LOVE NOTE Chapter 7: March 10-May 24, 1988. Part ii.

March 23 was Estelle's thirty-first birthday and a hairdresser-friend had given her an appointment to cut her hair at four thirty at his shop on Fourth Avenue at Fifth Street. By the time I arrived, Estelle's cousin Jaydee had dropped in, saying he'd seen her in the shop as he walked past; Nadine had come, saying she'd seen Estelle's car parked out front; and Tanager and Jane had happened by.

"I didn't get it," she said to me, laughing. "Then when Jane and Tanager got here, I said, 'This is too much.'"

"And we all shouted 'Surprise!'" said Tanager, grinning happily.

I surreptitiously did a line with Jaydee and we talked about the drug's effects. "It opens up a love space from which I can talk," I said.

"I believe you," Jaydee said. "With me it's the opposite. I don't have to care. It's very cold and detached."

"That seems a lot of people's experience. Have you read Less Than Zero?"

He had.

Estelle asked if I was still using the mirror and I said I was, but we discussed it no further. Tanager and I hadn't seen a lot of each other lately and circled the block a half dozen times, she in my lap, chatting.

It was a warm spring evening and I sang to myself on my way home after the birthday party. By eight Faith had put me to bed and set me up. No one else at the party had wished to be with a lover or alone. They'd been ready for a long gregarious night and would have it, the coke they wanted in hand. Doing coke had become a way of life to Jaydee, part of how she partied to Estelle, irresistible if available to Jane. In bed, benign and erect, I decided to call Josephine. Writing out and reading what I wished to say to Lee hadn't worked, but trusting to inspiration had promised then, as it promised now, to be still worse. Still, I thought, I can do it, it's possible. I even had the words! Then as usual they were gone. What, I thought, if she answers the phone, I've written nothing to say, and I’m stupid? Trust the moment seemed like very bad good advice. Do a line, then call? No. Yes. I found her phone number, did a line, lay back, checked to see if I was hard (I was), pulled myself to my elbow, and, knowing my confidence likely to dissipate the moment I heard her voice, dialed.

She'd just come in and poured herself a glass of wine, she said, and was glad to hear from me, had ideas for my kitchen floor. I soon turned the talk from the kitchen to my bedroom fantasy, haltingly attempted to describe what I imagined I was writing, and suggested she might be interested in sketching me as I lay feeling. She responded enthusiastically, though I was uncertain how much she had understood. Before hanging up I promised to send her a letter in which I would elaborate. I did another line, smoked, and soon lay back, then sacrificed my feeling to try to draft the promised letter. I knew that I was probably not really writing her at all, but, yet again, I thought that if what I was writing wasn't the letter that I meant it to be, it might serve as a chapter of As I Lay Feeling, or at least the seed of one.

I was unsurprised the next day when I neither read nor sent what I had written. I took that day off coke, indulged and played the following day, took another day off, indulged and played again, then abstained again and again and again. Even after my three consecutive cokeless days I wanted to do nothing more taxing than watch TV, but a week had now elapsed since my rash tactical promise to write and, committed, I felt I had to try. After three failures, a break, and two more failures, I decided a hit of pot might help me begin. It did--and for the first time at the typewriter in months words flowed; I felt no less a writer than Mann, no less than Joyce. I wryly let myself feel it, the gross inflation no particular harm, the writing deeply satisfying. The next day when I revised the genius' outpouring I was less euphoric; grimly I eschewed drug use but was soon contentedly deleting and rejuxtaposing. April Fool's Day I mailed Josephine what I had written and enclosed money for her airfare and her preliminary floor-design work. After a month of letter writing I had sent one!

April Fool's night I played with the mirror and, though I experienced some intense feeling, again felt less than I had come to expect. I then slept badly and, on waking April 2nd, thought about how hard the drug was on my body. Sleep regenerates us and sleeplessness wears us down. Not sleeping, I thought, especially not sleeping because I was using cocaine, must stress my heart. Two hours later I grinned and shook my head as I noticed I was thinking that the mirror would be fun tonight. That the letter to Josephine was sent, the fantasy so advanced, I thought--I wasn't certain--pleased me.

