Little Casino (14 page)

S
HE TURNS AWAY FROM THE WINDOW THAT
looks over the courtyard into which snow, the first storm of the winter, is heavily falling, then smiles at him and pulls her slip off over her head. He’s pleased to see that she’s wearing white underclothes. This would seem to be or perhaps he’d like it to be the late afternoon or early evening of their wedding day. They are well-fed and slightly drunk. There’s a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc in the small, frost-choked refrigerator and a half-quart of vodka in the cupboard. Plenty of cigarettes. Hotcha! She keeps her lingerie in an old metal breadbox, white with a motif of tiny yellow flowers, that she bought for a dime at a sidewalk sale outside the dairy-and-egg store. She walks to the window and looks at the snow falling heavily in the courtyard and he looks at her body and smiles. They’ve been in this apartment for six months, and some of their books and records and clothes and dishes have not yet been unpacked, a bad sign, perhaps, if you believe in signs. She walks toward the bathroom, her slip immaculately flowing, that’s the word, from her hand. What whiteness will you add to this whiteness, what candor? “What whiteness will you add to this whiteness, what candor?” he says, and she looks over her shoulder at him and shakes her white slip. He sits on the couch, waiting for her to finish her shower, drinking Scotch and smoking. There’s plenty of Scotch left. Once, she threw what he remembers as a pale-blue dress on the battered studio couch and pulled her slip off over her head in a perfect sexual silence. He’d never seen her even partially undressed, and now, here she was. The radio was playing softly, some WBAI Mozart chestnut, the January wind battering the drafty old frame house. She opened the lingerie box and removed white things: soft luster, lace. He sat back and watched her. Wedding bells are breaking up that old gang of mine, and so? He touched a small, pale scar on his thigh, a souvenir of a scratch her cat had given him the first night they’d slept together. Some years before, he’d had a dream in which he’d pushed a woman out of the bed and she fell on the floor, her nightgown up around her waist. “What a fucking jerk,” the woman laughed, “I might have known.” One of the cartons had the letter “K” for “kitchen” on its side, or for “strikeout.” “Strikeout?” she’d said. When he went out to buy cigarettes and cash his ridiculous paycheck he expected her to be asleep when he returned, but she was ironing his shirts in black cotton underpants and a torn Sarah Lawrence T-shirt. She had his worn rubber zoris on. He held up the two bottles of cheap Bordeaux he’d also bought, and she lifted the iron in a toast to penury. He would have preferred it had she been wearing the pale-blue dress that she’d worn the night they first made love in his new apartment. Or was that another night? Or was it a pale-blue blouse or slip? It’s draped carelessly over the back of a kitchen chair, and she reaches for it and says that she had better get home before the shabby cheap son of a bitch who shares the rent with her steals her television set. They spent most of the early morning lying on the couch in somebody else’s apartment, listening to unfamiliar records. “One of these days I’ll get a place,” he says. “Uh-huh,” she says. The snow falls at a sharp angle past the window and into the early morning silence of Avenue A. She keeps a change of clothes in a plastic Key Food bag. After they dress, he looks at his watch and discovers that it’s only 8:30. For some reason, this day reminds him of their wedding day. He is pleased that she’s wearing a white brassiere, and he tells her so. Actually, he says, “Hotcha! Wotta pair!” and leers at her. She’s irritated and hurt by this and they begin to quarrel and she packs her few things together and leaves. He watches her walk across the snowy park and then he opens the window and throws his wristwatch out onto the avenue, the fucking idiot. He poured her a glass of cheap Bordeaux and they ate Chinese food, smiling at each other in the new daze of new love. When he came back with the wine she was wearing white ankle-strap heels, the very shoes she’d worn the day they got married. “Aha, fuck-me shoes, she hinted,” he said. She hit him with a pillow on which was embroidered
Handsome Is As Handsome Does.
She sat across from him in the early September light that touched her sweet, sad face, and he began to laugh from sheerest love, O love. She sits back in the bleached-out Adirondack chair in a white T-shirt and pleated white shorts, her feet bare, and he gets up and kneels in front of her and puts his face between her thighs. She strokes his hair, soon they’ll be married, or so he thinks. He says something about it. He lifted his head to see her looking at the snow falling past the window. She stands up, her warm thighs touch his upturned face, and she pulls her white slip off over her head. She is wearing white underclothes. He watches her take a breadbox down from a closet shelf. A breadbox? He hasn’t seen a breadbox since the Depression. This was the early evening of their wedding day? Maybe. She lights a cigarette and puts the pack down on top of her pale-blue dress, thrown carelessly on the bookcase. “So what are your lewd plans for me this evening, you dirty filthy thing?” she says. O gay sweet careless love.

