Robert O'Brian
Jack Kerouac’s Confession chronicles the journey of a burnt-out poet-journalist whose descent into madness and desperation is interrupted when he re-discovers a long-forgotten connection with the young Jack Kerouac. The reader is taken on a riveting road trip of white-hot passion, betrayal and near-death, leading finally to Lowell, Massachusetts, Kerouac’s hometown, where the poet hears Jack Kerouac’s confession and learns the world’s greatest secret.
Copyright © 2009 by Robert O’Brian
PART I: THE TONIC CHORD
Song for the Lady
Song for the Lady
“The true mission of art is to provide a bridge between the living and the dead.”—Rudolf Steiner
ONE
Gabby
“She said, ‘I know what it’s like to be dead . . .’”—John Lennon
I |
t was when the last Kennedy brother was dying, Ted Kennedy, it was April or May, can’t remember, and I was strangely aroused, staring at a magnetic spring moon at twilight just after the senator was diagnosed with brain cancer, not long after I returned home from Lowell, Massachusetts where I’d heard Jack Kerouac’s confession—aroused because there’s nothing more seductive than leaving town.
Nothing.
Except, maybe, the moon.
If what some call daylight’s cradle, the crescent moon, were to wax and grow until it became the head and snow-white hair of somebody, you’d think it’d be Teddy Kennedy’s head or maybe an aged Kerouac’s, but the truth is, the metallic spring moon reminded me of Gabrielle Moses, my friend Joshua Moses’s mother, because I began to see, maybe with an inner eye, a faint image of the woman bathing in the crepuscule as I stood there—no, actually, I thought of Joshua or had an image of Joshua’s mustachioed face as he spoke, his squeaky voice lowered a step, about his mother whom he called ‘Ma,’ never ‘Mom’ nor ‘Mommy;’ who lay dying somewhere just off the Jericho Turnpike on Long Island, dying of progressive supranuclear palsy, PSP, a horrifying, muscle-destroying disease that’s usually misdiagnosed as Parkinson’s but, in any event, erodes all control over bodily functions, all mobility, even eyesight. When I last saw Gabby, she was totally blind and her skin looked as if it had been savaged by barbed wire. She couldn’t even scratch her nose. Was like she’d been buried alive. Trapped inside her skull. Imprisoned by the moon.
“You and I have a bond between us,” Josh had said to me a number of times over the years and by this, he meant we’d always be blood brothers of a sort because we both had bedded Dustin Hoffman’s girlfriend—not at the same time—back in school, when Christina was an 18-year-old freshman with crimped blonde hair and Swedish blue eyes, as blue as suicide. She was outrageous even then, played the dumb blonde at times, the helpless virgin at others, wore red velvet and white lace over her long and thin but not angular body. Looked like Claudia Schiffer. One spring day, I met her in Manhattan and she was wearing a Cub Scout uniform—blue cap and shorts, knee socks—and braids and asked me to be snotty to her and I complied. Wouldn’t you? Have complied? Hers was a kind of child-like sexuality, masochism notwithstanding; she had that high voice, not quite a deer-in-the-headlights look, more of an I-can’t-believe-people-would-do-that sort of naïve appeal to her. Christina left Buffalo after only one year to model in the city, to cohabit with Dustin Hoffman who was between marriages, and to become a fashion tycoon, pioneering and marketing some shoulder pad innovation for women which made her a fortune in the Reagan years. Dumb like a fox. Today, you can see her on YouTube selling her line of clothes, that high-pitched baby voice now damn near an aggressive merchant’s basso profondo. Still pretty, though. Still blonde. Lips like fat red worms.
“I have no residual feelings for Christina,” Joshua used to say. “I mean, there are things about her that are not exactly healthy. She never asked me to be mean to her, but telling you to throw her down on the concrete so she could get all scratchy as she put it and demanding that you rip off her panties out on the campus podium and stick it in her and practically strapping you down so she could suck you out in the open in the middle of the night is a little too funky for me.”
“She told you that?”
“No. You did.”
“Me?”
“Yeh. Years ago. I had no presumptions about blonde shikseh women but in the end, Christina was like a soulless blue-eyed Aryan to me, willing to destroy marriages, friendships, invade the Sudetenland of domestic bliss if she needed to. She called me just after Miriam and I were married and wanted to meet up, but I said ‘no.’ Okay, we did meet once and she was all over me in the back of a cab but she stopped calling when Miriam got pregnant with Ellie. Christina was some kind of born-again Christian, too, or a Scandinavian Protestant with the A-frame house and the Bible, then they moved to that mansion, her parents did, in one of the five towns on Long Island. Crazy chick. But you and I wouldn’t have become friends had it not been for her, I don’t think. It’s like you’re part of the family and it all goes back to Christina.” Joshua paused and gave me a grave almost angry look under his big black specs and Melvyn Douglas mustache. “Do you want to go see my mothah?”
