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To Michael Rothenberg's previous pieceLake Effect
Ohio--Lake Effect. Airports shut down. Flight's delayed. Arriving on time at Econo Lodge Bar. Electronic slot machines. How far will I go to make myself crazy? I figured she'd be gentle, and she was.
We meet.
Cold air meets warmer waters of lake creates mist, condensation, snow. Lake Effect blows over me like chocolate and cheap hotels, true love and lost control. Dreams never fulfilled. If only there was somewhere else to go. Somewhere to hide.
*
Lake Effect. Snow blows through hole in my shoe.
40 degrees below wind chill.
I feel myself harden.
I want to be loved, not controlled.
Ohio. Lake Effect snow blankets neighborhood streets.
Little houses. Trees and cars bound in white effect.
Nowhere to go but deeper.
Find door. Cocoon. Love.
Lithium and grace.
*
We talk all night, do the best we can, not really knowing each other. Everything being spontaneous. Without commitment.
And we can't get over how comfortable we are with one another. It seems so magically familiar.
As if we'd known each other in another lifetime.
But since other lifetimes are out of the question in a practical world, we find practical explanations to fascination. Figure there are most likely ten thousand other possible lovers walking around that very moment who could have fit the profile.
Thousands of similar footprints, fingerprints could fit in these same mittens and boots that belong to us as we embrace in Lake Effect.
Like the man who lives down the block who won't leave his wife. I'm like him. Right? There's always someone else, like-minded, who'd appreciate our kind of appearances.
Our kind of attitudes.
It's all in casting based on available talent.
Others who might share our brand of humor and disguise.
Who would understand what we're going through, make us feel okay about what we're doing, reassure us when we can't keep an erection, or have an orgasm.
Not Soul Mates, the two of us, we think, just two cool people with comparable cravings and the right set of attractions and contractions, thinking about Lake Effect, and how the road that led us to one another, although paved with good intentions, might have been closed by State Police anywhere or anytime.
It just happened to be us.
*
"I like you big time," she says, scanning the linoleum.
"Thanks."
"I think you're sexy," she strokes the hair on my chest, black silk on an ear of romantic corn.
*
In our bedroom in Susan's house built in 1917.
On the second floor, one of three small bedrooms situated around a narrow hallway.
A small bathroom with big white porcelain tub across the hall from all the rooms upstairs. A miracle of functionality.
Tub bubbling with shampoo. Deep enough for one. Wide enough for two. Never enough hot water, never enough heat in the world.
Upstairs is where we become butterflies in silky cocoon.
Downstairs, a living room with cozy fireplace. Mirror over mantle. Ornately upholstered chairs. Motif of Japan, and hand-carved wooden box Susan's grandfather made.
Dining room with dining table for stacking books, organizing papers, with six chairs for hanging overcoats.
The stairway from kitchen that goes underground to basement where latest communications equipment, computers, printers, phones are installed and in operation. Where Susan can go to be alone, stoned, in her own home, warm away from any storm blown in from Lake Michigan.
*
The kitchen.
Chrome stools with blue vinyl tops stood around Formica table built out of wall.
Susan offers a bowl of potato chips and cream dip.
"I've always wanted to have my own radio show," says Susan.
"You could do it," says Jan.
"Let's call it "Everyone Has One," says Susan.
Something about opinions and assholes.
We never left the kitchen, except to find the bed.
"Every soul is a melody that needs renewing."
"Who said that?"
"John Donne."
"And you're smart, too," Jan says, pouring herself a glass of white wine.
We kiss.
It went on like that for days because there was time to go on.
*
I like that. Do that. More. Hold me.
There are no windows or walls. All mysteries remain.
I can't say that, it wouldn't be right.
But I want to. I love you. Me too.
Pondering a place in our bigger lives for each other.
Holding on.
*
Going back to the first night, Econo Lodge midnight.
The short front step to a long weekend.
"He's cute," Jan says to Susan, as I sit down.
I'd take her, I think.
A dozen semis, steaming giants, heard of mastodons idling in adjacent truck-stop, waiting for apocalypse.
I discover her feet, skin, teeth, eyes.
Gone to bed.
Wrap ourselves in strange undertakers gauze.
Waking at four in the afternoon. Going back to bed at twelve. Never really getting anywhere, never really caring about getting anywhere.
Exploring, pressing, sealing one another in atmospheric depression.
White depression. Slow white depression.
Snow piled up over everything.
No landmarks or details.
Only hurried recollections of airplane to motel, gas stations, apparel stores and sexual initiation.
Then Jan and I move out of Econo Lodge to Susan's house and our cocoon upstairs.
*
We stop at Lulu's.
Eat late breakfast.
