Читать книгу An Unfortunate Woman - Richard Brautigan - Страница 10

I saw a brand-new woman’s shoe lying in the middle of a quiet Honolulu intersection. It was a brown shoe that sparkled like a leather diamond. There was no apparent reason for the shoe to be lying there such as it playing a part among the leftover remnants of an automobile accident and there were no signs that a parade had passed that way, so the story behind the shoe will never be known.

Did I mention, of course I didn’t, that the shoe had no partner? The shoe was alone, solitary, almost haunting. Why is it that when people see one shoe, they almost feel uncomfortable if a second is not about? They look for it. Where is the other shoe? It must be around here someplace.

With this auspicious beginning, I’ll continue describing one person’s journey, a sort of free fall calendar map, that starts out what seems like years ago, but has actually been just a few months in physical time.

I left Montana in late September, going down to San Francisco for two weeks, and then went back East to Buffalo, New York, to give a lecture, followed by a week in Canada. I returned to San Francisco, where I spent three weeks before being forced by dwindling finances to move across the bay to Berkeley.

I stayed in Berkeley for three weeks, and then went up to Ketchikan, Alaska, for a few days, then flew north to spend the night in Anchorage. The next morning, very early, I left the snow of Anchorage and flew to Honolulu (please bear with me while I finish this calendar map), Hawaii, where I spent a month, taking two days around the middle of my stay there to go to the island of Maui. Then I went back to Honolulu, where I finished out my visit, returning from there to Berkeley, where I’m living now, waiting to go to Chicago in the middle of February.

Now that we have some rough idea of where we’re at on the calendar map, we’ll go on with this journey that isn’t really getting any shorter because it’s already taken this long to get here, which is a place where we are almost starting over again. It’s cause to wonder what’s so important about a woman’s lone shoe lying in a Honolulu intersection, and one man’s few months wandering back and forth, up and down, over and across America with a brief touching of Canada.

Hopefully, something more exciting will happen soon.

That would be nice.

Maybe this will be a start: I don’t want to know which room she hanged herself in. One day somebody who knew started to tell and I said I didn’t want to know. They were nice enough not to go on with it any further. The subject was left there, unfinished at the kitchen table in the house.

We were eating dinner at the time and also I didn’t want her suicide to be part of the dinner. I can’t remember what we had for dinner, but there was no way that the death of an unfortunate woman would add an enhancing spice to what we were eating.

When one goes to the spice section of a market and looks among oregano, sweet basil, coriander seeds, dill, garlic powder, one does not want to come across death-by-hanging printed on the label of a spice bottle containing ingredients of horrible consequence and description guaranteed to ruin every meal.

You do not want to add death-by-hanging to any recipe you are cooking or if you are having dinner at somebody’s house and they serve a dish that has a unique taste to it and you ask the host and cook what that taste is and they announce casually, “Oh, that’s a new spice I’m trying out. Do you like it?”

“It’s different. I can’t place it. What’s the name?”

“Death-by-hanging.”

I guess now that I’m telling about the woman killing herself we’ve more or less started this book in a way that is probably more acceptable than pondering the circumstance of a shoe lying in a Honolulu intersection, so I feel a sense and ability of freedom to wander around in the calendar map of physical goings-on described loosely in the 4th, 5th, and 6th paragraphs of this journey.

Today is my birthday.

I sort of remember parties and the presence of loved ones and friends in the past, but none of this will happen today. I am very distant, almost in exile from my own sentimentality. Besides, I couldn’t do anything about it, anyway. I just know that I won’t be 46 again.

Even if I were a drunk and a singing Irishman on St. Patrick’s Day, wearing so much green that I could cover the entire of Australia like a billiard table, it would not favorably affect anyone.

It would not have made sense for me to have told my fellow passengers on the morning train from Berkeley to San Francisco, none of whom I had ever seen before or would probably ever see again, that it was my birthday.

If I had turned to the complete stranger sitting next to me as we traveled in the tunnel under San Francisco Bay, with fish swimming in the water above us, and said, “Today is my birthday. I’m 47,” it would have made everybody feel very uncomfortable.

