Luminous Airplanes (22 page)
Happenstance Institute
Denver, Colo.
May–June, 1970
Denver, Colo.
May–June, 1970
My star,
beyond dearness. You must be wondering why I ran away. I have been wondering the same thing myself. Me, wretched Dick, lame Duck (that’s what Ente means
auf Deutsch
—some crazy Jew chose it for the family a couple of centuries ago, a man who loved ducks, I guess), not a day passes that I don’t ask myself that question. For a long time I couldn’t answer. Just a voice in my head shouting, Go. Lately my ideas have been getting clearer, maybe on account of the mountain air. Also, I have fallen in with some fellows here who have an institute. They’ve latched on to the old Indian idea that we choose a life because there’s something we want to figure out. Each of our lives, and we have many, is like a book you pick up because there’s something in it you want to learn. I did some sessions with them early on and they told me what my problem is. It’s pride. I want to take all the world’s sorrow on myself. I look back at my life and everything fits into that pattern. Top of my class at Bleak, but a lousy law school. Top of my law school class, but a lousy job. And even that was too good for me; I had to quit S & M (I mean Silberman & Mischeaux), and do two-bit private law and live among bums. I had to find the greatest love I’ll ever know in my life, the only real love I’ve ever known, and run away from it. I look for the darkest spot in the woods and I run right in, hoping to make it less dark. That’s pride. I’m ready to let it go, and right now. Not in the next life, when I’ll probably be a rat or an ant given how I’ve screwed this one up. Getting to this knowledge has been hell, and a long trip, too. You wouldn’t believe some of the places I’ve been in the last four months, the dark spots I got into before I saw which way the light was. I slept in the woods with the Indians back of Jewett and got them so drunk, they agreed to do one of their most powerful curses for me. Together we blasted the whole USA, this sick land, and we begged the sky to take revenge on the bastards who shoot their chemicals into it, beginning with Joe Regenzeit and then all the way out from him. We stuck knives in our arms and bled for it to happen. Then I was on the South Side of Chicago, sleeping at the Y, talking to a disc jockey named A-10, who plays outer-space music from 2 to 4 a.m. because he wants the aliens to feel at home. I told him I was from Mars and he believed me. Apparently a lot of Martians go to Chicago, and all over the Midwest. He was going to take me to a nightclub for Martians but I got pneumonia and checked myself into the hospital and when I got out I left Chicago and drove all night to Santa Fe, where the air is pretty good. Spent some time there with a rabbi named Yoel Hernandez who tells me that half the population of New Mexico are Jews only they don’t know it. I was looking for a way back to the God of my fathers, then I saw it was all wrong, you don’t go backward to find God. God is in front of you if It is anywhere. So I went to Denver, met the institute folks, and here I am. I’m up at 5 a.m. every day to stare at my bellybutton; after three weeks I’ve come to think there might be something in it. I’ve given up pot and everything, even coffee; now I drink tea made from sage twigs and eat rice we get surplus from the US government, with weevils in it. I don’t eat the weevils. With the help of the good people here, I’m moving out of the darkness. I’m unjewing, laying down the ancestral guilt—I could write a book just about that. I sleep four, five hours a night. I don’t talk to my mother in my head. I teach english composition in a school that’s mostly Pueblo kids with bare feet and fantastic hippie hair. If they let me, I’m going to organize a debate team. I’m telling you this so that you’ll know it’s real, what I’m telling you. I hope you can see that. You always saw through me, you see into people as clearly as any swami, you have the magic eyes of serious purpose. I hope you can see me writing this in my little room, outside nothing but bushes and some uncollected litter and the big big night. I won’t promise you anything because promises are for liars, but if you come out here, I know you can trust me not to run. I love you with the real love. Nothing that happens will change that. But hope with me that it isn’t too late to make the wrong things right; hope with me that we can all still be fixed. I ran from you and it was the worst mistake of my life. But you can fix it, if only you’ll f
