Mason West
It's my ear. My left ear. That's the first thing most people notice. So it's good that she is boohoohoo-ing into my right ear, which is whole & unscathed. She complains that I am not giving her the attention that she needs. All the while there is this godalmighty thunderstorm going on outside: the furies rage; Santa Claus clobbers the roof with water balloons; depth charges explode around my submarine; in the slits of the Venetian blinds terrible flashes of blue light explode across the ebony of my apartment windows.
"Does your going to sleep mean that you want me to go back home tomorrow?" The windows flash with bright blue light, & I hold my breath until the thunder bangs & rumbles like Beethoven's echoing timpani.
"Home" means with her husband in Topeka. Her husband, according to her, is an accountant & an insensitive philistine. He has not read a book in 20 years, & he refuses to watch a movie more challenging than "The Dirty Dozen." Our friendship, romance, affair--I don't know what we're doing--is rooted in a mutual love of literature & hundreds of letters, post cards, & e-mail. We have written almost daily for a few years--letters at first, then, when I got out of prison, e-mail.
"No, my going to sleep means I'm sleepy." I bury my head in my pillow, but she will not let up.
"You asked me to come down here and now you're totally ignoring me."
Half of my left ear was blown away by a shotgun blast in a botched convenience store robbery. I don't hear well in that ear. Her warm soft breasts are pressed against my back & shoulder, a sensation I would find arousing if I weren't at the mid-week point of exhaustion. I've averaged four hours sleep per night since Sunday, & it is now Wednesday.
I told her how busy I am when she said she wanted to come down here to Austin. Her marriage was in crisis & she needed to get away for a while, she said. I always tell her how busy I am because she takes my long silences in e-mail personally. We correspond by snail mail, too--or at least we did when I wasn't so busy. Now she just writes me letters about going to Java John's in-between running errands to buy the right kind of English-made furniture polish that she learned about when she was in England last year. Her husband paid for most of that trip--she took enough of her own money to pay for tea. After she got back, she drove all over Kansas looking for a grocery store that carries Cotswold cheese. She'd lived on little more than tea & this kind of cheese in some ramshackle Sussez hotel where Quentin Bell had stayed for six months while his house was being remodeled. Charlotte's husband did not understand the value of staying onr night, much less two months, in a hotel because Virginia Woolf's nephew had stayed there, but she told him that he had not had a romantic idea since they illuminated his apartment in college with the light of 100 sandalwood-scented candles. "What is this weird writing thing of yours anyway? You're not making any money with it!" he told her, but she said she would someday. The bout of Anglophilia came hard upon the Bloomsbury publishing industry's impending celebration of Virginia Woolf's birthday last year. Hogarth Press was about to celebrate the birthday in a big way at Monk's House, Rodmell, Sussex, & Charlotte was determined to be there when 30 actors from the Royal Shakespeare Company would simultaneously recite every stream of consciousness of every character in Mrs. Dalloway in the short space of three minutes.
The Anglophilia phase had superseded an earlier vegetable phase in which, after reading Zen and the Art of Describing Vegetables, she had spent 18 months tearfully writing about the inner layers of onions, praising the root tether of voluptuous red radishes, exploring the speed bumps along jaundiced phallic carrots, & philosophizing on the diversity inherent in the homogenous jicama. She sent essays on vegetables everywhere, from The New Yorker to Rodale's Organic Gardening, but no one wanted to buy them.
Now she is weeping with eyes like watery wounds leaking onto my shoulder, saying, "Don't you know that I love you! I love you! How can you sleep when I'm telling you that I love you?"
In England she had fallen in love with an American tax refgee who, thoroughly pissed off with his Zen-based psychotherapist in Japan, had walked out in mid-session, packed a suitcase, left his English-teaching position, left Asia, & flew to England where he enrolled in a graduate school so hungry for cash that it accepted anyone with 5000 pounds for tuition into its creative writing MFA program. Only 72 hours had elapsed between the last English class that he taught in Japan & the first that he attended in England. In addition to the dramatic flight from Japan into the mercenary English grad school, Bob had ceremoniously peed a bladder full of Watney's onto an autographed picture of the psychotherapist. He wrote the psychotherapeutic Zen master some hate mail, telling him all he had done.
