Panama

2

THE SILVER ROOFS extended from my window in a fractured line under a sky which displayed a small but ineffably shiny cloud to the west. The radio was playing “Volare” by Dean Martin, the notorious companion of Frank Sinatra.

Catherine, bless her heart maybe, Catherine pried me from the door and put me in the guest room. Then she had Doctor Proctor come over and load me good on some intravenous downer. At first I thought I had passed into the great beyond. I thought quite objectively about the dead. They are given so much credit; when, in fact, they don’t know much of anything. And why should they? They have enough to do.

I’m busy too. I’m still alive and I’m not ashamed of it. I’m proud of this raiment. Bring on the ghosts. I’ll pack them through the streets. Let the ones who have ringed the city, who have made our lives an encampment, let them whiten the air, the sea. I happen to have enough to do already. Let the dead run a grocery store or build an airplane. I am not impressed with them, with the possible exception of my brother Jim. And having to argue as to whether my father is actually dead deprives the whole question of its dignity.

In the photograph of my mother’s funeral party, I am the third mourner from the left. I am wearing a Countess Mara tie, older than me, whose blue flowers arise like ghosts toward my throat. It is widely presumed that the expression on my face is a raffish grin; whereas it is plainly the grimace of gastric distress.

In the foreground of the picture, my aunts carry on their bulbous flirtation with the photographer. The picture is covered with the somnolent stains of handling by interested parties who believed me to have been grinning.

By noontime, Catherine had not come home and I had suffered a whiteout, a silence, a space between the echoes of the dead I had trifled with; and I felt prefigured in the vacancy, as though my future inhered there.

My hand was bandaged, I had evidently passed out and hung from the nail until discovered. The muscles in my arm were sore and stretched. From dangling.

I was falling asleep again when I heard Catherine arrive with someone, unloading groceries in front. Then she and the other person, another young woman, came and sat on the bed and looked at me. I pretended to be asleep.

“He’s still out of it,” said the other woman.

“This is Marcelline,” said Catherine.

“How did you know I was awake?”

“I can read you like a Dell comic.”

“How do you do, Marcelline.”

“Marcelline has just had an abortion.”

“I wasn’t making a pass at her, Catherine.”

Marcelline said, “If I roll a J will you all smoke on it with me?” I told her that stuff was cluttering up the drug scene and that I was opposed to its use.

“Who gave you the abortion?” I asked. All I wanted was to talk to Catherine.

“A laughing nurse in New Orleans. A real card. I had to change planes in Tampa.”

“Marcelline loves Tampa,” Catherine said.

“They make a nice cigar there,” I offered.

“How’s your hand?”

“Hurts a lot.”

“You had a nail in it,” said Catherine.

Marcelline said, “A little crucifixion. What a droll guy. I hear you can’t remember anything. You’re full of little tricks.”

“Used to be he just talked funny,” said Catherine, “now he’s commenced acting it out.”

Marcelline said, “Tampa is full of elderly nice persons who know they could eat it any minute. So they don’t talk nuts to get laughs. My, it hurts. That nurse just got in there and rambled.”

I looked at Catherine with her berserk mass of kinks and curls. I thought, it didn’t matter about men; but when push came to shove, these Southern girls only wanted to see each other. I didn’t know what I was, not a Southerner certainly. A Floridian. Drugs, alligators, macadam, the sea, sticky sex, laughter, and sudden death. Catherine initiated the idea that I was a misfit. I took to the idea like a duck to water.

I felt sleepy again. I heard a sprinkler start up, the first drops of water falling on the ground with distinct thuds. I heard the voice of my odious grandfather twenty years ago, “There’s a nigger fishing the canal and he’s got one on!” My hands were knit together and I was wonderfully happy and comfortable drifting away with the two pretty women chatting on the end of the bed, about Tampa, about the difficulty of getting nice cotton things any more, about Wallace Stevens in Key West.

When I woke up a few minutes later, Marcelline was kissing Catherine. One of Catherine’s little breasts was outside her shirt and her panties were stretched between her knees. Marcelline slid the green skirt over Catherine’s stomach and bottom, then put it up under her. Catherine lifted one leg free of the panties in a gesture that put her leg out of the shadow the bed was in, into the sunlight. Marcelline slipped away and stayed until I heard the familiar tremolo of Catherine.

When Marcelline stood up, tucking a yellow forties washdress around her good Cajun body, she laughed suddenly. “He’s awake!” Then leaned over and pinched my cheek. “I bet he jerked off the whole while!”

When Marcelline left, I said, “So that’s it, eating pussy all day.”

“Oh, God,” she said, getting up. “I’m going to the beach. And when your hand is better, you’re leaving too.”

“Why did you take me in?”

“I was embarrassed to have you nailed on the door.”

“Oh, Catherine. — Why am I itching?”

“My apartment’s got a cistern under it and the mosquitoes are coming up through the floor.”

“Have you turned queer?”

“Don’t talk to me like that, you.”

“Can I read my old love letters?”

“Burned them.”

“Burned them! They’re worth a fortune.”

“To who? Other depraved perverts?”

