Thomas McGuane - Panama

I talked to a woman who told me nothing larger than the house going off in the wind and the move to Tampa and thought, Let us not try to see beyond these walls where we are taken up into the terrible stream. And then my heart could swoon from the smell of a cold-cream jar left open, a calendar with two pages needing to be turned, a handsome lady looking to get by but holding some hard secrets beautifully lacking in universality.

I thought, I can handicap the track on this whole shit-heel civilization and truck paychecks till doomsday. It’s like taking candy from a baby. But I want that cracked thumbnail, the graze of wildly disingenuous eyes upon my own, breasts suspended in the frame of arms, and level thighs drifting toward each other into the dark.

Because then I’m happy. I wanted Marcelline as absolutely as I knew I would do nothing about it. It starts with a gesture you remember from somewhere else: a girl chipping the map of Czechoslovakia into the polish of her fingernail. And in my hope of immaculacy, my Catholic childhood enshrouded within, I brained myself with the thought of her pulling the T-shirt over her head, the skirt unwound, each leg over an arm of the chair. And yes, me, at the business end of where it counted.

* * *

I last saw my brother Jim at a mental hospital where he had a small, decent room with a poster of me on the wall and which, don’t ask me why, I couldn’t bear to see there. It was the famous one of me climbing out of the elephant to sword-fight the pitching machine. He had hospital corners on his neatly made bed, a toothbrush in a glass, paperbacks, and a spiral notebook.

We walked around the grounds and he gazed with happy awe at me and told his ineffable, funny stories about the other patients, stories told with the sense of humor that is the mirror of pain, the perfect mirror, not the trick mirror of satirists. We had a long talk about our mother and father, about Roxy and our uncles. Then I flew to Stockholm to do a show. Jim was due out of the bin in three days. A week later, full of morphine, he smothered to death on a plastic-covered mattress. I came home and the last I saw of him he was lying next to a Lithuanian, who, after eating cat food for three years in a Miami hotel, jumped out of its window. I said Jim was Jim and they filled out his tag.

I thought, they’ll fill out mine and Marcelline’s and Catherine’s too; which thought makes you tolerate every creep on earth. And I considered how Catherine had had enough. Well, hadn’t we all. You are always up against those who ask, Why go into it? and the smart set who tell you, musically, That’s how it is.

Wondering what I am doing here makes me behave as I have, which is a matter of record. Like Ulysses S. Grant, it was an instance of a village crank being called by his Republic; I found myself in the consciousness traffic, hawking a certain ugliness on a cash-and-carry basis. It took me a little while to get the bugs out; and after that, I was lethal.

See, in Key West, we were an old family that had lost its money … Marcelline was at the window. I want her to open herself for me without this fashionably veterinary innocence. This stuff is wicked and sinful and everyone knows it.

Marcelline, please.

* * *

I buried Jim. The rest of the family did needlepoint of ineffectuality to show how we’d gone broke. Jim was in an open casket, deferring to barbarism that mattered to his friends and our family. There were beaucoup whores and sorry-looking junkies, past masters at turning blue, who marched to the casket and then didn’t know what to do with themselves, chins abashedly on chests, and fingers laced over their lower abdomens. As always, I positioned myself among the mourners, third from the left. I saw the body for days without so much as being reminded of Jim, a real effigy. Then when Catherine was with me and the funeral parlor was empty, I saw behind the cosmetics and cold smell of the flowers, the same smell when I’d bought the flowers for Marcelline; well, I saw. I felt something physical rack through and Catherine took hold of me. And I had this thought which was, I guess, a watershed: That’s him all right and he’s dead.

But once you get the idea finally that what dead means is the end and no one is coming back, once you know that as opposed to having heard about it and having coppered your bet with a few well-chosen coins of stupidity, then you don’t care so much about your own any more. I don’t anyway.

* * *

“I can’t see why you brought me flowers.”

“It was an impulse. I think I’m trying to get close to Catherine again. And she cares about you and for example worries about the wrigglers in your cistern as well as her own. But the flowers are just for you too.”

“Are you jealous of us?”

“No.”

“Because it’s just this little thing, you know.”

“Okay.”

“I gather that at the end there you just went slap impossible on her.”

“I did that. I believed myself though. I thought if I turned myself into enough of a goblin, everybody would come out and say what they had on their minds. Ha ha ha. What did I know.”

“And gettin paid a lot with all kind of trash goin after you. Which you loved.”

“I didn’t hide that.”

“And bringin it back to Catherine until there wasn’t any pride left. New York chippies high-siding her.”

“Yes, it was very bad. Is she gay now?”

“We’re all just sick of you.”

“You didn’t know though how grand it was to go home to somebody who knew you for the asshole you were, that relief.”

“Well,” said Marcelline, “it got old.”

“Sure.”

“For instance you coming in with these flowers to do me up.”

“That isn’t true. I came because I felt badly about what that clown did and because I felt guilty that I thought it was funny. And I wanted to surround Catherine.”

“She still loves you but I don’t foresee her having a single thing to do with you. She put up with you right up to where you had become a real animal and a national disgrace.”

“That was the height of my career.”

“It was sick. You were a depraved pervert.”

“Everybody calls me that.”

“I wasn’t going for originality.”

“Did you ever turn tricks?” I asked her.

“For a little while.”

I said, “How’d you like it? Turning tricks is how I saw my job.”

“I dunno. This was out of a steak-and-brew joint in St. Augustine. It was real different, I guess.”

“Strung out?”

“Yup, and sixteen. I was geezing speed. Later, crossroads and quackers. Up and down.”

“Ever happy?”

“Quite often.”

“Ever ask yourself what you are doing here?” I was waiting.

“All the time.”

“How far do you get with the question?”

“Nowhere.”

I started wandering around the place, halfheartedly looking for a spot to take a leak. I was off on a tangent. Marcelline held electrical fingernails to the light and I thought, Jim knew what ailed me but died and never said. And what ailed him? The horizon.

“The thing of it is,” said Marcelline, “is that we want to talk and we want to fuck one another and if we fucked one another we’d talk better but we’re not gonna fuck and I wonder how come.”

I replied brilliantly, “We’re being faithful to Catherine!” She smiled and then laughed like a valkyrie.

“Now and again,” she said, “I see you looking at me and I can make out what you want and I feel bad about that.”

“I’m not neglected.”

“I mean, I’d do it.”

“I would too,” I said, “only we won’t.”

“I’m not even that sore from my trip, but I’m just not going to.”

“It gets curiouser and curiouser.”