The rain fell on downtown Portland, not in any kind of unusual way.
It was four-thirty on a December afternoon and Winslow, drunk, sat
by the front window of Kelly’s Olympian and watched the passersby.
The afternoon was fading fast and the faces were darkening outside,
unfurling their umbrellas against the rain, hurrying toward their
buses and cars and taxicabs and appointments, everybody rushing
toward their own deaths, Winslow thought, and none of them knew it.
He had a pack of Tareytons and a pitcher of draft beer and the daily
papers, the Oregonian and the New York Times both. He read the local
paper carefully from back to front, from sports to news, and then
went back through the Times to see what he had missed. When an item
struck his imagination he would sometimes write a sentence or two
down in his notebook. He kept the notebook in his overcoat pocket,
as he was not the type to write ostentatiously in bars or coffee
shops. Just then he felt an image coming up to the surface,
something about the faces outside the window, like a whole school of
fish turning at once, the silvery bodies in three dimensions,
something about the way they didn’t recognize themselves as
beautiful but just kept on schooling to their separate ends. Then
remembered that Pound had gotten there first: petals on a wet, black
bough … It was not fair that so many of his best ideas were
someone else’s.
The bar was long and dim with neon lights high up against an old tin
ceiling. A kitchen at the far back contributed the smell of stale
fryer oil to the general funk of spilled beer, cigarette smoke and
Lysol. Toothlessness and vomit; he watched a pair of old girls going
at it, shoving each other against the bar, cursing. One of them he
recognized as the folding-chair woman, a tiny short angry woman who
had been beating the day bartender with a metal folding chair the
first day he had found Kelly’s. The bartender was at least eighteen
inches taller than she was and had an earring and his head shaved
like Mr. Clean. He stood impassively with his arms folded in front
of him while she beat against him with the folding chair until she
wore herself out, and then he 86’d her. She had been 86’d by every
bartender so far, but the turnover was high on the day shift and so
she was back.
Later, when the light outside died completely, Winslow would move
back to sit at the bar, where generations of drinkers had worn
grooves into the top by rubbing quarters back and forth on the wood,
the knurled metal edges digging deep smooth trenches into the bar,
and nobody minded.
In the last months, he had seen youth in the bar, the black t-shirt
and black leather crowd, and soon it would be over and the last
downtown bar would be gone and Portland would have finished turning
into something else and it would be time to move on. Not yet.
So much money in town now, he thought. So much success. A little
failure kept him honest.
Winslow stubbed his cigarette out and laid the butt in the ashtray
in a parallel line with the rest of the afternoon’s dead soldiers.
They were each smoked down to half an inch from the filter, each the
same length, each lined up neatly with the others. The rain was
coming down a little harder now, the pedestrians all walking faster
or sleek under dark umbrellas and dark overcoats but still hurrying
before their shoes got wet, all hurrying toward drinks or dates or a
last appointment, all holding the city in the air between them,
Winslow thought, a city made not from bricks and concrete and
asphalt but by the intentions and desires of the souls who lived in
it. Everybody wanted something. Everybody wanted the same thing,
lately: money, success, a mistake-free life, a life without enemies.
All these intersecting desires, colluding, colliding, all this
assorted valence, with some of them missing an electron in the outer
shell and some of them with an extra electron … Wisdom from the
Army: he remembered Solomon Jackson, the look in his red, diseased
eyes when he said: You want to live without enemies. You’re afraid
to make enemies.
Later on they became friends. After that, Solomon died. Winslow
slumped back against the well-worn wooden bench, his hands splayed
out in front of him, like a priest’s hands, open and fat. The light
was delicate and gray. Winslow himself was fat and bald and drunk
but at least he was clean, he was scrupulous about that. He wore a
white shirt and a tweed sport jacket. He sat back waiting for
whatever the afternoon would bring him, and after that the evening.
He was watching the sky when June Leaf came in. He didn’t see her
until she sat down across from him and poured her own clean glass
full from what was left of Winslow’s beer.
