Ascher/Straus
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Featured Work Monica's Chronicle Monica’s Chronicle, endless sketchbook drawn directly from life yet a model of another idea of fiction and the source of much of Ascher/Straus’s work (most obviously ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party), can be read here in installments as it’s being edited. |
MONICA'S CHRONICLETechnology has, thankfully, caught up with me: now there’s a way to “publish” the raw, unfiltered Monica’s Chronicle directly, without the shaping ideas of “book” or “publisher” intervening. I believe that the Chronicle is meant for this medium — and may be at least one artist’s revenge on the triumph of the democracy of chatter and commerce over what I take to be the original impulses of the “web”. Certainly not undertaken with the “web” or the “internet” in mind (I began it, in some form, in the mid ‘70’s), it needed a medium that didn’t exist. Monica’s Chronicle is absolutely a daily activity that did not begin on purpose. I have some ideas about its roots and about some novels, notebooks, journals and so on that don’t at all resemble it yet may have set me on this path, but I’m not interested in talking about that here. The Monica’s Chronicle that will begin here and that will be added to whenever pages of the original, single-spaced typewritten Chronicle from 1976, cramped and hard-to-read, have been reformatted so that we can edit them (lightly, to make them more intelligible and to untie some knots and tangles) will be rough and unfiltered. New pages will appear with no particular regularity (website will have to be checked to see if something fresh is there). This is the Chronicle as it was (and is still) written: rough and unfiltered in the sense that it is different from every published or gallery-displayed form derived from it, when editing was allowed to go so far as reshaping and re-organizing the Chronicle’s record of the flow of events over time for artistic purposes, but also in order to make what we believe is a necessary aesthetic argument for a radically different basis for fiction, even more so than in the sense that every work of art is an argument for itself and against everything else. The two volumes of ABC STREET (Vol. 1, published by Green Integer in 2002, and HANK FOREST’S PARTY, forthcoming from Green Integer) are meant to explicitly raise questions about fiction and present themselves as models of something else. The title of one of Pasternak’s early works translates as My Sister — Life and of course that could be the title of any writer’s or artist’s record of life, no matter how far away it is from ordinary journal, diary, memoir and the like. My own lifework is, I think, more extreme and is more of an actual second life, a life lived again, a double, a twin to my life, than other records I know of. My art has never been concerned with being artful. For me to stop on the path of chronicling to make compositions would be, of necessity, to interrupt the process that is ecstatically demanding in its own way. I’ve never trusted memory, so I think I’ve written instead of remembering. The two volumes of ABC STREET take place in 1977. I’ve elected to start this potentially endless process (chronicling is endless and now editing and publishing it here will be endless another time) in 1976. Obviously, some of the same “cast of characters” appear, some of the same locations, all encountered raw, before stepping onto a stage where all sorts of aesthetic and compositional issues come into play in terms of organizing what here, in its natural state, is a record that follows events as they occur, interruptions and digressions that are events in themselves, persistent returns to the interrupted event, new interruptions, returns and so on. I love this process for itself and I wonder how many others find that the outer world is (always has been) their inner life. For an early view of the Chronicle we’re going to put Dennis’s introduction (called “Writing with Sheila Ascher”) to what was then called “Sheila Ascher’s Chronicle/September 1976”, published in Zone #7 Spring/Summer 1981, on our website. * Agnes (aka Gloria) Abebi Ahwesh Alexi (Hank Forest’s Party) Alyosha Andre (ABC Street) Andy (The Other Planet and Hank Forest’s Party) Arlington sisters Eunice Arlington Wanda Baer (ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party) Bah-Wah (ABC Street) Blanche (Salem Avenue neighbor-to-the-west) Hap (“Happy”) Huntington Blank (ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party) Brad Daisy Brennan (Hank Forest’s Party) Margaret Brennan (Hank Forest’s Party) Brownie Carla Ray Carlson (aka Carla Carlson, Carlita Carlson) Cassia Cathy Castle (ABC Street, Hank Forest’s Party) Debbie Castle (ABC Street, Hank Forest’s Party) Patrick Castle Scarlet Castle (Hank Forest’s Party) The "Clock" (aka "Clockface") Babette Coffin (ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party) Dean Coffin Greg Coffin (Red Moon/Red Lake, ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party) Johanna (“Jojo”) Coffin (Red Moon/Red Lake, ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party) Joshua Coffin (ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party) Lena Coffin (Red Moon/Red Lake, ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party) Rosamond Coffin (Red Moon/Red Lake, ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party) John Corcoran (Hank Forest’s Party) Pat Corcoran (Hank Forest’s Party) Philip Corcoran (Hank Forest’s Party) Timothy Corcoran (Hank Forest’s Party) Cristalene Kate Crosley (Hank Forest’s Party) Pat Czorny (ABC Street) Dalia David (ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party) Dr. DaVinci (ABC Street) Dorothy Dorm Kevin Douglas Elsie (Hank Forest’s Party) Aunt Em Andy Forest (ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party) Grete Forest (ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party) Hank Forest (ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party) Frederique (ABC Street) Elizabeth Garvey Ellen Garvey (Hank Forest’s Party) Patty (“Twiggy”) Garvey Rebecca Geiger (Hank Forest’s Party) Georgia Gilbert Juanito Goodman Graham (Hank Forest’s Party) Donald Green (Red Moon/Red Lake and ABC Street) Enos Greengrass (Hank Forest’s Party) Leslie Greengrass Sylvia Greengrass (Hank Forest’s Party) Lon Gurion (Hank Forest’s Party) Jerry H. Reggy H. Janey Hedges (ABC Street) Peter Hedges Helene Fayette Hickox Nelson Howe Dominick Ianni Cousin Jo Ellen Rudi Jolley (Red Moon/Red Lake and ABC Street) Kim (Double/Profile) Kitty (ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party) Klaus Bill Kropotkin Pam Leary (Red Moon/Red Lake and ABC Street) Ted Leary (Red Moon/Red Lake and ABC Street) Ambrose Lenehan Jr. Ambrose Lenehan Sr. (The Other Planet and Hank Forest’s Party) Finnley Lenehan Laurel Lenehan Nora Lenehan (The Other Planet and Hank Forest’s Party) Ryan Lenehan Larry Lille Tina (Martina) Lima (ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party) Tony (“Lima Bean”) Lima (Hank Forest’s Party) Audrey Liman Minnie Liman Riley Liman Tommy Liman Vicky Liman Cousin Linda Linette (ABC Street) Lou Lowell (ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party) Caroline M. Malcolm Margo (ABC Street) Marsha (ABC Street) Matty May Allison Meehan (Hank Forest’s Party) Melody Mikki (ABC Street) Nadja (The Other Planet and Hank Forest’s Party) Natasha (Hank Forest’s Party) Nina Ray Pierotti Jordan Pike George Plimpton Peggy Prince Puff Al Quinlan Peggy Quinlan Sonia Raiziss Al Regan Fionnuala Regan (Red Moon/Red Lake) Joan Regan (Red Moon/Red Lake) Regan Family (Hank Forest’s Party) JoAnne Renard (ABC Street) Mildred Renard (ABC Street) Nicole Renard (ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party) Ralph Waldo Rice Leo Romero (ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party) Lily Romero (ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party) Norma Rosenkranz Naomi Rosenwasser Rae Ryan (Red Moon/Red Lake and Hank Forest’s Party) Nora Salerno (ABC Street and as "Nora Woolsey" in Red Moon/Red Lake) Sandra Allison Savas (Hank Forest’s Party) The Sloths (Hank Forest’s Party) Nancy St. Cloud (ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party) Al Szarka (ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party) Ted Themis (aka Spylianos) (Letter to an Unknown Woman and Hank Forest’s Party) Artie Tilden Tristan (ABC Street) Twins Twinning Cousin Vince Billy Wall Hank Wattle (ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party) Nancy Wattle (ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party) ? Wattle (ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party) Willy Wattle (ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party) Wendy (Hank Forest’s Party) Yvonne Wilding (ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party) Marian Woolsey (Red Moon/Red Lake, ABC Street, Hank Forest’s Party) Jimmy X Leila X (aka Laura X, Gloria) (Double/Profile and The Menaced Assassin ) Ma X Nelly X Cousin Yma (Hank Forest’s Party) Xylon Edgar Zacharias January 1, 1976: snow on the ground at 7 a.m. after a day and a night of rain and deep puddles. Snow is not thick. Sun shining on snow at 7 and sky a bluewhite snowfield. A few wisps of white linger in the blueblack ink on grey bond notepaper.
Since David’s been working on a snow narrative it’s snowed often. Sitting outside: melting snow, red ink on grey bond, sounds of water, burning red hedges. Moisture, not colder temperatures, the key to burning. January 2. Out at 9. Another clear, cold day, colder than yesterday. Puddles are ice closed up. Nothing is dripping, bushes burn, sky is perfect in the distance. White the beginning of blue. Sitting outside indexing the Chronicle. Nora Lenehan and Ambrose Jr. are working in the same bar. He’s a bartender, she’s a musician. She and Ambrose Sr. were in the hospital together. Nora had polyps removed from her vocal chords. Kevin Douglas was getting beaten up outside of Sullivan’s by some twenty-year-olds, Lenehan Sr. intervened and landed in the hospital. Kate Crosley goes up the block to Nora’s. A series of small clouds. Water melting into ground. Silvery puddles, brown light, scraping of Sylvia Greengrass’s shovel as she slides water out of driveway. Lily Romero’s hair is 1/2 brown 1/2 blonde. Greg Coffin can’t start his car. Andy Forest tries to help, but can’t. Brownish cast to things as the day fades. Early morning: fresh snow on car tops and shadows of thin branches swaying. By afternoon snow has melted off car tops. Light still falling as day fades in the spruce tree, whose bare branches look like icicles. Lowell’s friend Elliot had an awful asthma attack after hearing his medical board scores. Thought about what it would be like to stop breathing and the next thing he knew he was in a hospital. It seems he was unconscious for three days and now he can’t sleep more than four hours at a time. He wakes with a start and can’t breath. A greenish cast to light falling on snow, on flower pot, on arm of Monica’s brown mouton, on moist pine needles. Mossy green edge of the flower pot is everywhere. On Sunday January 4 these things seem related: a sickle moon, cold air and sharp wind. Notes on Sunday that on Saturday January 3 it was raining when David went down to get the mail. Envelope from the Paris Review mailed Friday, January 2, 1976. First mail of ’76. “Dear Ascher/Straus, George Plimpton and I are most intrigued with The Blue Hangar installation you did at Charlotte Moorman’s extravaganza and would like to discuss it with you with a view to a possible portfolio with photographs and some discussion of your intentions and the genesis of the work. “I wonder if you might give a call soon (from a haywire half-hour with what purport to be operators in Queens, I have concluded that you are uncallable) so we might have lunch and talk about Blue Hangar. Best wishes, Fayette Hickox Contributing Editor. P.S. we are delighted to have Between Two Walls appear in our pages. It looks great!” Pat Czorny is in the hospital: miscarried, lost her child. Three months pregnant, she also hurt her back, so wont be working. Her lover Linette doesn’t live with Pat, she lives with Pat’s sister on ABC Street. Typing the handwritten January Chronicle on the porch on June 12: “just before going downstairs bamboo curtains golden with light. Leaves of Regans' tree moving in blue light. Typing in cool breezes, leaves can’t contain their light. One of those cleansed days that follow thunderstorms.” At around 10 p.m. on January 5 Monica is outside looking at the sickle moon. Early in the morning on January 6 she’s outside in sunlight. Call George Plimpton: lunch at his house for a taped interview about the Space Novel. Sherry drives by with a man. On January 6 or 7 (date not noted) Monica is in MOMA. Traces of snow along museum’s ridges of grey marble. Sunlight on a building around 4:30. Pink opening in grey. A spring day in winter is better than spring in spring. Familiar figure of “the poet” standing impatiently near his favorite table, occupied by an old woman writing. He’s been watching her writing for an hour. “Poet” in green chinos and charcoal grey sweater over grey and white striped shirt. Under his left arm a large tear in the charcoal wool of the sweater. Steely grey, thick and wavy hair. His angry stare doesn’t make the old woman look up. Green ink on white bond as vivid as magic marker. Raining all day. In the morning Monica, walking on Coast Boulevard, sees Lena Coffin leaving for the busstop to get Johanna. At noon Nelly (one of the vague X family women) and son Jimmy walk north on ABC Street from boardwalk toward Boulevard. Later David goes down to write in Monica’s father Alyosha’s car, borrowed and parked on ABC Street. As he opens the car door Monica (from porch or window) sees David wave to Nelly X who’s leaving Lena’s. A car stops in front of Lena’s house and lets children off. Monica begins to think about all the little events that may connect to Johanna’s birthday. On January 7 blue ink looks like magic marker. At 8:30 in the morning Monica is awake and chronicling an Arlington sister (the one who works). Arlingtons' door is ajar: too cold to stand outside, though sun is on their side of their street. Working Arlington sister stays outside for no more than ten seconds, then can be seen in the door opening, looking out. Monica notes that she hasn’t seen (recorded) any of the Arlington sisters since the working Arlington sister appeared in the October Chronicle (typed two days ago). Sound of human voices belongs to Twins Twinning (pair of men of undetermined age, like wooden nutcrackers in someone’s discarded brown or grey suits) Monica’s been chronicling for years, never one alone, always two together, one always more raspingly loud and audible than the other and always in the middle of an endless, bitter conversation. I felt better the time I was in the hospital than I do now when I’m supposed to be healthy. Lying around here? Bums! That’s what they are. They don’t work! Bums? Carrion! Human carrion. . . . Al Szarka and Yvonne Wilding are in good spirits. Pat and blonde-blonde little Timothy Corcoran come out the front porch door of their groundfloor apartment and leave. Brontosaurus-like Nancy Wattle comes out with little waggle-headed Hank and brother Willy: must be a school trip. Working Arlington sister closes her door: her lift has arrived. Green ink, jetties white with frost. On Sunday January 4 Wanda Baer picks up Monica and David in Monica’s brother Lowell’s car and they drive into Manhattan in falling snow to see Bunuel’s Daughter of Deception in MOMA. Spend the afternoon looking at Rothkos before the film. Monumental red, brown and black canvases seem meant to inspire awe and it’s hard to get around that one sensation. There are smaller, numbered Rothko canvases and the numbers imply a sequence and the sequence implies relationships between what precedes and what follows that Monica finds interesting. Tries to go outside, but day is bitter. Back into MOMA with no desire to look at another painting after Rothko yet wandering the galleries. Discovers a Cezanne painting neither she nor David had seen before, “Melting Snow — Fontainebleau”. David, who’s been working on a snow narrative, stays in front of it for a long time and is affected by it profoundly. (As long as he’s been working on the snow narrative, days have been filled with snow.) At 7 p.m., after the film, there’s very little snow left. Drive down to Oh Ho So in the rain. Waiting for a table with Wanda and David, Monica has a chance to think (not for the first time) about how the nothing-to-do of waiting is an opportunity. Window looks out on the street and cold rain; large mirror behind the bar provides another sort of opportunity; red brick wall; brilliant blue of jukebox; young women in boots, furs, bright-colored South American sweater-coats. Monica, David and Wanda Baer dine on stuffed crab shells, roast plum duckling, stuffed hot and sweet peppers with garlic sauce. The drive back home is stressful for Wanda: driving through snow (laid down earlier on road or has it picked up again?) is difficult for her and awakens her sense of incompetence. That night (Monica notes later) Wanda’s sleep is violent: “a violent night’s sleep” is how she puts it: covers on the floor, sheets tangled, almost knotted. Never happened to her before. Typing her January notes in June it isn’t always clear to Monica what the order of days is. For example: notes seem to say that at 10:30 on the morning of January 10 Nelly X calls and says she’d like to come by later and chat: Jimmy is gone for the day on a school trip (same one as or different one from the one the Wattle boys went on?) and she’s free. And later: on January 10 Monica is sitting outside: an icy day, but with less wind than yesterday. Barely possible to write; pen is cold, paper brittle. Scratching the surface; white paper is icy, ink black. Later, Monica walks to the beach: all exposed surfaces have a thick layer of ice that could also be snow. Ink-black jetties are white. Snow on black bark of trees and roofs, dazzling white or silver-grey. Green of the ocean is peculiar: easier to say what it’s not than what it is: not icy, warm, vibrant, electric, forest or leaf: surprisingly hot sunlight is cutting the waves at an angle, filling the green undersides with yellow light that makes green un-namable. Days later Monica still finds herself thinking about the numbered series of small Rothko paintings. One painting was all about yellow, invaded by green at the edges, green invaded by yellow from the center. Yellow swims out of the middle of the green, surrounds it, heightens it, makes it greener. Thinking about Rothko leads to thinking about warm yellow and wondering whether there’s a green that always exudes yellow warmth. Leads also of course to thinking again about the green undersides of waves with yellow in them: yellow is fragile (have to catch it quickly), soon becomes ashgreen, loses its glowing warmth. Ten degrees on January 10. Red barge on the horizon. White-on-black jetties. Days spent under the spell of Cezanne’s melting snow and Rothko’s yellow canvas. Discovery of tea: since snow began to fall (and since David started to work on a narrative about snow) Monica has been sipping tea: tea’s lightness and fragrance (the same thing?) like smoking a solitary cigarette. Red sun burning through violet clouds (at what hour of what day?). Timothy Corcoran crosses the street, slipping and sliding, holding a small plastic bag. He’s coming from Nancy Wattle’s with three aspirins for his mother. Says that she’s sick, but doesn’t seem to have a cold. His father has a bad cold; his mother’s illness is more indefinable. Monica remembers Pat telling her that she finds the time after Christmas dreary. Cold weather and nothing to look forward to. She loves summer. Makes Monica realize that shes been enjoying winter. Rothko again or still with her: the importance of grey; painting out of its frame; every inch of canvas is used around the sides. Room frames the canvas. Therefore, what surrounds the canvas. . . ? Timothy Corcoran walks to the busstop with his friend. Mother is sick again. Monica hears Lena tell David that she’s going to be in a play January 13: same repertory group as in the summer: Thursday through Sunday, First Congregationalist Church, 2.50 admission. Is it now Monica hears sounds of snow melting? On the way to the dentist (by way of the boardwalk?) Monica runs into Nora Salerno and Megan Leary. (Notes to herself that the last time she ran into Nora Salerno she was also on her way to the dentist.) Nora Salerno has stories to tell: Nancy St. Cloud bought a pinball machine (25¢ to play). Knows this from Peggy Prince who goes to the flea market and sometimes picks up things for Nancy. Pam Leary is working for a few days, that’s why she (Nora) is taking care of Megan. Hasn’t seen Nancy since December 23. Nancy called to invite her and Peggy Prince to Christmas dinner. How does Monica find out (is it from Nora Salerno on the boardwalk?) that Susie Leary (Ted Leary’s kid sister) knows Themis, tenant in the house where Monica lives on ABC Street and handsome Athenian short-order cook in the Cornucopia Diner. Could also know it from the tenant named Artie, who doesn’t get along with Themis (don’t like each other’s music). May be Artie who tells Monica that he sees Susie Leary in the Cornucopia Diner a lot. On Saturday night, around ten, Monica returns home and opens the front door: a fashionable young woman with long blonde hair and a little too much makeup coming out is surprised to run into Monica and gives her a big hello. Don’t you know me? Don’t you know your cousin! Monica hasn’t seen Jo Ellen in a long time and doesn't recognize her. Thought she lived in another borough. . . . Story is that she met Themis on Christmas morning (4:30 a.m.) and somehow ended up in the 24 hour Cornucopia Diner. Her Italian boyfriend had disappointed her, she was lonely and depressed. . . so went bar hopping with a friend. Has stayed at Themis’ a few times. Tonight her parents are entertaining relatives, so . . . here she is. Says she really doesn’t know this neighborhood too well. . . . Themis comes downstairs and is dismayed to discover that Jo Ellen is Monica’s cousin. . . . Shakes his head at the unlikeliness of it . . . . Jo Ellen is going to drive Themis to the diner, where she’ll hang out while he cooks. Is it at night that Sylvia Greengrass, in chocolate brown coat and white wool hat with a pompom, is shoveling and scraping ice from the driveway of her little brick fortress across the way? Sound of her scraping shovel travels how far. Joshua Coffin, looking as thin and sallow as his mother Lena (lost at least ten pounds), passes with Tommy Liman. After a night (Wednesday) of rain and wind strong enough to shake Monica’s attic apartment, she’s working outside on a surprisingly warm January 14: wind isn’t fierce and is itself the clean smell it seems to bring. Themis’ keys are in the mailbox, left there by Monica’s cousin Jo Ellen. If a bird sings as if it were March, does that mean that a bit of March has actually flown here? Sherry and an unknown man drive by in a red truck with blurred black letters painted over red side panels: “JONES DECORATING”. Monica and David have a breakfast of croissants from Colette’s, orange marmalade (what brand?), brie cheese, David’s strong coffee and brewed tea for Monica. In the morning another note about Wanda Baer: Wanda Baer looked awful last night and had a “splitting headache” after her session with Dr. DaVinci. Leaves Wanda drained of color and radiance. Phone call from Caroline M: hasn’t given birth, but has gained fifty pounds. Monica notes that her brother Lowell is now delivering babies. A windy, beautifully sparkling day yesterday when leaving for the dentist. Around four: puddles on brown earth and sidewalks. Dried red leaves are droplets in the smoky brown hedges, glittering like red berries. The color red predominates, but there’s no way to know that at any given moment. It was invisible before this year, even though it was dominant through 1975-76. There are layers of visibility. That is, what was invisible in 1975 is visible now only because of chronicling. Chronicling creates visibility (converts invisibility) through day by day recording. It was there, but without chronicling was it visible? Would it be visible now? Why is it noted here that in February ’73 Monica paid attention to a particular February green and also a particular February white? And in 1974-75 a winter’s rust: brown November, green November and also yellow: two distinct entities in November. The last few nights the sound of the ocean has been peculiarly loud at one a.m. (That is, at one a.m. Monica became aware of the sound of the ocean.) Moisture of yesterday is gone. Day of wind, sharp shadows, sharp outlines. Cold and clear, dry and sparkling. Cousin Linda will be getting chemotherapy, a side-effect of which is hair loss. Loss of her hair is particularly painful to Linda. Has always obsessed about her hair and washes it every day. Wears a baseball cap now to flatten it. Wants to take away every curl. Page 8 (the next page) of January 1976 is missing. Chronicle will resume abruptly wherever page 9 begins. * Continues, not abruptly with page nine, but with page eight, lost for years and inexplicably found (“now”) in a basement storage room, in a torn cardboard carton with other cartons on top of an old dresser. “I like Subida Al Cielo very much. I love the moment where nothing happens, like when the man says, ‘Give me a match.’ I’m very interested in that sort of thing. I’m fascinated by ‘Give me a match’ or ‘Do you want to eat?’ or ‘What’s the time?’ I was thinking of that sort of thing when I made Subida Al Cielo. . . .” Luis Bunuel in an interview in “Cahier de Cinema,” #36, June 1954 (quoted in MOMA 8 1/2” x 11” sheets accompanying Bunuel films in January ’76). Also quoted in the same MOMA 8 1/2” x 11” sheets: “The plot hinges on an outward and a return journey in a bus. When the film opens we are in a village which has no church (a happy village therefore) and where the inhabitants make a living from coconut palms. (‘A coconut palm,’ we are informed by the commentary, ‘is as profitable as a cow’. )” After the film Monica and David walk from 53rd Street toward 8th and 46th and there’s no doubt that the hot Mexican sun and the hot busride through it have something to do with the iciness of midtown January winds. The tiny storefront Mexican restaurant (El Tenampa) restores some of the film’s warmth. They have a meal of nachos (crisp wafers topped with refried beans, covered with melting cheese, slivers of hot chile pepper on top). Three salsas, one green, one red, both spicy, red far hotter. Two bowls of gazpacho. Enchiladas Chapultapec (stuffed with chicken, covered with a spicy and creamy sauce that has red pepper in it, fried beans, rice and shredded cabbage on the side). Chiles Nogada (stuffed chile peppers): outside as sauce and/or inside as stuffing: vegetables pureed with cream sauce (sour cream?), cheese, ground walnuts, green sauce of chiles or green tomato. Pollo Mole Poblano (chicken with spicy unsweetened chocolate-chile sauce), fried beans and sliced onion. Drinks are the cool drinks of summer and the flavors are interesting and unfamiliar: an unusual kind of lemonade and then a creamy white drink (horchata) that may or may not be made of coconut milk (creamy, with a vanilla flavor and a lemon flavor and also the strong aroma and flavor of the nutmeg and cinnamon ground on top). Served icy to balance the spicy food and all of it fragrant and delicious. Monica’s notes say that the restaurant is decorated with coconut palms. At 5:15 in Manhattan black winter light is beginning. Colder than what? Colder than ice blue and cold enough for rims of roofs to be red. There was cold sunlight, but not now.
Visit to Nicole Renard’s Washington Square apartment on what day? Nicole is thin, has lost her roundness, but complains of having gained six pounds. Dressed in denim jumper and (what color?) turtleneck. Lots of dirty teacups on the table. Ashtrays with cigarette butts. Nicole’s (or roommate Sandra’s) friends Nina, Brad and Ted are there, but Sandra is a few blocks away, taking care of a friend whose boyfriend has left her. Out of cigarettes. At 10:30 Brad and Nina begin to rush around — trying to get to The Ballroom at eleven for the Chad Mitchell Trio. Brad gets busy ironing a soft, grey wool turtleneck sweater to go with his navy blue slacks. Uses a big throw-pillow as an ironing-board. Nina is wearing an ankle length skirt and a Spanish cape with big red roses. Who is Nina? Someone who studies dance with Nicole at the Martha Graham studio. She’ll be in town another two-and-a-half weeks, then back to San Francisco. Brad is from a small town five hundred miles north of Chicago (right now lives in Ottawa). Monica knows none of these people. Called Nicole Renard pretty much on the spur of the moment and was greeted with enthusiasm. “When did you get back? Come right over! Nina is here with Brad and a neighbor who lives a few blocks away!” At first (when Monica walked in) everyone looked alike: Nicole (all honey and caramel as always) and a group of look-alike blond/blonde people. Blond young man having his hair cut in the center of what might be the diningroom, hair falling on newspaper spread on the floor around him. Hair cutting continues in Nicole’s bedroom. Sandra’s room/bedroom is half the large diningroom/livingroom. Lots of plants, big floor and couch pillows (one of the ones used by Brad as an ironing-board), many more decorative objects than Nicole used to have when she lived with the Coffins. Says that she’s quitting her job in two weeks. Wants a job as a waitress two days a week. Dancing every night is exhausting. Sandra’s friend was involved with the Italian guy for four years and they never did anything but sleep together. That’s all they did, nothing else. So what is there to be so upset about? Thinks the truth is that Sandra is lonely and is making use of the situation with her friend to fill up space. Not as close to Sandra as she was. Tired of living with her, ready for her own apartment. Doesn’t like Sandra’s friends, for one thing. So much so that when they’re around she goes into her bedroom and closes the door. Also thinks that, because Sandra doesn’t have a boyfriend, her (Nicole’s) relationship with Ted makes Sandra uncomfortable. Ted is not like Sandra’s friends. Like her (Nicole), he’s serious about himself and has ambitions: studying day and night for his psych comprehensives at NYU where he’s a Ph.D. candidate. Nicole and Ted were talking about death. Talking about death always makes her think of Jerry H. Monica may or may not know that she and Jerry H. were close: she knew herself and later found out for sure from Jerry’s grandmother that Jerry liked her a lot. She wasn’t with Jerry the night he died, but Billy was. Whole group was there, she thinks. Thinks Melody was there (Jerry and Melody were going to be married) and it may be because so many friends were there that there are so many versions of what happened. Someone said that Jerry tried to get out of the way of some people who were passing, leaned toward a parked car and immediately the aerial pierced his eye. (Supposedly they don’t make aerials that way any more.) What’s definitely true is that Billy Wall cracked up and went through hell, but she always felt that that version left a lot out. She’s also heard, for example: on the way to the hospital Billy Wall cradled Jerry on his legs. Not sure if it was the head, upper part of the body or what. And afterward someone told Billy Wall that Jerry should have been held differently. If he’d been held differently his lungs wouldn’t have become congested, pneumonia wouldn’t have developed and Jerry might have lived. He would have been a vegetable because his brain was already pierced by the aerial that went through the eye, but he might have survived. So that may be why Billy Wall cracked up. Mother was the closest to Jerry so she was the hardest hit. Father never got along with Jerry: he’s in an old age home now, but even then he had a heart condition — was twenty years older than the mother and had had a heart condition for years. So Jerry pretty much had to take over for his father at a young age and had a very hard life carrying that load. Younger brother Reggy was strange and doesn’t seem to play a role in anything. From the story of Jerry H.’s death to the story of her relationship with Ted. Met Ted through her sister’s boyfriend. Ted is from Tennessee. Family was once wealthy, but no longer. What exactly happened is not told or not recorded, but Ted’s father thought of himself as a failure, always struggling to get back to some point where he remembers once having been. Ted still remembers a conversation he had with his father when he was twelve. Father said he didn’t marry until he was forty-four and was a virgin when he married. At the age of twelve Ted of course was wrestling with his own difficult and important issues, so he remembers asking: what about masturbation? And his father answered what’s that? Father also said that he didn’t remember anything that happened in his childhood. You mean, he remembers saying to his father, I’m going to forget all this? Forget everything that’s happening to me now? Remembers also that his older sister used to be very bright and that he was considered to be less bright. Now she’s twenty-seven and still living with their parents in Tennessee. When she visits him in New York she seems to get younger every day she’s here. What else about Ted? Needs to move out: his roommate is crazy, passive and jealous. Resents the fact that he goes to Nicole’s to study. His goal: to go back home, live in Nashville, teach at Vanderbilt. On January 19 Monica is sitting at the ocean in bright sunlight on one of the coldest days of the year. Five degrees on the beach, beautiful summer in Subida Al Cielo, sunlit and icy in the streets of Manhattan, twenty-five below in Montreal, forty-three degrees below on Saranac Lake (passed it not long ago and may pass it again in a week or two, giving an unfamiliar landscape a feeling of familiarity). Cold pen is scratching on cold paper, making it hard to write. Boardwalk is empty, waves are super-audible, ocean shining to the degree that Monica can’t look in that direction. Writing in cold sunshine is pleasurable but not contemplative. Man passes wrapped in red snorkel coat, walking dog in red sweater. * Finding page eight clarifies some things (restores absent detail), but puts the order of events in question. For example: did Monica visit Larry Lille once or twice in 1975-76? And, while other notes seem to suggest that the visit in January takes place on the afternoon or the evening Monica visits Nicole Renard in her Washington Square apartment, on page eight Monica and David are being driven by Wanda Baer to New Jersey to visit Larry Lille and afterwards have dinner together in Lin’s Garden in Chinatown. But how could she have been in Chinatown with David and Wanda Baer when she and David stayed late at Nicole’s. . . ? Unless (not noted anywhere) Wanda Baer dropped them off at Nicole’s, went somewhere with friends and later picked Monica and David up for a late meal in Lin’s Garden. . . . On the same day as her visit to Nicole Renard or on another day Monica and David (Wanda Bear driving) visit Larry Lille in his university office in New Jersey (what town?). Drive along parkways and streets that for the most part have water in view: freighters, tankers, barges that Monica sees from a distance on the beach are oddly close up here. Cold air is blue and casts bluish overtones on every object; and cold and blue of air leaves grass dried out below. Wanda Baer (no idea why) thought Larry Lille’s office was in the basement, but it’s not: it’s on the ninth floor with a wide, far-away view of the harbor, freighters restored to their distance. Larry (one of the editors of a journal of formally innovative writing Monica and David have published in regularly) is dressed in tan slacks and tan sweater over a long-sleeved shirt (color not noted) and has a big desk and swiveling office chair. Monica doesn’t know why she should be surprised, but she is, that Larry Lille seems involved in the New York art scene. Says he is and he isn’t. His involvement is complicated. For example: he doesn’t like to live anywhere too long. Has remained in New Jersey longer than he planned to and longer than he’s stayed anywhere else. Has lived in Maine, in Philadelphia, Chapel Hill, San Francisco, etc., and in all those places he performed and exhibited and became part of the scene, but there were also practical reasons for that. Has a talent for designing things for other artists and can make money from that. His own sculpture, what he cares about most, makes no money. Dropped out of the “performance art” scene: not the sort of pressure he likes (to produce and be ready by a certain date, to maintain contacts, etc.) Talk about artists, writers, editors they have in common and about Monica’s trip to Canada for an exhibit of experimental writing organized by a Canadian gallery and by Larry Lille’s more famous colleague, Edgar Zacharias, author of dozens of books, editor of a zillion anthologies and periodicals, etc. Larry is surprised by what Monica has to tell him about the behavior of the poet Marcel Ashbee in Canada (not his real name, renamed himself to link his writing method to art that influenced him). Larry had always thought of Marcel as a sort of guru. At parties he behaved like an Indian mystic: aloof, serene, severe, wrapped in a serape. . . . Not, as Monica says, nervous before his performance and obsessed with money. Edgar Zacharias on the other hand spent his time in a fury at the Canadian organizer for taking over the exhibit: dominated by Canadian artists, Edgar’s Americans made to play second fiddle. Larry Lille counters Monica’s surprising information with the fact that Edgar Zacharias (who he’s known forever) never has to worry about money. May sometimes act concerned about money, but has no need to be. Aside from the income from his dozens of books, particularly his Xenakis and Joseph Albers volumes, his lectures, performances and so on, there’s substantial wealth in his family. Edgar’s father is an important neurosurgeon who was once Barry Goldwater’s private physician. And then there’s the family’s heavy investment in imported beer. In a pinch, Edgar can use his father’s Gramercy Park brownstone or, if it gets too hot in Manhattan, he can always escape to the family compound in Montauk. Larry Lille’s story couldn’t be more different. Father was a crane operator, mother an office worker. He left home before he was 16, never finished high school and has always been in debt (in debt for six grand now). A professor at this unimportant college in Jersey, but actually doesn’t teach. He’s in debt, but his eight-year-old daughter is rich. Wealth comes from her grandfather (Larry’s father-in-law). Disapproved of the marriage, but loves his granddaughter — so money will go straight to her. At about one a.m. Monica, David and Wanda Baer are in Chinatown, in Lin’s Garden, eating snails in black bean sauce, Suey Kow soup, chow fun Yung Sing style and what else? At two a.m. Lin’s Garden is crowded. A man sits next to them, orders soup, refuses to pay for it, fights with the waiter. Says “this soup is alive!” and attacks it with his fork as if defending himself, then calms down enough to tell Monica his story: his name is Gilbert Juanito Goodman and he’s a short order cook (a dishwasher at the moment) from New Hampshire. He hates New York, but had to get away from New Hampshire. He’s sure Monica understands: family problems, as usual. Says he comes from a town of “twelve thousand letters”, but it’s all being torn down. Everything he remembers about that town is disappearing. They say that Gus’s Café is still there, but he doesn’t remember it as a “café”, he remembers a bar. Of course he never should have smoked what he smoked. They said it would make him crazy and it did. When does Monica hurry to get a few lines down about Gilbert Juanito Goodman? That night when she gets home? Or the next morning. And when does she write: it’s so cold that the pen is laboring to write. Cold ink doesn’t want to flow onto brittle page. Can hear the scratch of its laboring. Also writes: when ink is flowing her blood is flowing. If the streets are an icy blue-white is that because when cold turns blue, blue turns white? The hedges are startlingly sparse, spaces in them are wide, yet houses across other backyards are hidden by leaves. Smaller and larger white squares and sky as thick as snow. (Last night the moon was visible through venetian blinds.) Sitting at the rear groundfloor bedroom window, overlooking the Salem Avenue backyard: bare January except for snow covering the ground and traces of green that show through the low hedges that separate Blanche’s backyard from the backyard of the Salem Avenue house where Monica sometimes house-sits. Green November light that pours through the tall hedges is gone in January. Fifteen degrees on what day? Small pine in Blanche’s backyard carries a light that’s silvery and moist under blue sky, white clouds that are deceptively warm to the eye only (meant for a warmer day). Fragile branches of the little pine move in wind that’s the same as light. Sun on white shingle = snow. Snow covering green garage roof. In early morning light Monica observes shadows of branches on snow, while branches themselves are no more than silver threads of light. On what day does Monica make final arrangements to have lunch at George Plimpton’s upper Eastside duplex to discuss publication of The Blue Hangar as an art portfolio? Date noted for lunch is Friday the 13th. More about Monica’s visit to Nicole Renard. Andy Forest gave Greg Coffin darts and dartboard for Christmas. Nicole gave Greg and Lena a beautiful ceramic salad bowl that Lena uses for bread instead of salad. And Lena gave Nicole a nonsensical 69¢ child’s toy. She’d rather have gotten a useful package of ponytail holders! Lena called Nicole to tell her that she’s playing Donna Ana in a neighborhood production of Don Juan in Hell, but forgot to tell her that (because Nicole’s car is still registered out there) she (Lena) had gotten an important letter related to the accident Nicole’s car had been in. . . . What else? Nicole visited her mother Mildred in New Mexico over Christmas, but for some reason Grete still hasn’t visited Nicole since she moved to Manhattan. Babette comes all the time and even JoAnne visits, but Grete and Andy will be in Manhattan to get one of Andy’s guitar strings fixed and then they run right back home. Think she doesn’t notice, but she does. What else? Says that Sandra lacks discrimination: in choosing friends, for example, and in the endlessness of her conversations on the phone, the kind of endless conversations you had when you were twelve. Needs to get away from her. . . . Free-floating bit of conversation with Mikki that arrives in January ’76 from where? Mikki says that, as Monica knows, Frederique can only talk about “issues”, not ever about herself. Well, now that she’s been invited to join the editorial staff of “Downtown Woman” they’ll have something to talk about again. She (Mikki) is not as close to Margo as she used to be and wonders if that has anything to do with the strength of her (Mikki’s) obsession with Marsha. Monday, January 26, not a bit of snow left in the Salem Avenue backyard. Frozen snow has given way to puddles of silvery brown earth. Continue to work on an extended snow narrative, the one in which she and David are working out a formal way for the narrative to accumulate in units, as if on a horizontal plane, side by side, without progressing. On Monday the 26th (or on the next day) even the silvery brown puddles are melting. No snow left to melt so what’s already melted is melting again. And the melting of everything is a reminder to Monica of last week’s (Thursday’s and Friday’s) bitter temperatures: cold wind made zero to five degrees feel like forty-five below and even in her warmest coat Monica couldn’t work outside as she loves to. Bunuel’s El (seen in MOMA on what day in January) opens with a priest washing a young boy’s bare feet, then kissing them. A second man (a pillar of the church) is watching the priest washing and kissing the boy’s feet. Man’s gaze travels from boy’s feet to a woman’s shoes. Something in the shot (not noted here) makes it clear that the man is transfixed by the woman’s shoes, or her feet in them. Bunuel says that “The hero of El is a type that interests me as a beetle or a disease carrying fly does. I had no explicit intention of imitating Sade in my choice of elements, but it is quite possible that I did so unconsciously. It’s natural for me to tend to imagine and work out a situation from a Sadist or Sade-like point of view, rather than from, say a neo-realist or mystical one. I said to myself: what should the character use? A revolver? A knife? A chair? I ended up choosing the most disturbing objects. It’s as simple as that.” “It (El) is one of my favorites. . . I like it particularly because it is a true documentary on a pathological case. But all the minute documented exposition of the psychopathic progress of the character is improbable in the eyes of the ordinary public, who generally laugh during the screening of the film. This confirms my feeling that the traditional commercial cinema has cultivated a great fondness in the public for the conventional, the superficial, the false commonplaces of sentiment. I would have liked to suppress the melodramatic part which precedes the marriage of the hero and which is no more than an amorous intrigue between the girl he is to marry, her fiancé and the paranoiac himself. . . . The film’s final intention is humorous rather than anti-clerical. The character is certainly pathetic. I am touched by this man possessed by such jealousy, such solitude and interior anguish, such exterior violence. I studied him like an insect. . . .” Snows on January 28 then clears. Days of rain, then snow, open for the first time into cold, exhilarating sunlight. Air is charged with this clearing. Monica, at home on ABC Street and working outside, feels it this way: if it were only a little bit warmer she would be up above in the charged air with the birds who’ve arrived without her noting it. Pat Corcoran comes out on the front porch where Monica’s working to complain that her lights went off. Knows that they went off next door (at Lena’s?) also — only stayed off for a few minutes — but she saw Monica and wanted to complain to her anyway. On January 30 Monica is working in the Salem Avenue backyard in pale sunlight. Return of winter light. Grey at the margins and pale in the center. Bah-Wah is with her and arguing with twin German Shepherds in another yard. Earth of lawns has dried to black. While in the Salem Avenue backyard Monica is reviewing her notes (or taking notes for the first time) on her visit to her young cousin Linda, home from the hospital for eight weeks. Found Linda terribly bloated, top-heavy and broken-out. Her mother wants her to drink nothing but real fruit juice, but Linda thirsts only for diet sodas and artificial fruit-flavored drinks. Month ends with a copy of Monica’s El Tenampa receipt:
Missing pages one and two of February ’76 inexplicably found in cardboard carton in basement storage room with page eight of January, so re-discovered pages have to be edited into already-edited beginning of February.
Let’s see: On February 1 it’s forty-five degrees and raining. Later a bit of snow on moist earth (gone almost as it lands). Reflecting back on February 1 (how many days later?) Monica makes a couple of additions to the El Tenampa check or menu: “Pipian” (chicken in a green sauce made of, among other things, ground pumpkin seeds and chiles) and one flan (with a burnt sugar sauce exactly the same as the sauce on Monica’s favorite French crème caramel). Also added: a line drawn between sunlight on Mexican streets (Subida al Cielo), whiteness of coconut drink in El Tenampa and terrible coldness in Manhattan. Also: a note about the crowded sidewalks of the Theater District (busloads of out-of-towners leaving theaters). In front of a theater where a play that has something to do with Bessie Smith (Albee’s The Death of Bessie Smith or something else?) is running a man is calling for a “Mrs. Bernard”. Calling and calling, with some urgency, “Mrs. Bernard!” But Mrs. Bernard, a very large black woman in a turban, is already seated in the very last seat in the darkness of the waiting bus. Monica is struck by the fact that she doesn’t answer the man who’s looking for her with some desperation. Lost in the mood of what she just experienced? (And how does Monica know that the woman in the bus is “Mrs. Bernard”?) Rediscovered February page one tells Monica that she also saw Bunuel’s The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz and La Fievre Monte a El Pao, subtitled “Los Ambiciosos” and apparently also known as “Republic of Sin” (with Gerard Philippe, Maria Felix and Jean Servais). MOMA’S 8 1/2” x 11” sheets quote Bunuel at length about Surrealism, but only some of it is of interest to Monica: “Surrealism was the great discovery of my youth. It remains the essence of what I do. It is all here (Bunuel taps his head). . . . I have not changed, the world has. . . . Only crypto-fascists pretend that they are ideologically free. . . . Man is never free but fights for what can never be. . . . I always followed my Surrealist principle: ‘the necessity of eating never excuses the prostitution of art’. . . .” Goes on to paraphrase Octavio Paz in this way: “if the white eyelid of the screen could reflect the light it possesses, the whole universe would jump. . . .” Earlier (than what?) on February 1 sunlight through only the narrowest slits in drawn venetian blinds was so bright — so impossibly bright — it made both Monica’s head and eyes ache. (But only for an instant.)
