Читать книгу The World Is the Home of Love and Death - Harold Brodkey - Страница 5

The first orchestral realization that something is up: Playing Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” on a spavined CD player. It was a gray day in early February and the sun came out; and I was thinking, “The Dry Cleaners, The Dry Cleaners, The Dry Cleaners, The Dry Cleaners.”

The first crocus: The Sunflower Market, Thai Vegetables and Seeds, 2809 Broadway, February 14th. Spindly and snow-flecked.

First cold, March 19th – April 2nd. My wife and I are on our way to our accountant’s. On the way I see two drunks fighting in front of the OTB on Broadway at Ninety-first; April is the duelists’ month. Tacitly flirting with my wife, I carry two small packets of Kleenex in my pockets—one for her, because of her allergies: she makes a small nifty nasal piccolo announcement of the annual change in her life. I make the second really bad pun of the season: We sound like Bruce Springsteen and accompanist doing Bach’s “The Cold Bug Variations.”

First episode of spring nosiness not having to do with allergies or nose-blowing: I don’t know why the soul’s primary mechanics should consider spying or snooping a natural attribute of renewed life, but in the office icebox I see a small gold-colored can, shaped like a shoe-polish can, of caviar, and I wonder, jealously, who is so happy and so bent on celebration (or self-indulgence), but when I open it, it is empty, and written on the bottom of the can, in pencil, is the phrase Hard Cheese.

First philosophical guess: My guess is that spring is a natural way of suggesting adolescence as something one should start to go through again: genetic duty and genetic activity are romance. Hmm.… Nature is as tricky as any politician.

The thought of George Bush leads to The First Depression of the Season.

First emotional detail: More light on the windowsill.

First piece of strange advice to one’s self: Lighten up.

First symptom of intellectual confusion (on waking after dreams of fair women and of various unspeakable acts with them; memory, those astonishing chambers of lost realities, becomes overactive, leaving a broad sensation of gambling.… Roué-lette): The enumeration of the bedroom furnishings—a nightstand, one-night stand, two-night stands, three-night stands.…

No, no.

In the bathroom, first session practicing smile.

First impulse of active love: A sloppy kiss while my wife is putting on her shoes.

She gazes at me. “Oh, it’s spring,” she says.

Shopping list for first three-day weekend in the country to rent a house for the summer: Contac, Kleenex, Beatles tape, citronella candles (to leave in the rented house if we find it), jump rope (for losing weight), walking shoes, jeans one size too small (to force oneself to diet), a handful of short-lived cut lilac to carry in the car as an aide-mémoire.…

First equinoctial death shudder and racial memory of human sacrifice for the sake of warmth and the return of summer: A roadkill on 32A outside of Saugerties—a no longer hibernating but probably still torpid, thin woodchuck.

Second such event after returning home: Cutting my thumb while using a new, Belgian, serrated-edge slicing knife that slipped on a small Israeli tomato, while I was thinking about Super Tuesday two years ago and whistling Dixie.

Am I unconsciously Angry?

First hysterical delusion: Advertised medicines that come to mind when seeing in a moment of stress spring flowers in the mind—Nuprin-yellow jonquils, tetracycline-colored tulips (red-and-yellow ones). Tylenol-colored clouds (Tylenol is Lonely T spelled backward). Advil-colored dirt. Theragran-M-colored drying blood.

With my hand betoweled and my soul a little mad with pessimism about the current ways we live, and with gaiety, heroism, and the spring wound, I phone my wife at her office. She makes more money than I do.

Advice, sympathy, information from my wife’s assistant while I am waiting for my wife to end a meeting. It is possible that even the assistant makes more money than I do. (I am a schoolteacher.) She says that in the stores is a helping-the-blood-clot-and-disinfectant-and-anesthetic spray; and there are clutch bandages. But: “Beware,” she says, “the spray depletes the ozone layer, and the clutch bandage harms circulation.” The finger may turn Nuprin-yellow, crocus-yellow, coward’s yellow.

The conversation with my wife is out of a melodramatic domestic novel, except that at work she is Nietzschean. I refer to her being possessed by the will-to-power.

