Addonizio, "Noir"

 *Everybody dies*, Bob Roberts, the crooked fight promoter, tells
Charlie Davis early in "Body and Soul," and it's the line Charlie
throws back at him like a perfect counterpunch at the close of the
film. The fix was in -- go the distance and lose the decision --
But Charlie refused to take a dive,

thereby losing sixty grand but regaining his soul
and his long-suffering true love. *What're you gonna do,
kill me? Everybody dies*, Charlie says, and he
and his true love go laughing into the final frame.
In the alternate ending, written but never shot,
Charlie's killed and stuffed into a trashcan. What difference

if the audience leaves the theater believing
Charlie's still out there somewhere,
working a cash register like his mother
or teaching neighborhood kids the value
of a left hook to the ribs, an uppercut to the jaw?
Everybody dies. John Garfield, who played Charlie

and was notorious in Hollywood
for screwing all the starlets, died
in a hotel room at thirty-nine. My old father,
after a year of lying paralyzed
in a nursing home, finally died, allowing my mother
the relative relief of widowhood. Maybe Charlie

lived long enough to go the same way,
all those blows to the head
coming home to roost, while his true love
sat beside the bed, holding his useless hands
in hers. On the TV there'd be some forties movie
playing like a black-and-white memory,

full of torch songs and champagne
and money swirling down the screen
like rainwater down a drain. That night after the movie
a group of us dined on clams and salmon
and drank martinis in a noisy restaurant
whose neon sign might have read

*Everybody Dies*, since all of us would;
the waiters in their striped French T-shirts might even
have been there to ferry across to the other world anyone who did. But
it wasn't our time. We emerged intact into an alley the rain was
lacquering with a sheen that seemed unreal, a movie set rain

orchestrated with levers and machinery
to suffuse the scene with the right proportion of melancholy as we all
stood a few minutes under a flickering light, reluctant to part, the
women buttoning their coats, the men lowering the brims of their
fedoras, everybody finally dispersing into the night.


Kim Addonizio

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Eavon Boland, "An Elegy for My Mother in which She Scarcely Appears"

I knew we had to grieve for the animals a long time ago: weep for them, pity them. I knew it was our strange human duty to write their elegies after we arranged their demise. I was young then and able for the paradox. I am older now and ready for the question: What happened to them all? I mean to those old dumb implements which have no eyes to plead with us like theirs no claim to make on us like theirs? I mean— there was a singing kettle. I want to know why no one tagged its neck or ringed the tin base of its extinct design or crouched to hear its rising shriek in winter or wrote it down with the birds in their blue sleeves of air torn away with the trees that sheltered them. And there were brass fire dogs which lay out all evening on the grate and in the heat thrown at them by the last of the peat fire but no one noted down their history or put them in the old packs under slate-blue moonlight. There was a wooden clotheshorse, absolutely steady, without sinews, with no mane and no mea
Read more

Sharon Olds, "The Race"

When I got to the airport I rushed up to the desk, bought a ticket, ten minutes later they told me the flight was cancelled, the doctors had said my father would not live through the night and the flight was cancelled. A young man with a dark brown moustache told me another airline had a nonstop leaving in seven minutes. See that elevator over there, well go down to the first floor, make a right, you'll see a yellow bus, get off at the second Pan Am terminal, I ran, I who have no sense of direction raced exactly where he'd told me, a fish slipping upstream deftly against the flow of the river. I jumped off that bus with those bags I had thrown everything into in five minutes, and ran, the bags wagged me from side to side as if to prove I was under the claims of the material, I ran up to a man with a flower on his breast, I who always go to the end of the line, I said Help me . He looked at my ticket, he said Make a left and then a right, go up the moving stairs and then run. I
Read more

Aria Aber, "Oakland in Rain"

Years before ever seeing California, I wrote a story titled “Oakland in Rain.” Rain served as an easy metaphor for the unexpected in a place known for abundance, and it provided a texture of melancholy. The nameless protagonist—an exiled drunk who was, of course, a thinly veiled version of myself— had lost her mind and believed the weather communicated with her: rain meant soberness, that she had been absolved of some sort of punishment. Plagued by her wild inner life, I imagined her wandering the city, intent on getting lost in the Catholic cemeteries, where she took note   of lemons in the wet grass (an offering?), the sky, a hawk on a tree. But no matter where she went, nothing was ever quiet enough. Despite my best efforts, the narrative was bleak; it lacked tension and a convincing resolution. Now, why am I telling you all this? Well, one day I woke up and it had been raining in the Oakland of my actual life. Outside my window, the cottonwood trees looked like the day before, but
Read more