A Quasi-Subterranean Stream

 

Lu Lu, Henry’s Cuban wife made him happy, she the palace guard.

The couple wakes early at nine. While sitting at the breakfast table Henry does a quick sketch of Lu Lu, showing it to her, 

dios mios, bebe, I’m all tits and ass, 

It’s a caricature, you know, exaggerating what's obvious,  

So, when you look at me, you only see tetas y culo? 

I feel the energies of the Gods and things falling from the sky, passing through you at the speed of light embracing me. 

Sure, Henry talk big, you're no Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I adore him, he's an artista  versed in the words of love. 

You love Marquez because he's Latin and writes in your language. If you love him so much fly to Columbia, light candles and burn incenses on his bones,

Estás celoso cariño? 

No, not jealous, I just don't like you talking shit about my work.

Henry gets up from the table and walks to his study where he to cowers over his typewriter, feeling the breeze from an open window, breathing it in his nose and exhaling from his mouth, shutting things down in his head, thinking; 

I had an affair, not long enough, with a Woman I met on Isla La Roqueta Beach in Mexico, we had a wild time,  smoking reefer, eating and fucking. 

Henry thumbs through some paperbacks on his desk— Hemingway, Durrell, Miller, Marquez turning on his Grundig radio, listening to Copland's 5th Symphony, typing a few paragraphs. 

Lu Lu walks into his study he says, 

fuck this I can't write let's go have lunch and a drink at the Tahiti Club?

About 2, they come home loaded and try to fuck but can't.

I go to work on a the John Cheever story.

John William Cheever was an American short story writer known for his rapier-like view of the middle class. His attention to detail, hypervigilant writing, and creative power was on fire.  

He was born on May 27, 1912, in Quincy, Massachusetts. His father Fredrick owned a shoe factory, losing it in the Great Depression, his mother Mary Lilly owned a gift shop.

Cheever was sent to Thayer Academy, a prep school in Milton, Massachusetts. As a seventeen-year-old Harvard-bound senior he arranged his own expulsion, spending his time at bars in downtown Milton, and writing at home.  

John struggled with alcoholism throughout his life and wrote about the disease in his stories about suburbanites who drink too much.

In the mid-1930s, John lived in a bleak boarding house in Greenwich Village, he taught English composition at City College

In 1943 he married Mary Wintergatz that same year publishing his first book of short stories, The Way People Live, mirroring his lifelong subject— the ways of suburban dwellers. 

Then in 1947, The New Yorker published his story, The Enormous Radio, it got raves from reviewers.

Each story eclipsed the last. Then in 1951, Cheever was made a Guggenheim Fellow.

By 1964, he was on the cover of Time Magazine, a world-renowned author. 

Later the same year his story The Swimmer was adapted for Hollywood, starring Burt Lancaster as Ned Merrill, who sees himself as a legendary figure. He's  sitting in his at home with a glass of gin in his hand, out of nowhere he decides to swim in every neighbors pool, a route Cheever might label as, 

a quasi-subterranean swim through curved streams and neighborhood pools. 

As Ned’s journey begins his mood is buoyant and in Cheever's words he's, 

sucking in the powerful eroticism of travel, traveling with a hard-on, tapping into Universal Love. 

Ned moves smoothly like a decathlon runner on a Slip and Slides, through lawns, running and jumping bushes to the next neighbor's pools

Like conquering king he's on the booze circuit, Ned's offered drinks along the, he sucks them down.

Then thunder roars and rain pours, Ned takes cover under a neighbor's patio where red maple leaves cover everything, the thought of Autumn causes him to feel glum.

Somewhere around the halfway point of his journey, he crosses a busy road and is jeered at, a teenager throws a can of beer at him.

In the end, Cheevers's greatest short story leaves you hanging, wondering if Ned made it home. 

Of course, the masterpiece transcends the swimmer's safari through the suburban backyards and is more of a journey into one man’s heart of darkness. In Cheever’s words,

it’s the telling of lies, a sort of sleight of hand that displays our deepest feelings about life.

Lucia looks over Henry’s shoulder and says, 

what ya doin bebe? 

I'm finishing a bit on John Cheever’s The Swimmer. Whataya say we go for a swim at Sunset Pool?