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Page 20.

Chapter 8

The night of his departure from the owl-eyed street, he would have a battle all alone with moths high in his garret room. But first—it was still daylight before then, and he was filled with the purpose of picking up dropped threads.

For the first time in several weeks, he drove out to his parents’ house in West Haven, arriving just as streetlights came on in the inky-blue evening. Crickets chirped in the remainder of raccoon- and turtle-filled tidal swamps as he knocked. The door was as always radiant with a friendly amber light. Good old milk box, good old dog house, good old trees, good old door handle, good old moths ticking blindly against the brick wall and the milky lamp cover.

Good old air conditioning. They three alone ate in the den while the TV flickered and the potatoes looked blue. His father, wearing Bermuda shorts and a crinkled white shirt whose buttons were laden with the weight of his belly hairs, sat enthroned in the easy chair with a seven-and-seven at hand. His mother, a small, wiry woman with her jet-black hair in curlers, sat beside Jon on the couch as they ate calmly.

“How about school in the fall?” his father asked after dinner, kneading his fingers and peering at Jon with discomfitingly direct, gleaming eyes while Merv Griffin sat back laughing on the black-and-white TV.

Jon shrugged. “I’ve thought about it. I’m making decent money and I may put it off for a year. Save some money, you know, get a bigger apartment.” It was a lie, sadly; he knew Charles Egeny would demand periods of dissolute artistry in which no money could be saved.

His mother said, “Are you going to continue in your major?” It was a reproving question requiring a negative answer.

He shook his head. “There is a good MBA program at Wesleyan.”

“What about UConn?” his father asked.

“I’m looking for something different,” he said. “I need a total change.”

“Do you think you can handle business and accounting?” his mother asked.

“I’ll have to take the Graduate Record Exams first, of course.” Jon Harney, if not Charles Egeny, was practical minded. He had no idea if he could do well on the GRE.

“That sounds a little more like it,” said his father, a smart fellow, lately working as a mill foreman supervising the extrusion of stinking rubber at a nearby tire factory. His father, a product of the Depression, hadn’t had the chance to go to college. His good mind and sound body had been carefully harnessed over the years to the task of raising a family and providing a comfortable, if small, home in a middle-class suburb which forty years earlier had been swamp land and farm country.

“We just wish you the best,” his mother said.

They were easy-going, understanding parents. They understood struggle, though they little realized it could exist in the form of poetry. He could attach no formula of rebellion to his departure from their enclosed world. They had married when his father was nineteen, his mother sixteen. Perhaps the one benefit of this premature liaison was that today they were still young enough to enjoy the relative calm as their children moved beyond adolescence.

It was too quiet around the house, and he rose, saying he was going out. “Try to stop by or call a little more often,” his father told him as they saw him to the door.

“And remember there’s always a room here for you if you need a place to sleep,” his mother added anxiously.

“Mom!” he admonished. After kissing her, he re-entered the night and dove back into his own life.

He drove reasonably and calmly through the narrow avenues of beaches and wind-swept trees he’d known all his life. Long Island Sound glittered under a field of stars. On a distant groin, a beacon swirled across galaxies—as if sailors from distant Aldebaran or Fomalhaut were in danger of running aground off—like—Charles Island or Montauk.

The ultimate dropped thread was his desk far away in New Haven, he knew. He resisted the thrill of warm typewriter ink and fresh paper cooked to a buttery aroma by a hot summer night. First, he turned a familiar corner near the beach and parked before a hedge-hidden house. Leaving his car at the curb, he rang the doorbell and stood waiting on a porch of laid brick, with amber light and moths, not unlike that of his parents.

The aluminum screen door revealed the approach of a tall, slender figure trailing gossamer house colors. Long black hair dangled glossy around a pale face with delicate pink lips and dark eyes. “Hi, how are you?” came the muted squeal of sincere pleasure from Dawn Ferraro.

He gave her a brotherly wink, to which she responded with familiarity, even a cool fondness. She was his best friend’s sister, which made even the thought of her as a woman seem offensive and incestuous. Not surprisingly, she seemed as stimulated by him as by an old car on blocks. “Is Andy home?”

