Bowl of Cherries Read online

  In this case, I’m the poor bastard. I’m having trouble avoiding another wallow in self-pity and a burst of bromides like “I’m too young to die” and so forth. What I need is distraction, not constant meditation on my predicament. I grab at straws. It takes all the resolve I can muster to concentrate on a yellow mongrel skulking out of the jungle. He shifts uneasily through the caked mud, delicately raising and lowering his paws as if with each step he expects the earth to cave in under him. He sneaks past three or four statues—obviously they hold no interest for him—until he arrives, with some sense of achievement, at the foot of Hashim Pachachi, Assama’s leading and remarkably inept industrialist. He raises a leg and, with a sly grin of ecstasy, pees. Is the beast aware that the man is an infidel and a glutton who eats a puppy for lunch whenever he can trap one?

  Assamans are aware of it; Hashim isn’t the only dog-eater in town. Nobody gives much of a damn about the contents of a fricassee; Assamans are essentially secular, with few if any dietary prohibitions, and Islam’s habits and customs are rich and varied. Cultures thrive within cultures, with subcultures bubbling beneath every sect and deviation.

  I wondered how long the dog with the sly grin, happily pissing away, would press his luck. Long enough to get laid: another yellow dog walks prowlingly down the mucky pike, and, ignoring all the best manuals about foreplay, my friend with the sly grin mounts her.

  I watch.

  Now what, you might ask, am I doing, an intricately calibrated man like me, watching a pair of decrepit beasts fuck in broad daylight? And what, I counter, what else is there to do? Coproliabad lacks even the homely slob diversions afforded by the most destitute of towns, like watching the streetlights go on (there are no streetlights) or listening to the plumbing (there is no plumbing) or peering at a sitcom (no TV).

  And so I watch, a little enviously, the dogs with their eyes of molten wax, the yellow arch of lust, the throbbing, thrusting, connecting rod, red-flaked and marbled white and veiny blue. The colors of the mammal race. I yearn, I yearn for one more day, one more hour of love and lazy exertion in that slow, unstately dance, ancient, eternal, that primal nepenthe beyond drink and drugs.

  That’s what pleasured me in Coproliabad, why I had come here in the first place, why I remained, and, ironic joke, why I would die. I look out at her now, eyes damp, throat dry. She stands there, pedestalized in the square, more of an idealization than a woman, extravagantly remote, faintly smiling. Oh, the prodigies we performed, in essence nothing more or less than what those yellow dogs were doing, dancing beast to beast, but with certain nuances, certain eerie refinements, breathtaking explorations.

  There is about her a curious quality: no matter what she wears she appears to be undressed. It is the kind of nakedness from which the beholder cannot unglue his eyes. Her face in a ring of shining hair, the freckled button of a nose, the upswept breasts with the chiseled nipples pointing at you, tracking you like the eyes of a Rembrandt. The legs so long they look skinny, the perfect scut. There! Now maybe you have some idea of what Valerie is to me.

  And she is somehow greater than the sum of her parts. Indeed, each part has its own summation, and this I find disturbing. The oval eyes are blue-green and deep as a sunless sea, but the total effect is of an oceanic vacancy. The brows so smooth and pale are unwary; what seems to emerge is a kind of unobtrusive numb inertia, as though she were beyond all worldly contest, or ran a subnormal temperature, or didn’t give a damn about anything.

  She didn’t give a damn about much. Early in our relationship (shallow, aseptic term), indeed before we had one, her slackness led me to believe that she was kind of dumb.

  I was mistaken, having somehow overlooked what was spectacularly obvious: that her air of dopiness derived from her beauty. She didn’t do anything; she didn’t have to. Beauty’s coign of vantage and its perks she accepted without question or analysis or the least expenditure of effort.

  I on the other hand have always been striving. That’s what got me into this mess that can only get messier. I’ve always tripped and floundered—is it any wonder I trip and flounder across these pages?