"No substitutions," says frumpy waitress, scolding, scribbling out instructions. "It says it on the board over there." She points pencil at menu on wall.
"Okay, then just give me what I want," I say.
"Hashed browns, crispy, rasher of bacon, short stack of pancakes, two eggs over-light, buttered toast and cup of coffee, black," the waitress repeats, yellowing hair, lopsided in oversized blue jeans and floral blouse.
Country radio blares in the repeat of pinball and video.
"I'll have the same," Jan says, putting menu down, smiling at me.
*
Under sheets.
Under blankets of darkness falling earlier every evening.
Waking later everyday.
Days getting shorter.
Memories spill in one sacred bed beneath blankets that will never untangle.
She kisses my chest.
Stops to wonder how far we should go.
"No, I don't think we should, " I hesitate, immediately regretting discretion, praying, for another chance to feel her lips around me.
"I understand," she says, lifting her head from my stomach.
"It's not that I wouldn't like it, it's just that we've never been tested. I'm old enough to make stupid mistakes. But bringing it home to my wife, isn't fair."
"I understand," she says. Moving her hand over my leg. Pulling herself up to me. My mouth.
*
Roads closed.
Poems and more poems, in cabinets, in books by bed, gold fish swimming across wall, waiting to be plugged in. Computer with goldfish screensaver.
String of gold crescent moons smiling, waiting to be plugged in. Lutes and lamps and collages. Thoughtful but spare. Quiet and alone.
I'm glad I did this. I think.
Lie back. Dissolve in movie of expectations.
Reality demands intoxication. Intravenous valium and laughing gas.
Night built inside of shell, built out of genetic depression, and sticky expectations.
*
"We're all fools." I tell her.
"I know," she says, excuses my Tom Foolery.
"I'm not as young as I used to be." I say.
"I don't suppose anyone is," she replies.
Trapped in sensation, wishing to stay trapped, sooner or later roads will open again, and we'll return to our native lands.
Caged animals, we begin to feel the security of incarceration.
Lake Effect.
*
Toll roads closed in Ohio.
Lake Effect in effect.
Shutdown in time capsule that doesn't recognize husbands, wives or children.
Dripping devotion.
Propelling ourselves into affection.
Goldfish in snow bowl. Jar she turns upside down and shakes. It's winter.
Silently.
Lake Effect blurs affair, not caring where it goes from wherever, wanting more shrouded sharing.
But we're not there yet.
"I could marry you," she says. "Well, maybe not, but I'd be interested in getting something going."
Who knows, maybe someday there will be a breed of humans who'll know what they want exactly. And what they want will also be what they need to survive.
Shouldn't that be what we're breeding for?
We're the kind of humans who climb in and out of emotional/psychological day and night, black and white, boxes, Chinese silks, parade until circus tents come down, and elephants trained to travel by train to another town, begin to travel away.
We're like that.
Like me.
Desire what I can't possibly have, because I can't possibly let go of who I was.
Like me.
Comfortable in the freeze.
*
"Come on, do it, you'll see, we'll have fun," she says.
Sounds so simple, seductively frightening.
"Come on. Just you and me, no one has to know," she challenges me.
"Loose lips..." I warn.
"Not a word," she reassures.
So distant and promising.
We meet secretly. Never speak of regret.
Though there were some gentle thumpings in the angora net of silence that swept over us in the last moments of the act.
*
We walk around the room naked, surprised with ourselves, confident.
*
I fall asleep. And dream of falling from the arms of one woman into the arms of another.
Raised, as if afloat, over a crowd without faces.
Handed overhead, a corpse, or one of a million sheep, overhead, never touching the ground.
Handed over to morning's mortality.
*
And there's more. Another one. Besides my wife. Or Jan. In Miami.
She doesn't know how I feel but I've begun to feel a longing. A tropical longing in the face-burning whip of Lake Effect.
I've never been rewarded for doing the right thing.
I sleep in Lake Effect dreaming of Miami.
Put my hand around her waist, hold her perfectly. Arm around her waist, and the "fit" of her.
I run home to Miami to find the fit of her.
In sleep.
*
Remember the first time, when the idea of "perfect fit" took me over. Mystified by the idea there could be one person alone who perfectly fit.
Erasmus probably stayed in seventeenth-century England too long, because he knew the feeling of fitting. Nothing was going on at the time, the English were all barbarians, but he had a friend he was dedicated to.
*
I'm moving on. Going home.
Not to the home of my wife, but the home of my first love.
Where palm trees and orchids, Spanish moss and saw-grass blossom.
Where pink birds, red birds, blue birds, coral reefs, seashells, tarpon and marlin, bonefish and puffer fish, angel fish and sheepshead, redfish and jewfish, yellow jack and mackerel, trout and sharks, barracuda and pinfish, stingrays and jellyfish blossom.
