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Deadline - 7.5.2020
_______
Charles Bukowski
Confession of a Coward
1956
God, she thought lying
in bed naked and re-reading Aldington's Portrait of a Genius, But... he's an impostor! Not D.H.
Lawrence, but her husband- Henry-with
his bauble of a belly and all the hair he never combed and the way he stood around in his shorts, and the way
he stood naked before the window like an
Arabian and howled; and he told her that he was turning into a toad and that he wanted to buy a Buddha and
that he wanted to be old and drown in
the sea, and that he was going to grow a beard and that he felt as if he was turning into a woman.
And Henry was poor,
poor and worthless and miserable and sick. And he wanted to join the Mahler Society. His breath
was bad, his father was insane and his
mother was dying of cancer.
And besides all this,
the weather was hot, hot as hell.
"I've got a new
system," he said. "All I need is four or five grand.
It's a matter of
investment. We could travel from track to track in a trailer."
She felt like saying
something blas+ like, "We don't have four or five grand," but it didn't come out. Nothing
came out: all the doors were closed and
all the windows were down, and it was in the middle of the desert-not
even vultures-and they
were about to drop the Bomb. She should have stayed in Texas, she should have stayed with
Papa-this man is a goon, a gunnysack, a
gutless no-nothing in a world of doers. He hides behind symphonies and poetic fancies; a weak and listless soul.
"Are you going to
take me to the museum?" she asked.
"Why?"
"They're having an
Art Exhibit."
"I know."
"Well, don't you
want to see Van Gogh?"
"To hell with Van
Gogh! What's Van Gogh to me?"
The doors closed again
and she couldn't think of an answer.
"I don't like
museums," he continued. "I don't like museum-people."
The fan was going but
it was a small apartment and the heat held as if enclosed in a kettle.
"In fact," he
said, peeling off his T-shirt and standing in just his shorts, "I don't like any kind of
people."
Amazingly, he had hair
on his chest.
"In fact," he
continued, pulling his shorts down and over the end of one foot, "I'm going to write a book some
day and call it Confession of a Coward."
The doorbell rang like
a rape, or the tearing of ripe flesh.
"Jesus
Christ!" he said like something trapped.
She jumped off the bed,
looking very white and unpeeled. Like a candy banana. Aldington and D.H.
Lawrence and Taos fell to the floor.
She ran to the closet and
began stuffing herself inside the flying cloth of female necessaries.
"Never mind the
clothes," he said.
"Aren't you going
to answer?"
"No! Why should
I?"
It rang again. The
sound of the bell entered the room and searched them out, scaled and scalded their skins, pummeled
them with crawling eyes.
Then it was silent.
And the feet turned
with their sound, turning and guiding some monster, taking it back down the stairwell, one two
three, 1, 2, 3; and then gone.
"I wonder,"
he said, still not moving, "what that was?"
"I don't
know," she said, bending double at the waist and pulling her petticoat
back over her head.
"Here!" she
yelled. "Here!" holding her arms out like feelers.
He finished yanking the
petticoat off over her head with some distaste.
"Why do you women
wear this crap?" he asked in a loud voice.
She didn't feel an
answer was necessary and went over and pulled Lawrence out from under the bed. Then she got
into bed with Lorenzo and her husband
sat on the couch.
"They built a
little shrine for him," he said.
"Who?" she
asked irritably.
"Lawrence."
"Oh."
"They have a
picture of it in that book."
"Yes, I've seen
it."
"Have you ever
seen a dog-graveyard?"
"What?"
"A
dog-graveyard."
"Well, what about
it?"
"They always have
flowers. Every dog always has flowers, fresh, all in neat little clusters on each grave. It's
enough to make you cry."
She found her place in
the book again, like a person searching for solitude in the middle of a lake:
So the bitter months dragged by miserably, accompanied by Lorenzo's tragic feeling of
loss, his-
"I wish I had
studied ballet," he said. "I go about all slumped over but that's because my spirit is wilted. I'm
really lithe, ready to tumble on spring
mattresses of some sort. I should have been a frog, at least. You'll see. Someday I'm going to turn into a
frog."
Her lake rippled with
the irritating breeze: "Well, for heaven's sake, study ballet! Go at night! Get rid of your
belly! Leap around! Be a frog!"
"You mean after
WORK?" he asked woefully.
"God," she
said, "you want everything for nothing." She got up and went to the bathroom and closed the door.
She doesn't understand,
he thought, sitting on the couch naked, she doesn't understand that I'm joking. She's so
god-damned serious. Everything I say is
supposed to carry truth or tragic import, or insight or something. I've been through all that!
He noticed a
pencil-scrawled piece of paper, in her handwriting, on the side table. He picked it up:
My husband is a poet
published alongside Sartre and Lorca;
he writes about
insanity and Nietzsche and Lawrence,
but what has he written
about me?
she reads the funnies
and empties garbage
and makes little hats
and goes to Mass at 8
AM
I too am a poet and an
artist, some discerning critics
say, but my husband
wrote about me:
she reads the
funnies...
