Frederick
Pollack
| Wonderful
Town 1 It’s 6:30, which means things are getting serious. Not necessarily a crisis – only a report, prospectus, due diligence. And that sense, however familiar and subdued, of rededication: quick wash, second shave, swipe of hand sanitizer. The slacks that appear, turning into the aisle between the cubicles the next room over, are a woman’s. Is she loyal, will she stay? … no, she’s gone, down to a block of freezing rain before her cab or subway. Four in the window office remain. A neocon I knew once became almost tearful, praising the connotations of the word company. The eldest (I think) has slung his jacket over a chair. The possible young hope, young blood, or someone’s idiot nephew gestures – a repeated downward pump or jab. Striped shirt never moves. Green tie shifts once, is still. No laptops, stenograph, speakerphone, realtime output, which means this is serious? or that drinks and dinner are delayed somewhere for ideas? Their wall is bare and white. In these blocks, no “green” enterprises, NGOs, pro bono; so one knows, more or less, who they are … Now the Old Man looks out and down at the rain puddling the twentieth-floor setback, then at my hotel, at me, whom at this distance (mystery is distance) he can’t see. 2 The espresso machine like a Victorian monument bronzed, the tables like Braque’s guéridons, the display case for cannoli, the notional chairs and between-table spaces, the walls brown from the smoking ages, the waiters’ trance, and this stretch of MacDougal don’t change with the decades. But today the place seems given to a private party, quiet and unannounced. The kid with his absurd beret and the one-volume Schopenhauer he doesn’t so much read as carry, the more or less fat guys with their Marx and journals, and a few older men seem at least in one sense together – they have eyes only for each other (and for the long-haired girl in a pleated skirt who doesn’t appear). Though no two glances meet. One probes a pocket for the number at which he must call his father from a payphone; another for his cellphone, to call his wife. The kid perhaps ponders; the thirty-something and forty-something read; another stops because the light’s too dim. They take out notebooks and write, or try to. Is that how they communicate? They’d deny it … (Outside, some sort of demonstration passes without a break, and fades; no one comes in. There’s no one to talk to, ever.) If they did write each other, what would they say? “You can’t write anything here. If you do, you’ll reject it later as sentimental.” Seeing which, the boy rises, surreptitiously tucks in his too-tight turtleneck, fills his bookbag, and leaves, expression resolute and dreamy because that’s expected of him. 3 Actually, we don’t discuss the obvious: arthritis drawing cries from him whenever he canes himself up, and slightly hobbling my own step when I cross the room to fetch some book he has pointed to. Or loneliness, or politics – the bullies that roam the body and the world will have their way, and meanwhile jabber; we ignore them, though they strain and shape all speech. He has grown very white since our last meeting, fifteen years and hundreds of emails ago, I very gray. The relics of his lover, who had disliked me on sight, lie small and quaint amid the clutter, and a ghost informs the collages – ties, real ties imposed on penciled – he’s doing. He gives me one. Reads new poems, vers-de-société of hell and the low slopes of purgatory. Paws what I bought at the Strand: Stead’s work since his stroke, Matthias sounding old, old. “Always the tourist,” he smiles. “You’re scoping out the terminal wards.” – “I want to see how much they transcend the personal, and if not, why they can’t.” – “Perhaps because there’s nothing else,” he says, provoking. – And one or two young free-associaters, who have no story but the stupid one the world imposes, “but at least aren’t chuckleheads”: thus I defend them, and bore him. He rarely leaves the apartment; is interested when I describe the cardboard, low-grade porn and verathaned ads at the New Museum on the rapidly gentrifying Bowery. “’Unmonumental’ – that’s what they call the show. The wall-text talks about art ‘responsive to an age of broken icons.’ It struck me there’s a contradiction in that.” – “The longer I live, or last,” he says, “the more I address one question to whatever I see and read: would anything be lost if this didn’t exist? If the answer is no, burn it.” We have been drinking all this time: one glass each, slowly. Now he offers another, but I have to go. Once more I praise his recent work. “I was glad to meet you again,” he says. “You seem to be more yourself than I remember.” I tell him teaching helped. And poetry. “Not an afterthought,” he smiles. Stands, painfully; we embrace as if we’ll meet again. Afternoon sun pours down the airshaft to his window. 