Strange Wine Page 3

  In considerably less polite language–one London newspaper review referred to it as “gut-spilling”–much of my work has been so labeled. It seems to disturb critics that I cannot keep a secret. Like impressionable readers who write me letters that attempt low-level psychoanalysis of the author by their wonky interpretations of what the author has written, critics too closely identify the writer with what he has written.

  Well, there certainly is a degree of truth in the charge. I have no secrets and, as is the case with Capote, nothing said to me or seen by me is safe from revelation. It all goes into the stew-pot, to be used in a story if the need arises. Like Isak Dinesen, I owe allegiance to nothing and no one but the story. But further, by having no secrets, I put myself beyond the shadow of blackmail…of any kind. By publishers, by friends, by corporations, by governments, even by myself and the cowardly fears to which we are all heir. I cannot be coerced into keeping anything back. I will say it all.

  Take for instance, “Croatoan.” It is a story about being responsible. Its magazine publication brought howls of outrage from male sexists, feminists, right-to-life advocates, pro-abortion supporters, and even a snotty note from someone in the New York City department of drains and sewers. Apparently they all read it as they chose, not as I intended. Poor things.

  All you need to know is that I wrote this story after an affair with a woman who had led me to believe she was on The Pill, who became pregnant, and who subsequently had an abortion. It was far from her first abortion, but that’s very much beside the point. The point, which obsessed me, was that if the people whose lives were touched by mine failed to take responsibility for their own lives, then I had to do it for them. I am not anti-abortion, but I am anti-waste, anti-pain, anti-self-brutalization. I vowed it would never happen again, no matter how careless they or I became.

  Two weeks after writing “Croatoan” I had my vasectomy.

  Croatoan

  “The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.”

  Anaïs Nin

  Beneath the city, there is yet another city: wet and dark and strange; a city of sewers and moist scuttling creatures and running rivers so desperate to be free not even Styx fits them. And in that lost city beneath the city, I found the child.

  Oh my God, if I knew where to start. With the child? No, before that. With the alligators? No, earlier. With Carol? Probably. It always started with a Carol. Or an Andrea. A Stephanie. Always someone. There is nothing cowardly about suicide; it takes determination.

  “Stop it! Godammit, just stop it…I said stop…” And I had to hit her. It wasn’t that hard a crack, but she had been weaving, moving, stumbling: she went over the coffee table, all the fifty-dollar gift books coming down on top of her. Wedged between the sofa and the overturned table. I kicked the table out of the way and bent to help her up, but she grabbed me by the waist and pulled me down; crying, begging me to do something. I held her and put my face in her hair and tried to say something right, but what could I say?

  Denise and Joanna had left, taking the d&c tools with them. She had been quiet, almost as though stunned by the hammer, after they had scraped her. Quiet, stunned, dry-eyed but hollow-eyed; watching me with the plastic Baggie. The sound of the toilet flushing had brought her running from the kitchen, where she had lain on a mattress pad. I heard her coming, screaming, and caught her just as she started through the hall to the bathroom. And hit her, without wanting to, just trying to stop her as the water sucked the Baggie down and away.

  “D-do somethi-ing,” she gasped, fighting for air.

  I kept saying Carol, Carol, over and over, holding her, rocking back and forth, staring over her head, across the living room to the kitchen, where the edge of the teak dining table showed through the doorway, the amber-stained mattress pad hanging half over the edge, pulled loose when Carol had come for the Baggie.

  After a few minutes, she spiraled down into dry, sandpapered sighs. I lifted her onto the sofa, and she looked up at me.

  “Go after him, Gabe. Please. Please, go after him.”

  “Come on, Carol, stop it. I feel lousy about it…”

  “Go after him, you sonofabitch!” she screamed. Veins stood out on her temples.

  “I can’t go after him, dammit, he’s in the plumbing; he’s in the fucking river by now! Stop it, get off my case, let me alone!” I was screaming back at her.

