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Page 70.
 Too many distractions.
Somewhere a window clapped shut. He stopped and looked into black night. Stars shone over Paris. A woman with a fishwife voice yelled insults, and a man with a voice like an ox responded in short bellows. A streetlight glowed amid a great conifer. A brilliant diadem of yellow lights crowned a residential building across the skyline. In one apartment, a party with raucous laughter was in progress. Somewhere else, a wistful hand bricked out sequential piano thoughts which rose disconnected through pine sap. A mosquito hawk’s shadow bumbled in fast zigzag motions on the tilted ceiling. The wine was tart and cold: stored Bordeaux coastal sunshine (cheap side).
The keys chickled and echoed over the street and he stopped and took another sip of wine.
Nothing. What’s missing is my lady’s loving eyes.
Léopold Montblé was not here tonight. Where was he? With Emma while he, fool, labored here? No such luck even. He hosed down wine as if putting out a fire. The computer-composter, dark and matte,sucked up his thoughts like a Black Body in space. He exerted sweat beads of force to drive home phrases ringing with irony and contrapuntal inventiveness. From the eye to the ear… Charles Olson had written, tracing the bioelectric flow of poetic music.
This hot machine, resentfully steeping these past weeks in sunshine and driven motes, absorbed all that nurture and belched forth not a spare syllable of meaningful reverie. The seat of his pants grew glued to the unkind, tacky seat of the chair.
In a window obscured by plastic blinds, a feminine form undressed. Not knowing she was on stage, she innocently cast filmy white garments onto a cold bed. He sat frozen at his machine, watching and afraid to tap out another key sound, as pink nipples dangled into/
—and then, as Marc stared hypnotically, her light went out. Whoever she might be, she went to bed alone, or so he fretted. She was unaware that here a man sat listlessly sucking in puckersome quantities of bloody grape ferment, wishing their destinies could be briefly twinned.
The wine bottle was empty, and another half-empty beside it.
He printed out a sheet of vacant speckles, ink stars on space paper, and threw it on the stacks of paper and books surrounding him. He was close to quitting. More useful to mow lawns. Live in the solid world rather than this ephemeral ghostly wine cellar of angel wings and demon eyes, of evil grinning and beards, of virginal hips and pale arms waving in a dance in this crazy place, this hazy space…
No love tonight. That special gift comes only once in an age.
The glass slipped from his fingers, met the desk top hard, but did not break. He weaved, sitting. Like a fish in an ocean of night, he gulped cobwebs. Those moths had multiplied. He gestured feebly to keep them off the blank page, but one great juicy green buck with majestically flapping, dirty-bedsheet wings hovered obsessively, almost angrily. With a crescendo of aimless keystrokes, this noble pilot turned a color like the speckling of sparse black hatchings on the page, where he’d tried to summon Léopold Montblé, conqueror of the skyline and the torch-waving statue. It got late and the party ended; not a single nipple beckoned pinkly nor ironically behind any more slatted windows. He heaved himself out of the glued chair with a rip of sat-on skin and staggered to the bathroom. Flailing drunkenly, he aimed a heavy piss at the porcelain crapper. Alone in the oppressive garret heat, he wended his way into the room again. There, gulping and gasping amid a sea of flailing dirty-white moth wings, he sank sideways into a stupor.
* * * *
The indignant mosquito-like keening of his dirty-white alarm clock, coupled with a damp, cold, greasy wind on his bare back, summoned him into gray dawn, many aching hours later.
Heavy-headed, he swung into a sitting position and enumerated the ways in which a red table wine could taste muffy, fluffy, nauseous, and thirst-burning the morning after.
Marc stumbled on aching feet over the dusty wooden floor into the kitchen where thankfully a pitcher of ice water was in the refrigerator. He quaffed deeply, draining perhaps a quart from its echoic hull. He’d read that most of one’s taste comes from smell buds. There it was: he winced in distaste at a rankling descent into ripeness and over-ripeness of variously refrigerated sausage and onions and browned lettuce.
Ahh… thus a bachelor pad, or what say ye?
He was on time for work. As he often did, he treasured the simple security, sought the ordered rhythms of work.
Let there be lawn mowing and hedge trimming.
On brick building walls all around, with their decorative sugar-white and cream-blonde bands of marble or granite, smiling putti and laughing angels and delighted cherubs looked down in approval or was it carefree mocking?
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