Panama Read online

  I was carrying her down the street in my arms with my tongue in her ear. She made me put her down. I took out my teeth and gaped at pedestrians. It was all like before and I had a girlfriend.

  * * *

  Question: was Catherine a looker? I think handsome at least. Certainly no traffic stopper. Her upper lip was a little turned back and mildly insolent. But she had silvery eyes, drawn in the corners. She looked self-owned, cheerfully fierce, and ready to rock and roll. In our time together, she was often stern with me. She said I used those old drugs too much. But, given the objective conditions of our lives, how can we avoid taking the drugs? It’s our only defense against information.

  When I was down and out and ugly, Catherine could hold me when no one else could, and keep on holding me when there was absolutely no one, including me, prepared to claim it was worth it. She left me when two things came together like an eclipse: I was in good health and had behaved unforgivably. When I thought about her wanting to get out, I can only imagine that the combination must have seemed a long time coming.

  As for her penchant for telling the bald truth, I’m not sure that it is a virtue. Cooking did not interest her very much; I loved sleeping with her not only for her fanciful approach but for her fucking back. Sadly, the more legendary I became, the more I neglected this and everything else. We ended quickly in the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, down the hall from Francis Ford Coppola’s majestic quarters, quick because of her power. She left and I who had become, among other things, ruthless, and an absolute cretin, thought at first—I who had ignored her—“I will die of this.” I couldn’t have been more of a pig.

  Instead, I slobbered, wept, crawled, and from time to time called room service for kiddie plates and gin. I masturbated endlessly and in some instances projected Catherine in humiliating variations on Leda and the Swan in which the featured players were a gruesome wattled turkey, an ostrich; never a swan, just the worst, most terrible birds.

  Before she could leave town, I caught her in the Russian Tea Room eating salad behind dark glasses. She was on something and I could tell the waiters had been having a problem. I had never seen her like this. I thought she was ruined and that I had done it.

  I took her back to the hotel, walking her through a corner of Central Park where a Puerto Rican folkloric festival was taking place. She kept saying, “Aren’t they damned good?” In the morning, she showered and split, apologizing crisply for the trouble, leaving an afterimage of her burnishing her face with a cloth and cold water, organizing her purse, adjusting her stockings out of my sight, and leaving her smell in three out of four rooms like an avenging angel.

  I yelled down the corridor, risking annoyance to the ministers and personnel of Francis Ford Coppola, “Are we finished?”

  “You bet your life,” she said and covered her face. Back in the room, I pulled a chair up to the radiator, sat with my knees to the heat, and looked at the asylum city. I began to try to summarize what was happening to me; but I could only think: This time the pus is everywhere.

  * * *

  We were still walking, taking in the chronicles of street repair from cobble to tar along upper William.

  “By letting everything fall apart,” said Catherine, “featuring your career and livelihood, are you attempting to demonstrate that such truck is beneath you?”

  “It’s not that, Catherine.”

  “They are totally beneath you.”

  “I disagree. I quit because I felt unpleasant. Demonstrating awfulness breaks down important organs and valuable coupons.”

  “You’re addressing the multitudes again.”

  “Yes, could be so. It’s reflexive.”

  She smiled, very slightly triumphant, but not unkind.

  “You women,” I said.

  “Oh, boy.”

  “Dragging me down. Pussy, job talk, intrigues. You’re not like the fellows, you cunts.”

  “Women the only trouble you had?” she inquired.

  “No, slapped up a bit by the po-lice. Threats from Counselor Peavey. Other than that, it’s pretty nice. Plenty of ozone. Catherine?”

  “What.”

  “Have I become pathetic?”

  “A little, I have to say.”

  “The other day there, was that a mercy fuck? I want to know.”

  “Yeah, a little mercy. A little auld lang syne and just enough bum’s rush to give it an edge.”

  This crack got me hot. You watch it, I thought.

  “There wasn’t any edge for me,” I said. “It was like fucking a horse collar. Fall through, you’d tangle your ankles.”

