It is one of those day’s you’ve heard about. Mid-fall chill penetrated by warmth – the kind that runs a wave of shivers through you when you stretch in the rays beaming through your window in the morning.
Midday. It’s warm enough that we can sit outside for lunch. Tango Baby has half her salad and then says she has to run – suddenly, she wants to do some shopping. I’m stuck with this good-looking little baby on my arm, trying to get used to its slightly pointed ears. Mack pays no attention. He’s carving into his pig steak. I can’t move to cut my veal because of the kid, so I stick my fork into what’s left of Tango Baby’s salad and eat that.
Funny, how things change – in ways you never expect or plan. Now I’ve taken up tango lessons. To begin, holding a girl in your arms and moving a few steps back and forth, I thought’d be pretty easy, but when I try to show her what I’ve learned, Tango Baby practically drops to the floor laughing as, holding her, I struggle and stagger two steps forward, trying desperately to hold the position, and nearly fall. It’s like getting up on a bike for the first time or trying to stand up straight on a pair of skates. I’m getting a little better, but it’s like a second, secret language for the body – and the secret’s drawn out with heartbreak and excruciating grief. The scene still repeats over and over. You’re taking the steps, you’re making the moves, but you don’t even know what you’re doing. You have no idea of the space around you or what your movement within that space means. You are disoriented and partly paralyzed by fear. And yet, it’s exhilarating. And you’re not supposed to be the one dancing. You’re supposed to be dancing the woman. Every step and twist of the torso and turn of the body is done for her sake – so she enjoys herself, so she looks good on the floor, so she’s feeling a certain way once you’ve gotten going and once you’re done. And with every woman, it’s different. You finally dance when she’s dancing – because of you.
Why am I doing this?
“So far as you know,” Mack starts saying as he finishes his steak, “we don’t know the whereabouts of the Minoan Monster.”
Mack’s referring to The Hunched Cornish. “No, no trace of him – nothing. No clue, nothing left behind. He could’ve taken it with him –”
“If he left.”
“Yeah, if he left, or destroyed it all, or, if he left, it could’ve all just disappeared – with him.”
“Poof.”
“Yeah, poof.”
“Say, Smith, you want me to take that kid for a while so’s you can eat your veal.”
“Thanks, Mack, that’d be great.”
The baby is still too small for it, but it’s like it starts to grope and grip at Mack once he’s got it on his arms like he wants to climb all over him. Mack starts to play with the baby and he looks really, really great – like it’s the most natural thing. They’re both laughing.
“So, on this side of it, all’s we got left is Davies.”
“If we ever had anything left, Mack. If there ever was anything to begin with.”
“Well, it seems to me, Smith, if he’s what we end with, then he was at the center all along.”
“No, Mack, I don’t think we can say that. I think that’s just how it turned out. I don’t think that we can conclude one way or another that Davies has been our… our…”
Strange. Has been our what? I can’t finish the sentence. I eat my veal instead.
“Yeah.” That’s all Mack says.
I try again: “I mean, things can change and suddenly someone else will be… will…”
Will be what? Again, I can’t finish. This time I feel sorry I started the thought up again. It wasn’t worth it. Strange how now I feel Mack had been perfectly happy with where that line had ended, and I now understand that so had I. I’m grateful this time he completely ignores me.
And strange, how I try yet again. This time I think what I will say might be relevant – to what we were doing, to our entire effort, to our… To our what? Before this last thought enters my mind, the words I’d prepared jump out – I cannot retrieve them back to the meaningless nothing from which they came.
“And then we’ve got all his writing out of that booth in the Kansas diner…”
Possibly meaningless.
Mack glowers. He’s looking down at the table. He doesn’t like it. The baby slaps his face. He remembers to keep bouncing it.
“Drop it, Smith. I don’t want to hear it.”
Maybe.
“I mean, the drinking, Mack – all that drinking really –”
But this time, it’s as if he pleads with me… to stop. “Please, Smith, would you just drop it?” For the fraction he opened, I felt that pain.
A few minutes go by and now, with the kid still on his arm, Mack’s managed to finish the rest of the potatoes on his plate, and I’ve finished most of mine, and he says:
“Say, Smith?”
“What’s that?”
You’re not a vampire, are you?”
I don’t answer.
“Say, Smith?”
“What’s that, Mack?”
“Does the name Jack Smith mean anything to you?”
Maybe it does. I don’t answer.
“Ever see ‘Flaming Creatures?’”
Again, I don’t answer, but from the way I don’t answer, Mack knows I have.
“What did you think of the visual generosity, the extraordinary charge and beauty of his images, their lavish quantity, the –”
“You’re overdoing it, Mack. There’s not that many images in the movie. Strange, you should remember lines and words from an essay written in 1964.”
“I took her to see it a lot of times in The Village. It was thanks to me she wrote it.”
“Susan Sontag?”
“The same.”
“Did you… you know…?”
“Yeah.”
“A bisexual Jewish New York intellectual. I never thought you… I mean…”
“One of my best back then, Smith. I was taking literature and arts courses at NYU at the time – film, postmodern fiction, post-apocalyptic dystopian poetry, music theory, art history… I can actually sketch a pretty good picture, throw off the depth and perspective just a little. Just enough to…”
He keeps talking. I don’t hear him. He’s full of it. I don’t believe him. He sees me not believing him but he makes no move in his mind that I can perceive to disabuse me of the notion he’s lying – as if he’s actually telling the truth. Well, naturally. I realize this moment I still have a lot to learn. Well, what can I say – Mack’s got the advantage of experience. And maybe he’s just better than me. Maybe he’s always been better, regardless how far experience has brought him. How far will it bring me?
“Mack, in that Bosch painting – the bodies are writhing, but I wouldn’t call them shameless. They’re horrible. They must be horrible to one another and to themselves. But they’re stuck, that’s their punishment. Mack, this is a moral space, not an aesthetic one.”
“No, Smith, you’ll always get the morality, but it’s foolish to agonize over it all the time. Life is meant to be lived. So live it. Morally, if you want to talk in those terms, it would be the biggest sin not to.”
“Should I not deny myself anything?”
“That’s up to you.”
There is a green book – he is giving it to me. It looks both like a book and a notebook.
He pushes it across the table silently, and I’m to understand I’m to take it, that he means for it to be mine. Or that now, from this point forward, it is supposed to belong to me, until…
The cover is worn and the pages dog-eared, stained through with finger grease, faded and yellowing, and the first pages starting to crisp and brown. The opening leaves are already disintegrating. But that only pertains to the book’s first half. Looking along the side, I note the pages of the second half appear to be mostly clean and fresh, almost pure white, and not knolly and rumpled like their predecessors, but barely leafed through and still firmly pressed together.
“All this is going to repeat again. It’s our nature. It’s our doom. We’ve got lots of work to do. I’ll be seeing you, Smith.”
I don’t see him go, and I don’t know how he did it – but one minute he’d been there, well, and as they say, the next minute he was gone.
Again, the baby is somehow in my arms.
Filed by John Smith, October 9, 2014