Bruce Wagner - I'll Let You Go

“Lay down awhile, girl!”

He nearly pushed her onto the futon, retrieved during a freeway-litter sally. While ecstatic to have found something like a real bed to lie down upon, this Jane flushed and demurred.

“I won’t take advantage of you! What would you have me for? I want you to rest . I’ve some aspirin — you’re feverish. Here: water. Drink!” She swallowed the pills, too, and he lit some liquor store — bought votives. “Dangerous for a woman out there, no? Brigands’ll rape and leave you bleeding. Happen yet? And the policemen —thugs and abominations! The policemen are worse! ’Cepting the ones on horseback … they seem a reasonable lot. Though maybe it’s the horses who are reasonable. But you don’t have to worry now, Janey — where’ve you been living? Where’ve you had a bath ? Or have you had one at all?”

“ ’ave! ’ave uh bith!”

She would not have him think she was careless and filthy; Lord, not him!

He sat back on his heels and stared, like a director at an audition. She was all jiggling flesh and great salmon-sushi lips, thighs and buttocks tattooed with the black-and-blue fingerprints of roughhouse vagrants, and wore deep squarish patches of dirt on shoulder and hip that would take more than scouring soap to erase. She kept repeating “un-keen” (which Will’m eventually translated: “I’m clean”), her echolalia accompanied by an almost involuntary disrobing, so that suddenly she sat before him naked and quaking, breasts avalanching to either side, bruised-white mutton legs rudely splayed.

He had never seen a woman of such epic proportions, and was humbled by her offering. Gently, he covered her up and sat down at futon’s edge.

“I don’t need any of that, Janey — don’t want that. It’s not that I don’t find you a stunner, all right? That, you most certainly are! It’s just — well, you’ve been with him , haven’t you? With Rossetti. And I understand it. I know I drove you to it. But you see I don’t know much anymore. Don’t know much about myself . And I don’t know you … and you, well, you don’t know me , now do you? What I’m up to. You’re not as keen on my work as you once were, no? Anyhow”—he stroked his stubble, mulling a mathematical problem—“it’s a while since I’ve been with a woman — why, I’d hardly know what to do! It’s a while since I’ve been with myself ! And we don’t need do it, Janey. We don’t need do it for me to look after ya, we won’t have any of that — not for me to look after you. Is that all right? That’s all right, isn’t it, Janey?”

While he spoke, Ms. Scull went from puzzlement to tender acquiescence, until finally answering “ess! ess!”—a thousand times ess . For while she could hear little, she understood all.

From that moment on, she became exceedingly careful of her person; carried herself differently when she walked, with and without him; and modulated her outbursts, which themselves became more studiedly articulate. The corrective afflatus was not the result of “falling in love,” for Jane Scull felt she had always loved this man, but rather a kind of self-reckoning that came upon her as would a religious vision — a sudden, inexplicable, karmic settling of accounts, a cosmic ordering and coming-to, a gyroscopic awareness that arrived with such ease and graceful surety that it would remain the rest of her days.

That night in the defunct Tropicana, they stayed up late and Will’m sang old Oxford songs. Then he lay on his back while she slept, attentive to her respirations. At half-past three, like that time at the Higgins, there were crashes and shouts and flashes of light as policemen raided the units. Will’m took her hand and ran as he’d run so often through the years — this time into the night, past the quiet pier and Camera Obscura, north along refurbished bluffs to the palisades of the California Incline.

They leapt a low wooden fence and spent the night huddled against each other on the cliffside brush of the esplanade, where, hours before, couples had lingered to watch the raked evensong of sunset skies.

Will’m was fated to meet all manner of eleemosynary souls — he brought that out. A few weeks ago, he had caught the eye of a Catholic outreach worker giving away condoms and toothbrushes on the Promenade. Now, seeing the bedraggled couple the morning after their eviction, the benefactor approached.

“Do y’all need help?”

“What do you mean, sir?”

“Do y’all need a place to stay?”

Will’m shifted, stroking his cheek where once the beard had been.

Jane Scull took the man in with benign, near stately indifference — proud new wife of the Chairman of the Disembodied.

“It is possible,” said Will’m, with guarded eyes.

“Y’all know SeaShelter? Over on Olympic? Salvation Army? Sure you do. Over by the buses — y’all seen the big yard with the Blue Buses?”

The voice loved to rise up, whether asking or telling.

“And what,” said Will’m, “is there, sir?”

“Well, showers and beds and lockers — y’all been to St. Joseph’s, haven’t you?” He looked at Jane Scull and squinted. “SeaShelter’ll get you a hot shower? And there’s food and lockers for your personal things?”

Her eyes lit up at the mention of amenities — yet it was the idea of a locker that for Will’m was a real enticement. He would be able to retrieve his manuscript and stow it close at hand.

“I can help y’all be guests if you want to be. Y’all can stay for twenty days. They can help with medical needs, too. Would y’all be interested in being guests?”

“Possibly yes, sir.” He didn’t want to be a pushover, or a charity case either. But he had Janey to think of now.

“Real good then! They’ll find you a job? Lotta hotels in this city now — new hotels. There’s one thing you should know? They’re drug- and alcohol-free? I mean, SeaShelter? That’s something they don’t tolerate. So they expect you to be sober?” He handed them a flyer with a map to the facility and a general list of rules and requirements. “Go stand at the gate between three and six, that’s when guests are let in. Three and six in the evening . Best get there early? Now, one more thing is, they ask you to leave by seven-thirty each morning? Because they don’t want you sleeping in? Y’all like me to go on and call ahead to say you’re coming?”

The couple agreed. After the minister left, Jane threw her arms around Will’m and said, “Shower!” without impediment.

SeaShelter is a small, clean hangar on Olympic, in the crook of the Santa Monica Freeway as it loops into PCH. Showers and lockers reside outdoors, while the structure itself contains kitchen, administrative offices and beds segregated by sex. Morning coffee and biscuits are provided, and supper too. At twenty days, guests are asked to decide whether they wish to stay on as bona-fide residents in a six-month social re-entry program. Jane and William elected to do so, becoming sterling citizens in short stead.

William was sent to a clinic for pills, the daily cluster of which had a sly way of distancing the voices of Victorian friends and family. The medications’ main side effect was obesity — he now tipped the scales at three hundred pounds. Jane Scull ate less than before admission but did not lose any flesh. She was fitted with new hearing aids, and waxed indispensable with pail and mop; whereas William Marcus — for that is how he came to be known — having offered his services impromptu during a mundane culinary emergency, was drafted thereafter into the role of kitchener and off-hours pâtissier.