  I thought I was ready but she brought one up from the floor and moused me good under the eye. She had more slick and wicked sucker punches than Fritzie Zivic. We walked on while my face beat like a tomtom.

  “Remember that morning we went to get married?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Did we?”

  “I don’t think so. I can check through my papers if you’d like. But I don’t think so.”

  We had now cut a pointless zigzag to Whitehead and ducked into the Pigeon Patio and got a table facing the Coast Guard station. We ordered a couple of wine coolers.

  “You working Marcelline for tips on me?” she asked.

  “Nope.” I bit a thick Cuban cracker and it sucked all the saliva out of my mouth. I pegged the rest of it to a bird who carried it to a sewer grate and dropped it through. That one’s going back to Cuba. “But I was on the trail.”

  “I can’t have it, and if you knew the state I’ve been in, you wouldn’t press.”

  “How’s your love life?” I, a Catholic, asked.

  “The last one is living in the Dominican Republic with his wife. She is a jockey. Every horse’s ass should have his own jockey. I was raised to think women did not become jockeys.”

  “Why are you here?” I asked.

  She said, “Can’t buy a thrill. How about you?”

  “Will you go for pain?”

  “Hell, yes.”

  “How about hatred of dead losses and hope of something better.”

  “I’ll buy it. Any others?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I’d like to point out my inability to stand having nothing that began long ago. Also we have sickness in the head and my failure to name my dog. We have no money, enemies at every turn, nuns haunting my house, evaporating lists of friends, the dark, family dead, and dead this and dead that and killing everything and killing time—”

  “Shut up you.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I will. I want a doctor.”

  “So I don’t want to hear this.”

  “If I had the right tubes I could have a baby. Get me a doctor.”

  “Oh fuck you.”

  “I just want to start somewhere,” I said.

  “So do I,” she said and by now tears were pouring down her face. I was, I guess, choking.

  “But do it my way. Admit to yourself that you wasted so much of your life that not enough of it can be saved to matter. Then pull into yourself far enough that you can stand it and hang on until it’s over.”

  “Oh, shit,” she said from her tormented face, and got up from the table. I didn’t have it to watch her go.

  4

  A BEGINNING I could make, an act of friendship, was to remove this sight, this agent, from the key. First, back to my place to collect my dear, spotted, nameless dog, sobbing and scooping meat mess from a tin upon which a beagle laughed at the world. I drew myself up and felt stern enough to stop this endless crying. I put my arms around the dog and thought, grit down. That’s what Catherine does and she knows better than you about all this. I put the empty dog-food can under the sink and headed off to find the agent, that shitsucker.

  I could have dialed the five sixes and got a cab across the island but I needed the walk to level off and attempt some alleviation of the sense that I was closing in on absolute zero. I began by congratulating myself on staying out of Roxy’s life for a little while; and permitting her
to make her own kinds of trouble without my interference. I had indeed elicited signs of life from Catherine. I had cheered Marcelline, I think, and was off now to improve her lot. And I had stayed away from cocaine, which has lacerated me like Swedish steel for longer than I care to recall.

  I went in through the front of the Pier House and stopped at the desk, where a boy with a trained voice saw to the registry of guests. I told him that all I knew was the first name of this agent, which was Mory, and that he was a member of the firm called International Famous. I mentioned none of his proclivities. In the trained voice, I hear, “That’s not enough for me to go on.”

  “I think you’re hearing the name Mory as being all I know of this person and I think that you’ll find the room number and even remember what he looks like.”

  When you are tired in a certain way you can say things like that; a matter of what is the least you’ll go through with; and above all, how you are to be avoided if you have a mean streak.

  Mory was taking a call at the poolside phone, aggressive in smart trunks, and his eyes bearing forward at the image of the person he was speaking to. I waited for him to finish.

  “Excuse me,” I said, “but we have a mutual friend and I’d like a word with you.”

