December 16, 2006--Saturday Story: "Ludavicio et al."--Concluded!

Part Four was largely devoted to Lloyd Zazlo’s four sessions with Dr. Boris Merkin, the psychiatrist who his wife Lydia moved on to after her Orgonomist, Dr. Luven, did not achieve the results she had been seeking—to help her, with Lloyd’s semi-skilled and tireless assistance, “get there.” Things did not begin well with Dr. Merkin: Lloyd found him decidedly ordinary for a shrink—bald; lumpy; without the hint of a distinguishing accent; and, above all, trained in Brooklyn and not Berlin, much less Vienna. Lloyd did, though, like the fact that Merkin valued talking about family dynamics and intrapsychic issues, using “dream material” as a window into the unconscious. And so he was quite surprised when, at the fourth and final session (Lloyd had been limited to just these by Merkin and Lydia), the doctor had asked him to draw on a pad a picture of the female vagina. Lloyd confessed to himself, after making a feeble effort, but of course not to Merkin, that he had not to date made a close study of actual ones and thus was only able to produce a cartoon-like version. But Dr. Merkin corrected him and Lloyd came away from the session with a much better idea than previously of the anatomically correct location of the critical clitoris. Two days later, with Lydia in Connecticut for a dance concert, he resumed his role as faculty advisor for the Writers Workshop. Though she slipped in late, Kathy was there, wearing an alluring tank top (to help her endure the heat and humidity) and read a powerful and deeply affecting poem that enthralled Lloyd, just before the onset of the big blackout of the late 1970s. Still intoxicated, Lloyd insisted on driving Kathy home to Queens through the darkened and dangerous streets.

And so, at long last, this brings us to the final Fifth Part, with Lloyd still in Queens and . . .

* * *

On her doorstep, Kathy said to me, “You’re not goin’ home tonight. You saw all those kids up to no good along Kissena Boulevard. It’s getting worser by the minute.” From inside her house, like all the others piled one atop the other, I heard what sounded like manic pounding. Noticing this, Kathy said, “Oh, that’s just Billy,” as if that were sufficient explanation. It was, at least for the moment. “You can call your wife from here, you’re married, right?, if the phones are workin’, and let her know.”

“We’ll, she’s out of town and I wouldn’t know how to reach her even if I wanted to.” That last admission just slipped out and so I quickly added, “They’re probably blacked out there too.”

“So,” she said, swinging the door open, “then there’s no problem. You can sleep on the sofa.” I was beginning to feel intrigued by the unfolding situation, even though everything made good sense--it was dangerous and I really didn’t know my way around Queens, especially with all the lights out; and then, with her son Billy there, her invitation felt just thoughtful and totally innocent. The perception of which, the practicality, released an immediate wave of disappointment—with the city blacked out and Lydia out of town, and out of range, with Kathy’s poem and her husky singing along with Miles still mixing in my mind, not to mention the lingering high from the marijuana and wine and the lurking sense of danger, who needed, who wanted innocence! If only Billy would evaporate, who knows . . . .

“Billy,” Kathy came to a version of rescue, screaming at him, “Get that out of here, will you. Dr. Lazlo’s gonna be sleeping on the sofa tonight.” Billy sat in the middle of the living room surrounded by lit candles and a professional-seeming drum set. That explained the pounding I had heard.

“Do I have to, Ma? I’m scared and don’t want to sleep all the way up in the attic.”

“That’s where his bedroom is,” Kathy explained to me in an aside, “I made him move up there after his father walked out so I could have some privacy for my studyin’ and writin’ and whatever; and wouldn’t have to listen to him drummin’ all night.” Privacy sounded like a good idea to me too, particularly when it came to whatever she meant by the “whatever.” In the threatening city I was feeling adventurous and bold!

Billy reluctantly and with considerable attitude hauled himself up out the chair and began, piece by piece, to drag the various drums and cymbals up the steps to the third floor, mopping and sighing with every dramatic step.

Kathy poured herself a tall tumbler of Bourbon and for me some white wine, still chilled from the silent refrigerator. She collapsed onto one of the chrome chairs at her kitchen table, signaling to me to join her. Which I did. She again shrugged off her sweater. Even in the candle light her electric blue tank top shimmered as it were animated by her deep breathing and swelling chest.

“It’s in the past,” Kathy mused, as if to herself, “but it’s at times like this that I think about Matty. That shit. What he did to me and his only living breathing son.” I began nodding, the version that I hoped communicated understanding and compassion. “I was no angel, that I’ll confess, but will spare you the details,” though I carved them. “He on the other hand, after he came home from the war, all strung out, all he did all day was begin to drink himself to death. The VA had a good detox program; but, no, he was too much of a man,” she sneered, “to admit he had problems much less be willing to put himself into one of those groups where he’d have to talk about what he did over there and what that did to him. He kept tellin’ me he could stop any time he wanted to. Sure. ‘No fuckin’ big deal,’ he said to me every time I nagged him about it, since I knew where all this was headed.”

