He held my hand on the walk-an unusual attention for a boy his age- and I guessed that he was lonely, but if I explained his conduct by this I must have been lonely myself because I enjoyed his company. He may have reminded me of my own childhood. The resonance of deep affection, some part of which is surely memory, was what I experienced. We had a good swim and had breakfast together and then he asked, very shyly, if I would like to play catch. We spent perhaps an hour on the back lawn, throwing a ball back and forth. Then the others came down and we started drinking Bloody Marys and there were the usual activities of a weekend, most of which excluded a boy his age. When we were dressing that evening to go out Maggie knocked on my door and said that her son wanted me to say good night to him. I did. When I got up on Sunday morning he was sitting on a chair outside my bedroom door and we walked again to the beach. I didn't see much of him on Sunday but I seemed
aware of him-his footstep, his voice, his presence in the house. I drove back on Sunday afternoon and I've never seen or heard of him but I definitely felt something like love for him during the few hours we spent together.
As for dogs I will also confine myself to a single example. In the spring I went out to Connecticut for a weekend with, the Powerses. After lunch on Saturday we decided to climb what they called a mountain. It was, in fact, a hill. They had a dirty old collie named Francey who came along. Near the summit there was a steep rock face that was too much for Francey and I picked her up in my arms and carried her to the top. She stayed at my side for the rest of the climb or walk and when we returned I carried her down the steep stretch. While we had cocktails Francey stayed at my side and I roughed the fur on her neck. I was just as pleased with her company, I think, as she was with mine. When I went upstairs to change Francey came along and lay on the floor. I went to bed at about midnight and just as I was about to close the bedroom door Francey came along the hall and joined me. She slept on my bed. Francey and I were inseparable on Sunday. She followed me wherever I went and I talked with her, fed her crackers and roughed and caressed her neck. When it was time for me to leave on Sunday, Francey, while I was saying goodbye, streaked across the driveway and got into my car. I was flattered, of course, but flattery is some part of susceptibility and all the way home I thought tenderly of the old dog as if I had left a love.
It took me an hour and a half to drive to New York and another twenty minutes to find a parking place near the museum. The odds against finding her in that labyrinth were unequal, I knew, but that it was a labyrinth, winding, twilit and cavernous, gave some fitness to my errand and I stepped into the museum at a basement entrance with a very light heart. It was a place I had visited once or twice a year for as long as I could remember and while there had been changes there had been fewer-far fewer-than there had been outside the walls. In fifteen years the Alaskan war canoe had traveled perhaps twenty-five yards, leaving a gallery of totem poles for a vestibule. Eskimo women in glass cases were performing the same humble tasks they had been performing when I was a child, clutching Gretchen Oxencroft's hand. I decided to start at the top of the building and work my way down. I took the elevator and began my search in a gallery that contained jewels and glass constructions of molecular particles. Lighting was a problem since if the galleries had been well lighted I would, by standing in any door, have been able to see whether or not she was there; but many of the galleries were nocturnal and I had to go from exhibit to exhibit, looking for her face in the half-lights. I was able to take in the Pleistocene room in a glance-that soaring construction of prehistoric bone and the intensely human odor of wet clothing-and the room that contains the stuffed copperheads was also well lighted. I passed the Blue Whale and the stuffed Aardvark and then stepped into another dusky gallery where the only illumination came from cases of magnified Protozoa. I descended from there to the even deeper twilight of the African gallery and from there to the North American habitat groups. Here in the stale and cavernous dark was a thrilling sense of permanence. Here were landscapes, seasons, moments in time that had not changed by a leaf or a flake of snow during my life. The flamingoes flew exactly as they had flown when I was a child. The rutting mooses were still locked, antler to antler, the timber wolves still slinked through the blue snow towards the pane of glass that separated them from chaos and change, and not a leaf of the brilliant autumn foliage had fallen. The Alaska bear still reared at the end of a corridor that seemed to be his demesne and it was here that I found her, admiring the bear.
"Hello," I said.
"Oh, hello," she said.
That was quick. Then she took my arm and said: "I have the most marvelous idea. Why don't you take me to the Plaza for lunch."
We walked across the park towards the Plaza. "I don't think I have enough money for lunch," I said, "and there's no place around here where I can cash a check." I counted the money in my wallet. I had seventeen dollars. "But seventeen is enough to take me to lunch," she said. "I mean you could miss lunch for once in your life, couldn't you?" That's what we did. She ordered a full lunch and a bottle of wine. I explained to the waiter that I had already lunched but I did drink a glass of wine. She said goodbye to me in front of the hotel. "I have to get back to Blenville in time to buy Grandfather's groceries," she said. "Back to my prison, back to my jail…" I had a hamburger and an orange drink at the corner and drove back to Blenville myself.
I was over there the next afternoon at around four. She answered the door. She was wearing a gray dress with a white thread on the shoulder. "Did you get anything to eat?" she asked.
"I had a hamburger."
"I'm sorry I spent all your money."
That's all right. I've got more. Why don't you come over to my house?"
"Where do you live?"
"I bought Dora Emmison's place."
"I'll get a coat. I feel like a prisoner here."
Back at my house I lighted a fire, made some drinks and we sat in the yellow room while she told me her story. She was twenty-three and had never married. She had lived in France until she was twelve when her parents were killed in an accident and her grandfather became her guardian. She had gone to Bennington.
