What We Are (16 page)

I said, “Get out.”

Susan craned her neck back, eyes glazed as if in a dream, and said, “Shit.”

“Get out.”

She pushed herself up from Sharon and the futon. Proudly stood in front of me, muscular and naked, panting. She reached down and grabbed her clothes from the coffee table, stepped into her panties, looked up at me as she slid them up her legs, stepped into faded painter pants, wiggled them tight, buttoned up, and said, “Sorry, Paulie.”

“Shut your mouth,” I said. “Get the fuck out of here.”

Susan snapped on her sports bra. “Will you be all right, hon?”

Sharon sat up. “Of course.”

“Get out of here, bitch.”

She was fully dressed. “All right. Glad to see you're in charge again. Leaving.”

Susan brushed by me and I felt something uncontrollable respond and I turned and tried to drive the image of their coupling out of my treacherous head with a thrust. I heard from the futon, “Don't!” Susan crashed down to her knees from the shove and I stomped toward
her. My hand reared back to strike the dyke hard and fast but Sharon's hands clutched me at the arm from behind and then slipped down to the waist.

Susan stood and turned with dignity. “Are you sure you'll be all right?”

“Yes.”

“Get the fuck out of here!”

“Just leave, Susie.”

Susan opened the door, “Don't worry, hon. I will be back.”

She left the studio, the door wide open.

I looked down on Sharon. Both arms were wrapped about me as if she were riding hitch on a motorcycle. She looked up, nude in the middle of the studio floor, eyebrows lifted in unprecedented subservience. She wanted something. But I separated from her, and pushed her onto the futon. She fell back, crying, her knees curled into her chest, the dirty-blond mane sticky with sex, sweat dotting the inside thigh, brow moist. Fully blushed and passionate. I took a step forward and some life came to her eyes. “You dare put your hands on me?”

“Yes.”

“You haven't made love to me in six months, you bastard! Fake purist bastard!”

“We did last month.”

“You fucked someone else!” Sharon pointed at my eyes. “I know you've got a hundred harlots up there in your head! I know it!”

“Get out.”

“You'd probably fuck Susie if I didn't! Wouldn't you? You sly bastard! Always on the sneak!”

“I said get out.”

I reached down and grabbed Sharon by the elbow. She dropped to her knees and put all her weight in her ass and said, “What the hell are you doing, Paul?”

I dragged her across the rug of our studio amidst the cries: “God! Don't do it! Liar! Don't!” She felt remarkably light, probably from her carnal romps with Susan. Who knew how long it had gone on?

The door had creaked halfway shut and I slammed it open into its door catch, leaned against it for leverage, and tossed Sharon onto the porch like a UPS package. She fell and rolled, but lay there for only a second, glistening white in the moonlit shine, her wet lips shivering.

I piously shut the door, then locked it. Walked over to the candles and blew them out. The studio was black. I went back to the door, focusing on silence. I needed to calm down or she might hear my excitement.

I held my breath, my ear to the wood. The wind cut in and out the cracks. I looked into the peephole. Susan was kissing away the tears, wrapping Sharon up in a flannel. I unzipped my fly, gripped the engine. It reached for my belly button, filled with blood. Then suddenly, like a dying butterfly, the engine began to flutter: I discovered: whether I opened the door again or not, I was finally alone in the dark commodious booth of my head.

So I didn't see Sharon again, but within the month I was back in a booth, watching Janine Lindemulder take on a shiny hairless brotha named Lexington Steele. Not regularly now, no ritual for me, but casually, because there was no one like Sharon around to betray. This time without plan or consequences or even caution and usually out of boredom, I'd go in the front door while traffic on El Camino Real whizzed by, even after being honked at once by young high-schoolers, mostly girls, it's like drinking in a dive whose patronage you disdain and to which you'd put a swinging wrecking ball with all of them, including yourself, in its dead center. Just when you're taking the shot of absinthe, fumes of dead wormwood singeing the hair of the nostrils and climbing upward through the nasal passage to drill holes in the walls of soft tissue—
Powwww!
—a big black ball of Lexington Steele right through the brain.

