Clarice in Claverack

I used to be so beautiful. Dressed only in Barneys. Had hair. Could stay up for twelve hours sniffing coke and drinking dozens of Heinekens. Weighed 160. Thin as a rail. I only painted shapes. I abstained from people. From the portrait. Now I just work on the house. I hang out with the dog and watch movies. Mission Impossible. Tom Cruise lowered from the ceiling, outfitted in that tight black turtleneck, his face as smooth a sheet of ice.

*

When I inherited the house, Clarice was on tour. Then she arrived. Stopped in the drive. Rolled down her window. “I’m Clarice,” she said. “I live on the flag-lot behind you.” She invited me over for tea. We watched rain fall through a tall window. “Your mouth,” she said. “It’s buzzing. Can I take a look?”

*

Saw Christian for dinner. The new place. The host put on a real show about “The Speakeasy.” He was like, “Have you seen The Speakeasy? I’ve gotta show you guys The Speakeasy.”

“The Speakeasy” was just a windowless basement bar, like many restaurants in Chatham have, but decorated in the style of a Hilton lobby. Or, maybe not a Hilton. The lobby of some kind of hotel that isn’t nice, but that is aspiring to look Millennial. We didn’t sit in “The Speakeasy.” Too bar-ish for me.

Christian ordered a salad with chicken and told me about how he and his husband invited this guy from their gym over for dessert. I ordered my burger rare. The waitress said “it’s a smash burger. We can’t really control the temperature.” I looked at her and said Okay. I looked at Christian and said Dessert or Dessert.

“Well…it turned out he’s straight.”

*

I spend my nights in the studio. A floor mattress. Piles of my finished and unfinished work. A single room in a crumbling Victorian on the bad side of a small town on the right side of the Hudson river. Toilet down the hall. Watched Dirty Harry on my laptop. Forgot how racist it was. Like so racist. But also, in this one part, Harry rides a cherry picker up to the top of a building off which a man plans to suicide. In another part, Harry runs up the courthouse stairs. Big fucking staircase. Marble. It takes so long. Torturous. You don’t get shots like that in action movies anymore.

*

This year the Hudson flooded over. A week of ice wind. Hardly a snow all winter then a blizzard at the end of February. I spent it with Clarice in Claverack. It snowed us in and she played me the cello and I read to her aloud. I felt young for a day or two. Remembered the rush of wild love. When I rode the subway in high school with Marcie. Kissed pressed against the pole. We couldn’t wait to get back home. I told Clarice about that and she said, “we’re running out of coffee.”

*

In the spring, I planted my land with saplings. Little growing trees. I don’t have many acres. Just a few. I gave them all classic animal names: Spot, Duke, Orville, Lady, and Good Boy.

Now in the summer I sweat in the heat and stand shirtless in the purging, torrential rains. Clarice giggles at me from her window. 

I walk and water the dog. I work out. I get back to work. It isn’t clear what I’m cut out for anymore. I’m not retired, but I’m far away from the beginning, too. I’m at an intermission.

*

My dentist is deeply closeted. He gives me a discount if I wear tight pants and let him put his hand on my leg. I feel this is a penance I must pay. I owe so much. I don’t know what it is I owe or to whom I owe it, but the debt weighs on me. Now and then the opportunities reveal themselves. I see a gap I can fill in the grand machination.

*

The Pizza Hut is under new management. I watched them unfurl the white sign as I sat in the lot by the Aubuchon, phone held to my ear, listening to the message from DJ. I stayed there in the car as the sky turned dark and turbid. Rain came. I sat typing on my phone. I don’t hit send anymore. The exercise contains itself right here.

I startled when I heard the nock on my window. An older man, rain soaked.

“My son,” he explained. “He was meant to get me but I said I’d walk. Then rain!”

I unlocked the car. I drove him back to town, dropped him by the pharmacy. He told me he lived nearly all his life in San Juan. This weather, he couldn’t break himself into it.

*

Hit myself in the face with a two-by-four. It hurt everywhere. I touched my chin. Blood on my hands. I was all alone.

Had had the two-by-four balanced and hanging off a stack of other shit. Something hit the loose end. Flipped up on me. Seesaw situation. Really had time to speed up. Gashed my chin up.

Walked up the driveway to my truck with a rag stuck to my face. Clarice passed by in her Prius. Gave me a sad wave. I looked back at the Green Zip System siding exposed on the house. I’d been doing real work on it. Small place. Not even 800sqft. That made the project, with all its catastrophes, more manageable. Just the other day I found rot in the framing. 

