The Arriviste, and: The Rabbi Said Never Go to Bed Angry

THE ARRIVISTE /Katherine Kane He swoons in the erotic nervy air of St. Tropez. He's got a white house with a portecoch ère, a blue-nevus in his ear. A girl serves pineapple beside a pool into which a woman flings shrimp & gallant salamanders silky as genitals. One woman in white flops under a palm to read Villon, her fieurde -lys borne off. Another woman still not me is wheeling a bundled figure past camellias while someone unbiddable runs zeromouthed away. Here I am on a private tour of the land, led by his paranymph admittedly a little The Missouri Review · 31 out of my dress & up the tiered gardens to Mr. V. He is wearing an aqualung & seems clenched in a sadness kissing meanwhile my hand, saying in Spanish: Hike thatyou roam. On a round bed I watch a wave glide in under him. Ah the arterial rivers of his arms, the vigorous legs, the intermittences! So long my red inwardness, saints of hermitage & winter in New York. He gave me a hat with a pink torsade & I am murmuring along his neck I'm yours. From the patio there were guitars. The parrot Mirabelle hummed Matrimonio. Horses, monkeys climbed the hill the last goat had a bronze bell, & treemen passed balancing a stand of dwarf cypress. Should we ascribe 32 · THE MISSOURI REVIEW Katherine Kane that happiness to burgundy? Who could have told us anything, it was all as a dream studied by one still asleep, the decreasing afternoon so strangely carried through, the ocean mountain view another language— like the supernatural communique's we sought from animal friends lining up about now for their provender at the north wall. Katherine Kane THE MISSOURI REVIEW · 33 THE RABBI SAID NEVER GO TO BED ANGRY / Katherine Kane I descend from a lubricious line of women, my skin redolent of 1900 plus a little gin. It's morning and after the argument I am blocked, so I move his car and go driving along till I'm brought again to a walk. His keys are in my pocket. I don't care if he wants to leave he'll get wild or submit like a huge child incurably docked. In bed last night he said "Don't start." That I was like a hen scratching for seed. Glad to be on my own now I'm standing in a burned farmhouse the three stone walls still warm like sides of an oven. I watch a pair of beige mares trawl their legs through the grass beyond their stalls. They walk it seems in friendship, waiting, while the other feeds, going again, waiting up. And the hill off which I sometimes see hang-gliders reel curves down like a woman. I think of my breakfast halves of pears becoming brown. 34 · The Missouri Review By noon I return, my breath helpless in my mouth. "I fell back," he says, "and dreamt you were being treacherously photographed." I suggest he not tell me these dreams from the dark pages. "Sweet Kate," he says, I throw his keys at his head, but he's complaisant with his clothes off, eating the bowl of pears. My pillows on the bed encircle him like vegetables to a roast. And the atmosphere gets even steamier. In my bath, I recall the boys after religious school tumbling in the grass, in shorts; I joined them till everything of mine was numb except my right kick. A year before, the same boys tied me to a ringbolt in the old barn just to look. He reaches up to draw the towel apart. "Come on," he starts. He stands his body on the bed above me like a guard and enters into that game of his: wrestling. Of course he wins. And I submit. When I was twelve the rabbi said never go to bed angry, but he did not tell me then Katherine Kane THE MISSOURI REVIEW · 35 of boys' bare legs, and nothing of a woman's easy drench, never mind the mixed emotions at the incomprehensible images and ways of men. 36 · THE MISSOURI REVIEW Katherine Kane ...