Chapter 9

As awesomely beautiful as Paris is upon arriving, New York has an impressiveness that creates its own awe. Not only do famous structures like the Statue of Liberty, the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building seen in the flesh excite, but the skyline of Manhattan, its mass of architecture within the strictures of an island towering above the water that had been empty of anything except itself for a thousand miles, with its curve of heights rising at the middle, dipping and rising again at the southern extreme, the many buildings becoming one structure looming over New York Harbor inspires even the most jaded and familiar viewer with wonder. Like a great piece of art, an opera or a masterpiece of painting or sculpture, one must be silent in its presence. Arms wrapped around each other, pressing our sides together, my sister and I stood on the deck of the great ship and beheld the City. My sister fell in love at first sight. I already was.

Arriving two weeks before school resumed, we got busy. Adoption proved problematic, mostly because of the risk of investigating my mother. We decided on marriage. She married the fashion photographer and moved in with him on paper. We worried the legitimacy might be checked, but needn't have. She pretended the Park Avenue address but stayed in the 5^th Avenue penthouse with my mother, the old flapper and myself. I showed my sister the City. (Though she wasn't my sister officially, we liked pretending we were siblings, incestuous but nevertheless family.) Inexhaustible, her enthusiasm infected. The princess joined us sometimes and the ménage a trois ended the days memorably. Mother reestablished connections with my clients. The matron from the ship called. As soon as they could they visited me in the penthouse. I only made use of the bed in my room for them. Otherwise I shared the old flapper's bed or my sister's. The old flapper feared I would ignore her for the cute French girl, but the majority of nights I slept with her, and she appreciated it. It eased her fear of looking weirdly fat. Being thin, her belly protruded obviously. When relaxed, she looked beautiful. She ate more and drank not at all and the fleshing out of her body softened it and along with a radiant glow, made her look healthy.

Reacquainting with my clients proved fun. They missed me and I missed them. Enthusiastic reunion sex resulted, especially the vixen who I had to hold tight or be thrown from a horse gone wild. She couldn't get enough and called her husband to not expect her home that night. We fucked and slept and fucked. Twice she woke me. In the morning, the dream to reality blow job had me slurping at her insatiable pussy while she brought me near climax. Holding her big rump for the finale, we played dogs. She was definitely in heat.

One day my sister and I went to Harlem to visit the School for Art and Music. Our skepticism proved right. Too old and too French prevented attending. However, since the land of jazz and junk surrounded us, we hung out until nightfall and went cruising for acquaintances. Having been a sort of mascot, my mother brought me to jazz shows throughout my childhood and to jam sessions as well. I knew where friends gathered. We visited one. We enjoyed the hard blowing and the fast rhythms and found a connection to heroin. I had to show him my inner elbow scars to convince him. He wanted me to wait. I wanted to know the dealer. He reluctantly agreed. I left my sister to enjoy the music and scored some dope. Though an easy score, the dealer appeared nervous. He told me not to come again. My youth and pale skin created a beacon in a place meant for darkness. I asked what other choices I had, and he told me downtown. Anxious to sample the stuff, I hurried back to the jam session and grabbed my sister and headed home. Miming a syringe, my sister had tried to get one. No one had a spare. They suggested snorting. We did. Harsh on the nostrils and the immediate rush absent and the stuff overly cut, we still got stoned, helped by the reefer one of the Negro musicians had given her. Later that night we journeyed to the East Village in search of pinned eyes and curved elbows and men nodding or scratching on stoops or bar chairs, signs of the junkie. Pinned eyes result from irises shrinking to pinholes when heroin invades the blood stream. We saw the signs, but didn't trust the subjects displaying them. At least we knew these white people scored it somewhere. Being high already, future possibilities led us down there.

Waking up the next morning, we finished the junk, smoked another reefer and headed for the princess's apartment with the last of our marijuana. Happy to see us despite being uninvited, she sat on her bed with my sister while I sat on the chair and shared the second reefer I had ever smoked with her. Being Labor Day, school began the following day and we wanted to let loose before the structure of school chained us. Giggly or profound, we chatted. The princess kept looking at our eyes. At last she said, "I know that look." She shook her head.

"What's the matter?" I asked.

"I want you to meet someone," she said, tossing off her pajama top, beautifully naked, and hiding the nakedness in a black skirt and a white blouse.

We returned to the East Village. In a Fourteenth Street tenement we walked up the noisy wooden steps and the princess knocked on a door. "Just a second," came from beyond it. The voice sounded rough and slovenly like an old drunk bum. The door finally opened. The young poet looked gaunt. "Oh hi." he said, returning to the yellowed unmade bed.

After introducing my sister, the princess asked, "How's the writing going?"

