Napoleon on Napoleon

"I feel myself driven towards an end that I do not know. As soon as I shall have reached it, as soon as I become unnecessary, an atom will suffice to shatter me. Till then, not all of the forces of mankind can do anything against me."

A Handful of Air

A Handful of Air

Deets is sick. In the hospital. Maybe dying, I don't know. I don't know anything. And I forgot to ask Jeb her last name. For Christ's sake, what's her last name? His name's Farley. But Farley what? I can't remember. I've never met Farley but I picture him -- short, stocky, thick neck, bald head, cold gray eyes behind steel-rimmed glasses -- that's how I picture him, Farley. But what's his last name? Jesus, I can't remember anything anymore. I should've asked Jeb.

I'm going through that little red address book, looking for someone to call, someone who'd know her name. The Aronsons. Peter Brennan, Cindy -- I get to the 'h's' and Sissy Hellman -- Deets' cousin? Her aunt? I can't remember which. I call her anyway and she asks me about my leg. How the hell did she know about my leg? Have we met? I tell her about how Jeb just called from the hospital and Deets is there, maybe dying. I tell her how I can't remember Deets' new name -- the new one she's had for fifteen years.
Sissy's voice is soft and sweet and I wish I could remember her but I can't. She gives me Deets' last name, Farley's last name, and I call the hospital in Connecticut and ask for her.
But the receptionist is wary, protective, she wants to know who I am. I tell her I'm Deets' ex-husband and there's a pause.
I don't want to cause any trouble, I just want to know how she is, that's all. She's so suspicious. I feel like saying, Look, you officious little bitch, we lived together for eight years, we made love every night, we've got a son named Jeb who looks just like me. I've got a right, goddammit.
The receptionist says she can't take any calls. Her condition is serious but stable. She'll give her the message that I called. I hang up and call the florist. The card will read, Get well soon. What else do you say? Farley might get mad. Fuck Farley. I put on my coat and go out for coffee.

We had her mother's car that day, that broken-down old Plymouth. It was summer and we were sick of it, sick of all the bills and the heat and the city, so we got in the car and we drove, all the way out to the country, through Valley Forge and Brandywine and King-of-Prussia, and Deets was smiling, smiling again, the prettiest girl in the school, passing me cold Millers from the plastic cooler in the back seat and I drove right the hell off the highway, into a pasture and up a hill, through the tall green grass, past great, sad, unastonished cows, and Deets was screaming, screaming I was CRAZY -- but she was laughing.
Jesus, I can remember her laughing.

I'm walking home and I see that old German Shepherd coming towards me, trotting kind of sideways, rump sloping, hind legs strangely out of sync. I reach down for him as he passes but he eludes me somehow and all I get is a handful of air.

The Comet

The Comet

There was a sickness there, the relationship was dying. Why couldn't I just accept it? Somehow I must have thought my loyalty would prevail, that my constancy would wear her down. She expected me to quit, but she'd be wrong; I'd never quit, I'd always be there, waiting, like a rock, like a planet; and eventually, inexorably, she'd be drawn into my orbit, drawn by the irresistible pull of my love.

But somehow the magnetic poles reversed, my very stability was pushing her away, and the power of my love was frightening her, only serving to increase that inherent sense of anxiety. She was slipping away, and all I could do was accept it, all I could do was let her go, and that was impossible.

So I survived on hope. The last resort of reason. That false sustenance that deludes the starving heart.

Ernie's Famous Diner

Ernie's Famous Diner

When I picture Ernie's Famous Diner I picture it the way it used to look when you were on your way there, maybe on a nice summer night, going for a coffee and a piece of coconut custard pie and maybe some converstation with Gus. Coming down Cherry Street, past Saint Clements, past all the narrow brick buildings (mostly filled with art students and old men), looking down the elm-lined street, down to the corner, you could see this little green displaced railroad car, looking like there should be a train attached at the other end, huddled in indigo shadows, spilling out warm yellow light into the summer night from its little windows, looking so friendly under street lamps. with this blue-green neon sign up there, over that old sliding wooden door, that said, "Ernie's Famous Diner".

I don't know who Ernie was, I never met him. Maybe there never was an Ernie. But somebody decided to call it Ernie's' Famous Diner and it wasn't Gus -- I know because I asked him. And the more I thought about it, it was a kind of inappropriate name, considering that no one knew who Ernie was, and the only people who knew about the diner at all were some of the art students and a few old men.

The Hands in the Boxes

The Hands in the Boxes

Horn and Hardarts automat was open all night and could have been one of the loneliest places in the world, considering the fact that you hardly ever saw anyone who worked there, only an occasional hand slipping quickly in and out of one of those little window boxes to replace a piece of pie. But at three o'clock in the morning it was the only place to go; and there was always an interesting assortment of characters there, and fascinating conversations. Writers and poets, actors and artists, cab drivers, hookers, cops, and old men who just sat there looking out the window, nursing a pot of tea, just waiting, because they had nowhere else to go and nothing else to do. You could stay there all night if you wanted to and no one ever bothered you because there was no one ever there, except the hands in the boxes, and they never bothered anybody.

The only drawback was, you could never get a free cup of coffee like you could at Ernie's or the Art Museum -- it would have been pretty awkward trying to convince one of those hands in the boxes to trust you for a cup of coffee -- besides, they moved too quick to even start a conversation.

The Portrait of Lara

I am not here now, I am in my hand; and my hand is in the drawing, and the drawing is in her eyes. She is all that’s here now; I am gone, forgotten, lost. She is in the drawing, breathing on my hand.

And now my hand is gone and there is only her and the sound of her breathing. And now she, too, is gone; and the table is gone and the room is gone and its all over and the drawing is done.

It’s three o’clock in the morning -- I push the pad away. I cannot look at her now, not yet. I have done with her and I am spent, I am drained and empty. The hand rests, flaccid and limp upon the table. I feel…a sense of loss, a sadness.

The spectator returns and sits down inside me: I am the spectator now; the artist disappears. I look at the artist’s work -- it is incomplete: it is her, and it is him, it is her having passed through him. She exists now, she is real. But she exists in nothing, not even a nebulous mist, she exists in blankness, in whiteness, in nothing: the background exists in the artist’s head -- not in the front of his head like an image, but in the back of his head like a half-remembered dream, like a name on the tip of your tongue.
And the name is Lara.

1981

Crazy Amy

She was remembering the summer of '78. Carla, Sue, Crazy Amy, the bar at the Skipper's Galley -- sipping frozen margaritas through candy cane straws, flirting with the fishermen, gossiping, trading dirty jokes, dumping on men in general -- "the Girls". Inseparable. Buddies forever. All gone.

Carla in Montreal, never writes. Sue in Boston with that artist creep, pretending to be an intellectual. And Amy. Dear Crazy Amy. She still thought about Amy almost every day, still avoided 495 like the plague; and when she had to use it, when she absolutely had no choice, she'd still get that terrible knot in the pit of her stomach every time she passed that damned Ramada Inn, and the tears would well up, and her fingers would tighten round the steering wheel when she came to that curve, that awful curve.

Oh, Amy -- why? She was doing eighty miles an hour, they said. No skid marks: she never even hit the brakes.

But all this was long ago, way back then, when life was an endless promise and death was only a rumor. When your most serious problems were how you looked in your new bikini and whether or not you were going to that party at Brad's on Friday night. When under all those cruel, sophomoric jokes and that self-defensive cynicism, under all that clever iconoclastic babble, they still believed in possibilities.