*

Christian and John convinced me to join them for dinner in Hudson with their gym friend. I suspected it to be some kind of set up. I ordered pasta. The portion was upsettingly small. The gym friend drank seltzer with lemon. I had a coke with lime. Christian and John shared a cocktail, a glass of Brunello, green salad, the swordfish. The gym friend, called Eric, told us in desert California, near the border with Nevada, there is a solar field. In its center is a tower with a reflective head that beams light down to the panels in shining, golden columns. Eric told me this image—the light from the tower traveling to the panels—reminded him of the cinematic rendering of Sauron’s eye in Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. He hated that his mind worked like that.

*

There’s a rhythm to being alone. Privacy can be addictive. It breaks you back down to the animal. No signifier. Food, water, shelter, and air. I return to the world and feel like an imposter wearing my skin. I move a face within my face. I can’t see the invisible. The gestures behind gestures. The games within the game.

*

I’ve discarded most of my young ephemera. The desire to be grizzled. The desire to desire. I just am all day now. I blast cigs in the studio, my head dangled out the open window. I own a dog who walks unleashed beside me. She never wanders, just needs to hear her name. Her ears, they collapse into little pockets of themselves when she frightens. It pricks me.

*

My brother only calls from places. “Tom,” he’ll say. “DJ here.” As if I wouldn’t know. “I’m at Schwab. Call me back.” DJ co-inherited the house with me. Our father’s house. His cabin. A refuge in the dark country. My task is to fix the house while DJ floats me. Then we plan to rent it, I guess.

*

With Eric I work differently. I find patterns. I become against the multi-task. I need to appear ordered amongst the disorder. He eyed me wielding a hammer. I looked for Clarice coming up the drive. Eric brought a thermos with him. He owned work boots already. He moved assuredly, silent. Occasionally, he walked off to smoke a cigarette. I tried to make small talk. Learn his useless facts.

He drove a nail into wood. “My brain is destroyed.” He laughed. “I see a sick view and I’m like damn those chemtrails rip. Fire ass chemtrails.”

When Eric talked, I felt he was looking beyond me at a great storm amassing in the negative space and rolling in at us. I offered him a soda. He looked mournfully out at my trees drenched in sunlight. “Do you know what happened to Kings of Leon? Those guys fucked.”

*

Eric didn’t show up. No word to Christian either. He didn’t answer his phone. My texts went through green. Inspired me to make some paintings for a series that I secretly call “The Disposables.” They take twenty-minutes at most. They’re all anyone buys of my work. I believe the modularity is a factor. Throw four on a wall and feel intelligent. They’re squares within squares within squares.

*

“Should we be worried about him?” Christian said. “He’s so cute.” He gripped the little handle of his empty espresso cup. “I guess I don’t really know him at all. I don’t even know his last name.” It was a tourist weekend in town. Warren street full of shoppers. People moving without a destination. I watched them in the window. City clothes. Elegant children. In the back recesses of the café a pan hit another pan.

*

Took the dog over to the house and tossed her ball among the trees then bent to rub her belly. Clarice came out for a cigarette. Went in to practice the cello. I sipped water from a container that resists any change in temperature. I played with the zippers on my sweater. I picked a spot in the sky and looked at it for as long as I could.

*

“Hi Tom, DJ here, I’m in the Adirondacks…I’m in Paris…I’m in Iceland…I’m on the bench in the park where you first kissed Marcie…I’m in London…I’m at dad’s grave…I’m in Westport…On the north shore…at Barney’s…In Warsaw…I’m at Babbo, should I feel guilty?…I’m at the apartment at the table having a brandy and wondering what you’re up to…I’m at church, no just kidding…I’m at the arcade, fatherhood, am I right?...I’m at the bookstore, really I’m outside, and I’m trying to remember, what was that novel you recommended. The one by the Belgian guy. The Map of the World?...I’m in East Hampton…I’m in Auckland…I’m running the numbers over here and having wonderful breakfast…I’m managing a litany of short-term, potentially fungible solutions. You’ll need to, you know, secure employment.”

*

Eric showed up. I know not to ask too many questions. He blew back in. I allowed it. We got to work. “I knew a guy with no right eye,” he said. The guy, apparently, popped it out as a party trick and he got new eyes as he grew, like shoes or sport coats. He knew a guy who tried to kill himself, but he messed it up, woke up in the motel not dead. “He was like, ‘fuck.’’ Eric said, “My life is so boring now. I’m out here on my woke shit…I told group that should any tactical situation arise I simply would disarm the shooter…They almost called the cops?”

Clarice walking down the drive.

“Look at her,” he said. “Absolute art baddie.”

*

Today tears appeared in Dr. Meisner’s eyes while he ripped plaque from my incisors. His free hand crept up my thigh. I lay in the chair, mouth agape.

