Sleepless Nights (4 page)

Not too many years later Juanita died of prodigious pains and sores; she went out in unbelievable suffering.

I like to remember the patience of old spinsters, some that looked like sea captains with their clear blue eyes, hair of soft, snowy whiteness, dazzling cheerfulness. Solitary music teachers, themselves bred on toil, leading the young by way of pain and discipline to their own honorable impasse, teaching in that way the scales of disappointment.

The paradox of the woman who reaches her true spinsterhood only after she is at last married and settled. She takes command and reaches a state of dominating dependency to which only she has the clue. How confident her reign, how skillful the solitary diplomacy, the ordering of the future and control of the present. She gathers in revenues and makes dispensations, carefully, never forgetting that she is alone.

Or when spinsters come in pairs, sometimes brothers and sisters, Clifford and Hepzibah. Beneath the pruderies and reticence, the humble acquiescence, the thin authority, the veils of a legendary
chagrin d’amour
, lovers unknown killed in wars: a tremendous turbulence rushes forth in season. Northern lights, comets.

Society tries to write these lives before they are lived. It does not always succeed. I have known from home the anarchic sexual secrets of plain, unmarried schoolteachers, some with their thick saving accounts, their accumulation of house lots and rooming houses, their hoarded legacies from parents, aunts, and uncles. Often these women tricked fate by their hidden inclination to men of bad character, younger than themselves: a yard man, a drifter, ex-convict. Gentlemen do not appeal to all women.

Je t’adore, brigand
.

My own affectionate, tireless mother had nine children. This fateful fertility kept her for most of her life under the dominion of nature. It was a thing, a presence, and she seemed to walk about encased in the clear globe of it. It was what she was always doing, and in the end what she had done.

Sometimes in the dark of my own nights her life would come back to me. When the counterpane was thrown aside, the light of the Hotel Empire shining red through the bamboo slats. Love and alcohol and the clothes on the floor; perfumes. No, no it was impossible that it was the same. Impersonal history, that which spreads over all, had altered the bedroom, the lovemaking.

My mother’s femaleness was absolute, ancient, and there was a peculiar, helpless assertiveness about it. Not the assertiveness of opinion, for she seemed to have no opinion about it and would, even when she was past seventy, merely shrug and looked perplexed when the subject of her own childbearing was raised. Or sometimes she might say: It did not make me miserable, if that’s what you want to know.

The assertiveness was merely the old, profound acceptance of the things of life. It was modest, smooth and soft as a handful of cotton. Without plan, without provision. All of that comes later as the body and even the soul go about the daily caring for the results of this seemingly natural acceptance.

And she was nothing at all like the cheerful twos and threes of the 1950’s, all of them living out their decade in the new station wagon, off to the camping site, the beach, the weekend, with the dog and the cat, the summer house and the camera.

An ineffable femininity, tidal. Mortification in the face of these oceanic rhythms was the unspoken, perhaps unconscious, lot of the children who expressed it in their passionate love for their kind, happy mother and in a singularly low birthrate for themselves.

Flaubert wrote in a letter to Louise Colet that he could never see a cradle without thinking of a grave.

During the joy of New York I was still for many years drawn back home. Christmas visits down to Lexington, carried in the womb of the George Washington Pullman cars on the old C&O. I—wearing a putative mink from the Ritz Thrift Shop on 57th Street. The train passed through mining towns in West Virginia, down through Ashland, Kentucky, through Olive Hill and Morehead. A stinging, empty, country stillness along the way, the hills rising up on either side to cradle the train as it slipped through the valley. Square, leaning cabins, clinging like mountain goats; ribbons of wood smoke drifting in the mist. Trail of the Lonesome Pine, Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come, the disreputable, whining vowels and diphthongs of the mountain people.

Once back home, my thought was: Do not speak to me of horses, of the Kentucky Derby. In school I remember that an unlikely radical in the Agricultural College did a study which seemed to prove that the costly offspring of thoroughbreds, auctioned off each year, did not bring in any more money, win more races, than the geniuses from the lower horse classes—those blessed mathematicians whose fathers ran candy stores. The joys of the Enlightenment.

