Well, it was a Joan Didion moment, or would have been if I
were Joan Didion, or could even halfway approximate the skill with which Didion
would have analyzed the setting, considered the antecedents, and then
scrupulously scalpelled—I KNOW, computer, but it should be a word—the incident
until it revealed precisely (a favorite Didion word) whatever it was she wanted
to reveal.
So we were at the table, Raf and I, joined by Taí and
Montalvo, since we had called him to tell him about Kitty’s death, and then to
invite him to dinner. And however wrong it seems to serve up the news of
Kitty’s death in an adverbial clause, trust me—we hadn’t taken it lightly.
We had taken Kitty to the veterinarian on Wednesday; on
Thursday he was doing much better. But on Friday morning, the vet called to say
that Kitty had a blood clot in his brain, and was showing neurological
symptoms. When I saw him on Friday afternoon, it was clear: Kitty was suffering
and no longer the cat we knew.
I wrote a poem about it, since there was nothing else I
could do, nothing else I could write, and since I had been strong for Raf over
the weekend, and now had the time to collapse on Monday. So we were talking
about the poem, which went as follows:
Grief
The problem? Somebody decided it was time
To sandblast my heart, the fucker,
And so the stains of love, of nurture, of life itself
Have to be scoured away.
It will be a gray, gritty sludge that will drip from the
attacked walls
Even as my heart still beats
Though at this point, well,
Is there a point?
The same committee sent someone off to find more
Hydrochloric acid to pressure-pump into my churning stomach,
Which has decided that food is no longer a necessity,
Since will anything again ever nurture me?
The chairman of the committee?
Well, they called him up on emergency duty,
Since there are now three shifts, the most active being
Of course! The night shift….
So I am there where he is not, alone in a dark apartment,
Looking at light outside that not again
Will come inside, despite the lamps that will get turned on
Only to light up nothing.
I only wonder, what manner of beast would chose this work,
What past traumas had left sullen purple keloids on every
nerve,
What cataracts had so blinded their eyes
That even light was a distant memory, or perhaps forgotten?
They are the termites of the soul, these mites who man the
hoses,
Who scour off both the stains and the patina,
Until the bleeding, beating heart is scraped of everything,
Until nothing is left but memory.
Well, it’s not much of a poem, but then, I’m not much of a
poet. So we were talking about a man who is very much of a poet, Derek Walcott,
who was born in St. Lucia and trained as a painter, which presumably is how the
brother of a friend of Taí’s became friends with him. (Just parenthetically,
though come to think of it, this is parenthetically, shouldn’t there be
a word for “the friend of a friend?” How many times have you had to say that? I
propose cousinfriend.) And Montalvo
had never heard of him, though Walcott had won the Nobel Prize, for which
Montalvo has the speech if not yet the book, or even the oeuvre, a word which
came to my mind, since I had just read that the Nobel Committee had said that
Walcott had “a poetic
oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a
multicultural commitment.”
Well,
an oeuvre seems like a totally cool thing to have, especially if some committee
decides to give me a prize. But then I wondered, does having written over 700
blog posts count? Didn’t seem likely, so I went over to ask Lady, who
definitely has an oeuvre, since the poems are hanging all over the walls, and
what could be more evident—or oeurvent—than
that?
So
Lady doesn’t know the word oeuvre, but Nico does, since he’s French and
therefore can even tell us how to pronounce it: “it’s just like the sound you
make when you vomit—oeuvre (that
italics being the best I can do to sound like a Frenchman on the computer….)
So
Lady hears the story of Walcott and Montalvo, and goes on to tell me that she
met Walcott, years before he won the Nobel, and what was Walcott doing? Being a
bum on the beach.
“So
we talked for a long time, and then he asked if he could come and take a shower
at my house. So I took him home, and my mother talked to him for a while, and
then she let him take a shower….”
See?
Lady’s updated the old English saying: always be nice to the girls, because you
never know whom they might marry. Or in this case, win the Nobel prize….
Then
Lady goes on to say: she had texted Montalvo that he owed her an apology, and
he had texted back: don’t hold your breath. Not a very inventive response for a
poet….
“So
he’s all yours now; I’m watching from a distance. I’ve done it for a lot more
years than you….”
What
had happened? Lady, ever trying to work Montalvo back into the Passage—that’s
the Poet’s Passage, in case you thought that first phrase was vaguely
obscene—had hired Montalvo to work at a private party. What had happened?
“I
need to see you right now, because I’m having a nervous breakdown….”
That’s
what Lady had said to me the day after the party, the entertainment—ok, the show—of
which had been Montalvo, and nobody had been amused. In fact, Lady had spent
four hours crying afterwards, and had thought to call me at four in the
morning.
Montalvo’s
story? He, surrounded by perfidious and jaundiced eyes, had been slandered!!
Fresh snow looked like 42d Street in its luridest days next to Montalvo!
“So
I’m done with him,” says Lady, and then goes on to ask, why had we been talking
about Walcott?
“Well,”
I tell her, and that’s when…
…the
gun went off.