auf Deutsch
—some crazy Jew chose it for the family a couple of centuries ago, a man who loved ducks, I guess), not a day passes that I don’t ask myself that question. For a long time I couldn’t answer. Just a voice in my head shouting, Go. Lately my ideas have been getting clearer, maybe on account of the mountain air. Also, I have fallen in with some fellows here who have an institute. They’ve latched on to the old Indian idea that we choose a life because there’s something we want to figure out. Each of our lives, and we have many, is like a book you pick up because there’s something in it you want to learn. I did some sessions with them early on and they told me what my problem is. It’s pride. I want to take all the world’s sorrow on myself. I look back at my life and everything fits into that pattern. Top of my class at Bleak, but a lousy law school. Top of my law school class, but a lousy job. And even that was too good for me; I had to quit S & M (I mean Silberman & Mischeaux), and do two-bit private law and live among bums. I had to find the greatest love I’ll ever know in my life, the only real love I’ve ever known, and run away from it. I look for the darkest spot in the woods and I run right in, hoping to make it less dark. That’s pride. I’m ready to let it go, and right now. Not in the next life, when I’ll probably be a rat or an ant given how I’ve screwed this one up. Getting to this knowledge has been hell, and a long trip, too. You wouldn’t believe some of the places I’ve been in the last four months, the dark spots I got into before I saw which way the light was. I slept in the woods with the Indians back of Jewett and got them so drunk, they agreed to do one of their most powerful curses for me. Together we blasted the whole USA, this sick land, and we begged the sky to take revenge on the bastards who shoot their chemicals into it, beginning with Joe Regenzeit and then all the way out from him. We stuck knives in our arms and bled for it to happen. Then I was on the South Side of Chicago, sleeping at the Y, talking to a disc jockey named A-10, who plays outer-space music from 2 to 4 a.m. because he wants the aliens to feel at home. I told him I was from Mars and he believed me. Apparently a lot of Martians go to Chicago, and all over the Midwest. He was going to take me to a nightclub for Martians but I got pneumonia and checked myself into the hospital and when I got out I left Chicago and drove all night to Santa Fe, where the air is pretty good. Spent some time there with a rabbi named Yoel Hernandez who tells me that half the population of New Mexico are Jews only they don’t know it. I was looking for a way back to the God of my fathers, then I saw it was all wrong, you don’t go backward to find God. God is in front of you if It is anywhere. So I went to Denver, met the institute folks, and here I am. I’m up at 5 a.m. every day to stare at my bellybutton; after three weeks I’ve come to think there might be something in it. I’ve given up pot and everything, even coffee; now I drink tea made from sage twigs and eat rice we get surplus from the US government, with weevils in it. I don’t eat the weevils. With the help of the good people here, I’m moving out of the darkness. I’m unjewing, laying down the ancestral guilt—I could write a book just about that. I sleep four, five hours a night. I don’t talk to my mother in my head. I teach english composition in a school that’s mostly Pueblo kids with bare feet and fantastic hippie hair. If they let me, I’m going to organize a debate team. I’m telling you this so that you’ll know it’s real, what I’m telling you. I hope you can see that. You always saw through me, you see into people as clearly as any swami, you have the magic eyes of serious purpose. I hope you can see me writing this in my little room, outside nothing but bushes and some uncollected litter and the big big night. I won’t promise you anything because promises are for liars, but if you come out here, I know you can trust me not to run. I love you with the real love. Nothing that happens will change that. But hope with me that it isn’t too late to make the wrong things right; hope with me that we can all still be fixed. I ran from you and it was the worst mistake of my life. But you can fix it, if only you’ll f
and then a square cut from the corner of the page where Richard Ente’s last words would have been.
Ollow me.
Ollow me.
“Marie gave it to me,” Celeste said. “After Richard died, she didn’t want to keep it. I doubt she even knows it’s here.”
