Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories Read online

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  For Tracy, with thanks

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Misterioso

  The Start of Something

  Drive

  I Never Told This to Anyone

  Fridge

  Midwife

  Confession

  The Kiss

  Córdoba

  Ordinary Nudes

  Current

  A Confluence of Doors

  Hometown

  Ant

  Ransom

  Marvelous Encounters of My Life

  The Samaritan

  Fantasy

  Transaction

  Flu

  Swing

  Between

  Arf

  Fingerprints

  Mole Man

  Bruise

  Ravenswood

  Brisket

  Alms

  Here Comes the Sun

  Coat

  Fedora

  Goodwill

  Dark Ages

  Wash

  Vista di Mare

  Voyeur of Rain

  Naked

  Tea Ceremony

  The Question

  Transients Welcome

  Flies

  Aria

  Belly Button

  Ice

  The Story of Mist

  Happy Ending

  Fiction

  Inland Sea

  Pink Ocean

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Stuart Dybek

  Copyright

  “They’re a rotten crowd,” I shouted across the lawn. “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”

  … First he nodded politely, and then his face broke into that radiant and understanding smile, as if we’d been in ecstatic cahoots.

  —F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

  It’s raining women’s voices as if they had died even in memory

  And it’s raining you as well marvelous encounters of my life O little drops

  Those rearing clouds begin to neigh a whole universe of auricular cities

  Listen if it rains while regret and disdain weep to an ancient music

  Listen to the bonds fall off which hold you above and below

  —Guillaume Apollinaire, “Il Pleut” (translated by Roger Shattuck)

  I was waiting for you. Please come back under the umbrella as if we were lovers.

  —Yasunari Kawabata, Palm-of-the-Hand Stories (translated by Lane Dunlop)

  Misterioso

  “You’re going to leave your watch on?”

  “You’re leaving on your cross?”

  The Start of Something

  Subway grates, steaming tamale carts, charcoal braziers roasting chestnuts, the breaths of the pedestrians outpacing stalled traffic, the chimneys Gil can’t see from the window of the airline bus—all plume in the frigid air. It’s cold enough for Gil to wear, for the first and only time, the salt-and-pepper woolen trousers he bought at an estate sale last summer. He’d stopped on a whim when he saw the sale sign, an excuse to tour a mansion that looked as if it once could have belonged to The Great Gatsby’s Tom Buchanan before he’d moved from Chicago’s North Shore to Long Island “in a fashion,” Fitzgerald wrote, “that rather took your breath away … he’d brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest.” Perhaps the deceased had left only debts, for the heirs, haughty with grief, were selling off the furnishings. Those there to buy spoke in subdued voices as if to seem less like scavengers. Gil browsed the sunlit rooms with no intention of buying anything, then in an upstairs bedroom he found an open cedar wardrobe filled with old, handsomely made men’s clothes. He selected the trousers and held them up before a walnut-framed full-length mirror, and told himself he might wear them for cross-country skiing even though he hadn’t skied in years. Later, when he tried them on at home, they fit as though they’d been made for him, causing Gil to wonder who the man who’d worn them had been. In one of the pockets there was an Italian coin dated 1921, and Gil thought it might be worth something to a collector. He kept it in a cuff-link box with spare buttons, a St. Christopher medal, a class ring, and cuff links he never wore. Even after he’d had the trousers dry-cleaned they smelled faintly of cedar.

  The airline bus has nearly reached downtown when the woman in the seat across the aisle leans toward Gil and asks, “Are those lined?”

  “Pardon?” he says.

  “Are those lined? They’re beautiful but they look itchy.” Wings of dark glossy hair and a darker fur collar frame her narrow face. Her smile appears too broad for her, but attractive all the same.

  “Partially,” he says.

  “Knee-length?”

  “Not quite. Actually, they are a little itchy, but they’re warm.”

  “They look right out of the Jazz Age. They’ve got that drape. I love anything from the twenties—music, furniture, the writers.”

