The Age of Miracles (12 page)

I got his father on the phone. I told him his son had been completely happy when he left for Rome. I told him his son had been the happiest man I had ever known. I asked if I could meet the daughter in Firenze. If I could do anything at all for them. I gave them my phone number in the United States. I said they could come to visit me and I would tell them about every minute of the weeks gone by. “He was the happiest young man I've ever known,” I told them. “What fine parents you must have been. What a delightful son you had.” Had. Here in the maya of space and time. On the planet Earth, in nineteen hundred and ninety-three A.D., in the only world there is.

 

Two days later Tannin and May Chatevin got back to Paris. They had met the sister. Tannin had helped identify the body. May Chatevin had lost ten pounds. I put her to bed in her apartment with one of my three remaining Xanax tablets. I sat in her living room while she slept and tried to read
Le Monde
. Tannin had gone home to rest.

“Get up tomorrow morning and write,” I told him. “Now will you believe? Now will you go on and write your hero's death?”

“No,” he answered. “I'm going to skip over to the part that takes place in the United States. After the child is born.”

“Requiem. Yes, go on.”

“We got a dog the last year we were at Sewanee. This brown dog we found at the pound. We had to hide it from the landlord.”

“What happened to it?”

“He took it to Nashville and gave it to his mother. I guess she's still got it. He used to let it ride in the car with him everywhere he went. That dog loved to ride in automobiles. He'd put his paws up on the window and stick his head out. Everyone knew our dog. We called it Vain for a girlfriend he once had.”

“I told his father he was the happiest man I had ever known.”

“He might have been. Now he is. Now he doesn't care.” We had been whispering. Now we embraced. He left me there. I opened French
Vogue
and began to read an article about how to dye the hair on my legs. We don't really need hair on our bodies anymore. But nature keeps it there in case things change.

The Raintree Street Bar and Washerteria

T
HERE WERE FOUR POETS at the bar and the son of a poet tending bar and the Piano Prince of New Orleans playing ragtime in the next room. It was a good day at the Raintree Street Bar and Washerteria. It was a Wednesday afternoon and it was ninety-nine degrees in the shade and (because of that) there was no one in the bar but people other people could trust. All the rich ladies and Tulane students had found air-conditioned places to hang out in and people who needed the Raintree to keep their lives in order could lounge around the bar sipping beer and listening to the Piano Prince play “Such a Night” and “Junko Partner” and “I Walk on Gilded Splinters” while in the back room the washing machines and dryers did their accustomed work. It was June in New Orleans, Louisiana, and it was exactly as hot as it was supposed to be.

“Fuck a bunch of rich women chasing my ass all over town,” the Most Famous Poet in New Orleans was saying to the Jazz Poet. “Fuck them calling me on the telephone. I can't even take a shit without the goddamn phone ringing off the hook. ‘Finley, is that you? You don't sound like yourself, honey. Is something wrong?' Is something wrong, you goddamn bitch, you bet it's wrong. Leave me alone. Oh, please, for God's sake, leave me alone.” The Most Famous Poet laid his head down on the bar and the Jazz Poet raised an eyebrow in the direction of the bartender.

“Come on, Finley,” the bartender said. “Come lie down on the sofa in the office. You got to save yourself for the night. Jay-Jay's coming to sit in with the band and Johnnie Vidocavitch will be here. You don't want to use it up in the daytime, do you? Come lay down.”

“Lie,” the Most Famous Poet said. “Chickens lay.” His head was almost to the edge of the bar, his right hand shoved his beer farther and farther down the bar. The phone beside the cash register was ringing. “Don't answer it,” he continued. “I'm not here. Say Finley isn't here. Finley is in Galway where he wants to be. Finley gone bye-bye. For God's sake, Charles Joseph, help me.” Now he was all the way down and the Jazz Poet moved behind him and propped him up and held him to the bar.

“Who doesn't he want to talk to?” the Jazz Poet asked. “Who's he hiding from now?” The Jazz Poet had only wandered in to wash a load of clothes. He hadn't meant to get so deep into poetry on a Wednesday afternoon in June.

