Famous in Cyprus

“Never a dull moment,” said Lady, looking up from painting her houses. We were sitting in her other store, Mi Pequeño San Juan. I was there, since there had been a mini-hurricane the night before; the water had backed up in the street, to such an extent that the pipes draining the roofs became vents for the street water. So the Poet’s Passage now has a swimming pool on the roof. What doesn’t it have?

Electricity.

OK—so Stephan and Naïa, tutor and tutee respectively, had moved to the front window, where there was sufficient light. I speak briefly to Zorba, Lady’s brother, who lives above the café and, now, under the swimming pool. He was up from one to five in the morning, coping with the situation.

It’s odd, the stuff that happens in the tropics that never seems to happen anywhere else. Where else does it rain so hard that the street water backs up the drains and floods the roofs? Or consider what Zorba reported:

“The transformers began exploding so bad it sounded like a war zone….”

Well, it’s been an improbable week, starting on Saturday, when a woman came into the café, eager to meet Lady, who is a poet as well as house painter. Lady had left a few minutes before to go to the movies with Naïa, and the woman was crestfallen. So she fell back on second best: me.

“I’m from Cyprus, but I’m here for a convention of chiropractors,” she said. So we chatted; she’s a music teacher and a poet, but not, it turned out, a chiropractor. That’s her husband.

“Hey, Marc, did you know I’m famous in Cyprus?” said Lady casually, a couple days later.

“What?”

“Yeah, there was this lady hanging around the café, and she couldn’t wait to meet me. Elizabeth kept calling me, asking when I was going to get there.”

Elizabeth being the manager of the gift shop….

“So she says everybody in Cyprus—well, everybody who reads poetry, that is—knows me and reads me. And when they heard she was going to Puerto Rico, they all got jealous and told her she HAD to meet me. Who knew? I’m famous in Cyprus!”

“Wow!”

“So then she asked, would I be willing to go to Cyprus, to give a lecture? So I told her: two first class tickets, and a week’s stay in a hotel. You wanna go?”

This is, of course, improbable.

As was my reaction, several hours later.

It was Monday, you see, and I had woken late, and was out of sorts. And then I had gone to the café, which now has air conditioning (after a couple months without), but Internet? It had checked out several days before.

All of that created a peculiarly excellent agar for a petri dish overflowing with….

A.   Envy

B.    Resentment

C.    Self-Pity

D.   Annoyance

E.     All of the above, and by the way? This is the answer….

Why, I raged, should Lady get to be famous in Cyprus when I have written what the six people who have read Iguanas say is a great, a wonderful, a landmark book, destined to blaze brightly against the literary skies of not just Wisconsin, not the United States, but verily, the entire world—and assuredly the whole of the solar system. What was so special about her? What about me? Sure, she’s been at it for twenty years, and I only drifted in the door—and the back door at that—a couple years ago, but WHAT ABOUT ME! At this point, I am raging in circles in the living room.

“Dammit, people love her poetry so much, they’ve even tattooed it on themselves! Remember that lady who came into the coffee shop and peeled her shirt down? And there it was—still red and glistening: Little by Little. Dammit, and then Lady has to sit down and remark that it’s the SECOND time someone has tattooed her poetry on themselves. Dammit!”

The cats scatter….

I stormed up the street, and tore into her shop.

“I just want you to know,” I said meanly, “that if the entire ISLAND of Cyprus came outside and begged me to be famous there, I WOULD SAY NO!!!”

“Marc?”

Well, I thought of Franny, who had once remarked, “well, we’re just going to have to meet at my current level of immaturity….” She had been playing a board game with Tyler, her 10-year old grandson, and there was a dispute about the rules. He dug his heels in, she dug her heels in, and if Jeanne hadn’t dragged Franny off by the ears to the kitchen, they’d still be at it.

“Well, I would,” I said defensively, and then turned to go.

Lady knows—sometimes words don’t help things; she hugs me instead.

“Hey, Marc, you see that lady over there?”

It’s the next morning, and yes, I had seen the lady, and had noted that she was cachectic—a fancy way of saying that she was looking only slightly better than your average concentration camp victim.

“She’s only got twenty days to live—that’s what her husband told me. He called and asked if it would be OK if they came from Portland and spent her last days in the café. See? Her whole family is there….”

It comes back to me—those days of waiting for the end, of holding on and letting go, of having your love torn out of you, wrenched away, of screaming silently and going away to wail in the woods and coming back and coping again until the next time you had to vent it.

There’s something else as well, something almost unbearable to say: you want your loved one to die.

Not all of you, not even most of you. But there is a part of you saying, “if it has to be—and I know perfectly well that it does—then for God’s sake GET IT OVER WITH! Because I cannot stand this pain, and it’s doing her no good at all anyway….”

You’re living with every last nerve ending firing standing next to a volcano in a hurricane. Oh, and did I mention the earthquake? In these moments, you are as close to the life source as you will ever be.

And they had come to Lady’s café? At such a moment?

OK, I decide.

She can be famous in Cyprus….