I nodded that I would and the two of us climbed into JoMo’s van—maybe it was a year ago when I was down for a visit—and drove to the Taconic, crossed the Whitestone Bridge, got on to the Cross Island, then to the Long Island Expressway which, dotted with only a few cars, reminded me of a soiled dinner table after a Thanksgiving feast. If you’d known Gabby, you’d have loved her, too; she smiled easily and was beautifully proportioned. Gutsy. Smart. Argumentative. Expressive blue eyes—Saint Louis blue—would raise her fist at her kids when irritated; on the phone, for instance. She wasn’t above suing restaurants or bus drivers when she felt it was her right. When Moses and Blau, another school friend, were held up for a night at the airport in Montreal upon returning from London, sophomore year of college, Gabrielle got on the phone.
“You sheep!” she screamed at Joshua whom she called ‘Jay.’ “Tell those bastards to put you up in a hotel with dinner or we’ll see them in court! I don’t fucking care who they are or what kind of operation they have! Tell them to do right by you or I’m calling my lawyer!”
The boys got the hotel room with dinner and breakfast in the morning. Must have been years, decades ago, when I went over to the Moses home in Jericho without Joshua, to watch The Godfather and hugged Gabby at her mahogany red front door and sort of fell in love with her; self-conscious because I was certain that Gabby felt the tumescence when we embraced, thought hardened into fact. There were times I didn’t hesitate to say that I loved Gabby more than I loved her son.
“So, you making any money yet?” she used to say with an inquisitive look that stung like thorny briars. Her hair was the brassy goldish, almost sunset orange that middle-aged women of that time opted for. Gabby had quit smoking some time in the 1980s, but her voice was still raspy and smoky. Sexy, but she never put it on, never played belle-of-the-ball or sex-starved housewife. No knowing looks or double entendres. Gabby preferred candor. It was indicative, you might say, that Mrs. Moses said just before getting sick—before she started screaming at parties and bar mitzvahs, ‘I want to die! Oh, God, I can’t take this anymore, I want to die!’—that Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt had ‘no relationship.’ She didn’t say they had no sexual relationship—and obviously Franklin and Eleanor had a great partnership—Gabby said that they had ‘no relationship.’ Period. Don’t you find that deliciously indicative? Sort of perfect? Her passion and knowingness; the stark sensation of drowning in emotion, the pity beyond all telling, evoked, conjured almost casually by one diamond-like expression of all time’s loss and longing?
No relationship.
The pity of love.
“Oy,” Gabby’d say to me, “you’ve been going to school for years now, bubi, when are you going to settle down and get married? You love children. What’s the matter? What happened to that girl you were seeing? The one with the big, brown eyes? Was she the lawyer? No, that was the other one. The blonde. I should have been a lawyer, you know I could have been a lawyer, another Ruth Bader Ginsboig if I’d just gone to Cornell like I was supposed to but those were the days when you got married out of high school. Sometimes, I think Harry and I shouldn’t have married so young, may no unkind word be said of him. And Harry should have been free, too. He should have been a musician, a pro. He loved his jazz and clarinet and played for me on our second date. ‘Frenesi,’ ‘Begin the Beguine,’ ‘I’m Confessin’ that I Love You,’ he was really something. My cousin Cecile said that if Harry had stayed single, he would have been Jason Robards in A Thousand Clowns.
“‘That’s Harry,’ Cecile would say, ‘Jason Robards in A Thousand Clowns.’”
“You know, guilt is a good thing,” Gabby continued, chest heaving like the morning tide, invisible cigarette in hand. “Guilt is good. It inspires you to do good things. Look at the civil rights movement. What about the labor unions? Lots of good things come from guilt, am I mistaken? I don’t want to come on too strong or make you feel guilty, but I think you should get a good job, find a nice goil and get married and have a family. How long are you going to wait? You’re not going to be young forever. I have arthritis. I know. Getting old is no fun and you have to be young to raise a family. The world hurts, boysha. I have arthritis. I know.”
I enjoyed needling Joshua through Gabrielle, provoking her with statements her only son had made.
