Why Not You and I?

SILTED IN

The pain in his chest was back again. Perhaps it was worse this time, but he couldn’t remember.

He leaned against the sink, trying to belch. The kitchen counter was stacked high with dishes: to his right dirty ones; to his left clean ones, waiting to dry themselves. He rinsed the suds from his hands, staring at them as the suds peeled away. Were the wrinkles from the dishwater, or had he grown that much older?

He sat down heavily at the kitchen table, remembered his cup of coffee. It had grown cold, but he sipped it without tasting. That was enough of the dishes for today; tomorrow he’d make a fresh start.

He hated the dishes. Each one was a memory. This was her coffee cup. This was her favorite glass. They drank together from these wine glasses. They’d picked out this china pattern together. This casserole dish was a wedding present. This skillet was the one she used to make her special omelets. This was the ash tray she always kept beside her favorite chair.

Her chair. He shuffled into the living room, collapsed across the swaybacked couch. Her chair waited there for her, just as she had left it. He wouldn’t sit in it. A guest might, but he never had guests now.

A broken spring pressed into his consciousness, and he shifted his weight. Not much weight now. Once he had enjoyed cooking for her. Now every meal he fixed reminded him of her. He left his food untasted. When he cleaned out the freezer, her dog had grown plump on roasts and steaks and chops, stews and soups and etouffees, fried chicken and roast goose and curried duck. After her dog died, he simply scraped the untouched food into the dog’s old bowl, left it on the back porch for whatever might be hungry. When his stomach gave him too much pain, he made a sandwich of something, sometimes ate it.

The mail truck was honking beside his mailbox, and he remembered that he hadn’t checked his mail all week. Once he had waited impatiently each day for the mail to come. Now it was only bills, duns, letters from angry publishers, some misdirected letters for her, a few magazines whose subscriptions still ran.

He was out of breath when he climbed back up the steps from the street. He stared at his reflection in the hallway mirror without recognition, then dumped the armload of unopened mail onto the pile that sprawled across the coffee table.

The phone started to ring, but his answering machine silently took charge. He never played back the messages, used the phone only now and again to order a pizza. No one comes up into the hills at night.

“Why don’t you answer it?” Bogey asked him. He was working his way through a bottle, waiting for Ingrid to show up.

“Might be my agent. He’s been stalling my publishers as long as he can. Now I owe him money, too.”

“Maybe it’s her.”

He ignored the poster and found the bathroom. He took a long piss, a decidedly realistic touch which was the trendiest verism in horror fiction this season. So inspired, he groped his way into his study, dropped into the leather swivel chair she had bought him for his last birthday. He supposed it was a gift.

He brought up the IBM word processor and hit the command for global search and replace, instructed it to replace the phrase “make love” with “piss on” throughout the novel. Yes, go ahead and replace without asking.

While the computer sorted that out, he fumbled with the bank of stereo equipment, tried to focus his eyes on the spines of a thousand record albums. He reached out to touch several favorites, pulled his hand away reluctantly each time. Every album was a memory. The Blues Project album he’d played while they made love for the first time. The Jefferson Airplane album she loved to dance to: Don’t you need somebody to love? And not the Grateful Dead — too many stoned nights of sitting on the floor under the black lights, passing the pipe around. Hendrix? No, too many acid trip memories.

“You’re burning out, man,” Jimi told him.

“Better to burn out than to fade away,” he answered. “You should know.”

Jimi shrugged and went back to tuning his Fender Stratocaster.

He left the stereo on, still without making a selection. Sometimes a beer helped him get started.

The dishes were still waiting in the sink, and Jim Morrison was looking in the refrigerator. He reached an arm in past Jimbo and snagged the last beer. He’d have to remember to go to the store soon.

“Fucking self-indulgent,” Jim said.

“What was? Oh, here.” He offered Jimbo the beer can.

Jim shook his head. “No. I meant changing ‘fuck’ to ‘piss on’ in the novel.”

“It’s the same thing. And anyway, it’s so New Wave.”

“How would you know? You’re past forty.”

“I was New Wave back in the ’60s.”

“And you’re still stuck in the ’60s.”

“And so are you.”

“Maybe so. But I know that I’m dead.”

“You and all my heroes.”

Back in his study he sipped his beer and considered his old Royal portable. Maybe go back to the roots: a quill pen, or even clay tablets.