I’d like to say that when I read my father’s last letter everything became clear, and that I knew for certain who Richard Ente had been, but actually what I thought was, Holy shit, he sounds just like Swan! And for a moment, just for a moment, I allowed myself to imagine something so sweet I could barely hold it in my mind, like an atom of an element not meant to exist in this world. What if Richard had lived? What if he hadn’t died in Denver, but had merely stolen away, in the darkness, on foot, and made for the narrow end of America’s funnel? What if after untold adventures he had settled in San Francisco and what if he found there the true visionary powers he had been looking for. What if he had become Swan. What if I had known him. U think? said the Swan in my head. U really think? Then the vision, or whatever it was, fell apart, and I began to think about the letter. “How come she didn’t go?” I asked.
“She couldn’t,” Celeste said. “You weren’t there, you don’t understand. Richard turned her inside out. He was such a fucking liar! He made us all live in a world of lies. But you know, when he left, the rest of us came out of it, and Marie, Marie
didn’t
. She, you know, she was pregnant, and we knew that, and she was certain that Richard would come back. Then he wrote her that letter, and your grandfather gave it to her, which was not conscionable. Because she wanted to go. Marie wanted to live with Richard Ente in the world of lies! I was the one who persuaded her to go to New York instead. Can you imagine what would have happened if she’d gone to Colorado? Can you imagine what her life would have been like? Living out there, in
dirt
…”
didn’t
. She, you know, she was pregnant, and we knew that, and she was certain that Richard would come back. Then he wrote her that letter, and your grandfather gave it to her, which was not conscionable. Because she wanted to go. Marie wanted to live with Richard Ente in the world of lies! I was the one who persuaded her to go to New York instead. Can you imagine what would have happened if she’d gone to Colorado? Can you imagine what her life would have been like? Living out there, in
dirt
…”
“Hello?” Marie called. “Where are you people?”
“We’ll be down in just a minute, Marie.” A door closed and we heard water running in the sink. “In the end, I made her choose,” Celeste said. “Richard or me. If you stay, I said, I’ll stay with you always. If you go, you’re on your own.”
Celeste looked at me uncertainly. She wanted me to tell her she had made the right decision, but I wouldn’t say it. Celeste had kept my mother from going to Richard. And then, heartbroken, presumably, Richard had killed himself. I couldn’t forgive Celeste for that, even if, at the same time, I knew that the person I really could never forgive was Richard Ente, who had killed himself and left us all to think about him endlessly. I was angry, and my anger focused itself on the hole in the page. How could Celeste have cut up Richard’s letter, as if it were just material? It didn’t occur to me until much later that the collage might have been more than a simple act of destruction, that for Celeste cutting might have been a way of coping.
“You killed him,” I said.
“No. You don’t understand. You don’t …”
“What are you two doing up there?” Marie called up the stairs.
“Coming, Marie!” Celeste shouted. “We’re coming.”
Weeks later, when I’d left Thebes and gone to stay with a friend in New York, Marie sent me a letter. It was three typed pages long, and I guessed that it had been through several drafts. She expressed her sorrow at what had happened to Richard Ente, and her guilt: if only she’d gone out to Colorado, Richard’s life, and hers, and mine, and everyone’s, might have turned out differently. But at the same time she felt that she had made the only choice she was capable of making. And although Richard’s death was an irreparable tragedy, she believed that she’d made the right choice, and that the consequences, for her, and Celeste, and me, were mostly good ones. You have two loving parents, she wrote, and you had a stable environment as a child. But finally, she wrote, we can never know what would have happened if I had made the other decision. Our lives are what they are, and I hope you can forgive me for being young, and confused, and scared of the unknown. She loved me, and one decision she would never regret was the decision to have a child.
I cut the letter into hundreds of pieces, which I put in a paper bag. I planned to make a collage out of them and send it back to Marie by way of an answer. But unlike Celeste I wasn’t really a maker of collages, and when I moved out of my friend’s house I left the paper bag behind. I asked my friend about it months later, and he said he must have thrown it away.
Was my father a lover or a liar? Was he sane or mad? I’ve asked those questions a lot in the last several months, but I still have no answer. My father is dead. What I have are stories. The real Richard Ente is a continent on the far side of an ocean I cannot cross. He is undiscoverable, and maybe he always was.
