I
n
October of 1988 I took a short trip to Paris—a very short trip, as it happened.
I was on the ground in France for less than seven hours, at least two spent in
cabs getting out of, then back into, DeGaulle. Another big chunk of the day
consisted of four separate stints of waiting on or taxiing across rainswept
tarmacs. Although I never saw a mountain, I crossed the Alps twice in nine
hours. I
was a guest that fall of the Rockefeller Foundation, which maintains the Villa
Serbelloni in Bellagio, Italy, as a conference and study center. People come to
Bellagio from all over Europe to check out the alpine vistas and terraced
lakeside gardens. The short fondamenta consists mostly of ferry docks, outdoor
cafes, clothing and souvenir shops, and hotels. Villa Serbelloni sits several
hundred feet up the hill from all this, at the tip of a thumb-shaped peninsula
called Il Punta Spartivento, the point where the wind is divided, and, not
incidentally, where the three arms of Lake Como converge. The
room Ellen and I were assigned, No. 9, was on the top floor of the villa, high
enough above the town that I felt comfortable standing naked in front of the
floor-to-ceiling window, especially when it was open and the south wind was
being divided. Our bedroom and bathroom windows faced south, with views of both
the Lecco and Como arms. During our five-week stay, we must have had
twenty-five days of sun, which gave first the Lecco arm a blindingly platinum
glitter, and then, as we got dressed for dinner, the Como. Sunsets, obscene to
begin with, were luridly doubled. But the moon made the water blaze even more
piercingly, since the mountains and sky remained black. Except for, on clear
nights, le stelle. Ellen, for her part, preferred to gaze out mostly clothed.
Almost ten weeks pregnant, she told me she was “gladder” than she ever had been
in her life. We both were. I’m so glad, I’m so glad, we giddily sang in the big
glass-doored shower, watching the sun going down over Switzerland. I’m glad,
I’m glad, I’m glad… Twenty-six
hundred years ago Celts built a stone fort at the top of the promontory, and
remnants of two of its walls can still be distinguished as ruts. Virgil and
Catullus refer to the place, as well as both Plinys, who had a summer home, the
Villa Pliniana, on the site in the years just after Christ was born. The younger
Pliny called the steep, rocky promontory Tragedia, after the stiltlike shoes
worn by Greek tragic actors. The present villa was commandeered in 1943 by the
S.S., who deployed it as R and R quarters for Luftwaffe pilots. Mussolini and
Clara Petacci hid out nearby before he was captured by the partisans and
executed by a one-person firing squad. Ella Walker, the whiskey heiress, had
purchased the villa in 1928 and refurbished it after the war. When she married
the crown prince of the Thurn und Traxis family of Duino, she came to be called
Her Serene Highness, Ella, Principessa della Torre e Tasso, although given the
source of her fortune Rosso e Nero may have been more appropriate. She died in
1959 having bequested most of her property to the Rockefeller Foundation, whose
president that year was Dean Rusk. We are eyeball to eyeball, he famously
stated, referring not to the Principessa but, three years later, to Khrushchev,
and I think the other fellow just blinked. It was Rusk who decided the villa
should be used as a haven for artists and writers and scientists. Being
the primo alpha hangout required those parts of the villa not surrounded by
water to be sequestered from the Bellagio proper with handsome stone walls hung
with ivy and sturdy iron gates topped with spikes. Residents were presented
with keys attached to small flashlights and oval medallions engraved with a
globe encircled by the foundation’s motto, The Well Being of Mankind Throughout
the World, but there wasn’t any reason to leave. All meals, goods and services
were provided, all snacks and beverages. Grappa! Persimmons! Huge, juicy figs
from the orchard. Much pasta. Newspapers, magazines, books. Pre-stamped
postcards. Pencils and pens, ritzy stationery, unlimited reams of typing
paper—slightly longer and narrower than American paper, and on which my poems,
I thought, looked more sleek. An IBM Correcting Selectric. (Only scientists
worked on computers back then.) Thirty-five straight days on which you didn’t
have to cook or do dishes. Or shop. If you didn’t want to interrupt your
writing for panza al fresco back at the villa, the kitchen staff packed you a
lunch to take to your studio. Thermoses of coffee or tea could be ordered for
delivery with mid-morning snacks. An
issue of some concern among the fellows and spouse-equivalents, especially
during the first several days of their residency, was whether the splendor of
the place could be less a catalyst than a distraction. An ancillary point was
often averred—that such patrician extravagance could even be rather
distasteful. I often politely agreed. Though it made us all nervous when staff
members ran to answer a summons from Lucia Giorni, the dark-eyed, imperious
assistant director. Even resident fellows weren’t safe from her wrath. On the
rare occasions when Lucia’s team lost at bocce, the winning team’s members had
reason to fear their supply of firewood, or even the electricity to their
studio, might be mysteriously cut off, or worse—they might not be invited back
ten years hence. About
half the guests, especially ones with reduced mobility (or enhanced immobility,
as Beckett would put it), had studios attached to their bedrooms. This was the
arrangement I’d hoped for before I arrived, though I hadn’t made a formal
request. My office at home is around the corner from our bathroom and upstairs
from the kitchen, so I was used to feeling covered both coming and going.
