Spring Fling: Memories of a Thousand Dollar Poem

2nd installment of the 2nd novel-in-progress.


THE REST OF IT GOES HERE

Memories of a Thousand Dollar Poem
Her night-breath upon my neck was like the ocean’s tide. Intrauterine music, soft and dark of before we were born. All things proceeded from this, her ocean-breath, the warm arm brushing like waves at seaweed the curlicues of chest hair. Sun rolls tongue over blue shards of robin’s egg. Day. Rain beads nostalgia of past lives on the window. Night. The April air smelled like cinnamon and her breasts were still blooming like stars behind the closed eyes of now. You only get tired of things you remember. I lay in bed tired, and alone. Tired like memories of a thousand dollar poem.
“Boyfriend,” she’d said, and it worked. How long had I known her (a half hour?) and already she knew what I’d wanted to hear. I’d given up on the love thing, felt deeply as a matter of lonely pride that I’d learned enough of that soul-twisting experience, that I could write about it from a cool, empirical outsider’s view. I had my friends, my life, and surely it was working. I had finished a two-hundred-thousand-word rough draft of a novel that Holly dismissed as solipsistic juvenilia. I had a certain momentum going. I worked, drank, wrote, played pool, beat off, repeated daily. Who was she to fuck with that? I didn’t need to be tampered with, fixed like a dog. I was married once. I wrote a thousand dollar poem once. Twelve years ago! And where was she? Burying her dolls or plastic dinosaurs in some sandbox in Michigan? The poem was simple I admit. Yet glorious. A little girl broods about death while bottling insects for her collection. I was a serious character once like Ezra Pound ranting against usury. I was going places! Sane places, accomplished places. She was some kid in her twenties packing a nice cognitive punch. And witchcraft.
“Jimmy?” she said one morning while I was half asleep before coffee.
“Um hmm,” I said, nuzzling her neck with eyes closed.
“Who are you who wandered into my life from left of heaven where the angels forgot to dust?” Her tone was serious, urgent. How many times had I asked her never to ask me anything before my first cup of coffee?
“Mmm?” I said, hand cupping her warm left breast. I wanted to remain undisturbed. I wanted to press against her heat and never say another word. I wanted her to let me be. So tired of explaining myself.
I felt the shift of Holly’s weight. She jerked up in the bed and I was cold. My eyes opened to confused slits. She shook me. “Quick Jimmy! Tell me the history of your life! All of it. Now.”
Oh no, I thought. Was this a test? I felt her fingers at my perineum. She tickled me silly. This was her way of rousing mindfulness and felt good till it crossed over to torture. “I-I don’t know,” I said, heaving and writhing and trying to jerk her hand away.
“Tell me now,” she said. “You have five seconds.”
Half out of my mind, hyperventilating, I said: “I was born, and then I met you, and now I’m here.”
She stopped tickling me, kissed my mouth, whispered. “Oh Jimmy, that’s so romantic.” And then my eyes became reacquainted with the deep angry scar that vertically ran the length of the left side of her face. It always surprised me, but never shocked or disturbed me. Holly’s scar colored her every feeling and thought, every day of her life. But it was a fact I often forgot. Her right profile was flawless. The fact that the left didn’t match was interesting to me, not ugly. I just wished, always wished that she could see her beauty, her feral feminine truth through my eyes, and then she’d know I really did accept her as she was.
“I just want you to be the best man you can be for me,” she said while reclining in bed.
Oh no, another nonsequiter, I thought. Deep into a second cup of coffee and preparing to leave, I hoped her statement was rhetorical. “Um hmm,” I said and put on my hat.
“Can I borrow a few thousand dollars for the surgery?” she said.
I slung my bag across my shoulder. “If I had it honey.”
“But I want to be a beautiful woman for you.”
The pathos in her voice made me want to feed my balls to the System, or more practically, blow up a bank or a dam. I faced Holly. She was pouting. “You are beautiful.” I wanted fresh air and time alone. “To me,” I added.
Her words came quick and urgent. “What do you mean by that? Am I ugly? Jimmy?”
“Damnit Holly, that’s not what I meant--you’re not ugly!--you’re not!” I stopped, shocked at the anger in my voice.
“Not pretty,” she whispered, and slowly shook her head from side to side. “No.” She started crying.
I dropped my bag to the floor and went to her. I held her as her tears dampened my collar. I bent to her cheek and kissed, imbibing the salt of her sadness, and saying “I’m sorry,” and “I love you,” and so on. We embraced and rocked on the bed and tasted each other’s tears. After a long period of quiet I felt it was safe to talk. “You ok?”
“I’m sorry I’m so crazy,” she said.
“Me too,” I said. Her eyes flung poison darts. “I mean, I mean--I’m sorry that I’m crazy too, Holly. You know, we’re citizens of the Island of Misfit Toys. It’s perfect, and I love you.”
She smiled at this. “Kiss my eyelids,” she said, and I did. “And now kiss my third eye.” This I knew to be code that disaster had once again been diverted. I pressed my lips between, and just above, her eyebrows. She moaned. Our relationship, whatever it was or would become, could go on. Once again I went through the motions of preparing to leave. “Wait Jimmy,” she said.
“What do you need honey?” [Oh my God!]
“I have a project for you.”
My shoulderblades buckled. I wasn’t breathing. “Uh.”
“Write something for me. How about, ‘Memories of a thousand dollar poem’?”
This was her usual way of poking fun. She wasn’t impressed with the actual thousand dollar poem, saying flatly “that’s nice” when I first read it to her. She had her ways of cutting me to shreds. She probably believed it was good for me, would make me worthy of her, but I figured she had a fierce passive-aggressive addiction. I gave her my crazy smile, brows crooked and high, eyes staring through her, vein pulsing on forehead. “All done honey,” I said. “Just four words.”
“What?” she said with hands on hips. “You can do better than--”
“Better than your poems.”