*

Clarice is the kind of person idiots mistake for frail. She has a skittering quality. She shakes hands limply. She doesn’t hold a gaze. There is a hardness to her. A relentlessness I lack. She’s an artist in the most professional sense. I’m just a guy who does things. Today I do trees. Tomorrow, whatever. Good Boy, on last visit, appeared frail. I’ve read trees talk through the soil, but it may not be true. Clarice waved to me. A cold wave. Her head didn’t turn. I was bringing in the wood stove, getting the house ready to for winter.

I knocked on the door and she took me against her.

*

I told Christian about Dr. Meisner at a farm-stand on route 9G. Flecks of gray in his neat mustache. “That’s so quaint,” Christian said. “Do you think he has a double life? Like, is he fucking the pool boy? Do you think he can afford a pool?”

John hefted a kaleidoscopic, wrinkled squash. John had another life before this. A wife and children in the Bahamas, of all places. Christian has always been who he is, which gives him a warm obliviousness that I adore. He’s never looked into the mirror and seen himself shattered.

*

Took Eric to dinner. We sat in “The Speakeasy.” A celebration. Our work was done. He said, “it’s low key hype down here.” I juiced three lime wedges into my seltzer. What was there to even say. We stuffed ourselves. He fiddled with his necklace and his ring.

When we went outside. The winter’s first snow came falling softly. It collected in dusty heaps on the light fixtures and parking meters.

Later, I went walking with the dog out in the dark on Warren street. Looked at my reflection in the closed shop windows. I made a boot print, she buried her nose in it. When a car came speeding by, music blaring, she sat somberly and released a single bark. 

*

I was sitting by myself outside of a Starbucks, behind a city tour bus, watching people walk across the street. I saw DJ before he saw me. Daniel Jr. in a sport coat and tailored shirt. Good jaw on him. 

“Walk with me,” DJ said and I did. There was paint on my pants. I wore a UFC hat. 

“You look like a yokel,” he said. 

I told him I am now. 

“You really aren’t,” he said. “Yokels don’t go to Columbia.” 

We sat at a café. He put papers on a table. I expected a speech. 

Instead, DJ took out his phone and showed me a naked woman the screen. 

“That’s Janice,” he said. “Doesn’t she still look so hot?”

This was an old girlfriend of his. An item from our wastrel youths. 

“She has a husband, but they never fuck. She sends me photos of everything. This is just the tip of the iceberg.”

I asked if he returned the favor. 

“She wants the weirdest things,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe it. Just sections of me. My traps. A tight rib cage shot. Shoulders drive her wild. I tell her I’d meet her anywhere, anytime. Name the time and the place. Only because I know she’ll never follow through. She lives upstate. By you, kind of, if you’re in the market…”

I took the pen and clicked it. 

“Alright,” DJ said. “Let’s get down to business.” 

*

I brought Clarice over a couple of my disposables, told her the house is done enough to live in now. I got the wood stove running. “We’re not gonna rent it,” I said. I wasn’t going anywhere. She wore wide-legged jeans, an angular black top with big shoulders, thick designer cross trainers. She’d cut her bangs high on her forehand. They sat there in sad, wet crinkles.

“So what are these supposed to be of?” she said about my paintings. 

*

Here at the house late in the dark when the sky lays dryly, the stars avail themselves, stupid bright, like tinsel ornaments. The TV plays the type of thing you might want to call a “program.” Public access and weather men with plastic faces.

I tend to my trees. Sometimes, I paint. I pass Clarice in the drive. She has me over or she doesn’t. I respect the distance. The way she operates. The pieces of herself she gives me access to. I can hear her at the border of our properties practicing the cello as the dusk slides in. I feel like a father. Not anyone’s father in particular. Not even the dog’s. Just a platonic father, stealing a bite of sandwich from an archetypal break room fridge. I stay in alien time. Eat bread rinds. Have coffee at midnight. I take these little notes in the day’s dusty corners. To do it during normal hours, the time meant for the world, is to miss the main event. The procession of light toward the space left by other light.

*

Driving in the dark last night, the bright of approaching headlights was pure color. Snow washed on the highway. Drifts piled up on the shoulder. Trees, big ones, bent in the wind. The deer came out and I didn’t have time to swerve. Hit it head on. The hood of my truck folded around it.

I got out and stood on the roadside until the snow weighed on me. I was frozen there, icicles in my beard. I took off my coat and my shirt. The snow felt cold and fresh on my skin. I wrapped my clothing around the leg of the now dead deer and pulled it off the road. I was useful—like a bag of oats or a jug of water.

There’s a line you call. People who come to handle these things. They carve the animals up. Use the meat. Keep the hides. Yesterday I forsook them. I escorted it myself from this life into the whatever.

____
Jackson Frons lives in Los Angeles, CA.