  She found a place where untapped tears waited, and I sat there, across from the sofa, for almost half an hour, just the one lamp casting a dull glow across the living room, my hands clasped down between my knees, wishing she was dead, wishing I was dead, wishing everyone was dead…except the kid. But. He was the only one who was dead. Flushed. Bagged and flushed. Dead.

  When she looked up at me again, a shadow cutting off the lower part of her face so the words emerged from darkness, keynoted only by the eyes, she said, “Go find him.” I had never heard anyone sound that way, ever. Not ever. It frightened me. Riptides beneath the surface of her words created trembling images of shadow women drinking Drano, lying with their heads inside gas ovens, floating face up in thick, red bath water, their hair rippling out like jellyfish.

  I knew she would do it. I couldn’t support that knowledge. “I’ll try,” I said.

  She watched me from the sofa as I left the apartment, and standing against the wall in the elevator, I felt her eyes on me. When I reached the street, still and cold in the predawn, I thought I would walk down to the River Drive and mark time till I could return and console her with the lie that I had tried but failed.

  But she was standing in the window, staring down at me.

  The manhole cover was almost directly across from me, there in the middle of the silent street.

  I looked from the manhole cover to the window, and back again, and again, and again. She waited. Watching. I went to the iron cover and got down on one knee and tried to pry it up. Impossible. I bloodied my fingertips trying, and finally stood, thinking I had satisfied her. I took one step toward the building and realized she was no longer in the window. She stood silently at the curb, holding the long metal rod that wedged against the apartment door when the police lock was engaged.

  I went to her and looked into her face. She knew what I was asking: I was asking, Isn’t this enough? Haven’t I done enough?

  She held out the rod. No, I hadn’t done enough.

  I took the heavy metal rod and levered up the manhole cover. It moved with difficulty, and I strained to pry it off the hole. When it fell, it made a clanging in the street that rose up among the apartment buildings with an alarming suddenness. I had to push it aside with both hands; and when I looked up from that perfect circle of darkness that lay waiting, and turned to the spot where she had given me the tool, she was gone.

  I looked up; she was back in the window.

  The smell of the unwashed city drifted up from the manhole, chill and condemned. The tiny hairs in my nose tried to baffle it; I turned my head away.

  I never wanted to be an attorney. I wanted to work on a cattle ranch. But there was family money, and the need to prove myself to shadows who had been dead and buried with their owners long since. People seldom do what they want to do; they usually do what they are compelled to do. Stop me before I kill again. There was no rational reason for my descending into that charnel house stink, that moist darkness. No rational reason, but Denise and Joanna from the Abortion Center had been friends of mine for eleven years. We had been in bed together many times; long past the time I had enjoyed being in bed together with them, or they had enjoyed being in bed together with me. They knew it. I knew it. They knew I knew, and they continued to set that as one of the payments for their attendance at my Carols, my Andreas, my Stephanies. It was their way of getting even. They liked me, despite themselves, but they had to get even. Get even for their various attendances over eleven years, the first of which had been one for the other, I don’t remember which. Get even for many flushings of the toilet. There was no rational reason for
going down into the sewers. None.

  But there were eyes on me from an apartment window.

  I crouched, dropped my legs over the lip of the open manhole, sat on the street for a moment, then slipped over the edge and began to climb down.

  Slipping into an open grave. The smell of the earth is there, where there is no earth. The water is evil; vital fluid that has been endlessly violated. Everything is covered with a green scum that glows faintly in the darkness. An open grave waiting patiently for the corpse of the city to fall.

  I stood on the ledge above the rushing tide, sensing the sodden weight of lost and discarded life that rode the waters toward even darker depths. My God, I thought, I must be out of my mind just to be here. It had finally overtaken me; the years of casual liaisons, careless lies, the guilt I suppose I’d always known would mount up till it could no longer be denied. And I was down here, where I belonged.

  People do what they are compelled to do.