Still I remember the old race track, before Keeneland was built, before the barns burned and the horses screamed all night in their prisons. A pastoral quality then, something theatrical and marginal, like the coming of the circus. The lustrous afternoons, faded blue paled by sunlight, the soft May air. The tracks at dawn, the early sun, the tranquil curve of the empty grandstands.

Near the end of the afternoon the important race is finally run. The purity of the dawn is forgotten. The dogwood and the lilac droop in the chill. And then the stress of the race, the pain and the pleasure of the outrageous effort are finally consecrated in a few moments. The sacrificial power of the horse and its Faustian contract with the jockey—something can be learned from that. A
tristesse
falls down upon the scene, down on the old memory. The horses are led away to their rest, their feelings about the race they have run unknown to us.

Perhaps it is true that being from where I am I was born a gambler. And as the gambler in Dostoevsky’s great story says: It is true that only one out of a hundred wins, but what is that to me?

“T
HE UNSPEAKABLE
vices of Mecca are a scandal to all Islam and a constant source of wonder to pious pilgrims.”

For the pilgrim to Mecca the life of the city trembled with its dangerous salvations.

1940’s

New York: there I lived at the Hotel Schuyler on West 45th Street, lived with a red-cheeked, homosexual young man from Kentucky. We had known each other all our lives. Our friendship was a violent one and we were as obsessive, critical, jealous, and cruel as any ordinary couple. The rages, the slamming doors, the silences, the dissembling. Each was for the other a treasured object of gossip and complaint. In spite of his inclinations, the drama was of man and woman, a genetic dissonance so like the marital howlings one could hear floating up from the courtyard or creeping up and down the rusty fire escapes.

The sharing of premises, premises laid out in these hotels with a brilliant economy that could make of strangers a mock family and turn a family into strangers. This sharing was all “living together” meant between us. And yet the grating friendship flowered in the morning and withered at night, shriveled in the winter and blossomed once more in the spring.

Often I lay awake fretting over some delinquency of J.’s. His coercive neatness inflamed me at times, as if his habits were not his right, but instead a dangerous poison to life, like the slow seepage of gas from the hotel stove.

In the evening he carefully selected and laid out his clothes for the next day; a preparation for going off to a much-despised job. Worst of all, J. had an unyielding need to brush his perfect teeth after dinner in the evening. This odd harness of habit held him in a vicious embrace and finally meant that no fortuitous invitation, no beguiling possibility arising unannounced could be accepted without a concentrated uneasiness of mind. These sacred routines did much to inhibit his sex life, even though he was, like the tolling of a bell, to be found every Saturday night at certain gay bars, drinking his rigid ration of beer.

Dear J.: Now you would be in an intense middle age if the carelessness of others had not annihilated in an instant all of your martyrdom to detail. A car went out of control at a crossing in Los Angeles and struck him down, he who was patiently observing the traffic lights. Hard not to imagine that the car, released from the oppression of brakes and the tyranny of a king at the steering wheel, malevolently rushed into an ecstatic terrorism against J.’s neat, clerkly life at the curb.

Even now I can still hear J. singing in a thin, pure tenor with a hint in it of the mountains, where his family came from. He greatly feared his father, a large, large, fair man in black clothes, a country businessman. When the father died, the state government sent a police escort to the funeral and the mountain people stood staring in the streets. J. greatly cared for his mother—classic that he was—although of the two the father was the more interesting, but too large, clothes too black, white shirts too starchy, collar too stiff.

I remember when I first toddled into his office, J. would say, a queer from my first breath, and knew that I had been dealt a wrong card—this man weighing three hundred pounds, sitting behind a roll-top desk. I’m told I screamed like the girl I was.

At home, as a clever and by some richly disliked high-school boy, J. developed a passion for jazz or maybe for blackness, even though he was hesitant with black men. The pursuit of records took hold of him and he brought to it the methodical, dogmatic anxiety of his nature. The music seemed to cut into his flesh, leaving a sort of scar of longing never satisfied, almost a wound of feeling. Like all passions it was isolating because there was much he did not admire that others would, to his fury, press upon him. And then he always said that it could be distressing to listen to jazz when one was troubled or with the “wrong” person. At times he would think of giving it up altogether, so difficult was it to define, even for himself, what popular music and certain ways of doing it were all about. What was it?... the sea itself, or youth alone?