Lucia, however, assigned me a studio a quarter of a mile down the hill, in a
grove of chestnut trees that would serve, I inferred, as my bagno. Il Polenta,
she told me they called it. During a famine that lasted from 1815 to 1817,
Alessandro Serbelloni employed an army of workmen to build the pathways,
tunnels and terraces surrounding his villa. My studio had functioned as the
“stand” from which his workers were served bowls of cornmush, probably
fortified with garlic and tomato, before they trudged the rest of the way up
the path with their loads of fieldstones and gravel. The
ground floor had an overstuffed reading chair, a working stone fireplace, and
three bookshelves empty except for a mildewed Webster’s New Collegiate and two
rolls of carta igienica. Upstairs were the desk, IBM, more empty bookshelves,
three windows. The north windows on both floors faced across the water to the fishing
village of Varenna. Beyond Varenna was the Lario arm of the lake, the deepest
fresh water in Europe. In some lights the water was steely gray-blue, in others
matte sable, titanium sapphire, turquoise pastel. When the north wind was up it
was slate ripped by whitecaps. The jagged granite mountains also changed color
and dimensionality as the sun arced across them. In postcards I mailed to the
States their peaks were capped with snow, but the month I was there they were
gray—light black, as Beckett would have it. The views were postcard-caliber by
any standard, but to a Midwesterner like me they looked downright unnaturally
vertical. I
wrote two decent poems in those rooms: “Punta Spartivento,” one of my very few
landscapes, and, of course, “Il Polenta.” I also drafted the first fifteen
stanzas of my (still unfinished) Laurie Dann poem, “Hubbard Woods.” Ellen and I
had some shiveringly romantic sex in them, too, though I never wrote a poem
about it. Afterwards I’d restoke the fire and down both our portions of the
local pinot grigio as we feasted on grilled yellow peppers or tuna panini. One
day we even fucked twice. We’d been told by Willa Hewer, Ellen’s gentle but
frank gynecologist, that intercourse was “altogether permissible.” (So long as
it was frank but gentle, I inferred.) Ellen was taking an elaborate regimen of
zinc, folic acid and vitamins, and reading What to Expect When You’re
Expecting, which confirmed what Dr. Hewer had told us. Leaving
or entering the studio, we could hardly help squashing ripe chestnuts with our
heels into pulpy white mash. Ellen kept threatening to dig up a recipe for
polenta della castagnaccia, or, failing that, to concoct one herself.
