– You lousy facker, how many times, five or six?
– Ah, grief makes us precise!
– Five or six, five or six, five or six?
– Listen, my friend, the elevator is working again.
– Listen, F., don’t give me any of your mystical shit.
– Seven.
– Seven times with Edith?
– Correct.
– You were trying to protect me with an optional lie?
– Correct.
– And seven itself might just be another option.
– Correct.
– But you were trying to protect me, weren’t you? Oh, F., do you think I can learn to perceive the diamonds of good amongst all the shit?
– It is all diamond.
– Damn you, rotten wife-fucker, that answer is no comfort. You ruin everything with your saintly pretensions. This is a bad morning. My wife’s in no shape to be buried. They’re going to straighten her out in some stinking doll hospital. How am I going to feel in the elevator on my way to the library? Don’t give me this all diamond shit, shove it up your occult hole. Help a fellow out. Don’t fuck his wife for him.
Thus the conversation ran into the morning we could not perceive. He kept to his diamond line. Catherine Tekakwitha, I wanted to believe him. We talked until we exhausted ourselves, and we pulled each other off, as we did when we were boys in what is now downtown but what was once the woods.
6
F. talked a great deal about Indians, and in an irritating facile manner. As far as I know he had no scholarship on the subject beyond a contemptuous and minor acquaintance with my own books, his sexual exploitation of my four teen-age A——s, and about a thousand Hollywood Westerns. He compared the Indians to the ancient Greeks, suggesting a similarity of character, a common belief that every talent must unfold itself in fighting, a love of wrestling, an inherent incapacity to unite for any length of time, an absolute dedication to the idea of the contest and the virtue of ambition. None of the four teen-age A——s achieved orgasm, which, he said, must be characteristic of the sexual pessimism of the entire tribe, and he concluded, therefore, that every other Indian woman could. I couldn’t argue. It is true that the A——s seem to present a very accurate negative of the whole Indian picture. I was slightly jealous of him for his deduction. His knowledge of ancient Greece was based entirely on a poem by Edgar Allan Poe, a few homosexual encounters with restaurateurs (he ate free at almost every soda fountain in the city), and a plaster reproduction of the Akropolis which, for some reason, he had coated with red nail polish. He had meant to use colorless nail polish merely as a preservative, but naturally he succumbed to his flamboyant disposition at the drug-store counter when confronted with that fortress of bright samples which ranged the cardboard ramparts like so many Canadian Mounties. He chose a color named Tibetan Desire, which amused him since it was, he claimed, such a contradiction in terms. The entire night he consecrated to the staining of his plaster model. I sat beside him as he worked. He was humming snatches from “The Great Pretender,” a song which was to change the popular music of our day. I could not take my eyes from the tiny brush which he wielded so happily. White to viscous red, one column after another, a transfusion of blood into the powdery ruined fingers of the little monument. F. saying: I’m wearing my heart like a crown. So they disappeared, the leprous metopes and triglyphs and other wiggly names signifying purity, pale temple and destroyed altar disappeared under the scarlet glaze. F. said: Here, my friend, you finish the caryatids. So I took the brush, thus Cliton after Themistocles. F. sang: Ohohohoho, I’m the great pretender, my need is such I pretend too much, and so on – an obvious song under the circumstances but not inappropriate. F. often said: Never overlook the obvious. We were happy! Why should I resist the exclamation? I had not been so happy since before puberty. How close I came, earlier in this paragraph, to betraying that happy night! No, I will not! When we had covered every inch of the old plaster bone F. placed it on a card table in front of a window. The sun was just coming up over the sawtooth roof of the factory next door. The window was rosy and our handicraft, not yet dry, gleamed like a huge ruby, a fantastic jewel! It seemed like the intricate cradle of all the few noble perishable sentiments I had managed to preserve, and somewhere safe I could leave them. F. had stretched out on the carpet, stomach down, chin in hands supported by wrists and elbows, gazing up at the red akropolis and the soft morning beyond. He beckoned to me to lie beside him. Look at it from here, he said, squint your eyes a bit. I did as he suggested, narrowed my eyes, and – it burst into a cool lovely fire, sending out rays in all directions (except downward, since that was where the card table was). Don’t weep, F. said, and we began to talk.
– That’s the way it must have looked