First, they would have pretended that I was talking to myself. It’s a lot easier to imagine that people are talking to themselves, rather than talking directly to you. When people are talking directly to you, it takes an added and more uncomfortable effort to ignore them.

What if I had been more persistent and insisted that people know about this so-called personal holiday of myself, i.e., my birthday, and repeated, “Today is my birthday. I’m 47,” in a manner to show unmistakably that I was not talking to myself but was addressing my fellow strangers?

It would have made things worse and filled people with an ominous dread.

What was I going to do next?

I had already said, “Today is my birthday. I’m 47,” and then repeated it to everybody’s uncomfortable and growing dissatisfaction. They all knew now that I was capable of anything.

Would I reveal 20 sticks of dynamite strapped to my body and hijack the train, demanding that we all be taken to my birthday planet Uranus, legendary sanctuary and powerhouse of Aquarius?

Some of the passengers would be riding on the edge of panic. They could see themselves as a newspaper headline: TRAIN HELD HOSTAGE BY MAN CELEBRATING BIRTHDAY.

Others would just want to get to where they were going on time. There are always the practical among us. They sort out the priorities and expect nothing more.

I of course said nothing on the train. I was a good passenger. I kept my mouth shut and got off at my appointed station. I just know that I won’t be 46 again.

January 30, 1982 Continuing . . .

My trip to Canada in October was wasted. At that time in my life I probably should have gone to any other place in the world but Canada. It was just a whim of fancy that took me there. I’m basically a very poor traveler. It’s kind of strange that I do so much traveling for somebody who isn’t very good at it.

To begin with: I don’t even know how to pack. I’m always packing too many of the wrong things and not enough of the right things. I guess even that would be OK, tolerable, but I worry constantly about it and often think about the logistics of my packing long after the trip is over.

I’m still thinking about a trip that I took to Colorado in 1980 when I packed six pairs of pants and only two shirts. What in the hell was I going to do with six pairs of pants on a two-week trip to Colorado? I needed more shirts. It should have been the other way around. I should have packed six shirts and two pairs of pants. That would have made a hell-of-a-lot more sense, because the weather was so hot in Colorado grasshoppers were eating people’s gardens right out from underneath their salads, and I only had two shirts.

Women used to pack for me when I traveled, and always did a good job. No woman ever packed six pairs of pants and only two shirts, but women are too expensive for me now, and I can’t afford another one packing my suitcase for a very, very long time.

I think if I were to watch a woman packing a suitcase for me now, it would be like watching the meter running on a taxicab taking me to a longer distance than I had anticipated and anxiously beginning to wonder if I have enough to pay the fare.

Toronto will always be like the flipside of a dream for me.

I called heads but Toronto came up tails.

One Sunday afternoon I took the streetcar to see some Chinese movies in a district that was outside of Toronto’s Chinatown.

I had never been to a Chinese movie theater that wasn’t in Chinatown before. Whenever I go to any city that has a Chinatown, I visit it. In the winter of 1980 I spent a week in Vancouver, British Columbia, but from what I could see there, all the Chinese movie theaters were in Chinatown, but not so in Toronto, and I found myself on a streetcar, carrying in my mind directions from a now forgotten origin, riding toward a misplaced Chinese movie theater in Canada. It would have been easier if the theater had been in Chinatown. It’s a logical location.

When I got to the theater, it was showing two American motion pictures. One does not normally go to a Chinese movie theater to see American movies. Also, would it be out of line to think that a Chinese movie theater should show Chinese movies?

Coming attraction posters indicated that some Chinese movies would be shown in the following weeks. I couldn’t wait, which was probably a good decision, because next week I was back in San Francisco. The Chinese movies coming to Canada next week would never have done me any good.

What else did I do in Toronto?

I had a very bitter affair with a Canadian woman, who was really a nice person. It ended abruptly and badly, which was totally my fault. It would be convenient if one could redesign the past, change a few things here and there, like certain acts of outrageous stupidity, but if one could do that, the past would always be in motion. It would never settle down finally to days of solid marble.

