snap and kill, a minefield of small, deadly explosions. Dinner
is eaten in front of partially opened windows. I cannot live
through this one more day, I say, each and every night, sometimes trying to smile and be pleasant, sometimes my face twisted in grief or rage. I am going to: kill the landlord. Today I almost
threw a rock through the windows of the hamburger place.
Today I almost went up to the man who runs it and spit at
1 1 4
him, hit him, cursed him, called him foul names, threw myself
on him and tore his throat open. All day long, every minute of
every day, but especially today, whichever day it is, I want to
kill, burn down, tear down, destroy, put an end to this,
somehow, anyhow. He does the dishes. I stalk him. I want to
talk with you, I want an answer, what are we going to do,
where are we going to go, I want to move to a hotel, I want to
move, I want to leave this city, I am going to kill somebody, I
want the landlord to die, I want to slice out his heart, I want
to pound him into the ground myself, these hands, I am going
to call him now and tell him what a foul fuck he is, what a
pig, I am going to threaten him, his wife, his children, I am
going to make them as afraid as I am cold, I know we don’t
have any money but I have to go to a hotel I can’t stay here I
am going to burn down the restaurant I know how to make
bombs I am going to bomb it I am going to pour sand down
their chimney I am going to throw rocks I am going to burst
the windows I am going to explode it and break all the glass I
am going to set a fire I am going to smash my fists through the
windows. I almost did that tonight, he says, shaking, I almost
couldn’t stop myself, I almost broke all the windows. I am
quiet. He is gentle, I am the time bomb. I look at him. He is all
turned inward with pain, on the edge of a great violence which
we are united in finding unspeakable when it comes from him:
we are believers in his tenderness: it is our common faith. He
has a surface, calm and clear as a windless, warless night:
underneath perhaps he too is cold, or perhaps I am simply
driving him mad. He wants to throw rocks, not egged on by
me but when alone, coming home. He cannot bear violence, in
himself, near him. I have absorbed it endlessly, I can withstand
anything. I am determined to keep calm, I see I am hurting
him with my bitter invective, I am determined to get through
another night, another day. He reads. Perhaps he is cold too?
We talk. We touch hands quietly. We fall asleep together in his
bed marooned. I wake up soon. He is asleep, curled up like a
lamb of peace. Perhaps you have never known a gentle man.
He is always a stranger, unarmed, at night wrapped in simple
sleep he curls up like a child in someone’s arms. It is after 1 1
pm, the restaurant has now been closed long enough for the
wind streaming through the apartment to have cleared out my
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room so that I will not choke or get head pain or throw up or
have sharp pains in my gut. My lungs will ache from the cold.
My fingers will be stiff. My throat will hurt from the cold. I sit
down to work. I must write my book. I work until the dawn,
my salvation, day after day, when I see the beauty of earth
unfolding. I watch dawn come on the cement which is this
earth of mine. Then I sleep my kind of sleep, of cold and
burning, of murder and death, of paralysis and silent screams,
of a man with a knife who moves with impunity through a
consciousness tortured with itself, of the throats I have slit, of
the heat of that tropical place. In the dream there was no
blood but I wake up knowing that it must have been terrible,
smelly and heavy and sticking and rotting fast in the sun.
*
I watch him sleep because the tenderness I have for him is
what I have left of everything I started with.
My brother was like him, frail blond curls framing a guileless
face, he slept the same way, back where I started. A tenderness
remembered tangentially, revived when I see this pale, yellowhaired man asleep, at rest, defenseless, incomprehensibly trusting death not to come. We are innocence together, before
life set in.
Sometimes I feel the tenderness for this man now, the real
one asleep, not the memory of the baby brother— sometimes I
feel the tenderness so acutely— it balances on just a sliver of
memory— I feel it so acutely, it is so much closer to pain than
to pleasure or any other thing, for instance, in one second
when each knows what the other will say or without a thought
our fingers just barely touch, I remember then in a sharp sliver
of penetration my baby brother, pale, yellow-haired, curls
framing a sleeping face while I lay awake during the long
nights, one after the other, while mother lay dying. It is con-
sumingly physical, not to sleep, to be awake, watching a blond
boy sleeping and waiting for your mother to die. Or I remember my brother, so little, just in one second, all joy, a tickle-fight, we are squared off, each in a corner of the sofa
(am I wearing my cowgirl outfit with gun and holster?), father
is the referee, and we are torrents of laughter, rapturous
wrestling, and his curly yellow hair cascades. He was radiant
with delight, lit up from inside, laughing in torrents and me
11 6
too. My childhood was this golden thing, eradicable, intense
sensations of entirely physical love remembered like short,
sweet, delirious hallucinations, lucid in fog. Now I love no
one, except that tender man now in the next room dreaming
without memory, a blessed thing, or not dreaming at all: that
curled-up blond muscled thing recalling every miracle of love
from long ago. I was happy then: don’t dare deny it.