“Gabby,” I began, “the other day, Jay and I were talking about the U.N. or something and at one point, your son said, ‘wait. Who is Albert Schweitzer? Of course, I know his name but I don’t really know what he did.’” JoMo is a bit of a polymath, but there are lapses. Gaps.
Gabby took the bait and immediately turned to Joshua. We were sitting in their pastel-colored Long Beach summer condo. “Who is Albert Schweitzer?!” she repeated, her voice rising like a police siren. “Who is Albert SchweitZAH!? He was a preacher and an organ player who went to medical school at thirty like your sister, Shira, then went to Africa to inoculate thousands of people. Children, too. He was also one of the greatest interpreters of Bach ever known. He was one of the greatest humanitarians of all time, may God strike me dead if I lie. Reverence for life. That was his thing. Reverence for life. What are they teaching at those colleges? Is this what we spent all our money on? So, you could be ignorant? Who is Albert Schweitzer? Oh, my God, I’m going to have a stroke!”
But Gabby didn’t have a stroke. She lay dying off the Jericho Turnpike of an unmentionable disease; a mass of putrescent mortality that sees and feels nothing.
Unless . . .
TWO
Babylon
(Queen of My Song)
“Your depression comes from your insolence and your refusal to praise.”—Rumi
Since returning from Lowell, Massachusetts, where I heard Jack Kerouac’s confession and got my horns and sanity back, I’ve been trying to elevate my writing, elevate all expression, actually, to a form of praise because first of all, your depression comes from your insolence and your refusal to praise and, second, praise for the ideal of the eternal feminine, for the Lady, is probably the best way to transform the earth into a work of art.
That’s our job here. That’s all my argument.
When you sing praises to the Lady—and I’m thinking of Gabby as I write this—you begin to feel as though something like golden blood runs through the veins of the earth, no toxic sentiment about it.
Make the world a work of Art.
For Her.
Revise it.
The world hurts.
While I’ve never been what anyone would call an abject failure with women—I idolize them too much to be a complete failure, I worship the French braids and shiny lipstick, their wisdom, the peek-a-boo outfits, the clinging sweaters, the lace, the ensellure, the striving in the eyes, their hidden strength, their desire, Claudette Colbert’s chest heaving up and down as Gable takes off his shirt, their eternity, their genius, their tongues—I’m more than willing to believe that the Messiah waits to be born inside the belly of a great lady—while not abject, I’ve been, clearly, a failure at romance and partnering which is to say, a failure at love. I have no sense of it, love that is, and I’ve sabotaged and ruined every one of my love relationships with infidelity, jealousy, neglect or just plain ordinary meanness.
Jealousy, of course, is the worst: where is she? I called at 8:00 and there was no answer but she said she’d be back before eight, so why isn’t she back? Did she go out for drinks with Alvin? She says Alvin’s gay but who really knows? At parties, she chats with one guy for half an hour. Why half an hour? A little flirting is okay, but thirty minutes by the guacamole going psss, psss, psss with the same man is an affront. An insult. If you’re going to have an affair, have one and let me go but I am not going to wait around by the phone or at a party and be consumed by this interior monologue, by this diabolical inner accuser. And it does consume and torment you, worse than Hawthorne’s bosom serpent. Oh, how it gnaws at me. It gnaws at me . . . I couldn’t get out of bed for days because Lyla, a Southern belle-of-the-ball, refused to stop lunching with a red-headed yuppie law student. Lyla had a heart condition and I was actually happy that she had to be hospitalized for a day because that meant she wouldn’t be going out for lunch with the red-headed yuppie. Esmé, too. She had some problem with her thyroid and I rejoiced privately because the condition briefly curtailed her social life.
This was way beyond schadenfreude. This was Love, right?
“Strumpet! Whore!” I could almost hear myself bellow like the Moor, commanding armies and navies of jealousy but, alas, never my own heart. And as for being mean, I once yelled at Margo, one of the kindest women in the world, yelled at the top of my lungs because she was late for dinner. We stood on the Bowery near Bleecker Street, outside a Thai restaurant on a cool spring evening, and I yelled and carried on like one of the Bowery characters, then told Margo she could spend Friday night alone if she were going to continue having ‘an attitude’ and The Lady’s ghost just disappeared like smoke through an open window. Why wouldn’t she? Anger, like alcohol, attracts people at first, goddesses, too, then, finally, repels them, and I’d become repellent in so many ways. La Betty Noir.