Bunuel paraphrases Andre Breton: “The most admirable thing about the fantastic is that the fantastic does not exist. Everything is real.” Of course Bunuel’s paraphrase of Breton makes Monica think at once of what Dostoevsky said at least half-a-century earlier. Not exactly, but something like “The fantastic is the real”. No matter what Dostoevsky’s exact words or tone, Monica had always taken the statement seriously as a witty way of compressing his view of the relationship between life and art. What others may have taken as fantastic or extreme in Dostoevsky he undoubtedly saw as another kind of realism: realism in regard to aspects of reality simply not seen by others. And, Monica believes, wouldn’t any “realism” in art taken literally and carried to its logical extreme yield results that would be labeled “experimental”, even unrealistic? February starts out softly and sweetly: moist backyard, soft earth. At about six a.m. Monica hears a loud thump and goes to investigate: it’s Bah-Wah pushing open the kitchen door (moving into the interior, away from violent rain and wind). Raining hard and blowing all night, but here on Salem Avenue Monica needs to get an early warning from Bah-Wah about what in her attic apartment on ABC Street she couldn’t help knowing about immediately. (Nothing there that even feels like an “interior” to retreat to: dormer windows, each half with six little panes in an old wood frame, right up against the world.) Bah-Wah wakes Monica up to a blizzard. Looks out to see rain turn to snow. At ten a.m. Bah-Wah doesn’t want to go out but has to be walked. Wind so strong that the wood-frame-and-small-pane-of-glass cubicle (for some reason known as “the areaway”) that shields the front door is filling up with snow. Snow is also built up against the back door and filling the grid of the screen: blows straight into the pantry when Monica pulls the door open. Bah-Wah doesn’t want to venture out either way. Monica has to push and drag her and soon they’re out together between snow drifts changing shape and blowing from one street to the other, reforming in the air. Clouds are purple-black and thick, yet there’s a strange Arctic sunlight, snow crunching underfoot. This is a severe beauty impossible to stay in: the fairy tale that may be a nightmare and the other way around. After reading over the “snow” narrative together last night there’s no way not to be conscious of the relationship between writing about snow — looking for a fresh way to tell a peculiarly snow-structured story — and maybe at the same time suggest a fresh approach to the structure of story-telling — a story built of units of equal weight with no necessary order except accumulation and their obligation to in some way relate to snow (or any other unifying idea or event) — which Monica and David have come to think of as a horizontal narration — and snow that’s been falling in January and February. Hours after reading over the snow narrative (which will probably be called “Snow”) a blizzard sets in. Monica can’t help thinking also about all the snow that’s been accumulating in the Chronicle: Let’s see: Real snow of winter ’74 Also, different kinds of snow that have fallen now in the winter of ’75-76: first snow of the season on December 1, 1975 was soft (in the MOMA sculpture garden?); heavier snow driving to Kennedy Airport; snow that cancelled dentist’s appointment; and today’s blizzard (first school closings of the year?). Out the back window the blizzard seems confined to the backyard: snow in neighbor’s small pine makes Monica think how thick with snow the tall Rhinebeck pine on her ABC Street front lawn must be! And snow in the low hedges bordering backyards to west and south. Snow comes from snow, writing from writing. Walking half-a-block today was painful. Fifty-mile-an-hour winds make ten degrees feel like thirty below and tonight Northwest winds are predicted to gust far higher (“high wind warning” and “travelers warning”: zero degrees and another fifty-miles-an-hour higher?). Monica, David and Wanda Baer are having a late breakfast of David’s baked pancake, strawberry jam, brewed tea and strong coffee while watching Edmund Goulding’s That Certain Woman: Bette Davis married a gangster when she was fifteen-and-a-half (when and how we learn this not noted). Gangster is killed in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, so Davis has to get a job. Before or after the gangster’s death (when and how also not noted) Davis falls in love with a rich young man (Henry Fonda) and they become engaged, but his father objects. Do they marry? Notes say the father (Donald Crisp) “interrupts the honeymoon”. Fonda fails to stand up to his father and Davis leaves, hoping he’ll come after her, but he doesn’t: he continues to knuckle under and (marriage apparently having been annulled) marries someone named “Flip”. Davis has gone back to work. Her boss, a married lawyer who’s in love with her (therefore encouraged her to marry Fonda) is the only one who knows she’s had a child (with Fonda but unknown to Fonda). Davis learns that Fonda and Flip are honeymooning in the south of France (what she does not noted). Their car crashes near Lyon. They survive, lie unconscious (how long?) in a hospital in France. Life continues. Lawyer becomes ill. Visits Davis in a delirium and warns her that Flip has hired a detective and she and the detective both know where she is and know about the child. Soon the newspapers publish stories about a “mystery child”. Is that how Fonda finds out about the child (or is it from Flip?). Fonda arrives, wanting to marry Davis (now that he knows that they have a child), and Fonda’s father arrives (Fonda first or father first?) with a court order for custody of the child. This time Fonda stands up to his father and sends him away. Lawyer (who was ill and delirious) dies and leaves Davis five hundred thousand dollars. Now Flip, in a wheelchair, pays Davis a secret visit: she’s only “half a wife”, loves Fonda too much to hold onto him. Wants him to marry Davis. Davis (not to be outdone) is so moved by Flip that she makes the ultimate sacrifice: gives her son to Fonda and Flip and vanishes. Monica glances up from the small screen: frigid day in February is coating the windows with a burning yellow light and sheets of ice that have lacy starbursts built up out of crystals or hammered and exploded. Hard to see frozen yellow light also coating neighbor-to-the-west’s small pine or the starburst pattern in the snow covering the backyard’s cement walk. Film resumes or continues or Monica re-enters it just by changing where she’s looking. A reporter who’d become Bette Davis’ friend, looking for her for months, traveling “half the world”, finds her in Monte Carlo: sitting, dressed elegantly in frock and fancy hat, at a table overlooking a garden, wistfully regarding children playing outside. Ball bounces through window just before friendly reporter arrives and says “Flip is dead!” Fonda is on a transatlantic flight! She rushes to the phone. “You’re coming over?” are her (the film’s) last words. Absurd yet somehow touching. On February 3 Monica and David are beginning to read over the narrative now called “Snow” in the Salem Avenue backyard. While listening to Monica read David wants to know if Monica saw the shadows of the birds-in-branches. Yes, Monica says, (even while reading) she saw the shadows of birds in the shadows of branches in the blue snow. A day of sunlight, yet snow is not melting. (Here and there a little patch that’s moist.) Overnight there’s a thirty-six degree drop in temperature: rain turns to snow, blizzard conditions before dawn, airports closed. On February 4 Monica steps out and sees a frozen street of light crossing Salem Avenue, snow on the ground everywhere. On the very same day Monica finds the air exhilarating: spring in the spaces that open: not everywhere, but in those spaces an exhilarating feeling “as if it were June”. An old man, walking very slowly in the snow with his cane, has no idea where he is. Monica borrows a car, drives him to where she assumes he lives (an old age home a few blocks away). Lost because of the way snow has re-drawn space? A fat green bird in her neighbor’s hedges. Hedges have asparagus-shaped buds, dark at the core. As the day wears on snow is disappearing, earth of the yard becomes moist and visible to Monica looking down at a shallow angle from the back window. From here, buds appear furry. It’s reported that January ’76 was one of the coldest Januarys on record: the fourth coldest in the past fifty years, average temperature 27.5 degrees, 4.8 below normal. Also: the usual January thaw was shorter than normal (lasted only two days). On the 26th, when the temperature reached fifty-four, and on the 27th when it reached fifty-six, there was a record rainfall of 1.84 inches. Pat Czorny has a pregnant friend staying with her in the attic apartment in the Salem Avenue house. Friend is eighteen but looks thirty or more. Born on welfare and still getting welfare, she’s applying for herself and the expected baby. All her sisters had children by the time they were sixteen. She waited until she was eighteen (a conscious decision because of her sisters?) to get pregnant. Pregnant girl’s mother worked all the time she was on welfare. Now Pat Czorny too is applying for welfare (for the first time?): links her miscarriage to a back injury in the hospital. So now she’s disabled, can’t work and owes two months rent. Pregnant friend is staying with Pat because she was paying thirty-five dollars a week for a tiny two room apartment with a shared bathroom and didn’t like living alone. (Helping pay Pat Czorny’s rent?) What else? Pat’s sister Janey is no longer living on ABC Street. Had to move because she was paying a hundred-and-seventy-five-a-month to live in a garage that was always flooded! Pat’s old girlfriend Linette’s boyfriend who used to work in the bank lost his job. Left his wife for Linette, but Linette is not well: might be liver trouble or might be kidney trouble, Pat’s not sure which — “never can be too sure with Linette, ‘cause she knows how to play the invalid game!” Monica finds a correspondence between snow and shadow: rapidly melting, still visible only where there are shadows. Eye takes in the landscape, and Monica has to stop and think to see that in all cases shadow comes to snow’s aid. Bah-Wah plays with her ball in snow as in sand: digs a hole, drops the ball in, digs deeper to get the ball out, drops the ball in again; uses both powerful front paws to throw snow or sand backward and so on, until she gets bored.
On Thursday February 5 a card from Nelson Richardson of Coda: “Dear Monica and David, Cheri showed me your ideas about readings employing visual-verbal work and I wonder if I could see a photo of your Space Novel event or one realization of it, or something else you’ve done, for use in an article on visual poetry for Coda? Sincerely, Nelson Richardson.” Seems logical to Monica to call Mikki to ask for Space Novel photographs (The Blue Hangar, As It Returns and 12 Simultaneous Sundays) because it’s her memory that Mikki had taken photographs at all three events. Others had taken photographs, but Mikki had taken several proof-sheets-worth and hers were bound to be the most professional. Also seems logical to Monica that getting credit in Coda would be pleasing to Mikki and might be useful in her effort to become a professional photographer, but, instead of welcoming the idea, it makes Mikki angry. Resents the implied criticism. What implied criticism? Says she hasn’t been in the darkroom for ages. She’s aware herself, without anyone reminding her, that she should have gone in, but she hasn’t. Has been busy working on her relationship with Marsha. But, Monica says, Mikki has made it clear that Marsha is young — a young twenty-one — with many dark problems. . . and that Mikki’s obsession with her also has a darkness to it. . . . Conversation ends in an argument. A letter to Monica from Elsie in Florida. Seems Elsie had only been in Florida for a week when Kitty called to say she met someone. She’s been dating someone and it’s serious! Monica also hears from Wanda Baer who bumped into Kitty on a Manhattan street: nothing about the new, serious person she’s dating, only that Kitty was wearing exactly the same hideous blue ski jacket that she (Wanda) used to wear! Monica, in the black leather and molded plywood swivel chair (the “Eames” chair now found everywhere?) in the Salem Avenue house, is watching snow fall through the front windows. New snow. Snow without wind. Snow that gathers before Monday’s blizzard-like snow has had a chance to completely dissolve. Snow that’s thick on the ground by two p.m. Veil of snow. White snow that falls from grey skies. Continues to fall into the night (fog horn sounds through it and is also slow, thick and muted). Snows from one end of winter to the other. On Friday February 6 in daylight, the lilac bush is thick with snow and it seems to Monica that the lilac buds, vivid against snow falling into continuous plane of snow, are the first green of the year. Snow stays on the ground for days (four inches or so). Kept from melting by the cold. Winter Olympics on tv: sun shining on snow in the Austrian alps. (Before Monica was a chronicler she and David spent a summer in Innsbruck and Vienna.) Later in the day snow grows hard with cold yet sometimes a clump of it falls with a thud from the roof; while inside Monica enjoys a hot and spicy bowl — a beautiful silvery white but not snow-like — of Hot and Sour Fish Broth (from what Chinatown restaurant not noted). On February 9, working in the Salem Avenue backyard, snow is melting but still thick in spots. Monica observes (hearing or seeing?) increased bird activity. (That is, enough activity for birds to be noticed.) Brown hedges dried to red all along their tops made visible by sunlight. Card from Nelson Howe addressed to The Ascher/Straus Collective. “Elections, Xerox grant and other biz at the PPF meeting, ‘The Brook’ 40-42 West 17 (8th floor) at 7:30 p.m. Wed. February 11.” Is it also on February 9 that buds are growing fatter, hedges golden and dripping? On Saturday (February 7, out of order?) two Bunuel films, Nazarin and Death in the Garden, are in MOMA. Monica only notes that Nazarin has something in common with Viridiana. Doesn’t spell out what, only that Nazarin ends with the ironic image of a pineapple: fruit that wears a crown of thorns and that’s difficult to eat. The Christ-like title character and the woman who’s been traveling with him like a disciple are back where they started. Nazarin’s realization is: that he’s accomplished nothing. At 5:40 on February 10 Fayette Hickox of The Paris Review telephones to postpone lunch scheduled for the thirteenth: “George is leaving for California sooner than expected, then on to New Zealand”. When Fayette called Monica and David had just started looking over THE BLUE HANGAR Space Novel (with The Paris Review interview and portfolio in mind), sitting in chairs surrounded by snow in the Salem Avenue backyard. Sun on snow at noon gives Monica a piercing headache: a headache that enters through the eye. * It seems to Monica that February 11 is in itself, taken as a whole, an opening in winter, but why? Will cataloguing what she sees be the same as figuring it out? Winter light on and reflected off snow in the Salem Avenue neighbor-to-the-west’s backyard reflected through criss-cross beams of neighbor’s fence makes a criss-cross shadow-fence on snow of the Salem Avenue backyard. Melting snow in hedges yields pearly light. Beads of light in hedges yield drops of water. Sun (from snow?) burns through wooden slats of venetians. Shadows are complex: shadows of wooden fence-beams are thick and these thick, crossing shadows cross the dark shadows of hedges probably built up out of the long or fine shadows of branches, twigs, pine needles. Is it in the sharp lines of the open spaces in these dark shadows that Monica finds the opening in winter (or in winter light)? Melting snow continues to fall in clumps from rooftops. More than one conversation (also on February 11?).
Aunt Em (vacationing in Florida) calls to say that she’s worried about Cousin Vince, in Guatemala when the earthquake struck, thirteen thousand dead at last count! Vince saw terrible things and he’s shaken up. Aunt Em is never quite sure why Vince goes to South America as often as he does, what exactly it has to do with business, but he was in the thick of it and saw terrible things. . . . Margo calls to tell Monica that she got into medical school. (Tone is uncommonly bright and perky.) A little surprised that Margo thought of calling her with the news, Monica asks who else Margo’s called. Idea seems not to have occurred to Margo and she has no answer. Did she call Kitty, for example? (Kitty, Monica’s sister, is Margo’s therapist at this moment and both Margo and Kitty are patients of Dr. DaVinci’s: on different orbits, but within the same galaxy.) No! she didn’t call Kitty! Why should she? Kitty wouldn’t care. Kitty is cold! And so on. Margo sounds like Margo, as always. Mikki calls: seems she also knows someone in the thick of the Guatemalan earthquake, a woman named Trina who’s still there (reason not given or not noted). Not astounded that Kitty is getting married in May, but is astounded by who she seems to be marrying. From what she knows about the guy he’s no different than a hundred guys Kitty could have married when she was twenty! Why wait all these years to marry someone like that?! And, if she’s not wrong, Kitty did date — did almost marry — someone exactly like that way back when it might have made some kind of sense! She should have gotten it over with then and saved herself the trouble. . . . What else? She had an odd experience. Once in a while — actually pretty often — she gets a craving for the food at the Pink Teacup. Loves their hot chocolate, bacon and tomato sandwiches, etc, and the food is good enough to make you ignore the fact that place is a disgusting steambath of smells. Sitting at the counter recently eating a bowl of soup (what kind?), her favorite bacon and tomato sandwich plus a hot chocolate when she noticed that the man sitting next to her looked familiar. Knew it was someone she knew but didn’t know. Someone she’d met a long time ago, not really someone from her own life, someone she knew through someone else. . . . Paid attention to him. He was eating something not too many people order — a plate of kidneys. (Other stuff on the plate, no idea what.) What about that would make it dawn on her that she was sitting next to Graham, David’s older brother, who, as far as she knows, no longer lived in New York? And what does it mean that back to back, the very next day, she ran into Wanda Baer at the same counter! Surprising because she didn’t know Wanda ate at the Pink Teacup. Would be found eating at a smelly dump like the Pink Teacup. But, beyond that, it seems to Mikki that there’s a meaning to the fact that she ran into both Graham and Wanda there. Thinks it means that despite having no resemblance or anything obvious in common, there must be something shared by Wanda and Graham that relates to eating at the Pink Teacup. Something, but what is it? Could name a few things, but Graham is so much older than Wanda that it doesn’t seem fair to assume that what’s true for him will be true for her. Tendency to drift from one thing to another, to talk without what you’re talking about ever amounting to anything. Can’t say that for sure about Wanda yet. This also: Mikki knows that Monica’s mother Elsie paid a visit to Mikki’s mother Beatrice in Florida and that she stopped to look at photographs of Mikki when she was married to Alan and things looked normal (photographs of the two of them together with the girls). Elsie, of course, was curious and asked a lot of questions. Heard (what she must have already heard a dozen times) about how successful Alan was (and still is) as a soybean executive and that made Elsie wonder even more about the official story she was being told. If all that her mother (Beatrice) was saying was true — about Alan being so successful and so nice, etc., and the pictures looking so normal — why did she (Mikki) leave all that? Why would anyone walk away from all that without a good reason? Mikki could tell from the way her mother told the story that she knew that Monica’s mother found Mikki’s mother’s version of Mikki’s story unbelievable and had managed to make her mother uncomfortable. Kitty calls to talk about her future husband Hap (“Happy”) Huntington Blank. When Hap first heard her voice on the phone he knew she was the one for him. Called Elsie in Florida, in fact, and announced to her and to assorted relatives who happened to be there: “I want you to know that as soon as I heard Kitty’s voice I said to myself ‘This is the one for me!’ ” (Kitty laughs uncomfortably — is flattered by it, but finds it a bit nutty — and also probably reflects what must have been Elsie’s attitude: may have laughed, but already beginning to wonder and to think of questions that make you squirm.) Another story: Kitty ran into her old friend Norma. Old friend from radical, political days. Hadn’t seen one another in a while. Took a look at each other, didn’t like what they saw and said so: what happened to you? you lost weight, your hair used to be wild and curly, now it’s short and straight, you look thin and conventional — what happened to the radical woman I used to know? Etc. Norma was even worse: hair in a permanent! But then Kitty had to tell her about her engagement to Hap. . . . On approximately February 11: snow in Blanche’s (neighbor-to-the-west’s) backyard is melting. Four inches melt in one day and soak into the earth. Despite melting snow and a heavy rainfall there are still white patches: snow in deepest shadow? Sodden earth of Blanche’s yard can’t absorb further melting. Lilac buds and forsythia buds are ripening on the Salem Avenue house’s front lawn and buds in Blanche’s yard that are nothing but fuzz now will bloom into outsize pink flowers (magnolia?). Rain on the windshield as Monica parks Alyosha’s car and just a little later silvery light on the ocean, aroma of suspended moisture in the air. Monica sits on the boardwalk breathing in soft breezes that may even be springlike while Bah-Wah plays with a shell, digging with demented joy in sand as in snow.
Nelly X passes on her way to pick up Jimmy (from what and for what?). Nelly X has stories to tell (though, as always, they’re a bit vague and have to be pinned down). Leila X (eldest of the three X sisters and the one Monica and David know best and have always been closest to) is in town. Why? Because Ma is ill. Ill in what way? She fainted and immediately decided to go up to Columbia Presbyterian (where the whole X family goes when ill) and headed for the subway station on AAF Street. Nelly wanted to stop at Ma’s apartment at the corner of ABC Street and the boardwalk to pack pajamas in case the hospital decided to keep her overnight, but Ma refused. Refused because? Nelly laughs (in her vague yet whinnying way) and thinks and says, well, Ma refused because she refused. Because she’s stubborn. Said no and then got stubborn about it. And besides, Ma said she didn’t have a clean pair of pajamas to pack! Nelly continues on along the boardwalk while Monica heads down ABC Street, past the ancient yellow brick apartment building where the X family has always had a large corner apartment on a low floor. Hears Leila X’s voice calling her through an open side window. Has more to tell Monica about Ma and much more clearly, with more detail than Nelly did. They kept Ma in the hospital longer than overnight. She’s there now and has been for days: diagnosed her as anemic and suffering from diverticulosis, exactly the way Ma had diagnosed herself. (Laughs — enough like Nelly that you’d know she’s her sister, but with an extra dose of something wilder yet more syrupy, further inward, deep in head and throat — over the fact that Ma diagnosed herself correctly, after fainting and while hurrying toward the subway.) Doctors say that she only has half her red blood cells. It’s hard for Leila to talk: Ma told her not to visit because there are all sorts of things you can catch in the hospital (it’s a big hive of disease, after all) but she wanted to go and sure enough she has a bad sore throat. Sipping hot coffee in sunlight (shadows of branches on yellow earth on February 11). A sparrow lands in a shadow and Monica notes that the sparrow’s grey-that’s-brown and brown-that’s-grey is the color of the shadows and also of the branches. Blue snow-shadows are gone, and now there are only sparrow-colored branch-shadows in dry winter grass. * Note from Larry Lille: “Dear Monica and Davey, “Sorry it took so long but this is the first letter I’ve written in the past six months and now my pen is running out of ink. I did enjoy your visit though, if you get the chance drop by again. Larry.” Charcoal grey bird lands on darkest shadow on grey cement near old outdoor shower stalls or more to the side (west) by the clotheslines strung between plumbers’ pipe sunk into paving blocks. Monica notes that bare spaces in the hedges are becoming more filled with bird-life. Also: red. Red buds on branches are swinging in sunlight against a blue sky and at about four the moon is the color and texture of soft clouds. Where is it that cold breezes are blowing through a circle of hot sunlight? Late in the afternoon of the eleventh Wanda Baer calls but what she has to tell Monica never gets told (or never gets recorded) because Monica is in a bit of a hurry to get to Manhattan for a PPF (Participation Project Foundation) meeting at The Brook. Ray Pierotti (who, Monica notes, lives at the intersection of Grand and Green) is already at The Brook with Nelson Howe and it seems to Monica that what they’re wearing is oddly similar. Isn’t the same but is. Both in corduroy pants, shirt with vest, leather jacket. But different in a number of ways: Nelson’s corduroy pants are purple, Ray’s are tan; Nelson’s jacket is long black smooth leather, Ray’s even longer suede (color not noted); no description of shirts or vests. So: purple and smooth black leather for Nelson, tan and (what color?) suede for Ray, but with an over-all effect of similarity on greeting them. Nelson Howe has a story to tell: he’s finally stopped teaching. Working something out so he’ll be collecting unemployment. But that’s not what’s important: he and Linda (last name not noted) and another woman have gotten an act together using karate and other martial arts and his manager is confident and optimistic about the salability of the show. Says that (according to his manager) even if it doesn’t work out theatrically there’s a demand for such performances in universities and they can travel around the country to one university after another and get a thousand dollars a show. Describes one of the highlights: Linda lies prone on broken glass, two hundred pounds of cinder blocks are piled on her stomach, he smashes them with a sledge hammer and she jumps up unmarked. Of course things do happen. Had a little setback just this morning in rehearsal: smashing the cinder blocks, chips flew off, grazed Linda’s forehead (cut it, actually), just missed her eyes — but did fly across a whole row of teeth. Destroyed one of the front teeth, so they’ll have to deal with that before they can get started. . . . After the PPF meeting Monica and David pay another visit to Nicole Renard in her Washington Square apartment and this time find her in her nightgown, on the phone, making plans to spend the weekend in D.C. visiting her roommate Sandra’s cousin (no name). Monica thinks something could be said about the vagueness or maybe it’s the ambiguity of Nicole’s love life (at least as Nicole has ever spoken of it to Monica). Not that she doesn’t have a very real and active romantic and/or sexual life (the boyfriend Ted, for example), but it seems to Monica that she’s noted over the years a number of categories of ambiguity (that is, lacking in immediacy or definition): relationships a) that are long distance; b) in which she’s “the other woman”; c) in which she denies sexual or even romantic involvement. There’s something else that Monica’s noted over the years that makes some, not all, of Nicole’s relationships with men hard to define — always in a light, even absurd way, never in a dark way — but Monica can’t name it. Off the phone, Nicole says that she’s liked (does she say “been involved with”?) Sandra’s cousin (name not recorded) for a long time. They’ve always liked each other, but that’s all. The cousin had been living with someone, but now she’s left — and that’s why she’s going to D.C. (For a second Monica waits for more, but there is no more because it isn’t in Nicole’s nature to inspect her reasons for going to D.C. any more closely.) Nicole Renard has a surprising number of stories to tell about the Coffins and Forests. Her closest relationship among all the Coffins and Forests — the whole galaxy of Babette, Greg, Grete, Andy, Lena, Tina (Martina) Lima (Grete’s daughter from her first marriage to Tony Lima) and little Hank Forest — is with Tina: they have “total communication”. Monica can’t help wondering if that means that Martina (Tina) Lima is the source of some of Nicole’s amazingly detailed inside information about the Coffins and Forests. Greg Coffin is involved with another woman and it seems serious. There’s no doubt about it, yet Lena doesn’t have a clue. Greg was bored with Lena and Grete is bored with Andy. Bored with Andy because Andy is boring. Gets on her nerves because he’s stupider than she is and also immature. Nicole thinks they’re living off two things: memories of the original sexual energy (which was great) and the fact that Andy is not at all bored with Grete. Thinks that Grete is still a goddess to Andy while Andy is obviously no god to Grete. Grete’s main involvement right now is with little Hank and maybe that’s what always happens to the energy between people when they have children. Grete and Babette are not getting along. They love each other, but the way house is divided — Babette alone in the big apartment upstairs and Grete, Andy, Tina and Hank in the little apartment downstairs — is an impossible situation. The truth is that Grete has never moved out of her mother’s house. When she married her first husband, Tony (“Lima Bean”) Lima, she was living with Babette in Forrest Hills and then Tony moved in. Grete always threatens to move out of her mother’s house but never has. What else? Nicole is bubbling over and Monica is trying to pay close attention (remembering while listening). Babette is involved with a married man. That’s positive, but other changes she sees in Babette are not. Aging? Nicole doesn’t like that explanation. Doesn’t think aging has to be that way. A stagnant, provincial life is more to the point. She (Nicole) is only twenty-one, but with “a thirty-year-old head”, and feels comfortable giving fifty-six-year-old Babette advice. Babette and Grete lead a provincial life and it’s even more disappointing in Grete. There’s no reason Grete couldn’t spend time in Manhattan, stay at her place, start to experience new things. . . and then in ten years, who knows? But she doesn’t do it. Stays at the beach with boring Andy: younger than her, and even younger than that because he’s immature, content to practice with Greg and the band, build something every-once-in-a-while, go fishing, smoke pot. . . . He’s happy that way but Grete is not. She knows for a fact that Grete would be open to a freer relationship (she and Andy allowed to explore other relationships), but there’s no way Andy could handle even the thought of Grete with another guy. Laid back as he is, who knows how nuts he might go. Nicole herself has observed Andy’s non-stop pot smoking and Grete complains about it (how docile and dull it makes him). So Tina tells her things, Grete tells her things, Babette tells her things and Greg talks to her just as freely as Grete and Babette do. . . . Later, when Sandra, her brother Gary and two or three other friends arrive, Monica again has the feeling (occurs to her only now that she had this feeling, but less so, when she visited Nicole and boyfriend Ted and all her blond/blonde friends were there) of being a somewhat invisible guest at a pre-teen pajama party. Good-looking young men and women together in an apartment, yet a noticeable absence of sexual tension. A little like a scene in Little Women, where all the girls are sisters and pals and all the boys are beloved, next-door-neighbor Jaimies. And at the center of it all beautiful caramel-and-honey Nicole Renard in her nightgown, more of a Little Women cotton night-dress than anything hinting at bed or bedroom, but still . . . . Nicole’s relationship with Sandra’s brother Gary is ambiguous (or at least puzzling or confusing to Monica). Seems to Monica that Nicole implied, late in her last visit, that there was some sort of ambiguous “involvement” between herself and Gary, but tonight she goes out of her way to make it clear that there isn’t. One reason for the ambiguity: Sandra works at The New School and Gary is a student at NYU, so it’s not unusual (right now, for example) for him to sleep-over at Sandra’s. Sometimes stays for days. Takes classes at night, sleeps in by day and can’t sleep in Sandra’s “bedroom” which of course is also the apartment’s livingroom — particularly because Sandra’s friends/girlfriends are often sleeping there — so he ends up sleeping in Nicole’s room. Seems to Monica an unavoidable conclusion that one way or another he sometimes “sleeps with” Nicole, but the actual nature of what happens is left deliberately ambiguous. Monica’s last image of the evening in Nicole Renard’s apartment is of Nicole at her breakfast table, wavy hair (exact shade of chestnut or honey at that moment not recorded) loose, arms bare and tan in conservative cotton nightgown, sipping brewed tea, smoking a cigarette and answering a call from a guy in New Jersey who’s interested in her and who she thinks she sort of likes. On the way home Monica and David stop at Lin’s Garden to take out Suey Kow soup and soy sauce chicken. If on Friday February 13 Monica, working in the Salem Avenue backyard, notes that sun is shining, air warmed to fifty degrees, yet earth is still black and sodden, and on February 16 it’s sixty degrees and she’s in MOMA again to see Bunuel’s Exterminating Angel and Simon of the Desert, what day is it (date not noted) when she finds it too hot to work in direct sunlight in the Salem Avenue backyard, while bare hedges welcome sun’s heat and soak it up? In order to work outdoors she has to move into the shadow of the hedges with a view into neighbor-to-the-west-Blanche’s yard where, two weeks ago, a blizzard smashed a fence to splinters. Is it the same day or another that red buds on branches are swinging in sunlight against the wooly blue of the sky? Softness and wooliness of blue impedes their swinging? At about four on that afternoon (date not noted) moon is again the color and texture of soft clouds. Snow has stopped but snow narrative is continuing. On the same day or another Monica is indoors doing something with the tv on. Snow is falling there, on tv, in the Alps. Bright colors of the clothing of Olympic skiers. Seems to Monica that it’s on another day altogether that Mikki tells her about getting together with Wanda Baer and Marsha or when Monica’s actually in the presence of Mikki, Wanda and Marsha sitting around a table (where?). Mikki is using tiny bits of information to analyze or compare-and-contrast a number of friends and/or lovers: Dee (someone Monica hardly knows) is defined by her love of power; Marsha (Mikki’s lover and Mikki’s current obsession), who went to a small college in Louisiana, combines (according to Mikki) Mikki’s “openness” and Frederique’s “containment”. Marsha may seem shy (laughs too much) but “moves into the fire” and melts there while she (Mikki) and Frederique are not melters (move away from the fire). Monica knows, even at the very moment of listening, that Mikki’s analysis may not survive a week or even a day, depending on what Marsha does tomorrow. On an undated day in mid-February wind springs up around 11 a.m. in the Salem Avenue backyard. Wind moves along the face of the hedges, rustling golden light from dry twigs. Earth still moist and dark yet, at the very tops of the hedges, Monica makes out (but can’t explain) the thinnest possible tissue of white. Rules out budding. Light and moisture form a layer that holds together but has no substance. Transparent as glass, thin as tissue without the substance of glass or tissue. (Something finely web-like suspending a transparent sheet of moisture?) Observes the Salem Avenue backyard only because, after walking down ABC Street (where red buds are popping up in every front yard and garden), Monica decides to cancel a dental appointment and heads for Salem Avenue to do a good day’s work and read her mail (delivered early on ABC Street by Lou, the rolypoly mailman). Only mail of interest: a note and chapbook from Ralph Waldo Rice, another editor (with Larry Lille, Edgar Zacharias and others), of the alternative literary journal where Monica and David have sometimes published. Haven’t heard from Ralph Waldo Rice for a very long time or it’s possible they’ve never heard from Ralph Waldo Rice — until now, after having visited Larry Lille once or twice. Is it on the same undated day (while walking down ABC Street) that Wanda Baer tells Monica that she stopped Greg Coffin to ask why she hasn’t seen the beautiful and large African singer, Mirembe? Greg’s answer surprised her. He hasn’t seen Mirembe because he hasn’t been performing with her. “She decided to take a break,” is how Greg put it, but Wanda Baer didn’t think Greg was being honest. Not performing at all right now, with the band or solo. He’s working as a dispatcher for a car service. Wanda of course doesn’t really care whether Greg Coffin is playing the piano or working for a car service. She only knows this: she’s disappointed because she was attracted to Mirembe — to her body and her voice — and now there’s no way she’ll be seeing her again. And (also on the same day?) Lena (who seems to like to confide little tidbits of absurd information to David) tells David (while brooming the driveway?) that she’s trying to get Johanna into tv commercials and has been taking her to auditions. On a different undated day in February wind from the ocean is so sudden and strong in the Salem Avenue backyard that the beach chairs and snack tables where Monica, David and Bah-Wah had just been having their usual slow and pleasurable breakfast (in this case Boursin cheese with salt sticks and other rolls from the famous Peninsula Bake Shop on AAF Street, granulated-sugar-coated and raspberry-jelly-filled donuts, fresh and warm from Peninsula’s ovens, David’s strong coffee and heated cream), get blown over. David goes inside, but Monica continues to drink hot coffee in strong wind. Fog at 4 a.m. (moon visible through venetians). And, on the morning of Thursday the 19th, cold rain leads to a spring day and another outdoor breakfast. Monica steps outside early — way before David is awake — to the sunlight, unearthly breezes, buds sprouting everywhere of spring-before-spring. Later, David bakes two large pancakes in cast iron skillets for himself, Monica, Monica’s brother Lowell and Bah-Wah and they have an outdoor spring breakfast of David’s baked pancake, wild blueberry jam, strong coffee and cream. On the same spring-in-February day Monica mails Volume Two of Green Inventory to Dick Higgins for a review in Margins. * On the morning of a day in February that may be the 19th or 20th Monica walks from the Salem Avenue house to her apartment on ABC Street. Of many possible routes between one place and another she often finds herself choosing ABA Street because there are so many trees and front gardens planted there: what were hundreds of red buds a few days ago and then slivers of white in the red buds and then only yesterday a cloudburst of white here and there today becomes nothing but a universal blossoming of white flowers, red still there, but forced into the background. Back on ABC Street the first thing Monica notices is a bank of long chrome-yellow forsythia wands on the front lawn. Later in the day what will strike her more is the rattling of the ancient dormer windows from ocean winds blowing at that third-floor altitude (sound not heard while housesitting on Salem Avenue). And in the morning Al Szarka’s loud radio wakes David up (at what hour?). David raps on Al’s door to complain and Al (always angry, always about to bark) lowers the sound while cursing David and complaining about the noise David’s always making — promising to rap on David’s door next time — every time! — David plays his music, etc. Working on the wide front grey board porch (first full day back on ABC Street) the flow of ABC Street life doesn’t hesitate to resume its streaming through whatever it is Monica’s working on. Lou, the rolypoly mailman, has mail and news to deliver. Thinks he knows before she does that Monica’s sister Kitty (who’s been living in the ancient yellow brick apartment building at the ocean end of the street where the X family has lived forever) is moving. But Monica had already heard, not from Kitty, but from her mother Elsie in Florida (laughing because she found it ridiculous) that Kitty was moving back to Manhattan and somehow had gotten both Hap (her new boyfriend) and her old college boyfriend Malcolm to help her move! And another fact that Elsie finds odd or ridiculous: Kitty says that Hap is afraid to meet her! Greg Coffin’s band is practicing next door in the massive white-stucco-and-orange-brick multiple dwelling Greg and Lena live in with their children Johanna (Jojo), Joshua and Rosamond and 1, 2, 3, 4, maybe 5 or 6 tenants and own with Babette, Grete and Andy. Unusual for the band to practice next door instead of in the open garage of Babette and Grete’s “mother and daughter” at the ocean end of the street. Someone told Monica that they’ve put together a wonderful new band, but sounds to her exactly the same as the old band. From her position on the wide flight of grey board steps or from a porch rocker behind the tall Rhinebeck pine or from another chair behind the dense holly bush Monica hears the rasping (or croaking) voice (and corresponding silent voice?), booming as if amplified, of the Twins Twinning as they pass. “They get hurt. “They could hurt you. “They wait. “Stand around there? “They wait for you.” Eight blank seconds pass while their voices are absorbed by the dense branches of the Rhinebeck pine as they pass behind it. “Think I give a shit?! “He’s no good! Spoke to ‘m this morning. “He’s like moss! “Don’t we know this house? “Don’t we know the people in this house? “I know the people in this house a million years!” On Tuesday February 24 Pat Corcoran looks terrible: she’s gained weight when she was supposed to be losing it, face is broken out and chin and neck have an awful flabbiness. According to Pat it’s all because of Pepsi. They tell her not to drink so much Pepsi but she can’t stop and does it anyway. Not only the Pepsi she drinks now, but the Pepsi she’s drunk all her life. What else? Pepsi-drinking, bad back and a runaway dog. Last Monday Puff was in the backyard. She looked out, saw him (not sure how he got out there), called him to come in but instead of coming in he dashed around the side of the house, down the driveway to the front and down the block. Wanted to go after him, but couldn’t. She was ill (bad back dates from the time nineteen years ago when Philip was born and they gave her a spinal; word “spinal” sends Pat off on a digression about John who had some work-related problems a few years ago: she warned him not to get the spinal they wanted to give him, but of course he didn’t listen, got the spinal and went blind for a few weeks), she was home alone, so she stood on the porch calling Puff, but just had to let him go. They haven’t seen him since, Tim is heartbroken and she thinks that and her Pepsi-drinking have made her flabby, bloated and broken out. . . . Tales of misery on a breezy spring day in February. Pat goes in (door to the right of the porch is one of the two entrances to the Corcorans’ always deeply shaded groundfloor apartment) and Monica goes back to writing about the bush at the intersection of ABA Street and Salem Avenue that seems to flower before all others: now that its furry buds have opened it should be more beautiful but it isn’t. Made the mistake of crossing the street? What had been only slivers of white from a distance (had to spend time contemplating them to see them and to enjoy the subtlety of their early near-blossoming against a blue sky) up close are something else altogether. Accidental beauty clotted up or fell apart as she approached. . . . And then later, typing upstairs, rose petals fall onto Monica’s desk as the typewriter carriage moves and jostles the vase (notes don’t say what it looks like or is made of) holding roses. Bright pink of rose petals against dark green of avocado leaves. Is the bright pink of rose petals against dark cucumber-peel green of avocado leaves “electric” or is there a better word for what should be a soft and mild color but isn’t? Word that describes the color-energy that vibrates aggressively in the eye? Types for a while, then reads the mail delivered by Lou, the rolypoly mailman. “I’m still acting as the go-between for my guest editors doing the anon issue. Brian Swann, who accepted your Double/Profile for #36 with much pleasure, suggested I ask you if you’d care to add a piece on your system of collaboration. I agree with him that it would make a very lively and provocative article on the moods and mechanics of two writers working in tandem: the genesis of ideas, the problems involved, the techniques, etc., etc. Neither of us can recall seeing something on this order. And if it has been done, there’s still room for expatiation on this intriguing topic, and/or an original approach — not necessarily the cut and dried interview mannerisms of asking and responding. But, but . . . well, I’m groping. “Whatever your way is, it should make an interesting human and word-workers expression of how you feel about it and manage the feat. Please let me know what you think of the idea. “Best wishes, Sonia, Sonia Raiziss, ed. “P.S. read your long elegant story in the #64 Paris Review: fine work.” Sixty-two degrees on Wednesday and birds (suddenly more audible) sound different. Monica looks out her window, down into the needles of the Rhinebeck pine (a peculiar green that greets her every morning on ABC Street — dark pine green of course, but also a harder-to-name lighter green she thinks of as “ash green”) to locate the source of an unfamiliar bird song and sees a grey bird with a red head and red stripe down its back. Where is Monica when she sees kites along the horizon, blue, white and glossy? Is it then that she runs into Janey Hedges, who used to live on ABC Street but now lives on ACE Street (though still friendly with Al Szarka and Yvonne Wilding): pregnant, in her eighth month, once pretty, says she’s been ill and looks ill now, skin both pale and blotchy. A little later on the same day Monica meets Nora Salerno on AAF Street (local commercial street that runs from Salem Avenue to the boardwalk) returning from a “luncheon” with Peggy Quinlan, Peggy’s ninety-two-year-old mother May, Ellen Garvey and her mother. (Wiry and strong as any pioneer woman, with thinning red-in-black or black-in-red hair, Ellen Garvey raised five daughters (without much help from the always-absent, handsome firechief husband) in a neat, always-freshly-painted three story frame house across from (maybe one or two houses south of) the white frame attached house where Peggy Quinlan lives. Peggy Quinlan is a handsome woman with an erect bearing and pale gold or white hair who keeps to herself, smiles a warm hello to Monica when Monica passes her sitting against the white front wall of her house with her elderly mother under a green awning, somewhere in the background a husband Monica can never picture. Ellen Garvey and Peggy Quinlan have stories to tell and Monica isn’t perfectly clear in her notes whether each one tells her own story or if they help tell each other’s story. a) Ellen Garvey’s mother and Peggy Quinlan’s mother come from the same part of Ireland (which part not told to Monica or not noted). b) Elizabeth, Ellen Garvey’s next-to-oldest daughter, is getting married in May. Someone comments that Ellen’s daughters have been getting married one by one, in