  And romanticize. But lest you confuse me with some love-swacked swain in an Elizabethan madrigal mooning after a buxom shepherdess, let me scrawl a compensatory note. If I were lured to Coproliabad by Valerie, it is equally true that I was driven here by greed or its euphemism, enlightened self-interest. Dr. Joseph Grady, that cunning gray eminence of UGH, had fanned the flames of my insolvency with tales of untold wealth. It was he who had discovered that riches were waiting to be snared in this unpromising, scorched chicken of a place, and from the most unlikely source. It was the secret formula of the shit bricks he was after, to isolate that mysterious elixir which would transmute dross into gold for the two of us by supplying an eager, overpopulated world with an endless, inexpensive supply of the most workable building material ever stumbled upon by man. The multinational consortium, Ultra Global Husbandry, would, through its subsidiary, Resource Analysis and Technology, finance the launch of our magic upon a receptive world. And launched we were. For a brief and splendid moment we soared across the financial heavens, Grady a comet and I his tail, his instrument and ambassador.

  Only to come to this. I hardly need a reminder of my plight but there it is: the caretakers of the tower are reporting for work, like groundskeepers of the college green tidying up for class-day japes. They manicure, pluck, and sharpen the pickets to receive my ventilated body. What a vulgar way to die.

  When my jailers graciously complied with my strange—to them—request for a ballpoint pen and a clutch of legal pads brought from home, it was, I told them, to keep me from going mad. This may be true, if I could only limit my meanderings to the soothing fellowship of the past, thereby obliterating the perilous present. But how can I write of the past without evoking my father’s disappearance, which defeats my very reason for writing? It tends naggingly to remind me of my own impending departure.

  I find nothing soothing in thoughts of death, particularly my own. But to die in compliance with the penal code of Assama—what a way to go. What they do—what they intend to do to me—I’m going to be prodded at spearpoint off a tower of shit and mud onto those impaling stakes a hundred feet below, and soon. But exactly when I haven’t an idea. When the British, the last of the Europeans, departed in ’48, leaving only the legacy of their language behind, the Assamans reverted to precolonial customs and institutions, which they found infinitely more appealing than those imposed by their Western rulers. They revived the stone-tipped whip for all manner of misdemeanors—that is, behavior that the sheikh did not condone. For serious offenses they preferred ganching to the British noose, possibly because a stout rope was difficult to come by, and in that climate prone to swift decay. The sentence carried with it a fiendishly cruel corollary: for a capital crime, an unspecific time of execution.

  I am due to appear at the top of the tower sometime in the month of May. Today is the twelfth or maybe the fourteenth. Under these suspenseful circumstances, precise dates grow furtive. I can be fed to the stakes any time now; it is this lack of specificity—I wouldn’t wish it on a steer in a slaughterhouse—that scrambles the circuitry, sunders my peace of mind, and plays hob with my nervous system.

  And now I hear the flat resonance of calloused feet padding down the corridor, each footstep falling like cowflop in a pasture. I listen in a trance of anxiety, straining to hear above the pounding of my heart. I have already been served my scummy breakfast bowl. It is too early for my scummy lunch. A sharp searing pain ricochets off my chest and tears like a raging Skilsaw through my shoulder and settles high in my left arm. Are those footsteps coming to get me? Is this the end of my muddle of a life, as short and unpredictable and insignificant as a sneeze?

  The cowflop footsteps come closer. I cradle the agony in my arm close to my body. I turn my eyes, the pain prowling behind them, back to the window, to the statue of Valerie. I drink in her slow, assured beauty, those gently flaring hips—I can feel, I swear, the heat of her thighs.

  She is, I suppose, all I ever wanted. All else is trumpery.

  TWO

  DIXIELAND

  The year after I was born, in Charlottesville, Virginia, the only child of two teachers, the family moved south, where my father accepted a post on the English faculty of a state-endowed university, otherwise undistinguished. It was on the outskirts of an unpleasant place which qualified in population and industry as a city, but in every other way it was a farm. Here I was toilet-trained, went to school, read from A–AND through MUN—ODD in the Britannica (Scholar’s Edition), and was hit by a tractor. I twist the ignominious facts. Actually the tractor was stationary. I hit it, absentmindedly. God knows what I was thinking about (something in MUN—ODD?). So much for the bewilderment of boyhood.