“I just don’t like that phrase. It’s not a clever phrase. It’s a dreary phrase and everybody’s calling me it. I’m sick of it. You hurt with those hand-me-down phrases. They suggest indifference. Will you get in here with me?”

“No.”

“You committed a crime against nature with Marcelline. What’s wrong with me?”

“That’s not the point, my dear. You’ll forget we did.”

“What’s Marcelline do?”

“She’s blackmailing a judge in Toronto.”

“I still love you.”

“Fuck off.”

“With my whole heart.”

“Why did you tell the magazines you regretted every minute with me?”

“Because you’d hurt me by disappearing without explanation, by leaving me flat. You can’t do that to a psychotic.”

“You told them that I was a nouveau Hitler maiden. Why?”

“Oh, did I do that?”

“That’s why I call you a depraved pervert.”

“Slip in here with me.”

“No, I’m a big bull dike. I only like eating pussy. You called me deep-dish Southern plastic in a national publication.”

“Catherine, don’t ridicule me. I suspect your motives, doing that at the foot of my bed anyway.”

“Come on, Chet, be the fun guy we knew you to be.”

“Eat it.”

“Not if it’s a shlong.”

“God, Catherine, I can’t have this smut.”

“Tell it to the dead elephant. Tell it to the creeps who said you’re God. Tell it to the mayor of New York.”

I stared at her, loving her hauteur, admiring that she was probably not going to buy it ever again. I wanted her. I was not down on sex, though some of my youthful flamboyance was no longer there.

She went to the wicker dresser and started raking idly through costume jewelry in a tray. She held the pretty junk to the light for an instant. Then her hands disappeared and her skirt fell. She turned and pulled the blouse over her head, then the little turned-in-knee two-step to get rid of the panties. She said, “Apologize.”

“I’m sorry. Forgive me.”

She slipped in beside me, skin cooler than mine, like an otter. I reached down. “What’s that?”

“Marcelline.”

“Gee. It’s all over the place.” I was a little disoriented, an orphan in the storm. I didn’t know if I was what Catherine required. I really was not sure; but when I glided around, slipping all around and touching her, opening her in the slow rude way I remembered her liking, she was right there climbing up under it, thrilled. I loved her quite unselfishly, watching her all the time. She came in a languorous flood and called me Marcelline.

“I’ll tell you what,” she said — and by this time, she’s walking around slamming drawers and assembling her duds to get the hell out, having behaved, by her lights, deplorably, having whipped it out—“you’ve gotten to where people can’t even talk to you.”

“What!”

“They know they’re gonna get hustled and left high and dry while you cruise into this five-and-dime sunset.”

“Oh, Catherine.”

“It’s true.”

“I know it’s true. But catch me when there are a few things I don’t regret, would you?”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Catch me when there’s something I’m proud of. At the moment, I feel shit out of luck. I have some questions—”

“Shut up! Shut up shut up shut up!”

Items in the air. Why throw things now? I must be completely safe. I detest being injured.

“I can go. My hand’s not that sore.”

“I won’t have your hand on my conscience! Now I’m feeling guilty! Can you beat that? Oh God, I want a restraining order!”

I got out of bed and snatched on my trousers. Boy oh boy was I in love. I started racing around for my belongings, trying to act like a cowboy but knowing full well what a duck I appeared. Something or other ricocheted from my head into the bathroom. A wooden coat hanger, I think it was. From the Sherry-Netherland. I was at Southard and Simonton before I knew it. There was a terrible squabble behind the wall opposite the police station. When I looked, I saw an older gentleman of the Cuban persuasion flogging an osprey out of his fighting cock runs. He had a gun.

Something about our republic makes us go armed. I myself am happier having a piece within reach, knowing if some goblin jumps into the path, it’s away with him. Here in Key West, we take our guns to parties. My pedal steel player had one on a clip under his instrument; it said “Death To Traitors” on the backstrap and was stolen by a fan in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, on New Year’s Day.

Why won’t Catherine even try to see eye to eye with me about our future? I could see I stood a really good chance of not getting her back. I wonder if she actually has any right to make me feel this way. God, I want her back.

Back at my place, the ocean made a simpering reedy wash under the eroded patio and my dog remembered my having failed to feed her last night. Mrs. Dean, who lived next door and who weighed much too much, felt her way across the crushed coral to the ponderosa lemon tree and laid on it with a flit gun until nothing could live there. I rattled nourishing kibble into a tin plate and felt my nail hole while the dog ate. My homecomings are always this heartwarming, full of the familiars of our day-to-day life, like radium watch dials, particle board, novelty pills, or dental floss.

Catherine’s yielding deprived me of a half-foreseen rape, something aesthetic to me, stooping over her sunken form, pre-owned gabardine trousers stretched across the piquant tendons behind my knees. And her flippancy of course left me nothing in terms of leverage, the way careless love leaves you empty-handed. No tug, no give and take. Where were the good old days?