I don’t love now, at all, except when I remember to love the
blond boy, the stranger not even related to me, not part of
anything from before, who sleeps in the next room: a tall blond
man: when I remember to love him certain minutes of certain
days. Don’t look for my heart. The beasts have eaten it. What
is his name?
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Our women writers write like women writers,
that is to say, intelligently and pleasantly,
but they are in a terrible hurry to tell what
is in their hearts. Can you explain why a
woman writer is never a serious artist?
Dostoyevsky
*
I came back from Europe. I lived alone in a pink apartment on
the Lower East Side across from the police precinct. I wanted
to be a writer. I want to write. Every day I write. I am alone
and astonishingly happy.
The police cars ram into the crushed sidewalk across the
street. The precinct is there. Men in blue with guns and
nightsticks swarm. Garbled sounds emanate from radios on
their hips. They swarm outside the impressive stone building,
the precinct headquarters. Red lights flash. A dozen cars swerve
in or swerve out, crash in or crash out, are coming or going,
burning rubber
on the burning streets, the smell of the burnt
rubber outlasting the sound of the siren as its shrillness fades.
The police cars never slow down. They stop immediately.
They start up at once, no cautionary note, the engine warming.
They pull straight out at top speeds or swerve in and almost
bang against the building but somehow the brake gets the
weight of the cop and the sidewalk is crushed on its outer
edge.
The sirens blare day and night. The cars bump and grind
and flash by, day and night. The blue soldiers mass like ants,
then deploy, day and night. The red of the flashing lights illuminates my room, like a scarlet searchlight, day and night.
The police are at war with the Hell’s Angels, two blocks
away. The motorcycles would collect. The swastikas would be
emblazoned, the leather would defy the summer heat, the
chains would bang like drums through the always-percussive
air hitting the cement. You could hear the anguish of the
motorcycles, hear the anguish of the streets, as the burning
rubber scarred them: the police cars would pull out fast and
there would be a din of dull anguish sounding like distant war,
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there would be the pain of acute exploding sounds that made the
buildings move and shake and your body was shocked by it even
before your mind could understand that you had not been killed.
There were fires too, loud red fire trucks: real fire, the
building across the street next to the precinct building burning,
the top two floors burning, the building right next to mine
burning. The red lights would flash like great red searchlights
and the sirens would scream right into the blood: and there
would be fire.
Across from the precinct in a gravel lot the police parked
their regular civilian cars and boys played basketball.
The street seemed to be overrun with uniforms, fires, guns,
cars careening in and out. The red searchlights and sirens made it
seem that the Martians had landed, or the army, or war had come,
or giant insects, or man-eating plants. Each day was a surreal
drama, an astonishment of military noise and civic emergency.
It was not the usual exile of the Lower East Side: condemned
into a circle of hell from which there was no exit, no one ever
left alive, no sign anywhere of what others call “ the social
order” ; instead, the social order swarmed and crushed sidewalks, was martial and armed; the social order put out fires that continued to burn anyway from one building to the next,
flaring up here, flaring up there, like one continuous fire,
teasing, teasing the men with the great hoses and the heroic
helmets. It was not the usual Lower East Side exile: one was
not marooned forever until death with only seawater to put to
one’s parched and broken lips: one could scream and maybe
someone with boots and a gun and a uniform and a right to
kill would take time out from the military maneuvers of the
swarming militia and keep one from becoming a corpse. One
hoped, but not really, that a single woman’s scream might be
heard over the military din. Right next to the precinct, in the
building next door, a burglar crawled into the apartment of a
woman in broad daylight, the middle of the hot afternoon,
simply by bending the cheap gate over her fire escape window
and climbing in the open window. The army did not stop him.
When he set the fire that killed her as she napped that afternoon, the red searchlights did not find him; the sirens, the hoses, the trucks, the helmets, did not deter him.
