ONLY THE WORDS ARE DIFFERENT

Pulse

I just looked up and a man fell by my window with his arms waving. (Earlier, my thumb was engaged in moving across the paper like a chicken drumstick. Scratching, scratching.) He seems to have been in a great hurry, and possibly there was something he wanted to tell me. This may, I realise, have something to do with the scaffolding which grew outside my window during the night; it’s out there now, as I write a wood and steel doily of piping, ladders, planks and pantlegs;

the sky shows through

in squares of blue.

I go to the window and there is a crowd below me, a red truck with two white attendants. The man is lying strangely on the pavement; perhaps he is very tired. Pigeons tiptoe down his legs and arms. Snails would be better, but snails (les escargots) are not in season—only strawberries. His mouth is full of strawberries. The red juice dribbles out of his mouth and streams along the pavement.

I wonder what it was that he wanted to tell me? Probably that he loved me.

* * * *

Schlupp-thunkk. Schlupp-thunkk. The wipers mimic a heart. Beating.

Postmortems of parties dead and cold now, passing home in a bouncing car. You here beside me, warm with drinking, soft with sleep in your pumpkin dress that skis off one shoulder and slides along your leg. The child in your lap. Shapeless in her bundle of flannel.

—like it’ll snow forever. And our Fiat crunches through the crust of that snow. The motor, in third, hums and whirrs. Thinking of our Ford gathering snow on the salvage yard. In the backseat now there are the remains of two pheasants and a bottle of brandy. The brandy rolls and clatters against the oven pan, rolls in its nest of birds’ bones and greasy dressing. Snow stipples the flat grey air, slurs the streets. I smoke the last cigarette and watch for ice. Guilt in small actions, always. The heater growls.

Who was that girl?

I pass the cigarette to you, you drag once and hand it back. The tip is wet now. Of course.

The sexy one. You consider her, try to remember other qualities she may have had. Long hair, boots. The one who kept drinking the brandy.

I shrug. Undergrad, I think. Light from an oncoming car catches in my eyes, trapped under the ridges, supraorbital—as you say, like pueblo cliffs, a moderately effete baboon. (And you . . . you have sat on those ledges and watched a world, the world in front, the world behind them . . . lived on the edge, looking.)

Painter?

That’s the guy she was with. Workshop, I think. Supposed to be very good. She has a novel coming out next year, from Harper.

In your class?

Too obvious, Jane. The brandy, or real annoyance? I shift into second to take a curve. The wipers are tossing away time. To buy our way home.

No. Not many of the writers are interested in Pope, they mostly go for modern lit. I’ve told you all that before.

The baby has crapped in its sleep and the smell fills the car. You reach for the cigarette, draw, encounter filter and throw it out, leaving the window a little open. You twist and rummage through your pockets; skirt, sweater, coat. I thought I had a pack of Salems somewhere...

We smoked them.

So: that sideways glance. A measured apprehension. A truck comes toward us, puffing chimney, cab outlined in small red lights. A huge interstate rig. We’re out of the city, coming onto open road. I shift to fourth and see your face in the truck’s lights. How many times, these five years, this same moment? The Fiat takes the curve and starts, up a hill, dropping speed. Touching the shift, I almost touch your knee but you pull away. The road drops steadily into the darkness, the vacuum, behind us. The lights spread out in front of us, a dull flash-lightning inside the fog, that goes on and on.

Look! but we’ve passed it, whatever it was.

What . . .

A styrofoam snowman. Someone has a goddamn styrofoam snowman in their yard—

O shit! A styrofoam snowman.

If another truck, even a car came by, I might see you crying. But nothing else passes, we’re alone on the road. I can only hear the sound of your breath in the dark. Finally you lean forward and shut off the heater.

How much further?

A few miles.

* * * *

Have you ever noticed how books accumulate around you? Like clouds. You don’t remember putting them there, or buying them (and if you had bought them, you’d have put them on the coffee table, or a shelf, or perhaps beside the bed). And they couldn’t have come through the mail slot; it’s too small. The post office doesn’t deliver. You never enter it: the Draft Board is just upstairs. But they go on accumulating, even now that you know, like clouds.

Then one day there appears on your desk—a surprise beside your morning coffee—this memo advocating the extinction of poems (though a few would be maintained in cages, well-fed and cared for, by way of Justice, for the children to see; to which they might toss an occasional leftover letter, partly eaten, or melted to a shapeless mess in their warm hands; perhaps an occasional colon or dash; an adjective, apostrophe). You quickly add your name —recalling it, letter by letter, as you write—to the already formidable list. This, it occurs to you now, is a petition. You pick it up and the first page comes apart in your hands like a newspaper. It begins to unfold, a very long list indeed. You follow the names through the study, library, den, kitchen, living room, dining room, up three flights of stairs to the bedroom. You jump out the window and run, as though you are (in October) flying a kite, and still the petition comes open, unfolds, like panels of toilet paper folded front to back, back to front, front to back. Each is stamped in blue Property of the British Government and you realise now that this was stolen from the Tate, more precisely from one of the toilet booths on the bottom floor by the cafeteria, behind the Trova and the would-be Michelangelo virgin.

