It wasn’t easy for Pamela because her family and friends were everywhere in New York and New Jersey, all of them well-situated, taking life seriously and pointing out to her, in the sensitive way they had, that she’d married beneath her station and that her life was moving in a precarious direction. Secretly I agreed with her family, but my thoughts where busy with something else. Something Pamela didn’t know about.
I had discovered that I was being followed. That I was being spied on. The man wasn’t someone who I’d been introduced to, not even fleetingly at a party or an East Side bar. A complete stranger. On the dark side. He appeared everywhere, following along in the crowd when I walked the streets. I’d seen him waiting for me on the library steps. One time he was in the lobby of our apartment building but ducked out of sight before I could get a square look at him.
One night after dinner, after the card table was folded up and put away and the dishes washed and the doors closed across the kitchen counter, Pamela and I settled down for a little reading. She had a book on gardening in Eighteenth Century England. I was reading something on Sumerian archeology. I thought we were all right.
After awhile Pamela said: “Is something wrong with you?”
“Why do you ask?”
“The way you’ve been lying on the floor when you read. Is something wrong with your back, Bradley?”
“Nah. I’m happy down here.”
“Bradley?”
“Yes?”
“What’s wrong with your eye?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve been holding your hand over your right eye when you read. You’ve been doing it several nights now.”
“Oh. I hadn’t noticed.” I took the hand away from the eye.
“You haven’t noticed you’ve been covering one of your eyes when you read?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“Brad?”
“Yes?”
“What the hell’s going on with you?”
“Nothing’s going on with me, Pamela.” I tried to not laugh.
“Don’t start laughing, Bradley.”
“I won’t.”
“I’m worried about you, Bradley,” she said caringly. “I feel something may be wrong with you.”
I went on trying not to laugh.
“What does that look on your face mean, Bradley?”
I couldn’t stop the laugh. I rolled over on my belly and laughed into my hands.
Pamela said: “You can just go to hell.”
That night I dreamed I was in darkest Africa. It was night, there was the jungle, the moon, a wide river. The river was deep and swift and dark. It flowed from right to left. It was my job to cross over it, or through it. Just as I screwed up my courage to begin the crossing I saw something move. A company of naked, black Africans was in the river marching in military formation with spears held upright. They were marching downstream. I woke up.
A couple nights later, lying beside Pamela in the pull-down bed, I realized I wanted out of our marriage. I couldn’t think of any good reason. The next morning I walked Pamela to the bus stop on First Avenue as I usually did. Forty-Second Street was cold and dirty at the same time. I saw the face powder of elegant ladies blowing across corpses. It made me think about Korea. I didn’t say anything to Pamela about leaving. I felt rotten and excited at the same time.
When Pamela’s bus came I went back to the apartment and packed and within the hour I was off to Mexico. It had always been good for me in Mexico. I caught a bus to Washington, a city bus to Arlington, and started hitchhiking. It was very cold. I couldn’t get a ride. While I stood there I kept an eye out for the guy who had been trailing me, but it looked like I’d lost him. When it started to get dark and I still hadn’t got even one ride I decided it wasn’t absolutely necessary to go to Mexico to get away from the marriage, so I caught the city bus back to Washington and caught a train for New York.
I took a room in a cheap hotel on Ninth Avenue. I went straight up and undressed and got into bed. I would stay there a week, maybe two weeks. Right there in bed. I got out the old Obelisk editions of Henry Miller’s Tropics I’d been carrying around. Sam Loveman had given them to me when I’d shipped books for him out of The Bodley Gallery on East 6oth Street. I opened Cancer. It had a red cover, while Capricorn was a dark green. What a surprise I got. If you want to know what Henry Miller is all about but don’t know where to start, read the first seventeen pages of Tropic of Cancer.
I stayed in bed four days and nights reading the Tropics, sleeping, and drinking water. I became so intensely happy I felt I was capable of anything. I felt elevated. And all the while, inside, the heart sizzled, sizzled. When I went down on the street again things looked better. It was still very cold, but not so dirty. At first I was worried about the dark complected man, but he was gone. I’d lost him on that sudden trip down to Arlington and back. I went from library to library inspecting their books. It amazed me to be reminded how many writers actually finish books. Anyone can start a book. I’d started a lot of them, but it was amazing to see how many others had forged ahead to a conclusion.