*
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The apartment was five flights up. The numbering of the floors
was European. The ground floor was not the first floor, it had
no number. The first floor was up a steep flight of stairs. The
fifth floor was at the top of a huge climb, a mountain of stone
steps, a hiker’s climb up. It was not too far from God. Each
day an old, old, heavy Ukrainian woman, bent, covered in
heavy layers of black skirts and black shawls, black scarf tied
tight around her head hiding her hair except for white wisps,
washed the stairs, bottom to top, then cleaned, the banisters,
top to bottom. She had her bucket and a great mop of stringy
ropelike mess, and a pile of rags: stoop-shouldered she washed
and rinsed, washed and rinsed, dusted and polished. There
was no smell of urine. In each hall there were three toilets, one
for each apartment on the floor. The toilet was set in concrete.
The cubicle was tiny. It didn’t lock from the outside, but
there was a hook on the inside. Each tenant cleaned their
own.
The apartment was newly painted, a bright Mediterranean
pink, fresh, garish, powdery. You walked in right to the kitchen, there was no subtle introduction, it was splintered, painted wood floors, no distinct color, a radiator, a grotesque,
mammoth old refrigerator with almost no actual space inside, a
tiny stove, and a bathtub. There was a window that opened
onto a sliver of an airshaft. There was a room on either side of
the kitchen. To the left, on the street, above the teeming blue
soldiers and desperate fire trucks, there was a living room,
backed wooden chair, and I bought a $12 piece of foam
rubber to sleep on, cut to be a single mattress. I bought a
bright red rug with a huge flower on it from Woolworth’s, and
laid it down like it was gold. Under it was old linoleum,
creased, chunky, bloating. There were two windows, one
opening onto the fire escape, I couldn’t afford a gate and so it
had to stay closed, and the other I risked opening. I found a
small, beautiful bookcase, wood with some gracious curves as
ornament, and in it I put like a pledge the few books I had
carried across the ocean as talismans. The room to the right of
the kitchen, covered in the same cracked linoleum, was like a
small closet. The window opened on the airshaft, no air, just a
triangular space near a closed triangle of concrete wall. The
120
room was stagnant, the linoleum ghastly with old dirt ground
into the cracks. The room was smothering and wretched. The
walls sweated. I didn’t go into it.
The toilet in the hall was outside the locks on the apartment
door, outside the huge steel police lock, a steel pole that shored
up the door in case of a ramming attack, outside the cylinder
locks, outside the chain lock. I carried a knife back and forth
and I slept with a knife under my pillow.
The glare of the lightbulbs was naked. The pink paint flaked
and rubbed off to the naked touch. The heat enveloped one,
the skin burned from the hot water in the air. I immersed myself
in the bathtub: in the heat one never got dry: and lived between
the desk and the mattress on the floor: writing and sleeping:
concentrating: smiling at the red rug with the big flower. I
learned to be alone.
*
The apartment was painted Mediterranean pink, the paint was
powdery, I found some remnants of cheap cot
ton in a textile
store and tacked them up over the windows: light came in
unimpeded, the heat of the burning sun, the red searchlights of
the military, the red alarm of fire, danger, must run, must
escape, will burn. The walls between the apartments were thin.
There was a thin wall between me and the man in the next
apartment, a tiny man of timid gentleness. I heard long conversations and deep breaths, discussions about the seasoning in soups and the politics of anal warts, both subjects of his expertise. At night I would dream that there was a hole in the wall, and everything was like a play, the extended conversations, a two-person domestic drama: I knew I was sleeping but I believed the hole was real: and I knew I was sleeping but
the conversations must have been real, in their real voices with
their real inflections, as they sat there in my view. We had no
secrets and at night when I would scream out in terror at a
bad dream, I would alarm my neighbor, and the next day he
would ask me if anyone had hurt me: late, timid. Above me
the man would get fucked hard in the ass, as his expletives and
explications and supplications and imperious pleadings would
make clear. The two male bodies would thump on the floor
like great stones being dropped over and over again, like dead
weight dropping. Sleep could not intervene here and mask the
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sound for me in flashy narratives of story-within-the-story,
play-within-the-play: the screams were too familiar, too close,
not yet lost in life rushing forward.
I slept when I was tired. I wrote. Sweat poured out. I took
long walks. My dreams were like delirium. I did not have hours
or days. I simply went on. There was a great, soft stream of
solitude and concentration and long, wet baths, and timid trips
to the toilet. Oh, yes, I had a terrible time getting money and I
don’t want to say how I did it. I lived from day to day, stopping
just short of the fuck. I had odd jobs. I did what was necessary.
I was always happy when I was alone: except when restlessness
would come like a robber: then I would walk, walk.
*
The pink walls and the red carpet with the huge flower were