On Monday morning I drove my mothers to the train station in Hudson. Celeste went to get tickets, and Marie took my hand. “I feel like there’s so much we have to talk about,” she said, but then Celeste came back with the tickets. My mothers boarded the train, and I saw them walking down the aisle, looking for seats. I thought of something that had happened a long time ago, when Marie started work at
S.
A host of names had joined us at the dinner table: Marcia the intern, Frank the managing editor, Nancy, Marie’s boss, the despot of Quick Styles and Personal Health, Mitch in the mail room. As Marie became familiar with these people, they acquired attributes that were as immutable as the epithets in Homer. Sing, Muse, of Marcia of the striped stockings, who was into Japanese men; and of Frank, whose lover was sick, very sick, Frank, whose lover was dying, Frank, who lost his lover to a long illness; sing of AIDS, or don’t sing, Marie didn’t, and I didn’t figure out what she meant by
a long illness
until later, much as it didn’t occur to me until I was an adult, looking at the Pacific Ocean on an overcast afternoon, what Homer had meant by
the wine-dark sea.
Sing of Nancy, that bitch, and sing of Mitch, a nice guy. Later, when Marie had been at the magazine for about a year, one name started to appear with more frequency than the others. Jean-Luc, the photographer, whose attribute was that Marie couldn’t see what all those women saw in him, was working with her on a story about dietary fiber. They went to the supermarket together and shopped for cereal, wasn’t it ridiculous? Jean-Luc was at the launch party for a line of clothing made from actual rags, wasn’t it funny? Marie spent the whole evening talking to Jean-Luc. He wasn’t so bad, she said, and that became his new epithet. Jean-Luc, who, it was true, had dated a lot of women, but was a good storyteller. Jean-Luc, who had been a photojournalist, and had a scar where a bullet had passed through his upper arm on its way from one part of Cambodia to another. Wily Jean-Luc, he had made himself a main character, and from that point on the story went in a new direction.
S.
A host of names had joined us at the dinner table: Marcia the intern, Frank the managing editor, Nancy, Marie’s boss, the despot of Quick Styles and Personal Health, Mitch in the mail room. As Marie became familiar with these people, they acquired attributes that were as immutable as the epithets in Homer. Sing, Muse, of Marcia of the striped stockings, who was into Japanese men; and of Frank, whose lover was sick, very sick, Frank, whose lover was dying, Frank, who lost his lover to a long illness; sing of AIDS, or don’t sing, Marie didn’t, and I didn’t figure out what she meant by
a long illness
until later, much as it didn’t occur to me until I was an adult, looking at the Pacific Ocean on an overcast afternoon, what Homer had meant by
the wine-dark sea.
Sing of Nancy, that bitch, and sing of Mitch, a nice guy. Later, when Marie had been at the magazine for about a year, one name started to appear with more frequency than the others. Jean-Luc, the photographer, whose attribute was that Marie couldn’t see what all those women saw in him, was working with her on a story about dietary fiber. They went to the supermarket together and shopped for cereal, wasn’t it ridiculous? Jean-Luc was at the launch party for a line of clothing made from actual rags, wasn’t it funny? Marie spent the whole evening talking to Jean-Luc. He wasn’t so bad, she said, and that became his new epithet. Jean-Luc, who, it was true, had dated a lot of women, but was a good storyteller. Jean-Luc, who had been a photojournalist, and had a scar where a bullet had passed through his upper arm on its way from one part of Cambodia to another. Wily Jean-Luc, he had made himself a main character, and from that point on the story went in a new direction.
“I don’t like where this is going,” Celeste said. “It sounds to me like he’s just using you.”
“For what?”
“Don’t be naïve.”
“Have you considered the possibility that
I’m
using
him
?”
I’m
using
him
?”
Celeste snorted. “Don’t let the women’s-magazine rhetoric go to your head, Marie.”
“It’s not rhetoric.”
“Please. The only thing worse than telling lies is believing them yourself.”
