Love Me (30 page)

 

 

 

Dear Brian, There is much to be said for a church wedding. There are clear cues and prompts and the nervous couple walks through it with the Lord’s help and comes away moved and edified by the old words about love and honor and sickness and health and there is no need for original poems or for turkey calling. You can do those at the drunken revels that follow. Call me an old fool, but writing your own wedding is a short road to pretentious silliness. God bless you both and give you a long happy life together.

 

 

 

Hot summer days, quiet except for the whining of insects and complaining children and dogs panting in the shade. Magnificent clouds and hawks hanging in the sky. A boy whizzed down the sidewalk on a skateboard. He had so much metal in his face, it looked like he’d been rolling around in the tackle box. On the 4th of July Bob and Sandy came for supper with their friends Bruce and Kirsten, and Bob cooked burgers on the grill, over an inferno hot enough to smelt iron, and they came out hard and black, raw in the middle. Bruce was a slender man with nice hair. His dark glasses were parked on top of his head all evening, which I got tired of looking at. Why not put them in your pocket? They seemed to be cutting off circulation to his brain. Kirsten wore a black blouse with a plunging neckline. She said that she and Sandy and Bob and Bruce were going to observe their 25th wedding anniversary with a “Celebration of Connection” at Mounds Park and would Iris and I perhaps like to join them in this? There would be music and food and we would recommit to each other. “You’re going to read Whitman, aren’t you,” I said. “Yes,” she said. “I celebrate myself and sing myself, and what I assume you shall assume, for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” I said I didn’t think I wanted to do that. Iris said she thought we were pretty well connected already. I turned to her, tearily, and kissed her. We walked to the river to watch the fireworks on Harriet Island. A crowd of neighbors I hadn’t seen in years, grown old, gotten divorced, lost jobs, children gone away in anger. The mayor arrived and was heartily booed and smiled and waved. An interminable wait and then the rockets’ red glare and the bombs bursting in air, which was also full of mosquitoes. Independence: not the best thing we could have hoped for, I guess, but what are you going to do? That night, the heavens opened in a downpour.

She asked me out on a date the next night. We went to Walker Art Center and a benefit for a Physically Challenged Artists Program. The crowd was gathered in the lobby, an enormous rectangle with glaring white walls, around a bundle of old newspapers on broken glass with a velvet rope,
Prose Rectangle.
A troupe of dancers in black underwear and tiaras were skimming around in a free-associational way and a poet in a wheelchair was crying out into a microphone, “It soared, a bird, it cried a swift pure cry, soar silver orb it leaped serene, soaring high in the ether, in the bosom of radiance all soaring over and about the all, the whole, the endlessness of the thing” et cetera. It was a Walker sort of event. Art that nobody actually enjoys but you find it interesting to be with the sort of people who go to that kind of thing.

Frank was there. I told him that Iris had quit MAMA.

“Yes, I know,” he said. “A year ago.”

“Surprised me that she’d go into massage therapy. But maybe she’s good at it.”

“She is.”

I blinked.

Iris wore a black silk blouse cut so low you instinctively cupped your hands, thinking you might have to make a diving catch.

And the frizzy-haired dork standing next to her was looking straight down the front of her shirt as if he was the chairman of the 4-H Breast Judging and trying to decide between these two semifinalists.

The crowd clapped for the poet, and Iris made a beeline for the chardonnay and Mr. Frizz followed her. At the wine table, she turned and smiled at him and he patted her on the shoulder, and right there I felt a primal male urge to plant one on his kisser and then his cell phone went off. He whipped it out and walked toward the front door, in conversation—NO, THAT’S OKAY, I WAS HOPING YOU’D CALL. WHAT’S UP?—primping, adjusting his balls, just one more phone bozo announcing his presence in the world—and I followed him. YEAH, I’M AT WALKER—and he stopped and turned and tripped over
Prose Rectangle
and his cell phone skittered across the floor like a hockey puck and Iris said, “Let’s go home.” I followed her, at a trot.