"Fine," he said with a half grin. He didn't resemble the young poet we knew. Bringing up the subject would have him rushing to his notebook. The last time I'd seen him I enjoyed a group reading. Afterwards we went to a local beer hall with his fellow poets and he discussed a new theory, and despite the cool he always layered over his wildness, his excitement burned hot. It had a profound influence. It added to the epiphany in Paris. He compared a poem to a human body. Each line breathed a single breath. Each syllable pumped a heartbeat. Each word sparked the brain creating thought. Every phrase became a confluence of sparks. Every sentence ordered the confluences. The page in which the body of the poem rested presented a field empty and open to anything. The body flowed on the field, not bound and stiff like a building, but malleable and moving. And as each breath has its own length, with inhalation being various distances between the lines, his pages rarely held a line to the left margin. Lines started in the middle, near the right margin or occasionally at the left. Reading them, he gave them the pauses expressed by the distances from each other on the page like a music manuscript.

"Can we see what you've written," the princess asked the emaciated junky.

"That's okay," he said withdrawing onto his bed.

"Have you eaten?"

"I haven't got anything for any guests. Sorry."

"Anything for you?" she asked.

"Now that you mention it..."

"Get dressed. Let's have breakfast."

"Okay." When he removed his dirty pajama top I saw the tracks. He threw on an army surplus shirt and covered his grayed underpants with threadbare black slacks, tying the rope he used for a belt so that they wouldn't fall from his thin hips.

The Ukrainian black bread French toast tasted terrific. The conversation proved less.

"What happened with your job?" asked the princess.

"They said I stole."

"Did you?"

"Did I what?"

"Steal?"

"I might have misplaced some things,"

"Where did you misplace them?"

"Where do you think? Stop being so fucking condescending."

"I'm sorry. I care about you. I'm worried about you."

"Yeah," he said.

"Maybe we should visit the hospital."

"Can't afford it. Besides, they'd think I was stealing again and kick me out."

"We can go to Bellevue. You were a nurse at St Vincent's right? They won't know you at Bellevue."

"Probably would. Word gets around. I can't afford it."

"You don't want to."

"Not really."

"How long have you been... ?" I asked

"Since the war," said the young poet.

"You seemed fine last time I saw you," I said.

"I was fine. I had a job. I got binging, got past my usual dose and fucked up."

"What are you doing now?"

"Friends, but that's drying up. Odd jobs. Running."

"What do you mean running?" I asked

"You know, buying dope for others." My sister and I exchanged meaningful glances when I translated. How stupid were we? Not stupid enough to let the princess catch the glance.

"You going to make your reading at St. Marks?" asked the princess.

"I'll be there."

"I'm going to read at open mic at Mercer Street on Saturday."

"You should publish, sweetheart," said the young poet. "You should have your own gig."

"I have to grow up more. I don't know anything yet."

"Nonsense," said the young poet. The princess smiled for the first time in his company.

"So you're going to come and be my rooting section?" she asked.

"With bells on," he said. "I'll make a lot of noise with those bells." We chuckled. We glimpsed his old self. Food helped. We intended to walk him back to his room, but he decided to stay on St Marks Place. The princess gave him a couple dollars when we separated, not enough for a nickel bag. He stayed gracious anyway.

We walked to the rehearsal space. I had a key. I wondered what the producer would do with the extra money not paying my mother out of the rent. Along the way I called the mulatto. I hadn't seen her since I left for Europe. She had been lazy on the last day before school and stayed home. She headed down.

I had a vision. Making it flesh became the problem. I looked forward to the conversation about our play or performance as we called it as soon as I got home. The epiphany had reinvigorated my interest. Unfortunately, the princess expressed less enthusiasm.

"Were you stoned?" she had asked during our first meeting after Europe, meaning on marijuana. I told her I hadn't been. "But what can we do with it? How can it make it better?" I explained it gave us a context. The cutting edge of nearly every art form expressed humanness uncensored. Artists moved deeper than the Surrealists who celebrated the unconscious as more real but held back. New artists journeyed beyond the Freudian psyche, expressing the guts, not just the brains. The genitals, the stomach, the spleen, the heart, the lungs, the throat, the mouth, everything that made a man a man became available. "The problem is," said the princess slowly, "those artists, the painters and writers and musicians have craft. You saw the drawings of the Estonian. You heard our young junkie poet's early work. Your bassist friend has been playing bass since the twenties. Because of skill and talent they can go anywhere they want with their art. What about us? We're trying to write a symphony without ever writing ... anything really. Maybe a song or two that Tin Pan Alley would piss on."

"You've been a writer almost as long as any of those artists," I said.

"Okay, maybe I've got skills, but what about experience, I mean life experience. What's in my gut that's so special? Maybe I've been around and seen some things. I don't know."

"Let's try automatic writing." I said through the crack in her objections.

"What about?"

"It doesn't matter. Just write the rest of the day. Next time we'll write some more. Don't look at any of it until we meet a third time. We'll trade pages and recite."