correct, descending order! And someone else tries to count off how long it should be until Patty, the youngest and the fattest, nicknamed Twiggy, gets married. Someone else says that she knows for a fact that Twiggy lost wight and is thin, but somehow Twiggy still looks fat to her! c) Peggy Quinlan’s mother, May, is ninety-two, but there were other mothers at the luncheon who are only eighty-four. d) Ellen Garvey knew Peggy Quinlan before they rediscovered each other here. Ellen, Peggy and Peggy’s sister Cassia grew up together in the same neighborhood in the Bronx. Nora Salerno doesn’t have as many stories to tell as usual. She’d been feeling fine in spite of all the miserable, snowy weather, but now, the last few days, with the weather turning pleasant, she’s been feeling ill. What else? For some reason (purely geographic, because they live in the neighboring house to Peggy Quinlan’s?) Margaret and Daisy Brennan come to Nora Salerno’s mind and she talks about them instead of herself, her daughter Nancy St. Cloud or anyone else connected to her directly. Wants to know if Monica knows that little Daisy Brennan has chronic rheumatoid arthritis and wonders if that’s something Daisy will outgrow — or if it will flare up dangerously all her life. Wonders also if Monica knows that Daisy’s mother Margaret Brennan has a hole in her heart that could kill her. Mikki calls to say that she’s worried about Frederique. Winter classes at City College have been cut back to next-to-nothing (cut out altogether?) so she’s teaching only one course at The New School, will have to sublet her Chelsea apartment and go live and teach in some godforsaken town out on Long Island. Anxious about money, worried and fatalistic as usual and smoking heavily again. Killing herself slowly — enjoying killing herself slowly — and there’s nothing Mikki can do about it. At 6:30 a.m. on Thursday February 26 Monica can feel the day through closed windows: compelled to open them and, as soon as they’re open, feels on her skin what she was already experiencing mentally. Sensation on skin of course is different from what she already knew in her mind. Unseasonable softness and aroma can only be felt exactly at the instant the window opens and bright light opens inward with it. Monica puts her head out into the fragrant breeze pulsing south to north, breathes in the extraordinary day. Looks toward the ocean to the south (source of all sensation?). Voices of children from beach and boardwalk. Turns head to right (north), toward Coast Boulevard: Margaret Brennan’s landlord Alexi’s handsome oldest son, Matty, is leaning over the porch railing of his father’s house, cursing his younger brother because he did something to Matty's car. This is where Monica is on February 26 (at what hour exactly?): on ABC Street, working outdoors on the wide grey planks of the groundfloor porch of the big cocoa-shingle-multiple-dwelling. Alive, breathing in the extraordinary day, taking in the day with eyes, skin, hearing and wanting her writing to make her even more alive in the day, consciously not wanting the ordinary head-and-shoulders gesture of writing to bend away from the day. Not inward, not toward anything other than the day, can her writing make her breathe, see, hear, sniff breezes even more? She wants pen or typewriter, carried outdoors, to be instructed in how much she wants to be alive in the day (February 26). * All sensations on ABC Street are different from all sensations one-and-a-half blocks north on Salem Avenue. Here by the ocean air feels different on skin, smells different and so on, but there’s more to it than that and these other differences are hard to name. Why (for example), Monica wonders, should there be an odd sort of melancholy in the exhilaration of the day. (Because of the exhilaration of the day?) Sitting outdoors with pen and typewriter will the simple act of listing her sensations be the same as figuring out where they’re coming from? Let’s see: the fact that she’s sitting on the porch on ABC Street on a splendid day in February ’76 in itself has layers of experience in it: memory or exterior memory in the fact of living here, with this precise aroma of sea air on a spring or spring-like day. Sudden, sharpened consciousness of bird-sounds seems new: a real arrival of birds suddenly migrating into consciousness? Seasonal layers in the air: this year’s moment of being alive brings to life another year’s moment of being alive. Therefore to be in the thick of it, to breathe the day deeply, is to be moved by the living memory of having breathed air in this place at this time of year before. Is that it? Events that happened one or four years earlier are being breathed again? Monica continues with her list that explains everything or nothing. Let’s see: at about 11 a.m. Monica, writing on the porch, saw a mourning dove. David, who’d also been writing outside (somewhere screened off from Monica’s view by shrubbery or an angle of the house), went inside for a glass of orange juice. Seconds after he left Monica spotted — in a pine (really more of an overgrown evergreen shrub) not far down the block (toward ocean or boulevard not noted) — a large (pigeon-size?) lavender-grey or rose-grey, subtly shaded bird. Certain it was a mourning dove, but doesn’t note whether her certainty was based on having heard a mourning dove’s unmistakable sound, so deep and quiet in the throat it stays in the woods, but just a little more daylit, a little closer to wherever you are, than the sound of an owl. Is it the sight or the sound of the mourning dove that moved her and continues to move her? Is that what’s melancholy in the exhilaration of the day? She knows that she feels the desire to keep experience in the present: mourning dove in neighbor’s overgrown evergreen shrub, not a lingering sound-memory of a day in Spring ’73 when she was acutely conscious of the sound of mourning doves just before and/or just after she and David learned that Monica’s friend, David’s friend and even-more-so Kitty’s friend, Agnes, had committed suicide while studying for her Ph.D. at Princeton. It happened when Kitty lived in Manhattan (one of the reasons Kitty moved from Manhattan to ABC Street) and while Monica and David were writing Green Inventory (their earliest attempt to convert the Chronicle into something other than itself: in this case, novel-length volume trying to use visual/concrete language design, but to take a step beyond design toward something systematic: where on the page (in what quadrant of the page) something is written also assigning significance. Tried this idea in Green Inventory and in some other “chamber” fictions, then tired of it, as usual). David comes back outside. He’s skeptical and Monica finds his skepticism irritating. He thinks it’s unlikely to see a mourning dove in February. Thinks they return with other birds in March. Monica doesn’t think they leave at all. Doesn’t think they migrate. It’s the other birds, the ones that are flocking back in exaggerated numbers, who migrate and usually return in March but are appearing today. David starts off down the block toward Coast Boulevard (therefore it was toward Coast Boulevard (north) where Monica spotted the bird earlier?) to find the bird and settle the argument. After a little while Monica hears David calling her name from what seems like a long distance: there he is, near the corner of ABC Street and Coast Boulevard, looking up at a bird a little too big for its perch on a telephone line and rocking a bit. “It is a mourning dove. . . !” Voice travels clearly on spring breezes, aloft on thermals. Lou the rolypoly mailman turns the corner and Monica joins David and Lou looking up at the wire. “What’s up?” Lou wants to know, hoping for a more interesting story than debating the identity of a bird. Clearly disappointed by what interests them. What difference does it make if it is a “mourning dove”? Might as well be a pigeon as far as he’s concerned is Lou’s good-natured shrug at the world. Monica notes that Artie Tilden (one of the second floor tenants) spotted her on the ABC Street front porch yesterday (date not noted) and started complaining. Stood there slackly, looking terrible. Longish red ponytail always makes his already too-small head look smaller and short nose adds to a somewhat compressed, cut-off or shrunken look. But yesterday he looked worse: eyes pouchy with an irritable brand of tiredness. Says that he’s twenty-four years old but looks in the mirror and sees someone much older. Is that what doing what you hate does to you? Only ranked “a five” in the post office, but could be — should be — an “eight” and doing exactly what he likes (working on post office machinery); but he overslept the day of the exam. “Overslept” is one way to put it. Truth is he came home stoned the night before the exam — forgot to set the alarm — or maybe he did set it — set it then shut it off again. Or not. No way to know. How is it ever possible to be clear about stuff like that? Could be one way or another. Tell ourselves we remember, but do we? Do we really? Really, really? “Lost in the fog.” Monica says that — without wanting to get psychological about it, without wanting to dig too deeply — does he think that — considering how important the job was to him — it was at all destructive to be lost in a fog that day? Artie Tilden seems to take offense. “Destructive?” No, not at all. No way. Says he’s a little amazed she’d ask that. That she’d use a word like that. That really surprises him. He’s not one of those types who sabotages himself. That’s way off. It’s just what happened is all. Life goes that way sometimes and we look for explanations and there are no explanations and there’s not much you can do about it. Monica has already registered (on what day?) the sudden, exaggerated arrival of birds this year. And today, February 26, at about 3 p.m., the chilly air is filled with them. (Not noted whether all one variety, several varieties or a wild mixture, and, if a mixture, which ones.) Is it the feeling of the air or the exaggerated chirping that pierces Monica with a seasonal sensation that may also be an emotion or a memory: a chilliness that smells like spring and an atmospheric energy that, if it were a human emotion, would be excitement. One sniff of this new air is like the apple corer that makes a twisting plunge through the core of time and through the self. “Life is changing. . . .” And what exactly is it that’s moving? On the strength of this sensation Monica relaxes back from her typewriter. It’s February ‘76 that’s being typed, but it’s being typed at eleven a.m., Wednesday June 23 on the ABC Street front porch. Monica’s carried her typewriter downstairs from attic to porch and is typing outside for the first time this year. Typing in the open air of summer is itself odd and wonderful, but there’s more to Monica’s sensation in the open air than the open air itself. . . as if every time she experiences a beginning (beginning of anything) the excitement of something absurdly cosmic is there. While typing on the porch and enjoying that to a degree she would find it hard to explain to another person (but which is essential to her pleasure in living and writing) she’s carrying with her another immense pleasure that might not be pleasurable to someone else: front room (that is, room fronting ABC Street) has just been freshly painted green (somewhere between mint and lime) and, because it was being painted, the room (largest of the three attic rooms linked by a long hallway) had to be emptied. Empty room, painted an unusual, vivid shade of green (a little like the impossible-to-describe living green blood of azalea leaves Monica and David have both always loved), old, irregular pine floorboards, sanded and stained, nothing but an enormous (cast-off from where?) oak table-that-will-become-her-desk carried in. Emptiness and freshness of green studio give her an absurdly cosmic excitement while typing on the front porch. Table/desk set under the dormer windows facing ABC Street: already sees herself there with papers spread out. Sitting on the narrow grey-painted bench in June ’76, typing February ’76. David brings her a tall glass of creamy iced coffee and a wedge of strawberry-rhubarb pie from the famous Peninsula Bake Shop. Little Rebecca Geiger appears from the Corcorans’ apartment, plops down next to Monica on the bench. “I know how to type!” Challenges Monica to get angry at her. Being thrown off the bench, or even off the porch, would suit her best. Tries to get her fingers on the keys to type random letters over the February Chronicle. Prevented, she says, “Ugh! Black ink is the ugliest ink! It’s no color and it’s an ugly color!” Shows Monica a four-color pen and begins to scribble wildly on a blank sheet of Monica’s paper. These are the colors she likes. . . ! Blond-blond Timothy Corcoran follows Rebecca out, angry that she’s using his four-color pen. Loves his four-color pen, uses it sparingly, doesn’t want to use up the little tubes of ink — and here’s stupid Rebecca Geiger grabbing it from his room and scribbling nonsense with it. . . ! His anger excites Rebecca Geiger. (Monica can see it in her flushed face.) Timothy sees it also (does he know that he sees it?), gets his skateboard and skates away down ABC Street toward the boardwalk. Nicole Renard slides up to the curb in her little green Saab, waves to Monica (who knew in advance that Nicole would be on ABC Street today) and parks next door, where Babette and Lena are conducting a “porch sale” on the small orange-stone-and-rusted-iron-guardrail first floor porch of Greg and Lena’s massive orange brick and white stucco multiple dwelling. Even before Monica came downstairs to work she saw Grete Forest on the next-door porch early in the morning helping Lena set up for the sale — and now they’re all there — Lena, Grete, Babette and even Nicole, though Monica has the impression that Nicole isn’t there to help with the sale: she’s carried a few items of her own from car to porch and is setting them out for Lena to sell. . . . Pat Corcoran spies Monica working on the porch (through open front door (June) or anytime of year from dark interior, through slats of wooden venetians, on the other side of one of three tall porch windows) and joins Monica uninvited on the bench. She has a breathless story to tell. Does Monica remember how, in January and February (face and voice just about pierce through the February Chronicle Monica is typing in June), Puff kept running off and then they’d find him? Lost him, found him, lost him, found him. . . ? Well, listen to this! Now, after all this time, they found him — Philip found him — but he’s absolutely lost and gone forever. This is how it went: as Monica knows, in June — or for the summer, actually — both Philip and Allison Meehan work over at Boggiano’s near the Funland Amusement Park. Philip took a break from opening clams and oysters — he was in the mood for an ice cream cone — so he walked the three long blocks from Boggiano’s on Coast Boulevard to the boardwalk and he was strolling along the boardwalk licking his cone when he ran right into some guy walking Puff! Knew it was Puff, not some other Lahso Apso, from his markings. And of course Puff recognized Philip and was yapping and jumping. There was a huge argument, but what could Philip do? Seems this guy was the son of one of the so-called gypsy fortune tellers on the boardwalk — and then the fortune teller came out and then the whole family and they all swore the dog is theirs, it’s always been theirs, it’s their family dog, Philip’s some nineteen-year-old kid trying to steal the dog that’s been in the family forever, the children all love this dog, blah-blah-blah. Patrol car came along. Philip had hold of the leash and wouldn’t let go and he’s hoarse from screaming and practically in tears. It was a mess. So Philip found the dog because he was in the mood for an ice cream cone and now because they know where Puff is they have to accept the fact that Puff is really gone for good and Philip feels like a failure and he’s depressed. So they figured the only thing to do was to go out and get Timmy another dog. Drove out to the Island and got him a huge dog, part Shepherd and part Elkhound — only three, four months old — so he’s a giant, but he’ll get bigger. . . . Anxious Lena Coffin and vague Nelly X come up the block from the ocean end of the street with Johanna (Jojo) Coffin and a girl (unknown to Monica) in a long, white dress. As always, Monica finds it hard to understand with certainty what Nelly X is saying, whether to someone else as she’s passing or even directly to her (Monica). Says something (to Lena?) about her son Jimmy helping “set things up”. That makes her laugh in her odd way, a throat sound that always borders on desperation, yet is so loose and shapeless it’s hard to tie it to any reason for laughing. Seems to be laughing about little Jimmy: “it’s his sixth birthday today!” Is it his own birthday party he was helping “set up”? Lena’s only reply is to ask Jojo if corn and liverwurst are ok for lunch. Summer sun: walking on Coast Boulevard in summer sunlight in February. Later Monica may again be typing the events of February ’76 in June ’76 (on the narrow porch bench), but no one in June calls out through February, no one puts her or his head through February’s window, walks through February’s door, presses fingers on February’s typewriter keys, typing over some of its sentences. . . . Not pulled into June (moment where she’s physically typing) Monica’s able to type herself back inside February and to be fully alive there. * On the beach (on an undated day in February) in breezes that feel like spring on her skin: blow with strength across skin, through wavy hair, yet leave green ocean smooth and unruffled. (Human body stands up into it; ocean lies down under it?) Runs into Nicole Renard and Grete Forest (little, solid Hank Forest a heavy weight on Grete’s back). Nicole says to Grete that Monica already knows how unhappy she is with her roommate, Sandra. And to both Grete and Monica Nicole says: before she wanted to move — now she needs to move. So she’s looking hard for an apartment. . . . Words “looking for an apartment” remind Grete that her mother — Babette — noticed (upstairs apartment of their house pretty much overlooks the yellow brick apartment building’s back entrance and driveway) Monica’s sister Kitty packing up her car — being helped load up her belongings by two men — as if she were moving out. . . . Grete has a story, or a story made up of many stories, to tell. Where to begin? Grete is not talking to Babette right now. And Tina, who doesn’t always agree, agrees with Grete that she doesn’t like the way her (Tina’s) grandmother is acting right now. Unlike Nelly X, who Monica would have to ask: what is it about the way Babette is acting that Tina and Grete don’t like?: Grete has a clear idea what she wants to say and seems to need to say it, as if her story has been cooking for who-can-say-how-long and is more than ready (overcooked?) to be dished out on the table. Grete doesn’t like — has never liked — the way her mother deals with her ex-husband (Grete and Greg’s father), Dean, a somewhat shadowy, seldom-seen figure. She doesn’t know all of the Dean-and-Babette story (hard to get the truth), but what she does know is this: when Dean came back to the States after WW II (a G.I. who hung around Europe after the war making money or thinking he could make money as a black market profiteer and who may have even been AWOL during the war) he didn’t look for work but put his young French wife (Babette) to work right away. Put an ad in the paper and hired her out as a domestic, even though she spoke no English. Nobody really likes Dean. Her mother doesn’t like Dean (but still has trouble standing up to him), she doesn’t like Dean (but she’s cool enough to keep him from knowing it), Greg doesn’t like Dean (not at all cool, he can’t help showing his hostility), Tina doesn’t like Dean (and doesn’t like the way Babette acts with Dean), etc. There’s a tangled story about money that’s more tangled than it has to be because she’s never been allowed to see more than a few threads of it. Some time (not clear how much) after Babette divorced Dean he set his sights on a wealthy older woman. (A wealthy old woman?) Or maybe not “wealthy”, just a lot better off than him. And after a while she accused him of cheating her out of a lot of money: twenty, thirty, fifty thousand dollars or more, Grete never knew exactly how much. It went to court and for whatever reason Dean won. She thinks there was a settlement and out of however much he was given he gave ten thousand to be shared between herself and Greg. It was made very clear that it was a gift, not a loan, but he must have gone through his money, because he’s hounding them to give it back. “I want my ten thousand!” “I need that ten thousand!” Over and over and over, with a zillion sickening variations. Worse and worse every month. And — because they won’t give it back (why should they? it’s theirs!) — can’t give it back (they don’t have it) — he’s after them every chance he gets to “work harder”. Not just her, not just Greg, but Andy and even Lena, who has nothing to do with his money and who’s raising three kids on very little income. “What do you do all day. . . ?! Get to work! Work harder! Get more jobs. Do whatever you have to, but pay me back my money!” And of course after a while Greg can’t control himself and shows his hatred. Grete wonders if Dean’s constant nagging has had an effect on all of them. For example: she hates to work in summer (has never outgrown her love of summer at the beach and everything that comes with it) but this summer she plans to work at her friend’s fish-fry place in Sheepshead Bay. She’d only do it a couple of days a week, but still. . . . It would be great if Andy worked full time, but the band has made that impossible. She thinks the band sounds better with the new singer. It’s a good band and she wants Andy to stay in it: she believes in the band, she believes in Greg and Andy, and, if you look at it objectively, the band is really all Andy and Greg know, it’s all they want to do and it’s all they can do, so if it fails. . . . Still, with the pressure of Dean’s constant nagging, Andy is auditioning Monday for a club in Brooklyn where he’d have a long-term gig. Greg has no intention of doing anything. Does play solo sometimes and occasionally gets hired to be the accompanist for someone famous and goes on tour and makes some money, but that hasn’t happened lately and things aren’t good for any of them. Her ex, Tony Lima, Tina’s father, gives next to nothing. Tries to provide a little support for Tina, but he’s re-married, has children and can’t afford much. Thinks Monica knows (did Monica know?) that they’re on welfare. On welfare, but get very little, not even enough to pay the rent, and have had to lie to get anything (they don’t know that she’s re-married). Lena was caught in a stupid lie. Claimed she was living with her mother-in-law, Babette, but obviously she isn’t. Wasn’t hard for them to find out that she and Greg own a house (even if it is a multiple dwelling that needs a ton of work, costs a fortune to run and hardly brings in anything), so now they’ve taken them off food stamps. . . . Andy needed to go to the dentist but couldn’t afford it, so he tried to apply separately for food stamps and medicaid — and was denied because he earns too much! Have to earn less than two hundred! It’s in the middle of all this that Dean keeps calling and saying “get a job! get more jobs! work harder! pay me my money!!” — and then there’s her mother, echoing Dean and reproaching her in front of Tina. You’d think language like Dean’s would never come out of her mouth, but it does. She desperately needs to move out — to get herself and Tina away from Babette — but she can’t. She tries to make it clear to her mother that their apartment is too small for so many people, but it doesn’t sink in. . . . She heard Tina telling Babette the other day that Hank wakes her up in the middle of the night. And it’s true that poor little Hank doesn’t sleep very well. He wakes up most nights and sometimes he cries or he’s had a bad dream and he’s angry or just making noise — and even though it only lasts fifteen minutes it seems a lot longer to Tina and it’s just not fair to her. She has her own room, of course, but still. . . the apartment is small and cramped and she probably hears every sound that’s made. How can that be healthy? And of course her mother pays lip service to it. Acts like she gets it. But there they still are, stuck downstairs, and there’s Babette, alone in that gigantic upstairs apartment. It’s hard for anyone — looking at it from the outside — to know how bad things really are. Lena drives up. She’s in a fury. Where’s Joshua? She wants to strangle him. Where is he? Her eyes are large. Her always tense voice is strung to the breaking point on its pegs. Just drove all the way to his stupid school (does he think she has time to waste? does he really think she has nothing better to do? that her life isn’t already squeezed enough?) — all the way to the stupid school and back because he told her — made her mark it on the kitchen calendar! — that there was a “special assembly” today and he was on the program — he was performing or giving a speech and he wanted her there — so she made time for it and she went — and he was wrong! He got it wrong! The special assembly is next week! A week from today! No reason to go there today! And now her day is ruined! So where is her idiot son so she can strangle him and get it over with. . . ! Goes off. Grete Forest says that Lena acting so nuts only confirms what she’s been telling everyone for months: they all (every one of them without exception) need to get back into “Mind Control”. It’s been three years since she was last in it and she definitely needs it again. Only six months since Babette’s been in, but she’s slipped back completely: very resistant, very stubborn and set in her ways: so as far as Grete’s concerned Babette’s back to where she was before (if not further) and probably needs Mind Control more than anyone. Even Andy, who’s so clear-headed and easygoing and uncomplicated and even has a good relationship with his parents, could use a little help under the circumstances. So he should go. Greg has no interest in it, but needs it and of course can’t afford it. She offered to send him there as a present — a couple of years ago when she had some money — but he said no and now when things are so bad that he might see the need for it she has no money and neither does he. So they all need it, but nobody’s going. On an undated day in late February Monica is driving Lowell’s car and parks it on ABC Street, between the Liman and Lenehan houses toward the ocean end of the street (ancient yellow brick apartment house, Coffin/Forest mother-and-daughter, Limans’, Lenehans’, sliding horizontally south to north from beach and boardwalk toward Greg and Lena’s orange-brick-and-white-stucco multiple dwelling and the cocoa-shingled multiple dwelling where Monica has her attic apartment and on toward Coast Boulevard) and runs into little, apple-faced Finnley Lenehan who has stories to tell and questions to ask. He wants to know if Monica knows that her sister Kitty moved to Manhattan: out of the ugly old apartment house to a brand new apartment house with a swimming pool. How does little Finnley know that Kitty’s new building has a swimming pool? Kitty invited him to visit and take a swim there! What else? Knows that his mother is upset about the envelope of her mother’s letters from Ireland that she can’t find and thinks she gave to Monica for her Chronicle. Finnley never even heard of his grandmother’s letters, but now, after Kitty moved without telling his mother where she was going, his mother remembered the letters and can’t stop talking about them. Finnley met Kitty’s new boyfriend, Hap: he sings Irish folk songs (sang them with his mother) and drives a Peugeot. Knows that he helped Kitty move (thinks an old boyfriend of Kitty’s helped her too) and these two or three things are just about all he knows about Hap or “Happy” so far. On the same or a different undated late February day Wanda Baer climbs the stairs to Monica’s attic apartment with a cellophane bag of French roast coffee beans (bought a big bag, decided to share it with Monica and David). Dark, profound and delicious fragrance (to Monica, not only the fragrance of the coffee-drinking moment and the rituals surrounding coffee making and drinking she observes in David, who’s addicted to coffee bean, coffee grinder, coffee cups (how many?) coffee aroma and taste, etc. (his favorite: a blend of Columbian Excelso and Ethiopian Djima he read about in one of the cookbooks he reads like novels, Roy Andries de Groot’s Feasts for All Seasons) to the point of worship, but also the aroma of New York warehouse regions where the fragrance of roasting coffee beans is in the air and in the stones as a dizzying, mouth-watering kind of soot) of darkly roasted coffee beans (bag opened to take a sniff?) in breezy sunlight in Monica’s green front studio. David’s not there, so no one to make coffee or breakfast and besides, Wanda Baer says, she’s in the mood for griddlecakes in the Cornucopia Diner! Truth is it’s not just the griddlecakes, Wanda has a story to tell or, more than that, a couple of difficult and confusing things have happened to her and she really needs Monica to help figure them out. Over griddlecakes, coffee, bacon and sausage in the diner, with it’s panoramic views — at the intersections of AAF Street, Salem Avenue and Bay Drive — of the bay and of oil-stained and expansive gas station plazas, Wanda says that she’s worried about her friend Dalia. One night Dalia woke up and realized she was alone in her apartment. Felt how alone she was. Why this time and not a zillion other times she couldn’t say, but her apartment didn’t feel like home. She thought: alone in this apartment and no one to hold. “ ‘I had to hold someone,' " Dalia told Wanda, " 'but I was alone — so I went into the kitchen and grabbed a plate. I wasn’t crazy, I knew that the plate wasn’t “someone”, but the need to hold someone (to be held by someone?) was so unbearable I had to do something (couldn’t do nothing). I held the plate tight enough to break it but it didn’t break.’ ” That story scared Wanda so much that she decided to spend a couple of nights at Dalia’s. While she was there Lowell called. Naturally, Dalia answered the phone. (Had Wanda Baer told Lowell she’d be staying at Dalia’s? Therefore Lowell obviously calling to speak to Wanda Baer? Or — what would puzzle Monica — does Lowell know Dalia? Know her well enough to be calling her? Monica doesn’t know the answer to any of these questions and is unhappy with herself for not thinking to get things clear with Wanda over griddlecakes in the Cornucopia Diner.) Dalia immediately started acting weird on the phone with Lowell. Laughing uncomfortably — nuttily — in the way that’s always a dead giveaway of all the miserable stuff you want to hide. Dalia’s clumsiness and discomfort surprised her. Afterwards Dalia’s explanation was that she just wasn’t ready to speak to someone like Lowell. Didn’t expect it and wasn’t prepared. Would need time to prepare for someone like that. Lowell is smart, asks a lot of questions, his questions are probing and he doesn’t accept bullshit as an answer. Wanda doesn’t get it. Wants to know a) if Monica thinks that Dalia told her the story about the plate just to get her to stay over; b) what “probing questions” Lowell could possibly have asked Dalia that would make her so uncomfortable; c) what was Lowell’s actual reason for calling; d) what’s wrong with Dalia; e) should she have been able to do more for Dalia than just stay there; was she just a little bit better than a plate? And, more than anything, she wishes Monica could help her figure out her confusing relationship with Lowell. What are they to each other? What are they to each other exactly? Neither one of them ever tries to define it and is she better off just leaving it that way? What else? The next morning Dalia woke up in a panic because she didn’t recognize her apartment. On February 26 Monica and David are having breakfast (bacon, eggs (whether scrambled or fried not noted and, if fried, not noted if sunnyside up or over easy), buttered toast done David’s way, sliced tomato and David’s strong coffee (David’s dark but not black, in his favorite Chinese rice bowl, Monica’s light and creamy in an unusually tall white ironstone cup she loves) at Monica’s big oak desk that’s now a table. Having breakfast in the ordinary range of breakfast hours or, more likely, late in the afternoon, after already having worked outside on the front porch. David remarks on the fact that Monica is the one who first drew his attention to the enormous white light of February. And here it is now, falling on the huge oak breakfast table that will spend most of its life as an enormous desk. Enormous white light of February falls on white hotel china plates of food, on coffee cups and bowls, on Monica’s papers already in enormous stacks and on her green typewriter with a sheet in the roller that so far only says THE MACOMBER AFFAIR. While they’re sharing a breakfast of bacon, eggs and tomato at the oak table they’re watching Gregory Peck and Joan Bennett sharing breakfast in a tremendous tent with a roof of leafy branches, walls of mosquito netting: the “dining tent” somewhere on the plains outside Nairobi. Monica and David don’t scribble down dialogue or sketch scenes while watching, but both watch and memorize in order to write immediately after: memory-on-purpose in order to remember = writing-before-writing. a) The Macomber Affair was directed by Zoltan Korda in 1947. Gregory Peck is Robert Wilson, the “white hunter” shepherding the bitterly unhappy safari couple, Francis Macomber (Robert Preston) and Margaret (Margo) Macomber (Joan Bennett). b) What is Gregory Peck’s flavor as an actor? So ideally handsome he might be carved out of walnut or maple. Does that make him a “wooden” actor? Monica thinks it’s more complicated than that. His deep and beautiful chest-and-head voice may convey the shades of unhappiness, the gravity of a beautiful wooden carving compelled to experience (and to express) human emotions, ethical conflict, to feel the burden of being Robert Wilson, for example, falling in love with acerbic Joan Bennett, married to the interestingly miserable big game hunter, Francis Macomber. c) Joan Bennett, Robert Preston and Gregory Peck (Margo Macomber, Francis Macomber and Robert Wilson) are having lunch in the dining tent. Peck says to Margo Macomber (trying to test her?): “that’s eland they’re serving you.” “You mean,” she says, taking another look at the steaming meat on her plate, “the large cow-ey things that jump like hares?” Wilson nods. “They’re not dangerous, are they?” “Only if one falls on you.” d) Also in the same scene, at lunch in the dining tent? “You do kill anything, don’t you?” Bennett asks Wilson in a different, harder-to-read tone of voice. “Oh yes,” he answers as if amused, “anything. Simply anything.” (Does she shoot him a look?) e) Eating breakfast in the enormous dining tent, listening to a lion roar about one mile upstream, Margo Macomber can see that Francis Macomber is having trouble eating and that he’s anxious, so she says as dryly as possible: “you’re not afraid, are you, Francis my sweet?” “No, it’s just that awful roaring.” “Rather impressive, I think,” she says in the same dry, unimpressed tone. “It went on all night,” he says irritably. “Oh really, darling? Why didn’t you wake me?” “Impressive, but I have to kill the beast!” “Well, dearest, that’s why we’re here, isn’t it?” While the Macombers are still eating Peck is already smoking a cigarette. Margo Macomber says: “I feel wonderful! So excited. . . !” A prodigious amount of useless activity with knife and fork. “Why don’t you tell Mr. Wilson about that enormous shark you caught, darling?” “Shark?” Preston to no one in particular and then to Wilson, “Don’t pay any attention to her.” “No?” “Well — my wife doesn’t always say exactly what she means.” “You shoot a lion, Francis,” she says sweetly, “and I’ll take your picture. ‘Francis Macomber with His Foot on A Lion’s Head.’ ” “The only thing that matters is us,” Macomber says to Margo Macomber with stupid urgency. “Yes,” she says, her “yesssss” drawn out to an impossible length inside the enormous, netting-walled tent. f) Margo Macomber, Francis Macomber and Robert Wilson are together again (whether inside the tent, at breakfast or dinner, outside in the jeep or on foot, hunting on the plains not far from Nairobi, not noted or remembered). “You don’t know what it does, Wilson,” Preston says ruefully (bragging?) "for a man to be constantly reminded that he’s married to a beautiful woman. . . .” “What it usually does to you, Francis, my sweet,” Bennett interjects with poisoned tenderness, “is what air does to a balloon.” And she starts to add: “Francis my pet, why?”, but the rest of the line is missing. g) Scribbled down just after the film — by Monica or David (not noted) — but not made clear who’s talking or in what setting, with what background, outside or inside, animal sounds or insect sounds by day or night, etc. Seems to be an unusually intimate, naked conversation between Francis and Margo Macomber, but no way to be certain. One of them says: “In many ways I think I’ve allowed you to live for me. Maybe I’ve compelled you to live for me. And then of course I’ve lived through you — by watching you, listening to you and so on. Sometimes it was even possible to imagine that I was speaking while you were speaking. Or that I was experiencing an emotion because you were experiencing an emotion. Have I been pretending to be alive, to be breathing. . . ?” The other (Joan Bennett?) answers with weariness. “Honesty. So-called honesty. Solves nothing. Why is it that what we call honesty always crops up at the end of things? Never, it seems, at the beginning. Maybe even less so in the middle — when it might do some good.” h) Joan Bennett is in her bathrobe, dabbing perfume behind her ears in the large, dark tent on the plains of Kenya. Takes off her bathrobe, walks across the expanse of the dark tent in her thin nightgown. (How do we know that Margo Macomber’s nightgown is “thin”? Does Korda backlight the scene just enough to give us a sense of Joan Bennett’s body moving inside the nightgown? Wants us to feel just a little of the acute consciousness Peck and Preston have of Bennett’s beautiful body when they’re in scenes with her?) Margo Macomber gets into bed and falls asleep. She doesn’t seem to notice that (distance between beds not noted) her husband Francis is sleeping fitfully. A night of anxious dreams: he manages to fall asleep, dreams of a charging lion, stays awake for a while in a state of anxiety, drifts off again and finds the lion waiting. Lion charges, roaring or soundless, without quite arriving. Wakes up again and again in a state of terror. How long has Margo’s bed been empty? Goes to the tent opening and listens for a while. Might be the sound of an enormous bird crying in agony. Cries out two, three, five, how many times? Or is it actually an unguarded and ecstatic human sound? He isn’t sure. Terror or something else. Joan Bennett returns, calm and relaxed. “Where were you?” Tries to sound stern, but his anxiety hasn’t left him. “Out for a breath of air, darling.” “Don’t give me that!” “Isn’t that what you want me to say, dearest?” “I won’t be spoken to that way!" (Too desperate to sound stern.) "I want to know where you were!” (Weaker.) “Out for a breath of air, darling.” “You think I’ll take anything, don’t you.” Meant to be bitter and challenging, but has no bite. “Yes, sweet, I do.” i) Light (or is it “first light”) of dawn on the gauzy surface of the enormous tent under a second roof of broad tree branches on the plains of Kenya. j) “Wasn’t that the damnedest ride?! It felt great!” Francis Macomber, flushed and confident after a successful hunting excursion (what he killed, what happened, not noted), to a subdued Margo Macomber during the jeep ride back to camp or already back at camp. “I hate you, Francis Macomber,” Bennett says quietly. “I know you do.” “For years — yes, for years — I tried. . . . ” “Yes, I tried too.” “For years I’ve hated you. . . ” “You wanted me to be a mouse, but things are going to be different now.” “So this is the sinister side of Francis Macomber.” They ride in silence or Preston’s reply is not recorded. The next words scribbled down by Monica or David are Joan Bennett’s. “I know just exactly how things are going to be different, Francis. For years I hoped something like this would happen to you. But, now that it has, I hate you more this way than the way you were before.” Monica and David aren’t certain, despite taking notes immediately after watching The Macomber Affair, one of them at the oak desk under the windows fronting (looking down on) ABC Street (west) and one on the front porch — or both downstairs but not together, always with a deliberately established circle of private space around her/around him) — whether k) or l), l) or k) needs to be first or second. Seems to them either order might work in different ways, though, on the other hand, re-viewing the film would probably restore a sense of inevitability to the flow of the narrative towards its conclusion. k) Robert Wilson is having a drink in one of those tropical bars that films of the forties (thirties and fifties too?) taught us to dream about as ideals of what exactly? Light (rest of line missing). Peck says to the attractive, wavy-haired young woman bartending: “a little of the same.” “A little of the same?” “A little of the same.” “A little of the same — what?” “Just a little of the same!” “Oh (as if just comprehending), your drink — your gimlet.” Monica’s notes say there were shots of the African plains here, but they don’t seem to belong. “Did you have a good hunt?” “Yes, very good.” (Unusually grumpy.) “Did you get all you wanted?” (Tone is suggestive.) “Maybe.” “And Mr. Macomber?” “Mr. Macomber?” “Last time he was in here with you he was drinking a lot. . . .” “I left him cold sober. . . !” “And Mrs. Macomber? Did she get a full bag?” “Look here! What are you driving at?” “She killed her husband! And you’re in love with her!” “It never entered my mind.” Seems to genuinely mean it. “It doesn’t have to enter your mind.” Peck’s expression not noted. Also not noted what shot the scene ends with. l) Wilson and Bennett are together (where?). Notes (not perfectly clear) seem to say that Wilson says: “he found out what it’s like to be a man.” “ ‘The short, happy life of Francis Macomber’,” is her reply. “Tell me: did you ever love him?” “Yes. In the beginning. We were married in 1937. He tried to hide his weakness with his brutality — the way he treated little people. I couldn’t change him: he changed me. I saw the buffalo in my sights and I saw Francis in my sights too. It was Francis I wanted dead. It was Francis I hated. So, maybe I killed him. If there’s such a thing as murder in the heart — you could say I killed him.” Another note about Kitty’s friend (and also David’s friend and a little less so Monica’s friend) Agnes, triggered by seeing (or only hearing?) mourning doves, adrift in the oceanic space of the Chronicle. That is, notes about the same event in time (something that happened on February 26 1976, for example) are not all necessarily recorded at the same time and can therefore be separated by many pages. Other events (a film, for example) intervene or simple forgetfulness submerges observation: keep it down until it pops up elsewhere. Monica makes an effort to record Agnes’s method of suicide: attached a vacuum-cleaner hose to the exhaust pipe of her car, ran it through one of the windows, rolled the window up against it (no further details told to her or recorded). Agnes’s suicide shook Kitty deeply. Inconsolable because she loved her (had been close friends since junior high school) and because she can’t be talked out of the feeling that she was insensitive to Agnes’s true condition. Can’t forget that she yelled at Agnes not long before her suicide. Not because she was angry at her, but because she thought she could shock Agnes out of her despair, breathe life into her. . . . But now Kitty is despondent herself. Feels she let Agnes down: obviously (Kitty says) whatever she gave Agnes was exactly what Agnes didn’t need. . . . On Sunday February 29 (leap year) Monica makes a plan with Wanda Baer: Monica has something to return to Wanda Baer (what it is not noted) and Wanda Baer is supposed to wait for Monica on the front porch. Supposed to be on the front porch, but isn’t. Space opens up for observation the way it always does when someone doesn’t show up, when we’re forced to wait for someone to arrive, etc. Monica might not have looked across the street, but does now: looks like an engagement party (name and location hand-written and illegible). Celebratory crowd of people in clusters. Throngs on lawn and porch — and there’s the halo of curly brown hair and large, pale and super-smooth face-oval of Wanda Baer’s head in the middle of it! Relaxed, laughing heartily, talking to a woman on crutches. Monica narrows her attention to a tight focus and can see that the woman on crutches is her cousin Linda, out of the hospital, out of bed and looking a little better, celebrating in warm sunshine. David joins Monica on the porch so they can begin to think of how they want to answer a letter from Chicago Review. “26 February 1976 “. . . . We liked IN DOUBT a lot, and plan to publish it. We expect to get it into the next issue (perhaps also with excerpts from Robbe-Grillet’s new novel; we’re still shifting space around and time for the next few issues). . . . “Do you have any preferences as to what should be in your contributor's note? If you want to provide your own short text we would probably run it verbatim. . . . It would be nice for it to be something other than a list of publications. For that matter — no, it probably wouldn’t work in a contributor’s note, but it is something we’ve been wondering — how do serious writers work in collaboration? Draft and revision? Alternate sections? Nothing so well-defined as that? By the way, if you have no strong objections, we’ve set up your names in full with an ‘and’, though I notice you have sometimes used surnames-with-a-slash. “We will be closing the next issue very soon, so please if you can give us a quick reply. . . . we like your work and wish you good luck. Best, Mitchell Marks.” Also on February 29? Monica and David travel to Manhattan to see Michael Snow’s film ‘Rameau’s Nephew’ Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen in MOMA. At home, the night of the film or the next day, Monica notes down the sequence that struck her most: dark surface covered with objects that are being shifted by left hand or right hand. Movements of left hand and right hand are narrated as we watch them and voice-over narration at first is perfectly synchronized with visual narration. After a while hand movements lag behind narration of movement: word and image are de-synchronized, creating a different kind of score — one that demands close attention and gives an odd sort of pleasure. After Rameau’s Nephew Monica and David share one of their favorite dinners (name of restaurant not noted, but the nature of the meal tells Monica that it might be Larré’s: moules remoulades, rillettes (an uncommon and delicious pork terrine with a coarse, shredded texture and an underlying smoothness), ris de veau (prepared how?) and vanilla-or-coffee-ice-cream-filled profiterolles in bittersweet chocolate sauce. On what day does David answer a phone call from Kitty intended for Monica? Kitty is in an agitated and angry mood. She’s confused about her feelings towards Monica! she says and wants — needs — Monica to come to a therapy session with her on Tuesday! David takes it on himself to say no, Monica won’t be able to do that. Not noted whether David and Kitty argue or whether Monica later objects to David’s intervention or welcomes it. A chill in the air in bright sunlight (therefore the chill becomes a property of the bright sunlight?). Passing cousin Jo Ellen’s parents’ house on ABA Street Monica sees Themis’s car parked in the driveway. Afternoon breezes after a morning’s stillness. On March 1 Monica wonders if winter is over for good: sun provides mild warmth for days and this mildness for the first time has a feeling of permanence (cold has lost the sharp point it would need to puncture through it).