The congruences of life are as relentless as they are poignant. Love, O love, O careless love.

“That this man, or one of them, is pleased that this woman, or one of them, is wearing white underclothes, would seem to strongly suggest that he is easily pleased.”

I was under the impression that we were more or less done with that pale-blue dress. Not that I mind!

“A man delighted with his beloved’s dress is a man who is, one might argue, easily delighted.”

Is this woman, or women, or whatever the hell is going on here, Dolores?

“Dolores asserts herself again in this memoir, although I use the word ‘memoir’ as a figure of speech, of course.”

“Memoir” or not, Dolores and her lady friends are heartbreakers all.

Harke, all you ladies that do sleep:

        the fayry queen Proserpina

Bids you awake and pitie them that weepe;

        you may doe in the darke

What the day doth forbid:

        feare not the dogs that barke,

                Night will have all hid.

“With the golden crown, Aphrodite,

Cypri munimenta sortita est.”

“Thou with dark eyelids.”

The Christmas tree

S
HE IS ON HER KNEES, NEXT TO THE
Christmas tree, her forearms on the edge of the worn couch. Her posture is reverential, even pious, although her skirt is up around her waist and her panties are down to the middle of her thighs, so that her buttocks are invitingly prominent between the torn white-lace trim of her slip and the dark tops of her stockings. He fucks her slowly and with fixed determination, by the living Christ he’ll prove to her that she loves him, no matter what she thinks she feels. He knows, though, that she doesn’t love him anymore, which is why he is fucking her so seriously. It would be nice if there were some goddamn heat in the dump of an apartment! He hates his stupid life, and hates hers even more. But he’ll show the bitch what a real fuck is. It is an intensely and violently erotic moment.

The couple so flagrantly and vulgarly spied upon for the voyeuristic pleasure of the reader (who is always in my thoughts) has been married for almost eleven years.

The magnificent “Blue Seven,” by Sonny Rollins, is playing on the phonograph during what I think should be called—and why not?—this “erotic moment.”

The Christmas tree! It could well have become, had this erotic moment been turned into a story, an image, crisp with irony, yet poignant with shared memory. Perhaps the reader once engaged in lovemaking under or next to a Christmas tree, and so can relate, and relate well, to the truth of the scene.

There are very few stories that we have not heard, popular opinion notwithstanding, very few indeed.

Writing, such as it is, that doesn’t quite become story, is often described, even condemned, as self-indulgent. And so it is. And no! The meaning of “such as it is” is not clear. It seems, somehow, crisp with irony.

The reader is always in my thoughts, as I think I’ve admitted.

4th of July

T
HEY REMEMBERED, FOR YEARS, THE BAR
becue they went to in East Orange, in somebody’s car. It was a lovely 4th of July, cool and sunny and dry, with a steady, fresh breeze off the Atlantic. In any event, that’s where death began or, perhaps, asserted itself. When questioned about it a few months later, everyone agreed, separately, that it began to become clear somewhere toward late afternoon, just before they got back in the car to return to the city. It wasn’t the day itself, certainly. The day was relaxed and cheerful, there were people everywhere, music and dancing, and no one got terribly drunk. A lot of people brought their children, as a matter of fact. It seemed to be the sort of 4th of July that is proffered as the American small-town norm, celebrant with bands and parades and picnics on the town mall or under the trees next to the Grange Hall. And yet there is no denying the fact that something happened, ribs, hot dogs, hamburgers, corn on the cob, kegs of beer, and the Stars and Stripes notwithstanding. Not even “The Washington Post March” could have overwhelmed it. There is a photograph to prove it.