“The society lady painter. The one that does the cartoons of her friends.”

“Oh, shit,” the Jazz Poet said. “I remember her.”

“She came in here last night all gussied up in black. She'd been to that Andy Warhol thing at the museum. Her mother was with her. Her mother's as bad as she is. Her mother was chasing ass all over the bar. They parked right out front and left the motor running. She's been stalking Finley for days. I guess he laid her. He shouldn't lay them if he doesn't want them coming after him.”

“Christ,” the Jazz Poet said. “Jesus Christ.”

It was June of 1979. A hard time for poets in New Orleans. Every society woman in town who wasn't into tennis was into poetry. They were trying to be poets, but they didn't know how. Some of the ones who were into tennis were also into poetry. They were into poetry but they didn't know how to do it yet. They didn't know how to write the poems or what poets to talk about or how to get anyone to publish the poems they wrote in case they wrote them. There wasn't a big poetry hook-up yet. Of course, over at Tulane a real poet was teaching a poetry class but it met at inconvenient hours for society women just getting into poetry and besides you had to already know how to do poetry to get into it.

Society women are hard to keep out of something once they decide they want to be in, however, and they had discovered the Raintree Street Bar and Washerteria. One of them had even brought her maid over one day pretending their washing machine at home was broken. There she was, sitting at the bar drinking beer and pretending to be a poet and going back every now and then to make sure the maid wasn't bored.

The society women were being terribly frustrated by the world of poetry in nineteen hundred and seventy-nine and if there is one thing a society woman won't put up with it is being frustrated or bored.

“Finley started a poetry magazine with her,” the bartender was explaining. “She got drunk one night and gave him a check for five thousand dollars to revive
The Quachita Review
. Now she's making him do it.”

“They asked me for some stuff,” the Jazz Poet answered. “They said they'd pay five dollars a line. I gave them a poem. First American Non-exclusive Serial Rights only, of course. Well, it looks like he's out, Charles Joseph. You want to leave him here on the bar?”

“Move his beer. No point in having to clean that up.”

Sandy George Wade made his way down Raintree Street from the streetcar stop on Carrollton Avenue, walking as fast as ninety-nine degrees in the shade would allow him to walk, admiring the windows of the little old-fashioned shops, pawn shops, and shoe repair shops and an antique store and a bakery. He had the address of the Raintree in his pocket. A poet named Francis Alter who came to teach at his reform school had given it to him a few months before. “Go by there,” the poet had said. “There are good people there. People who will help you.”

“Can I say I'm a friend of yours?”

“Sure. There are people there who know me. They know my work.”

“Are you famous?”

“They'll know my work. Poets know other poets by their work. Go there if you get lonely in New Orleans. Keep this address. You might need it someday.” The poet had folded up the piece of paper with the address of the Raintree on it and watched while Sandy put it in his pocket.

Sandy arrived at the door of the Raintree and looked inside and saw the Jazz Poet holding up the Most Famous Poet at the bar and heard the Piano Prince playing “High Blood Pressure.”
I get highhhh blood pressure when I hear your name
. It looked like a good place to stop. It looked like a place where a man could begin to straighten something out. The Jazz Poet was wearing a clean white T-shirt and a panama hat. He looked like a poet should look and Sandy walked on down the bar and took a seat beside him and ordered a beer.

“Did any of you ever know Francis Alter?” he asked. “He told me I could find friends here if I used his name.”

“Francis,” the Jazz Poet said. “You know Francis?”

“I knew him down in Texas. I was in his class.”

“He's the best. The absolute nonpareil. The very best. Look, we've got to get this guy to the office. You want to help?”

“Sure. I'll be glad to help. Who is he?”

“He's a great poet. The best in New Orleans.”

Sandy and the Jazz Poet eased Finley off the stool and moved him toward the office, with the bartender leading the way. “Don't answer it,” Finley kept calling out. “Tell her I'm not here.”

“He's not here,” the bartender said. “That's for sure.”