  The university had not too long ago emerged from the cocoon of an agricultural college; it still suffered the pangs of afterbirth. It was like some sprawling mutant, misshapen and without fingerprints, the tail wagging the mongrel, and its proud traditions were for thoughtful men embarrassing—a long devotion to the cult of the plow and the Confederacy. The undergraduate body, peasants in saddle shoes, were full of sweaty and ill-conceived pranks, like dressing up as Ku Kluxers on Halloween or energetically waving the Stars and Bars at football games.

  The football games were what I hated most, marching down the field in the band, caparisoned like a hussar with a shako of imitation fur slouching over my eyes and frogs of imitation gold braid curling across my chest. But I had to do it; performing on the tuba was a contractual obligation that went with my scholarship.

  There was constant conflict between the farmers and the philosophers. I can’t remember all the petty maneuvering my father reported to us at din
ner, but I’ll never forget the Honorable Orville Wiley, who rose in the state legislature to lead the impassioned fight against an expenditure to enlarge the French faculty.

  “The English language,” he declared, ape eyes burning, “was good enough for Jesus Christ, so it ought to be good enough for yew-all.” And that was that.

  My father had a certain sardonic sense of humor in those days, before life in its incessant pursuit of perversity turned him sour and obsessive. He relished those bitter inside jokes of the humanities people. Unfortunately he was himself an inside joke to his colleagues. I think he annoyed them with his fastidious precision, which made him unable to resist such infelicities of speech, however apposite, as “the rice of American civilization,” and “the Don Jooanism of Byron.”

  True, his tweeds were as rumpled as theirs, his ties were knit and his shirts were buttoned down. But there was something else, most vulgarly expressed, I suppose, in a dialogue between two of his confreres I happened to overhear one day when I was an undergraduate. I had stopped off briefly in the men’s room of the humanities wing and was minding my own business inside a cubicle when the outside door opened and two Professorial Voices proceeded to the urinals.

  “Ah don’ know where he gits ’em from,” the First Voice boomed and echoed in the tiled chamber. It was the voice of the head of the English Department, who had an untidy penchant for ending sentences with prepositions. “Don Joo-an, indeed.”

  “Ah fear,” resounded the Second Voice (it belonged to an instructor of freshman English), “Dr. Breslau’s Joo-an is a Jew-ism.” They shared a roupy chuckle.

  That, essentially, was the problem, but there were complications. My father could have accepted anti-Semitism with the sort of superior forbearance that made him say “rice” for “rise.” He would not have felt like a failure in the ugly face of discrimination alone, but he harbored the suspicion that there were other elements that undermined his success. He was a lousy teacher and a dubious scholar, and he knew it. He was no worse than the rest of that dismal congregation, but those his age were full professors and he was an associate; they had tenure and he did not.

  Had Morton Breslau’s discipline been other than English Literature, in those days a WASP monopoly, or had he lived in a country with a long history of hard-core anti-Semitism—Poland, for example—there possibly would not have been a problem. Jews in Poland knew where they stood—on thin ice to be sure—but their position was defined and unambivalent. A Jewish teacher had simply to embrace Catholicism, no more than superficially, and his academic permanence was assured. But here in democratic America, religious relationships were more subtle, and seldom discussed by gentlemen outside toilets, so to speak, and to endorse the reigning faith in America would not have helped. In America we pretend to take pride in the melting pot which only simmers, coming to a boil now and then; the juices seldom assimilate. We like Jews to be Jews, to attend their exotic synagogues and pursue their alien customs and traditions, and let the rest of us the hell alone. I think my father’s associates would have accepted him with a faint, bemused tolerance if his accent were Yiddish. It was his goddammed superior phonetic dandyism that so sorely afflicted them.

  My father never faced his chortling, democratic oppressors; they were contemptible, unworthy of his steel. He refused to pursue the gratification he might gain and the reward he would harvest in a public confrontation. I could not have resisted such a dustup, if only to relieve my frustrations by snapping off a few of their teeth, hitting the bastards with the nearest chair, pissing on their flag, burning down their sheep-dip library—all those books about animal husbandry and the cross-fertilization of squash—but that was not my father’s way. When things got too sticky, as sooner or later they did, he’d saddle up and shove off. Thus he had come south from Virginia, and before that, in inverse chronology, from Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Massachusetts.