  “What kind of a friend,” he said, wandering to his pool chair. I had to follow.

  “One who owes you the minimum of a lawsuit. Have you got a minute?”

  “That’s a very silky opening,” he said, “but I’m always being sued. It’s a testimonial to my energy. Every benefactor has his off days and mine make people bring suit. I don’t like this heat. When I’m with Double S on the boat, we move offshore when the heat gets this gummy. Then we keep the boat moving. We keep everything moving. You look irritable. This almost makes me forget the heat which is terrific but it’s not nice heat. It’s like dandruff.” He was very compact and he smiled with a crazy aggressive arc that showed how he saw all he wished for happening already in his mind’s eye. He got up. “A cold shower. I gotta get the lead out. You want to talk to me, you’re gonna have to yell it through a plastic curtain.”

  I walked behind him as he arranged a towel over his reddened shoulders, really arranged it, making each hanging end of the towel the exact length of the other. And he walked that way, staring at the imagined adversary. I could watch these special cases for hours.

  He had a suite looking out on the harbor. When we walked in, he pumped my hand and I gave him a false name. “I’m edgy,” he said. “I got this director, a cunt face. And his insolence is about to bust my balls. He’s Pied Piper to all these gifted kids who always think it’s a repertory company. But his fee is batshit and he wants my action. The lift is otherwise perfect. He has a house critic who sucks him off on every motion picture he makes and he has a gift. He’s an art whore and I only like the regular kind of whore.” Mory was getting more interesting and in some ways more appealing than that which he was about to get from me warranted. He moved around the room amid the Vuitton luggage and luxury denim piles and I watched him clean from the center of my ugly streak while he talked away with marvelous accuracy. “Now our hero of the youth with his picture-book beach home and his actresses for the hotels is sticking me up for half my fee on a picture which I conceived and upon which we had an airtight conversation indicating he was gonna flat-rate the cocksucker for a nice remunerative ride on the back end! The insolence! —You don’t even know what I’m talking about. If it wasn’t you, I’d tell it to the lamp.” He climbed into the shower. I went to the window and stood in the cold metallic air from the vents and looked at the anchored boats and the silver tanks and the casuarinas on the island across the way, ugly inside. When he was out of the shower, he wandered along the Habitat block walls plucking grooming tools off the dressers.

  I said, “I’m here about a friend of mine. Her name is Marcelline and I don’t like the way you treated her. I want you off the key.”

  “You want me off the key.” He didn’t turn around. “Marcelline. Well, you can’t blame me for that.”

  “I’m afraid that I do and you’re going.”

  “I’ll tell you what, my pal, she bored me. It was a question of getting the cattle to Abilene.”

  When I hit him my ugliness and weight were all there. I caught him in the back of the head and his face collided with the block wall. When he slid down it, he turned, his face not at all what it had been; and I had to lean to let him have it again, and snapped him back good. “Three hours or the next plane,” I said, “whichever comes soonest.”

  “Let me give you an errand,” he said, “that’ll clip your wings good. Tell Marcelline thanks for the invitation but I’m not gonna be able to make it over for dinner tonight. You go, chum. She was making me a nice piece of fish. You eat it. Yellowtail and black butter sauce from her sad little hands.”

  “It sounds like you got caught in traffic. What brought you to our island town?”

  “Chester Hunnicutt Pomeroy,” he said. “I’m the guy who could breathe life back into him.”

  “I know him,” I said. “There’s no hope. He’s in knots and nobody has anything he wants any more. You’re gonna have to sell it, but sell it in Los Angeles. You’re all throwing in your lot kind of pari passu, except for the kids—and send something to the critic. Make the ride silky for everybody. It’s good business.”

  “You’re magic,” said the agent. “You’re me all over.”

  “What you would like to be,” I said, “I can make come true.”

  “There’s only one thing I’d like to be.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  He grinned bleakly and said, “Runyonesque.”