My wife says, “How deep is the cut?”

“I think I see the bone.”

She says, “Do you see any white?”

“Yes.”

“That’s the tendon. Bones aren’t white while you’re still alive. They’re not white until you clean them after you rob them from a grave. You may have cut the tendon. Can you move it?”

“No. Yes. It looks like a bone.”

“It isn’t the bone. But there are nerves in there—”

“Is that true? That’s not just hypochondria?”

“You should be able to see only one nerve, unless it’s a really big cut—do you see it?”

“See the nerve?”

“It’s a thing, it’s visible.”

“What does it look like?”

“A thread. Does it make you sick to look at the wound?”

“No. What makes you think that?”

“Well, take a look and tell me what you see.”

There is a silence and then she calls out, “Hey, hey, hey.”

“I fainted a little. I’m sort of on my knees here. Hold on, let me get up. Whoo, that was stupid. What I saw was gray-white; there’s quite a lot of gray-white. I suppose I saw blood but it looked gray-white and blood isn’t gray-white, it’s bluish, I remember, I—”

“You’re in shock. Is there anyone with you?”

“I was cutting a tomato.”

“Yes?”

“Someone is coming over—someone will be here soon. You. But you can’t come home. You’re at work. Should I go get a clotting spray?”

“Go to the emergency room at the hospital. You did this call?”

“I don’t remember,” I say miserably.

“You cut your thumb?”

“Yes. I guess so. Unless this is all a dream,” I say hopefully.

“Did you dial with your left hand?”

“I wrapped my hand in a towel and I squeezed the towel with the other hand. I dialed with my little finger. It’s touch-tone, the phone is.… I think.”

“I forget if there are large numbers on the touch-tone phone or small ones.”

“Tiny, really.”

“Are they stubborn or easy?”

“Stubborn.”

“Then if you dialed and didn’t bleed all over the phone you’re probably O.K.”

“Would you say you were showing sympathy?”

“You may quiver with madness and shock at my saying this, but I promise that if you stay overnight at the hospital I will bring you volumes of Kundera, Solzhenitsyn, Havel, so you can see what horror and suffering truly are.”

“Shit.”

“On the other hand, our Maltese doorman’s sister-in-law died of sepsis after a knife cut in her hand which she got chopping beets when she was visiting her mother-in-law in Valletta. Wait for me. I’m coming home.”

My wife is a Spring Goddess. A Nietzschean Nightingale (Florence). “Here,” she says. “Let me look.… A kiss won’t make that well. Let’s go.” A kiss or two later, as we pass a homeless guy who at first I think is me in the third person hailing a taxi, and as my shock begins to lift, I say to her, sadly, “When I was a child, I had a Swiss barometer with a wooden house on it. The house had two doors. Out of one came a boy in shorts and with a Tyrolean hat on, and I think a girl in a dirndl came out of the other. They went inside if it was going to rain.” Nowadays I suppose you might have a homeless person carved in wood and sleeping on a subway grating to indicate good weather and going into an arcade or a subway to indicate rain.

Some prose written after the third kiss from her (and after the doctor took three stitches in my thumb). I sit at her desk in her office looking out her large window: Give me the huge actual clouds of the Republic and not the meager udders of water vapor painted on the old backdrops the Republic Studios used in John Wayne’s day. We like the actual big baggy clouds of a New York spring. One doesn’t want to flog a transiting cloud to death, but if we are to have sentimental light, let us have it at least in its obvious local form—dry, white, sere, and, I guess, provincial. The spiritual splendor of our drizzly and slaphappy spring weather, our streets jammed with sneezing pedestrians, our skies loony with bluster are our local equivalents of lilac hedges and meadows.

Blustery, raw, and rare—and more wind-of-the-sea-scoured than half-melted St. Petersburg. Yuck to cities that have an immersed-in-swamp-and-lagoon moist-air light. They are for watercolorists. Where water laps at the edges of the stones and bricks of somewhat wavery real estate is not home. Home is New York, stony and tall: its real estate is real.

So is its spring.