I Adjust to Autumn

The weather is fine, or it rains. The dog needs me, or sleeps. The children are joyous, or upset. My husband is near, or in Miami.

Music means too much, or is noise. My dreams stick, or dissolve. I am a beauty, but I am fat. My hair is too long, then too short.

My mitten is lost, or is found. I’m doing too much, or not much. I don’t spend a thing, or I splurge. I did, but I don’t have a jacket.

I am soaked, or dry as a bone. The leaves go, but don’t worry about it. We broke our bed, we still have a mattress. I am in love, or I am alone.

While courting, my love and I used to drive to the top of a mountain whose name I have somehow forgotten. You could hike up it, at least partway, but we didn’t have time for that. At the top we lay in the sunshine on the flat rocks and looked down on the brown and yellow shapes of the fields, and the shine of the river that cut through them. Breezes blew over us. We moved, without moving closer to each other, closer to consummation.

There is a certain peaceful feeling that accompanies the attainment of great heights, even if they are reached by car, or elevator, or are not particularly great. The first two apartments we shared were graced by communal roof decks to which we clumsily transported drinks, and dinners, and once a poorly timed party, which then had to be moved, quickly, back down. On the first roof deck there were periods when the building’s air conditioning blew hard, and we had to stop talking and wait for it to be done.

On vacation we are perpetually climbing things, and we are not alone. A few weeks ago, in Mexico, we climbed to the very top of the house and could see, in one direction, a blue and gentle ocean, calmed by the white breakers about a mile out, and in the other, a white, female tourist, who liked to read in her bathing suit and shorts in the shade of a palapa. We climbed also the ancient palace of Ek’Balam, a Mayan city built three thousand years ago in the Yucatán jungle, and only recently excavated, and rebuilt. Originally, the city was paved entirely with a white stucco, and was probably, from the top of the palace, blinding. Now the ground between the buildings is covered with grass, and populated by hot, black dogs. Our guide was loyal to this place, and jealous of the special attention given to Chichen Itza, where the steps were narrower, he said, than the steps at Ek’Balam, and where the people had polluted the pure Mayan with the Aztec by introducing the practice of human sacrifice. Also, he said, the souvenir vendors at Chichen Itza were impossible.

We got there early, but as the day grew hotter, and the dogs sleepier, groups of people arrived to climb the palace steps after us. It is possible to define all this climbing as an hysterical response to the rigors of vacation, in which nothing must be done, except to create a new purpose for one’s existence out of this nothing. On the other hand, and this is what I believe, what is a better, higher use of this empty time than the attempt to attain the peaceful feeling, accompanied by breezes, that one only gets, for some reason, at the top of one thing or another?

The very crappiness of the sandwich comprises its appeal: the soft and pillowy bread, tasting only of sugar and air; the pink, slippery meats, flesh compressed; the pale, sweating cheese, soft and fatty; the pale pink tomatoes, oozing water; the lettuce shredded, so that it has lost all its juiciness and bounce. Imagining the sandwich there, in front of me, I sniff the scent of fleshly happiness, and, more faintly, a belch. When something is an object of lust all that is disgusting about it, all that is second-rate, vulgar, and careless, becomes part of its potent charm. In this way lust, whose interest is wide-ranging, seems to enjoy an advantage over love, which is attracted only to what is beautiful, and good.