literature and also how he was unappreciated especially when
he taught English to a bunch of assholes in the sixties who had
no critical standards; and Freud reminds him of what it was
like to be such a sensitive child in school when all the boys
were masturbating and telling whatever jokes; and Jean Rhys
reminds him that he has been stalled on his own novel for
quite a while because of the demands of his job, which can be
quite pedestrian; and Djuna Barnes reminds him of a party he
went to in the Village dressed not in a dress like the other
whatevers but in a suit and didn’t that show whomever; and
Dickens reminds him of how much he abhors sentimentality
97
and the many occasions on which he has encountered it and
since he is in his late thirties there have been many occasions
and he remembers them all. And the Brontes remind him of his
last trip to England, which Maggie is really fucking up, which,
he tells me sternly, is going to hurt feminism.
And I wonder how I am going to survive being loved so
profoundly, like this. My palms do not sweat; they weep.
*
We went from the coffeehouse to the restaurant in the rain,
wet. I tried to slide along the broken New York sidewalks,
drift gracefully over the cracks, dance over the lopsided cement,
not hit the bilious pieces of steel that jut up from nowhere for
no reason here and there, not fall over the terrible people
walking with angry umbrellas into me. I tried to glide and
talk, an endless stream of pleasant yesses with an occasional
impassioned but do you really think. We stopped, we breathed
in the rain, breathless, in a crack I saw a broken needle, syringe,
I want it a lot these days, the relief from time and pain, I keep
going, always, away from it, he followed and we walked far,
across town, all the way from east to west, in the rain, wet,
cold, and I tried not to be breathless, wet, and the hair on his
lip glistened with lubrication and he strutted, his shoulders
sometimes hanging down, sometimes jutted back. They hung
down for the Japanese. They jutted back for Celine.
The cement disappeared behind us, a trail of rice at a
wedding, and stretched out in front of us, the future, our life,
our bed, our home, our earth, wet.
We went into the restaurant, wet.
*
A small cramped table, an omelette, a dozen cups of coffee, a
million cigarettes, one brutal piss after waiting all night, no
dessert, his credit card: dinner: I was tired enough to die. Hours
more of the canon, my heart. Except that we had reached the
end hours before, but still he went on.
We walked out, I wanted to go, off on my own, back to
myself, alone, apart, noiseless, no drone of text and interpretation, no more writers to love together
