Little Easter

London in December

Whenever I could not write, I’d assemble mental lists of authors and poets I could barely approximate and never be. There were very many lists. I would never be F. Scott or J.R.R. or e.e. or T.S. or J.D. or W.H. or D.H. or H.D. I’d never be Ernest or Ezra, Wallace or William, Kurt or Carlos, Richard or Raymond, Ann, Anne, or Ayn. I would never be Leo or Isaac, Hammett or Hesse, T. Wolfe or V. Woolf. I would always be Dylan, but neither Bob nor Thomas.

I was furiously making lists today. I was making lists to camouflage the bald spot on my brain where the words had stopped coming from. I was making lists to distract my eyes from the mounting pile of crumpled white paper surrounding my desk like unmelting snowballs. I was making lists to ease the frustration of blank pages. Blank pages; the only thing that ever made insurance work seem like romance.

When the lists didn’t work, I’d read. I was reading today. I was reading my own stuff; the three poems and two short stories that’d been published since my change of career. Sometimes reading my own printed words would pump me up, slap me, throw cold water in my face, fool me into believing there was hope and promise in the world and within me. Today, I wasn’t fooling so easy. Early on, I tried to juice myself by staring at photostats of the publishers’ payment checks, but today their sparse digits only fueled the frustration.

I switched to the product of someone else’s pen. I picked up the Whaler and studied something other than the grocery ads for the first time in five years. God, she really was good. Her sentences were as clean and taut as an old sailor’s knots. Her skepticism was sharp, but veiled like the microscopic teeth on a scalpel. Didn’t you know? All knives have teeth. All knives. She had knives. She had teeth. She knew how to use them. Again the question came. What had she done to fall this far?

Yeah, I’d pulled Kate Barnum’s name out of my memory’s hat. Her prose, however, had not been so readily retrievable. I guess I didn’t really have much respect for tabloid journalism. To me, newspaper writing was like newspaper print; easily washed off, easily forgotten. It really was some feat, you know, my recalling her name. Considering a good part of my newspaper reading had been done between sips of burned-bitter coffee in dull, heaterless front seats during eternal nights of mostly fruitless surveillance, it’s a wonder I could remember my own name. Then another question arose. Why did I remember hers?

The phone clicked or buzzed or whatever it was that phones did now in the digital age. I let its chips exercise their synthesized lungs until another wonder of the age threw its robotic two cents in.

“Hi! I’m not in right now,” my recorded voice lied, “or I’m listening to make sure I’m in the mood to speak to you.” That was more like it. “In any case, leave your name, number and time you called. I’ll try to get back to you soon as possible.’Bye.”

“Mr. Klein, this is Kate Barnum. If you’re there, please pick up. .” she waited. I waited. “Okay, then,” she went on, “I’d like to apologize for my behavior at the bar the other night. God, I’m sounding like such a jerk.” There was real discomfort in that pronouncement and it was followed by real anger. “I hate these fucking machines. If I could go back in time, I’d go back and kill the bastard who invented them.”

“Not me,” I picked up, interrupting her vengeful ramblings. “I’d go back and kill Van McCoy.”

“Van McCoy?”

“Van McCoy. You remember. ‘Do the hustle, doo doodoo doo doo doodoo doo doo. .’ I hated fuckin’ disco music,” I was actually gritting my teeth.

“Oh, him. He’s already dead,” Barnum delivered the good news.

“Hey, the guy who invented phone machines is also probably dead,” I chimed in sarcastically.

“Yeah, it sure is a wonderful life.”

“Ain’t it grand, though,” I paused. “I know there’s a point here somewhere and don’t tell me you really called to apologize.”

“It gave me a convenient opening,” she admitted easily enough.

“To. .” I wondered.

“To invite you to dinner tonight.”

I answered with silence. The kind of silence heavier than spent uranium wrapped in lead. The kind of silence louder than sonic booms in the Grand Canyon. She understood.

“No,” she replied to the unspoken questions, “my motives aren’t purely social. And yes, I’ll probably ask about the dead woman and your lame story concerning the events surrounding her demise. Look,” she cleared her throat, “I was a bit of an ass the other night-”

“A bit,” I agreed.

“Thanks for making this so easy,” Barnum replied sarcastically.

“Think nothin’ of it.”

“Will you shut up, please!” There was strain, all right. “You know you aren’t half bad looking for a guy as gray as London in December. And if you really are the man who wrote this dark poem I just finished reading,” she ruffled some pages by her phone’s mouthpiece, “then we should be able to get through dinner without much bloodletting. Even if you don’t answer my inevitable questions. What do you say?”

“I say you’re tryin’ too hard,” I paused a few beats, “but it’s been a long time since anyone’s tried at all. So, yeah, sure. I’m game.”

“My digs. Eight, eight-thirty.”

The rest of the conversation consisted of directional babble: “Make a sharp left after the alley behind Smythe’s Antique’s. .” That sort of thing. Sound Hill didn’t really have a wrong side of the tracks, but her address was located in that part of town which came closest to qualifying.

I had neglected to ask what we were having for dinner. I guess I really wasn’t very interested. I was, however, very interested in her. I felt it in my head and in my pants. From her fall to my poetry to her apology, she had pushed every right button there was to push. I forgot about attempting to write or making long lists. What I did do was to recall, in detail, the nightmare I’d had on the evening of the yellowbird murder and to try and regain the feeling of Kate Barnum’s imagined breasts in my now curious hands.