Unfortunately, she never got around to it. But chestnut polenta did make it
into the poem. When
we did eat lunch in the villa’s diningroom, the conversation tended to revolve
around Ellen’s pregnancy. Names, due date, morning sickness, circumstances of
conception, intensity of glow, gender preference (and various other cravings),
sweetness and patience of obstetrician or midwife. Or husband. Whether it was
safe to occasionally—now and then, once in a while, sometimes, seldom,
never—have a small glass of wine with a meal. Ellen’s position was that if
drinking a lot had been proven to compromise brain development, and no one
could draw the line saying how little caused none, she wouldn’t touch even one
drop. “Right
own, girl,” said one of the spouse equivalents. “That’s a Sixties expression
that means, ‘I agree with you.’” “Oh.” “You
only stay pregnant nine months anyhow.” “Hey,
what’s this about ‘only’ nine?” “Right!” “Absolutely.” “Grazie
Dio!” “Right
own.” “Though
you shouldn’t really imbibe while you’re nursing…” Of
course not. Of course not. Of course not. “You
shouldn’t?” “Of
course not.” “But
I do feel a little unfortunate being knocked up in the land of barolo and
frascati.” “But
mille fortunati not to have to abstain from this mindbending tagliatelle.” “No
way,” Ellen said. “This girl is eating for two—just as Vinci is drinking for
three.” “Maybe
four,” I’d chime in, and then swig. Since guests came and went on a rolling
schedule, and most of our meal partners changed every day, it was safe to
recycle a joke. “If
a little dolcetto makes me feel even half this prolific and silky, I may as
well have one more sip.” “Hey,
isn’t that Zeno’s paradox?” “It
is. Allows one to drink wine forever—an infinite number of glasses. Speaking of
Svevo, does anyone here have a cigarette? It’s for Ellen, of course…” “I
thought she said Zeno…” “Italo
Svevo. Wrote that novel about the guy who couldn’t quit smoking.” “La
Coscienza di Zeno.” “That’s
the one.” “Cigarettes?” “Cigarettes.” I’d
go out onto the patio and smoke one with one of the women. The
issue Ellen and I didn’t joke about, or even bring up, was how lucky we felt
that Ellen was pregnant at all. The location and extent of her endometriosis
had reduced the likelihood of conception by at least eighty percent. Surgery,
motility testing, thermometers, calendars, making love seven times in three
days—somehow, in the end, we got lucky. Having undergone a pair of
laparoscopies and spent three years trying despite hellacious dyspareunia, plus
knowing that the endometriosis now predisposed her to a greater likelihood of
miscarriage, Ellen was basically tiptoeing around the Villa Serbelloni with her
fingers and toes and her heart crossed. The pain during intercourse she’d
experienced before her surgeries had diminished even more now that she was
finally pregnant. (It sure hadn’t helped make it happen!) Between ourselves,
kneeling half naked in front of the Il Polenta fireplace, our joke was that
dyspareunia was better than no pareunia at all. And it was. Afterwards
Ellen pressed my ear to her belly. She was sticky with semen and sweat and
persimmon juice, and all I could hear was the crackle of the fire and a vague
digestive gurgle. The bulge below her navel was barely discernible, about the
size of a pancake, but hard underneath and slightly off-center. I kissed
her—her and what was inside her. We’d already pored over the astonishing
Lennart Nilsson photographs in A Child is Born. The ones for Six Weeks showed
the embryo floating like alien scampi in the transparent sac of cloudy amniotic
fluid. Arteries and capillaries of the oversized brain clearly visible,
miniature elbowless arms held up in front of the head as if for protection,
ending with short pale webbed fingers. And eyes! And a tail! According to the
captions, the thing was a quarter-inch long at this point. By the end of the
month it would be twice as big. The lenses of the eyes were developing. Could
it hear us, I wondered, or sense us in some other way? It didn’t even have ear
holes yet, let alone ears, but maybe its face could feel sound waves—the way
light could be sensed with your eyes closed, or seen, with them open, from past
the far curve of a tunnel. As glow. “Anything?” Ellen asked. She’d been humming
and stroking my ear. “Something.”