We lived there in the center of Manhattan, scorning the ups and downs, somehow believing the very placing of the hotel to be an overwhelming beneficence. No star was to be seen in the heavens, but the sky was always bright with the flicker of distant lights. No tree was to be seen, but as if by a miracle little heaps of twigs and blown leaves gathered in the gutters. To live in the obscuring jungle in the midst of things: close to—what? Within walking distance of all those places one never walked to.

But it was history, wasn’t it? The acrimonious twilight fell into the hollows between the gray and red buildings. Inside, the hotel was a sort of underbrush, a swampy footing for the irregular. What a mark the old hotel dwellers leave on your own unsteady heart—their brooding inconsequences, their delusions and disappearances.

These people, and some had been there for years, lived as if in a house recently burglarized, wires cut, their world vandalized, their memory a lament of peculiar losses. It was as if they had robbed themselves, and that gave a certain cheerfulness. Do not imagine that in the reduction to the rented room they received nothing in return. They got a lot, I tell you. They were lifted by insolence above their forgotten loans, their surly arrears, their misspent matrimonies, their many debts which seemed to fall with relief into the wastebaskets where they would be picked up by the night men.

The Automat with its woeful, watery macaroni, its bready meat loaf, the cubicles of drying sandwiches; mud, glue, and leather, from these textures you made your choice. The miseries of the deformed diners and their revolting habits; they were necessary, like a sewer, like the Bowery, Klein’s, 14th Street. Every great city is a Lourdes where you hope to throw off your crutches but meanwhile must stumble along on them, hobbling under the protection of the shrine.

The Hotel Schuyler was more than a little sleazy and a great deal of sleazy life went on there. Its spotted rugs and walls were a challenge no effort could meet and the rootlessness hardened over everything like a scab. Repetition—no one ever escapes it, and these poor people who were trying were the most trapped of all.

Midtown—look toward the east, toward many beautiful and bright things for sale. Turn the eyes westward—a nettling thicket of drunks, actors, gamblers, waiters, people who slept all day in their graying underwear and gave off a far from fresh odor when they dressed in their brown suits and brown snap-brim hats for the evening’s inchoate activities. At that time these loosely connected persons had about them an air that was sometimes thick and dumb and yet passive; the faces on the streets had not yet frozen into an expression of danger and assault, of malice and fearlessness, the glaze of death in the daylight.

The small, futile shops around us explained how little we know of ourselves and how perplexing are our souvenirs and icons. Watch the strangers in the city, poor people, in a daze, making decisions, exchanging coins and bills for the incurious curiosities, the unexceptional novelties. Sixth Avenue lies buried in the drawers, bureaus, boxes, attics, and cellars of grandchildren. There, blackening, are the dead watches, the long, oval rings for the little finger, the smooth pieces of polished wood shaped into a long-chinned African head, the key rings of the Empire State building. And there were little, blaring shops, narrow as a cell, open most of the night, where were sold old, scratched, worn-thin jazz and race records—Vocalion, Okeh, and Brunswick labels.

And the shifty jazz clubs on 52nd Street, with their large blow-ups of faces, instruments, and names. Little men, chewing on cigars, outside in the cold or the heat, calling out the names of performers, saying: Three Nights Only, or Last New York Appearance.

At the curb, getting out of a taxi, or at the White Rose Bar drinking, there “they” were, the great performers with their worn, brown faces, enigmatic in the early evening, their coughs, their split lips and yellow eyes; their clothes, crisp and bright and hard as the bone-fibered feathers of a bird.

And there she often was—the “bizarre deity,” Billie Holiday.

Real
people: nothing like your mother and father, nothing like those friends from long ago now living in the family house alone, with the silver and the pictures, a few new lamps and a new roof—set up at last, preparing to die.