Loon Lake

17

And then the life quickened, suddenly the people in green were scurrying about purposefully, there even seemed to be more of them, and I knew without being told that the master of Loon Lake, Mr. F. W. Bennett, was in place.

One morning I was mucking out the stables. Two horses were made ready for riding. The wide doors swung open admitting a great flood of light, the horses were led out, and I caught a glimpse of her in jodhpurs, velvet riding jacket, she was fixing the strap of her riding helmet. The doors closed. I climbed over the stall gate and ran to a window. A bay flank and a shiny brown boot moved through my field of vision. I heard a man’s voice, a quiet word of encouragement, and then she, on her lighter mount, passed my eyes, the boot not quite secure in the stirrup.

I ran to the doors and put my eyes to the crack: the back and head of white hair were all I could see of Bennett before Clara’s figure loomed up on her fat-assed horse, she didn’t roll with its footfalls but took each one bumping, her black riding helmet slightly askew.

And then horses and riders passed behind some trees and were gone.

I raked shit.

In the evening I went to Mr. Penfield’s rooms and we listened to the scraps of dance music carried from the main house on the wind.

“I suppose I’ll be out of here tomorrow,” I said.

“What?” He had been staring into his wineglass.

“When it comes to his attention.”

“You can’t be sure, Joe of Paterson. I have made a great study of the very rich. The one way they are accessible is through their whim.” He swallowed some wine. “Yes. I have not told you this, but six or seven years ago when I came up here at night along the track, as you did, I knew where I was going. I had traced Frank Bennett to Loon Lake and I intended to kill him.”

“I have the idea myself,” I said. He didn’t seem to hear me.

“Mr. Bennett was amused. I was invited to remain on the grounds and write my poetry. Yes. And now you see me.”

“I do,” I said. “I see you.”

“I know what you think. You think living this way year after year and not going anywhere, not doing anything, I have lost my perspective. It’s true! It’s true. So that everything that happens, every, oh God”—his eyes go heavenward, he swallows some wine—“small thing, is monumentally significant. I know! I lie in wait like a bullfrog lying in wait for whatever comes along for his tongue to stick to. Yes. That’s the only part of me that moves, my tongue.”

He dropped his chin on his chest and stared at me with his bleary red eyes. “You want to hear me croak?”

“What?”

He emitted the sound of a bullfrog, never had I heard such a blat of self-disgust I didn’t want to. It was not one night like this but several I remember, sitting in his living room over the stables, piles of books on the floor, a desk covered with papers, composition notebooks the kind I used in school, clumps of dust on the floors, ashtrays filled to overflowing, ashes on the carpet, on the window seat, he drifts back and forth back and forth between the wine bottles and the window, and all the while Miss Clara Lukaćs dances rides swims dines in the provinces of Loon Lake, mysteriously advanced now to the rank of its mistress.

“I don’t think it’s a small thing,” I said. “I think it is monumentally significant.”

“Yes,” he says, and he pulls his chair closer to mine, “this is not the first acquaintance. And it has nothing to do with who I am or the way I look, it’s always the same — the immediate recognition I have for her when she appears, and the ease with which she comes to me whatever circumstances I’m in, whatever I’ve become. Because I have no particular appeal to women and I never have, except to this woman, and so the recognition must be mutual and it pushes us toward each other even though we don’t talk the same language. And so, you see, now again, even though I’m indisputably fatter and more ridiculous as a figure of love than I ever was. And even though” his eyes brimmed—“she is faithful to nothing but her own life.”

I didn’t know what he was talking about.

He struggled out of his chair and ran to his bookshelves, and not finding what he wanted, he disappeared into a closet from which came the sounds of crashing and falling things.

He stumbled out with a book in his hand. He blew the dust off. “I want you to have this,” he said, “my first published work, my first thin volume of verse”—he smiled unsmiled—“The Flowers of the Sangre de Cristo.” He did not hand me the book but examined it closely. “I printed it on a hand press and bound it myself in Nutley. It was my project for recovery, you see. The signatures in this one are out of order. But no matter, no matter.”

He pressed the volume on me now and looked in my eyes as if hoping to see the wisdom that would flow into them from the book.

“Just a minute,” he said. He ran back into the closet there was a terrible crash I jumped up but he came out coughing in a cloud of chalky dust waving his second published work. “This one too,” he said, slamming the closet door. He swallowed a great draught of wine and slumped back in his chair wheezing from the exertion.

I held the two slim volumes, the second included a Japanese woodprint as frontispiece. “Don’t read them now, don’t ask me to watch you as you read them,” he said.

I held the books, I could not help granting him the authority he craved as profound commentator on his own life — he was an author! Never mind that he published his books himself, I was impressed, nobody I ever knew had written a book. I held them in my hand.

Apart from everything else and despite the shadows of the wishes in my mind the vaguest shadows of the implementation of the wishes, I am moved to be so set up in the world with such a distinguished friend. I know he is a posturing drunk, how could I not recognize the type, but he has made me his friend, this poet, and I have a presence in the world.

He tells me his one remaining belief.

“Who are you to doubt it,” he says angrily, “a follower of trains in the night!”

