Barry Hannah - High Lonesome

Everybody knows raccoons are graceful. I regard them as so refined in beauty they are almost like a work of art let out to eat, especially this big sleek friend who wouldn’t seem to mind going back and watching television with me when Jane was out of the house. I felt better, going around the shore, sometimes watching the animal freeze, poke, and snatch when it wanted something tasty out of the water.

The élan of the Indian tennis players occurred to me as I looked forward to the European tournaments on the big-screen Toshiba. I hoped there were some Indian tennis players left to watch, with their sweet moves, their gentlemanship, a power beyond victory and defeat to me, much in rebuke to our wearisome national jocks and deranged narcissists like McEnroe. I didn’t give the raccoon a name even as he became nearly a walking roommate. You should not name something more elegant than you, I thought. I didn’t even know its sex. Maybe it was a newly mated older boy like me taking a couple hours off from the little woman back at the castle.

I was near broke again, with all my buying for the house, back to the lower class. I’d never taken money from Jane and didn’t intend to. Our house felt like a rented thing to me, with none of my purchased future in it. I’d built a muscadine arbor one morning out of heavy stakes with lattice board for a roof. We would see it from our rear bay window on the slope into the lake. It was my first yard idea ever. I wanted a grape bower with a love couch underneath — somehow an all-weather one, if they made them. I wanted the raccoon to visit and eat the grapes, maybe even bring his family over. I expected the thing, in fact, to one day give up his beastly quietness and begin chatting with me. Or I would become a whole new animal, enough to chat in its language. Jane and I could ravish each other on the couch even into old age. I was sad, but so what? This was my only marriage and I didn’t intend to retreat from it. Maybe I was copying the decorator, the old granny with his erotic room ideas, or competing with him. I was proud.

But when Jane looked down in the yard at it she didn’t show delight. I could sense there was something wrong with it now. It wasn’t on television.

Then I got back from a trip to Kansas City one afternoon. Jane embraced me at the door, all bright, and said she had a surprise for us. I spied down toward my old arbor construct. It had been torn down and replaced by one in green metal exactly the shade of the trees. The granny had told her where she could get one, the whole outfit, and his men had put it up for her. I went almost insane. It was our first large fight — nearly all one-sided by me — but I felt eternity in it. I almost struck her, there with her eyes seeming dead and glib to me all of a sudden. I told her the raccoon wouldn’t likely come near that thing.

“The raccoon? The what raccoon?!”

“ My raccoon. For the grapes.”

“What, have you invited him? What’s this raccoon? You’re sick!”

She slammed away to her retreat in the plump covers of our king-size bedroom where more Japanese television was.

Yes, I was sick, and it continued. I was not the same, maybe am still not. I’ve got myself in trouble, a minor disaster I rather like — not a well man. I neglected my raccoon friend and imagined that it cared.

In the early spring I began playing more tennis, but not with Jane, who cared less now for the game. I played with little Mary. Not in spite, either. There was no special reason to tell Jane, and Mary’s now careful friendship was too precious to lose.

One day I went down to the courts with too much beer in me. I knew I could not drink over two beers without going straight into depression, more a desert than an abyss for me, longer and no abrupt way out with great effort. See here, I have sought help professional and amateur for myself. I’ve tried to heal myself, always a bit sick that the cluttered mentocracy of self-study that afflicts this fat nation had enrolled me too. I agreed with the last food doctor entirely on the beer and had been much better for it. I’d never been a real drinker anyway, just a medicator of joylessness.

Mary keeps running and trying, dear heart, even without a great deal of strength, but with the advantage of growing up on a family court in Memphis with a mother who was a tour player. I’m just a bit better, without a single formal lesson. I watch a good player — the Indians — and try to absorb their spirit. There is a dullish way of playing perfect tennis, by all the percentages, that causes tennis burnout to the young even in their twenties — the young of a certain sensitivity. They get tired of the geometry and the predictions, their coaches and families. I’ve been close to that just by the repetition of a few weeks of near-perfect play. Maybe I’d drunk the beer to make the match more even between Mary and me. She was winning and I was not slacking.

One of those body men of the same pair — who played beside me ranting about their exercise and food regimen months ago — came over as I was beginning to serve.

“Say, did you know you were always late with your backhand, just a little late? You should step up to the ball more, get to the height of its arc, and be in front of it.”

Hardly without a pause, I dropped my racket and slapped him in the face. I’d never hit a man with a full fist, and in this case the result would have been even sillier if I had. He popped me so fast with the ham of his forearms, twice, I was out cold for a time. I woke up sitting, with his face over me and into mine, now with more concern than anger. He was smiling. Then he must have smelled the beer on me. Mary was up by me, amazed on her little legs.

“You shouldn’t come out here drinking, pal. I’m sorry, but you’re very lucky I’m a belt. I only told you you were late with your backhand,” the man said.

“I’ve been late with my backhand for thirty years. It’s the way I play, it’s fun that way. You fucking loudmouth pig.”

Mary moved down to get between him and me as he took a step, saying no to both of us. He wore athletic sports glasses. In his horror over my infirmity, he cut into me with a high-beamed glass stare that reminded me of every imperious monster of life that had ever hounded me. I almost fainted with hatred, overcome by all my failures at once, and proud of them too.

Afterwards Mary and I drank even more beer in my closed store together. I took out a new Jaguar poster with an even nuder woman poised in a diaper on the hood, her toes stretched out as just then in the moment of sexual crisis. I tacked her up. She was more Ford than Jaguar.

“Yes, and I think I’m separating from Jane. This antiseptic thing is coming on too strong. We’re going to just be a laboratory with the right wallpaper soon. She even asked me if I thought we’d still make love after age fifty. My God, fifty. That’s probably gotten dirty too. Or unkempt. That’s what it is about those St. Louis Midwestern people. Their fear of soil, wood, anything that could leave a stain— that’s why they’re creeps. Want to pave the world, they’re paving the goddamn beaches, they want designer nursing homes for resorts.” And so on. “She doesn’t even like sex, I’ll bet. She just wants a picture of it.”

I thought I’d get some agreement from Mary. But now she scolded me, and I quit the beer.

“You’re not separating. No you are not. Separating is all you’ve done since I’ve known you. And you will work with Jane, you will compromise. At your age it’s just indecent, you, to always want to be a social nigger. You won’t get along without her. You’ll get worse.”

“We might strike up something again, you and me,” I said.