  “Some of my favorite writers, all right,” Gil says.

  “They still read so alive! Like that newly liberated, modern world was just yesterday.”

  It sounds like she’s speaking in quotes and Gil smiles as if to agree. Her hairstyle and the coat she’s bundled in both suggest another time. The coat has a certain Goodwill-rack look that exempts a woman from the stigma of wearing fur. Gil has no idea what kind of fur it is. It matches the luster of her hair. He has the vague feeling they’ve met before, which makes talking to her effortless, but Gil doesn’t say so for fear it would sound like a line. She’d know a man would remember meeting someone who looked like her.

  “Where’d you find them?” she asks.

  “At a kind of glorified garage sale.”

  “I didn’t think they were new. When designers try to bring back a style they never quite get it right.”

  “They’re the real deal all right, complete with little buttons for suspenders. I probably should be wearing suspenders.”

  “Not even half lined, though, huh? Bet it feels good to get them off.” She smiles again as if surprised by what she has just said.

  “You sure have an eye for clothes,” Gil says.

  “Don’t I, though?”

  Outside, snow settles on Chicago like a veil, as if it is the same veil of snow that was floating to earth earlier in the day when he boarded the plane in Minneapolis, returning from his father’s funeral. The airline bus has stalled again in traffic. She’s turned away, staring out the window. He doesn’t know her name, has yet to ask where she’s traveling from, if she lives in the city or is only visiting, let alone the facts of her personal life, but all the questions are already in motion between them.

  Why not end here, without answers?

  Aren’t there chance meetings in every life that don’t play out, stories that seem meant to remain ghostly, as faint and fleeting as the reflection of a face on the window of a bus? Beyond her face, snow swirls through steam from exhausts and manholes. Why not for this one time let beginning suffice, rather than insist on what’s to come: the trip they’ll take, before they know enough about each other, to Italy; those scenes in her apartment when she’ll model her finds from vintage stores, fashions from the past he’ll strip from her present body? Her name is Bea. She’ll say they were fated to meet. They’ll play at being reincarnated lovers from the First World War. So
metimes he’s a soldier who died in the trenches, sometimes a young trumpet player poisoned by bathtub gin. Scene added to scene, fabrication to fabrication, until a year has passed and for a last time he visits her apartment in the Art Deco building on Dearborn with its curved, glowing glass brick windows. There’s an out-of-place store on the ground floor that sells trophies—an inordinate number of them for bowling. Its burglar alarm, prone to going off after hours, as if the defeated have come by night to steal the prizes they can never win, is clanging again. She’s been doing coke and tells him that in a dream she realized she’s been left with two choices, one of which is to kill him. She laughs too gaily when she says it and he doesn’t ask what the other choice is. She’s mentioned that she’s been “in touch” with her ex-boyfriend—a man who over nine years, with time-outs for affairs, has come and gone at will in her life, a relationship it took her a while to reveal fully because, she explained, she didn’t want to give the impression she has a taste for “damaged men.” If she’s implying it’s a relationship that redefines her, she has a point.

  “Does he know about me?” Gil asked.

  “I’d never tell him you exist,” she said, her eyes suddenly anxious and her voice dropping to a whisper as if an omnipotent master might overhear.

  “In touch” means Gil has noticed bruises when he hikes her skirt to kiss the curve of her bottom. She’ll have asked for them, he knows, she’ll have begged, “Leave your mark.” The boyfriend is an importer, she says. He’s a connected guy whose family owns a chain of pizza parlors. He carries a gun, which she says makes her feel safe, though what she really means is that she finds it thrilling, and when she disappears into her bedroom Gil isn’t sure whether she’ll emerge armed or wearing a chemise from the thirties that she’s found at some flea market. No matter how often he strips the past from her body, she finds a way to wear it again. His impulse is to let himself out, but he doesn’t want her—and for that matter, doesn’t want himself—to be left with a final image of him running for his life. An escape might make it seem as if the choice in her dream were justified. He doesn’t want to admit she’s made him afraid, and so he sits and waits for her to reappear.