4 They queue, for rock clubs, movies, all-you-can-eat restaurants, even the tchotchke shops, to buy Liberty in snow-globes, foam, or pre-aged bronze. The lines intersect the crowds, so dense and slowed they feel as in dreams that the illusion of movement will fail any moment. Their coats absorb the smudged and trodden colors, poor relations of those above. To the east, the shows are letting out – the fishnet dancers in Cook County jail, a lion cub becoming king, a sexless lover with a mask – their music, in the minds of the new crowds exiting, merging at the corner with the noise. The new Stoppard may or may not have taught that rock-and-roll is freedom; that one can relax into freedom if one abandons murderous ideals. A couple next to us, with strict ideas of entertainment, squirmed at allusions to unfamiliar dates and names, to history, and left at intermission. There are cabs, but they rage, like other cars, for movement; we’ll take the E or 6 or walk crosstown to our hotel – the cold rejuvenating us, sustaining another hour the feeling that friends, drinks, dinner, window-shopping, the theater can go on. Call it joy, whose center is above this corner, all its plasma screens broadcasting fragments of it: cars, breasts, the sea, disembodied dancing handbags, market shares, wise commentators, an ecstatic Riemannian geometry of colors, colors, colors one yearns to rise and merge and splinter into, all motion effortless and theirs, reflected in the faces now surrounding us, blasé or brooding, avid for the possible. Exquisite Hour 1 A white police-car with its flashing lights is parked three feet behind another car, black, its driver obscure except for the set of his shoulders and head, facing front. For an indefinite moment they sit, the cop, the other driver, and the cars. Soon the cop will come out to take his careful walk to the window of the other, which will be lowered, letting in the cold, letting out perhaps a smell of wine, and allowing the exchange that, in this time, is of all usages the undoubted paradigm. But for now they await, while briefly self-conscious traffic passes, their different messages; as if, unaccountably, two cars had agreed to pull over and meditate. 2 When the rain stops, a mauve and ecru light seeps across the fallen leaves, grateful for surcease. As grateful as people are for peace; for a mercy of weather, now ever grander and Godlike; for the vagaries of business that allow them for the moment a home to rush to and dry in; for life and the boss. Yet a certain concentrated nervous yearning afflicts objects in this light and wind. A plastic bag soars to a second story; it saw that in a movie and since then there’s no stopping it. A recalcitrant dog imitates a rock, and vice versa. A tree, still full of leaves, unusually red, likes being ruffled and wants, not mobility so much as to become an animal. 3 Regret is a small Mafia clan. They hang around their clubhouse, do accounts and scan their neighborhood, the world, for shopkeepers to absorb, new services to offer, new markets. (Have said so often they are businessmen they believe it, and why not.) A face ratlike and wise in the ways of the moment it lives entirely in, despising the addicts, the compulsive failed gamblers it understands, belongs to the consigliere of regret. They sell me a blue powder from Afghanistan. When I take it, a gallery rises: backslaps and drinks and noise, the auxiliary and corollary joys of friends, the stabs of envy, which are sweeter. Spilling into the courtyard (that space priceless in the city), beneath the flying leaves of fulfillment, the other galleries beaming down, the sky where only the strongest stars survive. And the stuff on the walls (red dots blossoming beside prices) is sweet. Has brought the maniera grande into a time of tiny, solitary men, providing insight. – Thus the important critic, rarely effusive, who hugs and is seen to hug, and takes his drink into the courtyard, and, nonexistent, is completely blind. 4 From the manager and extra guards in the lobby, to the carefully-vetted maids, room service standing by with more champagne, and the vicariously triumphant sun, the staff attends the trillionaire in the Royal Suite, whose garden is the roof, its grounds the city. A flight of fighter jets, their boom disrupting all below, entertains and guards, ascending towards the sun; while the trillionaire, reclining on the gold-threaded pillow, says softly to a non-paying guest, “For you I would strip continents of industry and air, reduce billions to penury and let them scrabble from the rising sea. For you I would annex the planets and process them into one jewel or car, to please you. To make you laugh. I would twist and torture DNA itself until organic life became one orifice or limb, whatever would tease you. I have bought or have a controlling interest in all love, and lay it, darling, at your feet.” And the boytoy looks at the trillionaire, and as the words faintly register, his usual calculation flails in a void, unable to find relative advantage; so that he is almost annoyed but, professionally concealing it, murmurs into her ever-golden hair. >>>Pierre Joris
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