Return to familiar heat and flesh.
Where I was born.
Walking out of blizzard, onto warm white sand.
Warming feet in sand of someone new.
I taste death on the tip of my tongue.
*
"Let me know if you ever want to get married," I say over the phone to someone in Miami.
"It's too bad you don't want to get divorced," Miami says without hesitation.
"Why is everyone married?" I ask.
"Who are you saying this too?"
"I'm not sure."
Lost.
"You don't know what you're saying," Miami continues, shifting in her dress, in subtropical rhythm. Shoulders slipping out of her dress. Pulling straps back up over her shoulder. In rhythm. I could have sworn this was an invitation to come over.
Lost.
*
In Oregon.
There's no other character I can create besides myself.
A computer. Printer. Zen poem on the wall.
Tapestries from Bolivia and Mexico. A pearl-beaded hat from Thailand adorned with rooster feathers.
Ten oversized monographs of Argentinean Flora. Six pack of Billy Beer. Green paisley bean bag frog slumped over handmade tool chest. Stone crab claw from Joe's Stone Crab, blues harmonica, onyx letter opener from Mexico, scrap of weathered barn wood hung beneath sleeping Javanese mask. Naked woman sitting in abalone shell, hair blown about, floating in empty space, while pigeon flutters gray and blue wings invisibly overhead. An ibis preening, feeding in roots and branches of tree carved from pale wood in glass box from Singapore. Photo of San Francisco garter snake watching me.
Books, Pushkin, Pound, Roethke, Creeley, Whalen, Meltzer, Donne, Apollonaire, Baudelaire and Melville. Colored glass balls. Geodes. Maracas, dried gourd and seeds on stick. Copper fittings from power poles. Books on Jewish philosophy.
Crowded onto shelves.
Crowded into dusty affairs.
Refinished secretariat, like an ark, ensconced with fetishes, photos of people I pray for, green and yellow polka dotted papier mache frog, long red tongue drooping to floor disguising its inner cigarette lighter nature from 1960's, coasters from pubs throughout Great Britain.
Books no one has ever read.
Dusty affairs.
*
Lost in Lake Effect.
Jan lying beside me in our bedroom upstairs sleeping through my thinking.
*
In Oregon.
Everyday electronic treadmill keeps me up to speed. Mahogany red top Guild guitar, I can't play because of bursitis. Six foot section of vine from Louisiana thicket. Antique jewelry case where I keep toothpicks, postage stamps, credit cards I never plan to use.
*
I chew a toothpick in the dark.
Now there are three.
Ohio. Miami. And of course, my ever-faithful Oregonian wife walking Pacific dunes blowing through a fir forest in a trance.
I'll hang a small but colorful map of continental United States on wall, like body of Jesus. Stick pins in every city where I've sought answers to the great mystery of the right fit.
The dissembling of Soul Mates.
*
"But who's the one in Miami?" Jan asks. "You never told me about her."
"There's no one in Miami, but I suspect my libido to expand momentarily to include the unknown."
*
Obsessionate passion grace to stay depression.
Transgressions and afflictions.
Pulling my pants down in unfamiliar places in obsession of pleasure, anonymous, to steer me from chasm of emotional impotence and creative detachment.
What are the missing questions?
Good question, I think.
Then she walks me down stone steps, into subterranean torture room. I might find it fascinating. Might want to stay.
I did.
*
In the fortress of Lake Effect.
If I keep running I'll be okay. Like reading a book.
The curtains gone. The carpet next.
It's time to run. I'll tear them all away.
Lake Effect. All effects.
Find foundation, rebuild from bottom up.
Look at this house. Wallpaper coming down. Cats sleeping in open drawers.
*
"Are you the one? With dark eyes and mouth I want to kiss? My Miami invention," I ask, trying to get her attention.
"You stay right there. Don't get up until you've done your work!" she says. "You have to get things straight. Find yourself!"
"Where are you?" asks Jan.
"Where's Susan?" I reply, changing the weather.
"Downstairs."
"Oh." I reply. "I have to go."
"You have so much to be grateful for," says Miami. "There's no reason to move on."
*
My proclivity toward depression began when I was ten. I saw it as an awareness of the true nature of things.
It took me most of my life to figure it was a chemical imbalance.
Walking stone chambers, room to room.
*
"Now where's he going," inquires the triad. "You don't have to get up or go outside. Find your car inside your mind, drive for miles until you find what you fear most," continues the triad of lovers. "Until then, stay where you are."
So I cross Rocky Mountains. Head south through Albuquerque, east on Interstate 10. It's a long way across Texas. They should have made Texas into two states.
Louisiana. Mississippi. Alabama. Florida.
And I'm home free.
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