American Purgatorio (23 page)

I nod, tell her that I would, and so we arrange to meet. The idea of a picnic is mentioned. I watch her get into the station wagon and drive off, and as I walk away, I'm feeling as close to happiness as I can remember feeling in a long time.

7.

That afternoon, back at the boardwalk, I find Polino, shirtless, sitting against the boardwalk wall, looking out toward the ocean and the clouds above the ocean, holding in his hand a brown paper bag with a beer inside. He doesn't offer me any when I sit beside him, and I can see that, although I'm happy, Polino is not so happy. It turns out that the girl on the grass had no interest in him, that he got his hopes up for nothing, that he'd promised himself he would never get his hopes up because bad things always happen and now he did and they did and he's pissed off. At me. “You set me up, man.”

I can see, or think I can see, behind the anger, to Polino's sadness. And I sympathize. I feel a fondness for this person, but when I ask what happened, all he wants to tell me is that he fell on his face. “I fell, man. I forgot what it feels like but now I remember. The oldest rule in the book.”

I don't ask him which book he's referring to, and he goes on about what an asshole he is and how stupid he is, and I mention something Shakespearean about assuming a trait if you lack it.

“Fuck that,” he says.

“It's from Shakespeare,” I say.

“I know what it is, fuckhead.” And then he launches into a disputation on the nonexistence of Shakespeare. “He's a fake, man. He didn't exist.”

“As a writer, you mean?”

“Believe any half-assed bullshit you want, man, if it floats your fucking canoe.”

“Are you saying he's dead?” I ask, and we don't exactly argue about Shakespeare because I don't know the whole history of Shakespearean scholarship on the subject, but I think Shakespeare probably existed. And even if he didn't, I would like to believe, and find it useful to believe, that he did.

But Polino's not going along with that. “I don't believe in anything,” he says, “unless it's in front of my face.” He pulls out a cigarette from behind his ear, tears off the filter, and with it, gestures across the beach. “I believe
this.
This is my life,” he says, “and I like it.”

That's what he says, but really I think he dreams of a different life. And the problem is desire. He wishes that something would change, but he's made a calculation, at some level, that it's easier to deny his desires than to have them. He knows desire won't ever get him anything but more desire and so he's short-circuited the chain of desire, thinking that now he doesn't have it, that he's free and unencumbered, and he makes a case for his own happiness because of that supposed freedom.

But like the sea behind a seawall, the desire is still there. His finger in the dike has gotten used to holding it back—it's a habit—and so it doesn't seem unusual. He's convinced himself that he wants nothing and needs nothing, and to keep this myth alive he won't allow himself to feel the dissatisfaction pounding against the wall in front of him. He believes in the myth of the carefree life of no desire, which, although it's called carefree, actually takes a lot of work.

He drops his cigarette into the beer can, throws it toward a trash bin, and it lands, because of the wind, in the sand. This little four-second movie, as I replay it to myself, brings up a memory of Anne—I think it was Anne—dropping a beer can into a stream in the Catskill Mountains.

We were walking along a rocky streambed near a friend's house. Other people were with us and we were all drinking beer, and when she finished her beer, instead of holding on to it, she looked for a place to leave her can where it wouldn't be so obvious. She knew that what she was doing was wrong, and the fact that she knew it made it worse. At the time I tried to love her and overlook this—not indiscretion, but this thoughtless and ugly act. Although she wasn't ugly, it made her seem ugly, and I begin to remember that she wasn't completely beautiful, not unadorned beauty, and that my love for her had lapses. For a long time I was able to overlook those lapses, and was happy overlooking them.

Now I say something to Polino about leaving trash on the beach, and Polino tells me he's tired of my goddamn goody-goodness. “Don't walk around here if you don't like it,” he says. “Walk someplace else.”

Being the conciliator, I say something like “Yeah” or “Whatever.”