“Look,” good friend Blau once advised, his eyes like black olives resting on white cloth, “you don’t have to actually look her up and down, you know what I mean? Not up and down and up and down, staring at her belt. It’s kind of a giveaway, Slick. Too easy . . .”
And I cheated, oh God, cheated and lied. I’d call Esmé from a phone booth on Central Park West and say ‘I’m working the late shift at Fried, Frank and Shriver, dearest. I’ll call ya tomorrow’ or from my flat in Astoria, with Tatiana in the middle room—I’d shut the door and place another long-distance call with pine needles and love nectar drying on my neck. Pre-cell phone days. Eventually, all parties would find out, in fact, that’s how I wanted it so as to avoid the commitment and so on. Leonard Cohen said “I have decided to seek beauty the way other men return to the religion of their fathers” but you won’t always find beauty, passion and love in the same embrace, so, it was easier if the women I knew were alcoholic and not all together because then I could make my case to Esmé, protest that we aren’t getting along, not in that way, and, oh, I’m being unfairly treated and need comfort and passion and that’s why I’m going over to the Upper West Side twice a week to lay with a drop-dead-on-her-face drunk and so on and so forth. When you’re desperate like this, when it’s not about love (love?), when it’s not about two hearts and the innocence is kind of hidden, no vulnerability, then—
BEHOLD!
It really is the vanity of vanities and a striving after wind, even if she has silk bikini panties and smells like cream and rose petals and it won’t be about the truth, rocking, sweating, calling out to God, it’ll be about my garden idol smashing against hers, my marble hard flesh, my machine powered blood, my triumph, not hers—PULL DOWN THY VANITY, I say—and see, usually, she was out in a few hours anyway, out, asleep, drunk and after two days or so, I’d take the serpentine train up the serpentine Hudson River, back to Mount Kisco to stay with the Moses family, then drive west across the state to resume a ghost deception, to lie essentially, and smile because although all is vanitas and a striving after wind and hurt and perfidy rule the world, my marble idol vanity is ever faithful and never lies to me, but it wasn’t always this way, wasn’t always this corrupt:
GARDEN OF EDEN
Lovers
With their clothes
Off
Unashamed.
You don’t lust after flowers, doncha know.
“There is a truism that makes me angry,” I said to Blau, “that a man enjoys nothing more than a catfight, two girls pulling each other’s hair out. Not true. One of the most attractive things about women is their own appreciation of the feminine, their support for each other, and if that sounds banal, their language, then. That language women have.”
I accuse you of being a woman. Do you understand the severity of this charge?
Good friend Blau once joked that every year, women get together at the Woman’s Convention and work out more strategies to fuck over men.
(You have to admit: it’s funny. Just picture it.)
I began substitute teaching after moving back to western New York from the Big Apple, when preparations were being made for the Iraqi War.
“Well, it looks like they’re going to bomb the hell out of Iraq again,” I’d said to Blau over the phone.
“Babylon,” said Blau. “They’re going to decimate Babylon. The old Babylon, the original Babylon.”
And while the oak leaf clusters, the epaulettes and the pin-striped suits got ready to destroy or, rather, completely loot and plunder ol’ Babylon, the mind wandered from one of the old musty schoolrooms, back to my own Babylonian past, to my old neighborhood, back to a kind of Babylonian idolatry, to my greatest failure, to a buffoonery so profound, one can only see it as sublime, as something beyond even the imaginations of the stars. My brother won’t admit it now, but way way back, the two of us were crazy stupid in love with a little grape-skinned Jewish girl with long curly hair when we were kids outside Buffalo, New York—obsessed would be the word, I dreamed that she would love me and that I would save her from the Nazis in my old man’s ’76 Pontiac Catalina. To paraphrase Thomas Wolfe in Look Homeward, Angel, she was wine in my blood, a music in my heart. I was the star, she was the crescent. My brother and I watched as the little girl searched for crayfish in the muddy ponds before the suburbs were finished and when she became a woman, I dreamed of her nakedness and her scent, in fact, could almost taste her, then, years later, I saw her in Manhattan and got her address and sent her poems and prose, her curly hair was cut short and I swear she was even more lovely than I’d remembered. Now, this was a muse lady. Maud Gonne. Sœur Thérèse. Regal. Unattainable. Goddess of the Hunt. Smokin’ hot.
