I'll Let You Go

CHAPTER 29. Doggish Days

It has been written that after many a summer dies the swan, but plenty happens in the seasons preceding such a lyrical demise. To wit: the heavy-bodied bird must shed its feathers before finding a mate. That is what renders it flightless.

During most of his season, Will’m nested. Though he never ventured to Northern California, he did take the other half of his friend Fitz’s advice, trimming the wild oak tree of a beard close enough to skin so that it looked inadvertently modern (or nearly so). His accent too was shorn, the notes still melodious yet steeped in less juice; anachronisms came fewer and further between, while contemporary phrases and intonations grew like sprigs from pavement cracks. There was no explaining that. Our fugitive ruefully discarded his telltale tweeds and took to wearing a Smart & Final Iris windbreaker. He did not want for money, thanks to the deathbed bequest of the late, lamented Geo. Fitzsimmons; in the envelope that graced the blouse of the suicide lay $6,000, which Will’m did nothing to flaunt.

To what do we owe this transformation? That he was mindful of police and the continuous danger of his circumstances certainly did not explain all, for a larger part of him remained quixotic and incognizant of the threats of the world. On the streets, and with his toilet, he proved competent as always: only twice did he find himself significantly interviewed, each time by armed squadrons on horseback. Polite and sober-eyed throughout, still “in character”—but with the lambent fire of an actor more than midway through a very long run — Will’m refrained from the extemporaneous outbursts that were already so much a part of his past. In both instances, though he couldn’t produce sufficient I.D., he remained apologetic and unmolested, Santa Monica on the whole being indigent-friendly; the tanned, hairy-armed cops cantered off in search of nubile beachgoers committing misdemeanors.

How, then, to explain the mellowing?

He spent hours atop a Macy’s bath towel, burning his skin at the shore. The waves lapped relentlessly as is their wont; sunbathers lazed and sortied in pointillist ballet; dusk ushered in the nebulae. He imagined himself illustrated, a hero on a dead world that was tentatively beginning to flower again — saw himself standing tall under empyrean tempera of cloud-scudded sky, replete with William Morris’s beloved Arthurian garb, a gleaming, high-crested morion stuffed onto thickened head, with smoky visor and ventail, fat thighs squeezed into cuisses, wearing épaulières of rubies plucked from Saturn’s rings, sword and escutcheon raised against bottomless heavens filled with vessels of improbable size disgorging a-hundred-thousand-score armies of desperate, adventuresome men: celestial warriors! Will’m lay on the sand with his recumbent DNA and bore minuscule, magisterial witness to the wonder-book of yawping cosmological eye. (Science fiction pocket-book covers had forever seared the memory of a boy called Marcus Weiner, but the cryptonesic Will’m knew not whence the images came.) The pounding of surf stupefied him with reverence — any damn fool knew there had to be life elsewhere. Soon starships would hover like floating Escherian cities, ivied and fountain-filled, populated by toga’d handmaidens. “Fitz?” Will’m used to say. “We are temporal and temporary beings, nebulous childr’n on a wildly moving place!”

Like most fellow nomads, our friend enjoyed roaming the 3rd Street Promenade and varied fringes of this fair Bay City, and sitting on benches in front of the bookstores. The presence of so many volumes preening for passersby from behind the glass was heartening. One day, mused Will’m, he must use a portion of Fitz’s legacy to take a cab to that downtown place where the News from Nowhere journal of his wandering years was stored; a taxi would be more prudent than profligate — the detective and his minions were likely to entrap him if he went on foot.

On emerging from his reverie, he found that a woman of tremendous bulk had materialized beside him. She panted and perspired, her tender dewlap trembling as she turned to address him with doleful eyes.

He could do nothing but place an arm about her shoulders — something she seemed to sorely need, for her shaking instantly ceased.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

She made a guttural sound, then sneezed. He looked at her quizzically, and she sneezed again. Coughed. Laughed. Trembled and coughed again. He laughed himself, then said: “Christ! Can you speak?”

“Ih c’n! Ih c’n! C’n spake!”

But not well enough to intelligibly give her name: Jane Scull.

“Are you — are you hungry?”

“Yihss! Am — am unh-gree!”

She spoke in great grunting edicts, like a cannonball angel. Dirty white hearing aids were shoved in both ears.

“Good!” he shouted. “Let’s get you a Johnny Rocket’s!”

Will’m stood and walked a pace, then turned to see what she was up to. She stayed rooted, staring back like a frightened child — it panged him, for her helplessness evoked his orphan-daughter Amaryllis. Seizing a clammy hand, he steered them past storefronts. Three cheeseburgers and a quantity of milk shakes were ordered (strawberry, vanilla, chocolate), for which the cashier made him pay in advance. Then all the waiters and waitresses seemed to go mad, abandoning their posts while dancing and gesticulating to the music of the little silver jukes; he’d been to this café before, but had never seen such mayhem. Of an instant, their choreographies ceased and everything returned to normal. A few patrons laughed among themselves, amused by the gaping transient couple.

That he called her Janey (a thing that made the startled girl feel as if he could read minds), was a happy coincidence to his own privately parallel world — a slew of personae now alternately burning bright and fading too within the frayed fabric of a serpentine, superbly demented history. For while Will’m had begun to molt (as established), strange plumage persisted: wife Jane Burden, daughters Jenny and Mary; mentor Ruskin; boon companions Burne-Jones and Rossetti — the latter his best friend, who, so legend had it, betrayed Mr. Morris to become Janey’s paramour …

At dusk, they made their way to the boarded-up hotel where he’d been squatting. Jane Scull’s eyes widened with delight on seeing the room, as if it were Bexleyheath itself. It was clean and presentable enough, with a large scrap of wax paper tacked to the wall, upon which Will’m had stenciled flowers — trademark latticework of poppy, honeysuckle and fritillaria. The work left off abruptly, its maker having lost the thread.