I decided to throw a party, something nice, something with an orchestra, by the sea with food, the tradewinds in the sea grapes, the movements of ocean at least as loud as the baseball or the drunks on White Street. I would bring my dog and wind her chain around the forearm of my linen jacket. I would lean this way and that among the guests and say any god damn thing I pleased because it was my fucking party. I would order the guests about as whim provided. The servants would be little hippies with their hair tied back and clean shirts. They will have left the literature of revolutionary consciousness behind in their pads. They would be made to hop to on the highballs and party snacks. I would tell them Krishna is the sound of petits fours in the teeth, the little shitsuckers.

* * *

By the time I had fed the dog, my two uncles, Pat and Jack, were in the patio. Pat used to throw the ball for my dead brother Jim and me up onto the amazing bevels of my father’s roof and we would run around guessing wildly which way the ball would come down. Pat had all the time in the world for us, no matter that he was shell-shocked and having a time of it with his flagging law practice. Pat had a houseful of books, good cooking utensils, and a telescope in his attic. The rest of the family disapproved of him because he was a drunken queer.

Jack had all the family attention because he was a shipwright and kept the light of history burning. No one was building ships in Key West any more; but that didn’t matter. We were all proud of him for whiling away his life in the shipyard, listening to bubble-gum music on AM radio, flipping his pocketknife into the wall; and each year turning over the woodpile, catching the scorpions, and varnishing them on a piece of plywood over his desk. All Pat’s years of struggling in his law office with his twitching shell-shocked face would never really supplant his behaving like a terrible fruit fly. When I was ten, my father ordered Pat to stay away from Jim and me.

Jack said, “Some place you got here.”

“Just a seaside bide-a-wee.”

Pat found the old tiles in the walls, old Havana tiles with maidens and tobacco leaves blasted into the porcelain and no socialist realism in sight.

“Really quite a little place,” Jack said.

“Are you retired or something?” Pat inquired.

Jack said, “Where’s all your money? This place is okay for the dog. You were on Johnny Carson. Where’s the simoleons, kiddo. This is no way to live.”

“God,” said Pat, “they could never make tiles like that again.”

“It’s in a numbered Swiss account,” I said. “That way I could forget the number. It gives me humility, and humility is what I could stand a little of.”

“You can say that again,” said Jack.

Pat said, “I like everything you’ve done.” Pat was the one who threw the ball over and over again for Jim and me.

“I’m having a party at the Casa Marina.”

“The Casa Marina is abandoned. Besides, why don’t you hold off for a while. Your father’s supposed to be down soon on his boat.”

“My father’s dead,” I said.

“That’s a good one,” said Jack.

“I know what he means,” said Pat.

“There will be an orchestra and dancing in the weeds. Moonlight and whores in the old manner. Fireflies, bullbats, and phantom ships.” I wanted to focus on the party.

“C’mon,” Jack said. “We’re just your uncles. We don’t pay you to talk like that. They do.”

Jack had me there. Here at home I wasn’t being paid to sum up civilization or to act it out in a glimmer. Once again, I was Joe Blow and I wasn’t sure I was crazy about it.

“The main thing,” Jack said, “and I think Pat will agree. Whyn’t you go on and stay the hell out of Roxy’s business. She doesn’t like it to start with. And also, we aren’t situated on this island like we once were. Peavey could make it nasty. He’s connected every which way and some of it’s not too savory.”

“He’s dangerous,” Pat said.

“I’ll invite him to the party,” I said.

“Come on, Chet.”

“Yeah Chet gee.”

I let some quiet fall and added, “Otherwise I’d have to go ahead and shoot him.”

“Don’t even talk like that!”

“It doesn’t matter anyway. A little dancing by the sea and Peavey will be eating out of my hand.”

* * *

I talked to Catherine from a pay phone at the Wynn Dixie store. She was worried about Marcelline. I said, not Marcelline. She said yeah, she’s having trouble about this guy. I said Marcelline is indiscriminate. I said the sexually indiscriminate have lost the ability to convey a sense of privilege. I said they’re always having trouble with the guy. Don’t lay that shit on me, Catherine shouted. I’m not shouting, I shouted and customers looked at me in the chest-high booth where I stared into the soundproofing perforations and at the chained directory in false concentration. Trouble with the guy? Catherine said. Let me tell you trouble with the guy. Marcelline, it seems, had read some French novel and wanted to give herself in the form of a pagan rite, some form of utter consent. Sadly, she picked a vacationing agent from the firm of International Famous and he insisted on peeing in her face. Marcelline was in seclusion, in disgust with the human race.

“Has she had a chance to scrub up?” I asked.

“Hey, go fuck yourself.”

The line was dead. I wasn’t making the best of the conversations. I don’t quite know why, except insofar as it was part of this trajectory of declining hope which had gone so far in depriving me of what I formerly considered worth working for. For instance, I will soon be broke. Already, on the occasion of massive overdrafts, where once an obsequious vice-president would appear at the door, I now got an ill-tempered trainee with a pencil behind his ear who menaced my dog.

Then I thought, I could make Marcelline feel better about all this, about this terrible agent doing this to her face, with his thing, that agent. And by so doing, apart from placating my own humanity, I could wend my way back into Catherine’s affections, even to the extent of her withdrawing her remark about my fucking myself.