I don’t doubt it I don’t. I have listened to his life, heard it accounted indulged improved incanted and I believe it all. It is a life that goes past grief and sorrow into a realm, like the life of a famous gangster or an explorer, where sudden death is the ordinary condition. And somehow I’m invited to engage my instinct not to share his suffering but to marvel at it, a life farcically set in the path of historical and natural disaster it comes to me as entertainment—

The war before the war before the war

Before the rise of the Meiji emperor

Before the black ships—

his great accomplishment was his own private being the grandness and the depth of his failed affections each of his representations of himself at the critical moments of his past contributed to the finished man before me

Child Bride in a Zen Garden by Warren Penfield

In a poem of plum blossoms and boats poled down a river

Behind a garden wall the sun lighting its pediment of red tile

A fourteen-year-old girl aches for her husband.

One bird whistles in the foliage of a tree that stands on crutches.

Small things are cherished, a comb a hand mirror a golden carp

in a pool no more than eight inches deep. Curved wooden foot

bridges of great age connect the banks of ponds. But everywhere

we know on the map are mountains with vertical faces

and thunderous waterfalls, escutcheons of burning houses

and suicidal armies, history clattering in contradistinction to

the sunlight melting itself in the bamboo grove.

Oh the fifty-three stations of the Tokaido. On the embankment

above the rice paddy travelers crouch under slants of rain.

Messengers run with their breechcloths flapping. Merchants

beat their donkeys. Boats with squared sails make

directly for shore. Paper lanterns slide down the waves.

Rain like the hammers of sculptors works the curved slopes

of water. When the sky clears at sunset fifty-three prefecture

officials arrive in the stations of the Tokaido. Fifty-three

women are prepared for them. Sunlit legends will be made tonight.

Beans are picked from the gardens, plump fowl slaughtered, and

in castles above the road unemployed warriors duel the firelight.

They weep they curse they raise wine cups to honor. Saints

of the wrong religion go unrecognized in the darkness beyond the

lighted windows of the inns. And at the end of the Tokaido

at the top of an inaccessible mountain sits the emperor himself,

a self-imperator, a self impersonating a self in splendor

in his empty room its walls painted with long-legged waterbirds,

its floor covered with ministers lying face down attending him.

The emperor is lacquered, his sword is set with suns, while

in another room doctors dispute the meaning of his stool.

Oh compact foreign devils flesh of rice

Everywhere we are smaller than the landscape.

I sit on the wood promenade overlooking my garden and I

am the real emperor. The small twisted tree is very old and has a

name. The rocks like islands in the sea of raked

gravel have names. The gravel waves break upon the rocks.

wall. I run across the gravel sea

and spy on her through the gate. Her blue-black hair is

undressed, like a child’s. She sits on a bed of moss, her

bowed neck as long as a lady’s of the court. The words rise

and fall in my throat growling and humming and making tunes.

I am breaking the laws of my religion. She is alert now to

the aviary of our language and stares at me with her wet mournful

eyes, the track of one tear surmounting the pout of her lip

and disappearing in the corner of her mouth. I speak and she

shifts to her knees, deferentially places her hands flat upon

her thighs. The soles of her feet are pale. She listens.

She is as still as the fieldmouse in the talons of the hawk.

Oh the fifty-three stages of the Tokaido. The old monk and the girl

clamber up on the rock path. Along the path falls a stream

so vertically on rocks that the water, broken into millions of

drops, bounces pachinko pachinko like pellets of steel.

We find a ledge overlooking the ocean. I aspire to goodness.

I aspire to the endless serenity of the realized Buddha.

In the sun on the rock ledge I remove her clothing. I

remove my clothing she averts her eyes. We hunker in the

hairless sallow integument of our kind. Her haunches are

small and muscular. Her thighs are slender. Her backbone

is as ordered as the stones of a Zen garden. I see reflected

in the polished gray rock under her the entrance to her life.

It is like the etching of a fig.

Raising my hand in the gesture of tenderness, I see her chin

lift in trust and at that moment I fling myself at her

and she falls into the sea.

She falls in a slow spiral, wobbling like a spent arrow.

I feel her heart beating in my chest.

I feel all she is, her flesh and bone, her terror in the sky.

The field of his accomplishment was his own private being, the grandness and depth of his failed affections. Each of his representations of himself at the critical moments of this past contributed to the finished man before me. He proved everything by his self-deprecation, his sighs, his lachrymose pauses, his prodigious thirst for wine, and he proved it in the scene or two with Clara, when, at an hour he somehow always knew, he would get me to help him over to her cottage not five minutes since she had come in herself, her make-up and hair and dress all showing the use of the evening, and she in some sort of sodden rage. What excited Mr. Penfield was the idea of rescue. He wanted to save her, take her away, carry her off. It was the pulsating center of his passion. And she seemed now not to understand, as if they spoke different languages, hers being Realism.

“War-rin,” she would say, “do I have to spell it out?”

“Oh God,” he’d cry, lifting his eyes, “oh God who made this girl, give her to me this time to hold, let me sink into the complacencies of fulfilled love, let us lose our memories together and let me die from the ordinary insubstantial results of having lived!”

“Goddamnit,” Clara shouted, and then, appealing to me, the audience, a role I embraced as I would any she chose, “what does he want from me? Oh Jesus! Joe,” she’d say when, invariably, he broke down, “why did you bring him? Take him home. Get this fucking drunk out of here.”