I not only resisted playing on the 2nd but also on the 3rd, 4th, and 5th. On the 6th I was in bed, the mirror up, Faith gone, when Josephine called. She said she'd received my letter and thought my writing exciting.

"I imagine a triptych," she said. "You could hang it over your fireplace. I know a man who has a nude portrait of himself in his study. It's tasteful. I like it."

I didn't want my living room decorated by even a tasteful oil of me with lifted penis, legs raised and spread, feet next to my ears, or me on my side, penis pulled back pink and vulvar between my legs, its head visible between my cheeks.

"We can talk about my rates when I come see you," she said.

After we hung up I did more lines, smoked, and lay back. I'd thought of hiring Julia to be my collaborator, but Josephine's assumption I was interested in commissioning what she'd do to hang discomfited me. Relax, Arthur, I counseled. She said she'll come to town a week from Friday and might again join me Saturday, Sunday, or Monday night. We're locked into nothing, open to anything! If my play isn't a good idea, I wrote after I had felt a while, it seems I am only to learn it by doing it. Josephine's being perfect!
_____

I didn't sgurd again until the day of the night I expected to see Josephine. Two days earlier, sensing our meeting more as threat than promise, I had smoked at the typewriter and wrote a poem that began:

I feel, Josephine, I feel,
And you can paint the feeling,
The feeling of the man who couldn't feel
And does again.
_____

Josephine had left; our day together had been long and, not surprisingly, far from how I'd imagined it might be. I had been doing coke since three, had been with her since she'd arrived at the house at two. It had started to rain about four and Faith had left to do errands about four thirty. I'd asked her to be back by six to put me to bed and set me up, but at six she'd called to say her car wouldn't start, the streets were starting to flood, and she would be home as soon as she could. She'd gotten home a bit past eight, put me to bed, put up my mirror, propped me on my pillows, and helped spread my legs.

"Josephine's waiting in the kitchen," I said. "You should tell her she can come in when you go out."

"You're wild," Faith said. "Have fun. Should I close the door?"

"No thanks."

She blew me a kiss as I reached my left hand to my penis and closed my eyes. My feeling didn't begin immediately. Would it? I breathed slowly, relaxed.

"Shall I come in?" Josephine called from the living room.

Where was the feeling?

"Just give me a minute," I said. Why wasn't I erect? But why should I be erect before Josephine joined me? It wasn't necessary. If I relaxed, my penis would grow; if I relaxed I'd feel. I'd feel; I'd feel, but didn't yet.

Josephine browsed through my books in the living room. I was erect now but didn't call. I still wasn't feeling and thought calling would put off my doing so. Another line might do the trick. I heard her walk into the room in which I kept my first-edition library. I used my trapeze to pull up, did a quick line, and lay back. I was still hard and beginning now to feel; I called.

When she came in I wasn't feeling what I'd known I might, and her presence was more distracting than exciting. This wasn't going to work. I spoke but what I said was inconsequential, off the point. Only intense feeling would have let me speak as I wished, say what I knew to say from within the gate. I listened to her as I stroked my penis, not jerking toward orgasm, just stroking myself; though disappointed, I was grateful for what she soon said. "You are so trusting," she said; "you are a very trusting man, and a beautiful one, too." Soon a taxi took her home. I felt a surge in my penis as she closed the door behind her, felt more and more. I felt, alone. I didn't see her again.
_____

It was mid-May. I spoke as I lay feeling and then was silent. For just the second time, the old much-abused tape-recorder I had borrowed from Faith was beside me. The first time I hadn't uttered a word in the 45 minutes that the tape had run; this time I was talking. A relatively abstemious month had passed since my night with Josephine, and I would be in Jamesville in ten days. I had persisted in trying to work but still had nothing I might share with Dee and Joe and Angus and Hettie. If I had something, I thought, it might serve as a love note with which to invite them into my fantasy. And, still silent, I decided to change the working title of what I was (still not) writing from As He Lay Feeling to Love Note, which would still be its title at the beginning of the next millennium.