And so the third time happened in the rehearsal space on Labor Day. I asked my sister to sketch whatever she saw. She wouldn't understand the words spoken. I wanted her to capture a visual impression. We read each other's nonsense silently, getting used to the scribble, hers easier than mine to decipher. Many pages had been scribed. We drew lines under passages. We waited for the mulatto's arrival. When she arrived we shuffled some pages from each of us and handed them to her. We found the passages we underlined and studied them, thinking about what was being said. Feeling what was said. We let the mulatto catch up. We began reciting, talking to each other like regular conversation, our style, letting subtle inflections happen naturally. We found it funny and interesting. The mulatto at one point read a whole page. The princess and I spoke a line within the monologue like the way someone says "uhn-hunh" to acknowledge listening. I did some ballet moves and recited. My sister giggled. I gave her a dirty look but continued. Having been to a Martha Graham performance, I tried the breathing movement of her dance, letting the ballet positions soften and flow. The recitation changed when I danced. My movement created more inflection. Having studied modern dance for her acting, the mulatto joined me. I had a funny idea in my ballet class one time of choreographing a dance where the movement halts and the dancer collapses as if hitting a wall. It felt like our experience with trying to create the performance. The mulatto followed my lead and together we created the wall with our abrupt falls. I stopped.

"Hold up everybody. Let's talk." We sat on the floor of the stage facing each other. "What does imagination have to do with it?" I asked.

"It's not real and we're trying for real," said the princess.

"But it felt right," said the mulatto.

"I agree," I said.

"I got it," said the princess. "It's like a metaphor. When you describe something using words we know, clichés or just flat descriptions like hard wood floor and my butt aches or I'm cold, what does anyone get? There's no reverberation. But if someone gives you a metaphor, a sort of imagined relationship to something, the something becomes somehow more real. 'Icy planks didn't melt or give, only burned and pressed on bone.'"

"What are you complaining about? You got plenty of cushion," said the mulatto.

"You should talk," said the princess.

"Now girls..." I began.

"But his bony ass..." said the mulatto.

"You're right there," I said, shifting my weight. "What did we get out of this?"

"It kind of worked," said the mulatto. "At least sometimes."

"When?" I asked.

"When a connection formed," said the princess.

"Isn't that like seeing an abstract work and projecting flowers or a woman's face or something?" I asked.

"I don't think so. Words can never be completely abstract unless they're complete gibberish," said the princess. "We wrote English, not a word of gibberish. Speaking gibberish would get boring pretty quick."

"Associations," I said thoughtfully. "Amusing accidental associations. We talked about two completely different things, and yet they bonded, creating something new. To hear the bond, attention has to be paid to what is said. Maybe it's like the vase created by two profiles. We're creating a vase that isn't there, but becomes more real than the faces. They become the background."

"What is the vase?" asked the princess. "Is it everything else besides us or just happenstance?"

"Are you guys stoned?" asked the mulatto.

"Not anymore," answered the princess.

"Maybe we should be," said the mulatto.

"I had the one reefer," I said.

"Bring more next time," ordered the mulatto. "Anyway, I had fun. I liked when I spoke the monologue and you guys said weird things like you were adding to it. I liked the times when you acted like you were arguing about something, only you talked about two different things. I liked it when all three of us seemed to be on the same page so to speak."

"We should call it The Vase In Between," I proclaimed.

"How about just The Vase?" offered the mulatto. We agreed.

"What about plot, structure, story?" asked the princess.

"Right now I got theme," I said. "A person can never know another person completely, but within their attempts at knowing is communication."

"Between their own desires is a shared desire," added the mulatto.

"Between their own agendas lies society," completed the princess.

"Let's split up the writing," I suggested. "Maybe a plot will come out of it."

"The plot is the vase?" asked the mulatto. We agreed.

My sister and I walked the two young women to their subway station. We used a different one. We wanted to go somewhere else first. Somewhere the princess wouldn't like.

Not finding the young poet home or on St. Marks Place we gave up the search until another day and headed to the penthouse.

Mother took my sister to the only French speaking place she knew: an authentic French restaurant. My sister picked up the language a little, but with difficulty. I spent time teaching her. She memorized words by writing them in big letters on a sketch pad. She had a remarkable visual memory, capturing moments in our rehearsal and freezing them in her mind and drawing them for instance. She struggled with grammar. Mother wanted a tutor, but I thought I could do better and be more sensitive to her weaknesses. Princess enjoyed helping and enjoyed exchanging her help for French lessons. Her deep emersion in the nuances of English made her learning French difficult. Frustration never occurred. We loved each other's company. Most importantly, the women fell in love. The reason my mother went to the restaurant was to hire a translator. Despite the unorthodox approach, it worked.

The translator accompanied them in search of a mentor. Mother knew many artists. The search ended up frustrating my mother. My sister didn't want to work with them. Most she found too traditional, and the two she thought did interesting work made her uncomfortable.