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too. My childhood was this golden thing, eradicable, intense
sensations of entirely physical love remembered like short,
sweet, delirious hallucinations, lucid in fog. Now I love no
one, except that tender man now in the next room dreaming
without memory, a blessed thing, or not dreaming at all: that
curled-up blond muscled thing recalling every miracle of love
from long ago. I was happy then: don’t dare deny it.
I don’t love now, at all, except when I remember to love the
blond boy, the stranger not even related to me, not part of
anything from before, who sleeps in the next room: a tall blond
man: when I remember to love him certain minutes of certain
days. Don’t look for my heart. The beasts have eaten it. What
is his name?
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Our women writers write like women writers,
that is to say, intelligently and pleasantly,
but they are in a terrible hurry to tell what
is in their hearts. Can you explain why a
woman writer is never a serious artist?
Dostoyevsky
*
I came back from Europe. I lived alone in a pink apartment on
the Lower East Side across from the police precinct. I wanted
to be a writer. I want to write. Every day I write. I am alone
and astonishingly happy.
The police cars ram into the crushed sidewalk across the
street. The precinct is there. Men in blue with guns and
nightsticks swarm. Garbled sounds emanate from radios on
their hips. They swarm outside the impressive stone building,
the precinct headquarters. Red lights flash. A dozen cars swerve
in or swerve out, crash in or crash out, are coming or going,
burning rubber on the burning streets, the smell of the burnt
rubber outlasting the sound of the siren as its shrillness fades.
The police cars never slow down. They stop immediately.
They start up at once, no cautionary note, the engine warming.
They pull straight out at top speeds or swerve in and almost
bang against the building but somehow the brake gets the
weight of the cop and the sidewalk is crushed on its outer
edge.
The sirens blare day and night. The cars bump and grind
and flash by, day and night. The blue soldiers mass like ants,
then deploy, day and night. The red of the flashing lights illuminates my room, like a scarlet searchlight, day and night.
The police are at war with the Hell’s Angels, two blocks
away. The motorcycles would collect. The swastikas would be