But Polino has renounced, not only his desires, but me, who, strangely enough, represents desire, and when he tells me to leave, to fuck off and get out, what he's really saying is, Don't destroy my world.

So fine, I think, and I tell Polino that I'll see him later.

He says, “You don't get it, Van Belle. I don't want to see you later. I want to see you never. Go to a different beach. Find some other beach to do your … This is my beach.”

So I apologize. “I didn't mean to…”

“Go fuck yourself,” he says.

I stand there, not moving.

“Fuck you,” he says, and he walks away.

And then I walk away.

And ever the man to adust, I adjust to this. Okay, I think, and I walk to another beach. I have my meeting with Linda, and this meeting has become, or Linda has become, not the light at the end of a tunnel because I'm not in a tunnel, but a beacon, let's say, or a lighthouse.

I take a swim that afternoon. In my underwear I swim out far enough so that I'm floating in the salt water, beyond where the waves are breaking, away enough from everything I know to feel free of everything I know. I can feel the water surrounding my skin, the buoyancy of the water, the swells of water cradling me. I imagine what it might be like, taking a last breath and going down, under the water, holding my breath until I can't hold it anymore and then, when the time comes, when the breath runs out, to let the water come into me and take me. That would be fine. It would almost be desirable, except there's the human urge to maintain buoyancy. I can feel the water pushing me, incessantly, back to the shore, back to the world. And after a while I'm ready to go back. I'm ready to go back, and yet at the same time, I feel that I could float on the water forever.

VII

(
Avaritia
)

1.

Although the idea of sin is almost extinct, there are still certain things, certain habits of mind around which human beings seem to orbit. By habits of mind I mean the distractions that fill our world, the things we hate and love and get used to. We don't want to let them go. I don't want to let them go. I'm standing at the La Jolla Cove, in San Diego, orbiting now around something, and whatever it is, I can feel it pulling me. I'm looking out over the green lawn with the cypress trees and palm trees, and there's Linda, spreading a blanket on the grass. She's sitting on her knees, pulling out picnic items from a wicker basket.

It's sunny and cool and I sit beside her on the worn wool blanket. I'm looking forward to talking with her, to sharing with her something profound and personal. I'm searching, down in what I call my gut, for something with which to begin our conversation, and it's not that I'm empty, but before I can find anything down there, or even find the place where something might be hidden, she asks me a simple, unprofound question about living on the beach.

“Living?” I say.

“Isn't that what you do?”

“Well, yes,” I say.

“I don't see how you manage,” she says.

I shrug. I don't know what to say. There's nothing in me that I can think of. I'm relying on her to do the talking.

“It's a beautiful day today,” she says.

We both look out to the sea. And as we do, I can sense her go into herself, into her private thoughts, which is where I would like to go, into
her
life and
her
personality, to reach across the space between us and find—not love, but there's something I want from her, a feeling I want to have, and if I could get it, then love wouldn't matter.

“I hope it lasts,” she says.

“Me too,” I say.

My interest in her is obvious. She can see that I like her, and although she likes that, because she doesn't want to lead me on, she begins talking about seagulls. She says they make her nervous. She tells me about an arch that used to exist, carved by the sea in the sandstone cliffs, and that over time, because of the sea's incessant pounding, the bridge of the arch has worn away, and the thing that used to be there, that you used to be able to walk across, is gone.

