Many are the deceivers:
The suburban matron, proper in the supermarket, list in hand so she won't suddenly fly, buying her Duz and Chuck Wagon dog food, meanwhile ascending from earth, letting her stomach fill up with helium, letting her arms go loose as kite tails, getting ready to meet her lover a mile down Apple Crest Road in the Congregational Church parking lot.
Two seemingly respectable women come up to an old Jenny and show her an envelope full of money and promise to share the booty if she'll give them ten thou as an act of faith.
Her life savings are under the mattress covered with rust stains and counting.
They are as wrinkled as prunes but negotiable.
The two women take the money and disappear.
Where is the moral?
Not all knives are for stabbing the exposed belly.
Rock climbs on rock and it only makes a seashore.
Old Jenny has lost her belief in mattresses and now she has no wastebasket in which to keep her youth.
The standup comic on the "Tonight" show who imitates the Vice President and cracks up Johnny Carson and delays sleep for millions of bedfellows watching between their feet, slits his wrist the next morning in the Algonquin's old-fashioned bathroom, the razor in his hand like a toothbrush, wall as anonymous as a urinal, the shower curtain his slack rubberman audience, and then the slash as simple as opening as a letter and the warm blood breaking out like a rose upon the bathtub with its claw and ball feet.
And I.
I too.
Quite collected at cocktail parties, meanwhile in my head I'm undergoing open-heart surgery.
The heart, poor fellow, pounding on his little tin drum with a faint death beat,
The heart, that eyeless beetle, running panicked through his maze, never stopping one foot after the other one hour after the other until he gags on an apple and it's all over.
And I.
I too again.
I built a summer house on Cape Ann.
A simple A-frame and this too was a deception — nothing haunts a new house.
When I moved in with a bathing suit and tea bags the ocean rumbled like a train backing up and at each window secrets came in like gas.
My mother, that departed soul, sat in my Eames chair and reproached me for losing her keys to the old cottage.
Even in the electric kitchen there was the smell of a journey.
The ocean was seeping through its frontiers and laying me out on its wet rails.
The bed was stale with my childhood and I could not move to another city where the worthy make a new life.
Long ago there was a strange deception: a wolf dressed in frills, a kind of transvestite.
But I get ahead of my story.
In the beginning there was just little Red Riding Hood, so called because her grandmother made her a red cape and she was never without it.
It was her Linus blanket, besides it was red, as red as the Swiss flag, yes it was red, as red as chicken blood,
But more than she loved her riding hood she loved her grandmother who lived far from the city in the big wood.
This one day her mother gave her a basket of wine and cake to take to her grandmother because she was ill.
Wine and cake?
Where's the aspirin?
The penicillin?
Where's the fruit juice?
Peter Rabbit got chamomile tea.
But wine and cake it was.
On her way in the big wood Red Riding Hood met the wolf.
Good day,
Mr.
Wolf, she said, thinking him no more dangerous than a streetcar or a panhandler.
He asked where she was going and she obligingly told him There among the roots and trunks with the mushrooms pulsing inside the moss he planned how to eat them both, the grandmother an old carrot and the child a shy budkin in a red red hood.
He bade her to look at the bloodroot, the small bunchberry and the dogtooth and pick some for her grandmother.
And this she did.
Meanwhile he scampered off to Grandmother's house and ate her up as quick as a slap.
Then he put on her nightdress and cap and snuggled down in to bed.
A deceptive fellow.
Red Riding hood knocked on the door and entered with her flowers, her cake, her wine.
Grandmother looked strange, a dark and hairy disease it seemed.
Oh Grandmother, what big ears you have, ears, eyes, hands and then the teeth.
The better to eat you with my dear.
So the wolf gobbled Red Riding Hood down like a gumdrop.
Now he was fat.
He appeared to be in his ninth month and Red Riding Hood and her grandmother rode like two Jonahs up and down with his every breath.
One pigeon.
One partridge.
He was fast asleep, dreaming in his cap and gown, wolfless.
Along came a huntsman who heard the loud contented snores and knew that was no grandmother.
He opened the door and said,
So it's you, old sinner.
He raised his gun to shoot him when it occurred to him that maybe the wolf had eaten up the old lady.
So he took a knife and began cutting open the sleeping wolf, a kind of caesarian section.
It was a carnal knife that let Red Riding Hood out like a poppy, quite alive from the kingdom of the belly.
And grandmother too still waiting for cakes and wine.
The wolf, they decided, was too mean to be simply shot so they filled his belly with large stones and sewed him up.
He was as heavy as a cemetery and when he woke up and tried to run off he fell over dead.
Killed by his own weight.
Many a deception ends on such a note.
The huntsman and the grandmother and Red Riding Hood sat down by his corpse and had a meal of wine and cake.
Those two remembering nothing naked and brutal from that little death, that little birth, from their going down and their lifting up.