  The heirs were selling off the furnishings. Gil browsed the sunlit rooms with no intention of buying anything, but in an upstairs bedroom he found an open wardrobe smelling of cedar. He held the trousers up before a full-length mirror that like everything else in the house wore a price, everything except the clothes—for those he’d have to bargain. His reflection, gazing back, fogged behind layers of dust, appeared ghostly. The trousers looked as if with a little tailoring they’d fit, and maybe he could wear them for cross-country skiing. How could he have known then that he was only at the start of something?

  Drive

  Lost: the hot-pink bullet from the spent cartridge of lip gloss he’s found lodged between gearbox and seat. And the beat she always caught, chasing from station to station as they raced between red lights. The scent of summer evaporating at noon—coconut, sweat, the salt lick of her skin scorched against turquoise vinyl. Evening’s perfume of broken heat, a tide of lawn sprinklers whipping through the dark as moons emerge: each neighborhood, each roof, each windowpane sending up its own. In the smaze of foundry chimneys, a tarnished spoon bent by telekinesis into a wedding band. Over a steeple, a halo missing a saint. Above the shimmering sweet-water sea, a tragic mask with a comic reflection. Or is it vice versa? There’s one un-self-conscious about its pitted face; one with its own star in Hollywood; and another aloof, back turned as if boycotting tomorrow, the way that Miles Davis, circa Kind of Blue, would turn his back on the audience when he’d solo. And in the rearview mirror where it’s always October, leaves blowing off like pages from an unfinished memoir …

  “So, where to?” he’d ask.

  “Baby, just drive.”

  I Never Told This to Anyone

  I never told this to anyone—there wasn’t anyone to tell it to—but when I was living with my uncle Kirby on the Edge—the edge of what I never knew for sure (“Just livin’ on the Edge, don’t worry where,” Uncle Kirby would say)—a little bride and groom would come to visit me at night. Naturally, I never mentioned this to Uncle Kirby. He’d have acted as if I’d been playing with dolls. “A boy should play like the wild animals do—to practice survival,” Uncle Kirby always said. “You wanna play, play with your Uzi.”

  The bride wore a white gown and silver slippers, and held a bouquet. The groom wore a top hat, tails, and spats. Their shoes were covered with frosting as if they’d walked through snow even though it was summer, June, when they first appeared. I heard a little pop—actually, more of a pip!—and there on my windowsill was the groom, pouring from a tiny champagne bottle. “Hi! I’m Jay and this is Trish,” he said by way of introduction, adding confidentially, “We don’t think of one another as Mr. and Mrs. yet.”

  They had tiny voices, but I could hear them clearly. “That’s because we enunciate,” Trish said. She was pretty.

  “It’s these formal clothes, Old Boy,” Jay explained. “Put them on and you start to speak the King’s English.”

  I remember the first night they appeared, and the nights that followed, as celebrations—like New Year’s Eve in June. There’d be big-band music on my shortwave—a station I could never locate except when Jay and Trish were over—and the pip! pip! pip! of miniature champagne bottles. You should have seen them dancing to “Out of Nowhere” in the spotlight my flashlight threw as it followed them across the floor. I’d applaud and Jay would kiss the bride. But each celebration seemed as if it would be the last.

  “Off for the honeymoon, Old Boy,” Jay would say with a wink as they left. He’d sweep Trish off her feet and carry her across the windowsill, and Trish would laugh and wave back at me, “Ciao—we’ll be staying at the Motel d’Amore,” and then she’d toss her small bouquet.

  I didn’t want them to go. Having their visits to look forward to made living on the Edge seem less desolate. Uncle Kirby noticed the change in me. “What’s with You, lately?” he asked—You was sort of his nickname for me. “I mean, why You goin’ round with rice in your pockets and wearin’ that jazzbow tie? And what’s with the old shoes and tin cans tied to the back fender a your bike? How You expect to survive that way when the next attack comes out a nowhere?”