I kissed her again. “Absolutely.” Ten
days after we arrived at the villa, Barney Rosset called from Long Island to
insist I come to Paris the following afternoon to meet Samuel Beckett. Barney
would be over there anyway on publishing business. I told him I’d love nothing
better but doubted I could get away from the villa, let alone afford
last-minute plane tickets. Ignoring all this, he repeated his invitation. “Have
us some lunch and meet Sam,” he practically shouted, his voice disappearing
from moment to moment, blinking out over the ocean. “Just get Royal Hibernian
over king gay Paree!” Although he had called me in Bellagio, I had the
impression he thought I was still in Chicago. But wherever I was, it wouldn’t
have made any difference. “It’s
gotta to be tomorrow?” “Gotta
be, Vinci. Poor snot feeling so hot. Though he complains about anything.” I
was used to Barney’s impulsiveness, his breezy contempt for the merely
practical. Six hundred bucks worth of plane tickets for a two-hour visit? Next
question. Barney was eminently comfortable working on an ad hoc, last-minute
basis—was proud to, in fact. On the other hand, since the moment three years
earlier when he and his wife Lisa had signed me up at Grove, I’d been after
them to help me meet Beckett. So what was I complaining about? I had dozens of
reasons to feel overjoyed to be on their list, but none thrilled me nearly as
much as sharing an editor and publisher with Samuel Beckett. Not that Barney
could alter so much as a comma of Sam’s. But now he was telling me the
century’s greatest poet of dying was dying himself, and this would be my last
chance to meet him. Barney had named his second son Beckett. I was planning to
name my son Sam. The
rules of the Rockefeller Center could not have been clearer. They invited you
to one of the most beautiful places on the planet to work on a project, as well
as to mingle with scholars, musicians, policy wonks, government officials, and
scientists. Your time during the day was your own, but between seven and nine
in the evening they asked that you put on a jacket and tie to break bread with
your distinguished fellow fellows. The fourteen-page information sheet they’d
sent along with the original invitation spelled out the policy. “Once at the
Center, we expect guests to remain in continuous residence including on the
weekends.” A week before our flight, I got a letter from Lucia in which the
policy was pointedly, if subtly, reiterated. “We expect you will find that the
uninterrupted time for reflection and exchange minimizes the temptation to
tour.” Milan and Lugano were an hour away, Venice, Bologna, Tuscany, Provence
and the French Riviera all within an easy day’s drive. Who wouldn’t want to
visit these places? I had little doubt that Lucia and Paolo were forced to
entertain an endless succession of whining requests for an exception to be
made. Mi dispiace, but it’s the opportunity of a lifetime, so won’t you suspend
the rules just this once, per favore? Twenty
minutes after hanging up with Barney, I arrived outside the director’s office
not knowing what I would say. I hadn’t even talked yet to Ellen. And if I
couldn’t live up to a more-than-reasonable expectation in the face of such vast
generosity, what kind of dude did that make me? Yet I didn’t see how I could
possibly not go to Paris. Either way, I’d be looking a gift horse. Paolo’s
office had Renaissance tapestry on the wall, a fire crackling aromatically in
the hearth, a view of the Lecco arm with the Grigne massif behind it. On top of
one bookcase, alongside two cacti, were half a dozen framed photographs. All
but one were in color. The black-and-white pictured John Kennedy sitting in the
passenger seat of a nondescript sedan, being mobbed by grinning and waving
Italians. There is lust in the eyes of the women. Kennedy’s window is rolled
down and a man in a dark short-sleeved shirt has reached into the car; his hand
is actually clutching the president’s wrist. Kennedy appears tickled pink by
all the attention. I remember that his tie and lapels seemed amusingly narrow
to me in 1988, whereas now they’d be quite fashion forward, along with his tan
and the haircut. When
I asked Paolo where the photo was taken, he explained that Kennedy had come to
Bellagio in 1963. “On the very last day of giugno,” he noted millennially.
Kennedy had made state visits to several European cities, including West
Berlin, Dublin, and London. In Rome, an audience had been scheduled with Pope
John XXIII, but the pope wound up dying before they could meet. Kennedy
suddenly had a problem on his hands. He’d already landed in Rome, but his
attendance at a papal memorial would make him appear unduly in thrall to the
Vatican, as had been widely predicted he would be during the 1960 campaign.
Dean Rusk, who was now Secretary of State, persuaded his boss to lay low at the
Villa Serbelloni instead, as a guest of Rusk’s old foundation. The resident
scholars and artists were evacuated to a hotel. “Even our director, John
Marshall, was invited to leave by ’is advance team.” I
asked him what Jackie had thought of the place, gesturing to the view out his
window. “Mrs.