He rolled in a sheet of paper, typed I at the top of the page. He sipped the rest of his beer and stared at the blank page. After a while he noticed that the beer can was empty.

The battery in his car was dead, but there was a 7-11 just down the hill. His chest was aching again by the time he got back. He chugged a fresh brew while he put away the rest of the six-pack, a Redi-Maid cheese sandwich, a jar of instant coffee and a pack of cigarettes. The long belch made him feel better.

James Dean was browsing along his bookshelves when he returned to the living room. He was looking at a copy of Electric Visions. “I always wondered why you dedicated this book to me,” he said.

“It was my first book. You were my first hero — even before Elvis. I grew up in the ’50s wanting to be like you.”

James read from the copyright page: “1966.” He nodded toward the rest of the top shelf. “You write these others, too?”

“Fourteen hardcovers in ten years. I lived up to your image. Check out some of the reviews I stuck inside the books: ‘The New Wave’s brightest New Star.’ ‘Sci-fi’s rebellious new talent.’ ‘The angriest and most original writer in decades.’ Great jacket blurbs.” James Dean helped himself to a cigarette. “I don’t notice any reviews more recent than 1978.”

“Saving reviews is the mark of a beginner.” There hadn’t been many since 1978, and those had been less than kind. The last had pronounced sentence: Tired rehash of traditional themes by one of the genre’s Old Hands. Fie hadn’t finished a book since then.

James French-inhaled. “Don’t see many books since 1978 here either.”

“Whole next shelf.”

“Looks like reprints mostly.”

“My books are considered classics. They’re kept in print.”

“What a load of bull.”

“Why don’t you go take a spin in your Porsche?”

The remark was in poor taste, and he decided to play his tape of Rebel Without a Cause by way of apology. And then he remembered how she had cried when the cops gunned down Sal Mineo. Maybe he should get some work done instead.

The stereo and the word processor were both still on when he returned to his study, and there was a sheet of paper in his typewriter with 1 typed across the top. He studied all of this in some confusion. He cut power switches; cranked out the blank sheet of paper, carefully placed it in a clean manila folder and dated the tab.

He sat down. Maybe he should listen to a tape. Something that wouldn’t remind him of her. He turned his stereo back on. The tapes were buried under a heap of unanswered correspondence, unread magazines, unfinished manuscripts on the spare bed. He sat back down.

It might be best to make a fresh start by tackling an unfinished manuscript. There were a few, several, maybe a dozen, or more. They were all somewhere on the spare bed, hidden beneath one overturned stack or another. He’d paid fifteen bucks for the brass bed when he’d moved in, twenty years ago. Spent two days stripping the multi-layered paint, polishing with Brass-O. Five bucks to Goodwill for the stained mattress and box springs. They’d slept together on it their first year together, until he pulled down a big enough advance to convert his former housemate’s room into their bedroom, pay for a proper double bed. He’d always meant to sell the single brass bed, put in proper shelves instead.

He never slept in their bedroom now. It held her clothes, her pictures, her scent, her memories.

It would be an all-day chore to sort through all the mess to find just the right manuscript whose moment had come. Best to tackle that tomorrow.

He pulled out an abused legal pad, wrote i across the first yellow page.

His stomach was hurting now. That made it hard to choose which pen to write with. He thought there might still be some milk left.

He drank a glass of milk and then a cup of coffee and smoked three Winstons, while he waited for his muse to awaken. The living room walls were hung with the same black-light posters they had put there when they’d first moved in together, back in the late ’60s. He supposed that the black lights still worked, although it had been years since he had switched them on. About all that had changed over the years were occasional new bookshelves, growing against the walls like awkward shelf-fungus. They were triple-stacked with books he really meant to read, although he hadn’t been able to finish reading a book in years.

I can’t see you because of your books, she had warned him on occasion, from her chair across the room from his. And then he would stick together another shelf, try to clear away the confusion of books and magazines piled in the middle of the living room, try to explain the necessity of keeping copies of Locus from 1969. In another year the pile would grow back.

My books are my life, he would tell her. Now that she was gone, he had grown to hate them almost as much as he had grown to hate himself. They were memories, and he clung to them while hating them, for memories were all he had left of his life.

It was getting dark. He glanced toward the front door, thinking it was about time for the cat to show up to be fed. He remembered that he hadn’t seen the cat in weeks.

Time to get back to work. He would write all night.

The cigarettes started him coughing again. She had nagged him to see a doctor about that cough. He treasured the cough for that memory of her concern.