  5

  AT 3 A.M. there are cats on the ledges, diffident animals of odd hours who know the enemy is at his weakest right around then. When you walk the street at that hour you think you share something and you reach out, try to make a deal, to touch. But the cats remember and they run.

  Catherine didn’t mind. She knew better. Nor did she offer to demonstrate the five things she remembered from ballet when she was ten. She didn’t rant about cucumber sandwiches, other beings, the Montessori method, or the Schick center for the prevention of smoking. Fundamentally, she didn’t try to pet the cats. She understood that they’d clear out. A lot of people I know would reach and then find that space on the ledge, rotten shitsuckers who had no right to pester cats at three in the morning.

  “Let’s buy some ammo,” I said.

  “Too late. What do you want with ammo?”

  “I feel strangely Hessian,” says I.

  When we got to the corner of Duval and Caroline, some people sat on the wall and played various instruments. Catherine and I sang for them and we weren’t too god damned bad.

  Catherine limped around in time to the music. I removed my teeth. We commenced hopping up and down. I combed my hair with my bridgework. Ya-ya-ya-ya, say hello to the mayor of New York ya-ya-yah!

  Well, we were having a nice time out there. Certain abuses of our expectations were at arm’s length. No one clamored for encores. They stared at me and tried to put two and two together.

  We lined up at the taco stand. “I hate lines,” I said.

  “Nothing you can do about them,” said Catherine. “Not if you want a nice taco.”

  “I do. I want one.”

  “I want a messy one.”

  “They put us in mind,” I said, “of our neighbors to the south.”

  “Don’t be cavalier.”

  “After this let’s go down to the fuel dock and decode the sky.”

  We carried our tacos to the Gulf filling station. Avoiding interference from ambient or stray light, I was able to identify the Big Dipper, for Catherine. “Contrary to popular opinion,” I explained, “the Big Dipper did not die in a plane crash with Buddy Holly.” I was straining for laughs.

  Catherine said, “Thomas Jefferson picked out the site of Monticello at the age of ten.”

  “The Borgia Popes had a phone in ever
y room,” I replied.

  “At the bottom of the sea, the fish have no eyes,” she said.

  “Did you get that from that low-rent marine biologist?”

  “Everybody knows it.”

  “You got it from him, that seagoing wage ape.”

  “Watch the words, Chet, the words.”

  Cats fell from the tree in mortal combat. We stepped aside and they pinwheeled past. The pilings throbbed to hidden currents. I looked at the sad water and remembered when I wanted, because of the Saturday matinee, to run away as a cabin boy and find Charles Laughton’s blubbery Old Salt Wisdom to guide my future to a sun endlessly falling into a shining sea, the old whale road where flying fish spangled the surface a square mile at a time and where, basically, seldom was heard a discouraging word. Instead … well, you know how it turned out. Substitute cyanide for sea; and curtains of remorse for all the flying fish in heaven.

  * * *

  I noticed that many people I saw were surrounded by invisible objects. Many of the visitors from New York had invisible typewriters right in front of their noses upon which they typed every word they spoke. Boozy hicks played an invisible accordion as they talked. Hip characters stirred an invisible cup of coffee with their noses as they spoke. Senior citizens walked down the street, dog-paddling in turbulent, invisible whirlpools.

  When the sun came up, we were behind the A&B Lobster House. I was splashing water out of the bilge of my little sailboat with half a Clorox bottle. Catherine was hanging over the bow dangling a string in the water. She said the ripples made the reflection look like she was holding electricity.

  “That time in the Russian Tea Room, what were you on?” I asked.

  “I don’t want to talk about that.”

  I uncleated the centerboard and dropped it. It knocked under the hull. I looked around at the well-built little sloop, proof that I was not an utter damned fool; as a matter of fact, the only one in a shipbuilding family who could still build a boat.

  I stuck the tiller into the rudder and freed the lines that attached us to the decayed dock amid bright Cuban crawfish boats piled with traps and styrofoam markers. We began to drift away from the dock. Then suddenly I reached for the lines and tied us up again.