She paused to gather herself, “I have the scars to prove it.” And with that she popped out her upper plate of teeth and, holding it before her, showed it to me as evidence of how life at the end had been with him. I kept nodding and slid my chair closer to her so I could take hold of her hand. I began to stroke it.

Distressed with my reaction, I couldn’t believe how sexually stimulated I became with her still holding her teeth out as if they were an amulet of her pain. She began silently to allow tears to form and shuddered. I put my other arm around her, softly needing her tense shoulders. She leaned against me but quickly, snapping out of her spell, pulled away, saying lightly, “Can I get you a refill? I sure could use another.” She emitted her trademark throaty laugh. “And then let’s get you to sleep. Right?”

What was I supposed to say to that—“Sure, good idea, it’s getting to be past my bedtime. I need to get up early in order to . . . actually to do nothing.” I wasn’t the least bit tired and sensed that neither was she. It was only about 9:00 and Billy was now drumming away even more violently from his room up in the attic as if to drive away the demons let loose in the city by the blackout.

Sensing I was neither tired nor eager to let go of her so soon she proposed we look for my jazz station on her battery-operated radio. I showed her where to find it—106.4 FM, still broadcasting, with auxiliary power, from the crypt of Riverside Church. Now they were broadcasting John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman out into the ruby night.

Somehow we found ourselves clinging to each other and moving together to their thick, desolute sound in a sort of mongrel form of dance. In truth, using what passed for dancing as an excuse to just hold onto each other.

Though I can barely carry a tune I found myself singing along with Hartman, obliterating every nuance of his, every held note--

You are too beautiful
for one man alone
one lucky fool to be with
when there are other men
with eyes of their own
to see with . . .

Kathy snorted, “Just perfect,” I thought she was about to make ironic fun of my attempt at singing, “Perfect. ‘Too beautiful,’ for a dog like me.” And with that she began to sob. Her tears in an instant wet right through my shirt. I felt them drench my chest. There was no comforting her now, but in the midst of her tears she still managed to add, almost choking from laughing while crying, “Not that this isn’t also a comment about your singing.”

This broke the second spell of the evening and we both, still embracing, tumbled onto the sofa where we quickly found ourselves to be naked, the tank top the first thing to disappear, and immediately making love. Unlike with Kim, there was thankfully no flaccidity this time. We fucked for like what seemed like forever to the cacophonic mix of both Coltrane’s Elvin Jones and Bobby Dugan on drums.

I didn’t think even once about Lydia except when Kathy “got there,” with thunderous vengeance. But I did find myself wanting to say, “Thank you Dr. Merkin for showing me the way!”

* * *

I slipped out of Kathy’s house just as the sun began to rise and retraced my diagonal path across Queens back into Brooklyn, through the cemeteries, via the same Interboro Parkway. With no promises exchanged or expectations about what might happen next, we had said goodbye at 3:30 a.m. when she left me on the sofa to go up to her bedroom where she wanted Bobby to find her when he awoke.

I again found myself imagining how it might feel to be like Jack, on the road. From my overstocked brain, I recalled his line, “Burn, burn, burn like fabulous roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.” Stars Kathy and I had seen together as we cut through the black streets and then later the candles as we shuddered with pleasure in each others arms, aware also of the spidery sadness lurking at the center of our lives.

So perhaps, I thought, unhappiness aside, though maybe, I caught myself acknowledging, unhappiness front and center, I had in fact stumbled onto the appropriate subject matter and voice for Pearl and His Brother and the Dirty Books. Twenty years after Jack I was revisiting in spirit, and to some extent in substance, what he had so brilliantly accomplished. He had both defined and put a coda on his generation of ultimately disillusioned seekers. Also imbued by despair and unhappiness. But, as Kathy had discovered and taught me, my appropriation, equally despairing, had a chance to work because I had set it in the spirit of my time, among the successor generation, and had found a way to add the essential coloration of irony.

Thus self-inspired, it was with great anticipation that I found, when back on my porch in Brooklyn, a thick envelope waiting from Black Sun Magazine, where I had sent the first chapter of Pearl, thinking that they would welcome it. They had, recall, published some of my earlier fiction, in fact my only published story, and to see a part of Pearl in print, even in the modestly-mimeographed Black Sun, would encourage me to believe in it, press on with it.