Two weeks after I left Pamela I telephoned her at her father’s studio on Fiftieth Street. She was there. It was the lunch hour. She was always there at the lunch hour. We met trembling and crying at a Chinese cafe on Second Avenue. I needed to get laid in the worst way and hadn’t known who else to turn to. I didn’t really want to turn to anyone else. Pamela was concerned about our relationship and how it would be in the future. I felt moved by her pain, but I needed to get laid. Pamela needed to talk. We talked all afternoon. Neither of us was able to stop the crying. My cock was swollen up terribly. The Chinese waiters didn’t do anything to embarrass us. When we left the cafe the bastard was there again, standing in the entrance to a dry cleaning ship, his black overcoat hanging down to his ankles.
Back at the apartment on the sixtieth floor it was warm and cozy. We fucked and fucked. After awhile Pamela lost interest. I decided to give her a little breathing room. Not too much because I had a big problem with the cock swelling up. We lay apart in the darkness, silently. Then she started up again. First, she lit the cigarette.
“I don’t know how I should feel,” she said slowly and thoughtfully. “It makes me so insecure to know you don’t want to take care of me.”
“It has nothing to do with my not wanting to take care of you.”
“You did the same thing two years ago. One week you asked me to marry you, and the next you quit your position at the gallery and holed up in that awful hotel room in the Village. I don’t have to tell you what everybody thought.”
“You mean what your father thought?”
“Everybody had something to say about it.”
“You know what I like best about you father? How he gets drunk at fancy parties and eats insects.”
“I didn’t care what anybody thought. I loved you so much.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I was so sure you were going to be successful.”
I remained silent.
Pamela said: “Some men become writers when they’re young. Others need a long time to mature. It’s one of those things no one should feel uncomfortable about. But in the meantime there are other things to be considered.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Maybe this time it will be different.” She reached over and put her hand on my forearm. “You haven’t told me what you’ve been writing.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I don’t know that you really want to talk to me about it either.”
“There isn’t much to talk about.”
“Oh.” She was silent in the dark for along moment, then she said: “Do you think it’s something we’ll get some money for?”
“I’ve been writing down my dreams. Keeping track of them.”
“Oh.”
“I’ve been dreaming a lot. I mean a lot.”
“I see.” She lit another cigarette and dropped the match very precisely into the center of the ashtray where it lay on the sheet between us in the dark.
“I can’t write stories any longer. I can’t keep my mind on them.”
“I see.”
“No, you don’t. I don’t see either. It’s just the way it is.”
“It makes me so ashamed to have to go to work every day and to know you’re at the library or just sitting around the apartment and then to know that everyone else knows it too.”
“Your father can go hang himself.”
“Oh, Bradley,” she said, starting to cry. “What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“We just have to do something.”
“I have this feeling that there’s one thing I should do before I do anything else, but I don’t know what it is. I can’t find out.” I was full of remorse. I moved the ashtray and took her in my arms and she cried openly. I cried silently.
Pamela said: “I’m so afraid you’ll leave me again. Please don’t leave me, Bradley. I won’t be able to stand it. I’m so afraid you won’t ever be a good writer and we’ll live like this the rest of our lives. I’m afraid we won’t have children and that my father will never like you. I’m afraid of everything now. It all seems so impossible. I never thought it was going to be like this. And then you picking up and leaving me whenever you want. I’m just terrified.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“Ohhhhh,” she cried out. “It’s so unfair.”
The next morning I walked Pamela to the bus stop like in the old days. Walking toward First Avenue we could see under the bridge through the fog to the big soft vermillion sun rising up into the winter sky.
“Look at that sun,” I said. “Isn’t it a knockout?”
“Will you be around when I get home from work?”
“Sure I will.”
She looked at me questioningly.
“I promise you. I’ll be there when you get back.”
She looked at the sun. “It is attractive,” she said.
The prick with the black overcoat was everywhere. In the main reading room at the Central Library I sat with my back to the wall so I didn’t get any surprises. I’d never forgotten how Bill Hickcock had gotten his. I started thinking about horses, then cats. I didn’t get the connection.
I was too restless to read seriously, to read to a point. I walked to the library on Fifty-Sixth Street, then to some others. I decided to walk to every library in Manhattan and read five pages of important text on any subject at each library. My feelings were excessive. Some of the prose I read made tears run down my face. Even newspaper articles. The heart was buzzing, buzzing inside, where it was. I thought I might be getting ready to have a heart attack but it didn’t get worse. It didn’t get better either. Buzz buzz buzz. Sizzle sizzle.