He heard the toilet
flush, and a moment later, out she came.
"I'd like to be a
clown in a circus," he greeted her.
She got back on the bed
with her book.
"Wouldn't you like
to be a tragicomic clown stumbling about with a painted face?" he asked her.
She didn't answer. He
picked up the Racing Form:
POWER 114 B.g.4, by
Cosmic Bomb-
Pomayya, by Pompey
Breeder, Brookmeade
Stable.
1956 12 2 4 1 $12,950
July 18-Jam I I/16 1:45
1/5ft. 3 122 2
1/2 3 2h GuerinE'Alw 86
"I'm going to
Caliente next Sunday," he said.
"Good. I'll have
Charlotte over. Allen can bring her in the car."
"Do you believe
she really got propositioned by the preacher in that movie like she
claimed?"
She turned the page of
her book.
"God damn you,
answer me!" he screamed, angry at last.
"What about?"
"Do you think
she's a whore and making it all up? Do you think we're all whores? What are we
trying to do, reading all these books? Writing all the poems they -send back,
and working in some dungeon for nothing because we're not really interested in
money?"
She put the book down
and looked back over her shoulder at him. "Well," she said in a low
voice, "do you want to give it all up?"
"Give WHAT all up?
We don't have anything! Or, do you mean Beethoven's Fifth or Handel's Water
Music? Or do you mean the SOUL?"
"Let's not argue.
Please. I don't want to argue.
"Well, I want to
know what we are trying to do!"
The doorbell rang like
all the bells of doom sweeping across the room.
"Shhh," he
said, "shhh! Be quiet!"
The doorbell rang
again, seeming to say, I know you are in there, I know you are in there.
"They know we're
in here." she whispered.
"I feel that this
is it, " he said.
"What?"
"Never mind. Just
be quiet. Maybe it will go away."
"Isn't it
wonderful to have all these friends?" she took up the joke- cudgel.
"No. We have no
friends. I tell you, this is something else!"
It rang again, very
short, flat and spiritless. "I once tried to make the Olympic swimming
team," he said, getting completely off the point.
"You make more
ridiculous statements by the minute, Henry."
"Will you get off
my back? Just for that!," he said, raising his voice,
"WHO IS IT?"
There was no answer.
Henry rose wide-eyed,
as if in a trance, and flung the door open, forgetting his nakedness. He stood
there transfixed in thought for some time, but it was obvious to her that
nobody was therein his state of undress there would have been quite a commotion
or, at the very least, some sophisticated comment.
Then he closed the
door. He had a strange look on his face, a round- eyed almost dull look and he
swallowed once as he faced her. His pride, perhaps?
"I've
decided," he announced, "that I'm not going to turn into a woman after
all."
"Well, that will
help matters between us considerably, Henry."
"And I'll even
take you to see Van Gogh. No wait, I'll let you take me."
"Either way, dear.
It doesn't matter."
"No," he
said, "you'll have to take me!"
He marched into the
bathroom and closed the door.
"Don't you
wonder," she said through the door, "who that was?"
"Who what
was?"
"Who that was at
the door? Twice?"
"Hell," he
said, "I know who it was."
"Who was it,
then?"
"Ha!"
"What?"
"I said, 'Ha!' I'm
not telling!"
"Henry, you simply
don't know who it was, anymore than I do. You're simply being silly
again."
"If you promise to
take me to see Van Gogh, I'll tell you who was at the door."
"All right,"
she humored him along, "I promise."
"O.K., it was me
at the door!"
"You at the
door?"
"Yes," he
laughed a silly little laugh, "me looking for me! Both times."
"Still playing the
clown aren't you, Henry?"
She heard the water
running in the basin and knew he was going to shave.
"Are you going to
shave, Henry?"
"I've decided
against the beard," he answered.
He was boring her again
and she simply opened her book at a random page and began reading:
You don't want any more
of me?
I want us to break
off-you be free of me, I free of you.
And what about these
last months?
I don't know. I've not
told you anything but what I thought was true.
Then why are you different
now?
I'm not-I'm the
same-only I know it's no good going on.
She closed the book and
thought about Henry. Men were children. You had to humor them. They could take no hurt. It was
a thing every woman knew.
Henry tried-he was just
so-all this playing the clown. All the poor jokes.
She rose from the bed
as if in a dream, walked across the floor, opened the door and stared. Against the basin stood a
partly soaped shaving brush and his still wet shaving mug. But the water in the
basin was cold and at the bottom, against the
plug, green and beyond her reach at last and the size of a crumpled glove, stared back the fat,
living frog.
Black Sparrow "New
Year's Greeting" 1995