The Buddhist was so pleased with his patient's progress that he replied by FedEx, pronouncing Bob fully cured. In response, Bob took the tour of Scotch distilleries twice in a row.
Charlotte was enraptured by Bob, who droned maniacally for hours about Marxist deconstruction of Jane Austen's drawing-room dramas. Charlotte's husband never talked to her that way. It made her wet, she confessed in a series of e-mails she sent to me after I'd finally gotten out of jail & opened an Internet account. She was in love, & love for Charlotte is a state of anxiety, so her hair began to fall out. Her husband confronted her, not for infidelity (which Charlotte was obsessively certain her husband was incapable of discovering), but for the plumbing bill.
After a month of not sleeping & barely eating & fretting that she may be bald after a few more months of this, she received a frantic call from Bob at 3 a.m.. Bob declared he had quit taking his lithium a few weeks ago because he felt pretty damn good, but now he was having a nervous breakdown & was going back to Japan this morning to see his estranged wife Masumi & Bob Jr., the three-year-old son born a few months after their divorce. At that point, all of the other phone calls that Bob had made at more discreet times when her husband was not sleeping in the next room, during which Bob had begged Charlotte to join him for a life on the global literary road, East & West, suddenly seemed like the lies of a madman. They would, he had said, promising her the world, fuck in the basement of Henry James' house. She could come among stacks filled with the original scrolls of Sei Shonagon. He would promise enduring love for her in Shelley & Keats' free-love cottage, a stone's throw from the white cliffs along the English Channel. They would symbolically splash water onto the parched lips of the victims of the atom bomb explosion at a memorial in Hiroshima. Their souls would touch in a broom closet of the British Museum. They would spend weeks in the realm of the senses at a primitive Japanese country inn under Mt. Fuji. He had promised her all these things & more, & she had been hungry enough to want to hear them & sometimes even to believe them, she conceded, especially when she was alone again with her husband in Topeka. But with Bob's sudden flight back to Japan, the madness was suddenly, albeit briefly, clear to her. Charlotte's hair stopped falling out.
"What does your going to sleep mean? How can you sleep when I love you?" she blubbers in my ear. The tears on my shoulder feel like the rain leaking through the window from the thunderstorm outside. My cellmate used to talk about women doing things like this--boy, could that guy talk!--he called them "meltdowns."
Prison psychologists deemed my cellmate & me compatible. That means we probably wouldn't kill each other--but it still happens: the guys in the cell next to us had some kind of quarrel one night. The guy in the cell next to ours was going to hang himself at breakfast from the railing along the upper deck of cells, but then the knot in his sheet didn't hold, so he fell & landed on a table, crying & groaning with a broken leg, lying atop six breakfast trays, the sheet landing on him in a stream like a pouncing boa from above. Not long after that, the guards we called Siskel & Ebert--short & pudgy with thick black hair & tall, thin, & bald--discovered that the would-be suicide had killed his cellmate in the night by suffocating him with a blanket.
Things like that happen because you're in a different world. You're locked in this tiny metal room that seems to vibrate subtly with the weary & bored groans of the 60 guys on the block, & you share that room with some other guy who has done something as violent & immoral as you have, & you're in there from lockdown at night until some pre-dawn hour when the sound of the tumblers electronically unlocking our doors seems like a lie, because there is no other sign of morning. It's cold & dark & dead outside your scratched pane of Plexiglas with a view of dead brown weeds in the milky moonlight, & the spotlight caresses a chain link fence topped by accordion spirals of razor wire. It could be only 2 a.m. or some other deadly hour, & our keepers could be pulling some sort of cruel joke before marching us out onto the grounds to dispatch us in the dark, one by one, with .38 slugs in our brain pans. Then some fellow immates appear with the food cart outside the door of the cell block, & there is a comfort in that, because now you know that this is a production of fellow immates, the lucky ones who have kitchen duty.