It was good, making love two nights in a row. Doggone it, maybe we men are right about sex not being the answer; sex is the question, yes is the answer, and it blows away a ream of troubles, especially when it’s your old beloved. Oh, miracle of miracles. Authentic rapturous passion between two old pros. You lie in bed afterward in a warm daze, tired, rapturized, like a salmon who made it back to the headwaters, like an old stallion who has fulfilled his destiny one more time, and life begins anew. In the dark, the judges are holding up their scorecards—8.1, 9.0, 9.0, 8.9—but that doesn’t matter so much, what matters is that the war is over, the roads are open again, the ice is gone, spring is here, and you have discovered, for the 863rd time, the great beauty and simplicity of your life as an animal here on earth. You rise naked from the bed and go down to the creek for a drink of water and far off in the distance other males sound their cries of manly joy and wonder and you reply with a deep, chesty roar and the forest is quiet. You drink your water and return to the warm nest of percale and eiderdown and fit your naked self into the dozy curve of Madame’s body where she lies swooned on her side and you smell her dew and roses and absorb a simple thought about marriage: this woman is all women, and when you chose her, you became Jay Gatsby and Robert Jordan and Prince Andre and Raskol nikov and Ishmael and embarked on a life of imagination, which adultery cruelly violates, and breaks up the music in your head, and also it’s a hell of a lot of work to scout up something inferior to what you and she can create at home. You have roamed the Western world in search of the perfect tuna sandwich; your wife makes a good tuna sandwich; your powers of imagination are what make it perfect.

 

 

 

Iris called to ask if I wanted to take a vacation with her this summer, but we couldn’t think of any place to go, so we stayed in St. Paul. “Whatever you’d like is fine with me,” she said, “it makes no difference, so you choose, I can be happy either way.” We did make our wedding anniversary canoe trip on the St. Croix River and lay on a sandbar island in our swimsuits and I told her the story of Emmaline Humphries.

Emmaline kept a flame burning for Fitzgerald until he died, all used up, in 1940 at the ripe old age of 44. She clipped the reviews of his books, stories about him and Zelda dancing the night away in New York and Paris and Cap d‘Antibes, and when they returned to St. Paul briefly in 1922 for the birth of their baby, she helped them find a house to rent and a nurse. Six months after they left town for good, she married a classmate she barely knew who was a good dancer and looked good in a brown suit. He turned out to be a lush, too, except he didn’t write
The Great Gatsby,
he just sat in his office in the First National Bank and looked out at the Mississippi and in 1934 he went fishing on White Bear Lake and fell overboard, drunk, and drowned, and was washed up on the beach two days later. Emmaline went back to live in her parents’ house. Their money was mostly gone and her mother, though a Hampl, had taken in four roomers on the third floor, young men come in off the farm to try to become bookkeepers or teachers—any job offering a white shirt and a tie. Emmaline cooked and cleaned. When Fitzgerald came back, washed out, sweet and sad in his papery skin, she met his train at Union Station and they walked to the river and sat and talked. According to him, he had been on the wagon for six months, was doing the best work of his life, he wanted to come back to St. Paul.

“He sat and wrote our life story in the air from all those dear memories of that shining world we inhabited in the long-lost summer. He looked out at the river and closed his eyes and imagined how his life might be, frugal and disciplined and filled with simple pleasures. He would finish his movie writing and buy a house on the River Road and rent an office downtown and write two more books and go to the movies and eat popcorn and take long walks through the old neighborhood. His face shone as he said, ‘People can change. I know this! A man can pull out of a tailspin and land safely. The ship can find its way back to port. A fever rages and then it abates and the sick man sits up and walks to the window.’ And all the time he talked, he never touched me or looked at me. He was talking to his memories. I walked him back to the station and kissed him and he promised to write me a letter soon and half a year later he was dead.”

Iris was sick with a bad cold that week, hoarse, feverish, nose running, so I went over to the house early in the morning and made coffee and brought it to her in bed along with the newspaper. She liked that. She really enjoyed being waited on.
Boing
went my little brain: the lady who spent all those years helping the deranged and friendless gets pleasure from being brought coffee and the newspaper and maybe a warm croissant from the bakery.
Why didn’t I think of this twenty years ago?
She loves to be waited on.