My brother moved away and says he forgot all about her but I took my guitar and harps and sang at her window in Brooklyn, sent her letter after desperate letter, mailed her an old shopworn book of Robert Burns’ poems with dried rose petals and then, one day, saw her picture in The New York Daily News because as it turns out, the grape-skinned Jewish girl is Condi Rice’s niece and she was at some reception in her honor wearing big hoop earrings and, of course, I was desolate for now my chances of winning her had become even slimmer and, still, I sent her letters and sang “Summertime” over the phone for her and wrote things like “your skin literally takes my breath away and makes me tremble not in fear, though, because I would kiss every inch of it until you, too, were left trembling and breathless” and other treacle that is, frankly, embarrassing to relate now because in the 21st century, you’re not supposed to have emotions anymore (not really), but later I prayed on my knees that she burned all of the letters and poems I’d sent to that Brooklyn address. Hopefully, she threw them in the fireplace or shredded them with an Ollie North shredder or put them in a perdurable plastic bag and sealed them with a little white twist tie and one hoped she was undercover, too, because when you’re getting set to do Babylon, the poet’s dreams have no place and every vestige of earthly beauty must be stolen or erased.
(You probably guessed by now that I didn’t get the girl.)
THREE
The Right Values
(Ghost Dance)
“The Eternal Feminine draws us forward.”—Goethe
One girl I shouldn’t have got was Lyla—Lyla with a “y”—who put me through the most humiliating changes of my life; she tormented me, taunted me, tasked and heaped me so that I would have been better off had she roped, gagged and flogged me, so excruciating was the anguish. An armageddon of emotion. God fuck her. Eleven years my senior, Lyla was a Southern belle, married and divorced three, four, maybe five times, red glossy lipstick, big round saucer-shaped brown eyes, clear pale skin, thick shoulder-length flamenco brown hair, plu-perfect Michelangelo painted breasts. The Black Madonna. Old Spanish with Spanish eyes. Scot or Scots-Irish, too. Think Hedy Lamarr or Natalie Wood but even more voluptuous and with a southern accent or Ava Gardner in the early days, in The Killers most likely, legs crossed, leaned back, strapless gown, blood and fire in one being, all we know of heaven, all we need know of . . . Put it like this: the seductive power of this woman renders unnecessary any dishonest, florid, idealistic description or revision because there she is. Or was.
I mean, this is a human possibility. This walks among us. Or is it The Goddamn Goddess?
Many women say that they want a sensitive, caring, soft man who will listen to them and nurture them, who will get in touch with his feminine side but people, women, sometimes deceive themselves. Lyla was almost the reverse. She would tell you that she wanted an old-fashioned man, a man who takes charge, but she would let no man dominate her, not in terms of money—she was big southern estate wealthy—nor in terms of her life decisions. She really was Scarlett O’Hara with a dozen years added to her. Not quite Blanche du Bois yet, Lyla was shrewd, thrifty, intelligent and hard-headed, sort of a belle-of-the-ball feminist, proudly unreconstructed and unrevised, but sharp and fiercely independent, too. The daughter of a physician, Lyla had been a teacher for years and advised me not to follow suit, citing the time she was hit in the head with a pencil thrown at her by one of her music students. Lyla taught music (she was a pianist), math, English, art, just about all of the subjects, and she’d been a successful businesswoman, too. She was studying law with me and had her contracts, torts, malfeasances, misprisions, well-pleaded complaints and civil procedure down cold. She was nobody’s fool and her naked breasts, let’s call them vivid incarnations of the will to breathe, were more rapturous than anything found in nature, more captivating than the autumn sunset; a Roman feast, as beautiful as justice. A terrible beauty, you might say. Not trying to sound worldly or knowing, but you could not be unimpressed by or casual about her breasts and be human. Salomé would intone breathily that a frightening music emanated from them, from her, but if asked to describe Lyla just after she’d slipped off one of her black lace teddies and laid it beside her big brass bed, neither Gloria Steinem, Naomi Wolf, nor even Michael Musto (or Salomé) could fail to praise Lyla’s sumptuous buttermilk breasts or her carnation pink Lord-have-mercy-I-could-die-right-here-and-now hardening nipples. Candor ends paranoia.
I could die right here and now.