I remember waking up with her that first morning after I spent the night at her apartment and she said, “It’s a beautiful day here in Toronto and you’re with a nice Canadian girl.”

It was.

She was.

January 30, 1982 Finished.

I don’t know why I wanted a photograph of me and a chicken in Hawaii. Obsessions are curious things, and they can’t help but make a person wonder.

It rained on and off the morning the photograph was taken. There had been a storm the night before, and it was still continuing to rain the following morning. Frankly, I didn’t think the weather conditions would permit a photograph to be taken, but the person who took the photograph was optimistic. They had also located the chicken.

I don’t know how easy it is to find a chicken in Hawaii, but I was impressed. I am of course not talking about a chicken that is wearing an outfit suitable for a frying pan.

I’m talking about a living chicken, feathers and all.

The photographer called up on the telephone.

“Let’s try it,” he said.

“Trying it” meaning the actualization of one man’s fantasy.

What had concerned us was getting caught in a monsoon-like downpour that would also affect available light, because the photograph had to be taken outside to show the presence of Hawaii.

There would be no reason for the photograph of me and a chicken if Hawaii was not a character in the picture. I wanted to have the picture framed and hanging on the wall of my ranch in Montana.

People would visit me there and maybe one of them would ask about the curious photograph of me and a chicken, hanging interrogatively on the wall. Perhaps they would sense there was a story behind the photograph. It would be fascinating to see how they would verbalize their curiosity. Maybe they would say, “Interesting photograph,” and if they got no response: “Where was it taken?”

“Hawaii.”

“Is that a chicken?”

“Yes.”

“Is there a reason for that photograph? Is that some kind of special chicken?”

Now I would see how determined or not determined they were.

“No, I just wanted to have a photograph of me and a chicken taken in Hawaii.”

Where in the hell could they go from there? Where could you and I go from there if we were suddenly placed in that position? I haven’t the slightest idea what I would do. I’d probably change the subject or go into another room. I don’t think it would be a very good idea to fall helplessly into silence and just stand there staring at a photograph of somebody and a chicken taken together in Hawaii, waiting to be put out of my misery.

Of course it’s a retreat, but it beats still standing sort of dumbfounded in the front room, staring at the photograph of an idiot holding a chicken in Hawaii.

It was beautiful back in the mountains behind Honolulu, lush and provocative like an airplane ad flying you to a well-documented and predictable paradise.

There were a lot of chickens running free to choose from and soon I was holding one of them in my hands and the photographer was snapping away. We were worried that there wouldn’t be enough light, but it turned out that the light was no problem.

The chicken was very quiet in my hands, probably wondering what was going on. Having its picture taken definitely wasn’t part of this chicken’s everyday routine. Not many tourists want to have photographs taken of themselves holding chickens in Hawaii.

The chicken was very quiet and serious in my hands. Oh, God, that chicken was serious! After the photograph was taken, I put the chicken down. It walked slowly and bewilderedly away, feathers downcast.

Last week after I got off the train in Berkeley and walked home to the house where the woman had hanged herself, I saw a cat walking across the street in front of me.

Having nothing better to do and being a mammal myself, I said hello to the cat. “Hi, kitty,” I said, and then to really put the greeting across, I added, “Meow.”

The cat that was hurrying across the street slowed down at the sound of my greeting and then continued slowing down, coming to just standing there looking at me.

I said, “Meow,” again with the cat looking at me.

I passed out of the cat’s sight as I walked around the corner and started up the hill toward the house where the woman had hanged herself about a year ago.

After she hanged herself, her husband left everything just the way it was the day she committed suicide, and still very little of it had been changed. 1980s Christmas cards were still on the mantel, but the thing that really got me was the kitchen and I will go into it in detail later on. The dead woman’s kitchen demands its own time and attention and this is not that time.

As I walked up the hill toward the house, I was thinking about the cat that I had said hello “meow” to and cats in general and my intelligence soon found a single focus.

Cats don’t know that people are writing books about them that are splashed all over the best-seller lists and that millions of people are laughing at books filled with cat cartoons.