  I started walking toward the arching passageway that led down and away from the steel ladder and the street opening above. Why not walk: aimless, can you perceive what I’m saying?

  Once, years ago, I had an affair with my junior partner’s wife. Jerry never knew about it. They’re divorced now. I don’t think he ever found out; she would have had to’ve been even crazier than I thought to tell him. Denise and Joanna had visited that time, too. I’m nothing if not potent. We flew to Kentucky together one weekend. I was preparing a brief, she met me at the terminal, we flew as husband and wife, family rate. When my work was done in Louisville, we drove out into the countryside. I minored in geology at college, before I went into law. Kentucky is rife with caves. We pulled in at a picnic grounds where some locals had advised us we could do a little spelunking, and with the minimal gear we had picked up at a sporting goods shop, we went into a fine network of chambers, descending beneath the hills and the picnic grounds. I loved the darkness, the even temperature, the smooth-surfaced rivers, the blind fish and water insects that scurried across the wet mirror of the still pools. She had come because she was not permitted to have intercourse at the base of Father Duffy’s statue on Times Square, in the main window of Bloomingdale’s, or on Channel 2 directly preceding The Late News. Caves were the next best thing.

  For my part, the thrill of winding down deeper and deeper into the earth–even though graffiti and Dr. Pepper cans all along the way reminded me this was hardly unexplored territory–offset even her (sophomoric) appeals to “take her violently,” there on the shell-strewn beach of a subterranean river.

  I liked the feel of the entire Earth over me. I was not claustrophobic, I was–in some perverse way–wonderfully free. Even soaring! Under the ground, I was soaring!

  The walk deeper into the sewer system did not unsettle or distress me. I rather enjoyed being alone. The smell was terrible, but terrible in a way I had not expected.

  If I had expected vomit and garbage, this was certainly not what I smelled. Instead, there was a bittersweet scent of rot–reminiscent of Florida mangrove swamps. There was the smell of cinnamon, and wallpaper paste, and charred rubber; the warm odors of rodent blood and bog gas; melted cardboard, wool, coffee grounds still aromatic, rust.

  The downward channel leveled out. The ledge became a wide, flat plain as the water went down through drainage conduits, leaving only a bubbling, frothy residue to sweep away into the darkness. It barely covered the heels of my shoes. Florsheims, but they could take it. I kept moving. Then I saw the light ahead of me.

  It was dim, flickering, vanished for a moment as something obscured it from my view, moving in front of it, back again, dim and orange. I moved toward the light.

  It was a commune of bindlestiffs, derelicts gathered together beneath the streets for safety and the skeleton of camaraderie. Five very old men in heavy overcoats and three even older men in castoff army jackets…but the older men were younger, they only looked older: a condition of the skids. They sat around a waste barrel oil drum filled with fire. Dim, soft, withered fire that leaped and curled and threw off sparks all in slow motion. Dreamwalking fire; somnambulist fire; mesmerized fire. I saw an atrophied arm of flame like a creeper of kangaroo ivy emerge over the lip of the barrel, struggling toward the shadowed arch of the tunnel ceiling; it stretched itself thin, released a single, teardrop-shaped spark, and then fell back into the barrel without a scream.

  The hunkering men watched me come toward them. One of them said something, directly into the ear of the man beside him; he moved his lips very little and never took his eyes off me. As I neared, the men stirred expectantly. One of them reached into a deep pocket of his overcoat for something bulky. I stopped and looked at them.

  They looked at the heavy iron rod Carol had given me.

  They wanted what I had, if they could get it.

  I wasn’t afraid. I was under the Earth and I was part iron rod. They could not get what I had. They knew it. That’s why there are always fewer killings than there might be. People always know.

  I crossed to the other side of the channel, close to the wall. Watching them carefully. One of them, perhaps strong himself, perhaps merely stupider, stood up and, thrusting his hands deeper into his overcoat pockets, paralleled my passage down the channel away from them.