When it was time for Pamela to get off work I bought some Brussels sprouts and beat it back to the apartment. Pamela loved Brussels sprouts. “They’re just so attractive,” she told me once. “Like tiny little green cabbages.”
I cooked them up for her, along with a curry sauce. I knew it was going to make me fart like crazy. Later that night I couldn’t sleep. The heart was buzzing and simmering. I got up in the dark and dressed and went down to the street. I felt charged with energy. I started walking. I farted all over the sidewalks. In no time I was down to the Battery. I kept walking. I walked all night. I couldn’t stop. At dawn I returned to the apartment. Pamela was still sleeping. I sat on the couch and waited. When the alarm went off I grabbed a book and pretended to read it. I didn’t want to get into it with her.
Pamela said: “What are you grinning at?”
“I’m not grinning.”
“Bradley, what have you done?”
I started laughing. “I’m just trying to catch up on my studies.”
“What are you laughing about?”
“I’m not laughing.”
“Well, you are laughing, and you don’t want to tell me why. You can just go to hell.”
Pamela went in the bathroom to dress for work. I stopped laughing. The heart was simmering. I felt grateful that we hadn’t had an argument. I felt like I didn’t have anything to do. Then I noticed a large dark place on the wall that hadn’t been there before. While I idly wondered how it had gotten there, it appeared to grow larger. I shifted my gaze slightly to get a clearer look and found that the splotch of darkness was vibrating, or pulsating. I watched it carefully. The splotch formed itself into an hour glass several feet tall. It pulsated in and out, like a black bellows. At the same time it vibrated from side to side. The vibrations moved faster than the pulses, but weren’t so pronounced.
The heart began pounding and I heard a laughing sound. I realized it was me laughing. The laugh sounded intimate, but far away. Then the upper half of the hour glass moved in a new way. It was still pulsating and vibrating but now it was nodding as well, as if to get my attention. It had my attention, but it wanted something more. Suddenly I understood that the hour glass was an image of God and that He was trying to communicate with me. I felt myself lifted up. The body lost its sense of corporeality, the brain became weightless inside the skull, and I felt tremendously aware, as if nothing on the planet could get by me.
“Pamela,” I called out. “You’ve got to come out here. I’m having a vision.”
I heard her muffled voice through the bathroom door. “Don’t start anything this morning, Bradley. I’ve just snagged another stocking and I feel like screaming.”
OH MY GOD, PAMELA. YOU’VE GOT TO COME OUT HERE!”
I paced around the room like a crazy man. I kept saying: “Oh my God. Oh my God,” without meaning anything. I was too excited to keep my eye on the hour glass. When Pamela came out I told her about it. I pointed to the wall.
She looked. It was gone.
“I know it’s not there now,” I said. I was laughing. I understood how ridiculous it must seem to her.
“Are you going crazy, Bradley? What’s the matter with you?”
“Isn’t that something though?”
I meant about having seen what I’d seen.
Pamela looked at me warily. She still had some last minute things to do before she could leave for work. She went back in the bathroom. I wanted to see the hourglass again but I couldn’t find it. I’d lost sight of it by getting so excited. I felt too elevated to feel disappointed. I stood there looking around the room like a happy, plastered drunk. When I glanced down the hallway toward the bathroom the hourglass was protruding from behind the top of the closet door, which was standing open a few inches.
“THERE IT IS AGAIN,” I blurted out. “LOOK. OVER THE CLOSET DOOR!”
Pamela stuck her head out of the bathroom. “Goddammit, Bradley, now you just stop that.”
I felt a little set back hearing Pamela swear like that. It wasn’t like her. The hourglass was gone again. I still felt elated. I felt like I had been chosen, but I was confused too.
Pamela said: “Are you going to walk me to the bus stop or not?”
“Sure I am.”
“I don’t want any more trouble from you either.”
I thought it would be a good idea to make some small talk. I said: “I wonder how the sun’s doing this morning?”
“Just don’t say anything, Bradley. Just keep it buttoned up until I get on the bus.”
“Don’t I have a pair of gloves around here somewhere?”
“You’re wearing your gloves, Bradley.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said happily. “You’re right.”
“Don’t say anything more, Bradley.”
We took the elevator down to the lobby. I didn’t say anything.
Out on Fifty-Second Street, when we turned toward First Avenue, the vermillion sun was still there, underneath the bridge. It was a knockout. A real knockout!
End