Thomas McGuane - Panama

“You’ll have to get to your feet first.”

“Nylon said, ‘Let me collect that for you,’ but me, I had to be big.”

“Nylon hasn’t been doing so good either.”

“But if I hadn’t had to be big, it would of been him instead of me. Now look. God damn polished cotton’s worth its weight in gold. One knee’s done for and the thing is an outfit, not just pants and a jacket. And a tough one to come by.”

“They do reweaving down off Simonton Street.”

“I did it. I have to live with it.” He got in the Land-Rover and left.

“Where’s he going in the Buick,” Catherine asked.

I turned around. “Where did you come from?”

“Kiss me hard.”

I held her.

“I just thought today, maybe I can stand it. You’re out of the question but today I thought, it won’t kill me.”

“I never said that,” I said. “I never said it would kill you.”

I looked at her and she was glowing. She had evidently had some kind of moment with herself. I was holding it away. It seemed as if she was coming back or going to try and I didn’t want to distort it; if I could just hold on to one place for her to come back to. She would do that for me. And why in hell couldn’t I do that for her?

We walked around to the beach and Marcelline was there, sitting on a Ramada Inn towel and reading pornography. I had my arm around Catherine’s waist when Marcelline commenced an excerpt; it was gruesome filth. She laughed, then stopped and looked up. “What’s the matter?” she asked.

“I mean, I’m sorry,” she said.

“Look,” she said, getting up and folding her towel, “no salesman will call at your door.”

She left.

“Huh,” I said.

“Gee,” said Catherine.

Then Marcelline was back and she was throwing rocks at us. “It’s no call to do me like some doormat!” she shouted.

“Lay off the speed, Marcelline,” Catherine said, “this always happens. It’s venom … put down those rocks. ” Marcelline vanished again, weeping this time. “It’s venom, I tell you. Monday she’s blowing one boyfriend in his sports car and by Wednesday she’s cutting her wrists in another’s apartment because he says he doesn’t love her. Then by the time she gets back to the blowjob in the sports car, it’s on holiday in Europe and Marcelline’s standing there wondering why she’s always holding the bag. One minute you’re holding the bag, the next you are the bag.”

“This is your version?”

“This is it, this is la vie en rose. ”

“Do you think it’s possible for a little romance?”

“I seriously doubt it. It’s like eating gravel.”

Even in the sun, all the world seems to contain a hollow wailing moan, long and drawn out, as though purgatory understood the meaning of not knowing what was next.

“I love you so,” said Catherine. “Whatever’s missing in the world, I’m doing my part.”

We passed down the purlieus of Duval Street, past vile restaurants addressed “Rue Duval.” On the steps of St. Paul’s Church, a pigeon worked its way diagonally below the feet of two elderly gentlemen, factional members of a Long Island exodus.

“We could have had such a damned good time together,” I heard one say.

“Yes,” replied the one in the bonnet, “isn’t it pretty to think so.”

“Now,” said the former, “I’m heading home to put things by.”

* * *

“Want to hear some poetry, Catherine?”

“Like what?”

“Sappho or Dylan Thomas?”

“You don’t know any Sappho unless Marcelline told you.”

“The fuck I don’t.”

“She better not be reading your ass poems.”

I gave her my favorite Sappho. “Someone, I tell you, will remember us. We are oppressed by fears of oblivion, yet are always saved by the judgment of good men.”

“I didn’t think you knew one.”

“I don’t love Sappho as an excuse for eating pussy,” I said. “Now, let me tell you the Dylan Thomas poem I like.”

“None of the drunken slobber poems,” she said.

“I’ll tell you one that means the most to me: A process blows the moon into the sun, pulls down the shabby curtains of the skin; and the heart gives up its dead. ”

“Why is that one important to you?”

“I read it at my father’s funeral.”

“Your father didn’t die, fuckface.”

“Don’t tell me that an event I know by heart didn’t happen. I was the third mourner from the left in the funeral party and don’t call me fuckface.”

“That was your mother’s funeral. You showed me the picture. She did die.”

“My father died in the Boston subway fire!”

“Your father has never been in Boston! I asked him!”

We went into Fitzgerald’s for a drink. The waitresses were stuffing rugs under the lid of the piano. When one came we ordered Stolichnaya and limes. My ears were ringing.

“What are you doing to that piano?”

“The guy we hired is good but he’s too loud. He’s a spade.”

“That makes him too loud?”

“No, he happens to be an Afro-American person. I thought I’d mention that.”

When she came back with the drinks, I said, “Those rugs are going to keep it from playing at all.”

“It’s worth a try.”

“I think you’re showing real aggression toward this musician.”

“Leave her alone, Chet,” said Catherine.

“We love him. He teaches all the ofay waitresses how to get down, and we do his charts and balance his aura.”

“I see.”

“Three dollars.”

Catherine paid. I was on the humble, having mislaid my wallet. People were staring into the bar from outside. I let no one catch my eye. All they want are loans.

“Let’s take a sink or swim approach,” said Catherine.

“A little idle laughter or something?”

“Yeah, or something. We’re getting morbid or something.”

“Or something.”

“How do you feel you’re doing on your memory?”

“I’m avoiding that gumshoe like the plague. He’s been dogging my heels, following me into restaurants with his shitsucker showdowns.”

“I just wish out of respect for my investment you’d take the time to let him tell you what you’ve been doing.”

“Catherine, why do we have to talk about him now?”

“He’s looking at you.”

I glanced up and sure as hell.

“What are you trying to do to my mind?” I inquired.

“Restore the original luster.”

“Well, don’t.”

A member of Jorge Cruz’s orchestra sat at the bar with an uncased yellow saxophone propped next to him, reminding me of my commitment at the Casa Marina. He ordered two shots of Mount Gay Eclipse and began to hum a nervous salsa tune while spying on me in the mirror. With everyone watching me, I began to think of the writer, the one who quit everything to go home so Joe Cain’s widow could show him what was what. I could have gone with him and made a cowboy of myself or merely lived in a way that Jesse James would have understood, or even my grandfather with a cane in his scabbard and his Lucky Strikes and his board-and-batten barn in Excelsior Springs with its lunatic memories of upside-down border fighters.

I could, in any case, restore myself in the glades I’d loved as a boy, hunting turtles and smelling gunpowder from my.22 instead of trotting the burnt-out nerves of the nation like an adenoidal Basenji. I could stop lying and try to improve my memory without being an utter fool about it.

Catherine took me to a house on Lopez Lane to carry a lamp home for her. We entered in back beside the cistern under the dogwood lintel and found ten people concluding a coke deal. “It’s only me,” sang Catherine and the deal went on, with a young scientist on a three-beam scale trying to break a little boulder into quarter ounces. I commenced feeling the strain. The subject of the deal was a normal-looking young businessman given away only by half-mast eyes. There was a very tiny girl at the table and she chopped one little nugget on a piece of marble. The businessman rolled a crisp fifty-dollar bill and the girl separated the blow into rails. Ceremoniously the marble slab went round the table, the businessman first, passing his rolled bill, and when it came back to him, the fifty had turned into a one. When Catherine came back into the room with her standing lamp, the businessman was on his feet shouting, “Fuck this noise the deal is off!” At which point the tiny girl produced the fifty and indignantly demanded to know where her one went to. “It’s interest on my fifty,” said the businessman. I put the lamp over my shoulder, swallowed my spit, and headed for Catherine’s house.