  The channel continued to descend slightly, and we walked away from the oil drum and the light from the fire and the tired community of subterranean castoffs. I wondered idly when he would make his move, but I wasn’t worried. He watched me, trying to see me more clearly, it seemed, as we descended deeper into the darkness. And as the light receded he moved up closer, but didn’t cross the channel. I turned the bend first.

  Waiting, I heard the sounds of rats in their nests.

  He didn’t come around the bend.

  I found myself beside a service niche in the tunnel wall, and stepped back into it. He came around the bend, on my side of the channel. I could have stepped out as he passed my hiding place, could have clubbed him to death with the iron rod before he realized that the stalker had become the stalked.

  I did nothing, stayed far back motionless in the niche and let him pass. Standing there, my back to the slimy wall, listening to the darkness around me, utter, final, even palpable. But for the tiny twittering sounds of rats I could have been two miles down in the central chamber of some lost cavern maze.

  There’s no logic to why it happened. At first, Carol had been just another casual liaison, another bright mind to touch, another witty personality to enjoy, another fine and workable body to work so fine with mine. I grow bored quickly. It’s not a sense of humor I seek–lord knows every slithering, hopping, crawling member of the animal kingdom has a sense of humor–for Christ sake even dogs and cats have a sense of humor–it’s wit! Wit is the answer. Let me touch a woman with wit and I’m gone, sold on the spot. I said to her, the first time I met her, at a support luncheon for the Liberal candidate for D.A., “Do you fool around?”

  “I don’t fool,” she said instantly, no time-lapse, no need for rehearsal, fresh out of her mind, “fools bore me. Are you a fool?”

  I was delighted and floored at the same time. I went fumfuh-fumfuh, and she didn’t give me a moment. “A simple yes or no will suffice. Answer this one: how many sides are there to a round building?”

  I started to laugh. She watched me with amusement, and for the first time in my life I actually saw someone’s eyes twinkle with mischief. “I don’t know,” I said, “how many sides are there to a round building?”

  “Two,” she answered, “inside and outside. I guess you’re a fool. No, you may not take me to bed.” And she walked away.

  I was undone. She couldn’t have run it better if she had come back two minutes in a time machine, knowing what I’d say, and programmed me into it. And so I chased her. Up hill and down dale, all around that damned dreary luncheon, till I finally herded her into a corner–which was precisely what she’d been going for.

  “As Bogart said to Mary Astor, ‘You’re good,
shweetheart, very very good.’” I said it fast, for fear she’d start running me around again. She settled against the wall, a martini in her hand; and she looked up at me with that twinkling.

  At first it was just casual. But she had depth, she had wiliness, she had such an air of self-possession that it was inevitable I would start phasing-out the other women, would start according her the attention she needed and wanted and without demanding…demanded.

  I came to care.

  Why didn’t I take precautions? Again, there’s no logic to it. I thought she was; and for a while, she was. Then she stopped. She told me she had stopped, something internal, the gynecologist had suggested she go off the pill for a while. She suggested vasectomy to me. I chose to ignore the suggestion. But chose not to stop sleeping with her.

  When I called Denise and Joanna, and told them Carol was pregnant, they sighed and I could see them shaking their heads sadly. They said they considered me a public menace, but told me to tell her to come down to the Abortion Center and they would put the suction pump to work. I told them, hesitantly, that it had gone too long, suction wouldn’t work. Joanna simply snarled, “You thoughtless cocksucker!” and hung up the extension. Denise read me the riot act for twenty minutes. She didn’t suggest a vasectomy; she suggested, in graphic detail, how I might have my organ removed by a taxidermist using a cheese grater. Without benefit of anesthesia.

  But they came, with their dilation and curettage implements, and they laid her out on the teak table with a mattress under her, and then they had gone–Joanna pausing a moment at the door to advise me this was the last time, the last time, the very last time she could stomach it, that it was the last time and did I have that fixed firmly, solidly, imbedded in the forefront of my brain? The last time.

  And now I was here in the sewers.