“Ah ran away from home,” she sobbed on our first night out together. “Ah want to care for you. Ah want to make you happy. I’m loyal and true.” That was our first date! Lyla wore a powder-blue zip-up dress and we walked under an umbrella from the car to the pub, her left boob rubbing against my arm and chest as we tried to get cover from the rain. The first kiss: she acts so grateful, like a man had never tried to kiss her before. Lyla’s kisses were intoxicating; she gave those thick-tongued sweet strawberry wine kisses—the kind that taste good even with tobacco on the breath—and when I drank deeply at her delta (forgive the indiscretion), when her girlie juice squirted out from her ducts like a fountain of dreams and ambrosia, I got to the origin of uneaseful bittersweet life itself, so I thought; was transported to another place, to another time, to Nefertiti’s bedchamber, to the secret chambers of the pyramids; hallucinatory, archetypal, immaculate but we’re too sophisticated for all of this now, right? Sex is death, disease, impotence, pharmaceuticals, indistinguishable from money. Sex kills.
Right?
I loved to ram her. Why be polite?
“You know,” I used to say out loud with bestial delight, “allll the way out and allll the way back in for a loooong time. It’s the Ghost Dance makin’ you sane . . .”
Lyla wore garish furs, drove a big black Lincoln town car and, let it be said, you will never meet a woman silky refined or white-trash sleazy who loved to take it in her mouth as much as Lyla. One evening in early September, I was in the passenger seat of her town car and she said “take it out, take it out please” and when she saw the erection, diverting her eyes from traffic for a moment, she let out a weepy mournful, almost animal cry and virtually collapsed with weakness, then reached for the velvety tip of my manhood with her thumb and forefinger, her other hand on the steering wheel.
“Let’s stop somewhere down that road,” Lyla insisted and quicker than summer lightning, she dove for that thing like it was buried treasure, so eager was she to give old Iron John another lingering French kiss. Just after Thanksgiving, we were watching It’s a Wonderful Life at Lyla’s place and before Bedford Falls could even come to George Bailey’s rescue, Lyla became possessed, seized; she was maniacal, mad, working it for dear life, absolutely determined to soldier on with me between her teeth, then she maneuvered everything in just the right way, stopping, starting, then with her fingers, she pressed and released perfectly until the seeds of desire were catapulted on to the red and green of her embroidered Christmas sweater. But the most pathetic part of this seamy tale is that I was in love with her. I was consumed. Trapped. Imprisoned. I smell you, I touch you, I taste you. Now, I’m your slave. Graphic sexual detail is not embarrassing to relate, to share with others: it’s the emotion that’s embarrassing. Who wants to be this vulnerable? Supposed to rule over your emotions and not let them rule you . . .
There was no peace with Lyla, none at all, except when we made love, when we fucked till dawn, scaring away, you might say, even the phantoms of the desperate desperate night, belly to belly, like two worlds touching, when I could feel her coming like a shower of hot snow around my cock and mons pubis. “Pornography is ugly,” we used to say. “This is beauty.” To be loved, to be loved . . . I made Lyla the center of my existences, temporal and mythical, made her my soul catcher, the embodiment of every hope and dream. She was, in a way, my creation and also my opiate, my jailer as well as liberator. Was like she was tattooed to my skin. Of course, the jailer, the beast is within; I was my own captor but when the goddess is mewing “I’m trembling, I’m trembling,” because you’ve got the spear of destiny between her taut creamy legs, you don’t see it that way and why should you? I was so obsessed with Lyla, I sometimes wanted to be her, wanted to know what it would be like to receive. . . what it would be like to be seen by me. . . and to stand in front of a gold-encased mirror and gaze at my naked shoulders and breasts. To be ground zero for all that sexuality and femininity. To be seen.
Should I wear my hair back in a ponytail today or wear it down? Is it the glossy red lipstick for today or the clear? How much of my body should I show today? A little of my belly? Just a strip of skin where the blouse fails to meet the belt line? Even though I have millions, I just swoon when a man picks up the check. It’s so gallant. How did I get to be so hard-hearted? Neverthless, being Lyla, you’d wonder about your girls, your two daughters. Will they be all right? Will they be happy? Will they find the right men to marry? Men who will be servants to their beauty? I love them so. Why are we here anyway? What’s our purpose? To love? That must be it. It’s all kind of out of fashion now, c’est vrai? This adoration of woman. This idolatry. The mystery behind the silk, the strategies of conquest while pretending to be conquered, the receptive principle . . . who will fill the empty amphora that is my heart? Who will complete me in a marriage made in heaven? Until the 19th century, women were known simply as “the Sex;” not the weaker sex or the fair sex, just “the Sex,” because women were understood to be the container, for both genders, of romance; women were the caretakers, the guardians of beauty—protecting sexual love and glory, the Truth, from the wild wolves and the too-rough hands of the world, the way a mother protects her child (one reason two straight women can cuddle and French kiss)—and still are, although one sometimes wonders if the PoMo homeland security people will outlaw beauty some day. Yes, I wanted to be Lyla in those unfathomably passionate moments. As the song says, I’ll be your mirror.