The next day I was watching TV when I felt a twinge that seemed to center in my heart. I'd experienced similar discomfort several times in the past few weeks. My father had had his first heart-attack at fifty-five (nine years before his second, which would be massive and fatal). He'd felt that he had to burp but burping hadn't relieved what he was feeling, and for ten days before he'd seen the doctor who lived next door he'd tried to dislodge the gas he thought he felt by sitting at the foot of his bed, wedging a pillow against the base of his spine, and falling backwards. I was younger, only forty-six, but what I was feeling felt rather like a burp I couldn't pass. I counseled I not worry but remembered my father's experience. I counseled not worry but restraint.
_____

The night of May 21, three days before Faith and I were to fly to Jamesville, I lay spread before my mirror with the tape recorder for a third time at my side. What I'd said the second time had not recorded, perhaps because I had made a mechanical mistake, and tonight before Faith left I had her push the play and record buttons, which activated the machine, and the pause button.

"Okay?" she said. “When you want to record, you just push Pause.”

"Okay."

"I'll see you in the morning. Have fun."

She left; I hit Pause and the tape began to spin. My left hand held my scrotum over my penis so that, in the mirror, I seemed to have labia. My hidden penis was hard. I felt intensely alive; when I began to sing my words were accompanied by palpable currents of sexual pleasure.

Thirty minutes later the tape beside me was still spinning. The bedroom light was out and I was still erect. I was feeling and I'd spoken and it seemed likely that tomorrow I would still have the words of my ecstasy, whether I'd ever use them to write or not. I said a few last words and the tape ended. I turned off the machine, did another line, had a hit of pot, and lay back. "If I got that, I got what I've been after--if what I've been after exists," I thought. I knew it might not; I knew it did. Would I talk to Hettie and Dee soon? I imagined they'd just put me to bed. What could I say to make them stay, let them know that they were welcome and that I wanted them with me for a while longer? Words came to me as I lay feeling.
_____

Faith and I were to fly from Tucson to Syracuse May 24, and I'd been told when I bought our tickets I'd be able to take my chair batteries on the flight.

"You can't fly with those like that," I was told at the airport.

"But I was told to leave them in the chair," I said.

"I'm sorry, Sir. The cargo ports on our new fleet are only thirty inches high, so your chair has to be tipped on its side to fit--and the batteries can't be tipped."

"Better," I said. I left the batteries behind, as I had every other time I'd flown.

Faith had never flown before. "I don't know if I like this," she said as our plane accelerated on the runway.

Looking down on the clouds intrigued her.

"I can look more now than I used to," I said, "but I still lean toward the aisle when the plane banks toward the side I'm on."

"That's the wrong thing to do anyway," she said. "You should lean into the turns, like on a motorcycle."

"I was only on a motorcycle once," I said. "I begged the guy to let me off before we'd gone twenty feet." I looked across her out the window at the sunlit surface of the clouds. I found the clouds easier to look at than the ground. I knew at any moment I might find I was terrified, but for now the fear was almost only a memory. I superstitiously resisted spurious confidence. "He broke his leg when he wrecked it later that day," I said.

"I think I may get sick," Faith said. "I hope it gets better."

"So my stories are dull. Sorry."

"What?"

"Nothing, sorry; just something dumb."

"I can't hear so good. My ears feel funny."

On the ground in Chicago at O'Hare, the busiest airport in the country, we'd only twenty-five minutes to make our connection on a far-off runway. I was unloaded last, taken from my airline seat in an aisle wheelchair to an airport wheelchair, put in it clumsily--I barely fit--, and the race began. As one man pushed, a second held my feet, which unheld wouldn't stay on the footrests. Faith tried to keep up but fell behind and lost sight of us; she then correctly guessed which way to turn, caught up, and we made it to the second plane with no time to spare.

From Syracuse to Jamesville, Faith rode with Joe Cicero in the back of Angus' truck under the camper shell, carsick with a stranger. I was with Angus in front. As I was being carried from the car to the front door in Jamesville, a whip-poor-will was whip-poor-willing, as whip-poor-wills will.
_____
END LOVE NOTE PART 1

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