“Lay down awhile, girl!”

He nearly pushed her onto the futon, retrieved during a freeway-litter sally. While ecstatic to have found something like a real bed to lie down upon, this Jane flushed and demurred.

“I won’t take advantage of you! What would you have me for? I want you to rest. I’ve some aspirin — you’re feverish. Here: water. Drink!” She swallowed the pills, too, and he lit some liquor store — bought votives. “Dangerous for a woman out there, no? Brigands’ll rape and leave you bleeding. Happen yet? And the policemen—thugs and abominations! The policemen are worse! ’Cepting the ones on horseback … they seem a reasonable lot. Though maybe it’s the horses who are reasonable. But you don’t have to worry now, Janey — where’ve you been living? Where’ve you had a bath? Or have you had one at all?”

“ ’ave! ’ave uh bith!”

She would not have him think she was careless and filthy; Lord, not him!

He sat back on his heels and stared, like a director at an audition. She was all jiggling flesh and great salmon-sushi lips, thighs and buttocks tattooed with the black-and-blue fingerprints of roughhouse vagrants, and wore deep squarish patches of dirt on shoulder and hip that would take more than scouring soap to erase. She kept repeating “un-keen” (which Will’m eventually translated: “I’m clean”), her echolalia accompanied by an almost involuntary disrobing, so that suddenly she sat before him naked and quaking, breasts avalanching to either side, bruised-white mutton legs rudely splayed.

He had never seen a woman of such epic proportions, and was humbled by her offering. Gently, he covered her up and sat down at futon’s edge.

“I don’t need any of that, Janey — don’t want that. It’s not that I don’t find you a stunner, all right? That, you most certainly are! It’s just — well, you’ve been with him, haven’t you? With Rossetti. And I understand it. I know I drove you to it. But you see I don’t know much anymore. Don’t know much about myself. And I don’t know you … and you, well, you don’t know me, now do you? What I’m up to. You’re not as keen on my work as you once were, no? Anyhow”—he stroked his stubble, mulling a mathematical problem—“it’s a while since I’ve been with a woman — why, I’d hardly know what to do! It’s a while since I’ve been with myself! And we don’t need do it, Janey. We don’t need do it for me to look after ya, we won’t have any of that — not for me to look after you. Is that all right? That’s all right, isn’t it, Janey?”

While he spoke, Ms. Scull went from puzzlement to tender acquiescence, until finally answering “ess! ess!”—a thousand times ess. For while she could hear little, she understood all.

From that moment on, she became exceedingly careful of her person; carried herself differently when she walked, with and without him; and modulated her outbursts, which themselves became more studiedly articulate. The corrective afflatus was not the result of “falling in love,” for Jane Scull felt she had always loved this man, but rather a kind of self-reckoning that came upon her as would a religious vision — a sudden, inexplicable, karmic settling of accounts, a cosmic ordering and coming-to, a gyroscopic awareness that arrived with such ease and graceful surety that it would remain the rest of her days.

That night in the defunct Tropicana, they stayed up late and Will’m sang old Oxford songs. Then he lay on his back while she slept, attentive to her respirations. At half-past three, like that time at the Higgins, there were crashes and shouts and flashes of light as policemen raided the units. Will’m took her hand and ran as he’d run so often through the years — this time into the night, past the quiet pier and Camera Obscura, north along refurbished bluffs to the palisades of the California Incline.

They leapt a low wooden fence and spent the night huddled against each other on the cliffside brush of the esplanade, where, hours before, couples had lingered to watch the raked evensong of sunset skies.

Will’m was fated to meet all manner of eleemosynary souls — he brought that out. A few weeks ago, he had caught the eye of a Catholic outreach worker giving away condoms and toothbrushes on the Promenade. Now, seeing the bedraggled couple the morning after their eviction, the benefactor approached.

“Do y’all need help?”

“What do you mean, sir?”

“Do y’all need a place to stay?”

Will’m shifted, stroking his cheek where once the beard had been.

Jane Scull took the man in with benign, near stately indifference — proud new wife of the Chairman of the Disembodied.

“It is possible,” said Will’m, with guarded eyes.

“Y’all know SeaShelter? Over on Olympic? Salvation Army? Sure you do. Over by the buses — y’all seen the big yard with the Blue Buses?”

The voice loved to rise up, whether asking or telling.

“And what,” said Will’m, “is there, sir?”

“Well, showers and beds and lockers — y’all been to St. Joseph’s, haven’t you?” He looked at Jane Scull and squinted. “SeaShelter’ll get you a hot shower? And there’s food and lockers for your personal things?”

Her eyes lit up at the mention of amenities — yet it was the idea of a locker that for Will’m was a real enticement. He would be able to retrieve his manuscript and stow it close at hand.

“I can help y’all be guests if you want to be. Y’all can stay for twenty days. They can help with medical needs, too. Would y’all be interested in being guests?”

“Possibly yes, sir.” He didn’t want to be a pushover, or a charity case either. But he had Janey to think of now.

“Real good then! They’ll find you a job? Lotta hotels in this city now — new hotels. There’s one thing you should know? They’re drug- and alcohol-free? I mean, SeaShelter? That’s something they don’t tolerate. So they expect you to be sober?” He handed them a flyer with a map to the facility and a general list of rules and requirements. “Go stand at the gate between three and six, that’s when guests are let in. Three and six in the evening. Best get there early? Now, one more thing is, they ask you to leave by seven-thirty each morning? Because they don’t want you sleeping in? Y’all like me to go on and call ahead to say you’re coming?”

The couple agreed. After the minister left, Jane threw her arms around Will’m and said, “Shower!” without impediment.