But before I could settle onto the sofa to savor what was inside, I noticed the light flashing on the answering machine. It was Lydia, asking if I could go up to her studio on the third floor and retrieve from her dance album something that had been written about her a couple of years ago in The Brooklyn Eagle, a review of one of her performances, her only such notice thus far, that would be helpful to her, she felt, up in Connecticut where Jose Limon was auditioning her and others for his company. She sounded uncharacteristically buoyant and left a phone number where I could call and read to her the part that mentioned her “supple and passionate movements”—that’s the part she wanted to be able to cite.

I left the letter on the end table and lugged myself up to the studio where I found it right on top of a pile of papers and notebooks she had stashed in a file drawer. She frequently looked at the photos of herself contained in it so I was not surprised that it was so easy to locate. From the attic I called the number she left and read the sentence in question onto the tape of the answering machine. There was even a grainy picture of the troop in which she had performed, and the younger Lydia did in fact look like the supplest of them. The passionate part, though, did not come through as clearly.

As I bent to return the album to its place in the cabinet, eager to get back down to the letter, I noticed, peeking out from a disheveled pile of folders and papers, a leather-edged book with “Diary” in gold script etched on the dark brown cover. Without thinking, while sitting on a stool for a moment to catch my breath before returning to the living room, I picked it up and thumbed through it, fanning the pages aimlessly from front to back, stopping at various times to glance at what was written there in Lydia’s familiar handwriting.

It was mostly notes about dance classes and rehearsals. Very matter-of-fact material, it seemed more like a list of things to jog her memory than reflections on events or perceptions or feelings—“Took class with Ruth. Had problems with pliés. Need to practice them more. Feet need to be stronger. Work on it!” Things of that sort. To exhort herself to greater effort.

But then, more tempting, I saw that there were also entries about sessions with Dr. Luven. Over one or two of these I did shamelessly linger; but they too were mundane and to my, yes, disappointment did not mention me or much about what they discussed—not that discussing was such a big part of his technique. So she wrote, for example—“Orgone Box again today. No blue light. No energy flow. So he had me do Bed Work. Did get some reaction. Hopefully more next week.” But then next week’s entry was more of the same, though laced with more feeling and underlining—“Nothing again! Fucking nothing!! This is not working!!” It was almost as if I could hear her angry voice leaping from the pages.

And then toward where the Diary broke off, more in the present, amidst the dance notes, there were entries about sessions with Dr. Merkin. These I spent some time reviewing, even forgetting the letter downstairs, since I had so recently seen him and his technique was more classically psychoanalytic—mostly talk. This suggested that perhaps her entries would be more detailed. More revealing.

Some of the earlier ones were in fact full of dream material. I suppose this was where Lydia kept her notes so as not to forget them. Considering the limit placed on the number of sessions I was allowed, I used just a bedside pad and pencil—no need to inscribe them in such a formal way. And as another way to record my dreams, I could always fictionalize versions of them in Pearl!

But her notes from the last few months, those from just before I had taken over her time for a month were of a very different sort—they were much more narratives in bulleted form. So about two months ago she wrote—

“Wore black knit dress . . . Merkin commented how good I looked in it . . . so I wore it again . . . no bra this time. [Slow to catch on, I wondered, what’s this all about?] . . . no panty hose either . . . remembered to insert diaphragm . . . hate it but . . . for first time he wasn’t wearing his jacket . . . also no tie . . . he too was ready . . . [For what?, still naïve, I asked myself. I wasn’t yet getting it.] . . . two fingers in my cunt . . . [What in her? What, cunt?] . . . nothing at first . . . it began then . . . better than last time [I restrained myself from flipping back to her notes about that prior session] . . . but still yet not what I wanted . . . [I knew very well what that was!] . . . so he ate me . . . bit on my clit . . . [About the location of that he was, I knew, quite the expert!] . . . and I came and came and CAME and . . .

There were more such entries, with many italicized words. I merely glanced at the next few, with my heart thumping. It was clear from these that that then had become their routine: Lydia would describe what she was wearing; if she brought along or had put in her diaphragm; how long it took before Merkin would get down to the business of cunnilingus; how many times she CAME; and, of the greatest significance, the anatomical site of her orgasms. Most times, it appeared that the eclectic Merkin managed to get her fully there!

I of course was furious to have discovered this prima fascia evidence of Lydia’s, not to mention, Merkin’s betrayal.

That prick bastard Merkin. So well-named—look it up. No wonder his fucking “rules of the road” so rigidly forbade me from discussing anything with anyone, especially Lydia. I could only imagine what she would have thought, how she would have inwardly mocked me, if I came home from the vagina session, for example, and told her about the clamshell incident! What she would have thought of me? I could only imagine.

I was sputtering, but quickly realized this was in truth no real surprise. I reminded myself of Ludavicio? That Ginny gigolo. I bet if I hadn’t been so furious and had been able to read more thoroughly through Lydia’s Diary I would have found all sorts of explicit notes about the things they had done to each other. I could also only imagine that.

