Bill Zavatsky

For Rebecca Feldman and Brian Roessler That's what the first line says of the song I've been playing all summer at the keyboard—trying to get my hands around its dark, melancholy chords, its story line of a melody that twists up like snakes from melodic minor scales that I've also been trying to learn, though I'm no great shakes as a practicer of scales. Come to think of it, neither am I much when it comes to love—no great shakes, I mean. Not that I haven't had my chances. Twenty years married, I made a lousy husband, half asleep, selfish, more like a big baby than a grown man, the poet laureate of the self-induced coma when it came to doing anything for anybody but me. "Now and then he took his thumb out of his mouth to write an ode to or a haiku about the thumb he sucked all day." That's what I imagined my ex-wife said to our therapist near the end. She did say: "It's all about Bill." She was right. And suddenly it frightens me, remembering how, at our wedding, our poet friends read poems of (mostly) utter depression to salute us. I wondered if their griefs in love had double-crossed our union, if strange snakes in the grass of our blissful Eden had hissed at us, and now I worry, on your wedding day, if I'm not doing the same damned thing . . . . I haven't come to spring up and put my curse on your bliss. Here's what I want to say: You're young. You don’t know what love is. And as the next line of the song goes, you won't —"Until you know the meaning of the blues." Darlings, the blues will come (though not often, I hope) to raise their fiery swords against your paradise. A little of that you unwittingly got today, when it rained and you couldn't be married outside under the beautiful tree in Nan and Alan's yard. But paradise doesn't have to be structured so that we can never reenter it. After you've kicked each other out of it once or twice (I'm speaking metaphorically, of course), teach yourself how to say a few kind words to each other. Don't stand there angry, stony. Each of you let the other know what you are feeling and thinking and then it may be possible to return to each other smiling, hand in hand. For arm in arm, you are your best Eden. Remember the advice the old poet sang to you on the afternoon of August 4, 2001, the day you got married. May you enjoy a good laugh thinking of him and his silver thumb now that you've turned the key into your new life in the beautiful Massachusetts rain and—hey, now—sun!

Not long after you had told me, gently, that you still grieved for your last love, though that had ended almost a year before, and that you could have no intimate relationship with me, maybe not with anyone for a time, I stopped my fork in the air with whatever hung on the end of it that I was eating. My throat wouldn't swallow. I felt weak and sick, as if it were myself that I devoured, piece by piece, as you talked away the hopes that I had put in your lovely face. It was the old story coming true for me once more, though you were hardly mine. . . . When we finished I walked you back to your car; I don't remember having much to say. Why would I? Buildings drifted by, and cars, and faces. Then we arrived at the place where, afterwards, I would never see you again, at a parking lot near Times Square. There I marked the sidewalk with X's visible only to me: "At this place I was lost again," they'd say to me when I walked there in the future. "Dig here and find what's left of me, or what I left behind, where X marks the spot." I felt like the death's-head and crossed bones that surmount the treasure chest. I only felt a little like gold coins and jewels. I have signed the City with these sphinxes —in parks, in streets, in bedrooms, in my own apartments. And there we stood, you and I, hemmed in by the stitches of X's that could not hold you to me. But X's mean kisses, I realized, as well as what is lost: all the kisses I couldn't give you chalked like symbols on the sidewalk. After all, you yourself had been marked by loss, even in your laughter that afternoon at the show I had taken you to. Bright-eyed and smiling in the seat beside me, you stole my glances with your dark, dark eyes and your long hair. I thought that I had not been this happy in a long time with a woman and was ready to become even more happy, ready to do anything that you wanted in order to please you, to see that smile come up, not knowing what you were soon to say to me as we dined. And when you spoke, I felt life fall away from me. Again I felt that I would never be happy. I felt the words that I had wanted to say to you leaving me, rushing out of my chest like dead air, until I had no more words to say. I seemed to cut and swallow my food as if it were me myself that stuck in pieces on the end of the fork I had raised to my mouth. Had I been chewing on my own flesh? Self-Pity the Devourer took me by the hand that held the fork, and once again I feasted on all that was dark and hopeless in myself, in lieu of all that was beautiful, desirable, and unattainable in you. And then I stood beside you in the lot where you had parked your car, with the X's buzzing in the air, sticking themselves to you and me and the blacktop and the cars. When you reached out to embrace me, I moved to embrace you in return—and then came the part that I don't want to remember, the part I hate: I caught a glimpse of your face as we put our arms around each other, and your face said everything to me about how you had wasted the afternoon, how eager you were to speed away in your car, a mixture of disgust and relief that the thing would soon be over, that I would be crossed out forever from your life—and everything that I hated about myself, my stupid chin, my ugly nose, my hopeless balded head, my stuck-out ears, my wreck of a heart, crashed over me, spinning me into the vortex of a palpable self-hate that I have only ever let myself feel a little bit at a time, though it is always there