The slow rate of learning is discouraging to the older man, but thank God for illumination at whatever hour.

So I started slipping in early every morning and making coffee. One morning, Iris said she was going away for a couple of months. I had been ignoring the conversation, which I am pretty good at, like a yogi walking barefoot across burning coals, and I was reading a letter to Mr. Blue from a divorced man whose ex-wife (they are still good friends) starts dating his old high-school classmate and he goes nuts, and Iris was talking about the Minnesota Association of Massage & Aromatherapy, which she was active in and then she said, “They’ve offered to send me to Miami to study alternative organizational methods so I could work part-time next year lobbying for them at the legislature.”

“That’s great,” I said.

“Are you sure?”

“Sure.”

“You wouldn’t mind my going?”

“Should I?”

“Of course not.”

The association was active in promoting massage as a form of preventive medicine and wanted to be accredited for Medicare and Medicaid. Just because somebody is poor or elderly doesn’t mean they should be denied the health benefits of being rubbed with oil and listening to Tibetan flute music, does it? And then it dawned on me that I couldn’t let her go. I might lose her.

These things happen. Everything is breakable. A lady lands in Miami for a few months and she happens to drop in at a daiquiri bar and is introduced to a Cuban aromatherapist with glimmering swept-back hair who puts hibiscus over her left ear and teaches her to execute the samba
one-two one-two-three
and the tropical night throbs with mandolins, the stars, the moon, the white egrets, and they go to his apartment and mix their aromas and set up housekeeping and the poor sap back in Minnesota is left to walk around with a heart full of broken glass.

I told her, “You can’t go. I have nothing but you. You are what I have on this earth. My life is all about you.” She was grateful to be kept, though like a true Minnesotan, she said, “Well, if that’s what you want, okay.”

It was a splendid fall. The day before Labor Day, we went to the Minnesota State Fair, the Fair of all Fairs, the Holy Midway and the Grandstand and jams and jellies and quilts in Home Activities and 4-H and animal barns, cattle and swine and sheep and fat people strolling around looking at the animals’ rear ends, fat people with hair you wouldn’t believe looking at the tails of their entrees. “I need some centrifugal force,” cried Iris, so we climbed aboard a huge cylinder called the Salad Spinner and it spun, pinning us against the wall for two minutes, until we could barely remember our multiplication tables, and then we ate deep-fried walleye on a stick. And paid 75 cents to see the World’s Largest Piece of Toast under a tent, toast the size of a tennis court. And did not go to see the Maggot Man. He costs two dollars and he eats worms and maggots from a pail. We’d seen him years ago back when he had more of an appetite.

“Isn’t this great?” she said. “Didn’t you miss this?”

I did. How did I avoid coming here for all these years? Some people don’t go because it’s the same old stuff every year but that, of course, was exactly why Iris and I loved it. Christmas is the same every year, and Easter, too, but people don’t skip them on that account. The great white Horticulture Building smelled of apples and grain, and the fish swam in their tanks in the Conservation Building and they were walleyes and muskies, sunnies, perch, bullheads, just as when I was a little kid and wormed my way to the front of the crowd to see. Machinery Hill spread out above the racetrack, bright red and yellow and green combines and tractors and corn planters and silos. Back in the era of candy cigarettes and milk in glass bottles and washing machines with wringers and telephone exchanges named Juniper and Central and Harrison, these extravagant exhibits were just the same, the church dining booths, the butter sculptures in the Dairy Building, the DeZurik Sisters singing “Minnesota, hail to thee, hail to thee our state so dear. Thy light shall ever be a beacon bright and clear” and yodeling the refrain.

I called Iris the next day and got her machine. A recording of Pachelbel’s Canon and then her voice:
Thank you for calling Star-flower Bodywork. This is Iris. My hours are noon to seven p.m. Monday through Saturday and I offer an excellent deep-tissue non-sexual massage for $70 for the hour, $100 for 90 minutes. I’m located near West 7th Street and I accept cash, personal checks, or credit cards. Leave your name and number and I’ll get back to you just as soon as I can. And have a wonderful day.