Judy was leaving soon. She was leaving San Francisco after six years there, leaving people and places behind. Jack was staying in San Francisco where he had lived for the last twenty years, though he was not unfamiliar with leaving his past behind in search of something better. They stood in the tiny kitchen of her studio apartment, wrapping the last of the glasses in newspaper.
‘What are you going to do when I’m gone, Jack?’
‘The same things I’ve always done.’
‘Like what?’
‘Talk with friends and argue with idiots.’
‘Sounds like a poem,’ she said.
‘Everything is a poem if you listen the right way.’
She placed the box of newspaper-wrapped glasses with the other boxes in the living room-turned-obstacle course. Some were sealed, and others not. The sealed boxes she would take with her; the unsealed ones would be stored in her parents’ house in Los Angeles. Jack sat in one of the two chairs at a small table just outside the kitchen and lit a cigarette. ‘Do you think you’ll come back?’
‘I may, or maybe I’ll go back to LA. Or stay in Hawaii. Or go somewhere else entirely.’ She thought a moment. ‘It depends,’ she said, as if that provided clarification.
‘It’s good not knowing what you’re going to do next,’ he said.
‘I’ll keep that in mind.’
She snaked through the boxes over to the window that looked out onto the street and the hill beyond it, on which were more apartments and houses. Under the window was a stack of papers and notebooks which she began separating into ‘save’ and ‘discard’ piles.
‘Why did you choose University of Hawaii?’
She looked at a notebook and after some hesitation put it in the discard pile. ‘I was accepted by UCLA and Hawaii. I’ve already been to UCLA so I chose Hawaii.’
‘Because it’s further away? Or more exotic?’
‘Because,’ she said showing slight irritation, ‘I liked their program in public administration. Health care planning.’
‘Anything with ‘planning’ in it, I don’t understand. Urban planning, this planning, that planning. What is it? What is ‘public administration’? You get to call the shots? You got tired of social work and now want to be in some lofty position and tell other people what to do?’
‘No. That isn’t it.’
She would have argued with him in the past, but she wasn’t taking the bait. She’s definitely leaving, Jack thought.
‘Maybe I’m tired of PhD psychologists evaluating me as if they know how to do my job,’ she said. ‘I had one of them tell me I should get psychotherapy if I’m going to be in this line of work so I can better understand how to help people.’
‘He really said that? I would have told him to fuck off.’ When she didn’t respond, he said ‘I’m serious.’
‘We live in different worlds,’ she said.
‘We live in different parts of the same world.’
‘I’ll miss you, Jack.’
He laughed and she joined him. There then followed a long silence. They were both comfortable with silence. She continued to busy herself with her pile of notes, and then back to her boxes. Jack remained at the small table, the short stub of a lit cigarette between his lips, and removed a battered notebook from his shirt pocket and a broken pencil in desperate need of sharpening.
He looked at Judy and wrote: ‘Leaving people …’ He couldn’t think of anything to follow, and crossed it out. Jack was one of the people she was leaving he thought, and then wrote ‘I love her. Like a sister.’ He stubbed his cigarette out in a small dish that Judy had left on the table for him to use as an ashtray.
Judy was short and thin with dark straight hair. By her own description she had the features of a Polish person (her mother was of Polish descent) – slight bags under her eyes and high cheek bones. She was in her mid-thirties but looked to be in her twenties sometimes. Today Jack thought she looked older.
They met at one of Jack’s poetry readings in 1977; over the years they became friends and would get together, at her apartment, or in his hotel room, or at Old Uncle Gaylord’s Ice Cream Parlor on Market Street. She was adamant about not getting together with him for a drink at a bar.
He made friends easily, and was a familiar sight as he walked in various neighborhoods of San Francisco (most often North Beach), smoking a cigarette, waving to those who knew him. Some of his friends he knew from his New York days, fellow poets, of whom some were well known and others, like Jack, were struggling. He would hold court in coffee houses and bars, sometimes about politics and sometimes poetry, it was hard to tell the difference at times.
Jack was in his fifties but his white hair and the stubble on his face made him look older. His ways were familiar to Judy by now; his arguments and accusations, his anger, and self-righteousness, his drinking, betting, and confusion. He was a poet who had some published books by publishers that had long gone out of business. She had tried to help him in various aspects of his vagabond poet’s life – finding him jobs that he quickly quit, loaning him money that he never paid back, and trying with spotty success to get him help with his drinking and living situation.
Since she and Jack first met, various conflicts of the world served as a backdrop for Jack’s thinking and rantings: Iranian protesters on the streets calling for the removal of the U.S.-placed Shah; the tensions and attacks between the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel in 1978, the exile of the Shah of Iran in early 1979, the taking of U.S. hostages in Iran later that year, the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.
It was now 1981 and with Reagan’s election, the country was shifting to the right. ‘He’s out of his mind,’ she told Jack shortly after the election. ‘We might have World War Three.’ She had talked about leaving, getting away from the madness.
‘Where would you go?’ he had asked.
‘Unless I go overseas, and I don’t want to, there really isn’t any place to go. Every state voted for Reagan.’