“You fucker,” she said. “I thought you were working.”
“I was,” he said.
He pushed the pack of cigarettes over to her but she shook her head.
June Leaf smoked three a day but this wasn’t the time.
“What happened?” she said.
“I came to a spot,” he said. “It just seemed like a moment to take a
break.”
“How long have you been here?”
He held the pitcher at an angle so the beer ran down into a corner
of it. “Just this,” he said.
“Don’t you lie to me.”
Winslow looked at her: something in her voice, some new aggravation.
It was a small lie, one pitcher short of the truth, and, besides,
June Leaf was not an innocent herself. She drank the first glass of
beer in a hurry and then poured herself another out of the rest of
Winslow’s beer, leaving him half a glass away from dry. Then she
shook the cigarette out of the pack and looked around to see who she
knew. Eddie in the plastic pants waved back at her. She regarded
Winslow through the haze of her smoke.
“Did you get anything done today?” she asked.
“Enough,” he said. “I paid my debt to society.”
She knew he was not telling the truth-Winslow could feel it, the way
her eyes glanced off his face-but she didn’t take him up on it. This
was marriage in Winslow’s experience: knowing the other well enough
to know she was lying but not well enough to know why. June Leaf
settled into the opposite chair, a tall thin angular woman all in
black, half a head taller than Winslow, people stared when they went
out. She craned around to watch the dim afternoon outside.
“Nice light,” she said. “Filthy weather, though. You got a call this
afternoon.”
Winslow waited for the rest of it, watching her hands in the soft
enveloping light, as she was watching her hands herself. She stubbed
out her cigarette haphazardly in the ashtray, ruining his careful
alcoholic symmetry. June Leaf was a painter, though lately she had
been supporting both of them as a claims adjuster for Kaiser.
Winslow was fifty-five and she was forty-one and they had been
married three years. They met in Mexico.
“Who did I get a call from?” he finally asked.
“It was Jack Walrath, over in Athens?” June Leaf said. Winslow felt
his heart race inside him, this new call to glory, a voyage to
Greece; and June Leaf must have seen it on his face as she quickly
added, “Not that Athens. The one in Montana.”
Winslow remembered Walrath then, a fool, a fixer, a second-rate
poet. “What did he want?”
She said, “Apparently a visiting writer canceled out on them and now
they want you.”
“For what?”
“A semester, is what he said. Twenty-five thousand dollars and an
apartment, is what he said.”
“Oh, shit,” Winslow said.
He looked at her face in the fine soft light of the window, long and
lined, dark eyes, dark lips, the beautiful hollow at the base of her
throat. She looked tired, he thought.
“What’s wrong?” she said. “I thought you’d be happy about it.”
Winslow hadn’t written anything worth reading for eighteen months.
He knew that for a fact, knew that as well as he knew his own name,
and the thought of trying to tell anyone anything about poetry made
him ill. The idea of standing up in a classroom again, which he had
done before, and pretending that he knew anything about it. He
should have told her before, should have confirmed what June Leaf
suspected: that he spent his working hours in idleness and
masturbation. The enterprise of poetry had defeated him entirely.
He should have told her but he had not, and now it was too late.
June Leaf had been supporting both of them, with small exceptions.
It came down to the money.
June Leaf looked at him warily. “I thought you’d be happy about it,”
she said again.
“No, it’s good,” he said. “It’s a good thing.”
She knew him well enough to disbelieve him.
“Well, I’m celebrating,” she said, taking the empty beer pitcher
from the table. “I’m drinking gin myself. Do you want anything? Or
are you going to keep on drinking beer?”
“Scotch on the rocks,” he said automatically, watching her skinny
ass recede into the gathering crowd around the bar. It would take
her a few minutes to get the bartender’s attention, which was good.
Winslow would try to compose himself, try to be happy, as she
believed he should be. To feel the proper emotions. What one ought
to feel.
