Ray

XLIII

CHARLIE DESOTO is in the office.

“Ray, I’ve discovered that my wife is a lesbian, or at least so far divorced from usual commerce between us that love words do no good. Love-making hurts. It seems to be an inconvenience. It’s smelly, messy. She makes me feel like a raper. I can never satisfy her. This baffles this poor fool who married her and had so many, I can’t tell you, uh, loves with her. She prefers to sleep with her old coloring books. Nothing sensual I can say to her touches her. I’ve been drinking too much. I’ve used cocaine, LSD, listened for the phone, waited for her letters, since we’ve been apart. What do I do?”

“Split. Get out of this CM.”

“But I still have wonderful love dreams of her.”

“You can have dreams of somebody else.”

“I envy you and Westy. You sit there very smug.”

“Get off of it. Westy’s a hell of a woman, but I’ve had three months with no nooky. People are like weather where she grew up. I’m terribly sorry your wife’s queer.”

I went by Hooch’s house. The yard is cleaned up. The backyard is raked and the grass is growing around it like a billiard table. They are clean and neat now that Sister is dead. He’s working on the tugboat and looks two decades from his real age. He and Agnes don’t sleep in the same room anymore. He lives in Sister’s acoustic-tile room, and he plays those records and he writes his poems that beat the hell out of mine.

And the old man is sixty-seven. He’s got himself an Olivetti automatic typewriter and plays Sister’s album over and over.

He picks up her brassieres and her pictures and her underwear.

He handed me one:

Grief is

Looking at the wooden Indian where your little ones should be.

I bought a new color teevee.

All the people you should be are on the screen.

Everybody is pretty.