The building is two-story, with a front door of oval plate-glass set in heavy, much-varnished hardwood, with a brass loop handle and thumb-trigger.
The carpeting in the hall is worn maroon, with large, stylized flowers in green and yellow. The chipped paint on the wainscoting is off-white, an almost ashy gray. The doors to the apartments are the same much-varnished hardwood as the front door, and each has a brass number: 1, 3, 5, 7, 2, 4, 6, 8. “On the Steppes of Central Asia” is now virtually a roar, but then sudden silence: the radio has been snapped off. The smell of porkchops frying is almost palpable.
Before the door of apartment 3 lies the evening paper. The door opens, and a woman in a cotton housedress (white, printed with violets) stoops, picks up the paper, and glances momentarily down the hall. She has the classic, almost masculine face of a Venus de Milo; her hair is drawn into a bun at the back of her neck; her breasts are full, and her hips are broad and capable.
The hall is lighted by three meager frosted-glass, one-bulb fixtures spaced down the ceiling, and in the light, almost as if from candles or lanterns, the aura is golden, mellow, with the maroon of the carpet, the rich smell of the porkchops, the dark wood of the doors, and the many-layered paint on the woodwork. A woman’s gentle laugh is barely audible. And then a metallic clang, perhaps a pan that had fallen, and a man’s voice: “Damn!”
The radio plays again, now softly: “In a Persian Market.”
A woman appears beyond the glass of the front door and, holding a large brown paper sack in one arm, opens the door and enters the hall. Her tan plaid skirt stops just above her knees. The coat, with its fur collar, is chocolate brown. Her brown hair tumbles from beneath a brown tam. Her shoes are spike-heel black patent leather. She glances down the hall and then hurries up the stairs, which creak slightly with her every step. Behind her hovers the aroma of cosmetics, face powder, and perfume.
Throughout the city, brick apartment houses: sooty yellow or deep red. At six o’clock of an October evening, they glow at entryways and windows. They smell of frying meat. Their halls are musty and dimly lighted. From behind the doors come muted sounds of voices.
In the chill haze of an October evening, brick apartment houses. Mystery and romance.
IV
A new Rambler American, pure white, is parked beside the heaps of plowed, grimy snow. Deep-sunk footprints lead across the snowfield to the river, a quarter-mile from the blacktop road pied with glazes of milky ice.
The river runs green and swift between the snow and snow, here and there a foamy white where a rock breaks the current into eddies. Three stark and hoary trees stand lacy beyond the far bank.
The river gurgles, sloshes around the rocky point where the fisherman stands. He is insulated, puffed with down and kapok, his boots rubberized, his cap synthetic fur with earflaps pulled all the way down.
In his left, heavily-gloved hand he holds his pole; the right, ungloved, he tucks into his left armpit.
The pole jerks. He sets the hook. Another jerk, another sharp pull upward. A third jerk, another sharp twitch. He almost reluctantly pulls his hand from the warmth of his armpit and reels the catch in. The pole bends almost double and is alive with the struggle of the fish. The first breaks water, and he works it as he hauls the second and the third toward the surface. Now all three are moving with the current, strangely passive as though they’ve given up and, unlike trout, are ready for the net. But no such dignity as nets for whitefish, and he cranes them up, the rod almost an “O” with the weight of three foot-long fish.
With long-nose pliers, he unhooks each one and throws it back into the snow, where a heap of whitefish is growing, maybe twenty or thirty. From a plastic tube, with his right hand, he extracts a maggot, fat, white, but almost inert in the cold, and puts it on one hook. He puts a second maggot on the next hook, and a third maggot on the final hook. He puts his fingers to his nose and smells the putrid flesh in which the maggots were nurtured, the scent of death.
He casts the rig out and waits for the jerk-jerk-jerk of the struggling fish.
Tropical Thoughts
Depending on one’s mood, the tropics are either fetid or fecund. The two images, both pervasively green, are, on the one hand, of mildew, scum on stagnant water, ophidians waiting flickeringly for prey, vines strangling nobler growth, the stridently green cries of extravagant birds with grotesquely large bills, Roquefort striations on the milky pallidness of an orchid, a mossy crocodile lying inertly below the surface, only its unblinking luminously green eyes and its snout visible, impenetrable walls of smothering greenness—or, on the other hand, verdure: growth superabundant and languid plenty, the brilliance of a cockatoo uplifting its emerald comb, ripe fruits hanging golden among the leaves, a monkey chattering as it flashes from branch to branch, the ogle-eyed lemur looking through us into its future.
It occurs to me that some inhabit, slither about in, the fetidly figurative while others dwell, thrive, in fecundity. Or, to put the matter another way, some stagnate in greenness while others flourish in verdure.
But I’m not about to name names, not I, no sir, for I’m not a backbiting, wrongheaded bigot.
The Orgone Experience; or, Renewal Is Possible
AUGUST 10 (White Mountains in Maine)
Rain, from drizzle to downpour to drizzle.
We drove to Rangeley and visited the Wilhelm Reich Museum and Shrine.
Reich erected (or had erected, for he was, of course, the great proponent of erections) a granite, three-story Bauhaus atop a peak in the White Mountains. Perhaps fifty yards from the house is the tomb, overlooking valley and mountains: lakes and dense maple and birch forests. Next to the granite tomb (atop which is a bronze bust of the Master) sits one of Reich’s most important inventions, a “Cloudbuster,” which is a large metal frame supporting aluminum or steel tubes perhaps twenty feet long and a spaghetti-tangle of high-power electric wires. With his Cloudbusters, Reich called down the orgone power in clouds to create deluges (when needed by local agriculturalists).
In his first-floor laboratory, the Master had, among other scientific paraphernalia, a large, black microscope, through which he could view the orgone wriggling of the seed of life; on the top floor, the Master had a great brass telescope, through which he could view the cosmos, powered in its mighty churning by the selfsame orgone that propels the sperm toward the egg. Microcosm, macrocosm.
Awed and inspirited, my wife and I sat in an orgone chamber, feeling the power of the cosmos flow into our aging, failing selves. Emerging from the chamber after some twenty minutes of absorption, we raced, through the mud and rain, to the Buick Regal that we had rented from Alamo ($148 per week, unlimited mileage) and turned toward our home-away-from-home, the Spillover6 Motel in Stratton, Maine. Our Navy-blue Buick (we would have preferred white or silver!) churned down the muddy road from the Shrine onto Maine Highway 6 and glided faster, ever faster toward the Spillover.
After careening into the driveway and sliding sloshingly to a halt before Unit No. 6, we leapt from the auto; I fumbled, almost in a panic, to unlock the door. We entered. Our raiment flew hither and yon. We plunged onto the queen-sized bed, hardly aware of its thunking collapse, and, our muddy hiking boots still on our feet, we strove for the great, shuddering, liberatory orgonasm.
Later (liberated, Lahd Amighty, Free at Last!), we sat propped in the broken-down bed, sipping diet Coke and watching, beyond the toes of our muddy hiking boots, the Lawrence Welk Show, taped in Escondido. In a small canoe, Guy and Rona paddled about the artificial lake and sang, “My Cup Runneth over with Love.” Suzie and Bobby had fun at the pool, dancing to the lively strains of “Ain’t We Got Fun.” A basso profundo, contentedly angling as he crooned, climaxed