She had told him before-she was feeling it now-that she felt
invisible sometimes, that Winslow was the only living being in
Winslow’s world, that everybody else including her was just
furniture. He didn’t know that she was wrong. He hoped she was wrong
but he didn’t know. Did he love her? Winslow didn’t know. He felt
some deep stirring inside him but whether it was what other people
called love or not was a mystery.
But solvent, Winslow thought. Money in the bank, money in his
pocket. Back to being the overdog. He knew it wasn’t good for him
but still.
Somewhere outside, past the edge of the city and even in the city
itself, in the dark dripping passages between buildings and the
blackberry brambles along the edges of the railroad cuts, water was
dripping over dark leaves, animals were moving through the
undergrowth, the steelhead were making their way upstream from the
Pacific. Anadromous, he thought. Oregon out there in the rain.
“What’s the matter with you?” June Leaf said. She set the bar glass
down on the table in front of him and Winslow saw that it was a
double: happy hour.
“The long illness of my life,” he said, and both of them laughed and
drank. “When does all this start?” he asked. “When does he want me
over there?”
“The semester starts the end of January.”
“Dear God,” said Winslow. “We’re moving to the North Pole.”
“You’re moving,” June Leaf said.
Later: fat man in the bathtub. This was where he did his thinking,
after a fashion, whatever you called it when the brain was trying to
surface through a sheen of alcohol. June Leaf was at her studio
painting, or whatever she did when she was there, she erased-it
seemed like-more than she ever painted. And everything was fine with
her after the evening. There were cocktails, which made everything
fine.
Winslow floated. There was enough of him to make it perilous to
move, there was sloshing and splashing and water spilled on the tile
floor of June Leaf’s apartment. Though he lived there now, too,
though they were as married as they were ever going to get, it was
still and would be forever June Leaf’s apartment. Until the landlord
got them out. Floor by floor, apartment by apartment, the old
tenants were leaving and the landlord was remodeling in their wake.
The flat below, where Mrs. Esterhazy had said her last words in
Hungarian-said them to Winslow, who had found her with a broken hip
on the stairs and carried her inside-was now the nest of a pair of
cuckoobirds with square granny glasses and the girl had pink hair.
Everything was broken.
Winslow watched his dick float limp in the water, his gray seaweed.
Winslow tried to think of what he could tell the children of Athens
about poetry. He had not started out feeling like a Latin teacher
but by now he did, the lame protest that poetry was good for you,
that poetry built intellect and character, that captains of industry
and powerful men had all grown up on poetry, stupid enough even if
it was not a lie, which it was. The captains of industry had grown
up on touch football and beer. They liked red meat and heterosexual
sex. Even Mrs. Esterhazy, who could have used a little, had lived
and died entirely without poetry. The men at the paper mill where
his father had worked, the television-loving millions, they were
better off without it. Selling little ego pills: You can make this
work, little Susie, little Ned. You can make this somehow matter,
though the rest of us have failed.
He would teach them Rilke. They would like Rilke-the sponger, the
rich woman’s amusement with his angels and vapors. It would serve
them right. They would leave him alone. If they didn’t like it, he
would make them all read Gertrude Stein and then pretend to
understand it. What do you mean, little Susie, little Ned, that you
don’t get it? Why are you so worried about getting it?
Something about the prospect of teaching brought out the sadist in
him. But Winslow felt better now. He had a game plan. He nudged the
hot-water tap open with his foot and felt the healing waters spill
over him, took a sip from the icy glass of scotch on the edge of the
tub and settled back again, listening to Ellington in the next room.
The bathroom ceiling was almost ten feet high so the heights of the
room almost disappeared in the steam, a yellowing waterspotted
dimness in the incandescent light, a color out of favor now.
Everything was white or blue-white now, all cool and clean. No more
octagonal tile, no more wainscoting, no more faintly dirty
butter-colored light. We are the bees of the invisible, Rilke said.
At times Winslow could almost make sense of it. He lit a cigarette
and lay back in the water.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Winslow in Love
by Kevin Canty
Copyright © 2005 by Kevin Canty .
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Nan A. Talese
Copyright © 2005
Kevin Canty
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-385-51366-6