The guard overhead in the control room in the center of this wing--a tall, large-breasted woman with big hips in a deputy's uniform--is allowing the prison schedule to proceed. She sits before banks of switches controlling all the locks & sometimes she talks to us through a microphone & we yell back at her speaker so she can hear us. We eye her with a mixture of loathing for authority & the lust of deprived men--it is like fight-or-flight, except that we can do neither because we are encased in this giant community steel coffin, and rumor has it they have put saltpeter in our coffee. We line up in the common area between the blocks & are given our trays of eggs & oatmeal, & we will sit quietly, hair as wild as the weeds outside, & we will eat our chow. The the medic will come to the door & hand little paper cups of Streptomycin or Prozac or Valiums to those who have been authorized by the infirmary to receive them. They have to make a show of taking the pills, one by one, opening their mouths and sticking out their tongues to show that they really swallow the pills.
We all had our stories justifying why we robbed convenience stores & liquor stores or did things about which we would only mumble to our buddies in Day-Glow orange jumpsuits, but we all knew it was bullshit, so we didn't belabor the point. I had run a pen pals ad in a little magazine of essays published out of North Carolina. Charlotte's first letter appeared in mail call the day after the murder-suicide. It was a happy day, not just because of the mail, but because the tragedy during the night had given us all something to talk about during the day. One rumor said they had become gay & had a lover's quarrel; the other said the guy had gotten killed because he snored. A lot of us worried after that.
In jail I had already finished my GED & started work on a BA in English. I had done a pretty good job hiding the nature of my address, & Charlotte believed only that I lived in some ind of dormitory that mandated a lot of extra numbers in my address. Charlotte & I read the short novels of Henry James together, & I wrote her everyday, & someone she found the time to write back just as often. I especially liked The Turn of the Screw, & she dreamed of going to England to see James' English house & to handle his papers.
Eventually I prepared Charlotte for the truth about me in a series of 12 prepared paragraphs--one of the greatest writing exercises I ever did. I nested one paragraph at a time in my daily letters to her. She wasn't happy with the news, but, she said, she cared too much to let me go.
In my sophomore year I got parole. Charlotte had written a letter of recommendation that may have helped the parole board to lift the latch. I rented an apartment in a student ghetto in Austin & found a job in a portrait studio, which was kind of like one big joke because none of those people, dressed in their picture-best, knew I was a jailbird. The state helped pay my tuition--"to reclaim me," my parole officer said, though they had already claimed me pretty hard by locking me up & then releasing me to counseling & to a parole officer who liked to nose around in my underwear drawer as much as he liked to read my pay stubs.
Over the next two years Charlotte talked less about literature & more about her husband & the myriad details of her domestic life. I suppose people must find that interesting, judging from the success of TV shows like Oprah, but Charlotte seemed to be running only so desperation wouldn't catch up with her.
Meanwhile, my interest in writing became an obsession. I drove myself hard from 6 in the morning when I went to campus, worked in the afternoons & evenings in the portrait studio where my head filled with notes on how I would write about the people in three-quarter poses, or about the families I arranged in grotesquely happy & symmetrical little groupings--the affairs, the incest, the father passing out at the dinner table, all those filthy secrets I was sure lay just beyond their plastic smiles, hidden in the way a layer of Maybelline hides a zit boiling just below the skin. I got great smiles from children with my circus stories about an elephant nibbling off my ear with his trunk, & we sold a lot of pictures with those smiles, & that made my employer happy enough to give me raises, & that made my parold officer happy, & that kept me out of jail. But it was the certainty that a shotgun lay behind every counter that kept me out of convenience stores.
Now I am one of the few 40-year-old seniors on campus, running from dawn to midnight to finish the degree I started in Jail & to get into graduate school. Can a felon missing half an ear teach college English? I don't know & I don't care. I enjoy the run & I'm running out of patience with the woman sobbing on my shoulder.