She rubbed her hands in concern. “No…” She shouted over her shoulder, “Mom, where’s Andy?” A distant voice answered. Jon could have reached through the screen and hugged her, loving these people and their familiar voices.

Welcome back to a normal existence.

“He’s out on a date,” Dawn said regretfully, wringing her hands on a dish towel. “Want to come in?”

He felt slightly relieved. He’d done his duty and made this initial gesture of re-establishment of contact with his old high school friend. He shook his head. “I know he’s probably mad I haven’t called. I’ll head on back to my apartment. Can you tell him I called? Ask him to call me? If he calls tomorrow I’ll stop by tomorrow night!”

He drove away from the beach, headed through the poorer outskirts of the city. He had nothing to lose here and drove through rapidly, thinking of the several phone numbers secreted in his wallet from meetings in meat racks and not-so-meat racks (bars frequented by college students rather than divorcées) in recent months. Satisfied with the evening’s picking up of threads, he resolved now to explore the world of Charles Egeny, left delinquent for weeks.

The city was enchanted with lights, betraying the bitter truth of its pocket ghettoes. It was an old city, and in other pockets survived remnants of its past as a slumbering colonial dame. Coursing amid squinting streetlights rubbed by leafy elm branches, he was touched for a moment by the irony of the fact that Merile’s apartment was a scant six blocks from his own.

His street, as leafy and owl-eyed as any, nestled amid parks and schools on the border into Hamden, a five-minute walk from Edgerton Park, in the shadow of East Rock whose illumined red flanks shot teasingly into the clear sky, surmounted by a celebrative column visible for miles.

Putting up the top and sealing the windows of his car, he mounted the long, creaking steps to the fourth floor of the rambling house in which he shared an apartment with two Yale students.

He emerged into darkness. He flickered the light switch. Morose illumination spattered a central living room, which was no more a living room than their apartment was a home. He barely knew the names of his two fellow tenants. As was often the case, both roommates were out. In the refrigerator in their shared kitchen he found several bottles of inexpensive California red wine, left from a party he’d helped co-sponsor, but never showed up at.

He took a steamy shower in the shared bath, reminded of separate, territorial masculinities as he smelled three distinct shaving creams stacked on individual shelves.

Toweling himself dry, he regretted that the place did not have an air conditioner. The summer night was not yet airless, oppressively sticky, and sweaty. Nevertheless, he turned on the oscillating fan as he entered his small room with the steep garret roof. His room: A bed, under the louvered ceiling; a bureau filled with rumpled underwear and unironed shirts; a steamer trunk filled with manuscripts and untouched books; a chair, a desk, and a typewriter. One poster adorned a limply wallpapered wall: the Manhattan skyline, with a soaring Concorde superimposed over a verdigrised Statue of Liberty. Charles Egeny would one day be famous there.

A wall of loneliness engulfed him as he sat at the typewriter. Three moths coursed about the open lamp nearby. A fourth moth buzzed in the glowing trough of light, fanning itself into extinction while its fellows danced about. He had brought a bottle of cold Gallo from the kitchen, its glass in icy tears, and poured a tangy few ounces. With eager fingers, he pulled paper onto platen.

He tried hard, but only crap came out—no sexy rhythm, no jazz, no undercurrents, nor sensuous entendres. The typewriter clattered dustily in the night. Somewhere a window clapped shut. He stopped and looked through the torn screen window, through a great conifer, at the brilliant diadem of yellow lights of a residential building across the street. 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 Pacific coastal sunshine.

Clattering, the typewriter echoed over the street and he stopped and took another sip of wine.

Nothing. What’s missing is my baby’s loving eyes.

Charles Egeny was not here tonight. Where was he? With Merile while he, fool, labored here? No such luck even. He hosed down wine as if putting out a fire. The typewriter, dull and black, soaked in 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 electric flow of poetic music.

This hot typewriter, 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, borrowed 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 typewriter, watching and afraid to tap out another key sound, as pink nipples dangled into/

—and then, as Jon 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.

That special gift comes only once in an age.

The glass 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 twirl of the platen, this noble pilot turned a color like the speckling of sparse black hatchings on the page, where he’d tried to summon Charles Egeny, 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.