Grete Forest is next door, helping Lena Coffin measure windows. Two women working side by side to fix up a house: an appealing image or something else? Nicole Renard jumps at the chance to walk Monica and David to the post office 1 1/3 side streets and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 long avenue blocks north and east of ABC Street: a) because she has stories or fragments of stories to tell that can’t be told so close to Grete and Lena and b) because she can’t wait to get away from Grete and Lena and their arguing. Even though Grete is helping Lena today, Nicole says, they’ve been having the same quiet, bitter argument today and every day about how little help Lena feels she gets. Feels she has to do everything in that stupid house. Endless amount to do and no one lifts a finger — not Grete, not Andy, Babette, no one! — even though you’d think it would matter to them, considering that they own it with Greg. . . . She’s worn out by all her chores and responsibilities. . . . Etc., etc. Grete has answers for everything, but Nicole finds it all repetitious and dumb and can’t remember them. Let’s see: what else? Just back from D.C. (visiting her roommate Sandra’s cousin). Had a great time, feels great (looks great too: waves of hair against smooth skin, honey in caramel and caramel in chestnut), dressed in denim skirt (long, flowered skirts that sail in breezes her uniform, denim a little opaque and motionless for her) and high boots, but there’s a new guy in her life (when and how they met not told or not recorded) and it’s complicated, as usual. Story is this: he’s a Madison Avenue advertising man, not her usual type: dresses a little too elegantly, lavishes praise on her too much, talks about his love for her too much, insists a little too much that she’s going to fall in love with him, even though she’s made it clear that while she likes him and finds him interesting, she certainly doesn’t love him and isn’t even attracted to him! Greg has stopped playing the piano completely: no band, no solo jobs, no practicing. Right now he’s nothing but a full-time dispatcher for a car service! She’d like Monica’s and David’s opinions: what does it mean exactly — is it because he’s not playing? — that Lena has stopped making Greg breakfast. Returning home along ABC Street, approaching the house where Monica has her attic apartment and then Greg-and-Lena’s massive multiple dwelling right after that, Monica, David and Nicole Renard see Lena, Babette and little planetarium-dome-headed Rosamond going down ABC Street toward the ocean and Nicole remembers that there’s another problem brewing between Grete and Babette. Is it accurate to say that Grete resents the closeness of the relationship between Babette and Tina? Nicole thinks that Grete is bothered by something subtler and harder to name. She thinks that Grete thinks it isn't natural or innocent that Babette always takes Tina’s side. Tina knows she can always go to Babette and that Babette will say that Grete is wrong and Tina is right. That’s an obvious problem for her as Tina’s mother. This is where it gets complicated and where she needs their (Monica’s and David’s) advice. Grete thinks (or she thinks that Grete thinks) that Babette is creating an unhealthy sense of obligation in Tina, binding her to her in a way that makes it impossible for Tina to disagree with her in a normal way. Feels obligated to return Babette’s unconditional support. . . . Does that make sense? Is she misinterpreting what Grete’s thinking? Is it all just simple jealousy and resentment. . . ? Little Riley Liman (Tommy Liman’s younger brother), passing with a large, realistic rubber worm and a briefcase boldly lettered LIMAN, stops to sit on the front porch bench next to Monica and show her how he’s able to add long columns of numbers on a folded sheet of lavender scrap paper she’s given him. And while Riley Liman is adding — going at it with the kind of concentration that can build to ecstasy — Monica is remembering (writing down) a forgotten detail of David’s conversation with Kitty: when he took it on himself to refuse to call Monica to the phone because her request struck him as a trap baited with emotions (can’t quite name them) that Kitty may have but Monica doesn’t, all she said was: “you mean you’re not even going to ask her?!” Kitty couldn’t know how difficult the decision was for David and David wondered if all he’d done was give Kitty a better reason to be angry. Between March 1 and March 5 nothing but fog and drizzle. On March 5 Monica and David are doing a number of things: a) experimenting to see if the text of AS IT RETURNS (SPACE NOVEL) will work independently as a more traditional reading experience, as something read while being held in the hands, resting in a lap, etc. — without what’s gained and lost (ruptured and expanded) in the idea of reading a book when grids of writing (on the faces of return manuscript envelopes) are installed on facing gallery walls; b) reading and answering correspondence: 1) reading an announcement/invitation from Fletcher Copp, 110 Bowery, to send something to “The Last Correspondence Show, Art Dept April 7-30 California State University, Sacramento 6000 ‘J’ St. 95819” (would be an 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of white-on-red paper folded in three to fit in a letter-size envelope if the bottom margin weren’t clipped to a point); 2) preparing to mail to Nelson Richardson at Coda a large photograph of a figure (Monica’s brother Lowell?) crossing an abandoned landing strip, taken at Floyd Bennet Airfield during the publication/performance of THE BLUE HANGER (SPACE NOVEL), together with a fragment of related text from the BLUE HANGER and a general account of SPACE NOVEL ideas; 3) writing a note to Larry Lille about his exhibition of toy-like wood sculptures. Also on March 5? Pat Corcoran spots Monica writing on the front porch and comes out to complain. Complaints come out fast, slippery and tangled, but Monica straightens them out and slows them down as she listens (writing-before-writing). Let’s see: she’s tired. Only slept one hour last night and, in fact, has hardly slept the last few nights. (Reason why not told or not recorded.) Maybe her tiredness has a little to do with the school cutbacks: because of the stupid cutbacks she has to be sure to remember to pick Timmy up at 2:15 instead of 3 on Monday and Friday! So that may be on her mind and keeping her from sleeping. Wants Monica to solve this puzzle if she can: why has she gained so much weight since moving to ABC Street? Why is she so puffy? Eliminated all of her favorite junk food for Lent — even cut down on her Pepsi! — so she should be losing weight but she’s gaining. The life of ABC Street is at all times walking, driving, bicycling, running by, in all cases horizontal, in all cases the horizontal narration of the day, headed south toward boardwalk, beach and an ocean horizon that settles down toward the distant righthand edge of its arc into an ambiguous spit of land, indistinctly lit at night; headed north toward Coast Boulevard, Salem Avenue, Bay Drive, and a dark little skyline model of one borough sprouting through another. Andy and Nadja (last names not known), tobacco-blond-bearded, Christ-look-alike lifeguard and his tall, tanned and beautiful, smooth as syrup poured from a syrup jug (Hungarian or Romanian?) girlfriend who rent (but only during spring and summer) Lena-and-Greg’s second floor rear studio apartment with its rundown little back porch in the treetops, pull into the paved but weedy driveway indistinctly divided between Greg-and-Lena’s house and the house where Monica has her attic apartment. Andy’s ancient Volvo (its finish time-and-weather-faded to a dull, hard-to-name pale green) has a recognizable, rough sound in its engine’s throat. Andy-and-Nadja’s car pulls up to the left (south) and immediately afterward Ellie, the younger daughter of two squat daughters and one squat son of Monica’s squat landlord who lives in the neighboring, new and ugly two family house to the north (right), pulls up with her fiancé and tries to gingerly ease her dazzlingly new and bright blue-and-white Plymouth Volaré down the steep driveway that leads into a garage under the house. Finnley Lenehan passes with a big supermarket bag of cabbage and potatoes for Friday’s corned beef dinner. Stops, sweet and apple-faced as always, to chat with Monica. He has stories to tell, also as always. He’s met a girl — he’s dating a girl (Monica marvels a little mentally while Finnley is talking that Finnley is already old enough to be “dating”) — whose first name is Eileen but whose last name is the same as his mother’s family name (O’Hara) and who was born on exactly the same day as him! What else? He’s traveling to Ireland in August with his mother and his sister Laurel. On a March day whose date is not noted Monica, David and Lowell are in MOMA to see Godard’s Numero Deux, a film that’s divided structurally and visually but unified intellectually and politically. It begins with Godard in front of the camera, projectors visibly whirring, talking about film-making: the machinery, politics and economics of it: and yet it’s personal because there Godard’s face is, intelligent and unhappy, narrating himself into the narration that is starting to be acted out on television monitors. Screen is split, an unusual amount of space between the images: video, film, television, all within the screen space and the central image tv-screen-size. Whatever else the title may mean, it certainly has to do with what the “factory” of the body produces and that brings into play the human ass: what comes out and what’s forced in as an act of oppression. To say that the film is concerned with the structure of work, family life, sex, film-making and presents powerful metaphors that link all politically is to say the obvious. A housewife’s daily drudgery, a husband’s factory work, the oppressive structure of family life become the “story” (the characters from the tv monitors). Sex is related to work. When the husband's day at the factory doesn’t go well sex is withheld; when he desires it the wife must accommodate him. When she sleeps with another man the husband wants to rape her: her ass becomes the focus of pleasure, pain, humiliation and punishment: the daughter hears the mother’s cry of agony (or anguish) from the parents’ bedroom. The politics of the narrative are never far away, yet Monica takes the film (whatever else it obviously is) as a personal document of despair. Unhappiness and disgust, possibly illness, speak through this film, relieved only by Godard’s love of the physical world, as always: film as a way of really being alive in a material world that otherwise is the invisible background of a lazy, worn-out human gaze. Monica also notes that in the wealth of human contact in Numero Deux there are moments of tenderness only between mother and child. She wonders (during or afterward?) if what’s most interesting to her are Godard’s restless search for fresh ways to narrate experience, to narrate ideas along with experience, and also the way he quickly establishes a relationship between direct, personal narration (however laden with ideas) and fiction (narrative story telling), however laden with ideas. Out of order, Monica notes that, before the film, she went for a walk in Central Park and then up and down Fifth Avenue with David and Lowell: hedges green, trees sprouting (or: trees green, hedges sprouting) much earlier than they will at the beach. After the film they walk to 76th and Second Avenue to have dinner in Il Monello, a restaurant she doesn’t go to often: mussels in marinara sauce; baked clams; pollo a la Tuscana (with eggplant and cheese, kind of cheese not noted); chicken livers alla moda di la colle (writing unclear); artichoke with wine and mushrooms; green and white fettuccini Il Monello (preparation not noted); strong yet smooth-textured cappuccino, its darkness made lighter without losing coffee’s dark taste, its smoothness made softer by a float of whipped cream melting on the hot surface. The only conversation recorded is Lowell’s expression of surprise that he’s enjoying the oncology rotation. Thought the oncology rotation would make him hate going to work, but he actually finds himself looking forward to it. Sunday March 7 is a wintry day at the beach. Monica, spending the day catching up with chronicling at the big oak desk, is joined by David, carrying traces of the cold beach indoors: a windy crispness. (Monica wonders later: David is not someone to take a solitary walk on the beach, so what would have drawn him there?) Reports to Monica (for her Chronicle) that instead of the usual seagulls at the shore (their pencil-chalk-and-charcoal colors blended and smudged) there were the more angular terns with sharply marked-off zones of black, grey, white. And winter and spring seemed to be frothing up one through the other as a near-freezing ale of green-in-blue. A good draught of that could make the brain turn cold, crystal and foamy. David’s come over to help Monica and her brother Lowell hang Monica’s new roll-up bamboo shades. The harsh light of March demands them: naked light without snow’s complex modulations. As soon as the shades are hung and lowered the room softens and becomes more intimate (is able to retain the inward light of its lamps). Another thing: one day in March (date not noted) Monica woke up to find that Lowell had been there and left a three foot high avocado plant outside her door. Couldn’t figure out where to put it (did she have her own desk yet?) so plunked it down in a corner of the worn plank floor between closet and low eaves door. It’s clear at once to Monica that the plant is unhappy there: knows that it will be disturbed often because Monica or David have to go into the storage space below the eaves (long, dark and dusty attic-like hollow of sloping roof beams and unvarnished planks between inner wall of room and outer shell of house) or into the closet; in shadow more than light; reaching toward the ceiling from the floor the slender stalks seem to feel the weight of their height, hunched and drooping like someone trying not to be tall. Straightens up as soon as they hoist it onto the desk, against the shades. Stops its weak and droopy sagging and inclines toward the bright light it senses on the other side of the shaded windows. On the same wintry March day or another chrome yellow forsythia wands are blooming on the cold front lawn and Monica is outside wrapped in a velvety brown mouton handed down from mother or aunt. Cousin Jo Ellen passes (whether or not in the neighborhood because of handsome Themis, the Cornucopia Diner cook, not noted), then Wanda Baer passes, looking awful (stops to explain that she has a horrible cold she just can’t shake), then Nicole Renard’s little green Saab passes and at noon or so Monica meets Nicole Renard and Grete Forest on the boardwalk. Grete has a story to tell and questions to ask. Says that she knows someone who knows Monica and David, but probably knows Monica’s sister Kitty better. Knows him for a while, but only from a distance (to wave to on the beach) or from the telephone (to make arrangements for the children or when they chat casually before he hands the phone to Patricia, the woman he lives with — the one Grete actually knows — in a house they just bought about a mile west along the shore). She’ll tell Monica everything she knows about Jordan Pike just from waving to him and talking to him briefly on the phone, some of it correct, some of it wrong or assumed and made up as just one more story in the assumed-and-made-up stories about everything and everyone we almost-know or just see in passing, the fiction-of-everything that equals life in this neighborhood, some already corrected, some still unsolved and ambiguous. . . . a) Grete has regarded Jordan Pike in a favorable way since a casual telephone conversation years ago: for some reason she mentioned Tina’s asthma and Jordan Pike said that he suffered from asthma too and made two or three suggestions that sounded odd but later turned out to work (what the suggestions were: not remembered by Grete or recorded by Monica). It’s so rare, Grete says, for anyone’s advice to actually be practical and useful — that that made her start to revise her mental narrative about him. b) What was her mental narrative about Jordan Pike? Let’s see: Every time she saw Jordan Pike he was on the beach with pen and notebook or home (when she stopped at Jordan-and-Patricia’s house to drop off or pick up a child) at a table or desk with a typewriter and a beach view in a picture window behind him. Seemed to be working-but-not-working, like some stupid idea of a writer in a movie. So she thought he was someone attractive and happily lazy, striking a pose as a writer, supported by Patricia (who she knows works hard as a real estate agent). Sometimes wondered if he made money from the silly songs and jingles his daughter Amanda sang and then Tina would start singing (like “Mother of Pearl, I’m in love with your girl!”) until it got stuck in your head and drove you nuts. Could that be what Jordan Pike actually is — a jingle writer? Monica starts to answer that she knows this much about Jordan Pike: he does write advertising jingles for a living and, she thinks, also has written some mass market paperback thrillers under an assumed name, but she’s cut off by Nicole Renard who’s inspired to talk about her boyfriend of the moment, also in advertising (as Monica and Grete know) but definitely not a jingle writer: works on serious ad campaigns, makes a lot of money, goes to an office every day (doesn’t lounge on the beach posing as a writer!) and also, just to amuse himself, writes for Kojak. . . . Monica can hear in Nicole Renard’s breathless narrative, which has a little surprising aggression to it, that Nicole felt the need — because of the apparent similarity? — to separate herself and her life in Manhattan from Grete and her stupid life at the beach by separating her boyfriend (a real advertising man and a real writer) from Jordan Pike, an absurd, provincial parody only a hopeless provincial like Grete could find attractive. . . . Or did she get it wrong? In any case it’s lost on Grete, who goes back to her Jordan Pike story without a blink. c) Neither of Jordan Pike’s children — Amanda or Jonah — are his biological children: if she has it right Amanda is Patricia’s child (Patricia and Jordan have been together about six years) and Jonah (who only visits on weekends) is the child of the woman he lived with before he met Patricia. Tina has a little bit of a crush on Jonah and maybe the other way around as well — because they’re always visiting back and forth — and that reminds her of the real point of all her stories and questions about Jordan Pike! Just the other day, when he came by to pick up Amanda, he looked at the yellow brick apartment house and commented that she (Grete) lives — or lived — next door to one of his oldest and closest friends who, he thinks, is also a friend or at least an acquaintance of hers (Grete’s). Her name is Kitty. . . . But now of course she isn’t Grete’s neighbor, because Kitty just moved back to Manhattan. . . . “Yes, I know,” Grete says she said. “I actually saw her move because I was looking out my mother’s window, but I was never friendly with Kitty. Kitty was not my friend. I’m friendly with Kitty’s sister, Monica. . . .” She remembers being struck by the look in his eyes when she mentioned Monica’s name. It was intense. Unusual blue eyes capable of looking at you with an odd and striking intensity. And — even though she hasn’t been face-to-face with Kitty all that many times — she was struck by the similarity in the intensity of their gazes. . . . His eyes are not the same color as Kitty’s eyes and the source of his intensity doesn’t seem to be aggression (as it does with her). His intensity is a little harder to read, but still. . . does Monica find it crazy that in some way she saw Kitty in Jordan Pike? * Because her notes say that she’s typing outside on a hot and sunny morning (9:30 a.m.) Monica rereads them closely and sees that, while she’s still writing about March 1976, she’s taken a step back and away from March in the sense that her notes were intruded on by the reality of when and where she was typing them. On June 28, 1976 she’s on her front porch in the heat, typing up (editing?) handwritten notes taken in March ’76. The intrusion of one reality in another or the fact of writing in two realities at once doesn’t confuse her. On the contrary, she enjoys it and even believes it’s a natural, universal fact of writing that’s ignored for no good reason, but realizes it could be confusing for the reader without some effort to separate realities. On the hot morning of June 28, while sitting outside and typing notes from March, the crying and head-waggling of one of the two lightbulb-headed Wattle boys (whether Hank or Willy not noted) on the wide, brown-painted stone steps of the big brown and ochre hacienda-style multiple dwelling where the Wattle family lives directly across the way is like the shadow of a cloud passing across the handwritten or typed page Monica is working on. At the same time that Hank or Willy Wattle is sitting on his steps, crying and wagging his head, Wanda Baer is passing with a friend. (Who the friend is not noted.) Monica can see, now that they’re subtracted, that under winter’s cover of grandmother’s mouton (and other layers) Wanda had been growing strangely massive: below the halo of curly brown hair and the smooth white oval of the face-mask her shoulders, arms and the rest of her body have become as burly as a Russian discus thrower’s. (Not noted: is this Monica’s first view of Wanda Baer since winter?) This beefy version of Wanda Baer crosses paths with Grete Forest (already tanned, happy and summery, long-armed and long-legged in (what color?) shorts and short- sleeved lavender blouse wide open at the neck, like a pretty child grown up yet still playing on the beach) just about in front of the porch where Monica is working, screened off by the Rhinebeck pine and holly bushes. She finds this odd: Wanda Baer and Grete Forest pass each other with no greeting. Wanda Baer and her friend hurry by Grete Forest and Grete Forest glides by them with at least as little friction. It’s only after Wanda is well past her that Grete stops, turns and stares after her, as if puzzled. Starts off down the block again (which one is headed north toward Coast Boulevard, which south toward home or beach not noted) and stops, looks back and stares again. And then again still one more time. Turns and stares at Wanda Baer’s bulky, retreating back three times but doesn’t stop to say hello. Not sure if this beefed-up version of Wanda Bear is Wanda Baer? But still, that wouldn’t explain why Wanda didn’t say hello to Grete Forest. . . . Beefed-up version of Wanda Baer not sure she’s Wanda Baer? Doesn’t know the ABC Street cast of characters the trimmer version knows? What else? While Leo Romero (Andy-Forest-and-Greg-Coffin’s band’s wiry, nervous drummer) is parking the car Lily Romero gets out, spots Monica through the pine boughs and says hello. An extraordinarily pale, beautiful girl leading an everyday life, seen by next to no one. Her extreme, naked pallor needs no makeup, but she has no idea how she looks and is wearing so much blue eye shadow everything else about her is invisible. Her invisibility to herself makes it possible for someone with her extreme form of beauty to be with nervous Leo Romero. Just an invisible, ordinary girl with too much blue eye shadow. . . . What else? “See that that you got an early start!” Old Rae Ryan across the way (what articles of royal blue clothing Rae Ryan is wearing not noted), leaning over the porch railing of the Regans’ house where she has a small, groundfloor back studio, chatting with a summer tenant who’s just pulled into the driveway under the tremendous elm after grocery shopping. “See that you got an early start” is enough to launch a pleasant conversation, a pleasant way for old Rae Ryan to pass ten minutes or half an hour, talking about this and that the way a cloud pulls apart and loses its human or animal shape while crossing the sky, even more so because Monica doesn’t tune her antenna that way and lets their conversation go. On the night of June 28 (or the evening before) David is cooking “Moroccan Chicken” while the sun is setting in Monica’s new, golden bamboo blinds and a documentary about hyenas is on tv. Monica’s notes don’t say where David got the recipe for “Moroccan Chicken” (he doesn’t own many cookbooks: can’t afford them? no place to keep them?), but he’s friends with the local librarian and has renewed half-a-dozen or a dozen favorite cookbooks so many times he feels as if he owns them: his fingerprints, his cooking stains, his pencil marks are on them for all time. Her notes talk about the perfect summer light surrounding David while he cooks in old, hand-me-down pans at the ancient black and white gas stove: darkest dark green of avocado leaves only adds electricity to the odd not-quite-lime of the freshly-painted walls of the front studio and darkest dark green and electric green together frame the bamboo blinds and the golden light that travels through them into the old sauté pans. Monica writes about the room’s green and golden harmony of summer light: simmering again around sautéing chicken in a sauce of lemon, lemon peel, parsley, butter, olive oil, oregano and scallion. David thinks it’s likely that he clipped the “Moroccan Chicken” recipe out of the NY Times and added it to his collection of clipped-out, cooking-stained recipes stored in returned-manuscript envelopes a friend later threw out in an idiotic seizure of uninvited “cleaning up”. Later still (now?) he accidentally re-found the recipe in Craig Claiborne’s NY Times Menu Cookbook, 1966, pages 281-282, under the title “Moroccan-Style Chicken”. MOROCCAN-STYLE CHICKEN 4 servings 1 lemon 2 tablespoons olive oil 1 frying chicken (3 pounds), cut 2 shallots or scallions, finely chopped into serving pieces 1/2 teaspoon finely minced garlic Salt and freshly ground black 3/4 cup Chicken Stock (page 475) pepper 1/4 cup chopped parsley 1/4 cup butter 1 teaspoon dried oregano 1. With a swivel-bladed paring knife pare away half of the lemon rind and cut it into very thin strips. Reserve. Squeeze the lemon and reserve the juice. 2. Sprinkle the chicken parts with salt and pepper. Heat half of the butter and the oil in a skillet. Brown the chicken pieces in it on all sides and transfer them to a warm plate. 3. Add the shallots and garlic to the skillet in which the chicken was browned. Cook, stirring, until golden. Add one-quarter cup of the stock and stir to dissolve all brown particles clinging to the bottom and sides of the skillet. Cook until the liquid is almost evaporated. Reduce the remaining stock to one-third cup. 4. Return the chicken to the skillet and sprinkle with the parsley, oregano, lemon rind, lemon juice and the reduced stock. Cover and cook slowly for about thirty minutes, until the chicken is tender. Stir the remaining butter into the sauce and serve immediately. David’s adjustments to Craig Claiborne’s recipe not noted, but David and Monica prefer the look and flavor of scallions to shallots, David unquestionably multiplied the quantity of garlic 20-30-40-fold, probably cut down on the oregano and may have increased the amount of lemon. Also: no recommendation to do so by Claiborne, but David made a quantity of simple chicken-stock-sautéed-onion-and-possibly-garlic-flavored risotto to be eaten with it as an integral part of the dish. After sun has faded from dark avocado leaves, from golden bamboo, from the odd, living green of the walls the sky is still stubbornly rosy (refuses to fade though the eye can barely discern it). * At about midnight (of what June or July day?) Lena Coffin and two younger women (Lily Romero and a pregnant woman unknown to Monica) return on bicycles from the boardwalk to Greg-and-Lena’s massive, cracked white stucco and orange brick multiple dwelling. If there’s any conversation Monica doesn’t hear it. Putting herself on the side of the reader (forced by the Chronicle to put herself on the side of the reader?): there are times (now, for example?) when Monica can see that her method (a method that isn’t a method or doesn’t want to be a method, dislikes the idea of a method yet is a method in the sense that, though it may be an organic expression of her nature, her way of life, her love of writing outdoors, for example, bringing naturally in its wake the intrusion of the passing event which she feels compelled to not let evaporate, the record of passing events gradually does become methodical and pleasurable in equal measure, intrusion into and digression from events by other events emerging as her true subject, her true interest in life and writing, telling the stories of the stories that tell themselves — while (not as easy as it may seem) following her instinct to ignore or discard most of what happens or is said in a day) can seem complicated (now, for example, with one season blowing through another like air and light through bamboo blinds). Sitting outside again, typing March ‘76 in June or July ‘76, it isn’t always absolutely clear (when weather doesn’t make it clear) in which season an event is occurring. To be difficult is not her intention and she does her best to sort it out, but there are times when she isn’t sure she’s right. Typing her March ‘76 Chronicle outdoors (on the front porch bench) in June ‘76 Monica hears the rough bell of the cutlery grinder’s truck while typing dreary March tales told to Alyosha by a woman (who she is not noted) sweeping her sidewalk on Salem Avenue: a) the woman’s daughter, who used to visit with her husband, can’t visit because she broke her leg (story of how the leg got broken either not told to Alyosha or by Alyosha); b) because of the broken leg the daughter not only couldn’t visit her mother (the woman sweeping her Salem Avenue sidewalk while telling Alyosha her unhappy tale), but was confined to her house and couldn’t do much of anything; c) after a while the sweeping woman’s daughter didn’t feel right: teeth and gums began to bother her so much that she had to make the effort of leaving the house to go to the local dentist, dentist couldn’t solve it so she went to other dentists (notes say “many” but not how many) before she found someone who recognized that she had cancer. d) Monica debates with herself after typing a line or two whether to keep transcribing into typewriter the second unhappy tale told to her by Alyosha (a tale that clearly makes Alyosha as unhappy while he’s telling it as when he heard it) on a cold, dark and windy day in March, written down quickly that same day in hard-to-read script on long folded sheets of lavender scrap paper (given to her in reams by a friend with a job at a commercial printer’s), being typed out-of-doors in flowering June. Too many unhappy March tales in June? And it’s a long story — much longer than the first — about people Monica used to know, a whole family that owned the three story house facing the three story house (in another neighborhood in another borough) where Monica spent part of her later childhood. Parents of Monica’s friend owned the house, different sections or angles of their family or families (only mother’s family, only father’s family or tangle of both?) occupied various floors or angles and sections of floors of the house. Monica’s high school friend, her twin brother and their parents occupied the main or “ground” floor, though it was actually up one short flight of steps. Monica knows this much in 1976: her friend Alana’s parents are still occupying the main/ground floor apartment; Alana is married to a lawyer and has two children; her twin brother Alan is married and a professor, also with two children. Two elderly aunts (Thelma and Olivia) on the second floor. Thumbnail story of Olivia’s life goes like this: she was married for exactly one hour before her husband left to die in World War II and the rest of her life hung from that peg. Thelma seems to have always had a heart condition of some kind and that was the peg her life hung from. Olivia (the healthier one who’d been married for an hour) became ill (nature of illness not noted) and died in early winter of ’76, Thelma is left alone and Alyosha wonders (feeling the insoluble melancholy of it) how Thelma will get along without the sister who was her companion all her life. A brother (mother’s or father’s?) whose wife died of cancer so many years ago it seems as if he’s always been alone on the third floor. There’s one other person (another daughter, again not clear whether father’s or mother’s, therefore also a sister to someone?) who looks exactly like Monica’s friend Alana. Alyosha has never been able to tell this young woman — who comes and goes and doesn’t seem to have one fixed location on one of the floors of the house as everyone else does — from Monica’s friend. He says that he always got them mixed up and sometimes even said hello to one when he thought he was saying hello to the other. Monica is no help either. Now, how many years later, in ‘76, listening to Alyosha unburden himself of the unhappiness he absorbed letting others tell their unhappy tales to him (and whose point is not at all to talk about this mysterious other daughter and sister), Monica finds it odd and irritating that (so unlike herself!) she never bothered to find out exactly who this young woman is: where she fits into the family’s and the house’s layers, sections and angles. Let’s see: what else passing in June forces its way into March being typed outdoors in June? a) A brand new, clean and shiny basketball (so new it seems more bright and orange than it should) comes rolling quickly south to north (boardwalk —› Boulevard) along the sidewalk. Blond and solid Tommy Liman runs after it, scoops it up in front of the porch where Monica’s working and comes up just long enough to explain to Monica that this basketball is new because his old basketball was chewed up by their new sheepdog, Shep. Doesn’t say that their new sheepdog Shep is meant to replace their old sheepdog Shep killed last year when Tommy’s mother Audrey backed out of the driveway too fast and ran him over. b) Two young women are visiting Pat Corcoran. Pat, spotting Monica working on the porch (and possibly giving herself the excuse that Monica already allowed herself to be interrupted by Tommy Liman and his basketball), decides that it’s a good time to come out and introduce her nieces who’ve taken the day (Monday?) off to visit. They’re sisters and they work in the same office. No, one of them corrects Pat Corcoran, not only in the same office, just one desk apart! Monica isn’t sure if that means that they sit next to each another or if there’s a desk between them and wonders a little why the location of their desks is more interesting to her than facts that should be more interesting. The two sisters are happy to be visiting Pat, but they’re even happier to be subtracting days from their work-week. Took today off, they’ll work Tuesday and Wednesday, and then they they’ll come out again on Thursday: take Thursday off and then take Friday off too and make a holiday of it! The week will slip into the Fourth of July weekend that way, the other one says. . . . Yes, and then Monday is the fifth and summer will be under way. . . . No names are given or recorded, only their complete happiness laying out their plan for the week to come. (The happiness of not doing something equal to the happiness of doing something.) c) Little, planetarium-dome-headed Rosamond Coffin pays a short, unexpected visit: runs up the stairs, says Hi!, runs back and forth across the porch once or twice and leaves. d) One day in June (date not noted), while sitting on the porch and typing handwritten March notes, Monica’s attention is drawn to the beautiful movements of a lightweight summer fabric in the right-hand window of two side-by-side windows of an apartment next door (in Greg-and-Lena’s massive multiple dwelling). Light fabric breathes in the beautiful breezes of June. And the next day (date also not noted) the lightweight fabric (a summer curtain?) has moved to the left-hand of the two side-by-side windows while a large, overly-bright green bath towel is completely filling the space of the right-hand window, too dense to be moved by summer breezes. * Monica sometimes has to tell herself to block it all out, no matter how much she welcomes the intrusion of life through writing, the digression brought on by something said directly to her, something overheard or glimpsed while working. Still, to get anything done, Monica can’t continually be looking away from the page. First there has to be a page to look away from and, for that page to come into being, Monica has to be as focused on the language before her, to the exclusion of the world around it, as the fine point of the pen or pencil pressing into paper. Movement forward toward typewriter and folded scrap paper with its barely-legible, barbed and tangled lines of scrawl corresponds to earlier moment of leaning back away from written March ‘76 into living June ‘76 around her? Has to remind herself: where was she in March ‘76 when June ‘76 (where she’s trying not to know she is now) intruded?: and she’s almost succeeded in reading herself back into her March notes when a loud thumping next door keeps her in June. Has to lean away from the typewriter again — has to get up, in fact — to see that it’s thin and nervous yet oddly good-looking Lena Coffin next door, banging with the heels of both hands, straining and banging upward against the inside of the upper edge of the lower window frame, trying to get the windows of the enclosed porch room open. Banging and banging and straining and straining and making very little progress until one of her tenants, Allison Savas (short, with dark black hair, hunched shoulders and dark-rimmed glasses) hears or sees Lena struggling and lends some of the pent-up force in her arms and shoulders to the task of forcing up one frozen window, then another. . . . On what day in March do blue-black clouds together with naked sun create a harsh, diffuse light above the roofs? An above-the-roofs, still-wintry view that can make a room cold because it’s forced to look at it. Monica’s new bamboo blinds (picked up in Manhattan (on what day?) on the way to dinner in Il Monello) mediate the harshness of that stare. The golden veil of an ambiguous season, between inside and outside. Whatever’s gold in the harsh light over the roofs is caught and stored in that dense, horizontal web of fine rods and then radiated inward: mysteriously warm, mysteriously gold and green interior: angular, vertical or diagonal branches of trees projected (as “shadows”?) through horizontal rods, cold sun forced to warm itself up there and, on this side, darkest of dark green avocado leaves opaquely against it. Taking it all in (trying to take it all in), writing it all down (trying to write it all down), Monica is hyper-aware that she’s here, in this west-facing green room on ABC Street, at this moment in March 1976. How far, she wonders, can this moment travel with her or for her. Monica’s notes clearly say that it’s on March 9 that both snow and light are falling with difficulty through the narrow horizontals of the new bamboo blinds. Monica notes also the odd, pearly snow-light that has as much to do with the broken panorama of snowy roofs as the silver skin of a lake does with the illuminated panel of sky above it. Notes skip to March 11 when it thaws. According to the definitive word of Tommy and Riley Liman’s mom, Audrey, this was “the last snow and the last thaw” of the year: of no help to Pat Corcoran, who uses the slippery last snow and last thaw of the year to fall down the porch steps on the morning of the 11th. Pat’s explanation: at 7 a.m., after snow had turned to rain, it froze again and the steps only looked wet but were actually slick and icy: just had to set one foot on them. . . . Also on March 11, but at what hour?, sounds of water dripping everywhere immediately flow into the visible: rapid dripping and muscular rushing (down drainpipe, down alley and driveway): silver skin of tiny, irregular lakes or fathomless black cavities in gutters and sidewalks wherever Monica looks or walks. . . . A rushing, dripping universe of sound is, in general, eclipsed by the full-time job of looking. . . . It rains all night, from March 11 into March 12. And March 12 is nothing but wind. Wind blows as if it has a job to do and that job is to bring back cold air. Cold wanted to go wherever it goes in March but wind blows all day and forces it back, drying puddles with unnatural speed. Wind and sun have an effect on one another: extraordinarily dazzling light in the alley — the narrow line-of-sight that continues for blocks — between the Sloths’ white shingle house and to its left the Greengrasses' dark, bricked-up twin of the Sloths’ house. Wind and light blow through it in equal measure, one polishing the other — a white, gauzy shirt struggling wildly on a line in the distance. Somewhere Leo Romero is sawing in the sound-universe that occasionally saws its way through the visible, but is it in March or in June? * Typing her handwritten notes (in this case typing cold March notes in warm June) is a way for Monica to write her way back into her own life once, twice, how many times? Finds herself in her handwritten notes recounting the events of a film most likely watched in March, not June (no evidence of the passing world of June intruding) and most likely also a film watched at home, on television. Also not noted: title of film, name of director, actors, etc. (Just pure plot, dialogue, mis-en-scene in an odd vacuum of identity.) No way to look it up and retrieve information about it. No way to refresh her memory later. Her only “memory” is this re-creation (by herself and possibly also by David, who has a liking for converting film action and dialogue into language on the page). 1) Von Werra crash-lands in a field in England: referred to in the film (according to Monica’s notes) as “an English Field” or “The English Field”, as if a field in England has distinctive national or cultural characteristics. 2) Von Werra is captured (in the English field?) by how many constables, all unarmed, together with a shopkeeper in a white apron. 3) Scenes of von Werra’s internment in a British prisoner-of-war camp. 4) Interrogation of von Werra by a British Intelligence officer: “You should know,” von Werra says (but with exactly what tonal shading, what slight color of meaning (pride, defiance, sarcasm, arrogance and so on) Monica can’t gauge because she doesn’t know who’s playing von Werra), “that an interrogation will get you nowhere with a soldier like me.” “Oh” (playing along in a tone both casual and flattering) “we wouldn’t waste our time trying to get anything out of a man like you. You’re right about that. We saw that at once. I was just curious about you and wanted to have a bit of a chat. . . . Just a friendly conversation by the fire — man to man — you in your armchair, me in mine. . . .” No record in Monica’s notes about von Werra’s (the unidentified actor’s) expression; therefore no way to judge whether the British officer’s chatty technique is fooling von Werra, even a little. 5) Von Werra is transferred to another camp where, on the way back from Exercise Hour, singing a German tune along with other German prisoners walking or marching down the English road, he escapes for the first time. Two farm girls with pitchforks are the only ones to see him slip over the fieldstone wall, glide without turning or with only the slightest backward look across the distance of another English field and into the safety of an English forest. Reluctant to leave the forest? He hides in it for how long? Still in the forest, but on a slope with an English road below it (it wouldn’t take much for von Werra to roll out of the forest shade and into view), he watches (and listens to) a British solider galloping loudly down the road on his horse, seeing nothing, as if blinded by the noise his horse’s hoofs are making on the hard surface. If the film is on television in March why does Monica again find herself leaning back from her typewriter into June? Forced out of March and out of the film (out of the English countryside) by Greg Coffin’s band, practicing with or without Greg, next door or far away in the open garage of Babette and Grete’s house near the beach (but as audible as if it were next door)? Earlier, tall and thin Greg Coffin, who’d gotten up late (time not noted) and wandered out onto his raftlike second floor front porch in his bathing suit, rubbing face and hair as if trying to wake up, wandered back into the big, loft-like front room that’s both Greg-and-Lena’s kitchen and his piano room (and probably other things too) and started fooling around on his synthesizer (not his usual piano scaffolding). . . . Monica was struck by Greg’s posture leaning over the railing, paying no attention to (ignoring?) Lena, JoJo, Joshua and Rosamond who, it seemed to Monica, were deliberately making noise (in a friendly, cheerful way) to get his attention. Sleepy but also elsewhere in some other way. Yvonne Wilding (good-looking, slouching, drugged?) passes Monica twice: arrives in a much-too-heavy sweater, rushes inside, comes back out in a bathing suit. Smoking, starts to give Monica a mumbled reason for the sweater (says it has something to do with work, though Monica has no idea Yvonne Wilding is working) and heads for the beach to cool off. Loud banging in Greg-and-Lena’s enclosed groundfloor front porch and ping pong room keeps Monica in June a little longer. Landlord’s son, Kenny (squat, big-assed, near-sighted, pretty much like mother, father, sister) also keeps Monica from getting back to the too-handsome, too-blond German pilot hiding in the English countryside, by clumsily trying to hack down a sapling first making its way into life in the narrow space between the massive, cocoa-shingled multiple dwelling where Monica has her apartment and the landlord’s ugly, not-quite-modern two family next door. Narrow alley, which has a wooden fence running its length, is a surprisingly leafy, shaded space where David sometimes likes to put a chair and write, invisible to the passing world of ABC Street. Kenny is trying to hack the little sapling down (young and slender as it is, it doesn’t want to be hacked down and is putting up a fight) with a rusty shovel-blade instead of a saw or an axe and the small branches are taking forever to give up their sharp, painful cracking. The terrible sound of blunt human stupidity carried into action — destruction that always gives itself its good reasons — and it stops Monica from seeing, hearing, thinking or writing. . . . 6) A succession of shots captures the passage of days; days pass horizontally as von Werra makes his way across the English landscape: green or muddy hills, bogs, the empty forests of winter, endless tracts of mud, shallow trenches, stone walls, bogs again — an exhausting catalogue of English landscape features. . . . There the figure of von Werra is in the distance. An English farm girl (looks exactly like one of the earlier English farm girls with their pitchforks) is the only one to spot him. “There he is! That’s him just going over the hill!” 7) Another capture and another transfer from one camp to another. Scenes of von Werra, with other inmates, digging a tunnel. The details of his escape (listed by Monica as “Escape #2”) are lost — because neither Monica nor David made any attempt to recreate them or because the film, like almost every film on television in 1976, is created anew, created as a different film, by snipping out bits of action-and-dialogue considered non-essential to the advancement of the plot and splicing in little, connected and repetitive loops of advertisements always in the same sequence. Monica has wrestled with this thought more than once: altered by what’s added and by what’s missing, a film on television is translated into another film, but that misinterpretation is the film that first becomes our own. . . . Scenes of the tunnel being dug are missing but the prisoners somehow dig the tunnel without the help of our watching them and somehow the resourceful von Werra (bizarrely presented as a sort of too-blond, too-beautifully-handsome Nazi Odysseus) escapes again. 8) Von Werra in a handsome, fleece-lined leather flight jacket, the sort that every boy would like to have. Now von Werra is a Dutch officer, “Captain van Lott”, Dutch but an RAF pilot. A complex, interesting scene in a railway depot. “I’m Dutch officer van Lott: my plane just crashed north of here — not too far from here, actually — in an English field near the railroad track. I followed the track from there — used it to get here. . . .” The railway clerk has his suspicions, but nevertheless arranges for von Werra/van Lott to be driven to an RAF base. Lengthy questioning. The handsome leather flying suit with its beautiful fleece lining seems to arouse their suspicions. It’s discussed and analyzed at length. Monica has the nagging feeling while writing or typing that the order of the scenes (not to mention their exact look and meaning) is not certain in her (or David’s) notes. The scenes seem scrambled to her, as if the units of his progress — questioned by one Englishman after another, every one of whom has suspicions yet does nothing — a kind of amiable stupidity that the film seems to link to being English — are interchangeable. Is it at the RAF base, for example, that, while von Werra/van Lott is being interrogated, a phone call is made to Aberdeen to confirm something about van Lott’s identity? And is it then (with his Odyssean alertness) that he gets wind of their suspicions and makes Escape #3 through a bathroom window? Makes his way (Monica thinks her notes say) to an RAF hanger and attempts to steal the experimental Hurricane Fighter “Aperture #2”. Notes say “at gunpoint”, but where did he get a gun? 9) Captured again? Yet here he is in a pickup truck, a Dutch seaman (no name noted) looking for work. 10) There’s a gap in Monica’s (and/or David’s) notes after the ride in the pickup. Now he’s a prisoner again: one of a group of German prisoners for some reason being sent by ship across the Atlantic to Canada — as if Canada itself were a large, escape-proof wasteland. 11) Now von Werra is in Canada, on a train with other German prisoners. A scene on the train that has to do with eating apples, recounted in Monica’s or David’s notes only in a sketchy way. “These beggars act as if they’ve never seen apples before!” (von Werra talking contemptuously about other prisoners as they hungrily wolf down apples? If someone else’s voice, Monica can’t figure out why she wouldn’t have said so.) “Can’t we have more heat?!” Also on the train. Also von Werra? 12) Escape #4: others attempt it, but only von Werra succeeds: the others don’t make it off the train or are captured immediately: von Werra alone is able to slip out a small train window undetected: down the snow-slope extending from the artificial embankment built up under the tracks — one unbroken sheet into the distance — as far as von Werra can see. “Now I know where I am. This is not muddy England with its rain and its horses and horsy set and its fairytale little farm-market towns and farm-girls! This is Canada: nothing but snow, nothing but frozen wasteland that goes on forever without demarcation. . . .” A terrible, difficult trek through deep snow in a direction he calculates to be south, toward the Saint Lawrence and the border. Goal is to get to neutral American soil. . . . For the first time von Werra is exhausted and may find himself thinking again: “So this is all there is to Canada: nothing but snow. . . .” A scene (barely written) that again bizarrely demonstrates von Werra’s wiliness and super-human will, this time crossing the frozen Saint Lawrence. May be a scene in a rowboat, but Monica’s (or David’s) notes aren’t clear. Something about a difficult climb up a ladder. (Monica notes von Werra’s exhaustion again, but doesn’t sketch any of the events that show it.) 13) Von Werra’s made it: he’s in the U.S.A. “Iverson, U.S.A.” Captured again (what number?), but he may expect and even want it. The machinery of what-happens-next is missing in Monica’s and David’s notes. Von Werra decides (or needs) to get back to Germany. 