If you were to show a book full of cat cartoons to a cat: Frankly, it wouldn’t give a damn.

February 1, 1982 Finished.

I tossed the bottle of tequila across the street in Ketchikan and the young Alaskan state legislator caught it without hesitation, effortlessly, maybe because he liked to drink tequila.

It was a wonderful drunken night in Alaska.

Before I launched the bottle toward him, I said, “Here, catch, wild legislator.” That’s what I had taken to calling him, though we had just met that evening.

A group of us funnying and laughing wandered through the streets of Ketchikan, one of the most beautiful towns I have ever visited.

Ketchikan flows like a dream of wooden houses and buildings around the base of Deer Mountain, whose heavily wooded slopes come right down to the town, beautifully nudging it with spruce trees.

The population of Ketchikan, 7,000, and the integrity of the town is virtually unspoiled by a form of style and architecture that could be described as “Los Angeles.”

There is no endless street of franchise restaurants and automobile-oriented business. There are no shopping malls to flagrantly disrupt the simplicity of commerce. When people want to buy something, they can just walk down to the store.

So much of America, even what were once unspoilable beautiful towns, look as if “Los Angeles” had overflowed on them like a toilet bowl whose defecated contents all have something to do with the lifestyle of the automobile.

I think the worst case of “Los Angeles” automobile cultural damage I’ve ever seen is Honolulu. For all practical purposes of survival you might as well drop dead if you don’t have a car in Honolulu.

I’m not talking about being a tourist at Waikiki and lying around like a suntan lotion postage stamp on the beach, mounted right next to thousands of other postage stamps in a stamp collector’s album owned and operated by the sun.

I’m referring to living in Honolulu.

I think I saw more cars there than I ever saw people.

Often whenever I saw somebody just walking down the street with their feet actually touching the ground and not accompanied by four wheels and a metal eggshell around them, I was startled.

I almost felt like stopping the car I was driving in and offering the person sympathy for the circumstances of misfortune that had led them to walking.

A folksinger has written a song about Honolulu in which she mentions tearing down paradise and putting up a parking lot.

I saw a downtown restaurant that had a sidewalk café as a part of the restaurant. It was a rainy day and nobody was sitting there. “That must be an interesting place to sit and watch people when the weather’s good,” I said to the woman I was, of course, driving with, because it really doesn’t make any sense to try and walk around Honolulu. It’s a problem of you can’t get there from here that would have baffled Einstein. E = MC² was duck soup compared to Honolulu traffic.

“You used the wrong word,” she said.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“Cars. You watch cars, not people.”

We drove on to the next place where we had to drive because if we didn’t drive there, we wouldn’t be able to find a parking space, and that’s very important in Honolulu. I think that I would find automobiles a little more interesting if they carried their own parking space with them.

When I arrived in Honolulu from Alaska, I saw a bird flying around in the Honolulu International Airport. I had never seen a bird inside an airport before. It flew casually around people boarding airplanes, and people just getting off them.

The bird did not act frightened as if it had accidentally been trapped in the airport. The bird was quite comfortable. I think the airport was its home and this was a poetic life, not touched by fear of flying. Also, the bird was perhaps an omen, a portent of the chicken photograph.

When I stepped outside the airport, a Japanese woman was waiting for me, and I got into her car, not knowing what I was really getting into, which became a way of life when Los Angeles visited Hawaii on vacation but decided not to go home.

Oh, yes, I forgot to mention there’s been a change in the calendar map. I moved out of Berkeley yesterday and came back across to stay in San Francisco for two weeks before I go to Chicago.

What led me to leave the house where the woman hanged herself needs a few days sorting through details before I perhaps attempt to describe my leaving or I may not put it down at all. I probably should because in a remote way it has something to do with the woman hanging herself.

But, also, we must not forget that this is the route of a calendar map following one man’s existence during a few months’ period in time, and I think that it would probably be unfair to ask for perfection if there is such a thing. Probably the closest things to perfection are the huge absolutely empty holes that astronomers have recently discovered in space.

If there’s nothing there, how can anything go wrong?

February 1, 1982 Finished.