New crises arose at the magazine: there had been a small but significant misprint in the fiber story, women in Ohio were giving themselves colitis by eating hundreds of servings of Chex, and Jean-Luc vanished from our conversation for a while. Then he was back, he was flying to Los Angeles and he wanted Marie to come with him, it was a business trip, sort of, they were going to scout designers.
“Actually,” said Celeste, “what surprises me is that you seem to be asking for my permission.”
“That’s not it,” Marie said. “I just want to make sure you’re comfortable with the idea that I’ll be gone for a few days. And to make sure there aren’t any, you know, conflicts.”
“Why, are you afraid of conflict?”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
“I’m not going to reassure you. In fact, if you were asking my permission, I would say no, because I don’t like the way you’re trying to disguise a romantic getaway as a business trip. If you had said, Celeste, I’m going to California to fuck …”
“Celeste …”
“If you had told me you wanted to fuck this guy’s brains out on the beach in California, at least that would have been honest, and I would have said, go, have fun, just make sure this French creep doesn’t get his hooks in you too deep, because you know where he’s been. But that’s not the situation.”
“No, it’s not.”
“As it is I have nothing to say. You don’t need my permission. Do what you want.”
“Jesus, Celeste,” said Marie. “Why do we have to fight about this?”
“I’m not fighting.”
“We’re separate people. I wouldn’t do this to you if you were going away.”
“That’s because I’m not going away,” Celeste said.
“Well, I am,” said Marie.
But she didn’t mention the trip to Los Angeles again. She did mention Jean-Luc, but only once, to say that he had turned in some photographs late. It was as though he were one of those Homeric sailors whose names are mentioned only as they die in a shipwreck. We talked about ordinary things again, about those morons at the
Times
, about whose play was opening at La MaMa, about the terrible people on the subway and in the supermarket. Then Marie vanished. The phone rang while Celeste and I were eating dinner, Celeste answered, she said, “I see,” and hung up. “My sister isn’t coming home,” she said.
Times
, about whose play was opening at La MaMa, about the terrible people on the subway and in the supermarket. Then Marie vanished. The phone rang while Celeste and I were eating dinner, Celeste answered, she said, “I see,” and hung up. “My sister isn’t coming home,” she said.
“Where is she?” I asked.
“Downtown.”
“When will she be back?”
“I don’t know.”
“Tonight?”
“No more questions,” said Celeste.
Days passed. We didn’t talk about Marie at dinner. Instead Celeste talked about her work: she was thinking of writing a book, she said, but not a regular book, it would just be quotations from other books that she fit together so it looked like they all belonged. It would have a story, only she didn’t know what the story would be yet; that was the thing about this book, it was the kind of story you wouldn’t understand until it was finished, which was, she said, true of all stories, only people kept getting themselves into trouble because they thought they knew what they were doing in advance. And indeed the story of my mothers was already turning in an unexpected direction. Celeste was happier than I’d ever seen her. Her voice was louder, her gestures larger, as though she were gaining volume to compensate for the twin who had left. One night the famous art critic came to dinner. She sat in Marie’s chair and smiled indulgently at Celeste’s
poulet basquaise.
Celeste explained that the recipe was a relic of an old plan to move to Paris, and the famous critic did not disapprove, either of the plan or of Celeste’s failure to carry it out. She chuckled and lit a cigarillo off the candle flame. “Paris, Paris. It’s not what it used to be. Do you know the poem by du Bellay?
Nouveau venu, qui cherches Rome en Rome, et rien de Rome en Rome n’aperçois …
Nowadays it’s all Russians with too much money, Russians and Japanese. Do you know why the Japanese photograph everything? They’re documenting, so that when they get home, they can reproduce it all in miniature.” Another dark chuckle. “No, that’s unkind. Celeste, my darling, do you know that I once had a penis?” I stifled laughter. “Yes, it’s true, I wore a penis to a Surrealist dinner. A lovely pink plastic penis. In more or less the appropriate location. Were the Surrealists amused? My dear, they were not. There was quite a scandal.
Mon chéri
, said our hostess, the wife of some painter or other,
cette personne a oublié de fermer sa braguette!
