Up here on the sixth floor, looking down at the night. The new snow has emptied the avenue, and me. I like it. I love it. I sit in the dark, a field of cold here glows from the glass, the rippled glass crack glazed in its century old wood frames, soft and splintering; the cold on my face like clean water, like the incense that pours from the white street, up into me. The same incense pours from inside me. Empty, cold, alert, alone. I don’t know what it is. It is suffering, it is a sweet thankful exile, it is a joy like a moment before being executed, a moment that leaps through time and lands and grabs my insides with the cold. It is something like ecstasy, like a mother’s arms, like a spoon fed dream. Cold, alone, agaze, above, the nighted silence wrapped in snow, no cars, no people, just the pond of streetlight yellow on white, the long neck of the lamp bucking in the wind, the wind emptied by the end of the snow, emptier and colder and shining black wind.
Down the hall, down and across the hall, my apartment sits empty. I sit in this one, lately, while it’s empty, while Janet Cohen’s at work, away. She used to have a cat. My wife would feed it. The cat died.
My apartment is unoccupied. In a small club up the avenue under an eight light fake old chandelier I know my wife’s hand is on a man’s thigh, and his arm is over her shoulder, and her ringed hand is holding his. They know me, they know I know, and I know. It is a club as yet undiscovered, selling vodka in plastic cups and with upholstered booth seats that are red and chilled, drug from somewhere else, away from the walls. A man with an alto clarinet and a man with a bass saxophone are ripping bird sounds from their bells. They play, standing on the floor, no stage. People watch and nod. My wife and the man whose thigh her hand rests light on, they can feel the heat of each other’s ears close to one another. It is cold in the club. It is a new, unknown place. It is. The sound of the reeds mixes with the heat they can feel between the bells of their ears. They can hear the heat, a small conch spiral drinking them into one another. It is like their ears are kissing, kissing and whispering. Candles on the few tables, and the eight light chandelier, and a blue light behind the bar, a borrowed bar with black leather upholstery on its inclined front, tacked down with red hand-sized hearts. All the upholstery is nicked, white stuffing oozing. A melting track of snowwater winds in from the street. My wife can smell his clothes and they don’t smell like mine, and that is the smell. The way his body receives her touch is not like mine, and that is the way. The way he listens, when she speaks, as if his entire body leans into her words, is not the way I listen, and that is the way his listening hears. Even the water that melts from the heels of his shoes melts not like mine, and that is how. A gust of wind tears a pile of snow from the top of the roof across the street from me, punching it through the streetlight, making it stop, flip,then atomize above the ground sixty feet below. The entire window shudders, in aftershock. A small pebble in me thrills, aches, then quiets.
We’ve already exchanged blows once. No one could really say they lost. Not really. Sometimes another man is the shovel one needs to dig out a space in life. In marriage. It would be wrong to say I prefer it; and wrong to say I even accept it. And I cannot say I’ve felt anything but smoldering violence in me for the duration of its acte. Still, I do feel like I’ve taken him in hand, his legs tucked under my arm, and used his head as a shovel’s head, and dug a clearing down into the ground where I’ve found a solitude and a cleareyed chime that rings in the back of my mind. I’ve tossed him back up, and clapped my hands clean, and set down and settled down and returned to a mind I didn’t even know I’d lost, the mind I lost to marrying. If she peered down over the edge and told me she’d cooked and would I like to eat, I’ve no doubt I’d climb back up and lose the mind I’d now found and return to the married kind. But she’s not. She comes back, in the end. But by that time, a valve has been turned too tight to unturn and I have too hard a time trying to start again. It ends up me being the one who looks like they left. Then neither of us want her, and we – him and I – soon both find others. She spends a good stretch alone. Then she too finds another. But that’s so long from now, so so long.
I read Janet Cohen’s mail when I’m in here. A man it seems she’s known for most of her life handwrites her extraordinarily long and – luminescent – prose about his life. They are post-marked Juno but I gather that’s the closest post. The paper seems to have been soaked then dried, it is stiff and tough and feels resistant. His handwriting is patient, immaculately punctuated, what look like tobacco-finger prints line the edges. He double underlines the
Ms on the address. The sticky lopsided roach-sandy built-in drawer under the counter in the kitchen is where the whole archive is. I’ve read the entire body of letters. It is actually the only reading I do now. I look forward to it. They arrive at five week intervals. I don’t mind rereading any of them. Some have become more favorite than others. But in my illegal hours here in her place, it is as if the door to her apartment is the entry to a telescoping world, and I gain distance on the life I don’t have, and the secret pages I read mend me.