T
ODAY WE BREAK
from custom.

Like the dutiful dog that I am, I've been pacing the garage for an hour in the late noon when La Dulce pulls in, says, “You just a lonely horny little thing, ain'tcha? Get in.”

“What about the garage?”

“What?”

“Our daily tryst. In the garage.”

“No.”

“No?”

“We gonna go meet you some fellow
artistes
.”

“Do you have to say it like a Frenchwoman?”

“I'm a Haitian, fool. Figure out the history.”

“I don't like your
artistes
.”

“You wanna keep your room?”

“What bait,” I say, walking around the car.

We drive to Downtown San Jo in silence. I get the sense that she wants me to get all wide-eyed with hope. I mostly sleep, thinking about her beautiful backside bouncing around on my tip by the boxes and brooms in the garage.

We're entering the urban campus of the Silicon University of the Valley and I say, “Nah. Forget it. I ain't going back to school for you, for no one.”

“You gotta keep your mind open for opportunity. You need some credentials.”

“I'm kicking it with you. What more do I need?”

“I'm your last hope on the education front.”

“You wouldn't know where to start.”

“Start with money,” she says. “Just like everyone else.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Don't embarrass me. These my folks. Without me, they got no program.”

“You just go to these things to clean yourself up and act like a big shot. If they ever heard how you really talk, they'd ban you from the campus.”

“Listen. Get your appetite on tonight. This MFA graduation party is your dinner.”

The barbecue announces itself: there's a banner the size of a football field tied between the English Department building and the gymnasium. I can barely read the first few words without shaking my head: “
WELCOME TO THE PRIZE WINNERS OF TOMORROW
....”

This special brand of
artistes
looks about the same as past gatherings. You've got your standard preponderance of berets and turtle-necks and all kinds of curious cross-dressing. You've got your bad dancing, bad acoustics. Today it's a lady whiter than her sea-shells doing a belly dance to a Ravi Shankar tune, the sitar played by a bearded prophet with one name, one letter: Z. La Dulce whispers this fact into my ear as if it were holy scripture. At a picnic table, a group of writers is playing Trivial Pursuit 2005, a game that has no data on its quiz cards before 2000. The Sphinx, St. Peter's, the Constitution? Not worth keeping in the long-term memory box.

I walk on, trying my best to feign non-judgment on my face, find another prize-winner-to-be perched in the branches of a small tree pontificating to the crowd of poets below about the essence of staying true blue to yourself and threaten to jump and (of course) not do it.

“Can you die from a sprained ankle?” I ask La Dulce.

“Shush.”

“Shush? More like
shove
. Someone give the poor guy a hand.”

“That's Swartie. He depressed.”

“Better,” I say, “than oppressed.”

“He got his three-hundredth rejection letter this week. Carries them around in his backpack.”

“Like a novel manuscript?”

“Have some sensitivity for once in your life. You only here because of me.”

“That's exactly what I'm saying.”

“Help me out a little here, baby.”

“Okay,” I say, “no worries.” I take the bed of dead grass by the wall of the gym. It's shadowed by an unoccupied magnolia, the most ego-free area of this celebration.

La Dulce walks off to chat and I watch and listen to it all. Some bearded cat in a swabbie pullover is introducing himself to new recruits as Colonel Bobby Jameson. The Alpha Graduate. He has the entitled attitude of election. He's talking loud so that everyone, even me, can hear his loving elaboration on the creative value of oxygen bars in Berkeley. He starts up a debate with Swartie in the tree about whether it's better to write by candlelight or moonlight.

I hear from above, “I prefer to compose by Bud Light.”

The colonel responds, “I prefer my bud lit.”

And so on with the impromptu quips.

I hear tales of paper cuts told in weighty tones of limb severance, and this seems to me to be something of a story in itself, a bad vaudeville, where the characters are all by choice forcing themselves on
one another. Everyone in great pain, everyone trying to be clever. The vibe of these people makes me worry about the arts.

Because it always happens like this, La Dulce interrupts my thoughts. “Baby, stand up and meet someone.”

I do, wishing when I take his hand that I hadn't. It's palms down. I'm supposed to kneel and kiss it.

