The End of Me Read online

  “Practically.”

  “But I am the first in a long time?”

  “Since Delores.”

  “Delores?”

  “A Negro girl.”

  “How nice.”

  “You would think so. It really wasn’t.”

  “Why?”

  “I was the fool I usually am.”

  “Oh, Asher. Not with her, too?”

  “I bat a thousand. In my league.”

  “What happened?”

  “Oh. Afterwards, she began to talk to me about all the friends I must have who smoked pot. She wore a green dress. Very vivid. The black and the green. My vivid Delores suggested that my friends, and she was sure I had friends, rich friends, intellectual friends, friends who had in mind small exclusive orgies, would make a very good market for pot. We could share, among other things she delicately hinted at, the profits. It did no good explaining to her she had my friends all wrong. You couldn’t jive Delores. All them books: she’d bet my friends liked being turned on anyway. Poor Delores. She’d got the wrong pusher.”

  Silence. The snow swirled. I could feel her move against my hip. The bed was more than warm now.

  “Tell me another story,” she said.

  “Do you like stories?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I looked down. Her hair, blacker than Delores, covered me.

  “Well,” I said. “Once upon a time there was a girl who had long hair. Long long black hair.”

  “How long?”

  “Down to here. Down to there.”

  “What happened to her and her long hair?”

  “She tripped on it. She got it in her soup. She got it caught in subway doors.”

  “How awful. Why didn’t she cut it?”

  “She was superstitious.”

  “Superstitious?”

  “Yes. Then her hair began to fall out. In handfuls. When she combed it. And she was always combing it.”

  “And?”

  “Her boyfriend . . .”

  “Did she have a boyfriend?”

  “An elderly one. But still handsome. In a ruined way. And every morning her boyfriend, when he tottered out of bed, found hair all over the place. On his rug. On the floor of his bedroom. On his pillow. On his monogrammed shirts. All over the place.”

  “Where did he live?”

  “In a big hotel.”

  “That wasn’t very hygienic. All that hair. Did the hotel complain?”

  “Constantly.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He finally traded her in for something more sanitary.”

  “I’ll bet he missed her. Sanitary or not.”

  “He missed her. But his life was simpler without her.”

  “And duller.”

  “Definitely. But he was an old man and he liked things dull.”

  “What did he do at night after he traded her in?”

  “He read. He thought.”

  “Was he very much of a thinker?”

  “No. Not really.”

  “Did he sleep alone after he traded her in?”

  “Yes. With the windows wide open. Wide-open windows are very healthy.”

  “Was he a healthy old man?”

  “Well. He had pretty good windows.”

  “Didn’t he miss this?”

  “What?”

  “This.”

  “Oh, that. Yes, he missed that.”

  “And this?”

  “He missed that, too.”

  “I’ll bet he couldn’t live without it even if he had the best windows in town.”

  “Well it would be wiser if he tried.”

  “Is he going to try?”

  “Not just yet.”

  “Not for the next hour?”

  “An hour? Darling. I’m not a decathlon champion.”

  “Oh. An hour isn’t long. A healthy old man. With such strong windows.”

  “Aurora.”

  “It isn’t long at all. Is it, darling?”

  “Aurora!”

  “Yes, darling. I’m here. I’m right here. Here I am, darling.”

  38

  The Visible Woman towered up. She was sixty feet high. Her plasticine hair streamed. She had Aurora’s face.

  By chartered plane, by double-decked bus, by through express, they came to see her.

  She was the latest and the most bizarre of all the attractions on Broadway.

  Admission booths were in her painted toes. Noiselessly the elevators ascended her transparent thighs.

  And I was among them. The enchanted tourists. Who’d come to part the pubic doors by which she was entered.

  Inside her was distraction and delight: forgetfulness and fun: surcease and simplification.

  We drank at her bars. They were in the sockets of her swelling hips. We gambled at the dice-tables in her extended fingers. Sat (small, intimate, compact) in the two cinemas built into her breasts. Listened as, unchanging as a waterfall, irradiating color, her blood coursed and recoursed through her tubular veins. The music to dance by was the beat of her great artificial heart.