You run, you run, you’re out of breath. Finally, in New Jersey, you reach the end of the list. It began with the names of several well-known artists (painters, sculptors, ceramists, filmmakers, mixed mediasts) and ends with the signature of the local cub reporter. The only names missing are those of the poets themselves—though a few of them, too, have signed. Under pressure, one presumes. Of their wives, publishers, bankers, typewriters, cigarettes, “humor.” All the way back across mitred New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania, you search for your name but are unable to find it, even in Philadelphia. But you have considered removing it and this, like the poetry itself, is a noble gesture; you are sure of that, at least. . .

Over dinner I explain all this to you, my wife, and your new friend Harrison. It apparently means little to you, but Harrison feigns interest quite well. And I like him. I feel myself attracted to this strange, quiet man. But let me warn you, darling: his name was not on that list!

* * * *

Story

They are in love. They go to the beach at Brighton and she is disappointed, there are only rocks, where is the sand. The Camden Town Zoo. Shopping together at Heal’s. The East and West for curry. Westbourne Grove (Notting Hill). Baby elephant. Theatre closed—seats outside for sale, want them, can’t find anyone to ask. They return to Portobello Road and, stomachs rumbling from the Madras (this, like the sound of wind in the pastiche-Corbusier elephant house), make love. She wants “your child.” Sadly watching him roll the rubber down over his penis, thinks of discarded peacock feathers lying on ground at zoo; they climax (him 3, her 2). Nothing is ever said. He returns with her to America (on the boat, his birthday, she has him lean his arms against the upper bunk and masturbates him, slowly). They take a flat just outside New York. Strain of isolation, his disorientation, intimations of an affair apart from her. Their love, always silent, is now proclaimed in words. The words distort, fictionalise, lead them each into “false” emotions; they are farther apart with each day, each word (she still wants his child). He finally leaves in the middle of the night, after a (rationalised) argument—the words—over sex. Three days later she receives a small package. No name, no return address, postmark Grand Central Station. She opens the package, which is beautifully gift-wrapped, and takes out what is inside. Holds it up to the light of the kitchen window: precise visual description. A rubber, the nipple filled with semen, a knot tied just above it. Title: Love Letter.

* * * *

Molly keeps a cockroach. It lives in a cage made of Japanese matchsticks, the size of a child’s shoebox, floor covered with a jiggerful of sawdust. It lives on charcoal which it extracts from cigarette filters dropped into its cage by Molly and her lovers, rolling the residue of paper into tiny neat balls to store in one corner of the cage. When Molly mates, it climbs up the side, crawls upsidedown halfway out across the top, then drops down into the litter and starts up the side again—faster and faster, again and again. Finally it drops down onto its back and lies there in the sawdust, exhausted, moving its legs slowly, like eyelashes.

Afterward Molly stands there by the cage telling us, The roach is a dead end, it hasn’t changed in a handful of thousands of years.

Later the roach will ascend to the light fixture and cry there for the crumbling dry bodies of flies. When Molly climbs on a chair to bring it down, it will stare at her with its one cold black eye, it will wave one leg frantically in her face. J’accuse, J’accuse.

* * * *

The Mayor has declared war on the roaches, believing common cause will bring us together; restore esprit, order. The contraceptives have been burned in bonfires on Town Hall Square, people queue outside the compulsory strip shows, the city’s water supply is pumped full of aphrodisiacs—and still, it’s not enough. No one cares. No one, frankly, gives a damn. Anomie and entropy. The birthrate still declines, the city collapses into itself. Stronger measures are required, the Mayor declares from the top of the Town Hall steps (the sun on his skull, the smell of burnt rubber, burning plastic), We must act now!

Badges came last night, press-gang firemen, to bear Molly’s roach away to its execution. She locked the door and shoved things against it—bureaus, bookshelves, the stove—and when they finally broke through, attacked them with shishkebob skewers. She blinded three, ruined another’s hand, neatly burst the balloonlike testicles of the last. Holding her, kicking, screaming, against the wall (halls filled with inquisitive Citizens), they took the cage cover off and discovered that she had (predictably, perhaps) killed the roach herself—with a gold stickpin left behind by one of her lovers—to keep them from getting it.

Molly, “The stars and the rivers

and waves call you back.”

* * * *

And the citizens, when they return to their flats from gaping and gasping in the hall—what is it that they do? There, in that abject privacy. Contained by those colorful walls.