So
there in Number Eighteen Rugby Street's
Victorian
torpor and squalor I waited for you.
I
think of that house as a stage-set -
Four
floors exposed to the auditoriums.
On
all four floors, in, out, the love-struggle
In
all its acts and scenes, a snakes and ladders
Of
intertangling and of disentangling
Limbs
and loves and lives. Nobody was old.
An
unmysterious laboratory of amours.
Perpetual
performance - names of the actors altered.
But
never the parts. They told me: 'You
Should
write a book about this house. It's possessed!
Whoever
comes into it never gets properly out!
Whoever
enters it enters a labyrinth -
A
Knossos of coincidence. And now you're in it.'
The
legends were amazing. I listened, amazed.
I
lived there alone. Sat alone
At
the hacked, archaic, joiner's bench
That
did for desk and table,
And
waited for you and Lucas.
Whatever
I was thinking I was not thinking
Of
that Belgian girl in the ground-floor flat,
Plump
as a mushroom, hair black as boot polish:
The
caged bird and extra-marital cuddle
Of
the second-hand-car dealer who kept
The
catacomb basement heaped with exhaust mufflers,
Assorted
jagged shafts of cars, shin-rippers
On
the way to the unlit and unlovely
Lavatory
beneath the street's pavement.
That
girl had nothing to do with the rest of the house
But
play her part in the drama. Her house-jailor
Who
kept her in solitary was a demon
High-explosive,
black, insane Alsatian
That
challenged through the chained crack of the door
Every
entrance and exit. He guarded her,
For
the car dealer, from all, too well finally.
Not,
seven years in the future, from her gas-oven.
She
was nothing to do with me. Nor was Susan
Who
still had to be caught in the labyrinth,
And
who would meet the Minotaur there,
And
would be holding me from my telephone
Those
nights you would most need me. On this evening
Nothing
could make me think I would ever be needed
By
anybody. Ten years had to darken,
Three
of them in your grave, before Susan
Could
pace that floor above night after night
(Where
you and I, the new rings on our fingers,
Had
warmed our wedding night in the single bed)
Crying
alone and dying of leukaemia.
Lucas
was bringing you. You were pausing
A
night in London on your escape to Paris.
April
13th, your father's birthday. A Friday.
I
guessed you were off to whirl through some euphoric
American
Europe. Years after your death
I
learned through desperation of that search
Through
those following days, scattering your tears
Around
the cobbles of Paris. I deferred for a night
Your
panics, your fevers, your worst fear -
The
toad-stone in the head of your desolation.
The
dream you hunted for, the life you begged
To
be given again, you would never recover, ever.
Your
journal told me the story of your torture.
I
guess how you visited each of your sacred shrines
In
raging faith you'd catch him there, somehow,
By
clairvoyance, by coincidence -
Normally
child's play to a serious passion.
This
was not the last time it would fail you.
Meanwhile
there was me, for a few hours -
A
few pence on the fare, for insurance.
Happy
to be martyred for folly
I
invoked you, bribing Fate to produce you.
Were
you conjuring me? I had no idea
How
I was becoming necessary.
Or
what emergency Fate would make
Of
my casual self-service. I can hear you
Climbing
the bare stairs, alive and close,
Babbling
to be overheard, breathless.
That
was your artillery, to confuse me:
Before
coming over the top in your panoply
You
wanted me to hear you panting. Then -
Blank.
How did you enter? What came next?
How
did Lucas delete himself, for instance?
Did
we even sit? A great bird, you
Surged
in the plumage of your excitement,
Raving
exhilaration. A blueish voltage -
Fluorescent
cobalt, a flare of aura
That
I later learned was yours uniquely.
And
your eyes' peculiar brightness, their oddness,
Two
little brown people, hooded, Prussian,
But
elvish, and girlish, and sparkling
With
the pressure of your effervescence.
Were
they family heirlooms, as in your son?
For
me yours were the novel originals.
And
now at last I got a good look at you.
Your
roundy face, that your friends, being objective,
Called
'rubbery' and you, crueller, 'boneless':
A
device for elastic extremes,
A
spirit mask transfigured every moment
It
its own séance, its own ether.
And
I became aware of the mystery
Of
your lips, like nothing before in my life,
Their
aboriginal thickness. And of your nose,
Broad
and Apache, nearly a boxer's nose,
Scorpio's
obverse to the Semitic eagle
That
made every camera your enemy,
The
jailor of your vanity, the traitor
In
your Sexual Dreams Incorporated,
Nose
from Attila's horde: a prototype face
That
could have looked up at me through the smoke
Of
a Navajo campfire. And your small temples
Into
which your hair-roots crowded, upstaged
By
that glamorous, fashionable bang.
And
your little chin, your Pisces chin.
It
was never a face in itself. Never the same.
It
was like the sea's face - a stage
For
weathers and currents, the sun's play and the moon's.
Never
a face until that final morning
When
it became the face of a child - its scar
Like
a maker's flaw. But now you declaimed
A
long poem about a black panther
While
I held you and kissed you and tried to keep you
From
flying me about the room. For all that,
You
would not stay.
We
walked south across London to Fetter Lane
And
your hotel. Opposite the entrance
On
a bombsite becoming a building site
We
clutched each other giddily
For
safety and went in a barrel together
Over
some Niagara. Falling
In
the roar of your soul your scar told me -
Like
its secret name or its password -
How
you had tried to kill yourself. And I heard
Without
ceasing for a moment to kiss you
As
if a sober star had whispered it
Above
the revolving, rumbling city: stay clear.
A
poltroon of a star. I cannot remember
How
I smuggled myself, wrapped in you,
Into
the hotel. There we were.
You
were slim and lithe and smooth as a fish.
You
were a new world. My new world.
So
this is America, I marvelled.
Beautiful, beautiful America!
Beautiful, beautiful America!