  Endlessly they came. From the isolated village. From the anxious town. From the dangerous city.

  To her.

  In a party of four. In a jolly twosome. In outings arranged by the Chamber of Commerce. I’d come alone.

  Someone said it was snowing. I ran down her intestinal staircase. It was snowing. Her kilowatted eyes blazed in the storm.

  I clung to her great leg. She was cold. Whatever they had made her from (the mysterious alloy, the enigmatical chemicals), she gave no warmth.

  I cried: Aurora!

  And awoke. The window was open. The snow blew in. The other half of the bed was empty.

  39

  In the morning it stopped snowing. I went out. Dog piss stained the drifts. Soot pockmarked the snowbanks. Now you heard the shovels.

  The stores put rock salt on the sidewalks. The salt got into the little dog’s paws. The little dog whimpered. Now you heard the snowplows.

  The ferries were running again. It was possible to get to Hoboken. The cars had been dug out of their graves of snow. Where a car had been there was a space a car’s length long in the banks of snow. Now you heard the carchains.

  She couldn’t have stayed. I knew that. Nevertheless, there was a flare of anguish. I had sustained too many losses. It was useless to go after her. To wait. Outside the University. Argue. Plead. Threaten. Demand. It would do no good. It was useless to go downtown. To stand. Outside Michael’s. Staring at the blind wall. Waiting for her to come down the stairs. I had done that before in my life: it would do no good. She was gone. Nevertheless, I went. And stood. Outside the University. Hoping. Nevertheless, I went. And stared up at Michael’s brownstone. The studio had no window fronting on the street. It was almost a secret room. Stood. Across the street. At the railing of an Episcopal church. Staring up. Suffering. It did no good. I’d been given the one night. She was gone. I walked to the corner and whistled for a cab and it came to me, spraying dirty snow.

  In the lobby of my hotel, nobody looked as though they understood the uselessness of it. The women had furs and the men attaché cases. I went to the cigar stand and bought a paper. One said: Going up? I went up. In the corridor I went by the carts with their bitten, half-devoured sandwiches. Their stained napkins, their coffee urns. I put the key into the lock of my hotel door.

  As soon as I entered, I knew she had been in the suite.

  On the writing desk was the key I had given her.

  And on the coffee table, in front of the couch, was my album of photographs. And in the album, green as foliage, the money.

  Then I knew that Michael had been there, too.

  I opened the album.

  Oh, they hadn’t defaced anything. Not really. Not scrawled on or obliterated or mutilated me. I was still there: in all the photographs. All my successive selves. The series that turning forward aged, that riffling backward younged. What they’d done, and it was funny
, I could see them laughing, it did look funny, what they’d done, together, and quite artistically I thought, was cut out of the stacked bills, not all of course, just enough, the presidential portraits that adorned the nation’s currency, and with care, oh, infinite care, over the young middle the finally aging face that I had through the years turned toward the kind or the cruel camera pasted mounted superimposed the distinguished heads of Washington Lincoln Jackson Grant all the presidents of money.

  It summed me up, I guess. It came to a not insubstantial sum, considering. I wasn’t any of the things I’d thought I’d been. I was merely money. Well. They’d been very neat: she’d say the neatest.

  I didn’t bother to remove the presidential heads. It seemed too late to deny anything. I went to the window and looked out. They’d be together now, under the skylight. Below, in the unclean snow, a fag went by. A fag and two dogs, a poodle and an afghan. Even from the window I could see the dogs had jeweled collars. A cop went by. I saw him look at the jeweled collars to which the leather leashes were attached and then he looked at the fag in his parka and his ski boots walking his dogs and they all went by. A girl with a large net shopping bag went by. Heavy-wheeled a truck went by. A cab went by. They went by white. They went by black. Old they went by. Middle-aged they went by. They went by young. They went by slowly. Quickly they went by. Cold they went by. It didn’t stop. The going by didn’t stop. It would never stop. Fag cop truck cab girl white black vas you efer in Zinzinatti voulez-vous venir en surprise-party avec moi Vote for Jose Fuentes. Everything went by. Nothing went by. I went by.