Up on the roof, waiting for the fireworks to begin in warm winter rain, a moment ago I stepped from the elevator into the black air of an almost New Year and need a minute to catch my breath at the spread of city open to my eye. I can't go to the edge; I never could. The old fear of height still troubles me, the sensation that nothing can be under me if I am surrounded by mist and rain and all of the dark night air we breathe. Even a glimpse at the treetops in the park, with its slick crisscrossing roads that plunge into the jumbled panorama of East Side Manhattan, hysterical tonight with its own incandescence, gives me the willies. I feel as if I were standing on the deck of a showboat of a cloud as it drifts down some dark river, waiting for it to bang into some other building's fifteenth floor. How can these old people hunch the railing, hoisting their plastic glasses of champagne from under dripping umbrellas, as if they drank the rain as they laugh their analyses of the weather? Maybe now, like me, they have nothing to lose. I moved in three weeks ago; this is my first trip to the roof. I don't want to die tonight, the first fatality of 1990! There's too much of me I left in pieces last year, oh, the whole last decade: But I'm up here to distract myself, temporarily, from what I don't want or can't have in the way of love. . . . That must be the Triborough Bridge, tied in its strings of blue lights, and I can see in Central Park the skating rink, like a scoured mirror below, where some madman waves a red lantern; he must be drunk. I have only sipped a speck of Drambuie, which I didn't carry in my Coca-Cola glass up to these festivities. This is the first New Year's I've spent alone in twenty, twenty-two years. I never could go to the edge; but I did. Out there in the dark: my marriage, the woman I loved badly, as she did me, or none too well; the places we lived; the apartment I once half-owned; the thousands of books I had to leave behind (though I am to be granted library privileges) and the black and white cat I really miss. My wife's with her friends tonight somewhere in Brooklyn; friends of mine out there, too, though I don't know where. It's just like me to move in the middle of a telephone company strike. Thus, no calls from anyone—and I don't even have a telephone yet, so who could call? Damp but trying to smile, I eye the revelers. Two young men and their enormous girlfriends have joined us, really large women who carry balloons, all ready to froth in merry champagne. We check our watches to the screams from swarms of apartment windows to the west as the sky lights up with the first furious bombardment of colored shells. I can see that red lantern swinging toward the rockets—aha! So it wasn't a drunk, but the fireworks engineer preparing to blow the year's last sky to smithereens for our delight! I like to follow the tiny spurts of flame from the launching pad in their heavenward trajectory as much as I like the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air, which give proof to the night that I am still here, hands jammed in the pockets of my sodden raincoat, face dripping with rain, hat soaked, wondering if the skinny guy in the army jacket behind me (who looks just like I did in the sixties) is mumbling his way into a combat flashback and ready to hurl me over the edge of the roof and into kingdom come. I guess not yet. We've survived the first blasts of spinning green, corkscrews of spangled flame, buds of fireballs spewed in arching gold sprays, the whistling fire-fish that curl and howl as they flare, falling to ash. Screaming its head off, the New York New Year enters. I feel sad that beautiful things must die, even shadows made of smoke and flame, whatever I thought I had made out of my life— music, poems, books, kisses, a little useless fame. The army guy behind me grumbles at the haze of rocket smoke that coils around the trees, then tumbles up into the air toward Harlem. That bump and thud and bump sound everywhere, more clouds smacking each other head-on. The flashes of the explosions are close enough to touch if you wanted to burn your fingers on the sky, and the glare rocks our shadows back against the brick, as if chaos snapped our pictures in the dark. I smile for my portrait, curious at the New Year, smelling the acrid smoke of the one we've just destroyed. Then I squeeze into the tiny elevator car with the others, anonymous, reconciled to be so, back to my little apartment and the waiting glass of amber drink I'll raise, only half in jest, to my new life.