Speaking of things going not according to plan, the morning that I moved over from the strange house in Berkeley back to San Francisco, the bus taking me here to the Japanese section of town, where I am at a hotel, was rerouted because a building was burning down.

Then the driver stopped and asked us all to get off the bus and change to another bus, so obligingly we all got off, but then somebody came running up to the bus, carrying himself in an official manner and uniform, yelling at the driver, trying to get his attention.

I paid no other attention to what was going on with the bus because I was too busy watching the building burn down. It was a huge fire with smoke rising like a vaporous tower from a disorganized fairy tale that I had failed to finish reading when I was a child or so the smoke seemed.

I had walked away from the other passengers to observe this burning phenomenon of architecture gone awry. It was a huge building and flames were pouring out the roof.

Suddenly, almost instinctively, I turned around and saw the bus I had just gotten off driving away with all the passengers back on it. We all got off when we were told to, and then they all got back on again, except of course for me. I think it had something to do with the official who was running up to the bus, yelling. He must have told the driver to let the passengers return to the bus, which they all did, except for one passenger who was busy watching the fire.

That passenger decided to walk to his hotel.

He did not want to deal anymore that morning with buses that had revolving doors. The fire was on the way to his hotel, so he stopped briefly and watched the flamey doings. The passenger had never been fascinated with burning buildings before, so his watching the fire was an exception to his lifestyle.

There were three ladder trucks with firemen on top of long-flame-reaching ladders pouring water down on the fire, and there was a good crowd of people watching the building go.

The passenger noticed that there was almost a festive feeling among the observers. Many were smiling and some of them were laughing. Not attending fires regularly, preferring movies, he was fascinated by this.

A man complete with a sleeping bag and backpack containing what he called his life was sitting down across the street from the fire drinking a bottle of wino-type wine. The man looked as if wherever he went was his address, and only a bloodhound had any possibility of delivering his mail.

He enjoyed long, carefully thought-out sips of wine from a bottle in a paper bag while he watched the building burn down. It would be an easy matter for a trained mail-delivering bloodhound to track this man down. All the dog would have to do would be to follow a trail of paper bags with empty wine bottles in them to deliver this man a letter from his mother saying: “Don’t ever come home again and stop calling. We don’t want to have anything to do with you anymore. Get a job. —Love, your ex-mother.”

It was not a building occupied on a Sunday morning, so there was no drama of life and death to mar or perhaps enhance the fire viewing. The passenger had no idea why people gathered to watch buildings burn down, especially if it had nothing to do with them, if it wasn’t their house burning down or one nearby threatening to burn down where they lived.

Yes, the passenger found it all very different and interesting, and then he remembered a woman that he had been involved with years ago. They’d had an often very intense love affair that occupied large portions of his time in the late 1960s and finally dwindled out in the early 1970s. It was the kind of involvement referred to as “off and on.”

During a time when he was not seeing her, she had picked up an undue interest in fires and become a firetruck chaser. She would go out of her way anytime, day or night, to be at the site of a burning building. One morning around 4 a.m., she found herself watching a duplex join the kingdom of ashes and ruin when she noticed that she was wearing a bathrobe over her pajamas and had a pair of slippers on. She had just jumped out of bed when she heard the sound of nearby fire engines, slipped on her bathrobe, put on her slippers, and headed out the door toward the fire.

She had been watching the fire for about half an hour before she noticed what she was wearing. Her attire startled her. She had gone a little too far, so she hung fire-watching up.

She had absolutely no interest in becoming a nut.

She probably wondered how it had gotten this far.

She went home and vowed to denounce the siren call of sirens.

The passenger years later, watching a building burn down in San Francisco, decided spontaneously to call her on the telephone if she still lived in San Francisco. She had done a lot of traveling since he had known her in the later 60s. The last time he had seen her, accidentally meeting, she was living in San Francisco.

Perhaps she was still there.

He decided to call her up from a telephone booth right across the street from the fire. It seemed like a logical thing to do for a passenger whose bus had gone off without him.

What are old former fire-groupie lovers for?

