Robert Coover - Pricksongs & Descants

Their lunch — an indescribable amalgam of black meat, greenish-brown gravy, and thick wet wads of some uncertain doughy matter — concluded at last, the city firemen emerge belching from Jenny’s Home Cooking Cafe, cross the small square, and, armed with putty knives and plastic buckets of soapy water, begin to remove Klee, once and for all, from our sight, and thus, let us hope, from our minds. The Chief, a withered crowfaced career man with a bent bluish nose and a citywide reputation for a strict interpretation of the Laws, is shrieking obscene commands into a microphone hooked up to a public-address system with three oversize speakers and an unholy howl (a fourth speaker is present, but disconnected).

The growing bulge of spectators huddles about the accident, so-called, staring with astonishingly blank faces at the sweating black-slickered firemen. One o£ these latter, an enormous fire man whose uniform is, literally, splitting apart where sewn, stamps furiously up to the — what do you call it? — the point of impact, and as though in protest against the pressing dull-faced crowd, stoops and farts indelicately, yet, as it turns out, wholly unintentionally: though the crowd is visibly delighted, his own fat face reddens perceptibly, and he ducks to the task at hand with exaggerated interest. What he is doing is merely collecting in a small pouch the fragments of Klee’s dentures, which He scattered over the pavement like… ah… like miniature milestones, let us say, marking the paths of his spilt life’s blood. Well, we could say more, but the direction is dangerous.

But mark this detail: a small scrap of paper, completely illegible and perhaps even blank, lies not far from us in the fringe splatter of the main impact, weighted by a finger joint. Is it possible that for some time past the destructive elements in Klee’s character were few and effectively — though with great effort — submerged, but that Klee perversely guarded the notes and themes provided in despairing moments by these elements, and that these notes, all too honest, all too unanswerable, eventually contributed decisively to his inevitable but no less abrupt and disturbing end? Hmmm, but perhaps I betray my trust. For the piece of paper may well have been there on the pavement before Klee arrived so melodramatically, and would so be a circumstance of no account. In fact, I confess, it looks more like a handbill. The streets are always cluttered with them, more so today. What is life, after all, but a caravan of lifelike forgeries?

All of Klee has now been gathered up and stuffed into a wax-lined shopping bag — strange how little of him there was that it should all fit! — and the firemen are hard at work with water and scrub-brushes. Pretty dull stuff. Hardly the kind of show to keep crowds about, especially when there’s a circus in town, and it goes without saying that they’re all moving on. So may we. It only remains to be observed that Orval Nulin Evachefsky suffered from a mental disturbance marked by melancholy and irrational terrors, more or less sat upon, which, when given license over him as a consequence of Sissy Ann’s splotches, drove him hastily to his self-annihilation. Whether Klee’s suicide, however, was the result of a mere disease of his private reason, or if, more simply, reason itself was Klee’s disease, we will, I am sorry to say, never know. And even if we should find out somehow, though I cannot imagine it, even then it’d be damned little consolation to Klee. The best we can do, finally, is to impose the soothing distortion of individuation on the luckless bastard, and I for one feel we deserve more than that, whether he does or not. We didn’t start all this just to search out a comforting headstone, God knows. No, no, in the end, in truth, we are left virtually with nothing: an overlooked eyetooth, the P.A. left howling, a stained and broken ostrich feather, the faint after-odor of the fireman’s fart. Abandoned. And a good fifteen, twenty minutes shot to hell.

I’m sorry. What can I say? Even I had expected more. You are right to be angry. Here, take these tickets, the city clerk, obsequious fool that he is, refused them, you might as well go. I owe you something and this is all I have.

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6

]’s Marriage

It began not otherwise than one might expect. After an excessive period of unlicensed self-humiliation, ecstatic protests of love, fear, despair, and the total impossibility of any imaginable kind of ultimate happiness (to all of which she replied and usually in kind, though rarely with such intensity), J at last determined, or perhaps this had been his determination all the while, the rest mere poetry, to marry her. Slow, but then there were admittedly substantial drawbacks to the affair: he was much older for one thing. And though she was certainly intelligent and imaginative, he was far more broadly educated. In fact, it wouldn’t be unkind to say, and he brought himself to confess it in the torment of his most rational moments, that a good many of the most beautiful things he said to her she failed to understand, or rather, she understood not the sense of them, but merely the apparent emotion, the urgency, the adoration behind them. And did he adore her, or the objectification of a possible adorable? To search out this answer, J frankly did not trust himself. And, more generally and therefore more significantly, all of his most oppressive fears about the ultimate misery of any existence, the inevitable disintegration of love, the hastening process of physical and mental rot, the stupidity of human passion, and so on, these fears were entirely real, in fact, more than fears, they were his lot and he knew it. But there was no alternative short of death, so he decided to marry her.

To his great embarrassment, however, she was shocked by his proposal, apparently so at least, and pleaded for time. Only much later did he come to understand that a new kind of fear had burgeoned in her, a fear that no doubt cowered beneath the surface all the time, but which had always been placated by the suspicion that J himself was really nothing more physically substantial than his words, words which at times pierced the heart, true, kindled the blood, powerful words, even at times painful; but their power and their pain did not, could not pin one helplessly to the earth, could not bring actual blood.

At the time misconstruing her behavior, however, J grew angry, pressed his affections with atypical peevishness. She tore away, spat out at him hatefully. He withdrew, collapsed into a prolonged and somewhat morbid melancholy, unable to lift a hammer or turn a blade. She sought him out. She wept, embraced him, tried pathetically to explain. He again misunderstood and renewed his assault. She screamed in terror and escaped. Again he fell back in remorseful confusion. He grew ill. She cared for him. And on and on, thus it dragged, until, in summary, it at last became apparent to him that although she did love him and had a healthy longing for mother hood, at least in the abstract, she was nevertheless panic-stricken by the prospect of the Ioveact itself.

What was it? a lifetime of misguided dehortations from ancient deformed grannies, miserable old tales of blood and the tortures of the underworld (which the woman’s very position in the event must give one thoughts upon), or some early misadventure, perhaps a dominant father? It hardly mattered. For, in the instant of the present act, the past in all its troubling complexities becomes irrelevant. This is what J believed anyway, and once the immediate cause of their problems had finally been made manifest to him, he felt immense relief. Not only was his pride assuaged, but more to the case, there was now no longer any obstacle to their marriage. At the level where they two existed, he explained to her, his voice appropriately muted, eyes darkened, brow furrowed, Truth his domain where he might guide her, at this level sex could not be comprehended without love, but love could be distinguished without reference to sex; in short, that one was the whole, the other a mere part, contributing to the perfection of the whole to be sure, but not indispensable, not indispensable. More precisely, he added: whatever her terms, he could not imagine life without her, and if later they came to share in the natural act of lovers, well, so much the better of course, but they would arrive there, if at all, only with her express encouragement and at her own pace.