Kennedy did not accompany ’im at all to Europe. She must stay ’ome with their
children.” He paused. “But your president did not sleep alone.” He
allowed my deep shock to sink in, and I tried not to smirk. But the more I
thought about his use of the second person, the more it sounded like an
indictment. Of me. Or maybe it was just all Americans. “Which
room did he sleep in?” I finally asked, hoping he’d say No. 9. “I
do not know. If you like, Vince, we ’ave a short film of your president ’ere in
Bellagio, from the television.” “By
all means, Paolo. Please. Molto grazie. That would be wonderful.” He
straightened the picture of Kennedy. “The man in this photograph may be the
last alive person to reach inside the car of and to touch the American
President.” “No
question.” I
looked again, hard, at the man reaching into the car, this time assuming it had
to be Paolo. He was featured, after all, in most of the other photographs. It
was prominently displayed in his office. The man in the black-and-white picture
had a more intact hairline, but that had been twenty-five years ago. They both
had the same beaklike nose. Like Beckett’s, I realized. Yet the obvious
question seemed, at that moment, unaskable. As
Paolo opened his appointment book to block out a time to screen the old
footage, Lucia pushed open the door and told him lunch had been served. She
nodded and smiled in my direction, but she was clearly pissed off about
something. Because I’d gone over her head? While she and Paolo conversed for a
moment in heated Italian, I gathered my thoughts, attempting to formulate an
acceptable proposal. Perhaps I should make it to both of them—now, simultaneously,
looking from one to the other, making eye contact with each of them fifty
percent of the time, although maybe the hierarchy dictated the eye contact
should be, say, sixty-forty… Above all, I wanted to avoid embarrassing either
of them by requesting an off-villa sojourn in front of the other residents at
lunch. Asking in private seemed the likeliest way to get the response I was
after. Lucia
left the room too abruptly—I remember she was wearing a short, crisply pleated
grey kilt—for me to ask both of them. As soon as the door closed I more or less
blurted out Barney’s proposal and offered to fly up to Paris and back the same
day. I would leave before dawn, return before sundown. That way I wouldn’t miss
even one cocktail hour or dinner. I must have been hoping Paolo would deem a
one-day roundtrip so utterly inefficient and ridiculous he’d give me, along
with his blessing to stay overnight, the name of his favorite Left Bank
hotelier. He
immediately agreed that I should go. “What an opportunity! Beckett!” But he
still seemed distracted by something Lucia had told him. “My God!…” “He’s the man,” I admitted. He
opened his door. I stood up. Because of the look on his face, I doubted my
previous expression made sense to him, and so was trebly surprised when he
said: “I know twenty people ’oo would kill to be able to meet ’im.” I
coughed. Wouldn’t a murderously rare opportunity dictate a pause in the rule?
“Ventuno,” I managed to say. “Of
course. You are, Vince, so lucky.” “I
hoped you’d see it that way.” “I
studied for one year, do you know, at the Sorbonne. In nineteen and
seventy-six.” “No,
I didn’t…” As
we strolled toward the diningroom he quizzed me about Beckett’s health,
stopping to jot down the names of two restaurants in Montparnasse. He even
offered to have the Center’s travel agent make the arrangements, an offer I
gratefully accepted. One of his drivers would take me to Linate airport and
pick me up upon my return. It
was settled. I
left before five the next morning. The cost of the ticket was crazily
exorbitant, something like eight hundred and fifty thousand lire, but I told
myself Beckett was worth it. Ellen and I would have virtually no other charges
on Visa for thirty-five days. We’d budgeted for daytrips to Milan and St.
Moritz, and those would have to be put on hold. But the most difficult question
was whether Ellen would accompany me. She’d never been president of the Samuel
Beckett fan club, and she’d spent time in Paris before we met, but those
weren’t really the issues. Two roundtrip tickets would have come to eleven
hundred dollars. Plus four lengthy car rides, two international flights, four
customs gauntlets—for a woman in the first trimester of her first pregnancy, it
was all just too much of a muchness. Even so, I still wished she’d come with
me. The
driver, Roberto, was the same one who’d picked us up at Malpensa ten days
earlier, but he didn’t seem to remember me. (There’d been another Rockefeller
couple in the limo, and I’d kept my Bulls cap pulled down, trying to sleep
during the two-hour drive.) He didn’t speak very much English, though he
managed to identify for me the series of young women standing in the rain by
the side of the road, some of them next to small trailers. “Prozetitutes,” he
said, using the English word. He insisted two times, once in English, that none
of these women were Italian. “Zingaro francesi,” he said. “L’Africani.
L’Albaniani.” He pointed to his wedding ring and shook his head sternly. Linate
was older, more frayed, than Malpensa, but my ticket was waiting, as promised,
at the counter, and customs was easy. The plane was an elderly 727 crammed with
French and Italian businessmen. I thought I could tell the Parisians from the
Northern Italians by their voices and coloring, but it was the Milanese dudes
who really stuck out—leonine haircuts, Armani, exquisitely tooled leather
satchels. I believe it was on this plane that I beheld my first cell phone.