The passenger dialed information and sure enough, she still lived in town. He called her and when she answered, she immediately identified the passenger’s voice, though he had only said, “Hello,” and she said hello back using his given name, which of course was not Passenger.

Though it would have been slightly amusing if she had said, “Hello, Passenger.”

That would have startled and given the passenger cause to think.

But no such thing happened, thank God, and the passenger returned her greeting by saying, “I was just thinking about you.”

“Oh,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m watching a building burn down, and I thought I’d give you a call.”

She laughed.

“I’m right across the street from it,” he said.

She laughed again and said, “I just heard about it on the radio. They say the smoke is eight stories high.”

“Yeah,” the passenger said. “And there are three firemen standing at the end of ladders pouring water down onto the roof, but you probably know more about this than I do.”

Again: laughter.

“Well,” the passenger said. “That’s about it. The next time I see something burning down, I’ll give you a call.”

“You do that,” she said.

They both pleasantly hung up.

In the past there had been many exchanges between them that were not nearly as pleasant. The passenger thought about their past together: of first meeting, then becoming lovers, and days and nights together, crossing from one decade into another and then events crumbling away into blank years and the silence of emotional ruins.

The passenger thought about the telephone call that he had just made to her. Somehow it seemed perfect in its bizarre logic.

He never would have made that telephone call if the bus had not driven off without him, stranding him at the site of the fire, which he decided to investigate, having nothing better to do, and being on the calendar map that February Sunday morning of his strange wanderings, which started out innocently enough when he left Montana in late September.

I guess that’s what a passenger’s supposed to do, pass from one place to another, but it doesn’t make it any simpler. About all you can do is wish him luck, and hope that he has some slight understanding of what uncontrollably is happening to him.

Why am I suddenly back in Alaska being driven down a road by somebody who is insisting on taking me somewhere to look at fake totem poles? I guess this is just the way it happens if you have lost control of days, weeks, months, and years.

I’ve seen real ones in the museum of anthropology at the University of British Columbia, but I humor the man who wants to take me to see fake totem poles in Ketchikan, Alaska, because he is a nice man and wants to be a good host, guide, and some fake totem poles are part of his itinerary for me.

As we drive toward the fake totem poles, he tells me about his love life, which in no way did I encourage him to get started on. He has a very complicated love life and I think he wants some good useful advice from me to maybe help sort out and make sense of it.

But I just feel uncomfortable driving along toward some fake totem poles in Alaska. After that night when people asked me what I did that afternoon and I told them, they all said, “Why did he take you out there? Those are fake totem poles,” and I have no answer for them as I had none for the man’s love life.

I could not afford the luxury of a complicated love life. I had a simple love life and often when I have a simple love life, I don’t have any love life at all. I sort of miss it, but the complications all return soon enough, and I find myself occupying sleepless nights, wondering how I lost control of the heart’s basic events again.

We had to walk through some woods to get to the fake totem poles.

The man didn’t talk about his love life in the woods. Instead he gave the local names of the vegetation that we walked through to get to the fake totem poles. As we walked along, it was as if he were reading from a living list, which I would forget as fast as he would check it off.

After a while I wished that he would go back to talking about his love life. At least then I wouldn’t feel guilty if I should forget something.

I’ve never really been very interested in remembering things that did not immediately catch my attention. I think this is a character weakness, but it’s a little late to do anything about it now.

I’ve just turned 47 and I can’t go back into the past and realign my priorities in such a way as to create another personality out of them. I’m just going to have to make do with the almost five decades sum of me.

It may not add up to the total I had envisioned for myself when I was younger and not as warped as I am now, but I just can’t copy a list of plants down that I saw briefly in my mind on the way to some fake totem poles.

The totem poles were very, very fake.

When we drove back to Ketchikan, it started raining. A cold bleak December rain fell out of the sky, and the man went back to talking about his love life, and I felt as if I were slowly shrinking in the car, getting smaller, almost childlike.

The windshield wipers kept even with the rain, but the man’s endless and complicated love life was a losing battle for me. As we drove back into Ketchikan, my feet were no longer touching the floor and my clothes hung about me like a tent.