“Finley in spirit land,” the Jazz Poet added. “Hey, I could make a poem of that. Finley gone to spirit land where no rich lady bother him. Not make him read her dreadful poems. Not make him listen to her whine. No ladies call him on the phone. No magazines send him rejection slips. No blues in spirit land. Goddamn, Charles Joseph. Listen to this. Ain't No Blues in Spirit Land. What a riff.”

“That's good,” the bartender agreed. “That's really good, Dickie. Especially the last line.”

“Where are we going?” Sandy asked. He was now the sole support of Finley. The other two were leaning against the walls talking. The four of them were wedged into a small hall between the bar and the washerteria. The air was thick with the exhaust from the dryers. The smell of panties cooking, Sandy decided. Little flowered panties getting cooked.

“Turn in that door,” the bartender said. He took back his part of the burden, hooked his shoulder under Finley's arm, and began to drag him to the door. “Right in there, that's the office.” Sandy pushed open the door and they entered a small neat room with a large sofa in one corner.

“Right there,” the bartender directed. “Ease him down. That's it. He'll be okay as soon as he gets some sleep.”

“What's wrong with him?” Sandy said. “Who doesn't he want to call him?”

“He's in deep trouble,” the bartender answered. “They put an article about him in the paper and now all the society women are after his ass. It happens. I told him not to let them interview him. My old man's a poet. I slept in a bed once with W. H. Auden. I know about this stuff.”

“You slept with Auden?” the Jazz Poet said. “You never told me that.”

“He was passed out in my bed, in Starkville, when he came to read, the last year before he died. He slept in his clothes. God, he was a lovely man.”

“I envy you so much,” the Jazz Poet said. “I would give anything to have had your childhood.”

“It was nice,” the bartender agreed. “I wouldn't trade it.”

“Who's Auden?” Sandy asked. “Is he some friend of yours?”

“Let's go back to the bar,” the Jazz Poet answered. “I want to hear about Francis. All my life I wanted to meet that man.” He put his arm around Sandy's shoulder, and, with the bartender leading the way, they went back down the hall and out into the lofty beer-and cigarette-laden air of the Raintree bar. The sky had darkened. It was going to rain. The Piano Prince had just returned to the piano after taking a break to get a fix in the men's room. He smiled upon the world. He lifted his genius-laden fingers and dropped them down on the piano and began to play his famous rendition of “Oh, Those Lonely, Lonely Nights.”

“This poetry seems like a good deal,” Sandy began. “I like the feel of it. I'd like to get in on some of it.”

“It's about death, baby,” the Jazz Poet answered. “But it's to keep the skull at bay. I wrote a poem about waiting in the welfare line that got me so much pussy I had to change my phone number. I just wrote down what everybody said while we waited to get our checks. That line used to stretch all the way down Camp Street from the old Times-Picayune Building past Lafayette Square to the Blood Bank. I met some characters in that line who were unforgettable and I made the longest poem in the world out of it and used to put it on down at this theater we had on Valencia Street. I had to beat them off with a stick when I'd do my welfare line poem. I'll do it for you someday.”

“It's great,” the bartender put in. “It's a great poem.”

“But enough about me,” the Jazz Poet added. He pushed his panama hat back from his brow and wiped his face with a pale orange and white bandanna, then tied the bandanna around his neck. He could see their reflection in the bar mirror. Charles Joseph's back in his ironed white shirt and the good-looking new kid and his own hat and bandanna and strong hawkish profile. “Tell me about Francis,” he went on. “I'd give anything to know him. He's the best there is, the absolute best.”

“I thought you said that guy was.”

“He's the best there is down here. Francis is the best in the United States. He's a god.”

“I'm going to go see him,” Sandy said. “He said I could go up there to Arkansas and help him run some lines.”

“I'll go with you. God, I'd love to go up there. Do you think he'd mind if I came along?”

Oh, those lonely, lonely nights. Oh, those lonely, lonely nights
. In the adjoining room the Piano Prince was playing his heart out. He was in heaven, back in the arms of his honey juice and as soon as he finished here he'd be back in his bed with his monkey in his arms.
Monkey, monkey, monkey
, the Piano Prince sang to himself and laid down his heart into his hands.
Oh, those lonely, lonely nights. Oh, those lonely, lonely nights
.