Jane and I could ravish each other on the couch even into old age. I was sad, but so what? This was my only marriage and I didn’t intend to retreat from it. Maybe I was copying the decorator, the old granny with his erotic room ideas, or competing with him. I was proud.

But when Jane looked down in the yard at it she didn’t show delight. I could sense there was something wrong with it now. It wasn’t on television.

Then I got back from a trip to Kansas City one afternoon. Jane embraced me at the door, all bright, and said she had a surprise for us. I spied down toward my old arbor construct. It had been torn down and replaced by one in green metal exactly the shade of the trees. The granny had told her where she could get one, the whole outfit, and his men had put it up for her. I went almost insane. It was our first large fight — nearly all one-sided by me — but I felt eternity in it. I almost struck her, there with her eyes seeming dead and glib to me all of a sudden. I told her the raccoon wouldn’t likely come near that thing.

“The raccoon? The what raccoon?!”

“My raccoon. For the grapes.”

“What, have you invited him? What’s this raccoon? You’re sick!”

She slammed away to her retreat in the plump covers of our king-size bedroom where more Japanese television was.

Yes, I was sick, and it continued. I was not the same, maybe am still not. I’ve got myself in trouble, a minor disaster I rather like — not a well man. I neglected my raccoon friend and imagined that it cared.

In the early spring I began playing more tennis, but not with Jane, who cared less now for the game. I played with little Mary. Not in spite, either. There was no special reason to tell Jane, and Mary’s now careful friendship was too precious to lose.

One day I went down to the courts with too much beer in me. I knew I could not drink over two beers without going straight into depression, more a desert than an abyss for me, longer and no abrupt way out with great effort. See here, I have sought help professional and amateur for myself. I’ve tried to heal myself, always a bit sick that the cluttered mentocracy of self-study that afflicts this fat nation had enrolled me too. I agreed with the last food doctor entirely on the beer and had been much better for it. I’d never been a real drinker anyway, just a medicator of joylessness.

Mary keeps running and trying, dear heart, even without a great deal of strength, but with the advantage of growing up on a family court in Memphis with a mother who was a tour player. I’m just a bit better, without a single formal lesson. I watch a good player — the Indians — and try to absorb their spirit. There is a dullish way of playing perfect tennis, by all the percentages, that causes tennis burnout to the young even in their twenties — the young of a certain sensitivity. They get tired of the geometry and the predictions, their coaches and families. I’ve been close to that just by the repetition of a few weeks of near-perfect play. Maybe I’d drunk the beer to make the match more even between Mary and me. She was winning and I was not slacking.

One of those body men of the same pair — who played beside me ranting about their exercise and food regimen months ago — came over as I was beginning to serve.

“Say, did you know you were always late with your backhand, just a little late? You should step up to the ball more, get to the height of its arc, and be in front of it.”

Hardly without a pause, I dropped my racket and slapped him in the face. I’d never hit a man with a full fist, and in this case the result would have been even sillier if I had. He popped me so fast with the ham of his forearms, twice, I was out cold for a time. I woke up sitting, with his face over me and into mine, now with more concern than anger. He was smiling. Then he must have smelled the beer on me. Mary was up by me, amazed on her little legs.

“You shouldn’t come out here drinking, pal. I’m sorry, but you’re very lucky I’m a belt. I only told you you were late with your backhand,” the man said.

“I’ve been late with my backhand for thirty years. It’s the way I play, it’s fun that way. You fucking loudmouth pig.”

Mary moved down to get between him and me as he took a step, saying no to both of us. He wore athletic sports glasses. In his horror over my infirmity, he cut into me with a high-beamed glass stare that reminded me of every imperious monster of life that had ever hounded me. I almost fainted with hatred, overcome by all my failures at once, and proud of them too.

Afterwards Mary and I drank even more beer in my closed store together. I took out a new Jaguar poster with an even nuder woman poised in a diaper on the hood, her toes stretched out as just then in the moment of sexual crisis. I tacked her up. She was more Ford than Jaguar.

“Yes, and I think I’m separating from Jane. This antiseptic thing is coming on too strong. We’re going to just be a laboratory with the right wallpaper soon. She even asked me if I thought we’d still make love after age fifty. My God, fifty. That’s probably gotten dirty too. Or unkempt. That’s what it is about those St. Louis Midwestern people. Their fear of soil, wood, anything that could leave a stain—that’s why they’re creeps. Want to pave the world, they’re paving the goddamn beaches, they want designer nursing homes for resorts.” And so on. “She doesn’t even like sex, I’ll bet. She just wants a picture of it.”

I thought I’d get some agreement from Mary. But now she scolded me, and I quit the beer.

“You’re not separating. No you are not. Separating is all you’ve done since I’ve known you. And you will work with Jane, you will compromise. At your age it’s just indecent, you, to always want to be a social nigger. You won’t get along without her. You’ll get worse.”

“We might strike up something again, you and me,” I said.

“Not a prayer. You’re had. You worked for it hard to be had, and you’re not stepping out now! You’re married, Royce! You’re so absolutist. You think heaven’s supposed to feel like heaven. If you quit this, I know this: you’ll get old and tired instantly, with all your little principles intact. Just old and tired.”

Now she was wet in her eyes.

But my raccoon, my arbor, my self! “A house should be a boat on this planet, riding nature. She wants a high-profile mausoleum, a monolith with a lawn like a pool table around it.” This felt original to me, and I was in rare beer eloquence, with my face good and bruised by that fiend on the court. I felt good and brave.

Mary simply left, on her little legs, and I had the shop alone.

So now our love life is getting worse, although the raccoon came right up for the muscadines when they were out two years later. It didn’t care if the poles were green metal. I fixed a couch under the vines that Jane seemed to like, but easing her toward long talks — we had nothing left to say — and pleasures under the moon will be a job. Sometimes on the television we’ll see a number of people, peasants, driven off into a chasm in the desert by charioteers with great-looking helmets in pursuit, and she’ll get a little warm. Sometimes there’s a sort of new kindness about her. I saw her feeding the raccoon with a can of premium King Oscar sardines once, out there by herself with it. I don’t think she knew I could see through the vines from the house.

She got bored and the granny decorator, with his delicious whip of a tongue, wanted her to work with him, since she was educated to his home touches. I imagine he’s seen with her at very good restaurants where they eat in St. Louis. She eats with him a lot more than with me, and that’s fine, really, since we can’t talk very much. One week there was a sort of scandal, rather pathetic, when the old granny was lying in his own bed playing with himself in easy view of several straight young workmen busy at his house. Jane took his side. I was surprised how this desperation endeared him to me too, sad fellow. Because I’m on his team. The coach has sent me in whether I wanted to play the last losing quarter or not. I look at my lean face in the mirror and see less a younger man than a thing in progress to a remarkable death’s head.

Thanks deeply for listening as I wind down this scratchy log. I’ve gone back to the Presbyterian church of my youth a few times, alone and secretly. White church music is still awful and middle-aged everybody still appalls me, especially the sudden careful holiness they’re given over to, having bought a ticket to a proverb convention — I judge.

Yet the very few graceful, profound, and bewildering words of Our Saviour do get through to me more and more, so different from this loser’s, lost like a two-headed snake in jabber at itself, condemned to my own story like somebody already in an Italian hell. I am slow, I am windy. I have so little vision, engaged in this discourtesy of length and interminable excuse, but seeing bits of light here and there ahead. The Indian tennis players aren’t winning much anymore, but I hope they’re still around.

Tell me. Did Our Saviour die because he was right, or is it that he simply was right and then he died? Tell me, let’s chat. I’ll be mostly in the shop.