She forgot to button her fly! Oh, oh, Paris, really, it hasn’t been Paris since Gertrude Stein passed on to whatever was left for her to discover …”A long thin sigh of smoke. Another story. How she had hitchhiked all the way from Paris to Geneva with a fork in her purse, with which she planned to stab any man who dared to touch her. How she still had the fork. Though nowadays, she said, she preferred to be touched. “Which reminds me, my dear, what happened to your sister?”
poulet basquaise.
Celeste explained that the recipe was a relic of an old plan to move to Paris, and the famous critic did not disapprove, either of the plan or of Celeste’s failure to carry it out. She chuckled and lit a cigarillo off the candle flame. “Paris, Paris. It’s not what it used to be. Do you know the poem by du Bellay?
Nouveau venu, qui cherches Rome en Rome, et rien de Rome en Rome n’aperçois …
Nowadays it’s all Russians with too much money, Russians and Japanese. Do you know why the Japanese photograph everything? They’re documenting, so that when they get home, they can reproduce it all in miniature.” Another dark chuckle. “No, that’s unkind. Celeste, my darling, do you know that I once had a penis?” I stifled laughter. “Yes, it’s true, I wore a penis to a Surrealist dinner. A lovely pink plastic penis. In more or less the appropriate location. Were the Surrealists amused? My dear, they were not. There was quite a scandal.
Mon chéri
, said our hostess, the wife of some painter or other,
cette personne a oublié de fermer sa braguette!
She forgot to button her fly! Oh, oh, Paris, really, it hasn’t been Paris since Gertrude Stein passed on to whatever was left for her to discover …”A long thin sigh of smoke. Another story. How she had hitchhiked all the way from Paris to Geneva with a fork in her purse, with which she planned to stab any man who dared to touch her. How she still had the fork. Though nowadays, she said, she preferred to be touched. “Which reminds me, my dear, what happened to your sister?”
“She fell in love,” Celeste said.
“Enfin!”
said the critic. “I was afraid it might never happen. And now, how magnificent, you’re free.”
said the critic. “I was afraid it might never happen. And now, how magnificent, you’re free.”
“I suppose so.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“May I give you a word of advice?” asked the critic. “Live. The road to art passes through extravagant life.”
Celeste smiled. “That’s easy to say.”
“Everything is easy to say,” said the critic. “Also, I would suggest you cut your hair short. As it is, you look like someone’s grandmother.” She shot up from her chair and kissed the top of my mother’s head. “I must go.”
Celeste did not cut her hair, but she spent more hours working on her project. I missed Marie, but as the weeks passed the way I missed her changed. I didn’t imagine her coming home to live with us; instead, I pictured myself going to visit Marie and Jean-Luc downtown, shaking hands with old J-L, walking with them along the South Ferry piers. The sunlight was clear and strong. I balanced on a bollard and spread my arms like wings. You’ve grown, said Marie. Have I? I asked, archly.
My understanding of how that scene would go was so complete that when Marie actually came home, and told me it had all been a terrible mistake but she was back now, she was back, and she would never leave again, I was confused. This was no longer the dream I wanted to come true. Surely there had been a mistake, a moment misfiled in the big cabinet of time. We didn’t talk about what had happened downtown, and I never knew whether she was, as she said, overcome with remorse at how she’d left her sister and her son alone, or whether Jean-Luc got tired of her, as Celeste had predicted he would. My discretion was less perfect than Marie’s, though. I mentioned that the art critic had come over to dinner, and we’d all had a good time. I asked Celeste if she might come again, and if she had any more stories about forks.
“Forks?” Marie said. “What about forks?” Her voice was bright, but it was clear to us that she was searching for an explanation.
Celeste only nodded and went on eating, and it fell to me to say, portentously, as my sole and ample revenge for what she had done, “There’s a lot you don’t know.” That was what I thought of as I watched my mothers walk through the train, looking for two seats together; and it occurred to me that they had paid for the decisions they’d made thirty years ago. They had chosen each other. They were together still.
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