He drank a glass of water from the tap, then remembered that her plants needed watering. She had left him with her plants, and he tried to keep them watered. He was crying again by the time he completed his rounds with the watering can. That made the cough worse. His chest ached.

“What you need is to stop feeling sorry for yourself,” Elvis advised him. “Stop moping around this dump. Go out and get yourself a new woman.”

“Too old for chasing tail at the singles bars,” he protested, reaching around Elvis to select some pills from the medicine cabinet. Shitty street speed they sold now only made him long for the good old days of Dex and Ritalin and black beauties.

“Never too old to make a comeback,” The King said.

“Who says I need to make a comeback?”

“Shit. Look at yourself.”

“You look at yourself, dammit! You’ve got an extra chin and sleeping bags under your eyes. Try to squeeze that stomach into one of those black leather jackets you slouched in back when I was trying to grow sideburns like yours.”

“But I’m not getting any older now.”

“And I won’t grow up either.”

“It’s not the same thing.”

Street speed always made him hungry. He ate half of the cheese sandwich, felt vaguely nauseated, and had a swallow of Maalox with several aspirin.

He really ought to take a break before getting back to work. There was nothing on television that interested him at all, and he wondered again why he paid for all the cable channels that were offered. Still, best to have access; there might be something that would inspire him — or at least fill the empty hours of pain.

He could watch a tape. The trouble was that the tapes were unsorted and unlabeled, stuffed away into boxes and piled together with all the other debris of his life. He could dig through it all, but then he would run the risk of pulling out a cassette of a film that was special to her. He would never watch To Have and Have Not again. Best just to turn on Cable News and let it run.

He put the rest of the cheese sandwich out for the cat, in case he came back during the night. His stomach was hurting too much to finish eating. Despite the Maalox, he felt like vomiting. Somehow he knew that once he started vomiting, he would never stop — not until all that he spewed out was bright blood, and then not until he had no more blood to offer. A toilet bowl for a sacrificial altar.

There was inspiration at last. Vomiting was back in vogue now — proof that great concepts never die.

While the fire was in him, he brought up the IBM, instructed global search to replace “kiss” with “vomit on.”

That was more than enough creativity for one day. He felt drained. It was time to relax with a cold beer. Maybe he could play a record. He wondered if she had left him a little pot, maybe hidden away in a plastic film canister.

But film canisters reminded him of all the photographs they had taken together, frozen memories of the two of them in love, enjoying their life together. He was too depressed to listen to a record now. Best just to sit in the darkness and sip his beer.

Janis Joplin was trying to plug in one of the black lights, but she needed an extension cord. Giving it up, she plopped down onto the couch and grinned at him. She was wearing lots of beads and a shapeless paisley blouse over patched and faded bell-bottoms. From somewhere she produced a pint of Southern Comfort, took a pull, offered the bottle to him.

“Good for that cough,” she urged in her semi-hoarse voice. “Thanks,” he said. “I got a beer.”

Janis shook back her loose waves of hair, looked around the room. “Place hasn’t changed.”

“It never does.”

“You’re stuck in the past, man.”

“Maybe. It sure beats living in the future.”

“Oh wow.” Janis was searching for something in her beaded handbag. “You’re buried alive, man.”

“Beats just being buried.”

“Shit, man. You’re lost among your artifacts, man. I mean, like you’ve stored up memories like quicksand and jumped right in.”

“Maybe I’m an artifact myself. Just like you.”

Janis laughed her gravelly cackle. “Shit, man. You’re all left alone with the pieces of your life, and all the time life is passing you by. Buried alive in the blues, man.”

“Since she left me, all I have left to look forward to is my past.”

“Hey, man. You got to let it go. You got to let her go. You know how that old song goes.”

Janis began to sing in her voice that reminded him of cream sherry stirred into cracked ice:

Look up and down that long lonesome road,

Where all of our friends have gone, my love,

And you and I must go.

They say all good friends must part someday,

So why not you and I, my love,

Why not you and I?

“Guess I’m just not ready to let it all go,” he said finally. But now he was alone in the darkness, his chest hurt, and his beer was empty.

She shouldn’t have left him.

He tossed the beer can into the trash, turned off the kitchen light. One thing to do before sprawling out across the couch to try to sleep.

He opened the upright freezer. It had only been a matter of removing the shelves.

“Goodnight, my love,” he whispered to her.