“This the colonel, baby.”

“What's happening?” I say.

Arrogance all over the guy's face, like he wrote every poem that ever mattered. He traces with a manicured thumb the rim of his beer—a Bud Light—and watches himself do it, as if the act were deep as an oil drill, says, “I hear you're a poet?”

La Dulce says, “Paulie's got the chops, colonel.”

“Is that so?”

“He working on a book.”

“We are
all
working on a book, Beatrice,” he says, bowing and softly patting her shoulder.

“He won the LeRoi Jones Hookup for Off-the-Hook Artistic Achievement fellowship.”

“I see. I'm sure Gabby will offer him a scholarship before the night's over. Or a parking space. Whichever comes first.”

“What about an office?” La Dulce says.

“So our poet is published?”

“No,” I say. I've grown tired of hearing myself spoken about in third person. “But he almost killed someone once. Does that count?”

I smile full on, wide as I can, knowing not to look over at La Dulce's tortured face.

“Good to meet you,” he says, nodding at me, bowing at La Dulce, ducking and spinning on his heels like an English gentleman. Less than half a minute passes before he's at the base of the magnolia, his head in the lower leaves, no doubt whispering to Swartie about my felonious history.

I look at La Dulce:
Why would you sponsor any of these people?

“Did you have to say that to him?”

I don't answer La Dulce because, like a blessing, I'm offered a dog. No ketchup, no mustard, no relish, but it's cool. The server puts the paper plate down and stands before us both. He's in a tie-dye shirt that reads
THE AVATAR OF AQUARIUS
. I immediately feel a little bad for him, not only because his long handlebar sideburns have hairless patches that look like a mountain cat took a few paw swipes, but because his eyes exude a need for both pity and praise, the formula of the failed poet.

I say, “Thanks, bro.”

Before I get or give a name he's telling me that the incoming poets are actually eating frozen leftovers from last year's reception, “Thus,” he says, “saving us upward of a hundred dollars.”

“That's pretty impressive,” I say, chewing into my year-old dog. “You got one over on 'em. You came up.”

La Dulce grabs my hand. “This Gabriel von Morley. He the dean here, baby.”

Von Morley lets the fact settle into my system. I nod with appreciation and wonderment, he reaches out for my hand, the one interlaced in La Dulce's, and forces into my grip a thin, stapled, Xeroxed copy of a pamphlet. He nods, awaiting our perusal. La Dulce flips the words upright and holds the cover page in front of us like we were sharing a hymnal.

“
Impotent Yet Proud, Unknown Yet Grateful
,” she reads aloud. “
Twenty Poems on Pain
. A chapbook by Gabriel von Morley and Colonel Robert Jameson. Deadhead Press.”

I add/read, “Thirty-nine dollars.”

“It's a signed limited edition,” he says.

“Cool,” I say.

He's waiting for something. I don't think I'm going to give him this one, whatever it is. He puts his tiny hand out, palm up, and I
smile, look over at my sponsor, the lucky lady with all the cash. “You gonna pay the man, baby?”

He takes the two twenties as if we're the ones getting the good end of a deal, looks over at the colonel, whose regal back is turned to us, pockets the cash without bothering to finger around for a buck change, says, “Somewhere in the middle of Nebraska, Jack Kerouac told me, ‘Gabe, you gotta get some life into your stuff.' Forty-eight years later, I have done just that: an utter explosion of voice. Now there is an undeniable connection, I admit, to Ezra Pound, in that one starts at the base of formality and then, like Adrienne Rich—who is a dear friend—gracefully leaves it.”

I nod. “Cool.”

I can feel pressure on my elbow. La Dulce, fine woman, is trying to shove me along. I take her cue and step out, but he grabs my other elbow with his unctuous hand, pushes me back to my original place, and says, “I have tried to meet my writerly devoir, weaving blank verse with the chaos of language poetry, sometimes borrowing from the surrealism of the New York School of Poets, many of whom I knew very well, including John Ashbery. We studied together at the Squaw Valley Writers Conference. Iambic pentameter between terrifying runs down the snowy slopes....”