“You’re a delicious man,” she’d drawl and, of course, I believed her. Who wouldn’t? “Sometimes when you speak in class, ah listen to you and ah just want to rip your clothes off. Such a beautiful boy. Truly, you are my heart . . .”
(Maybe she was telling the truth but, as my old friend Hubert used to say, “the devil will tell you 99 truths. And one lie.”)
Lyla grew up in the Baptist church but later become an Episcopalian because this is what all earnest, devout, God-fearing, upwardly mobile Christians do. J.P. Morgan did it, so why not? Tragically, Lyla had assimilated all of the prejudices of her father and of her father’s father, all of the awful, soul-destroying, bone-calcifying xenophobia. Racists hopelessly in love with their prejudices, who guard them like diamonds, who literally define themselves by their relationships with the “other.” Lily-white frat boys dressing up as gangstas on a Saturday night, for example. Still, there was something about Lyla’s passion, that passion you see in the eyes of the brylcreem toupeed evangelists with gold rings on their fingers and in their painted and perfumed coiffed consorts—religious conviction so deep and penetrating that it spills over into the sexual or, perhaps, sexual passion so deep and on fire, it carries over into the religious—that may be redeeming, hucksterism notwithstanding. None of this abstemious monkish asceticism, no “I’m sorry, dear lady, I cannot. I’m a man of God.” Of course they get caught with hookers in motel rooms. Of course the white supremacist preachers and politicians slip it to their kids’ wet nurses and sire illegitimate (not right?) babies that grow up to literally haunt them. It’s not just the passion, though, it’s the love of the shadow, the lust for repentance, you might say. The hypocrisy is epic yet the passion and even the martyrdom of Elmer Gantry will always be preferable to the dead-cold, cadaverous certainty of the anchorite and the angular righteousness of the secular liberal who also wants to outlaw beauty. Even the cries and yelps of a Tammy Faye Bakker had more soul than the perorations of priests or scientists, or TV anchors for that matter, it’s just that those preachers don’t want you to know that passion, only them, and the racism, of course, is ugly and unbearable. When Lyla said that Dr. King was “despicable and self-serving,” I could have strangled her (non-violently, of course) and watched her body become lifeless and limp, cinammon breath and perfect tits be damned but no one could say she was lukewarm, someone to spew with disgust from the mouth of the apocalypse. She was, in a number of ways, despite all else, the Blessed Magdalene, the fallen lady, or maybe the Ukulele Lady: if a man showed the right kind of interest, she loved him.
But she was unhappy.
Of course.
She was the world.
Like all those who don’t atone, Lyla couldn’t just sit and ruminate on her real sin, the sin of bigotry; she had to elevate it to a virtue. She couldn’t just admit to the sin and say “Yeh, I’ve got a problem, I’m a bigot, I need to expiate.” No. The very thing that kept peace away from Lyla’s black widow heart was raised up, elevated to something desirable and virtuous. A shining city in a swamp. It was good, then, that her church was an all-white church because, that way, tradition was maintained and there’s the issue of states’ rights and blacks don’t want to mix with us, anyway, so we’re doing them a favor, don’t you see, and I don’t care about race or color, truth be told, I only care that a man has the right values.
“That’s crap,” I remember saying to her. “A black man could recite Shakespeare, bake a crème brulé and dance the minuet and you still wouldn’t let him into your country club.”
“If he had the right values,” Lyla insisted. “Oh, yes, we would. If he had the right values.”
In spite of it all, though, I really was in love with Lyla and felt that I couldn’t live without her. I was helpless. Trapped inside the temple of her heaving femininity and it hurt to see her cry or on the defensive.
“Don’t you wag your finger at me,” she cried, “you can’t judge my soul. You can’t . . .”
