and I shared a bed and a home for fifteen years, and it ended finally and suddenly, broken off mysteriously and mutually after a petty quarrel, and I’ve never understood it. That was many years ago, and he’s been dead for ten, and I never again truly shared my life and lived with anyone that way, so profoundly, not after him. I was involved with a few, but none like him.
Yannis is no grand passion, not even a small one. He’s a comfort to me, and sometimes he is not, as when I am irritable from drink and he is sulking about some wound that is probably self-inflicted. I do have a sharp tongue and say things I don’t mean, most of which I’m sure he doesn’t understand, but the boy has a terrific capacity for dark moods, which sometimes frighten me. I try to cheer him up with gifts and small trips. I don’t understand him and he certainly doesn’t understand me. He thinks I putter about and just type, for example, and I think—I don’t know what I think. I am too old to expect more. I am ridiculous. My body is decaying, the flesh literally weakens and drops from the bone, gravity is pulling at me. I grow old, I grow old. Alicia says it’s the drink and perhaps she is right.
T.S. Eliot understood decay, I’ve often said that was his métier. But need and lust, in me they have not weakened and from me they have not fled, even though my body shrinks, grows tired, and my flesh loses its hold, its grip on life. It doesn’t matter—matter’s not the matter—and more’s the pity, because my thoughts are the same, and if I allow myself these—primitive, primordial, and ageless—they make me young again, in my mind, and I feel a blast of lust, of full-bodied, young desire rising up from my darkest self. Furiously it rushes into my mouth and then to my genitals where it settles, only to become cold and solid and still. I can taste it, my desire and lust, like Proust’s madeleine. I can become terribly sad, despondent. I want to rage against this inevitable fate, to rage like so many men before me. Sometimes I want to die.
I often picture my funeral, even when I’m happy, especially when I’m happy. I see the faces of friends, back in the States where I’ll be buried, of course, in the family plot, just beneath—in the row below, that is—my father and mother. My parents visited their future gravesite once a year, to place flowers on their mothers’ graves—their mothers knew each other well—and I was taken along, my spot pointed out to me with pride. At my funeral—I can see it very clearly—friends who haven’t heard from me for years and years will remember me and my antics in prep school and college. Then my publisher will say a few words, and some of the New York crowd, whoever’s alive, will make the trip, and say how charming I could be, and so forth. I will leave the world in relative anonymity. It’s unbearable to me. I drink until I can drink no more.
The magnanimous black sky is bottomless, fathomless like death and life too, and it comforts me in a way Yannis can’t, which is not the dear boy’s fault. He’s asleep on the bed, a body made tender by unconsciousness. I am looking out at the harbor, still as death at this time of night. Nothing is moving but the water and the clouds. Even the wind blows silently. The air is cold and startling. The night gods have chilly breath. Whatever paradise is, it must happen when everyone’s asleep, when there can be no complaints, and that must be why night gets so dark, so that we cannot see any imperfections in our world, and there can be nothing to complain about. Pound wanted to write paradise at the end: “Let the wind speak, that is paradise.” My enduring, stubborn passion must be written on the wind. And there it goes, there it goes, blown away by an indifferent blast of black and silent night air. Helen’s light is finally out.
Chapter 5
It might be a policeman’s flashlight shining on my puffy face. It could be the police. But
Yannis is no grand passion, not even a small one. He’s a comfort to me, and sometimes he is not, as when I am irritable from drink and he is sulking about some wound that is probably self-inflicted. I do have a sharp tongue and say things I don’t mean, most of which I’m sure he doesn’t understand, but the boy has a terrific capacity for dark moods, which sometimes frighten me. I try to cheer him up with gifts and small trips. I don’t understand him and he certainly doesn’t understand me. He thinks I putter about and just type, for example, and I think—I don’t know what I think. I am too old to expect more. I am ridiculous. My body is decaying, the flesh literally weakens and drops from the bone, gravity is pulling at me. I grow old, I grow old. Alicia says it’s the drink and perhaps she is right.
T.S. Eliot understood decay, I’ve often said that was his métier. But need and lust, in me they have not weakened and from me they have not fled, even though my body shrinks, grows tired, and my flesh loses its hold, its grip on life. It doesn’t matter—matter’s not the matter—and more’s the pity, because my thoughts are the same, and if I allow myself these—primitive, primordial, and ageless—they make me young again, in my mind, and I feel a blast of lust, of full-bodied, young desire rising up from my darkest self. Furiously it rushes into my mouth and then to my genitals where it settles, only to become cold and solid and still. I can taste it, my desire and lust, like Proust’s madeleine. I can become terribly sad, despondent. I want to rage against this inevitable fate, to rage like so many men before me. Sometimes I want to die.
I often picture my funeral, even when I’m happy, especially when I’m happy. I see the faces of friends, back in the States where I’ll be buried, of course, in the family plot, just beneath—in the row below, that is—my father and mother. My parents visited their future gravesite once a year, to place flowers on their mothers’ graves—their mothers knew each other well—and I was taken along, my spot pointed out to me with pride. At my funeral—I can see it very clearly—friends who haven’t heard from me for years and years will remember me and my antics in prep school and college. Then my publisher will say a few words, and some of the New York crowd, whoever’s alive, will make the trip, and say how charming I could be, and so forth. I will leave the world in relative anonymity. It’s unbearable to me. I drink until I can drink no more.
The magnanimous black sky is bottomless, fathomless like death and life too, and it comforts me in a way Yannis can’t, which is not the dear boy’s fault. He’s asleep on the bed, a body made tender by unconsciousness. I am looking out at the harbor, still as death at this time of night. Nothing is moving but the water and the clouds. Even the wind blows silently. The air is cold and startling. The night gods have chilly breath. Whatever paradise is, it must happen when everyone’s asleep, when there can be no complaints, and that must be why night gets so dark, so that we cannot see any imperfections in our world, and there can be nothing to complain about. Pound wanted to write paradise at the end: “Let the wind speak, that is paradise.” My enduring, stubborn passion must be written on the wind. And there it goes, there it goes, blown away by an indifferent blast of black and silent night air. Helen’s light is finally out.
Chapter 5
It might be a policeman’s flashlight shining on my puffy face. It could be the police. But
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