Nonie in Excelsis
(Excerpt from About Ed)

Robert Glück

July 1991

A knock at the door. There stood Nonie’s downstairs neighbor, hands folded and face lifted in pleasure. On second glance she was sixty or so and yes, beautiful. I was surprised; our relationship had been confined to waves and encouraging shouts, but even so, I enjoyed her old-fashioned air, continental, her scarves and tailored jackets, and her tarnished silver voice. She’d been sent by Nonie, who had an errand for me to run.

Clipper Street was the Champs-Elysées when I strolled across it with this gracious woman whose name I didn’t know. I headed upstairs to Nonie’s apartment, but my neighbor’s hand on my elbow held me back. Nonie had moved to a smaller place on the first floor. Why? The old apartment was too large for her alone. When was that? Soon after Mac died. For a moment Nonie was still at a window high above me forever. I waved to her when I left my house. The curtain twitched—it was a safe bet she was watching from behind. I had depended on Nonie; now I understood that my life passed unobserved.

When I entered Nonie’s apartment, I was surprised again. Nonie had expanded. She was installed against a wall; I had to stare a moment, sorting out the filigree of tubes, drips, and oxygen that surrounded her. She was breathless and even paler than she had been—how long ago? On her face too much thin white membrane was painfully exposed. She cried in a proud whisper, “Guess what, Bob? I can’t budge from here.”

Nonie faced a TV that obviously had a life of its own; an Olympic diver was shaking out his celebrated arms and legs. I wanted him like I wanted anything and he sort of agreed to be mine if I resolved to diet and go to the gym. Above the TV, a window exactly framed my front door. I felt relief, Nonie was still keeping track of me. Her neighbor said, “Poor thing, isn’t she brave?” We considered Nonie, glorious in a sky of pain, goddess of stasis. An ever half-full glass of lager stood on a side table next to her. Nonie’s neighbor enthused, “She never makes a complaint.” Nonie beamed affirmation.

I envied her easy life, the far-flung lyricism of her glass of beer. Nonie was a jewel arrived at its setting, a fantasia on entropy. I also longed for immobility and sometimes even wished for a disease that would commit me to one room, one chair. I could taste the fat government check made out to Robert P. Glück.

I pulled up a chair. Nonie had a clear plastic mask over her nose to deliver purer oxygen, and it emptied the rest of the air. I said, “You know, you can call me any time you like.”

“I’ve had the same phone number since 1956,” she breathed, as though I’d made a point and she were proving it. She sipped her lager, and her wedding band slid down her chopstick finger and clinked against the glass. “We had a brown dog named Ranger—we could send him to the butcher.” I thought Nonie was from the Midwest—she had that twang—but it seems she grew up in Stockton and San Francisco.

“Do you miss Mac?”

My question was not as relevant as the passage of time. Nonie’s pale eyebrows lifted in disbelief. “He died six years ago last April. Michelle wants to ride me out to his grave. Oh Bob, I couldn’t take that.” Nonie’s neighbor—Michelle—shook her head no. She was delighted to be on the sofa, crossing her legs and touching her hair.

“Do you have an errand for me?” Life was pressing in too urgently against nothing, against a wild fatigue.

“That Albert,” Nonie hissed. “I asked him three weeks ago. He lives two blocks away from it.” So, another trip to the Sunshine Pharmacy. Albert was my landlord. He and his family had lived in their house before they rented it to me. They became friends with Mac and Nonie, but the older couple’s lips drew back from the taste of Albert’s name: his blithe selfishness and the spectacle of his sins against order. Albert bought derelict properties like the house on Clipper, let them fall to ruin, and unloaded them when they outlived their usefulness. Mac and Nonie stewed as my windows fell out, the back stairs sank and chunked off, plates of rain-sodden plaster dropped from the bedroom ceiling. Mac had crossed the street to put groundwater-fouling poison in the weedy sidewalk cracks.

Nonie leaned out of the firmament and spat, “Albert may be an Arab, but to me he’s a Jew.” I went mentally cross-eyed for a moment. I could tell by the roundhouse punch in her voice that she was drunk. I felt elated by her hatred of difference: here at last was something authentic, a cultural tradition with roots. I wanted to congratulate Nonie on her steadfast faith. Let evil be a weed that prospers in the next valley—rip it out, toss it in the trash, goodbye on garbage day.