When I told Lyla as we studied criminal procedure that under no circumstances would I consider being anyone’s sixth husband, she stormed out of the law library and I chased her down the hall and that was when it all began. Or ended, depending upon one’s perspective. That’s when she started spending quality time with the red-headed yuppie, dilating her brown eyes so that they were even bigger and rounder, playing the part of the coquette with the come hither stare. Loyal and true. The red-headed yuppie was not only at her side at all times, he was in our every conversation. He was such a gentleman, he knew how to dress, he owned some apartments in town, he was well-fixed for cash, he was going to be a great attorney. I was just vulnerable and stupid enough to be affected by this song and dance. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, devils filled my head and left me weak and tormented crazy like flesh without blood. What if they go out somewhere and she puts her hand on his while sitting in the car? What if they walk along Ellicott Creek holding hands the way we used to? That was it: just the idea of Lyla holding hands with another man sent me into unspeakable agony, into perdition, bronco on the freeway. Oh, merciful God, what if they kiss? KISS??? One night, after finally dozing off, I dreamed that Lyla was sipping a tequila sunrise on some yacht, not with the red-headed yuppie, but with an older, distinguished, well-heeled businessman in a sailor’s cap and loafers, graying temples, chiseled face, a man who commanded other men, who bred horses and owned a vineyard, everything that I am not. Oh, how it gnaws at me. It gnaws at me . . . Our conversations became poisoned. Where, at one time, everything I said was charming and insightful, the soul of wit itself, now I could say nothing that wasn’t boorish and inappropriate.
“If you’re going to be a teacher,” Lyla admonished over dinner, “you have to be more subtle. You can’t be so open about your judgments. You wanna be a bohemian your whole life? A beatnik? And if you are going to practice law, you have to be more thick-skinned. You really are an ingenue. Now, look, that’s not how you eat soup. Watch me.” She sat upright, composure serious and sober as a judge. “You put your spoon in the soup this way, away from you. Sit up straight. Bring the spoon up to your mouth but don’t bend to eat it and never lift up the bowl . . .”
Our dialogues would heat up like a jet engine with Lyla going on about ‘the right values.’ She didn’t care about race, she averred, only about values.
“Oh, my heart, you’re going to give me a heart attack,” she cried. “You know ah have a heart condition. Don’t make me have another episode . . .” then we made up and she pleaded with me in a teary whisper as if under duress: “are you going to explode inside of me again? Oh, dearest, when you explode inside of me tonight, have mercy on me. Please, have mercy on my poor heart . . .”
If Lyla sounds vulnerable here or brittle or even a tad silly, I was even worse. Much worse. “Don’t you love me?” I asked her about a week later, in tears myself. “Do you love me?” An old-fashioned word, love, but that was the feeling.
“I love everyone,” she responded, having regained her powers. “I try to love everyone I meet.” I yearned for succor, for true love, romantic love, and suddenly Lyla was Gandhi, was my old friend, Kerouac’s favorite, Saint Thérèse de Lisieux, loving the broken heart of the world the way a mom forgives a rowdy kid.
“Don’t you know you are killing me?!” I screamed at her. “KILLING ME!!”
“She’s a drug,” I whined to Blau. “She’s heroin. I can’t stop. Can’t quit.”
“There are other drugs,” Blau said quietly over the phone.
“No, there aren’t,” I assured him.
“Can’t you just make this woman your fuck buddy and forget about the, you know . . . love and obsession?”
“No, I can’t.”
Never give all the heart.
Now, this is true, this actually happened, no revision here, no lie, no fiction: the jealousy kept building steadily, kept growing like a weed, like fly larvae on August corn. Lyla knew just how to play me, touching the yuppie’s hand when she spoke to him, eating lunch with him near every day, then greeting me at her apartment door at night in her black lace teddy and pink robe. I was beyond miserable and sex was my only respite but, eventually, even passion couldn’t keep the black dog away. I wasn’t in the garden anymore, but, what’s a heaven for, anyway? Our tolerance for each other’s differences was vanishing more quickly than the rain forests. Once, I mentioned that Jesus of Nazareth may have been a black man and, much to my surprise, Lyla didn’t argue to the contrary.
“But I’d never let a black man touch me,” she added, “not even if he were Jesus Christ.” Special Southern emphasis on the ‘Keeeer-ah-st.; like fat sizzling in the frying pan.
“But, you’re a Christian. Devout . . .”
“I know. Ah just couldn’t. Couldn’t. And I could never let my daughters date a man who wasn’t white.”
“So, you wouldn’t let your daughters date Jesus Christ? He’s not good enough?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But you did.”
“I don’t care about his color. He has to have the right values.”
“Wait, I have to get this straight. You wouldn’t allow yourself to be touched by Jesus? You don’t deny that he was black. Or not white. So, tell me because I don’t get it. You’re saying that he’s not good enough? You wouldn’t go out with Jesus Christ?”
“Well,” she said completely in earnest, “if he had the right values . . .”
“Well,” she said completely in earnest, “if he had the right values . . .”
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