Monday night Charlotte & I went for coffee. I was feeling like I had always carried the weight of our conversations, & I was waiting for her to talk, & with my tongue on strike we waited in suspended silence for at least half a cup. Finally Charlotte broke down & said, "So..." She looked at me with her eyes bugging out of their sockets.
"So? Does that mean you want me to talk? Why don't you just say 'Speak! Boy! Speak!' Arf arf!" I gave her my best Yorkshire Terrier falsetto.
Tuesday we went to a movie in which everyone was in the movies or wanted in the movies badly enough to screw anyone to get it. It was a sleazy business.
"Let's not go home yet," she said. "Let's get some coffee."
My hopes rose. Maybe she would talk about the movie.
"So," she asked over coffee, "what was that movie about?" I told her I thought it was about how the movie business makes everyone screwy, & she told me that it was about all the relationships in the movie, & then the conversation died because, she said, she felt too intimidated by me to discuss the film in detail.
Last night we had dinner at my friend Kathy's house. I know Kathy from my shrink's office, & unlike Charlotte, she has no problem speaking her mind & keeping a conversation alive. Kathy is getting through a divorce, & I just don't have time for complications, so we are, as they say in Hollywood, just good friends. I enjoy the unassuming nature of our friendship, so I wouldn't want to screw it up with sex. You see how that's gone with Charlotte.
Now we are having another one of those talks which convinces me more than ever that my visitor is deluded about what people think, why people do things, & what's going on in her life. She has told me that her shrink says she doesn't accept responsibility & I have seen this for myself & now I get a billion examples of it in rapid-fire succession. This conversation is heated & fast & loaded with erratic details, so I don't think I can repeat it here. She says she knows why I bring Kathy around. She knows, she says, what's going on between Kathy & me--she isn't really explicit about what it is, though, & that I use Kathy to buffer myself from her.
"So, you took me from my husband's house," she says, "and now you leave me stranded? Is there nothing that can change your mind? I know you don't love me, but have you no kindness with which to pity me? Not the sculpted promises you gave me in all those letters, and not the dreams to which you promised to awaken me, but just the happiness we could have if we were together! All that's just blown away into nothingness! I may as well burn all your letters when I get home."
She's testing me because we've always fantasized how those letters would be the mother lode for our biographers. I just sigh.
"No woman should trust a man's word because if a man craves, there is no lie he won't tell, and no promise he won't make and just as easily break. And once you get what you want, you forget everything. You can't deny that while you were caged in that cell, I resuced you and risked my reputation--and my husband's--rather than fail you in your time of need--for which my whole life has been torn apart. I've trust in you and I'm losing my husband, and now I'm losing you. I guess I'll just rot on the street."
"Hush, and listen to the storm outside." God is bowling strikes.
"What kind of bastard are you? What bitch had you in a gas station toilet? If you didn't want to marry me, you could at least have fit me in here. I would clean your mess and massage your feet and make your bed. I don't even know why I'm bothering to say this. You're not even listening, and you're not talking to me
"If only I'd never subscribed to that stupid stupid magazine with your ad. If only they had never let you place that ad--a small East Texas junior college, my God! I was so stupid and naive to write to you, and then to believe everything you said.
"Where will I go now? Who can I depend upon in this mess? Am I just to go to England? Just walk across the Atlantic? Can I hope for my husband's help after I've deserted him? I am high and dry in Topeka. I can't even find Cotswold cheese. It's like I live on an uninhabited island and my every means of escape is blocked. There is no hope."
She is also certain that I am the one who invited her here. A paranoid & jealous spouse would be better than this. So I'm thinking why am I putting up with this? Why am I even having this conversation? I tell her it is time for her to leave.
And this morning, while it still seems too dark to believe the day is here, I say to her again, just in case she has rationalized her way out of her eviction notice, "I want you gone by the time I get home today." I may be nuts for saying it was OK for her to come here in the first place. I may be nuts for having put up with it this long. But this has gotten way out of hand, & I don't owe her anything, so I'm not going to put up with the rants that make calls from a collection agency seem like a friendly chat on the phone.