  I told him that dragging shoes and cans built up my endurance and the rice was emergency rations, and he left me alone, but I knew he was keeping an eye on me.

  Luckily, no matter how often Jay and Trish said they were off, they’d show up again a few nights later, back on the windowsill, scraping the frosting from their shoes. And after a while, when they’d leave, walking away hand in hand into the shadows, Jay hooking his tux jacket over his shoulder rather than sweeping Trish off her feet, and Trish no longer carrying a bouquet to toss, neither of them would mention the honeymoon.

  I didn’t notice at first, but gradually the nights quieted down. “A little more sedate an evening for a change,” Jay would say. Trish, especially, seemed quieter. She said that champagne had begun making her dizzy. After dancing, she’d need a nap.

  “I get no kick from champagne,” Jay would tell her, raising his glass in a toast, “but I get a kick out of you.”

  Trish would smile back, blow him a kiss, and then close her eyes. While she rested, Jay would sit and talk to me. He had a confidential way of speaking that made it seem as if he were always on the verge of revealing a secret, as if we shared the closeness of conspirators.

  “Actually,” he’d say, lowering his voice, “I still do get a kick from champagne, although it’s nothing compared to what I feel around Trish. I never told this to anyone, but I married her simply because she brought magic into my life. The most beautiful songs on the radio came after she turned it on. She made the ordinary seem out of this world.”

  It wasn’t until the sweltering nights of late summer, when Jay and Trish began to bicker and argue, that I realized how much things had changed. The
two of them even looked different, larger somehow, as if they were outgrowing their now stained, shabby formal wear.

  “I’m so tired of this ratty dress,” Trish complained one evening.

  “Now it’s nag nag nag instead of pip pip pip,” Jay replied. “And please don’t say ‘ratty.’ You know how I despise the term.”

  Jay would harangue us on the subject of rodents in a way that reminded me of Uncle Kirby on the subject of Commies or certain ethnic groups. Jay had developed a bit of a potbelly and looked almost as if he were copying Trish, who was, by now, obviously expecting. Expecting was Trish’s word. “Out of all the names they give it, don’t you think ‘expecting’ sounds the prettiest?” she’d asked me once, surprising me, and I quickly agreed.

  Their visits had become regular, and they showed up, increasingly ravenous, to dine on the morsels I’d filched from the supper table at Jay’s suggestion. “Old Boy,” Jay had said jokingly, “you can’t just take the attitude of ‘Let them eat cake.’ After all, cake isn’t a limitless resource, you know.” I was glad to pilfer the food for them. It made mealtime an adventure. Stealing rations in front of Uncle Kirby wasn’t easy.

  After I served their little dinner, they’d stay and visit. Jay would sit drinking the beer that he’d devised a way of siphoning from Uncle Kirby’s home brew.

  “We could use a goddamn TV around this godforsaken boring place. It would be nice to watch a little bowling once in a while,” Jay would gripe after he’d had a few too many.

  “Maybe if you’d do something besides sitting around in your dirty underwear, drinking and belching, things wouldn’t be so BORrrr-ing,” Trish answered.

  Once, after an argument that made Trish storm off in tears, Jay held his head and muttered, as if more to himself than to me, “I never told this to anyone, but me and the Mrs. had to get married.”

  By the time the leaves were falling, they had shed their wedding clothes. Trish wore a dress cut from one of my sweat socks, boots of bumblebee fur, and a hat made from a hummingbird’s nest. Jay, bearded, a blue-jay feather poking from his top hat, dressed in the gray skin of an animal he refused to identify. He carried a knitting-needle spear, a bow he’d fashioned from the wishbone of a turkey, and a quiver of arrows—disposable hypodermic needles he’d scavenged from Uncle Kirby’s supplies. He tipped each arrow in cottonmouth venom.