14) Not exactly, not purely, Escape #5, because von Werra is being helped. No longer wily Odysseus, just a German officer being helped to return for the good of the fatherland. Across the border into Mexico. Mexico to Guatemala. Guatemala to Brazil. Brazil to Bolivia. Bolivia to Argentina. From Argentina to Europe (details of European journey not noted). Arrives in Berlin on April 18, 1941, is honored, decorated with crosses, etc. Several months later his aircraft disappears over the North Sea. * On what day in March does a small, French blue box arrive in the mail: inside a French blue pack of Gauloises “Disque Bleu” cigarettes, an odd advertising promotion. Box seems to have been meant for David (a non-smoker who has no mailing address of his own), but the sender has absurdly misconstrued David’s name as “Delil” and turned his second name into “Straw”. Both Monica and David love the absurd, made-up-name “Delil Straw” and decide to file it away to use someday in a novel, Space Novel, story or chamber fiction. Also in the mail: an announcement that “Spencer Holst” is reading in Carnegie Hall. Monica knows that she knows the name “Spencer Holst” — knows that she knows it in some personal way — that she’s crossed paths with “Spencer Holst” sometime and that that’s the reason she’s being sent this announcement — but can’t at all figure out when or why she met him and can’t picture what “Spencer Holst” looks like either. Notes say: another cold day in March (one of many). Because there’s nothing of spring in these days Monica (from her front, west-facing green room windows?) is surprised to see what she takes to be a baby robin (because of the characteristic sweet potato “red” of the breast that — not robin-like? — seems to extend to the head) at Lena Coffin’s second floor porch feeder. Out of the corner of her eye, in a round mirror hanging to her right, Monica sees herself typing a sentence with herself in it inside her room of green and bamboo (two wraparound smooth planes of a green that has as much life in it as the green flesh of an avocado and of the lime that’s squeezed on it and two golden grids of bamboo) smoking a pungent Gauloise Disque Bleu. Monica observes that Leo Romero and Lena Coffin have always resembled one another or have started to resemble one another over time, the more their paths cross. Monica doesn’t say, and doesn’t know for sure, if she only means the way their black, thick and curly hair frames their oval faces, their unnatural thinness, their tension and wiry jumpiness. . . . Or is she talking about some other condition Leo and Lena increasingly have in common? WANDA BAER STORIES a) On Tuesday, March 16, despite the inevitable damp chill after a morning of March rain, Monica is outside on the front porch, writing about Wanda Baer. (How Monica’s dressed on a cold and wet March day not noted.) b) Wanda Baer has stories to tell about some of her recent experiences and tells them to Monica during the course of what must be an impossibly long and slow car ride to Manhattan from their narrow strip of land between bay and ocean. c) Early in the evening of Monday, March 15, Wanda Baer calls Monica to tell her that the last few weeks have been terrible. The reason why Monica hasn’t seen much of her and the reason why, yesterday afternoon, when she was coming back from a horrible walk on the beach — not the “walk on the beach” people picture when they talk about going for a walk on the beach — just someone dead-alive as a big uncooked turkey or capon on a formica counter, dead but alive in the wrong way, a dead, uncooked capon or turkey somehow alive — stuffed? — and buzzing with anxiety (which Dr. DaVinci always says is a sign of life, but is a horrible, uncomfortable sensation) inside a dead turkey walking on the beach looking like a living, happy person smelling ocean air and feeling ocean breezes but feeling absolutely nothing but her own dead anxiety, just a big sandbag trying to get through the sand — she couldn’t stop to talk, could barely say hello when she ran into Monica talking to Grete and Nicole Renard on the boardwalk yesterday afternoon. . . . Not just yesterday, this horrible state has been going on for weeks. But seeing herself through Monica’s eyes — and even through Nicole’s and Grete’s eyes — made her realize that she’d better tell Monica what was going on and get her advice. Tonight she has a car (says it’s a big one, but doesn’t say whose it is) and she’d love to drive anywhere Monica wants and have dinner so they can talk. This is the condition Wanda Baer is in: when Monica says that she’s already made a plan to be in Manhattan tonight to meet a friend for dinner, but that, if Wanda likes, they can drive in together, leave a little earlier so they’ll have time to talk in the car or maybe even have a coffee together — Wanda Baer only hears “Manhattan” and “dinner” and says that dinner in Manhattan with Monica is just what she wanted! d) Begin to drive (car is a big American car, as Wanda said) and cold March rain picks up again or they drive into it, heading north and slightly west. Driving slowly because of the steady rain against the windshield, Wanda Baer has time to tell her stories. Driving slowly and talking (staring straight ahead?) while Monica is listening, looking at the colorful world go by abstractly — like so many shampoo, cosmetic and powder bottles, tubes and tins, knickknacks, brushes and mirrors through the glass panel of a shower stall — and at the same time trying to write-before-writing by untangling at least a few of the tangles of the tangled order of Wanda’s stories that may really be all one story made to seem like many different stories because of all the knots in her string. Let’s see: she woke up on Saturday and couldn’t move. Thought about getting up, knew that she should get up, but couldn’t. Does Monica think that’s inertia? Is “inertia” the right word for not being able to get up? True, she was inert, but does being inert automatically mean that you feel awful? It seems to her that it’s even possible to enjoy being inert: to be in a position and not want to change that position (not want to leave the comfortable chair where you’ve slouched to get something in the kitchen, for example): that’s entirely different — isn’t it? — from her horrible feeling on Saturday. She’s trying to find a way to make Monica feel what it was like to wake up and not be able to get out of bed. For example: where’s the line — where exactly is the line — between “not being able to” and “not wanting to”? Can almost feel now what it felt like to be in bed, under the covers, world far away and disconnected. Rest of the world (everything not her in her bed) might as well be in outer space, that’s how little she could feel it. Not warm and comfortable and cozy in her bed, but at least she could tell that her body was touching the sheet and mattress! If she got out of bed. . . is it completely true to say: if she got out of bed what would stop her from being able to walk through the wall? True, but not completely true. The longer she stayed in bed the more disconnected she felt. But also — does this make sense? — the more drugged she felt, as if she’d swallowed poison. Lying there, unable to (not wanting to) move, because she was poisoned — or poisoned by lying there? Lying there was making her turn into a poison for herself. When the self drinks too much of its own self it drugs and poisons itself? Drugged, poisoned, disconnected — all day and into the night in bed. . . . When the room got dark and the windows got dark she thought to herself: I’d better move! better force myself up, get dressed, get out, go somewhere. . . . Or maybe that’s true but not completely true either. Maybe she just finally got up . . . . Knows that she got in the car (Monica registers the fact that Wanda Baer doesn’t own a car and wonders 1) whose car was available to her and 2) if it’s the same big American car they’re driving in now) and began driving. Driving through the world: driving somewhere (but where?), down real streets, road under her, sidewalks, houses, stores on one side or both, could be water, could be one tree or a whole street of trees, could even be a park, could be apartment houses or some other kind of big building: it was almost the same feeling she had in bed. Same, but not exactly the same. She was moving and she wasn’t in her apartment or on her mattress, but still no connection. Wonders how true it is to say that she couldn’t exactly feel the automobile. She was the one driving (didn’t think someone else was driving her, didn’t feel like a passenger in someone else’s car), she was the one turning the wheel, not crashing. . . but in no way having a sensation of driving, moving, being in a car. How does Monica explain that? Wants to know if Monica thinks that’s like being a ghost in your own life: can make things happen or someone else could probably see her car driving down the street — but can’t at all feel it yourself. . . ! She’s pretty sure she remembers actually thinking at one point, “what am I doing here?” And maybe being able to have that thought made her see that she was on a highway, in traffic, moving fast, but not as fast as everyone around her. Did that scare her? Not sure if that’s true. Not sure if it’s true either that she thought to herself that she needed to see someone, talk to another person, get out of her own skin and head (needed to stop being alone), but it’s definitely true that for some reason she knew that she was not far from the parkway exit for Dalia’s apartment. Dalia was asleep. She’d been teaching Sunday school, her only job. Finding Dalia asleep is not unusual. Dalia may give as her reason that she was teaching and teaching exhausted her, but Wanda Baer knows that that makes no sense. It isn’t her little bit of teaching that exhausts Dalia. Dalia sleeps a lot, especially in the afternoon — when she should be awake and doing something. Wanda Baer says that she understands this very well. Too well, in fact. Because she’s been sleeping too much herself. “Sleeping” isn’t even an honest word for it, it’s more like the drugged and disconnected state she was trying (and finding it hard) to make Monica understand. It’s true that you’re “exhausted”, but why? From what exactly? More exhausted from doing next-to-nothing than from doing something. Wanda says that after a few classes, for example, like Dalia after a little teaching, she’s mysteriously exhausted, has to lie down and then doesn’t want to (can’t) get up. And Dalia’s exhaustion may even be worse than hers! But this is one thing she needs Monica to answer: if it’s obvious to her (any idiot can see it!) that Dalia’s depressed, does it automatically follow that she’s depressed too? She and Dalia have been meeting three times a week in the Campus Sugar Bowl and three times a week they have the same horrible, depressing conversation. It always starts like this: Dalia will say, (louder than she thinks, almost wailing, audible enough for heads to turn) “what am I doing?! where am I going?! what’s the sense to all this??! what am I going to do with my life?!”: and on and on like that. It makes her crazy. Someone else would know how to answer, but she doesn’t! Other people might not know, but she’s sure that Monica does, that she’s always been like that: she needs time to figure out what just happened. Even worse: she needs time to know what she just felt! People expect you to react right away. They want to see an emotion on your face. Want you to say something sincere and intelligent, express some feeling, help figure things out. . . . She’s never been able to do any of that. Needs to take her distance. More people expect her to act normal and human, more distance she needs. Hasn’t Monica noticed that her letters are always more intelligent, more thoughtful than she is in person? Her thinking actually gets clearer when she has a chance to write! Can hear when she talks sometimes (not always) what a frozen dope she sounds like. But when she writes in her diary or writes a letter and reads it over she’s surprised and impressed by how intelligent and insightful — how un-frozen — that person is. If only she could just write to people instead of talking! Write a letter the day after having dinner with someone. . . . So, finally, she wrote a letter to Dalia. She was honest and direct: “I don’t want to continue our relationship this way. I can’t go on having the same depressing conversations with you whenever we meet. Talking to you is like drinking a little poison. You get used to it, you don’t die, but you’re poisoned. I think I’m getting poisoned by your depression. I have too many problems of my own to be able to defend myself. So — if we’re going to be friends — you’ve got to change. . . .” Thinks the letter was better than that, but that’s the idea. She told the truth, something she never does when she meets Dalia in the Campus Sugar Bowl. Figured they’d discuss the letter the next time they saw each other — and that would be a way of talking about their relationship and then maybe that would be a way of getting Dalia to see that she had to do something about her depression. . . . But of course the next time she saw Dalia after the letter was the night she drove to Dalia’s place without knowing where she was going. . . . Started to try to tell Dalia about her weird experience in the car, but Dalia didn’t want to hear it. Didn’t want to talk about anything. Didn’t want to be in her apartment. “I don’t want to sit around my apartment with you, talking about something depressing!” Dalia seemed happy to see her, but she thinks the only reason Dalia might have been happy to see her was because she needed to get out of her apartment! Wanted to drive somewhere — anywhere — had no idea where — and (in her crazy condition) neither did she. Where can you go at 3 a.m.? So they got in the car and started driving and she ended up back where she came from — in her own neighborhood! in the 24 hour Cornucopia Diner looking out at the bay from the other side of Bay Drive! Eating her reuben sandwich and drinking her strawberry ice cream soda she thinks she started to feel more alive. Looking across the table at Dalia (with the dark bay just barely visible — there only because you know it’s there? — can’t tell whatever lights are moving on it or glowing at the airport or on a bridge or highway from the lights that are always spread across the inner bubble of any diner window anywhere) she remembers feeling that she couldn’t just sit there stuffing her face with her reuben and soda (which were actually pretty good) without confronting Dalia in some way. So she said: “you haven’t said one word about my letter! You must have read my letter. . .!” No answer. So she’s pretty sure (after a while it gets hard to tell if you’re making it up — if what you think is memory is just the mind telling you the story of what could have or should have happened) that Dalia’s silence made her angry enough to say to Dalia that the only time Dalia ever opened her mouth was to talk about her own misery. No interest at all in the horrible sensations she (Wanda) was having. . . ! Thinks she also managed to say that when she arrived at Dalia’s — it was probably the reason she drove to Dalia’s without knowing where she was or where she was going! — it was important for her to get Dalia’s opinion about her horrible feeling of disconnection — her inertia that might even be paralysis, her feeling of being drugged or poisoned, sensation of being far away from everything and without a body, a body-less ghost that could walk through walls — a dead-alive body driving through a horrible body-less ghost-world. . . . She’s almost certain she said all that or something similar to that and that all Dalia said was, “don’t tell me I didn’t read your letter, because I did! I read your letter and I can’t say you’re wrong. You don’t want to be around someone depressed because you can’t handle it. I can’t argue with that. That makes sense. But that’s exactly why you should understand why I don’t want to hear about your depression. . . .” Wanda Baer wants Monica to tell her how she should have answered that. It confused her and shut her up. Her rueben sandwich was all cold and congealed — it was disgusting — but she started nibbling at it again. Dalia must have noticed that (don’t they always notice stuff like that?) because she went on the attack. She said that she (Wanda) left something out, as usual: Wanda had money, while she lived in poverty. Wanda had a nice apartment in a nice house in a nice neighborhood while she lived in a crummy apartment in a crummy neighborhood. So it isn’t hard to figure out why she’s depressed, but it is hard to figure out why Wanda’s depressed. Wanda thinks now that she should have answered (but didn’t) that there’s some crazy way that Dalia is bragging about her horrible life. In some topsy-turvy way Dalia thinks her poverty makes her superior. But Dalia hardly ever works and that’s why she’s been stuck (if she is stuck) in her lousy apartment in her lousy neighborhood for eight years or more. Thinks Dalia doesn’t work to give herself a reason for having the crappy life she has! Wanda says that she should have said that she finds Dalia’s neighborhood and apartment ugly and depressing, but does Dalia? Does Dalia really? Doesn’t work — so she can’t leave — then can say she’s “stuck” there — and then being “stuck” there is her reason she’s depressed and can’t work so can’t leave and on and on like that forever. . . . Should have said all that, but she’s actually only really thinking it now, talking to Monica. . . said nothing then, just ate too much of the dead corpse of her sandwich and ended up feeling sick. . . . Wanda Baer wants Monica’s opinion about this too: a) does Dalia glorify her poverty, her lousy neighborhood, lousy apartment, etc. because she thinks it’s some sort of stupid weapon against Wanda — and anyone else who hates the idea of living like that? Even though (or just because) Wanda never says anything to Dalia about how much Dalia’s apartment and neighborhood disgust and depress her (bends over backward not to say anything) Dalia probably knows how she feels — so she makes a big deal about her “poverty” to make Wanda feel middle class! Dalia knows that she has a tiny little apartment — no bigger than a tube of elbow macaroni — in the attic of a multiple dwelling where there must be five, six, eight other apartments and that her little tube of an apartment worms its way right through the middle of part of the landlord’s apartment — right between two of their bedrooms! Does Monica think that Dalia actually sees that as middle class? Does Monica think that’s middle class? That she’s middle class? Can your way of life be middle class and yourself not be middle class? Or the other way around? There’s this possibility too: Dalia really loves her crappy way of life and couldn’t live any other way. Couldn’t live in any other neighborhood and is lying to herself when she says it depresses her. Wants to know how you can ever answer questions like that. Seems to her that either thing could be true and that gives her a headache. . . . b) Monica has to answer this: is it a sign of depression or is it exactly the same thing as the impossible-to-answer questions about Dalia and her apartment and why — why really, why exactly — she lives in that neighborhood that Dalia’s relationships with men are always so sick. Always sick, insane and depressing. Guy she’s involved with right now, for example, has an incurable disease and there never has been — never can be — any sex (nature of disease not given by Wanda or noted by Monica). Dalia claims that no sex doesn’t matter, but Wanda doesn’t believe that’s true and wonders if Monica agrees with her that there’s some weird similarity between that and the peeling paint and broken plaster in Dalia’s apartment that Dalia’s never in eight years done anything about. . . . Let’s see: what happened next? Thinks they got onto the subject of suicide, one of Dalia’s favorite topics. Dalia is obsessed by suicide. Thinks and talks about it constantly, but says that she “doesn’t have the guts” to do it. Wanda argues with her about it but it’s as pointless as all their other arguments because no matter what Dalia says Wanda really has no idea what she’s thinking. Last week, for example, she had a strange experience: Dalia asked her to drive to the campus of one of the City colleges, took her to a spot on campus and told her that exactly on that spot where they were standing a student had just recently committed suicide. Jumped from the building that was throwing its chilly shadow on them and landed here (on the un-stained pavement under their feet). Had a newspaper with her and, while they were standing there, read her a long article. Wanda has a copy of the article in the car and gives it to Monica (“for the Chronicle”). “COLLEGE STUDENT DIES IN PLUNGE” “A twenty year old sophomore jumped or fell Wednesday afternoon from a ledge on the sun deck outside the Student Union Building penthouse. He died two hours later at a nearby hospital and police and college security officials have not yet determined whether the death was a suicide or an accident. They have discounted homicide. According to college security officials the student, Arthur Sypes, fell seven floors into the narrow alley between the Student Union and Valegrove Towers, a six floor apartment building, at about 1:30 p.m. A student passing by (identified as Edgar Cereno) heard a muffled cry followed by a thud and reported the fall to Student Union authorities. Security guard Luke Snell, who was also passing, revived Sypes, bleeding from his mouth and nose, by giving him artificial respiration. Police and an ambulance arrived within minutes to take the blond-bearded youth to Outerborough Hospital. He was pronounced dead at 3:42 p.m. from major multiple head trauma. Sypes’ father said that his son had suffered a head injury stumbling as he got off a train on a college-sponsored tour of Italy in December and that he’d been in great pain ever since. Sypes had left a looseleaf ring binder filled with a hundred-or-so pages of indecipherable longhand and a music textbook on the sun deck ledge. No other students were reported in the area at the time of the incident. The ledge, which is exactly forty inches wide, cannot be seen from inside the penthouse.” Wanda says that while Dalia was reading her the article — which seemed to her gruesome and depressing — she felt a chill because she recognized the name “Sypes”! She knew that she knew the dead student! Or didn’t really “know” him but had just seen him, just sort of met him on the beach — not one week before he killed himself! — because Lowell knew him, said hello to him on the beach and introduced them. He’s the younger brother of someone that Lowell’s been friendly with since childhood. . . . Doesn’t know whether Lowell knows about the suicide or not — or whether it would affect him if he did know. Would it depress him? Should she call Lowell? Would she want someone to call her with news like that? Wouldn’t calling Lowell be something like Dalia dragging her to the suicide spot and reading her the article? — word for word and with more animation and excitement than she showed about anything else? Would she care, would she be depressed about the suicide if Dalia hadn’t made her stand in the shade of the Student Union Building, right on the pavement that had obviously been scoured clean? Mentioning Lowell makes Wanda remember this also: Lowell met Dalia through her (as she thinks Monica already knows). Thinks he found her attractive, but she’s not sure. Does know for sure that Lowell called Dalia a couple of times and finally decided to ask her out to dinner. Said that he had an urge to go to Chinatown. A craving for Lin’s Garden food. And for whatever reason thought it would be interesting to sit in a restaurant with Dalia and get to know her. Thinks she remembers Lowell saying that he could tell that there were interesting dark depths there and that he was curious. But then, when the time came, when he drove over to her place to pick her up, she didn’t want to go out. He tried to reason with her: he was dying for Chinese food (for Lin’s Garden Chinese food) and was in the mood for being in a restaurant, not sitting around someone’s apartment all night talking. (Didn’t say: sitting around Dalia’s repulsive apartment.) Dalia was sweet about it. She apologized, but wouldn’t budge: never eats Chinese food and listed all Chinese food’s unhealthy qualities. So, Lowell said, Dalia got her way. They stayed in and talked. But he found out all he needed to know about her from that (that she was someone who probably always got her way, one way or another) and he definitely won’t call her again. What else? Wanda Baer thinks she remembers Lowell saying — after they met Sypes on the beach —that he’d had a nervous breakdown, had been hospitalized and still suffered from terrible headaches. Also this (and this is important, doesn’t know how she almost forgot it!): she wants Monica’s opinion about Dr. DaVinci’s analysis and advice. Or maybe “advice” isn’t the right word. More like instructions. . . . In her Monday session with Dr. DaVinci, after the Saturday when she couldn’t get out of bed and couldn’t move even in bed, Dr. DaVinci surprised her by saying that she should have telephoned. Should have made the effort to get to the telephone and call him. She should have considered it an emergency, as serious as a heart attack (or maybe he compared it to another fatal or near-fatal disease and she’s got it mixed up). He offered to call her every day to make sure she hadn’t fallen into another state like that. She was moved by his concern, but she said “no! don’t do that! it would make me too nervous to think it’s you every time the phone rings!” She laughed at herself when she said that and thought he would laugh too, but he didn’t. His tone was serious and never changed. “I want you to listen to me today,” he said. “I want you to listen and pay attention and really hear what I’m saying to you.” He said that when he looked into the waiting room to call her today he noticed that it took her an unusually long time to respond: her gaze was rigid and she was staring straight ahead. (No movement of head or eyes.) That concerned him greatly. That’s why, as soon as she came in and stretched out, he made her move her eyes around — rotate them — look here and there — almost like he was trying to get them unstuck! “I want you to make a conscious effort to move your eyes, the way we’re doing now. And I want you to remember my words and picture my face talking to you.” Then he made her recite back his directions. “Remember to move. I want you to keep moving. Move your body, move your eyes. Force it if you have to. . .” Remembers that he made a sort of pushing gesture with his arms and she took that to mean (does Monica agree?) that she needed to give herself a shove to keep herself in motion. Then he said something that really bothered her. “Of course you’re young. But that alone is no solution — and it also doesn’t account for all the energy you have. There’s no such thing as ‘too much’ energy. But you have more energy than most of the patients I see and you have no idea what to do with it. So — if you think about the amount of energy you have — the potential movement in you — and then you realize that up until this minute in my office you haven’t done anything — that the circumference of your life is really tiny — it’s no wonder you feel empty and you’re miserable!” He said that the lack of significant movement in her life had started to become physiological and that’s not something he can ignore. . . This is not clear (to Wanda then, while driving in the rain toward Manhattan, or to Monica later, while writing, or later still, while typing what she’d written or later still?): she doesn’t see how it could be in the same session, because it doesn’t make sense, but how could there have been another session, another time after she’d been out with Dalia? Maybe Monica can help her figure it out: did this happen in the Cornucopia Diner or another night in another restaurant? While Dalia was talking, telling one of her usual horrible, depressing tales, Wanda felt herself getting sluggish and sleepy right then, felt it coming over her as if she could lie down across two chairs or on a barely-padded bench in a booth and go to sleep. Got home that night and fell into a stupor, woke up in a strange, horrible mood, not as severe as the other time, but still with no desire, no zest for getting up. “What’s the point?” Thought of Dr. DaVinci and forced herself to get up and go through the motions, but still with the feeling, “why? what for? what’s the advantage to not being in bed?” She doesn’t remember it, but that must be when she called Dr. DaVinci and that must be why there’s another session that she’s getting mixed up with the first one. This time she must have gone into detail about her relationship with Dalia — because now she has two sets of instructions from Dr. DaVinci: a) force herself to move — her eyes, her face in general and her body, of course — and move also in the larger sense of taking action in her life and b) follow Lowell’s example and stay away from Dalia. * On what day in July ‘76 is Sylvia Greengrass, a white bandana around her thinning scrubpad of reddish hair, carrying a beach chair northward along the west side of ABC Street, returning from the beach to her little brick fortress in white beach shoes and white beach dress? Lean forward out of the moment: into the ecstasy of language, even if it’s the ecstasy of rewriting March ‘76 notes about Wanda Baer and her dangerously depressed friend, Dalia. Unlike other forms of ecstasy, built into consciousness? Sometimes — not always — sentences cascade one into the other and then there’s a waterfall the mind goes over into a special state of lucidity — out into the unchanging panorama with its weird rotation of sameness and difference. Sooner or later there has to be a moment of leaning back out of the cascade of writing that’s come to rest and there Monica is in July: Sylvia Greengrass returns from the beach and disappears into the deep, permanent shade of the narrow driveway between her house and the Sloths’ white-shingle-covered twin house to the north and then Wanda Baer returns from walking Bah-Wah. Says that she went to the beach with Bah-Wah and ran into Norma Rosenkranz (not the person she needed to see!) walking her ugly dog Brownie. While Bah-Wah and Brownie were going crazy digging holes in the sand together she was stuck listening to Norma Rosenkranz: searching for the job she’s never going to get, getting along a little better with her mother and on and on like that. Then (because Norma is really always horribly depressed and nuts) out of the blue she looked at the long, deep holes the dogs were in ecstasy digging and said: wasn’t it weird that the dogs had decided to dig three graves. Also: three graves, not two and not four. What could that mean? She can’t explain to Monica how profoundly Norma Rosenkranz’s morbid craziness disturbed her. Had to get away from her and had a terrible time pulling Bah-Wah off the beach. . . . On a hot July 9 Monica is on the front porch, typing and editing written (barely legible) March notes. Nicole Renard, Nicole’s sister JoAnne and Grete Forest, on their way back from the beach and about to go up the orange brick front steps of Greg-and-Lena’s house, spot Monica behind the tall Rhinebeck pine and stop to chat. One of the three (which one not noted) says that all they did was walk, no one went in the water, can’t say why. Nicole says that it makes no sense: she already went swimming on Sunday and definitely would have been happy to go in again today, but no one else wanted to, so she didn’t go in either and now she thinks it was stupid. Monica says that she and David have been trying to figure out why neither one of them has gone swimming yet — as if there’s a feeling that winter stayed late equally in the mind and in the ocean. Fear of diving under a very thin surface of summer and finding what? Nicole suggests that, if Monica’s willing, and maybe even David too (though she knows that he hates to be cold), they could go back and take a swim together later when there’ll be some shadows on the beach and it will still be too hot on the porch for writing. . . . Talking about the beach and swimming reminds Grete that she has a story to tell: Andy (last name never recorded, possibly never known by Monica), the tobacco-blond-bearded lifeguard who rents the second floor rear studio in Greg and Lena’s every spring and summer with his girlfriend Nadja, has a serious staph infection (swollen lymph glands etc.) that he may have picked up (she’s not 100% sure) after he went swimming in the cold ocean last week. This too: Nadja is going to be a lifeguard for the first time this year. Surprises her a little, because she always thought of Nadja as very likable, very beautiful, but lazy: likes to bicycle and may even be athletic in her own way, but only if she can fit bicycling, swimming, etc. into her smooth and pliant way of passing the day. Lifeguarding could have been another athletic but pleasant way of passing the day for Nadja, but it won’t be because of Andy’s idiotic lifeguarding code of ethics. He thought it was unethical to use his seniority and influence to make sure Nadja was assigned to a local beach, so they’re making her travel all the way to Staten Island while guys who scored much lower than her are getting the beaches she could have had. What else? Thinks Andy told her (but she’s not sure) that Nadja may finally be willing to get married. . . . Typing (rewriting) in the hot shade of the porch. Preoccupied by the stories other people tell us, as if they were our own. Are our own once we’ve become preoccupied with them? Monica makes these notations quickly: 1) Andy Forest just had his hair cut and now it looks exactly like his brother-in-law Greg Coffin’s. 2) Greg Coffin’s haircut and Andy Forest’s haircut look like Joshua Coffin’s haircut, but Monica can’t remember if Joshua Coffin’s haircut came first. 3) Grete Forest, always loose-limbed and girlish, a beautiful woman with a girlish gait, has new, sad lines around her eyes. Eyes make a direct, sad contact with Monica’s as she talks about things that don’t seem sad at all. 4) JoAnne Renard used to look a little more like her sister Nicole. Monica wonders what in JoAnne’s life has whittled away everything that isn’t blandly normal: whittled the warm and pleasing softness in her face to a trim boniness: thin face sculpts a big nose that wasn’t a big nose only a few years ago. And the size of her nose seems absurdly meaningful. 5) Only Nicole, of the three women returning from the beach, still seems on the right side of time. 6) Are these the minute changes we never see as they’re happening or are these already the visible end products of invisible events? David decides to join Monica when she goes swimming on July 9 (first time in 1976). Truth may be: no great lover of the beach, David goes only to be with Monica and immediately finds the water icy. Iciness is so deep and central to the ocean’s core that hot sun doesn’t dissolve it. So David spends a good part of the day on the beach (Monica sometimes with him, sometimes in the water) eating grilled cheese sandwiches and drinking strong iced coffee. July notes say that a gardener named Dominick Ianni was mowing the Greengrasses' two little plots of lawn (guarded by a low brick wall, spiked iron fence and gate) before Sylvia Greengrass returned from the beach in white bandana, white dress and shoes. Monica wonders how her notes can be accurate when she knows that mowing his two little plots of lawn grass is one of suntanned and wiry Enos Greengrass’s great passions, possibly second only to hosing clean the driveway he shares with the Sloths: hosing driveway with expert side-to-side swings of the hose (nozzle turned on high), then hosing sidewalk, even a little way into the gutter, as if there’s a longing to hose dirt and debris all the way to bay or ocean. . . . Lean forward? Not easy to lean out of the heat of July (distracting more because it’s unpleasant or because it’s pleasant?) into icy (undated) days of March: no sun, only cold rain and wind for days. “On Thursday night”, though Monica already has a cold and is losing her voice, she and David are on the beach in the rain, thrilled by the storm in and around the ocean at high tide. Surf breaks over the boardwalk railing and deposits sedge along the beach as fragrant as mown grass. Feel the full force of the ocean like this: imagine that they’re in the faded blue rowboat flung out of the water at their feet, breaking into pieces what had held together for half a century or more. * On an undated day in the third week of March Monica is typing into her Chronicle a letter from Jonathan Williams of the Jargon Society, Highlands, North Carolina, dated March 15, 1976. “Dear Monica and David, “I wont say no to your sending me the manuscript of Green Inventory (5) (Discovery of the World/Discovery of the Word), but I will confess that there are two problems: (1) I am swimming in accepted, but unpublished, texts for Jargon, and the funding and production of these will take at least three years to achieve before I take on yet more. . . (2) your work sounds much more on the wave-lengths of Richard Kostelanetz and Dick Higgins than it does on mine. I.e., us southerners ain’t very ‘conceptual’, despite Dore Ashton’s efforts to make me seem so in some art magazine. In fact, we barely have ‘minds’ at all down here in the Big Foot Country, facts first pointed out by Tocqueville and W.J. Cash. However, if you really see Jargon as a place into your work would fit, then send ahead. I do hope you have some sense of the books I have been doing. Mason Jordan Mason, Mina Loy, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Tom Meyer, Ralph Eugene Meatyard seem in another part of the ballpark - - but I may have it all wrong. Ultimately, I never presume to know what I want until I see it. That is a confession, but not an open sesame. . . . “I am driving to such scintillating places as Roswell, New Mexico, Fort Worth, Texas, Biloxi, Mississippi, and Bainbridge, Georgia now, for foundation-begging, poetry reading, and seeking after two photographers. Back here April 9th. “Best wishes, “Jonathan Williams” (large, bold and black ink script signature) “Jonathan Williams,” (typed) “Director” Long list of Directors, Advisors and Particular Friends of the Society below, a second address for Williams in Corn Close, Dentdale, Sedbergh, Cumbria, England and still one more address, a business address in Millerton, N.Y. On another undated day in the third week of March Nelly X knocks on Pat Corcoran’s front porch door and then has trouble getting directly to the point: that is, she’d like to know if, despite the cold weather, Timothy Corcoran would like to come out and play with her son, Jimmy. Does Nelly X invite Timothy Corcoran over to the X/Kropotkin house nine blocks away? (Not said or not heard.) Stands awkwardly in the open doorway, letting cold air blow in and waiting for Pat Corcoran’s response, but Monica fails to record it. Air like January, bird cries of March. March 19 is a warm and comfortable day for working out of doors and Monica, though she still has laryngitis, is on the porch, writing. (No outdoor typewriting — no transcription of earlier handwritten scrawl into typewriter — until warmer weather.) Doesn’t get far into whatever it is she’s working on (not noted) when she hears Joan Regan — wheeling a chocolate brown baby carriage back and forth along her side (the west side) of ABC Street — calling up to old Rae Ryan sitting tranquilly on the Regans’ porch, waiting for the world to deposit something, as it always does. “A terrible week, wasn’t it?” “Awfully cold, yes.” Street takes its time breaking through the moment and then Rae Ryan may see a little more clearly that Joan Regan isn’t just strolling back and forth, she’s wheeling a carriage. . . . “Is that the little girl. . . ?” “Yes, Fionnuala’s second. . . .” From where she’s sitting (because of the pine tree or the holly bush or because of light and shadow) Monica can’t see old Rae Ryan at all and can barely see Joan Regan wheeling Fionnuala’s chocolate brown carriage. “And just how old would she be now, Joan?” “Well, Rae, she’ll be four months on April fourth, I think. Let’s see: December, January. . . yes, Rae, I think four months in April is right. . . .” “Not quite four months yet, then. Let’s not take two weeks away from her already, Joan,” and she laughs. But Joan Regan, who’s much closer to Rae Ryan than Monica, doesn’t seem to hear her clearly, as if Rae Ryan’s words traveled directly across the street, over her head, missing her entirely, and she answers irrelevantly: “Yes, they had to get some groceries, so I’m watching her.” While hearing what’s traveling her way from across the street Monica is looking at what’s near at hand: Light on pine needles (does light on = color of?) Light on leaves that are green all year. Light on leaves and light on needles don’t yield the same green, but difference in the two greens is not noted here. Looking at light on leaves and on needle-leaves and in some way trying to separate leaf masses from the light on them is it possible to still be listening — to really tune herself to listening? The street seems more silent, though it’s possible that it isn’t a question of looking-replacing-hearing, but simply that Joan Regan and Rae Ryan have stopped talking and are just existing for a little while in the warm day. The universe of sound seems to have reorganized itself around Monica’s looking, almost the way it does around someone indoors (even with windows open): sound of human voices, sound of bird songs (rarely a complete song, usually a string of smooth or barbed wire clipped to a longer or shorter length) spin together in the air and human hearing has to drift out to it through venetian slats, into the warm breezes of middle air where voices are comfortable traveling. Monica notes that we hear birds far more often than we see them. They populate our sound world but always surprise us in our visible world. Reminds her to wonder: what was the large bird she spotted earlier on the 19th in a tree on Coast Boulevard? A large grey bird with a stiff tail at a severe angle. Reminds herself also to ask David if he can find out what she saw. The kind of puzzle-solving or detective-work by thumbing through reference books that David relishes. At what time on the same warm March day does Monica hear Nelly X’s voice? And, only seconds after hearing Nelly X, Nelly X spots Monica and joins her on the porch or (not clear in Monica’s notes) Monica descends the short flight of steps and stands with Nelly X directly in warm sunlight on the sidewalk where winter is still stored in and under the yellow-grey paving blocks. Nutty as ever or even nuttier? Song of vague yet obsessive worries (usually about handsome seven-year-old son Jimmy) escalates through endless loops and repetitions into a boring (unbearable?) shrillness. Monica can only take so much of it, but in some way feels obligated to listen to some of it. Chronicle, almost always a source of something like ecstasy for Monica, has its obligations that are not at all ecstatic yet may lead to (are a necessary part of?) ecstasy. Notes also say “high-pitched and dry” and “a sweetly sickening little girl monotone”. Let’s see: this is the story — story made up of nothing but worries — that Nelly X needs to tell about handsome little Jimmy (looks something like Troy Donohue): the other day Jimmy came home from school complaining (crying?) that he had no friends in class. That upset Nelly so much (remembering how she felt ostracized and isolated as a child) that she insisted that she and husband Bill Kropotkin visit Jimmy’s teacher and question her about Jimmy’s problems at school. Doesn’t Monica agree that any parent, seeing her child shunned and rejected and upset enough about it to cry to his mother, would do the same thing? Wouldn’t Monica want to know why other children don’t like her child? Try and get to the bottom of it right away? Wouldn’t she feel that her son’s teacher had some responsibility and needed to be questioned? and needed to see also that there were concerned parents. . . ? And Bill? What does Bill think? Now that she thinks about it, Monica says, she hasn’t seen Nelly X’s husband, Bill Kropotkin, for a long time. (Nelly X’s husband Bill is of course not a member of the “X” clan, he’s a scholar who’s fallen out of the safety of the academic tree and now does this and that to help support the family and whose gloomy, somewhat angry face always has dark shadows he can never seem to shave out of their deep furrows. Nelly X may or may not call herself “Nelly Kropotkin”, but Monica’s known the X’s too long for her to think of Nelly that way.) Bill is unconcerned. Bill Kropotkin is Bill Kropotkin and has always been Bill Kropotkin and is unconcerned about whether his son is getting along with his classmates or about anything else. His only concern, as usual, is with trying to turn his Fourier articles into a publishable book. The Anarchist Press has shown interest, but that was a year ago. Someone there read one of Bill’s articles in a scholarly journal and thought Bill had a fresh perspective, but it’s taking him forever to get it all together into book form. Never stops doing research, never stops piling up notes, and that’s why no one ever sees him. He’s home right now, indoors, up to his neck in paper on a day like this, patching together his notes on Fourier and Proudhon instead of spending the day outdoors with his son. . . . There’s no question that Bill’s unemployment compensation will run out before he submits a manuscript to the publisher. Not that the book’s going to earn anything. . . ! Bill’s been lost all his life in a period that interests very few people: the mid-nineteenth century when Communism was being hatched and there were other, secondary figures (the forgotten, somewhat cracked ones that Bill’s obsessed with) who split off from Marx and the others because they were more humanistic or romantic or utopian or because they were mystics or anarchists: that’s where her husband, Bill Kropotkin, really lives. In real life he applied for one of those grants that he never gets, his unemployment will run out and he’ll be driving a cab again this summer. . . . And did Bill ever go with her to see the teacher? Yes. She got Bill to go, but then of course the teacher said that she couldn’t imagine what Jimmy was talking about. Not true that he has no friends. Certainly not “ostracized”. In fact, he’s very popular and always seems happy and mischievous. So now she’s worried because Jimmy wanted her to think he’s as lonely and miserable as she was when he isn’t. . . . Monica may be in MOMA on March 19 to see an exhibition of works by an artist who interests her or (more likely) to see a film, but neither film nor artist is noted. Her only notes are about a few things she observes in the MOMA sculpture garden (where already, on this warm March day, there are café tables and chairs): a) Two people (gender not noted) at a garden café table and on the table: oranges (being sectioned and eaten), bagels (too pale a caramel to be properly baked or toasted), green bottles of beer (number not noted). b) Beautiful New York light: at this afternoon hour (what hour exactly not noted) sun along the upper edges of buildings only, absorbed and softened by subtly different stone and reflected with different degrees of brilliance by various strips or squares of metal, glass, etc., depending on angle, composition, lack of transparency. . . and framed to make someone in the garden (or garden café) encounter the street as a real, changeable street but also as something designed into the museum’s architecture as one more aesthetic experience (and in that sense pre-experienced for you before you can experience it yourself). In Monica’s view, for things to be really random they have to be more of a mess: that is, chaos framed for viewing is already something different from chaos. (It isn’t news to anyone that artworks in museums are a little like zoo animals.) c) And yet: there across the way from the sculpture garden in the (what story?) window of a handsome town house on W. 54 Street, an elderly woman wrapped in something beautiful in a deep chair with a tall green back is being served (what?) on a tray, just visible through distended reflections. d) Helene, pretty blonde schoolteacher and MOMA café regular Monica runs into, generally with Helene’s little circle of café regulars, whenever Monica stops in to have a cup of coffee and a slice of maple walnut layer cake in the MOMA café: at an outdoor table (somewhat unusual for Helene not to be indoors) with a guy who’s just her type (blond, lanky, a little younger than her, and with something hard-to-put-a-finger-on that’s slightly off). Helene is wearing blue eye shadow. Helene’s blue eye shadow interests Monica more than anything else that she can see or hear in MOMA. Does the magnetic or clustering principle of events demand that Helene (once she made the decision to wear eye shadow at all on March 19, 1976) put on blue eye shadow? Also blonde, but a little more or a little less than twice as old as Lily Romero and nowhere near as pale or as strangely beautiful. An attractive, not-quite-middle-aged blonde schoolteacher whose ever-so-feminine voice spreads a sort of perfumed powder in the air around her and through her very nice, very feminine clothing and personality: a fragrant powderpuff personality, yet there’s always something odd about the men she’s with and there are hints of a more darkly shaded life outside her daytime life of teaching and museum-going. e) 1) Now sunlight has retreated (to a degree that’s only measurable after the moment has already occurred) to tile or slate rooftops only: sunlight so delicate, so transparent it’s barely a brushed-on wash of egg thinned with water. 2) Four people (gender not noted) arrive, compose themselves around a small café table and immediately are in the thick of a conversation in Swedish. 3) The woman (a MOMA café regular) Monica and David have always referred to as “the Slavic woman” without actually knowing if she’s Slavic makes an appearance in the garden café for the first time (for Monica) in 1976. Monica hasn’t seen her for a long time, now here she is, looking handsome, her beautiful chestnut hair pulled back and profoundly gleaming, suggesting — together with her intelligent good looks — a fragrance and mystery that may not be justified, not at all showing to the world the money-worries that Monica knows she has. With her a handsome, chestnut-haired man who could be her twin and therefore, to Monica, becomes “the Slavic man”. 4) Two young men excitedly looking through a New York restaurant guide (which guide not noted or Monica is seated too far away to read its cover). One of them (Germanic accent?) points to a listing in the guidebook and says: “All the drinks you can drink for only $7.75!” f) Not indicated why Monica is still in MOMA late enough to see that, at night, on March 19, the sculpture garden is so grey and bare she’d never know that just short hours earlier it had been warm and blooming with human life: the miraculous and absurd infinity of conversation and the imaginary biographies of those we don’t know at all or may know completely in one way but not at all in others. This is not clear to Monica: leaning in or leaning out? Typing March 19 and March 20 notes in June, July, possibly August and leaning absolutely forward into reading handwritten March notes, editing them, rewriting, translating them into typewriter and in that way reading and writing her way completely inside March — only leaning back out into June-July-August if someone or something jerks her out of March. Or, something having jerked her out of March into the warm season around her (maybe just having leaned away from scrap paper and typewriter to take a break and look around), she’s completely in summer of ‘76. For example: notes don’t say whether Monica meets Nicole Renard on her porch, on the sidewalk in front of her porch, on the boardwalk or somewhere else. Nicole seems more dressed for a cool day in March than for any day in August, but Monica knows that the evidence of Nicole’s clothing is inconclusive. Let’s see: from the ground up: beautiful brown suede boots, blue-on-white or white-on-blue long cotton skirt, hip-length belted blue suede jacket, oversized blue canvas shoulder bag, wave on wave of honey-brown hair with lines and dashes of gold combed through it. Says she was looking for Monica because she has two stories to tell her: 1) She’s flying down to Bermuda, possibly even tomorrow. Her mother, Mildred, is getting divorced after eight years of marriage to Klaus, in some ways more of a business partnership than a marriage. She wanted to visit Mildred a month ago in London, but Mildred said no, not right now, the time’s not right, she’d explain it later, etc., etc. Nicole thinks that Mildred didn’t want her to come to London because (though she’d never admit it) she’s self-conscious about the age difference between herself and her new boyfriend. It’s no secret that she’s been living with him — she’s not embarrassed about that — if anything she seems to want her (Nicole) to know how much better she’s feeling since she’s been living with this new what’s-his-name, how wonderful friends say she looks, how youthful, how glowing, blah blah, since this guy. But the one thing she does seem self-conscious about is the fact that he can’t be more than a year or two older than Nicole. So it’s Nicole’s opinion that Mildred made her wait until she (Mildred) went to Bermuda where there’d be no chance to bump into this guy whose name Nicole really doesn’t know . . . . 2) The two stories have a common thread in this way: she’s going to Bermuda not just to see her mother: she’s using Mildred’s divorce and the trip to Bermuda to get away from her Madison Avenue executive! She desperately wants Monica’s advice about whether or not this is the right way to handle it. There’s no question that she’s running away from him, but at the same time that she’s running away from him she gave him her Bermuda telephone number, hoping (is this nuts?) that he’s intelligent enough or at least sensitive enough to get the meaning of the deliberately mixed signal she’s given (the absurd “no” hidden in the “yes” of being given the number where she can be reached by the woman who’s obviously trying to get away from you). Monica knows how much she likes his company, so why is she running away from him? Yesterday, for the first time, their relationship became sexual. She knew that sex was inevitable and in some way she was dreading it. How long could a relationship that isn’t simply a friendship go on without it becoming sexual? Even though she knew it wouldn’t be good. This may sound stupid and it may be awful in its own way, but it’s true: he’d spent so much money on her, made so many grand, expensive gestures, “wined and dined” her in the best restaurants, taken her to this opening and that opening (took her to opening night of the Joffrey last week) etc, etc. that that added to the inevitability of sex. And she likes being with him. He’s intelligent, he’s entertaining, he’s not a child, he’s a man of the world with an important job that he takes seriously, yet there’s something. To like a man, to enjoy his company and spend as much time with him as if he were your boyfriend (maybe even to think of him as your boyfriend) but to know that you really aren’t attracted to him and don’t want to sleep with him — and at the same time to be aware that he wants much more than that from you, that he’s obviously attracted to you and is dying to sleep with you, may even be in love with you, whatever his idea of “you” is — when one person has that for another and the other feels none of that, isn’t that a horrible, doomed situation? He wants to be physically close, longs to get into you (and whatever it is he imagines you are) just the way you don’t want to get close to and into him. And it’s awkward and terrible to like everything about a man but know that you’re completely un-attracted and that the sex that’s impossible to avoid without ending the relationship is going to be clumsy and awful. The difficult question is: what’s the reason for this disconnection? Does Monica know? She thinks she’s been able to isolate something and wants to know if Monica thinks it makes sense: in the midst of everything else there’s an impossible-to-explain note of inhibition in him: the one thing that may not matter any other time (someone else might not even notice it), but that’s impossible at the moment that (for her) has to be relaxed and playful and happy. It’s not the tenderness that other women talk about that she craves in sex: it’s the sense that it’s no big deal — no more serious than if they were two children playing in the water. . . . With her Madison Avenue guy it’s the wrong kind of seriousness and the wrong kind of intensity, if Monica knows what she means. It feels as if he’s reading too much meaning into the moment and it makes her self-conscious and uncomfortable. It’s as if she sees sex as a comedy and he sees it as an opera, maybe even a tragic one. . . . Is she making herself clear? It’s such a subtle sensation that it’s hard to put into words. There’s this too: he doesn’t leave her alone. Yesterday morning, for example, between 9 a.m. and noon, he called her twenty-one times! And there have been times that have been even worse. She’s told him more than once that it bothers her, that she finds it weird, but it doesn’t stop him. So her mother’s divorce is coming along at a perfect time: she’ll go swimming, she’ll sunbathe on the beach and at Mildred’s pool, she’ll be alone and she’ll have time to figure out what to do. . . . Monica’s notes say clearly: at 5:15 p.m. on August 4, while typing the March Chronicle, (hidden behind the dense boughs of the tall Rhinebeck pine), she sees (just below her in the sunbaked, weedy driveway) Greg and Andy enjoying working on Greg’s old car together (make, model, not even the color are noted). Happier hunched and banging away under the hood than they ever seem during band practice in Babette’s open garage. And a little later starkly pale (white as meringue) and strangely beautiful Lily Romero adds to Greg and Andy’s pleasure working together on Greg’s old car by bringing them tall glasses of iced tea to sip as they work. Monica wonders: does her August note about Greg and Andy (that is, knowing for sure that she made this quick sketch of Greg and Andy while leaning back out of her immersion in March notes) prove that she ran into Nicole Renard and heard her two long stories in August rather than in March? Out of order: may be the same thing as saying that it’s the natural order of the Chronicle to find a detached bit of fabric from someone’s story sewn in later for all sorts of possible reasons (leaning into/leaning out of the written page or the surrounding moment, lengthy intrusion of passing events, digression that develops its own need to be told, etc., etc.). Monica could always go back — could go back now, for example — and re-attach the detached bit of fabric to the time and place where it belongs, but why? Here it drifted and here it stays. Monica believes that to make the Chronicle orderly in this way would be to create a more serious dis-order. Lean back into March immersion. Notes say that “last night” in MOMA the sculpture garden was “balmy” (spring into summer on the skin), yet grey and wintry to the eye (nothing blooming). Drive back from Manhattan toward the beach through the between-zone of Brooklyn and at the beach a black and gold world is rippling: dark gold moon that’s perfectly round in a black-within-black sky ripples in threads through black ocean and threads of black cloud can be found in the moon and all of it coursing (its cold spiciness arising exactly from what?) through Monica’s hair, north in waves toward the bay, where it dies before reaching Brooklyn. “Out of order” too? On the same night that Monica and David are in MOMA Wanda Baer is in Chinatown with her West African friend, Abebi, who changed her name from “Ababi” when she married a man whose last name is Ahwesh because she liked the sound of “Abebi Ahwesh” more than the sound of “Ababi Ahwesh”. During the drive home Wanda Baer describes their dinner in Shanghai Town like this: only the spring rolls were perfect: the spicy eggplant, the Hunan-style lamb with spicy scallions, the crabs in Hoi sin sauce were all horribly disappointing. Not the way she remembered it at all. Why did the food seem so delicious the night she was there with Monica and David and so lousy tonight with Abebi? One other thing: she’s looking forward to tomorrow when her French friend (doesn’t say her beautiful, secretive, delicate and hyper-sensitive French friend, Cristalene) will be visiting. Must be August? Monica (while writing on her porch) records the appearance of one of the seldom-seen Arlington sisters, all three rather small, dark-haired, a little hunched and very hard to tell apart, knowing them only by seeing them from across the street — coming or going and sometimes only peering cautiously out from the entryway, as if from the mouth of an underground burrow. The three Arlington sisters live in the righthand (northernmost) house of a long row of not-quite-new attached houses, partly brick and partly shingle. The only sister who it’s at all possible to distinguish from the others is the one Monica sees now, the one who works. At about 5:30 p.m. on an undated day in an unidentified month that must be August the Arlington sister who works returns from work wearing nothing more than a pale blue cotton skirt and darker blue jacket. On Thursday March 18 Fayette Hickox of The Paris Review calls with two stories to tell and has a long conversation with David: 1) George Plimpton had to go to Jamaica (reason not given or not recorded), won’t be back in town till some time in April and wanted Fayette to call and make sure that Monica and David could schedule a lunch meeting at his townhouse to sort out the format of THE BLUE HANGER SPACE NOVEL portfolio. David doesn’t tell Fayette that Monica has laryngitis and wouldn’t be able to meet George in March in any case. 2) FH: “By the way, I have a piece of information for you.” D: “You have a piece of information for me?” FH: “Yes. I suppose you could call it that. A piece of information for you and for Monica. It might be considered ‘good news’ or it may just be a piece of information that could be of interest to you or you could actually take it as a message passed to you through me.” D: “Yes?” FH: “Do you know someone named Dorothy Dorm?” D: “No, I don’t ‘know’ Dorothy Dorm, but I have some idea who she is.” FH: “Do you know that she runs an interesting little magazine called So What? Do you know it?” D: “I’m aware of it, yes.” FH: “Well, I was in someone’s loft for one of those things you could call an ‘event’ but actually just feels like a party and a young woman came up to me and introduced herself as Dorothy Dorm and somehow she seemed to know that Paris Review was planning an art portfolio of THE BLUE HANGER and that we’d already published an interesting story of yours and she made it seem that speaking to you was urgent. . . .” D: “But what for?” FH: “I don’t know exactly. All she said was that she’d been trying to get in touch with you — couldn’t find any of the usual ways to get in touch with you directly — and begged me to give her your telephone number. But naturally I said I felt uncomfortable about doing that without your permission. Do you want me to give her your number? Do you have some objection?” D: “No particular objection, no.” FH: “She said she had some manuscripts of yours. Is that true? Does she have some manuscripts of yours?” D: “True and not true. She has something, but not much.” FH: “Have you noticed how she seems to have a way of getting these major figures for her magazine? I guess you have to give her credit. . . .” D: “Do you know anything about her history?” FH: “No. Nothing. She seems to have sprung up out of nowhere. One day there was no Dorothy Dorm and the next day there was nothing but Dorothy Dorm. And she comes on strong. So What? hasn’t been around very long — yet, as I say, she’s published all these important figures in it: Rauschenberg and Cage and so on — and I know for a fact that she just flew out to Arizona and persuaded Paolo Soleri to give her something substantial. And now she’s pursuing you. . . ! And yet she comes on as just one more smart but noisy girl from Roslyn. . . .” D: “Is the efficiency of unencumbered ambition the same as what people call ‘will power’?” FH: “Well, that may be true, but I didn’t know that when I met her. I didn’t know anything about her. But I think I felt that. I felt that she was looking at me solely as a path to something (you!) — that she saw me as a potentially useful implement — and it certainly doesn’t make her particularly pleasant to deal with. Not very appetizing in my opinion. . . .” After David’s conversation with Fayette Hickox on March 18 Monica has to remind David that he already knew something about Dorothy Dorm and So What? that Fayette Hickox obviously doesn’t know, that David probably forgot and that she (Monica) may have forgotten also, but that the Chronicle can’t forget. (Chronicle is her memory and she goes to it instead of trying to “remember”.) Not sure when exactly (didn’t copy down the date), but David once recounted to her (expressly for the Chronicle) a telephone conversation he had with Larry Lille when (for reasons not remembered or recorded) Dorothy Dorm’s name came up, possibly the first time David ever heard of her. Chronicle says that Larry Lille had a story to tell about Dorothy Dorm: when Dorothy Dorm first arrived in New York (can’t remember from where) she already knew exactly what she wanted and went after it aggressively. Came armed with a pretty accurate list of who to seek out for advice on how to get connected, how to get a magazine started, how to advertise herself, how to make a few quick ripples in the downtown art pond, etc., etc. And one of the people she made a beeline for was Edgar Zacharias (not himself and not Ralph Waldo Rice). That told him that she was well-informed about who mattered: who had had (probably still had) that same kind of ambition. Wonders how many others reacted the way Edgar did (apparently not too many!). He couldn’t be bothered. Treated her as a nuisance, a tourist. “If I gave that kind of advice to everyone who asked for it. . . .” Chronicle says that Larry Lille said that he had to admit that it wasn’t uninteresting to stand back and watch their little dance: ridiculous buzzsaw of undisguised ambition and absurd posture of self-importance. And he knows that Edgar was surprised that he miscalculated to that extent, because later, when she actually succeeded in making So What? a big deal, Edgar had the nerve (the opacity?) to submit a manuscript to her — and then was nuts enough to be shocked and furious when she sent it back! Monica comes across another fragment of David’s conversation with Larry Lille later or (more likely) David’s memory of his long-ago conversation may be re-awakened by Monica’s fresh chronicling of it and he adds this: Larry Lille asked: less nutty or more nutty? More opaque or less opaque? Possible to say: “just Edgar being Edgar”: or would David say it exceeds even Edgar Zacharias’s standard of Edgar-Zacharias-ness? Could be before Dorothy Dorm predictably rejected Edgar’s manuscript, but he thinks it may actually have been after the manuscript rejection: Edgar Zacharias suddenly remembered that, though he’d brushed Dorothy Dorm off as a vulgar, social-climbing out-of-towner, he’d actually found Dorothy Dorm somewhat attractive and saw no problem with calling her up and asking her out (to do what not stated by Larry Lille, not remembered by David or not noted by Monica). Rejected again, of course, and more or less shocked and furious than before? Or (Edgar being Edgar) hardly noticed and on to the next anthology, next seminar, next trip abroad, next brilliant graduate student. . . . At about ten a.m. on a chilly (undated) March day Monica is writing in a porch rocker in the southernmost corner of the porch to get some sun: well behind the Rhinebeck pine but not in its shade (sun slanting in from the ocean, under the deep porch overhang). Late in the afternoon of a hot (undated) August day Monica is working (typing March notes?) in the same, southernmost corner of the porch (not far from Pat Corcoran’s front door), but a little closer to the Rhinebeck pine in order to be in its shade. Typing her March Chronicle in August Monica finds a notation that isn’t clear but can’t think of the right person to straighten it out. Sketchy notation seems to say that at the moment of typing March ’76 in August ’76 Kitty’s wedding, which had been set for late October, is being postponed till the following July. Makes a note to a) get an explanation for the delay and b) find someone who can confirm the accuracy of these dates. Porch life is beginning next door in Greg-and-Lena’s house: on the vast, raftlike second floor front porch running the width of the massive house; on the tiny groundfloor stone platform leading to the porch enclosure where pingpong is played; and on the small, run-down porch attached to the second floor rear studio. The massive cocoa-shingled multiple dwelling where Monica has her attic apartment, by contrast, only has the single, broad “groundfloor” front porch (up a flight of six grey board steps), shaded by pine, holly bush, etc. A man and a woman (identities unknown to Monica) are on Greg-and-Lena’s second floor front porch with tall Andy Forest (in jeans and sleeveless white undershirt): sunlight on the bare, muscular arms of Greg’s buddy and band-mate, Grete’s husband, guitarist-carpenter-and-fisherman. Enormity of the ocean — even though it’s at the far end of ABC Street — shines behind everything: all human figures on all porches and everything else. Enormity of ocean’s cool and spicy aroma as well. Monica is alive — looking, breathing, recording, feeling air on skin — on this March day in 1976, trying to quickly sketch the elements of this instant of life. What else? Lena Coffin, thin and plaintive, appears just long enough (on the second floor porch?) to cough and to tell Monica that she has bronchitis. In the short time Lena’s on the porch talking to Monica (with difficulty, while coughing) Greg pops out with a younger man who looks oddly like him (Greg), at least in the quick double/profile Monica glimpses: two tall, lean men with angular-but-not-unfriendly faces. Pops back in at once — directly into the Coffins' spacious (loft-like?) kitchen that’s also their livingroom, diningroom and Greg’s piano room — as if Greg didn’t expect to find Lena on the porch, coughing and talking to someone (invisible to Greg) down below. After Greg’s back inside Lena adds that she wonders if Monica has an opinion on whether or not these two facts are related: 1) Greg has pretty much stopped working, stopped playing with the band, stopped playing solo, and it’s hard to figure out what in life Greg does want if he no longer wants that and 2) she’s been sick an awful lot lately and hasn’t been sleeping. Monica knows that Lena doesn’t want an answer and knows also that if she said even a little of what she’s thinking Lena would never tell her anything again. On an undated day in March Monica pauses at the intersection of Salem Avenue and ABA Street to look at a tree she doesn’t remember ever having stopped to look at before, not exactly the same as the way she sometimes finds herself in front of a painting, traversing the depth of its surface, no more an illusion than any other reality known only by sight. Looks at it so long she might be reading and re-reading a difficult passage in a novel, listening for a resonance with something remembered from pages or chapters read weeks earlier. What’s stopped her here is the fact that it’s a tree whose branches are reed-like wands: fuzzy and grey-green but also grey-brown with unexpected red-brown tints hard to tell apart from the red-brown and grey-brown tints of the sparrows flying in and out of its green and open tangle. Foreground colors always intensify background colors? In this case background sky-color of palest pale blue. Is this tree with reed-like wand-branches what’s known as a “pussy willow”? Are the “sparrows” really purple finches? Pausing at the intersection of sun and ocean: warmth of sun settles pleasantly in the dense waves of Monica’s hair and inside her head and clothing: can only smell (not feel on skin) the cool spiciness of ocean breezes trying as usual to see if they can get all the way south —› north across the narrow width of the peninsula and into or even across the bay to the swampy edge of another borough. How can she possibly know this? Monica wonders while typing March notes: Vicky Liman, the eldest of the Liman children, a girl with straight blonde hair and a long face, in some way horse-like yet also almost-beautiful, has at least one story to tell and must have told it (since Monica finds it recorded in her notes). Vicky Liman’s story is in Monica’s March notes as if she’s the one Vicky told it to, but she has no memory of having talked to Vicky Liman in March or any other time. She couldn’t say two words about the sound of Vicky Liman’s voice, yet here Vicky’s story is and it doesn’t sound (to Monica) filtered through retelling by a second or third voice. 1) Twenty-year-old Vicky Liman is back in New Hampshire with her boyfriend. Therefore her “story” had to have been told before she left. 2) Vicky Liman’s boyfriend is a twenty-six-year-old carpenter, originally from Broad Channel, who moved to a small (un-named) New Hampshire town years ago (how many years not told or not noted). 3) Boyfriend’s lived in New Hampshire so long a) he no longer feels at home in New York and b) has become the town carpenter (the only carpenter in town?). 4) Vicky Liman met her boyfriend when he was on a visit home. (Exactly when and how they met not told or not noted and this missing information makes it hard for Monica to understand how they could have met simply because he was home when their homes are in different neighborhoods.) 5) Vicky’s mother, Audrey (if there’s a Liman husband/father Monica doesn’t recall ever having seen him or heard his name mentioned) “accepts” (the word used in Monica’s notes) Vicky’s boyfriend and even paid Vicky’s way back and forth between New York and New Hampshire. 6) For a few months Audrey Liman was hopeful that Vicky’s boyfriend might move back to New York. His desire to be near Vicky, to see her every day, was so strong that he took an apartment on ABC Street, in Greg-and-Lena’s house, let’s see: 1, 2, 3, 4 or is it 5 houses from the Liman’s house (sandwiched between the Coffin/Forest “mother and daughter” and the Lenehans’ sprawling mess) toward the ocean end of the street. But he had to get back to work and now Vicky’s followed him to New Hampshire. 7) It isn’t clear in Monica’s notes whether it’s Vicky or Audrey who expresses or Audrey and Vicky both who express doubt about whether things will work out now that Vicky’s living with her boyfriend in the small town in New Hampshire where he’s the only carpenter, near absolutely nothing, without her family, without a job and with nothing to do. It also isn’t clear in Monica’s notes if it’s Audrey Liman who says that now that he got exactly what he thinks he wanted the boyfriend may have ruined everything. Let’s see: Monica doesn’t think her notes clearly tell Vicky Liman’s story. She thinks it’s possible that Vicky Liman wasn’t good at telling her story or there may be all sorts of other reasons, but it seems to her that Vicky Liman’s so-called story is just a catalogue of events whose order probably needs to be reshuffled, even though she doesn’t feel like doing it. Wonders this too: if the order of events in Vicky Liman’s story were reshuffled would it become possible for Vicky and her boyfriend to be the couple Monica saw with Andy Forest on Greg-and-Lena’s raftlike second floor front porch or for the carpenter-boyfriend to be the tall, angular guy Monica spotted briefly twinning with Greg Coffin, also on the second floor porch? March 22 is bitter cold and Monica tries to remember if it’s another of Audrey Liman’s definitive weather principles that any cold day after March 21 is meant to be felt as a stinging slap with an ice-covered hand. By late March the longing for spring is so overwhelming (even days of false spring won’t be questioned) that an un-gloved slap of icy rain, snow and 65-mile-an-hour wind is meant to be a cruel lesson in the stupidity of longing. It’s either on the 21st or 22nd (unclear in Monica’s notes) that Monica agrees to walk four blocks west to Lowell’s apartment on ABG Street for breakfast and finds herself walking through bitter wind and freezing rain. Let’s see: Monica runs into Nelly X two times on March 21st or 22nd: the first time, on the way to Lowell’s place on ABG Street through bitter-cold rain and wind, Monica and Nelly X hurry by one another with only a quick hello. Cross paths, but where? on ABC Street (Monica heading south, toward the boardwalk where she’d make a sharp right turn west, Nelly X headed north toward Coast Boulevard?); on the boardwalk, Monica rushing west through wind-driven rain, Nelly east?; on Coast Boulevard?; the beach?. Nelly X may pause to explain (unclearly) why she’s running (as if the weather isn’t enough of an explanation): it’s already almost eleven (may say “past eleven”) and she was supposed to be at the bus stop on Coast Boulevard to pick up Jimmy five minutes ago! Monica makes a mental note not to forget — at the appropriate place — to translate into typewriter her handwritten notes about her second encounter with Nelly X. Monica finds no explanation in her notes for the fact that Lowell isn’t home. There may be an explanation, may even be a note, but all that's recorded is Lowell’s empty apartment, the fact that something is wrong with the plumbing (no running water?) — therefore making breakfast would have been impossible — and the ocean view from the windows of Lowell’s small, second story apartment (three, four, five — Monica realizes she can’t say for sure how many houses from the beach). Moment of cold sunshine through the windows of Lowell’s empty apartment. Cold that makes ocean’s already-cold blue an odder (deeper?) blue. Long, rust-red stain of the horizon, more red than rust, vividly alive but drying. Not quite the same: the rust-red of the changeable shoreline mirror-horizon: more rust than red, closer to the rust-brown that runs through winter hedges (called “winter’s rust” by Monica and David in section 21 of their long chamber fiction called “Time Table”, still unpublished in March ’76 but written when?). Monica starts to write something (in her original handwritten notes? or while she’s typing and has a chance to think about what she’d written) about the “chamber fictions” she and David have been experimenting with, but hesitates because there’s too much to say about them and she has the feeling that the Chronicle will spit out like a mouthful of dirt and pebbles the kind of language it would take to talk seriously about the chamber fictions’ relationship to the Space Novels, to the long Green Inventory (Chronicle turned into a symphonic version of the chamber fictions) and also their relationship to the paintings and aesthetics of Mondrian, Rothko and other painters who saw meaning in the positioning and progressive shifting of blocks of color on the painting surface as well as to Michelle Butor’s interesting (interesting-enough-so-that-it-doesn’t-matter-if-he’s-wrong) essays about Rothko, Modrian, etc. — as well as Monica’s and David’s curiosity at this time about how much added significance and depth could be layered into fiction by a) using the wasted landscape of the page, whose topography could be broken up into zones (meaning of what’s written changed by where it appears on the page and the writer bound by a sort of topographical grammar) and/or b) seeing if a second narrative path could be added to the reader’s usual path through sentences and pages: a see-through layering of blocks of narrative from page to page through the space-time within a fiction. All these ideas (and other, related ones) interest Monica and David greatly at this time, but don't interest many others, and so they gradually lose their energy. Monica walks back toward ABC Street along the shore. Cold sun seems to have burned away cold rain, but sun and wind reinforce one another — or do her handwritten notes say “strike with equal force against her” as she tries to make her way along the beach? March sun, of course stronger than December sun, is borne by wind as a blow against Monica’s face. (Audrey Liman again?) Now is the place and time that Monica has to remind herself not to forget to type in her second encounter with Nelly X. She can see in her notes, scrawled almost illegibly in a different color ink, that she walked to Lowell’s place by way of the beach (not boardwalk, not Coast Boulevard, etc.) and that’s where she met Nelly X frantically hurrying because she thought she was late picking up Jimmy at his Coast Boulevard bus stop. Monica finds this an interesting fact about Nelly X: frantically hurrying, worried and guilty about little Jimmy, as usual, still she made a wide, looping detour south to the ocean. Why? Because, like Monica, she wanted to feel the full, bitter force of the weather? or for some other, loonier reason? For Monica this hard-to-explain detour by Nelly X helps balance all the irritating qualities that make Nelly X someone to avoid. Monica can’t believe it: here, exactly at the same time she’s heading back from ABG Street to ABC Street, is Nelly X again! This time with little Troy-Donahue-like Jimmy in tow, again along the shoreline, against the wind. Oddly doesn’t seem to be headed for Ma X’s apartment in the ancient yellow brick apartment house at the intersection of the boardwalk and ABC Street. Nelly pulls Jimmy off the beach with only a vaguely laughing “so long” — up across the boardwalk and down ABD Street, one block short of her mother’s. Image of disappearing, colorful beret and long wool coat down below Nelly X’s ankles. No record of Jimmy’s unremarkable clothing. A few things seem to happen at 4:30 p.m. on March 21st or 22nd: 1) Monica is outside (on porch or street not noted) wrapped in her inherited brown, bear-like mouton against the bitter wind no longer west —› east along the shore, but tunneling with force north —› south down ABC Street from beyond the bay, beyond Brooklyn and Manhattan, burrowing into the ocean at so many points they seem infinite because nobody can bother counting them. Not noted why Monica returned from her cold and windy walk back from Lowell’s, went upstairs, wrapped herself in her bear-like brown mouton and went back down to put herself in the path of the cold again. 2) While standing outside Monica witnesses at least two events: a) A doctor enters the Greengrasses’ brick fortress directly across the way (not noted whether down the narrow driveway between the Greengrasses’ and the Sloths’ and through the side door or if allowed through the iron front gate, up the brick porch stairs and through the front door). Doctor’s visit brings to mind the fact that Monica hasn’t seen wiry Enos Greengrass for months. b) Not clear where Wanda Baer comes from or whether Monica only sees her in the distance, entering Greg-and-Lena’s house (where Wanda has an odd elbow of an apartment in the attic, bending through the small bedrooms of parents and children) or if Wanda Baer passes Monica and stops for a cold second to say something. She’s wearing nothing as a coat but a brown suede jacket — more like a man’s blazer or sport jacket than anything else — and the fact is, Wanda Baer says, she saw it in the men’s department (store not named or not recorded), loved it and bought it. But now she’s wondering if she looks a little too male in it. Wants Monica’s honest opinion, but she’s too cold to wait for it. May also have said something about looking forward to seeing her French friend, the beautiful and super-sensitive Cristaline — though, of course, as Monica knows, that relationship isn’t and can never be the kind of relationship Wanda would like with Cristaline. Says that everything is superficial right now: a superficial, weightless existence without work and without a relationship. . . . Or it should be weightless, should be light and carefree, but it isn’t. Or, if it’s possible, her existence is weightless but she’s not, always weighed down with anxiety. Her egg whites are never beaten completely: always some stubborn stuff that remains at the bottom of the bowl. . . . c) Doctor’s car is gone: never see him leave: a short visit. On what day in late March does Pat Corcoran find Monica to tell her that Puff is gone again? Does Monica remember that the last time Puff disappeared she turned up in the Bronx?! The story of how she got there and how she was found is a long one. Too long to tell right now, Pat Corcoran says, and this is one of the many times Monica has no trouble deciding whether or not she’s grateful that (through the natural editing of the horizontal day’s random narration) a long story never gets told. In late March Monica’s brother Lowell gives her the gift of a second avocado plant grown from a pit into something beautiful. It seems that the second plant given to Monica is actually the first one grown. Grew it first, gave it second. The first-grown/second-given avocado plant is short with thick, densely leafing stems, more like a small shrub than the first-given/second-grown plant (tall, wandlike stems whose leaves begin high up on the stalk). The tall, first-given avocado plant with its high-up leaves has been standing on Monica’s enormous, found-in-the-trash oak desk/table since when? (Monica makes a mental note to go back and check to see if the arrival of plant and desk coincide and when — when exactly — that was.) At first outlined against one set of bare, nine-paned casement windows and then against the golden rods of the bamboo blinds. Second-given/first-grown, short, thick and densely leafing shrub-like avocado adds asymmetrical balance to the desk: two similar-and-dissimilar plants framing Monica at opposing corners of the desk, against the blinds and windows. It gives Monica great pleasure to work at her desk, surrounded by these never-ending gifts of Lowell’s. Monica notes this too: all this avocado plant growing and giving (not to mention the plants grown and nurtured from pits by Lowell for himself) hint at the obsessive degree to which Lowell is an avocado-eater in 1976. After March 22 a number of little occurrences are noted but not always dated, and for that reason it’s easy (later, in August, when Monica’s on the front porch typing her handwritten March notes and to some degree using typing as a preliminary way of editing and putting-in-order) to get the real sequence of events mixed up. Typed and mixed-up sequence of events as good as the real sequence? or do the missing dates change things in ways that matter? For example: on an undated day that may be March 23 or 24 Monica notes a “blue chill” to the day. Chill penetrates a thin, beautiful layer of warm sunlight. Aroma that isn’t only the aroma of the ocean or even of the cool air blowing inland from it. What is this aroma exactly? Coolness itself an aroma? Sniffing cool air of at least two seasons with the self’s second nose of memory as well? Sunlight lies warmly on the surface of what? Chill is above and below it and so is the color blue, but are the chill of March 23 or 24 and the blue of March 23 or 24 exactly one and the same thing? Block of blue ocean, as always, at the end of the street as if poured there into the bottom of the tall, narrow beaker between ancient yellow and newer red brick apartment buildings. Solid block of cold blue ocean permanently poured out into the bottom end of the street. Blue sky without a cloud — and yet Monica notes the day’s sharply-defined “blue-whiteness”: sailing of 1, 2, 3, 4, maybe 5 or 6 or even more three story, turn-of-the-century white shingle houses through blue sky (and through what else?). May be on this white surface that warm sun lies, very precisely clipped-in by cold blue. . . . March 23 is noted clearly for two things: Monica’s lingering cold (voice still not back to normal) and, in the house’s communal mail box, a letter addressed to Yvonne Wilding from a Mrs. C. Grogan, 523 Clovelly Lane, Clovelly 1302, Sydney, Australia. The surface of the envelope of course tells Monica nothing beyond the obvious, but does make her wonder what could have happened in Australia to make someone write to slouching-and-goodlooking-clever-and-indifferent Yvonne, who rarely (never?) talks about her life in Australia and seems to have severed all family ties. . . . One day it’s cold, another day not as cold, but which ones? “Thursday” and “Saturday” are noted but not clearly attached to corresponding temperatures. And then another day is “not as cold as yesterday”. At 5 p.m. of an undated day in late March the beach is unusually long, unusually golden and the undersides of waves are both green and warm (or notes may say “a warm green”). Is it also at 5 p.m. of the same day that a ship with a red smokestack is approaching (seeming to angle southeast out of the harbor and Narrows?). By chance Monica is taking this note on an undated day in March (on the beach or when she gets home) in red ink. In red ink she notes the distant ship’s red smokestack and the distant approach along the shore of a woman in a red coat, strolling arm in arm with a man whose dark clothing is not noted. Also noted in red ink (lingering on the cold beach after dark): a red bonfire (at first only something oddly red and bright in the sand, more star-like than flame-like, before Monica realizes that it’s a bonfire no more than one block west from where she’s standing or sitting). Monica can’t say why a television news story on August 4 makes her lean back out of March. Typing the March Chronicle on August 4 she should be outside, but (even though it’s not noted) it’s possible that she’s indoors at her enormous oak desk/table in the green room (where there’s a television that could be turned on and visible) because August heat has taken over the porch, slipping under the second story overhang with afternoon sunlight, while, with casement windows cranked wide open to catch north flowing —› breezes from the ocean or <— south flowing breezes trying to get across the Atlantic from Canada, the plaster walls retain a green coolness. Twenty-four deaths from “a mysterious illness” are reported at an American Legion Convention in Philadelphia, “cause unknown”. One-hundred-and-forty-some-odd people who attended the convention have been hospitalized: one or two have already “recovered” and been released while those who died did so rapidly after developing fevers of up to 107 degrees. Television news report makes this much clear: the mysterious illness affects the lungs, causes dangerously high levels of fever and severe headaches. While no one has suggested the possibility of foul play, Philadelphia homicide detectives have been seen questioning those who attended the convention without having to be hospitalized and are pursuing conventioneers who’ve scattered across the country. Then, in August, pulled out of March by this strange news report from another reality, or later, Monica wonders what about this story cut across writing or typing. On the same or another undated day in late March Monica makes note of the fact that her new bamboo blinds will change (have already changed) her easy way of exactly locating events occurring in or across her windows: lefthand or righthand set of nine small panes and within these sets upper, middle, lower, this corner or that corner, etc.: in this way the old casement windows mapped whatever happened in them with their own very precise brand of latitude and longitude — very much like the grid structure of the Blue Hanger in Floyd Bennet Airfield that Monica and David used in THE BLUE HANGER SPACE NOVEL to pinpoint the location of random events. Now, with the blinds lowered, light is more or less intense, less or more golden within a net of imperfectly ruled horizontal lines, but no way (for example) of tracking a bird’s flight path. . . . On the same undated day in late March the sky is as blue (and also as cloudless?) as it should be and there’s as much green in the ocean as on land: whether warm green currents or cold green currents Monica has trouble telling from porch or open window (blinds raised); a perfect blue-green world with escalating bird sounds at a broken and scattered, hard-to-locate mid-air level. Monica notes that writing about the blue sky is always a problem: is the blue sky inevitably “sky blue”, for example? She knows that Rilke, in his letters, thinking about Cézanne, was troubled by the color blue: wrestled with all the blues there are and the need to find a new language to get at the truth of the exact blue of the moment, just as with everything. Always the imperative to push away received language, the lazy common language of approximate truth. Sky may be (as it is now, as she writes or types) “sky blue” one minute and then the fine, rounded tip of something invisible draws a thin but slightly fuzzy chalk line across a great length of it — starts as a dull or gleaming point and at once is a fuzzed chalk line getting fatter and more cottony by the millisecond, utterly changing the blue around it. White changes blue? or line may be accompanied by something rumbling and explosive that’s inaudible to Monica on the front porch on ABC Street or there may be some other inaudible or invisible disturbance that changes one blue to another blue. Now sky may even be the blue of a pack of Gauloises “disques bleu” that arrives un-asked-for in the mail. . . . Let’s see: what else happens on this undated day (same or another): Monica can’t say how she knows which Greengrass car is Sylvia Greengrass’s and which is Enos Greengrass’s but she must know because she writes that Sylvia Greengrass’s car (make, model, color not noted) pulls up at the curb (not in the narrow driveway between the Greengrasses’ and the Sloths’) and Sylvia Greengrass, next-door-neighbor-to-the-south Al Regan, thirty-year-old Greengrass daughter, Leslie, and Enos Greengrass, looking barely alive, get out. Monica is startled: always compact and energetic — a short, sun-darkened, tightly-wired, bald and bare-chested, compulsive driveway-hoser — Enos Greengrass looks slack, yellow, boneless, a peculiarly clay yellow little chicken being gripped by its boneless wings by Al and Sylvia. . . . Doesn’t seem to want to be held up: wants to sink to the ground and they have to take deeper handfuls to get him down the driveway, Leslie Greengrass following with Enos’ walker, through the brick fortress’s side door. . . . On the same undated March day or another. At about the same time as the Greengrass incident (or not at the same time at all). Ryan Lenehan (middle of the three Lenehan boys, third eldest of the four Lenehan children) passes, on the way home south <— north from school, carrying a heavy load of books. Passes again, bicycling south —› north toward Coast Boulevard and beyond. Passes a third time (how much later?), again heading south —› north (having bicycled round the back of everything), bouncing a basketball. Round basketball wants to get to the round center of Earth, but yellow-grey pavement rejects it. The thud of this rejection, the stunned look on the basketball’s face, then another thud — how many? — from one margin to the other. Ryan calls out to Monica, “basketball practice!”, then disappears behind the holly bushes. Not noted how much time passes before apple-faced Finnley Lenehan passes, elated, on his skateboard. At 4:30 exactly on the same day a brilliant arrow of green light darts across the Regans’ lawn, under the giant elm, altering the green of the early grass to something hard to name, more like the water-light that passes through an old bottle fired green with a mineral salt no one remembers. Arrow of light doesn’t come to rest on the Regans’ lawn. Its light is odd and beautiful, but it behaves like something aimed right at one of the three hunched and dark-haired Arlington sisters who’ve just arrived home at their little ranch house under (just south of) the Regans’ old three story white shingle. Monica tries (while writing in March or typing in June, July or August) to remember the Arlington sisters’ names: knows there’s a Lorna and then there’s one whose name Monica can’t remember, though she does remember that her daughter’s name is Eunice. And then there’s the third sister (whose name escapes Monica at the moment of writing and then again at the moment of typing) who (how does Monica know this?) stays up most of the night, doesn’t fall asleep until the world is starting to show some blue light and then sleeps till noon or beyond. (In other words, there’s an Arlington sister who keeps the same hours as David!) Let’s see: at what hour after 4:30 does Ryan Lenehan return from basketball practice, decide to sit on the front steps with Monica and chat. Has a story to tell that, as it unfolds, Monica isn’t sure she wants to hear (yet she records it): the Lenehan family knows a woman named Carla Ray Carlson, also known simply as Carla Carlson — who for some reason (Ryan knows this for a fact because he’s seen her do it!) signs her checks Carlita Carlson. But who exactly is Carla Ray or Carlita Carlson? Monica wants to know — and how did Ryan’s mother Nora, or the whole family, get to know her? Ryan tries to find an answer by dribbling his basketball — and the basketball does have something to say, but Ryan realizes that he’d need to know more than Morse code to decipher it and says that he never asked himself that question. It’s an interesting question, but he never thought about it. There are people who are in his life as if they’ve always been there and most of them — Monica is probably right — come from his mother. Mother meets them somewhere and then the whole family gets involved one way or another and you forget how you met them. He can say this: the thing he thinks of first when he thinks of Carla Ray Carlson is that when he met her she had to weigh 300 pounds minimum and hardly ever got out of bed. Had to go to her place to see her. Weird thing is that his mother, the one who’s friendliest with Carla Carlson and sometimes even shopped for her and did other things to help her, was the one who joked about her weight and told the family things they probably didn’t need to know. Monica knows how his mother can crack herself up: great at telling stories, great at finding exactly the right words to make you see the most ridiculous image of someone — someone who might be stupid, for example, looks like a complete idiot when she describes him — and you can’t stop laughing even if you know it’s wrong and his mother of course is doubled over coughing and laughing and getting as red as if blood is going to come out of her eyes. He knows that Monica’s seen his mother that way. Well: his mother found the image of Carla Ray Carlson in bed, getting flabbier every day, white as dough made of nothing but milk and flour, without a muscle, unable to get up and stand on her feet anymore, hilarious. Had a whole routine she did that made her hysterical. She got such a kick out of telling the story about the time Carla found blood in her panties and couldn’t figure out why (an image he wishes he didn’t have in his mind!) that she could hardly get through it. But the other side of it of course is that without his mother Carla Ray Carlson might be dead. His mother went up there (sometimes she got Bobby Rafferty or Patty Callaghan to go with her) and called for an ambulance at least three times that he knows of, but Carla Ray refused to go. And it was his mother who realized that Carla had suddenly started losing an insane amount of weight. She said “ninety pounds in two weeks”, but he has no way of knowing if that’s true. Finally it was his mother who made the decision for Carla and that’s the reason Carla Ray Carlson’s been in Bayview Hospital since December. Thinks he heard someone say “cancer”, but when he asks a question no one gives him an honest answer. Doesn’t know either what anyone’s told his father because his father’s been sneaking bottles of brandy and lemon meringue pies to Carla whenever she asks for them and who can say whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. These are some of the things the Chronicle does: it continues (a daily infinity). it walks (sometimes takes a drive) horizontally down ABC Street or through the neighborhood. it keeps low to the ground, as if longing to move horizontally along the ground like the passing world it records, but also likes to glide over the roofs, parallel to the ground, and to settle on tree-branches. It also asks itself questions: does it stay mainly in its own neighborhood because there are laws (even if they’re laws invented by itself) that keep its universe bounded? Is it right to feel itself to be a universe, infinite in its own way, inclusive and digressive yet absolutely made of certain materials and not others? Some materials are pulled into it, others tossed out. Are its laws absolute or are they free to change themselves? On March 24 bright yellow bath towels (exactly what yellow not noted, except that the yellow is so bright, flat and saturated it’s more like the yellow sheets of scrap paper — called “canary” yellow — she sometimes uses than like the absorbent surface of dyed cotton with its micro-shadows of tiny thread-loops) and soft rose-pink bath towels are reflected in Naomi Rosenwasser’s front (east-facing) picture window. Towels are reflected in an overlapping way — yellow flaps over rose-pink, rose-pink flaps over yellow and so on, randomly as the breeze moves and changes, sometimes in surprising, multiple layers of rose-pink-yellow-rose-pink etc. Monica loves the unstable beauty of the world as it frames itself and disappears. Can’t chase this beauty or this instability; can barely notice it as it forms, reforms and goes away. Rosenwassers’ picture window is on the second floor of the two story house where the Arlington sisters have their groundfloor apartment: therefore Monica realizes that what she wrote before about the Arlingtons living in a “ranch house” isn’t true. Isn’t a ranch house, just looks like one. Monica is awake and outside by 9 a.m. Must be on the porch, her gaze angling slightly west and south to catch sight of the briefly framed towel reflections. Also sees light (from the direction of the ocean and doubly bright for that reason, as if the air has swallowed an ocean of reflections) evenly cut and spaced out on the grey planks of the porch floor by the bars of the left-hand (southernmost) railing. What’s seen and what’s heard can (to what exact degree?) be recorded, but only a living being can feel and smell air: its precise coolness, in what way its coolness is spring-like, coolness of the particles of ocean aroma that are carried in what’s pulsing north along the street. . . . What else? Pinpoints of light at the needle-edges of the odd, off-green of the Rhinebeck pine. Smoky green lawns in the distance, like so many cups of green tea giving off their vapors. Bolts of color (flowers that are actually there, but haven’t bloomed yet). Light now dripping in pine tree (can almost see the drops forming and dripping from the needle-edges) and the glowing undersides of the dark, not-exactly-jade-green of the boughs as well. If not exactly “jade”, then what is the name of this dark green underside that has a smoky or ashen green overside? The yellow sun-surface of what? At exactly the same instant: David comes downstairs with a mug of foamy, steaming coffee for Monica to sip while she works in chilly but springlike air and Lena Coffin’s old car coughs and tries to clear its throat, struggling to shake off the morning chill and get started in the cracked and weedy earth-and-pavement driveway just below the south railing of Monica’s porch and also just to the left of the front grey board steps where she’s sitting, only partly hidden by the Rhinebeck pine. Monica can’t see Lena behind the wheel, but she can see Jojo and Rosamond Coffin in the back seat, where sunlight must be making it warm and boring. Sipping hot coffee and utterly within its steam and aroma: bubble inside the day, side door into the day or step back from the day? Sipping hot coffee on a chilly March morning also a step back from writing and a step back from writing = less looking, less hearing, less being in the day in every possible way? Noise of a helicopter shreds experience in its blender along with leaves, wind and dirt. There it is: a blue helicopter hovering at the south end of ABC Street, above the ocean and doubly or triply noisy because it’s fallen into the narrow beaker between apartment buildings that always has dark blue ocean at the bottom of it. Shredding of Monica’s private coffee bubble makes it possible for her to see that the brilliance and deep saturation of the towel-colors in Naomi Rosenwasser’s picture window have faded to dullest yellow, weakest pink and even a lifeless white. Where did Peter Hedges (Janey Hedges’ husband) come from? Here he is, asking Monica politely if he’s interrupting anything — if she minds him waiting for Al Szarka on the steps with her? Fact that he’s already sitting, already uncapping a bottle of beer (brand not noted) doesn’t mean he isn’t being polite. As always, Peter Hedges has a paper bag of beer bottles with him, loose and rattling and clinking, not bound in a six-pack. Offers Monica a beer and/or a cigarette. In no time at all Peter Hedges is deep into beer: one beer smoothly after the other, as if drinking one continuous beer artificially broken into units, each cap that has to be popped a tiny pause in the lifelong beer stream. Are these tiny pauses the openings Peter Hedges needs to take in the world and assess it? Peter Hedges has stories to tell and for some reason is eager to tell them to Monica. He’s seen Monica on the steps or on the porch for months, looking around, writing stuff down, sometimes with a typewriter, most of the time with pen and paper. What could there be to write about in this neighborhood? Looks down the street while she’s writing — as if it’s a sketch pad and she’s sketching in a hurry before something turns into something else: nothing’s happening, there’s not even anything to see. His curiosity about what she’s doing is similar to suspicion. Can’t trust anything Al Szarka or Yvonne Wilding have to say about it and if Janey says that she likes Monica that means nothing. None of them has a clue about anything. But he’s worried that he may not be able to figure out what she’s after just by studying her while he tells his story. Janey is pregnant again (in her eighth month). Married less than a year and here comes a second kid! No! not “less than a year”! Today is actually their anniversary! She was on the pill, but it made her bleed — so they had to drop that and buy a diaphragm for $40 and of course it didn’t work. How does he know it didn’t work? Laugh is harsh. Cause they used it once and here they are! But he’s going to make sure that never happens again. He’ll lay out their financial situation and then he’d like to hear Monica’s opinion about whether they can afford a third (can they even afford a second?) child. They’re on Welfare. They get Medicaid. They get $190 every two weeks and Medicaid is paying the $1400 medical bill. Rent is $250 a month for two bedrooms, two baths on ACE Street. A two bedroom apartment on ACE Street isn’t his idea of living. Janey thinks that new carpeting will solve all their problems. He thinks that the only thing that can possibly solve their problems is planning. Have to plan for the future. Don’t spend money on stupid stuff like carpeting. Put money away for a house. Paying rent all your life is as stupid as working for someone all your life. Doesn’t know if Monica knows that he’s already in the contracting business with his older brother, Louie, who lives just up the block from Monica with his wife and new baby daughter. The business grosses $120,000 a year, but of course that’s not figuring in all their expenses: equipment, materials, etc. And the other problem is that they can’t take on anything but meaningless jobs because they’re not declaring their earnings. They haven’t been paying taxes, period. So, until they start doing that, they can’t think of themselves as a real business, can’t expand, can’t earn serious money. . . . The good news is that right now his father’s putting a foundation under the summer cottage he’s always had out at Windy Pass so that he and Janey can have a year-round home of their own until they can afford something else. So that’s good, but it isn’t done yet and (knowing his father) god alone knows when it will be. So that’s uncertain — and there’s the business that isn’t really a business to worry about — and the second kid on the way. But what Janey’s worried and miserable about is the old carpeting! It makes him nuts. . . ! It isn’t easy for Monica to be certain what it is (what it is exactly) Peter Hedges wants from her and before she can think of the exact right thing to say Al Szarka joins them on the porch, his energy, as usual, the energy of the point of an elbow aimed at someone’s ribs. Peter leaves to visit his brother Louie and Al Szarka decides not to go with him. His sharp edges can’t find a comfortable spot to settle down on, but Monica can see that Al, conscious of the fact that Peter Hedges — instead of escaping upstairs to Al’s place, bringing his bag of beers with him – hung out down here with Monica, yapping about god-alone-knows-what for half-an-hour or more, has the urge to tell Monica a story (or at least some broken fragment of a story) too. Not sure what he wants to say, so begins like this: Does Monica know (that is, did Peter tell her?) that Peter got married when he was only seventeen? He’s only eighteen now, but looks much older. Al (Monica doesn’t see him up close too often) has home-cut blond hair, unusually sharp teeth — like a whole mouth full of incisors — and blue eyes that are intensely focused (insanely focused?) but also somewhat watery. Voice has too much emotion in it no matter what he’s talking about, and it’s not always easy to tell if he’s enraged or overjoyed or just miserable to the point of anguish. He says the lesson of Peter and Janey is not lost on him. Al is twenty-two (an old twenty-two?) and there’s no way. . . . All you have to do is look at your friends who’re married. Take a good look, especially at the ones who ran to have children right away . . . . He can’t picture it. “Married with a baby.” And still living like this? The way they all live, crowded into these little apartments, arguing about money. . . . Can Monica imagine Yvonne. . . ? Taking care of a baby? Makes himself laugh (with affection?): thinking of the absurdity of the idea of Yvonne taking care of a baby. . . . Peter and Janey couldn’t be doing it without Welfare and Medicaid. Peter actually had someone write up a document — someone who could write decent English — that said that Peter’s mother had been supporting them but now she was sick or something and couldn’t do it anymore (mother signed an affidavit confirming it) — so they could apply for Welfare and Medicaid. And Welfare believed it and gave them everything they wanted! But all that lying and all that red tape is not for him. Monica would like to find a way to insert a cardinal’s song right here. There it is (as it often is), blood red on her neighbor’s tv antenna, its throat pulsing as if having no choice but to translate the coded electrons arriving through its feet. The opening notes are always startling: ecstatic, lyrical and very clearly shaped, ascending in a fixed sequence of elongated ovals — up through the tangled tree branches above the roofs and antennas. Ecstasy trails off and is interfered with, as always, by codes that are less lyrical, rougher, more guttural, less shaped. Still the cardinal? Is its coded song that complex? Or just the tangle of what it’s provoked. Just as Monica thinks she may be getting the hang of the cardinal’s song so that she might find a way to note it down on paper, like overhearing and writing down from memory the long, intimate monologue of someone at a restaurant table, it leaves: over two roofs or twenty: onto another antenna or settling somewhere in the wide-open weaving of the neighborhood. “Later on the same day” Monica is taking a walk and stops on ABA Street to look at a tree: its wand-like branches are a fuzzy grey-green, like pussy willows. The owner of the tree (lawn it’s on, house behind it, etc.) appears (exactly from where not noted) and greets Monica warmly. Introduces himself as Xylon and says that he’s observed Monica observing the tree many times. It gives him almost as much satisfaction that someone else is paying attention to the invisible stages of the tree’s development as the fact that the tree has been flowering since February. He’s been able to watch the tree and to keep track of the handful of neighborhood people who come by regularly to look at it because he’s been home from work, recovering from a long illness. Indoors for months, confined to bed for endless stretches, he was forced to spend long hours looking out his bedroom window. He’s seen Monica alone and also a few times with her friend and in certain ways he feels he knows them. He has a story to tell and this is it in a nutshell: being sick is a similar twilight state to retirement or retirement is a similar twilight state to sickness, but in fact he’s a long way from retirement. Even today, for example, he was asked to travel halfway across the country as a consultant on an irrigation project but had to say no. He’s an agronomist with advanced degrees in chemistry and engineering who emigrated to the States from Greece in 1939. Initially taught at Princeton but quickly realized that he needed to make more money and took a job in private industry. There’s more to Xylon’s story, but what is it? Conversation goes on a while longer, but at some point Monica becomes conscious of the fact that she doesn’t want to hear or know more about Xylon; she wants to get home to get down on paper whatever it is in the meeting that interests her or find out what interests her by getting it down on paper. Let’s see: it’s not perfectly clear to her, but she thinks that Xylon said that he has two daughters: one who’s already married and a policewoman who he admires: married and a policewoman, yet also in law school. While the other one — the younger one —cares only about marrying her boyfriend: stays in college only because he’s forcing her to get a degree. (Optimistic about one, has no hope for the other.) Hurriedly taking notes “later on the same day” Monica wonders when in his story she became aware (what exactly in his story made her become aware) that Xylon’s older daughter once was Wanda Baer’s roommate! If, Monica reasons, Xylon voiced some worry (can’t say for sure whether he did or didn’t) that his older daughter weighs three hundred pounds or more then, logically, that should be what reminded her that Wanda Baer once had a three hundred pound policewoman-roommate, about to get married and determined to go to law school no matter what. On the other hand, Monica reasons, Xylon had to have said something about his daughter’s weight, otherwise how could it have entered her mind and helped her connect Xylon’s daughter to Wanda Baer? Monica is positive too that Xylon said something else to reinforce her certainty about the connection between Wanda Baer and his daughter but later (while translating handwritten notes into typewriter) can’t find it. What else?: the ball-shaped tips of the pussy willow wands are turning yellow-green and there may even be a flush of a color that may not be red but makes you think of red. . . . This too: Xylon apologizes to Monica for the run-down condition of his lawn and house and blames their neglect on his prolonged illness. In other words: an apology, like most, that secretly contains its own denial? Any test for the truth of the stories we’re told? Or: whether true in some ways, not true in others, true in yet another way just because they’re told. Monica asks herself some questions while taking her note or later, while typing and editing her note. For example: Is any event ever unique (only happened once, to us, therefore no one else can truly understand it)? Is any event ever universal (whatever happens to us has also happened/also will happen to everyone, therefore everyone can understand it)? Corollary to these questions: is she the only one (because of the perspective on how life works — patterns it forms of its own accord — given to her by years of Chronicling) who sees the connection between Wanda Baer and Xylon’s daughter as the central reason for meeting and listening to Xylon?: always-always the freakish lightening bolt of randomness that strikes us in the course of our horizontal path through the day that may actually be an even more freakish lightening bolt of order — invisible as order when viewed through the microscopic or telescopic perspective of life cut into units by the sharp chef’s knife of habit. Xylon fell in love with the pussy willow tree when he saw it in Russia, so he imported one from Russia as soon as he bought his house. Planted it on his front lawn, unlike many others who keep their pussy willow trees indoors all year so that the warm interior will make their little trees flower during the winter for their owners alone. When does Monica find out (and who is it that could have set her straight?) that an essential fact (one that she wasn’t sure she heard or remembered clearly) in Xylon’s story is wrong? Xylon has three daughters, not two: Eldest daughter (one missing in Monica's notes), leading a straightforward, conventional life as wife and probably mother too. Youngest daughter, exactly as described. Middle daughter is the three-hundred-pound-plus policewoman, going to law school, unmarried, whether gay or not not noted (or known) who was once-upon-a-time Wanda Baer’s roommate (Monica still can’t figure out when or where). Where does this new, correct information about Xylon and his daughters come from? Neither noted nor remembered. (Not noted = not remembered.) The only possible source Monica can think of — the only one Monica knows who would know the facts — is Wanda Baer. Monica doesn’t feel like going back and editing what’s already written and printed to bring it in line with the true version of events learned later. Leaves it to the reader to correct it or leave it alone. On the way down ABC Street toward the boardwalk at 9:30 a.m. (on an undated day in late March) Monica sees Jojo Coffin waving to her as she approaches Babette-and-Grete’s “mother and daughter” just before and below the ancient yellow brick apartment house. Beautiful, tadpole-faced Jojo is in the passenger seat of Babette’s cocoa brown Camaro convertible. Monica stops to chat because it’s clear that Jojo wants her attention (has a tiny fragment of a story to tell): Rosamond (frowning, looking miserable in the back seat) is waiting for Grandma to drive her to the doctor. She has an awful case of pink-eye and her teacher told her not to come to school. So she’s home — might be home for days — and she’s grumpy. It seems to Monica that Friday, March 26, is warm in a new way: working outside (that is, coming downstairs with pen and paper and the intention of working outside she’s having trouble getting started) in a world as blue from rim to rim and 360o around as if she were on an island in the Mediterranean. To try to write is to drift in an ocean of blue paper. She feels inspired to do: nothing. Sits on the steps, pen in hand, trying to remember: was the Mediterranean the color of the blue paper she sometimes uses? Blue paper that blows up into blue sky, then falls into blue water: has nothing but sky and water in it. Or it may be altogether another blue for which she can’t find the word exactly. May be only now, reluctantly picking up her pen (probably not a blue pen, because she doesn’t like writing with blue ink), that the fluid languidness of the day — with its south to north breezes that might as well be currents of blue water — make writing as difficult as diving into blue shallows to scribble urgent notes on a pad as visible on the sunlit ocean floor as your own yellowish feet. Not as shallow as it looks? Pad not exactly situated where it seems to be? Dive and dive again, but just can’t touch it before you’re forced back to the surface. No point: might as well just float. . . . Sky isn’t cloudless, but clouds are also blue: sky’s inner blue pulled out like pants pockets' darker cloth. What is it that’s so urgent that Monica can’t let herself do nothing (float in the blue warmth of the day)? Monica feels compelled as a Chronicler to take notes while events are still inside language. She’s tempted to say: write with the hand of immediate experience, not with the handless glove of memory, but how long does it take for experience to become memory? Write quickly, as if you’re still where you just were. Finds herself trying to sketch in last night’s dinner and conversation with David and Wanda Baer in an odd, Romanian restaurant called “Le Beau Pere” on W. 13 Street in Manhattan — quickly, with as few pen-strokes as possible, but why? In order not to rely on memory, of course, but is there more to it? Let’s see: the restaurant is on the street level floor of a townhouse: 1313 W. 13 Street: the owner of the townhouse is the host of the restaurant (how this makes itself known not noted) and from the outset there’s the peculiar sense of being ushered into a room in a stranger’s house to have dinner. The room is dark: very little light is given off by the Victorian chandeliers hanging from a black ceiling; dim light of candlelit tables and the only other light the light of a small desk lamp on a desk toward the back of the room where the host, an exceedingly thin and pale man in a dark suit, hair as black as the ceiling and parted on the side, sits writing in a