When I don't respond about the rocks, she begins busying herself with the picnic basket. She's brought olives and napkins and sandwiches and she begins unpacking and organizing these things on the green blanket. The seagulls are flying overhead, gliding against the breeze off the water, and one seagull drops a load of shit. It lands in the grass at the edge of the blanket and she doesn't like it. She stands up to move the blanket, but I have an idea. “An idea,” I say, and I walk over to a wooden building at the edge of the grass. It's a bridge club for senior citizens and some broad-leafed plants are growing near this building. I find a large flat leaf from the bottom of a bush and I pull it off the stalk. I go to the turd and attempt to scoop the turd up in the leaf. But because it's not a solid piece of turd, it doesn't want to be scooped up. “Come on,” I say. I'm talking to the little gray guano. “Come on into the leaf.” And it's easier, in a way, talking to a turd than a human being. And because it's also slightly ridiculous, Linda begins smiling. And smiling is good, so I keep trying, unsuccessfully, to scoop it up. She's still smiling when we finally decide to move the blanket, and when we do, and as her smiling dies down, I start wondering, Why couldn't I be with her? Why couldn't
that
be my life? We seem to get along, and I'm energized by this sense of getting along and the potential for future getting along. When she pulls at the bottom of her shirt I tell her that I understand how someone might want that.

She holds up the arm of her yellow shirt. “It wicks moisture away from the body,” she says.

“Your shirt,” I say.

“Supposedly.”

She's talking about her shirt.

“What do you mean?” she says.

“I mean that it must not be made of cotton,” I say.

And although our conversation is not in absolute sync, it doesn't matter because in my proximity to her I feel that I exist. I believe the casual touching, as we reach for sandwiches, and her acknowledgment of that touching, means that the world we're creating is real. I'm enjoying the sense of reality, thinking about how I can maintain my promixity to that reality when she begins unwrapping her sandwich. My sandwich is still in its plastic on the blanket, but she unwraps hers. She begins eating hers. Not just eating; she brings her whole attention to the act of eating, absorbing herself in the fact of eating, staring at nothing as she chews each bite of basil leaf and mozzarella and the red tomato between the slices of bread.

I'm sitting cross-legged on the blanket, my knee almost touching her knee, but like a tree in the proverbial forest, I seem, for a moment, not to exist.

And then she finishes eating. She looks up.

“There you are,” she says, blinking her eyes. “Are you ready?”

She doesn't focus immediately, but when she does she sees me, and we begin packing up the picnic supplies. You'd be able to see in my eyes that I want to stay with her or walk with her, to somehow be with her, and I'm disappointed that what I want doesn't happen. She has to meet Geoffrey, she says. She's in love with Geoffrey.

And because I'm disappointed, and because I'm letting that disappointment show, and because she doesn't want to be the cause of my disappointment, she invites me to dinner.

“Tonight?” I say.

“If you want,” she says.

And I say that yes, I can make it. I have no previous engagements. I tell her I'd be happy to come, and I want her to see that I know it's just a dinner, nothing more, just an invitation, but that's enough. If I could have that, I wouldn't need anything more.

2.

I spend the rest of the afternoon wandering along Garnet Avenue, aimlessly watching the quotidian world of people driving cars, walking dogs, stepping out of dental offices. In an effort to merge with that world I walk up to a gray-haired woman and ask her for directions to the nearest supermarket. Even though I already know where the supermarket is, I'm grateful to the woman for talking to me. I can tell she's happy to talk, pleased to be practicing the ritual of talking, glad to be useful or real. And for a few minutes I feel real. But I can also feel myself fading, feel that the woman, even before she ends her speech, has forgotten I'm there, that even before she turns and walks away, the brief reality we'd created is gone.

I try it again, this time with a man, his hair tied back in a ponytail. He walks up a street with vines growing over the sidewalk and I follow him to the corner. While he's waiting for the light to change I get close to him and look at him and I would speak to him but so many other things are going on. A million things are happening—the cars and the houses and the weeds in the cracks in the sidewalk. When I don't pay attention to any one of them, in that moment of not paying attention, they seem not to exist. For a moment the man has left my mind, and when I turn back to him he's already crossing the street. He's already walking away, getting smaller and smaller and smaller.

I'm trying to fill the time of waiting with something other than waiting, but all I do is wait. I notice, while I'm waiting, the obvious fact of the sun on my skin or the bus-stop bench I'm sitting on, but my concern isn't the bus-stop bench. My concern is later, the future, and then the future arrives.