David Gates - The Wonders of the Invisible World

So the thing to do now was just get in to work. Jesus, five hundred dollars right down the toilet. I put on my overcoat, patted the pockets: the right-hand pocket was soft and lumpy, the left-hand pocket hard and flat. Terrific. So I hadn’t lost either my five-dollar street gloves ( What, lost your mittens? You naughty kittens! ) or my Portable Blake, a gift from Jane. Back when love was young, a few months ago. I didn’t have the heart to tell her I had an old Laurel edition kicking around, with everything anybody would reasonably want to read. The heart: ha.

Out on the street it seemed even colder than last night: sky clear blue, wind stinging. My breath made steam and my face was stiff and numb before I even got to the corner. At the bottom of the subway stairs, out of the wind, I stopped and pawed back my frayed left coat sleeve with my gloved right hand: quarter to nine. The usual line at the token booth, people looking over their shoulders toward the platform, huffing out their breath (no steam down here in the human-heated air), as an old geezer at the window took his sweet time over some bullshit with the token clerk involving a senior-citizen pass or whatever the hell it was. I felt smug breezing by them with my little store — three tokens left from the ten I’d bought on Wednesday — then realized that of course the fuckers count on that, on people like me thinking they’re better than the down-and-outs who can only buy one or two at a time. They use it to divide us. Which doesn’t sound so reasonable now that I write it down.

On the platform, people were packed shoulder to shoulder, meaning either a train coming any second or trouble on the line. I pushed through the turnstile, hearing in my head, as usual, Drrrop the coin right into the slot/You gotta hear somethin’ that’s really hot. Plus I have this thing where I always have to get through without the turnstile touching my ass when it comes around. I assume my unconscious thinks the spokes are dicks. Dicks going at your ass and another dick (the clarinet) in your mouth. No wonder you have trouble with women. Though I suppose I should cut myself some slack about the clarinet, since just about every other instrument is also a dick, no? I mean, the electric guitar is a well-known dick. The real interpretive problem this morning wasn’t why I liked sticking a clarinet in my mouth, but why I had, in effect, thrown it away. Now, generally, leaving something behind someplace means either (a) you wanted to get rid of it or (b) you didn’t want to go. I’d guess (a) over (b): after Billie Holiday they’d started Ella Fitzgerald, and I was only too glad to clear out of there. Okay, so let’s agree that the clarinet is a dick: then you get something like Wants to abandon his responsibilities as a man. Like I say, what don’t I know.

I’ll give you an absolutely textbook instance of (b) that leaps to mind, the one where you don’t want to go and what you leave behind is a stand-in for yourself. This happened the time my brother Miller came to New York for MLA with that graduate student. Alix. Big hair and tight jeans, but ultra-large glasses denoting seriousness: you could see why Miller bought the package. Miller was the charismatic Lacanian of his department; I was the dead-ender who had cannily crossed over into administration to become a rising young hack. We brought them out to Pennsylvania for the weekend, and it was painful to listen to him on the phone with Felice and the kids back in Indiana. After Miller got us stoned, this Alix and I locked eyes a couple of times, which I hoped Laura didn’t notice. Which was all that happened. At any rate, when Laura and I and Carrie (she was three) came out again the following weekend, I was straightening up the spare room and found a copy of Snow White (Donald Barthelme’s, I mean) with Alix’s name inside. The old paperback with the naked girl on the cover whose buttocks had been blurred for decency, so naturally your eyes went right to the blur. On this copy, somebody had recloven the cleft in fine-point felt-tip. Ah so, I thought. But I was a faithful husband then. That copy of Snow White is on my shelf right now, next to The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches, which I might as well stop kidding myself I’m ever going to read. The Snow White Laura ended up with, in the Division of the Things, had been mine.

And since we’re on the subject, there’s one other story that goes with this Alix. One of those nights when they were out at the farm, it got to be Carrie’s bedtime and Laura was holding her in the wicker armchair, about to read The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin. “Oh, Laura, could I ?” said Alix. She’d plunked down on the couch between me and Miller. “That is just such a great book. It’s like— boundaries. ”

“You’d have to ask Carrie,” Laura said. Which I thought was fucking brilliant. We’d had drinks before dinner and wine with. (House rule: the dope came out only after beddy-bye.)

“Carrie?” said Alix. “Would you let me read Squirrel Nutkin to you? That’s about my favorite book.”

“No, I want Daddy to,” Carrie said.

“You want me to?” I said. “Your mom’s already got you.”

“I want you to get me.”

Laura rested her cheek against the top of Carrie’s head, closed her eyes, smiled and said, “Loves her daddy.”

“Pretty mutual,” I said. I got up off the couch, knelt by the wicker chair and put my arms around the both of them, and just then old Alix could go fuck herself, her and her nice ass and her little eye games.

Alix, anyway. At some point one stopped hearing about her from Miller, and that was all she wrote for Alix. Call her a distant early warning. It was about a year later that Mickey crossed my path. Michelle, really: she’d renamed herself at age ten because the Beatles song infuriated her. One suspects that if it hadn’t been Mickey it would’ve been somebody else, but at the time being with her seemed worth — oh, boring. To cut a long story short: there my wife and daughter are, in Greenfield, Massachusetts, and here I am.

I walked to the far downtown end of the platform where the crowd thinned out some, though even here I could’ve reached out and touched: two probable secretaries, white, each pretty enough to go to bed with once; a muttering black man, my age, whose checked pants were trodden ragged at his heels; a black teenager with a Raiders cap and a Triple F.A.T. Goose down coat. To assume that such a coat must have been bought with drug money was unworthy of me, a good man. I smelled human shit, glanced around, spotted the pile in the corner where the big trash bin met the wall. A residuum of modesty? Or a reversion to wary animality, shitting in a spot where you couldn’t be blindsided? I stood in the stink and looked back up the platform at them all. Some read newspapers, others fat paperbacks. A few ventured to the edge and peered past me into the tunnel. But most of them watched others, looking away when the others saw. I took out The Portable Blake. Holding it up to read meant exposing my fraying cuffs. But I’d be straphanging any minute now, so what the fuck. And what the fuck anyway. I needed (meaning wanted) something between me and all of them. How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way, I read, Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five? Like I could give a shit. Eventually a train came along and took us all in. Shut its doors with that phoebe sound and brought each of us to where we did what we had to do, here in New York City.

I was going to leave it at that because I liked the cadence and the way it came around again to the phoebe thing. But you can’t have all these loose ends. Did she go ahead with the abortion? Did he ever get his clarinet back? Or, I mean, you can, but. Plus, there are these two other moments I want to set down before I forget them. Or set down in hopes of forgetting them, whichever. Same principle as sticking stuff on a floppy that you don’t want cluttering up your hard drive, if that’s not too techno a model for that immense world of delight, the human mind.