Half my rage was because the surging reality of this discovery had imposed itself on the memory of all the magical things Kathy and I had just experienced through our blacked-out night. These were pushed so far back in time that they felt now as if they had been merely part of an almost forgotten dream. The delicious tactile reality of it had been substantially obliterated.

That cunt Merkin. That bitch Lydia . . .

And then, thankfully, I remembered that there was the letter. I raced downstairs to devour it, craving its news to take me away from all of this sordidness.

* * *

“Professor Zazlo” it began. Not a good sign, I was already squirming on the sofa since neither the “Professor” nor the “Zazlo” part, much less the lack of a “Dear” filled me with much optimism. From having published me in the past I would have expected a simple “Dear Lloyd.” And from that formal greeting things only got worse:

There was the blah-blah about how much pleasure it had given them some years ago [more than I was happy to acknowledge] to have been able to publish my first story and blah-blah how they, since their founding [“founding” did not seem to me like the best way for them to be thinking about the “launch” of a journal that was mimeographed in someone’s bedroom], since that time, the editor wrote, they sought to be among the first to publish the works of young writers who held the promise blah-blah of developing into major literary figures who embodied “unique visions and innovative styles.” [I knew from this set up where this was leading.]

“So it came as a great disappointment to us,” Chauncey Biddle continued [yes, that was his actual name], “to find you, after all these years [again with the “all-these years”] to be producing work so conventional, so derivative.” [But Kathy had said . . . and I had come to believe that . . . so why . . . ?]

Mercilessly he went on to say that though in my accompanying cover note I had indicated my debt to Kerouac and how in my revisiting and reimagining his “epic” I had attempted to “resituate” it in place and time while infusing it with an contemporarily-appropriate “tincture of irony” [Chauncey’s quoting me back to myself was such that, even in my misery, I sounded to myself, via this echo, pretentiously puffed up like a pseudo-literary hen]; but, as he went on, as if flinging the “tincture” thing back at me wasn’t enough, he continued to quote me when I wrote to them about what “was missing from Jack’s ominously serious, yet, for its time, brilliant achievement”—this lack of “angular self-reflection” I had called it [something more for me to choke on]—was something I had endeavored to include in my own text. Blah-blah.

Though this was more than enough for me to have to choke down, he had a bit more to say and did not choose to restrain himself—“You wrote to us about how the structure of the novel is made up of ‘a braided strand of narrative elements,’ which, you claim, resembles the way ‘memory is constructed and recalled.’ But then, as we looked even casually [only casually?] at your actual text, we found that it so lacks cleverness, much less anything inspired by, how did you put it, your ‘ironic muse,’ that all we found was you dancing on surfaces. You cannot write about the ‘inner life’ [he had here taken to lecturing me], again this is what you tell us is your intention, while never burrowing the depths beyond mere inches.” [Though I was not impressed by the “burrowing mere inches” part—it didn’t quite parse—I was desperately afraid, I was, that he was right.]

So I was glad when he concluded with the inevitable kiss off since I needed, I crushingly realized, to, how else to put this, I desperately had to do . . . something.

“What you submitted from Pearl and His Sister [sic] and the Dirty Books is just too turgid and affected, not a good combination, for us to even consider it for publication in Black Sun.” There was not even the obligatory, “We wish you well with your future endeavors and welcome the opportunity to review anything else you might wish to submit to us in the future.” And then he signed it using both of his phony WASP names.

“That piece of shit rag!" I shouted to the empty house.

* * *

How I found my way there to this day I do not know. But there I was by my battered self looking out over the East River, past the ragged southern edge of Manhattan, on toward the setting New Jersey sun. Sitting out at the end of a broken-down pier. Even that image I sensed was exhumed from my reverberating literary consciousness.

And then it came to me—yet again it was from Kerouac! There was no escaping him, even though I supposed I had come to the waterfront to put an end to either my ambitions or myself. But there he was waiting to, what, yank me back or push me overboard? I was game for either.

Kerouac, who, twenty years earlier, had found himself also at the end of his road in quite similar fashion. But of course his broken-down pier was in Manhattan; mine was still anchored on decaying piles in Brooklyn.

He had written back then:

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier [see what I mean?] watching the long, long skies over New Jersey [all I had been able to come up with was, “the setting New Jersey sun”—Chauncey was indeed right about me] and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge [I could have helped him make that better!] over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it [pretty good stuff, no? And wasn’t it Capote, that jealous swish, who had called this “typing”?], and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry . . . .

And as I too began to cry, I remembered something else Jack had written—

Nobody knows what’s going to happen . . . besides the forlorn rays of growing old.

So then there will be more . . . .