When her grandfather moved to the country she took an apartment and got a job as a receptionist at Macy's. She was bored and lonely in the city and had come out to Blenville in the autumn with the hope of finding a job, but the only industry in Blenville was the motel and she didn't want to be either a prostitute or a chambermaid.
While she was talking there was a loud crack of thunder. Thunder was unusual at that time of year-the late winter-and at the first explosion I thought a plane had broken the sound barrier. The second peal-rolling and percussive-was unmistakably thunder. "Dammit," she said.
"What's the matter?"
"I'm afraid of thunder. I know it's absurd but that doesn't make any difference. When I was working at Macy's and living alone I used to hide in the closet when there was a thunderstorm. I finally went to a psychiatrist to see if he could do anything and he said the reason I was afraid of thunder was because I was a terrible egocentric. He said I thought I was so important that the thunder would seek me out for extermination. All of this may be true but it doesn't keep me from trembling." She was trembling then and I took her in my arms and we became lovers before the storm had passed over my land. "That felt good," she said, "that felt very good. That was a nice thing to do."
"I've never had it better," I said. "Let's get married."
Six weeks later we were married in the church in Blenville. Marietta wore a gray suit with a white thread on the lapel. (Where did all those threads come from? Later, when we traveled in Europe, she would sometimes appear with a white thread on her shoulder.) After the wedding we flew to Curacao and spent two weeks at St. Martha's Bay. It was lovely and when we returned to Blenville I seemed to possess everything in the world that I wanted. When I finished the Montale and took it into New York I discovered that the poetry had already been translated but for some reason this didn't disappoint me. It seemed then that nothing could. I don't know when the honeymoon ended… I'll settle for a night in Blenville. Eleven o'clock. Groping, I found Marietta 's side of the bed empty. There was a light on in the kitchen. The shape of the lighted window stretched over the lawn. Was Marietta sick? I sleep naked and I went down the stairs into the kitchen naked. Marietta stood in the center of the floor wearing her wedding ring and nothing else. She was eating, with a bent fork, from a can of salmon. When I embraced her she pushed me away angrily and said: "Can't you see that I'm eating." The salmon gave off a sea smell, fresh and cheerful. I felt like taking a swim. When I touched her again she said: "Leave me alone, leave me alone! Can't a person get something to eat without being molested?" After that night-if that was the night-I saw more of distemper than tenderness and often slept alone; but while Marietta 's distempers were strenuous they had no more permanence than the wind. They seemed at times to be influenced by the wind. Spring and its uncertain zephyrs-any sort of clemency-seemed to create a barometric disturbance in her nature that provoked her deepest discontents. Violence, on the other hand-hurricanes, thunderstorms and buzzards-sweetened her nature. In the autumn when tempests with girls' names lashed the Bermudas and moved up past Hatteras into the northeast, she could be gentle, yielding and wifely. When snows closed the roads and stopped the trains she was angelic, and once, at the height of an epochal blizzard, she said she loved me. She seemed to think of love as a universal dilemma, produced by convulsions of nature and history. I will never forget how tender she was the day we went off the gold standard and her passion was boundless when they shot the King of Parthia. (He was saying his prayers in the basilica.) When our only mutuality was a roof tree and some furnishings she looked at me as if I was a repulsive brute to whom she had been sold by some cruel slavemaster; but when the carts of thunder rolled, when the assassin's knife struck home, when governments fell and earthquakes blasted the city walls she was my glory and my child.
A clinician like Shitz would have said that I had been warned but he was wrong all along. My fault was that I had thought of love as a heady distillate of nostalgia-a force of memory that had resisted analysis by cybernetics. We do not fall in love-I thought-we re-enter love, and I had fallen in love with a memory-a piece of white thread and a thunderstorm. My own true love was a piece of white thread and that was so.
Sleeping alone then, as I often did, I found myself forced into the reveries of an adolescent, a soldier, or a prisoner. To sublimate my physical needs and cure my insomnia I fell into the habit of inventing dream girls. I know the vastness that separates revery from the realities of a robust and a sweaty fuck on a thundery Sunday afternoon, but like some prisoner in solitary confinement I had nothing to go on but my memories and my imagination. I began with my memory and pretended to be sleeping with a girl I had known in Ashburnham. I remembered her dark blondness in detail and seemed to feel her pubic hair against my naked hip. Night after night I summoned up all the girls I had ever romanced. Night after night they came singly and sometimes in pairs so that I lay happily on my stomach with a naked woman on either side. I began by summoning them but after a while they seemed to come of their own volition. Like all lonely men, I fell in love-hopelessly-with the girls on magazine covers and the models who advertise girdles. I did not go so far as to carry their photographs around in my wallet, but I was tempted to, and having fallen in love with these strangers I found that they willingly joined me in bed. Surrounded then by the women I remembered and the women I had seen photographed I was joined by a third group of comforters produced, I suppose, by some chamber in my nature. These were women I had never seen. I woke one midnight to find myself lying beside an imaginary Chinese who had very small breasts and a voluptuous backside. She was followed by a vivacious Negress and she by an amiable but very fat woman with red hair. I had never romanced a fat woman that I could recall. But they came, they solaced me, they let me sleep, and when I woke in the morning I was moderately hopeful.
I envied men like Nailles who might, I suppose, looking at Nellie, recall the number and variety of places where he had covered her.