ledger with the aid of the desk lamp, bent over the desk as if seriously at work on something and not wanting to be disturbed. A banister, black, winding and shiny, leads to private quarters upstairs. The walls, not easy to make out in the dim light, appear to be red; deeper, murkier than cherry, more blood-like: a flash of color at the margins of the dark room. (Not noted who, if anyone, greeted them at the door: no record of the host rising from his desk.) Is the atmosphere of the restaurant genuinely odd or is its oddness staged? If staged, not interesting. Not interesting to experience experience already experienced for us or foregrounded for us as an imitation of experience which we predictably experience as we’re meant to. Can our next bacon cheeseburger really be the riddle no one else has solved before? (Should we content ourselves with this?: the more naïve we are, the stupider even more so, the more surprising and entertaining life and all its imitations seem to be.) Monica can’t help having these doubts then, while she’s in “Le Beau Pere”, or later, quickly sketching in her experience on a day whose languorous current flows against writing — but still she has to admit that she isn’t at all sure where the oddness and “mystery” of this restaurant lies between staged reality and reality. . . . Finnley Lenehan, zipping by quickly on his skateboard (some speed wasted in friction, more lost as noise), cradling a small forest of fresh, violet-green broccoli, calls out to Monica: “my mother’s making Irish Stew!” and seems to skip from Lena’s orange brick and cracked white stucco multiple dwelling, 1, 2, 3, 4 or is it 5? houses south to the chickenwire gate of his own house, eager to get the broccoli to his mother, Nora. Back into the fragrant day: perfume of tea, perfume of honey when there are neither. Holly bush, green and unchanging all year, seems to be sprouting young, light green leaves — as if it wants to flower but can only manage to push out new leaves and a tea-like or honey-like fragrance that attracts the intense zzz-ing and darting of yellow jackets. Warm shade of a pine tree on ABC Street does not resemble a sunny coastal town in southern Italy. Fragrance of strong coffee and a little plate of warm dessert on a sunny café table are not the tea-and-honey fragrance of sprouting March shrubbery in New York, but among the many things that are keeping Monica from writing about last night’s strange dinner the otherworldly perfume of early flowers on coastal breezes may be the most distracting — because the nose is sniffing it in reality and the self’s second nose of aroma-memory is sniffing it too. . . . Lilac fragrance here or there? Lilac even more dizzying than the others. Aroma of lilacs leads to seeing lilacs: still in their green casings or barely opening, their tiny asparagus tips just the very earliest thought of purple. Yellow comes first and then purple surprises us overnight, still overwhelmed by the masses of chrome yellow forsythia wands that are everywhere. Monica notes that, this year, ABC Street’s forsythias don’t compare in brilliance to the forsythias of ABA Street, as if ABC Street’s were still weakly dreaming of being forsythias instead of waking up and being forsythias. Hard for Monica (or for anyone else) to see: skinny little Minnie Liman, Vicky Liman’s younger sister, walking by with her boyfriend, Berry: hard for Minnie and Berry to see Monica or the world through the fine blue mist that’s also a fine blue powder that’s also sea air blowing in from the ocean to the south and making Minnie and Berry quickly disappear as they hurry south toward the Limans’. . . . Monica can’t tell clearly from her notes: does the smell of a motorcycle (its fuel, its exhaust, etc) precede or follow the noise of the motorcycle's explosion through the easily-torn fabric of the day. Let’s see (forcing herself out of the day and all the other days it may contain): what else about “Le Beau Pere”? Wanda Baer returns from the bathroom and tells Monica that she must — she has to — go to the bathroom to see Dracula’s wallpaper! Naked women — naked voluptuous women — and a mirror directly facing the toilet, so that when you’re on the toilet you see yourself — you have no choice but to see yourself — half naked, surrounded by beautiful, naked women rolling all around each other. . . ! Monica wonders again: doing what they’re supposed to do? After Wanda Baer’s bathroom-wallpaper story Monica, David and Wanda Baer examine their surroundings, study the host, whisper and laugh about their shared observations. David, for one, thinks that the host is genuinely odd. For example: listening, as always, to conversations at other tables, using his peculiar ability to hear remotely, even to the farthest corner of any space (a kind of aural out-of-body transportation), he’s been trying to tune in to the host’s little lighted area in the darker-than-cherry-red-darkness, but the host hasn’t spoken a word — not even when an attractive young woman approached his desk to talk about a recent trip through Romania, her deep interest in Romanian cuisine, etc. She tried to ask questions about the menu, wondered if there was a French influence on what seemed to her an elevated, hard-to-define difference between the food here and what she’d been eating during her travels. . . . No answer. Ignored her completely. And when she persisted, he got up, made a little bow and walked away. . . . What else? (Monica continues to struggle to take notes despite the double fragrance of the here-and-now and the here-and-somewhere-else.) Now they’re really curious about the food. A platter of traditional (Middle-Eastern or Greek or Turkish?) appetizers (stuffed grape leaves, artichoke hearts, humus, less-common and delicious pate or terrine or at least a thick slice of something from a baked loaf that may or may not be called “dulma bryndza” that seems to have an unfamiliar cheese as its basic ingredient) is very good, but not remarkable. What follows is so good, so unusual and hard-to-define, that Monica’s reluctance to write on this unearthly March day on ABC Street makes her write next-to-nothing in her sketchy notes: David’s “orange duckling” is nothing like the French “duck a l’orange” (possible reason the host turned his back on the young woman who found the food to be sophisticated and French?): skin is deliberately charred, not burnt, as if its impossible-to-identify spices rubbed into the skin have blackened it more than the fire of roasting, its orange sauce more bitter than sweet. Monica’s stuffed, boneless chicken is an unexplainable mystery: David and Monica keep tasting it, trying to figure it out. Skin also crisp, interior moist, stuffing and spices impossible to analyze and the flavor of the chicken different from and a thousand times better than any chicken she’s ever eaten. Can’t stop eating it, but in small mouthfuls, trying to figure out and remember the taste (nothing about the taste noted in any way that helps remember it). Wanda Baer orders moussaka and it’s very good but commonplace, like the appetizers. Monica notes the correspondence between the otherworldly flavors of the food and the restaurant’s atmosphere, but can’t take it any further. Also writes in her notes (or types later) that she’d welcome recipes or suggestions that would help explain (and make it possible to reproduce?) what they ate. What else? Viennese coffee, an unusually dense and dark double espresso with whipped cream and lime. Crème caramel? Other desserts, if any, not noted. This too (almost forgotten: would be forgotten if Monica hadn’t scribbled a few “key” words on a scrap of paper in her handbag as a reminder for the next day): while they’re slowly making their way through the surprises and mysteries of the meal — tasting, talking, sharing, analyzing and also listening and looking around (Monica’s and David’s usual way of eating together, so that every meal goes on forever, a self-contained universe), Wanda Baer engages them with what may be a story — or both a story and a question she urgently needs their answer to. In her last session with Dr. DaVinci he pretty much gave her a lecture and used a term she’d never heard before. He used the term about her and then went on about it in general — he had a lot to say about it — and she needs to know from Monica and David whether to take what Dr. DaVinci said as a criticism, or, even worse, as a sign that Dr. DaVinci’s getting sick of her: sick of her problems, sick of her complaints, sick of the flavor of the whole thing. Needs to know how concerned Monica and David think she should be. This is what he said: psychoanalysts in the past, from Freud through someone named “Karl Abraham” and then some others after that (names not remembered by Wanda Baer), used the term “narcissistic neurosis” in a way that Reich later disagreed with. And he (Dr. DaVinci) himself has made observations in his practice that are in basic agreement with Reich but just a little different. What he’s come to believe is that she (Wanda) is a good example of what they used to call “narcissistic neurosis”: her preoccupation with her problems, incessant dwelling on her self and all its minor ups and downs, is a form of self-love, not “self-hatred” as it appears to the narcissistic patient. Obsession with your own misery is a form of self-love. The narcissistic neurotic (like Wanda) knows nothing but her own problems. Her problems and her misery are her universe. Essentially no one else exists: the lives of others are as meaningless to her as the reality of movie extras there to give flavor to the background of a scene. The narcissistic neurotic claims to hate her/his misery, but is really in love with it, otherwise why would he/she do so little to get rid of it? The stinky cheese of the self that the narcissistic neurotic loves the smell of. Nibbling on the stinky cheese of the self’s misery more enthralling to the narcissistic neurotic than a Beethoven sonata! On the other hand (Dr. DaVinci went on) it used to be a universally held conviction that there was no way to help a narcissistic neurotic: so self-absorbed, so inward, such an endless, inward loop of self-sniffing misery, complaining and love of complaining and misery, the whole libido absorbed into this inward-turning loop, that it’s a lost cause. World is always inflicting injuries on the narcissistic neurotic and, it was thought, the narcissistic neurotic was so enamored of these injuries that it was a hopeless waste of time trying to get her/him to stop examining and lamenting them. . . . But he sees it a little differently. He’s extremely cautious when treating the older chronically miserable patient: to interfere with the endless need to find a new grievance, new wound, new spool to wind the self around would be to block the older narcissistic neurotic’s desperate defense against the possibility of happiness, not in any cosmic sense, just in the sense of the threatening possibility of a happy moment. He lived through that catastrophe a long time ago: made a brilliant attack on such a person’s defenses and watched the whole hideous structure crumble with no way and no time to rebuild it in some better way. . . . But, with someone Wanda’s age, he feels it’s his duty to attack her, to criticize and put pressure on her — to get her moving and stop all that miserable garbage from solidifying. Asked her three, five, ten times if she understood: wanted her to think about middle-aged or older relatives hopelessly in love with their own misery, the chronically unhappy ones it’s terrifying to think of becoming. . . . Said she understood what he was talking about, but does she? Does she really? How do you let who you are “crumble”? Is she afraid of happiness? Is Dr. DaVinci saying her self is like a stinky cheese she’s in love with and refuses to get rid of even though no one else can stand the smell. . . ? One other note scribbled by Monica to help her remember the next day, but nevertheless overlooked — forgotten and found by accident later: Wanda Baer (before or after recounting Dr. DaVinci’s “narcissistic neurosis” lecture?) says that she’s worried about her sister, Cindy. Monica and David know of course that Cindy is twelve, but still looks and talks like a soft, blonde baby (just about kept in diapers by their father, Oscar, who gets some kind of weird thrill out of her lisping, babyish “yes Daddy’s” and “no Daddy’s”). Now Cindy is becoming anxious: an anxious, lisping baby who’s begun to pull the hairs out of her eyebrows over the tensions of the seventh grade! Calls her every day and most days more than once. For example: tomorrow Cindy has three stupid, meaningless tests and she’s having a nervous breakdown over them. She tries to be reassuring and to say the right thing — tries to imagine what Dr. DaVinci would say or Monica would say — but the truth is she has no idea how to help her. Wonders if Monica or David could give her a clue. . . . On a day of unearthly beauty in late March: Pat Corcoran’s washing machine is on the blink and Pat and Philip Corcoran are on their way (by car? on foot with a shopping cart? not noted) to the big, dreary laundromat on the run-down commercial block of AAF Street leading to boardwalk and beach. A big pile of Themis’s stained Cornucopia Diner uniforms and aprons (along with other laundry?) is heaped in a laundry basket on the porch, but no sign of Themis. Yvonne Wilding slouches up the porch steps, looking no more depressed, no more burdened than usual under a heavy sack of freshly-washed laundry. “On Sunday” ABC Street’s forsythias are revived by the sun: drink it up and absorb a pure yellow from it. Is it the forsythias and their agitated yellow (almost blinding: saturated with yellow and radiating what can’t be absorbed) that are fragrant? All of ABC Street (all of this unusual New York City neighborhood by the sea?) radiant with sun being converted to yellow and spicy with fragrances from sources so multiple it would be impossible for Monica to list them. Monica would have to walk down every block and find every flower and shrub that’s just reached the point of beginning to release curled-up fragrance. Too much walking? Too many steps would inevitably equal too many words. And sometimes (often) chronicling requires having to write yourself out of words. Monica wonders this: if the forsythias of ABC Street are revived — a wide-awake yellow instead of a drowsy yellow — then what can the already-wide-awake forsythias of ABA Street be like? Walking from ABC Street toward ABA Street through a breezy world that seems all blue and yellow, but how many blues and how many yellows? Everywhere (stopping to look up, down, sideways, sniff the air and feel air on skin, etc.) Monica finds herself looking through butter yellow blossoms and chrome yellow wands at blues that have no end or back or bottom to them. Self or soul gazes into blue as if it wants to travel into what’s programmed to move away from it. Monica finds herself again in front of the golden branches of Xylon’s tree, which Nelly X insists is “just a willow, not a pussy willow”. Golden yellow of the reed-or-wand-like branches of Xylon’s tree makes the sky’s blue darker. Sail-like billowing of this darker blue like a blue skirt trying to turn a windy corner. Wind in the sails of what? Day condenses into a concentrated little blue-and-yellow blob way up in the open tangle of wand-branches — blob that hops along the branches and then squeezes out a sequence of song notes and squawk notes so long and complex there’s no way for Monica to remember or note it: underside of fat little bird is the glowing gold-yellow of Xylon’s tree, blue of back (and beak as well?) so dark it’s even darker than the sky’s indigo through Xylon’s golden branches. Later on the same day the ocean is golden and oddly furrowed, like a wheatfield, and all the shore birds flying over it are the color of oatmeal the way Monica likes it — with lots of melted butter and cream folded in. On the same heavenly day or on the next colder and breezier day Monica runs into Pat Corcoran’s young friend, Cathy Castle, approaching the house — on her way to visit Pat Corcoran — just as Monica is leaving. A young mother with three children, Cathy Castle’s face is (or was when Monica first met her) a tight little acorn of girlishness. A girlish, rather short young mother — a sapling when Monica first met her, now thickening a little into a tree — whose girlish acorn-face seems to age years in the span of months between their accidental meetings. Today Cathy Castle looks exhausted (fresh wrinkles around the eyes) and says that she hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in years. Hesitates. Should she say more? She has a story to tell but doesn’t want Monica to think of her as a complainer. Doesn’t want to think of herself as a complainer: one of those chronic complainers who have a story to tell whenever you have the bad luck to run into them and whose stories are nothing but complaints. On the other hand: what story does she have to tell other than her complaints? If her life is nothing but problems and her story is nothing but complaints about them and she can tell that someone (Monica) sees in her eyes that she’s worn out — that she’s aging overnight exactly because she’s worn out — which path should you follow?: tell your endless sour story of complaints or shut up? Shut up and say nothing or tell Monica what Monica is probably already guessing. Doesn’t Monica agree that we generally only tell people what we suspect they already know? So why not tell Monica some of the things she’s probably not going to tell Pat Corcoran? (Pretty much tells Pat only what she wouldn’t mind posting on the supermarket bulletin board.) Says that she knows she’s starting to look weird: like an aging little girl. Hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in years. Three-year-old twins, Debbie and Patrick, who she has with her now — on foot, not in their busted, hand-me-down carriage that’s impossible to wheel (might as well carry it) — sleep in the same room as her (Cathy) and her husband (name not noted or never known). Both Debbie and Patrick are early risers. If one of them sleeps late the other’s sure to wake up early (this morning, for example, they both woke up pretty much simultaneously at 5 a.m.), so her sleep is always interrupted. Yesterday she got up at 6 a.m. to take Scarlet to the hospital: her throat was painful and she had to have her tonsils out. Should have been simple, should have been “routine”, but nothing is ever routine or simple when you go to Bayview Hospital. They didn’t admit that something went wrong, but she could tell: kept Scarlet for observation all afternoon (she (Cathy) had to take a couple of buses home and then bus back in the evening to pick Scarlet up because they had no bed for her overnight) and then they gave her a thousand warnings about bleeding. “Pay close attention! Watch carefully for any sign of bleeding if she coughs!” etc. etc. So of course she was a nervous wreck, had Scarlet sleep with her and watched her all night instead of sleeping. Life might be a little easier if she got some help, but she doesn’t. Her husband (Monica notes that Cathy Castle never uses his name) works nights, so he’s useless night and day. Her mother’s dead. Her mother-in-law and sister-in-law (who obviously know her situation better than anyone) never ever offer to help and her husband never tells them to help, so even though she knows it might be dumb she never gets any help because she refuses to ask. What else? Cooped up all winter and going nuts. Weight dropped from 135 to 117 in three months because she was so miserable she stopped eating. Cooped up, looking at the same worn-out furniture, hearing the same conversations, she couldn’t stand the sight of food. She loves chicken. Can usually eat chicken any time in any form. And she likes potatoes just about any way you cook them too. So last night she made some breast of chicken the way she likes it (no recipe given) and a big pot of fresh mashed potato and the children loved it and her husband ate a big meal before going to work but the chicken disgusted her and all she could eat was a few forkfuls of potato. . . . Lena Coffin doesn’t know what to do. Someone’s parked her/his car at the mouth of the driveway and gone to the beach. Driveway’s blocked and Lena can’t back out. Starts honking, quickly figures out that honking is pointless, gets out of her car, paces a little trying to find a solution by studying the driveway, says something to Monica writing on her porch without expecting an answer and gets behind the parked car and stares at it as if trying to concentrate enough furious energy to push it out of the way. Margaret Brennan and golden, light-as-air little Daisy Brennan wave and say “hi” to Lena and to Monica on their way home from the beach to their apartment in Alexi’s house toward the northern end of the street, but Lena’s too angry to wave back or even to see them. Same day or another? Notes (“out of order”) that Monica forgot to include or different notes about a similar experience on a different day? Light-of-day is particularly clear and clean, but the moist ash-green needles of the tall Rhinebeck pine are dripping with something that resembles sleep. If not sleep, what is it (dark and dripping under shaggy boughs)? As the day continues breezes wake the pine tree up and make its needles shine. Blows light in them. Blows light out of them. Blows light off and through them. Now Monica sees bits and dashes of brilliant yellow forsythia through the broken plane of ash-green pine. Light-of-day lends radiance to needle-leaves and yellow forsythia wands and glowing yellow and shining ash-green add a lustrous moistness to light-of-day. Everything breathing in the light of everything else. Radiance of each becomes the radiance of the other. Absorbed from each and given to each. On this supremely clear and radiant day everything invents everything else. Sky can’t escape it. What more (Monica wonders) can be said about its blue, recessive and cloudless, hiding another blue in whatever blue you think you’ve gotten to the bottom of. No matter what, Monica wants always to record the fact that she’s here — taking notes because she’s alive and alive because she’s taking notes — on this day (whatever day), but today even more so. Anyone (David, for example) waking up after 11 a.m. on this day will have no idea of the day. Already fading into ordinariness by eleven. Blue whitens in a subtle way and, with the subtle whitening of sky’s blue-in-blue, light on Earth gets duller, loses its power to animate one thing with another. Working on the porch, smoking a solitary cigarette, sipping creamy iced coffee. Enough of March has passed (from handwritten page to typewritten page) that when Monica leans back out of March it’s Friday, August 10 and Dominick Ianni is mowing Sylvia Greengrass’s lawn in plain, bright sunshine. Hot, as it should be. Noise of cicadas at its height (also as it should be). Monica wonders if it’s accurate to say that the noise of cicadas has a tapering shape to it, drilling its way to a point, while the noise that’s made by Dominick Ianni’s crew of industrial strength lawnmowers is wide and shapeless: pointed drilling of cicadas easily threshed up in its blades and engines. Atmosphere mangled with noise is also fragrant with freshly-cut grass. (Monica wishes that a reader with some idea of the math and physics of it could supply even an approximate number of just-cut slices of grass and weed blades.) Monica may have pulled back her porch rocker entirely — away from typewriter and March notes that aren’t always easy to decipher — because she feels compelled to stay where she is and get some things that happened/are happening today into writing before their cell structures weaken and they turn into the slush of memory. Let’s see: the last vase of hydrangeas was discarded earlier (whether a cloud of Monica’s favorite but undescribed, light-but-saturated-not-quite-sky-or-French-or-ultramarine-blue or some other impossibly shaded hydrangea color not noted and not noted either which neighbor’s overloaded bush David clipped them from). No more hydrangeas to cut, therefore the end of one of the season’s inner, un-named seasons? Her rocker pushed a little back from her typewriter, Monica’s trying to block out August in one way in order to write about it in another. More about hydrangeas? She doesn’t think so: other events of this August day that she had in mind to sketch in are refusing to be re-lived in language. Why would that be? Writing isn’t “automatic”, but she doesn’t have to remind herself to do what’s harder than it seems and let the pen conform to experience. And yet: it’s as if there’s a shadow or a branch in the mind’s way. . . . Turns her head a little and sees an enormous, unfamiliar young man (a “boy” of no more than fourteen or fifteen) crossing the wide porch boards from the front door toward the porch steps with an odd, padding softness, a little bear-like. Goes down the porch steps and some of his weight seems to rejoin him: carries sacks of trash from inside the house down the steps with ordinary human thudding. Doesn’t head back in. Sees Monica in the south-west corner in the shade of the pine — not typing (writing in a spiral-bound, narrow-ruled notebook), but with a typewriter in front of her on a bench and seems attracted to it. Crosses the porch, traversing the length of the wall where the Corcorans’ windows and door are, all the way to the railing (and behind Monica): an enormous figure padding quietly, but not necessarily trying to be quiet. More like an animal with padded feet that manages to arrive right next to you from the deep distance: shaggy and noiseless, now you know it’s there because you can hear it breathing. Stands behind her contemplating the back of her head and may be trying to read what she’s writing. Can’t be sure. Staring at her typewriter? Just enough of a shadow to keep her from doing the writing that took her out of March. May stand there, staring and breathing — padding back across the porch — approaching again, etc. — going back and forth across the porch like that for a while (saying nothing) before going in. Young, completely blank (and stupid?) face may help make the enormous figure odd but not as menacing as it could be. Monica thinks, for example, of Pam Leary’s enormous brother, Rudi Jolley, who came to visit when Pam and Ted Leary lived in the apartment below Monica’s and whose aura made you look over your shoulder as you walked up the porch steps on a dark night. Enormous boy goes in and strange, retired pharmacist, Lon Gurion (thin black hair, black worm moustache, thick and strangled voice-tone) pops out, having too-swiftly crossed the maroon-carpeted hall from his dark little ground floor rear studio apartment with (Monica thinks, but it isn’t 100% certain) one small window looking down (north) into the hedge-and-fence-filled channel between the massive three-story multiple dwelling and the squat landlord’s modern-not-modern two-story. Monica (trying to re-focus on the August day’s events that are losing their contour and oozing into memory) braces for the inevitable interruption. Lon Gurion is sure to have a story to tell and at the same time his stories are stories they’re also loony theories. Wants Monica to know that his grandson is not retarded. Quite the contrary, in fact — as strange as that may seem, considering his silence, his blank stare, his lumbering gait, his awkwardness, etc., etc. All that is superficial and deceiving! Others aren’t, but he knows that Monica is too insightful to be fooled by it. She probably guessed at once that that dull and clumsy affect, that manatee-like glide of speckled blubber through warm water or warm air, masks a brilliant boy! So uncommonly brilliant he’s in a school for special children: the Walter Disney School in Chicago. Not “special” used dishonestly to mean the opposite of what it really means — not “special” when they really mean “retarded” — “special” as in: so brilliant he’s classified as “schizo-hyper-active”! A surprising term that actually comes close to matching one of the terms in his own system of psychological classification. . . . What else? His grandson has an older sister, almost sixteen, who went to the same school and is now a counselor there: not quite as brilliant as his grandson and her brilliance not nearly as disguised by dullness or disturbance. Two younger sisters, nine and eleven, have their problems, but would never be classified as “schizo-hyper-active” because everything in them is more muted: their disturbance is muted and so is their intelligence. Wants to know: on which side of the age-old debate does Monica come down?: better to be normal to the point of mediocrity or brilliant to the point of being cracked. . . ? Let’s see: after Lon Gurion loses his head of steam (a little more relaxed now that he feels he’s persuaded Monica about his grandson’s invisible brilliance) and has gone back to his tiny groundfloor-rear apartment, Monica finds herself wondering if all Lon Gurion’s grandchildren are the offspring of the only child of Lon Gurion’s Monica knows of (and may once have met): a daughter who lives in Connecticut and who raises a rare breed of dog called a “Papillon”. Breed of dog is so rare, according to Lon Gurion, that his daughter’s Papillons constitute most of the Papillon population living in the United States. Could the odd boy on the porch, transfixed by Monica or by her typewriter — and all the other odd grandchildren as well — be the offspring of the Papillon-raising daughter in Connecticut? It’s David’s pleasure to go to the local library on Coast Boulevard near AAF Street and look “Papillon” up in all the reference books he can find: according to the “Shorter Oxford” a Papillon is “a breed of toy spaniel, having erect ears resembling the shape of a butterfly’s wings and a white coat with a few darker patches. . . . “ (Nothing about its rarity or where it’s bred.) According to another source the “Papillon is one of the oldest of the toy spaniels”. Also: “Papillons are parti-colored (white with markings of any color). An all white dog or a dog with no white is disqualified from the conformation show ring.” Same source also provides alternate names for the Papillon: “Phalene (drop ear type) “Continental Toy Spaniel “Epagneul Nain Continental” and “Nicknames: “Butterfly dog “Squirrel dog (due to tail 'carriage' ” and “country of origin: “France, Spain and Belgium”. David also finds this: “Papillons can be registered with AKC as the following colors: “White & Black “White & Lemon “White & Red “White & Sable “White, Black & Tan “Black, Brown & White “Black, Red & White “Brown & White “Fawn & White “Red, White & Sable “Sable “White “White & Liver “White & Silver. “The most distinctive aspect of the Papillon is its large ears, which are well fringed with colored (not white) silky fur. The color covers both eyes and the front and back of the ears to give the ideal butterfly look. A white blaze and noseband is preferred over a solid-colored head. Nose, eye-rims, and lips should be black. Paw pads vary in color from black or pink depending on the coloring of the dog.” Space is at last cleared for Monica to write about this August day. Happy to be rid of Lon Gurion: space warps around such people: mind feels the force of their inner whirlpools, even though their tales can be seductive. . Only the zzz-zzz-ing of yellowjackets to get in the way of thinking: not a few — hundreds of them zzz-zzz-ing around the perfumed leaves of what plant or shrub? Such a seductive tea-and-honey fragrance (honeysuckle where Monica sees none?) that Monica’s mind (or her mind’s mind and mind’s mind’s nose as well) is zzz-zzz-ing there too. . . . Why does Monica find herself writing about Peggy Quinlan’s neck? Ink forcing its way into not-very-rounded grooves in paper says: “Peggy Q’s neck and lower face are surprisingly wrinkled. Surprising because the skin of her face above that lower jaw line, above the chin, has the glow of a beautiful young woman’s. An unusual dividing line in a face." Monica’s also written the phrase “folds of flesh”, but then can’t figure out how that fits in. In a hurry to get things down, to remember by writing (true or exaggerated to say that her pen will do the remembering?), Monica can’t let herself care about the exact order of events: let the pen outline their shapes on paper and pay attention to “order” later. She thinks it begins like this: David on the sidewalk in front of the house on the afternoon of this August day or the one before, looking for Lou, the rolypoly mailman, who’s way overdue, or for some other not-noted reason, spots Peggy Quinlan’s husband, Al, in the distance — 1, 2, 3, 4 or is it 5 houses north, almost at ABC Street’s intersection with Coast Boulevard — trimming the Quinlans’ hedges because some leaves or branching twigs may have randomly popped up 1/2” or more above a perfectly level plane and are spoiling Al Quinlan’s clean and trim vision of the world, which extends from his personal hygiene all the way to the farthest horizons of ABC Street. David calls up to Monica (writing or typing on the porch) to tell her (thinking of her Chronicle) that he’s sighted Al Quinlan because a sighting of Al Quinlan (whose voice neither Monica nor David can remember ever having heard) is almost as rare as sighting an ivory-billed woodpecker would be and he knows that the Quinlans’ zone of ABC Street isn’t visible from where Monica’s working on the porch. (David wonders aloud why seeing Al Quinlan trimming his hedges should remind him of — and make him feel a restless need to — get back to the barely-written sketches for a narrative revolving around the Lenehans: Nora, Laurel, Ambrose Sr., Ambrose Jr., Riley and Ryan, the “family friend” Kevin Douglas, etc. Why would Al Quinlan make him think of the Lenehans all the way at the southern end of the block and about getting back to figuring out how Monica’s zillions of notes about the Lenehans (and about the block) might relate to another idea that’s been eating at him and that seems to have no relation to the Lenehans, but could have a powerful, inverse relationship to the Lenehans because nothing about the Lenehans has to do with the future and the character that’s been buzzing and annoying him for months is a restless and detached young woman who wants to find a way into the future. . . . Reports to Monica that — because he’s looking north — he also sees wiry Ellen Garvey tending to her flower beds and her lawn across from the Quinlans’ (or, to be exact, Monica would have to ask David to walk north and pace off the relative positions of the facing houses), rarely upright, always kneeling or on all fours in the earth, as lean, hard-working and weathered as a pioneer wrestling with a resistant plot of land. Monica’s notes say that Peggy Quinlan is in front of her (the Quinlans’) house in a thin sweater on a chilly evening, but they don’t say whether it’s the evening of the same day that David reported to Monica about Peggy’s husband Al quietly restoring order to their hedges. Notes also don’t say how or why David (or Monica) is close enough to Peggy Quinlan to see how thin her sweater is or hear what she’s saying. David could be walking toward Lou, the rolypoly mailman, who’s waving as he approaches from the north, turning the corner after having rolled his cart west along Coast Boulevard from ABB Street, but no way to know for sure. Monica’s notes do make a couple of things clear: a) at some point David gets all the mail for the house from Lou to save him at least one trip up the porch steps out of how many trips up how many flights of how many steps per day, per week, per year and that they chat on the sidewalk for five, ten or more minutes, as usual. And b) Peggy Quinlan is in front of her house on a chilly evening, trying to figure out what to do about an old white car that’s blocking her driveway. Peggy says that it’s not just that a car shouldn’t be parked there at all. That’s obvious. It’s also the way it’s parked: at a crazy diagonal, as if someone wanted to make sure that there’s no way to find an inch of space to maneuver around it. As Monica and David know, she says, her mother is ninety-two — and at ninety-two there’s no such thing as being “in good health”. It’s day-to-day and minute-to-minute. Anything can happen at any moment. And if something did happen they’d be completely blocked by this idiot. Any solution they could come up with would take too long. . . . Peggy Quinlan probably says more but Monica (pushed back out of March, but distracted from recording her August day) can’t think of it. What she writes (what she remembers thinking-but-not-saying while sympathizing with Peggy Quinlan) is that the old white car blocking the Quinlans’ driveway at a crazy angle looks like pony-tailed and permanently-stoned Artie Tilden’s. Resembles his car and the indifferent way it’s parked seems like Artie Tilden’s angle toward existence. When does Monica find out that the car blocking Peggy Quinlan’s driveway is not Artie Tilden’s? Let’s see: 1) After thinking (but not saying anything to Peggy Quinlan) about Artie Tilden, and at the same time making mental notes about the similarities and differences between Peggy Quinlan’s blocked driveway and Lena Coffin’s blocked driveway and Lena’s demeanor vs. Peggy’s demeanor, the wildly parked car starts to look less like Artie Tilden’s and more like John Corcoran’s, but that makes no sense (the Corcorans have their own cracked and weedy driveway to park in) and she dismisses it. 2) In Monica’s notes (struggling to concentrate and to remember by writing through distractions that are just distractions and not digressions that also have to be remembered (written)) David meets Lou, the rolypoly mailman, and takes the house’s mail from him to save him the trip, etc., but it can’t be the same August day and same moment he sees Lou wave from the corner and walks toward him (toward the Quinlans’), because all the circumstances described by Monica are different: David (seeing Lou approaching from one of the front, “green room” windows, cranked open to catch ocean breezes on an August day) hurries down two flights of steps, across the porch and down the porch steps to intercept Lou, who in any case is idling at the foot of the stairs, hoping David will appear and save him the trip up the 5, 6 or 7 wide board steps. 3) A package for Pat Corcoran sends David to the Corcorans’ front porch door and he’s surprised that it’s blond-blond little Timothy Corcoran who opens the door to take it. Timothy says that he’s the only one home: father’s probably at work and his mother’s on Long Island (not sure where exactly). His father came home from work last night in one of his moods — in such a bad mood he parked the car somewhere down the block and couldn’t even remember where he left it — and his mother said she was sick of it and his father got angry and they had a horrible fight. She called someone (friend or relative not said or noted), someone came for her — she tried to take him (Timothy) with her, but his father grabbed his arm and wouldn’t let go and his mother had to leave or it would have gotten even crazier. Later on the same day David reports to Monica that he overheard (the accidental overhearing that automatically becomes deliberate listening and memorizing?) Philip Corcoran talking in the downstairs hall (not in his apartment, but why?) on a phone whose coiled wire he must have stretched to its full, straightened length through the Corcorans’ interior entrance just outside Lon Gurion’s rear studio apartment. A little unusual to hear Philip Corcoran’s voice: usually quiet and recessive with Monica and David, more loose and vocal overheard alone with Yvonne Wilding or when he’s had a few beers or smoked a joint with Al Szarka and his buddies or when he’s alone and assumes no one is within earshot and he practices the guitar and warbles weak, nasal versions of “Rocky Raccoon” and “Blackbird”, a little of the background music of his inner life leaking out. “How is it your fault? It’s Dad’s fault, so why are you suffering so much? “I don’t think he suffers. . . . . “Why are you upset? Let him be upset. Why are you always the one. . . !” Silence while he listens to a little longer speech at the other end of the line (somewhere not too far out on Long Island). “How many times have I told you that. . . ! “You know I think that. . . . “ More anguished as it goes along? “Of course you should leave! “Should have left him a long time ago, but you didn’t! You always come back and he knows it. . . !” David reports that he can still make out Philip’s voice, but it’s less intelligible, as if he’s cupped his mouth or turned away from the stairwell, so that his body’s blocking and absorbing the waves and vibrations that had been traveling all the way up to David’s ear as coherent units. . . . “How am I hurting you? Why is it wrong to say that? Why am I always told I’m wrong when I tell the truth. . . ? “This is what you always do to me. I didn’t say it’s your fault and I didn’t say you’re afraid to make a move. . . I only said . . . . “Did I make a stupid joke? I don’t remember making a stupid joke — but if I did make a stupid joke I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings. . . ." When does Monica write that she forgot to record the saturated rose towel and internally shining emerald green towel framed by (ambiguously reflected on/flapping into the interior of) the front picture window of the Arlington sisters’ downstairs apartment in the attached “ranch house” just south of the Regans’ white three story shingle? If something unexpected crosses our horizontal path along the street where we live (our horizontal path across the earth) is it out of order? Ignore it or pay attention to it? Exclude it because it doesn’t fit or chronicle it because, now that it’s crossed our path, it does fit. . . . Not noted on what day in late March David reports to Monica (for her Chronicle) that he ran into Nancy Wattle’s husband/Hank and Willy Wattle’s father and — he can’t say why — ? Wattle (first name never asked or told) went out of his way to say hello and engage him in conversation. May have said more, but all David remembers is that ? Wattle was born in Brooklyn, joined the Marines as soon as he was of age, was stationed in Kentucky and never saw any sort of combat. He lived in Kentucky for six years — so he can say that the Marines changed his life by giving him a taste for open spaces. Another way: his six years in Kentucky made it impossible for him to come home and live in Brooklyn. Even this neighborhood — surrounded by water — has a completely clear horizon only to the south. To the north you can see the city and it’s his theory that if you can see it it’s too close: city’s shoulders look like their whole aim in life is to shove the waters of the bay south into the ocean. David may know (he says) that he’s a corrections officer (the story of how he came to be a corrections officer is long and depressing and David can imagine how much he hates it). How do we end up where we don’t want to be, doing what we don’t want to do? How does it happen to so many? Can it just be a question of money? He doesn’t think so. Bad luck? Who we meet? Lack of courage? No imagination? Stupid advice? Marriage and children? Another excuse. . . . So what makes us do it. . . ? Well, maybe the upside of the downside is that it’s exactly the tension of being displaced that makes the world go round. Is it some sort of necessity? Maybe it’s part of the “grand plan”. But he can tell David this: he won’t be able to take it much longer — and then one day all the Wattles will just disappear from ABC Street. . . . Monica overhears this: one of the tellers in one of the banks on AAF Street says that she’s glad — no, she’s overjoyed — that spring is coming: “winter gives me a bad feeling.” “Well, so-and-so,” an elderly customer answers, “no one likes winter. I’ve never liked winter. It makes us all feel bad.” “No, Mrs. Connelly, that’s not what I mean. I have those seasonal feelings too. I suppose everyone has that. But I’m talking about something different. When I was five” (in Monica’s handwritten notes it isn’t clear whether the teller says “five” or “nine”) “I fell on the ice and broke my arm. And the shock of that single step sliding away from me and the pain when my arm shattered on the ice has never left me. That long second of falling has been with me my whole life. So, whenever it snows — as soon as it begins to snow — first thin little snowfall of the year — way before there’s ice on the ground — I go back to that second when my foot slid out from under me and I’m frightened. I’m depressed like everyone else because it’s winter, but I’m frightened because I can feel myself starting to fall: so I spend the whole winter in a kind of frightened depression, waiting for spring. . . .” On an undated day in late March David says that when he was with Peggy Quinlan he noticed something odd about her face: youthful above the chin, “hanging in folds” below it. Monica wonders how this observation migrated here from her earlier notes about Peggy Quinlan. (Or did the migration occur the other way around?) On Tuesday, March 30, Monica and David are in the sun at the southernmost end of the porch, trying to help each other make two lists: a little (local?) catalogue of the state of what’s blooming/not blooming in early spring and a list of neighborhood people aged by the severe, snow-laden winter of ’76. Let’s see: 1) Walking or driving, green and yellow are still the only colors seen along the streets and avenues. 2) Forsythias haven’t lost their brilliance: sunlight still converted there to chrome yellow that drips like paint. (The long, dripping yellow tangles of the forsythias are the color of earliest spring.) 3) Still not able to trace the aroma of tea-and-honey to its source. The mildly sweet aroma seems to exactly coincide with the blooming of forsythia but doesn’t seem to come from forsythia (sniffing doesn’t isolate it there). 4) Unidentified pale yellow flowers given to Monica and Wanda Baer by the owner of “Le Beau Pere” last week are still oddly vibrant (no visible change from the moment he clipped them). 5) Lilacs just opening out of their tight green sleeves: just showing the tip of a blackberry core of darkest purple. (Spotted while walking along Salem Avenue on March 30, not one day before). 6) Driving toward Manhattan, not through Brooklyn, but through Broad Channel, along Cross Bay Boulevard: Monica doesn’t think (has never thought) that the long rows of trees lining the sides of Cross Bay Boulevard are willows, but they look like willows and Monica doesn’t know what else to call them, so in her mind she calls them “willows”: a mist of earliest pea or beansprout green not visible in one tree but spun just-visibly through their long rows when looking-while-driving under them. 7) Xylon’s pussy willow on ABA Street — yellow before? — has now become green (what shade of green exactly not noted) throughout its open web of wands and tangles. 8) Hedges everywhere still have winter inside them: their invisible core is cold wood, branching and thorny: whatever thin sprinkles of green have begun to dot their surfaces don’t seem to come from that dark, reluctant center. BRIEF OFF-THE-TOP-of-THE-HEAD CATALOGUE OF LOCAL ACQUAINTANCES & PASSERSBY AGED BY THE BRUTAL WINTER OF ’76 1) Cathy Castle (see the undated day in late March that may be March 28 or 29 — page number uncertain — for Monica’s quick sketch of Cathy Castle’s sudden thickening and souring out of an unnaturally prolonged girlhood). 2) Old age, climbing Peggy Quinlan like a vine, has reached just below her chin. 3) Greg Coffin (neither Monica nor David had given any thought to how Greg Coffin’s been looking before deciding to sit together in the sun to try and figure out who’s been aged, damaged or seriously altered by the harsh winter of ’76). It’s not so much Greg Coffin’s face that’s changed, and it may not even be a question of his having “aged” in the usual way, as it is a subtle change in his way of gesturing and moving through space. Greg Coffin’s physical signature has always been a fluid and relaxed aloofness that suits his slender height. Now (after the bitter winter) Greg seems to have lost the ease of movement that comes with indifference: crosses space impatiently, as if whatever space he’s in is a box he can’t wait to get out of. Monica can’t help wondering if he’s come to the conclusion that life, which already hasn’t gone as expected, is going to be disappointing. May have reasoned with himself: already disappointing: therefore (looking at life clearly and unsentimentally over a dark winter) the possibility of achieving his loftier ambitions (which turned out to have complications he had no way of foreseeing) is unlikely, even absurd. To be just one more endlessly-striving, little-known musician among zillions might be good enough for Leo (happy enough just to get to play his drums!) or even for Andy (just as happy fishing, crafting a cabinet, getting high as he is playing the guitar) but not for him. No matter how anyone defines it he can’t imagine where “success” is going to come from — and his loss of faith in life’s weedy possibility of sprouting surprises is visible from below in the movements of his legs and sudden, angry swing of his shoulders across the Coffins’ second floor porch. 4) Pat Corcoran just looks lousy (face broken out, skin a yellowing putty, eyes lifeless, voice dull, almost silent, usual fire hydrant of stories not spouting). “Let’s see,” Monica and David ask each other, “anyone left out?” 5) Enos Greengrass? Both David and Monica have the sense that Enos Greengrass should be included, but neither can remember when exactly it was they saw him last or how terrible (how terrible exactly) he looked. 6) A woman who used to be seen passing regularly by Monica or David, seen only rarely now: Monica thinks her real name is “Pat” or “Patricia”, but she was never a Pat or Patricia to them: was always an “Agnes” (along with “Fat Agnes”) in Monica’s and in David’s notes, or was she sometimes a “Gloria” (also another name for Leila X)?: an obviously once-good-looking-or-just-glamorous woman always in stiletto heels and skin-tight, tropical-colored dresses passing on the opposite (west) side of the street, walking at a rapid but broken pace (because of her high, needle-pointed heels?) from oceanfront apartment house north toward Coast Boulevard. “Agnes” or “Gloria” passes in March ’76 looking a lot worse. Face, never easy to see from across the way, is for some reason as vivid to Monica or David as if one of them were the medicine cabinet mirror where Gloria or Agnes is studying herself before applying her makeup: face alarmingly furrowed and cross-hatched with fresh wrinkles. Where have they arrived from, as if having flown there like a flock of starlings into a tree? 6 1/2) “Agnes’s” or “Gloria’s” husband — whose real name could be “Dave” but who, to Monica and David, has always been “the Clock” (never “Clockface”?) — passes, looking terribly aged (exactly how not noted). Also can’t remember exactly why they called him “the Clock” or “Clockface”: shape of head or face seems most likely but there also could have been something ridiculously regular and predictable about his appearances heading north or south. Notes say something about a terrible loss of weight always equaling a terrible increase in wrinkles. 7) True or untrue, fair or unfair, to include the winter-phobic bank teller on their list? On an undated day in late March Monica is walking on Coast Boulevard when someone in a passing car waves, calls out “hi” and pulls up: it’s Cousin Jo Ellen in a chatty mood: a story to tell? Or one of those daily non-stories that may be made of a dozen or more pulverized stories. Cousin Jo Ellen says that she’s on her way to pick up a friend — “not Themis”. Goes out of her way to make it clear that she doesn’t want Monica to assume it’s Themis and also goes out of her way to define him as “only a friend”. True, she says, she has to admit that she can see why someone might think or assume there’s something between her and Themis — because she’s in the Cornucopia Diner till 3, 4 in the morning almost every night. Hangs out there, but not just because of Themis. If anything, she hardly hangs out with Themis at all because he’s always in the kitchen! She spends just as much time with the owner, Christos, as she does with Themis — and she’d say of him in exactly the same way that he’s “just a friend”. For her the Cornucopia Diner is — at least late at night — a community. How can she explain? It’s a long story if you tell it one way and a very short story (or not even a story) if you tell it another way. The short-short version is that, because she lived and worked on Aruba for so many years (how many not noted), when she came back to the States and to New York she couldn’t live in Manhattan (where it should have made sense for her to live) because that kind of anonymity was not for her. She’d gotten too used to island life or village life or whatever the right term is for that scale of existence. So she moved into a neighborhood she thought would be like that, a sort of self-contained town or village: the community of the street, everyone recognizable, everyone knowing you by sight and saying hello, a village-like neighborhood where you could establish yourself as a “regular” in a café and a bar, etc., etc. But her neighborhood is not Aruba — there is no community. She’s not old enough, she’s not young enough, she’s not married, she has no children, she has no idea what category she belongs to — so there is no community and she felt totally isolated until she stumbled into the Cornucopia Diner late one night. Got talking to Christos and Themis may have wandered out from the kitchen, the cashier was nice and she probably chatted with someone at the counter – and then she tried it again another night, started to get to know the late night regulars and began to feel at home. A weird thing to say, but the Cornucopia Diner has made living around here bearable. She’s sorry she took that stupid job with the plastic surgeon in Forest Hills because she has to get up early and it’s ruining her nights. . . . What else? Let’s see: Cousin Jo Ellen says that she weighs exactly one-hundred-and-thirty-nine pounds and her height is 5’ 6” so she’s supposedly just the right weight for her height, but it doesn’t feel that way to her and starting tomorrow she’s limiting herself to five hundred calories a day. “From now on it’s black coffee and cigarettes for me. . . !” Not perfectly clear in Monica’s notes: Does Cousin Jo Ellen add this before driving away down Coast Boulevard (east) in the direction of AAF Street or beyond? Despite the community of the diner, despite Christos and Themis and the cashier and the late-night customers she now considers friends, despite her dumb new job and the fact that she no longer feels so horribly isolated, it’s always in her mind to disappear one day: just pull herself up by her shallow roots and look for another island. . . . On what undated day in late March, while working at her typewriter or eating breakfast at her tremendous oak-desk-and-breakfast-table under the west-facing windows of the green room, is this what Monica sees?: Her favorite vase, given to her by a childhood friend, a smoky tower of heavy Czechoslovakian crystal tapering up in polished blocks from a narrow base, with forsythias in it for the first time. First flowers clipped for Monica by David this year (therefore first time vase has water in it)? Vase must already have been there, empty, dark, gleaming and beautiful in another way, because Monica’s notes say that yellow flowers floating on water and long, forsythia wands “bring it to life”. Long yellow forsythia wands “brush against” and cross the dark crocodile green of the leaves of Lowell’s avocado plants flanking Monica’s typewriter, but is the darkness of the green changed by the yellow crossing it and, if so, in what way (in what way exactly)? And, if dark crocodile green and lively chrome yellow change one another, what’s changed in Monica’s view through them toward the complex mutations of light in the bamboo blinds?: light against them, daylight/sunlight through them: on leaves, on glass, on water, on green of leaves, on completely other (chlorophyll?) green of walls, on how many yellows altering to other yellows throughout the day and on not-quite-transparency-not-quite-colorlessness of water and glass. Things are concentrated or re-organized by other things in so many places that eye and brain have too much work to do and generally don’t bother to sort it out. . . . Notes also say something about a certain critical moment of light in the green room — when light through bamboo is truly “golden” and all elements of the room are drawn into a fleeting internal resonance of green and gold? Also: the beauty of the dark, upright pool of water in the Czechoslovakian vase. On the same day as the “forsythia” day or on another day (just because two events appear side-by-side, one after the other or even tangled together on the same handwritten notebook page of Monica’s Chronicle doesn’t necessarily mean that they happened at the same time or on the same day) Cathy Castle visits Pat Corcoran with stories to tell and stops on the porch to tell her stories to Monica before telling them to Pat. Cathy Castle (still looking both blown-up and worn out, a cute but stubby little kirby pickled too long in the brine of a bitter winter) is worried about Scarlet. She doesn’t think Scarlet should be, but still is feeling the effects of the operation: smallest little rough edge of food hurts her throat. Last night, for example, she gave Scarlet some simple broiled chicken cut up into tiny pieces and a small amount of mashed potato whipped real smooth and creamy the way Scarlet likes it, but the potato seemed to hurt her throat even more than the chicken, so she ate practically nothing. All Scarlet can tolerate consistently are chocolate pudding and chicken broth so a) she’s running out of ideas about what to cook and b) she’s worried that there’s more to what’s wrong with Scarlet than the after-effects of the operation. For example: why is it that she can drink milk and apple juice but can’t drink orange juice? Orange juice makes her cough and every time she coughs Cathy’s afraid she’s going to bleed — so she’s still sleeping with Scarlet on the livingroom day bed and just about sleepless. Husband gets in from work at 2 a.m. and wakes everybody up: Debbie thinks it’s morning, gets over-excited and wants to play. What else? Cathy Castle wants Monica’s opinion. Obviously her first concern is Scarlet. She’s been very careful not to cook anything that could injure her throat. But then what does she do with her husband? If her husband goes too long without his favorite meals he gets all cranky and depressed and miserable and he makes life miserable for everyone else. So, over the weekend, she decided to make a roast loin of pork with red cabbage, mashed potatoes and gravy. Scarlet has always liked that dish and she was hungry and she wanted some (she’s sick of chocolate pudding and chicken broth!), but she was afraid that no matter how small she cut up the roast a little dry edge of it could injure Scarlet’s throat — so, while everyone else was eating roast pork and cabbage and mashed potato and gravy and the smell was filling the house, Scarlet was eating some boring goo and there was nothing she could do or say to make it seem alright. What does Monica think: was she wrong for making the roast? for caring whether or not her husband was miserable without his meat and gravy? Is there a solution she’s not seeing. . . ? Over a number of undated days in late March Monica walks into the green room and is struck first — immediately on entering — by the yellow of the forsythias. Yellow is striking just for being yellow: against green even more so. After a while she’s able to see that morning yellow is entirely different from afternoon yellow and for obvious reasons. In the morning — even on sunny days — at the moment of sun’s freshest, most naked clarity and brilliance — it’s at the exact, diagonally opposite pole from the green room, on the far side of the massive peaked roof, and its indirect light is a kind of daylit shadow that makes blossoms cluster more densely. Light falls on them but doesn’t get through them. Entering the green room Monica sees dense yellow masses without illumination. In the afternoon, lit up from behind, the forsythias are a thin, blazing screen. Leaning in or sitting back? Typing March notes in August August always has a chance to drill or talk its way through and pull Monica in a completely physical sense out of the leaning-forward position that’s necessary for her to keep her hand and eye on folded sheets of handwritten scrap paper or on handwritten notebook or pad and at the same time be able to place her fingers on the keys of her typewriter and also keep track of the new, edited version of the handwritten notes that — completing the circuit of handwritten scrawl —› into left hand, through more than one region of Monica’s brain —› into and through right hand —› into typewriter —› onto paper — has to be checked for accuracy. This leaning-forward state is one of great intensity and focus, but it’s also fragile and easily torn: a voice, a sunspot of music, grinding motors of gardening machinery, blast of weather, even an exiled thought wandering through the frame of March walks through easily, sometimes pulling a long train of digressive note-taking with it. . . . March in August in March in August and so on. . . . Pat Corcoran pops out through her front porch door (having had to cork herself up too long? impatiently watching Monica leaning over her typewriter as if she’s doing something that matters) to forewarn Monica that if Lou gives her any mail for Allison Meehan it has to go in their (the Corcorans’) box. Repeats again: not in the general mailbox, but in the separate bin near their front door marked “Corcoran”! Not clear in Monica’s notes: does Monica ask Pat Corcoran how that’s any different from the way it’s always been? What else would she do with Allison Meehan’s mail, seeing that Allison Meehan (the Corcorans’ niece) lives with the Corcorans? Or: Pat Corcoran’s meaning may be too obvious for Monica to say or write anything: Pat Corcoran went out of her way to say something stupid and meaningless to Monica, snapping her out of her leaning-out-of-August-into-March position, because she wants Monica to know that she see things. Monica may not think she sees, but she does: sees things and knows things because she watches: looks through the wooden slats of her old venetians and sees Monica downstairs sometimes or David downstairs sometimes, waiting for Lou the rolypoly mailman: and sees how Lou sometimes hands them all the house’s mail and she resents it! Bothers her, but she doesn’t want to argue with Monica or maybe not even say out loud that she spies on life in front of the house through the slats of her venetians, because in her mind’s eye she can see that if she were the one listening (Monica) she might find the one babbling and complaining (herself) a little odd and annoying, so she chooses what seems to her the middle ground: just pop out across whatever reality Monica might be leaning into: pop into Monica's March and Monica's August like the big-headed shadow crossing the auditorium — already talking and sounding like Pat Corcoran before Monica can focus and see that it's Pat Corcoran. Monica wonders: is it true that a sentence can cancel death? Certainly not just any sentence. Therefore: what kind of sentence? Worth spending a lifetime trying to write such a sentence? Could it be the one endless, horizontal sentence it takes a lifetime to write? On the spur of the moment Wanda Baer, Monica and David drive to Manhattan to have dinner together. Wanda Baer has nothing in particular to talk about — no urgent story to tell — and isn’t conscious of needing advice about anything: it seems to be the lack of any reason or purpose that inspires them and all three feel it equally. 