‘Minnesota didn’t,’ he had said.
‘Too cold.’
They both had laughed at this after which Judy had said wistfully that she felt like the country left her. ‘Even some of my friends voted for him.’
‘Nothing
is forever," Jack had said.
Judy was now looking out the window. It would be dark in a few hours. She would be off for Los Angeles the next day, and then to Hawaii a few days after that.
‘What are you going to do with your car?’ he asked.
She looked back at Jack. He knew she suspected that he wanted it, but both played it as if he didn’t. ‘I’m leaving it with my brother.’
He’ll probably sell it, Jack thought.
‘What are you writing, Jack?’
‘Some ideas.’
‘For a poem?’
‘Yeah. Ideas mostly. Lines of a poem.’
‘A poem about what?’
‘I don’t know yet. Sometimes I don’t know I’ve written a poem until after a few days. The lines I thought would go in some poem actually is the poem.’
He suspected the poem would be about leaving – and being left behind. He wondered how many lovers she had had while she lived in San Francisco. He only knew about Karl; someone he never met, but felt like he knew, like a television show or movie that mentions someone that all the characters talk about, but who is never part of the show.
‘You still getting postcards from Karl?’
‘What made you think of Karl?’
‘I don’t know.’ He leaned his head to one side and rested it on hand, pretending his eyes were a camera and he was making a movie. ‘You told me he writes you postcards every now and then.’
‘Yeah, once in a while. I got one a few months ago. He was in Germany; he sent me a card from there.’
‘What does he talk about? On the cards I mean.’
‘Not much. What he’s seen. He doesn’t ask about me. It’s like he’s writing in a diary. He wanted to go to Germany; he was fascinated by Germany. The movies coming out by these new directors.’
She said nothing and looked down at the pile of papers and notebooks, now just whittled down to those that she decided to save.
‘I
once saw him coming out of a movie," Judy said. 'It was during an Ozu festival. Some theater
was showing all these movies by Ozu, the Japanese film-maker. It was a little after we broke up. I
remember coming out of the theater.' Judy said.
‘What was the movie?’
‘I don’t remember. But we said hello, and he went on his way. A few days later I get this card from him saying how Wim Wenders was influenced by Ozu and he was saying some things about the movie we had both seen. How Ozu’s movies are all about family and their break-up.’
‘Does he know you’re leaving?’
‘I haven’t talked with him. I doubt he knows. And I’m not about to tell him.’
‘He wants to get back together with you. How long has it been? Since you two broke up?’
‘Jesus, Jack. It’s been two years. And it’s not like we were going together for a long time. And he’s the one who broke it off. If he wants me back, he can call me instead of sending me postcards. He knows my phone number.’
‘Do you want him back?’
‘I’m leaving, Jack.’
She wanted him back, Jack thought. He sensed a sadness in her, though he wasn’t sure if it might by his. He thought about old lovers, and then his ex-wife, the anger, his feelings that nothing was his fault and then how everything was. There was some in-between but he could never pin it down. The break-up of families; yes, Ozu was right, and it wasn’t just a Japanese thing, he thought. He thought about his son, now a teenager, who he saw when he went down to L.A. His ex-wife tolerated his visits and he would make an effort to stop drinking for at least a week before he visited. She had moved on and married someone; a nice guy who ran his own printing business in an old area of L.A.
He looked down at his notebook and read what he had written a few minutes earlier. ‘You asked me what I would do when you were gone. I gave you an answer but it wasn’t a complete one. Here is the rest of it: I’ll be thinking of you. I’ll be thinking of you as I write poems, as I walk around San Francisco, go to the races, smoke cigarettes, and drink coffee in the morning. I’ll be thinking of you as I try not to get drunk, as I go to sleep somewhere, hoping I wake up the next day. I’ll be thinking of you as we try to save the world. Each in our own way.’
He thought about giving it to her, but decided not to. It might make a good poem, he thought, but maybe not. He would read it over later. Not now. Now it was time to go. Time to leave.
He put his notebook back in his pocket and stood up. The sun was out in the way that it sometimes emerges on overcast days – not a full commitment to sunlight, but enough.
‘I have to go,’ he said, heading for the door.
‘OK, Jack.’ She made her way through the maze of boxes to meet him at the door.
‘I’ll be thinking of you,’ he said.
‘Me too.’
‘Write to me,’ he said. ‘I don’t know where I’ll be living soon, but you can send it care of Caffe Trieste. They know me.’
‘I will.’
‘I’ll still be here if you decide to come back,’ he said. ‘I’m not hard to find.’
‘Goodbye, Jack.’
‘I love you. Like a sister.’
‘I know.’
They hugged, and she rested her head on his shoulder.
‘I have to go,’ he said.
She stood at the door and watched him start walking down the three flights of stairs. His steps echoed in a dramatic fashion as he imagined Karl’s steps had when he left Judy that last time. When Jack reached the entrance he stood, looking out and then opened the door. He walked outside and stood, waiting for the door to close behind him, and lit a cigarette.
No comments:
Post a Comment