  It was hardly a solution. Frustration that is unrequited in one corner finds, like a confused and famished rat in a maze, sustenance in another. Dr. Breslau among his colleagues (neither he nor they considered the other peers) maintained his rigid politesse. His most virulent public expletive remained a quiet “son of a biscuit” without even the mild explosive of an exclamation point at the end. For major irritant and inconvenience, ranging from a cut finger to a dented fender, he would say “sugar.” Still, they got to him, vultures pecking away at his entrails. In private, in the secret shell of our small house, it wouldn’t even take a cut finger to elicit sheer red-eyed choler, the veins beating at his temples like the wings of a blind bat, the wales of his cheeks pulsating. In our house all was rampage—the price of a can of soup jumping a nickel, a trace of starch on a shirt collar, a broken shoelace and he’d be off, apoplexed, calling my mother a fat cunt, striding across the length of a room to push me out of his way, invariably followed by regrets, remorse, pronouncements of self-hatred. Then he would put an arm over my shoulder and ask with grave deference what I wanted to be when I grew up. I would mumble, shifting my weight from one leg to another, kicking imaginary shit like Jimmy Stewart in a stable, “I don’t know.”

  Once, I’ll never forget, this oblique, irrelevant armistice led to an even nastier war. I was perhaps ten at the time; he asked me that persistent question I had until then successfully evaded. But now, “I want to be a teacher,” I said sturdily, eager for his approval. His eyes went red again, his face twisted as if his stomach had suddenly gone sour, and something obscure, monstrous, and terribly uncomfortable flashed between us. I didn’t realize until years later that the conflict was oedipal, that I was giving him notice of competition, but I knew enough to be frightened. “You miserable little coward,” he screamed at me, and pushed me away as if I were unclean.

  My mother had given up teaching when she married and moved for the first time, that trek from Massachusetts to Connecticut. She paid surprisingly little attention to her husband’s outbursts, even when he called her names, not because she was inured to them but because she paid little attention to anything outside her “work.” You had to ask her questions twice and still she’d look at you with the glazed fixity of a sleepwalker. She wrote poetry constantly; that was her “work.” She was a slow bleeder and she slaved over it for long, exhausting hours, and many a middle of a night I could hear her creaking around the dead house with a pen in one hand, a clipboard and flashlight in the other, refining her poems, jotting down the lines of a conceit. Writing never came easy for her; it gave her calluses. She never courted the muses, she wrestled them, mauled them all over the house and came up, after weeks of peripatetic labor, with a slim Spencerian sonnet, fourteen lines of imagistic jabberwocky. Or she’d shape her stanzas to form a geometrical design on the page. Her favorites were wings, stars, and shields.

  She was a handsome woman, my mother. If you like largeness, you’d call her statuesque. She looked like Amy Lowell, but there the comparison ended; unlike Lowell my mother was silent (although she sighed loudly and often), she never swore, she did not smoke cigars, and she could not write her way out of a net brassiere. But she did pack a lot of brisket.

  My mother’s output, starred and pseudonymous, appeared regularly in one of those little, irregular periodicals so limited in readership that they might be called incestuous. Subscription was by invitation only, and contributors would go into a rage over a misplaced comma and brood for days if their poems were understood. All this called for constant and voluminous correspondence between my mother and the editor, about what I never knew, because the whole system was built along the lines of a secret society whose secrets were kept from everybody, including the membership.

  There was one time of the year, however, when my mother could not ignore the rages of my father. It was when his name came up for tenure, and for weeks the poet and I would scarcely breathe, would speak in whispers, and only if spoken to. She continued to write, of course; to her the production of poetry was like a ravaging disease, but she didn’t put her usual body English into it. She’d walk the house day and night, but carefully, not bumping into chairs, and with her head bowed as if she were balancing something, a bottle or a cane, on the back of her skull. For my part, I shunned all contact with my tuba as if it were the carrier of some dreadful virus.