1) Following her impulse to do nothing but follow her impulse Monica (as soon as they cross the 59 St. Bridge) drives to a small French restaurant called “La Mangeoire” on Second Avenue between 53 Street and 54 Street. No one thought of going there and, even though Monica remembers having gone there with David, she can’t remember when and the fact that she has no idea why she drove there now makes everyone want to go there. 2) Look through the window at the owner, Gerard, a slender man with a gentle, scholarly appearance, recessively overseeing his cloud-world of food and flowers from his caisse just inside the door and to the left, then stand in the entrance for a while sniffing the permanent aromasphere of Mediterranean spices under the ceiling. 3) Is it because no one craved anything that what’s given by accident seems perfect? 4) Kept afloat on clouds of flowers and whipped cream? (“Heaven” because it’s not ours?) 5) Also just inside the entrance, on an enormous old sideboard (to the right?), a crystal punch bowl of what’s said to be “sabayon sauce”, but seems too puffed and cloud-like, as if the silken yellow custard has been folded with whipped cream; a crystal bowl of perfect strawberries; a crystal bowl of dark “champignons a la grecque”. 6) After they’re seated at a leafy table not far from the entrance David is preoccupied by the sideboard, particularly by the strawberries being spooned into long-stemmed glasses: strawberries (which David loves in any case) are so large and ideal that he can taste their perfect strawberryness from where he’s sitting: from childhood David has had the gift of teleportation: over there while appearing to others not to have moved: and there he is now, in his chair and also right next to the crystal bowl of strawberries being spooned into tall desert glasses, froth of white or just-faintly-egg-yellow-white sabayon sauce spooned over them with great care and deliberation by a waiter dedicated to his task, pausing before spooning again to allow froth, which does have a certain liquid weight to it, to run down between the berries that can’t wait to be tasted. Now their filled-to-the-skin red only shows out at a few points from the whipped-up cloud around and above them. 7) Monica wonders if it’s possible that David — before they’ve even ordered or tasted anything — is already worried that by the time dinner is over there won’t be any strawberries or sabayon sauce left for him. 8) A basket of bread (kind not noted) and small crocks of butter. 9) Only one first course noted and not noted either whether there’s more than one order of it: warm salad of sausage and potato lightly dressed with a garlic dressing of some kind. No memory (no record) of ordering or eating “champignon a la grecque”: therefore, apparently, David is not obsessed with that end of the sideboard. 10) What else? One of the day’s specials for David: roast veal with a white wine and mushroom sauce with seventeen herbs (Monica would like a list of the “seventeen herbs”, but couldn’t get one then (in the restaurant) or later (while writing or typing); steak au poivre for Wanda Baer (“Madagascar green pepper” sauce that’s dense — not a fiery black crust of cracked black pepper — more a real sauce that may have a little cream in it); and for Monica (her favorite?) duck a l’orange: skin crackling, sauce bittersweet with (Monica and David put their heads together and are pretty sure) strong stock made from duck or chicken; something caramelized yet not sweet; orange rind; dark wine with some sweetness to it (could even be port); Grand Marnier, Cointreau or some other orange liqueur or brandy; a few other things they can’t figure out. 11) Everything perfect, everything as it should be. When anticipation and imagination aren’t spoiled by experience, then in what reality are we? 12) Let’s see: perfect pommes frites, broccoli prepared how?, a good bottle of red wine chosen by David (drawn to red wine by instinct even before he knows the first thing about it — type not remembered or recorded). 13) David has no choice: he has to have the strawberries for dessert and his only disappointment is that he can barely manage one overflowing glass of them. Wanda Baer has also been eying the sideboard, but lusting only for the cloud of sabayon sauce, not the strawberries: therefore orders chocolate mousse cake (moistened with rum) served alongside a dreamlike and towering cumulous cloud of sabayon/whipped cream Wanda Baer can’t wait to get her spoon or finger into — as if tasting and licking it might be the same as traveling across the universe on a raft of it forever. Monica’s dessert comes last (takes the longest to prepare) and is worth waiting for. Added to her pleasure in having the best dessert: David advised her to change her mind and have the perfect strawberries like him and Wanda Baer is so lost in her whipped cream cloud — not so much in her rum-soaked chocolate mousse cake — that she doesn’t care what Monica orders. Monica’s profiteroles are as large as ostrich eggs: two egg-ovals under darkest dark chocolate that pools around them in the well, up to the inner rim of the decorative border of an oversized platter: cumulous cloud-on-cloud of just faintly eggy-white sabayon/whipped cream upright beside the two dark-chocolate-covered egg-ovals: the bowl of a large spoon brings to the mouth, all in the same moment, several layers of taste: bittersweet chocolate sauce, bit of thin, crisp, somewhat eggy dough, surprising-to-the-tongue taste of cool vanilla custard (released from interior by spoon breaking through crust), little froth of sabayon/whipped cream with its subtle tastes of marsala and orange liqueur: darkest dark and bittersweet chocolate has just a little sweetened crunch of dough hidden in it and the softening contrast of silky vanilla custard and the very slightly sweet and aromatic, melting-away-as-you-taste-it cloud that has to be chased by the tongue to be tasted and chased and tasted again and again to have the slightest reality: depth of chocolate tries to anchor everything but slides away. Monica wonders: is the compulsion to record experience the same (exactly the same?) as the desire to be completely alive in the instant of experience? The same question or different: where does experience happen? While eating, consciousness and its sensory eclipse chase one another’s tail and it’s the dream of each instant to erase the one before it. Find out what happened by writing? No knowing without writing? Or: writing not a way of knowing at all, but of living in a parallel, horizontal universe. The ambiguous tang of what’s always sliding away from us. Monica believes this: our truest autobiography happens outside our skin: is us because it isn’t us (yet draws our outline?). End-of-March days may follow their usual order, but not necessarily in the Chronicle. Day follows day and event follows event, but not one day is dated and no event is matched to one dated day — so the events and days of the end-of-March might as well be laid out side-by-side on a table where they could be shuffled in any order and no one would know the difference. On a sunny day the air is chilled: sun visible in the air can’t be felt on the skin: skin feels far-away ocean’s cold green currents more than sun that falls directly on it, while “yesterday” skin was warm without sun and without the remote touch of far-away currents. “Today” a chilled sun falls on everything. Fresh green grass has sprung up overnight around the far-reaching tangles of the forsythia wands. Not clear to Monica while translating her hard-to-read notes into typewriter: can it already be the edges of these new green grass-blades — green with no color in it but green — nothing but green and the light that helped it out of whatever sheath was containing it — edges of these just-born grass-blades that are at once “sharp” and “resilient” and “fluttering” because of icy ocean currents already coursing through them as south —› north breezes? Grass wasn’t there yesterday around the forsythias, but today it’s tall enough to be shaken by the force of currents going through it: currents that are also “green”, but a more unimaginable one: an iced green drink, nearly frozen, made out of water and salt and strong alcohol with something wild and herbal pounded for centuries there into a refractive crystal powder. Same day or different? A woman’s one piece black bathing suit and a man’s mustard bathing suit are moving in Naomi Rosenwasser’s picture window in a more restricted way (stiff and heavy with water?) than the flapping white sheet that caught Monica’s attention how many days earlier? despite the severe southwest angle from the southern end of the porch. Now that it’s happened by chance Monica’s become conscious that there’s something to observe and record at the endpoint of that angle of looking and she’s curious to see what happens if she keeps cataloguing what’s reflected in Naomi Rosenwasser’s picture window when she happens to be looking that way. Also makes a note to herself to try and figure out (by calculating the angle from porch or sidewalk?) whose flapping and fluttering sheets, pillow-cases, clothing on whose clothesline have been pictured there for years with no one to notice or record them. What else? Note about this day or about several days: the colors of end-of-March clothing and bedding reflected in Naomi Rosenwasser’s picture window are all by-and-large muted pastels: pale pinks, mild greens, faded yellows creased and folded one across the other in patterns that can’t help changing, are often complex and occasionally beautiful. Monica knows that in the course of a day she does an unusual amount of looking or staring at things and she also knows that the spring sun is deceptive and dangerous: seems cool in cool air (harshness of sun neutralized by cold green ocean currents?), but staring at ocean “earlier” or staring at window reflections “later” or even a bolt of light off a passing car sometimes brings on a painful sun-headache, as it does now. Double or triple (at least triple) image of forsythias: 1) From the green room, looking down deliberately by separating the fine horizontal rods of the bamboo blinds with the fingers of one hand: a clear view of the long reach of the chrome-yellow wands from the center of the right-hand wing of the lawn all the way across it to the sidewalk. 2) From the far south boardwalk end of ABC Street: a vivid, somewhat horizontal and tangled cloud of yellow on or just off the sidewalk: distance doesn’t matter: vision flies to it, giving an odd sensation of out-of-body travel: yellow the only color other than a few thin washes of green and the dull and muddy anti-colors of brick, shingle, pavement, etc. . . . 3) From inside the green room: Monica is struck by how far the long yellow wands now seem to extend from the smoky Czechoslovakian glass vase, as if they’re growing there. Not noted before (therefore “out of place”?): Monica had loaned her Czechoslovakian crystal vase, one of the few presents from a childhood friend she’s taken with her whenever she’s moved, to her sister Kitty: reason not remembered or recorded: and Kitty returned it when she moved back to Manhattan — out of the ancient yellow brick apartment house where ABC Street meets the boardwalk — just in time for the forsythia wands David had clipped for Monica. Does the return of the vase “mean” something? sever something? Nothing but what it is? Another way: nothing to be seen in the vase but water, trimmed lower ends of forsythia branches and a few floating yellow petals. On March 31: a) Monica crosses paths → ← north/south with Lena Coffin, walking quickly (nervously?), carrying two long and heavy cast iron twelve-muffin muffin pans from her house to Grete/Babette’s or from Grete/Babette’s to her house (which way not noted and not noted either whether Monica’s returning from or headed for the beach). Hardly takes time to pause and say, as if calling out to someone in the distance: “Baking muffins for Rosa’s birthday!” “’Rosa?’” Monica never heard Rosamond called “Rosa” before, finds it odd but has no way to figure out what it means. Joshua just had his birthday: she baked something for him — so of course she has to bake something for Rosamond and now everything’s happening all at once! — there’s no time — there’s never any time — and she’s beginning to forget her own name. . . . Today is one of those days when she needs someone to remind her who she is. . . . b) At what time does Pat Corcoran find Monica to tell her this story: earlier this morning (time not said or not noted) she smelled gas: strongest when she approached the entry door to her apartment that opens into the hall just outside the little back studio where that disgusting old man is living. Sniffed around a little to make sure that that’s where the gas was coming from, then called the gas company. How did the man from the gas company get into Lon Gurion’s musty little studio? Monica tries to find out, but can’t, because once Pat Corcoran’s mind and tongue get hooked up together and start racing around their track, two wheels up on the edge of the steep, banked wall, there’s no way for Monica’s voice to break in. Pat makes this much clear: fire department came: gas was coming from “that repulsive man’s” dark little studio: he has a habit (Pat Corcoran says) of disappearing for days, leaving his door padlocked. This time he left his oven on and the pilot light blew out: next time it will be worse! Pat Corcoran reminds Monica that she’s been saying from the minute he moved in that that weird old man is dangerous — and that, if the landlord didn’t get rid of him, he’d end up killing them all. . . . Which arrives first: raw green spice of just-cut grass (not sniffed by the nose, arriving through the nose instantly from any distance (demanding a better quantum physics of the senses) straight to the brain and sniffed by the startled brain only) or zzz of lawnmower cutting grass in the deep middle distance? At about 6 p.m. on March 31 Monica hears the unmistakable sound of Al Szarka’s voice, clogged with anger and anguish. Coming from where to where? “Where’d you get it?” (Monica assumes that Al Szarka is talking to Yvonne Wilding, but no answer so can’t say for sure.) “From Danny, right? You’ve been getting stuff from Danny — you’ve been sneaking it. . . !” Now Monica clearly hears Yvonne Wilding’s voice: an odd sort of childish whining from this darkly lazy, attractively depressed woman who thinks a lot and says little. “Sneaking into the bathroom, am I right? Shooting up there! snorting coke in there! am I right or am I wrong? Don’t lie to me, Yvonne!” More childish whining and wheedling. “Then what was that funnel I found in the bathroom, Yvonne? We have no funnel. You always think people are stupid, but you always get caught. Why is that, Yvonne? Huh? Can you explain that? Can you explain why someone who’s smarter than me and smarter than everyone else always gets caught — always messed up and trying to weasel her way out. . . . Explain that to me, Yvonne. . . !” Yes, Yvonne admits, she did snort some coke in the bathroom. But absolutely did not — did not — shoot up. (Slightly less whining, slightly more like Yvonne’s normal voice, even a little irritated?) Snorted some coke, so — big deal. And she did not — repeat again, did not — get anything from Danny! She’s got other ways, her own ways, ways he knows nothing about, to get what she needs. . . . “You’re so full of shit, Yvonne. . . !” At intervals from Al, always clogged and anguished, but sometimes a little more anguished, sometimes a little more angry: “is this what you want?” “you don’t love me — can’t say you love me! — if this is what you do. . . .” “if you really loved me, Yvonne, you wouldn’t. . . !” “want to snort coke in the toilet? is that your idea of living, Yvonne?” “why do you always do this stuff? You wouldn’t always do this stuff if you. . . .” On and on like that, for how long? And a little later it’s Yvonne, whining and wheedling like a little girl again, who says “you don’t care about me, Al — you wouldn’t talk to me this way if you loved me. Everyone says they love everyone but no one loves anyone and everyone’s full of shit. There’s something you want from me or something you need from me and that’s what it’s all about, Al.” Is it Al Szarka or someone else who later tells Monica that Yvonne’s mother, who died a few years ago, was an alcoholic who beat Yvonne regularly. Also this: as Monica must have noticed, Yvonne has been losing weight rapidly. Losing weight suddenly and quickly, looking tired, looking lousy — drawn, droopy and haggard — and that’s not a good sign. Last time she looked and felt like that, about a year ago, they found her od’d at the Queens Plaza Mall. March ’76 notes end with Monica and David on the porch together again, adding to their catalogue of those undone by the harsh winter of ’76. (Adding to it or repeating themselves because they don’t remember what they’ve done.) “The Clock” Pat Corcoran Bank teller, with her long complaint about winter. August in March. Or, more accurately, though it sounds more confusing, August in March in August: that is, working on the porch in August, typing (translating) handwritten March notes, the August-that's-around-her that she's blinded to sometimes intrudes, breaking March’s hold on Monica’s consciousness. Lean back, away from the typewriter (therefore, out of March). “Late in the afternoon” (date not noted) Monica is typing March notes behind the Rhinebeck pine, still in the afterglow of an icy swim at 1 p.m. (rough water and strong undertow). She feels compelled to stop her translation of March notes to sketch in a brief encounter with Pam Leary on Coast Boulevard. Pam Leary’s lip is swollen and there are ugly sores on it but she says that this is nothing: she was out in San Diego visiting her family and she spent too much time in the sun. “Sun poisoning.” Sores were terrible (no one could look at her) and her lower lip swelled up to twice — more than twice? — its normal size. Let’s see: Rudi is home, living with their parents again after all this time, and he’s gone back to college to finish his degree. She has to admit that she had a hard time with that. Had a hard time accepting Rudi being there, paying no rent, etc.: as Monica knows her parents (their parents) lost their life savings — spent every dime they had to keep Rudi out of prison. And she hates him for that. Can’t hide the fact that she resents him for that. Naturally Donald Green is back in the picture. Somehow Donny got involved with real estate. Had no idea Donny knew anything about real estate, but the story is that he makes a lot of money — goes nuts — goes broke — goes back to real estate and earns more money. Donny can survive his own craziness, but Rudi can’t. So Rudi’s living at home, Donald is buzzing around, stoking him up, filling his head with nutty ideas again and something’s bound to go wrong. What else? Polly is in San Francisco, keeping her distance from the mess they know is brewing. Monica’s handwritten notes for April 1, 1976 say that the light rain that’s falling has a green cast to it. Later (November?), while typing her notes up, she asks herself what kind of green? Just-born green fresh out of the pod? Not-quite-avocado green of the bushes in the narrow channel between the massive cocoa-shingled multiple dwelling and the landlord’s ugly pseudo-modern? (And, if avocado, skin of avocado or flesh of avocado?) Nothing she can think of matches the green of the rain she’s seeing. Internal light in young leaves should be added and also external light able to pass through their thin membranes, but what else? Green mist of rain stirring slowly through the whole globe of space has something of ocean’s mineral green elixir in it too. . . . This too: “Pine is the green of winter, light through youngest peapods the green of April.” A question that always interests Monica, though she realizes it may be destined to always be a question: if a string of unrelated events stretches the length of a day (April 1, for example) and in that way measures the day or, more accurately, is the day — and Monica does her best to catalogue the events in the string — is it still a catalogue of “unrelated events”? or are they now related because they happened on the same day or because Monica catalogued them within the frame of the day? a) Green light, green mist, green rain, etc. b) Wanda Baer passes under a bright, pie-wedge umbrella of primary colors: wedges of red, blue, yellow form a brilliant pinwheel over her head against the rain that’s barely more than a green mist: while down on the ground Wanda Baer is wearing an earthen brown suede jacket (same jacket Wanda fell in love with in a department store men’s department, then worried a little later that it was a mannish jacket when she caught sight of a car window reflection of herself walking down ABC Street — or is it another brown jacket altogether, also cut to fit a man’s more squared-off frame?); chocolate brown corduroy pants; high caramel brown boots; a white turtleneck for contrast; an oversized brown leather shoulder bag that used to be Kitty’s (given to Wanda when Kitty moved back to Manhattan). c) Lilacs are trying to flower: buds look edible, small and tight as raspberries, black-purple-violet as blackberries: small, hard and edible buds or berries barely out of their green casings: green skins bursting with the lengthening berry-tips that can’t quite get out and flower. On April 1 is the whole sprouting natural world edible, even here on ABC Street? New “snowball” leaves look like brussels sprout leaves to Monica. Lilac and hydrangea, unidentified bushes in the channel between two houses: peapod, brussels sprout, raspberry and blackberry. Only forsythias (their long wands and their yellow) don’t conjure the impulse to chew on the world to know it. d) Is Monica’s notation that the morning of April 1 is “windy” out of order? e) Some more notes on blue: Monica can’t say for sure whether she still has Rilke’s letters (therefore Cezanne) in mind when she struggles for the right word for the day’s mild blue. Action of pen on paper: right word might as well be right brush stroke: writing the word blue she’d love to see a creamy wash of exactly the blue of this day. What softened it to this degree? At about 3 p.m. green mist clears to reveal a sky like a tropical sea: blue of young sky is to blue as newly-minted leaves are to green: the blue and green of an underripe world. These blues and greens exist in Cezanne and in Matisse too, most vividly in Matisse’s “View of Notre Dame” where all of green nature reveals itself as a mysterious green globe in the midst of an extraordinary plane of a blue that may be the blue of April 1, 1976, but on that canvas may be a wall, a window, a sky — or sky, wall and window — though not exactly equal to the vertical plane of brushstrokes that confronts us along with the black, sketched diagram of an architectural shape. Monica’s mild blue ocean of sky can certainly be found in works by both painters, though not necessarily in their skies or their oceans. Or: their skies may not always be where we look for them. Monica wonders: where — where exactly — did they find their blue? and did they name it? This too: she’d love to know what pigments had to be mixed with winter’s cobalt to arrive at the sky that exists when the mist clears on April 1. f) Monica notes “three blue skies in one”. g) More notes on forsythias or some notes on the color yellow: in the “heavy wind and rain” of the morning (what time not noted) ABC Street’s forsythias lost a great number of petals: yellow on the ground, sky’s unnamable blue above (each altering the other) and a dry tangle of woody wand-branches with some weak yellow caught in it at or just below eye level. Softest of white clouds have painted themselves in to complete the image of a perfect summery day in spring. Greg Coffin (inspired by the forsythias that colored ABC Street yellow from one end of March to the other, holding on into April?) is painting the walls of his enclosed porch/ping-pong room a harsh chrome or egg yolk yellow: vivid, saturated wall of yellow through Greg-and-Lena’s side window. Monica can’t be sure from her angle, looking south from the porch, if the quadrant of dull wall being gradually swabbed with yellow by Greg Coffin, is really in the porch/ping-pong room or in the hall leading out of the ping-pong room and toward the inner stairs and chambers of the massive house. h) David reports to Monica (for her Chronicle) that Mikki called (while Monica was working on the porch) with a tiny fragment of a story to add to a long story already-being-told. Tiny fragment of story splits in two: Mikki’s been enjoying herself, but now she’s not sure whether or not to be revolted by herself: been enjoying herself in a way that, while she was enjoying herself, she told herself Monica and David would think of as sloppy and stupid (but of course went ahead and enjoyed herself anyway): wallowing (the only word for it!) in hot fudge sundaes with her “little cowgirl” Marsha — gorging on cake and pastry with Marsha — having — what other way is there to put it? — simultaneous sugar, cream, chocolate and butter orgasms with Marsha — with the inevitable (horrible?) result that she put on fifteen bloated pounds and looks pretty ugly. So she’s a little guilty, a little disgusted with herself — but she’s addicted to all these sloppy pleasures and doesn’t know how to (doesn’t want to?) cure her addiction. . . . On April 3 the Corcorans are hanging green-and-white checked curtains in niece Allison Meehan’s bedroom (large room that used to be the bedroom of a tenant named Marian Woolsey, now with a wall thrown up to divide it neatly in two: 1/2 for Allison Meehan, the other shared by Philip Corcoran and blond-blond younger brother, Timothy). Monica notes (how does she know this?) that Allison Meehan’s bed is a canopy bed, that the canopy is green and white (though not “checked”) and that (obviously) the reason for the green-and-white checked curtains is to complete the look, or the hard-to-define mood, of spring-like sweetness and cheerfulness invoked by the look of crisp green-and-whiteness in Allison Meehan’s bedroom. What else? Monica wonders if the Corcorans are going to remove the roll-down paper or vinyl shades on Allison’s bedroom windows now that they’ve hung the green-and-white checked curtains. Sometimes, still on the porch after dark and with a lamp lit in Allison’s bedroom, Monica noted with pleasure a hard-to-explain green shadow rippling through the pale, yellowish egg-white of the pulled-down shades. On April 3 several people pass Monica while she’s writing on the porch and there are others Monica passes when she’s walking along ABC Street and through the neighborhood. For example: 1) Margaret Brennan has a friend named Wendy who lives in the ancient yellow brick apartment house at the ocean end of the block who Monica knows exactly this much about: Wendy is an attractive woman with a solid, shoulder-length block of dark, straight hair who walks or drives by generally in the starched, form-fitting white uniform of a nurse or medical assistant; divorced or has an invisible husband; has two daughters: older, athletic and intelligent, hair a shade darker than blonde, sometimes walks, bicycles or runs by quickly, glancing inquisitively sideways at Monica; younger one, Natasha, pretty but with a dull-eyed look that makes her seem dumber than she is and with an odd impediment to her movements that makes her legs seem heavier than they are — passing now, her beautiful, dark and wavy hair curling against a brown, somewhat mannish suede jacket that looks exactly like the one Wanda Baer walked by in “the other day”. Does Monica wonder then, on April 3, or later, in October, when she’s in her red studio translating April’s handwritten notes into typewriter, if the twinning of “man-tailored” brown suede jackets is a signal that the impediments that make Natasha appear duller and heavier than she is may have something in common with the impediments that frequently make Wanda Baer seem dumber and clumsier than she is? Twinning of suede jackets, twinning of impediments really = twinning of what? This too: Monica would like to keep track of the suede jacket into which both Wanda Baer and Natasha fit like two names slipped into the same sentence — but she knows that chances are they’ll never come up together again or, if something accidentally links them again, it will be when Monica’s long-since forgotten about this moment — so Monica will never know if the correspondence of jackets, etc. means less or more than it seems to now and it will be up to someone else to draw a line between distant points. 2) Not noted where Monica meets (or sees from a distance) Lon Gurion, looking even more hideous than usual; wearing an overcoat in April, coat a tattered rag: pulling (or may say “pushing”) a bent-out-of-shape shopping cart overflowing with god-alone-knows-what unidentifiable junk that might draw flies if he was standing still. Looks so ragged and wretched Monica has to look twice or three times to make sure that it is Lon Gurion. As if, however horrible he looked before, complete annihilation has befallen him overnight. 3) Not noted at what time or exactly where on April 3 Monica runs into Leila X and Ma X on their way to the post office: Leila X is wheeling a creaky old baby carriage. Lanky and athletic, now somewhat slow and stooped, Ma X uses the carriage for carting heavy supermarket bags from AAC Street (or is it AAD Street?) back to her apartment in the ancient yellow brick apartment house at the ocean end of ABC Street — so Monica wonders if Ma X and Leila X are not on their way to just the post office, but also to the supermarket just another two hundred yards or so further east on Bay Drive. Monica notes that Leila X — who still sometimes looks as breathtakingly beautiful (golden hair combed in five hundred thousand straight ruled lines down to her waist partly accounts for her beauty, but not completely) as she did when David first met her on a bus over ten years ago — looks dreadful enough to be added to the list of those undone by the bitter winter of ’75-76. “Dreadful” in what precise way not noted, only that Leila X’s fair skin looks dry, skin around the eyes like oddly bleached desert sand marked with shallow furrows that weren’t there before — eyes red with recent weeping. What else? Leila X says that Kim visited her in Burlington “a few weeks ago” and now he’s here, supposedly visiting relatives in Brooklyn but really here to see her — to try to talk her into marrying him again — and, though she told him not to come, she’s given in, of course, and she’ll go out to Brooklyn later this afternoon. . . . Truth is she’d rather see him in Brooklyn with his relatives than alone in her apartment in Burlington because (as Monica knows) she’s not and never has been sexually attracted to Kim: much too smooth and hairless for her — a shiny, hairless little dog, while she’s attracted to men who are dark and shaggy. But doesn’t Monica agree? When someone is obsessed with you that obsession alone can sometimes be the reason you end up sleeping with him even when there’s no attraction. . . . Ma X interjects irrelevantly that she’s suggested to Leila several times that she fly over to Korea to visit Kim when he’s there — just to see, you know, whether or not she might like to live there. Seems reasonable to her, but not of course to Leila. Might like the way of life there better than the way of life in Burlington — life in Burlington certainly doesn’t seem to be making Leila any too happy — but Leila refuses to go just because of this silly “fear of flying” people have. . . . Ma X laughs a laugh that’s dry and whinnying. Or do Monica’s handwritten notes say “dry and unhinged”? Ma X’s somewhat droning way of talking — a voice tone that’s high, strained and boring — suddenly spikes into private laughter: an odd brain laugh that escapes through the mouth as if the ufo of the brain has launched without warning, whizzing off into regions clearly visible to her (to it), invisible to everyone else. Ma X’s brain laughter whizzes off into far-away regions, jerks back into the vibrating throat, leaving only the eyes bemused by the uncomfortable target (daughter Leila). Leila X at first looks a little red and embarrassed, but it doesn’t take long for her brain to catch Ma’s spark and start laughing oddly too. (A once-and-sometimes-still-beautiful-and-intelligent woman laughing at herself just because her mother is.) Moment crystallizes for Monica (not for the first time) the Ma X she hears in Nelly X’s and Leila X’s high, un-modulated voice tones and nutty, disconnected laughter. 4) Little, planetarium-dome-headed Rosamond Coffin passes, heading south down ABC Street toward home, holding a bright, ultramarine rabbit balloon bigger than she is. Here comes grandma Babette to meet her, her hair cut shorter than usual around her round, always-suntanned face, calling out in her subtle French accent (which Rosamond may or may not hear) that she has fresh-baked cookies for Rosamond! and Rosamond runs toward her, almost letting her huge blue balloon fly away. 5) “The rough, immeasurable coast of reality”: language that flows into its crannies and crevices doesn’t measure it, but what does it do? Takes on the form of its ragged edges? This too: ragged edges get planed away so that reality can fit into a sentence and into memory. 6) In or out of order? “Around 5 pm on April 3” wind is shaking the fading yellow petals of ABC Street’s forsythias: both those made to seem wide awake by lingering sunlight and those already dozing in shadow. Note taken on “April 3 around 5 pm” is typed on Friday, October 16 at 9:30 (morning or night not noted) in Monica’s red studio. Not noted whether still April 3 or already April 4, 5 or even 6 when Laurel Lenehan passes with a friend named “Jean” (who “Jean” is not recorded and therefore absolutely not remembered). Also not recorded: whether or not it’s Laurel Lenehan (beautiful, laughing, happy and apple-faced like younger brother Finnley, not like either older brother: mysteriously burdened eldest brother Ambrose Jr. (burdened by the simple burden of being Ambrose Jr.?) or handsome and ambitious, but ambitious-about-what? next-to-oldest brother, Ryan) or someone else who calls out to Monica, “a perfect day! a perfect spring day! had to get outside and look at all the forsythias!” Same time exactly (or just a few minutes later) as the time Laurel Lenehan passes, but not necessarily on the same day, Fionnuala Regan strolls by in a kelly green blazer that changes her shape: makes her look as matronly as she may very well be destined to look five, ten or twenty years from now: wheeling a dark cyan blue carriage with shiny chrome hardware. (Does Monica make a note to herself in April or in October to decide at some future date whether or not to insert a comment about the magnetic or clustering principle of events?: how a random event is often (so often it can be seen as one of life’s principles) followed by a related event (“related” only if an observer is there to note the relationship): and how related random events draw more related events into their orbit and then cluster magnetically together within the span of short panoramas. For example: the battered old baby carriage/shopping cart Ma X and Leila X had trouble pushing along Bay Drive and Fionnuala Regan’s new and elegant dark blue cloth and shiny chrome one that rolls by easily on ABC Street. Such occurrences, which may be patterns (the similarities and differences between baby carriages — and those wheeling them — that pass Monica within a short span of time, for example) interest Monica whether they’re patterns or not.) Monica notes this too: she spots the forceful head of little Matthew Regan sitting up and peering around from the same blue carriage where Fionnuala’s new baby is dozing as she rolls through the world, beginning to tell herself life's horizontal story. Monica wonders: who exactly is “the Clock” and does she call him the Clock because of the precise regularity of the hours when he passes north —› (heading toward work?) passes south <— hurrying or dragging himself home? or because he has a clock face? Knows (without knowing how she knows) that the Clock’s name is “Alan” and that she’s been seeing him pass long enough not to give it a thought when he waves and mouths “hello” (as he does today) from the west (facing) side of ABC Street. Later Monica tells David that they need to add the Clock to their list of those destroyed by the terrible winter of ’76: at first she thought his face was oddly “creased”; then (as he turned toward her to say hello?) it seemed oddly “folded”; then (turned full-face toward her from across the way) the face was a nightmare-face in the cool sunlight of a perfect April day: seemed to her that half the Clock’s skull was missing!: or, not actually the skull, half the face covering the skull: left half (what looked oddly creased or folded before he turned) ordinary face-surface, right half exposed skull! skull with peculiarly pointed teeth (some teeth missing too?) facing her, mouthing a friendly “hello” while waving with one hand (briefcase in the other?). Warmth and sunlight = return of spring and return of spring = return of strollers in the street. (For Monica to take a walk is a kind of writing-before-writing. Might as well take pen and paper with her. Or: might as well be paper. . . .) Those she’s been seeing and running into are joined by those she hasn’t laid eyes on for months. . . . Wonders if this is true also: warm, early spring makes the phone ring. For example her friend Howard calls from a neighborhood at the boundary between New York City and Long Island to tell her that Anthony spent the afternoon getting the grill and the outdoor furniture ready so they could eat in the garden under the trees and that made him think of Monica. . . and David too, of course, if she wants to bring him. Let’s see: who else? Mikki calls from Manhattan to say that she’s been thinking about Monica for days — not sure why, but hard-to-define thoughts of Monica keep drifting through her mind — and then today there’s something in the air — cool spring day hidden in warm spring day hidden in etc. — and the smell and feel of the air in Manhattan (doesn’t say the smell and feel of the air below 14 St., probably somewhere near her walkup on East 10 St.) made her want to get out of Manhattan. And that feeling, together with her thoughts about Monica, compelled her to call and ask if she can come out to ABC Street. Wants to come out today! Right now! This minute, if possible! Adds that Marsha thought a day at the beach and a day talking to Monica might help clear up the terrible cold she can’t seem to get rid of — a cold that Marsha thinks is an emotional or spiritual cold — and the idea of Marsha encouraging Mikki to come to ABC Street to cure her cold turns Monica’s yes to a no. This too: Monica’s cousin Yma calls, but nothing about it is recorded. Monica comes across this handwritten April note while typing in October and trying to list everyone she spoke to, saw or ran into on April 6 solely because it’s a perfect day (without being 100% certain it is all on one day in early spring)) and no longer knows what it means: “it seems to get more intense every year.” The beginning of a thought that doesn’t complete itself, so Monica adds (in October, typing in her red studio), without having any idea if it’s what she had in mind in April: “every year there seems to be more to observe: the density of life increases and along with it my sense of obligation to record it and (therefore) my concentration is bound to grow more intense”. Not sure what this means either so she tries again: “the thicket of the world (ABC Street) gets thicker or thinner depending on when and how I look into it. Are ‘focus’ or ‘concentration’ the right words for it or is it something else? Wonder if it’s true that it (ABC Street) seems to have grown thicker over the years because I’ve taught myself to pay attention to it in a different way. . . .” Monica meets Nancy St. Cloud on Coast Boulevard (assumes it’s on April 6, but date, time and cross street are not noted), wheeling nine-month-old Tristan in a carriage (mental note made when? to link it with two other baby carriages) that’s undoubtedly handsome but not described. Monica can’t helping looking (staring) at Nancy St. Cloud to see if the terrible winter of ’76 did her any damage and it’s clear that the bitterly dark lead and tin winter months of January, February and March have turned Nancy St. Cloud’s long, straight and beautifully glossy chestnut-and-caramel hair a lusterless pewter streaked with shining silver. 1) Nancy says that she’s sure that Monica remembers her good friend Georgia: while Georgia was trying to lose weight, she gained weight and now she’s up to nearly three hundred pounds! 2) She finds it interesting (and thinks Monica will too) that Georgia's weight-gain doesn’t seem to have affected her relationship with Andre’s friend Fabien. Fabien’s the purser on a ship that’s sailing to Barcelona next month — so Georgia’s going on still one more cruise. . . . 3) What else? Not really a different mini-story: a couple of even smaller fragments of the same mini-story, bits of a corner of it that crumbled off and now are trying to drift back into place in time for Nancy St. Cloud to re-attach them for Monica. There are one or two things, Nancy says, that she knows about Georgia’s relationship with Fabien that trouble her, but they don’t trouble Georgia — and for that reason she’d value Monica’s opinion. Are they the danger signs they seem to her or, as usual, is it her own life, own memories, bad experiences with men and so on, that are poisoning her judgment? a) According to Georgia her relationship with Fabien is both passionate and “platonic”. What can that possibly mean? Literally of course it has to mean that there’s been no sex. But what there has been is less clear. Hasn’t been able to pin her down. Doesn’t Monica find that contradiction strange and troubling? b) Fabien keeps warning Georgia that, no matter what, no matter how intense their feeling for each other may be, he meant it when he told her that he’s engaged to someone back home in France, a girl he’s known forever and intends to marry. Georgia is sure that the story is false and that it’s just his way of slowing things down. . . . But, to her way of thinking, if you put that together with the fact that there’s no sex. . . . Does Monica see the potential disaster waiting for Georgia that she does? 4) Andre’s parents are coming from Paris for a long visit this summer. The way she understands it his father’s the first person in France to survive a catheterization and it’s not completely clear to her (or it’s clear to Nancy, but not clear in Monica’s handwritten April notes) if, when Andre’s father arrives, all he’s going to want to do is rest and recuperate. 5) Andre’s parents are bringing Andre’s son with them. Monica notes that Andre’s son and Andre’s best friend are both named Fabien, but son’s age is not noted. 6) Monica has the feeling that Nancy St. Cloud — who Monica sees rarely and is always beautiful and wistful, with brown eyes that may be darkened by the same emotions as those of an actress whose profoundly rippling shallows we can’t stop diving into — is looking for ways to prolong the conversation by searching out the tiniest free-floating fragment of her mini-story. 7) Let’s see, she says, what else? Oh yes: Tristan resembles Pam and Ted Leary’s little Caitlin: blue eyes and red-blonde hair: so her mother, Nora — who, as Monica knows, is in love with Pam and Ted and spends a thousand more hours a week there than she does at her place — doesn’t seem too sure if she’s Tristan’s grandmother or Caitlin’s. The other day Nora got her two families completely mixed up and called Tristan “Teddy” and she (Nancy) lost it and told Nora to leave and not come back until she could remember her grandson’s name. She needs Monica to tell her the truth: was she justified in throwing her mother out? Is it as unforgivable as it seems to her for her mother to love an acquaintance’s family more than she loves her own? did she over-react because she has her reasons (which she’s not ready to talk about) for having to stop herself from socking her mother. . . ? Yellow forsythia petals are sprinkled in the new grass (exact shade of fresh green not noted). The same breeze blowing through the fading forsythias or a different breeze on a different day? Same April day or another April day? Best buddies and band-mates Greg Coffin and Andy Forest seem happy to be playing ping-pong together in Greg-and-Lena’s enclosed porch room that they’ve just painted yellow (whether a wide-awake forsythia chrome yellow or a somewhat harsher corn yellow or an even harsher and brighter chemical yellow is hard to say). Greg-and-Andy contentedly playing ping-pong in sunlight in a yellow room. While hearing the tock-tocking of the ping-pong balls next door and trying not to be distracted by the flashes of yellow sunlight off glossy yellow walls, Monica is reviewing some pages of her 1975 Chronicle and finds a lost card from Ralph Waldo Rice. Mailed in July ’75, lost since August ’75. (Lost but not lost? since here it is where it belongs — “out of order”, but somewhere in Monica’s thick folder of 8 1/2” x 13 1/2” folded-in-half sheets of lavender scrap paper that Monica’s ’75 Chronicle was written on.) “Dear Monica — Dear David, good to hear from you. I ran to the Postcard Show at NYU on Saturday after we talked and found it gone. I missed it by one day which is typical of the rotten things that happen when one has employment. Glad you’re on to the Floyd Bennet Festival and hope your work goes well, there and elsewhere. It’s been a funny summer for me. I am waiting to hear about my baseball book. Will talk to Pocketbooks today. Otherwise working on a small book of cartoons with Billy Cullen. And some small fictions just to keep my hand in. Best to both of you and yourselves together, Ralph.” Card is a slightly over-sized postcard, a left-over advertising card for Ralph Waldo Rice’s last book (how many years ago not noted) and Ralph has managed to neatly letter all his sentences around THE FLOATING PRINCIPLE by RALPH WALDO RICE in large dark letters in the center. Each letter of each word has no more depth than the shadows cast by trees caught between a sheet of Monica’s white typing paper and sun that (today) has its whole existence along the plane of tile or shingle roofs of three-story, one-family frame houses and massive multiple dwellings the whole length of ABC Street. A plane of brilliance it’s impossible to look at: can’t look there, but it arrives here, next to Monica, on the uppermost, blinding surface of her sheets of white typing paper. Cover it with shadows as fast as possible. April wind below roof-level and without sufficient weight to sink down to the plane of human activity on the ground. Two cars pull up in front of Enos and Sylvia Greengrasses’ little brick fortress: daughter Leslie arrives alone in one car (color, make or model not noted), neighbor to the left (south), Al Regan, behind the wheel of the other (also not described), Enos and Sylvia in the back seat. Now Monica has a clear view of Enos: Al on one side, Sylvia on the other, helping the feeble, shrunken creature who must be Enos, barely taller than he must have been when he was eight or ten years old, through the rarely-used iron front gate, up the 3, 4 or 5 brick front steps to the rarely-used front door — not down the driveway to the side door, as usual. As if he’d been taken to the hospital to give birth to the hideously shrunken child who resembles him. Why up the front steps? Makes Monica speculate about the internal structure of the Greengrass house: what sort of steps would have to be climbed inside the side door — up to the level of livingroom, bedrooms, etc. Barely supporting himself: legs as weak and flexible as if they have no bones. Climbs up front steps or lifted by still-vigorous Al Regan, dark and wrinkled Sylvia balancing Enos just enough from the other side to keep him from tipping that way. Leslie’s parked, wrestled with something in the trunk, and now she follows, carrying a walker that must have some weight. . . . What else? Seeing Enos disappear inside makes Monica think of the Sloths, the Greengrasses’ neighbors to the north (right): identically designed house, sheathed in purest white shingle. Monica’s reminded that she hasn’t seen Mr. Sloth, who had been visible on his small front porch in wheelchair and lap robe, for months. Long months of the deadly winter of ’76 only, or longer? This too: as far as Monica knows the Sloths and Greengrasses haven’t been on speaking terms since Enos blocked the Sloth’s access to the shared driveway with an illegal fence and gate. Monica asks David to check if Enos Greengrass is already on their list of those undone by the terrible winter of ’76. At 10 a.m. on an April day (next April day?) — day of pale sunlight and weak breezes — Andy Forest is helping Greg and Lena Coffin polish the dull, un-polishable surface of Greg-and-Lena’s old coffee-colored stationwagon. Same April day or another (not noted). A van that’s an ambulance but doesn’t look like an ambulance is parked in front of the Greengrasses’ house. In a hurry to sketch in events as they’re occurring Monica doesn’t have time to do the kind of sorting through the mind’s obscure catalogues of names, resemblances, associations, Crayola crayons, paints, etc. it takes to come up with anything close to the right term for the van’s odd, ambiguous color: writes “bronze” on one line, “gold-orange” on another, and also “weird orangey gold”: “TUFARO’S NORTH SHORE AMBULANCE AND WHEEL CHAIR TRANSPORTATION” stencilled on the side. Two blue-coated attendants (exactly what shade of blue not noted) wheel Enos Greengrass from house to van. Left out of Monica’s hurried sketch whether out rarely-used front door or more commonly used side door, but Monica is careful to note that the wooly blanket Enos is wrapped in is exactly (exactly) the same ambiguous bronze or gold-orange or orangey-gold as the van-ambulance, therefore the color was consciously chosen and is meant to have meaning/tap into an emotion that’s lost on Monica. Notes say: “a chilly day with brilliant sunlight not on the plane of ABC Street’s roof tiles only”: therefore must be a different April day? Sylvia Greengrass hurries out of her rarely-used front door, down the short flight of brick steps, through the rarely-used iron gate into sunlight so dazzling it’s bleaching the Rhinebeck pine’s needle-leaves of all their odd off-green: no color, nothing but light blazing there in short dashes. Birds seem too dizzy in the crisp, overly-bright air to manage their usual sequences of notes. “New light” and also “early light”. Sylvia seems desperate. Desperately down her stairs and even more desperately up the stairs of the Regans’ three story white shingle next door (a right turn for Sylvia, left to Monica across the way, south for both). Regans’ front door must be open: seems to Monica that Sylvia enters through it. Out again quickly. Door open but found no one home? In and out and in again, looking crazed enough to call something out to Monica in the other realm across the street. Though they’ve never spoken (and though Monica knows it’s possible that Sylvia’s never noticed her writing on the porch or steps) Sylvia may have considered for an instant (before wheeling around and re-entering the Regans’) asking the near-distant young woman with dark, wavy hair for help. Or it could be that, half-crazed, she had an impulse to call out to Monica, “oh! how yellow! how very yellow your forsythias are today!” Now some of the pine’s ashen green returns to it, slashes of light-that’s-only-light cutting through it not randomly but according to the sun’s relation to the un-mapped angles and crevices of the houses at the north-west end of ABC Street. Sylvia Greengrass must come out of the Regans’ house again, but Monica doesn’t see it. Tufaro’s ambulance-that-doesn’t-look-like-an-ambulance is idling impatiently. While Monica is wondering why it’s more important for Sylvia to find Al Regan than it is to get Enos to the hospital she’s also getting lost in the recesses of the sky’s blue: an “early morning” blue sometimes called “baby” blue that may just be a blue with not quite enough blue in it: mind swims into it, hungry for more blue. |
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