James Baldwin’s outstanding title Going to Meet the Man fizzed semi-relevantly
up through my brain, like a jingle that won’t be dismissed. We left the gate on
schedule but spent forty-five minutes on the tarmac waiting to be cleared for
takeoff. I felt guilty for leaving the villa, for not bringing Ellen, and
spacey from not having slept much. I found myself idly wondering how much the
prostitutes charged. Did they work for themselves or have pimps—and, if so,
what was the split? Beckett was stabbed by a pimp, Robert Prudent, in 1937, as
he was attempting to extricate himself from relationships with Lucia Joyce, Peggy
Guggenheim and (probably) one of M. Prudent’s poules. He met his future wife,
Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, while recovering from his wound in the hospital….
A delay of this length on so short a trip seemed profoundly absurd. If I
arrived too late at Barney’s hotel, he might think I’d canceled and go on to
the hospice without me. The pilot explained at least twice what the problem
was, but only in rapid Italian and even more rapid French. I was indeed going
to meet the man, Samuel Beckett, but it is only in retrospect that all the
waiting I did on that day seems germane. As
I waited to fly up to Paris that morning, waited for the snack to be served, to
descend through more stormclouds, deboard and clear customs, for the Algerian
taxi driver working behind the dysfunctional wiper of his ratty Peugeot to
brake, honk, brake, curse and accelerate his way through the rain across Paris
at a cost of some four hundred francs, I barely had published two books. And
for most of that miserable trip, both of them sat in my lap. Having agonized
all night about how to inscribe them, I’d decided to leave them unsigned. The
first, Torque, was actually more of a chapbook (with a godawful “illustration”
of the title on the cover), brought out in 1979 by Alexis Lynch Press in
Urbana. Book out of print, press defunct, R.I.P. to the both of ’em. My second
book, Wedding Preparations in Beringia, was—is, damn it, is!—a 129-page,
2307-line poem about getting married at the Arctic Circle midway between Russia
and Alaska as the cold war is fizzling out. Bird nerds, Tlingits, Aleuts,
Haida, Star Wars, the Pribiloffs, Nunivak, eagles and grizzlies, Da Bears,
double entendres on latitude and longitude, wheat futures, Bering and Kafka and
Reagan and Gorbachev, love… It has everything. It was probably the sexual
dimension of the poem—middle-aged groom shares narrow bunk with lusty young
consort—that appealed most to Barney. He and Lisa had seen sections of it,
under provisional subtitles, as they came out in The Paris Review, The Atlantic
(where Part I, “Dead Reckoning,” first appeared) and some smaller magazines.
Barney called up to offer me a contract as the typescript was making the rounds
of the usual presses and contests. (It had never occurred to me to submit it to
Grove.) When the book came out in September 1985, Barney ran a quarter-page ad
in the Times Book Review, something almost unheard of for poetry. He and Lisa
and Ira Silverberg made sure it got reviewed, too. That it was published by
Grove in the first place helped make it a little notorious, and most of its
issues and politics were timed serendipitously. In October it was named as a
finalist for the National Book Award. Although Sharon Olds eventually won in
November for The Dead and the Living, I got a check for a thousand dollars, my
name appeared yet again in the Times and other good places, and the famous NBA
open-book emblem would still be embossed, albeit in silver, on the front of the
paperback. Ed Hirsch, Sandra Cisneros and Barney wrote letters that yielded a
Guggenheim, a Shifting, and the Bellagio residency. Pritzker gave me tenure and
promoted me to associate professor. Since
then my stock has spiked downward. I’m tracking decidedly bearishly, as my
colleague Charles Deakin has put it in his mock Harvard accent. (Prosers with
Hollywood options can afford to be snotty, I guess.) I still get invited to
summer conferences and autumn colloquia, and I give about a reading a year.
Seven shortish poems from what I hope will be my third book have come out in A
(or A minus) list magazines, but right now I don’t have a contract. I do,
however, continue to be listed in a prestigious Who’s Who put out by the
International Biographical Centre in Cambridge, England, and am annually
invited to update my entry and purchase a leatherette-bound copy for only
L89.70, plus postage and handling. In
1986 Ann Getty and Lord Weidenfeld—an appropriately monikered duo if ever there
was one—bought Grove Press from Barney, leaving him with the impression Ms.