“It would be fun to get drunk with Nonie, to find out something about her and to find out what she knew about me.”

Nonie, I wanted to cry, everything is so much worse than you imagine! Was enjoying her bigotry disrespectful?—I couldn’t push down laughter squirming in my chest. The dignity of tribal hatreds, Nonie hieratic in her chair, her beliefs never deformed by a newspaper. I felt like flinging her around the room in a polka like the rag doll she was.

What identity did she support with so firm a grasp? Who were these people? I looked to Michelle, hoping for a moment of complicity, but apparently her goodwill did not admit a conspiracy. She laughed with the sheer joy of the present, and I wondered if perhaps she was over-medicated. The present didn’t look so good to me. Michelle offered me tea or—worried idea—beer?

“Yes, beer.” I wanted to participate. I broke my promise to the athlete on TV, forsaking without a struggle our early morning dives into the steaming lake, exertions of all kinds that keep us laughingly out of breath. Nonie and I could toast our passivity, our depressive’s love of stasis.

Michelle brought me the beer on a tray along with a glass and bottle opener. The toasty bitterness shaped my thirst. For some reason, after a few sips I got a little drunk and a pressing image possessed me: The new husband stands naked in front of his bride who is naked on their iron bed. They are entirely committed to their culture and for a moment they know they are natural; they are only partly themselves because they are also a season, a culture, and a time of life. About his erection: I have to remind myself how it works. It projects from his body—prong—and goes inside her and she wants that. With each thrust and smack, her loose flesh ripples backward around her thighbones. Her face radiates serene ecstasy. The young couple overwhelmed me; boredom and beer, lowering my resistance, opened a door to their truth.

It would be fun to get drunk with Nonie, to find out something about her and to find out what she knew about me. I had never heard her speak three sentences together except to deride Albert. As though on cue, Nonie began. “Bob, Mac had a parrot. I hated that damn bird, but Mac loved her like a daughter. Polly had a foul mouth. We couldn’t shut her up.” Nonie paused a moment to let the problem sink in. Her respirator farted like a straw at the bottom of a glass. Michelle laughed to display her attractiveness. I could see the problem; Mac was rather prim.

“One day Mac got so mad at Polly that he threw her in a cupboard and you would not believe the din. He took the bird out but she was worse than before. Polly let loose a string of four letter words that lasted fifteen minutes. Then Mac threw her in the freezer. ‘That’ll cool her off.’ In a minute it got real quiet. Mac was afraid he’d harmed Polly, so he opened the door and that bird stepped out of the freezer and tip-toed up his arm as nice as a ballerina.” Here Nonie became Polly, perching on her dead husband’s shoulder. “‘Mac, I know we’ve had some problems, and I’m terribly sorry. I’ll try to watch my language in the future … By the way, what did the chicken in there do to get you so mad?’”

Okay, that didn’t happen. I couldn’t seem to control my imagination. In fact, Nonie told us about Ranger. “He was a good dog—we sent him to the butcher on 24th Street to get the liver. He loved my sister Annette—he waited outside her door. She played organ for the movies at the Pantages down on Market Street. She was the diva and the prima donna. She had the best furniture and kept her own room clean, period. She treated me like a pet, but my parents wouldn’t let her marry her boyfriend because he was Catholic, so she took up with a musician, Ivor Carlson. Annette became an alcoholic like our brother. She’d go to Oakland and do her carousing there,” Nonie whispered, still scandalized. “Things went from bad to worse in Oakland. They always do. Annette got sick and Ivor kept her in his cabin out in Walnut Creek. He was twice her age.” Horses grazing on golden grass in the valley, the white road next to the brown river, cottonwoods, a bright dry outcropping at the top—the track of a narrow-gauge railroad and coast live oaks against the blue. “Annette was sick in her heart or kidney and Ivor didn’t get any help. They found both of them three months later.” The sky bright blue and white, then rolling thunder and discrete blurs, smudges of rain down to the earth. “He left a note, she died and he was committing suicide. Her first boyfriend was a musician too.” Nonie was still in mourning. “All that talent gone! If only we could pass it on! It was a wonder to behold.”