The man under the bed

The man who has been there for years waiting

The man who waits for my floating bare foot

The man who is silent as dustballs riding the darkness

The man whose breath is the breathing of small white butterflies

The man whose breathing I hear when I pick up the phone

The man in the mirror whose breath blackens silver

The boneman in closets who rattles the mothballs

The man at the end of the end of the line

I met him tonight I always meet him

He stands in the amber air of a bar

When the shrimp curl like beckoning fingers

amp; ride through the air on their toothpick skewers

When the ice cracks amp; I am about to fall through

he arranges his face around its hollows

he opens his pupilless eyes at me

For years he has waited to drag me down

amp; now he tells me

he has only waited to take me home

We waltz through the street like death amp; the maiden

We float through the wall of the wall of my room

If he’s my dream he will fold back into my body

His breath writes letters of mist on the glass of cheeks

I wrap myself around him like the darkness

I breathe into his mouth

amp; make him real

Bennett asleep. Face up. Arms at sides. Marie Winkleman is not with him. I sneak into my own bed as the blue light comes down through the window. I am too happy to sleep. But what will I tell Bennett in the morning? I lie in bed thinking of Adrian (who has just driven off and by now must be hopelessly lost again). I adore him. The more he gets lost, the more perfect he appears in my eyes.

I wake up at seven and lie in bed two more hours waiting for Bennett to awaken. He groans, farts, and gets up. He starts getting dressed in silence, stomping around the room. I am singing. I am skipping back and forth to the bathroom.

“Where did you disappear to last night?” I say blithely. “We looked all over for you.”

“Where did I disappear to?”

“In that discotheque-you suddenly left. Adrian Goodlove and I looked all over for you…”

“You looked all over for me?” He was very bitter and sarcastic. “You and your Liaisons Dangereuses,” he said. He mispronounced it. I was seized with pity for him. “You’ll have to make up a better story than that.”

The best defense is a good offense, I thought. The Wife of Bath’s advice to lecherous wives: always accuse your husband first.

“Where the hell did you disappear to with Marie Winkle-man?”

He gave me a black look: “We were right there in the next room watching you practically fuck on the dance floor. Then you took off…”

“You were right there?”

“Right behind the partition, sitting at a table.”

“I didn’t even see a partition.”

“You didn’t see anything,” he said.

“I thought you’d left. We drove around for hours searching for you. Then we came back. We kept getting lost.”

“I’ll bet.” He cleared his throat in the nervous way he had. It was a low death rattle sort of sound. But muted. I hated it worse than anything else about our marriage. It was the theme song of all our worst moments together.

We ate breakfast without speaking. I waited, half-cringing, for the blows to fall, but Bennett did not accuse me further. His boiled egg rattled against the cup. His spoon clanked in the coffee. In the deathly silence between us, every sound and every motion seemed exaggerated as if in a movie close-up. His slicing off the top of the skull of his egg could be an Andy Warhol epic. Egg, it would be called. Six hours of a man’s hand amputating the top of an egg’s head. Slow motion.

His silence was so strange now, I thought, because there had been times when he’d blasted me about little failures: my failure to make him coffee on time in the morning, my failure to do some errand, my failure to point out a road sign when we were lost in a foreign city. But now: nothing.

He just kept clearing his throat nervously and peering into the open head of his egg. His cough was his only protestation.

That cough took me back to one of the worst of our bad times together. The first Christmas we were married. We were in Paris. Bennett was hideously depressed and had been almost from the first week we were married. He hated the army. He hated Germany. He hated Paris. He hated me, it seemed, as if I were responsible for these things and more. Glaciers of grievances which extended far, far beneath the surface of the sea.

Throughout the whole long drive from Heidelberg to Paris, Bennett said almost not a word to me. Silence is the bluntest of blunt instruments. It seems to hammer you into the ground. It drives you deeper and deeper into your own guilt. It makes the voices inside your head accuse you more viciously than any outside voices ever could.

I see the whole episode in my memory as if it were a very crisply photographed black and white movie. Directed by Bergman perhaps. We are playing ourselves in the movie version. If only we could escape from always having to play ourselves!

Christmas Eve in Paris. The day has been white and gray. They walked in Versailles this morning pitying the naked statues. The statues were glaring white. Their shadows were slate gray. The clipped hedges were as flat as their shadows. The wind was sharp and cold. Their feet were numb. Their footsteps made a sound as hollow as their hearts. They are married, but they are not friends.

Now it is night. Near Odéon. Near St. Sulpice. They walk up the Métro steps. There are the echoing sounds of frozen feet.

They are both American. He is tall and slim with a small head. He is Oriental with shaggy black hair. She is blond and small and unhappy. She stumbles often. He never stumbles. He hates her for stumbling. Now we have told you everything. Except the story.

We look down from the very top of a spiral staircase in a Left Bank hotel as they climb to the fifth floor. She follows him around and around. We watch the tops of their heads bobbing upward. Then we see their faces. Her expression petulant and sad. His jaw set in a stubborn way. He keeps clearing his throat nervously.

They come to the fifth floor and find a room. He opens the door without any struggle. The room is a familiar seedy hotel room in Paris. Everything about it is musty. The chintz bedspread is faded. The carpeting is ravelling in the corners. Behind a pasteboard partition are the sink and bidet. The windows probably look out on rooftops, but they are heavily draped with brown velour. It has begun to rain again and the rain can be heard tapping its faint Morse code on the terrace outside the windows.

She is remarking to herself how all the twenty-franc hotels in Paris have the same imaginary decorator. She cannot say this to him. He will think her spoiled. But she tells herself. She hates the narrow double bed which sags in the middle. She hates the bolster instead of a pillow. She hates the dust which flies into her nose when she lifts the bedspread. She hates Paris.

He is taking off his clothes, shivering. You will remark how beautiful his body is, how utterly hairless, how straight his back is, how his calves are lean with long brown muscles, how his fingers are slim. But his body is not for her. He puts on his pajamas reproachfully. She stands in her stocking feet.