Getty was simply providing Grove with an infusion of cash and that Barney would
continue to run things. She’d written a poem about Barney and Grove, after all,
and Barney had hired her son. Who could imagine bad faith? So that when a few
months after the contract was signed Barney was fired by Ms. Getty’s henchmen,
he was more than a little surprised. As
a non-Nobel Prize-winning poet, I was handed over to a decidedly junior senior
editor named Earlie Sydney, who went out of her way in a letter to let me know
how much she “admired” my work and who less than a year later was proffering a
generous discount on remaindered copies of the paperback Wedding. Evergreen
indeed! In September it will be eleven years since my last book came out, two
since Ms. Sydney turned down my third, citing “timing” and “marketing
exigencies.” When
I finally got to the Hotel PLM, Barney was waiting for me in the lobby. As
always, he looked amazingly studly for a guy in his middle sixties. Cheekbones,
strong chin, fierce blue eyes, about two percent body fat sleekly clad in black
Levi’s, black turtleneck, black leather jacket. Just your typical Jewish
Catholic anarchist millionaire porn-pushing Nobel Prize sort of guy. His big,
veiny hands were holding a bottle of Jameson, and he told me we had to leave
now. We went back outside and caught another taxi. “How’s
Ellen?” “Ellen
is pregnant and happy, and happy to be in Bellagio. She says hi to you and
Lisa, and to Beckett. Where’s Lisa?” “Don’t
ask,” he said, laughing. He shouted directions to the driver, who seemed to
have his own ideas about how to most quickly reach the hospice. I could see
through the streaky glass that we were on the boulevard Raspail but had no idea
in which direction we were, or should have been, headed. I hadn’t been in Paris
since my third year of college, and I’d only stayed three or four days. We
rocketed past a parked white police van, the driver’s side door unreassuringly
ajar, blue flashers streaking the puddles. Le flics. In
one piece, and briskly, we made it. No. 26, rue Remy-Dumoncel. Le Tiers Temps.
As Barney paid the driver, I saw through the drizzle that at two-and-half
stories it was the shortest building on the block. Red brick first floor, white
stucco above. A woman came out the front door, opened a blue Credit Lyonnaise
umbrella, hurried away down the sidewalk. Barney
had called ahead, so the tall woman who answered the door was expecting us. I
knew Beckett’s wife, Suzanne, was gaunt and tall—that in fact she looked much
like her husband—but I understood this was not her. The woman and Barney
exchanged little hugs, and I heard him address her as Claire. M. Beckett was
having a walk, Claire explained. We could wait for him back in his room. I
am in my mother’s room. It’s I who live there now. I don’t know how I got
there. Perhaps in an ambulance, certainly a vehicle of some kind. I was helped.
We followed Claire toward the back of the house. Meat was cooking somewhere
close by, and I noticed that the floor tiles and panelling changed, became
newer, as we moved down the hall. Molloy could stay, where he happened to be.
In the annex of a hospice in Paris. I’d always loved the way he used commas…. And
then I was inside the room. It was small but not tiny. Bed with no headboard,
two chairs, chest-high dresser, small brown refrigerator with books stacked on
top. In one corner a pewtery oxygen tank, beside it an oxygen mask. A small
desk beneath a square window. Then I went back inside the house and wrote, It
is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was
not raining. Barney
carefully set down the bottle of Jameson near the middle of the desk. We both
remained standing. In a row against the wall at the back of the desktop were a
few dozen books: Keats, Derek Mahon’s Day-Trip to Donegal, a tattered beige
Divina Commedia, but mostly biographies—Ellmann’s of Joyce, Brenda Maddox’s of
Nora Joyce, Max Brod’s of Kafka. I wondered whether Barney would be asked, or
instructed, to burn Beckett’s unpublished manuscripts, manuscripts here in this
room. On this desk. Perhaps he would burn them himself. I
felt someone, not Barney, beside me. I turned and stepped back. He was taller
than me, which seemed right. Behind oval lenses his blue eyes, called gulls’ eyes
in so many accounts I had read, were bloodshot but friendly. (It stupidly
occurred to me that they were red, white and blue.) Barney was introducing us,
and Beckett was h |